Through the Daemon's Gate: Kepler's Somnium, Medieval Dream Narratives, and the Polysemy of Allegorical Motifs [Paperback]

Series Editors Foreword Acknowledgments 1: Polysemy and Allegorical Signification 2: Allegory and Movement 3: Language and its Limits as a Celestial Vehicle 4: The Process of Stellification 5: John of Salisburys Critique of the Dream Book 6: The Journey, the Book, and the Dream: An Overview of the Somnium 7: The Poetic Structure of the Circle 8: Keplers Allegories: The Somnium is not a Somnium 9: The Speech of Daemons

This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Keplers Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinfords looks at the ways that Keplers Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed considerable popularity among medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, John of Salisbury, Macrobius, and Alan of Lille. He examines the generic conventions of the cosmic dream, also studying the poetic and theological sensibilities underlying the categories of dreams formulated by Macrobius and Artemidorus that were widely used to interpret specific symbols in dreams and to assess their overall reliability.

Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between tlp