From Dante’s purgatorial dreams to Petrarch’s sonnets, the language of dreams and visions permeates the writings of the Tre Corone, where it acts as the vocabulary of the liminal. In Petrarch’s ‘Dream of Scipio the Elder’, Petrarch experiences visions that identify him as a successor of Homer and Ennius, and in Boccaccio’s De casibus VIII.1, Petrarch appears to Boccaccio in a dream, reviving his desire for immortal fame. As Boccaccio appropriates and re-interprets Dante’s dream vocabulary in the Trattatello in laude di Dante, he is inscribing himself in a genealogy of inspired dreamers, divided from Dante by space and time, but partaking in interconnected (literary) dreams.

This session of the Canadian Association for Italian Studies 2021 Conference will analyse how the Tre Corone engage with the vocabulary of dreams and visions, and how early Italian literary dreams meditate upon the perpetuation of literary memory and the formation of the Italian literary canon.

Potential paper topics include but are not limited to:

• The relationship between dreams and visions in the writings of the Tre Corone;

• Literary dreams and the imitation of classical authors;

• Dante’s, Boccaccio’s, Petrarch’s literary dreams and visions and their relationship to the broader medical, astrological, religious, and philosophical discourses;

• The intersection of models and genres in dreams and visions;

• The role of the body and the senses in dreams and visions;

• The reception of Dante’s, Boccaccio’s, and Petrarch’s dreams and visions in the commentary tradition, visual arts, cinema, and literature.

Papers that explore the interconnections between the depiction of dreams and visions in two or more authors of the Tre Corone are particularly welcome.

Please send paper proposals (approx. 300 words) and a short bio to Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė (ak914@cam.ac.uk) by March 1, 2021.