Reminder: the Music, Medicine and History Network invites you to join us for our next Wednesday seminar.



This will take place on February 14th on Zoom (3-4pm UK time) and is open to all.

Further details and Zoom links can be found on our website: https://musicmedicinehistory.org/



February 14th: Dr Meghan Quinlan – Uppsala University, Sweden

‘The Somniale Danielis dreambook: Hearing in Dreams, Pre-modern and Modern’

The relationship between sound and sense, phonos and logos, has long engaged musicologists and literary scholars alike. In dreams, sound’s polysemous quality comes to the fore: modern psychoanalytic and medical case studies document the ways in which dream sounds act as anchors of association, gesturing toward alternative meanings through punning, parapraxes, and distortion, thus complicating the boundaries between sound and sense.

The notion of sound as a hinge for disparate thoughts in dreams, however, is not new. Premodern dreambooks—lists of dreamt objects and their brief, prognostic interpretations—preserved from Ancient Egypt, Ancient and Byzantine Greece, and medieval Iceland, for instance, use paronomasia and etymology as principles of interpretation. This paper focuses on sound-related interpretations in one such dreambook, the Somniale Danielis, the most widely transmitted dreambook in medieval Europe, extant in Latin and the vernacular in hundreds of sources, often among medical texts. Although most of the wordplay in the Greek and Arabic versions from which it evolved is lost in translation, there are several instances of musical or environmental dream sounds being interpreted as affect-charged but unspecified words, translating affect across the word-music divide and thus dissolving the distinction between the two.

Drawing on medieval theories of grammar, etymology, allegory, and dreams, particularly the dream theories of William of Conches, who cites the Somniale danielis, Quinlan considers the epistemological value, for medieval readers, of such dream sounds. How does the (meta)sensory experience of hearing get at the truth of the dream? How can continuities in sound tell the future?





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Dr Hannah Scott
NUAcT Fellow in French Cultural History
Newcastle University

Chair of the Music, Medicine and History Network @MusicMedHistory

Please note my working days are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Latest publications:
-- Illingworth and Scott, 'Hope Labour, Precarious Research, and the Future of French Studies', Nottingham French Studies, 62:3 (2023), 233-50 https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0386

-- Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870-1904 (London and New York: Routledge, 2022)  https://www.routledge.com/Singing-the-English-Britain-in-the-French-Musical-Low-Brow-18701904/Scott/p/book/9780367416126

-- ‘The Singing Linguist: Popular Songs on Fin-de-siècle Language Learning’, Contemporary French Civilization, 46:4 (2021), 373–93







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