Pieter Bruegel and Carlo Ginzburg: The Debatable Land of Renaissance Dreams

Milne, Louise S.

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.

Citation

Milne, L. S. (2013). Pieter Bruegel and Carlo Ginzburg: The Debatable Land of Renaissance Dreams. Cosmos, 29, 59-126

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 31, 2013
• Publication Date: 2013
• Deposit Date: Jun 28, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 28, 2018
• Journal: Cosmos
• Print ISSN: 0269-8773
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 29
• Pages: 59-126
• Keywords: Peter Bruegel the Elder, dreams, nightmares, witches, witches' Sabbath, carnival, benandanti, Carlo Ginzburg
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/7794
• Publisher URL: https://thisisthetcson.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cosmos-29-text-after-proof.pdf