Cardano's Book of Dreams

For more than four centuries, Girolamo Cardano's four books on dreams have been readable only in Latin. This is the first complete English translation. Cardano spent nearly thirty years on a question he could not put down: how can a dream know something the dreamer does not? His answer appeared in Basel in 1562, printed by Heinrich Petri. Four books, 278 pages, the compressed remains of a work he had once planned at ten. Cardano was a physician, a mathematician, and an astrologer, and he brought all of it to the problem. Philosophy, medicine, natural history, religion, and decades of his own recorded dreams are pressed into a single demanding inquiry. - Book I asks why some dreams appear true, then builds a vast ordered catalogue of things seen in dreams: gods, weather, animals, bodies, emotions, professions, illness, death, family, rulers, travel, punishment. - Book II separates dreams caused by food, humors, memory, fear, and habitual thought from those Cardano considered more direct. - Book III studies the dreamer: temperament, health, age, occupation, fortune, and habits are all said to alter meaning. - Book IV tests the method against examples, closing with fifty-five of Cardano's own dreams recounted in unusual detail: dreams of employment, illness, money, family conflict, grief, reputation, and death. Translated complete from the 1562 Basel first edition, using the public-domain copy held by ETH Bibliothek. Every body chapter was transcribed and checked against page images. The edition's errata sheet is recorded in a ledger, and all forty-five corrections applying to the treatise are reviewed at their printed locations. The 1663 Opera omnia and the 1563 German Traumbuch Cardani served as control witnesses. The original chapter table, instructions, and subject index are retained; bracketed locators refer to pages in the 1562 edition. The treatise has been edited in Latin and translated into French. It has not, until now, been available in English. A historical edition, not a manual. Cardano's medical, astrological, and social claims belong to the sixteenth century and are translated accurately rather than smoothed or corrected. Where he repeats the assumptions of his world, the translation preserves them and the notes identify them. For readers of Renaissance intellectual history, the history of medicine and psychology, astrology and divination, and anyone curious what dream interpretation looked like before psychoanalysis.