Humanities Dissertation Initiative Scholar
Department of History

Dreams and Dream Interpretations in Early Modern Lutheran Communities

My dissertation, tentatively entitled “Dreams and Dream Interpretations in Early Modern Lutheran Communities,” explores dream narratives in the context of Lutheranism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks at both personal and published materials on dreams, including diaries, notes, correspondences, autobiographies, funeral sermons, medical and pastoral treatises. This study regards the effort of narrating dreams and fixing them in texts and images as a social/cultural practice that involved the intersection of individuals’ self-knowledge, contemporary discourses on devotion, political realities as well as multiple, concrete channels of communication.