Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Priki brings the HP into comparative dialogue with two earlier dream-romance traditions: the thirteenth-century Byzantine Tale of Livistros and Rodamne and the Old French Roman de la Rose. The article focuses on instructive speeches addressed to neophyte lovers, arguing that erotic instruction functions both as an integral component of the protagonists' initiation and as a rhetorical engine driving the narrative forward. This cross-cultural comparative approach is unusual in HP scholarship and significantly expands the text's interpretive frame beyond its Italian Renaissance context.

Priki analyzes how the text-image relationship shifts across the 1499 Aldine edition, the 1546 Jean Martin/Kerver edition, and the 1600 Beroalde de Verville edition. She argues that the Italian woodcuts are deliberately schematic, driving readers toward the text, while the 1546 French edition reverses this by filling in visual detail and adding thirteen new woodcuts that elucidate rather than mystify. The 1600 Verville edition adds an alchemical interpretive framework through its frontispiece and introduction, influencing later reception including Jung's use of the HP as alchemical allegory.

Priki surveys the HP's dissemination and reception across two peak periods: the early modern era through approximately 1657, and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarly revival. She argues that the HP's decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be partly attributed to the broader cultural shift away from emblematic culture toward text-dominated reading. The article emphasizes the HP's irreducible multiplicity of meaning, showing how its ambiguous language and imagery have invited allegorical, alchemical, architectural, and psychoanalytic readings depending on each audience's cultural context.

Priki examines an underexplored dimension of the HP's hieroglyphs: their structural role within the dream narrative rather than their sources or proto-emblematic character. She maps the hieroglyphs' placement against the overall spatial and narrative architecture of Poliphilo's initiatory journey, arguing that they function as integral narrative devices rather than mere decorative insertions. The article provides a detailed conceptualization of the HP's multi-layered narrative structure, distinguishing the dream frame, the two first-person narrators, and the spatial progression through the dreamworld.