Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Loue in a Dreame

About the book

Overcome by troubled thoughts of love, Poliphilus falls asleep and finds himself moving through an unfamiliar landscape. A threatening wood gives way to elaborate structures, inscriptions, ornaments, and encounters whose meanings require continual interpretation. His longing for Polia supplies an emotional thread, but the narrative repeatedly pauses over imagined works of art and the difficulty of describing what he sees. Classical learning and sensual attention make the journey as much an exploration of crafted beauty as a romance. This text preserves the language of the 1592 English rendering, identified by the catalog with Robert Dallington, rather than modernizing its spelling and vocabulary. Its demanding surface is part of the experience: readers follow a dreamer whose perceptions continually exceed ordinary measures and familiar explanation.

• Dream and desire
• Art and architecture
• Classical imagination

Why read it

An unusual romance in which the imagined environment commands as much attention as the lover's progress through it.

1592 English rendering attributed to Robert Dallington