Zrínyi álmai = Zrínyi's Dreams

UNSPECIFIED (2015) Zrínyi álmai = Zrínyi's Dreams. In: Lengyel, Réka and Csörsz, Rumen István and Hegedüs, Béla and Kiss, Margit, (eds.) Amicitia: Tanulmányok Tüskés Gábor 60. születésnapjára / Beiträge zum 60. Geburtstag von Gábor Tüskés. Reciti Kiadó, Budapest, pp. 140-162. ISBN 978-615-547-819-2

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Abstract

The paper focuses on the philological analysis of a mysterious chapter taken from Miklós Zrínyi’s Vitéz hadnagy (Virtuous General, 1650–53), a treatise on the moral virtues and military skills of the ideal commander. The chapter in question („Visio, somnium” i.e. „Vision and Dream”) advances a dubious thesis on the apparitions and messages we receive in dreams: allegedly everyone of us have a twin soul in the air, created simultaneously with the spirits of the visible human beings, connected by a certain sympathy with the pair spirit below, and sending dream messages on the future events and personal destiny to wait. A close reading of Zrínyi’s text reveals the remote intellectual background of such a heretic view from the hard line Catholic author (Platonizing Stoic dream theories, such as Synesius’ treatise De insomniis, its followers in the neo-platonic tradition, and Origen’s doctrine about the preexistence of souls), and its immediate sources (Cicero’s On Divination and Macrobius’ commentary on the Somnium Scipionis). However, the most important inspiration Zrínyi had taken from an indirect, secondary source, which probably called his attention on Cicero’s texts and offered an up-to-date synthesis of the current views on demonology and dream theories: the Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (1599) by the Jesuit scholar, Justus Lipsius’ friend, Martin-Antoine Delrio. While dealing with the complicated reception history of Delrio’s work (a curious mix of witchcraft ideology and outstanding humanist textual scholarship), the paper explores the hidden network made of allusions and direct references to the dream/divination motive in Zrínyi’s prose and poetic oeuvre.

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