Dreaming in the Age of Reason: Sacred and Secular Visions in Eighteenth-Century French Architecture

Abstract

This dissertation examines three case studies–a natural grotto, a church, and a book–that catalyzed discussions surrounding the interplay of space, architecture, and the oneiric in the Enlightenment. Each case foregrounds a site, whose reality became contested, and whose textual and visual representations reflected the spatial expression of sacred and secular visions in the course of the eighteenth century. My narrative begins with the discovery of the “marvelous” Grotto of Antiparos at the homonymous island of the Aegean archipelago at the end of the seventeenth century; it then turns to the miraculous episodes that were reported at the cemetery and church of Saint-Médard in Paris, from 1727 onwards; and it concludes with the eccentric architectural dreamworlds staged in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book originally published in Venice in 1499, which enjoyed a long afterlife in France through a series of reprints, commentaries, and creative adaptations.

Deceivingly singular, the “dream” (both rêve and songe in French) encompassed during this period a wide range of spatially articulated phenomena that weaved the dual heritage of antiquity and the Bible into the scientific vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Thus, the oneiric appears in this dissertation in two ways: on the one hand, it becomes enmeshed with the subject matter, whether it be the astounding experience of the marvelous Grotto of Antiparos, of the miraculous cemetery of Saint-Médard, or of the dreamworld in which the protagonist of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili wanders. In all three cases, it becomes a vehicle to explore how intricate, visionary experiences were articulated spatially, comprehended aesthetically, and, to an extent, repurposed ideologically in the course of the eighteenth century.

On the other hand, the oneiric emerges in this dissertation as a powerful arbiter in the architectural negotiation between a euphoric, late eighteenth-century progressivism and the centrifugal forces of the past. Each of the three episodes my dissertation considers foregrounds a decisive, seemingly rationalizing reframing of historical precedents that brought architecture into uncomfortable proximity with marvelous, miraculous, and licentiously imaginative forces. The aim here is to highlight not only the apparent collision of pre-modern metaphysical attitudes with late eighteenth-century rationalism but also,-- and most importantly– their coalescence, as architecture became increasingly the medium for the reshaping of esoteric dreams into republican visions.

Traditionally considered a period of radical secularization and material monism, the Enlightenment has been for the most part overlooked or bypassed by historical surveys of dreaming as the cold, jarring, and uninspiring progenitor of the fervent Romantic fixation with the oneiric subjectivity. Bringing together a wide array of primary sources -from travel accounts and construction registers, all the way to philosophical, religious, and literary works- my dissertation presents an alternative, autonomous and multifaceted understanding of dreaming as an integral and indispensable component of eighteenth-century socio-political processes, highlighting its value as an analytical tool in the study of collective representation, experience, and practice.