In his great essay “On Experience” (1580) Montaigne wrote, “There's more fuss interpreting interpretations than interpreting things and more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss one another” (1580, 1115). Anyone sampling dream theory from antiquity through the Middle Ages will notice the persistent rehashing and occasional modification of received ideas. As Kruger (1992, 119) tactfully put it about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, “older dream theories proved remarkably resilient.” But the early modern period sees a proliferation of writings on dreams and dreaming much greater than any printed bibliography has indicated, and one can no longer resist exclaiming, “Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser.” With less tact than Kruger, MacKenzie (1965, 83) stated, “Almost 1500 years separate Goethe from St. Augustine— a millennium and a half in which no really important new ideas about the dream entered European thought; a period in which, according to experience, education, and religion, men largely repeated the insights or prejudices of much earlier writers.” I agree with Holland (1999, 12) that MacKenzie “is largely right” about these 1,500 years. The main exception, as we shall see, is the unjustly neglected work of Christian Wolff.

Early Modern Aristotelianism

Until the close of the seventeenth century, one figure continues to dominate dream theory, for, as far as dreams are concerned, Aristotle remains just as much “the philosopher” as he had been for the scholastics. In fact, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Renaissance dream theory is a series of footnotes to Aristotle's two brief treatises. Even theorists who repudiate his views end up working with his conceptions, as we shall see with Hobbes, and two of the most influential Renaissance theorists, Julius Caesar Scaliger and Girolamo Cardano, are as much engaged with Aristotle as the titular authors of their works, Hippocrates and Synesius. Aristotle is everywhere, often unacknowledged. Take, for example, the definition of the dream from Thomas Nashe's The Terrors of the Night Or, a Discourse of Apparitions (1594), which never mentions Aristotle on dreams: “A dreame is nothing els but a bubling scum or froath of the fancie, which the day hath left vndigested; or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations” (1904– 1910, 1.355).