Dance

Dance was a major pastime during the European Middle Ages. It was a favorite leisure activity for men and women, from lower social classes to aristocrats, and was integral to most celebrations and rites of passage. Dance also played a role in sacred contexts, accompanied in some cases by devotional dance songs, although not all dancing was approved by religious authorities in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, the three major religions in medieval Europe. Alongside accounts that speak of sacred dance in positive ways, condemnations of dance were also plentiful; some were aimed at specific performers or audiences (e.g., clerics or young people), others at specific occasions or locations (feast days and sacred spaces), and others condemn wholesale the entire activity. Infdormation about dance in the late Middle Ages emerges from a number of sources, although few contain sufficient details to allow modern scholars to reconstruct a clear picture of the activity. Literary accounts are very helpful in placing dancing in a social context, as is iconography. To these can be added several types of documentary evidence, including treatises on poetry, since much dancing was done to dance songs whose forms and subject matter are discussed along with those of other kinds of poems. Music treatises also provide some details when they include dance music among the descriptions of musical forms. And additionally, dance music itself, songs and instrumental pieces that are identified as intended for dancing, contributes more information that aids in our understanding of what dance might have been like during the centuries prior to the writing of the first treatises devoted to dance in Europe in the 15th century. The subject of medieval dance has been studied from several different and partially overlapping viewpoints by musicologists, dance scholars, literary scholars, and art historians, which has dictated to a degree the organization of some sections of the bibliographic material in this article. The subject has been considered in terms of its social aspects, and the dances themselves have been studied in terms of their forms (carol and estampie), their performance intentions (vocal or instrumental), and their national origins (England, France, etc.) Further, while the earlier dances all consisted of a set pattern of steps that were repeated over and over, at the end of the 14th century a new tradition of individually choreographed dances arose. That repertory is treated separately at the end of the article.

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