«Le divinazioni de’ nostri sogni» (Conv. II, VIII, 13). Agiografia e incubazione nell’età di Dante

At the beginning of the XIV century when Dante undertook his visionary journey through the afterworld, one of the most resounding expressions of the thaumaturgical power of the saints was still their oneiric intervention as therapists to the benefit of worshipers who fell asleep on their tombs or had simply asked for their help by making vows to them. This paper is not a contribution to Dantean exegesis but an analysis of the hagiographical sources (lives of saints, collection of miracles and processes of canonisation) which demonstrate the spread of the practice of incubation and its possible transformations between the mid XIII and mid XIV century, above all in Mediterranean countries. The Divine Comedy is the transcription of a dream vision that was actually experienced and reformulated in a literary way. However, Dante’s work is not restricted to the sum total of his sources, which also include dream visions or experiences that cannot be directly analysed on the basis of the poet’s erudite reading. On the other hand, dreams are also always constructed using the historical and literary materials available to the dreamer. If there is a link between the religious imaginary of the historical world in which Dante lived and worked, and the literary imaginary that interacted with it, a systematic study of the most common forms of dream divination documented by hagiography can help us to gain a better understanding of certain ritual threads underlying Dante’s vision, which also seem to emerge from his unique oneiric autobiography, the Vita Nuova.