This scholarly tour de force is at least two books in one. In order to explore the proliferation of dreams as a poetic genre in French Renaissance verse, Bokdam first immerses her reader in theories about dreaming, and more broadly about imagination, that circulated during the era. As a result, she has produced a contribution to the history of ideas as well as to literary scholarship. A brief review cannot do full justice to these dual contributions but will give potential readers a sense of the variety of topics they will encounter in this richly detailed catalogue of Renaissance dream discourses.

The first half of the book establishes that dreaming preoccupied Renaissance writers, even if no truly innovative or unified dream theory emerged, and even if sixteenth-century thinkers never came to understand dreams primarily as expressions of the self. Rather, the increasing availability in Latin or the vernacular of ancient texts of every stripe breathed new life into old arguments about the illusions of sleep and their potential relation to truth. These debates were not defined by national or linguistic boundaries, so neither is Bokdam’s account of them. Ficino, Peucer, and Cardano figure significantly in this section alongside, Rabelais, Calvin, Montaigne, and Bodin. Despite the broad scope of her thematic approach, Bokdam seeks to trace which themes proved most influential among French writers.

Dreams constituted a case in point for a dizzying variety of philosophical, physiological, and theological speculation across the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of the topics that Bokdam addresses, such as the susceptibility of the human soul to divine and demonic influence and the pervasiveness of dreams of the dead, have been addressed recently by others. But many, including the circulation of compendiums of dream narratives, growing interest in the brain as the organ of thought, and the debate about whether the pleasure experienced during an erotic dream was real, open up new approaches to dream material. In comparison to recent works by Stuart Clark and Claire Gantet, Bokdam’s analysis hews to a traditional history of ideas methodology, except in those sections focused on Protestants, in which the fraught confessional context seems to play a more central role.

The second part shifts focus to the dream as a poetic genre, formally diverse but intuitively recognizable by virtue of the common human experience of dreaming. A first section traces the evolution of the form from classical and medieval models during the period from the thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries, paying close attention to the influence of the Dream of Scipio and Roman de la Rose. The second section examines the very significant influence in France of Italian works, juxtaposing, for example, Petrarch’s Triumphs and Marguerite de Navarre’s La Navire, and tracing in a long chapter the interesting transformations wrought on Colonna’s Hynoerotomachia Poliphili by French translators and imitators. A third section focuses on dreams in love poetry, especially Ronsard’s. The final section returns to the central philosophical problems highlighted in the book’s first half, the distinction of reality from illusion and the possibility of prophetic foreknowledge, but now as a subject for the literary invention of poets who were also philosophers and Christians concerned about their personal salvation. This problematic became especially significant in religious poetry, including works with an apocalyptic bent, which struggled with the problem of whether dreams reflected the future or the past.

Readers should note that the book’s thematic approach means discussion of one author is often taken up in multiple chapters; for those who wish to trace what a specific author made of dreams throughout all his or her works, the index and some patience is essential. But such patience will reward an interdisciplinary audience with many insights. In sum, Métamorphoses de Morphée is clearly the fruit of many years’ study. It is a challenging and admirable work of serious erudition.