Mary Baine Campbell

This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic France and “New France”—through the lens of gender. In the case of early modern Atlantic dreaming, gender and its confusions in the social imaginary are not tied to the historical practice of female-bodied persons. The femininity investigated here is positional and symbolic. There are many kinds of “female” in the early modern shake-up: the terms of sex and gender lose purchase in an avalanche of novel categories at least transitionally operative in the social and epistemological chaos of the period. Confronted by the colonial New World, European gender and other fundamental categories are visible as fragile arrays of power relations, grounded in opposing forms of consciousness.

The last works of Francis Godwin intersect with three mutually reinforcing historical narratives: that of the explosion of transatlantic and transcontinental ‘‘travel’’ under the Tudors and the Habsburgs, speeded by developments in navigation; that of the fascination with alphabets, languages, and cryptography, including real characters and taxonomic languages, spurred by the reports of the travellers and by the philological energies of humanism and hermeticism; and the historical advent of speed itself——advances in speediness at all scales, interest in it, measurement of it. I shall suggest the logic of their relations through a glimpse at Godwin's influential jeux d'espirit, two sites where these trajectories intersect:The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus.

The article presents an alternative world to that of discrete material objects, a world of "dream things." I call it a world because it is organized and various, sensually perceptible, collectively recognized and participated in, represented, theorized and, from the perspectives of the populous genre of the dreambook, early modern dream records, and the customs of the Iroquois and Montagnais nations (among others) during the late contact period, consequential. The article focuses on two of most "thing-like" phenomena in the cultural field of dreams, the dream dictionary and the individual dream about an existing object. It moves chronologically from the medieval corpus of dreambooks (as collated from numerous manuscripts of the Somnium Danielis) to early modern instances of a new genre, the personal dream record, in order to consider the difference made by a developing sense of property (and dream) as private. It concludes by examining a mid-seventeenth-century Huron Indian dream recorded by the Jesuit Missionary Paul Le Jeune: the dreamer was instructed to collect goods from the surrounding tribes as well as the French missionaries in her village - but the latter refused to give up their property.