Introduction

Is dreaming a sin? What does God think of our dreams? The sexual dream, which is characterised by erotic content and may come along with nocturnal emissions, crystallises the numerous questions emerging from the relationship to the dream in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. At this time, oneiromancy, the art of divination by the interpretation of dreams, spreads primarily through dreambooks. These are small treatises, giving explanations of the essence of dreams, explaining how they emerge and how to acknowledge and encourage prophetic dreams. These books also include a series of interpretations, arranged by thematic or alphabetical order. This constitutes a distinct genre, present since ancient times and self-perpetuating, where each author borrows from previous authors. There are in France several types of dreambooks: scholarly works, mostly in Latin, and some light works intended for a broader audience which may include the uneducated masses. Books for the common man belong mostly to the Bibliothèque bleue (Blue library), a format born in the early seventeenth century with two families of printers, the Oudot and the Garnier, who recycled knightly stories and other popular works, including dreambooks.

In order to reduce production costs, they were cheaply printed on small blue covered booklets, hence their name. Similar to English chapbooks, although with less illustrations, they accounted for a large part of the popular book culture. Yet it would be risky to consider these books a typical representation of the popular culture of the time, on the ground that they were intended for the popular classes. Most of these books weren't even published for this reason and were recycled earlier works. Le Palais des curieux (Palace of the curious), for instance, was a successful dreambook, the first edition of which wasn't intended to be published in the Bibliothèque bleue. Its content is even quite scornful of the populace, who are described as unable to have premonitory dreams. We don't know how these books were passed along. There were probably group readings, which might have encouraged the oral dissemination of these dreambooks, but it may well have blent with pre-existing oneiromantic practices.