“Dream of the Virgin” – “Sogno di Maria” in the Context of Italian Literary and Folk Texts about the Passion of Christ

Abstract

The “Dream of the Virgin” is an apocryphon about the Passion of Christ, revealed to the Mother of God in a visionary dream. It circulated among many European nations in the form of a spiritual verse, a narrative, a prayer, or an incantation. Starting with the fundamental work of A. N. Veselovsky, this story has been an important subject of comparative research up to the present day. The oldest manuscripts with texts related to it are of Italian origin and date back to the 14th and 15th centuries. The article presents features of the Italian tradition of the apocryphon in texts preserved in these early manuscripts and in more recent folklore recordings. In Italy, the “Dream of the Virgin” existed in the context of various poetic texts about the Passion of Christ and the Lament of the Virgin Mary. The development of Italian volgare literature on the theme of the Passion is associated with the cult of the Passion of Christ, which was extremely widespread in the 13th and 14th centuries. Some details in the Italian texts suggest that the motif of the Virgin Mary’s dream about the Passion possibly originated in the tradition of the Holy Land related to the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane