“Pieter Bruegel and Carlo Ginzburg: The Debatable Land of Renaissance Dreams”
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's pictures of witches and dreams are discussed in relation to Carlo Ginzburg's studies of the benandanti (do-gooders, good walkers) and the mythology of the witches' Sabbath. The shared context for these is dream-culture as a "debatable land" - a socially contested territory. The visions of the benandanti were based on traditional structures of dreaming and carnivalesque imagery; Bruegel's innovative visual rhetoric for this material demonstrates how these traditions about fantasy and the spirit world could decompose, condense and undergo category-shifts under the pressure of religious and cultural reformation; in the case of night-walking, effectively nocturnalisation and demonization. Ginzburg's account of these changes can be updated to consider them as part of a wider redefinition of dream-culture, carried out through the reconfiguration of composite motifs in existing traditions and templates for representing dreams and the folk imaginary in the Renaissance.
Author: Louise Milne
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2280844727