Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) 9780197527276, 0197527272

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Ringleaders of Redemption

OX F O R D ST U D I E S I N H I ST O R IC A L T H E O L O G Y Series Editor

Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary

Founding Editor

David C. Steinmetz †

Editorial Board

Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-​Wilhelms-​Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia

MORALITY AFTER CALVIN Theodore Beza’s Christian Censor and Reformed Ethics Kirk M. Summers

DIVINE PERFECTION AND HUMAN POTENTIALITY The Trinitarian Anthropology of Hilary of Poitiers

THE PAPACY AND THE ORTHODOX A History of Reception and Rejection

Jarred A. Mercer

DEBATING PERSEVERANCE The Augustinian Heritage in Post-​Reformation England

Andrew Kloes

Edward Siecienski

Jay T. Collier

THE REFORMATION OF PROPHECY Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet and Old Testament Prophecy G. Sujin Pak

THE GERMAN AWAKENING Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–​1848 THE REGENSBURG ARTICLE 5 ON JUSTIFICATION Inconsistent Patchwork or Substance of True Doctrine? Anthony N. S. Lane

AUGUSTINE ON THE WILL A Theological Account Han-​luen Kantzer Komline

ANTOINE DE CHANDIEU The Silver Horn of Geneva’s Reformed Triumvirate

THE SYNOD OF PISTORIA AND VATICAN II Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform

ORTHODOX RADICALS Baptist Identity in the English Revolution

CATHOLICITY AND THE COVENANT OF WORKS James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition

Theodore G. Van Raalte

Matthew C. Bingham

Shaun Blanchard

Harrison Perkins

Ringleaders of Redemption How Medieval Dance Became Sacred KAT H RY N D IC KA S O N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​752727–​6 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

To my parents, Tina and John, who made sure that I could dance on my own two feet, and who surrounded me with the love that moves the sun and the other stars

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xiii xvii

Introduction

1 I .   G R AC I N G T H E   I D O L S

1. Dance Typologies: The Medieval Bible

13

2. Ghost Dancers: The Saints

49

3. Dance of the Hours: The Liturgy

77

I I .   G R AC E B E F O R E I T S   M A S T E R 4. Discipline and Redemption: Dances of Penitence

105

5. Partnering Divinity: Mystical Dancers

141

6. Romancing the Dance

174

7. Dance in the Late Middle Ages: Decadence and Death

207

Epilogue: Mastering Grace Notes Index

233 237 365

Illustrations 1.1. Miriam, doors of Paradise, detail

18

1.2. Dance of Miriam

19

1.3. Vézelay Abbey, Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene, capital

22

1.4. Rape of Dinah

23

1.5. Getty Apocalypse, illustration for Revelation 11:10

24

1.6. Dance around the golden calf

26

1.7. Psalter with David dancing with descendants, detail

33

1.8. Crucifixion; death of Absalom

34

1.9. King David dances; Evil-​Merodach mutilates his father’s corpse

35

1.10. Dance of King David

37

1.11. David presents head of Goliath; Israelite women rejoice, detail

39

1.12. Prayer to St. John the Baptist with dance of Salome

44

1.13. Psalter with dance of Salome; miracle of the loaves

45

1.14. Historiated initial for Corea with female dancers

46

2.1. Reliquary of Sainte Foy

51

2.2. Daughters of Judah dance in Jerusalem, illustration for Psalm 46 

55

2.3. The martyrdom of St. Stephen, Psalter illustration for Psalm 101

57

2.4. The mother of Scipio leads her children away from idolatrous dancing, detail

61

2.5. St. Francis in glory

74

3.1. Plato casts away idolatrous dancers

80

3.2. Misericord (no. 13, prebend of Somerley)

84

3.3. Guillaume Durand, Rational de Divin Office 87 3.4. Hours of Anne of France

89

3.5. Calendar for May

90

3.6. Christ before Caiaphas /​dancing tormentors

93

3.7. Labyrinth, Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca

98

3.8. Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral (nave)

98

4.1. The Dancers of Colbek 4.2.  St. Augustine and dancers on the Sabbath

108 121

x Illustrations

4.3. The inebriated doe

122



4.4. Demons lead dancers

123



4.5. Devils dance on a coffin

123



4.6. The bleeding host

124



4.7. The beguine and dancers

125



4.8. Buon Amour

126



4.9. The dance of David, Purgatorio X

130

4.10a, b.  detail, La Commedia Illumina Firenze 131 4.11a, b.  detail, The Way of Salvation 137 4.12.  Manuscript for Purgatorio XXXI

139

5.1.  Adoration of the Lamb

145

5.2.  Apocalypse of Isabella of France

146

5.3.  The Wise and Foolish Virgins

148

5.4.  Elizabeth of Hungary and maidens

151

5.5.  Annunciation to the Shepherds from a book of hours

153

5.6.  Virgins of Paradise

162

5.7.  Abduction of the daughters of Shiloh from the St. Louis Psalter

169

5.8.  Capture of the unicorn

170

5.9.  Book of Hours, use of Maastricht

172

6.1.  Courtesy invites Amant into the carole 180 6.2.  Amant dances with Richesce

181

6.3.  Amant dances with Franchise

182

6.4. The Carole of Amor

185

6.5. The Carole of Amor

185

6.6.  Demons and dancers

188

6.7. The carole magique 189 6.8.  Christians dancing and praying

190

6.9.  Explicit for Le Roman de la Rose 194 6.10.  Frontispiece for Le Testament 195 6.11.  Dante, Beatrice, and Thrones

200

6.12.  Church Fathers, Franciscans, and Dominicans in the Heaven of the Sun

202

6.13.  Dante, Beatrice, and solar dancers, detail

202

6.14.  Beatrice, Dante, and the celestial rose, detail

203

Illustrations  xi 6.15.  Virgil, Dante, and the sodomites, detail

204

6.16.  Beatrice, Dante, Cacciaguida, and the souls in Jupiter, detail

205

7.1a, b.  detail, choreomaniacs and epileptics

215

7.2.  Charivari

216

7.3.  Dance of the Wild Men

217

7.4.  The Nativity and marginal Morris dancers

219

7.5.  Illustrated leaf of Franciscan friar and Death

224

7.6.  Book of Hours

225

7.7.  Le Respit de la Mort 229 7.8.  Le Roman de la Rose 230 7.9.  La Danse aux Aveugles 231

Acknowledgments Given the historical depth and breadth of my research, I relied heavily on access to archival sources and material artifacts. I am particularly grateful to the archivists and the library and curatorial staff at the following institutions:  Bibliothèque Nationale de France (sites Richelieu, François-​ Mitterrand, Arsenal, and Opéra), Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Bibliothèque Inter-​ Universitaire de la Sorbonne, Bibliothèque de l’École Nationale des Chartes, Musée Condé, Musée de Cluny, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the British Library, the Oxford Bodleian Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, Cologne Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, the Museum Meermanno, the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Honnold/​Mudd Library (Claremont), the Bancroft Library (Berkeley), Santa Clara University Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the University of Southern California Libraries. Several faculty, staff, and graduate students contributed to the intellectual maturation of this project. During my first year as a graduate student at Stanford University, Philippe Buc mentored my research on medieval dance and directed me toward promising primary source material. Over many conversations, and while co-​teaching, Lee Yearley shared with me his profound ideas about Dante and the role of movement in the Commedia. Marisa Galvez assisted me in translating Old French texts and advised my approach to medieval romance. Bissera Pentcheva’s breathtaking scholarship instilled in me the courage to embrace creativity. Fiona Griffiths, a mentor of mine for many years, made me aware of the historical complexities of medieval religion and gender. Barbara Pitkin’s careful reading of earlier drafts elicited astute corrections and suggestions. Shahzad Bashir’s erudition and guidance influenced my own theoretical framing. Janice Ross supported my interest in dance history and helped me articulate the larger implications of my work to dance studies scholars. Exchanges with Anastasia-​ Erasmia Peponi generated intriguing reflections on premodern dance. Kathryn Starkey and Elaine Treharne allowed me to circulate earlier chapters within a public forum, in which colleagues from the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies engaged with my work in fruitful ways. Librarians David Jordan, John Rawlings, and John Mustain assisted me in special collections and, in some

xiv Acknowledgments cases, acquired sources on my behalf. As interlocutors and friends, former graduate students and now professors VK Preston and Beth Coggeshall heightened the depth of my inquiry. Max Harris (University of Wisconsin-​Madison), a theater scholar I met at Stanford, responded without fail to my many queries concerning medieval liturgy and ecclesiastical Latin. Moreover, generous support from the Margaret Ross Lewis Fellowship, the Graduate Research Opportunity Grant, and the Mellon Foundation enabled me to conduct research and complete my writing in a comfortable and timely manner. The Mellon Dance Studies in/​and the Humanities program provided intellectual and moral support from dance scholars belonging to a variety of disciplines. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider spearheaded this multi-​ year initiative for the benefit of early career scholars. I  am especially grateful to the summer cohorts of 2015 (Northwestern University) and 2016 (Brown University) for their useful critiques of my work. Rebecca Schneider and Tessie Liu gave my work an especially close reading. At the University of Southern California, where I am currently a postdoctoral fellow, I am grateful for the abundance of mentorship from the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the School of Religion. Lisa Bitel kindly read the manuscript and offered insightful feedback. Tom Seifrid gave me a scholarly platform to share my work. Nathan Perl-​Rosenthal and David Albertson provided crucial suggestions. The generous funding from USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities made possible the many color illustrations throughout this book. It was a pleasure to work with Oxford University Press. Executive Editor Cynthia Read and Series Editor Professor Richard Muller perceived the book’s potential at its earliest stages. Drew Anderla, Brent Matheny, Gwen Colvin, and Salma Ismaiel ensured that the editorial and production processes went smoothly. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback and corrections. Thanks are also in order for the editors and publishers who allowed me to reproduce sections of previously published material in the book. Select pages from ­chapter  1 appear in “King David in the Medieval Archives:  Toward an Archaic Future for Dance Studies,” in Futures of Dance Studies, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider, eds. (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), pp.  36–​55. An excerpt from c­hapter  2 appears in “Gracing the Idols: Sainte Foy and the Sanctification of Western Medieval Dance,” European Drama and Performance Studies, 8:1 (2017): 43–​69. Part of ­chapter 4 appears in “Discipline and Redemption: The Dance of Penitence in Dante’s Purgatorio,” Dante e l’Arte, 4 (2017): 67–​100. A segment from ­chapter 6 appears in “Caroling Like Clockwork: Technologies of the Medieval Dancing Body in Dante’s Paradiso,” Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts, 41:3 (2018): 303–​34. Chapter 7 is an expanded form of a book chapter,

Acknowledgments  xv “Deca-​dance in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Choreomania,” in Medieval Theatre Performance:  Actors, Dancers, Automata and Their Audiences, Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington, eds. (Cambridge:  D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 141–​60. A special thanks is in order for my closest mentor, Hester Gelber. As my principal advisor during my doctoral program, Hester believed in my project from the beginning, and saw it through until the end. From perfecting my Latin translations, to reading painstakingly my many drafts, to posing important theoretical questions, her insights and expertise helped transform my research from intermittent musings to sophisticated and intellectually responsible scholarship. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, John and Tina Dickason. Together, they nourished my love of dance since childhood. I trust they are pleased that the frenzied “bouncing off the walls” of my youth has since shifted into a more sober, sustainable profession. They have been at my side through times of hardship and happiness, always an unfaltering source of encouragement and love. I dedicate this book to them.

Abbreviations BL British Library BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Richelieu) BNF Ars Bibliothèque Nationale de France Arsenal BSG Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Cod. Codex Conc. Aev. Karol. Concilia Aevi Karolini Conc. Merov. Aevi Concilia Aevi Merovingici CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Diss. dissertation fol. folio fr. French germ. German gr. Greek KB Koninklijke Bibliotheek lat. Latin LCL Loeb Classical Library Leg. Leges MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica ms. or MS. manuscript nouv. acq. nouvelle acquisition NPNF Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers ÖNB Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Oxford BL Oxford Bodleian Library PG Patrologia Graeca PL Patrologia Latina PML Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum r recto SS. Rer. Merov. Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum v verso vat. Vatican

Introduction On December 17, 2014, thousands of tango dancers from all over the world gathered at St. Peter’s Square to celebrate Pope Francis’s seventy-​eighth birthday, paying homage to his Argentinian roots.1 Christina Camorani, a tango dancer from Italy, organized the “street tango flashmob” via Facebook.2 “We are here for the pope’s birthday,” one participant remarked, and, she explained, “we are dancing the tango as our present to him.” As many of his supporters know, Pope Francis himself is a former tango dancer, and is especially fond of the related milonga.3 But not all Catholics are at ease with the pontiff ’s pastimes. A staunchly orthodox, anti-​Vatican II website finds his love for tango problematic to say the least. The website’s content rails against the “immoral,” “indecent,” and “sensual” tango which, as the writer claims, originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires. In light of this evidence, the writer argues that the then Cardinal Bergoglio “is not a Roman Catholic and has no Catholic sense of anything.”4 Another conservative website denounced the Cardinal’s promotion of similar abominations, notably a “tango Mass” in 2013.5 Commenting on the same event, another blogger elaborated upon its inherent malignancy: Tell me which one of you, confronted with such a sacrilege, would not cry scandal and declare the priest responsible for such an impiety, and everyone willingly involved in the preparation and execution of such a monstrosity, either extremely stupid and utterly deluded, or else positively evil . . . it is reasonable to think that every Argentine prostitute of one hundred years ago, if provided with a minimum of fear of the Lord, would have shuddered at the mere idea of such a spectacle. . . . Open your eyes and see the evil in the face; that you may, by much prayer and penance, avoid sharing the destiny of those among these fools who will die in their prideful delusion.6

How could something as seemingly insignificant as dancing derail the image of an otherwise extremely popular pope? Such conservative commentary indicates the tension that lies within Christianity’s relationship with the body in general, and the dancing body in particular. Although premised upon the belief in an incarnate God, Christianity has a history of reviling particular bodily actions and appetites. Perhaps because of its distrust of the body, Christianity is Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

2 Introduction one of the few religions that excludes dancing from any integral part of its devotional program. But when did this exclusion originate? How did dancing—​ perhaps the most harmonious of corporeal actions—​become equated with sinful conduct and demonic wiles? Was there a time when the Church did authorize dance for religious purposes? And if so, what were the Church’s ideological stakes in authorizing religious dance? The demonization of dance began when Christianity started to transition from a fringe movement into a more mainstream religion. The Church Fathers and early Christian thinkers, including Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Isidore of Seville, St. Augustine, and others, shaped the theological principles and daily practice of what became orthodox Christianity. In their sermons and writings, ecclesiastical authorities expressed their discomfort over dancing, due to its potentially carnal, seductive, and sacrilegious qualities. This position marked a shift from attitudes toward dance in antiquity. Greeks and Romans honored the deities with choral song and dance. According to Platonic cosmology, collective movement mirrored the perfect ordering of cosmic spheres. For Gnostic Christians, too, dance was compatible with religion. In the apocryphal Acts of John (c. second century), Jesus initiates his disciples into the knowledge of the divine mysteries by leading them in a round dance.7 However, for the Church Fathers who were trying to proselytize citizens of the Roman Empire, dancing symbolized the remnants of paganism. Taking place on the classical stage, dancing was associated with theater and pantomime, with artifice and unbridled passions. Dancers recalled a bygone era of frenzied bacchanals, sensual goddesses, and lecherous satyrs. Compared to the martyrs, monks, and Desert Fathers of Late Antiquity, dance flouted Christian virtue. Tainted with excess and abandon, it paved the road to perdition. It should therefore, in the minds of the orthodox, be obliterated from Christian society. Nowhere was discourse on dance more polemical and controversial than during the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced the evils of dancing, reasoning that it incited lust, pride, sacrilege, and demonic intervention. Building upon patristic commentary, religious texts announced biblical and theological justifications for identifying dance as a transgression. Ecclesiastical councils and city statutes prohibited dances in religious spaces and on holy days. With fiery rhetoric, preachers warned laypeople of the dangers of dancing, as it could lead to disfigurement, death, or damnation. Confessional manuals instructed the clergy on how to address the sin of dancing with the appropriate form of penance. In dramatic fashion, church plays reinforced the association between dance and the devil. Representations of worldly dancers in art and literature signified folly and impiety. Traditional scholarship has echoed these views, portraying medieval dance as a blasphemous and forbidden act.

Introduction  3 Differing from past studies, I argue that dance became an integral part of medieval religious life. Indeed, Western medieval dance was a complex phenomenon that underwent various qualifications and transformations. Although always a controversial subject, dance, under certain circumstances, could embody piety, holiness, and even humility. With its propensity to signify sin or sanctity, the ambivalence toward dance never went away. Perhaps this very tension invested medieval dance with its expressive power. Tempering risk and transgression with discipline and regulation, the dancing body achieved spiritual transcendence within the confines of Church dogma. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. This book is about the religious authorization of dance in Western Europe. In this study, I investigate how dance became a legitimate form of devotion in medieval Christian culture. Scriptural commentaries produced paradigms of sacred dance. Clerical and lay dancers animated the performance of the liturgy and worship of the saints. The complex relationship between dance and penitence informed ideas about Christian morality and intentionality. In vernacular literature, dance became a locus of interaction between the secular and the sacred. Mystics used dance to frame spiritual experience, whereas poets and artists appropriated dance motifs to imagine death and the afterlife. Invoking numerous manuscript, primary, and visual sources—​including biblical commentaries, sermons, saints’ lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography—​ this project challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the absence of dance in Western religion. The title of this book, Ringleaders of Redemption, is indebted to medieval etymology. The terms “ringleader” and “ringleading” come from Old and Middle English, where, in popular poetry and lyric, they denoted the leader of, or act of leading, a ring dance. Writing in the vernacular, mystics employed the idea of the ringleader metaphorically to signify Christ initiating the dance of the cosmos. The term did not acquire negative connotations until the Protestant Reformation, when opposing sects conspired against one another.8 (Interestingly, around this time Western dance underwent a significant secularization). In its medieval sense, ringleader, by implying the circularity of the ring, captures a communal ethos. Entitling this work Ringleaders of Redemption, I examine the key figures and social movements that championed dance for religious purposes. But “ringleader” also suggests hierarchy and difference. Embedded within its social context are power and politicization. Participants in the ring must submit to a superior authority. Likewise, dance in the Middle Ages had a darker side. Redirecting residual paganism to the New Law, dance functioned as a tool of indoctrination. Underneath their exuberance, Christian dancing bodies were, in ideological terms, achievements of conquest and conversion. As medieval

4 Introduction historian Robert Bartlett argued, the making of Europe was, in part, a story of the colonizing project of Christendom.9 Along these lines, medieval religious dance exerted a similar force. In short, it was an enterprise equally about redemption and domination. It proves difficult to define precisely what dance was in the Middle Ages. Western dance notation, or the practice of documenting dance steps with written notes and graphic symbols, did not develop until the fifteenth century.10 The absence of dance notation makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct choreography, which is one of the main tasks of early dance historians of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Moreover, modern definitions of dance are limited. Consider the following definition of dance from The Oxford English Dictionary: “[Dance is] a rhythmical skipping and stepping, with regular turnings and movements of the limbs and body, usually to the accompaniment of music; either as an expression of joy, exultation, and the like, or as an amusement or entertainment; the action or an act or round of dancing.”11 For some of the extant evidence, this definition does suffice to describe the basic execution of bodily movement and jubilant emotions associated with medieval dancing. However, today’s description of dance falls short in capturing the experiential, theological, and epistemological richness that premodern dance manifested. Dance in the Middle Ages was an all-​encompassing activity that spanned the full spectrum of human experience. It could be a physical, outward display of one’s love and reverence for God and the saints. In this way, dance is analogous to medievalist Jean-​Claude Schmitt’s theory of medieval gesture, in which bodily motions index an interior state of the soul.12 With the mystics, dance could be a private, imagined, or invisible sensation of approaching divinity. Through this kind of dancing, religious practitioners came to know God. Placed within a religious context, interiorized and privatized dancing subverts the modern conception that dance is an inherently visual art form performed before spectators on the proscenium stage. Medieval representations of dance in heaven, with the circulation of cosmic and angelic bodies, extended dancing into the context of nonhuman entities. Poetry and rhetoric relied on dance metaphors to express the inexpressible. In a secular setting, dance also served different functions. As a ritual of courtship, it offered a means of socialization between the sexes. As a leisurely pastime that required regular training, it exhibited and naturalized class difference. Appearing across secular and sacred spheres, medieval dance helped shape religious identity, social stratification, and human intention. Beyond definitions, dance in the Middle Ages was not as distinct a genre as it is today. It does not coincide neatly with the modern subcategories of the performing arts (dance, music, theater). Secular dance forms, such as the popular medieval carole, were inseparable from instrumental music, song, and lyric poetry. In Christian worship, dance was integrated into the liturgy, processions,

Introduction  5 drama, and devotional exercises. Moreover, medieval dance terminology tends to be ambiguous. The Latin terms for dance—​including chorea, in choro, saltare, tripudium, jubilus, and others—​could denote actions as diverse as leaping, springing, singing, chanting, or displaying exaltation before divine presence. Dance, therefore, belonged to a wide-​ranging repertoire of performance practice. Especially within a religious milieu, dance often entailed, or was inseparable from, other varieties of artistic expression. One particularly overlooked discontinuity between medieval and modern dance lies in the concept of grace. Our predominant notion of grace is rooted in aesthetic, humanistic, and secular concepts that developed in the ancient, early modern, and modern worlds.13 But among the classical Charites (the Three Graces), Sandro Botticelli’s painted figures, and the Romantic ballerina, a decidedly Christian variant of grace emerged. Byzantine Christians invested grace with a kinetic charge. Grace set into motion a spiritual dynamism that channeled divinity into humanity (hence the Eucharist, from the Greek charis, grace).14 The Latin Fathers, particularly Augustine (d. 430), theologized the concept of grace (from the Latin gratia) in terms of a gift freely given by God. The divine bestowal of graciousness was of pivotal importance. It was the sine qua non that allowed post-​lapsarian beings to receive mercy, participate in salvation, and enjoy eternal life. Later articulated and synthesized in the works of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), grace reordered the disorder engendered by the Fall. In Thomist thought, grace effected the transition from the Old Law of Moses to the New Law of Christ. While grace enacts divine gifting, favoring, and loving, its efficacy is contingent upon the individual soul turning itself toward God (convertere). Conversely, the soul turning away from God and into sin (avertere) rejects the gift of operations of grace.15 Christian sacraments signify and cause grace, thereby remedying sin and reestablishing the primal likeness between God and humankind. Working for and within the soul, grace animates the processes of conversion, the sacraments, and redemption. Far from an aesthetic convention, grace played an operative role in medieval dance. Grace galvanizes the movements of the soul necessary for transformation and beatification. In doing so, the medieval dancing body turns an otherwise abominable act into a receptacle of transcendence. This book expands upon the few, yet formative studies on Western religious dance. James Miller’s scholarship traces the development of the cosmic dance from Ancient Greece to Late Antiquity. Through an analysis of philosophical texts and religious movements, he reveals the sophisticated and esoteric makeup of dance in Antiquity. Miller’s close reading of the Church Fathers suggests that early Christian dance exerted both an ascetic zeal and an erotic charge.16 Focusing on dance and pantomime, classicist Ruth Webb underscores the growing demonization of dance in the Roman Empire. In her assessment of the sources, she argues that dance was dangerous because it had the power to

6 Introduction change the perception of the viewer.17 Knowledge of these historical foundations is essential to understanding the controversies over dance that ensued in the Middle Ages. In recent years, Byzantine studies has produced pioneering research on Christian dance. Byzantinist Nicoletta Isar explores the relationship between dance and space in Byzantine churches and religious iconography. In doing so, she uncovers the theological underpinnings of dance in Byzantium.18 Art historian Bissera Pentcheva continues this avenue of inquiry. In her work on Hagia Sophia, she demonstrates how dancing bodies enact and animate sacred space. Her phenomenological approach unveils how dance, chant, and poetry informed one another.19 These studies have sharpened my attention to liturgical performance in the Latin Church. Scholarship on Western medieval dance, although still marginal, began to take shape in the 1990s. European scholars have been the most prolific on the subject. In her impressive catalog of medieval dance iconography, Birgit Fassbender has called attention to the volume and variety of dance in material culture.20 Art historian Catherine Ingrassia has compiled a wealth of imagery and primary texts pertaining to medieval dance.21 Robert Mullally’s research on secular dance forms offers a sophisticated philological and musicological approach.22 Scholars Jean-​Michel Guilcher, Yves Guilcher, and Paul Bourcier have assembled enough textual evidence to place medieval dance within a larger narrative of Western dance history.23 Julia Zimmermann’s published dissertation surveys a trove of primary texts, ranging from the Church Fathers to German romances. Her work remains the most encompassing chronicle on medieval dance.24 Other studies probe further the historical and cultural complexities of medieval dance. Musicologist Christopher Page has underscored the variety of positions that the Church developed toward music and dance.25 Historians Constant Mews and Philip Knäble have shown how medieval liturgists negotiated the role of dance in the church.26 Gertrud Jaron Lewis, in her work on German nuns and sister-​books, claims that dance was common in nunneries and helped structure the experience of ecstasy.27 Karen Silen, in an in-​depth analysis of medieval religious women, suggests that physical acts of devotion constituted a kind of dramatic choreography.28 Together these scholars have provided evidence for the legitimate use of religious dance in the Middle Ages. One of the problems with medieval dance scholarship is its propensity toward binary thinking. In other words, it tends to portray dance as either sinful (i.e., the devil’s dance) or holy (i.e., the cosmic dance), with little analysis as to what lies in between. A few scholars, however, have started to complicate this polarized view. Historian Alessandro Arcangeli scrutinized medieval debates on dance.29 Focusing on dance mania, Gregor Rohmann has underscored the continuities of Platonic thought in medieval attitudes toward dance, and how the Church

Introduction  7 wrestled with them.30 In her study on the medieval dance of death, art historian Elina Gertsman demonstrates how dance, as a potent metaphor, could elicit a variety of theological interpretations on the part of the reader/​viewer.31 Addressing sacred and secular dance forms, literary scholar Seeta Chaganti has analyzed medieval dance through postmodern critical theory.32 Any study of dance demands a sustained reflection on the body and embodiment. Along these lines, I am indebted to medievalists who have forged innovative ways with which to grasp the role of the body in medieval culture. Historian Caroline Walker Bynum’s groundbreaking scholarship has shown the significance of bodily symbols and bodily experience for religious women. Her latest work explores the paradoxes that materiality posed and how theologians and material artifacts worked out these paradoxes.33 In a similar vein, Jean-​Claude Schmitt has contributed to the reconstruction of medieval anthropology. His studies on gesture and rhythm highlight the religious logic that undergirded bodily acts.34 Like Schmitt, Barbara Newman is interested in, among other things, the interactions between elite and popular culture. Her recent work lends a new perspective on the “crossover” between the sacred and the profane in medieval art and life, which is a phenomenon that occurs throughout medieval dance history.35 Not all scholars have been entirely optimistic in their approaches to the medieval body. Historians Dyan Elliott and Nancy Caciola have explored both the opportunities and the downsides that embodied spirituality had for women.36 In women’s visions and raptures, the malleability of the body could render them either close to Christ or the carrier of a demonic incubus. Through the lens of gender, Elliott and Caciola reveal the slipperiness of medieval embodiment. This insight informs my understanding of the ambivalence of medieval dance. Outside the purview of medieval studies, my methodology derives inspiration from the disciplines of Performance Studies and Dance Studies, which have produced insightful theorizations on how to address the problem of absence and ephemerality that dance necessarily entails. As dance critic Marcia Siegel observes, dance exists “at a perpetual vanishing point.”37 Performance Studies and Dance Studies offer us ways to complicate and reappraise the relationship between archival data and live performance. In Performance Studies, Diana Taylor, Philip Auslander, and others have demonstrated how performance, even in its absence, continues to act socially and politically.38 As Rebecca Schneider posits, “[performance remains] through the set of acts and spectral meanings. . . . Instead of performance disappearing, think of performance as a medium that negotiates, perhaps becomes, materiality.”39 Moreover, Dance Studies scholars Mark Franko, Ann Cooper Albright, and André Lepecki have provided paradigms that re-​access the agentive and political underpinnings of the dancing

8 Introduction body.40 As a premodernist, these approaches have encouraged me to valorize, rather than lament, the “intrinsic absence” of performance.41 My research builds upon these historical and theoretical frameworks. Although this book analyzes sources from all over Western Europe, I focus on medieval France, Italy, and Germany. I begin by exploring how dance transitioned from residual paganism to an acceptable Christian practice. Chapters 1 through 3 address the Christianization of dance in Western Europe within three major domains:  the Bible, the saints, and the liturgy. By “Christianization” I  mean the institutionalization of religious dance under the auspices of the Latin Church. These chapters demonstrate the means by which Western Christianity championed dance for religious purposes. They also reveal how the legitimation of dance justified the Church’s growing anti-​Judaism, crusader ideology, and political dominance. Chapter  1 explores the relationship between dance and biblical interpretation. I focus particularly on the strategies by which medieval commentators condemned or praised dancers from the Bible. In many of these commentaries and other sources pertaining to the Bible, dance became a vehicle of differentiation, separating (proto)Christians from their pagan and Jewish predecessors. Biblical glosses, as well as visual representations of the Bible, constructed the archetypes of sinful and holy dancers. These archetypes created lasting paradigms of dance that influenced Christian ideas about the sacred and the profane. Chapter 2 considers the role of dance in the cult of the saints. Here I trace the evolution of dance vis-​à-​vis sanctity and cultic worship. Dances performed at saints’ vigils, shrines, and pilgrimage sites induced and honored the presence of holy individuals. For some saints, dancing became part of their iconic image. Within the context of saintly devotion, dance helped to induce conversion and promote social cohesion. In this way, the cult of the saints functioned to uphold the project of Christendom and contributed to the sanctification of religious dance in the West. Chapter 3 turns to the role of dance in medieval liturgy. Incorporating evidence from liturgical manuals, rituals, and dramas, this chapter explores how dance and liturgical choreography impressed itself onto the regular rhythms of the liturgical calendar. Although ecclesiastical councils expressed anxiety over the pagan origins of dance, liturgists described and prescribed dance rituals. On holy days, clerics authorized and performed dances in the sacred spaces of churches and cathedrals. Dance in church dramas could also exert a didactic function, reinforcing anti-​Judaic rhetoric. The liturgical stage created a context in which the Church worked out the ambivalence of dance. The following three chapters examine dance in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, when the so-​called corporeal turn of medieval religiosity was firmly in place. New attitudes toward the body and individuality informed dance in

Introduction  9 theory and practice. Chapter 4 considers how medieval dance partook in the evolving discourse of intentionality. In their handbooks on confession and repentance, pastoral preachers identified the conditions under which dance constituted virtue, venial sin, or mortal sin. With a sophisticated logic, medieval penitence classified how dance occupied the interstices between good and evil, punishment and salvation, therefore opening a window to the medieval moral conscience. Chapter 5 investigates the use of dance in evoking and transmitting ineffable experience. Examining the deployment of dance in mystical treatises, I reveal how female mystics created a new repertoire of choreography (dance-​writing) that subverted traditional paradigms of sacred dance. Their erotic pas de deux with Christ enabled them to transcend the limits imposed on their liturgical activity by a male-​dominated Church. Privileging bodily experience via the imagination, mystics’ dance language opened creative and subversive avenues to access the radical alterity of God. Chapter 6 explores the sacralization of dance in secular literature. I begin by demonstrating how romances coopted sacred dance motifs to circulate aristocratic values and celebrate the deification of courtly love. Operating within a gift economy, these dances represented the noble virtues of richness, generosity, and sincerity, all the while supporting the exclusivity of an elite society. I argue that dance in romance functioned as a quasi-​religious vehicle of reenchantment; it recovered aristocratic privileges that began to shift with the rise of a market economy. Shifting from chivalric to moralizing romances, I thereafter discuss how certain authors used dance to criticize the project of courtly love, thereby reerecting the binary between sacred and secular dance. Finally, turning to the Divine Comedy, I  show how Dante’s artful mix of dance with poetry helped reconcile his cosmic vision with his use of the Italian vernacular. Through the poeticization of dance, I  posit that Dante became the ultimate troubadour, collapsing the distinction between secular literature and Christian theology, and transforming courtly love into caritas (love for God). The final chapter examines dance traditions in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1350–​1450). During this period, dance underwent significant shifts, namely by acquiring associations with illness and death. I first discuss the choreomania (dance mania) epidemics of France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland. Choreomaniacs (dance maniacs) erupted in excessive, seemingly involuntary mass movements that befuddled clerics and tested the limits of legitimate dance. In an effort to cure the afflicted, ecclesiastical authorities revitalized rites of pilgrimage and devotion to saints. Concurrent with choreomania, late medieval courts fostered a renewed appetite for spectacularity. Their entertainment was elegant yet extravagant, grotesque yet fashionable. I conclude with a meditation on the danse macabre (dance of death). In the mid-​fifteenth century, the danse

10 Introduction macabre introduced a metaphorical relationship between dancing and dying, which, as I show, carried a variety of theological and sociological meanings. By the sixteenth century, the religious tenor of the dance of death movement began to erode, coinciding with the professionalization and secularization of dance in the Western world.

PART I

GR AC ING T HE I D OLS

1

Dance Typologies The Medieval Bible

In medieval Christianity, the historical prototypes for religious dance came from the Bible. The Vulgate (the principal Latin version of the Bible)—​the most widely read, copied, and analyzed text of the Middle Ages—​was the urtext by which medieval authorities developed and justified their ideas about dance and its place in Christianity. The Old and New Testaments associate dancing with praise, thanksgiving, joy, and prophecy. Both Testaments also contain counterexamples in which dance enacts desecration, impiety, and sin. Among the many references to dance throughout the Bible, the four most impressionable moments are: the dance of Miriam (Exodus 15:20), the dance around the calf (Exodus 32:19), the dance of David (I Samuel /​Regum 21:11, 29:5, II Samuel /​Regum 6:5, 6:14, 6:16, 6:21, I Chronicles /​Paralipomenon 13:8, 15:29), and the dance of Salome (Matthew /​Secundum Matthaeum 14:6, Mark /​Secundum Marcum 6:22).1 From these four paradigms, medieval thinkers drew distinctions between sacred and profane dance. In short, exegetes employed their scriptural knowledge to classify what constituted legitimate and illegitimate dance. The art of dancing and medieval biblical interpretation both involve the idea of the figure (figura). Medievalist Niklaus Largier calls dance an “exemplary art of figuration,” and “the production of figures in time and space,” that opens up new horizons of perception and experimentation.2 The literary critic Erich Auerbach has shown the conceptual role that the figura played in medieval exegesis. As Auerbach explains, the figure in classical thought referred to a plastic form, the motions of atoms, or the semblance between a model and its copy. With the Church Fathers and medieval theologians, the figure became a form of “phenomenal prophecy.”3 That is, the figure was at once anchored in historical reality and foreshadowed events to come. The figure facilitated a typology, or logical correspondence between the Old and New Testaments in which the Old prefigured the New. Grounded in figural understanding, biblical typology, with its taxonomy of types and antitypes, unveiled a dynamic, teleological view of Christian history. Accordingly, the semiotic plasticity of biblical dancers operated as figures, transporting the reader to the interpretive possibilities of scripture.

Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

14  Gracing the Idols Drawing inspiration from figural interpretation, this chapter investigates attitudes toward medieval dance that emerged from reading and interpreting the Bible. Medieval approaches to biblical dance orchestrated turning points between old and new regimes. In doing so, they constructed the categories of sacred and profane dance. Sacred dance connected exemplary individuals to Christ and the Virgin Mary. Profane dance, by contrast, signified pagan and Jewish practice. I begin by discussing Miriam, an archetype of acceptable religious dance. In their various interpretations, Church Fathers, theologians, commentators, preachers, and artists claimed that Miriam’s dancing prefigured penitence, Christian worship, and the Virgin Mary. Next, I examine the dancers around the golden calf. With their ritualistic backwardness, these dancers typified the idolatry of the pagans and Jews, thereby defying the conformist project of Christendom. Then, I turn to the dance of King David. As a precursor to Christ, David was the prototype of the holy dancer. However, by Christianizing dance, the figure of David in turn authorized prejudice and violence against medieval Jews. Finally, I discuss the dance of Salome. In opposition to David, Salome was the prototype of the sinful dancer. Blamed for causing the death of John the Baptist, Salome functioned as a negative figura, impeding the progression of Christian history. Together, the complex makeup of dance typologies demonstrates how the medieval Bible was constantly in flux. Rather than regurgitating doctrine, commentaries generated intervisual, intertextual, and hypertextual understandings of dance. Moreover, exegetical treatments of dance responded to contemporary concerns, including conversion, the sacraments, political propaganda, and warfare. Beyond the sacra pagina (sacred page), dance typologies exerted lasting influences on religious life in the Latin West.

Latria: The Dance of Miriam Exodus 15:20 contains the first reference to dance in the Bible. Prior to this episode, Moses had just parted the Red Sea, leading the Israelites out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land. Consecrating their successful passage from sea to land, from bondage to freedom, the Israelite women erupt in festive effervescence: “So Mary [Miriam] the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand: and all the women went forth after her with timbrels and with dances.”4 Miriam’s dance performs a rite of praise, thanksgiving, and commemoration. Moreover, the dance marks a shift from the idolatria (idolatry) of the Egyptians, who enslaved the Israelites, to the latria (worship, adoration) of the one true God. Equipped with the powers of a prophet, Miriam manifested the figural capacity to move between the past and present. As this section shows, the figure of Miriam

Dance Typologies  15 received a wide range of interpretations from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages. The Church Fathers and early commentators identified her sacramental significance. For liturgists and thinkers of the High Middle Ages, she exemplified Christian worship. Late medieval interpreters, including theologians, preachers, and artists, took typological readings further, suggesting that Miriam was a precursor to the Virgin Mary. The Church Fathers stressed the sacramentality of the dance of Miriam. As a coda to the parting of the Red Sea, her dance formed a relationship with the baptismal rite. Following Ambrose (d. 397), late antique Christians formed a typology between exodus /​baptism, and baptism /​the Resurrection. Just as exodus marked the transition from enslavement to freedom, early exegetes construed baptism as a death followed by a rebirth, mimicking Christ’s rising from the tomb.5 In this context, the dance of Miriam expresses the joy of being reborn in Christ. It seals baptism with the laetitia (joy) of spiritual renewal, and orchestrates the socialization of the Christian community. Other early commentators tempered her laetitia with corporeal discipline. In this way, the sacramentality of Miriam’s dance extended to Christian penitence. The Glossa Ordinaria (Ordinary Gloss) offers this interpretation of Exodus 15:20. Anselm of Laon (d. 1127), his brother Ralph, and their circle of colleagues and pupils compiled the Glossa Ordinaria between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. By the year 1200, the Glossa became a medieval bestseller, and almost every library in Europe owned a copy.6 The Glossa combined biblical passages with the authoritative commentaries of Church Fathers and Carolingian theologians—​Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, Bede, and others.7 Addressing Exodus 15:20, the Glossa contains this interpretation by Cassiodorus (d. c. 585): The dance however is both a multitude of people singing and it is said that the chorus is their song. Therefore because in the dance all resound equally in voice, through it charity is signified by which we are all one in Christ. Therefore we may praise whoever delivers jubilation to God: whoever should lead in this dance, that is, in charity, and with this tympanum, that is, in the mortification of the flesh.8

For Cassiodorus, the dance of Miriam emblematizes Christian fellowship. The combination of sacred dance and song represents the fusion of caritas (divine love) and penitence (mortification). Following Jerome (d. 420) and Augustine (d. 430), Cassiodorus exploited the materiality of the tympanum (timbrel or tambourine instrument) that Miriam played. Composed of a flayed, stretched piece of animal skin, this instrument generated music from the act of beating or striking. The playing of the tympanum evoked the discipline of penitence,

16  Gracing the Idols specified here as the mortification of the flesh.9 Augustine, in his reading of Psalm 149, delved further into the ascetic makeup of the tympanum: When the tympanum and the harp are taken up, the hands join together with the voice. . . not just the voice sounds but the hands also harmonize, because the words harmonize with the acts. You have taken up the instrument and fingers unite with tongue. And the very mystery of the tympanum and the harp ought not to be shattered. On the tympanum the skin is stretched and on the harp the strings are stretched: on each instrument the body is crucified.10

In a penitential setting, Miriam’s dance involves an aspect of violence. Yet this violence is unlike the spectacles of bloodlust that characterized pagan performances.11 As Cassiodorus’s exegetical treatment indicates, violence in the dance of Miriam was self-​directed. The dance initiated the sacrament of penitence, refining the body and soul of the Christian ascetic. However diverse their interpretations, early Christian thinkers seemed to agree that Miriam’s dance displayed a corrective form of movement. Bringing one out of error and out of sin, it functioned figuratively by introducing Christian latria. In this way, Miriam might be read intertextually alongside Ambrose’s commentary on Luke, a work that medieval authors frequently cited. In his reading of Luke, Ambrose interpolates a passage from Ezekiel 6:11: “Thus said the Lord God: Strike with your hand and stamp your foot, and say: Alas, for all the abominations of the evils of the house of Israel: for they have fallen by sword, by famine, and by pestilence.”12 Percussive movement mediates the relationship between God and the faithful and corrects Israel’s errors (i.e., falling into idolatry). Ambrose elaborates that “scripture has taught us to chant solemnly, to play spiritually. But it has also taught us to dance wisely [saltare sapienter], by the Lord saying to Ezekiel, ‘Clap your hand and stamp your foot.’ ”13 In the same way, the dance of Miriam exerts a corrective thrust and offers a performative means of devotion. In the High Middle Ages, select commentators contributed further to the Christianization of Exodus 15:20. For Honorius of Autun (d. 1154), Miriam helped pioneer the practice of sacred dance in Christianity: The chorus of musicians and singers assumed its origin in the dance [chorea] which antiquity established before the idols, so that they, having been deceived, praised their gods with voice and served them with their whole body. But by the circling motion of their dances [per choreas] they wished to realize the revolution of the firmament; by the linking of hands the connection of the elements; by the sound of singing the harmony of the resounding planets; by the gesture of the body the motion of the [celestial] signs; by the clapping of hands

Dance Typologies  17 or stamping of the foot the sound of thunder; which the faithful imitated and turned [converterunt] to the service of the true God. For it is read that the people who passed through the Red Sea did a dance [choream duxisse], and Miriam preceded them with a timbrel; and David danced before the ark with all his strength [totis viribus saltasse], and chanted psalms with a cithar [stringed instrument or lyre]. And it is said that Solomon instituted singers around the altar, who, with voice, trumpets, pipes, cymbals, and cithars, are read to have amplified the song. From that time on, one enjoys dances [choreis] that advance with musical instruments, since the heavenly bodies are said to move around in sweet melody.14

Honorius combines etymology, allegory, and the Bible to summarize the Christianization of dance. He begins with the Greek chorus, or collective dance and song performed in a ritual context. Exemplary dancers from the Bible converted choral dance from a pagan rite into a service for the true God. Honorius’s contemporaries have since integrated dance into the Christian repertoire. Likely drawing from Isidore of Seville (d. 636), Honorius isolates the continuity and discontinuity between pagan and Christian cultures over time.15 The Latin term for dance, chorea (to some extent interchangeable with chorus), carried several associations, both religious and secular. Often merging movement with music, chorea became a fixture in medieval liturgy by processing and circumambulating through sacred space.16 Beyond biblical hermeneutics, Honorius’s text may allude to actual liturgical practice in the Middle Ages. Alongside David and Solomon, Miriam helped initiate the Christian liturgy. Medieval art, too, constructed Miriam’s typological relationship with Christianity. Visual representations of Miriam juxtapose her with prophets, saints, and paradise.17 As an image, Miriam partook in the ideological project of Gothic art. Art historian Michael Camille viewed the entire Gothic aesthetic as a spectrum of “anti-​images” asserting the dominance of true doctrine over false representations.18 The Gothic enterprise effected its own visual program against idolaters (pagans, Jews, Muslims, heretics). Accordingly, Miriam typifies an acceptable method of adoration. For example, consider the Ghiberti Doors, also known as “the Bible in bronze,” located at the east entrance of the Florence Baptistery, an edifice dedicated to St. John the Baptist (figure 1.1). Ghiberti placed Miriam next to a panel of Moses receiving the law. Dancing and playing her tambourine at the gates of Paradise, Miriam’s act of worship foreshadows the afterlife of piety. Years before Ghiberti’s doors appeared, Dante himself was baptized there and refers to the baptistery’s interior iconography in the Paradiso. Ghiberti’s Miriam exudes associations of exodus, baptism, and the Resurrection. He depicted her dancing body as joyful, yet controlled.19 Miriam is an icon of devotional rectitude, imbuing latria with an acceptable expression of laetitia.

18  Gracing the Idols

Figure 1.1  Miriam, doors of Paradise, detail, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Baptistery of St. John the Baptist, east entrance, Florence, early /​mid-​fifteenth century (commissioned 1400/​1401)

During the Late Middle Ages, biblical interpretations elaborated upon Miriam’s prophetic power and her connection to Christianity. In this period, the most pivotal typology forged a parallel between the dance of Miriam and the glory of the Virgin Mary. The Bible moralisée (Moralized Bible), a vernacular picture book of sorts, condenses this schema in caption and image (figure 1.2).20 The above roundel and Old French text refer to Miriam: “Here the sons of Israel come and are joyful and celebrate having been saved from danger and from their enemies, who were drowned, and Miriam, Aaron’s sister is in the middle and plays the tambourine and dances and is joyful [qi timbre et bala et fet grant ioe”]21 In the lower roundel, the Virgin Mary appears alongside this gloss: “That the sons of Israel celebrated and were joyful and Miriam danced [marie bala] for God who helped and aided them signifies the angels of heaven who sang and prayed with great joy when Jesus Christ crowned His mother and put her in heaven with Him.”22 The Bible moralisée creates narrative continuity

Dance Typologies  19

Figure 1.2  Dance of Miriam, Bible moralisée, French, early thirteenth century, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. Vind. 2554, folio 21 verso

between the dance of Miriam and the coronation of the Virgin. (Moreover, the name Miriam is Hebrew for Mary). The vernacular rendering of Exodus 15:20 connects the celestial to the terrestrial. The corporeal prototype of Miriam’s dancing body preludes Mary’s materiality and maternity.23 Miriam originates the dance of praise. Mary, instrument of the Incarnation and queen of heaven, activates its apotheosis.24 Miriam’s figuration of Mary’s coronation contributes further to the sacralization of dance. The coronation of the Virgin was one of the most dynamic depictions of heaven in medieval art and literature. In the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), for example, Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) envisioned the corona/​chorea (crown/​dance) parallel in the form of a cosmic ceremony: [The Virgin Mary is] is attended by choirs of Angels, compassed about by troops of Archangels, accompanied on all sides by the jubilation of Thrones, encircled by the dances [tripudiis] of the Dominations, by the plaudits of Powers, by the

20  Gracing the Idols honors of Virtues, the hymns of the Cherubim and the chants of the Seraphim. The ineffable Trinity also applauds her with unceasing dance [perenni tripudio], and the grace with which the three Persons totally infuse her draws the attention of all to her. The illustrious order of the apostles extols her with praise beyond expression, the throng of martyrs offers every kind of worship to so great a queen, the innumerable army of confessors sounds a continuous chant to her, the shining assembly of virgins sings a ceaseless chorus [or make caroling or dancing, choream] in honor of her glory.25

This coronation exudes majesty, pomp, and play. It is also reminiscent of Mary’s childhood recounted in the apocryphal Protoevangelium Jacobi (Gospel of James, c. 145). After a temple priest blessed her at age three: “He set her down upon the third step of the altar, and the Lord God sent grace upon her; and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her.”26 The dancing Mary is a phenomenon of en-​gracing. Full of grace (gratia plena), she orchestrates concord and animates angelic rounds. Like the dance of Miriam, the coronation of Mary generates its own typology. The cosmic ballet commemorates the triumph of a new dispensation over the old regime. An anonymous thirteenth-​century text, Vita Beate Virginis Mariae et Salvatoris Rhythmica (The Rhythmic Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Savior), renders this transition in poetry: It is always full [plenum] in the palace of my bridegroom Dance [Tripudium], and delight, and charming song; Where the instruments sound in sweet melody, Cithars with flutes in sweet harmony; Moses and Abraham and David play the lyre There angels dance [chorisant] with archangels; There the cymbals of the saints echo without end, There stairways [cunei] lead the prophet into the chorus There is the eternal joy of exultation And the eternal exultation of joy. . . .27

These verses encapsulate the splendor of heaven’s court, unfolding movement and melody in infinite succession. A prophet traverses paradise via the cuneus, a Latin term for wedge-​shaped seating in Roman theaters. The poet has transformed cuneus into the very architecture of the celestial court. The rhythmic life (vita rhythmica) of the Virgin registers the heartbeat of the Christian community. She sets the tempo for the procession of universal history, offering a gateway between past and present.28 The passage from Miriam to Mary brings figura full circle, transfiguring archaic ritual into the Christian telos.

Dance Typologies  21

Idolatria: The Dance around the Golden Calf If Miriam represented the advent of sacred dance, the dancers around the golden calf committed the first act of sacrilegious dance. This dance (Exodus 32:19) is the first, and, with the exception of Salome, the only negative reference to dance in the Bible. The Bible narrates this scene from the perspective of Moses, on his return from Mount Sinai: “And when he [Moses] came nigh to the camp, he saw the calf, and the dances: and being very angry, he threw the tablets out of his hand, and broke them at the foot of the mount.”29 The story of the golden calf reveals the struggles of a fledgling Israelite community and its failure to follow God’s commandments. Far removed from these origins, medieval Christians refashioned Exodus 32:19 to address contemporary concerns. The golden calf ’s relationship with idolatry informed medieval visual culture. The dancers’ dissoluteness classified categories of religious otherness. In preaching and penitential contexts, Exodus 32:19 shaped discourse on sin. Standing in counterpoint to the figura of Miriam, the dancers around the golden calf authorized negative discourse on dance in the Middle Ages. The classic interpretation of Exodus 32:19 identifies the golden calf with the origins of idolatry. In Western medieval visual culture, however, the concept of idolatria was never clearly defined.30 In this way the Latin Church differed from Byzantium, whose iconoclasts and iconophiles articulated specific arguments either denouncing or supporting icons.31 Nor did Christianity follow the aniconic trends in Islam and Judaism. Moreover, during the High and Late Middle Ages, idolatry tended to be less problematic than in Late Antiquity, when Church Fathers strove to differentiate themselves from powerful pagans. For instance, writing as a Christian minority in the second century, Tertullian fulminated against the prevalence of idols (brass, silver, ebony, or wood) and their aversion to God: “The supreme offence in His eyes is idolatry . . . . Man himself, author of every kind of guilt, is not only the work of God, but also His likeness; and yet in body and spirit he has fallen away from his Creator.”32 In practice, Tertullian’s words resonated more with early modern reformers than medieval theologians, given the resurgence of discourse on idolatry during the Reformation. Casting Catholics as idolaters, popular printed works, especially Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) with illustrations by Albrecht Dürer, disseminated golden calf dance iconography as Protestant propaganda. The medieval Latin Church managed to reconcile idolatria and devotion with imago (image). Investing images with a religious function, Latin Christendom could slip past the first commandment, which forbade the making of graven images (Exodus 20:4).33 Though the Cistercians and other select religious orders were more austere, the Church generally championed images as a vital component of worship. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) echoed this reasoning, provided that

22  Gracing the Idols one did not confuse images with the holy persons they represented.34 The Latin imago obtained a particular ontological status as an agent of conversion and revelation. Representations of the golden calf in medieval art forged a connection between idolatria and impious conduct. The sculptural programs of Vézelay Abbey (the home of Cluniac and Benedictine monks and once the site of Roman baths) offer a visual gloss on idolatry. A nave capital depicts Moses, who observes a hideous demon exploding from the calf. In one of Vézelay’s chapels, we see the same demon—​with its Halloween hair and wild eyes—​dancing and fondling the breasts of a nude woman (figure 1.3). This sculpture encapsulates Meyer Schapiro’s claim about the “eruptive” quality of Romanesque art, which relishes in archaic renderings of raw experience.35 With this capital, the onlooker’s experience is one of horror; idolatry constitutes a demonic ritual. Whereas Miriam prefigures paradise, the golden calf adumbrates damnation. As a prototype for profane dance, the golden calf influenced the interpretations of other biblical narratives. For example, the Ci Nous Dit (What This Story Tells

Figure 1.3  Vézelay Abbey, Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene capital, St. Madeleine Chapel, c. mid-​eleventh /​early twelfth century, courtesy of Web Gallery of Art

Dance Typologies  23

Figure 1.4  Rape of Dinah, Ci Nous Dit, CCXXIX, France, c. 1340s, Chantilly, Musée Condé MS. 26, folio 146 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

Us), an Old French collection of religious tales, contains a chapter devoted to the dancers adoring the golden calf.36 A fourteenth-​century Ci Nous Dit manuscript at Chantilly places the golden calf story within the same bifolium (facing page) of the rape of Dinah, a story from Genesis 34 (figure 1.4).37 “Folle Cointise,” the author explains, caused the rape of Dinah. In medieval French literature, cointise usually means elegance, grace, or fineness. The Ci Nous Dit draws from the less savory connotations of cointise:  vanity, coquetry, ornament.38 Foolish vanity descends from the sin of gluttony. Since cointise incites dancing, this is how the daughter of Jacob was ravished at a festival.39 Interestingly, the Vulgate does not specify that dance had occurred in Genesis 34. The Ci Nous Dit’s close proximity between the rape of Dinah and the golden calf suggests that these stories should be read intertextually and intervisually. In either story, dance generates immorality. Operating in the manner of an idol, the dance iconography functioned to show its inherent dysfunction.40 With its conflation of dance and idolatry, the figura of the golden calf colored medieval interpretations of the New Testament. Consider Old French Apocalypse manuscripts’ treatment of the book of Revelation (or Apocalypsis Ioannis, Vulgate). One of these adaptations inserted derelict dancers into Revelation 11:10 (figure 1.5).41 The dance iconography forms a contrast between the frivolity of Jerusalem and the pathos of the deceased prophets, whose unburied corpses the dancers left to rot and decay. The artistic license of the Getty Apocalypse elaborates upon its Vulgate source: “And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them and make merry: and shall send gifts one to another, because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt upon the earth.”42 Depicting dance as dissolution, the Getty Apocalypse reconfigures idolatry within an eschatological framework. Notably, the two prophets, commonly

24  Gracing the Idols

Figure 1.5  Getty Apocalypse, illustration for Revelation 11:10, London, c. 1255–​ 1260, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig III 1, folio 17 verso

identified as Moses and Elijah, both defied idolatry. The former did so with his outraged response to the golden calf. The latter challenged false prophets to induce their god Baal, forged as a golden bull, to make fire. In supplication to Baal, they leapt around the altar. The fire failed to appear, just as Elijah predicted (III Regum 18:26). Imposing dance onto the Vulgate, the Getty Apocalypse fabricates a classification of anti-​Christian conduct.43 The derelict dancer has turned away (avertere) from the true icon, and together with the other entertainers have degraded God’s messengers with profane amusement. The golden calf ’s influence on medieval perceptions of the Apocalypse suggests that the unfaithful will receive divine retribution at the end of time. The broadly construed analogy between dance and idolatry helped construct medieval categories of religious otherness, namely pagans and Jews. In its opposition to the dance of Miriam, the dance around the golden calf was an unacceptable Christian rite. The exclusion of idolatrous dancing from Christian worship appears in a scene from the life of Otto, Bishop of Bamberg (d. 1139): After our holy father Otto had come again in peace to his episcopal site, on the completion of his first apostleship to the Pomeranian people, two of the best-​ known towns, Wollin and Stettin, moved by the envy of the devil, returned to their former sordid idolatry . . . . which was accompanied by large gatherings and dancing [tripudio]. Although the town had been cleansed by the word of

Dance Typologies  25 faith and the washing of baptism, and the people, moved by the holy bishop, began to burn the larger and smaller idols that were in the open air, certain stupid persons carried off secretly some small images adorned with gold and silver, little knowing how they were bringing about destruction to their town. . . . By doing this they laid themselves open to divine reproof. For when all the people were engaged in playing and dancing in the heathen fashion [ludis et saltionibus paganico], the fire of God suddenly fell from heaven upon the apostate town.44

The passage reads as if it were a re-​adaptation of Exodus 32:19, replacing the Hebrew dancers with pagan Slavs. There is, evidently, an historical record for Otto trying to convert the pagans in Pomerania. After a few attempts, he achieved some success. Whether or not the Slavs truly danced in such a way, historians concur that it took centuries to bring the Eastern European and Germanic tribes under the mantle of Christendom. And even then, many of their pre-​Christian customs left a lingering trace.45 Otto’s vita (life story) therefore unveils the uncomfortable coexistence of paganism and Christianity. Ebbo, his hagiographer (spiritual biographer), deploys dance to frame the Slavs as idolaters bereft of Christian discipline. Idolatrous dancing both differentiates pagans from Christians and justifies the need for conversion. Even after Europe had become predominantly Christian and the pagan was more of an abstraction than a reality, the golden calf retained its symbolic association with religious and ethnic otherness. In an anonymous sermon from the British Library from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the author specifies that Moses, together with the sons and daughters of Levi (founder of the priestly tribe), danced after crossing the Red Sea in praise of the Lord. Conversely, the dancers around the golden calf impeded worship and honor. The sermon ascribes an Egyptian, that is, pagan, origin to their disruptive anti-​ritual.46 The golden calf ’s demarcation of religious otherness included the differentiation between Jews and Christians. In the Late Middle Ages, textual and visual treatments of Exodus 32:19 often emphasized the dancers’ Jewishness. In a German picture Bible known as the Bible Historien, for example, this caption accompanies a miniature painting of the dancers around the golden calf: “The Jews [made] a golden calf idol” (figure 1.6).47 Interestingly the Vulgate does not use the term Jews, and later refers to these people as “the children of Israel” (filiis Israhel, Exodus 32:20). The manuscript image conflates a few narrative scenes: Moses receiving the Law (Exodus 20), Moses communicating with God (Exodus 33), and Moses discovering the dancers around the idol (Exodus 32). In the central image, Moses, upon beholding God, appears with a nimbus, an iconographic detail that may point to a Christological reading. Emphasizing the disparity between the dancers and Moses, the Bible Historien seems to suggest a

26  Gracing the Idols

Figure 1.6  Dance around the golden calf, Bible Historien, Swabia, late fourteenth century, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 268, folio 9 recto

typological relationship between Moses and Christianity, or the Old Law and the New Law. In contrast, the dancers, with their ritualistic backwardness, thwart law and revelation.48 Although there is no historical evidence to substantiate the idolatry of medieval Jews—​who were likely more image averse—​medieval commentaries on the golden calf project contemporary anti-​Judaism onto scriptural understanding. While the golden calf could refer to idolaters, pagans, or Jews, curiously it did not necessarily symbolize medieval heresy. Despite the golden calf ’s association with religious otherness, dance per se did not carry the stigma of heresy in the medieval West. This was a departure from the Church Fathers, who accused opposing sects (e.g., the Donatists, Priscillans, and Gnostics) of dancing in a depraved manner.49 In the rural areas where the Dominicans tried to uproot heresy, they discovered that unorthodoxy often took the form of superstition. Reminiscent of the golden calf, one group of Lyonnais peasants worshipped a dog they called St. Guinefort.50 However, direct equations between heresy and dance did not resurface until the Late Middle Ages, when flagellants challenged the papacy, and the Witches’ Sabbath infiltrated the popular imagination. During the Albigensian Crusade, inquisitorial records contain sparse references to dancing heretics. One account mentions how the cleric Arnaud de Vernoilles seduced a group of young boys who had been dancing and wrestling.51 Evidently, the scandal has more to do with sodomy than with heretical dance, given Arnaud’s

Dance Typologies  27 involvement in the affair. Similarly, in medieval interpretations of the golden calf, the dancers could be non-​Christians or wayward Christians, but rarely heretics. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the dance around the golden calf became integrated into clerical discourse on sin. According to these texts, the dancers around the golden calf symbolized numerous sins, including disobedience, pride, lust, and idolatry. Given the clergy’s monopoly over confession, penance, and absolution, retellings of Exodus 32:19 strategized the spiritual superiority of priests over the laity. An anecdote on disobedience from the Viaticum Narrationum, a late medieval compilation of religious stories, tells how a deranged Christian danced around an adorned ram and cursed a priest. The wrath of God arrived with a vengeance, inflicting a storm that destroyed the entire region.52 Similarly, in his influential treatise on vices (c. 1250), the Dominican Guillaume Peraldus invoked the golden calf dancers to chastise laity who disrespected the formality of the mass.53 In a later section on pride, Peraldus sets the dance of Miriam against the dancers around the golden calf. Miriam’s performance exemplifies pious dance and song, since it could have taken place in a temple. By contrast, the dance around the golden calf was false and fraudulent.54 James of the Marches (d. 1476), a pupil of the legendary preacher San Bernardino of Siena, aligns the dancers with lust. In one of his sermons, Moses, an otherwise most gentle man, became angry upon seeing the dances because, spurred by lust and idolatry, the Israelites abandoned themselves to temporal joy (l[a]etitiae temporalis). To deliver his point home in sordid detail, James concludes by quoting Augustine’s comments on Matthew: “Every movement of immodesty is a leap [saltus] into a deep sewer.”55 James theologizes how, through dance, idolatria contaminates laetitia. In the Ci Nous Dit, the sin of Exodus 32:19 resonates with the present.56 The Chantilly manuscript pairs the story with an image of lay nobles engaged in a secular medieval dance. In all of these examples, the image of the golden calf facilitates the contemplation of sin in the Middle Ages. The conflation of Exodus 32:19 and Christian ideas about sin demonstrates how clerics used scriptural interpretation to construct a larger system of knowledge. For instance, the Archbishop of Bohemia, Konrad of Waldhausen (d. 1369), offers a biblical etymology of dance that places dance into a larger context of illegitimate activity: It is noted that dance [corea] is to be avoided on account of its lascivious motions and its name in Gaelic and Teutonic. In Latin it is said chorea, like a heart going toward perdition by excessive carnal desire; and in Gaelic it is said: garea, since it lacks all law, because Moses broke the tablets’ laws; and in Teutonic it is said: dancz, from Dan, and whose tribe of many men led dances

28  Gracing the Idols before the calf, and also in that tribe the calf was placed by Bean, in the city which is called Dan, until the day of their captivity.57

Konrad first addresses the Latin etymology of chorea to decode what he sees as dance’s deadly sin: lust, given the phonetic proximity between the word for dance and the word for heart (cor). For the Gauls, garea, a Gaelic word for ram, forms a direct correspondence with the golden calf. He proceeds with the Germanic root, dancz, which derives from the biblical tribe of Dan. Konrad links Dan to the malicious children of Bean (I Maccabees /​Machabaeorum 5:4), who are otherwise unrelated. The Bible never specifies Dan as the dancers around the golden calf, but it does contain some clues to Dan’s idolatry.58 Though ill-​founded, Konrad’s etymology resonated with medieval Christians. In medieval legends, Dan migrated from Israel to Scythia. The Vikings and Goths descended from them and conquered northern Europe. Medieval etymologies, while not often linguistically sound, made sense to medieval readers. Following Augustine, medieval thinkers believed that the verbal sign of a word contained its essence.59 Equipped with biblical and etymological evidence, Konrad contends that dance derives from barbarism, lust, lawlessness, and idolatry. As Konrad’s passage shows, the golden calf contributed to a broader understanding of biblical and Christian history. Moreover, he reframes Exodus 32:19 as a story of origins. The golden calf was the archetype of sinful dance, and its enduring resonance shaped the formation of medieval dance polemic.

Sacer Saltator: The Dance of David The dance of King David is the most celebrated dance in the Bible. Throughout the Middle Ages, it ratified the place of dance in religious worship more than any other scriptural scene. Between Late Antiquity and the Late Middle Ages, Christians upheld the sanctity of David’s dance in various ways. Early Christian interpreters de-​ paganized the figure of David, distancing his performance from those that decorated the Roman stage. The Church Fathers and medieval exegetes employed hermeneutical strategies to Christianize the dance of David, instilling it with Christian virtues. Medieval interpretations of David’s dance extended beyond the purview of textual commentary by informing liturgical dance practice. For medieval commentators and theologians, the most salient aspect of David’s dance was its prefiguration of the Passion of Christ. However, the sacrificial topos came at a price. In the medieval sources, David’s proximity to Christ dissociated him from his Jewish roots, thereby effectively justifying anti-​ Judaism. Moreover, with their royal and military propaganda, medieval kings and crusaders politicized the figura of David. As this section reveals, David, the

Dance Typologies  29 sacer saltator (sacred dancer), was equally complicit in the degradation and demonization of religious otherness. Readers first encounter the dance of David in II Regum (or II Samuel in modern Bibles), amid a flurry of ceremonial acts. After David captured Jerusalem, the Israelites carried the ark into the city of David. This event was a homecoming and a relocation of the ark, just recovered from Philistine (hence pagan) territory.60 The king’s coterie brought ox and ram for the sacrifice. At this point in his life, David was neither the adolescent challenger to Goliath nor the aged penitent. He was a vigorous leader, a military man, and an iconoclast of Baal. He had recently defeated the Philistines and Canaanites, and eradicated their idols (II Regum /​II Samuel 5).61 Paying homage to the return of the ark, David orchestrated animal sacrifice and distributed the feast to the multitudes (II Regum /​II Samuel 6:17-​ 19). The dance of David was the highlight of the festival: “And David danced with all his might before the Lord: and David was girded with a linen ephod [priestly robe]. And David and all the house of Israel brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord with joyful shouting, and with sound of trumpet.”62 As the episode unfolds, the Vulgate implies that David’s dancing was as pious as it was problematic. His wife Michol, or Michal, was not pleased with his role in the ceremony: “And when the ark of the Lord was come into the city of David, Michol the daughter of Saul, looking out through a window, saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord: and she despised him in her heart.”63 Michol may have been disgusted with the quality of his dancing. The Vulgate employs the Latin verb saltare, which connotes dance as well as jump, leap, spring, and hop. It could also suggest a salacious, sensational type of movement.64 David’s dance may have resembled more of a prance or jig than a dignified processional more appropriate to his regal rank. A few lines later, the Vulgate indicates that David danced while he was nudatus (naked). He was probably not completely nude, since the text mentions his ephod (priestly robe). Most likely, his exuberant outburst caused his garment to momentarily reveal his nether regions. Michol was furious that the king would so carelessly expose himself to his own subjects.65 Medieval artists remained conservative when depicting David. He is never nude, though he occasionally appears topless or clad in a risqué mini robe.66 The issue of David’s nudity was perhaps more troubling in Late Antiquity than in the Middle Ages. For Christians living under the Roman Empire, David may have reminded them of pagan performers. Though no sex scenes transpired on the antique stage, full nudity of men and women was a staple of Roman theater.67 David’s exposure thus corresponds to what occurred in classical performance culture—​a subject of much criticism by Tertullian, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. I would suggest, then, that the Church Fathers’ immediate response was to de-​paganize David, to sanitize his saltus.68 (Pseudo) Cyprianus (d. 258), for instance, explained that though it is written in scripture that David and the

30  Gracing the Idols Israelites danced, it is not written that they danced like the performers of Greek spectacles.69 John Chrysostom (d. 407), a severe critic of the dance, assured his congregants that David’s dance was unlike those of the diabolical women and prostitutes; David made his domus (house) into a church, not a theater.70 Procopius (d. 565), elsewhere scandalized by (soon to be Empress) Theodora on stage, differentiated David’s dance from the contortions of pantomimes. For Procopius, David’s dancing body taught us not to blush at the cross.71 David’s ascetic nudity likens him to a martyr in the amphitheater.72 In the context of late antique performance practice, early Christian authorities strove to differentiate David from the pagan dancing body. Historically removed from antique theater, medieval exegetes did not have to de-​paganize David to the extent of their late antique predecessors. They instead demonstrated how the dance of David operated as a vehicle of Christianization. Both the Church Fathers and medieval thinkers invested the dance of David with Christian virtue. In Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob (Morals on the Book of Job, c. 595), David’s humility unfolds in the choreography of the wheel (rota): And yet, when he brings back the ark of God to Jerusalem, he dances before the ark [ante arcam saltat], mingled with the people, as though forgetful that he had been preferred to them all. And because, as is believed, it had been the custom of the common people to dance before the ark [coram arca saltare], the king wheels round in the dance [per saltum rotat], in service to God. Behold how he whom the Lord preferred specially above all, condemns himself beneath the Lord, both by equaling himself with the least, and by displaying abject behavior. . . . Before God he performed even the extremist vileness, in order to strengthen, by his humility, the bold deeds he had performed in the sight of men. What is thought by others of his doings, I know not; I am more surprised at David dancing, than fighting [ego David plus saltantem stupeo quam pugnantem]. For by fighting he subdued his enemies; but by dancing before the Lord [saltando autem coram Domino] he overcame himself. 73

Gregory parallels David’s self-​effacement with his self-​sacrifice. Paradoxically, his solo saltatio (dance) made him evaporate into the masses. David’s abjection carried religious and political consequences. In his reverence for the ark, David submitted himself to a kingdom more powerful than his own. Gregory downplayed David’s military prowess in favor of his debased dancing; the latter proves more awesome than any of his conquests. The dance’s archaic, uncivilized quality both suspended and enhanced his kingship.74 Gregory emphasized the wheeling component of David’s dance that per saltum rotat mysteriously implies. Evoking the revolutions of celestial bodies, rotare (to rotate, wheel, or revolve) aligns David with the cosmic dance and brings to mind Honorius’s

Dance Typologies  31 etymology of chorus. For the martyrs, the wheel symbolized an instrument of torture and execution at the hands of the Romans. In this sense, David’s rota enacted a form of martyrdom. Gregory offered another typology of the wheel in his Ezekiel commentaries: the unfolding of the Old Law into the New Law.75 Read intertextually, David becomes a figura that presages the new order. His rota is a technology of the Christian dancing body that impels one forward, advancing the progression of sacred time. The Gregorian gloss recasts David as an agent of divine revelation. Gregory’s approach to David remained influential in biblical commentary of the High Middle Ages. Commenting on the dance of David, the Ordinary Gloss explains: “And because the dance before the ark, as it is believed, had been in the manner of common people, the king rotates [or wheels, per saltum rotat] himself in obedience to the divinity, through having danced in a lively manner . . . . and scorns himself while exhibiting abjection.”76 The Gloss positioned David as a forerunner to the Christian virtue of humility and ascetic practices of self-​denial. By stressing David’s obedience to God, medieval commentary managed to reconcile David’s transgressive act with religious sobriety, or involuntary excess with voluntary suffering. Georges Bataille’s ideas about excess and transgression help clarify the interdependence of saltatio (dance) and passio (suffering). David’s dance, like Bataille’s discussion of prehistoric art, emerges out of the excesses of festival and sacrifice: “A work of art, a sacrifice contains something of an irrepressible festive exuberance that overflows the world of work, and clashes with, if not the letter, the spirit of the prohibitions indispensable to safeguarding this world.”77 Commenting on the cave paintings of Lascaux, Bataille locates the origins of art in transgression. The movement from work to play, from homo faber (human being as maker or creator) to homo ludens (human being as player), reclaims the intimacy of the sacred. He restores the intimacy of divine order through physical excess.78 David’s exuberance exceeded the boundaries of ordinary (profane and utilitarian) spheres of existence. His holy play evokes the dynamics of beatitudinal inversion: the high become low, the low become high. The dance’s disruption of the normative order rendered David an archetype of Christian piety. The various interpretations of the dance of David in the Gloss testify to its spiritual multivalence. The Gloss’s physical layout confronted the reader with centuries of interpretation; its hermeneutic web overflowed with multiple meanings. Reading scripture in the Middle Ages was by no means a solitary activity. When practiced well, it became a living dialogue with God.79 Indeed, the Gloss’s hermeneutic excess has led David Salomon to construe it as a medieval hypertext. In the hypertext, knowledge is constantly recombined and renewed. It confronts readers with choices and alternatives, allowing them to craft their own episteme.80 Wandering through the Gloss’s maze of meanings, medieval readers

32  Gracing the Idols navigated the diverse nodes of their literary terrain. Reading the dance of David, exegetes enacted an intellectual rota by which they extracted esoteric knowledge. Once instituted as a Christian figura, the dance of David could, to borrow from Auerbach’s analysis, oscillate between historical event and phenomenal prophecy. Medieval Bible illustration likewise alluded to David’s temporal kinesis. Consider an illustration for I Chronicles (or I Paralipomenon, Vulgate), a more historiographical book of the Bible that reiterates the dance of David (13:8 and 15:29). An incipit page from a medieval Bible highlights David’s dance in conjunction with some seminal moments of Genesis.81 The historiated initial converges Adam and Eve, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel, and Jacob’s ladder. Along the margins, men carry the ark, and musicians play the bagpipes, pipe, tabor, and rebec. David dances in ludic abandon. The image documents the past while showing David marching into the present moment. By dancing, Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) wrote, “David had moved the Redeemer to come out of his own flesh, and his joy announced [Christ] by prophesying.”82 With its physical provocation, David’s dance literally moved (moverat) the savior, releasing an earthquake of cosmic consequences. For medieval readers and viewers, the dance of David conveyed a dynamic temporality, investing historia (history) with revelatio (revelation). The dance of David’s influence on medieval Christianity was not limited to texts and images. In several churches and religious communities, David influenced actual liturgical practice. Ambrose began this protoliturgical paradigm in his De Poenitentia (Concerning Penitence), a work that Western theologians knew well. For Ambrose, “the dancing [saltavit] which David practiced before the ark of God is commended. For everything that is seemly is done for religion, such that we need not be ashamed of a service which tends to the worship and honoring of Christ.”83 The Western Church tamed David’s exuberance into the solemnity of the Latin rite. Amalarius (d. c. 850), a Frankish liturgist, saw David’s dance as the first Christian liturgy. David initiated the Christian chorus, which Amalarius codified into Carolingian ritual.84 Eudes Rigaud (d. 1275), the Bishop of Rouen, recorded that the dancing nuns at Villarceaux justified their custom by appealing to David’s example.85 Late medieval sermons surmised that David anticipated Pope Martin V (d. 1431), known for offering indulgences to the participants in his processions.86 As author of the Psalms, David appears in medieval psalters (books of Psalms) enacting penitence or praise. Monks and nuns recited the Psalms daily, and the laity learned them in the liturgy and personal prayer books. An historiated initial from an Italian psalter depicts David as an old man clutching his psaltery (harp-​like instrument), while his young descendants dance around him (figure 1.7).87 This illustration corresponds to the beginning of Psalm 80: “Rejoice in God our helper: rejoice to the God of Jacob.”88 The text and image together evoke a serialization of David’s dance. In medieval devotion,

Dance Typologies  33

Figure 1.7  Psalter with David dancing with descendants, detail, historiated initial E (Exultate) for Psalm 80, Vulgate, Master of Isabella di Chiaromonte, Matteo Felice, illuminators, Naples, c. 1465–70, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 131 F 18, folio 86 verso

the dance was passed down through the generations. Performing David’s Psalms, Christians pulsed to the rhythms of sacred history. The most salient accomplishment of late medieval approaches to David was the explicit typology between David and Christ. Consider a scene from the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation), which places the dance of David alongside diverse biblical episodes (­figures 1.8 and 1.9).89 The Speculum recounts biblical stories in pictures and minimal text.90 Across from David on the top left is a Crucifixion scene, showing that God will destroy and raise the temple of God in three days (figure 1.8). Below Christ is the accidental death of Absalom, David’s rebel son (figure 1.8). On the top right, Michol derides David’s dancing and compares him to a buffoon (figure 1.9).Opposite Absalom is Evil-​Merodach (Amel-​Marduk), son of King Nebuchadnezzar and future king of Babylon. Fearing that his father whom he rebelled against will return from the dead, Amel-​Marduk exhumes the corpse, dismembers it into three hundred pieces, and feeds it to three hundred vultures (figure 1.9). Typically, the Speculum divides these scenes, so that the Crucifixion and King David appear together on one page, whereas Absalom and Amel-​Marduk appear together on another page, with continuous text below.91 The German manuscript shown here, however, merges all four images on the same bifolium and disperses the text among several scrolls. This unique arrangement multiplies the interpretive avenues that readers and viewers may follow. The many mirrorings—​of life and death, scorn and empathy, victory and mourning—​engender a variety of interpretive possibilities. With its intertextual and intervisual schema, the Speculum Humanae Salvationis enhances a typological reading of the dance of David. Elaborating

Figure 1.8  Crucifixion; Death of Absalom, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Clarenberg, c. 1360 Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, ms. 2505, folio 46 verso

Figure 1.9  King David dances; Evil-​Merodach mutilates his father’s corpse, Speculum Humanae Salvationis Clarenberg, c. 1360, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, ms. 2505, folio 47 recto

36  Gracing the Idols upon the late medieval focus on Christ’s suffering, the Speculum conflates the dance of David with the Passion of Christ.92 To Michol, David’s dance was public shaming, just as the Crucifixion was, to Christ’s tormentors, a theater of humiliation. The Speculum’s juxtapositional structure reinforces a figurative reading. In medieval literature, the speculum (mirror) was a metaphor by which one contemplated truth and perceived one’s true self. The speculum offered a descriptive and prescriptive view, showing us who we are and what we should be. In the monastic context, scripture was the most important kind of speculum. Contemplating its reflection, one could grasp the Bible’s deeper layers of meaning.93 The specularity, or mirroring capacity, of the dance of David, I would add, effects a return to sacred order, erasing the boundaries of self and other. As Augustine wrote, “[David is] all Christ, head and body” (totus Christus, caput et corpus).94 Medieval commentaries developed further David’s transparency as a signifier of Christ. The intimate relationship between David and Christ helped institute the Christianization of medieval dance. One of the unfortunate side effects of the Christianization of David was the sense of illegitimacy that he projected onto the Jews. Mythologizing David as the conduit of Christianity downplayed—​or effaced—​his Jewish origins. For medieval Christians, distancing David from Jewish tradition was a way to claim him as their predecessor. In doing so, they shifted the transgressive aspect of David onto his wife Michol. The rift between David and Michol had a scriptural precedent. “How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself before the handmaids of his servants, and was naked, as if one of the buffoons should be naked,” Michol remarked. David responded with a defense of dance: “I will both play and make myself more base [sic] than I have done: and I will be little in my own eyes: and with the handmaids of whom thou speakest, I shall appear more glorious.” As retribution for her spite, Michol remains infertile all her life.95 In medieval biblical interpretation, infertility was the least of Michol’s faults. Typological readings magnified the disparity between (pre) Christian David and the Jewish Michol. Glossing the dance of David, the Bible moralisée polarized their respective religious identities (figure 1.10).96 In the top roundel, David dances and Michol observes. A figure descends from the heavens to bless David. The corresponding caption reads: “Here the ark comes into Jerusalem and David undresses before all the others and takes off his robe as far as his chemise and comes before the ark and dances [et bale et trippe et dance et kerole] and is joyous in honor of the ark, and Michol is at a window and sees David and despises him in her heart.”97 In the bottom roundel, David has transformed into Christ, whereas Michol, now ugly and disfigured, is accompanied by Jewish men. A similar figure descends from the heavens and gestures toward Christ. The corresponding caption reads: “The ark which came into Jerusalem signifies the Holy Church which came into the world. David who danced [bala] before the ark signifies Jesus

Dance Typologies  37

Figure 1.10  Dance of King David, in Bible moralisée, French, early thirteenth century, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2554, folio 44 recto

Christ who celebrated the Holy Church and celebrated the poor and the simple and showed great humility. Michol who mocked David and despised him signifies Synagoga (the personification of the Synagogue) who mocked Jesus Christ and despised him.”98 The Bible moralisée’s separation between (pre)Christianity and Judaism is clear. Although the text does not specify the relationship between David’s dance and the Passion of Christ, the rapport between Michol and Synagoga makes that connection, especially since medieval Christians identified Christ’s tormentors as (mostly) Jews. With orientalized features and disfigured bodies, the Jewish figures in the Bible moralisée, as historian Sara Lipton has shown, exude disturbing anti-​Semitic overtones.99 This thirteenth-​century manuscript appeared during the height of anti-​Jewish activity in Western Europe. Pogroms, blood libel, and the burning of rabbinic books comprised some of the atrocities inflicted on medieval Jews.100 Within the larger context of premodern anti-​Semitism, the Bible moralisée manipulated the dance of David to craft the mythologization of evil Jews.

38  Gracing the Idols The Bible moralisée participated in a larger project of differentiating dancers on religious grounds. Interpretations of David tended to Christianize dance, while interpretations of Michol identified her scorn for dancing as theological error. Commenting on Ecclesiastes 3:4 (“a time to mourn and a time to dance”) the Ordinary Gloss morphed this passage into Christian soteriology:  “We mourn now and we will dance in the future [in future saltemus], that dance [saltationem] which David testified around the ark. The daughter of Saul scorns the dance, but it was pleasing to God.”101 Ambrose turned Luke 7:32 (“we have piped to you, and you have not danced: we have mourned, and you have not wept”)102 into a soteriological disaster for Jews: “That is, you did not raise your souls to spiritual grace [spiritalem gratiam]. ‘We wailed, and ye wept not.’ That is, you did not repent. And therefore was the Jewish people forsaken, because it did not repent, and rejected grace.”103 David and Michol resurfaced in a Jesuit apology on dance, in which the author coined the neologism micholaiser, or “to micholize.” The Apologie applies this term to those who blame all dance as scandalous, lustful, bawdy, or vicious. Those who lack refined judgment and understanding relive Michol’s error.104 Anti-​Judaism therefore continued to inform attitudes toward dance in early modernity. From exegesis to lexicon, biblical typologies conjured theological arguments to substantiate the moralization of dance. Throughout the Middle Ages, biblical interpretations of King David influenced secular affairs. Medieval kings and warriors politicized the figure of David to bolster their imperial agendas. For example, women sang, danced, and clapped their hands to celebrate Clotaire I’s victory over the Saxons in 555.105 This scene, I believe, follows a biblical precedent from I Regum 25:5 (or I Samuel 25:5 in modern Bibles). This passage describes how the Israelite women danced for David as he paraded through the city with the head of Goliath. Well before his coronation, violence became integral to David’s identity. Jerome’s interpretation of the name David, “with the hand of a strong or desirable man,” suggests that brute force and divine favor formed the essence of his persona.106 Moreover, moralizing and courtly literature from the Ottonian Empire fashioned David as an exemplar of decorum. He achieved the ideal equilibrium between militarism and majesty.107 Together these examples project political posturing onto David’s dancing image. During the Crusades, kings and warriors deployed David to mobilize and justify their military exploits. For instance, an image of David’s triumph over Goliath, as well as his dancing cheerleaders, appear in a Bible produced during the Seventh Crusade (figure 1.11).108 Commissioned during the reign and crusade of King Louis IX of France (d. 1270), this Old Testament picture Bible functioned as political propaganda. Abounding with images of Old Testament patriarchs, kings, and military heroes, the Crusader Bible fueled

Dance Typologies  39

Figure 1.11.  David presents head of Goliath; Israelite women rejoice, detail, Morgan Crusader Bible, Paris, c. 1250, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 638, folio 29 recto

warriors’ morale and their desire to conquer the Saracen (Muslim) infidels. Although the Crusader Bible only depicts Jewish figures, its representations of David and Goliath, or David and Michol, could suggest a contrast between the Christian warrior and the Islamic other. In this way, biblical dance iconography helped communicate the ideology of war.109 From the perspective of medieval kingship, the Crusader Bible may form a typology between its patron and David, given King Louis’s piety, asceticism, and eventual canonization as a saint. Anointed by grace, medieval kingship assimilated the dual nature of Christ.110 Ernst Kantorowicz famously dubbed this twinning phenomenon “the King’s two bodies.” As Kantorowicz explains, the “body natural” is mortal flesh and the body politic is the immortal sovereignty that remains unaffected by infirmity and death. When a king’s “body natural” expires, the body politic transmigrates from one kingship to another. In medieval theology of the Incarnation, the king’s two bodies pertained to the duae naturae (two natures) of Christ.111 Accordingly, the Crusader Bible demonstrates how the David-​ Christ typology perpetuated the legacy of David’s imperial rule within medieval Christendom. Invested with political significance, the dance of David deployed the geminization, or twinning, of Christ and king. The propagandist treatment of David did not amount to empty rhetoric. It helped promote real violence against non-​Christian communities. From the perspective of persecuted Jews, their actual contact with medieval Christians re-​ signified dance typologies. For instance, in 1096, crusaders massacred Rhenish

40  Gracing the Idols Jews on their way to the Holy Land. Faced with pogroms, book burnings, and forced conversions, Jewish victims of Christian violence became martyrs in their respective communities.112 Jewish commemorative poetry incorporated dance references from the Bible. A poem by the German Jew Meir of Rothenburg compares the burning of the Torah to Jewish martyrs. One day they will reemerge from the smoke that consumed them: “Once again you will wear a crimson ornament, and take up your timbrel /​And go forth in dance, singing for joy in your dances.”113 To represent the vindication of Israel, Meir borrowed dance language from Exodus and Jeremiah. Another poem honors a thirteenth-​ century Jewish martyr from Metz. The poet describes how Christians mangled his body on the wheel and then burned it: “They bring wheels upon wheels inside wheels [and] coals hot for blowing. /​And mournfully, they utter laments and woe. . . . Disgraced among the enemy, in rags he was brought forth like a lamb to slaughter.”114 Departing from the Gregorian rota, this wheel refers to a torture device used in medieval Germany. Destroying Jews, this object degraded the rota into a dance of death. In Jeremiah’s words, their dancing turned into mourning (Lamentations /​Lamentationes 5:15). Evidently, then, the sacralization of Western dance was inextricable from the violence, both rhetorical and actual, against religious otherness.

Saltatrix Criminis: The Dance of Salome If David institutionalized the sacralization of dance, Salome codified its criminalization. According to late antique and medieval Christians, Salome occupied the nexus of adultery, incest, and murder. Throughout the Middle Ages, Salome served as a negative exemplum—​an example of what not to do. The figure of Salome had far-​reaching ramifications for categorizing and caricaturizing dance in the Middle Ages. This final section explores how Church Fathers, exegetes, theologians, playwrights, and artists understood the dance of Salome as a negative figura, impeding the unfolding of a Christian telos. Late Antique authorities situated the dance of Salome against the decadent backdrop of pagan Rome. Early medieval thinkers dehumanized Salome, comparing her to animals. In the High and Late Middle Ages, a variety of texts and images portrayed her sin, depravity, and criminal conduct through the lens of medieval misogyny. Biblical interpretations of Salome helped shape dance prohibitions in the Middle Ages. By the dawn of early modernity, Salome became conflated with witchcraft, thereby accentuating the deviance of dance. As a saltatrix criminis, or (female) dancer of crime, whose dance was intimately tied to murder, Salome was the prototype for the feminization and demonization of dance.

Dance Typologies  41 The scriptural reference to Salome comes from a few vague gospel verses. The following description of the dance of Salome is from Matthew: But on Herod’s birthday, the daughter of Herodias [Salome] danced before them:  and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath, to give her whatsoever she would ask of him. But she being instructed before by her mother, said: Give me here in a dish the head of John the Baptist. And. . . he commanded it to be given. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison. And his head was brought in a dish: and it was given to the damsel, and she brought it to her mother.115

What is initially curious about the passage is Salome’s anonymity. Neither gospel account (Matthew 14:6, Mark 6:22) names her. In the late first century, the Jewish historian Josephus gave her the name Salome.116 The Bible identifies her as the daughter of Herodias (filia Herodiadis), the woman who married Herod Antipas. A few lines earlier, the gospel recounts that John the Baptist rebuked Herod and Herodias for violating marital law. Leviticus 18:16 stipulates that a man cannot marry his (deceased) brother’s wife.117 As the former wife of Herod’s brother, Herodias and her new husband broke the rules of consanguinity; they were guilty of adultery and incest.118 In the medieval imaginary, this incestuous union signified wickedness, sorcery, falsity, and lust.119 Herod’s appreciation of Salome’s dance further complicated the theme of incest. The Bible gives spectatorial, rather than choreographic, detail. The dance of Salome pleased (placuit) Herod. In the Old Testament, the same verb typically refers to things that please God:  sacrifice, virtue, and songs. Yet Herod’s pleasure probably derived from the sensuality, and perhaps sexuality, of his wife’s daughter.120 Moreover, René Girard’s philological analysis concludes that Salome was a young, prepubescent girl. This scenario makes Herod a pedophile.121 By all accounts, his court was a breeding ground for scandal. In Late Antiquity, Christians highlighted the scandalous atmosphere of Herod’s court to paganize the dance of Salome. Just as commentators in Late Antiquity depaganized the dance of David, the Church Fathers and Byzantine theologians embellished the hedonism of Salome. Their portrayals of the banquet scene recycled stereotypes of pagan indulgence and immoderation. From John Chrysostom to Andrew of Crete, King Herod and his courtiers reveled in a den of gluttony, drunkenness, and debauchery. The depraved spectators could not control their concupiscence.122 Ambrose, Basil of Seleucia, Theodore the Studite, Andrew of Crete, and Theophanes Kerameus depicted Salome as a maenad or Corybant, one of the wild, inebriated followers of the god Dionysus. Her frenzied romp—​punctuated by rolling eyes, contorted gesticulations, and a wayward tongue—​accentuated her disorder in flesh and spirit.123 Origen and Ambrose

42  Gracing the Idols contemplated the ethnic otherness of Salome’s dance, which they believed was Hebrew or Egyptian.124 A silver idol of Eudoxia, Empress of Rome, reminded John Chrysostom of the dance of Salome and Herodias’s murderous intent, thereby aligning them with pagan idolatria.125 Gregory of Nazianzus, Juvencus, and Ambrose contrasted David’s honesta saltatio (honorable dance) with Salome’s lascivia saltatio (lascivious dance).126 According to classicists, the dance of Salome was a biblical spin on the death of Orpheus. After severing his head, the Thracian nymphs danced around his mutilated corpse. Salome embodied this myth, as her dance caused the beheading of St. John.127 Fourteenth-​century Byzantine theologian Nikephoros Kallistos invented a peculiar addendum to the decollation. Like something out of the Inferno, he gave Salome a Dantesque contrapasso (counter-​suffering). One day, while traversing a frozen river, the ice broke beneath her and she fell in neck-​deep. In a struggle, Salome’s limbs danced and wriggled in the water, and the razor-​sharp ice decapitated her. Nikephoros claimed that Salome’s body was never recovered, though someone found her head and sent it to Herod and Herodias. Salome’s dead head became a powerless icon, befitting of her pagan spectacle.128 Together, these examples position the dance of Salome within a context of pagan immorality. In the Middle Ages, treatments of Salome achieved her dehumanization. Early medieval sources reimagined her dancing in animalistic terms. Peter Chrysologus (d. c. 450), the Bishop of Ravenna, likened Salome’s dancing body to a serpent. Rabid and cannibalistic, she fed on human flesh.129 Carolingian examples tempered Salome’s sex appeal with her grotesquerie. Milo of Saint-​ Amand’s poem De Sobrietate (Concerning Soberness) envisioned Salome as a dancing monkey (saltatrix simia). He proceeds with a tirade against women who, out of malice, send their lovers to hell: “Deceived by her, Adam was banned from the tree of life; thus Hemor [Hamor] and Sichem [Shechem] died when Dinah was ravished; the Hebrews, mingling with harlots, worshipped Baal; a courtesan degraded Samson and consigned him to the millstone—​see clearly what it is, then, to have milled!”130 In the Vulgate, Eve, Dinah, and Delilah have nothing to do with dance. By making Salome into an animal, Milo justified his totalizing discourse of misogyny. The trope of the nonhuman Salome continued into the High and Late Middle Ages. German moralizing literature of this period referred to Salome’s affentanz (ape dance).131 According to the bestiary (a book of animal lore), monkeys symbolized the animal side of humanity. They were creatures of impulse, amorality, and vulgarity.132 Blending biblical referent with popular lore, the affentanz’s alterity rendered Salome a curiosity of profanation and dehumanization. Christians of the High and Late Middle Ages found other ways to articulate the depravity of Salome. One such method they derived from a semantic analysis of the Vulgate verses. The Vulgate uses the same verb to dance, saltare, for both David

Dance Typologies  43 and Salome. Whereas David’s saltatio conjured the image of humility, Salome’s saltatio indexed her depravity. Saltare has its roots in Roman pantomime, a theatrical dance form that medieval mimi (mimes) and hystriones (actors) revived to entertain royalty.133 The vernacular variants of saltator—​including jugleor (Occitan) and jongleur or tumbeor (Old French)—​helped resituate Salome on the medieval stage. Though these entertainers performed within secular contexts, clerical authors identified Salome as one of them. When recounting the death of John the Baptist in his Manuel des Pechiez (Manuel of Sins, c. 1270), Franciscan William of Waddington wrote: “this story tells how Herod swore [to give anything] to a girl who tumbled [tumba] before him.”134 William’s text belongs to a larger body of clerical criticism on jugglers, mimes, minstrels, actors, and dancers. In the twelfth century, Radulfus Ardens envisioned the feast of Herod as a masquerade of jongleurs.135 Honorius of Autun, elsewhere a dance advocate, condemned minstrels as “ministers of Satan” (ministri Satanae).136 From an ecclesiastical perspective, Salome’s affinity with popular entertainers underscored her immorality and colored clerical attitudes toward medieval dance.137 Salome’s image facilitated intertextual interpretations of the Bible that highlighted her opposition to sanctity. Consider her appearance as an acrobat in a meditational miscellany by Anselm of Canterbury (figure 1.12).138 Flaunting her physical dexterity, she tumbles and tosses swords in tandem. This image accompanies a prayer to St. John the Baptist, which Salome profanes with a cheap circus trick. As a sword dancer, she literalizes Jerome’s often-​attributed phrase pertaining to dancing women: “the swords of the devil” (gladii dyaboli).139 The miniaturized murder overwhelms the historiated initial S (for Sanctus). Obeying Herod’s command, the assassin approaches John with a sword. Then Salome gives John’s head to Herodias. Presenting the severed head on a platter, Salome inverts the victory of David over Goliath. Similarly, an English psalter offers a typology between Salome and the feeding of the five thousand (figure 1.13).140 The bisected imagery contrasts the excess of acrobatics with the abundance of bread. The former feast leads to murder of a holy man. The latter feast nourishes an entire community in the fellowship of Christ. Herod’s banquet promotes prodigality for evil ends. The miracle of the loaves transgresses natural law to reveal the excessiveness of God’s goodness. The panis angelicus (angelic bread) sets straight the choreography of crime. Beyond the Bible, Salome’s presence in a fourteenth-​century medieval encyclopedia shows her role in the acquisition of knowledge and criminalization of dance. Compiled by James le Palmer, canon lawyer and exchequer to King Edward III, the work proffers knowledge on a massive scale. James entitled his oeuvre the Omne Bonum (“all good things”), since all the good things one needs to know are contained in this book. In the tradition of encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), James’s oeuvre presents a bricolage of scripture, canon

44  Gracing the Idols

Figure 1.12.  Prayer to St. John the Baptist with dance of Salome, Anselm of Canterbury, prayers and meditations miscellany, (“The Littlemore Anselm”), Dorchester, mid-​twelfth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Auct. D. 2. 6, folio 166 verso

law, theology, medicine, and penitentials. Written in his own hand, James arranged the book in alphabetical order, facilitating its use as a reference tool. The only known manuscript (which once belonged to Cardinal Wolsey) comprises nearly six hundred folios, with numerous full-​page illustrations and over seven hundred miniature paintings.141 James’s work includes an entry for Corea sive coree (“dance or dance,” spelled two different ways in Latin). The accompanying miniature shows three women linking hands in a dance (figure 1.14).142 James borrowed from patristic authorities, namely Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory, to build upon the foundation of his argument. He proceeds by explaining the causes, circumstances, and intentions related to dance, all of which substantiate his mostly negative discourse on the subject. The Omne Bonum argues that dance is an evil activity because it leads to libidity and damnation, thus confirming Jerome’s suspicion that dances “are not to be performed on account of the various dangers that result.”143 The crux of James’s argument comes from Salome, whose dancing personified lust. Seductive and ornamented, the female dancers pictured here lead men into the trappings of luxuria (lust) and, ultimately, into fires of Gehenna (the Old Testament equivalent to Hades). Of all James’s examples of depraved dancing, Salome gives the tour de force performance: “Here in Matthew 14 it is read that a female dancer [saltatrix] caused the amputation of the head of John the Baptist, in which it is understood that dances [saltantes] and songs separate themselves from the head of Christ.”144 The passage offers a vivid typology.

Figure 1.13  Psalter with dance of Salome; miracle of the loaves, Oxford, early thirteenth century, British Library MS. Arundel 157, folio 7 recto, © The British Library Board

46  Gracing the Idols

Figure 1.14.  Historiated initial for Corea with female dancers, James le Palmer, Omne Bonum, southeast England, c. 1376–1375, British Library Royal MS. 6 E VI, folio 451 verso, © The British Library Board

Whereas David replicated the body of Christ, Salome disembodied and decapitated the corpus Christi (body of Christ). Designed to promote knowledge, the Omne Bonum taught readers that Salome originated sinful dancing, and that her wicked legacy continued to contaminate dance in their lifetime. The application of this knowledge, in the form of statute and prohibitions, could advance the criminalization of medieval dance. The connection between Salome and dance prohibitions was especially evident among ecclesiastical authorities. Bishops, monks, and priests grafted meanings onto Salome and Herodias that had ramifications for the performance of the liturgy. In the ninth century, Bishop Gautier of Orléans used the Salome story to ratify his grounds for the banning of liturgical dance. Dancing in the manner of the daughter of Herodias, he reasoned, had no place in religious ceremonials.145 Following the tradition of Gautier, medieval ecclesiastical authorities produced numerous prohibitions on dancing (and especially women dancing) in churches.

Dance Typologies  47 When the dance of Salome did appear in medieval liturgy in the form of church dramas, it showcased her antagonist role in Christian history. Tumbling with intentio (intention), the Salome of a thirteenth-​century religious play from Lille confirmed clerical opinions that sinful dancing was quintessentially a woman’s vice. In dialogue with Herodias, Salome’s first lines reveal her intent to kill: “my lady mother, by my self-​possession with you I want to please him, for in so much that I am your heir, I am obliged to do it.”146 More brazen than her biblical counterpart, the Lillois Salome conjures the idea of dancing for King Herod: “Noble king, to console you and your honorable company, I come to play a divertissement before you at your table.”147 In lieu of specific dance terminology, the text employs the Old French esbattement, which is more inclusive of performative diversions (dancing, juggling, singing, acting, playing, etc.). This saltatrix (female dancer) offers to Herod a full repertoire of ludi lascivi (lascivious games). The dramaturgist, following the Vulgate, left Salome unnamed (la fille de Herodïas). By the end of the play, however, there is no doubt that Salome manufactured the plot to kill St. John. As the narrator concludes, “Saint John the Baptist was terminated at the request of the daughter of Herodias, who by her subtle manner had executed [or machinated, machiné] the plan.”148 Performed on the liturgical stage, such dramas exhibited women’s villainous role in the Christian narrative. Salome functioned as a counter-​figura, whose sinister calculations silenced the phenomenal prophecy of St. John. Between the Late Middle Ages and early modernity, the misogynistic overtones of dance polemic escalated. During these periods, the afterlife of Salome entered into folklore, black magic, and sorcery. Christian writers hybridized Salome and Herodias to construct the ultimate saltatrix criminis: the witch. Medieval sermons, penitentials, and folklore paired Herodias with the Roman deity Diana to underscore her ritual deviance.149 When discussing sortilegia (activities pertaining to sorcerers and soothsayers), certain penitentials describe how deranged women went out in the evening hours “with Diana, goddess of the pagans, or with Herodias” (cum Diana Dea Paganorum, nocturnis horis, vel cum Herodiade).150 Sermons identified Herodias as the leader of the sortilegium, who eats, drinks, and dances with her female disciples.151 Folkloric versions referred to these vigils as bone res (good things)—​quite the euphemism for sacrilege.152 For these dissolute women, “good things” encrypted their séances with pagan goddesses and sinful saltatrices (female dancers). The dance of Salome came back to haunt the late medieval imaginary with the Witches’ Sabbath. These obscene dances constituted a larger arsenal of maleficia (witchcraft)—​gluttonous banquets, night flights, infanticidal sprees, and Satanic orgies.153 By the start of the sixteenth century, the Witches’ Sabbath, under the scrutiny of the Inquisition, completed the criminalization of dance. * * *

48  Gracing the Idols One redemptive aspect of the Salome story is martyrdom.154 At the Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Peter Chrysologus proclaimed that: “Today, brothers. . . John was born from his death, and Herod died from his birth.”155 Elsewhere Peter wrote that, unlike the daughter of crime (filia criminis), John entered the eternal chorus of angels.156 This typology replaced the old, defunct order with the triumph of Christianity. Peter’s words resonated with the medieval West and its highly elaborate cult of the saints. Dante’s Paradiso transported this typology into vernacular poetry: “My desire is so fixed on him /​who wished to live alone, /​whom dancing [per salti] led to martyrdom.”157 By means of a dance, John’s martyrdom eradicated the pagan past and etched itself onto the sanctorale (the Church’s calendrical cycle of celebrating the saints). As the next chapter demonstrates, it was the saints, the heroic dead, who reclaimed festive rhythms for their medieval cults.

2

Ghost Dancers The Saints

In her sequence to St. Rupert (d. c.  732), Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179) refashioned his dead remains as a sacred dancer: Noble urn, that remains untarnished, not drunk to the dregs in the dance [saltatione] in the ancient cave, nor destroyed in the attacks of the ancient ravager –​ the Holy Spirit makes music over you, for you belong to the dances of angels [angelicis choris], and are filled with the beauty of the Son of God, and have no flaw. What a beautiful urn you are!1

Hildegard composed this liturgy nearly four centuries after Rupert’s death. Though reduced to bones and ash, his holy body radiated kinetic presence. In the context of ritual veneration, Rupert’s dancing body generated sacramental and political significance. His inspirited movements distinguished himself from specious cults. As the patron saint of Rupertsberg, he protected Hildegard’s nunnery. Negotiating between presence and absence, medieval saints were, in the words of historian Peter Brown, “the very special dead.”2 This chapter explores how saints and their cults endorsed the sanctification of dance in Western Christianity.3 Although I refer to several saints, I limit my main discussions to two saints of the Latin tradition. In the first section, I focus on the child martyr known as Sainte Foy (d. c. 290) and the role her medieval cult played in legitimating religious dance. Through the worship of her relics (from reliqua, remains, or pignus, pledge of a saint’s presence), the faithful set Foy’s afterlives in motion. Commemorating her ghostly presence authorized and expanded a repertoire of festive dance. In the second section, I consider the role of dance in the life and afterlife of St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). Unlike most canonical saints and martyrs who died before Emperor Constantine’s normalization of Christianity in 313, Francis lived among medieval Christians. In order to express and authenticate his holiness, Francis’s disciples reconfigured his life as a living legend. Within their hagiographic schemas, dance haunted and historicized Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

50  Gracing the Idols Francis’s sanctity. The Franciscan legacy garnered success by exploiting the pastness of his presence.

Restless Revenant: The Festive Afterlives of Sainte Foy Given the production of dance polemic in early and medieval Christianity, dance and sainthood may at first seem incommensurable. Medieval sermons, statutes, and especially hagiographies (or saint biographies, from the Greek hagios, holy), demonstrate this dissonance. Byzantine sermons declared that while Salome’s dance pleased King Herod, it offended the martyrs.4 For St. Radegunde (d. 587), dancing desecrated the aura of the sacred. When a nun joked about a group of laity singing and dancing near the monastery (inter choraulas et citharas dum circa monasterium a saecularibus), Radegunde responded: “ ‘That’s fine if it thrills you to hear religion mingled with the odor of the world. . . . God witness that I have heard nothing of any worldly song.’ Thus it was obvious that though her flesh remained in the world, her spirit was already in heaven.”5 St. Musa of Rome (d. c. 593) refrained from dancing on earth in order to dance with the Virgin Mary in heaven.6 The Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend, c. 1260), a voluminous hagiographic compilation by Jacobus de Voragine, contains numerous anecdotes of saints who deliberately avoided dance or punished sacrilegious dancers.7 King Louis IX (d. 1270), one of the few sainted monarchs in Latin Christendom, worried that dance would diminish his ascetic rigor. To ensure the sanctity of his surroundings, Louis reiterated dance bans from Carolingian statutes.8 (The king’s forced prudery led the satirical poet Rutebeuf to mock these ridiculous measures.)9 Iconography, too, evoked the rift between dance and sanctity. A fresco in the St. Francis Basilica in Assisi offers a medieval rendering of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (d. c. 307).10 Catherine appears before the Roman Emperor Maxentius, who tries to persuade her to recant the Christian religion. Clad in Quattrocento fashion, his courtiers perform a ballata or bassadanza, which were popular dance forms in medieval Italy. This pictorial anachronism would not have been problematic for medieval viewers. It illustrates how the past is immediately relevant to the present. Together, these examples show that hagiographies (saints’ biographies) associated dance with paganism, worldliness, and impiety. Attaining sanctity seemed to demand what I call choreoclasm (the destruction of dance). It was against this cultural backdrop that the cult of Saint Faith—​known to medieval Christians as Sainte Foy in Old French, or Sancta Fides in Latin—​flourished. Preceding Constantine’s Christianization of Rome, Sainte Foy was a martyr, an athlete of God who testified to his power. The martyrs—​from the Latin martus, or legal witness—​endured physical torments in the name of religion. In accordance with early Christian ideals of sanctity, Foy’s legend placed less emphasis on her gender and instead highlighted her steadfast faith. Sainte Foy’s vita, or life story, first appeared

Ghost Dancers  51 in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (Martyrology of Jerome), a mid-fifth-​century collection of martyrs’ tales.11 The martyrology and later medieval corpora document her life, relics, and miracles. Born to noble parents in Agen (in Aquitaine, France), the twelve-​year-​old girl refused to offer sacrifices before the goddess Diana. A Roman prefect observed Foy’s errant behavior and instructed his minions to bind her to a bronze bed and set it aflame. Miraculously, Foy did not perish under this torture. The prefect then ordered her beheading, after which angels promptly carried her soul into heaven. Her relics were interred at Agen and subsequently moved to the Abbey of Conques, located in today’s Midi-​Pyrénées region.12 Although the late antique sources documenting Sainte Foy’s earthly life and martyrdom made no mention of dance, the medieval sources incorporated dancing into her posthumous identity. These events took place in close proximity to Foy’s relics at Conques. It was Foy’s dead body, therefore, that conjured and authorized rhythmic movement. Sheathed in gold and gems, Sainte Foy’s ninth-​century reliquary (relic container) served as a visual prosthesis for performance (figure 2.1). In this section, I reveal how dance marked and memorialized

Figure 2.1  Reliquary of Sainte Foy, Sainte Foy Abbey at Conques, c. ninth century, (select gems encrusted as late as sixteenth century), photograph by ZiYouXunLu, Wikimedia Commons

52  Gracing the Idols the encounters between Sainte Foy and her cult. Countering traditional hagiography, Sainte Foy’s afterlives helped legitimate dance as they empowered the Abbey of Conques. Foy’s impact on sacred dance wielded consequences that were at once regional and international, religious and political. Sainte Foy’s identification with sacred dance began more than seven centuries after her death. An anonymous eleventh-​century account describes how Foy’s fragmented corpse came alive before one’s eyes: Hail, renowned daughter of Zion, O bountiful Foy, foster-​daughter of the heavenly Jerusalem, gleaming forth among the dances of virgins [choreas virginum] like a rose and lily. . . . O exceedingly happy land of Conques, adorned with the relic of such a gem and of such a lantern, you shine brightly with her lightning; rejoice and applaud, clothed with such a light, which gleams above the ether like the sun among the stars.13

The passage extolls Foy’s reliquary, the decorative container that allegedly held a piece of her skull. Relics and reliquaries worked synergistically. Relics inspirited the otherwise hollow interior of the reliquary, whereas the reliquary’s dazzling materials transmitted the phenomenality of glitter and sparkle.14 For medieval Christians, Foy’s filigree effigy simulated the effect of animation. Under the shadows and candlelight of the altar, the reliquary’s coruscating movements visually reinvested Foy’s skeletal remains with liveliness. Oscillating between seen and unseen, contained and uncontainable, the reliquary disturbed the boundaries between subject and object.15 Once roasting on a red-​hot grill, Foy now inhabits paradise, frolicking in virginal roundelays.16 The reliquary resembles the rose (symbolic of the Passion, caritas /​charity, or divine love), and the lily (chastity, purity), aligning her with Christ and the Virgin Mary. Foy’s jewel-​ encrusted casing evoked the heavenly city of Jerusalem and helped maintain the purity of her dead flesh.17 As biblical allegory, ancient martyr, and patron of Conques, Foy’s dancing image unsettled linear temporality; it generated a vision that was both mnemonic and proleptic. Constituting a material object and an immaterial essence, Sainte Foy’s reliquary eludes traditional understandings of the visual arts. As a sacred (sacer, set apart) entity, she was all too real, yet her inner presence (praesentia) was not always perceptible by sight.18 Her reliquary displayed and dissimulated what it held. Like the Virgin Mary’s womb, it contained the uncontainable. In medieval Christianity, the stuff of relics included corpses (the most powerful), bodily bits, contact relics (clothing and accoutrements), and acheiropoieta (images not made with human hands, e.g., the Shroud). Resisting putrefaction, relics emitted physiological signs of sanctity. Sainted flesh remained fair, fragrant, and translucent. Relics were miraculous matter, and therefore defied the laws of ordinary

Ghost Dancers  53 matter. Unlike the impotent idols of antiquity, relics had the power (potentia) to enact miracles of healing and retribution. Indeed, saints were the first major break from Roman and Jewish tradition. Graves and corpses were impure from the perspective of many pre-​Christian religions. From the Roman point of view, Christians venerated defiled matter. Not only did they build churches on tombs and burial sites, Christians exhumed, dismembered, and enshrined dead bodies. These “holy pieces” functioned as if they were whole. Their omnipresence played a significant role in conversion and the universalization of Christianity. The efficacy of relics was, from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, the most significant mechanism of Christian conversion.19 Witnessing these extraordinary events foregrounded the primacy of sight in proselytization; seeing was believing. With the rising cult of the saints, as Peter Brown writes, “the immemorial boundary between the city of the living and the dead came to be breached by the entry of relics.”20 Sainte Foy’s reliquary was crucial to both the growth of her cult at Conques and, in turn, to the sanctification of Western dance. The enshrined reliquary created a relationship between the living and the dead, especially through postmortem miracles. According to Sainte Foy’s hagiographers (spiritual biographers), she repeatedly healed the blind, released innocent prisoners, and punished the wicked. In one anecdote, Foy healed a blind boy who had been attacked by brigands and left for dead. When led to her shrine, the boy instantly recovered his sight. Witnessing this transformation, the faithful convened in joy and thanksgiving: “The people gathered and no one of any sex or age stopped praising the holy virgin. No orator could find the words to describe their applause, their dancing [tripudia”]21 The festive response to Foy’s potentia was explosive. Her healing incited a spectacular response. The dancing neutralized the boundaries of age and gender and transcended the writer’s rhetorical acumen—​it was clearly outside of his experiential realm. Despite the consistency of Carolingian statutes forbidding dances on holy days, Foy’s cult authorized and sacralized an otherwise transgressive act.22 It was the authority of the undead dead, not of conciliar decrees, that established the intimacy between humanity and divinity. Ironically, it was the idolatrous afterlife of Sainte Foy that facilitated the popularity of her cult. The Conques reliquary incorporated the bust of a Roman emperor.23 Conflicting with the theme of her martyrdom, Foy’s statuesque head was literally pagan. In the Early Middle Ages, however, popes and other ecclesiastical authorities encouraged such practices of absorption. Gregory the Great (d. 604) instructed bishops to build over pagan temples with saints’ tombs. Early Marian and Black Madonna iconography appropriated the imagery of former goddesses: Isis, Venus /​Aphrodite, and Nike. Historical evidence indicates that the Latin West was not fully Christianized until the early seventh century.24 Even

54  Gracing the Idols into the eleventh century, chronicles referred to particular sculptures of Celtic deities. Similar allusions in Bernhard of Angers’s Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis (The Book of Miracles of Sainte Foy, eleventh century) suggest that idol worship was still rife in Auvergne.25 The Foy reliquary therefore functioned as a visual anathema. It distinguished between idol and imago (image) by demonstrating what her image was not. As art historian Beate Fricke explains, “in rejecting and negating the idol, Christianity absorbed, acculturated, and incorporated into Western medieval culture the antique idea of the image. By doing so, Western Christianity preserved the antique image culture, by the very destruction of its images.”26 In the Carolingian period (c. 780–​900), Sainte Foy’s cult developed concurrently with sophisticated theorizations of imago. The Libri Karolini (Charles’s or Charlemagne’s Books) worked out an image theory based on sacramentality. Like the Eucharist (Communion rite), a religious image should be based on an ontology of presence, as opposed to mere likeness.27 These criteria became more compelling in Gothic art. Miracle stories of Gautier de Coinci (d. 1236) and Caesarius von Heisterbach (d. c. 1240) recount how statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary came alive before the faithful, whereas metal idols fell and remained impotent.28 Once a Christianized idol, Foy became a champion of true iconicity, catalyzing the turnaround from idolatria (idolatry) to latria (worship). Foy manifested faith, the martyr’s virtue par excellence, which stood in diametric opposition to theological error. The Spanish writer Prudentius (d. c. 413) staged this dichotomy in his allegorical account of the Psychomachia, the cosmic battle between good and evil. In his text, Fides (Faith) confronts Cultura veterum deorum (the Cult of the old gods). Faith trampled over Cult, blinding the idolatrous imposter with a single stomp.29 With her paganesque reliquary, Sainte Foy inverted the Psychomachia. As Fricke concludes, “this acculturation of pagan culture negates images only at a first view. In fact, by negating the pagan image culture Christians conserved formerly pagan customs and adapted them according to their needs.”30 The Carolingian reappraisal of imago coincided with a gradual recovery of cultic dancing. Bodily movement, at least on the level of representation, reappeared in ninth-​century Western iconography. Along with Sainte Foy’s reliquary, one of the greatest artistic achievements from this period was the Utrecht Psalter, here shown as an eleventh-​century copy from the British Library called the Harley Psalter (figure 2.2).31 This manuscript combined pen-​ and-​ink drawings with religious texts (Psalms, prayers, canticles, and creeds). Interestingly, the scribe(s) did not employ Carolingian miniscule, the popular national script of the era. The Psalter features capitalis rustica (rustic capital script). This style of lettering imitated continuous script (scripta continua, i.e., without separation between words), which was characteristic of ancient Roman paleography. Likely commissioned by Archbishop Ebbo of Reims (d. 851)  or King Charles the Bald (d. 877), the Utrecht Psalter glorified religious orthodoxy and the bishop’s role in instilling it.32

Ghost Dancers  55

Figure 2.2  Daughters of Judah dance in Jerusalem, illustration for Psalm 46 (Vulgate), Harley Psalter, copied from the ninth-​century Utrecht Psalter, England, early eleventh century, British Library Harley ms. 603, folio 27 recto, © The British Library Board

Of interest to this study is the Utrecht Psalter’s dance iconography. Drawings of dancers and processants adorn the text of the Psalms. The illustration here represents sections of Psalm 46 (Vulgate). On the right, the daughters of Judah perform a round dance, encircled within the walled city of Jerusalem on high: “Let Mount Zion rejoice and the daughters of Judah be glad, because of your judgments, O Lord.”33 Their graceful postures and circular formation foreshadow the cosmic order that shall return after the Last Judgment. Given the

56  Gracing the Idols centrality of Psalm recitation in monastic devotion, the Utrecht Psalter may imply a growing continuity between representation (dance image) and reality (dance performance). In this light, the daughters of Judah, like the faithful of Conques, privilege embodied offering over written testimony: “Praise his name in the dance” (Laudent nomen eius in choro, Psalm 149:3).34 The cultic activity in Carolingian France helped strengthen the connection between the saints and the performance of the liturgy. By the High and Late Middles Ages, this connection crystallized in the practice of liturgical dance. For example, a fourteenth-​century hymn celebrates martyrdom with festive performance: Stephen was a martyr the first, after the Lord born of a virgin. Whom today we praise. . . . With psalms and dance [Psallat cum tripudio]. . . . Wondrous is the virtue of Stephen.35

The hymn refers to St. Stephen, the first martyr (d. c.  34). Song and dance commemorate his martyrdom, turning loss and mourning into presence and festivity. A thirteenth-​century psalter complicates the semiotic relationship between sanctity and dance (figure 2.3).36 An historiated initial for Psalm 101:2 depicts the stoning of Stephen: “Hear, O Lord, my prayer, and let my cry come to thee” (Domine exaudi orationem meam et clamor meus ad te veniat). Along the right margin, a woman dancing hovers above a bagpiper. Read literally, the profane performers contrast with, or even mock, the saint. However, as art historian Michael Camille and other scholars have shown, medieval marginalia could form dialogues, rather than dichotomies, with the central iconography.37 One of many possible interpretations might suggest that the dancer, with her disciplined physique, enacts a secular variant of martyrdom. Similarly, at Conques, Foy’s cult accessed saintly praesentia with bodily movement. By possessing Foy’s relics, the devotees at Conques experienced the ghosting quality of religious dance. An eleventh-​century account of Sainte Foy’s relics shows the correspondence between devotional dance and celestial revenant: The city of Agen, flooded with a red wave of blood, was the first to cherish her body, but afterward bemoaned its loss. Now the soil of Conques enjoys the presence of these sacred limbs, And this renowned land sparkles with the rays of such a star. . . . we shall dance [modulemus] for you with magnificent praise through the ages.38

Ghost Dancers  57

Figure 2.3  The martyrdom of St. Stephen, Psalter illustration for Psalm 101, perhaps Ghent, late thirteenth century, British Library Burney MS 345, folio 127 verso, © The British Library Board

These verses poeticize Conques’ acquisition of Sainte Foy’s relics. Foy’s decapitation caused Agen to bleed with her blood until Conques restored the beauty of her remains. Fashioned like an aetiology, or a fable of origins, this text mythologizes Conques’ ownership of sacred matter. Collective dancing reenacted and reaffirmed the myth.

58  Gracing the Idols According to Carolingian records, the translatio (transfer, or movement of relics from one location to another) was an epic event. At translation ceremonies, Christians reportedly danced before the tombs of Saint Boniface, Saint Sebastian, Saint-​Germain-​des-​Près, and Saint Pirmin. In 837, the monks at the German Abbey of Corvey acquired the relics of Saint Vitus. The faithful, now free of maladies, danced jubilantly alongside clergy (cum crucibus et cum tripodio corpora transtulit. . . . cum maximo clerici plebisque tripudio regressus est).39 Interestingly, the Translatio of Sainte Foy employs different dance terminology. The phrase “dancing through the ages” (modulemus. . . . per aevum) uses an archaic term found in Roman writings. Modulemus, from modulatio or modulor, emphasizes the rhythmic components of dance—​measure, beat, modulation, or marching to time.40 Foy’s translation endowed dance with a temporal structure. Its rhythm presupposes repetition and reenactment, framing the expectation for recurrence. Her relics’ sacralizing agency channeled and controlled surrounding flux, thereby legitimating dance with its transcendent authority.41 This passage, however, belies a less savory history of Foy’s cult. Around 866, a monk named Arinisdus left the Abbey of Conques for Agen, under the pretense of joining its monastery. He instead stole Sainte Foy’s relics and brought them back to Conques, where the monks commissioned a bejeweled reliquary for them. The practice of furtum sacrum, or the sacred theft of relics, was common in the Middle Ages. If relics were stolen successfully, the act was justified as God’s will.42 Relics were desirable for religious purposes and political ones. Producing and circulating miracles, they attracted pilgrims and donors (including King Charlemagne himself, depicted on Conques’ west tympanum). They enhanced the renown and wealth of their residential institution. Gems, silver, gold, and other material splendors of reliquaries were selling points for pilgrims. (Abbot Suger, the so-​called inventor of Gothic architecture, understood this. The first thing he did at the Basilica of St. Denis was to commission new reliquaries).43 On the feast day of Sainte Foy’s Translation, the clergy performed processions that brought the relics /​reliquary out of monastic enclosure and into the public purview. This reenactment of translatio appealed to non-​elites while conferring territorial power onto the clergy.44 From a political standpoint, Foy’s relics played a role in activating civic harmony. The Peace of God Movement (c. 900–​1100) was an attempt to restore security and well-​being to the nonwarrior classes. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, lords on horseback invaded vulnerable villages, decimated peasant farms, stole church property, raped women, and murdered bystanders. Medieval clergy created a pact with the violent lords, according to which the clergy would pray for the knights in exchange for peace. In church councils, the threatening horsemen took oaths on Sainte Foy’s relics to uphold their side of the agreement.45 These ceremonies became subsumed into the celebration of Sainte Foy’s translation.

Ghost Dancers  59 Once an historical act of theft, the Translation turned into a demonstration of peace and feast. Joining tomb and altar, translatio pignorum was equally a translatio studii; the translation of relics was a translation of power. Sainte Foy’s translatio therefore exemplifies how ritual operates strategically. The translation at Conques was not intrinsically valid, but it managed to exercise a declaration of what is sacred, and how a sacred event should be remembered.46 The rhythmic response to Sainte Foy’s translation thereby aestheticized a tactical achievement. The choreographic texture of Translation Day implied a broader ideological program: In fact, on account of their reverence for the virgin the very devout people of Christ chose the abovementioned day of the Translation as their most festive day ever, a day surpassing all others in complete joyousness of true faith. The Christian community of that whole land observe that day annually in praising God since that time, and now, in the future. Totally transported by spiritual dance [totoque spirituali tripudio], they adorn it with every kind of ornaments of sacred worship and celebrate the festivity once more. Therefore from that day until the present people from everywhere very frequently gather in great multitudes at the church of Conques in order to visit the relics of Christ’s holy martyr.47

This Translatio passage indicates that honoring Sainte Foy endows one with true faith (vera fides). The movement of relics corresponds to the dance of the faithful, who, to borrow Émile Durkheim’s phrase, bubble over with “collective effervescence.” Commemorating Sainte Foy’s translation ensured her continuous presence over time; ephemerality congealed into monumentality.48 Foy’s hagiographer claimed that multitudes of Christians come to adore her on the Feast of her Translation (January 14). For Sainte Foy’s cult, this day supplanted the anniversary of her martyrdom (October 6), when medieval saints were typically honored. The Translatio’s dance vocabulary is again significant, implying a Christianization of dance. The author uses the word tripudium, an etymological compound of earth /​terra, (ter) and foot (pes). In the works of Cicero (d. 43) and Catullus (d. 54), the tripudium denoted a joyous or energetic dance. Livy’s (d. 17) use of the term connoted the dances performed during a solemn, cultic vigil, the stomp-​like processions of warriors and barbarians, or the saltatory rituals of the Salii (“leaping priests.”) Tacitus (d. 120) recounted how youths, equipped with swords and lances, danced as part of their military training to obtain dexterity and grace.49 Distancing himself from pagan excesses, the Church Father Jerome (d. 420) mocked the vain military triumphs of a Roman dignitary whom the populace welcomed with public tripudia.50

60  Gracing the Idols The Christian use of tripudium assumed a liturgical and Trinitarian significance. Clerics performed the tripudium on saints’ days to a three-​time rhythm. This three-​fold division signified Christian humility: three steps forward, one step backward; in other words, we progress, yet falter.51 In the hagiography of St. Rictrude (d. 688), onlookers enacted a tripudium upon the return of the venerable Bishop from exile: “the king and the nobles alike made great rejoicing together and all the people danced in solemn celebration of his return.”52 In the thirteenth century, the deceased Marie d’Oignies intervened on earth to replace her own lost relics. A local prior soon discovered this miracle, and danced with joy at receiving her remains (dictus prior tripudiaverit gaudio).53 A  liturgical trope entitled In unio martyris begins with an invocation to the “dancing martyr” (tripudians martyr). In some of its extant manuscript versions, this trope’s musical notation appears alongside Romanesque illustrations of jugglers and acrobats. It finishes with a proclamation that, at the end of time, saints will intermingle with pious Christians for all eternity.54 This devotional function of medieval dance contradicted early Christian polemic. The Church Fathers contended that Christians should avoid dancing, especially when venerating the martyrs. Some critics complained that people celebrated these days with activities that were neither solemn nor devout, including disordered dances and profane songs.55 John Chrysostom (d. 407), Bishop of Constantinople, bemoaned the members of his congregation who skipped Mass for the theater, circus, and gladiatorial games.56 Elsewhere he decried how unruly congregants went from worshipping the martyrs in church to dancing, drinking, and singing disgraceful ditties at the tavern.57 The intermingling of men and women during holy days was particularly alarming. It unleashed temptation, thereby distracting priests and devolving saints’ feasts into bacchanals.58 Writing to his friend Bishop Alypius (c. 395), Augustine argued that martyr celebrations must not revert back to pagan revelry, lest they reenact the dance around the golden calf and the breaking of the Law (Exodus 32:19).59 Augustine pronounced: “it is not in dancing, but in praying [non saltando, sed orando], it is not in drinking, but in fasting, it is not in instigating brawls, but in sustaining the blows, that the martyrs have gotten their victory.”60 Written during the Visigothic invasions, Augustine’s Civitas Dei (City of God) fulminates against the violence and vanity of Roman spectacles, which, according to him, led to the moral degradation of the empire.61 A late medieval manuscript miniature from this work casts the Romans as shameless idolaters, dancing in the nude (figure 2.4).62 This particular scene refers to the Roman senator Scipio Nasica (b. 227 bce), regarded as the most outstanding citizen of his age. Augustine criticized Scipio for honoring Roman matrons with the Magna Mater, a civic statue he acquired from Anatolia. The medieval image serves as a visual gloss, and is more prescriptive than descriptive. Departing from Augustine’s text, the illustration

Ghost Dancers  61

Figure 2.4  The mother of Scipio leads her children away from idolatrous dancing, detail, Augustine, La Cité de Dieu (illustration for II.5), Old French translation by Raoul de Presles, Maître de François, illuminator, Paris, c. 1475–1480, Museum Meermanno MMW 10 A 11, folio 45 recto

shows how Scipio’s mother could have prevented this immodest display of glory. She therefore shields her children from abominable customs that are displeasing to God. Departing from patristic polemic, lay devotion of Sainte Foy exploited music and dance as Christian tools of inculcation and conversion. Composed during the eleventh century, La Cançó de Santa Fe (The Song of Sainte Foy) transported Foy’s veneration into a vernacular realm. While the aforementioned sources concerning Sainte Foy were written in Latin, the language of the clerical elite, the anonymous Song was written in a Catalan dialect of Occitan, the language of the Provençal troubadours.63 Likely based on a lost Latin original (Passio sanctorum Fidis et Caprisii), the Song captures the unfixed oral and performative culture of the High Middle Ages: “I heard a song that is beautiful to dance [q’es bella ‘n tresca], which was on a Spanish subject. It was not in Greek nor in the Saracen tongue. It is sweeter and more delicious than a drop of honey or any spiced drink prepared by man.”64 The Song uses the term tresca to designate the dance. Especially popular in medieval Italy, the tresca derived from country dances punctuated by percussive, stomps and wild hands.65 Given the subject matter,

62  Gracing the Idols this tresca may have also attempted to bridge feudal epic (chanson de geste) with liturgical movement.66 The author of the Song states that all Basque people know this story, as well as the Spanish and the French. Clerics and scholars likewise read Foy’s story with profound interest. The Song’s Spanish origin is key to understanding the trans-​regionalization of Sainte Foy’s cult. Given Conques’ location along the Pyrenees, the author seems to have confused her shrine in France with a “Spanish subject.” Nevertheless, Sainte Foy developed a substantial following in Spain (as well as England), as Conques lay along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, which in turn was on the route to the mountainous Monastery of Montserrat. At these sites, pilgrims visited the shrines of St. James and the Black Madonna, respectively. The Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (Red Book of Montserrat) provides evidence of pilgrims’ dance activity.67 In the rubrics (red script), the anonymous monastic author proclaims the social function of his book: Because the pilgrims wish to sing and dance [trepudiare] while they keep their vigil in the church of the Blessed Mary of Montserrat, and also in the light of day, and in the church no songs should be sung unless they are chaste and pious, for that reason these songs that appear here have been written. And these should be used modestly, and take care that no one who keeps watch in prayer and contemplation is disturbed.68

Concerned about the questionable piety of pilgrim dances, the Red Book served as a disciplining document. It contains a virelai called Stella Splendens in Monte (The Splendid Star on the Mountain). The virelai was one of the medieval French dance-​songs (from virer, to twist or turn), which combined lyric poetry, song, and dance. Consistent with most medieval dance music, it was written in triple meter.69 The Stella’s lyrics relate how all Christians—​from prelates to ploughmen, from burghers to fishermen, from countesses to nuns—​came together to behold the Black Madonna, who in turn filled her devotees with grace. The manuscript contains another virelai called Regina Polorum (Queen of the Heavens). A scribal annotation indicates that a ball redon (round, circular dance) may accompany this score.70 Rather than prohibiting dance, the Red Book provided appropriate dance music to uphold the sacrality of the Black Madonna. Compared to the Song of Sainte Foy, however, the Red Book bears the mark of monastic prudery. Yet the latter author’s anxiety was not without warrant. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, captures the lives of pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket (d. 1170). Their stories feature numerous dance motifs (e.g., dance as courtship, seduction, refinement, vanity, or joy). When describing the Wife of Bath, the General Prologue captures her sexual expertise with a dance metaphor: “Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce, /​

Ghost Dancers  63 for she koude of that art the olde daunce.”71 For humorous effect, Chaucer follows the Knight’s Tale, populated with the graceful rounds of ladies and gentlemen at court, with the bawdy dancing bodies in the Miller’s Tale. Medieval legislation, too, reflected clerical discomfort regarding these issues. Certain ecclesiastical synods forbade pilgrims to dance near saints’ tombs or shrines. If they broke this rule, additional penance would be required.72 When ecclesiastical statutes failed to control dance, intimidation tactics on the part of clergy became increasingly imaginative. Étienne de Bourbon’s Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus (Tractate on Diverse Preaching Matters, c.  1240–​1260) contains edifying anecdotes that preachers could insert into their sermons. His section on pilgrimage warns against the dangers of pilgrims behaving badly. A marginal notation from an extant manuscript marks this section as “Against dances at vigils and pilgrimages for the saints.”73 Étienne begins by aligning sacrilegious Christians with Jews and Babylonians: So do those pilgrims also who, when they visit holy places, sing lecherous lays. . . . [and] tread down the bodies of holy Christian folk in the churchyards, where they dance [choreant] on saints’ vigils and kindle the living temples of God with the fire of lechery, flocking to the churches on saints’ days and vigils holding dances [choreas ducunt] and hindering the service of God and his saints.74

Étienne proceeds by retelling a story he heard about the diocese of Elne, where a preacher forbade the laity to dance in his parish. Apparently, his congregants had danced through the church and cemetery, sometimes wearing masks and mounted on a wooden horse (super equum ligneum ascendere, et laruati et parati choreas ducere, in uigilia festiuitatis illius ecclesie, in ecclesia et per cimiterium). One rebellious youth cursed the priest and continued this custom. Another scribal annotation alerts the reader to pay attention to this part of the story: “Take note here about a young man who incited others to join dances [choreas] and the fire in the church.”75 Indeed, the youth’s insistence upon dancing in the church had devastating consequences for him and the parish: When therefore the aforesaid youth pranced upon his wooden horse into the church, while the congregation were keeping their vigils in peace and prayer, then on the very threshold of the sanctuary a fire caught him by the feet and utterly consumed him, horse and man. No man in that church, whether kinsman or friend, could bring him the least help to quench those flames that burned before their eyes; wherefore at length the whole congregation, dismayed by this judgment from heaven, left the church and fled to the priest’s house. He arose and came to the church, where he found the youth already almost utterly

64  Gracing the Idols consumed, from whose body rose so great a flame that it seemed to issue forth from the windows of the spire. . . . This I heard in the parish itself, not long after the event, from the chaplain and the youth’s parents and other parishioners.76

Étienne fashioned his dance polemic with vivid detail. To modern readers, it conjures a cinematic horror story of a Trojan horse “gone bad.” Although Étienne validated his account through eyewitnesses, he obviously peppered his prose with exaggerated rhetoric. Such stories aimed to bolster clerical authority and encouraged the laity to attend confession. (Confession was now mandatory for all Christians, as decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215). Beneath Étienne’s charged rhetoric, however, are allusions to actual unrest during pilgrimages. And the cult of Sainte Foy was no exception. Pilgrims who engaged in rustic songs, paganesque romps, and juggling near the monastery annoyed the Conques clergy. Translation Day, though important for promoting Foy’s cult, created overly crowded conditions: Unless you see it with your own eyes it is difficult to believe the report of how many come and return in closely packed multitudes. In some instances the size of the monastery does not suffice to contain them suitably, although it is of great magnitude. There they customarily observe the nocturnal offices with candles and after completing prayers and the mass they joyfully return home.77

The multitude of Christians both glorified Sainte Foy and made her pilgrims susceptible to harm. Overcrowding facilitated robberies and accidental deaths. Visiting a shrine was especially difficult for frail or pregnant women. Abbot Suger (d. 1151) remembers one incident in which female pilgrims were suffering in such intolerable pain “that you could see with horror how they, squeezed in by the mass of strong men as in a winepress, exhibited bloodless faces as in imagined death.”78 Crowded conditions caused bodily contact between men and women. This stampede-​like effect alone could explain why women were denied access to certain shrines. Moreover, perhaps clergy were worried that dancing would devolve into carnal delight. By comparison, the tresca from the Song of Sainte Foy resembled a formalized ritual. The expansion of the Conques cult reflects how Sainte Foy, the restless revenant, transcended historical, geographical, and social boundaries. The Song’s author hoped that someone would adapt his work into French: “Whoever says it well in the French style, I believe that it will be to his great profit and that it will so appear in this world.”79 It is unclear if the author referred to the trouvère (northern French) style of poetry and dance-​songs, or to the liturgical chant innovations from Paris. Either scenario points to the adaptability of medieval dance, shifting between Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, local and

Ghost Dancers  65 universal. Operating posthumously via miracles, Sainte Foy appealed to a variety of social classes. Given Foy’s playfulness, historian Pamela Sheingorn and others have referred to her as “the trickster saint.” For example, hagiographer Bernhard of Angers called Foy’s miracles “jokes” (joca). Like a crafty child, Foy tricked her patrons into giving Conques more gold. She once bargained with a noblewoman to exchange jewelry for a safe pregnancy. Elsewhere she reached out to the rustici (commoners, or peasants), thereby attracting lay devotion across the social strata.80 The dances performed during Sainte Foy’s Translation Day helped to unify her followers. Since collective movement did not require literacy, material wealth, or rank, dance rituals could temporarily efface the barriers of social class. With its Spanish underpinnings, the Song of Sainte Foy sheds some light on the (proto-​)multiculturalism of medieval dance. Whereas most of Western Europe by the eleventh century was dominantly Christian, medieval Spain maintained a confluence of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures. Music and dance from these territories reflected their multicultural makeup. Select Christian codices notated dance music that adhered to Islamic principles of musical composition. The dance-​songs of Andalusian slave girls supposedly influenced the troubadour lyric of Occitania. Medieval Spanish chroniclers documented instances of Jews and Christians dancing together in churches on saints’ days.81 Within this historical context, the Song of Sainte Foy participated in a transregional process of acculturation that went beyond site-​specific shrines. As an instrument of religious conversion, the Song of Sainte Foy likewise partook in the geopolitical project of Latin Christendom. Pilgrimage and other Christian rituals embraced “occidentation,” or the desire to replicate Western cultural norms of homogenization, which developed with the Carolingians and heightened with the Crusades.82 Performance, however evanescent, helped to administer these lasting effects. As musicologist Christopher Page argues, medieval musical notation carried a proselytizing agenda.83 Regularized rhythms mapped themselves onto dancing bodies, encoding and embossing them with a cultic identity. In the words of historian Robert Bartlett, the conquest of Christendom was not about “regional subordination,” which is instead a feature of modern colonialism. As Bartlett clarifies: What they were doing was reproducing units similar to those in their homelands. The towns, churches, and estates they established simply replicated the social framework they knew from back home. The net result of this colonialism was not the creation of ‘colonies,’ in the sense of dependencies, but the spread, by a kind of cellular multiplication, of the cultural and social forms found in the Latin Christian core. The new lands were closely integrated with the old.84

66  Gracing the Idols Through this historiographical lens, medieval religious dance focused more on integration than differentiation. In this way, the cult of Sainte Foy differs from the previous approaches to the role of dance in colonization and conquest.85 In the case of Sainte Foy, the ritualization of dance helped mobilize and multiply her local cult’s dominion. The compelling presence of Foy’s dead body designed a way for dance to live.

The Vital Specter: St. Francis of Assisi Unlike Sainte Foy and most other saints and martyrs, Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) lived among medieval Christians. Always in the public purview, his ascetic program merged urban and monastic dwelling. Francis’s contemporaries witnessed and acknowledged his sanctity. For them, the saint’s praesentia was visible and perceptible. Perhaps matched only by Saints Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc, Francis’s radicalism propelled his legacy into modern thought and experience. From ballet modernism to feminist scholarship, from Dante’s Commedia to a Zeffirelli film, from Walt Disney’s Snow White to The New Yorker, and from garden statuettes to our current pope, St. Francis exerts a lasting influence on religious and secular spheres.86 In this way, St. Francis does not resemble the typical “ghost dancer.” His omnipresence in elite and popular culture suggests that he never quite died. Approaching Franciscan studies is, therefore, confronting an historiographic mother lode. I do not intend to regurgitate the formative scholarship on Francis here. Rather, I focus on the role of dance in written and visual renderings of St. Francis produced during his lifetime and shortly after his death. Specifically, I examine how representations of Francis as a holy dancer blurred the boundaries between tradition and innovation, past and present. Religion scholar Hester Gelber and others have demonstrated how Francis’s hagiographers met the challenge of recuperating his past life into the present moment. Thomas of Celano, Bonaventure, and others developed hagiographic techniques to evoke the saint’s real presence within the past register of historical prose.87 I instead investigate an opposite, yet complementary, phenomenon: the pastness of his presence. In other words, Franciscan writers and artists legitimated Francis’s sanctity by fashioning him as a living phantom. The early documents suggest that Francis belonged to another era of Christian history, haunting medieval Christians with a holiness both strange and familiar. In this chapter, I  have hitherto demonstrated how, with Sainte Foy’s Translation, dance ritualized the cult of the saints and enlivened sanctity. While Francis incorporated vernacular expression and popular culture into his spiritual program, dance contributed to the archaic dimension of his exemplarity.

Ghost Dancers  67 In life, Francis evoked the image of a vital specter; his saintliness lay at the interstices of animacy and shadow. Exhibiting Francis as a living legend, his hagiographers tamed, disciplined, and authorized Francis’s radical spirituality. Construing Francis as a ghost dancer encouraged ecclesiastical support for him and for his Order. When narrating Francis’s early life, the vitae (life stories) convey an unlikely candidate for sacred dance. Francis the youth, then known by his birth name Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, indulged in a lifestyle botched by frivolity and depravity.88 With his father’s mercantile prosperity, Francis could buy himself into knighthood. In the Middle Ages, fighting in battle was typically an aristocratic privilege. The rising merchant class in Italy afforded Francis this honor, much to the scorn of nobles and bishops. Moreover, Francis belonged to a rowdy confraternity known in medieval Italy as the brigata who wreaked havoc in Assisi. During the period of his brigata membership, Francis had ties to a certain Society of Dancers, or the Society of the Staff, known for disturbing saints’ days and summer festivals with their riotous dancing. Italian chroniclers reported how brigate staged burlesque parades during the feast of the Holy Innocents. They pantomimed parodies of Herodias and Salome on St. John’s Day. Evidently the young Francis reveled in these farces. According to contemporary accounts, these juvens (young bachelors) honed their sexual expertise in a most opportune fashion.89 These sources indicate that prior to his conversion, Francis was rooted in his present-​day world. He was by all accounts a sign of the times. When Francis matured as a living saint, however, he conjured an otherworldly presence. In the words of his disciple and first hagiographer, Thomas of Celano (d. c. 1265), Francis revalorized dance in pastoral performance: He was speaking with such fire of spirit that he could not contain himself for joy. As he brought forth the word from his mouth, he moved his feet as if dancing [or leaping, pedes quasi saliendo movebat], not playfully but burning with the fire of divine love, not provoking laughter but moving them to tears of sorrow. For many of them were touched in their hearts, amazed at the grace of God and the great determination of the man.90

Thomas’s account portrayed the performative dimension of Francis’s preaching. The saint’s oral delivery demanded mobility and commanded emotional response. Announcing the lessons of the gospel compelled his body into movement, just as the fire elicits flickering flames. Thomas employed the word quasi (as if) to describe his buoyant bouncing, investing Francis’s body with a mysterious, indefinite quality. At the same time, Francis’s sheer determination, and his deliberate intentionality, impressed his spectators.

68  Gracing the Idols Francis was masterful at positioning himself within his social arena. He exploited the dramatic valence of his surroundings, carving an interactive space in which the ephemerality of performance had a lasting effect on his audience.91 In Thomas’s passage, Francis’s dramatic motions overshadowed play with pathos, thus manipulating the antipodes of affect:  comic and tragic. Theatrical behavior that typically merited laughter was recalibrated as catharsis. Others reported that Francis preached in the nude or made animal noises while delivering the sermon. Elsewhere he received attention from befouling himself with ashes in the town square, all the while claiming that he was a glutton, illiterate, and could barely recite the psalter (book of Psalms).92 Francis’s alterity flowed into his contact with the animal kingdom. To the mystification of his onlookers, the animal realm performed for Francis. As Bonaventure (d. 1274) wrote, Francis communed with beasts. Lambs and rams abandoned their own shepherds to frisk about and bow before him. A hare leapt into his lap, whereas fish treaded water to play with him. In his presence, birds sang the Hours. The falcon’s aerial ballet foreshadowed his stigmata from the seraph.93 Francis’s ability to communicate with wildlife recalls older archetypes of holy presence: biblical patriarchs, martyrs in the amphitheater, and virgin maidens who lured the elusive unicorn. In his diverse social contexts, Francis situated dance along a wider spectrum of religious association and emotional response. The radical tenor of St. Francis belongs to a mode of sanctity as old as Christianity itself:  the vita apostolica (apostolic life). Francis’s zest for the apostolic life revitalized late medieval piety. This archaic aspect of his spirituality complemented his idiosyncrasies.94 His total submission to the gospel message cultivated an insistence upon the apostolic motifs of poverty and preaching. In this way, the living man inhabited the aura of a spectral saint. Francis’s early hagiographers, particularly Thomas of Celano, endowed his vita with the status of a classic text. He operated within a schema of timelessness, projecting universal Christian values.95 When reporting the posthumous deeds of the founder, the first Franciscans heightened his haunting effects on others. In Thomas’s treatise on miracles, the deceased saint overshadowed the living as chiaroscuro overwhelms clarity. In one story, a man blasphemed Francis. Consequently, “at night he saw in a dream his home full of men and women dancing with loud jubilation [choreas cum magna iubilatione ducentibus]. His son, named Gafaro, soon took sick and shortly afterwards gave up his spirit. The dancers [chorea] he had seen were turned into a funeral’s mourning, and the jubilation to lament.”96 Without the mediation of relics or a tomb, Francis’s ghostly presence percolated into the blasphemer’s sleep. The apparition upset the presumed binaries between fact and phantasm, joy and grief. This anecdote is compelling because of the otherworldliness it superimposed onto a (pre-​)modernizing, mercantile Italy. It uncannily

Ghost Dancers  69 resuscitated Thomas’s earlier image of Francis the prancing preacher, outpouring with affect. In the posthumous miracle, Francis reappeared as a revenant, now abstracted into invisible praesentia. Within a dream narrative, Francis appropriated the archaic practice of Benedictine cursing. In his vita of St. Benedict (d. 547), Gregory the Great showed how holy individuals could curse in the service of justice, rather than malice.97 Francis emitted a psychological variant of cursing that unsettled the expressive index of dance performance. Though Thomas left the anecdote open-​ended, the curse perhaps served as corrective punishment, adumbrating the force of Francis’s potentia on the living. Elsewhere Thomas described how the newly dead Francis continued to exercise apostolic fervor. His passing made the gout-​stricken bounce about (salit podagricus).98 Upon observing these miracles, Pope Gregory IX (d. 1241) erupted in effervescence: The Roman Pontiff heard of these things and understood: he, chief pontiff of all, leader of Christians, lord of the world, shepherd of the Church, the anointed of the Lord, and the Vicar of Christ. He rejoiced and exulted, dancing with joy [gaudet et exsultat, tripudiat et laetatur], for in his own day he was seeing the church of God renewed with new mysteries that were ancient wonders.99

The pope’s extemporaneous dancing is not the only animating attribute of this passage. The pope identified Francis’s pastness as the source of present revelation. For the people of thirteenth century Italy, Francis’s ghost revitalized the church with ancient wonders (antiquis mirabilibus) that seemed frozen within a bygone era. Francis, a specter of archaic religion, enabled medieval Christians to behold the pastness of the present. Bonaventure authored the Order’s official vita (Legenda Maior, or Major Legend, c.  1263), which extends the saint’s spectrality into his earthly life. One day, Anthony of Padua, who would become a saint in his own right, was preaching in Arles (southern France). Suddenly a vision of Francis appeared before Anthony, brother Fra Monaldo, and other disciples. Hovering over the crowd, Francis floated in mid-​air, framed by the symmetrical curvature of his upraised arms. The friars then experienced the consolation of the Holy Spirit. Bonaventure understood this event as another anticipation of Francis’s stigmata, symbolic of his identification with Christ.100 At Arles, Francis was not yet dead; he materialized an apparition of himself. Giotto envisioned this event in his St. Francis cycle fresco at Santa Croce, Florence.101 His rendering accentuates the ghostly habitus of the saint. Francis’s posture matches that of an orant, or individual in prayer. In early Christian art, the orant prayed while standing with splayed arms. Its stance mimicked Christ on the cross. The catacomb paintings of Domitilla in Rome, for example, employed this imagery, which constitutes some

70  Gracing the Idols of the earliest figural representations of Christianity. Giotto, who privileged the pivotal moments of Francis’s life, recycled this imagery in his Franciscan iconography.102 As orant and vision, the image of Francis presents history as phantasmagoria; real events and spiritual phenomena converge within a single narrative. As Victor Turner has argued, St. Francis was a perpetually liminal figure. Lying betwixt and between his social situations, he defied conventional processes of classification and integration.103 Coincidentally, Trecento and Quattrocento images of the Banquet of Herod resemble Giotto’s fresco. For example, an altar painting by the Master of St. John depicts the dancer Salome in a similar pose.104 Fra Angelico and other artists gave more attention to showcasing the palms of her hands.105 Typical of the Italian style, the Master of St. John rendered Salome controlled and concentrated, perhaps in obedience to Herodias. Art historian Jane Long suggests that Italian images of Salome, which were often in public view (churches, chapels, cathedrals), may have functioned to educate the rising merchant classes towards better etiquette.106 The resemblance between Italian representations of Francis and Salome is immediately contradictory. Salome’s dance orchestrated the death of a saint. Francis’s apparition at Arles radiated sanctity. However, consonant with my earlier discussion of Salome, Francis incorporated profane entertainment into a religious context. Thomas and his fellow friars told how Francis punctuated his preaching with pantomime. He often sang in French (gallice cantabat) while pretending to play the viola. These secular diversions materialized the sentiments of his spirit: “All of this dancing [tripudia] often ended in tears, and the cry of joy dissolved into compassion for Christ’s suffering. Then the saint would sigh without stopping and sob without ceasing. Forgetful of lower things he had in hand, he was caught up to heaven.”107 Francis resituated dance into an economy of penance. For the saint, inhabiting the guise of a troubadour or histrion (actor) transcended artifice and recreation. It was a technique of meditation on the Passion of Christ. Francis’s preaching conjoined the liveliness of secular performance with the commemoration of the death of God. The jongleur saint authorized a spirituality that departed from Latinate monasticism, yet maintained the mark of authentic piety. Indeed, what set Francis apart from previous saints was his ability to bridge tradition (vita apostolica, activa, or contemplativa) and innovation (vernacularity, secularity). His nickname Francesco (“the Frenchman”), given to him by his merchant father, assumed a spiritual register in his sainthood. As the writer and theologian G.K. Chesterton explained, Francis was a tumbler of God (jongleur de Dieu): Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind;

Ghost Dancers  71 which was really like the reversal of a complete somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.108

Chesterton refers to the incident of the cave, told in Francis’s early vitae.109 Located near the local church of St. Damian, this cave served as a hiding place where the young, still impudent Francis shielded himself from his father’s rage. After one month passed, Francis emerged from the cave. He was emaciated and besmirched with filth, more reminiscent of a corpse than a living being. It was then that he experienced a totalizing conversion. For Chesterton, this act of reversal constituted a death that necessarily preceded a rebirth.110 Like St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers of the ancient east, Francis immersed himself voluntarily into the wilderness and deprivation.111 He returned to civilization as if he were a phantom of his former self. The people of Assisi greeted him with stones and mockery, labeling him a madman. For Francis’s hagiographers, as for Chesterton, this homecoming marked the beginning of a sacred quest. Francis here recalls the sacer saltator (sacred dancer) King David—​humility that borders on humiliation, transgression that turns into sanctity. Once out of the cave, Francis no longer needed to flee the Gregorian “shipwreck of this life.”112 He made the world into a cloister, religion into theater. Through this marriage of strangeness and familiarity, Francis became a living legend. In classic mythology and folklore, a legend revolves around a figure from the distant past whose legacy lives on in present memory through texts and storytelling; hence the rapport between legenda, legend, and legere, to read. Francis’s hagiographers who knew him intimately authorized his alterity by reading into him the stuff of legends. Given the Order’s precarious legitimacy, the saint’s legendary identity became more crucial to the friars after his death. Laced with legend, a sermon that Jacques de Vitry delivered to the Franciscans (c. 1229–​ 1240) helped authorize the Franciscan project. Though a powerful Dominican, Jacques admired the competing Order. His sermon praised its exemplary commitment to piety and poverty. It ends with the following parable: We read of a certain king, who said to one of his soldiers, “Let’s go out tonight through the streets of the city and see what is going on.” When they came to

72  Gracing the Idols a certain place, they saw a light coming from the window of an underground dwelling. There a poor man sat, covered with filthy and torn clothing, beside his wretched little wife. She was dancing [saltabat] near her husband, singing and exulting with great joy. Then the king began to wonder how these people, who were surrounded by such squalor, not having decent clothing or even a real house, could lead such a happy and secure life, indeed seemingly a rich one. And he said to his soldier, “It is truly amazing that you and I are not more pleased by our life, surrounded as we are with so many pleasures, and so much glory, while these stupid people rejoice in their miserable life which seems to them sweet and gentle, when it is really bitter and harsh.” The soldier replied very wisely: “How much more stupid and miserable does our life seem to the lovers of true life and of eternal glory. When compared with heavenly treasure, they would judge our splendid palaces and clothing and riches as dung and our glory as wind, nothing when compared to the ineffable beauty and glory of the saints which is in heaven. For just as these people we’ve seen appear crazy to us, in the same way and more do we, who wander about in this world and think we have fulfillment with this false glory appear worthy of tears in the eyes of those who enjoy the delights of eternal goods.”113

The parable celebrates Franciscan virtues of poverty and humility. The poor woman’s dancing approximates beatitude. Compared to the splendor of the saints, the false happiness gained through material wealth is folly. Jacques did not specify if the poor man was St. Francis. To his Franciscan audience, the poor man could signify Francis the caveman, content with his life of voluntary deprivation. The dancing wife paints a portrait of Lady Poverty from the Sacrum Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate (The Sacred Exchange between the Blessed Francis and Lady Poverty). This mystical take on commerce personified poverty as a consort, or even a goddess, inspiring him toward virtue.114 The king represents Italian merchants and their insatiable vanity, or perhaps ecclesiastical authorities who had misunderstood the Franciscans. The overall message indicates that the friars—​however eccentric they seem to others—​are spiritual superiors. What is particularly striking about this parable is that it derives from the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat.115 By the thirteenth century, Barlaam, essentially a Christianized story of the life of the Buddha, was already a well-​traveled tale. Scholars surmise that Barlaam originated in Asia and transmigrated to the Mediterranean via Pahlavi (Middle Persian) texts. The medieval West eventually acquired a Latin translation of a seventh-​century Syriac version. Medieval readers attributed its authorship to either John of Damascus (d. 749) or John Chrysostom (d. 407).116 In the context of Jacques’s sermon, conflating Francis with Barlaam and Josaphat was an ingenious technique of authorizing the

Ghost Dancers  73 fledgling Franciscans. Supplying a prehistory of Francis authenticated his sanctity and promoted the viability of his Order. Integrated into a thirteenth-​century context, the parable emits what medieval historian Gabrielle Spiegel calls the “social logic of the text.” That is, it served as a script to be enacted by social actors in the construction of history and historiography.117 The sermon’s social logic imposed a Franciscan sensibility onto an ancient legend, implying that the spirit of Francis was an historical precedent to the saints of antiquity. Through the fable of a poor dancer, the saint’s historicity ratifies posthumous political maneuvers. The fluid temporality found in the vitae passed into Franciscan musings on sacred dance. (Pseudo) Bonaventure’s Dieta Salutis (Regimen of Salvation) contemplates dance through an eschatological lens.118 His final chapter on heaven describes the infinite dance of the blessed: In following, that celestial glory has the most beloved society, since the saints always make a full dance [choream plenam] around God with all charm. From this take note that in that celestial dance [coelesti chorea] or ballata there are three things to be most faithfully contemplated: certainly the innumerable assembly, the infinite circulation, and the inestimable song. Truly that dance is blessed whose company is boundless, whose song is happiness.”119

The author populated this spectacle with a great multitude of holy people: Christ, the Virgin Mary, angels, martyrs, saints, prophets, kings, and clerics. His vision choreographically blends celestial circumambulation (chorea) with Italian social dance (ballata). Dance’s rhythmic regulation presupposes futurity. Measured beats and sequenced steps prolong themselves to infinity. Consonant with the Legenda Maior, Bonaventure’s official biography of Francis, the author bridges past, present, and future time within a seamless schema. He situates Francis within an eschatological frame, at once anticipatory and historical.120 In the Dieta Salutis, dance became a way of (after)life that graced the passage from earthly history to ultimate fulfillment. In Franciscan art, Francis and Christ were nearly interchangeable as lords of the cosmic dance. Antonio Vite’s sacristy fresco of St. Francis in glory provides one example. Located at the San Francesco church in Pistoia, the image shows Francis enthroned in paradise (figure 2.5). Cherubim and seraphim frame his throne. Angelic dancers twirl atop clouds, partnering one another with undulating port de bras (carriage of the arms). Genuflecting angels accompany them with instruments typically associated with secular dance music: shawms, bagpipes, hurdy gurdy, and nakers (kettle drums).121 Italian iconography of the Ascension or Resurrection of Christ depicted similar scenes. Andrea di Bonaiuti, for instance, painted a comparable configuration of sacred play.122 His Ascension fresco at the Spanish Chapel in Florence pictures an airborne Christ cheered on

74  Gracing the Idols

Figure 2.5  St. Francis in Glory, Antonio di Vita (Antonio Vite), San Francesco, Sala del Capitolo, fresco, Pistoia, c. 1385–​90, photograph by Mongolo1984, Wikimedia Commons

by dancing angels and musicians. The Virgin Mary and sainted apostles honor him below, flanked by archangels Michael and Gabriel. As with the Pistoia fresco, this image was painted over a vault, heightening the verticality of the heavenly realm it depicts. Despite the Spanish Chapel’s Dominican patronage, medieval viewers would have associated this fresco with St. Francis. Christ displays traces of the stigmata on his hands and feet. In Vite’s fresco, Francis bears stigmatic scars on his feet and left hand.123 Foregrounding the stigmata became the pièce de résistance in Franciscan iconography. It showed the visual commonality between Christ and Francis and met the challenge of representation in the Late Middle Ages, when less attention was paid to relics and reliquaries.124 According to Thomas of Celano, Francis received the stigmata in maturity, two years before his death. At Mount Alverna (Tuscany), Christ appeared to Francis as a winged seraph bound to a cross. This encounter indelibly scarred the saint, piercing his hands, feet, and side in replication of the Crucifixion.125 The stigmata embossed Francis with the trace wounds of Christ’s body, verifying his likeness to God. The stigmata rendered Francis as a living relic, authenticating his simulatio Christi (simulation of Christ). The Vite and Bonaiuti frescoes juxtapose the pain caused by the stigmata with the pleasure associated with dancing. In doing so, they cross-​reference a past event (the stigmata) with vital presence (dancing), while anticipating future

Ghost Dancers  75 glory (the Resurrection). Among the early Franciscans, Bonaventure was most concerned with placing the stigmata within future time. He identified Francis as the sixth seal of Revelation, the great earthquake (terraemotus) that will prelude the Last Judgment.126 Elsewhere he validated Francis’s stigmata with the image of the papal seal.127 The stigmata therefore acquired authenticity through its connection to ecclesiastical auctoritas (authority). The Church’s recognition helped reposition the legend of Francis within the confines of orthodoxy, which in turn helped neutralize faction disputes within the Franciscan Order.128 More careful and academic than his predecessors, Bonaventure was reluctant to overexpose the saint’s eccentricities. He portrayed the saint as a transparent mirror of divinity. Francis’s puncture wounds not only revealed him as a membra Christi (a piece of Christ), but as totus Christus (all Christ).129 The stigmatic saint duplicated the savior and prefaced his return at the end of time. Bonaventure’s use of cyclical time imbued the legenda with a sense of completion through Christ. This Christianized circularity underscores (Pseudo) Bonaventure’s reflections on sacred dance: Accordingly, in that celestial dance [celesti chorea] the infinite circuit must be contemplated, since it will always have entered, progressed, and retreated. Entering into the gaze of divinity, progressing toward the aspect of humanity as it is held by our savior. And just as a single person who is leading the whole dance [totam choream] into other dances, Christ therefore is and will be the leader of the dance [Christus est et erit chorealis ductor], leading and preceding that most blessed society.130

This passage from the Dieta Salutis describes a temporal triad of sacred movement: arriving, advancing, and withdrawing. Harmony involved progressive and recursive action within a Trinitarian structure. The metaphor of gradus (step) featured prominently in the Bonaventuran mystical program.131 In the dance of the elect, both action and reflection, as well as historia (history) and eschaton (end of times), found equilibrium.132 Christ provided the source of celestial revolutions; he is the heartbeat of heaven. Through his redemptive essence, humanity became integrated into beatitudinal bliss. In the blessed society of specters, Francis recedes into the corps de ballet to follow the ultimate Ringleader. * * * When Francis uttered his famous words, “we are the jongleurs of God” (nos sumus joculatores Domini), he was nearing the end of his life.133 Around this time, he composed the first religious poem in the Italian (Umbrian) vernacular, the Canticle of the Sun. Invoking Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and Mother Earth, the song insists upon a ritual framework. Upon completing the Canticle on his

76  Gracing the Idols deathbed, he instructed his brothers in the art of preaching. The Franciscan preacher should first deliver a sermon, then sing, and finally assist people in doing penance. In other words, ceremony and the sacraments relied on performance to materialize the sacred. The next chapter turns to liturgical dance and its role in Christianizing sacred time in sacred space.

3

Dance of the Hours The Liturgy

The medieval liturgy was the most programmatic part of Christian devotion. Liturgical sources (missals, breviaries, graduals, and books of hours) organized Christian worship within precise temporal sequences, including the liturgical hours, feast days, and the culminating Easter cycle. Within a ritual context, medieval dance created a space where the ephemerality of dance impressed itself onto the repetitive nature of the liturgical calendar. Fleeting movement participated in the passage of sacred time. Dance was not just a component of the liturgy; it played a formative role in the Christianization of the liturgy. In particular, liturgical dance revised pre-​ Christian ideas and practices for Christian devotion. For example, the frontispiece of a Notre Dame polyphony manuscript, known as the Magnus Liber Organi, or simply the Florence Codex, illustrates the Christianization of the cosmic dance.1 The three registers correspond to the three categories of music from Boethius’s Plato-​inspired treatise, De Institutione Musica (Concerning the Principles of Music). On the top register, the personification of Musica points to musica mundana, or the music of the spheres. In the middle register, Musica greets a group of dancing clerics and laity, who represent musica humana, or sacred music. On the bottom register, Musica appears alongside a musician, standing in for musica instrumentalis, or secular music. Designed to embellish the liturgy, the Magnus Liber Organi contains responsorial chants, processional chants, early motets, and rondeaux (a genre of dance music). Polyphony overwhelmed sacred space with multitudinous sounds and coruscating motions, mirroring Abbot Suger’s project for Gothic light.2 Of interest to this chapter is the manuscript’s confluence of pagan and Christian, secular and sacred. Popularized by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and subsequently with the work of early theater historian E.K. Chambers, early twentieth-​century scholars and folklorists attempted to locate the classical polytheistic, or pagan, origins of Christian ritual.3 The institutionalization of Christian dance was, however, more historically fraught than their narratives suggest. The legitimation of liturgical dance is perhaps better understood as part of a larger process of ritualization.

Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

78  Gracing the Idols Ritualization, as religious studies scholar Catherine Bell has articulated, is an archaeological excavation, probing the processes of ratification and negotiation by which otherwise ordinary behaviors constitute sacred acts.4 Moving beyond the function and semiotics of rituals, ritualization brings to light the power relationships—​as domination, consent, or resistance—​that undergird religious performance.5 This chapter investigates the processes of discipline, regulation, and justification that enabled dance to become an acceptable mode of liturgical expression. Far from excluding dance and obscuring its pagan associations, medieval liturgy refashioned dance into a devotional act that embodied the rhythms of sacred time. The first part of this chapter addresses medieval liturgists and their authorization of dance rituals. In their ritualization of dance, Christians saw themselves as continuing and surpassing pagan rites. The second part turns to the use of dance in liturgical drama. The dramatic capacity of dance helped the audience to relive sacred time and experience cosmic dualism. The third and final section gives a close reading of a specific liturgical dance ritual performed at Auxerre Cathedral. My analysis shows how dance enabled practitioners to balance the pagan past with Christian temporality. The ritualized dancing body was an exercise of equilibrium, reconciling pre-​Christian legacy with the Christian ordo (order).

Disciplina Liturgica: Dance and Ritualization Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the profusion of ecclesiastical dance prohibitions indicates that dance was deemed a remnant of paganism that the Church must purge. Yet, as this chapter will show, there was a gap between clerical rhetoric and lived reality. Despite its early associations with the Greek chorus and the Roman stage, dance became integral to church dramas and the performance of the liturgy. In their manuals, medieval liturgists argued that dances should still be performed, and they expounded upon their significance for the Christian community. In doing so, liturgists self-​consciously coopted and Christianized a pagan past. For antiquarians Thomas Warton and Francis Douce, the sacralization of drama was a product of deliberation, in which the clergy reconciled profane performances with didactic exercises: “But finding no regard was paid to their [the clergy’s] censures, they changed their plan, and determined to take these recreations into their own hands. They turned actors; and instead of profane mummeries, presented stories taken from legends of the Bible. This was the origin of sacred comedy.”6 The transition from classical to Christian drama, however, was complex and took place over centuries of negotiation.7 This section traces the authorization of liturgical dance in the Western Middle

Dance of the Hours  79 Ages. I begin by discussing Church Fathers’ polemic against pagan performance. I then turn to liturgists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who valorized, rather than criticized, the residue of classical spectacle. As my analysis shows, medieval liturgists achieved a convergence of ancient rites and Christian devotion. Through their ritualization of dance, medieval liturgists created a translatio spectaculi (translation or transfer of spectacle), renovating ancient traditions with the discipline of the Latin rite. Dance, as an embodied ritual of worship, impressed itself onto the liturgical calendar. The calendrical organization of sacred dance enabled Christian temporality to synchronize with, and ultimately eclipse, classical tradition. For the Church Fathers, dance did not constitute an appropriate display of Christian devotion. Late antique dance polemic broadcasts the patristic intolerance toward pagan spectacles. In a sermon for the New Year, Augustine (d. 430) warned his congregation not to confuse Christian devotion with the kalends of January: Now, if this feast of the pagans which is celebrated today with such joy of the world and of the flesh, with the singing of meaningless and base songs, with banquets and shameful dances [saltationibus turpibus], if these things which the pagans do in the celebration of this false festival do not please you, then you shall be gathered from among the nations.8

As he continued, Augustine emphasized that Christ’s sacrifice succeeded in separating the Christians from the pagans. Though you once walked in darkness, now, Augustine concluded, you are children of the light. Similarly, in his Confessiones (Confessions), Augustine conveyed the seductive charm of the theater. Abandoning theatrical spectatorship marked one’s crossing over from pagan Rome to the society of Christ, from cult to Church.9 Influential throughout the Middle Ages, Augustine’s Civitas Dei (City of God, early fifth century), written during the Visigoth invasions, exposed the corrupt moral fiber of Roman spectacle. At night the City of Man unleashes “indulgence in sport, drinking, vomiting, dissipation,” where one hears “the noise of dancing” everywhere. In this God-​forsaken place, “the theatres erupt in cries of indecent merriment and with every kind of utterly cruel and utterly degraded pleasure.”10 A late medieval manuscript of the Cité de Dieu (an Old French translation of the text) accentuates the paganism of the Romans (figure 3.1).11 Dancing nude before their golden gods, they personify idolatry. In a visual twist, Plato takes his revenge on the dissolute dancers. (Though Plato was not a Christian, Augustine deeply admired him, and, in this part of his text, drew from Plato’s theories on the will).12 Augustine’s reaction to these pagan performances coincide with Guy DeBord’s theories on spectacularity. From the Christian standpoint, Roman

Figure 3.1  Plato casts away idolatrous dancers, Augustine, La Cité de Dieu, illustration for VIII.21, translation by Raoul de Presles, Maître de François, illuminator, Paris, circa 1475–1480, Museum Meermanno MMW 10 A 11, folio 388 verso

Dance of the Hours  81 spectacles amounted to mere apparitions of ultimate realities.13 They supplanted meaningful activity with stultifying stimuli. Augustine’s remarks belonged to a larger discourse concerning the disapproval of spectacle. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and others construed the Greek chorus as the primitive, and thus pagan, origin of dancing.14 Tertullian (fl. second century), John Chrysostom (d. 407), Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), and others condemned secular spectacles as figurae diaboli (figures of the devil).15 Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) and Isidore expressed contempt for the inebriated and lascivious conduct that these events provoked.16 Isidore conceded that chorea (dance) was more trifling than pernicious. Yet when discussing theater, mime, pantomime, acting, and gladiatorial contests, he contended that attending these events would corrupt Christian spectators.17 Caesar of Arles (d. 542) fulminated against those who executed ballationes and saltationes in the sacred basilica. He saw them as a devolution into pagan customs.18 An anonymous late antique sermon, once discussed by the modern monk and scholar Jean Leclercq, implored Christians to reject dances (De saltationibus respuendis). In particular, the sermon argues that the malice of women, through dancing, brought about the fall of man. According to the sermon, one must cease dances in order to wrest oneself from sin and the stain of Eve.19 The patristic anxiety over dance—​especially when enacted in churches, in cemeteries, and on feast days by women—​percolated into the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval period, numerous church councils and ecclesiastical statutes tried to prohibit dances of different kinds and in different contexts.20 Often redundant in content, these interdictions applied to indecent, lascivious, and obscene movements, dances in sacred places or on holy days, and specific dancers (women, clergy, pilgrims). Some of the more emphatic statutes tried to outlaw dancing, hurling threats of excommunication and prolonged penitence. Sermons, liturgists, and penitential sources justified their condemnations of dance with biblical interpretation. Some of the greatest medieval minds, including Peter Abelard (d. 1142)  and John of Salisbury (d. 1180), reiterated these criticisms in their assessment of popular entertainers (jongleurs, mimes, minstrels, and acrobats), who exude indecent, histrionic gestures.21 By the High Middle Ages, however, pagan practice was no longer an actual threat to the Church. For some commentators and theologians, theater and dance could imply residual polytheism. Western liturgists, however, began to theorize how performance catalyzed the progression of Christian history. Writing in the twelfth century, Honorius of Autun (d. 1151) described a seamless transition between the theatrum (theater) of antiquity and the ecclesia (church) of Christendom: It is known that those who recited tragedies in the theaters represented to the people, by their gestures, the actions of conflicting forces. Even so, our

82  Gracing the Idols tragedian [the celebrant] represents to the Christian people in the theater of the church, by his gestures, the struggle of Christ, and impresses upon them the victory of his redemption.22

Honorius envisioned the mass as a piece of theater. The priest, with his formalized movements, delivered an evocative performance that awakened his congregants to the mysteries of the vita Christi (life of Christ). Departing from the diatribes of the Church Fathers, who viewed the theater and the Church as diametric opposites, Honorius recognized the continuity of dramatic expression. The Christian era instituted a new kind of theater which reoriented the faithful to God. As Honorius’s passage shows, Christian liturgy involved the recuperation of sacred time. The performative elements of the liturgy (musical rhythms, choral voices, moving bodies) upheld the temporal schema of devotion (the regularity of liturgical hours, the Eucharist, and feast days). Music, song, and dance can work in the service of sacred time. Reclaiming pre-​lapsarian mirth, the otherworldly temporality of dance and music effected the return of sacred time, or, in historian Jacques Le Goff ’s words, it performed “a summa on sacred time.” Implied in his Proustian title, Le Goff ’s last book, À la Recherche du Temps Sacré (In Search of Sacred Time), excavates the construction of the sanctorale (the Church’s calendrical cycle of the saints) in the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend).23 Le Goff ’s recherche, like that of Proust, is also the (re)discovery of time. In the Christian defense of psalmody and dance, the liturgy accomplished the rediscovery of sacred time. For medieval liturgists, situating dance within sacred time helped them christen dance as a religious ritual. Writing in the late twelfth century, the French liturgist Jean Beleth (d. 1182) demonstrated how dance facilitated the transition from pagan to Christian time. As historian Constant Mews has shown, Beleth’s De Ecclesiasticis Officiis (Concerning the Ecclesiastical Offices) proffers an exegesis of the tripudium, or liturgical dance, performed at the vigil of St. John the Baptist (June 24). Beleth described a seemingly heathen custom of boys who, during the vigil, burned bones and other impure things, watched the smoke, made torches, and then turned a wheel. This account is vague and it remains unclear what boys (novices, rustics, etc.) followed these customs. Beleth nevertheless delivered a tour de force typological reading of the vigil. According to him, the burning symbolized the quelling of impurities and eradication of old rites; the Old Law thus made way for the coming of the New Law. The torches signified St. John, the coming of the true light. And finally, Beleth wrote, “the wheel is turned to signify that the sun then climbs to the height of its circle and immediately returns. To suggest this, a wheel is turned” (Rota voluitur ad significandum, quod sol tunc ascendit ad altiora sui circuli et satim regreditur ad quod innuendum voluitur rota).24 Beleth glossed the wheel once more, suggesting that, due to the

Dance of the Hours  83 spring and autumn equinoxes, as St. John’s days were shorter, Christ’s became longer.25 Beleth linked the summer solstice—​typically associated with pagan rites—​to the conceptions of Christ and St. John. And he was not apologetic about it. With its interplay of pagan, seasonal, and sacred time, the tripudium recalled Celtic and folkloric renderings of Christ as the dancing sun.26 One should not abstain from rejoicing on this feast, Beleth asserted, since John the Baptist heralded the coming of grace. The tripudium, with all its pre-​Christian associations, actualized an en-​gracing event for the new aevum (age). Not despite of, but because of, its pagan residue, dance helped shape the symbolic and temporal dimensions of the Christian liturgy. Elsewhere Beleth is more cautious about the role of music and dance in a devotional setting. In the following passage, he asks if dance and song actually assist Christians’ scriptural understanding: In the primitive Church it was forbidden for anyone to speak in tongues unless there was someone who could interpret. For what use was it to speak, unless there was understanding? Thus was implanted the praiseworthy custom in the Church in certain regions that once the gospel was declaimed literally, it was immediately expounded among the common people. But what is to be done in our times when never or rarely is found someone who understands as he reads and listens, who notices as he sees and acts. . . . It therefore seems that there should rather be silence than psalmody, rather silence than dancing [tripudiandum]. But, lest the mouths of the singers be closed to you, Lord, my God, let us apply, with God’s help, the remedy of a three-​fold reading against this injury and speak firstly about ecclesiastical institutions, secondly about the explanations of different words, thirdly about the reasons for days.27

Beleth contemplated whether dance and music could lead the faithful astray. He was not the only one who worried about the distracting potential of performance. Cesarius of Heisterbach (d. 1240) and medieval priests told tales of devils sneaking into the choir when the choristers made mistakes or began to snooze.28 Cistercians circulated fears about the susceptibility of malignant influences on the singers, namely demonically-​transmitted dizziness, coughing, vomiting, and a hoarse voice. Christine von Stommeln (d. 1312) witnessed demonic infiltrations into the choir and liturgical rites, where the devil himself would dance.29 Choir stalls carried an ambivalent charge, as a chasm between the angelic and the demonic. Carved misericords from medieval choir stalls may reflect these anxieties. In Chichester Cathedral, a supple dancing woman comes into close contact with a male musician (figure 3.2).30 Misericords originated to aid elderly, fragile monks who were unable to stand throughout the office. In time, the imagery grew more profane and humorous, comparable to the wild

84  Gracing the Idols

Figure 3.2  Misericord (no. 13, prebend of Somerley), Chichester Cathedral, early fourteenth century, photograph by Brian LeMarquer

images of medieval marginalia.31 As these examples insinuate, music and dance could detract from worship. Beleth’s concern about the liturgy, however, has more nuance. Ultimately, he is less concerned with song and dance than with a lack of perception. Drawing from Augustine and Abelard, Beleth wonders that, if our congregants do not understand us, then what good are our words? The ability to understand the gospels, sacraments, and redemption is what is at stake, rather than the policing of dancers and singers.32 If the faithful do require psalms and dances to acquire knowledge and truth, then this is preferable to the perpetual befuddlement of the masses. Moreover, for the clergy, Beleth sanctioned Christmas games as well as the tripudia (dances performed for the Feasts of the Circumcision, the Holy Innocents, St. Stephen, and the Epiphany), provided that the dancers did not degenerate into revelry.33 Rather than banning dance from the liturgy, Beleth recognized the didactic effects of performance. Sicard of Cremona (d. 1215), one of Beleth’s younger contemporaries, contributed further to the ratification of religious dance. Sicard was indebted to Honorius’s views on the liturgy. He approached dance in a calendrical fashion, describing performances enacted on specific saints’ days and feast days. Sicard’s Mitralis de Officiis (loosely translated as Commentary on the Divine Offices) provides documentation on the pila /​ pelota (ball) games and dances performed by clergy in the French cathedrals, including Chartres, Rheims, Sens, Senlis, Amiens, and Narbonne. Clergy of all stations—​bishops, priests, subdeacons, and boys—​engaged in these festive affairs. Sicard offered numerous descriptions of the “December freedoms” (libertas decembrica), a sort of Christmas adaptation of the Roman Saturnalia (celebrated between December 17 and 19). Horace (d. 8

Dance of the Hours  85 bce) once referred to Saturnalias as “freedoms” because on this topsy-​turvy day, he recalled, slaves obtained the freedom to speak their minds.34 Sicard’s exposition of the December freedoms demonstrates some continuity between pagan and Christian practice: All Christians ought to come together freely at the above mentioned daily offices to celebrate the glory of the resurrection, which will be revealed in us. This solemnity is therefore the jubilee of Christians, when quarrels are settled, offenses forgiven. Let those who had sinned be reconciled, let debts be cancelled. Let work places not be opened, merchandise not displayed for sale except for those things without which a meal cannot take place. Let prisoners be freed, shepherds and servants not forced to service so that they are able to enjoy freedom and to delight in the festivity of future joy. Thus it is that in the cloisters of certain churches even bishops enjoy the December freedom with their clerics, even to descending to the game of the circular dance or ball [ludum choreae vel pilae] although it seems more praiseworthy not to play; this “December freedom” is so called in that in the month of December, shepherds, servants, and maidservants were governed among the gentiles [pagans] with a kind of freedom by their masters, so that they could celebrate with them after the harvest was collected. And note that the gentiles established circular dances to honor idols [idolorum choreas], so that they might praise their gods by voice and serve them with their whole body, wanting to foreshadow in them in their own way something of the mystery.35

In Sicard’s narrative, the transition from the Saturnalia to the December freedoms moves toward the Christian virtue of humilitas (humility). Bishops and clerics subjected themselves to ball dances, casting off their dignity to submit to a higher power. This beatitudinal behavior—​the high become low, and the low become high—​follows biblical precedents. For example, in his entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, Christ established the first liturgy. For William of Auvergne (d. 1249), this humble adventus (arrival) marked the genesis of processions, as well as the very word processio (procession).36 Drawing from Cassiodorus (d. 585), Sicard, and Guillaume Durand (d. 1296), William explained how ring dances, once a staple of worship, eventually shifted to two linear formations to prevent clerical confusion.37 Thus the procession was born. In medieval iconography, Christ’s entry into Jerusalem generated festive impulse. A fresco from the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, for instance, extends the biblical description in its depiction of little boys bursting into song and dance. Every December, Sicard’s clergy elicited a similar response to the Nativity. Bubbling over in festive effervescence, even the most solemn of Christians disavowed their worldly

86  Gracing the Idols rank to honor the coming of the savior. Liturgical dances and processions choreographed the genesis and progression of sacred time. Additional documentation from liturgical manuscripts affirms Sicard’s calendrical calibration of sacred dance. Musical notation contains evidence for the performance of religious dances. A 1360 gradual from Mosburg notes a dance that occurred on specific feast days, whereas a 1215 document from the Cluniacs at Limoges instructs the monks to dance and rejoice. A Notre Dame de Paris processional gives the following rubric for the Alma redemptoris chant: Antiphona per choream (indicating that the antiphon is to be danced).38 The choir in Limousin danced during the feast of St. Martin and chanted Gloria patri. Then in their local dialect, they added: “Saint Martin, pray for us, and we will dance [espingaren] for you!”39 A  manuscript from Sens Cathedral contains precise instructions for the precentor (i.e., the one who sings before the choir).40 The rubric on the left column indicates that the precentor must dance in the church’s nave on the feast of St. Stephen (In inventione beati Stephani, ad processionem in navi ecclesie Senonum precentor debet ballare). On the right, the precentor again dances on the feasts of St. Columba and St. Lupus (In processione ad sanctam Columbam, precentor in festo sancti Lupi debet ballare). Musicologist Jacques Chailley observed an additional notation on the right column written into the third line, Arière, which might function as a sort of choreographic symbol.41 Interestingly, this codification of sacred dance did not promote the dancers’ technical prowess, as did conventional Western dance notation in the Renaissance. Instead, liturgical dance commemorated the passage of sacred time.42 With their choreographic regimes, liturgical dances cultivated a corporate Christian identity. Following Beleth and Sicard, the thirteenth-​century liturgist Guillaume Durand (d. 1296)  supported the institutionalization of liturgical dance. Guillaume was more prescriptive than descriptive in tone, and restrained from highlighting the pagan vestiges of these festivals.43 An image from a liturgical manuscript of Guillaume Durand’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (Explanation of the Divine Offices) seems to suggest clerical disapproval of dancing (figure 3.3).44 The miniature depicts a bishop elevating the host, Moses offering a lamb, and a pagan dancing with wild abandon. This iconography initially brings to mind strategies of classification and differentiation, setting firm boundaries between pagan and Christian, or Jewish and Christian, rites. However, Guillaume’s treatise did authorize clerical dancing. Accordingly, the image may suggest a harmonious, rather than contradictory, relationship between dancers and clerics, between pagan rite and Christian office. In addition to accommodating pre-​Christian elements, medieval liturgy adopted and integrated secular motifs into religious worship. For example, in his

Dance of the Hours  87

Figure 3.3  Guillaume Durand, Rational de Divin Office, translated by Jean Goelin, French, c. 1374, Bibiothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 437, folio 58 recto

Lo Tezaurs (The Treasures, c. 1225), troubadour-​cleric Peire de Corbian interconnected Arthurian legend, popular dance forms, and the Mass: I know a great many stories: the story of Merlin, of the death of King Arthur, of Tristan and Isolde, stories about lovers and great lords. I also know how to sing well in the service of the Holy Church: how to dance [triplar] the Sanctus and the Agnus in counterpoint, how to intone the saeculorum. And I know my profession well—​how to sing chansons, make good poetry, write pastourelles, rotrouenges and dances [dansas]. . . . The Lord God allows me to accomplish many things that will earn me salvation at the Day of Judgment.45

In the manner of a jongleur, Peire boasts about his multiform talents. He can recite romances, compose complex liturgical sequences, and write dance-​songs. What is more, he believed that, on account of his artistic acumen, God will count him among the blessed. Peire conflated the Occitan trobar (to find, trope, discover) with the liturgical troparium (musical trope). Through innovative music

88  Gracing the Idols and dance, Peire enhanced the liturgical experience with troping, devising, and nuance. Sacred and secular elements informed one another. Beyond liturgical books proper, medieval books of hours helped situate dance within a liturgical setting. In the Hours of Anne of France, for example, lay dancers exhibit their devotion with circular movements and chant (figure 3.4).46 In the middle of an outdoor banquet and fire, a group of nobles link hands and dance around the church, while singing a psalm:  “In Jerusalem, mountains are round about it:  so the Lord is round about his people from henceforth now and forever.”47 The rota of collective dancing releases the infinite circularity of cosmic rhythms. The dancers exemplify the “centrifugal” force of the liturgy. Coined by scholar Josef Jungmann, liturgical acts project from the inside out, striving to overwhelm and reverberate the vastness of surrounding space.48 The medieval dancing body was the interface between sacred time and sacred space. With their temporal structure, devotional books could position dance within the liturgical calendar. An Italian calendar, for instance, lists the feast days for the month of May. The bas-​de-​page (bottom of the page) illustration depicts secular motifs. The left roundel features a medieval rendering of Gemini, depicted here as two hawkers. In the right roundel, lay men and women dance to the pipe and tabor (figure 3.5).49 The dancers likely represent a rite of courtship and the joys of springtime. Painted alongside the liturgical calendar, they become part of the devotional schema. The imagery suggests a confluence of several temporalities: mythological/​zodiacal time, human time, and the sanctorale, all harmoniously overlapping.50 The ritualization of the medieval dancing body achieved such a synchronization of pagan and Christian, lay and religious, secular and sacred.

Ludus Liturgicus: Dance in Drama Medieval drama offered Christians a way to relive sacred time.51 Most plays were adaptations of biblical stories, saints’ lives, and visions of the afterlife. In religious theater, dance had a variety of functions. Positioned among interludes, dance provided an aesthetic framing of dramatic action. Dance created an aura of cosmic dualism, representing heavenly bliss or the plight of the damned. The dramatic quality of dance was a compelling marker of difference, distinguishing protagonists (Christ, saints, Christians) from antagonists (Satan, devils, Jews). Elsewhere dance was integral to the dramatic narrative itself, marking the passage from sin to redemption. In all of these scenarios, the reenactment of Christian history on the liturgical stage became a place for the ambivalence of dance to be worked out and re-​signified.

Figure 3.4  Hours of Anne of France, Jean Colombe, illuminator, illustration for Vulgate Psalm 124 (125), Bourges, 1470–1480, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 677, folio 128 verso

Figure 3.5  Calendar for May, Gemini, Bologna, c. 1324–1328, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 511, folio 3 recto

Dance of the Hours  91 As a theatrical device, dance on the liturgical stage could signify celestial afterlife, sanctity, and salvation. In Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum (Order of Virtues, c.  1151), personified virtues dance and sing in perfect unison to demonstrate their essential rectitude. (Satan, by contrast, can only speak and stumble).52 In the Innsbruck Ascension of Mary Play, from the mid-​fourteenth century, Christ commands angels to dance for his mother:  “All angels, stand up, you should dance [tanczen] very gracefully with your dear lady and thereby honor me.”53 Similarly, in The Prophecy of Sibyl, Christ commands the Virgin Mary and her dancing angels to direct the dead into heaven.54 In The Hessian Christmas Play, a mid-​fifteenth century production, Joseph dances and leaps around the cradle. Joyfully deprecating himself before his regal child, Joseph’s capers mark the end of an old dispensation and herald the new ordo.55 During the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1), the dancing “boy bishop” temporarily embodied Christ’s humble infancy.56 Along these lines, English plays, namely The Conversion of St. Paul and The Killing of the Children, featured a chorus of saints and virgins dancing. Framing narrative action, their appearances at the prelude and postlude offered a dynamic diptych of biblical reenactment.57 Moreover, literary and theater scholar Cora Dietl mentions stagehand instructions, which, by means of ropes and cranes, simulated airborne roundelays around Christ.58 When engineered operations mobilized Christian miracles, medieval spectators must have regarded such tricks as quite the Deus ex machina. Propelled by superhuman force, dance represented the realm of the blessed. Dramatic dances also produced unsavory theatrical effects, namely by imitating satanic ritual and the afterlife of the damned. In the twelfth-​century Jeu d’Adam (Play of Adam), demons welcome Adam and Eve into hell with a great dance.59 Similarly, in the Mystère de Sainte Barbe (Mystery of St. Barbara), devils drag a sinful emperor into hell and coerce him to dance among them.60 In the Mystère de Saint Louis (Mystery of St. Louis), too, souls descend into hell while devils sing and dance together.61 The fourteenth-​century Jour de Jugement (Judgment Day) contains a scene in which demons celebrate the birth of Antichrist: “Let us dance [Dançons] on the way! /​Angignart, lead this dance [moinne ceste dance”]62 In a miniature from the only known manuscript of this play, a group of demonic dancing bodies coalesce in a fiend fest.63 Together these examples demonstrate how medieval dance could dramatize the forces of evil. The polarizing effect of dramatic dance—​that is, its ability to represent good or evil—​functioned as a means of differentiation. In this way, dance scenes helped the audience differentiate between pagans and Christians, or Christians and Jews. Indeed, one of the more disturbing aspects of dance in medieval drama was its demonization of Jews. Passion plays, with their emphasis on Christ’s sufferings at the hands of his tormentors, often exhibited pagan or Jewish dancers. In the Passion de Semur (Passion of Semur), for example, Annas makes

92  Gracing the Idols fun of Christ for hanging on the cross with these lines: “Master, God save you! By the garland on your head you resemble a young gallant; and by your arms thus outspread it seems that you want to dance [danser], shame on you, Jesus, shame on you I say.”64 The Ludus Coventriae (Play of Coventry) includes a Crucifixion scene in which Jews dance around the cross as if it were a maypole, thereby mocking Christ’s suffering.65 A book of hours from the Pierpont Morgan Library depicts a comparable exchange (figure 3.6).66 In the upper register, Christ comes before Caiaphas, signaling a prelude to the Crucifixion. Below, his tormentors enact a grotesque jig, creating a visual contrast to Christ’s suffering. This image perhaps offers a pun, illustrating the crucial difference between ludentes (those who play) and illudentes (those who mock). The anti-​Judaism is even more vivid in the Alsfelder Passion Play. During the Crucifixion scene, Synagoga (the personification of the synagogue) instructs the Jews that: “we shall perform a dance [lobedancz] of honor for him who wears a royal crown.”67 The accompanying Latin stage directions specify that the Jews dance around the cross (Et sic Judei corizando per crucem cantant).68 Other directions, this time taking place in Herod’s court, indicate that “the Jews or devils dance” (Judei vel dyaboli corisant).69 The interchangeability between devils and Jews reveals how holy games operated within, and expanded, discourses of difference and alterity. In medieval drama, dance had an othering effect; it maximized the divide between self and other, Christian and non-​Christian, and transposed these differences onto the antipodes of good and evil. In biblical and morality plays, the demonic disposition of dance helped characterize sinners. For example, late medieval and early modern dramas of the Prodigal Son deployed dance scenes to exhibit the theme of folly. Acolastus (1529) contains a tavern scene in which the Prodigal Son consorts with profane musicians and dancing harlots. The cook Bromia enters the scene, saying: “And Pamphagus [the rogue and flutist] will do his duty nimbly enough, for when the fine gentlemen calls for the cithern players—​so the camel can dance [camelus saltitet], as you might say.”70 This image of the dancing camel recalls John Chrysostom’s condemnation of Salome, which in turn condemned all worldly dances: “God has not given us legs so that we can dance like camels, but so that we can join the dance of the angels” (non ut perinde atque cameli saltemus, sed ut cum angelis choreas agamus).71 Thus, as John concluded, “where there is dance, there is the devil” (ubi enim saltatio, ibi diabolus). Interestingly, the dance of the camel can also be traced back to Aramaic proverbs and the Talmud. In its original usage, the phrase meant that “anything is possible in Media” (part of the pre-​Achaemenid Persian Empire, or present day Iran and Turkey).72 Acolastus went further by making the flute player into a parody of Orpheus, whose melodies lure listeners into debauchery.73 The play exploits the animalistic and pagan connotations of dance to exaggerate the deviance of the Prodigal Son and his consorts. The same story, however, could draw upon

Dance of the Hours  93

Figure 3.6  Christ before Caiaphas /​dancing tormentors, France (perhaps Angers), c. 1465–1475, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 263, folio 17 recto

the multivalence of medieval dance. When the Prodigal Son finally returns home and asks his father for forgiveness, the community celebrates their reconciliation with song and dance.74 An image from the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation) depicts this joyous occasion.75 From

94  Gracing the Idols a fall from grace to an act of redemption, dance enhanced the dramatic scope of biblical narrative. When performed within churches or cathedrals, stage directions could enhance the religious symbolism of dance. The Bible distinguishes between the way of the right and the way of the left (Proverbs 4:27, Matthew 25:33), in which the saved are on the right side of God, and the damned are on the left side. Expounding upon Proverbs 4:27 and Matthew 25:33 with interpretive license, a thirteenth-​century manuscript entitled La Massa del Diavolo (The Devil’s Mass) argues that dances are inherently sinful because they circle toward the left (ad sinistram).76 William of Auvergne extended this metaphor for liturgical processions that have gone awry. Otherwise an advocate of Palm Sunday processions, William indicated that perverse processions resembled Renard, the trickster fox, or provocative women inciting spectators’ lust. Processants moving to the left exemplified an anti-​Christian liturgy. William concluded that in these situations, the people saying “I go to the dances,” (ego vado ad choreas), were actually going to the devil’s Office (ad officium dyaboli).77 Accordingly, a particular execution of liturgical choreography could signify righteousness or malice. Although few medieval plays provide specific stage directions, theater historians believe that medieval actors tended to use the space in symbolic ways. Since dance comprised a shared activity between this world, heaven, and the underworld, it helped relate biblical narratives to the trials of Everyman/​ Everywoman. The Alsfeld Passion Play of late fifteenth-​ century Germany provides one such example. The play exposes Mary Magdalene’s Weltenleben (worldly life) that preceded her conversion to Christianity. The devil addresses Mary with these words: Look into the mirror and recognize your beauty! You are more beautiful than any woman at any time. /​Perceive how beautiful your body is! They should fiddle for us once more, and I shall properly dance [denczeren] with you! Yes, my dear fellows, it suits me well. You give me more than enough happiness, you match me well. You help me to dance [danczen] and sing. I shall dance [springen] with you and I shall perform many merry jumps.78

In the above passage, dance is an outward manifestation of demonic wiles and the depravity of the unbaptized. The playwright exploits Mary’s early life in Magdala, which in biblical times was known for its wealth and material refinements.79 The majority of the play focuses on Mary’s pre-​conversion dalliances, rather than her eventual proselytization of the pagans of Gaul, as The Golden Legend famously recounted. The Alsfeld Mary spends her time consorting with Lucifer and his fellow imps, who encourage her to dance and dress in finery. She even tempts one of Herod’s soldiers into a suggestive pas de

Dance of the Hours  95 deux. Elsewhere Mary performs a solo dance (corzando sola), emblematic of the joy she experiences in parading in pretty clothes and dancing with lovers: “I shall search for pleasure; pleasure is well known to my heart when I dance and leap [mit tanczen und myt spryngen”]80 One of the characters, a snake named Natyr, dances among the carefree coterie, signaling the Fall. However, upon hearing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, Mary no longer dances. Likewise, in the St. Gall Passion Play (c. 1300), Mary Magdalene dances three times before her conversion.81 The cessation of her earthly dancing coincides with Jesus’s singing. Three times he chants to her the Caelestis medicus responsory.82 The liturgical framing signals Mary’s participation in heaven’s celestial rounds, prefiguring the cosmic dance. Although the Bible does not identify Mary Magdalene as a dancer, dance becomes integrated into her theatrical identity and helps humanize her character. Perhaps the most compelling use of dramatic dance occurred when dance signaled the triumph of good over evil. An event of this nature occurs in the Officium Stellae (Office, or Play of the Star), an eleventh-​century German play performed during the Feast of the Innocents (December 28).83 The Office of the Star is essentially a theatrical adaptation of Matthew 2:1–​16. The play begins with the Annunciation to the Shepherds, followed by the journey and Adoration of the Magi. The Magi proceed to follow the star to the whereabouts of the baby Jesus. One of King Herod the Great’s messengers informs him of three foreign kings coming to see a newborn king. Herod orders his scribes to verify this rumor, and, in reviewing the scriptures, they find prophetic proof of the advent of a savior. Furious at this revelation, Herod relays a message to the Magi that they must report back to him at his court, but they do not. Herod, in a rage from being trifled, leaps up from his throne and declares: “I shall quench my blaze of rage by a cataclysm!”84 This is actually a line from Sallust’s War with Catiline (c. 40 BCE), which, in a gesture of comic irony, portrays Herod as the vengeful pagan that he is. In true tyrannical fashion, Herod orders the massacre of the innocents. At the end of the play, however, Herod’s coterie turns away from him and pays homage to the true king: Let’s sing ‘hurrah!’–​this yearly feast brings with it royal praises! This day has given us what the mind could not have hoped: it’s truly brought a thousand joys in answer to our prayers, restored this kingdom to its King, and peace too to the world, to us it’s brought wealth, beauty, singing, feasting, dancing [choreas]. It’s good for him to reign and hold the kingdom’s scepter: he loves the name of King, for he adorns that name with virtues.85

As literary scholar Peter Dronke suggests, the final scene choreographs a ritual inversion: “The hexameters . . . are a triumphant paean. Just as Herod

96  Gracing the Idols thinks he has killed all the little boys and stamped out the rival King, the mutiny breaks out in his own palace: it is Herod’s own page-​boys who, in his royal procession, proclaim the rival King, the true rex Iudeorum” (king of the Jews).86 Dance lends human expression to an event of cosmic proportions. Moreover, the passage may refer to actual liturgical practice, when, during the Feast of the Innocents, the youngest boys of the cathedral school (clericuli) spent the day as the lords of misrule. As a liturgical component, the Office of the Star both provokes and resolves ritual inversion. According to theater historian Max Harris, the Office of the Star was a historical precursor to the medieval Feast of Fools.87 Considering the larger context of performance, Harris muses on the play’s ludic aftermath: The Freising Office of the Star closed with slaughter commanded but not yet enacted. Perhaps a Herod game followed in the refectory. One can imagine Herod strutting his angry stuff, exaggerating the pagan king’s role as the “personification of vice” that medieval Christians knew him to be. Armed clerics might have engaged in swordplay and chased Innocents, while others put on demonized Kalends animal masks to play devils taking Herod to hell. Poetry would have been sung and songs danced, as the choirboys had promised. Noisy as it may have been, such a game would have exposed the ultimate foolishness and defeat of Herod’s violent opposition to Christ no less surely than the more restrained Officium Stellae that preceded it.88

Far from a mere diversion, the dance element in medieval drama helped reveal Christianity’s triumphant destiny. Liturgical dancing bodies reenacted how sacred time enveloped and influenced human history.

Laborintus Liturgicus: From Crete to Cathedral In the early eighteenth century, a certain Abbé Jean Lebeuf discovered an ecclesiastical chapter from the Auxerre archives. This document recounts a peculiar ritual that clerics performed every Easter Monday before vespers at the Cathedral of St. Stephen.89 Recorded in the late fourteenth century, the clergy participated in a dancing ball game on the cathedral’s labyrinth: Having received the pilota [a leather ball] from the newest canon, the dean, or someone in his place . . . began antiphonally the sequence appropriate for the Easter feast, Victimae paschali laudes [offer praises to the paschal victim].

Dance of the Hours  97 Then taking the ball in his left hand, he danced [tripudium] to the meter of the sequence as it was sung, while the others linked hand in hand did the dance around the maze [choream circa Daedalum]. And all the while the pilota was delivered or thrown by the ringed dean alternatively to each and every one of the dancers whenever they whirled into view. There was sport, and the dance [chorea] was set by the organ. Following this dance, [choream] the singing of the sequence and the dancing/​leaping [saltatione] having concluded, the chorus proceeded to a meal. . . . During this an appropriate sermon was read from the bishop’s seat or the pulpit. Thereafter, following the ringing of the larger bells from the towers, they proceeded to Vespers.90

At first glance, the Auxerre ritual contradicts orthodox rites of the Latin Church. Combining a pagan symbol with dancing and playing, the ritual could provoke disorderly and impious conduct. The Church Fathers and medieval theologians alike decried the heathen origins of dancing.91 Reminiscent of Roman spectacle, games seem to profane the sacred space of the cathedral. As Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) wrote, Christian worship should not resemble the frenzied romp of maenads; God’s chorus is a sober one.92 How, then, did this ritual continue every Easter for nearly a century and a half without incurring ecclesiastical censure? The remainder of this chapter reveals how the Auxerre ritual integrated remnants of paganism—​namely the labyrinth and cultic dancing—​ into a legitimate Christian performance. In the Middle Ages, labyrinths refashioned a classical past with a Christian identity. The architectural design for medieval labyrinths was loosely inspired by descriptions of the Daedelian maze in the classical literature bequeathed to the Middle Ages.93 But despite its origins in Greek mythology, the pavement labyrinth became a common feature in twelfth-​century churches and Gothic cathedrals.94 The wall labyrinth at San Martino, Lucca, appears alongside an inscription that encapsulates the Cretan myth: “Here is the labyrinth that the Cretan Daedalus built, which no one, having entered it, was able to exit, except Theseus, thanks to Ariadne’s thread”95 (figure 3.7). Positioned near the entrance of the church, medieval Christians imbued the Cretan story with Christian motifs. Ariadne, for instance, prefigured the Virgin Mary, protecting Theseus with her grace (gratis ariane). During the Crusades, the labyrinths in Gothic cathedrals emblematized an act of personal pilgrimage to the Holy Land.96 Unfortunately, the Auxerre labyrinth was destroyed in 1690, presumably in an effort to repave and renovate the debris-​ridden church. (Though it is likely that, as was the case with Rheims, the rampant playing of children during sermons had caused enough disturbance to prompt the labyrinth’s

98  Gracing the Idols

Figure 3.7  Labyrinth, Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca, twelfth or thirteenth century, photograph by John Dickason

removal.)97 Most art historians concur that the topographical design of the Auxerre labyrinth would have resembled that of Chartres, though on a smaller scale (figure 3.8). In that case, it would have been designed as a unicursal structure (i.e., a single entrance stemming from a long, circuitous path leading to the center). Like most Gothic cathedral labyrinths, the Auxerre labyrinth was located within the lower portion of the nave. This location would have secured a close proximity to the organ, which, as the cathedral chapter specifies, set the meter for the dancers.98 Alluding to the architectonic legacy of Daedalus (choream circa Daedalum), the Auxerre rite supplants Minoan mythology with the Eastertide liturgy.

Figure 3.8  Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral (nave), late twelfth /​early thirteenth century

Dance of the Hours  99 Pre-​Christian philosophies of dance informed the idea of the medieval labyrinth. In medieval manuscripts, diagrammatic images of labyrinths demonstrated the relationship between primordial matter, the creation of heavenly bodies, and the movement of the spheres. Astrological and encyclopedic texts reproduced the Chartrain labyrinth as a pictorial model of the universe. It comprises eleven tracks which lead to a single, circular center. This structure follows the Aristotelian model of the universe, which featured twelve components (the four elements, the sun, the moon, the five visible planets, and the fixed stars). Additionally, the assimilation of Platonic cosmology in medieval Christian theology and philosophy furthered the correspondence between the labyrinth and the cosmos.99 Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 bce), an exposition on the creation of the universe, established the relationship between regularized revolutions and the planetary spheres. Restructuring chaos and void into harmonious motions and ordered movement, the celestial rotations mirrored terrestrial dancing.100 The Church Fathers and theologians—​from Basil of Caesarea (d. 379)  to Honorius of Autun (d. 1151)—​adopted and accepted the cosmic dance through a Christian lens. The close affiliation between the labyrinth and Christian Platonism invested the Auxerre ritual with cosmological significance. Unfortunately, the destruction of the Auxerre labyrinth trumps any precise scholarly attempt at choreographic reconstruction. However, as architecture scholar Tessa Morrison suggests, the movements of the Auxerrois dancers may have imitated the movements of the spheres. Drawing from Platonic philosophy and the mystical Neo-​Platonism of Pseudo-​Dionysius, Morrison indicates that the oscillating orbits corresponded to the trajectory of each circuit of the Chartrain labyrinth: turn, halt, counterturn. At Auxerre, the dean’s tripudium, which he performed directly on the surface of the maze, may have represented this tripartite schema.101 This choreographic pattern also recalls the performance of ancient hymns, in which the choric dancer turned during the strophe, re-​circled in the opposite direction, and counterturned during the antistrophe.102 The Auxerre liturgy generated endless kinesthetic possibilities, verifying dance historian Curt Sachs’s statement that “the essence of the labyrinth is movement.”103 Regardless of its pre-​Christian legacy, clerics conceived the labyrinth as a progenitor of cosmic choreography. The overall structure of the Auxerre ritual infused dance with an archaic quality. According to the Auxerre document, the canons danced a chorea, or a type of round dance typically executed with conjoined hands, and, in this case, coupled with song.104 The canons’ chorea served as a terrestrial expression of the harmony, circularity, and perfection of the cosmos, while the dean’s solo tripudium embodied the paschal mysteries. In the cathedral

100  Gracing the Idols chapter, the term saltatione connotes a fervent quality of the canons’ ring dance, which, recalling the dance of King David, implies an energetic, springlike movement. The confluence of the dean’s elevated rank and solo dance recuperated the praesul. A combination of the words prae-​ (before), pontifex (high priest), and saliens (leaping or dancing), praesul refers to going before, or the one who leads the dance, which in turn relates to the Greek choragus (dance leader). In Roman times, praesul denoted the leaders of cultic mysteries, or the bishops who led circumambulations around the altar. In time, bishops replaced the praesul with a different form of leadership. Rediscovering the image of the cultic ringleader, the dancing dean fused Christian rite with pagan precedent.105 The incorporation of the labyrinth into the liturgical calendar conjoined mythic time to Christian history. Performed every Easter Monday, the Auxerre ritual commemorated the consummation of the Christian myth. The celebration of Christ’s Resurrection marked the most significant moment of the liturgical calendar. The Auxerre dancers dramatized the Easter cycle with jubilant play. Medieval theorizations of time substantiated the Christianization of the labyrinth. Consider diagrammatic images of the labyrinth in the form of computus manuscripts. The computus was an arcane mathematical science that calculated the date of Easter.106 Within the logic of the computus, the labyrinth embodied Christian temporality. The liturgy of the Late Middle Ages sharpened the correspondence between the labyrinth and Easter. As dance and literary scholar Penelope Reed Doob has shown, the apocryphal Harrowing of Hell became conflated with the medieval Easter liturgy. Within this frame of reference, the Auxerre ritual offered a live enactment of this tradition, in which Christ descended into a mazelike underworld to rescue pre-​Christian souls and conquer the devil.107 Centuries before the Auxerre dancers, the Church Fathers and early medieval theologians (including Saint Ambrose, Isidore, and Marius Victorinus, d. 364) reconfigured the myth of the labyrinth as Christian allegory: Christ, the conqueror of the labyrinthine web of sin and death, was the new Theseus, while Satan replaced the Minotaur.108 Mastering the daedalian maze, the dean at Auxerre evoked Christ’s Crucifixion /​ the Harrowing of Hell, together with his triumphant Resurrection. Joining hands around the labyrinth, the swirling canons animated the cosmos and affirmed the salvific nature of Christ’s sacrifice. Experiencing this event intersubjectively, the Auxerre canons animated the Easter liturgy through communal movement. Beyond an act of representation, the Auxerre dancers carved sacred space by reactivating the salient moments of Christian history. Reconciling the dualism of paganism and Christianity, the labyrinthine dancers were conduits for the sacralization of dance.

Dance of the Hours  101 In conjunction with sacred dancing, antiphonal chanting aligned the Auxerre labyrinth with Christian liturgy. As they danced, the practitioners began the Easter hymn: Christians, sing forth praises to the Easter victim, The lamb redeems the sheep. The innocent Christ has redeemed the sinners to the Father. Life and death have been joined as a wondrous battle. The leader of life rules, living though dead.109

As Christ himself danced between life and death, the bodies of the circumambulating canons resounded in melody. The marriage of music and dance recuperated the Platonic vision of cosmic harmony, whereas the fusion of dance and song created a complementarity between movement and words. In the style of the Christus victor (Christ as victor) motif, the hymn dramatizes Christ’s epic victory over death.110 In ecclesiastical literature, the labyrinth was conceptualized as a type of textus (text, or literally woven cloth) due to its complex, imbricated fabric and interlaced construction, mirroring the circuitous style of medieval exegesis.111 The garlandlike composition of the dance reflects the interwoven layers of sacred writings. Labyrinth-​as-​textus refashions the song and dance as a hermeneutic thread that leads practitioners toward sacred insights. The music that accompanied the Auxerre rite helped create the sensation of sacred time. Musicologist Craig Wright has identified the recursiveness in the original notation for the Easter hymn sung at Auxerre. In his analysis of its cadences and rhythmic structure, Wright suggests that the hymn produced a meander effect.112 The recursive element of the hymn resonates with the Greek verb choreo, which denotes the dual action of withdrawing and going forward.113 This double motion resembles the circuitous journey of moving through the labyrinth. Further, the alternations between progression and recession echo the paradoxical understanding of the labyrinth in the Middle Ages (i.e., in malo interpretations likened it to sin and heresy, while in bono interpretations aligned it with spiritual transcendence and steadfast faith).114 In a liturgical atmosphere, the faithful would recognize this back-​and-​forth sensation as a hovering between divine presence and absence, or in this context, between ancient and Christian temporalities. Moreover, the dance, always occupying a liminal space between liveness and disappearance, served as the ideal medium with which to portray the transformative—​yet ever transitory—​moment of spiritual awakening. The playful quality of the Auxerre ritual lent a ludic dimension to liturgical performance. As they danced and chanted, the dean and canons tossed a pilota back and forth. While there are several explanations for the symbolic significance

102  Gracing the Idols of the pilota (including the ball of pitch, Ariadne’s thread, or a cosmic sphere),115 liturgists have documented the existence of ball games in medieval churches since the twelfth century.116 The intermingling of holy and ludic elements is neither necessarily contradictory nor subversive. As a sacer ludus (sacred game), exchanging the pilota could have functioned to unite fellow Christians, as well as to satisfy the participant’s desire to “play” with Christ, both of which are fulfilled through the sacred game. In the Middle Ages, the Christ child was considered a great gamer. Apocryphal infancy narratives told how he outplayed all of his boyhood companions, and amazed them by riding on sunbeams.117 What was more at stake with playing on the labyrinth, I contend, was to capture a sensation of risk, incertitude, and contingency evoked by the temporary death of God. The Latin term laborintus underscores the physical exertion, and literally labor, of “going in,” therefore transposing the challenge of Theseus’ original mission onto Christ’s apocalyptic acrobatics by which he journeyed in and out of hell.118 In fact, a modification to the Auxerre ritual in 1412 specified that the dean /​new canon could only catch the pilota with his left hand, thus heightening the challenge posed by an already difficult ritual.119 Inserting a pedestrian act into sacred space may, as I posit, promote the sanctity of transgression. In this context, ritual devotion—​despite its repetition and regularity—​does not undermine creativity and novelty. As exemplified by the tossed pilota, ritual can play upon variance and indeterminacy.120 The live engagement with sacred space enhanced the individuality of the Auxerre dancers, while placing their performance along a continuum of Christian devotion. In the spirit of reform, the Auxerre dance ritual dissolved after several ecclesiastical and civic debates of the Late Middle Ages and early modernity. Due to an escalation of suspicions regarding the dance’s subversiveness, it was finally prohibited in 1538.121 Throughout the Middle Ages, however, medieval liturgy—​ far from opposing dance and religion—​succeeded in harmonizing a mythic past with eschatological anticipation. * * * In the following chapter, I turn to the role of dance in medieval penitence, which emerged from the confessional exchanges between priests and laity. Lay dancing and clerical rhetoric informed one another to produce a new discourse on dance: the moralized intentio (intention) of the medieval body in motion.

PART II

GR AC E BE F OR E IT S  M AST E R

4

Discipline and Redemption Dances of Penitence

Regardless of its cultural or historical context, dance is a disciplined form of bodily movement. In acquiring proper technique, dancers submit to a corporeal regime. The disciplinary basis of dance has led scholars to explore dance through Michel Foucault’s theorization of discipline.1 For Foucault, discipline in modern society entails a correctional approach to human conduct. The penitentiary system, with its production of “docile bodies,” exemplifies the operations of discipline.2 Foucault contends that all other institutions—​educational, religious, political, and legal—​model themselves after the penitentiary system. “By means of a carceral continuum,” he writes, “the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve.”3 From a Foucauldian perspective, the dancing body labors under the gaze of the dancing master, working toward aesthetic perfection. Although Foucault locates discipline within the modern state, his theories share some affinities with the Middle Ages, given the Church’s institutionalization of penitence, confession, and purgatory. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, penitential materials preoccupied themselves with the laity’s spiritual welfare. Designed to promote moral discipline, these texts encouraged repentance and confession. Negative attitudes toward dance abound in these sources. Historian Alessandro Arcangeli has scrutinized the relationship between dance and punishment in medieval preaching.4 In Arcangeli’s assessment, the use of dance in pastoral texts typically evoked a “theater of the punishment of God.”5 Preachers shared riveting anecdotes of sinful dancers: lightning struck dancers who disrupted the Mass; the dance leader, a demon in the guise of a beautiful woman, deceived dancers; the devil himself promptly escorted unfortunate dancers to hell. For many preachers, dancing distracted Christians from hearing the sermon in particular, and impeded worship in general. With their exaggerated rhetoric, preachers exposed the diabolical underpinnings of dance and warned that dancing both incites demonic intervention and transports perpetrators to hell. In sum, this evidence aligns dance with sin, demonic machination, and the wrath of God. However, a closer look at the extant materials suggests a more complex relationship between medieval dance and religious discipline. Not all preachers Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

106  Grace before Its Master and philosophers defined dance as such a grave sin. Dance was not evil per se, but it was an activity that warranted self-​control. For medieval preachers and philosophers, what was really at stake with dance was the issue of agency. Intoxicated with motions and rhythms, dancing could impair dancers’ will and intent, thereby making them more susceptible to sin. Yet clerics appropriated secular dance motifs into penitential and philosophical texts. In sophisticated ways, dance became mapped onto a medieval moral psychology composed of discipline, intention, and redemption. This chapter explores the pastoral approaches to dance along three trajectories. First, I  examine various preaching materials that forged the equation between dance and sin. With their fiery rhetoric, these texts effected the demonization and feminization of dance. Second, I shift to penitential and philosophical sources that offer more nuances. These sources do not necessarily indicate that dance is evil in itself. Rather, they identify the conditions under which dance can be sinful or holy. Third, and finally, I consider how dance could enact a form of penitence, thereby redefining dance as a remedy—​not a precursor—​to sin. In an analysis of the Purgatorio, I show how Dante’s literary representation of dance inverts the traditional pastoral paradigm by leading sinners toward spiritual reconciliation. My assessment of medieval dance helps modify Foucualt’s paradigm by highlighting the redemptive, rather than punitive, modalities of discipline.

Demonizing Dance “The Dancers of Colbek” (also spelled Kölbigk) is one of the most widely circulated stories about dance and punishment. The story takes place in eleventh-​ century Saxony. It recounts that a group of rowdy lay Christians disturbed the Christmas mass by dancing in the churchyard. This tale became a staple in medieval preaching materials, and even made its way into German folklore through the Brothers Grimm.6 The version from the Alphabetum Narrationum (Alphabet of Tales), a pastoral text in alphabetical order compiled by Arnould de Lièges in the early fourteenth century, describes the divine retribution given to disobedient, sacrilegious dancers.7 The following story appears under the rubric Corizare/​chorizare (to dance): William [or Tullius], preacher of the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, began mass during the Christmas vigil. In truth, certain women who were leading dances [choreas ducentes] in the cemetery with men were disturbing the divine office. When they had refused to keep quiet at the order of the priest, he called upon them, saying, “Let it please God and the blessed Magnus that you should endure this for a year.” And so it happened. For a whole year, rain fell over

Discipline and Redemption  107 them, neither hunger, nor thirst, nor their clothing impaired them, but because they were frenzied, they were singing over and over, leading dances [ducentes choreas]. Then when a certain man, when he tried to bring his sister near, he pulled off her arm from her body, but no blood issued from it, the very woman endured it with the others. After a year had passed, Herbert the Archbishop of Cologne arrived, absolved them from this fetter, and reconciled them before the altar. When one woman and two men were examined immediately, others fell asleep for three nights. In truth they stretched out the penalty with a perpetual tremor of the body. This happened in a certain city of Saxony around the year 1010. Even now this story instructs us to avoid disobedience.8

A twelfth-​century English manuscript contains an illustration of this epic disaster (figure 4.1).9 The dancers’ repetitious motions were so incessant that they began to sink into the rain-​soaked earth. “The Dancers of Colbek” story is classified as an exemplum, or short anecdote within a sermon or larger text that provides an example of how to (or not to) behave. As historian Jacques le Goff explains, an exemplum is “a brief narrative given as true and destined to be inserted in a discourse (usually a sermon) in order to persuade listeners by means of a salutary lesson.”10 In the Christian West, the earliest exempla came from biblical parables, such as the “Prodigal Son” and the “Wise and Foolish Virgins.”11 While Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) seems to have been the first to use exempla in preaching, most medieval exempla are indebted to Gregory the Great (d. 604), whose Dialogues presented concrete anecdotes that served a didactic function, as readers extracted from them important truths.12 By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this patristic tradition morphed into monastic and pastoral contexts.13 The exempla are noted for their brevity and their appeal to authority (auctoritas). They functioned as didactic narratives that communicated a moral message.14 Preachers inserted material from popular literature as well, in order to maximize lay comprehension.15 These tales could be at once horrifying and humorous, teaching people about divine retribution while making them smile.16 Within a pastoral setting, exempla formed an intersection between oral/​lay and written/​clerical culture.17 Humbert of Romans (d. 1277) stressed that exempla should be short to be most effective, and even if they were not true, they should still ring authoritatively.18 Preachers devised rhetorical techniques—​often theatrical or gestural—​to persuade their listeners to follow the exemplum’s message.19 Indeed, the emotional impact of medieval exempla was, in medievalist Jean-​Claude Schmitt’s words, “the thunder of the Middle Ages.”20 The Cistercian prior Caesarius von Heisterbach (d. 1240)  authored some of the earliest medieval exempla concerning dance. Caesarius had a decidedly negative view of dance, and particularly of dancing women. In his Liber

Figure 4.1  The Dancers of Colbek, England, twelfth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS Bodley 614, folio 51 verso

Discipline and Redemption  109 Miraculorum (Book of Miracles), the section devoted to temptation contains a story about an old woman, who, by dancing around and jeering at Master Arnold, hindered him when preaching on the cross (De vetula, quac per choream verbum crucis a magistro Arnoldo prolatum impediens et irridens, infra triduum defuncta est). According to Caesarius, Arnold was a pastor from Burgundy who caught his parishioners dancing on the feast days of Saints Peter and Paul. He came to them with a cross and implored them to quit their devil’s game. While some of the Christians stopped to listen to his sermon, others continued dancing. Among these impudent dancers was an old woman who mocked the preacher as she danced and sang. Within three days of this incident, she died suddenly. Thereafter, the good preacher mourned her death as if he had killed her by his own hand. This exemplum, as Caesarius concludes, teaches us to shun the vice of pride.21 The dance content in the Book of Miracles typically reveals the sinister side of dance. Caesarius included anecdotes involving the black arts and magic circles, which incited the presence of demons. Dancers were particularly susceptible to demonic agency.22 In his section concerning demons, Caesarius narrates how, at one time, scholars from all over the world flocked to Toledo to learn the art of necromancy. During one class demonstration, the master drew a magic circle on the earth, which proceeded to bring forth demons. In their attempt to lure the students into their evil realm, the demons took the form of female dancers: They changed themselves into very beautiful girls, and danced about them [choreas circa illos ducebant], inviting the young men with every kind of alluring movement. One of them, more beautiful than the rest, chose out one of the scholars, and as often as she danced up to him [chorizando], held out a gold ring, inflaming him to love by both inward suggestion, and by the outward motion of the body. When she had done this over and over again, the youth was at last overcome, and put his finger outside the circle to receive the ring, and immediately she drew him out by that finger, and disappeared with him.23

This passage illustrates how dance, including dance spectatorship, incites lust and deception. Even the most educated of minds are susceptible to its wiles. As the narrative continues, Caesarius recounts that the master pleaded with the demons to allow his student to return from hell, which, after much deliberation by a court of fiends, was granted. But, Caesarius adds, the young man’s face was so ghastly pale that he seemed to have just returned from the tomb.24 Despite dance’s inherent ephemerality, it can, when orchestrated by the devil, create lasting effects. The student’s zombie-​esque presence signifies how close an infernal pas de deux brought him to eternal damnation.

110  Grace before Its Master While Caesarius’s text was intended for a monastic readership, exempla in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries shifted toward a mendicant milieu. Desiring to improve the spiritual state of lay Christians, the Franciscans and Dominicans reinvented exempla as part of a preaching rhetoric.25 Indeed, the preaching orders appropriated and transformed folkloric motifs to serve their own ends. Though anecdotal, their texts were considered authoritative, and certain compilers organized their exempla alphabetically. To the thirteenth-​century preacher Guillaume Peraldus, mendicants were following in the footsteps of St. Dominic (d. 1221), whose fervent preaching corrected the errors of heretical faiths.26 During the Albigensian Crusade (1209–​1229), Dominicans hoped to root out the Cathar heresy by preaching to lay villagers in their own language. Under such circumstances, the preacher was, as Humbert of Romans said, the voice of Christ in this world.27 In general, medieval preaching materials proclaimed the dangers of dance. For example, Dominican preacher and inquisitor Étienne de Bourbon (d. c. 1261) authored a tractate of diverse preaching materials that aligned dancing with negative exempla, or examples of what a Christian should not do. Much of the dance content appears in a section concerning the avoidance of dances (De fugendis choreis). One of Étienne’s anecdotes envisions the demonic origin of dancing: For not only should they fear the company of women and avoid their trickery, but also the very street and the theaters and spectacles in which they are accustomed to come together to watch. . . . We should specially avoid the places wherein dances take place [fiunt choree], and the dances themselves [ipse choree fugiende]. The devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and dancers [Diabolus est choreizancium et danciarum inventor et gubernator et procurator]. I have heard how a certain holy man saw the devil, under the form of a little Ethiopian, standing over a woman who led the dance [ducebat choreas], and leading her round at his will, and leaping upon her head.  .  .  . Moreover, the dancers and ones leaping which they do dancing [Dancie autem springaciones quas faciunt choreizantes] appear to have had their origin in the devil who deceived the Egyptians in the guise of a certain bull, having on its shoulder a sign as if a white horn were the crescent moon, which they called Apis or Serapeum, which Pliny claims to have seen himself, as it can be read in the Scholastic History [by Peter Comestor]; which, emerging from the river in which the Egyptians submerged the boys of the sons of Israel, on a certain day which was their feast, it [the bull] was being raised by assembled Egyptians to the sky above them with all kinds of music, moving themselves and dancing and making gestures and movements [movens se et saltans et faciens gestus et

Discipline and Redemption  111 motus], with which those people molded themselves on earth, singing and chanting psalms with the cithar and timbrel and with all kinds of musical instruments where it is believed that they were taught gestures of dancing and springing [danciarum et springacionum]; [the bull] itself, after it had been erected in such a way, vanished before their eyes. The inventor of these things is Satan, leading vain folk who are like young plumage lifted away by the wind, or the dust which the wind throws from the face of the earth, or clouds without water vapor, which are stirred about by whirlwinds.28

This passage equates dancing with sinister beings, vain women, and pagan idolatry. The dancing woman conforms to the will of the black demon hopping over her. The reference to the Ethiopian seems to mythologize and racialize evil, or at least equate a dark appearance with devilish origins. As Humbert of Romans explained, the more sinful we are, the darker we get.29 Citing Pliny the Elder (d. 79) and Peter Comestor (d. 1178) as authorities, Étienne even provides the name of the ancient Egyptian bull deity, Apis or Serapeum, to demonstrate the errors of their religion.30 Dance is sinful precisely because it has an evil origin, and therefore expresses faith in false gods. In another of his exempla, Étienne narrates a recent episode in which dancing unleashed demonic destruction: Moreover, God allows him sometimes to vex men with a sudden tempest on account of the sin of dancing [peccatum chorearum,] and to wreak the fury of his wrath upon them. I heard from Brother Philip, first prior of our convent at Reims, of a certain church in the diocese of Soissons where dances had been made [fuerant choree]. While the priest sang mass one morning in that church, there arose suddenly a great whirlwind and uproar, and a thunderbolt fell upon the church, consuming the altar cloth and slaying many of the congregation, but leaving the priest and the host untouched; moreover, it overthrew a mill that was there and slew four men. One who fled from there saw many demons springing and leaping after the fashion of dancers over a certain ditch; [multos demones super fossatum quoddam springantes et salientes et choreas presentantes] by whom he was beaten to death and escaped barely by making the sign of the cross, from which they fled in indignation and terror. One of the demons in his wrath bit a mighty stone in the wall and carried away a great part, with the marks of his teeth on the remaining stone, as the men of that place showed to Brother Philip in testimony of the fact; and the aforesaid man who had been beaten by the demons told the tale in the presence of Master Jean des Vignes, who was in those days the greatest clerk and preacher in France.31

112  Grace before Its Master In this exemplum, Étienne combines local lore with sacerdotal authority. Étienne flaunts his dramatic flair to portray dance as the precursor to harrowing events. Dance invites demonic fury and signifies the fall from grace. In his preaching materials, Étienne uses the devastating effects of dance to inculcate morality through fear. In this sense, his collection of exempla follows the spirit of Humbert of Romans’ De Dono Timoris (Concerning the Gift of Fear). Humbert was a Dominican who studied at the University of Paris and, in his writings, expounded upon the values of discipline and orthodoxy. According to Humbert, fear was an important means of understanding the machinations of sin and evil in the world. Humbert provided numerous variations on the Last Judgment theme, which for him moved Christians to piety through fear of God.32 As Alessandro Arcangeli has shown, for Étienne dance is the model of sinful conduct that warrants punishment.33 In his dance exempla, Étienne describes rowdy bands of pilgrims consumed by fire in the church. Lay Christians spent the entire night dancing in the cemetery, only to be struck dead by lightning.34 Elsewhere, dance exemplifies a lurid enchantment that leads people astray, as with the nocturnal rites of Diana, or the allurements of King Arthur’s court.35 In still another exemplum, Étienne tells of a knight named Gui de Forez who chose to dance on Christmas before leaving for crusade. As a result, the castle collapsed onto the dancers, causing most of them to perish. The event was so traumatic that it inspired the expression danse du Forez. In other words, it refers to anything that turns dancing into mourning, or joy into grief.36 According to Étienne’s text, women are particularly to blame for the sin of dancing, as it is they who incite the dance of the devil (dancia dyaboli). Moreover, a woman’s fashionable clothing could entice a demon to prance around her garments.37 Female dancers are particularly perilous when they impede the liturgy. For instance, Étienne tells of a girl, who, on a feast day, interrupted the sermon with dancing and singing. She contracted a blistering skin condition that was only cured after she delivered her confession.38 A medieval manuscript of Étienne’s treatise adds marginal annotations beginning with Contra choreas (against dances) that emphasize the author’s correlation between dance and forbidden activity.39 In several of his sermons delivered to laity and women, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) contributed further to the demonization and feminization of dance. Many of these anti-​dance sermons appear within his rubric De peccato choreis (concerning the sin of dances).40 For Jacques, the pompous women who dance in fine clothes exude vanity and bring shame upon the Church. On the contrary, pious women abstained from earthly pastimes.41 Jacques describes a woman dancer as the instrument of the devil (mulier enim cantans in chorea est velut instrumentum dyaboli). He forms an analogy between a female dancer and quailliers, the Old French term for a trap used to capture quail.42 For Jacques, women’s role in leading dances was particularly dangerous because they could steer others into

Discipline and Redemption  113 sin. “When a man does not wish to lose his cow,” Jacques explains, “he ties a bell around its neck so that he may hear where she is. As the cow which goes before the herd has a bell around her neck; so likewise the woman who leads the song and the dance [choream ducit] has as it were a devil’s bell bound to hers. Upon hearing the sound of the music, the devil says, ‘I have not yet lost my cow.’ ”43 In another exemplum, Jacques concludes that “the dance is a circle whose center is the devil [Chorea enim circulus est, cujus centrum est diabolus]; and all dances incline towards the left [in sinistram], because all of them extend toward eternal death. For if the foot of a man is being suppressed by the foot of a woman, or if the hand of a man is being touched by the hand of a woman, it is being set aflame to the fire of the devil.”44 The close contiguity between dancing bodies upsets the presumed natural order. In the dancing ring, women dominate men and rob them of their will. This kind of inversion can only lead to damnation. Thomas de Cantimpré (d. 1272), a contemporary and colleague of Jacques, echoed and expanded upon the correlation between dance and perdition. In his compilation entitled Bonum Universale de Apibus (Book of Bees), Thomas includes several horrific exempla that revolve around dance. According to his anecdotes, dance is a remnant of pagan activity that Augustine (d. 430)  and other Christian authorities were right to denounce.45 Unruly dance addicts, typically women, are subject to untimely deaths, often by lightning or drowning.46 Musicians who entice dancers are likewise brought to their own demise.47 Realizing the correspondence between dance and deception, demons may take the form of dancing clergy in order to seduce congregants into sin.48 In his Book of Bees, Thomas stresses the sacrilegious thrust of dancing. Dance is particularly sinful when it breaks the sanctity of the Sabbath. In this way, it heightens the dancer’s vulnerability to demonic intervention. Consider Thomas’s story about “the girl who was liberated from a demon by an innocent boy from Flanders” (de puella a demone liberata per puerum innocentum iuxta a Mechliniam): On this subject we have learned of visual testimony which happened in the city of Malines in Brabant. A young girl, on the holy Sabbath day, gave herself over to the dance [chorizauerat] for a long time with some young people. Overwhelmed with fatigue, she returned to her house, but as soon as she went to sleep, she was invested by a demon. The family got up, they bound the furious girl, whose crying roused the family, and in the morning they carried her to the chapel of the glorious Virgin of Hanswijck outside of the city. Mary had frequently manifested her power there and realized numerous miracles. The little boys from the school rushed up to the chapel, where the young girl was tormented, and one of them who was not yet twelve years old, more audacious and intelligent than the others, began to coerce and implore the demon to

114  Grace before Its Master leave the body that he had possessed. Without delay, as soon as the demon was manifested around the navel by a swelling, the boy opposed him with the sign of the cross with his thumb and like that, little by little, thanks to the cross, he obliged the demon to climb up towards the mouth, just until in the aspect of a hairy worm everyone saw in the wide opening of the mouth. However, with a surprising effort, the demon wanted to descend again; the people began to cry; the child insistently opposed the demon with the sign and obliged him to exit with great manifestations of violence. This rejected demon, as we have said, was in the form of a hairy worm, the child seized it boldly with his right hand and right away threw it in a small pit full of rain water. He disappeared immediately from everyone’s eyes, leaving them only a reason for joy and testimony to the actions of grace. But then the hand of the child remained soiled with black stains due to his contact with the worm; they remained there until they were washed with holy water.49

Not all dancers were that lucky. In another one of his local tales, Thomas recounts the unfortunate death of a female dance addict (de muliere choreis addicta infeliciter mortua): In a locality of Brabant, as a brother of the Order of Preachers [i.e., Dominicans] told me, there was an imprudent and vain woman who had the habit of leading dances [choreas] on almost all of the feast days. And so it happened that some young people were amusing themselves and were jumping near the dance [ad saltum iuxta choream ludentibus], one among them wanted to strike a ball with his hooked baton, it escaped from his hands and hit the head of the woman who was leading the dance [ducentem choream]: she died there without delay. Seeing this, everyone was filled with confusion; they returned her body to her house and placed it on a stretcher. When the local priest arrived accompanied by clerks to recite the vigil, there came a pitch-​black bull—​in fact a very mean demon—​rushed up while howling; he inverted the stretcher and the body, tore the cadaver with his horns, pierced the members so fine that scattered entrails spread an intolerable stench. Everyone fled, abandoning the lacerated cadaver until the next day, that is to say, up until the moment where the odor dissipated and when the parents were able to approach the body in order to take it to be interred outside the cemetery.50

This anecdote contains a double transgression, as Thomas had negative views on games as well as dances.51 In his narrative, dancing makes one particularly prone to accident and death. The black bull, like Étienne’s Ethiopian, conjures the image of idolatry. Since the girl died without having made her final confession, the demonic entity mutilated her body and made it unfit for a proper Christian burial.

Discipline and Redemption  115 Thomas’s exempla reflect major shifts in medieval Christian theology and religious practice. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (canon 21) mandated annual confession and required penance from all lay Christians for the absolution of sins.52 Mandatory confession placed the laity under clerical scrutiny. In this era, preaching manuals promoted the importance of confession, heightening the laity’s moral awareness.53 According to historian Nicole Bériou, confession was “the exceptional instrument of self and of moral and spiritual progress.”54 The post-​Lateran IV context generated several explanations concerning the effects of confession. The Italian Franciscan James of the Marches (d. 1476)  likened the sacrament of confession to the Holy Spirit levitating the soul of a repentant sinner.55 For others, confession operated in a way similar to exorcism, especially during Lent.56 William of Waddington’s (d. c. 1250) Manuel des Pechiez (Manual of Sins) underscores the role of confession in obtaining grace. Saving Christians from the devil and mortal sin, it is through confession that one is often re-​ graced (suvent regracie).57 Failure to confess sinful conduct—​which for Thomas includes dancing—​diminishes one’s ability to receive divine grace. Indeed, dying without having confessed was the worst kind of death in the Middle Ages.58 Like Thomas’s unfortunate dance addicts, those who failed to confess before death were subject to terrifying afterlives in hell. Although confession was considered a private, personalized exchange between priest and penitent, exempla exhibited the sacramentality of confession for public consumption.59 As the thirteenth century progressed, exempla percolated into theological treatises. This shift imbued exempla with a more theological, rather than anecdotal, sensibility. The Dominican preacher Guillaume Peraldus (d. c. 1271) wrote one of the most influential treatises on virtues and vices. In his text, Peraldus expounded upon the evils of dancing, discussing dance in a commentary on the sin of lust (luxuria). Peraldus warned that listening to profane love songs, paired with dancing, makes the participants morally torpid.60 To demonstrate the immorality of dancing women, Peraldus cited Ecclesiasticus 9:4, which counsels against the moral entanglements of women:  “Use not much the company of she who is a dancer, and hearken not to her, lest you perish by the force of her charms.”61 For Peraldus, women were most seductive, and therefore most dangerous, when dancing. In his section on the vice of lust, Guillaume Peraldus devoted a full chapter to dance. He focused on the evil that dances bring (De Choreis, et quam malus sit ducere eas). To prove his theory, Peraldus offered examples of scriptural testimony, reasons why dance is dangerous, and explanations as to how it is foolish.62 Similar to other medieval moralists, Peraldus aligned dance with the transgressions depicted in the golden calf, the dance of Salome, and the like.63 Peraldus gave six reasons why dance is perilous: it is the sword of the devil, it leads one to the fires of hell, it endows the devil with more power to do evil, it

116  Grace before Its Master does not honor the saints, it contradicts the sacraments of the Church, and it can lead to other sins.64 Guillaume Peraldus saw the sin of dance lying in the interdependence of demonic forces, feminine wiles, and deceptive motions. In the dance, the devil operates not through one sword but through all the beautiful and richly attired women.65 Peraldus then mapped the demonization and feminization of dance onto a specific choreographic pattern. Since dances tend to move in a circular motion (motu circulari), we do not always see the devil’s sword that intends to strike us, and are fooled by beauty.66 This is, Peraldus added, how great men like David, Samson, and Solomon were overcome.67 The dancing woman therefore works like a devil in diverse ways; she tempts men into sin by motion, touch, sight, and speech. By holding hands, singing softly, and showing their beauty, women made dancing a most dangerous pastime.68 Guillaume Peraldus proceeded by explaining how dance obstructs all seven sacraments of the Church (baptism, orders, matrimony, confirmation, penitence, the Eucharist, and extreme unction).69 For example, dance corrupts the sacrament of confirmation because it obscures the sign of the cross on our foreheads. In doing so, the sign of the cross is abandoned for the sign of sin.70 Beyond challenging the sacraments, dancing, Peraldus concluded, unleashes a multitude of illicit behaviors that lead to other sins and vices, including pride, idolatry, pleasure, turpitude—​all of which obstruct the law of God, (contra legem Dei).71 Taking these sentiments further, the German Dominican Johannes Herolt (d. 1468), in one of his Sunday sermons, proclaimed that dance mocks Christ’s crucifixion; it is an empty form of joy that repels Christ’s mercy.72 When discussing dance, Herolt played on the verbs cadere (to fall) and ascendere (to ascend). If Christians want to go to heaven, he reasons, then they must avoid dancing, which is falling into hell.73 In sum, these pastoral sources highlight the sacrilegious character of dance. It is a deliberate transgression that rebels against divine authority, echoing the disobedience of Adam. In the reflections of the French theologian Alan of Lille (d. c. 1203), dance becomes a metaphor for the willful fall from grace: “All sin is voluntary, since, if it is not voluntary, it is not a sin. And so according to this, even original sin is voluntary, because it had its original dance [or leap, saltem] in the will of Adam.”74 Dance is most deviant when it originates from bad intentions.

Moralizing Dance Medieval exempla can be situated within a long ecclesiastical tradition of penitence, the process of obtaining the forgiveness of sins and redemption through the Christian faith. In Late Antiquity, Tertullian (fl. second century) stressed

Discipline and Redemption  117 the role of penitence in providing a remedy for sin. Penitence reestablishes the grace and joy that Adam enjoyed before the fall.75 Tertullian and other Church Fathers understood baptism as the most rudimentary form of penitence, as this sacramental rite cleansed subjects of their transgressions. The parting of the Red Sea symbolized the primal baptism, by which God redeemed the Israelites.76 In the Early Middle Ages, Bede (d. 735), an English Benedictine monk, elaborated on the repentant nature of baptism and its penitential function.77 The penitentials of (Pseudo) Bede and others often portrayed the public nature of early medieval penance, in which sinners were humiliated before their communities as a means to efface their sins.78 In the High Middle Ages, Peter Abelard (d. 1142) theorized on the importance of intentionality in the penitential process.79 Similarly, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) emphasized the role of contrition in penance, which the sinner shows with real tears of compunction.80 The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, by mandating confession for all Christians, caused shifts in penitential theology and practice.81 Following the Council, penitentials, preaching manuals, and treatises on vices and virtues proliferated throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These texts focused on the remission of sins via the tripartite formula of contrition, confession, and satisfaction.82 Yet, the increase in confession and discourses on confession created a new rapport between confessor and penitent through the examination of conscience.83 The post-​Lateran IV context affected attitudes toward dance in preaching and penitential materials. The growing sophistication of ideas about sin and redemption influenced a moralization, rather than a stark demonization, of dance. As this section shows, confessors, preachers, and theologians situated dance along the interstices of good and evil. In discussions of penitence, dance probed the gradations of sinful conduct and the steps toward absolution (the erasure of sins). The scholastic theologian Peter Lombard (d. 1160) offered one of the most seminal insights concerning penitence and recreational activity. In addition to the Bible, Peter’s Sententiae (Book of the Sentences) served as an essential textbook for scholars of theology studying at the universities. In one of his discussions, Peter advises that penitents may only partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist in clear conscience, that is, after having confessed. He then correlates the erasure of sins with the avoidance of performative forms of fun: Let the penitent be wary that he does not partake of the host before [confession], as shall be consonant with good conscience, and let him lament that he does not yet dare to partake of the life-​giving chalice which he greatly desires. He who wishes the perfect grace of remission to follow will keep himself from entertainments [ludis] and from worldly shows [spectaculis seculi].84

118  Grace before Its Master Peter’s succinct exposition on the relationship between penitence and recreation inspired numerous commentaries. In exempla and penitential sources, dance (chorea) is often equated with, or considered a variety of, games (ludi). Likely composed during the eleventh century, (Pseudo) Augustine’s treatise, De Vera et de Falsa Poenitentia (Concerning True and False Penitence), states that penitents must abstain from profane amusements, lest they repeat the unfortunate rape of Dinah.85 Expanding upon Lombard and (Pseudo) Augustine, the Spanish Dominican Raymond of Peñafort’s (d. 1275)  summa on penitence elaborates on the danger of worldly amusement for penitents. Guillaume de Rennes’ gloss on this work specifies the conditions under which dance impedes penitence. If performed on a feast day, then dancing is a mortal sin. This transgression, he concludes, recalls the libidinous conduct of King David and Bathsheba.86 Similarly, in his sermon De Ludo (Concerning the Game), Franciscan preacher James of the Marches identifies dance as a mortal sin if performed in a sacred location or on a sacred day, whereas the anonymous Liber Exemplorum’s (Book of Exempla) section on ludus expounds upon the lascivious and sinister nature of dancing.87 Despite the impiety of ludic diversions, medieval theologians also produced philosophical accounts of acceptable gaming. In his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the Franciscan St. Bonaventure (d. 1274) provides a lucid template pertaining to the dance problem: Therefore, I say that the game of dances is not evil in itself [Dico igitur, quod ludus chorearum non est malus secundum se], . . . but it may become evil on account of four causes, certainly on account of manner, when the manner is lascivious; on account of goal, when it may act to provoke libidity; on account of time, so that it may not be done at a time of sadness; on account of person, that it may not be done by a religious person [i.e., clergyman]. With these things removed, it is able to be done.88

This passage offers clear reasoning outlining the circumstances under which dance does or does not constitute a sinful act. Bonaventure explains that the evil associated with dance lies in how it is enacted and the effects of its enactment, rather than in the dance per se. Bonaventure then addresses the relation between dance and penitence. According to Bonaventure, the true penitent, in the spirit of repentance, must live in a time of sadness, and therefore should abstain from such spectacles. Consonant with Bonaventure, the Dominican Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), in his commentary on the Sentences, clarifies whether or not games and dances constituted sinful acts. As musicologist Christopher Page has shown, Albert seems to be more understanding than his fellow confessors of the human need to

Discipline and Redemption  119 engage in play and festivity.89 Albert turns to the Bible to frame his arguments for and against (pro et contra) dance as a mortal sin. Citing passages from Exodus, Isaiah, Corinthians, and Thessalonians, he provides biblical precedents for idolatrous, lewd, and malicious varieties of dancing. Albert then crafts his counterargument. Employing examples of the dance of Miriam, Psalm 68, and Jeremiah, he demonstrates how dance can achieve a legitimate manifestation of joy, praise, and thanksgiving. For Albert, as for Bonaventure, dance is not wholly sinister, but a wayward will can make it so. Penitents should not dance, as they are in a time of weeping, not of laughing or of empty spectacles (tempus est flendi, non tempus ridendi et vacandi spectaculis). Albert therefore concedes that dance is permissible at times of celebration and joy, including marriage, military victory, a return to one’s homeland, and so forth. Of equal importance to him is the execution of choreography. Dancers must move in an honest, noble way, not like that of lechers or ribalds.90 These trends in scholastic reasoning eventually percolated into the otherwise conservative penitentials. Consider a passage from the Franciscan preacher John of Erfurt’s Summa de Poenitentia (Summa Concerning Penitence, c. 1295): There are generous men, as Cicero says in his De Officiis, book II, who pour out money in banquets, games, and in the preparation of games and hunts. “Games” are dances [ludi apparentur coree], which are customarily performed during banquets, the gesture of actors and the playing of musical instruments. A certain kind of dance [choream] is religious praise [lauda], that is to say when it is done for the worship of God as when Miriam, the sister of Moses, took up a drum and led dances [duxit choreas] while crossing the Red Sea; [a dance] is disgusting and depraved when it is done for the sake of wantonness and abandonment. However, this may be done without mortal sin if four conditions are met: that it be not done in a forbidden time, as in Lent or Easter, or during communion; that the manner of the dancing [modus chorizandi] be neither wanton nor an incitement to lust; that it be done without a wanton that is to say an evil intention, and that it be not done by forbidden persons, worst of all by a person in religious orders.”91

Interestingly, John of Erfurt utilizes a pagan authority, namely Cicero (d. 43 bce), to construct his arguments regarding the Christianization and demonization of dance. Echoing Bonaventure and Albert, John appropriates a biblical example of permissible dancing and specifies when dance comprises an illicit behavior. Resituating these arguments in a pastoral context, John underscores the significance of intentionality. The interiority of one’s conscience is just as important, if not more important, than the kinetic spectacle of the dancing body.

120  Grace before Its Master Although elsewhere critical of ludi, Thomas de Cantimpré’s Book of Bees proffered another perspective on the moralization of dance. After criticizing the wantonness of secular entertainment, Thomas made a concession for marital dances: Yet those dances [choreae] which are held at the weddings of the faithful [nuptiis fidelium] may be partly, though not wholly, excused; since it is right for those folk thus to have the consolation of a moderate joy, who have joined together in the laborious life of matrimony. For, according to the vulgar proverb, that man is worthy to have a little bell hung with a golden chain around his neck, who has not repented of taking a wife before the year is out.92

For Thomas, dances performed at Christian weddings exemplified a modest, proprietous pastime. Moreover, decent lay Christians have earned the right to experience the joy that dance brings. Contrary to the dance polemic of Guillaume Peraldus, the sacrament of marriage remains untarnished by bodies in motion. Scholastic and penitential sources expressed clerics’ concern for the spiritual welfare of the laity. Within a confessional milieu, the relationship between preacher and penitent redefined the journey towards personal salvation. Paying penance for one’s sins, as several exempla demonstrate, is a rudimentary part of the process of absolution. The growing awareness of one’s will and taking accountability for one’s actions were just as crucial as processes of contrition and satisfaction. In penitential compilations customized for lay consumption, dance played a critical role in reshaping the contours of sin and salvation. One such text is the Ci Nous Dit (What This Story Tells Us), a moral encyclopedia of Christian instruction. Written in the early fourteenth century (c. 1313–​1330), the Ci Nous Dit contains sections on faith, morality, conversion, Christian life, the saints, and the apocalypse. Incorporating biblical, patristic, and hagiographic sources, as well as preaching materials, this didactic compilation taught Christians how to counteract sin, sharpen the will, and emulate holiness. In short, it recognized the consequences of human actions, good and bad, and charts an interior plan for salvation.93 Much of the dance content from the Ci Nous Dit borrows from, and reinterprets, biblical examples. For instance, its version of the rape of Dinah, as explained in my first chapter, identifies dance, gluttony, and vanity as the cause of the tragedy.94 The sons of Israel erred by dancing around the golden calf.95 Dancing during the wedding at Cana tempted the youth and did not follow the example of Christ.96 The dance of Salome caused the beheading of John the Baptist.97 These narratives portray dance as a precursor to, or cause of, immorality and sin.

Discipline and Redemption  121 Elsewhere, the Ci Nous Dit attempts to explain the conditions under which dance can be sinful. Incorporating patristic authority, one story from the Ci Nous Dit explains why it is sinful to dance on Sunday. An illustration from the Chantilly manuscript shows the bishop St. Augustine standing before a group of laborers and dancers (figure 4.2).98 This episode draws from one of Augustine’s commentaries, which proclaimed that people should not dance on the Sabbath, and would be better off ploughing the fields and making wool (Melius est enim arare, quam saltare), despite the Old Testament prohibition against labor on the Sabbath.99 Though Augustine refers to Jews and women, numerous medieval texts cited Augustine’s remarks in order to instruct lay Christians. For example, the anonymous Tabula Exemplorum (Tablet of Exempla, thirteenth century), and English preacher John Bromyard (d. c. 1352), cited Augustine to prohibit dancing on Sundays.100 The Somme le Roi (Survey for the King, or The Book of Vices and Virtues, c. 1279), a moralizing compilation composed for King Philip III of France, warned that caroling during masses is akin to serving the devil.101 The Manuel des Pechiez (Manual of Sins, thirteenth century) emphasizes that one must obey the third commandment, that is to keep the Sabbath holy.102 Also drawing from Augustine, Guillaume Peraldus claimed that dancing on the Sabbath will prolong one’s period of penitence.103 Thomas of Cantimpré argues that dancers forfeit their place in God’s kingdom, for dancing on sacred days commits mortal sin.104 A sermon by James of the Marches links the aftermath of the golden calf to the assumption that it is better to work on Sunday than to lead dances.105 Echoing Augustine, all of these texts seem to argue that, if it is already sinful to labor on the Sabbath day, then how much more taboo is it to dance? Like many of the aforementioned examples, the Ci Nous Dit does not state that dance is inherently evil. Rather, it concedes that there is an appropriate time and place

Figure 4.2  St. Augustine and dancers on the Sabbath, Ci Nous Dit, CCXXXI, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 147 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

122  Grace before Its Master

Figure 4.3  The inebriated doe, Ci Nous Dit, CCXXVI, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 144 recto, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

for dancing. Christians should spend the Sabbath praising the Lord in song and good works that emanate from a true heart and clear conscience. The Ci Nous Dit’s moralizing of dance goes beyond mere prohibition. Some of its anecdotes address the issue of agency. Leadership is built into the semantics of medieval dance. Historical documents habitually employ the phrase ducere choreas (to lead dances).106 The Latin verb ducere—​meaning to lead, command, conduct, think, or consider—​imbues dance activity with a volitional thrust. The Ci Nous Dit, however, complicates the willful image of the dancing body. One story recounts how a group of nobles gave wine to a doe. “And after having danced and leaped [dançoit et salloit],” the tale goes, “she broke her foot due to drunkenness.”107 A miniature painting depicts the animal’s unfortunate faux pas (figure 4.3).108 In this case, inebriation impairs individual volition. The outward display of dancing expresses the effects of compromised agency. With an enfeebled will, Christians lose the ability to act as moral agents; they stoop instead to the level of beasts.109 In another animal analogy, the author explains how a nobleman riding a horse is comparable to devils directing a group of dancers.110 In the accompanying illustration, five aerial demons hover over five unsuspecting dancers (Figure 4.4).111 The dancers link one another’s hands with handkerchiefs, a common stylization in secular choreography of the Late Middle Ages.112 Here, the Ci Nous Dit inverts the paradigm of dance as an agent’s activity. Though they began innocently enough, the dancers enter a perilous predicament. Dancing renders them susceptible to the vagaries of demonic forces, which overtake their bodies as readily as the knight rides his steed. With a diminished capacity to align the will with intention, dancers obey the whims of the devil. The Liber Exemplorum (The Book of Exempla) made the image of agentless dancers still more horrific.

Discipline and Redemption  123

Figure 4.4  Demons lead dancers, Ci Nous Dit, CCXXXV, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 150 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

Figure 4.5  Devils dance on a coffin, Ci Nous Dit, CCCCXXII, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 27, folio 7 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

In a section on illegitimate games, the text explains how dancers become the instruments of evil. It tells how demons manipulate the bodily limbs of dancers, just as puppeteers pull the strings of their marionettes.113 Dance can be a dangerous game precisely because it disturbs the mechanics of human and demonic agency. Disconnecting the desire to do good from the performance of good deeds, dance degrades moral responsibility. For instance, another story from the Ci Nous Dit tells about a man who confessed without true repentance. In other words, he went through the motions of penitence without the right intention. Thereafter, holy bishops observed a pair of devils dancing atop his coffin, as illustrated in the Chantilly codex (figure 4.5).114 Lacking transparency and

124  Grace before Its Master sincerity, the penitent forfeits the remission of sins. Without a contrite heart, dance devolves into a sign of perdition. While these examples indicate that dance hinders penitence, elsewhere it inspired penitential discipline. Indeed, pastoral literature could redirect dance’s moral failing to a demonstration of sincere repentance, and, ultimately, to absolution. In its section on morality, the Ci Nous Dit contains several stories about dancers who become good penitents. One of these tales recounts how a woman sinned by taking the host, or the Eucharistic wafer, into her purse on Easter. She then proceeded to dance for the whole day. The pocket that held the wafer began to bleed, giving evidence of her irreverent conduct (figure 4.6).115 In the following chapter, the same woman went before a priest holding the host. She asked him if this was the same sacrament with which God forgave Mary Magdalene, and he said yes. The woman began to weep tears of contrition and was pardoned.116 Though not presented as a virtuous activity, dancing could restore the transparency between agency and intention. For religious women, too, dance served as an indirect vehicle of penitence. Another anecdote from the Ci Nous Dit tells how, on a certain Sunday, a beguine (lay sister) from Cambrai renounced the beguinage (beguines’ communal housing), returned to her birth town, and immediately threw herself into dancing. In the flurry of movement, she came to remember Christ’s Passion, and had a change of heart. This meditation brought her to tears, and she returned to the beguinage to resume her role as the bride of Christ (figure 4.7).117 In both of these tales, dance is a quintessential part of the penitential experience. It brings about a change of will that enables the dancing body to transcend itself. One of the Ci Nous Dit’s most powerful juxtapositions between dance and penitence occurs in a chapter entitled “Buon Amour,” or good love. Located within the section on belief, “Buon Amour” is the longest chapter of the entire

Figure 4.6  The bleeding host, Ci Nous Dit, CXLI-​CXLII, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 96 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

Discipline and Redemption  125

Figure 4.7  The beguine and dancers, Ci Nous Dit, CCXXXVII, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 151 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

compilation. Composed in rhymed verse, it imitates vernacular love lyric and ballads that accompanied secular dances. Rechanneled within a pastoral setting, the lyrics of “Buon Amour” encourage merrymakers to ruminate on religion: Foolish costumes have overtaken the dancers [danceur], and there are so many who have forgotten the one who suffers for them, who from now on calls us to order, the one who dances in another manner [qui dance d’autre maniere] and leads us to rejoice in that wicked crown. Foolish is the one who forgets this crown of anguish. . . . Wise is the one who repents.118

These verses are a call to repentance. “Buon Amour” specifically addressed nobility and those who enjoyed leisurely pastimes.119 The costumes likely refer to the chapiau, or chapelet, a floral garland worn during certain secular danced dramas. The author employs dance as a starting point for penitence. An image from the Chantilly manuscript reinforces the comparison between accoutrements of folly (the chapelet) and an instrument of Christ’s Passion (the crown of thorns) (figure 4.8).120 The left side of the image juxtaposes the Dance of the Cross with profane pleasures. The right side of the image shows the dancers, now seated, holding the garlands in their hands as they meditate upon Christ’s Passion. Whereas some preachers dismissed dance as a mockery of the Crucifixion, dance in “Buon

126  Grace before Its Master

Figure 4.8  Buon Amour, Ci Nous Dit, LXVI, Paris, c. 1340, Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, folio 42 verso, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

Amour” creates an opportunity for moral reflection. In doing so, it customizes penitential discipline for a lay audience. As the Ci Nous Dit demonstrates, the vernacularization and laicization of religious discourse accommodated dance. More importantly, such sources transformed dance into a useful pastoral strategy. The process of translatio (transfer or translation) allowed a cultural transfer of authority from the Latin language to the vernaculars, with all of its institutional power. Clerical authority found a new voice in the sermo humilis (humble sermon), which made the preacher’s message more comprehensible and appealing to the laity.121 In their sermons and exempla, preachers incorporated some Provençal phrases and regional dialects into their Latin texts, thereby amplifying the edifying content of exempla. Bishop of Paris Maurice de Sully (d. 1196) peppered his sermons with references to Arthurian characters and the carole (secular dance) in an effort to sharpen his audience’s attention.122 Nicolas Bozon, an English Franciscan friar active during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, wrote religious poetry in Anglo-​Norman, an Old French dialect that was popular in medieval England.123 He insisted upon the didactic value of translated accounts of saintly individuals. In Bozon’s The Gospel Translated from Latin into French, he stresses the importance of the translation project: “lay people do /​not understand the Gospel because /​it is in Latin, so the Gospel is /​translated out of Latin into French /​for the understanding of lay people, /​without which understanding no man can be saved.”124 Moreover, Bozon’s Anglo-​Norman Life of Magdalene, a story he had found in the Latin (ke en latin trové ay), expresses mainstream Christians’ distaste for Latin readings: If I were to put into this account Each miracle that the Latin relates

Discipline and Redemption  127 Through long delay in reading People would be too weary [oppressed]; For persons apprise themselves well How long it lasts before they read. If it is short, they take delight; If it is long, they hold it in disdain, And they read all with absolute boredom. And lose the merit of great virtue. But I pray Mary, the gentle one, May her kindness not chide me, To aid Bozun in this task, Who wishes to translate her Life So that people may love her more, And gain merit from the reading.125

This passage captures Bozon’s view of an ennobled vernacular. Far from a vulgar imitation, vernacular renderings of religious motifs could improve lay piety, and bring salvation. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, dance contributed to the vernacularization of pastoral literature. One example of this trend lies in the story known as Bele Aeliz (Fair Alis or Aelis), which describes how a young woman goes into a garden to pick flowers for a garland. The figure of Fair Aelis was originally the subject of medieval dance-​songs, or lyrics set to song and dance. The Fair Aelis dance-​song was especially popular in France and England, and made its way into a sermon by (Pseudo) Stephen Langton, an English cardinal who became the Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1228). Introducing Fair Aelis, the author inserted Old French verses into his Latin sermon: Fair A[e]‌lis arose early, dressed and prepared herself, went into a garden, found there five flowers, made of them a garland of rose blossoms. In God’s name depart, you who do not love.126

(Pseudo) Langton’s appropriation of Fair Aelis contrasts with that of Jacques de Vitry, who, in French couplets, told his audience how, when adorning herself, Fair Aelis missed the Mass. Following this oversight, devils carried her away. In his sermon, Jacques compares Fair Aelis to Humbeline, the sister of Bernard of Clairvaux.127 Humbeline was notorious for living a life of luxury, resplendent

128  Grace before Its Master with dancing and sumptuous attire. When Humbeline visited Bernard’s monastery, he almost refused to see her, presuming that she would behave inappropriately. (A few years after this visit, however, Humbeline converted and lived a life of harsh penance).128 Unlike Jacques, (Pseudo) Langton did not use Fair Aelis to criticize the customs of the laity. Rather, he offered his congregants a spiritual exegesis of a secular motif. In his sermon’s opening benediction, he alludes to King David, the forefather of sacred song and dance: “Grant that He who was born of the lineage of David /​guide us all to good and true songs.”129 These lines resituate the story of Fair Aelis within a religious milieu. The preacher then glossed the dancing of Fair Aelis: When I say “Fair A[e]‌lis,” you know that dancing [tripudium] was first devised for vanity; yet in dancing [tripudio] three things are necessary, namely: a sonorous voice, the entwining of arms, and stamping of feet. In order, therefore, that we may be able to dance to God [Deo tripudiare], we must possess these three things in us: a sonorous voice, that is, holy preaching, pleasing both to God and to men; the entwining of arms, that is, a twofold charity, namely, the love of God and neighbor; and the stamping of feet, that is, works harmonizing with our preaching, in imitation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who undertook first to do good works, and then to teach.130

Though dancing may originate as a vain pleasure, a moralized interpretation converts it to the service of God. With their melodious voices, interlinked arms, and percussive feet, dancers symbolize various elements of religious practice. For (Pseudo) Langton, dance creates an interpersonal connection—​between preacher and audience, layperson and fellow layperson, Christ and Christian. Moreover, his reference to bodily movement enhances the persuasive power of his sermon. In medieval rhetoric, as medievalist Mary Carruthers explains, authors turned to the concept of the ductus, or directed movement. The Latin term ductus (related to the verb ducere) referred to the flow of the composition. For Augustine and medieval thinkers, ductus brought to mind an ordered, directed motion, comparable to the well-​rehearsed motions of human limbs.131 In (Pseudo) Langton’s text, Fair Aelis serves as a rhetorical tool, whose mobile quality arouses the attention of the audience and enriches the lessons of the preacher. (Pseudo) Langton continues by giving etymologies for Aelis’s name, which, like the lily, represents one who is without worldly impurity. Aelis is a virgin, sprung from the root of Jesse. Her five flowers signify faith, hope, charity, virginity, and humility. Her garland is the golden crown that the Virgin received at her coronation. Those who do not follow love, as the refrain goes, are the heretics,

Discipline and Redemption  129 pagans, and false Christians who do not believe in the Resurrection. They will accordingly burn in the eternal fires.132 (Pseudo) Langton even offers a Marian exegesis of Fair Aelis, identifying her as the Virgin Mary herself: This Fair A[e]‌lis, that is, the Blessed Virgin Mary, prepared her bridal chamber, that is, the conscience of the mind, when she conceived the King and Lord of Heaven. . . . Through what has been said, it is evident that this is the Fair A[e]lis, about whom we have spoken; she is the Queen of Justice, the Mother of Mercy, who bore the King and Lord of Heaven, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, [world without end]. Amen.133

By casting Fair Aelis as the Virgin Mary, (Pseudo) Langton’s sermon inverts the demonization of dance characteristic of the preaching rhetoric with which this chapter began. Inner virtue, as the sermon implies, animates the dancing body with reverence and grace. Performed in good conscience, dance construes the absence of sin. (Pseudo) Langton turned to the vernacular to reconcile dance and redemption.

Redeeming Dance Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, completed in the early fourteenth century, offers a mature model for understanding the relationship between dance and penitence. Nestled between the tortuous Inferno and the blissful Paradiso, Purgatorio presents a community in the middle of things. It is the most human realm of the Commedia. The Purgatorio’s inhabitants have acknowledged the ethical shortcomings of their past lives. They submit to various corporal and psychological correctives (torture, fire, and humiliation). More importantly, they comprise a community of penitents on the quest for a refined moral conscience. In Dante’s vision, this realm is far less concerned with punishment and guilt than it is with recovery and repair.134 The resurgence of redemptive possibilities for the body, society, and the human condition permeate Purgatorio’s esprit du corps. Dance is a purgatorial discipline bringing sinners from penitence to redemption.135 Purgatorio’s first explicit dance scene occurs on the terrace of pride (superbia). For the prideful shades (ombre), the dance of King David is the model of humility to emulate.136 Dante and Virgil encounter the sacred dancer in the form of a marble relief: “There, proceeding the holy vessel, leaping with /​ his robes girt up, was the humble Psalmist, and he /​was both more and less than king on that occasion.”137 This scene presents David’s dance as edification for prideful souls. David’s humble gestures show how dance has a devotional purpose (figure 4.9).138 The penitents respond to the image of David.

130  Grace before Its Master

Figure 4.9  The dance of David, Illustration for Purgatorio X, Northern Italy (Emilia or Padua), early/​mid-​fourteenth century, British Library Egerton MS 943 folio 80 verso, © The British Library Board

Bent under the burden of heavy stones, their shadowy bodies perform corrective gestures to counteract their inclination to pride. As Dante describes, they morph into living caryatids, nearly buckling over with their burden.139 They gain strength from contrition and purification to move boulders up the mountain. Their conscious labor in David’s spirit paves a path toward spiritual renewal. Purgatorio’s disciplined ethos suggests a penal colony in which penitents are “doing time.” The return of time and resurgence of hope contrasts with the eternal punishments that fill the Inferno.140 Segregated in customized terraces (one for each of the seven deadly sins), the shades in Purgatorio, as illustrated in Domenico di Michelino’s painting, enact a repetitive program of compulsory punition (figures 4.10a and 4.10b). Sword-​bearing angels survey their progress. One of them, with the tip of his blade, inscribes Dante’s forehead with seven Ps (for peccatum, or sin), which may recall the ancient Roman practice of tattooing criminals. All the while, penitents labor under the panoptical divine gaze.141 At

Discipline and Redemption  131 (a)

(b)

Figures 4.10 a. La Commedia Illumina Firenze (The Comedy Illuminating Florence); 4.10b detail, Domenico di Michelino, Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, 1465, photograph by John Dickason

first glance, Dante’s account of these captives seems to have more in common with the so-​called prison literature of the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306). Jacopone construed his time in prison as a kind of penance, in which the body waged a battle with the soul:

132  Grace before Its Master Filthy, evil body, master of gluttony! Is this your answer in my hour of need? Here, feel the lashes on this knotted cord! They may sound like jarring rhythms to you, But you will have to master them And learn to dance [danzare] to this music!142

Departing from the dark image that incarceration conjures, Dante’s shades work self-​consciously toward moral advancement. Physical exertion effects the rebirth of their spiritual selves.143 Through their spectacle of organized labor and corporal discipline, penitents cultivate a moral education. Dante upsets the traditional penitential model by showing how dance facilitates, rather than impairs, the purgatorial process. The presence of redemptive dance diverges from mainstream depictions of penitence and purgatory in medieval theology, art, and literature. Early medieval sources accentuate the mortification and guilt entailed in the penitential regime.144 While purgatory did not become an official component of Christian doctrine until the late twelfth century, oral and written legends of knights and monks traveling through the underworlds infiltrated the popular imaginary. Early literary accounts of purgatory, such as the Visio Tnugdali (Vision of Tundale) and Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (Saint Patrick’s Purgatory) epitomize the via purgativa (the path to purgation) through physical pain and torture.145 Penitentials also contributed to the criminalization of penitents.146 Visual iconography of purgatory in the Middle Ages likewise resembles the torments of hell. The crucial difference is that inhabitants of purgatory clasp their hands in prayer, a gesture signifying hope and the possibility for redemption.147 When dance occurs in medieval accounts of purgatory, it often alludes to demonic or punitive activity. For example, in a twelfth-​century Irish poem, Sir Owain, a devil greets a knight in purgatory with these words: You have come to suffer torture in order to nullify your heinous sins, but it will gain you nothing! You shall be given harsh, agonizing and barely endurable pain for the deadly sins that you have committed. You will never have suffered a greater misfortune than when you begin to dance [daunce] with us and we begin to play our game with you!148

The horrific image of purgatorial dancing continued into the Late Middle Ages. The fourteenth-​century Dominican Jean Gobi, in his compilation addressed to preachers entitled Scala Coeli (The Ladder of Heaven), contends that “the dance leads us toward many evil things [corea multa mala inducit in nobis.”] He supports his claim with the following (abridged) tale about St. Patrick’s Purgatory:

Discipline and Redemption  133 A certain young monk crossed the Purgatory of Saint Patrick, and there he observed horrible and terrible torments . . . he saw there an iron circle, full of the sharpest nails, on which they danced [corisantes]. Over them was a rain of relentless flame and sulfur, and dragons, who were standing in the middle of the dance [in medio coree stabant], gnawed and devoured their bowels.149

For some theologians, the correlation between dance and punishment was retributive. Nicholas de Bayard, a Dominican at Oxford (fl. 1300s), recounted a story about a woman who heard a dance-​song (cantilena) and received eighteen extra days in purgatory, since she never confessed to doing it.150 In counterpoint to these examples, Dante’s Purgatorio portrays otherworldly dance as a remedy for sin. Dance constitutes an instrument of penitence that purges the faithful of their moral failing. What is especially unorthodox in Dante’s text is the harmonious comingling of dance and pride. Pride constitutes the gravest sin in Purgatorio, and it is therefore positioned on the lowest terrace of the mountain. The prideful undergo the greatest expenditure in paying off their debt to God. Dante’s treatment of pride reflects the Church Fathers and medieval theologians, for whom pride was the direst sin.151 Even though Dante found inspiration from Guillaume Peraldus’s Summa on vices, particularly pride, Peraldus associated dance with sin, exile, and misery.152 Moreover, confessionals and penitentials connected dance and the sin of pride. An anonymous confession manual, for instance, when commenting on pride, instructs preachers to “[inquire whether the penitent] will have celebrated dances [coreas celebraverit] which may have been done in many ways: in assembling together, in buying fine clothes, in disturbing young girls, and in doing things of this kind.”153 The Speculum Laicorum (Mirror of Lay People, c. 1275) and similar pastoral texts recount the story of a dead girl whose entire body burned again and again on a fiery wheel in retribution for her pride and fondness of dancing.154 The Middle English version of the Somme le Roi describes Lucifer as the original prideful sinner. “Pride is kynge of alle synnes and grettist of alle,” the author proclaims, and thus pride causes Christians to violate holy days, which makes them resemble the Saracens (Muslims) who dance before false gods.155 In light of these texts, the valorization of dance in Purgatorio seems subversive. Dante’s representation of purgatorial dance may hint at his deep connection with the sin of pride. Pride was a particularly piquant subject for Dante, since he considered it his own greatest vice. (Hence the Commedia’s continual juxtaposition between Dante and Ulysses).156 In his bold attempt to render sacred truths in vernacular poetry, Dante rode a fine line between poetic celebrity and pious posturing. In doing so, Dante empathized most with the prideful. Traversing the terrace of pride, Dante the pilgrim began to feel the weight of stones on his back.

134  Grace before Its Master He anticipated returning to the terrace of pride one day and spending a great deal of time there.157 Part of Dante’s own legacy involves the mockery of his self-​ glorification. Folkloric tales present Dante as a smug know-​it-​all. He outsmarts kings, chastises a blacksmith who sings the Commedia badly, and instructs minstrels on how to garner success.158 For Dante, the terrace of the prideful is the most self-​referential place in purgatory. He inserts the example of King David to inspire himself and others toward moral rectitude. Placing the dance of David in purgatory, Dante conflates David’s identity as dancer and penitent. Medieval Christians believed that David composed the seven Penitential Psalms (Vulgate 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142) as expressions of atonement for his double sins of adultery and murder. Repeating the language of turning (from the Latin vertere, to turn; advertere, to turn away; revertere, to turn back), the psalmist configures the movements of conversion (convertere, to turn over, turn upside down, change, or alter) as the repentant soul turning to God, turning away from sin, and returning to the path of righteousness.159 Conversional choreography repairs the channel of grace that links humanity to divinity. In this way, the Purgatorio resembles the image of David put forth in Ambrose of Milan’s De Poenitentia (Concerning Penitence), a fourth-​century text often cited in medieval penitentials: The dance [saltationem] should be conducted as did David when he danced [saltavit] before the Ark of the Lord, for everything is right which springs from the fear of God. Let us not be ashamed of a show of reverence which will enrich the cult and deepen the adoration of Christ. For this reason the dance [saltatio] must in no way be regarded as a mark of reverence for vanity and luxury, but as something which uplifts every living body instead of allowing the limbs to rest motionless upon the ground or the slow feet to become numb. St. Paul danced in the spirit [saltabat spiritaliter] when he exerted himself for us, when he endeavored to be a soldier of Christ, because he forgot the past and longed for the future. But you, when you come to the font, do lift up thy hands. You are exhorted to show swifter feet in order that you may thereby ascend to everlasting life. This dance is an ally of faith and an honoring of grace [Haec est saltatio fidei socia, gratiae comes].160

Ambrose wrote about David in the context of early baptism, which aligned the baptized with Christian fellowship and erased their prior sins. Read through the perspective of purgatorial theology, the passage suggests that by honoring God correctly, one can temper pride. Reverence before divine majesty rewires the moral aptitude of the body to perform spiritual service. Here the medieval dancing body is a site of formative change and metamorphosis.161 Though Dante

Discipline and Redemption  135 populates Purgatorio with penitent shades, their physical acts of repentance locate the purgative experience within the plastic power of the body. The disembodied shade re-​somatized itself through the activity of the soul.162 In a penitential community, dance reestablishes the bond between self and other. It is a vehicle of (re)socialization within the Christian fellowship. Unlike Ambrose and the Vulgate, Dante does not employ the term saltare (the Latin verb to leap or dance in a lively manner), even though the same term exists in the Italian vernacular.163 Instead, the David of the Purgatorio dances the tresca, an Italian country dance with stomplike percussive movements, occasionally associated with illicit sexual conduct.164 The Commedia’s only other reference to the tresca occurs in the seventh circle of the Inferno, reserved for the violent.165 Given his university and Dominican education, Dante’s decision to change the Vulgate was deliberate. With his new rendering, Dante may suggest that David’s dance, although more rustic than royal, cleanses the tresca of its infernal residue. Moreover, the tresca’s rusticity, even its vulgarity—​in the spirit of vulgare—​champions the vernacular project of Dante’s poetry. Dances in Purgatorio therefore harmonize the significance of human intention and Dante’s own will (vele) to be a poet.166 As the disciplines of penitence and poetry bleed into one another, Dante achieves an equilibrium between crafting new language and announcing a moral imperative.167 Dance facilitates the reconciliation between innovation and orthodoxy. Far from blasphemy, David’s vigorous tresca signifies a penitential exercise par excellence. The subsequent dance scenes in Purgatorio consecrate the last steps of its penitential program. Situated on the top of Mount Purgatory, these dances take place in the Earthly Paradise, a lush garden reminiscent of Eden. Here Dante encounters Matelda, a beautiful woman who appears to him singing and dancing: and over there appeared to me. . . . a solitary lady, who was walking along both singing and choosing flower from flower among those that colored all her way. . . . As a lady turns who is dancing [donna che balli], with her feet pressed to the ground and together, scarcely placing one foot before the other: so she turned on the crimson and yellow flowers toward me, not otherwise than a virgin who lowers her modest eyes, and she contented my prayers, drawing so near that the sweet sound reached me with its meanings.”168

136  Grace before Its Master For medieval readers, a woman singing, dancing, and gathering flowers easily evoked the bucolic backdrop of pastoral poetry—​or perhaps even the image of Fair Aelis. Yet Dante does not seem to recognize this donna (lady), either as an historical figure or a Florentine contemporary. Over the years, Dantisti have exerted painstaking efforts in trying to identify Matelda’s historical prototype.169 In Dante’s text, she remains anonymous until Beatrice names her in the final canto of the Purgatorio. Fraught with ambivalence, Matelda recalls the biblical figures Eve (before the Fall) and Leah (for her active piety).170 Yet her aesthetic allure reminds Dante of the sensuality of pagan goddesses.171 Dante does not attempt to over-​spiritualize Matelda’s dancing. Integrating the sacred and the profane, the erotic and the chaste, Matelda introduces a new kind of lyric that is both sensual and ethical. She carries religious significance, yet her words and gestures appropriate the Italian ballata (from ballare, to dance), a popular dance-​song (or combination of love poetry, music, and dance) that was performed from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.172 The ballata consists of an initial refrain (ripresa, or ritornello) sung by a solo woman standing in the middle of a ring of dancers. The next few verses (piedi) are sung and danced by everyone. The final “turning-​line” (volta) is generally sung by the soloist, and signals the end of the strophe and a transition to the refrain. The ballata alluded to in Purgatorio also overlaps with the Italian pastorella (a genre of lyric poetry romanticizing a knight’s seduction of a shepherdess), though Matelda remains pristine and unravished.173 Dante therefore recasts secular lyric within a realm of Edenic innocence. Dante’s decriminalization of dance differs from most Italian treatments of penitence. Italian Franciscan James of the Marches supplies six main reasons to flee from dancing (multe sunt rationes que docent nos coreas fugere). For James, dance is a form of deception, it arouses lust throughout the body and the senses, it ejects otherwise holy men from paradise, it constitutes sacrilege in holy places, it counters the sacraments, and it generates other kinds of sin.174 In an exemplum by San Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444), the dancing partner of a cardinal’s servant becomes mute for three years.175 Moreover, the Triumph of the Church fresco by Andrea di Bonaiuto (or Andrea da Firenze) at the Santa Maria Novella Chapel in Florence (c. 1365–​1367) seems to suggest that earthly dancing obstructs Christians’ entry into heaven (­figures 4.11a and 4.11b). Taking inspiration from the Jacopo Passavanti’s Specchio di Vera Penitentia (The Mirror of True Penitence), this imagery bolsters the Dominican Order’s defense of orthodoxy. In the center of the fresco, St. Dominic leads penitents to the gates of paradise, while members of the Order preach to the laity and the dogs, symbolic of the domini cani (dogs of the lord), combat heresy. Among the pious laypeople, the artist even included a cameo of Dante and Beatrice. The figures on the upper left comprise the blessed, who seem to oppose the dancers and musicians on the

Discipline and Redemption  137 (a)

(b)

Figures 4.11  a. Andrea di Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze), The Way of Salvation fresco; 4.11b detail, Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, c. 1365–1367, photograph by Tina Dickason

right.176 This imagery may imply that dancing is a frivolous pursuit that distracts one from penitence and, ultimately, bars one from paradise. Far from an obstacle to penitence, Matelda emerges as a female counterpart to King David. In canto XXVIII, she references Psalm 91, Delectasti (You have delighted), which monastic communities sang at Lauds. In the following canto, Matelda sings Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata! (Blessed are those whose sins are covered), from Psalm 31, a penitential psalm sung at Matins.177 Moreover, Matelda embodies a language of conversion. Throughout the Earthly Paradise, Dante frequently employs the Italian term passo (step, pace, or dance step), which is derived from the Latin verb patior, pati, passus sum (to suffer, undergo), a term that is often invoked in the Middle Ages for religious designations, as in the passio Christi (Passion of Christ). In his liberal use of passo to denote

138  Grace before Its Master dancing, stepping, and suffering, Dante’s embodiment of conversion conflates movement and sacrifice.178 Matelda’s own dainty steps captivate Dante, who tries to replicate her movements: “And like nymphs that used to walk alone . . . she then moved against the stream . . . and I even with her, matching /​little steps with little steps [picciol passo con picciol seguitando”]179 The medieval scholar and Commedia commentator Benvenuto da Imola (d. 1388) drew a correspondence between Matelda’s triple steps and the three steps of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction).180 Her delicate steps presage Dante’s own movement toward self-​transformation, change, and redemption. As Dante traverses the Earthly Paradise, movement reintroduces him into the Christian community. He witnesses a liturgical pageant, as well as a return to the Garden of Eden. The first procession, equipped with elders and candelabras, reenacts Christian history.181 The allegories of Faith, Hope, and Charity dance at the chariot’s right wheel, following the shifting tempo of caritas: “Three ladies came dancing in a circle at the /​right wheel [Tre donna in giro da la destra rota]. . . . and now they seemed drawn by the white /​one, now by the red one; and from the latter’s /​song the other two took their slow and rapid /​pace.”182 The motion of wheeling is integrated with the dancers’ steps to signify a shift from an old dispensation (i.e., Old Testament and temporal virtues) to a new order (i.e., New Testament and theological virtues).183 Processants encircle the Tree of Knowledge while murmuring “Adam,” momentarily recapturing the harmony of Eden before the Fall.184 The dancers embody the rhythms of sacred history. These impressionistic interludes serve as an acknowledgment of the past and a preface to beatitude. Formalized movement reintegrates Dante into the Christian fellowship.185 Within the Earthly Paradise, the most significant function of redemptive dance is to lead Dante to Beatrice, his portal to grace. To prepare Dante for this event, Matelda and the allegorical virtues enact a dance of initiation: The beautiful lady opened her arms, embraced my head, and submerged me, so that I had to swallow some of the water. Then she took me, and, drenched as I was, inserted me into the dance of the four beauties [la danza de le quattro belle] and each of them covered me with her arm. “We are nymphs here, and in the sky we are stars; before Beatrice descended into the world, we were appointed to be her handmaidens. We will lead you to her eyes, but to the joyous light that is in them yours will be sharpened by the three over there, who see more deeply.”

Discipline and Redemption  139 . . . the other three, showing their more noble rank in their bearing, came forward, dancing to their angelic carol [danzando al loro angelico caribou]. “Turn Beatrice, turn your holy eyes,” was their song, “to your faithful one, who has come so far [trodden many steps, ha mossi passi tanti] to see you!”186

In this evocative passage, Matelda submerges Dante in the Lethe, or the mythical river that erases the memory of corruption, evil, and sin.187 Matelda assumes an ecclesiastical role through directing and overseeing a religious ritual, a privilege from which medieval women were excluded. Dante’s immersion recalls archaic baptismal practices and gnostic rites of initiation that emphasized the necessity of death before rebirth.188 A mysterious dance follows the cleansing act, which involves Matelda, Dante, and the four (feminized) temporal virtues (Prudence/​Prudentia, Justice/​Iustitia, Moderation/​Temperantia, and Courage/​ Fortitudo). These dancers then lead Dante to the ethereal pas de trois of the theological virtues (Faith/​Fides, Hope/​Spes, and Charity/​Caritas), prefiguring Beatrice, who is clad in all three colors (white, green, and red) of the theological virtues.189 Beatrice, the vehicle of revelation, leads Dante to Christ, represented as a gryphon, and to the Church, represented as a chariot. An early manuscript illustration of this canto pictures these narrative moments, conveying the pilgrim’s initiation as a physical progression through space (figure 4.12).190 This scene is one of the most enigmatic of the Commedia. Throughout the dance ritual, Dante seems to be in a trance, submitting willfully to a regime of self-​transformation.191 Within a penitential framework, the discipline of dance is empowering; it acts as an agent of purgation and metamorphosis.

Figure 4.12  Manuscript illustration for Purgatorio XXXI, Northern Italy (Genoa?) late fourteenth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Holkham misc. 48, p. 107

140  Grace before Its Master Though Beatrice herself does not partake in dancing, she sets the scene into motion. After eliciting Dante’s own confession and absolution, Beatrice ensures that Dante becomes “pure and made ready for the stars.”192 (Or, literally, to leap or dance—​from salire—​to the stars). By the end of the Purgatorio, dance is both an avenue toward redemption and a heavenly reward.193 Emboldened by his reformed conscience, Dante tours the celestial spheres with Beatrice, bedazzled by the cosmic choreography of paradise. * * * Beyond moralization, mysticism remade dance into a spiritual discipline. In their visions and poetry, mystics employed dance motifs to experience and express the presence of God. The ensuing chapter explores mystical dancers and their ability to connect humanity to divinity.

5

Partnering Divinity Mystical Dancers

The previous chapters examined medieval dances performed primarily in groups. Collective movement was the most common form of devotional dancing. Dancing en masse—​whether in the liturgy, cultic worship, or Dante’s Purgatorio—​sharpened the solidarity of the Christian social body. Partnering, or the dance of two people, comprised another variety of medieval dance. Centuries before the couples’ dances of the Renaissance, medieval mystics imagined the intimate pairing of mystic and God through dance. In general, the idea of partnership in the Middle Ages connotes an exercise of spiritual collaboration—​between abbots and monks, patrons and artists, bishops and lords. Often emerging from monastic milieu, these pairings brought men together with men, or women together with women. Recent scholarship on religion and gender has uncovered partnerships that developed between men and women. Male clergy, notably Peter Abelard (d. 1142), promoted female spirituality and devoted their lives to serving their so-​called dominae (female lords). Monks and nuns coproduced religious texts and iconography, sometimes working together in the same scriptorium. Witnessing the sanctity of beguines (lay sisters), confessors became women’s hagiographers (spiritual biographers).1 There is, however, another variety of partnership that flourished in the Late Middle Ages: mystical dance, or the visionary, yet visceral, encounters between women and Christ. This chapter explores the production and transmission of mystical dance during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when an efflorescence of female piety reshaped the contours of religious life.2 I examine texts and images written by, or about, Flemish beguines and German nuns, as well as select sources pertaining to French, Italian, and English mystics. For my purposes, mysticism denotes a radical intimacy between the female practitioner and the (typically) male Godhead. Mysticism, in medieval Christianity and other traditions, defies any uniform definition; hence I  employ this term nominally. In my study of mystics’ written testimonies, I do not attempt to address the theological validity of these visions, nor do I portray mystical phenomena as discrete, irreducible entities.3

Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

142  Grace before Its Master As this chapter demonstrates, religious women attained privileged proximity to God through dance. Though select studies have addressed the role of dance and bodily movement in mystical experience, they often equate dance to liturgy, mimesis (imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ), or spirit possession.4 Diverging from past scholarship, I am interested in how women’s experience and communication of mystical union reveal a hitherto overlooked form of medieval choreo-​graphy (or dance-​writing).5 Mystical choreography challenges modern assumptions about what constitutes dance. For medieval practitioners, mystical dance was both imagined and physical, private and performed, ineffable and transferable. Mystics reimagined the graphic texture of dance through nuptial imagery, erotic encounters, and contortionist spectacles. This chapter begins by exploring the use of dance motifs in bridal mysticism, in which female piety oscillated between risk and passivity. Next, I take a closer look at women’s own writings, arguing that dance language operated to convey otherwise privatized experiences of God. Finally, I address the dark side of mystical dance. The gender politics that underpin these partnerships presents women as victims of divine domination. In my assessment of the evidence, dance positioned female mystics as both visionary agents and tools of subjugation.

Bridal Bodies in Motion: Between Submission and Subversion Recent scholarship on women’s religiosity has drawn parallels between female mystics and the so-​called French feminists. For the French feminists, women’s writing constitutes an act of empowerment and resistance. Coining the concept of écriture féminine (women’s writing), Hélène Cixous believed that women’s writing could undo patriarchal hegemony and its erasure of women’s stories. In Cixous’s feminist manifesto, (Rire de la Méduse) (The Laugh of the Medusa), she writes: Woman must write her self:  must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—​for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—​as into the world and history—​by her own movement.6

Cixous’s notion of writing is intimately linked to (Western) religion, and its longstanding degradation of women. In line with Cixous, Luce Irigaray urged women to reclaim divinity in their own image—​that of the goddess—​to help them achieve a feminist subjectivity.7 Julia Kristeva revalorized the maternal,

Partnering Divinity  143 symbolic body that imparted meaning outside the confines of male dominance.8 Catherine Clément championed trance, ecstasy, and rapture as alternative modalities of the sacred that could enable women to emerge from the margins of society.9 Monique Wittig proposed a more extreme feminization of religion, rewriting the Song of Songs /​Song of Solomon from a Sapphist perspective.10 These thinkers recognized how women’s spirituality enacts a transvaluation of patriarchal values. For medievalists and scholars of religion, French feminist thought has cast the revolutionary, countercultural thrust of female mysticism into relief. The sheer creativity of medieval mystics points toward feminist goals. Yet female mystics of the Late Middle Ages achieved and transmitted their radical spirituality within the strictures of the Latin Church. In what follows, I provide a preliminary examination of the role of dance in mystical texts and images. By transposing dance into a visionary framework, the brides of Christ reached a delicate equilibrium between submission and subversion. Historical shifts in medieval religious practice helped shape women’s vernacular virtuosity. In the Rhineland and the Low Countries during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a new variant of female religiosity began to blur the boundaries between monastic and lay piety. These women, called the beguines, relinquished marriage and material luxuries to attain a deeper rapport with God.11 The beguines roughly coincided with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, a watershed moment in ecclesiastical history that galvanized sacramental and liturgical reforms. As medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum has argued, the post–​Lateran IV emphasis on Incarnational theology valorized the role of the body in Christian worship. Although women were denied access to the priesthood, these changes afforded them opportunities in religious life.12 Devotio moderna (modern devotion, a reform movement) galvanized a new variety of consciousness, which for medievalist Jean-​Claude Schmitt was essential to the discovery of the individual.13 Moreover, the founding of new religious orders came to support female sanctity. With their campaigns to canonize female saints, the Franciscans, according to historian André Vauchez, initiated “the feminization of sainthood.”14 Many Dominican clergy dedicated themselves to the cura monialium (care of religious women) and exalted beguines as counterexamples to the Cathar heresy.15 In the Late Middle Ages, both beguines and cloistered women exploited their roles as brides of Christ to achieve mystical union through dance. The so-​called beguine prototype, Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213), established an intimate relationship with Christ that caught the attention of theologian Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240). As the self-​proclaimed handmaiden of Christ, Marie’s sexless marriage to Jean de Nivelle only heightened her affection for God. According to Jacques, Marie responded to divine presence—​via the

144  Grace before Its Master Eucharist, liturgy, and visions—​with ecstasy, body clapping (plausu corporali), and repetitive genuflection (up to 1,100 times per prayer). Marie’s Middle English vita (life story) describes her physical comportment as an “outewarde berynge of body with a litil excesse.”16 Although the sources do not specify that Marie incorporated dance into her devotional program, she evidently christened a body-​centrism that subsequent beguines appropriated into their spiritual repertoire. In a supplement to Marie’s life, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré (d. 1272) supplied an anecdote of a (nameless) pious woman who danced during communion: She danced with all her limbs [tripudiabat illa membris omnibus] and her face was replete with graces [plenissima gratiarum]. While she danced, she uttered cries of such sweetness that there could be no doubt that she was being called to the wedding banquet of the Lamb in which . . . the almighty Father joins the heavenly to the earthly, the lowest to the highest.17

Thomas’s testimony accentuates the Eucharistic ethos, thus tempering drama with doctrine. As he observes, the woman’s countenance exudes divine gifts (plenissima gratiarum), as if she were a cameo of the Virgin Mary, full of grace.18 The woman dances solo, yet Thomas anticipates her nuptial tryst with the Lamb of God. The wedding banquet encapsulates the telos of Christianity; the lowly become lofty, sacrifice becomes salvation. With their physical dynamism, beguines could contradict popular attitudes toward cloistered women, as expressed in a French dance-​song: “By my faith, says Robinette, I was made a nun too young and this profession will never be for me. . . . Cloistered should be the bodies that are crippled, women with only one eye or deformed, not a dainty young maiden who knows how to dance [Qui scet baler du talon].”19 On the contrary, the brides of Christ crafted a new aesthetics of devotional performance, bringing them in close contact with God. The dancing bride motif reappears in devotional literature made for medieval women. For example, an image from the Rothschild Canticles (c. 1300) situates female mysticism within the adoration of the lamb (figure 5.1).20 With outstretched arms, a group of nine women gesture toward the levitating lamb as an angel plays the viol.21 Unlike most medieval dance iconography, which depicts uniform formations, this illuminator gives the illusion of movement by highlighting the unique motions of each dancer. The image accompanies biblical and liturgical sources, namely Revelation 14:4, the vision of choice virgins who follow the footsteps of the lamb.22 For these women, dance enables mystical marriage with divinity. Moreover, the representation implies redemption. The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (Agnus dei, qui tolis peccata mundi)

Figure 5.1  Adoration of the Lamb, Rothschild Canticles, Flanders, c. 1300, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS. 404, folio 13 recto

146  Grace before Its Master erases any trace of transgression associated with the female dancing body. When the Bridegroom offers his hand to the Helfta nun Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), her leaping heart consecrates their conjugal union and preludes the afterlife.23 Wedding dances symbolized soteriology in laywomen’s religiosity as well. In the Apocalypse of Isabella of France, paradise is a realm of festive feasting, celestial sounds, and angelic jamming (figure 5.2).24

Figure 5.2  Apocalypse of Isabella of France, French, fourteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 13096, folio 67 recto

Partnering Divinity  147 The combination of religious and kinesthetic imagery in these sources assists communities of readers and viewers to access the experiences of mystical women. Religious Studies scholar Matthew Kapstein argues for the shared experience of aesthetics: “Our aesthetic responses, therefore, are not merely subjective; they are intersubjective. They can be communicated to and apprehended by others.”25 While not discounting the uniqueness of individual experience, Kapstein suggests that cultural contexts, already deeply encoded, facilitate an economy of sensory perception. The symbolic import of mystical dancing supports Kapstein’s logic. Male hagiographers may have found beguines’ behavior strange or sensational. Yet the visions these women conveyed to them placed extraordinary actions within the safety net of scripture. Consider the life of Lutgard of Awyières (d. 1246), a nun whom Thomas mentored and deeply admired. When oil flowed miraculously from Lutgard’s breasts, she exclaimed, “ ‘I am so filled up inwardly by his superabundant grace that now even my fingers are outwardly dripping a kind of oil as a manifestation of grace.’ Saying this as if she were drunk—​and indeed she was drunk—​she danced around the reclusorium [enclosure] with wondrous gestures [cum gestu et tripudio mirabili”].26 Lutgard’s tipsy tripudium exemplified the new mysticism. Casting herself as the consecrated bride of Christ, Lutgard loses herself in spiritual intoxication. Inebriation fuels her awesome pantomime. Drunkenness, though associated with women’s spirituality, percolated into the writings of male visionaries. Flemish mystic and beguine supporter Jan van Ruysbroeck (d. 1381) theorized the phenomenology of spiritual inebriation. In his words, “it makes one unstable in all members so that one must run and jump and dance.”27 Similarly, Thomas’s description juxtaposes Lutgard’s cell, a place of solitary confinement, with her spectacular motions. The excessiveness of Lutgard’s spectacle is, however, shaped by conventional imagery. For medieval Christians, her references to wine and oil recall the Song of Songs, the most erotic book of the Bible, and in this period, the most mystical. Half a century before Lutgard, Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) sermons expounded upon the spiritual significance of the Song of Songs. Bernard reimagined the allegory of the Bride and Bridegroom. The Song’s wine, oil, and breasts became subsumed within an exegetical strategy. Oil constituted a way of knowing God. Wine evoked Christ’s redemptive blood, symbolically imbibed during the Eucharist. The breasts that are better than wine (Song of Songs 1:1) connoted the spiritual substance with which preachers nourished their congregants.28 For religious women, the blending of erotic and sacred elements into spiritual matrimony demonstrates how they construed mysticism as relational. Within this schema, dancing bodies interlocked with grace and fluidity, exemplifying the perfect partnership. The Rothschild Canticles, for instance, employs a dance motif to illustrate the parable of The Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matthew 25:1-​13) (figure 5.3).29 The artist separates the five wise virgins, those

Figure 5.3  The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Rothschild Canticles, Flanders, c. 1300 Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS. 404, folio 30 recto

Partnering Divinity  149 who brought oil for the lamps, from the five foolish ones who neglected to fuel their lamps. Christ the Bridegroom welcomes the vigilant virgins to celebrate his second coming. Their lit lamps seem to illuminate their backdrop of glistening gold. Barred from the wedding ceremony, the imprudent ones tumble down the stairway, confronted by a demon armed with a lance. Art historian Jeffrey Hamburger emphasizes the secular style of the dancers along the top register representing the heavenly court.30 The trio of dancing couples expresses the arousing effects of bridal mysticism and approximates the reunion of Christ and the faithful at the end of time. The validation of women’s dancing on the part of male clergy departs from earlier condemnations of nuptial festivity. In his sermons, John Chrysostom (d. 407) lamented that weddings, which should be modest, sober celebrations, have degraded into satanic pomp and drunken debauchery. In his observation, marriages resemble Greek comedies and pagan mysteries more than any Christian rite.31 An anonymous eleventh-​century sermon argues that marriage dances are impious, reasoning that biblical couples (e.g., Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and the daughters of Laban) did not dance at their weddings like the impudent brides of his day.32 Interestingly, pastoral texts by beguine supporters echoed these austere sentiments. Jacques de Vitry, as my previous chapter noted, preached to young women that dance is diabolic and dancing women lead others to the devil.33 Thomas of Cantimpré’s Book of Bees, also noted earlier, contains stories of young women who died suddenly after indulging in caroles.34 The Ci Nous Dit (What This Story Tells Us), another pastoral work discussed earlier, alludes to the depravity of wedding dances. Referring to the marriage at Cana (John 2:1-​11), the author states that Jesus went to the wedding but did not dance.35 From the perspective of dance polemic, these texts indicate the subversiveness of bridal mysticism. Female mystics themselves were well aware of the dangers of dance. Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179), elsewhere a pioneer of liturgical choreography, urged her sisters not to follow the example of the dancer who acts like a whore. Hildegard’s vocabulary (saltatrix) recalls Salome, the infamous seductress.36 In their own writings and exchanges with their confessors, late medieval nuns internalized the apparent slippage between dancing and feminine vice. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231) commanded another woman to cut off her long, flowing hair, reasoning that thereafter “she shall no more, because of her hair, go to dances, or carols, or haunt such vanities.”37 Franciscan tertiary Margaret of Cortona (d. 1297) disclosed to her confessor that she had seen Satan dancing with great joy (cum magna lætitia saltantem).38 When Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) meditated on her sins, Christ reminded her of the sufferings he underwent for her sake: “For the sins of your feet, vain running and dancing [choreando vane] and loose walking about for pleasure, my feet were bound and twisted and nailed on the wood of

150  Grace before Its Master the cross.”39 A howling multitude of dancers tried to lure Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) into their wanton revelry.40 Elsewhere, Catherine asks: “Would not people think a person truly stupid and mad who was condemned to death and went to execution singing and dancing [ballando], showing signs of mirth?”41 Dorothea of Montau (d. 1394), a mother of nine children turned hermit, observed how dancing girls were more concerned with coquetry than prayer. She herself found little joy in dancing, which made her feet bleed.42 The Benedictine nun Francesca of Rome (d. 1440)  substituted mendicancy for dancing, jewelry, and fineries. God rewarded her pious exhibitionism with lobsters, figs, and other edible gifts.43 Paradoxically, women developed negative attitudes toward dance while they themselves danced in mystical visions. Socioeconomic realities may help to explain the tense relationship these women had with the dancing body. The most condemnatory female mystics often came from noble or wealthy mercantile families. In their social circles, dance signified leisure and pleasure—​lifestyles in which lower strata could not indulge. Therefore, for high-​born religious women, abstaining from dance was a class-​conscious mode of self-​discipline. This devotional technique is most evident with royal mystics. The Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) describes how Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231), as a child princess with royal privileges, partook in games and dances with other girls. Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) indicates that Elizabeth recalibrated these activities into spiritual service. Resisting idleness, she withdrew early from the caroles and ring games and proceeded to enter the chapel. “Let’s let one round [unus circuitus] be enough, and give up the rest for God,” she told her companions.44 The Krumauer Codex, a picture book of Bible stories and saints’ lives, illustrates Elizabeth’s steps toward spiritual progression. In one sequence (see middle register), she dances with one foot, wishing to lead the others into the church (Hic dat fugam ad ecclesiam. Secundum ludum in uno pede saltans) (figure 5.4).45 The visionary Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373), also of royal lineage, equated dance with vanity. In her view, ephemeral movements corresponded to transient delights. Bridget’s mysticism informed her perspective on dance. In one of her visions, Christ reprimanded the ribaldry of secular dancing.46 In another encounter, Bridget transcribes the Virgin Mary’s disquisition on the subject: The Mother of God spoke to the bride, saying: ‘My daughter, I want you to know that where there is a dance [ubi est chorea], there are three things: empty joy, loud shouting, and meaningless toil. If someone enters the dance hall [domo choree] sorrowful and sad, then his friend, who finds himself in the midst of the joy of the dance [choree leticia] but sees a friend of his entering sad and gloomy, immediately puts aside his joy, leaves the dance, and condoles with his sorrowing friend. This dance is the world that is always caught up in anxiety,

Partnering Divinity  151

Figure 5.4  Elizabeth of Hungary and maidens, Krumauer Bildercodex, Bohemia, c. 1355–1360, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 370, folio 86 verso

for to fools [it] seems like joy. In this world there are three things: empty joy, frivolous speech, and useless toil, because a person who is in the midst of this worldly dance [mundi chorea] consider my toil and sorrow and then condole with me—​who left behind all worldly joy –​and would leave the world behind! At my Son’s death I was like a woman who had her heart pierced by five lances.’47

In this passage, Mary discourses on the moral significance of dance. From the perspective of a saint, dance constitutes a spiritual neurosis. Mary relegates a seemingly happy activity to false joy. It is a worthless expenditure that one

152  Grace before Its Master must abandon for spiritual labor. In mockery of the Mater dolorosa (sorrowful mother), dancers enact sacrilege. However, visual representations of Bridget’s sanctity temper the austerity of these sentiments. According to the legend, the Virgin Mary rewarded Bridget with this vision after pilgrimaging to Bethlehem. An Italian panel painting depicts Bridget, kneeling with her rosary, observing the holy family. Various orders of angels hover above them, and the Annunciation to the Shepherds appears on the right. Along the upper corners, golden angels form dancing clusters while others play the portative organ and gittern.48 Bridget perceives a sanctified image of dance. The birth of the savior infuses the world with grace. When dancing bodies revere Christ and Mary, they are without sin. Mystics from humble socioeconomic backgrounds experienced bolder dancing visions. The Austrian beguine Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315) imagined movement transformed into religious allegory. After discussing faith with her confessor, Agnes envisioned her own faith in the form of a beautiful young girl: [Faith was] clapping her hands, with a happy countenance she festively danced on the highest step around the altar of the Blessed Virgin.  .  .  . This virgin, however, wondered who this girl might be that danced so happily [exultans et tripudians] and moved so proudly. Then the girl told her, “I am your faith. The other virtues pledged themselves to humility; I alone, on the other hand, seized pride and glory for myself, because they belong to me. . . . I am proud and praiseworthy above all sects and false teachings which are putrid in the sight of God. I also enjoy truth and I possess it.”49

Although Agnes did not write her own visions, her visionary technique is sophisticated. By turning her faith—​an inner, theological virtue—​into a visible, corporeal entity moving before her, Agnes allegorizes a part of herself. The dance of Faith reconciles simplicity and exuberance, recalling King David and his vigorous saltatio humilis (humble dance). As the daughter of farmers, Agnes’s dance imagery may reflect her humble origins. Medieval iconography of the Annunciation to the Shepherds often shows peasants in a joyful jig (figure 5.5).50 For Agnes, envisioning dance functions as an authorizing strategy; it re-​signifies humbleness as holiness. A closer look at the dance of Faith reveals that Agnes’s visions could be submissive and subversive. (In fact, the first published edition of her vita was released in 1731 and was immediately subjected to censorship).51 The feminine allegory usurps male privilege by glossing superbia, or pride, one of the seven deadly sins that provoked countless theological commentaries. Heightening the sense of taboo, Faith enacts her dance on the altar steps, a sacerdotal space

Figure 5.5  Annunciation to the Shepherds from a book of hours, Northern France or Flanders, c. 1445, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 287, folio 64 verso

154  Grace before Its Master prohibited to women. In another exchange with her confessor, Agnes tries her hand at hermeneutics: The wound of the right foot signifies levity, not heaviness or agility. The wound of the left foot signifies the possession of joy and happiness, that we call the “three-​step” [tripudium]—​not that there is a “three-​step” or dance in the way this word denotes a festive event among us, but she could not offer another similarity.52

Agnes offers a theological commentary of Christ’s wounds. She identifies the wound of the left foot as the tripudium, a three-​step dance which, as explained earlier, was associated with the Roman military, the translation of relics, and liturgical performance (see ­chapters 2 and 3). Agnes’s confessor hints at her limited vocabulary, yet his own familiarity with the tripudium testifies to its regular use during feast days. Interestingly, Agnes’s revalorization of the left foot stands in counterpoint to the Church Fathers and theologians. From Ambrose to Aquinas, Christian thinkers ruminated over the moral significance of feet. The foot, or the area where the serpent bites, marks residual sin that persists after baptism. Metaphors of the limping left foot (pedus sinister) signified the will lagging behind the intellect.53 By glossing the left foot as a dancing god, Agnes reconfigures sin as redemption. The daring inversions put forth by Agnes address gender relations. At one point, Agnes meets a deceased friar among a throng of resurrected dancing bodies: . . . . she saw friar Erlolf with an immensely large group of virgins as if he were leading a ring dance [quasi choream ducentem] and holding hands. . . . she saw countless virgins with friar Erlolf, who were all crowned with golden crowns, but were naked, and he appeared together with them, also naked and crowned. And that nakedness was not only not unchaste or disgusting to the eyes of the onlookers, but filled the heart of that virgin with great happiness, propriety, and joy.54

Despite the transgressive quality of this vision, Agnes is moved by the purity—​ not provocation—​of the dancers. Erlolf, her late mentor, appears to her as a celestial ringleader. Recovering pre-​lapsarian bliss, the nude dancing virgins exculpate the stain of Eve. Compared to earlier, high-​born saints, Agnes’s access to sacred dance is more privileged and direct. The life of Burgundofara (d. c. 655), a Merovingian noblewoman who became an abbess and saint, describes a nun named Gibitrude. On the threshold of death, she perceived a chorus of dancing virgins while two youths separated her soul from her body. Once airborne,

Partnering Divinity  155 Gibitrude encountered angels “dancing in delight.” The tribunal of the Merciful Judge, however, deemed her unprepared to experience heaven. She was re-​ embodied among the living for an additional three days.55 By contrast, beguines experienced the afterlives of dance before having to die. Agnes’ preview of paradise culminates with a vision of the Virgin Mary and her caroling coterie: “These all simultaneously circled the throne of the Blessed Virgin like a crown as if dancing a round-​dance [coronae et choreae circuibant quasi tripudiantes], well prepared, now advancing, now retreating, so that now these, then those came closer to the Blessed Virgin.”56 Hovering between presence and absence, mystical vision mirrors the progressive-​recursive motions of the cosmic dance. The interplay of proximity and mystery enabled Agnes to apprehend the Incarnation and Assumption. For all her questionable orthodoxy, in the end Agnes conceded that sacred dance issues forth from Mary, the ultimate sponsa Christi (bride of Christ).

Choreographing Intimacy: The (De)Privatization of Performance According to William James’s classic study on mysticism, mystical experience trumps all attempts at verbal communication. As James explains, “the subject of it [mystical experience] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”57 The Jamesian approach argues for the radical singularity of each mystical encounter. James championed the privatization of mysticism based on the assumption that individual experience is wholly unique and therefore resists interpersonal communication. In some ways, medieval mystics are comparable to James’s privatization of religious experience. Appropriating dance performance, women’s visions turned public display into private eroticism. Their mystical pas de deux anticipated or consummated their most intimate experiences of divine presence. Dance marked a state of interiority; it manifested the privileged, personalized moment of encounter. However, the fact that women wrote about their visions suggests that mysticism did not remain hermetically sealed. In this way, dance language overcame ineffability with its capacity for communication. Choreography, with its kinesthetic and embodied texture, is inherently relational. As dance studies scholar Susan Foster argues: Any notion of choreography contains, embodied within it, a kinesthesis, a designated way of experiencing physicality and movement that, in turn, summons

156  Grace before Its Master other bodies into a specific way of feeling towards it. To “choreograph empathy” thus entails the construction and cultivation of a specific physicality, whose kinesthetic experience guides our perception of and connection to what another is feeling.58

Similarly, for medieval women mystics, dance activated the transcription and transmission of extraordinary phenomena, thereby enabling an inter-​subjective register of mystical experience. In her Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead), beguine Mechthild von Magdeburg (d. c. 1282) imagined a partnership between God and her soul. Writing in Middle Low German (a northern German dialect), Mechthild stages the mystical union as a pas de deux of transcendence: “Young lady, [the young man says], my chosen ones have shown off their dancing [tantzen] to you. Just as artfully should you now follow their lead.” She says: “I cannot dance [Ich mag nit tanzen], Lord, unless you lead me. If you want me to leap [springe] with abandon, you must intone the song. Then I shall leap into love [so springe ich in die minne], from love into knowledge . . . beyond all human sensations. There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.”59

This passage begins with an invitation to the sacred dance. The Lord summons Mechthild’s soul to a rite of initiation. As she matriculated into the elect, Mechthild portrayed the tension between resistance and desire. Dynamic interplay depends on divine leadership from the prime mover. Situated within the mystical imagination, her dance charts the ascending gradations of humanity’s journey toward divinity—​from Minne (love) to gnosis to self-​annihilation. For many beguines, the sacralization of romance informed their devotional itinerary. In the poetry of Hadewijch of Brabant (d. 1248), mastering the art of love demands a spiritualized, disciplined form of courtly love: “But those wanting to revel with the beloved here, /​To dance in self-​seeking feeling, /​To kiss in self-​absorbed gratification, /​I tell them well in advance: /​Indeed they should grace themselves with virtues /​Or the tuition is lost on them.”60 Communicated through mobile imagery, this partnership transports the devotee along unforeseen epistemic avenues, awakening her mystical consciousness. Mechthild’s vision continues with intensified eroticism. The couple’s pairing conflates gender conventions found in secular courtship and spiritual marriage. The young man (i.e., Christ) commends his beloved (i.e., Mechthild’s soul) in her performance of praise.61 Fatigued from dancing, the young lady then goes to refresh herself.62 After drinking wine with him in a secret chamber, Mechthild removes her clothes. “Then,” writes Mechthild, “he surrenders himself to her, and she surrenders herself to him.”63 The eroticization of dance effaces the distinction

Partnering Divinity  157 between self and other, materiality and spirituality, and man and woman. In its dramatic unfolding, this kinesthetic partnership conveys Mechthild’s penetration into the radical otherness of the sacred. Disembodied dancing bodies express the fleeting moment of indwelling. In this way, Mechthild’s choreography realizes the archaic mysticism of Pseudo-​Dionysius (fifth or sixth century): “Eros is eminently a power of unifying, binding, and joining. . . . It is a power which conjoins equals in communion with one another.”64 Mystical dance is the great equalizer; it produces an anagogical interpretation of the two becoming one flesh. Couched in sexual metaphors, Mechthild’s words indicate a marriage between dance and spirit that simulates spiritual intercourse with the divinity. Contrary to William James’s claim that mystical experience is nonverbal, beguine spirituality was inextricable from language. Recreating her communion with God, Mechthild shows how, as scholar Frederick Streng has argued, language can induce mystical experience.65 Privacy foregrounds Mechthild’s visions; yet she employs dance-​writing as an instrument of mediation by which the text activates live presence. Occupying a communicative register of experience, mystical dance presupposes transmission and translation. The use of the German vernacular contributes further to the aura of intimacy, increasing the reader’s familiarity with God. Describing the ambulant virgins, martyrs, and preachers in heaven, kinesthesia deprivatizes Mechthild’s vision: “Thus does the throng of the three blessed bands go merrily forth into the presence of the Trinity, dancing finely in a circle [spilen . . . . in einem sussen reien]. Then toward them a threefold stream flows out playfully from God, filling their minds and hearts so that they sing the truth effortlessly with joy, as God had entrusted it to them.”66 Through the machinations of grace, movement materializes the exchange between human subject and divine entity. Just as God makes himself known to, and hidden from, the individual soul, so does cosmic choreography advance to, and recede from, the Godhead. This dialectical formula expands personal revelation into a broader theological commentary. Mapping the processual experience of paradise onto dancing bodies, Mechthild delivers her own version of perichoresis, a theological term for the movements of the Trinity. More specifically, it denotes the reciprocal movements of persons of the Trinity into each other. Steeped in Christian metaphysics, perichoresis (literally “dancing around one another”) conceptualizes the ontology of divinity and the nature of Christology.67 While theologians assumed that perichoresis surpassed human knowledge, Mechthild rendered it perceptible via kinesthetic empathy. “The Holy Spirit, too,” she writes, “shares its heavenly outpouring of love, enriching the blessed and so utterly satisfying them that they sing with joy, charmingly laugh and leap [springent] with measured step.”68 The sprightly partnering then proceeds with direct intellection. Gazing into the mirror of eternity (den spiegel der ewekeit), the human soul, as imago Dei (image

158  Grace before Its Master of God), understands the Trinitarian origin of creation. To better explain the interpenetration of Creator and creation, Mechthild invokes a metaphor of transparency: “The soul is formed in the body with human qualities but has a divine shimmer about it and shines through the body as radiant gold shines through pure crystal. . . . Just think what such movement is like [pruvent, was das varendes sie!”]69 In this spectacle of kinetic coruscation, the body radiates the essence of humanity. Indeed, mystical writings exploited the excessiveness of dance, translating esoteric mystery into a theater of grace. Mystics’ recontextualization of intimate and open spaces forged avenues for intersubjective experience. This achievement is perhaps best expressed in an historical anecdote, namely the founding of the Order of the Garter in 1348, which incidentally involved dance. According to the legend, King Edward III was dancing with his queen (or possibly his mistress), when a blue garter slipped from her leg and fell to the floor. In front of his mocking courtiers, Edward retrieved the object and placed it on his own leg. In this moment, ridicule changed into reverence, hence, the Order’s motto: “Shame be on whoever thinks evil of it” (Honi soit qui mal y pense). In medievalist C. Stephen Jaeger’s analysis, this shift from private to public sphere transformed an embarrassing faux pas into a gallant gesture. Disgrace became honor.70 Mystical dance demonstrated a similar inversion, whereby interior sentiment projected itself to the outside world. As detailed in their writings, women’s explosive choreography provided a context for communities to witness and validate mystics’ closeness to Christ. For beguines and nuns alike, excessive jubilation opened up a space for communicating mystical experience. Alongside eroticism, madness, and lovesickness, the jubilus comprised a common trope in visionary literature. The jubilus, or the overwhelming sensation of joy provoked by immense caritas (love for God), became synonymous with spiritual dancing in religious literature. The idea of the jubilus originated with the Psalms and their laudatory language. According to Augustine (d. 430), the jubilus denoted the vocal utterance of sound that occurs when a Christian bursts with exaltation.71 In the Late Middle Ages, the jubilus became increasingly embodied on the part of female mystics. Mechthild, in her account of the jubilus, mythologizes the origins of sacred dance. In one vision, the Virgin Mary explains to Mechthild how the soul was created in the jubilus of the Trinity: “[The Redeemer became the Bridegroom] in the jubilus of the Holy Trinity. When God could no longer contain himself, he created the soul and, in his immense love, gave himself to her as her own.”72 Mary proceeds with an exegesis of jubilus, linking it to the Fall, the Annunciation, and the Incarnation.73 Though received internally, the expansionist aesthetic of jubilus comprises the totality of Christian history.

Partnering Divinity  159 German sister-​books (Schwesterbücher) testify to a wide variety of jubilation. Produced in Dominican nunneries in the Teutonic provinces during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, these manuscripts feature devotional texts written by and for nuns. In her in-​depth study of sister-​books, scholar Gertrud Jaron Lewis provides numerous accounts of the jubilus.74 According to the sister-​books, German nuns integrated the jubilus into their liturgical practice and personal devotion. At the Gotteszell monastery, sisters reconfigured the jubilus as a hymn of praise. When sister Heilrade found herself overcome by celestial harmony (armonia celestis), “her soul, as it were, began to dance [or leap, salire] in her body.”75 For Eite von Holzhausen, a nun at Kirchberg, receiving the Eucharist unleashed “grace jubilus” (die genad jubilus), which punctuated her ascetic regularity with outbursts of joy, whereas Adelheit’s jubilus caused her to be “enraptured into paradise.”76 Musical harmony led Christine Ebner (d. 1356) to experience a jubilus of the heart.77 In her Büchlein von der Genaden Überlast (Little Book of the Overwhelming Burden of Grace), Christine devised a requiem jubilus that she performed on her deathbed: “Jubilate, meditate, /​Jubilate, contemplate, /​Jubilate, speculate, /​Jubilate, be at peace.”78 Sister Elisabeth von Kirchberg theorized the jubilus in terms of a surrender to God’s grace: One should know that whoever wants to come to the grace jubilus . . . must be completely free in heart and mind from all attachment to passing things and must have complete, uncontaminated purity. . . . But note what the grace jubilus is: It is a grace that is so immeasurable and great that nobody can hide it and yet nobody can fully describe it in its sweetness. It is so abundant that heart, soul, and mind, and all veins of the human being are inundated with ineffable sweetness so perfectly that no one is disciplined enough to contain oneself in this grace. Perfect love shines through in this grace with divine light. This is the jubilus.79

In this passage, Elisabeth explains the paradox of jubilus. Disciplined, yet spontaneous, it allows asceticism to act with abandon. Its grace is aesthetic and theological, oceanic and invisible.80 Such a sophisticated understanding challenges the modern assumption that dance is an “irreducibly visual” form of art.81 Transcribing their experiences involved a deprivatization of intimate sensations. The verbalization of dance publicized one’s interior spiritual state. The female dancing body signified a symptomatic response to intensified spirituality. For example, Mechthild von Waldeck’s bodily gestures indexed the motions of her soul.82 According to her hagiographer, beguine Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268) frequently publicized her fervor: “whether she willed it or not, her interior

160  Grace before Its Master jubilation of mind [iubilantes mens] would break out in some manifestation, and the mind’s inner jubilation would betray itself outwardly in laughing or dancing [tripudio] a gesture or some other sign.”83 During a vision, Adelheit von Hiltegarthausen led an earth-​shattering jubilus during a vision, in which she heard the music of the spheres (sie das firmamenten klanck horen): And there she was led to the rotation of the firmament, and from there came such sweet sound and music that it exceeded all senses. Later, when she came to, she told her intimate friends everything: If all the string music that this world could play and all the sweetness that anybody ever heard sounded together it would still not resemble that loveliest of sounds she had heard there.84

Adelheit’s jubilation assumed cosmic proportions at the hand of the prime mover. The shifting of tectonic plates created a sense of vertigo, and, eventually, a sensorial blackout. Typical of mystics, Adelheit emphasized the ineffability of her vision. Nevertheless, she attempted to convey the monumentality of the heavens by verbalizing movement and music. This passage demonstrates mystics’ inner and outer bodies. Acts of uttering effect the embodiment of affect, espousing corporeality to spirituality.85 The phenomenality of women’s visions often escalated into rapturous, extraordinary feats. Sister Adelheid Geishörnlin, a nun at Adelhausen, enacted vertiginous stunts. Teeming with spiritual delight, she bounced and turned like a spinning top around the altar, while others marveled at how she whirled (das si vff fůr und zwirbelet vmb den altar, vnd schoß ir das blůt ze munde vnd zů nasen vs).86 Nuns and beguines allegedly levitated, emblematic of the machinations of grace running through them. The airborne suspensions and ballerinaesque balances of Provençal beguine Douceline (d. 1274)  stunned onlookers. While levitating, “her feet would not be touching the ground except for her two big toes.” When “the strength of her amazing rapture” increased, her body rose further, so that “she would be the space of a person’s palm above the ground.” In the latter position, devotees could kiss the soles of her feet. In her ecstatic states, Douceline remained “completely transported in love.”87 At Gotteszell, sister Irmendraut experienced a curative form of elevation. Upon levitating to liturgical song, she descended onto the dancefloor, now bereft of illness: While the song was sung, this sick sister was kindled with such great joy that she stretched out her hands in a comely manner. And when the community saw that the sick sister was in such a state of tender divine grace, they ordered the chantress to continue singing loudly, until this sister became so deeply

Partnering Divinity  161 enraptured that she jumped off the pillow [where they had laid her] and into the middle [of their circle] with quick straight legs. And then, in the presence of the community, she danced so lovingly in God’s praise [trat sie so mynicklich in gotes lob] that all who saw and heard it felt longing and anguish for the joy that was so unknown to them.88

Irmendraut’s performance strengthened social solidarity while highlighting her unique spirituality. The other sisters had not achieved Irmendraut’s proximity to God. As dance spectators, however, they recognized her sanctity. Placed into narrative form, accounts of mystical dance recorded and ratified the varieties of religious experience. These instances of legitimation are most striking when women proved their sanctity to men. Upon falling asleep in the choir, Dominican nun Margareta Ebner (d. 1351) envisioned a group of heavenly beings clad in white. Margareta began chanting “Jesus Christ,” and they followed her. “From that I gained such grace and joy,” she remarked, “and I said, ‘We should dance.’ Then they answered, ‘We should dance [tancen] and eat and drink with one another.’ ”89 Margareta shared these experiences with her confessor, Henry of Nördlingen (d. 1356), who came to realize that she had surpassed him in grace. Henry identified Margareta as a mirror of divinity, whereas he compared himself to a piper to whose melody others danced better than he. In Henry’s estimation, Margareta helped him so that “he might be able to master the steps of the dance of a true life to the sweet piping of Christ.”90 Perhaps more audaciously, select nonvirgin mystics deployed dance motifs to redefine their sexuality. The English mystic Margery Kempe (d. 1438), who mothered at least fourteen children, expressed regret that she could not join the “maidens dancing merrily in heaven [maydenys dawnsyn now meryly in hevyn]”.91 In forgiveness, Christ responded: Daughter, you shall be right welcome. . . . I have told you before that you are a singular lover, and therefore you shall have a singular love in heaven. . . . And, forasmuch as you are a maiden in your soul, I shall take you by the one hand in heaven and my mother by the other hand, and so shall you dance in heaven [so schalt thu dawnsyn in hevyn] with other holy maidens and virgins.92

The image of maidens dancing with Christ in paradise granted women access to an elite, otherworldly realm. Typically, the chosen brides constituted an exclusive society, where they enjoyed close proximity to their celestial bridegroom. Attributed to Simone Marmion (d. 1489), an illustrated leaf depicts women in heaven adoring their holy husband, the sublime ringleader

162  Grace before Its Master

Figure 5.6  Virgins of Paradise, Simone Marmion, illuminator, Amiens, c. 1467–1470, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1975.1.2477, courtesy of Art Resource, NY

(fig. 5.6).93 Some don secular garb, while others wear the nun’s habit. Women and angels partake in communal activities, including reading, processing, and dancing. Margery offered her signature interpretation of this trope. Virginity is no longer fixed; one may recapture it within the flux of the dance.

Partnering Divinity  163 By choreographing intimacy, the bride of Christ reemerged as a malleable category of mystical experience.

Disciplines of Domination: Victimizing Mystical Dance The dance content described thus far paints a portrait of female mystics as empowered, radically creative devotees of Christ. However, underneath their apparent agency lies a darker profile of religious partnership. An examination of the politics of women’s writings and embodied religiosity indicates that dance also contributed to their subjugation by male figures—​namely clergy, God, and occasionally the devil.94 From the perspective of gender politics, the submissive status of female mystics in the Middle Ages resonates with professional dancers in recent times. In their study of Western classical dance, Judith Lynne Hanna, Ann Daly, and others have shown how ballet—​in technique, pedagogy, and performance—​ demolishes female autonomy. The traditional image of the ballerina exudes grace and strength. Her independence, however, is illusory. In practice, she submits to a disciplinary regime, rehearsing meticulously to acquire the idealized dancing body. The ballet choreographer is almost always a man. Like a puppet master, he engineers dance, manipulating dancers’ every move. He prepares them for the stage, where, even more aggressively, they will be subject to the male gaze.95 Medieval nuns and beguines experienced dance under comparable conditions. Through mysticism and penitential programs, mystical dancers displayed Christ’s dominance over their bodies. The hagiographic materials suggest that women danced involuntarily, as if they were victims of divine manipulation. Male clergy began to develop ambivalent views about these women. On the one hand, ecstatic spectacles offered visual signs of women’s holiness and humility. On the other hand, they insinuated ravishment or demonic possession lurking within women’s bodies. This final section traces the more disturbing side of mystical dance, charting the devolution from submissive brides, to phantom contortionists, to satanic carriers. Though framed as loving partnerships, the pas de deux between Christ and mystics did not always fit mainstream notions of gender equality. Mystical choreography prescribes specific gender roles, with Christ leading and the mystic following. A  thirteenth-​century devotional text presents Christ as the dancing master (Der Tanzmeister), the divine prototype who instructs the soul to move heavenward: “Jesus is the master of the dance /​Wisdom teaches him to prance, /​first to the left then to the right he sways, /​All dance, his teaching they obey.”96 In the anonymous Christus und die Minnende Seele (Christ and the Loving Soul), Christ the minstrel (Spielmann) addresses a feminized soul with

164  Grace before Its Master imperatives: “Leave off crying and praying /​Come, you must dance a roundel.”97 An illustration of this scene depicts the soul as a Dominican nun, whose dancing figure conforms to the drumming rhythms of Christ.98 Owned by a Dominican monastery in Constance, this same manuscript contains the writings of the Rhenish mystic Henry Suso (d. 1366). Interestingly, Suso’s own writings contain mystical dances emerging from penitential and courtly motifs.99 The fact that Suso promoted female spirituality enhanced the didactic function of these texts for women who traded worldly comforts for spiritual service.100 When Christ and the Loving Soul is coupled with Suso’s writings, a more subservient picture of spiritual partnership begins to emerge. In women’s visions, sacred dance could encode for, and emulate, Christ’s suffering. Transcribed into Latin by the Helfta nuns, Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber Specialis Gratiae (Book of Special Grace, late thirteenth century), frames dance as the Passion of Christ. The Virgin Mary appeared before Mechthild to give her a gold ring, which Mechthild in turn offered up to Christ. He then gave Mechthild a ring adorned with seven stones, corresponding to the seven joints of her finger. Christ proceeded to offer a spiritual exegesis of each joint. His exposition of the second joint animates the so-​called Dance of the Cross: In the second joint, remember how I led the dance [choream] after the banquet like a comely youth, when I fell to the ground three times as if I had made three leaps so mighty [tres saltus feci tam validos] that I was drenched in sweat and shed bloody drops (Luke 22:44). In that dance [chorea] I clothed all my fellow soldiers in triple garments, obtaining for them forgiveness of sins, satisfaction of souls, and my divine glorification.101

In this passage, Christ’s triple fall and rebound (saltatio triplex) correspond to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. The choreography of the Passion symbolizes the journey from suffering to salvation. Mechthild reenacts this dance as a visionary technique of imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ). Thereafter, Mechthild felt pain on her ring finger that made her reflect on Christ’s suffering for her sake. Her conflation of nuptial and painful motifs reflects the mystic’s compulsion to replicate Christ’s initiative. The English mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349) echoed a similar sentiment. Out of love for humanity, Rolle explained, Christ took up the cross to redeem us. Thus, “love precedes the dance, and gives the lead (amor preit in tripudio, et coream ducit).” Christ’s leadership imparts an alternative view of religious partnership. As Rolle concludes, “in truth, it can be said love dances first in a ring (loue ledeth þe rynge); /​what him so low has laid, if not love, was no thing.”102 Mystics’ imagination viewed Christ as both ringleader and victim. Women’s fixation on the Passion morphed into corporal discipline. In visionary literature, women’s performance of penitential rituals gave

Partnering Divinity  165 heavenly beings dominion over their bodies. God the Father subdued his spiritual daughter, Marie d’Oignies, with the whip of discipline (disciplinae flagello subdidit). Elisabeth of Schönau (d. 1164) received five lashes from an angel. He then implored her to write things down that were revealed to her rather than hide them. God informed Mechthild von Magdeburg that her life was sanctified precisely because the switch never left her back. Bridget of Sweden reports being whipped with a rod by an angel.103 For the widow-​turned-​nun Helen of Udine (d. 1458), dance deserved punishment: “Thirty-​three stones I put in the soles of my shoes because I have so often offended God with my leaping and dancing [saltando ac tripudiando] . . . . I flagellate my body for the impious and carnal pleasures with which I indulged during my marriage and out of regard for my Lord who was whipped at the post for me.”104 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, female mystics cultivated an interrelationship between dance and humility. Mechthild von Magdeburg devised ways to exercise her humility through dance. When God asked her to dance with him in heaven [himmelreigen mit dir tretten], she responded:  “O wretched lame dog that I am, I would also shuffle along with you.” Although Mechthild wrote her visions, she stressed that only her confessor, not an “earthbound fool,” could decipher them.105 Gertrude of Helfta (d. c. 1302), a highly literate nun, emphasized her unworthiness when communing with God. In her own words, she juxtaposed the abundance of Christ’s mercy with the depths of her dejection: Now as time passed, most wretched, unworthy, and grateful of creatures that I am, I began to lose the taste for these graces which should make heaven and earth continually dance [tripudio] for joy, rejoicing that you, from your infinite height, should graciously descend to my extreme lowness, you, o Giver, Renewer, and Preserver of all good things, aroused me from my torpor and received my gratitude.106

Women’s self-​effacing tactics rendered their visions all the more astonishing in the fulfillment of New Testament inversions (including Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and Mary’s Magnificat):  the low shall become high and the high shall become low. For beguines and female saints, the vita disciplina (disciplined life) could be rewarded with dance. At Adelhausen, sister Adelheid von Brisach, for example, regularly missed Friday morning mass, since every Thursday evening she contemplated the Passion so diligently that she awoke the next day paralyzed and ill. “For that the preachers punished and reprimanded her,” this sister-​ book recounts, “and she was accused of being a heretic (und angesprochen für ein ketzerin)” Nevertheless, Adelheid garnered a popular following:  “Then

166  Grace before Its Master she left the chapter in a happy mood, dancing and singing [springende vnd singende]:  Laudate Dominum omnes gentes [Psalm 116, Vulgate]. And all the young children who were in the monastery ran after her and helped her sing.”107 As a result of meditatio Christi (meditation of Christ) dance authorized Adelheid’s sanctity. For the nuns of Unterlinden and Engeltal, the Virgin Mary or King David allegedly appeared beside sisters’ deathbeds. About to expire, Sophie von Rheinfelden erupted in an intoxicating jubilus, “the entire community of sisters came to see with amazement this blessed sister dancing and singing the psalms at the threshold of death.”108 David’s harp exuded an Orphic, trancelike effect on the liminal anima (soul). The co-​presence of Psalmist, Psalms, and the three-​step dance lent a ludic flavor to penitence at the hour of death. As one dying sister exclaimed: “I will not die until King David comes to play my soul out of my body with the tunes of his harp.”109 With Clare of Assisi (d. 1253), ascetic discipline made her into a martyr. As expressed in the Legenda Versificata Sanctae Clarae Assisiensis (Versified Legend of Saint Clare), her severe regimen served as a precursor to celestial jubilation: Clare, cultivator of chastity, delights the heavenly citizens. . . . Mortification of the flesh makes her an equal with the martyrs, the emblems of virginity giving her that dignity of being among the virgin dances [Ipsam virgineis dignam dant esse choreis].110

The beguine known as Christina the Astonishing (d. 1229)  emerged as the penitential dancer par excellence. Though she died young, God revived Christina so that she could undergo spiritual labor on behalf of other Christians. As a holy zombie, Christina performed miraculous stunts that defied the laws of physics and the limits of human anatomy. Recorded by her hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, Christina’s choreography featured bodily contortions and wild gesticulations.111 When infused with the grace of contemplation, Thomas likened her to a hedgehog (instar ericei conglobatum corpus redibat ad formam)—​at one moment all rolled up, at another, stretched and straightened.112 When Christina discussed Christ with her fellow sisters, she would whirl so violently from being ravished by the spirit (rapiebatur a spiritu), that her limbs became indistinguishable.113 Given her excessive spectacles, Christina was at first a questionable figure. Members of her cult believed her to be an instrument of God. Other members of the community mocked and ridiculed her. And some onlookers trembled in horror. Christina’s family initially mistook her sanctity for lunacy. When they tried to tame her through confinement, divine intervention came to her aid: “One night when the divine Spirit came upon her, the chains

Partnering Divinity  167 with which she was bound were loosed and . . . she walked around the cellar and danced [tripudians], praising and blessing him.”114 Christina’s movements were not impelled by as much freedom as a prison break would imply. As scholar of religion Ann Taves argues, even the strangest phenomena are never raw or unmediated; they are always embedded within a larger discourse. However extraordinary, they are fraught with cultural assumptions and remain inextricable from their original contexts.115 The ecstasy, rapture, and trance that enlivened mystical dancers were not immune from political motivation. The motif of ecstasy (from ex-​stasis, literally standing outside of oneself) provides a rhetorical frame for dance to modify gender. From the medieval male perspective, women—​classified as fragile, unlearned, carnal, and unfit for the priesthood—​could not acquire spiritual gifts without surpassing their vice-​ridden bodies. Religious women emphasized their feebleness, illiteracy, and foolishness as strategies to legitimate their visions within a male-​ dominant Church. Tempered by ecstasy and trance, the extraordinary visions of Elisabeth of Schönau allowed her to decode esoteric wisdom and utter prophecy in Latin.116 (Even Hildegard von Bingen, an exceptionally learned mystic, used a similar trope).117 Christina’s out-​ of-​ body and near-​ death experiences helped validate her miracles. Throughout the text, Thomas tempers her eccentricity, insisting that her body is the instrument of divine—​not individual—​autonomy. To be considered sacred, Christina’s body must work in the service of orthodoxy. By interceding on behalf of the inhabitants of purgatory, her public gymnastics upheld Church doctrine: When one of the townspeople died whom she knew in spirit to be damned for his sins, she wept and twisted herself and bent herself backwards and bent and re-​bent her arms and fingers as if they were pliable and had no bones [ac torquebat et retorquebat se, curvabatque se ac incurvabat, et recurvabat brachia ac digitos suos, velut si sine ossibus essent mollitie flexibiles] . . . . But for those who died and were destined to be saved, she danced so joyfully [tanto tripudio resultabat] that it was a great marvel to see her so happy.118

Concurrent with the development of purgatory and penitential theology, Christina’s spirituality focused on saving sinners. In this way, her salvific tumbling counteracted any resemblance to Salome, the saltatrix (female dancer) who caused the murder of a saint. Thomas fashioned Christina’s dancing body as a technology of intercession. Christina was so effective that God revived her three times, and she became more miraculous with each iteration. Near the end of her life (i.e., third death), Christina’s phantasmic figure was so crystalline that her body barely cast a shadow and could pass through walls.119 The transparency

168  Grace before Its Master of her form mirrors the integrity of her spirit. Her complete surrender to physical labor signifies her total obedience to Christ. Christina exemplifies how partnering divinity could constitute a discipline of domination. Women’s passivity toward divine otherness could go too far, resting precariously between carnality and spirituality. The term raptus, from the Latin verb rapere, appears frequently in women’s mystical treatises and hagiographies, as well as secular romances and legal texts. In the Middle Ages, raptus acquired diverse meanings, including abduction, seizure, ravishment, and rape.120 The term’s inherent ambiguity gives an unsettling view of mystical marriage, reframing partnership as victimization. In classical and Judeo-​Christian accounts of raptus, the inclusion of dance heightens women’s vulnerability to abduction. Late medieval manuscripts visualize the rape of the Sabines as a courtly farandole (chain dance) that degrades into the seizure of women.121 The biblical book of Judges describes how the daughters of Shiloh, when dancing at a religious festival, became victims of abduction (rapere) when the Benjamites took them as their wives (Judges 21:19–​25).122 The Psalter of King Louis contains an illustration of this scene (figure 5.7).123 Celebrated for his penitence and eventual sainthood, Louis IX (d. 1270) may have reflected upon this image to cultivate empathy for the lowly. (Or perhaps, more sinisterly, biblical examples of abduction fueled his crusading ideology). Troubled by this passage, medieval commentators tried to deflect some of the blame onto women. An anonymous preacher glosses this story to demonize and feminize dance: “But hear what may be read in the last chapter of the book of Judges, how the sons of Benjamin hid themselves in the vines and when they saw the daughters [of Shiloh] come out dancing caroles they sprang out and snatched them as wives for themselves; thus young demons and young girls do in caroles.”124 The Christianized allegory of the unicorn provided a mythical rendering of raptus that influenced gender relations. Originating from the Physiologus (a Christianized work of animal lore, c. second century), the unicorn became a symbol for Christ, the Passion, or the Incarnation. The virgin who tames the beast represented the Virgin Mary, and her exceptional act of mothering divinity. The hunters of the unicorn signified the Old Law (the Jews) that defied the Church.125 As Jeffrey Hamburger observes, the Marian cycle of the Rothschild Canticles contains unusual unicorn iconography (figure 5.8).126 On the top register, a naked woman dances suggestively before the unicorn. The lower register depicts the capture and killing of the unicorn, revealing the dancer’s insidious intent.127 Transferred to tapestries and caskets for married couples, the unicorn’s horn reemerged as a phallic symbol, reminding young brides of the conjugal debt. Similarly, in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession, c. 1389), dance, often paired with seduction or rape, signifies the dangerous folly of love.128 With all of the above examples, dance heightens women’s vulnerability

Partnering Divinity  169

Figure 5.7  Abduction of the daughters of Shiloh from the St. Louis Psalter, Paris, thirteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. lat. 10525, folio 66 recto

to men’s sexuality. The cultural encoding of raptus was multiform and ambiguous, ranging from misogyny to male guilt. Congruent with these sources, the language of rapture became increasingly violent for certain medieval mystics, suggesting an intensified spiritualization and eroticization of rape. For these women, encountering otherness could be violating, invasive, or even symptomatic of a demonic incubus. Dancing and lurking

Figure 5.8  Capture of the unicorn, Rothschild Canticles, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS. 404, folio 51 recto

Partnering Divinity  171 around the choir, the devil disrupted Christine von Stommeln (d. 1312) with adversarial threats while she slept and performed rituals.129 In her post-​Pentecostal ecstasy, Margaret of Cortona juxtaposed the joys of martyrdom with “our adversary [who] jumps about and claps his hands [and feet] like a dancer [saltem pedibus et manibus plaudens more histrionis chorizantis], and struts like a conqueror [raptoris] who returns from battle with prisoners.”130 Likening Satan to a war criminal, Margaret recasts dance as a sign of pillaging. As historians Dyan Elliott and Nancy Caciola have shown, women’s startling visions could be turned against them, in effect criminalizing their spirituality. Exorcist manuals and inquisitorial techniques inadvertently forged a resemblance between ecstatic dance and demonic possession; one could easily be mistaken for the other.131 Overseen by male clergy, these processes of discernment unleashed suspicious attitudes toward female spirituality. A late thirteenth-​century exempla compilation from Angers is indicative of this shift. This text, authored by an anonymous Dominican, includes a mock dialogue between a theologian and a beguine. The beguine caricatures their differences as follows: You talk, we act. . . . You inspect, we choose. . . . You glow, we take fire. You assume, we know. . . . You search, we find. . . . You sow, we reap. . . . You sing, we dance [Vous cantés et nous espringons] . . .  You taste, we savor.132

This passage juxtaposes and genders two types of knowledge. According to its logic, men are cerebral and contemplative, whereas beguines are physical and active. To male readers, the beguine is a satirical figure, boasting about her claim to divine revelation. Elite and popular culture alike debated rumors about the hypocrisy and lasciviousness brooding within beguinages.133 A  Flemish book of hours, for instance, contains dance imagery that suggests women’s spiritual ambiguity. Appearing below scriptural passages, a marginal nun lifts her skirts to a friar’s tune (figure 5.9).134 Her ecstatic posture perhaps indicates divine indwelling or, more likely, a fall from grace. Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose, c. 1275), a quest narrative of courtly love, created the allegorical characters Constrained Abstinence, a beguine, and False Seeming, her confessor. The disjuncture between what the characters appear to be, and what they are, tarnishes their spiritual partnership and degrades romance. The reader is left to decide who the beguine really is—​a pious virgin, a deflowered maiden, or a lusty wench.135 Misogynist renderings of women associated their

Figure 5.9  Book of Hours, use of Maastricht, Liège, early fourteenth century, British Library Stowe MS. 17, folio 38 recto, © The British Library Board

Partnering Divinity  173 dancing with frivolity and sexual dalliance. Dance could threaten, rather than uphold, women’s religious integrity. By the late fourteenth century, the beguina benigna (kind beguine), now a victim of ridicule and interrogation, devolved into the beguina maligna (malicious beguine). * * * Despite medieval misogyny and the clerical critique of romance, courtly love evoked a quasi-​religious sensibility. In this way, courtly love was just as disciplined as the mystics who drew inspiration from it. Lovers embodied the project of courtly love by means of rules and conventions. One such convention was the carole, a secular dance form that refined and socialized noble bodies. As the next chapter reveals, dances of courtship lent a ritualistic dimension to romance, sacralizing the art of love.

6

Romancing the Dance This book has hitherto examined religious dances by analyzing biblical commentary, cultic worship, liturgical ritual, and mystical experience. In addition to sacred dance, the Middle Ages cultivated a rich tradition of secular dance. Medieval literature and its accompanying manuscript illustrations offer numerous examples of secular dancing, thus defying the popular assumption that Renaissance dance masters invented courtly dance. References to secular dance abound in medieval romances. Romance was a literary genre that wove stories of adventure, chivalry, and amorous pursuits. Most medievalists separate secular dance from sacred dance. Differing from past studies, this chapter demonstrates the overlap between the two manifestations. In love poetry and romance, dance functioned as a ritual, conferring a sacred aura onto courtliness and romantic love. One important source for medieval secular dance is Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), a literary work by two authors, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Rose contains the longest literary depiction of medieval social dance. Extant in over three hundred manuscripts, the Rose is considered the most celebrated romance of the Middle Ages.1 In the story, Amant, the Lover and protagonist, recounts a dream in which he falls in love with a fair Rose. Amant seeks counsel from many allegorical characters—​including Courtesy, Reason, Friend, Old Woman, Nature, Genius, and False Seeming—​to help win the Rose’s favor. Amor, the God of Love, accepts Amant into a special society of lovers. It is here, in the garden of Pleasure, where Amant learns how to love, and he does so by observing dancers and partaking in their dance. Following the advice of his interlocutors, Amant is able to seduce the Rose, and the romance ends with the conquest of the Rose. Despite the abundance of scholarship on Le Roman de la Rose, few studies have critically addressed the role of dance, and its social and religious implications, in this work. The first part of this chapter examines the contribution of Guillaume de Lorris, the Rose’s first author (4,058 lines, completed c. 1230). I offer a close reading of the Rose’s dance content alongside troubadour lyric, Arthurian literature, and dance-​songs (poetry set to music, song, and dance). As my analysis shows, dance in romance signified aristocratic values, the gift economy, and enchantment, and, therefore, sacralized the project of courtly love. I argue that secular dance

Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

Romancing the Dance  175 lent a religious sensibility to romance, authorizing elite identity through the ritual performance of courtly love. Second, I address the Rose’s sequel by Jean de Meun (17,724 lines, completed c. 1270). Jean was known for his university erudition and satirical tone. In many ways, Jean’s Rose formed a counterpoint to that of Guillaume de Lorris. As this chapter shows, Jean coopted the Rose’s dance content to criticize the project of courtly love. Jean’s moralized approach reerected the binary between sacred and secular dance. Dancing is legitimate in heaven, but earthly dance—​however elegant it may seem—​works only to fulfill carnal desires. Jean underscored the folly of earthly dance by emphasizing the slipperiness of language. His use of dance exposes the limits of representation and calls into question the ethics of romance. The third and final section turns to Dante Alighieri (d. 1321), who produced one of the many afterlives of Le Roman de la Rose. Emerging from the Dolce Stil Novo (sweet new style) school of poetry, Dante’s Fiore (The Flower) revived the Rose in the Italian vernacular. The Fiore readapted the romances of Jean and Guillaume into 232 sonnets.2 My analysis focuses on Dante’s Paradiso, which I consider yet another iteration of the Rose. In its poetic rendering of a journey through paradise, the Paradiso instructs readers on how to love. Of particular interest to this chapter is the Commedia’s dance content. Just as Amant encountered the carole (secular dance) of lovers in the garden, Dante witnessed the dance of the blessed in paradise. Unlike the Rose, the Paradiso concludes not with sexual conquest, but with salvation. While Jean de Meun fashioned dance as a slippery signifier, Dante deployed dance to resolve the limits of (vernacular) representation. The poem’s choreographic texture frames the progression from fin’amor (fine love) to caritas (divine love), both fulfilling and surpassing the project of romance. As this chapter reveals, dance in romance, with its evocation of ritual, enchantment, and transcendence, effected a simulation of the sacred.

From Romance to Ritual: Guillaume de Lorris and the Carole of Love Le Roman de la Rose is set against the cultural backdrop of courtly love. As a technique of socialization and a rhetorical expression, courtly love was essentially a refined practice of courtship. Courtly love grew out of medieval love lyric. In the twelfth century, the troubadours of Southern France coined the concept of fin’amor (fine, perfect, or true love). Composing poetry in Occitan (the southern French dialect), the troubadours found ways to articulate the attributes and experience of fin’amor.3 They represented love as an alternative religion in which the lover worshipped an ideal, and often unattainable, lady (domna).4

176  Grace before Its Master Troubadour poetry developed a repository of rules and conventions pertaining to courtly love, including cortezia (courtliness), joi (joy), joven (youth), mezura (self-​discipline), pretz (merit), riqueza (richness), and amor de lonh (love from afar). The poems deified love with their invocations to Amor, the God of Love.5 The troubadours and trouvères (poets who wrote in the Northern French dialect) contributed to secular dance by composing dance-​songs and developing specific dance terminology.6 When Guillaume wrote Le Roman de la Rose in the early thirteenth century, the conventions of courtly love were firmly in place. His Rose embraces the phenomenon of fin’amor. In his text, dance embodies the values and conventions of courtly love. In doing so, it externalizes the interiority of desire.7 The kinetic texture of Guillaume’s Rose challenges traditional scholarship on medieval romance. Most scholars identify romance as a fixed, written genre, as opposed to troubadour poetry, which poets performed orally before members of the court.8 Despite Guillaume’s use of a dream-​vision, crystallized allegories, and octosyllabic rhymes, dance infuses his romance with liveliness. Presenting the phenomenality of dancing bodies, the Rose re-​invests medieval literature with kinesthetic presence. In Guillaume’s Rose, dance cannot be reduced to marginal ornament. It generates animacy, narrative progression, and character transformation over the course of nearly 600 lines (ll. 719–​1291). The text abounds in dance terminology: dancer, baler/​bal, tumber, espringuer, jugler, tresque—​but the carole (also spelled as querole) is the most frequent dance form.9 In this section, I investigate how the carole functions as a ritual that sacralizes courtly love and elite identity. My analysis diverges from the influential “from ritual to romance” argument, which traces the religious origins of medieval romance. Popularized by Jessie Weston’s book, From Ritual to Romance (1920), scholars of this school of thought have tried to identify the religious roots of Arthurian legend.10 Departing from Weston, my reading of Guillaume’s Rose demonstrates how dance transforms romance into ritual. In other words, dance instilled a religious aura into an otherwise secular genre. Operating within a gift-​economy, dance in romance circulated the courtly virtues of richness, generosity, and sincerity, all the while supporting the exclusivity of an elite society. Literary depictions of dance proffered a ritualized extension of fin’amor, reenchanting romance with the sacralization of secular ideals. In Guillaume’s Rose, Sir Pleasure (Deduiz) and Lady Joy (Leesce, related to the Latin laetitia) initiate the carole d’Amor, or the dance of the God of Love. The carolers’ movements impress Amant: These people of whom I speak had begun to dance [a la querole], and a lady was singing to them, whose name was Joy. She could sing well and pleasantly, and

Romancing the Dance  177 no one could have made the refrains sound better or more agreeable. Singing suited her wonderfully, for her voice was clear and pure, and she was by no means clumsy, but knew well how to move her body when dancing, to stamp her feet and have fun . . . the dancers move[d]‌and. . . . tread daintily, executing many fine steps and turns on the fresh grass. . . . They knew well how to sway in the dance. I cannot describe it to you but as long as I could have seen those people thus exerting themselves in the rounds and dances [de queroler et de dancier], I would have wanted to move.11

In this passage, the allegory of Joy summons her noble companions to a carole. The carole was the most popular dance form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Most scholars concur that the carole was a group dance performed in a circle (or occasionally in a line), in which the dancers held hands and stepped to the left, accompanied by song and instrumental music. The carole was a dance reserved for the nobility, and was known for its elegant restraint.12 Illustrations in Rose manuscripts offer much choreographic variation. The dance iconography ranges from ring, to processional, to couple dances (bassedanses), to a combination of these forms, perhaps mirroring the dance styles that were most fashionable at the time of a particular manuscript’s commission.13 As Guillaume’s description implies, the carole followed a call-​and-​response format. The character of Joy announces the refrains (refrais or rotruenges) from the center of the circle. She is the lead caroler who ushers in the courtly coterie. In carole performance, the vuelta (or volta, the turning line) rhymed the last line of each strophe with the refrain. The central lady’s vuelta signaled to the other dancers when it was their turn to respond.14 As the famous Carmina Burana (Songs from Benediktbeuern, c. 1230) attests, “Now Dione’s /​joyful dance /​responds to their songs /​in eager counterpoint [Iam Dionaea /​laeta chorea /​sedulo resonat cantibus horum”].15 This dynamic texture was characteristic of dance-​songs (e.g., rondeau, virelai, ballade), and exemplifies how medieval dance complicates the modern categories of dance, music, and poetry.16 While the Rose presumes that readers would recognize the carole as part of their daily lives, in the narrative, dance transports Amant to an otherworldly sphere of existence. From Amant’s perspective, the carole is so noble that it seems like something out of paradise. He describes the dancers as celestial beings: “when I saw them I could not tell where they might have come from, for in truth they seemed to be winged angels [anges empenez]: no man living ever saw such fair folk [bele gent]”.17 Rose manuscript illustrations often depicted the God of Love with wings, causing him to resemble Cupid or an angelic being.18 Additional layers of performance contribute to the sense of wonder. Minstrels play an air from Lorraine, a place from which, according to local knowledge, the best dancers came.19 Ladies toss tambourines and catch them on one finger,

178  Grace before Its Master inserting into the dance playful suspense.20 As a spectator, Amant is entranced by the dance; just watching the others impels his desire to move. Guillaume’s kinesthetic vision allows Amant to deliver a variation of troubadour tornada (turned stanza), reflecting back on himself.21 Drawing in the spectator/​reader, the carole opens a space for empathetic engagement. Placed within the garden of Pleasure, the carole in the Rose constitutes a ritual for aristocratic lovers. Indeed, courtship undergirds the relational texture of the carole. In the Rose and other medieval romances, dance offered an acceptable mode of socialization between men and women. (In fact, some dance historians contend that partnered dances began in the Middle Ages).22 In terms of gender, dance was both unifying and differentiating. Medieval romances describe how young ladies (danseles, puceles) and young men (bachelers, valets, esquires) encounter one another in refined roundelays. Usually they enacted the same choreography. Occasionally the ladies moved delicately while the sprightly lads exerted themselves with jumping or fencing.23 Dancing inculcated class-​specific gender norms. Caroles could have a masculinizing effect, delineating the ranks of knighthood and squires’ roles. The famous knight Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356) stated that every young knight of any worth should learn to dance, alongside jousting, singing, and other noble activities (Il ne se doivent lasser de jouer de jouster, de parler, de dancer et de chanter en compaignie de dames et de damoiseles). Through dancing, Geoffroi reasoned, the knight acquires social graces and military skills.24 Medieval society expected noblewomen to dance beautifully. A medieval gloss on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love, 2 ACE, a classic text to which both Rose authors refer) exclaims that the city of Paris is teeming with dancing girls around the church of St. Germain des Près. According to the Dominican preacher Guillaume Peraldus (d. 1271), old women gave their dancing clothes to their daughters, just as sick soldiers lent their arsenal to comrades lest they forfeit the fight.25 Interestingly, the Old French danse/​ danser/​dancier may be related to dansele (young woman) or danseler (to caress), as some philologists believed that early caroles were performed by women to inspire the love of men.26 The relationship between carole and courtship extends to acts of marriage and procreation. Prior to the professionalization of dance that we recognize today, medieval dance was a skill transmitted primarily through an effect of courtship: children. Parents encouraged their children to learn the carole, as Peraldus and other preachers remarked.27 Material culture echoes the cross-​generational transmission of medieval dance. The cover of an ivory casket, for instance, depicts courtly dancers, resembling those described in medieval romances. These luxury objects often served as wedding gifts and were passed down as family heirlooms.28 Secular dance, as a ritual of courtship, could prefigure the sacramentality of marriage and facilitate the continuity of the bloodline.

Romancing the Dance  179 Beyond the intricacies of courtship, the carole wielded significance pertaining to class distinction. In Guillaume’s Rose, the sacralization of elite identity becomes especially evident with the carole of Lady Courtesy (Courtoisie). Courtesy invites Amant to dance: I stood watching the dance [la querole] until a very mirthful lady noticed me: it was Courtesy, a worthy and gracious lady whom God preserve from harm! Courtesy then called out to me and said “Fair friend, what are you doing there? Come here if you please and join in the dance with us [A la querole, s’il vos plet”]. Without delay or hesitation I joined in the dance [a la querole]; I was not too embarrassed, for I can tell you that I was very pleased when Courtesy asked and commanded me to dance [Et me dist que je querolase], being very eager and anxious to dance[queroler], if only I had dared.29

Courtesy’s invitation to dance is a pivotal moment in Guillaume’s Rose. As a carrier of noble values, Courtesy catalyzes Amant’s rite of passage into the society of Love. In Western medieval culture, the idea of courtoisie emerged from Ottonian and Carolingian bishops residing at court who cultivated elegant manners (morum gratia). In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Provençal troubadours promoted their own variant of courtesy, or cortezia, which encapsulated the ethical system of fin’amor. Cortezia referred to a repertoire of rules, conventions, and discipline. As the troubadour Folques de Marseille (d. 1231)  once wrote, “courtliness is nothing else but measure.”30 In romances, courtesy encapsulated the noble values of refinement, moderation, generosity, and love.31 By summoning Amant into the carole, Courtesy hails him into subjecthood.32 Through an Althusserian lens, Courtesy serves as an interpellating device, positioning Amant within the ideology of courtly love.33 A Rose manuscript illustrates Courtesy dancing and gesturing toward Amant (figure 6.1). 34 In the carole of Courtesy, Amant makes the passage from dance spectator to dance participant. As a dancer, Amant partakes in the ritualization of courtly love. The carole’s ability to shape courtliness reflects the role of bodily comportment in medieval class consciousness. In the Middle Ages, courtly choreography shaped the body into an ultracivilized carrier of propriety. In conjunction with knightly training, dance was a means to achieve social stratification through techniques of the body. Moreover, as medievalist Jean-​Claude Schmitt has demonstrated, the medieval body signified an individual’s intrinsic qualities; it forged an indexical relationship between bodily articulation and personhood. According to Schmitt, an “ethics of gesture” codified one’s physical comportment and allowed the body to reveal his/​her moral value. In the medieval and early modern periods, the upwardness of the body connoted courage, valor,

180  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.1  Courtesy invites Amant into the carole, from Le Roman de la Rose, French, mid/​late fifteenth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Douce 195, folio 7 recto

and fortitude. Conversely, failing to execute verticality signified both physical deformity (as in the hunchback) and moral turpitude (such as laziness or hypocrisy). This system privileged modestia (modesty) as the most valued ideal, exhibited through modest or moderate gestures.35 Through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory, dancing shaped consciousness prescriptively, or from the outside in, instructing its subjects to accept their learned (but profoundly habitual) mannerisms as ontological givens.36 The carole engaged in these processes, differentiating the noble body from the nonnoble body and portraying nobility as naturally superior. From a sociological perspective, the carole was no mere diversion; it realized the stratifying potential of courtesy.

Romancing the Dance  181

Figure 6.2  Amant dances with Richesce, from Le Roman de la Rose, French, c. 1380, British Library Yates Thompson MS. 21, folio 9 verso, © The British Library Board

As Guillaume’s narrative continues, Amant reinforces his courtly identity with his subsequent dance partners:  Richesce (Wealth), Largesse (Generosity) and Franchise (Sincerity) (figures 6.2 and 6.3).37 They wear sumptuous garments and demonstrate gentle manners, indicative of their elite status. The interpersonal nature of the carole helps animate the allegorical characters and circulate aristocratic values. In doing so, it transforms romance into a rite. Amant’s initiation into the society of lovers is complete when he becomes the God of Love’s vassal and receives his commandments. Amor instructs Amant that, “a young man ought to learn. . . . how to dance [dancier], for in this way he will win great advancement.”38 Being a good dancer makes one a good lover. Mirroring the feudal relationship between the God of Love and the Lover, Amant assumes the discipline of dance to devote himself to Amor.39 Becoming a vassal of Love demands discipline and sacrifice. The God of Love rewards his devotees with richness and privilege. The Rose’s emphasis on richness does not revolve around money or materiality per se. Troubadour-​turned-​bishop Folques de Marseille used the word ric (rich) to transcend monetization. For a wealthy man, life without love renders him a pauper. By contrast, the love of one’s lady (domna) grants inner wealth in the form

182  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.3  Amant dances with Franchise, from Le Roman de la Rose, French, c. 1380, British Library Yates Thompson MS. 21, folio 11 recto, © The British Library Board

of joy.40 Consonant with the Rose, the thirteenth-​century Roman de Flamenca (Romance of Flamenca) describes the rich quality of a court dance: “Never in Brittany nor in France /​was held such a noble dance [tan rica danza].”41 Read literally, this scene implies that wealthy people are dancing. What is really at stake is the relationship between richness and generosity through feasting, gifting, and gesturing. In other words, dancing showcased a gift-​centered, as opposed, to a cash-​regulated, mode of exchange. As theorist Marcel Mauss has taught us, gifts reflect back on the giver, orchestrating the rhythms of reciprocity. In medieval Christianity, the valorization of the gift alluded to grace (gratia), the gift from God that is too great to be repaid.42 Channeling largesse and richness, the carole of Love simulates the motions of gratia. The Rose’s correspondence between gifting and dancing recuperates earlier medieval performance practices. Within the engraced realm of gifting, twelfth-​ century troubadours accepted the generosity of their patrons in the form of housing, banquets, and other favors. William Marshall, a knight known for his fondness of dancing, understood the social importance of generosity. Bestowing favors on his minstrel increased his powerful reputation, as the minstrel spread the rumor (reputation) and fama (fame) of his noble patron. In this context, gifts, not salaries, resounded in social value.43 The privileging of gift-​based culture coincided with the Church’s endorsement of almsgiving and other charitable acts

Romancing the Dance  183 and, conversely, its critique of entertainers who performed for profit.44 As musicologist Christopher Page has shown, criticism of popular performers increased in the thirteenth century, when monetary payments had largely replaced the earlier model of compensation based on largesse. For example, Thomas of Chobham (d. 1230) surmised that minstrels would abandon their trade if it ceased to be lucrative, whereas William of Auxerre (d. 1231) hinted that minstrels who did not embrace voluntary poverty were impious. Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) likewise defamed those who squandered money on minstrels. In 1286, the council of Ravenna attempted to prohibit payments to jongleurs by clerics.45 The so-​called last troubadour of Occitania, Raimon Vidal (d. 1252), expressed these unfortunate shifts in his poem Abril issa. In this work, the passage of April into May connoted the end of a golden age. Vidal speaks to the decline of gift and ceremony, of largesse and cortezia. He witnessed the breakdown of old ideals and the emergence of new performative paradigms, as artists appropriated mercantile methods.46 Against this historical backdrop, the carole reimagined a performative community of gracing and gifting. Its secularization of largesse entailed the sacralizaton of courtiers’ transcendent privilege. As the concept of elite privilege implies, the carole had as much to do with inclusion as it did with exclusion. Guillaume’s Rose highlights the exclusivity of fin’amor. Amant’s inclusion presupposes the exclusion of the non-​initiated. The very construction of the lovers’ garden alienates a group of allegorical vices, which are sedimented into stone reliefs around the garden’s wall. For instance, Amant describes the image of Tristece (Sadness) as “the sorrowful wretch . . . [who] had no interest in making merry, in dancing [queroler] or treading the measure . . . for joy and grief are opposites.”47 In troubadour terms, Tristece is a lauzengier, an enemy of love, and accordingly cannot partake in the carole. The garden likewise excludes Vielleice (Old Age) from the garden, and Rose illustrations show her as hunched over or handicapped. Evidently, the carole limits its membership to able-​bodied youths.48 Dangier (Rebuff, or Rejection), another character in the Rose, represents the arch-​nemesis of Love. Rose manuscript illustrations represent Rebuff as a stocky peasant or barbarous fool, either armed with a club or wildly gesticulating.49 In contrast, when Joy dances, she bears no resemblance to anything vileine.50 In Occitan, vilain referred to a base person or fool who opposes the lover/​courtier. The carole of Amor enforces the irreconcilable opposition between insiders and outsiders; it is an agent of social differentiation and exclusion. The carole’s reflection of class difference registered in the medieval imagination as categories of the sacred and the profane. The image of sacred and profane dancing became mapped onto noble and peasant bodies, respectively. The dances of lords and ladies took place in the courtly arena, a space of power and leisure.51 In contrast, peasants, as agrarian workers, were tied to land and labor. Literary

184  Grace before Its Master and visual representations of dance embodied the sacred (noble) and profane (peasant) binary, often exaggerating the difference between noble and non-​noble dancing bodies. The minnesang (German love poet) Neidhart von Reuenthal (d. 1250)  underscored the relationship between peasants and fertilization to derogatory effect. In Neidhart’s Veilchenschwank (Violet Prank), a knight finds the first violet of spring and prepares to present it to his lady. This does not go as planned since a stock peasant figure defecates on the flower, and afterward the villagers dance around it. This (mis)representation of peasant dancers marked their bodies with images of vilains and excrement. The polluting, uncontrollable peasant body opposed the gracious refinements of the noble body.52 In medieval France, the carole was so socially differentiating that it prompted dance historian Paul Bourcier to call it “the art of the caste.”53 The carole’s drive to sacralize nobility may also derive from the Rose’s thirteenth-​century socioeconomic context. The Rose appeared at a time when seigneurial society had undergone shifts. Under the earlier system of feudalism, the disparity between nobility and the peasantry was especially stark. The feudal system changed with the rising burgher classes. With their penchant for a cash (rather than gift) economy and social mobility, the merchants and bourgeois acquired wealth and developed values that diverged from those of the nobility.54 In this sense, the carole of Love functions as a vehicle of (re-​)enchantment. For displaced nobility, dance in romance mythologized courtly love. This myth allowed readers to relive an elitist fantasy. Romances created, rather than reflected, the chivalric utopia.55 Dance offered a way to represent and experience this fantasy. The carole’s quasi-​religious sensibility helped distinguish dance from other mundane activities. The association between dancing and “Maying,” or seasonal activities conducive to courtship, helps cast the carole as a rite. As the Carmina Burana exclaims, “Let’s dance the roundelay now, /​my lady. /​Let’s take joy in Maytime! [Springen wir den reien /​nû, vrowe mîn /​vröuwen uns gegen den meien”].56 In the Rose, the carole takes place during spring. Amant observes that “the birds assembled there [in the garden] . . . [were] merrily warbling Love’s dances [Les dances d’amors”].57 Exchanging floral wreaths (chapelets) during the carole, the dancers accentuate the connection between dancing, springtime, and courtship.58 Moreover, the garden carried a religious symbolism, in reference to the hortus conclusus (closed garden) of virginity, that is, the Virgin Mary. Rose illustrations could make the religious atmosphere more explicit. In its portrayal of Edenic innocence, one Rose illustration (figure 6.4) resembles a miniature from Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme (The Pilgrimage of the Soul), in which men and women dance around the Tree of Life.59 This imagery redefines the carole as an expression of pre-​lapsarian communion with God’s creation.60 Another Rose miniature includes a nun or abbess in the carole, clad in a robe, habit, and rosary (figure 6.5).61 Guillaume’s text does not specify that a religious woman

Romancing the Dance  185

Figure 6.4  The Carole of Amor from Le Roman de la Rose, Paris, c. 1380, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 132, folio 7 verso

Figure 6.5  The Carole of Amor, from Le Roman de la Rose, French, fifteenth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS Douce 188, folio 7 recto

participated in the carole. In this way, the image informs the text; the religious woman serves as a visual gloss, lending a ritual dimension to dance in romance. Certain romanciers (romance authors) seemed to deliberately enhance the religious valence of dance. In their romances, they juxtaposed the carole with liturgical performance. In both his Jehan et Blonde and Manekine, Philippe de Rémi (d. 1265) embedded dance scenes into the social and religious life of his courtiers. Danced interludes precede or follow sumptuous banquets, marriage ceremonies, and religious masses. Elsewhere, dance performances occur on the feast of Pentecost, on Easter, after vespers, and before none (the ninth liturgical hour, corresponding to 3 p.m.). These strategically timed enactments conflate religious life with the values of chivalry and courtliness.62 In Arthurian literature,

186  Grace before Its Master noble subjects enact caroles on the feast of Pentecost, suggesting a confluence between the dancing body and the movements of the Holy Spirit.63 The correspondence between formalized movement and Pentecostal ecstasy infuses the carole with charisma (from charis, grace, or Eucharist, engraced). Anagogically apprehended, dance rituals contributed to the religious tenor of the Round Table; bodily training sanctified knighthood, culminating in the grail quest.64 Medieval romance relied on enchantment to express the sacred quality of the carole. In these texts, the carole had a direct association with magic and fairyland. In Arthurian literature, dance enlivens the corteges and banquets honoring Merlin, whereas maidens resembling fairies cause onlookers to dance.65 From a philological perspective, the carole’s enchantment may be related to Stonehenge. Authors Wace (d. c. 1175) and Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. c. 1155) referred to Stonehenge as the chorea gigantum (Giant’s Dance), and the carole as gaianz (the Giants’ Carole). The logic behind these phrases is that, according to the medieval legend, pagans came to Stonehenge to celebrate the funerals of great rulers and to pay tribute to their gods. For medieval readers, Stonehenge evoked a realm so enchanted that they believed that Merlin himself crafted the monument.66 Dancing the carole animated archaic magic; ephemerality imprinted monumentality. The motif of enchantment percolates into the Rose, as the carole enthralls Amant. The conclusion of the carole marks a turning point in Guillaume’s narrative. Once the dance is over, the lovers disperse and devolve into more suggestive modes of coupling, culminating in lovemaking.67 At this point, Lady Youth (Joenesce) and Sir Pleasure (Deduiz) lead Amant to the perilous fountain/​mirror of Narcissus. (Guillaume employs the Old French word laz, or trap, to insinuate its danger).68 While peering into the fountain, Amant sees the Rose alongside his own reflection, and falls in love with her. Departing from the carole’s enchantment, Amant’s encounter with the Rose suggests entrapment and ultimately disenchantment. In the end, the garden’s enclosure—​“in which the whole art of love is contained”69—​ultimately lacks closure.70 The unfinished quality of Guillaume’s Rose, however, was part of its appeal to other authors. Some forty years later, Jean de Meun authored an afterlife of the Rose, which helped the Rose become the most famous romance of the Middle Ages. Jean’s Rose exploited the indeterminacy of dance, calling its sacrality into question.

Fol’amor or fin’amor?: Dance and Jean de Meun In contrast to Guillaume’s dreamy, phantasmic aura, Jean exudes a moralizing tone. Consonant with his university training and concern with auctoritas (authority), Jean’s Rose is learned and discursive. Jean, as a scholar imitating a

Romancing the Dance  187 magister amoris (master of love), refers to earlier works (both Latin and vernacular) as a strategy of authorization.71 As this section shows, the dance content in Jean’s Rose recuperates Christian paradigms of sacred and sinful dance. Jean uses dance motifs to reinforce the boundary between the sacred and the profane. In doing so, he works against Guillaume, de-​sacralizing the carole of Love. Moreover, Jean’s Rose deploys dance to highlight the indeterminacy of language. Semiotically speaking, Jean’s textual representations of dance both gloss and destabilize its meaning. The instability of dance contributes to Jean’s broader critique of language and of courtly love. For Jean the moralist, courtly love is all convention and rhetoric; it lacks integrity and intrinsic value. Although Jean’s text is deliberately ambiguous, for many readers it seems to suggest that fin’amor (fine love) is, in essence, fol’amor (foolish love). The religious commentary in Jean’s Rose establishes a binary between earthly and heavenly dancing. Jean introduces a character called Genius, the mastermind of creation, who delivers a sermon that expounds upon this binary. In his sermon, Genius differentiates the dances in the park of the lamb (parc de l’agniaus) from the dances in the garden of Pleasure (vergiers de Deduiz): Anyone making a comparison between the beautiful square garden . . . where this lover saw Pleasure and his people dancing in a ring, [la querole, /​ ou deduit et sa gent querole] and the fair, the utterly and perfectly lovely park . . . would be guilty of serious error if he did not make the same comparison as he would between truth and fiction. Anyone who entered the park  .  .  .  would dare swear with certainty that the garden was nothing in comparison with this enclosure, which is not square in form but round, and so skillfully shaped that no beryl or ball was ever so perfectly rounded.  .  .  . [Pleasure and his dancers] in the garden are trumpery toys. There is nothing lasting here; everything . . . will perish . . . . The young man [Amant] tells us that he saw Pleasure leading the dance on the fresh grass, and his people dancing [Deduiz qui demenoit sa tresche /​ et ses genz o lui querolanz] with him over the fragrant flowers . . . . He saw dances that came to an end [Il vit queroles qui faillurent], and all those who danced them will pass away.  .  .  . But.  .  .  . of the lovely things enclosed within this fair park. . . . no heart could conceive nor human tongue relate the immense beauty and worth of the things contained therein, nor the lovely games nor the great, lasting, true joys experienced by the dancers [que li queroleeur demainent] who dwell within the enclosure. . . . 72

For Genius, preaching about dance is a tool of ekphrasis. In classical rhetoric, ekphrasis pertained to the orator’s ability to create images in the minds of his audience.73 Genius’s sermon conjures two opposing caroles. The carole in the

188  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.6  Demons and dancers, Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’Amor, Toulouse, fourteenth century, British Library Royal MS 19 C I, folio 204 verso, © The British Library Board

garden, a motif that Jean pulls directly from Guillaume’s Rose, is illusory and transient.74 The carole in the park is genuine and eternal. The ambivalence of dance that Genius discusses places the Rose in conversation with other pastoral and philosophical texts. The condemnation of the carole mirrors theological writings that equated dance with lust, sacrilege, and demonic wiles. As Bishop of Paris Maurice de Sully (d. 1196) remarked, “the carole is the crown of the devil [Querole, si est coronne au deable”].75 Consonant with Maurice’s stance, the Franciscan author of the Breviari d’Amor (Breviary of Love, begun 1288) implores lovers to master their desires, suppress their carnal urges, and serve God. A manuscript image from the Breviary depicts demons directing dancers into hell (figure 6.6).76 Indeed, clerics’ negative discourse on the carole was so potent that some scholars wonder why the Church did not brand it a heresy.77 Moreover, Genius’s suspicious attitude toward the carole of the garden recalls the carole magique (magic carole). According to the Arthurian tale, Lancelot came upon a remote land where noble men and women were forced to dance the carole magique forever until a valiant knight broke the faery spell (figure 6.7).78 Similarly, Genius stresses that the carole is an ephemeral enchantment that obscures one’s ability to follow sacred quests. Fittingly, in his commentary on the Rose, Paris chancellor Jean Gerson (d. 1492) remarked that, “When speaking about holy, divine, and spiritual things he [Genius] mixes in dissolute and moving words with all kind of filth, yet the filth he describes will never be allowed in paradise.”79 Despite Gerson’s disapproval, the carole in the park of the lamb resonates with philosophical and religious conceptions of sacred dance. The circularity of the carole, within the perfect, infinite roundness of the park, manifests the

Romancing the Dance  189

Figure 6.7  The carole magique from Lancelot du Lac, French, c. 1316, British Library Additional MS. 10293, folio 292 verso, © The British Library Board

sacred by mirroring the motions of celestial bodies.80 For Plato, the Church Fathers, and medieval liturgists, dancing was a terrestrial expression of cosmic splendor. In line with Genius’s sermons, a medieval manuscript containing Augustine’s (d. 430)  orations depicts a group of dancers. Their harmonious movements create a bridge between heaven and earth (figure 6.8).81 Moreover, the pastoral quality of the park correlates with representations of the Annunciation to the Shepherds. As my previous chapter discussed, the shepherds and shepherdesses erupt in jubilant jigs in reverence to the sacred lamb (­figure 5.5)82 Genius ends his sermon with an imperative to honor Lady Nature and follow the footsteps of the lamb. One’s heavenly rewards shall include “singing motets [motez], part-​songs, and canzonets for all eternity and dancing [querolant]

190  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.8  Christians dancing and praying, Prayers of St. Augustine, French, early fifteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 916, folio 32 verso

beneath the olive.”83 Genius’s pairing of the motet with dancing sacralizes further the carole of the park. With his University of Paris affiliation, Jean de Meun would have been aware of the motet, a new musical style of the thirteenth century. Composed by the cleric-​trouvères of Arras and Paris, motets employed the technique of contrafactum, a sanctification of profane poetry. Some motet composers were students who used their musical skills to finance their education. For instance, Henri Bate, a University of Paris student in the mid-​fourteenth century, wrote how he composed love lyric and dance-​songs. He enjoyed leading dances, noting that they did not harm his studies too much.84 The motet format contains two or three vocal lines that may juxtapose competing perspectives (men vs. women, clergy vs. laity, fin’amor vs. fol’amor). Although technically a secular, vernacular genre, motets appropriated interpretive techniques of the Latinate

Romancing the Dance  191 intelligentsia, with which they authorized their spiritualization of fin’amor.85 For example, a motet from the Montpellier Codex (c. 1300) recasts the Virgin Mary as the patron saint of lovers: “All of those who are in love may come and dance [viegnent dançar], but not the others. The queen [i.e., the Virgin Mary] commands [all those who are in love] that the jealous be driven away from the dance [la dance] with a stick. All those who are in love may come forward, but not the others.”86 In the Rose, the religious symbolism of the motet helps recast the carole as a devotional exercise. Roughly contemporaneous with Jean’s Rose, theoretical treatments of the carole placed dancing within a civic and ethical framework. Johannes de Grocheio’s treatise on music, De Musica (Concerning Music, c. 1300), surveyed the importance of these new musical forms, arguing that love lyric and dance-​ songs contributed to good government.87 Following recent trends in medieval philosophy and scholasticism, Grocheio believed that the harmonious interplay of music and dance fostered civic conformity and common welfare.88 For example, his moralizing description of the carole repositions secular dance as a pious activity: “The ductia [carole] is a melody that is light and brisk in its ascents and descents, and which in the dance is sung by young men and girls .  .  .  . It influenced the hearts of young girls and men and draws them from vanity, and it is said to have power against that passion which is called love or ‘eros.’ ”89 Far from a precursor to perdition, Grocheio’s carole precludes sin, guarding its participants against the pitfalls of luxuria (lust), vanitas (vanity), acedia (spiritual sloth), and superbia (pride). He presents the carole as a phenomenon that benefits society and upholds morality. With Grocheio’s gloss, the carole in the park of the lamb propels the succession from romantic love to divine love. The sacred quality of dance is, however, precarious. In Jean’s Rose, dance can easily devolve into folly. His text contains several characters who dismantle the sacrality of the carole. In his disquisition on marriage, Ami (Friend), frames dance polemic within medieval misogyny and fol’amor: Thus we see that in marriages where the husband imagines that he is wise to scold and beat his wife and fill her life with wrangling, and tells her that she is silly and foolish for spending so much time dancing [dont tant demeure a la karole] and so regularly frequenting the society of handsome young men, true love cannot last, since they inflict so many evils upon each other and he wants to be master of his wife’s body and possessions. “You are too flighty,” he says, “and your behavior is too foolish. When I go to work you immediately start dancing and capering [tantost espinguez et balez] and making so merry that it seems positively immoral, and singing like a siren. May God send you a bad week!”90

192  Grace before Its Master According to the husband’s antifeminist stance, his wife’s flightiness justifies his corrective acts of domestic abuse.91 From a misogynist perspective, dance is an act of desecration. It profanes the sacramentality of marriage. A subsequent character, Vielle (the Duenna, or Old Woman), echoes Friend’s association between women, immorality, and artifice. As a walking summa of seduction, the Duenna instructs her younger counterparts how to dress to their advantage for dances and balls.92 In her conversation with Amant, the Duenna presents dance as a grotesque parody of the Christian mass: A woman must be careful not to lead too cloistered a life, for the more she stays at home, the less she is seen by everyone and the less her beauty is known, desired, and sought after. She ought often to go to the principal church and attend weddings, processions, games, festivals, and dances, [a geus, a festes, a karoles] for it is in such places that the God and Goddess of Love hold their classes and sing Mass to their disciples.93

Although the Duenna deifies courtly love, dancing exposes the pride and narcissism that undergirds it. Couched in liturgical terms, her views on love align dance with sacrilege. The commentaries of Friend and the Duenna relegate dances to stratagems of self-​gratification and sexual dalliance. In doing so, they echo fabliaux, or short narratives in the French vernacular typically about love triangles between lusty priests, frivolous ladies, and cuckolded knights. Their bawdy, anticlerical subject matter was both entertaining and edifying.94 The dance content in fabliaux often involves corrupt priests and vain women. For example, Rutebeuf ’s thirteenth-​ century Brother Denise exposes Friar Simon, a charlatan who tricked a young virgin into joining the Franciscans as a transvestite so that she could satisfy him sexually during confession. Upon discovering this transgression, a knight addressed the friar with these words: “You tell us that young people should /​not be allowed dancing and balls [les dances et les quaroles], /​citterns and tabors and violes /​and all delights of minstrelsy. /​You’ve brought on yourself infamy. /​You tell me, Mr. Tonsured Head, /​is this the life Saint Francis led?”95 The anonymous fabliau called The Three Girls invites more misogynist readings by chronicling the characters’ cosmetic escapades: “There were three girls who dwelt in Brilly. /​I couldn’t say if they were silly /​or wise, nor vouch that they behaved /​themselves, but most of all they craved /​to go dancing [caroles], and they applied /​ much effort in getting prettified.”96 The correspondence between dance, ornament, and women underscores the theme of fol’amor. Based on illusion, courtly

Romancing the Dance  193 love ultimately effects disenchantment. As a ritual of courtship, the carole circulates within an economy of deceptive appearances. Jean’s Rose desecrates dance further with False Seeming (Faus Semblant), a character whose signature trait is deception. As his name implies, False Seeming dons a friar’s garb and pretends to be pious: “He was false indeed, but he would never have been accused of falseness, for the seeming worked so powerfully that it covered up the falseness . . . you would have sworn by the king of heaven that the man who used to be the handsome Robin of the dance [de la dance li biaus robins] had now become a Dominican.”97 This passage alludes to Robin and Marion, stock figures from the trouvère lyric of Adam de la Halle (d. 1288). Composed in the Arras dialect, Adam’s Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (The Play or Game c. 1283) places the courting of Marion the shepherdess by Robin the rustic in a pastoral setting. Robin courts Marion by dancing the tresque, carole, and farandole. The image of Robin and Marion was so popular that nobles of medieval France masqueraded as these rustic pairs to declare their love for one another.98 Members of the clergy did not view the Jeu so innocently. A 1272 Christmas sermon by Daniel de Paris addressed his congregants in an accusatory tone: “you have not sung like the angels; it is not with them that you went to a carole to sing of Marion or of Robin.”99 In Jean’s Rose, the theatrical and impious qualities of Robin heighten the duplicity of False Seeming.100 His verisimilitude desacralizes dance, corrupting its virtues with worldly vices. Flouting the ideals of fin’amor and Christian charity, False Seeming disables the romantic and sacred sensibility of the carole. False Seeming boasts to Amant how he makes money off of Christians by the sale of indulgences: “Then in the meantime my silver and gold increase, for before my treasure is empty, I acquire money in abundance. Do I not make my bears dance well? [ne faz je bien tumber mes ours]”101 Contradicting the codes of largesse and caritas, False Seeming’s apparent avaritia (greed) corrupts the economies of gifting and gracing. His allusion to dancing bears suggests a carnivalesque spirit. In festive contexts, dancing bears appear in Arthurian literature, Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), and along the margins of medieval manuscripts.102 The image of the dancing bear also pertains to theological polemic. For St. Augustine, the bear was diabolical (ursus diabolus), given its carnal appetite, whereas Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882) condemned games with bears.103 For the Dominican theologian Humbert of Romans (d. 1277), the bear symbolized sensuality because it preferred honey above all things.104 According to heraldry expert Michel Pastoureau, bears signified fallen kings. They evoked the mythic rulers and ancient warriors that the

Figure 6.9  Explicit for Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, French, fourteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 24388, folio 145 recto

Figure 6.10  Frontispiece for Le Testament by Jean de Meun, French, fourteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 24388, folio 146 recto

196  Grace before Its Master emblem of the lion and Christian dynasties eventually supplanted. Perhaps in line with this shift, circus performers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages subjected bears to muzzles and humiliating tricks.105 In this larger cultural context, False Seeming’s allusion to his bears imbues dancing with perversion and falsity. As Jean’s Rose progresses, deception emerges as the principal theme. Dance helps frame the crisis of representation between word and thing, between intent and outward appearance.106 Toward the end of the text, Genius confounds the categories of sacred and profane: “ ‘I will make all haste to bring aid to true lovers [fins amanz’”] he tells Lady Nature, “ ‘but first I must take off this silk chasuble, alb, and surplice [clerical garments’]. He hung them all on a hook and put on his secular clothes, which were less cumbersome for him, as if he were going to dance [si com s’il alast queroler]. Then, taking to his wings, he flew swiftly away.”107 The shape-​shifting guises of Genius have troubled Rose commentators. One moment he is a preacher at the pulpit, and another moment he resembles the God of Love on his way to the carole. This passage implies that dance is incongruous to religious identity. Characters like Genius, Friend, the Duenna, and False Seeming help support the larger argument that Jean tried to make about the instability of language. While Guillaume’s Rose celebrates the values of courtly love, Jean’s Rose exposes the folly and falsity of fin’amor as fol’amor. For Jean, courtly love is merely a set of empty conventions; it lacks any essential, intrinsic meaning. In Jean’s narrative, dance contributes to an ambivalent semiotics. Jean’s Rose deploys dance to highlight the indeterminacy of language. Dance morphs into slippery signifiers—​from the splendors of heaven, to the duplicity of women, to the folly of love. The indeterminacy of dance is consistent with the ambiguous ending of Jean’s Rose. Through a thinly veiled allegory of sexual conquest, Amant plucks his fair Rose. Commentators of the Rose have divided opinions on the ending. For some, the conquest of the Rose exemplifies fol’amor. For others, it invites a religious or allegorical reading. Certain Rose manuscripts heighten this ambiguity. For instance, a fourteenth-​century French Rose flows into the frontispiece of the Testament, a serious, religious text also by Jean de Meun. After reading about the conquest of the Rose, the reader turns the page and confronts an image of the Crucifixion, which marks the beginning of the Testament (figures 6.9 and 6.10).108 The manuscript’s bizarre layout defies any definitive gloss. Medieval dance in romance engaged in a similar semiosis, overwhelming the text with interpretive possibility.

Romancing the Dance  197

Romance of the White Rose: Dante, Craftsman of the Cosmic Dance The divergent agendas of Guillaume and Jean have long befuddled Rose commentators. Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso (completed in the early fourteenth century) however, seems to reconcile their approaches to love. Transforming amorous quest into spiritual journey, Dante revalorized the task of the romancier.109 This third and final section examines the Paradiso’s representation of cosmic dance—​through imagery, metaphors, prosody, and neologisms. Dance language expresses ineffable phenomena while authorizing the vernacular. In crafting the apotheosis of dance and romance, Dante’s words actualize divine love. As Dantisti have observed, the theme of love animates the entire Commedia. In sum, the poem offers a guide on how to love—​how to redirect, purify, and perfect love.110 Unlike most religious ascetics of the Middle Ages, Dante does not abandon human love for divine love. He endorses a sustained progression from fin’amor to caritas. The crossover of sacred and secular parallels his leveling of Latin and vernacular. Indeed, Dante shows how poets can convey sacred truths in the mother tongue. Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise is as much a theological itinerary as it is a reevaluation of courtly love. Adulteress Francesca da Rimini blamed Arthurian romance for paralyzing her will (Inferno, canto V). Dante’s fellow poet, Guido Cavalcanti, denied the salvific power of love for a woman (Inferno, canto X). Troubadour Bertran de Born perverted lyric to satisfy his bloodlust (Inferno, canto XXVIII). Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel purged his excessive erotic love (Purgatorio, canto XXVI). The Commedia’s quest for true love mirrors the teleology of Dante’s own personal and poetic maturation—​from the Fiore, to canzoni (lyrical love poems), to the Vita Nuova, to the Commedia. In the Commedia, and especially its final canticle, Paradiso, Dante discovers that grace ennobles and sanctifies love. Beatrice Portinari, the embodiment of grace and emblem of true love, is the mobilizing principle of Dante’s vision.111 This section explores Dante’s poeticization of dance, and its articulation of the experience of loving God. Throughout the Paradiso, dance expresses the operations of grace, the splendor of heaven, and the beatific vision. Moreover, by embodying justice and good governance, dance represents the politics of paradise and Dante’s ethical program. The cosmic dance frames Dante’s encounter with Beatrice, the Virgin Mary, and, ultimately, God. Paradiso is a mobile kingdom, whose inhabitants dance forever.112 Infused with Christian theology, experimental prosody, and spectacular dances, Paradiso is at once the most traditional and innovative section of the Divine Comedy.113

198  Grace before Its Master Like the French troubadours who came before him, Dante devised new possibilities of verbal expression. To simulate the phenomenology of the divine love, Dante invoked Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred song. Yet, this inspiration was still inadequate to convey the sight of Beatrice, and her sensational smile. Dante then appealed to kinesthesia: and thus, figuring forth Paradise, the consecrated poem must leap over [saltar], like one who finds his path cut off.114

To resolve the limits of language, Dante conjures an ineffability topos. To convey the beauty of Beatrice, the sacred poem must leap (saltar), transporting readers beyond mundane sensory and semiotic frames of reference.115 The Italian term saltar derives from the Latin saltare, a verb meaning to spring, jump, leap, or dance.116 Later, when St. Peter circumambulates Beatrice, Dante devises a similar phrase: Therefore my pen leaps over [salta la penna] and I do not write it, for our imagining has colors too unsubtle for such folds, let alone our speech.117

The Italian penna denoted a pen, as well as wings and feathers. Penna may also refer to Dante’s surname, Alighieri (alagerus is Latin for “wing-​bearer”). At a moment when poetry needed to go beyond words, authorial abandon enabled the poet to surpass himself. Dante cultivated additional verbal technologies to simulate the sacred. Paradiso is especially famous for its many neologisms, in which Dante invented nearly one hundred new words in the Italian vernacular. As he explained near the beginning of Paradiso, the otherworld made Dante feel like Glaucus. Glaucus was a rustic fisherman from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 ACE) who, after eating a magic leaf, transformed into a fish-​man, and eventually a god.118 Likewise, Paradise transgresses the rules of the natural world. The self-​othering changes it brings are wondrous, and even unsettling: To signify transhumanizing [trasumanar] with words is impossible; therefore let the comparison suffice for those to whom grace reserves the experience.119

Trasumanar is Paradiso’s first neologism. It encapsulates the radical experience of ontological recalibration. As a verbal device, “transhumanize” helped Dante repair the rift between verbal communication and direct experience. Throughout Paradiso, Dante continued to coin new words. Many of them depend on motion, time, and space:

Romancing the Dance  199 So I saw the glorious wheel [i.e., the sun] turning, voice answering voice, with tempering and sweetness that cannot be known except there, where rejoicing forevers itself.120

The neologism “forevering” (s’insempra) collapses the distinction between linear and cyclical time. Elsewhere, Dante tried to count the rapid revolutions of celestial bodies, but each turn:  “enthousands/​itself [s’inmilla] beyond the doubling of the chessboard.”121 The circling, he adds “more fully entruths itself [s’invera] therein.”122 Hovering above the planets, Dante absorbs sacred truths from Beatrice, or she “who imparadises [’mparadisa] my mind.”123 With spatio-​temporal reflexivity, Paradiso’s language effaces the boundaries between self and other, transcendence and immanence. Dante’s last neologism appears when beholding the face of God. He likened himself to the geometer who tries to square the circle, and: such was I at that miraculous sight; I wished to see how the image fitted the circle and how it enwheres itself there.124

Seeing the face of God, like squaring the circle, exemplifies achieving the unachievable. For Dante, this involves the verbal gymnastics of transmuting revelation into poetry.125 The act of enwhere-​ing (s’indova) creates a dance of space between two opposing forms. Here the spatialization of movement begets a generative realm of possibility. Dante’s vision of the cosmic dance appropriated concepts from ancient and medieval philosophy.126 Plato recounted how God created the universe by ordering chaos and void into a harmonious, formalized dance.127 Around the sixth century ACE, the Neo-​ Platonist Pseudo-​ Dionysius Christianized the cosmic dance, adorning it with angelic and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Dionysius appears in Paradiso’s Primum Mobile, the fastest moving place in heaven due to its close proximity to God.128 As Dante described: its motion is so swift because of the fiery love that pierces it.129

Despite its cerebral overtones, Dante’s cosmic dance was also playful. In the Empyrean, or the highest heaven, angelic orders interact with ludic abandon. Then in the two penultimate tripudia, Principalities and Archangels whirl; the last of all is Angelic play.130

200  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.11  Dante, Beatrice, and Thrones, Paradiso, canto XXX, Italian, late fourteenth century, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 676, folio 124 recto

These lines place emphasis on the rhymed words, tripudi (a three-​step dance) and ludi (game), accentuating the aura of dance and play.131 Fittingly, one Commedia illustrator offered a Dantesque game of Thrones (figure 6.11).132 With their cherubic chugs, the Thrones (another angelic order) poke fun at their lofty position in Paradise.133 Elsewhere, Dante poeticized the relationship between humanity and divinity with mechanical movement. In Paradiso, the clock operates as a technology of the medieval dancing body, programming piety. In the solar sphere, Dante writes: Then, like a clock that calls us in the hour when the bride of God rises to sing a dawn song to the Bridegroom, that he may love her, whose one part pulls and the other pushes, sounding tin tin with so sweet a note that a well-​ disposed spirit swells with love: so I saw the glorious wheel turning.134

The clock simile converges mechanical, liturgical, and human time. The push-​ pull dynamic of the bell clapper synchronizes with the cyclic rota (wheel). Couched within a nuptial “bride of Christ” motif, the church bells call monks and nuns to their morning prayers.135 The couple consecrating their love with a dawn

Romancing the Dance  201 song is a daring comparison to praying. Devised by the Provençal troubadours, the dawn song (or alba in Occitan) referred to the nocturnal tryst of adulterous lovers. When day breaks, the lovers must depart, lest the lady’s jealous husband catches them in the act.136 The presence of clocks in Paradise seems rather striking. The mechanical clock was invented around 1270, and most scholars concur that Paradiso—​ written in the early 1300s—​contains the earliest known literary reference to it.137 While earlier monastic communities used astrolabes or sundials to measure time, later patterns of urbanization and commerce required more precise hourly measurements. As Dante wrote the Commedia, public clock towers and clockmaker guilds flourished in Europe, and especially Italy.138 Astronomical clocks became fixtures of churches and city squares, combining religious symbolism with mechanical ingenuity. During Dante’s lifetime, Italy pioneered European mercantilism and a protocapitalist cash economy, and embraced the new “merchant time.”139 Paradiso’s attention to gears, wheels, and inner cogs was technological and theological. Clocks’ regular rotations traced the time and timelessness of God’s love for humanity.140 Love, in its myriad forms, constitutes a principle theme of the Commedia. For many scholars, the text is a manual on how to love. The mobile texture of Paradiso helped articulate its ethical program. As literary scholar Robert Harrison explains, Dante is “a poet of motion,” and Beatrice was his mobilizing principle.141 Throughout the Commedia, Dante envisioned “the Love that moves.”142 When composing the Commedia, Dante invented a new poetic schema he called terza rima (third rhyme). Its structure is dynamic; it moves forward by turning, effectively rotating along a spiral.143 In consonance, some Italian artists reproduced this spiral effect (figure 6.12).144 Depicting solar dancers, this imagery mimics terza rima and helped viewers visualize the moral heartbeat of the poem. Elsewhere, dance heightens the socialization of the universe. This is evident in the solar sphere, where swirling souls congregate under the sun’s rays: [they] revolved about us three times, like stars near the fixed poles, they seemed like ladies not freed from the dance [ballo], but pausing silently, listening until they have gathered the new notes.145

Despite dance polemic put forth by certain doctors of the Church, Dante inserted prominent Fathers and theologians into the cosmic ballet. Contradictory theologies and competing religious orders now pay homage to one another,

202  Grace before Its Master

Figure 6.12  Church Fathers, Franciscans, and Dominicans in the Heaven of the Sun, Paradiso, canto XII, Lombardy, ca. 1400, Bibliotheca Nazionale Centrale Florence MS B.R. 39, folio 353 verso

reflected in complementary kinesthesia.146 One Commedia manuscript illustration painted the souls as nearly indistinguishable; their individuality dissolves into the vortex of divine love (figure 6.13).147 The Dantesque vision of kinesthetic empathy reached its apex with one woman.148 Dante placed the Virgin Mary at heaven’s peak.149 She occupies the white rose, surrounded by saints and blessed souls.150 The illuminator Giovanni di Paolo depicted the white rose as a theater of the Incarnation (figure 6.14).151 Mary provides another variety of love, radiating purity and selflessness.

Figure 6.13  Dante, Beatrice, and solar dancers, detail, Paradiso canto XII, Italian, late fourteenth century, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 676, folio 104 recto

Romancing the Dance  203

Figure 6.14  Beatrice, Dante, and the celestial rose, detail, Paradiso, canto XXXII, Giovanni di Paolo, illuminator, North Italy, c. 1444–1450, British Library Yates Thompson MS. 36, folio 187 recto, © The British Library Board

Channeling divinity into humanity, her maternal body inaugurated sacred dance. The archangel Gabriel reenacts the Annunciation, exclaiming: I am angelic love, wheeling about the deep joy that breathes from the womb that sheltered our Desire.152

Gabriel’s wheeling recalls Mary’s mysterious impregnation by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:26–​38), and prefigures her coronation as Queen of Heaven.153 Residents of the rose petals chant “the divine cantilena,” a sanctified dance-​song, in her honor.154 Dante’s damned, by contrast, are choreographically challenged.155 In other words, God rewards defective love with disordered movements. The avaricious and prodigal, for example, perform a ridda, a rabid roundelay, punctuated with tosses, rolls, and collisions.156 Their greed and wastefulness transmogrify into kinetic chaos. Elsewhere, the barraters dance into a river lest devils poke them with prongs.157 With frenetic fingers, the violent perform a tresca, or Italian country dance, to ward off a relentless rain of fire.158 The sodomites perform a “disco inferno” of sorts: As is the custom of wrestlers, naked and oiled, spying out their holds and their advantage before they come to blows and wounds; so they wheeled [rotando], and each kept his face toward me, so that their necks made a constant motion contrary to their feet.159

204  Grace before Its Master From the conservative perspective of medieval theology, the backward motion of their rota signified sodomites’ transgression contra naturam, or against nature (Figure 6.15).160 However, Dante may have employed biblical sodomy to comment on poor pedagogy, as here he is reunited with one of his old teachers. When masters try to make their students into intellectual clones, knowledge is reduced to one person’s quest for immortality. Just as bad teachers render knowledge sterile, the sinners’ infernal wheeling amounts to useless displacement. Founded upon self-​directed love, their dance is devoid of dynamism; it leads nowhere.161 Deeper into hell, all movement ceases with the frozen corpse of Satan.162 Put differently, those furthest from love are forever immobilized. Dante was interested in the complex imbrications of love and language. In Paradiso, he argued that new writings and ancient scriptures teach one how to love virtuously.163 Elsewhere in his philosophical treatises, Dante discoursed on the philanthropy of language. Although he revered Latin, resplendent in elegance and erudition, Dante campaigned for the use of the Italian vernacular. For him, the common tongue was ennobling and generous. Like a benefactor, it could bestow gifts for the greater good of humanity.164 This position on language helps clarify the Commedia’s political tenor. From the depths of hell to the heights of heaven, justice is a driving force in the Commedia. In Paradiso, the planet Jupiter contains the souls of just rulers, who perfectly synthesize religious and civic values. With their cosmic choreography, they form

Figure 6.15  Virgil, Dante, and the sodomites, detail, Inferno, canto XVI, Emilian/​ Paduan, mid-​fourteenth century, British Library Egerton MS. 943, folio 28 verso, © The British Library Board

Romancing the Dance  205 corporeal letters, quoting King Solomon: Diligite iustitiam, qui iudiciatis terram (“Love justice, you who judge the earth,” Wisdom 1:1).165 They then merge into the last letter M, now signifying Monarchia (Monarchy). This word shape-​shifts into the Florentine lily, which in turn morphs into the eagle, a symbol for secular, imperial governance (figure 6.16).166 In Dante’s estimation, it took more than one thousand aerial bodies to “leap” (salir) and form the last image.167 This scene also recalls Dante’s political treatise De Monarchia (Concerning the Monarchy). This text theorized secular government and advocated for a balance of temporal power (the monarch/​empire) and spiritual authority (the pope/​ecclesia), and ultimately condemned ecclesiastical encroachments.168 Consonant with this political stance, Jupiter’s cosmic ballet dissolved into a denunciation of the papacy. Here Dante himself uttered an apostrophe against an absent pope, caricaturing the pontiff ’s dismissal of St. John the Baptist, or one “who by dancing was led to martyrdom [che per salti fu tratto al martiro].”169 This line refers to the dance of Salome, which caused the decapitation of St. John the Baptist (Matthew 14; Mark 6), forerunner to Christ and patron saint of Florence. Resituated in Paradiso, this story suggests that religious authorities, by lusting after political dominion beyond Rome, abandoned the greater goals of the Church. In Dante’s lifetime, the papacy’s abuse of power ravaged Florence with civil war. This issue was personal for Dante, as he himself was a politician. He was one of the six priors of Florence, the most prestigious elected governmental office in the city. When his own political party (the Guelphs) fractured, Pope Boniface VIII banished Dante and his associates from Florence. As a result, Dante composed the entire Paradiso in exile under the patronage of the Guibelline Can

Figure 6.16  Beatrice, Dante, Cacciaguida, and the souls in Jupiter, detail, Giovanni di Paolo, illuminator, Paradiso, canto XVIII, North Italy, c. 1444–1450, British Library Yates Thompson MS. 36, folio 161 recto, © The British Library Board

206  Grace before Its Master Grande della Scala, Lord of Verona.170 Within this larger body politic, Paradiso infused the dance of the stars with a moral imperative. Given Dante’s religious and political posturing, one cannot underestimate his call for compassion, empathy, and love. Dante’s moralization of the vernacular is tantamount to the conclusion of the Commedia, when he imagines the face of God.171 The holy visage, he observed, seemed to be painted with “our effigy” (nostra effige).172 Just as divinity graced human flesh with the Incarnation, a face that one recognized and learned how to love can make one blessed (the literal meaning of Beatrice). Like the earthly dance, the hidden face of God exists at the vanishing point. Preserving the radical otherness of divinity, Dante’s vision melts away, like a snow angel under the sun.173 But the effects of love endured. Paradiso’s final lines retained its rhythms, internally replicating the dance of the stars: Here my high imagining failed out of power; but already my desire and the will were turned, like a wheel [rota] being moved evenly, by the Love [l’amor] that moves the sun and the other stars.174

Despite the fragility of this vision, a metamorphosis has transpired. Dante is no longer the limping man in a dark wood, where his “halted [left] foot was always the lower.”175 Following the path of love, he reestablished the equilibrium between action and intention. And the poetics of dance—​however vestigial its traces—​helped transmit the vertiginous thrill of infinitude. At the end of the journey of our life (del cammin di nostra vita), the specter of the white rose still haunts, calling us to the dance of love.176 * * * Dante’s Commedia marked the last great vision of sacred dance. In the following century, the image of religious dance underwent dramatic changes. Poets and artists became obsessed with death. The following and final chapter addresses the decadence of dance in the Late Middle Ages.

7

Dance in the Late Middle Ages Decadence and Death

Thus far, this book has examined the ways in which dance became a legitimate form of Christian thought and practice. Biblical commentary helped shape the paradigms of sacred dance. The cult of the saints and the liturgy integrated dancing into religious devotion. Within a penitential framework, dance contributed to the growing sophistication of moral psychology. In their writings, mystics employed dance metaphors to approximate and communicate the experience of being one with God. Many of these traditions trickled down into the vernacular via secular performance and literature. This seventh and final chapter investigates dance at the end of the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, both secular and religious dances changed significantly. In the secular arena, royal and Burgundian courts inspired new dance forms. Typically performed at feasts, weddings, or other ceremonial interludes, late medieval dances were extravagant and increasingly technical. Another shift in dance practice included the emergence of dances that were related to crises, namely illness and death. Dance epidemics hurled chaos and confusion into medieval society. The aesthetic movement known as the dance of death was, according to most scholars, a response to plague and bodily decay. Traditional scholarship reduces dance mania to a medical condition and essentializes the dance of death as an expression of human frailty. This chapter, however, focuses on the religious reconstitution of these two phenomena. In the case of dance mania, I show how the Church’s intervention transformed an aberrant illness into an acceptable means of devotion. Once resituated within churches and before shrines, frenetic movements gave way to formalized ambulations. In this way, religion provided a means to tame and discipline bizarre behavior. Turning to the dance of death, I explore the various ways in which dance framed the experience of dying. A religious reading of the dance of death demonstrates how medieval Christianity infused the imagery with didactic messages, and, ultimately, the possibility for salvation. In sum, this chapter reveals the religious underpinnings of the dominant dance forms in the Late Middle Ages that preceded the secularization of dance in the early modern period.

Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

208  Grace before Its Master

The Decadance of Devotion: Choreomania Choreomania, or dance mania, (from the Greek terms choros, or dance, and mania, or madness), refers to the dance epidemics that swept Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.1 Contemporary accounts reported how hundreds of people erupted in excessive, frenzied movements, sometimes dancing themselves to death. Although once a medieval phenomenon, choreomania has since been integrated into modern, medicalized understandings of chorea (from a Latin word for dance). Today’s medical literature typically defines choreomania as “a hyperkinetic movement disorder characterized by excessive spontaneous movements that are irregularly timed, randomly distributed, and abrupt.”2 The neuropathological (and sometimes psychiatric) reconstitution of choreomania may acknowledge its medieval predecessors, but tends to divorce this disease from folkloric legends and superstitions. Choreomania entered Western medical discourse as early as the sixteenth century. The Renaissance polymath Paracelsus (born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in 1493)  rejected the medieval assumption that demonic possession caused dance mania. Instead, he studied the physiological symptoms of choreomaniacs (dance maniacs) and prescribed specific remedies.3 In the following century, Thomas Sydenham renamed choreomania as Sydenham’s chorea (or chorea minor), a disorder characterized by involuntary and jerky motions. (This diagnosis, however, actually refers to a form of acute rheumatic fever). Due to overlapping physiological symptoms, choreomania in the nineteenth century was associated (erroneously) with Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative genetic disorder.4 In an effort to diagnose medieval choreomaniacs, more recent studies on choreomania applied modern epidemiology to the extant medieval evidence. In the early twentieth century, Swedish pharmacologist Eugène Louis Backman ultimately argued that choreomania was caused by ergotism, a species of poisoned fungus (claviceps purpurea) that exhibits LSD-​like properties. Following the multiple floods that occurred in Flanders and the Rhineland in the Late Middle Ages, Backman suggests that ergot would have infected the grains consumed by medieval subjects, particularly peasants. Backman explains that the ergot in rye induced hallucinations, agitation, intensely colored vision, and increased susceptibility to external influences (such as rhythm, which initiates dancing).5 Other scholars align choreomania with an early manifestation of tarantism, a disorder that allegedly comes from a spider’s bite and can be remedied by wild dancing.6 Most recently, historian of medicine John Waller suggests that medieval choreomaniacs were in a trance state, which may explain their involuntary motions and the long duration of their dancing.7 Similar to Waller’s findings, Robert Bartholomew has diagnosed medieval choreomania as Mass Psychogenic

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  209 Illness (MPI), or an epidemic hysteria of collective symptoms that defy any plausible pathogenic explanation.8 In sum, scholars have generally reduced this phenomenon to a collective pathology. Differing from past studies, I examine choreomania from the perspective of late medieval religious discourse and practice. Rather than re-​pathologizing choreomania, I demonstrate how dance mania became integrated into the religious life and culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In doing so, I follow the work of historian Gregor Rohmann, whose recent scholarship on the subject reveals how Christian thought shaped the creation, classification, and reception of medieval choreomania.9 Rohmann’s oeuvre is magisterial, and I do not attempt to surpass it here. Rather, I highlight the role of choreomania as a performative practice and interpret its effects on religiosity. This section traces the development of late medieval choreomania, in which deviant displays of devotion shifted toward sanctioned exercises of worship that local religious communities helped authorize, formalize, and memorialize. Departing from a diagnostic analysis, this chapter reconsiders choreomania as a collective manifestation of religious expression that evolved from an aberrant to a manageable means of devotion. Despite the unruly symptoms that contemporary chroniclers reported—​stomping, spinning, gesticulations, and convulsions—​medieval choreomaniacs became less deviant with each successive outbreak. As such, they contributed to the shaping of late medieval spirituality. I begin by addressing early outbreaks of choreomania, which befuddled local clerics and resembled demonic possession. I thereafter analyze how choreomania entered institutional religion via pilgrimage and the cult of the saints. By localizing and historicizing medieval choreomaniacs as dance practitioners and religious devotees, I hope to show how the decadence of dance partook in the recalibration of religious life in the Late Middle Ages and beyond.10 The first ramifying, and perhaps most perplexing, outbreak of medieval choreomania began in Aix-​la-​Chapelle (Aachen, Germany) on July 15, 1374. Over the next four months, these dancers migrated to Cologne, Flanders, the Rhineland, Liège, and Trier, infecting others along the way.11 Writing in the late fourteenth century, the Flemish chronicler Jean d’Outremeuse reports a peculiar event that transpired in the city of Liège, in present day Belgium: on the 11th of September in 1374, there came from the north to Liège . . . a company of persons who all danced continually [dont cascuns fors dansoit]. They were linked with cloths, and they jumped and leaped [et trippoit et sailhoit]. . . . They called loudly on John the Baptist and fiercely clapped their hands. Such a disturbance they did create that all who heard them were afraid, their hearts trembling with fear, and so they were driven out of Liège. . . . For the Devil in hell was their master [car li dyable d’ynfer trestous les governoit]. . . . The men

210  Grace before Its Master were without reason and the women abandoned themselves to frivolity. All these people from various parts danced with each other. The country was full of them. . . . Some of them returned to Liège, shouting and bawling and making such a din that it seemed the whole world was coming to an end. . . . The attacks were such that in their homes and in secret people could not help dancing.12

According to this chronicle, an itinerant mob infiltrated the streets of Liège and danced incessantly. Jean insinuated that those in the clamorous crowd were corporeal vessels of Satan.13 Since these dancers invoked St. John the Baptist, some sources made a correspondence between Salome and the death of St. John (Mark 6:22–​25; Matthew 14:6–​8), thereby blaming the seductive saltatrix, or female tumbler, for inflicting choreomania.14 Indeed, some reported that choreomaniacs beheld the head of St. John swimming in blood as they partook in their own danse macabre.15 Even more striking is the contrast between the Liègeois mob and contemporary dance practice. The distorted, unbridled quality of the choreomaniacs of 1374 could scarcely be more different from the elegant carole that was fashionable in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Jean’s chronicle continues by providing a detailed description of the disturbing dancers. As he explains, the dancers bound themselves with cloth, perhaps in an effort to mollify the pain induced by their physical exertion. (Interestingly, certain medieval dances were performed with handkerchiefs.) The exhausting list of observed symptoms included rampant movement, chanting, hallucinations, bodily convulsions, chest and abdominal pains, hyperventilation, foaming at the mouth, sexually suggestive gestures, and, in later cases, even public copulation. As a couplet from another Flemish chronicle stated succinctly, “Uneasily the people fall /​as they foam at the mouth in their pangs” [Gens impacata cadit /​dudum cruciata salivat].16 Moreover, some choreomaniacs refused to wear poulins—​the fashionable pointed shoes of the day—​lest their discomfort become more insufferable. Others expressed fear at the sight of water or the color red. Such massive eruptions could not be contained within the confines of a single city. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous other chroniclers of France, Germany, and Flanders recounted similar stories of the dancing plague. During the early outbreaks of choreomania, chroniclers conveyed ambivalent attitudes toward the crazed dancers. Some archival sources from 1374 portray choreomaniacs as helplessly unholy: “Thus there they danced and leaped [Dansabant ac saltabant ibi]. They had been besieged by demons. When the evil spirit descended to their legs, they could not help dancing and leaping [dansatione et saltu]; when it moved up into the belly they suffered great pain.”17 Conversely, another chronicle claims that the dancers, following their exertion, received divine visions: “They see the Son of Mary and the heavens open

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  211 [cernit Mariae filium et caelum apertum”]. Thereafter, “They fall to the ground [edeorsum prosternitur”].18 Still other accounts accused the dancers of being frauds—​who pretended to suffer for alms and attempted to misbehave with women.19 The Dutch chronicler Petrus de Herenthal (d. c. 1391) reports that “the people danced and leaped violently [Populus tripudiat nimium saltando]. One lightly touched another’s hand, then shrieked. ‘Frisch, Friskes,’ women and men cried it with joy.”20 The word frisk, from the German frisch, referred to the whooping cough or other maladies marked by epileptic and convulsive mannerisms, though it could also signify health and vitality.21 Hence, even the earliest documentation depicts choreomaniacs as (literally) dancing between demonic possession and divine inspiration. While choreomaniacs produced enough of an urban disturbance to appear in city chronicles, clerics—​although suspicious—​did not officially accuse them of heresy, given the apparent involuntary nature of their dancing (sin generally requires evil intent). Instead, many observers of 1374 identified the choreomaniacs as demonically possessed, or demoniacs. Such stigmatized individuals had played a role in Christian history since biblical times, whereas cases of female demoniacs were common in the Late Middle Ages.22 In typical artistic representations of exorcism rites, a priest, sometimes with the help of a saint, administers the cure. The cleric rebukes the demon, often in the form of a black, impish figure, thus visualizing the process of dispossession (literally a vomiting out of the demon), as it is expelled from the demoniac’s mouth, as shown in an altar painting of St. Severin.23 Like demoniacs, choreomaniacs emitted aberrant gesticulations, which clergy construed as visual signs of their interior malignancy. Exuding gestural dissonance, the 1374 choreomaniacs were held suspect by chroniclers and ecclesiastical authorities. As a variant of demonic possession, choreomania provoked the necessity of clerical control. With their spiritual knowledge, clergy were capable of demarcating sinful from sacred dance, and discerning (or diagnosing) spirits of divine or demonic possession. The sources strongly suggest that choreomaniacs embodied and made sensorially apparent the presence of demons (se levantes quod sentierent presentiam demonis). Some choreomaniacs went so far as to blaspheme Christ or the Virgin Mary.24 When clerics tried to contain choreomania via exorcism, however, they experienced some initial resistance. According to Radulphus de Rivo (a Tongeren-​based deacon, d. 1403), choreomaniacs in Liège administered exorcisms on each other and began to devise homeopathic healing techniques to treat their aching appendages. In doing so they assumed quasi-​ clerical roles and even threatened to usurp their local priests. (Radulphus, however, stressed that these techniques were unsuccessful).25 Some choreomaniacs complained that the priests, due to their covert involvement with concubines, had botched their parishioners’ baptisms. Despite the anticlericalism in these

212  Grace before Its Master sources, Radulphus reported that the local Liègeois clergy performed successful exorcisms of possessed dancers (daemonici tripudiantes).26 Beyond theories of spirit possession, choreomania made manifest the uncanny parallel between dancing and demons within the context of medieval dance polemic. As my c­ hapter 4 has shown, dancers who appear in medieval exempla (i.e., moralizing stories often inserted in sermons) were typically punished. They developed leprosy, received clerical curses, or suffered death and eternal damnation.27 As described in sermons and confession manuals, the devil often disguised himself as an alluring woman whose sinuous gyrations tempted her dance partner into hell.28 Indeed, pastoral texts forewarned how dancing empowers demons and renders participants susceptible to perdition. Similarly, in his preaching compendium (Summa Praedicantium), the fourteenth-​century English Dominican John Bromyard narrates how a group of saintly men approached a certain city inhabited by dissolute dancers: They saw a demon sitting upon the ramparts of the city, and when he was asked why he sat there alone he replied: “I do not need the help of anyone, because the entire city is obediently subject to us” [the forces of the Devil]. Entering the city they found the population in a state of the greatest dissoluteness, that is to say dancing caroles and occupied with diverse other entertainers [videlicet choreizantes, aliis diversis ludis occupatos]. Terrified, they left that city.29

Negative attitudes toward medieval dance resonate with what might be called the legendary precursors to dance mania. For example, in the famous legend of the dancers of Colbek (or Kölbigk) described earlier, a group of men and women in 1027 insisted on dancing a carole in the churchyard during Christmas Eve mass. St. Magnus, the patron saint of Colbek, cursed the disobedient parishioners and forced them to dance without respite for a full year. Some died following the incident, whereas others were left with permanent tremors.30 Another episode occurred at Maastricht (or Utrecht, depending on the source), on June 17, 1278, in which two hundred dancers interrupted a funerary rite. Subsequently, the Moselle Bridge collapsed beneath them and caused many of the dancers to drown. These morbid tales remained within the popular imaginary, as a woodcut from the Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493) later attested.31 Gregor Rohmann stresses that such anecdotes functioned to promote discipline and control: “This legend is not about pagans versus Christians, not even about young folk wanting to dance and a cleric trying to intervene, but continues to be about the remnants of ancient Christianity and the efforts to discipline them. It is not about dance as cosmic mimesis, but about who should be allowed to dance, under which circumstances and for what concerns.”32 I would add that choreomania, as a performative reiteration of these folk legends, heightened the

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  213 clergy’s need to dominate the rustici, or lay peasants.33 By enacting rites of exorcism, clerics repositioned choreomaniacs into an orthodox rite and circumvented the threat of urban depravity. However unruly and dissolute, choreomania provided a space for dance to be reconstituted within a spiritual economy. During the next waves of epidemics, a more disciplined variant of choreomania began to affect urban piety. In early fifteenth-​century Zabern (in modern-​day Switzerland), Strasbourg, and Cologne, pilgrimage replaced rites of exorcism in the response to choreomania. The ancient martyr St. Vitus (d. 303) emerged as the patron saint of dancers, entertainers, and plague victims, as a consequence of the cultic activity of his followers at this time. (Hence another name for dance mania: chorea sancti viti, or St. Vitus’ Dance). A German chronicle from Königshoven reports that dancing mania besieged Strasbourg in 1418: “In Strasbourg many hundreds of men and women began to dance and jump [tanzen und springen] in the marketplace, the lanes, and the streets. Many of them went without food for days and nights until their mania subsided. The plague was called St. Vitus’ dance [gelad St Vits Tanz ward gennant die Plag”].34 For the victims of St. Vitus’ Dance, pilgrimage emerged as the preferred mechanism of somato-​spirtual reconstitution. Wagons transported groups of choreomaniacs to St. Vitus’ chapel in Zabern. Upon arrival, the dancers circumambulated a shrine that reportedly cured them.35 Moving through sacred space reconnected choreomaniacs spiritually as well as topographically. Medieval cities typically privileged the location of churches. Cities’ geographical layouts tended to promote the centrality of the cathedral as it loomed over the entire city. Choreomaniacs’ corporeal recentering therefore occurred in tandem with spatial reorientation. Rhythmically moving their bodies within the sanctioned space of the church, choreomaniacs underwent a shift from degeneration to regeneration. While pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages connoted a form of exile, over time—​and especially following the Crusades—​this ritual morphed into an individual journey of penitence, healing, and self-​reflection. Embracing the experience of earthly life as homo viator (humankind as wayfarer), the trope of traveling comprised a significant facet of medieval selfhood. Miracles associated with particular pilgrimage sites and their corresponding shrines, saints, and relics gave the wanderer purpose, accomplishment, and a gateway to salvation. These miraculous reputations in turn inspired competition between pilgrimage sites, as pilgrims brought considerable prestige (and revenue) to medieval cities.36 Rather than threatening religiosity, the fifteenth-​century epidemics revitalized pilgrimage and the cult of local saints. Choreomaniacs embarked upon pilgrimages to churches associated with St. Vitus as well as the Virgin Mary, the most beloved healer in the medieval Christian pantheon. In fact, some of these saints’ feast days occurred during Pentecost and perhaps led choreomaniacs to

214  Grace before Its Master believe that the Holy Spirit inhabited their bodies. The sources suggest that the displacement of their dancing bodies from city streets to city sanctuaries disciplined the movements of their souls by redirecting them toward God. The choreomaniacs’ display of saintly devotion is evident from reports of their dancing in front of shrines and statues of patron saints. For these choreomaniacs, urban peregrinations not only sacralized their dancing bodies, but reaffirmed the holiness of city saints and publicized the beneficent effects of bodily movement. Thus, in spite of their marginal status, choreomaniacs fruitfully altered their own religious landscapes. In Strasbourg, Zabern, and Cologne, their kinetic rigor participated in the creation of culture, by both embodying and challenging social norms. As theorist Carrie Noland has argued, the gestural capacity of the body mediates between vitalism (individual agency) and constructivism (social determinism):  “kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in performance that account for the larger innovations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.”37 An altar painting from Cologne Cathedral demonstrates a similar equilibrium between cultural determinism and individual intent (figure 7.1a). In this image, St. Vitus is paired with St. Valentine, the patron saint of the “falling sickness,” or epilepsy. The painted plinths at their feet depict a group of choreomaniacs (left) and epileptics (right) (figure 7.1b). The choreomaniacs’ bodies exude vigor and suppleness, while the epileptics lose motor control and restraint. While choreomania was identified as an involuntary affliction, the dancers pictured here nevertheless exert a degree of discipline. Pilgrims ambulating through Cologne Cathedral reawakened devotion to St. Vitus; this ritualized recovery conflated liturgy, pilgrimage, procession, and dance. The choreomaniac-​as-​pilgrim offers penitential meanderings to the patron saint in exchange for physical and spiritual renewal. In fact, the very association between St. Vitus and dance was made possible by the choreomaniacs of his cult.38 This system of spiritual exchange rids dance mania of its earlier deviance, and, by extension, recasts choreomania as a religious practice that helped shape the contours of urban piety. Incidentally, choreomania shares some affinities with certain late medieval dance practices. Within the realm of secular entertainment, new dance forms exuded excess and extravagance. The charivari (known in English as shivaree, or “loud music”) was a folk custom, which usually involved a mass protest against a questionable marriage in the community. Charivaris paraded the motif of misrule with wild masks, collective movement, and strident music.39 One of the most infamous charivaris occurs in the Roman de Fauvel (Romance of Fauvel). A  fourteenth-​century manuscript illustration shows bands of mummers and maskers instigating mayhem and cacophony as Fauvel (False Veil) approaches his marriage bed with his new wife Vaine Gloire (Vain Glory) (figure 7.2).40

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  215 (a)

(b)

Figures 7.1  a. detail, grisaille altar painting with Saints Vitus and Valentine; 7.1b Painted plinths depict choreomaniacs and epileptics, Cologne Cathedral, c. 1500, photograph by Matz and Schenk

Fostering an ethos of folk justice, the charivari offers a form of disruption that is both entertaining and transgressive. Disruptive dances were also performed in courtly arenas. One of the most noteworthy was the Bal des Ardents, or the Dance of the Burning Men. In January of 1393, King Charles VI of France and five of his courtiers dressed up as wild men to perform wedding festivities for Catherine, a lady-​in-​waiting to Queen Isabeau, Charles’s wife. (Some historians conclude that this interlude was a charivari, as some people may have mocked Catherine’s remarriage). The wild man motif appeared in medieval romances and art, and symbolized the state of

Figure 7.2  Charivari from Le Roman de Fauvel, French, c. 1320, Bibliothèque Nationale de France fr. ms. 196, folio 34 recto

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  217 humankind stripped of civilization.41 Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (Chronicles, before 1405)  and Michel Pintoin’s Chronique du Religieux de Saint-​ Denys (Chronicle of the Monk of St. Denis, before 1422) both chronicle the incident, as it ended in tragedy.42 During the performance, a torch ignited the dancers’ bodies, which were caked with pitch and flax. Only King Charles and one of the courtiers survived (figure 7.3).43 Given Charles’s propensity for madness—​and possible schizophrenia, as some historians today believe—​the aura of primitivism may insinuate a crisis of control and masculinity provoked by a mad king.44 In any event, the presence of savagery on the royal stage attests to an appetite for wildness and extravagance. Other varieties of courtly dances testify to this emerging aesthetic. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the moresca (or morisca, mauresque, Moriskentanz, morris dance), became fashionable throughout Europe. The moresca’s long and convoluted history supposedly began in the twelfth-​century as a mock battle between Christians and Muslims celebrating the Reconquista, known as the moros y cristianos.45 (However, theater scholar Max Harris has disproved this connection).46 Although the moresca acquired several regional variations, it typically involved a danced pantomime of a solo woman and her

Figure 7.3  Dance of the Wild Men, from Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, Bruges, c. 1470–1472, British Library Harley MS. 4380, folio 1 recto, © The British Library Board

218  Grace before Its Master several suitors vying for her attention. In the extant descriptions and illustrations, the male dancers don extravagant costumes, bells, turbans, and blackened faces.47 Numerous surviving guild records specify the considerable expenditures required for the dancers’ extravagant costumes, which were often made of luxurious fabrics.48 Israel van Meckenem’s well-​known engraving from the late fifteenth century pictures a circular arrangement of various Moriskentänzerin revolving around a single woman while a group of spectators look on through the rear window.49 The male dancers' acrobatic and excessive gesticulations contrast with the lady’s sinuous curvature. Choreographically demanding, the Moriskentanz’s contorted twists, turns, and kicks display a certain technical bravura, though to a medieval audience these movements would be construed as a comic competition or parody of courtly love.50 Marginal morris dancers framing the Nativity in a book of hours testify to the dance’s popularity (figure 7.4).51 By the mid-​fifteenth century, artistic representations of morris dancers showed a penchant for exoticism. In his series of Moriskentänzerin statuettes, Erasmus Grasser (d. c. 1515) depicted dancers with a darkened complexion and stylized gestures.52 Grasser’s orientalist work may have had the Turks in mind, given the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.53 Although I am not forging a causal relationship between choreomania and other late medieval dance forms, the trend toward extravagance and misrule is noteworthy. In this way, choreomania partakes in a larger project of dance practice, and helps diversify the repertoire of bodily display in medieval culture. As the Middle Ages waned, choreomania’s omnipresence in Western Europe gradually ceased. Attitudes toward choreomania shifted as well. The sixteenth century witnessed a medicalization and feminization of dancing plagues, as detailed in the writings of Paracelsus and paintings of the Brueghels.54 By the Romantic period, these kinetic spectacles receded into cultural memory through the folklore of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Goethe, Robert Browning, and the ballet Giselle—​all highlighting figures who danced themselves to death.55 With the exception of Echternach (present day Luxembourg), in which the community enacts a hopping procession every Whit Tuesday, dance mania in modernity degraded into a pathological problem.56

Dying to Dance: The Medieval Danse Macabre In the fifteenth century, medieval dance underwent another significant shift. Throughout Europe, dance came to signify the act of dying in works of art, poetry, and drama. The fresco cycle at Les Innocents, a Dominican convent and cemetery in Paris, appears to be the first instance of danse macabre (dance of death) imagery. Completed between 1424 and 1425, the composition included

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  219

Figure 7.4  The Nativity and marginal Morris dancers, Book of Hours, French, c. 1440, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS. M 157, folio 119 verso

thirty persons from all stations of life, with a personification of Death leading them in a procession. The accompanying inscriptions, perhaps by Jean Gerson (d. 1429) or Jean le Fèvre (fl. fourteenth century), enacted a dialogue between Death and each of the figures. The dance therefore constituted an encounter

220  Grace before Its Master between the living and the dead, which the charnel house in the cemetery of Les Innocents made all the more palpable. Prior to the fresco’s destruction in 1669, John Lydgate, upon a trip to Paris in 1426, translated the verses into Middle English. Between 1485 and 1490, the French printer Guyot Marchant copied the designs and published them as woodcuts in five different printed editions. The wide dissemination of Marchant’s prints and the spread of similar large-​scale imagery across Europe testify to the danse macabre’s ubiquitous popularity.57 Typically depicted as the merciless abductor of both rich and poor, young and old, such images portray Death as the great leveler of humankind.58 Traditional historiography explains the late-​medieval obsession with mortality as a mass response to the Black Death. Also known as the bubonic plague, this illness devastated rural and urban populations between 1346 and 1349. Marked by telltale lymph node eruptions, the contagion seems to have originated in China in 1333. Rats subsequently transmitted it to the West. Initially infecting Sicily, it proceeded to cause demographic disaster in Italy and France, eventually spreading throughout most of Europe.59 The over-​accumulation of corpses in the street, coupled with the rapidity of the disease’s progression, may have inspired a morbid aesthetic in medieval art and literature. Curiously, however, few scholars have questioned why the dance of death began to proliferate nearly a century after the worst plague struck Europe. In recent years, some exceptional scholars have unearthed complex semiotic and historical factors undergirding the dance of death phenomenon. Literary scholar Jane Taylor’s scholarship demonstrates the diegetical interactions between text and image in early danse macabre prints.60 Art historian Sophie Oosterwijk sheds light on the political and social significance of dance of death imagery.61 Art historian Elina Gertsman contextualizes dance of death iconography, arguing that specific art works represent themes as diverse as the Crucifixion, the Last Judgment, arbitrariness, and salvation.62 Employing different approaches, these studies have defied any universal or reductive understanding of the medieval dance of death. Drawing upon the insights of these scholars, the remainder of this chapter analyzes the role of dance in the dance of death. As a malleable form, dance functioned to channel anxiety, promote religious edification, and meditate upon the possibility of salvation. With its penchant for self-​abandon, dance expresses the realm of the unknown. Often appearing within a sacred space, dance served as a vehicle of moralization, preparing Christians for a good death, that is, one that follows penitence and confession. Contemplating dead dancing bodies, viewers might reflect on their place in the Resurrection at the end of time. The great paradox of the dance of death lies in its pairing of opposites: dancing and dying. The macabre aesthetic relies on full-​bodied experience to approximate disembodiment and inertia. As such, the dance of death connects with

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  221 historian Caroline Walker Bynum’s theorization of medieval matter. According to Bynum, medieval thinkers “understood matter as the locus of generation and corruption.”63 Matter was a paradoxical substance. Bleeding relics, moving statues, and animate icons displayed the incorruptibility of matter and the location of sacred presence. At the same time, matter became profane when it devolved into putrefaction and decay. The dance of death was so powerful because it allied the communicative capacity of the body with the realization of its extinction. Like Bynum, I do not wish to present the Late Middle Ages as a death-​ obsessed culture. Nor do I attempt to explain away the dance of death with reference to plagues, the Hundred Years’ War (1337–​1453), or aesthetic taste. Rather, I examine the various ways in which dance invited the living to perceive the process of death, with all of its religious, social, and individual implications. In what follows, I show how dance structured the medieval experience of dying. The first known reference to the danse macabre is literary. Jean Le Fèvre’s poem, entitled Respit de la Mort (Respite from Death, 1376), narrates the poet’s own near-​death experience. Le Fèvre apparently suffered a grave malady but lived to tell about it. The poet frames this event with the following metaphor: I did the dance of Macabree [Je fistz de macabré la dance] who leads all people to the dance and who addresses them at the grave that is their last abode.64

The etymology of “macabree” remains obscure. Philologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered numerous theories. For some, Macabre referred to the name of an author, whereas others believed that the term was related to the biblical book of Maccabees. Still others found a connection with Saint Macarius, or Jewish and Arabic terms related to tombs, corpses, and grave diggers.65 Regardless of the origins of Le Fèvre’s term, he employs it to capture the moment when the body passes from one world to the next. In this formulation, dance occupies the fleeting, transitional moment between materiality and immateriality. The phrase danse macabre exploits the ephemerality of dance, which, like death, “is a passing from presence to absence, a movement from figuration to disfiguration.”66 In Le Fèvre’s poetry, dance reenacts the embodied act of disembodiment, reliving the moment when the soul wrests itself from the body. For Le Fèvre, the process remained unfulfilled, as he admittedly won this struggle with death. Transmuted into text, his mode of writing highlights the physicality and visuality of the graphic (written), for it is through the act of writing dance that the poet reimagines and reinhabits the past.67 By the fifteenth century, the danse macabre evolved into a more sustained metaphor on the act of dying. The inscriptions at Les Innocents, supposedly transcribed in Guyot Marchant’s printed edition, began to flesh out the mystery

222  Grace before Its Master of the macabre. The text begins with the Acteur (Author), visually depicted as a cleric or priest. The Author begins with these words: Oh rational creature, who desires eternal life. Here you have wisdom, worth noting: to properly end your mortal life. It’s called the dance of death [La dance macabre sappelle], which everyone will learn to dance. For man and woman it’s natural, Death spares neither small nor great.68

The Author’s prelude universalizes the danse macabre. The dance is obligatory and inevitable; it encapsulates the endpoint of mortality. From a rhetorical perspective, dance—​as both language and image—​operates to visualize absence. According to Elina Gertsman: The Dance of Death can be construed as a pictorial response to, and visual commemoration of, the moment of passing, the moment of “taking away.” The painting shows the viewer what it is that death takes; in other words, Death assumes those attributes of the living it robs them of: the ability to move, the ability to speak, and, ultimately, their presence.69

The emphasis on absence, however, does not reduce the dance of death to a mere memento mori, a reminder that one must die. The Author’s commentary serves as a gloss on death. He implies that readers may derive wisdom by contemplating the act of dying. The moralization of the macabre heightens with the metaphor of the mirror. As Marchant’s prologue continues: In this mirror [miroer] everyone can read that he will dance likewise [Qui le conuient ainsi danser]. Sage is he who mirrors himself well. Death makes the living advance, You will see the greatest begin for there is nobody whom Death does not vanquish.70

The reference to the mirror is steeped in medieval theology. The speculum (Latin for mirror) was a didactic instrument; it showed readers what they should know. The mirror provides a tool of contemplation and sharpens the conscience. Moreover, mirroring elicits an aura of direct confrontation.71 It allows for the interblending of self and other, the collapsing of presence and absence. In the macabre mirror, the living come into contact with their dead doubles. Dance creates an interpersonal connection between the living and the dead.

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  223 The interactive quality of the dance of death was even more powerful in public imagery. While Marchant’s woodcuts allowed for personalized viewing, most dance of death cycles were placed within large, public places. The large-​scale painting in Reval, Estonia (now Tallinn) provides such an example. Located in the Saint Nicolai (or Niguliste) Church, the late-​fifteenth century painting by Bernt Notke contains a (now incomplete) sequence of life-​sized figures placed above corresponding Low German inscriptions in Gothic miniscule.72 Notke’s canvas includes a preacher figure, numerous personifications of death, as well as a pope, empress, emperor, cardinal, king, and so forth.73 Near the left side of the painting, Death announces the invitation to the dance: I call all and everyone to this dance [dantse]: pope, emperor, and all creatures poor, rich, big, or small. Step forward, mourning won’t help now! Remember though at all times to bring good deeds with you and to repent your sins for you must dance to my pipe [myner pypen springen].74

Death’s address to the public hails viewers to engage with the text and image. As Gertsman has shown, life-​sized figures in the Reval cycle fostered a dynamic relationship between the viewer and viewed. The Reval panel’s dimensions (originally 30 meters in length) demanded a physical engagement with the figures and inscriptions. The painting would have rested at about eye-​level for most participants, thereby demanding a direct confrontation with the image. Traditionally the spectator would begin on the left side and traverse the scene to the opposite side.75 The viewer’s moving body created a customized reception of the artwork’s message. Moreover, the painting juxtaposes the city landscape with a spectacle of decaying bodies, perhaps commenting on the abundance of material luxury in Reval, given its significant mercantile industry and inclusion in the Hanseatic League.76 In this context, the dance of death warned against what medievalist Philippe Ariès calls an “excessive attachment to life.”77 Clergy were not immune to Death’s moralizing tone. The pairing of Death and the Pope, for instance, shows how the dance of death humbles ecclesiastical authority. Death’s instruments, such as the bagpipes pictured near the left side of the Reval panel, suggest a menacing tone of baseness. According to musical iconographers, piped instruments connoted peasant origins and were linked to the sexual abandon and inebriation of lechers and pagans. And according to folk belief, bagpipes were capable of raising the dead.78 It is precisely this kind of imagery that gestures toward the Reval Pope. “Pope,” say Death, “now you are the highest, /​let us lead the dance, you and I! [Dantse wy voer ik vñ du]”79 In this exchange, the dance of death choreographs inversion; the uppermost ecclesiastical

224  Grace before Its Master office submits to his undignified demise. No degree of sanctity can excuse the pope from this performance. Here the dance becomes a regime of humility. The abundance of religious figures in dances of death does not indicate that the macabre was fundamentally anticlerical. Franciscans and Dominicans preached before the fresco at Les Innocents. Integrating the danse macabre imagery into their sermons, their preaching rhetoric aimed to deliver persuasive arguments over contemptus mundi (contempt of the world).80 Moreover, the macabre in itself constituted a devotional exercise. For medieval Christians, it was a spiritual meditation that demanded acts of literacy and viewing. In this way, the dance of death serves as a variation on the office of the dead. The faithful delivered prayers for the dead during All Soul’s Day and other liturgical feast days. Similarly, the office of the dead in medieval books of hours commemorated the deceased and promoted the salvation of souls.81 The accompanying illustrations typically included corpses, skeletons, graves, funerals, and burials, sometimes alongside depictions of King David, Job, or Lazarus. Late medieval hours gravitated toward increasingly personified images of death. For instance, in an illustrated leaf, presumably from a book of hours or devotional prayer book, death clutches a Franciscan friar amid a deserted landscape (figure 7.5).82 This morbid pas de deux is emotionally fraught, as the friar turns his face toward the viewer, perhaps in a desperate plea for prayers. In another manuscript housed at Oxford, a king awaits death while below a cluster of skeletons enact a ring dance to the beat of a drum (figure 7.6).83 The combination of prayers and dead dancing

Figure 7.5  Illustrated leaf of Franciscan friar and Death, Italy, c. 1440, Free Library of Philadelphia Lewis E M 0.29-​02

Figure 7.6  Book of Hours, French, sixteenth century, Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Douce 135, folio 72 recto

226  Grace before Its Master bodies creates a dynamic interplay between the liturgical hours and the natural life cycle. In the context of prayer, the dance of death lends a rhythmic configuration to personal piety. The religious roots of the macabre may also be related to patronage, as most of the large-​scale representations appeared in churches and monasteries. It is noteworthy that many dance of death cycles support the primacy of the Preacher. He often has the first and last word, and provides a theological commentary on Death and his dance. Bernt Notke’s Reval panel, for instance, begins with the Preacher, who stands at his pulpit on the far left of the painting.84 As he delivers his sermon, the Preacher initiates the dance but he himself does not partner Death. The privileged position of the Preacher suggests that clergy possess a monopoly over death. In the midst of chaos and indeterminacy, religious authorities prepare the souls of the faithful for their earthly departure. In this way, death’s disorder belongs to part of a larger Christian scheme of redemption. The ecclesiastical undergirding of the dance of death upholds an aura of sacramentality. As a counterpoint to Death’s imperatives, the Preacher proclaims a call for repentance. His homily alludes to the penitence and penance that require authorization from a priest. In doing so, he tries to prevent laypeople from dying without a final confession. Indeed, a mors improvisa, or an unexpected death, was nightmarish to a medieval Christian. Leaving this world in a state of sin denied one the state of grace. Death’s dance seemed so unsettling because it opposed the ideal Christian death, one that was peaceful and prepared.85 A fifteenth-​century church painting from Bar-​sur-​Loup (in southern France) expresses the anxiety over an untimely death. Located in the Church of Jacques-​ le-​Majeur, the painting features a band of demons seizing the souls of various sinners.86 According to local legend, the Count of Bar hosted a ball during the period of Lenten restriction. Amid all the amusement, the floor of the dance hall suddenly collapsed, causing the deaths and injuries of several courtiers.87 The Occitan inscription accompanying the image reinforces the association between dance and impiety. The narrator begins by addressing the poor sinners who often go to balls and lead mad dances.88 The narrator proceeds to predict the aftermath of such folly: “and then you will dance in the terrible dance [la terribla dansa], which is well called perpetual cremation.”89 Despite the scene of impending damnation, the Bar-​sur-​Loup’s danse macabre contains a glimmer of hope. On the far right, the archangel Michael occupies himself with the weighing of souls. Above Michael, Christ appears from the heavens, suggesting the possibility of redemption. The inscription explains how one may surpass sin: “For if you enter one time in such a dance [Quar si vous intrares una fes et tal dansa], you must repent, but if you are too late, it will be useless.”90 The narrator equates dance with transgression and appeals to individual contrition. His counsel promotes the sacrament of confession, thus maintaining the authority of medieval clergy.

Dance in the Late Middle Ages  227 Certain dances of death, however, seem to destabilize theological reasoning. This is most apparent when Death appears to the most vulnerable victims, namely children. In these exchanges, the grim reaper abducts the infant from his/​her cradle, toys, or mother’s breast. A  1465 woodcut series known as the Heidelberg Blockbook features a poignant dialogue between Death and the Infant. Death approaches the Infant with a command to move: “Crawl hither, you must learn to dance here [Kreuch her an du must hy tanzen”]91 The child recognizes the unfairness of his situation: “Alas, my dear mother, a black man [Eyn swarzer man] pulls me away. How will you abandon me thus? Must I dance when I cannot yet walk? [Nw mus ich tanzen vnd kan noch nicht gan”]92 The accompanying illustration shows a racialized Death snatching the child by its wrist.93 Death’s stark physique—​exposed rib cage and all—​contrasts with the child’s delicate features and cherubic baby fat. Preying upon innocence and vulnerability, dance becomes a cipher for tragedy and injustice. Resituated within a religious narrative, the child who must dance before he/​she can walk may foreshadow the predicament of Limbo, where its inhabitants are forever denied the beatific vision. In the Middle Ages, the death of the Infant may have reminded parents to baptize their own children as soon as possible. The dance of death targets the vulnerable as well as the powerful. Victimizing all, it effaces the markers of class, gender, and age. From a sociological standpoint, the dance of death terrifies the living because it disrupts social structure. In Marchant’s danse macabre, the interaction between Death and the King exemplifies the usurpation of rank and order: I have not learned to dance so savage a dance and tune [A danses et notes si sauuvage]; Alas, one can see and think What pride, force, and lineage are worth. Death destroys all, this is his usage.94

The macabre moment overturns the King’s hitherto unchallenged power. The accompanying woodcut accentuates the King’s reluctance and resignation to dance.95 Death turns toward the King, nudging him with his bent knee, whereas the King remains frozen with fear. Death’s unseemly kicks suggest the grotesque qualities emerging from a cruder sector of society. The King expresses his ignorance regarding this wild frenzy, as he is only familiar with courtly dances and their characteristic regal restraint.96 The uncouth nature of Death’s “savage” dance decivilizes the king and strips him of his aristocratic cultivation. The King’s refinement must give way to Death’s dissonant distortions. The encounter between Death and nobility upsets traditional paradigms of late medieval dance practice. The processional quality of dances of death recall

228  Grace before Its Master liturgical rituals, but in the fifteenth century may also point to a parodic version of the bassedanse. The bassedanse featured sustained forward, backward, and sideways movement, and may be the first instance of couples dancing in the West.97 By the fifteenth century, the bassedanse surpassed the carole in popularity and inspired the first extant dance notation outside of Italy.98 In true fifteenth-​century fashion, a manuscript illustration from Le Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose) supplements the bassedanse for the carole in the garden of Pleasure.99 The courtiers’ gliding promenade displays their elegance and refinement. The danse macabre, by contrast, derails the King’s aristocratic training with an unruly jig. In a radical reimagining of bodily practice, the danse macabre transmogrifies the noble body. Dance acts as a mechanism of disruption, revealing and dismantling the superficial constructs underpinning society. What is at stake here is not the universality of death, but the specter of disorder infecting an elaborately crafted fiction. With its deconstructive thrust, the dance of death welds indeterminacy onto the act of dying. The specter of instability looms over representations of death and dance in Late Middle Ages. One example occurs in a manuscript of Le Respit de la Mort, which, as noted earlier, contains the first known reference to the danse macabre. The author Jean Le Fèvre is pictured on his deathbed, while Death, personified as a skeleton, prepares to wield an arrow (figure 7.7).100 The same manuscript contains Le Roman de la Rose, the most celebrated medieval romance. Despite the obvious differences between these two texts, there are iconographic similarities. In one illustration, the God of Love prepares to strike his arrow at one of the carolers encircling him (Figure 7.8).101 In the foreground, the Lover gazes into the fountain of Narcissus, where he will fall in love with the Rose, a distorted version of his own reflection. The illustrator may be playing upon the phonetic similarity of Love (Amors) and Death (Mors). Beyond philology, the artist portrays both love and death as contingent forces beyond the individual’s control.102 The concordance between falling in love and dying symbolizes the dispossession that danse macabre incurs on its victims. In this indeterminate atmosphere, dancers can no longer act as willful agents. La Danse aux Aveugles (The Dance of the Blind), a fifteenth-​century text by Pierre Michault, takes this analogy further. In this work, the Acteur (Author) learns of the perils of three blind entities: Love, Fortune, and Death. Given the text’s proclamation that “dance and divertissements [Dances et soulas] /​are perilous, alas,” dance connotes humanity’s demise.103 In a larger sense, dance emblematizes the condition of the human being, who is, in this life, a victim of chance. An image from a manuscript housed at Chantilly shows the figure of Death, blindfolded and riding a bovine, in the center of the dance floor. With

Figure 7.7  Le Respit de la Mort, French, fifteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 19137, folio 46 verso

230  Grace before Its Master

Figure 7.8  Le Roman de la Rose, French, fifteenth century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 19137, folios 46 verso and 68 recto

his extensive dart, he is about to seize one of the unfortunate dancers (figure 7.9).104 The courtly context of the scene may call to mind the macabre spectacles staged by Burgundian dukes and King René of Anjou (d. 1480).105 Michault’s moralizing discourse, however, has more to do with religious edification than with popular entertainment. He reveals the haphazardness of mundane affairs while underscoring the significance of spiritual matters. Death’s dance, like that of Love and Fortune, is arbitrary. It dramatizes accidental forces that resist design and calculation.106 Concurrent with debates on contingency and nominalism that circulated within late medieval philosophy, the dance of death defies any universal rationale.107 One’s only hope is to dance well (bien danser) in this life in order to reap heavenly rewards and avoid eternal torment. As Death explains: After dancing you will come to the day of judgement [Aprés dancier venrés au jugement],

Figure 7.9  Death, from Pierre Michault’s Danse aux Aveugles, French, c. 1470–​1480, Chantilly, Musée Condé MS. 146, folio 56 recto, cliché CNRS-​IRHT, © Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly

232  Grace before Its Master where you will be examined; and there you will find the judge all ready who will render unto you your reward: he who will have danced well to please God [qui bien aura dancié pour lui complaire] will have a rich and estimable prize, the evil one dancing will have to satisfy him [le mal dançant aura pour satisfaire] an eternal, putrid, and abominable fire.108

Although the dance of death continued into early modernity, it underwent significant alterations in the sixteenth century. In 1538, Hans Holbein the Younger printed his first Totentanz (Dance of Death), a series of woodcut engravings that would be reprinted hundreds of times.109 Like medieval dances of death, Holbein personified Death as a skeleton, sometimes with a scythe, musical instrument, or other recognizable accoutrement. He throws himself upon people from all walks of life when they least expect it. However, there are many changes that differentiate Holbein’s Totentanz from its medieval predecessors. Departing from the richness of medieval poetry, Holbein’s text is minimal, often consisting only of captions. With his Reformist and humanist agenda, Holbein’s approach to religious characters is decidedly anticlerical, and he often depicts them committing a sin. The most obvious omission is the dance itself. No longer does Death summon the living with a procession or pas de deux; he now comes ready for the kill. Moreover, Holbein’s work encouraged an early modern trend that valued private and printed, over public and largescale, compositions. Whereas most medieval viewers experienced the dance of death by moving through the iconography and dialogue, the early modern viewer was more likely confined to a series of snapshots on the printed page.110 The performative, processional engagement with the macabre gave way to more subdued interaction between the image and the beholder. Gertsman observes that, “here, the reader/​viewer becomes a spectator rather than a participant.”111 Removing the tanz element from the Totentanz, Holbein’s work limited the semiotic capacity of text and image. With its emphasis on vanitas (vanity) and moral failure, the early modern depiction of death downplayed the possibility for redemption. In doing so, it displays the modernization of Western thought. As historian Dallas Denery explains, “the origins of European modernity depend in large part on how people reacted to the specter of uncertainty and skepticism, the result of a widespread crisis of confidence in which long-​held religious, cultural, and scientific institutions and beliefs had become unstable, even untenable.”112 The postmedieval macabre contributed to the desacralization of dance in the West.

Epilogue Mastering Grace

During a 2007 conference on the liturgy and the sacraments, Francis Arinze, a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was asked about the role of dance in the Mass. Cardinal Arinze answered that “dance should not enter the liturgy at all.” And, he continued, “the people discussing liturgical dance should spend that time saying the rosary. . . . We have already enough problems. Why banalize more? Why desacralize more?”1 In the Cardinal’s view, dance is inextricable from frivolity and worldliness. As a form of secular entertainment, dance defiles and detracts from the sacrality of worship. Even in the twenty-​first century, Arinze’s condemnations are not limited to staunchly orthodox circles. Christian dance remains a marginal practice, and only the most liberal of denominations allow it. Today’s dance polemic indicates ignorance of the longstanding tradition of sacred dance in the Middle Ages. Why, after the wealth of evidence put forth in this book, has a centuries-​old practice vanished from cultural memory? Why does the Church deny its own history? One explanation lies in the radical changes that occurred during the Reformation and Counter-​Reformation. The early modern period produced a new wave of dance polemic which would have lasting consequences for Christian thought and worship. Competing Christian sects contributed to the marginalization and demonization of religious dance. For Protestant reformers, dance was a sign of impiety, excess, and moral folly. Catholics, too, produced treatises that expounded upon the vices that dancing engenders. Among the reformist positions, the Calvinist censure of dances was particularly virulent.2 Moreover, in an extension of their Calvinist roots, Puritan ministers urged their congregants to abstain from such morally dangerous pastimes.3 Religious debates percolated into popular culture with Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) in which dance signifies insanity, folly, and idolatry.4 The growing anxiety over heresy contributed further to the desanctification of dance. With witchcraft and the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dance took a sadistic turn.5 The magistrate Pierre de Lancre’s 1612 work, Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons (On the Inconstancy of Witches), compiles eyewitness accounts of the Witches’ Sabbath, an inverted liturgy complete with infernal dances, demonic orgies, child abductions, and Ringleaders of Redemption. Kathryn Dickason, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197527276.001.0001

234 Epilogue satanic rituals.6 Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the first ballet, Le Balet Comique de la Royne (1581), premiered at the height of the witch trials in France.7 The ballet’s principal antagonist is the sorceress Circe, who, in counterpoint to the French monarchy, symbolizes disorder and illegitimate power. Negative attitudes toward dance migrated to colonial contexts. In the New World, dance became a visual indicator of otherness. For European missionaries and colonizers, the indigenous dancing body was a sign of animalistic behavior and irreligiosity. In colonial encounters, dance facilitated the construction of religious and cultural differentiation. It forged a false dichotomy between Christianity and savagery.8 Together, these views suppressed and silenced a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, and supported an artificial distinction between Western (written) and Eastern (embodied) religions that persists today. Where dance did flourish was in the early modern court. Renaissance Italy led the way, with its pioneering production of dance treatises, manuals, and Western notation. Choreographic advances shaped the professionalization of Western dance. Aristocrats made their mark on the dancing scene with patronage and participation. Nobles began to employ dancing masters to train them in the fashionable dances of the day. They performed refined dances at court, particularly during royal weddings and banquets, and before political ambassadors. Dance historians and musicologists have put forth reconstructions of these dances based on the treatises of the great maestri di ballo: Domenico da Piacenza (d. c. 1470), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (d. c. 1484), and Antonio Cornazzano (d. 1484).9 Another discontinuity between medieval and early modern dance lies in the concept of grace. Whereas grace in the Middle Ages was an act of gifting that bonded humanity to divinity, the concept of grace in Renaissance dance manuals diverged from theological principles. Like Renaissance painters, early modern dance masters refashioned grace into an aesthetic category.10 The graceful dancer had achieved aesthetic mastery of his/​her art. Beyond artistic accomplishment, the acquisition of grace symbolized social progress. Removed from the cloister, the cathedral, and the mystic’s mind, professional dance crystallized into a civilizing regime, one that could be taught and bought for facilitating social mobility, marital alliances, and royal propaganda.11 By recasting grace from gifting to ownership, early modern dance developed a preference for monumentality over ephemerality. In his poem “The Art of Dancing” (1729), Soame Jenyns celebrates how Raoul Auger Feuillet, the most famous dance notator of the period, saved dance from error, loss, and uncertainty by transforming it into a written medium: Long was the Dancing Art unfix’d and free; Hence lost in Error and Uncertainty:

Epilogue  235 No Precepts did it mind, or Rules obey, But ev’ry Master taught a diff ’rent Way: Hence e’re each new-​born Dance was fully try’d, The lovely Product, ev’n in blooming, dy’d: Thro’ various Hands in wild Confusion toss’d, Its Steps were alter’d, and its Beauties lost: Till Fuillet [sic] at length, Great Name! arose, And did the Dance in Characters compose: Each lovely Grace by certain Marks he taught, And ev’ry Step in lasting Volumes wrote. Hence o’er the World this pleasing Art shall spread, And ev’ry Dance in ev’ry Clime be read: By distant Masters shall each Step be seen, Tho’ Mountains rise, and Oceans roar between. Hence with her Sister-​Arts shall Dancing claim An equal Right to Universal Fame, And Isaac’s Rigadoon shall last as long As Raphael’s Painting, or as Virgil’s Song.12

Jenyns’s poem shows the intersection between the codification and imperialization of Western dance. In the form of a lasting, written document, dance obtained status and renown. Its fame and majesty could then spread across geographical boundaries. The advent of Western dance notation fostered a new technology of the body. Dancers honed their technique not by embodying a religious ethos, but by replicating a choreographic code. No longer is dance a spontaneous expression of divine presence, or a kinetic ritualization of Christian devotion.13 The textual turn in Western dance history replaced centuries of oral and embodied memory. Jenyns’s valorization of the new dance creates its own periodization, setting modernity against the medieval past, thereby echoing the development of the nation-​state. The postmedieval stage played out this championing of modernity. Dance, as it did in the baroque ballet de cour (court ballet), projected the absolute authority of the sovereign. Whereas the Middle Ages shaped the Christianization of Western dance, I propose that early modernity ushered in its secularization. To borrow from Marcel Gauchet’s theory of secularity, early modern dance—​though marked by grandeur and spectacle—​underwent a process of disenchantment. As Gauchet explains, the essence of homo religiosus (humankind as religious) is dispossession, or one’s total submission to divine agency and the contingencies of the natural world. Whereas practitioners of archaic religions dwelled in a timeless, mythical past, secular subjects view the world as empirically available for scrutiny and manipulation, seizing their role as autonomous actors. Secularity is

236 Epilogue never wholly opposed to religion. Rather, it is a byproduct of the rise of the modernity.14 Accordingly, the proliferation of dance technologies reoriented one’s epistemic stance and engagement with the world. In this way, my study of medieval dance offers a pre-​history of Western classical dance. Secularization does not imply the extinction of religious dance. During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the Jesuits were champions of Christian dance and advocated the use of gesture, theatrics, and movement in their regular worship. In their published treatises and apologies on dance, the Jesuits were keepers of cultural memory, recounting the devotional dances that occurred from biblical, to medieval, to contemporary times.15 Their overall influence on the Church, however, was marginal. From the mid-​eighteenth century on, the Shakers introduced dance rites into Christian services. Yet then, and especially now, they remain a fringe sect.16 Following Vatican II (1962–​1965), attempts were made to introduce liturgical dance into churches. Although some dancers and choreographers were successful at integrating dance into public worship, the practice remains rare and controversial.17 Even today, Cardinal Arinze and his ilk go so far as to declare that dance was never a part of the liturgy. The mainstream assumption that denies Christianity’s historical inclusion of dance is, as this book has demonstrated, a fallacy. Aesthetic, political, and philosophical maneuvers managed to overshadow a longstanding tradition of Christian thought and practice. Retrospectively, then, this study unveils a history that has been obscured. * * * I first became interested in dance history when I  was a young ballet student around the tender age of twelve. My ballet teacher at that time, Toni Carrion, had a lithograph facsimile of Romantic ballerinas hanging up in the studio. Toni’s favorite dancer from this era was Fanny Elssler, whereas mine was Marie Taglioni. The nineteenth-​century French poet and dance critic Théophile Gautier famously called the voluptuous, exotic Elssler the pagan dancer (la ballerine païenne) and the virginal, ethereal Taglioni the Christian dancer (la ballerine chrétienne).18 Gautier seemed to be identifying the dancers as pagan or Christian on aesthetic, rather than religious, grounds. I could not have known at the time that years later, Gautier’s provocation would lead me to investigate the origins of the pagan/​Christian dichotomy in the history of Western classical dance. As I discovered, nowhere was this tension more vivid than during the Middle Ages. However, despite the harrowing pagan residue of dance, the medieval era witnessed an efflorescence of the art form under the aegis of Christianity. Dance evolved recreationally, intellectually, aesthetically, and above all spiritually. This book may be read as a revisionist history of medieval religion. Perhaps more importantly, this book offers a long-​ neglected, yet ever crucial, part of dance history’s master narrative.

Notes Introduction 1. “Pope Francis’s Birthday Celebrated with Mass Tango at St. Peter’s Square,” The Guardian, December 17, 2014, accessed June 10, 2019. 2. Christina Camorani, Facebook page, accessed June 10, 2019. 3. Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin, Pope Francis, Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio: His Life in His Own Words (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), 152–​53. 4. “He Likes to Tango:  ‘Pope’ Francis Loves Immoral Dance,” Novus Ordo Watch: Exposing the Modernist Vatican II Church, accessed June 10, 2019. 5. “Cardinal Bergoglio Promotes a Tango Mass,” Tradition in Action, accessed June 10, 2019. 6. “Francis’ ‘Tango Mass,’ ” Mundabbor’s Blog. Tradidi Quod et Accepi:  Catholicism Without Compromise, November 12, 2013, accessed June 10, 2019. 7. See Max Pulver, “Jesus’ Round Dance and Crucifixion According to the Acts of St. John,” in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. 178–​79; Barbara Bowe, “Dancing into the Divine:  The Hymn of the Dance in the Acts of John,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7:1 (1999): 83–​104. Some recent studies, however, have argued that dance in apocryphal texts reflected mainstream Christian practice. See Paul Dilley, “Christus Saltans as Dionysios and David: The Dance of the Savior in its Late-​Antique Cultural Context,” Apocrypha 24 (2013): 237–​53; Erik Yingling, “Singing with the Savior: Reconstructing the Ritual Ring-​Dance in the Gospel of the Savior,” Apocrypha 24 (2013): 255–​79; Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Thursday Night Fever: Dancing and Singing with Jesus in the Gospel of the Savior and the Dance of the Savior around the Cross,” Early Christianity 3 (2012): 229–​48. 8. “Ringleader,” in The Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Record of the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), “Ringleading,” in ibid., accessed June 10, 2019. Johannes de Grocheio called the carole dance the ductia, related to the Latin term for leading; see Timothy McGee, “Medieval Dances:  Matching the Repertory with Grocheio’s Descriptions,” The Journal of Musicology 7:4 (1989): 506–​508. 9. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–​1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 10. Dance notation developed much earlier in India, e.g., the Nātyaśāstra, c. 300 bce. 11. “Dance,” in The Oxford English Dictionary, accessed June 10, 2019. 12. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

238  notes to pages 5–6 13. E.g., Sarah Kaufman, The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2015). 14. Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon:  Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), esp. 156–​60. 15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Summa Theologica: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Notre Dame: Christian Classics), esp. par. I, q. 62, q. 95; par. II, q.  109–​114, q.  176–​78, par. III, q.  7–​8, 60–​90; Thomas Aquinas, Nature and Grace:  Selections from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, ed. A.M. Fairweather (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), esp. pp. 139, 141, 147–​50, 156, 159, 162–​63, 167, 176, 178, 193, 197–​98, 201–​202, 212, 215. 16. James Miller, Measures of Wisdom:  The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1986); Miller, “Christian Aerobics:  The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions,” in Acting on the Past:  Historical Performance across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover:  Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 201–​37. See also Steven Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. Anastasia-​ Erasmia Peponi (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013); Graham Pont, “Plato’s Philosophy of Dance,” In Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250-​1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 267–​81. 17. Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Webb, “Salome’s Sisters:  The Rhetoric and Realities of Dance in Late Antiquity and Byzantium,” in Women, Men, and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (London: Routledge, 1997), 119–​48; Webb, “‘Where There Is Dance There Is the Devil’: Ancient and Modern Representations of Salome,” in The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, ed. Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 123–​44. Dance Studies scholar Anthony Shay’s neologism “choreophobia,” although coined for contemporary Iranian dance, is also useful here for ancient and medieval dance, see Choreophobia:  Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999), esp. 7. 18. Nicoletta Isar, Chorós: The Dance of Adam. The Making of Byzantine Chorography, the Anthropology of the Choir of Dance in Byzantium (Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2011); Isar, “The Dance of Adam: Reconstructing the Byzantine Chorós,” Byzantinoslavica 61 (2003): 179–​204; Isar, “Chorós: Dancing into the Sacred Space of Chôra,” Byzantion 75 (2005): 199–​224; Isar, “Chorography (Chôra, Chôros, Chorós)—​A Performative Paradigm of Creation of Sacred Space in Byzantium,” in Hierotopy. The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov and Glen Peers (Moscow: Progress-​Tradition, 2006),  59–​90. 19. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon, ch. 6; Pentcheva, “Miriam’s Dance: Poetry as Movement in Byzantine Culture,” in Bild, Ding, Kunst, ed. Gerhard Wolf and Kathrin Müller (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015), 149–​54. 20. Birgit Fassbender, Gotische Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1994). 21. Catherine Ingrassia, Danseurs, acrobates et saltimbanques dans l’art du Moyen Âge:  Recherches sur les représentations ludiques, chorégraphiques et acrobatiques

notes to page 6  239 dans l’iconographie médiévale (unpublished diss., Université de la Sorbonne, 1990); Ingrassia et  al., La Danse médiévale:  20 Reconstitutions de danses et partitions musicales (Beauchamp:  Le local, 2009); Ingrassia, “La Moresque, danse au XVe siècle,” in Théâtre et spectacles hier et aujourd’hui: Théâtralisation (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1991), 131–​43; Ingrassia, “De L’Art and manière de bien danser la basse-​danse,” in Jeux, sports, et divertissements au Moyen Âge à l’Âge Classique. Actes du 116e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Chambéry: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1991–​1993), 215–​34. 22. Robert Mullally, The Carole: A Study of a Medieval Dance (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); see also Richard Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Ann Harding, An Investigation into the Use and Meaning of Medieval German Dancing Terms (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1973). 23. Jean-​Michel Guilcher, Rondes, branles, caroles: Le Chant de la danse (Rennes: Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, 2003); Yves Guilcher, “Dance as a Reflection of Society,” Choreography and Dance 2:1 (1992): 77–​107; Paul Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet (394–​1673) (Nîmes: La Recherche en Danse, 1995); Bourcier, L’Histoire de la danse en Occident (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), esp. ch. 3. 24. Julia Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze:  Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main:  P. Lang, 2007); see also Walter Salmen, Der Spielmann im Mittelalter (Innsbruck: Edition Helbling, 1983); Salmen, Jüdische Musikanten und Tänzer vom 13. bis 20. Jahrhundert:  “-​-​denn Die Fiedel Macht Das Fest” (Innsbruck:  Edition Helbling, 1991); Salmen, Der Tanzmeister: Geschichte und Profile eines Berufes vom 14. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim:  G. Olms, 1997); Salmen, Tanz und Tanzen vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Hildesheim: Olms, 1999); Salmen, “Dances and Dance Music, c. 1300–​ 1530,” in Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie Blackburn (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 162–​90; Jennifer Nevile, “Dance Performance in the Middle Ages: A Contested Space,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance:  Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 295–​310. 25. Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale:  Musical Life and Ideas in France, c. 1100–​1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 26. Constant Mews, “Liturgists and Dance in the Twelfth Century: The Witness of John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona,” Church History 78:3 (2009): 512–​48; Philip Knäble, Eine Tanzende Kirche:  Initiation, Ritual und Liturgie im Spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016). 27. Gertud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, About Women:  The Sister-​Books of Fourteenth-​Century Germany (Toronto:  Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996); Lewis, “Music and Dancing in Fourteenth-​Century Sister-​Books,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Bennett, Thomas Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William Pollard (Suffolk:  D.S. Brewer, 1995), 159–​69; Lewis, “The Mystical Jubilus:  An Example from Gertrude of Helfta (1256–​1302),” Vox Benedictina 1:4 (1984):  237–​47; Lewis, “The Mystical Jubilus II:  An Example from Mechthild von Magdeburg (1207/​12–​ca. 1282,” Vox

240  notes to pages 6–7 Benedictina 3:4 (1986): 327–​37; Lewis, “The Mystical Jubilus III: An Example from a Medieval German Convent Chronicle,” Vox Benedictina 5 (1988): 164–​74. 28. Karen Silen, “Elisabeth of Spalbeek: Dancing the Passion,” in Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 207–​27; see also Susan Rodgers and Joanna Ziegler, “Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Trance Dance of Faith: A Performance Theory Interpretation from Anthropological and Art Historical Perspectives,” in Performance and Transformation:  New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary Suydam and Ziegler (New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 299–​ 355; Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-​ Century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed., Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 10–​23. 29. Alessandro Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?:  Il Dibattito Europeo sulla Danza nella Prima Età Moderna (Rome:  Viella, 2000); Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research 10:2 (1992):  30–​42; Arcangeli, “Dance Under Trial:  The Moral Debate, 1200–​1600,” Dance Research 12:2 (1994): 127–​55; Arcangeli, “Moral Views on Dance,” in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 282–​94. 30. Gregor Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania:  Frankish Christianity, Platonic Cosmology, and Bodily Expressions in Sacred Space,” Medieval History Journal 12:13 (2009):  13–​45; Rohmann, “Vom ‘Enthusiasmus’ zur ‘Tanzwut’:  Die Rezeption der Platonichen ‘Mania’ in der Mittelalterlichen Medizin,” in Tanz und WahnSinn:  Dance and Choreomania, ed. Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger (Leipzig: Henschel, 2011), 46–​61; Rohmann, Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 31. Elina Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval: The Preacher and His Audience,” Gesta 42:2 (2003): 143–​59; Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 32. Seeta Chaganti, “Choreographing Mouvance:  The Case of the English Carol,” Philological Quarterly 87:1/​2 (2008): 77–​103; Chaganti, “Proleptic Steps: Rethinking Historical Period in the Fifteenth-​Century Dance Manual,” Dance Research Journal 44:2 (2012):  28–​ 47; Chaganti, “Danse macabre and the Virtual Churchyard,” Postmedieval 3:1 (2012): 7–​26; Chaganti, “Under the Angle: Memory, History, and Dance in Nineteenth-​ Century Medievalism,” Australian Literary Studies 26:3/​4 (2011): 147–​62, Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Chaganti, “The Time of Reenactment in Basse danse and Bassadanza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2018), 505–​24. 33. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987); Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–​1336 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1995); Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011); Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About

notes to page 7  241 the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22:1 (1995): 1–​33; Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self: Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Faithful Imagining: Essays in Honor of Richard N. Niebuhr, ed. Sang Lee, Wayne Proudfoot, and Albert Blackwell (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 81–​104. 34. Schmitt, Les Gestes; Schmitt, “The Ethics of Gesture,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part II, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New  York:  Zone, 1989), 2:128–​ 47; Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures in the West:  Third to Thirteenth Centuries,” in Advances in Nonverbal Communication:  Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Fernando Poyatos (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publishing Co, 1992), 59–​70; Schmitt, Les Rythmes au Moyen Âge (Paris:  Gallimard, 2016). See also Georges Vigarello, “The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Chivalry,” in Fragments, 2:148–​99. 35. Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2013); see also Newman, “Exchanging Hearts: A Medievalist Looks at Transplant Surgery,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12:1 (2012): 1–​20; Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 36. Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman:  Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 4–​5; Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-​1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. ch. 7; Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and Alastair Minnis (Suffolk:  York Medieval Press, 1997), 141–​73; Elliott, “Raptus/​Rapture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Beckman (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 189–​99; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits:  Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), ch. 5; Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:2 (2000): 268–​306. 37. Marcia Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 1. 38. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 141–​42; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 2008). 39. Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6:2 (2001): 104–​ 06. See also Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” in Unmarked:  The Politics of Performance (London:  Routledge, 1993), 146–​66; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead:  Circum-​Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 40. Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Franko, “Figural Inversions of Louis XIV’s Dancing Body,” in Acting on the Past, 35–​ 51; Franko, “Fragment of the Sovereign as

242  notes to pages 8–13 Hermaphrodite: Time, History, and the Exception in Le Ballet de Madame,” Dance Research 25:2 (2007): 119–​33; Franko, “Epilogue to an Epilogue on Reenactment,” keynote lecture for “Regarding the Re-​Reconstruction, Reperformance, Research” conference co-​sponsored by Stanford University Drama Department and Stanford Humanities Center, February 18, 2012; Franko, “Epilogue to an Epilogue: Historicizing the Re-​in Danced Reenactment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, 487–502; Franko, “The Notion of ‘Fantasmata’ in Fifteenth-​ Century Italian Dance Treatises,” in A Spectrum of World Dance: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation. Selected Papers from the 1982 and 1983 CORD Conferences, ed. Lynn Wallen and Joan Acocella (New York: Congress on Research in Dance, 1987), 68–​86; Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction, and Beyond.” Theatre Journal 41:1 (1989): 56–​74; Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006); Lepecki, “The Body as Archive:  Will to Re-​Enact and the Afterlives of Dance,” Dance Research Journal 48:2 (2010): 28–​48. See also Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment:  Performing Gestures /​Producing Culture (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2009); Susan Leigh Foster, “Introduction: Choreographing History,” in Choreographing History, ed. Foster (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1995), 16. 41. Mark Franko and Annette Richards, “Actualizing Absence:  The Pastness of Performance,” in Acting on the Past, 1.

Chapter 1 1. Additional dance content in the Vulgate includes: dance as joy or the opposite of mourning (Judges/​Iudicum 11:34, 21:21–​23, Judith/​Iudith 3:10, Esther/​Hester 8:16, Job/​Iob 21:11, Psalms/​Psalmi 29:12, Ecclesiastes 3:4, Lamentations/​Lamentationes 5:15, Matthew/​Secundum Matthaeum 11:17, Luke/​Secundum Lucam 7:32, 15:25); prophesying dance (Isaiah 13:21, Jeremiah/​Ieremias 31:4, 31:13); and praising God with dance (Psalms/​Psalmi 86:7, 149:3, 150:4). For a summary of biblical dance scenes, see Julia Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen–​Engelstänze: Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main:  P. Lang, 2007), 60–​65; Catherine Ingrassia, Danseurs, acrobates et saltimbanques dans l'art du Moyen Âge:  Recherches sur les représentations ludiques, chorégraphiques et acrobatiques dans l'iconographie Médiévale (Diss., Université de la Sorbonne, 1990), ch. 1–​2; Choreography and Dance, special issue, “The Bible in Dance,” 2: 3 (1992). 2. Niklaus Largier, “Figure, Plasticity, Affect,” in Touching and Being Touched: Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Sabine Zubarik (Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 23, 25–​26. Interestingly, “figured dance,” which took the form of geometric designs, was a hallmark of Baroque ballet, see Marina Nordera, “Ballet du Cour,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25–​27; Mark Franko, Dance as

notes to pages 13–16  243 Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp.  15–​31. 3. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes of the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28–​29, 53. See also Georges Didi-​Huberman, The Power of the Figure: Exegesis and Visuality in Christian Art (Umeå:  Institutionen för Konstvetenskap, 2003), esp.  24, 31, 33, 37–​38; Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality:  Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003), esp. ch. 4. Compare with Richard Emmerson, “Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination,” in Typology and Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh Keenan (Atlanta: Georgia State University, 1975), 7–​38; James Paxson, “A Theory of Biblical Typology in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 3:2 (1991): 359–​83. 4. Vulgate, Exodus 15:20, in Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson (Stuttgart:  Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007). All subsequent Vulgate references cite this edition. All English translations are from Vulgate.org, accessed June 11, 2019. 5. Ambrose, De Poenitentia, II.2.8, in CSEL 73. 6. Christopher de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1987), 14. 7. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 44–​66; Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009), ch. 3. Specific gloss clarifying biblical terminology appeared between the lines of biblical quotes (interlinear gloss). In-​depth interpretations appeared in the margins of the manuscript page (marginal gloss). 8. In Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/​81, ed. Karlfried Froehlich, Margaret Gibson, and Adolph Rusch (Brepols: Turnhout, 1992), 1:162. Translation mine. 9. Compare with Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, III.22.9–​14, ed. Barney, 98; Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), ch. 5. Conversely, in Greek mythology, the tambourine originated with the Corybants and the birth of Zeus, Ivan M. Linforth, “The Corybantic Rites of Plato,” Classical Philology 13:5 (1946): 122. In early modern Germany, select churches displayed relics of Miriam’s tambourine fragments, see Jean Devisse, “A Sanctified Black: Maurice,” in Race-​ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly Pindar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51. 10. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum, CLXLIX.8, in CCSL 40; translation mine with assistance from Hester Gelber, and after James Miller, “Christian Aerobics: The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions,” in Acting on the Past:  Historical Performances across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 209. Note that this corresponds to Psalm 150 in most modern Bibles. Cornelius Meyer compiled an online repository of Augustine’s works addressing dance, Tanz und Tantzen bei Augustine, accessed June 11, 2019. 11. Cassiodorus, in his correspondence with the Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric, reported on contemporary Roman entertainment. Though less critical of pagan theater

244  notes to pages 16–17 than his Christian counterparts, Cassiodorus did convey the factions and bloodlust that characterized pagan spectacles, see Variae, in Corpus Christianorum Scriptorum Latinorum 96, ed. A. J. Fridh (Turnhout: Brepols, 1973). For more on the violence of antique spectacle, see Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), esp. 159–​60. 12. Ezekiel/​Ezechiel 6:11, Vulgate. James Miller notes that Ezekiel more likely had ritual gestures of wailing and mourning in mind, “Christian Aerobics,” 209. 13. Ambrose, Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, VI.8, in PL 15:1670–​71; trans. Miller, “Christian Aerobics,” 209. In his choreographic analysis of Ambrose and other Fathers, Miller breaks down the Church’s honesta saltatio through the movements of correctio, extensio, percutio, progressio, exultatio, and revelatio, by which the faithful formed “a holy society of Grace,” Miller, “Christian Aerobics,” 202–​03. 14. Honorius Augustodunensis, “De Choro,” from Gemma animae, I.139, in PL 172:587–​ 88. Translation mine, after Eugène Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. E. Classen (Hampshire:  Noverre Press, 2009), 36. 15. For Isidore of Seville, the chorus constitutes a multitude of people gathered together for sacred rites who stand around an altar in the shape of a crown (corona) and perform in concord, Etymologiae, VI.19.5–​8, XIII.11.10, in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen Barney, W.J. Lewis, and J.A. Beach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147, 275. Plato employed a similar logic with the dance (chorus), which he relates to joy (charā), though these terms are not actually related, see Laws, 2.653. 16. Charles du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (Niort: L. Favre, 1883–​87), 313, 316. The Lexicon Totius Latinitatis defines chorea as a dance combined with song, ed. Egidio Forcellini (Padova: Typis Seminarii, 1896), 606. Charlton Lewis and Charles Short define chorea as “dance in a ring,” whereas chorus denotes a “choral dance,” Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), 328. Chorea could carry architectural associations, referring to circular apses of the High Middle Ages, see Henri Leclercq, “Chorea,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Fernand Cabrol and Leclercq (Paris: L. Letouzey, 1913) 3: 1413–​23; Eugène Viollet-​ le-​Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française, 8:456. Zimmermann gives a sustained discussion of medieval dance terminology (Latin and vernaculars) in Teufelsreigen–​Engelstänze, ch. 2. 17. E.g., the Bohun Psalter, ÖNB Cod. 1826, fol. 20r; the Queen Mary Psalter, BL Royal 2 B VIII, fol. 284r, where the dance of Miriam juxtaposes the burial of St. Catherine of Alexandria. 18. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol:  Ideology and Image-​Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 19. The Gothic Miriam is more subdued in gesture than most Byzantine representations. For studies on the dance of Miriam in Byzantine iconography, see Alfred Büchler, “Music Both High and Low: Tancred of Lecce Enters Palermo, 1190,” Imago Musicae 9/​10 (1992–​1995):  91–​122; Bissera Pentcheva, “The Dance of Miriam:  Poetry as Movement in Byzantine Culture,” in Bild, Ding, Kunst, ed. G. Wolf and K. Müller

notes to pages 17–19  245 (Munich: Fink, 2011), 149–​54; Donatella Restani, “Primi Simboli Musicali Cristiani,” in Atlante Storico della Musica nel Medioevo, ed. Vera Minazzi (Milan: Jaca Book, 2011), 12–​19; Tilman Seebass, “Iconografia Musicale Bizantina,” in Atlante Storico, 54–​ 57; Thomas Steppan, “Tanzdarstellungen der Mittelund Spätbyzantinischen Kunst: Ersache, Entwicklung, und Aussage eines Bildmotives,” Cahiers Archéologiques 45 (1997):  141–​68; Svetlana Kujumdžieva, “ΑΣΟΜΕΝΤΩΚΥΡΙΩ:  The Miniature Depicting the Song of Moses in Manuscript Vat. Gr. 752,” Music in Art 26:1/​2 (2001):  92–​106; Zsuzsanna D’Albini, “The Choral Dance of Miriam:  Changing Iconography in Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Psalters,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 20 (2014): 28-​41. 20. Bible moralisée, ÖNB, Cod. Vind. 2554, fol 21v, French, early thirteenth century. 21. Bible moralisée, trans. Gerald Guest in Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995), 76–​77. 22. Ibid. The Rohan Hours contains a similar gloss on Miriam, see BNF ms. lat. 9471, fol. 181v. 23. The Old French passage employs baler/​bal, carole/​querole/​kerole, danse/​dance, and trippe, which were common terms for dance, dance in a circle, divertissement, leap, or jump. See Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française, et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle:  Composé d'après le dépouillement de tous les plus importants documents, manuscrits ou imprimés, qui se trouvent dans les grands bibliothèques de la France et de l'Europe, et dans les principales archives départementales, municipales, hospitalières ou privées (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1883), 1:563, 786, 2:422, 8:42. By comparison, a medieval French Bible (BNF Ars ms. 5056, fol. 62r) uses the term “queroles” for the dance of Miriam. Moreover, Miriam is particularly significant for women preparing the Jewish Seder, and appears in medieval Haggadah manuscripts, which are among the few figural representations in medieval Jewish art, e.g., BL MS. Additional 27210, fol. 15r; BL MS. Orient. 2737, fol. 86v; BL MS. Orient. 2884, fol. 16v; Sarajevo National Museum, fol. 28r. For studies on medieval Jewish dance iconography, see Cia Sautter, The Miriam Tradition: Teaching Embodied Torah (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), ch. 1, 3; Barbara Sparti, “Dancing Couples Behind the Scenes:  Recently Discovered Italian illustrations, 1470–​1550,” Imago Musicae 13 (1996): 21–​33; Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​Masters and ‘Jewish Dance’ in Renaissance Italy: Guglielmo Ebreo and Beyond,” in Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingbar (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 235–​50; Thérèse and Mendel Metzger, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages: Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1982), esp. ch. 6–​7; compare with Walter Salmen, “Jüdische Hochzeit–​und Tanzhäuser im Mittelalter,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 5:1 (1995): 107–​ 20; “Jewish Dance Issue,” ed. Judith Brin Ingber, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 20:1-​2 (2000). Katrin Kogman-​Appel traces the evolution of figural representation of Jewish art, which began in the 1230s, “Christianity, Idolatry, and the Question of Jewish Figural Painting in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 89 (2004): 73–​107. 24. Furthermore, the divinization of royalty would have resonated with the patrons of the Bible moralisée, who were French kings, queens, and their kin. Clerics, however,

246  notes to pages 19–21 tended to commission the later versions of this work; see John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles moralisées (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 1:50–51. 25. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, CXV, ed. Giovanni Maggioni (Tavarnuzze: SISMEL, 1998), 2:791; trans. William Ryan in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1: 471. 26. Protoevangelium Jacobi, VII, in Ante-​Nicene Fathers, trans. Alexander Walker, 8: 363. For an early modern Latin translation of this passage, see Protevangelion sive de natalibus Jesu Christi et ipsius matris Virginis Mariae, sermo historicus divi Jacobi minoris. . . . Evangelica historia, quam. . . . (Basil: Oporinus, 1552), 32. Jacobus de Voragine and other compilers integrated apocryphal stories into their works. Compare with Mechthild von Magdeburg’s choreographic portrayal of the Virgins’ graces in Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, VI.39. 27. Anon., Vita beate virginis Mariae et salvatoris rhythmica, ll. 1046–​55, in H.  von Strauch, ed. Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 23 (1925): 353–​56, translation mine. The three biblical characters mentioned in these verses played typological roles in medieval exegesis. Moses did so through Exodus as the first baptism; Abraham’s bosom provided a resting place for pre-​Christian souls before the Harrowing of Hell; and David’s humility prefigured Christ’s Passion. Moreover, Zimmermann cites several German vernacular poems in which the Virgin Mary, King David, angels Michael and Gabriel, Moses, Abraham, Solomon, and Christ perform sacred dance: Die Lilie; Konrad von Wurzburg, Goldene Schmiede; Konrad von Wurzburg, Marienlieder; Heinrich von Neustadt, Apollonius; Walther von Rheinau, Marienleben; Bruder Philipp, Marienleben; Der Schweizer Wernher Marienleben; Mariä Himmelfahrt, see Teufelsreigen–​Engelstänze, 121–​29. 28. Jean-​ Claude Schmitt, “Histoire des rythmes:  Des Rythmes dans l’histoire aux rythmes de l’histoire?” Rhuthmos January 14, 2013, accessed June 11, 2019; Barbara Kowalzig, “Broken Rhythms in Plato’s Laws:  Materializing Social Time in the Chorus,” in Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. Anastasia-​Erasmia Peponi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 172–​76, 185–​98. 29. Vulgate, Exodus 32:19. 30. The Carolingians, however, produced profuse debates on images, see Thomas Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Art historian Beate Fricke explains that medieval authorities understood the golden calf as an idol because it represented only the cultic and sacrificial, as opposed to the ethical and moral, aspects of religion; Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, trans. Andrew Griebler (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 223, 225. 31. Interestingly, Jaś Elsner demonstrates how Byzantine iconoclasts modeled their arguments after debates in Judaism and Roman imperial culture, “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium,” Art Bulletin 94:3 (2012): 370–​76. 32. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, II, in LCL 250:236–​37. 33. This corresponds to the second commandment in most Jewish and Protestant traditions.

notes to pages 21–24  247 34. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, in Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Notre Dame:  Christian Classics, 1989), 50, 3a, 25, 3. 35. Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Architectural Sculpture, ed. Linda Seidel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 2, 6. 36. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXXX. 37. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXXIX, in Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS. 26, fol. 146v, French, c. 1340s. 38. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française, 2:175. 39. Ci Nous Dit, CCXXIX, in Chantilly Musée Condé MS 26, fol. 146v. Compare with Jerome’s letter warning female novices against the wanderings of Dinah and the tripping dance (ludat pedibus), Epistola CVII, Ad Laetam, De Institutione Filiae, in CSEL 55:297. 40. Christian Heck, Le Ci Nous Dit:  l'Image médiévale et la culture des laïcs au XIVe siècle: Les Enluminures du manuscrit de Chantilly (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 78. The Ci Nous Dit is not arguing against the use of images. Other stories from this collection describe bleeding hosts, miraculous relics, and true icons emanating the presence of divinity, all of which serve educational and devotional purposes. For other interpretations of the Dinah story that connect Dinah and dance, see Joy Schroeder, Dinah’s Lament:  The Biblical Legacy of Sexual Violence in Christian Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 15, 35, 42. 41. Getty Apocalypse Ms. Ludwig III 1, fol. 17v, London, c. 1255–​1260. Similar iconography appears in other Apocalypse versions, e.g., BL MS. Additional 18633, fol. 20r; BNF ms. lat. 688, fol. 17v; Bibliothèque Municipale de Toulouse MS. 815, fol. 22v. 42. Vulgate, Apocalypsis Iohannis 11:10. For theories on Jewish authorship of the book of Revelation, see Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012); John Marshall, Parables of War: Reading John's Jewish Apocalypse (Waterloo:  Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001); Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012). 43. Compare with Guillaume Peraldus’s treatise on vices (c. 1250), which identifies the swarm of locusts from Revelation 9:2–​11 as dancing women clad in demonic accoutrements, Summae de Virtitibus ac Vitiis, II.8, 36–​37; trans. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 196–​98; compare with Nota de choreis, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 864, fol. 146v. For images of dancing prophets in medieval art, see Kurt Weitzmann, “The Ivories of the So-​Called Grado Chair,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 26 (1972): 43–​91; the Jeremiah trumeau of Moissac Abbey; the Isaiah sculpture on the west façade of the Sainte-​Marie Church in Souillac; and a miniature of Moses dancing in BL Cotton Claud. MS. B IV, fol. 92v. 44. Ebbo, Life of St. Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, III.1, cited and trans. in Juan Antonio Alvárez-​Pedrosa, “Fortune and Fertility Rites among the Pre-​Christian Slavs,” Studia Mythologica Slavica 15 (2012): 164–​66. 45. Ibid., 164–​66; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–​ 400 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 9; Alan Cameron, The Last

248  notes to pages 24–27 Pagans of Rome (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011), Introduction, ch. 1; Ludo Milis, “Introduction,” in The Pagan Middle Ages, ed. Milis, trans. Tanis Guest (Cambridge: Boydell Press, 1998); Alain Dierkens, “The Evidence of Archaeology,” in ibid., 39–​64; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–​1350 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1993), 15–​18. Even Pope Innocent I offered a temporary sanction that permitted the performance of pagan rites during the Visigothic invasion of Rome. 46. BL Harley MS. 3823, fols. 372v, 373v. 47. Bible Historien, PML MS. M 268, fol. 9r, Swabia, late fourteenth century, translation mine. Compare with the following Judaizing or othering tendencies in Exodus 32:19 iconography: Rabbis dancing before the calf in BNF Ars MS. 6329, fol. 7v; BL MS. Royal 17 F III, fol. 54r; and the idolatrous dancers in the margins of a Bruges breviary fragment, BNF ms. nouv. acq. lat. 149. 48. See also Vorauer Bücher Moses, a twelfth-​century text in Middle High German, discussed by Scott Langston, Exodus Through the Centuries (Malden:  Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 240–​43. For a Jewish interpretation of Exodus 32, see Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 72–​74. 49. E.g., Augustine, Epistola XXIX.2, in CSEL 34; Theodoret, Hereticarum Fabularum Compendium, IV.7, in PG 83. 50. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); dir. Suzanne Schiffman, Le Moine et la Sorcière (Bleu Productions, 1987 film). 51. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1979), 264; Francesca Sautman, “Response:  ‘Just Like a Woman’:  Queer History, Womanizing the Body, and the Boys in Arnaud’s Band,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Buger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 168–​89. In the Middle Ages, some heretical sects, such as the Hussites, criticized and attempted to prohibit dancing, see Walter Salmen, “Dances and Dance Music, c.  1300–​1530,” in Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie Blackburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 163. 52. Henmannus Bononiensis, Viaticum Narrationum, LV, in Das Viaticum Narrationum des Henmannus Bononiensis, ed. Alfons Hilka (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1935), 78. 53. Guillaude Peraldus, Tractatus de viciis, XXII, BNF. Ars ms. 536, fol. 35r. Compare with James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, which accuses the golden calf dancers of replacing honor for God with self-​absorbed vanity, BL Royal MS. 6 E VI, fol. 451v. 54. Guillaume Peraldus, De superbia cantus, in Tractatus de viciis, VI.77, BNF Ars ms. 536, fols. 188v–189r. Curiously an early modern edition of this work (Summae de virtutum ac vitiorum, ed. Rodolf Clutius, Paris: Ludovico Boullenger, 1648), omits the passage on Miriam in favor of negative biblical exempla of dance and song. 55. Iacobus de Marchia (or Giacomo della Marca), Sermo XVII, De Luxuriae, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Renato Lioi (Bibliotheca Francescana, 1978–​1982), 1:305. 56. Ci Nous Dit, CCXIX, in Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 26, fol. 147r.

notes to pages 27–29  249 57. Konrad von Waldhausen, Detestacio coree, in Vĕstník, eds. V. Flajšhans and M. Jana Husi (Prague:  České Akademie Císaře Františka Josefa, 1903), 754, translation mine. A  different manuscript version links dance to the Antichrist, see Berlin Staatsbibliothek, Ms. theol. lat. quart. 321, fols. 35r-​ v, cited in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen–​Engelstänze, 91, n. 132. 58. Some clues to Dan’s idolatry occur in Judges /​Iudicum 18:14–​31, when tribe members make and keep carved idols. By contrast, Jerome’s De Nominibus Hebraicis interprets Dan as the tribe of judges, or those giving judgment (“judicium, aut judicans”), in PL 23. Moreover, the book of Revelation states that Dan, unlike the other original tribes of Israel, does not receive a seal (Revelation/​Apocalypsis Iohannis 4:8). 59. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011); 231; B. Darrell Jackson, “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” in Augustine:  A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Markus (Garden City:  Anchor Books, 1972), 131; Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 100. 60. Jacobus de Voragine provides a detailed journey of the ark’s various displacements and its return to Zion, see “The History of David,” in The Golden Legend. 61. For a militaristic approach to David’s dance, see William McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),  68–​70. 62. II Regum 6:14–​15, Vulgate. Note this passage corresponds to II Samuel 6:14–​15 in most modern Bibles. 63. II Regum 6:16, Vulgate. This passage corresponds to II Samuel 6:16 in most modern Bibles. 64. Miller’s etymology is instructive: “The nouns saltatio and saltator spring from the verb saltare, which descends from the noun saltus (‘single leap’ or ‘series of hops, skips, leaps’). Saltus, in turn, derives from the highly active verb salire (‘to jump’ or in erotic contexts, ‘to hump’). A salax was a lusty leaper, whence the modern adjective ‘salacious.’ From salire and saltare descends a large family of composite verbs, including exsilire (‘to spring out’) and exsultare (‘to leap wildly, run riot’) and praesultare (‘to leap before’),” in “Christian Aerobics,” 236, n. 19. Lonsdale offers a Greek etymology of saltatio from halmati (related to jumping), Dance and Ritual Play, 251. The Hebrew Bible uses the word kirkēr (whirl, roll around, go in a circuit, pirouette), which would imply a circular kind of movement; see Mayer Gruber, “Ten Dance-​Derived Expressions in the Hebrew Bible,” in Dance as Religious Studies, ed. Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-​Cappadona (New  York:  Crossroad, 1990), 48–​66; David Wright, “Music and Dance in II Samuel 6,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121:2 (2002): 220–​21. Interestingly, Martine Clouzot compares the dance of David to the medieval jongleur, see Le Jongleur, Mémoire de l’image au Moyen Âge: Figure, figurations, and musicalité dans les manuscrits enluminés (1200–​1330) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), esp. ch. 3. 65. Allan Russell Juriansz gives an analysis of nude dancing as a messianic activity, King David’s Naked Dance:  The Dreams, Doctrines, and Dilemmas of the Hebrews (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2013), ch. 1.

250  notes to pages 29–31 66. E.g., Biblia Pauperum, PML MS. M 230, fol. 16r; PML MS. G 42, fol. 125r; Bible de St. Vivien, BNF ms. lat. 1, fol. 215v; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 13067, fol. 18r. Studies on dance of David iconography include:  Hugo Steger, David Rex et Propheta:  König David als Vorbildliche Verkörperung des Herrschers und Dichters im Mittelalter, nach Bilddarstellungen des Achten bis Zwölften Jahrhunderts (Nürnberg: H. Carl, 1961); Birgit Fassbender, Gotische Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1994); Igrassia, Danseurs, acrobates et saltimbanques dans l'art du Moyen Âge. 67. Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 2. 68. Recent scholarship on early Christian apocryphal texts, however, has identified correspondences between David and Dionysius, see Paul Dilley, “Christus Saltans as Dionysios and David: The Dance of the Savior in its Late-​Antique Cultural Context,” Apocrypha 24 (2013): 237–​53. 69. Pseudo-​Cyprianus of Carthage, Liber de Spectaculis in CSEL 3:3, Appendix I; compare with John Chrysostom, In Matthaeum homiliae, LXVIII.4 in PG 58; Augustine, De Fide et Operibus, trans. Gregory Lombardo (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1951), I.18. Moreover, classical authors employed leaping (throisko) to depict the birth of Zeus, see Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play, 156. 70. John Chrysostom Expositio in Psalmis XLI.2, in PG 55. 71. Procopius of Gaza, Commentarii in Libro II Regum, V-​VI, in PG 87:1127. 72. For a study on David’s nudity and its relationship to medieval kings, see Susan Smith, “The Bride Stripped Bare: A Rare Type of the Disrobing of Christ,” Gesta 34: 2 (1995): 126–​46. 73. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, V.27.77, in CCSL, ed. M. Adriaen, 143; trans. John Henry Parker in Morals on the Book of Job (London: J.G.F. and J. Rivingon, 1884), 876. Here Gregory responds to Job /​Iob 37:24. 74. Hrabanus Maurus, Peter Cantor, and Rupert of Deutz reiterated this approach to David’s humility. See Hrabanus Maurus, Commentarium in Libros IV Regum, II.6, in PL 109; Peter Cantor, Verbum Abbreviatum, ed. Monique Boutry CCCM 196: XIII; Rupert von Deutz, De Trinitate et Operibus Eius, in CCCM 21: XI.25, “De humilitate.” 75. E.g., Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson (Etna: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1990). 76. Glossa Ordinaria, 2: 58, translation mine. 77. Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting:  Lascaux or the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Lausanne: Skira, 1955), 39. Bataille develops his theory of excess and transgression in Eroticism (the second volume of the Accursed Share), but I find his analysis of the Lascaux paintings more germane to the medieval materials. 78. Suzanne Guerlac, “Bataille in Theory:  Afterimages (Lascaux),” Diactritics 26:  2 (1996):  10–​12; Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 55–​61. 79. Robertson, Lectio Divina, xviii; Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio divina (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998), 15.

notes to pages 31–33  251 80. David Salomon, An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria as Medieval Hypertext (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). Salomon bases his understanding of hypertext on postmodern literary theorists such as George Landow, Ted Nelson, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, as well as recent approaches to reading in the digital age. 81. Bible, PML MS. M 969, fol. 173r, northeastern France, late thirteenth century. For an online color image, see the Morgan’s Corsair website, accessed June 22, 2020. 82. Hrabanus Maurus, Commentarium in Libros IV Regum, II.6, in PL 109:88, translation mine. A manuscript version of this passage features a marginal doodle of the faces of two bearded men, along with two hands, which might suggest the mirroring of David and Christ, Bibliothèque Inter-​Universitaire de la Sorbonne, MS. 169, fol. 32v. Hrabanus Maurus was an essential source for the Glossa Ordinaria, as he compiled many early commentaries, yet there are few modern editions of his oeuvre, see E. Ann Matter, “The Church Fathers and the Glossa Ordinaria,” in Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 99–​105. 83. Ambrose, De Poenitentia, II.6.42, in PL 16:508; trans. in Selected Works and Letters, in NPNF, Series II, 10: 615–​16. Compare with Ambrose, Epistola LVIII.4–​6. Interestingly, translator Roger Gryson notes that Ambrose’s attitude on dance draws from Cicero’s Pro Murena, in La Pénitence (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1971), 160. 84. Amalrius, De Ecclesiasticus Officiis, in PL 105:II-​III. 85. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 91. 86. Carlo Delcorno, “Liturgie et art de bien prêcher (XIIIe-​XVe Siècle),” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou and Franco Morenzoni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 215. 87. Psalter, Master of Isabella di Chiaromonte, Matteo Felice, illuminators, The Hague, KB 131 F 18, fol. 86v, Naples, c. 1465–​1470. Although David’s son King Solomon does not dance in the Bible, the Florentine Biblia di Borso d’Este (Borse d’Este Bible) contains an image of Solomon’s family dancing together on the incipit page for Ecclesiastes, in Modena Estense Library, ms. lat. 422, fol. 180v. 88. Psalmi 80:2–​3, Vulgate. Note that this corresponds to Psalm 81 in most modern Bibles. 89. Speculum humanae salvationis, XXV, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek, Darmstadt, ms. 2505, fols. 46v–47r, Clarenberg, c. 1360. 90. Intended to instruct the laity with vivid imagery, the Speculum belongs to other typological genres, e.g., the Bible moralisée, Biblia Pauperum, and the Ci Nous Dit. 91. PML MS. M 766, fol. 146v, for instance, demonstrates the traditional layout. It is noteworthy that early modern blockbook editions of the Speculum omit the dance of David, see Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humane Salvationis, 1324–​1500 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985), 40–​41, 200. This work has survived in over four hundred manuscripts, indicative of its great popularity in the Late Middle Ages; see Peter Lucas, “A Description of University College Dublin MS. 9,” Manuscripta 52: 2 (2008): 326–​27.

252  notes to pages 33–39 92. E.g., Caroline Bynum, Wonderful Blood:  Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 1, 7–​8. 93. For overviews of speculum in medieval religious thought, see Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29:1 (1954): 100–​15; Herbert Kessler, “Speculum,” Speculum 86:1 (2011): 1–​41. 94. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XVII: 1–​2, in CCSL, 40. 95. II Regum 6:20–​23, Vulgate. This passage corresponds to II Samuel 6:20–​23 in most modern Bibles. 96. Bible moralisée, ÖNB Cod. 2554, fol. 44r. 97. Bible moralisée, trans. Guest, 121. The Old French passage employs baler, kerole, dance, and trippe, which were common terms for dance, dance in a circle, divertissement, leap, jump; see Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française, 1:563, 786, 2:422, 8:42. 98. Bible moralisée, trans. Guest, 121. 99. Bible moralisée: Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Lipton, “The Root of All Evil: Jews, Money, and Metaphor in the Bible moralisée,” Medieval Encounters 1 (1995): 301–​22; Lipton, “The Un-​moralized Bible,” Bible Review 17/​2 (2001): 30–​ 37, 48, 50. Kathleen Biddick provides a more comprehensive study on the evolution of Christian/​Jewish typology in The Typological Imaginary:  Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 100. By contrast, Jewish Studies scholars have read Michol’s response as a denigration of Saul’s dynasty in favor of the line of David, as well as David instituting cultic reforms, Wright, “Music and Dance in II Samuel 6,” 217–​23. 101. Glossa Ordinaria, ed. Gibson et al., 3:214. Translation mine. 102. Luke /​Secundum Lucam, 7:32, Vulgate; Ambrose, De Poenitentia, II.6.41, in PL 16. 103. Ambrose, De Poenitentia, II.6.44, in PL 16:508; trans. in NPNF 10:616. 104. Anon., Apologie de la ieunesse, sur le fait & honneste recreation des danses: Contre les calomnies de ceux qui les blasment (Anvers: Grégoire Balthazar, 1572), Bibliothèque Mazarine 8° 40909–​11, ll. 25–​26 [in-​fol.]. 105. MGH SS. Rer merov., V; Vita Faronis 78:193. 106. Jerome, Liber de Nombinibus Hebraicis, in PL 23. 107. E.g., Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, ll. 5821–​ 24; Rudolfs von Ems, Der Weltchronik, ll. 28048–​8182; Bruder Berthold, Rechtssumme, 1:2097: ll. 78–​83; cited in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen–​Engelstänze, 135–​35, 300–​09, 332. 108. Crusader Bible, PML MS. M 638, fol. 29r, Paris, c.  1250. This manuscript contains numerous dance images, see also fols. 9r, 13v, 17r, and 39v. The accompanying inscriptions are in Latin, Persian, and Judeo-​Persian, which testify to the manuscript’s unusual provenance. 109. A more detailed study on the relationship between the Crusades, Capetian kingship, and the Morgan Crusader Bible appears in Kathryn Dickason, “King David in the Medieval Archives:  Toward an Archaic Future for Dance Studies,” in Futures of Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider

notes to pages 39–41  253 (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 45–​50. See also the Lanercost Chronicle, an anonymous annal covering English history from 1201 to 1346 that employs the image of David as a dancer and military hero to narrate a war between England and Scotland; see Anon., Chronicle of Lanercost, trans. Herbert Maxwell in The Scottish Historical Review 10: 38 (1913): esp. 177, 181; Political Poems and Songs of the Fourteenth Century, Rolls Series 1:48. For theories on authorship, see James Wilson, “Authorship of the Chronicle of Lanercost,” Scottish Historical Review 10:38 (1913):  138–​55; A. G. Little, “The Authorship of the Lanercost Chronicle,” English Historical Review 31 (1916): 269–​79; Robert Deshman, “The Exalted Servant:  The Ruler Theology of the Prayerbook of Charles the Bald,” Viator 11 (1980): 385–​442; Adam Cohen, “King Edgar Leaping and Dancing before the Lord,” in Imagining the Jew:  Jewishness in Anglo-​Saxon Literature and Culture, ed. Samantha Zacher (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2016), 219–​36. For an analysis of the historical King David’s militarism and bloodlust, see Steven McKenzie, David:  A Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000); Joel Baden, The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (New York: Harper Collins, 2013). 110. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 49; ch. 3. 111. Ibid., 16. 112. For context on anti-​Judaism during the Crusades, see Robert Chazan, “‘Let Not a Remnant or a Residue Escape’:  Millenarian Enthusiasm in the First Crusade,” Speculum 84 (2009): 289–​313; James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), ch. 25. Differing from medieval thought, some Church Fathers held more ambivalent opinions of the Jews. Gregory the Great did not believe in persecuting them, whereas Augustine’s early writings, which embrace more flexible scriptural interpretations, are more tolerant toward the Jews; see Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 112; Gillian Clark, “The Ant of God: Augustine, Scripture, and Cultural Frontiers,” in Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. David Brakke, Deborah Deliyannis, and Edward Watts (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 160–​63. 113. Meir of Rothenburg, “Sha’ali serufah ba-​esh” (Ask, O You Who Are Burned in Fire), cited in Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 77, ll. 65–​66. 114. Cited in ibid., 105, ll. 7–​8, 11. 115. Matthew /​Secundum Matthaeum 14:6, Vulgate. 116. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, trans. Louis Feldman, LCL 433:XVIII.5.4. After Josephus, one of the earliest references to Salome’s name occurs in a letter by Isidore of Pelusium, Epistolarum, in PG 78:IV.96. The dancing Salome is not to be confused with the Salome in Secundum Marcum/​Mark 15:40, one of Christ’s disciples and a witness to the Crucifixion. 117. There is evidence that Jewish and Christian communities did permit this type of union, known as a levirate marriage, provided that there were no children from the first marriage, though this does not apply to Herodias, see Jack Goody, The

254  notes to pages 41–42 Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 39–​40, 60–​63, 71–​72, 170–​72. 118. St. Germain (d. 576), Bishop of Paris and outspoken critic of incest, identified Herod as the prototypical violator. In an exemplum on Herod and Herodias, Iacobus de Marchia commends Bishop Germain for trying to eradicate incest in Gaul during Childebert’s reign (from Legenda Sancti Germani), in Sermones Dominicales, 4: 35, 91. 119. E.g., Arnold of Liége, “Nequicia Herodis,” in Alphabetum Narrationum; William of Waddington, Le Manuel des Péchés: Étude de littérature religieuse Anglo-​Normande (XIIIe siècle), ed. E. Arnould (Paris:  Librarie E.  Droz, 1940), 71; John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes; Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 75; Herzog August Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 105 Noviss. 2° fol. 73v (the latter contains this caption: “Hic tantus datur incestui traditur adulterae acciditur”). 120. E.g., a capital from the Saint Étienne Cathedral at Tolouse, which shows Herod bestowing a “chin chuck” on Salome, a gesture typically used by lovers in medieval art, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3–​6. 121. René Girard, “Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark,” Ballet Review 10:4 (1983):  67–​76. Janice Capel Anderson explains that kordisan, the original Greek term used for Salome, is a diminutive of korē, which the Bible employs to describe adolescent girls, but it could still carry erotic connotations; “The Dancing Daughter,” in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1992), 121–​22. 122. John Chrysostom, Homilia in Matthaeum, LVIII; John Chrysostom, Homilia in Matthaeum, in PG 58:XLVIII.6–​8; (Pseudo) Chrysostom, Sermo de Paenitentia et in Herodem et in Ioannem Baptistam, in PG 59:485–​90; Andrew of Crete, Oratio XV in S. Johannis Decollationem, in PG 97. 123. Ambrose, De Virginibus, in PL 16:III.6.26–​27; Basil of Seleucia, Oratio, in PG 85:XVIII.1–​2; Theodore the Studite, Oratio VIII.6, in PG 99; Andrew of Crete, Oratio XV in S. Johannis Decollationem in PG 97; Theophanes Cerameus, Homilia LVI, in PG 132. I  have come across only two Western medieval examples (both Carolingian) of the paganization of Salome:  Christian of Stavelot (or Christian Druthmar), Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam in PL 106; Paschasius Radbertus, Expositiones in Matthaeum, ed. B. Paulus, CCCM 56:VII.14. 124. Origen, Commentarium de Evangeli Matt., in PG 13:X.22; Ambrose, Sermo LII.6, in PL 17. 125. In NPNF, Series II, 2; compare with John Chrysostom, Homilia in Matthaeum, in PG 58:XLVIII.4. 126. Gregory of Nazianzus, in Oratio V contra Julianum II.35, in PG 35; Juvencus, Evangeliorum, in CSEL 24:II.52–​57; Ambrose, Epistola XVIII.4, in PL 16. 127. Lawler, The Dance in Ancient Greece (London: A. et C. Black, 1964), 142. Plutarch said that ex-​cons danced like the Thracian nymphs. 128. Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, Ecclesiastical History 1:20.

notes to pages 42–43  255 129. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo CLXXIII, in PL 52. Compare with a medieval encyclopedia that pictures Salome dancing next to a man-​eating dog, BNF Ars ms. 5080, fol. 83r. 130. Cited and trans. in Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages:  New Departures in Poetry, 1000–​1150 (London: Westfield College, 1986), 125–​26. 131. Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, esp. ll. 10321–​10330, ll. 13413–​18, cited in Zimmermann, Teufelsregien—​Engelstänze, 77, 277. In German texts, the affentanz referred to human folly; see Ann Harding, An Investigation into the Use and Meaning of Medieval German Dancing Terms (Göppingen: Verlag Alfred Kümmerle, 1973), 13, 47, 87. Compare with an exemplum of dead women dancing with monkeys in hell, Compilatio singularis exemplorum. 132. Some bestiaries added that monkeys could represent grace and virtue, and, like the unicorn, could only be captured by a virgin; see Christian Heck and Rémy Cordonnier, The Grand Medieval Bestiary:  Animals in Illuminated Manuscripts (New York: Abbeville Press, 2012). 133. Lewis and Short emphasize the Roman context for saltare (including pantomime and gesticulation), “mostly with a contemptuous signification,” A Latin Dictionary, 1620. Forcellini’s lexicon indicates that Latin texts often paired saltator (dancer) with the pleasure, delights, artifice and pantomimes’ gestures (voluptas, deliciae, artifex, gesticulationes, histriones), in Lexicon Totius Latinitatis, 204. 134. William of Waddington, Le Manuel des Pechiez, BNF ms. fr. 14959, fol. 17r, translation mine. A scribal maniculum (one of the few annotations in this manuscript) marks the importance of this passage. 135. Radulfus Ardens, Homilia I.33, in PL 155:437. Zimmermann discusses a “Johannes” composition written by a certain Frau Ava in 1127, which describes the quick, springy, and juggleresque dance of Salome, Teufelsreign–​Engelstänze, 189, n. 18. 136. Honorius of Autun, Elucidarium, II.18, in PL 172:1148; Anne Wéry, La Danse écartelée de la fin du Moyen Âge à l'Âge Classique:  Mœurs, esthétiques et croyances en Europe romane (Paris:  Librairie Honoré Champion, 1992), 126. However, Edmond Faral shows how jongleuresses could obtain power and influence in medieval courts, Les Jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 63–​64. 137. For studies on Salome iconography, see Hugo Daffner and Wilhelm Thöny, Salome:  Ihre Gestalt in Geschichte und Kunst, Dictung, Bildende Kunst, Musik (Munich:  Hugo Schmidt, 1912); Torsten Hausamann, Die Tanzende Salome in der Kunst von der Christlichen Frühzeit bis um 1500:  Ikonographische Studien (Zürich:  Juris, 1980); Fassbender, Gotische Tanzdarstellungen, ch. 1, 4; Ingrassia, Danseurs, acrobates, et saltimbanques; F. de Mély, “Signatures de primitifs:  Le Peintre Johannes Gallicus à Brunswick (1246) et la danse de Salome,” Revue Archéologique 23 (1914):  349–​78; Jane Long, “Dangerous Women:  Observations on the Feast of Herod in Florentine Art of the Early Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 66: 4 (2013): 1153–​1205; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen –​ Engelstänze, ch. 7; Barbara Baert, Revisiting Salome’s Dance in Medieval and Early Modern Iconology (Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT:  Peeters, 2016); Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber, “The

256  notes to pages 43–46 Dance of Salome,” Clio: Women, Gender, History 46:2 (2017): 189–​98. For studies on the modern representation of Salome, see Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Rhonda Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007); Petra Dierkes-​Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing:  Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2010); Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, ed. Clair Rowden (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2016); Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987); Loyd Llewellyn-​Jones, “ ‘Salome, Nice Girl’: Rita Hayworth and the Problem of the Hollywood Biblical Vamp,” in Reception of Ancient Virtues in Modern Popular Culture: Beauty, Bravery, Blood, and Glory, ed. Eran Almagor and Lisa Maurice (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 206–​30; Maggy Anthony, Salome’s Embrace:  The Jungian Woman (New  York:  Routledge, 2018). Also, Arthur Pita choreographed Salome for the San Francisco Ballet in 2017. 138. Oxford BL MS. Auct. D. 2. 6, fol. 166v, Dorchester, mid-​twelfth century. Compare with Cambridge, Pembroke College MS. 120, fol. 5v, depicting Salome as a contortionist with two swords. Sword dances did comprise a form of popular or courtly entertainment in medieval England, but not until the fifteenth century. 139. Medieval authors like James le Palmer and Johannes Nider attribute gladium dyaboli and gladium ignis (sword of fire) to Jerome and place them in the context of lascivious dancing women. Several of Jerome’s letters refer to women, dancing, swords, and fire in negative ways, but I have not yet found the above phrases expressed verbatim in any of Jerome’s writings. 140. BL MS. Arundel 157, fol. 7r, Oxford, early thirteenth century. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle that occurs in all four gospels: Secundum Matthaeum/​ Matthew 14:13–​21; Secundum Marcum/​Mark 6:31–​44; Secundum Lucam/​Luke 9:10–​17; Secundum Ioannem/​John 6:5–​15. 141. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne Bonum:  A Fourteenth-​ Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge: British Library Mss Royal 6 E VI-​6 E VII (London: H. Miller Publishers, 1996), 1: 14–​15, 35; 2: 142, Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator: The Case of the Omne Bonum,” Art Bulletin 71: 4 (1989): 552–​53. Sandler believes that this manuscript was designed for private use. 142. BL Royal MS. 6 E VI, fol. 451v, southeast England, c. 1376–​1375. 143. James le Palmer, Omne Bonum, in ibid., translation mine. 144. Ibid., translation mine. Other condemnations of Salome in sermon collections echo James: BL Harley MS. 3823, fols. 372v-​373r; Oxford BL MS. Bodley 90, fol. 38r; Nota de choreis, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 864, fols. 146v-​147r. 145. Capitula XVII, in PL 119:602–​608. 146. La Décollation de Jean-​Baptiste, in Les Mystères de la Procession de Lille, ed. Alan Knight (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 4:196, ll. 79–​82, translation mine. Countess Margaret of Flanders instituted the Procession of Lille in 1270, originally to commemorate a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary (Notre-​Dame de la Treille). The clergy processed through the streets and around the city walls with relics of the Virgin (hair

notes to pages 46–48  257 and breast milk), and guilds later performed the plays in town squares, William Tydeman, The Medieval European Stage, 500–​ 1500 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), 530. 147. La Décollation de Jean-​Baptiste, 4:205, ll. 269–​74; translation mine. Editor Alan Knight indicates that the actors who portrayed Herod and his ministers donned brightly colored costumes (red, blue, yellow) and held wine glasses. Their table was covered with meat and bread, ibid., 4:191–​92. 148. La Décollation de Jean-​Baptiste, 4:212, ll. 416–​19; translation mine. 149. This Diana is very different from Isidore’s pastoral rendering of her and her dancing nymphs, Etymologiae, I.39.16, ed. Barney et al., 65. 150. Raymond de Peñafort, Summa de poenitentia (Rome: Ioannis Tallini, 1603), 107, translation mine. 151. Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XXVII, De Sortilegiis, in Sermones Dominicales, 1:431. For other accounts of queens and girls dancing with Diana, see Fasciculus Morum, XXVI, in Eton College MS. 34, fol. 49v; Oxford BL MS. Bodley, 410, fol. 51r. 152. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus, XCVII, in BNF ms. lat. 15970, fol. 209v; Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon (Paris: H. Loones, 1877), 88–​90; Jacques Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur:  Récits facétieux du Moyen Âge (Paris: Brepols, 1992), 140; Recueil des Exempla, BSG Ms. 564, fol. 15r-​v ; Du Cange, Glossarium, 1:181, 656. 153. Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell:  Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–​1500 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), ch. 7; Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies:  Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 154. Another positive reading of Salome comes from the recently discovered gospel commentary by Fortunatianus of Aquileia, in which Salome signifies the Church, see Commentary on the Gospels, trans. H.A.G. Houghton, in CSEL (Berlin:  De Gruyter, 2017), 60–​61. See also Baert, Revisiting Salome’s Dance, ch. 6; Lynneth Miller, “The Dance of Salome: Dancing Women, Sin, and Salvation in Medieval Texts,” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 12, 2016. 155. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo CXXVII, in PL 52:552, translation mine. Compare with Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum, CXL.26, in CCSL  38–​40. 156. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo CLXXIV, in PL 52. 157. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, XVIII:133–​35, in Paradiso, trans. Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 366–​67. In the larger context of this passage, Dante denounces the degradation and avarice of the papacy.

Chapter 2 1. Hildegard von Bingen, Sequence to St. Rupert, cited and trans. in Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages:  New Departures in Poetry, 1000–​1150 (London: Westfield College, 1986), 167–​68. According to Dronke, the urn (or vessel)

258  notes to pages 48–50 can also connote an angelic metaphor or the saint’s innocence. Barbara Newman renders the word urn (vas) as a chalice; see Symphonia. A  Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations], trans. and ed. Barbara Newman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 192–​97. Hildegard crafted this sequence with care, Newman emphasizes, ibid., 295. 2. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints:  Their Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), ch. 4. 3. This chapter does not address the saints’ involvement in mysticism or healing. See ­chapter 5 for an analysis of dancing female mystics and beguines. See c­ hapter 7 for a discussion of Saints Vitus (known in France as St. Gui), Willibrord, Anthony, Magus, and Valentine, who reportedly incited or remedied dance epidemics. 4. Basil of Seleucia, Oratio XVIII.2, in PG 85; Theodore the Studite, Oratio VIII.7, in PG 99. 5. Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, I.36, in MGH, SS. Rer. Merov. 2:375; trans. Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 84. For an illustration of this scene, see Bibliothèque Municipale de Poitiers, MS 250, fol. 40r. The Latin choraulas or corollas designated a secular dance form, better known as carole in Old French, which I discuss in more depth in c­ hapter 6. 6. Eudes de Cheriton, Sermones Dominicales CXXI, in Les Fabulistes latins depuis le siécle d’auguste jusqu'à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Léopold Hervieux (Paris:  Firmin-​ Didot, 1896), 4:344, translation mine. For Odo’s more condemnatory discourse on dance, see Alessandro Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?: Il Dibattito Europeo sulla Danza nella Prima Età Moderna (Rome: Viella, 2000), 100. 7. Jacobus de Voragine, “De Sancto Benedicto,” “De Sancto Nereo et Achilleo,” “De Sancto Hieronymo,” and “De Sancta Elizabeth,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 188, 310, 599, 689, 698. Jacobus called his compilation the “Golden Legend” since his pious tales are worth their weight in gold. After the Bible, the Golden Legend was the most copied and read text in the Middle Ages. It went out of favor during the Protestant Reformation, as Reformers considered it a remnant of superstition and idolatry. Some Protestants renamed it The Iron Legend, due to its gruesome details of tortured martyrs, see Eamon Duffy, “Introduction,” in ibid., xx–​xxi. 8. E.g.: MGH, Leg., II.3.83. See also the dance prohibition in a sermon attributed to St. Eligius in Audoin de Rouen, Vita Eligii, II.5, in MGH SS. Rer. Merov. 4:705–​706; Eleanor Duckett, The Wandering Saints of the Early Middle Ages (London: Collins, 1959), 59. By the term Carolingian, I mean the period in medieval history that roughly corresponds to the reign of Charlemagne and his immediate heirs, c. 780–​900. Modeling itself after ancient Rome, the Carolingian Empire consolidated power in France, fostered education and the arts, and implemented liturgical reform. 9. Rutebeuf, Complaint de Constantinople, ll. 103–​104: “Or nous desfent la carole, /​Que c’est ce qui la terre afole,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Rutebeuf, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin (Paris: A. et. J. Picard et Cie, 1969); Brian Levy, The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabilaux (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000), 111–​12. However,

notes to pages 50–52  259 the St. Louis Psalter, BNF ms. lat. 10525, and the Crusader Bible, PML MS. M 638, commissioned by, or during the reign of, Louis IX, contain several representations of dance and violence. See my c­ hapters 1 and 5 for a discussion of these manuscripts. 10. St. Catherine of Alexandria (haloed, in white) before Emperor Maxentius (enthroned, in black), Andrea de Bartoli Chapel of St. Catherine, Basilica di San Francesco Assisi, c. 1368. Similarly, a fresco at Campo Santo attributed to Andrea Bonaiuti depicts the twelfth-​century St. Ranieri of Pisa abstaining from joining a round dance of women, here symbolic of the worldly pleasures he must avoid, as he achieved sainthood by rejecting his former life as a minstrel. See also Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research 10:2 (1992):  35; Gregor Rohmann, Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 309–​10, 330–​33. 11. Jacques Dubois and Jean-​Loup Lemaître, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1993), 106. For theories on authorship, see Kevin Donovan, “The Sanctoral,” in The Study of Liturgy, ed. Cheslyn Jones (London: SPCK, 1992), 473, 480. 12. Pamela Sheingorn, “Introduction,” in The Book of Sainte Foy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 21–​22; Passio of Sainte Foy, in ibid., 35–​36. In some accounts of her martyrdom, Foy died under the Roman Emperor Diocletian (d. 305), one of the most notorious persecutors of Christians. 13. Anon., Translatio S. Fidis, II.25, in Acta Sanctorum, III (Oct. 6): 299; trans. Sheingorn in The Book of Sainte Foy, 273. 14. Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon:  Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Pentcheva, “Moving Eyes:  Surface and Shadow in the Byzantine Mixed-​Media Relief Icon,” Res 55/​ 56 (2009):  222–​234; see also Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty:  Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–​circa 1204 (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 120. Luminescence was considered an ideal of beauty and a criterion for theological aesthetics in the Middle Ages, see Sarah-​Grace Heller, “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in Le Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76:4 (2001): 934–​59; Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988), esp. 89, 92; Eco, History of Beauty, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2004), ch. 4. 15. For more specific studies of the reliquary as a medium of animation, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 2011); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1994), 301–​02; Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary:  Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Hahn, Strange Beauty, esp. ch. 7. 16. Kathryn Dickason, “Gracing the Idols: Sainte Foy and the Sanctification of Western Medieval Dance,” European Drama and Performance Studies 8 (2016): 43–​70.

260  notes to pages 52–53 17. Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval Cult-​Image in the West,” Acta Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 8 (1979):  186; Bynum, Christian Materiality, 70, 184–​85; Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-​1336 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1995), 200–​225, 318–​29. 18. Brown expounds upon saints’ praesentia in The Cult of the Saints, ch. 5. 19. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 4–​9; Bynum, Christian Materiality, ch. 3; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New  York:  Zone Books, 1991); Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–​400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 112; Martine De Reu, “The Missionaries: The First Contact Between Paganism and Christianity,” in The Pagan Middle Ages, ed. Ludovicus Milis (Woodbridge, Suffolk:  Boydell Press, 1998), 13–​22; Jacques Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and the Golden Legend (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2014), 23. Occasionally the authenticity of relics was questioned; see esp. Guibert of Nogent, De Pignoribus, I.3, in PL 156. It is noteworthy that in the Middle Ages, Jewish communities developed their own cult of martyrs, who were often victims of pogroms, see Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death:  Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2002); Ra’anan Boustan, From Martyr to Mystic:  Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). Interestingly, Robert Bartlett discusses dance ceremonies for the commemoration of Jewish saints, in which Muslims occasionally provided means of transportation, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 629. 20. Brown, The Cult of the Saints,  4–​5. 21. Anon., Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis, IV:3, in Liber Miraculorum, ed. Auguste Bouillet (Paris: A. Picard et Fils, 1897), 179; trans. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 185. The eleventh-​century monk Bernhard of Angers authored the first two books of the Liber Miraculorum, whereas an anonymous “monk-​continuator(s) ” at Conques wrote books III and IV between the early and mid-​eleventh century; see Sheingorn, “Introduction,” in trans. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy,  24–​26. 22. Concilium Cabilonses, XIX, MGH Con. Merov. Aevi, I: 212; Pope Leo IV, Synod of Rome of 826, canon 35, in MGH Conc. aev. Karol., 1:16; Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio (Graz: Akademische Druck-​und Verlagsanstalt, 1960–​ 1962), 14: 1008. Adrien Badois shows that by the late Middle Ages, secular courts controlled the proper execution of dances on saints’ days, see “On ne Badine pas avec la danse: Les Structures d’encadrement d’une fête de saint patron au début de XVe Siècle en Picardie,” Transposition 2 (2012): 2–​14. 23. Beate Fricke, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints: Western Attitudes towards the Worship of Images and the ‘Cultura Veterum Deorum,’” in Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm, ed. Anne McClanan and Jeff Johnson (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2006), 69, 80; Fricke, Ecce Fides: Die Statue von Conques, Götzendienst und Bildkultur im Westen (Munich:  Fink, 2007); Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 16–​17. Thomas

notes to pages 53–54  261 Hoving, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, believed that Foy’s reliquary came from a portrait or death mask of the Emperor Charlemagne (d. 814), see “Letters,” in Harper’s Magazine (May 2009). 24. Elizabeth S. Bolman, “The Enigmatic Coptic Galaktotrophousa and the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Egypt,” in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), esp. 13; Thomas Mathews and Norman Muller, “Isis and Mary in Early Icons,” in ibid., 3; Mary Lefkowitz, Divine Mirrors:  The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts, ed. Melissa R. Katz (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 134; Ilene Forsyth Haering, Throne of Wisdom:  Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Barbara Newman, Gods and Goddesses:  Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 239–​40; Bissera Pentcheva, Icons and Power:  The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-​Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 1; Gregory the Great, Registrum Epistolarum, in MGH, Scriptores 11:37, 56. 25. Fricke, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints,” 69–​74; Bernhard of Angers, Liber Miraculorum, ed. Bouillet, I.13; Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–​1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 22. For instances of martyrs working as iconoclasts, see Jacobus de Voragine, “De Sancto Nicolao,” in Legenda Aurea, trans. Granger, 23; Fricke, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints,” 70–​73; Helen Saradi-​Mendolovici, “Christian Attitudes Toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity and Their Legacy in Later Byzantine Centuries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 54–​57. 26. Beate Fricke, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints,” 69, 80. For instances of early Christians attempting to preserve pagan monuments, see Saradi-​ Mendolovici, “Christian Attitudes Toward Pagan Monuments,” 47–​54. 27. Theodulf d’Orléans, Libri Karolini, esp. II.27; Bynum, Christian Materiality,  46–​47. 28. The Image de Pierre (image of stone) story, from a thirteenth-​century collection (also adapted by Gautier de Coinci and William of Malmesbury), recounts the idol problem during the era of Gregory the Great. The Christian characters continue to adore statues of Venus, which angers the Virgin Mary, and she even threatens a youth and the pope with damnation if they neglect to make a statue of her, in La Vie des Pères, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1987), 1: esp. ll. 8672–​93; Adrian Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French Vie des Pères (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 539–​50; Paul Baum, “The Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” PMLA 34 (2009): 523–​79. 29. Prudentius, Psychomachia, l, 34. 30. Fricke, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints,” 80. Compare with Philippe Buc’s study on “object-​conversion,” see “Conversion of Objects: Suger of Saint-​Denis and Meinwork of Paderborn” Viator 28 (1997): 99–​143. Analyzing Gothic art, medieval historians have posited that Western iconography, with its increasing emphasis on Christ’s material body, underlies a gradual working out of Incarnational theology; see

262  notes to pages 54–56 Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Le Corps des Images: Essais sur la Culture Visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); Bynum, Christian Materiality, 33. 31. Harley Psalter, BL Harley ms. 603, fol. 27r, England, early eleventh century. The original illustration appears in the Utrecht Psalter, illustration for Psalm 46 (Vulgate), Rheims, early or mid-​ninth century, Utrecht Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Bibl. Rhenotraiectinae 32, fol. 27v. See also Jonathan J.G. Alexander, “Dancing in the Streets,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996):150–​51; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, La Raison des Gestes dans l'Occident Médiéval (Paris:  Gaillimard, 1990), 126. Additional dance imagery appears on fols. 24v and 83r. The Utrecht Psalter was copied several times in England and Spain between the tenth and twelfth centuries, see Cambridge Trinity College MS. R 17.1, and BNF ms. lat. 8846 (the latter renders the Utrecht dance content in an early Gothic style). 32. Celia Chazelle has, for instance, drawn attention to images of synodal councils that accompany the written creeds, see “Archbishops Ebo and Hincmar of Rheims and the Utrecht Psalter,” Speculum 72:4 (1997): 1062–​70. 33. Psalm 46:11, Vulgate. This corresponds to Psalm 47 in most modern Bibles. 34. See also Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XLVII.1, CXLIX.7, CXII.3, in CCSL 38–​40. Hildegard’s gloss on Psalm 150 ties the tympanum to the choric exultation of martyrs, Scivias, III.13, trans. and ed. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1990). 35. In Analecta Hymnica, ed. Guido Maria Dreves (Leipzig, Fue’s Verlag, 1895), 21:135, ll. 1–​4, 18–​20, translation mine. This text comes from Engelberg MS 314. See also a late medieval hymn about Saint Ursula and her numerous female companions, martyred at the hands of the Huns: “You led the host /​Of eleven thousand virgins /​In the dance of angels /​To the rejoicing of the heavens /​And to the everlasting eternal life /​ Trampling vices under foot,” in Analecta Hymnica, 1:137, ll. 7–​12; trans. Eugène Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. Ernest Classen (Hampshire: Noverre Press, 2009), 45. Attributed to the Byzantine iconophile John of Damascus, another hymn for the Feast of St. Gertrude (November 17), contains these verses: “your courts of angels /​encircle perpetually in the dance,” cited in Louis Gougaud, “La Danse dans les Églises,” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 15:1 (1914):  5; Gougaud, “Danse,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, eds. Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq (Paris: Letouzey, 1920), 4: 248, n. 6. 36. Psalter illustration for Psalm 101, perhaps Ghent, late thirteenth century, BL Burney MS 345, fol. 127v. For additional manuscript images of saints and martyrs alongside dancers, see PML MS. M 729, fol. 260r; PML MS. M 75, fol. 386r; PML MS. S 7, fol. 249r; PML MS. M 626, fol. 49r; BL Yates Thompson MS. 13, fol. 133v. 37. For more complex understandings of the role of marginalia in medieval art, see Lilian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1966); Michael Camille, Image on the Edge:  The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Word in the Text and the Image in the Margin: The Case of the Luttrell Psalter,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 87–​99; Sandler, “The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present, and Future,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 1–​49; Meyer

notes to pages 56–58  263 Schapiro, “Marginal Images and Drôlerie,” in Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art:  Selected Papers (New  York: George Braziller, 1979), 196–​98; Rosina Buckland, “Sounds of the Psalter:  Orality and Musical Symbolism in the Luttrell Psalter,” Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 28:1–​2 (2003): 71–​ 97; Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29–​30. 38. Translatio S. Fidis, II:26–​27, in Acta Sanctorum, III (Oct. 6): 299; trans. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 274. This document, written between 1020 and 1060, provides the most detailed information regarding the translation of Foy’s relics. 39. Candidus, Vita Aegilis, MGH, SS, 15:222; PL 123:579; MGH, SS. 35; Translatio S. Viti, MGH SS, II:513; Acta Pontificum Cenommanis, ed. Ambroise Ledru (Le Mans: La Société des Archives Historiques, 1901), 328, 347. See especially Pierre Riché, “Danses profanes et religieuses dans le haut Moyen Âge,” in Education et culture dans l’Occident médiéval (Aldershot:  Variorum, 1993), 165; Riché, “Translations de reliques à l’époque carolingienne,” in Le Moyen Âge 82 (1976): 201–​218. See also Bat-​Sheva Albert, Le Pèlerinage à l’époque carolingienne (Louvain-​la-​Neuve: Collège Erasme, 1999), 234–​35. 40. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1156–​57. This term appears in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, etc. 41. Roy Rappaport stresses the importance of ritual’s invariance in constructing a transcendent discourse, see Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 42. Patrick Geary gives a rich history of this phenomenon in Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978). Fricke explains that in the medieval West, the tomb was the most sacred site until about the ninth century, when stolen relics demanded ceremonial legitimation, “Fallen Idols and Risen Saints,” 67–​68. 43. Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 170–​71. 44. Peasants reportedly spent a night or two keeping vigil on the Translation day, during which many healing miracles occurred, see Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, “Sainte Foy on the Loose, or the Possibilities of Procession,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), esp. 54–​63. As the authors explain, the St. Foy processions did not seem to adhere to a regularized, prechoreographed route: “Within Conques the processions do not appear to have followed any particular symbolic route; the main purpose was rather to transport a sacred center out of town to another location (usually a rural one) where the reliquary statue could act on behalf of the monastery,” ibid., 63. See my c­ hapter 3 for a more extensive analysis of dance processions in medieval liturgy. 45. Bernhard Töpfer, “The Cult of Relics and Pilgrimage in Burgundy and Aquitaine at the Time of Monastic Reform,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 45, 55; Head and Landes, “Introduction,” in

264  notes to pages 58–59 ibid., 6–​7, 11–​12, 17–​18; Head, “Peace and Power in France Around the Year 1000,” Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006): 1–​11; Ashley and Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1999), 121; Ashley and Sheingorn, “Sainte Foy on the Loose,” 59–​61; Relics and reliquaries could even be sold to pay tribute during hostage crises, see Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God (Mahwah: Hidden Spring, 2003), 218–​22. Sheingorn and Ashley add that medieval women also contributed to the implementation of the Peace of God, tempering their husbands’ militarism with the image of the pious wife, thus encouraging men’s pacifism and donations to the Abbey. Sainte Foy, however, maintained a more militant, masculine demeanor as a solider of Christ (miles Christi), and healed the wounds of pious warriors; see Ashley and Sheingorn, Writing Faith. 46. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion:  From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 56, 63; André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 536. 47. Translatio S. Fidis, II:20, in Acta Sanctorum, III (Oct. 6), 298; trans. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 271, with my changes to her translation. 48. See also David Payne-​Carter, who describes how Benedictine processions turn the mourning process into publicized, festive rites, “Procession and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in a Benedictine Monastery,” The Drama Review 29:3 (1985): 44. 49. Friederike Fless and Katja Moede, “Music and Dance: Forms of Representation in Pictorial and Written Sources,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford:  Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 255; Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1901; see also Livy, X.20.4, XXXVIII.17; Xenophon, Symposium, II:15–​20; Aeneid, V:545–​603; Homer, Iliad, book XVIII; Tacitus, Germania, XXIV; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, I.17.2–​6. 50. Jerome, Epistola XXIII ad Marcellam, III, in CSEL 54:213; trans. W.H. Fremantle et al., NPNF, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), 6. This anecdote also appears in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea; see The Golden Legend, trans. Granger, 599. 51. Edigio Forcellini, et al., Totius Latinitatis Lexicon, 6:185; L’Abbé Henri Villetard, “La Danse Ecclésiastique à la Métropole de Sens,” Bulletin de la société archéologique de Sens 26 (1911): 118; Du Cange, Glossarium, 6:673–​74; Marilyn Daniels, The Dance in Christianity: A History of Religious Dance Through the Ages (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 33. 52. Hucbald, Vita Rictrudis, I.7, in Acta Sanctorum (May 12), 16:83; trans. in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 201 and n. 23. 53. Thomas Cantipratensis, Supplementum, in CCCM ed. R. Huygens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 252:183; Brenda M. Bolton, “Mary of Oignies: A Friend to the Saints,” in Mary of Oignies:  Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke Mulder-​Bakker (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2006), 211, n. 65. 54. In Analecta Hymnica 49:372, trans. Backman, Religious Dances, 45. The text, a liturgical trope, comes from numerous manuscripts (c. tenth to twelfth centuries) from the Cluniac St. Martial Abbey in Limoges, now housed primarily at the BNF. For an

notes to pages 59–60  265 analysis of the manuscripts’ musical structure and accompanying images, see Nicole Sevestre, “Quelques documents d’iconographie musicale médiévale:  L’Image et l’école autour de l’an mil,” Imago Musicae, 4 (1987): 23–​34. 55. Augustine, Sermo CCCXI.5, in PL 28: 1415; Peter Brown, “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” Early Medieval Europe 9:1 (2000): 2, 10. 56. John Chrysostom, Contra Ludos et Theatra, in PG 56:263–​70; trans. Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen in John Chrysostom (London: Routledge, 2002), 119; Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 175, 195. Aside from the fiery rhetoric of John Chrysostom, Tertullian, and other outspoken early Christian leaders, the Byzantine Church was generally more tolerant of dancing than its Latin counterpart. For instance, in the early sixth century, Theodoret of Cyrus discussed the ascetic life as an angelic dance (Sermo III: De angelis, in Graecarum affectionum curatio, in PG 83:891), whereas a fourth-​ century sermon on the anniversary of the martyr Polyeucte implored congregants to honor the saint with dances; see Gougaud, “La Danse dans les Églises,” 10; Backman, Religious Dances, 23–​24; Benjamin Aubé, Homélie Inédite en Append. à Polyeucte dans l’Histoire (Paris: 1882), 79. Early Christians danced around the column of St. Simeon the Stylite, see Brown, “Enjoying the Saints,” 2, n. 7. The Greek Church still performs sequences and responsories that celebrate dances of praise for saints and martyrs. 57. John Chrysostom, Homilia in martyrem Pelagian, in PG 3:582; Caesar of Arles, Sermo 55.2; Brown, “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” 2–​3; Bartlett, Why the Dead Do Such Great Things, p. 136. 58. Bartlett, Why the Dead Do Such Great Things, 136. To counteract unruly behavior, some priests placed thick ropes between the men and women of their congregation. In another anecdote, a priest, upon hearing his parishioners sing a profane love song (cantilena), could not get the lyrics out of his head. Instead of “the Lord be with you,” he chanted, “Love be merciful,” the love song’s refrain. 59. Augustine, Epistola XXIX, in Epistolarum classis I, in PL 33:114–​20. 60. Augustine Sermo CCCXXVI.1, “In Natali Martyrum,” in PL 38:1449. See also Sermo CCCXI.5, “In Natali Cypriani Martyris,” in PL 38:1415; Bartlett, Why the Dead Do Such Great Things, 60, n. 40. 61. Augustine, Civitas Dei, II; XVIII.10. Se also Barlaam and Josaphat, attr. John of Damascus, in LCL 34:484–​85. 62. Augustine, La Cité de Dieu, illustration for II.5, Old French translation by Raoul de Presles, Maître de François, illuminator, Paris, c. 1475–​1480, Museum Meermanno MMW 10 A 11, fol. 45r. Two other Cité de Dieu manuscripts contain similar iconography: BSG MS 246; BNF ms. fr. 18. 63. The Song is apparently the first known document of this Catalan variety of Occitan. 64. La Canço de Santa Fe, ll. 14–​19, in La Chanson de Sainte Foy d’Agen, Poème provençal du XIe siècle, ed. Antoine Thomas (Paris: H. Champion, 1925), 3; trans. Robert Clark, in Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 275; Elisabeth Work, “The Eleventh-​Century Song of Saint Fides: An Experiment in Vernacular Eloquence,” Romance Philology 36:3 (1983): 366–​85; Francesc Massip, “Theatra i Dansa en els Camins de Pelegrinacio

266  notes to pages 60–62 a l’Edat Mitiana,” in El Camí de Saint Jaume i Catalunya (Montserrat: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2007), 481–​83. The Cançó survives in a single manuscript, at the Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, MS Voss. Lat. 0.60, fols. 14v-​23r. 65. James Miller, “Christian Aerobics,” in Acting on the Past, 218. As Miller explains, the term tresca is related to the English verbs thrash and thresh. The vigorous, percussive motion of trescare is akin to the stamping of feet, the slapping of hands, or the beating of sheaves to separate kernels from stalks. In Italian, the word can also connote an illicit love affair, ibid. I discuss Dante’s use of the tresca in c­ hapter 4. 66. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 26, 307–​308, n. 5 and 6. 67. Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, Catalonia, c. 1399, Biblioteca de Montserrat E-​MO MS 1, fol. 22r. 68. Ibid. “Red” refers to the red binding in which the manuscript was placed in the nineteenth century. See also H. Anglés, “El ‘Llibre Vermell’ de Montserrat y los Cantos y la Danza Sacra de los Peregrinos Durante el Siglo XIV,” Anuario Musical 10 (1955): 45–​ 79; Massip, “Theatra i Dansa,” esp. 483–​84; Maricarmen Gómez Muntané, “Canciones y Danzas del Siglo XIII: El Manuscrito de Sant Joan de les Abadesses,” in ibid., 485–​ 94; Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700–​1500 (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 155–​58; Miri Rubin, Mother of God:  A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 237–​38. The monastery at Montserrat is also important for the history of the Jesuits. According to the legend, Ignatius of Loyola came before the Montserrat Madonna to help heal his battle wounds. He placed his military accoutrements at her shrine, and proceeded to practice a period of asceticism, after which he founded the order. 69. Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, E-​MO MS 1, fols. 22v–23r; Michele Temple, The Middle Eastern Influence on Late Medieval Italian Dances: Origins of the 29987 Istampittas, in Studies in Dance 2:12 (Lewiston:  Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Timothy McGee, Medieval Instrumental Dances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 70. Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, E-​MO MS 1, fol. 24v. 71. Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” Canterbury Tales, ll. 475–​76. In The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, and F.N. Robinson (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1987), 31. See also Ko Ishazaka, “Singing, Dancing, and Playing in Chaucer,” in Language and Style in English Literature: Essays in Honor of Michio Masui (Hiroshima-​shi: English Research Association of Hiroshima, 1991), 277–​79, 281–​85; Margaret Jennings, “Ironic Dancing Absolon in the Miller’s Tale,” Florilegium 5 (1983):  178–​88. Chaucer’s mockery of pilgrims’ lascivious conduct was not just empty rhetoric, given the graphic sexual imagery of pilgrimage badges; see Bynum, Christian Materiality, 197–​208. 72. Synod of Bayeux in 1300, canon 31, in Giovan Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 25: 66. For the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi, pilgrim dancers were not sinful themselves, but rather the corrupt Pope Boniface VIII, the “new Lucifer,” who orchestrated them during Holy Week: “when people stay at home in mourning, /​Your servants were going around Rome, /​Jousting, breaking lances, singing and dancing; /​God will punish you severely for this. /​In the heart of St. Peter’s, near the Holy of Holies, /​You sent your servants to dance and sing. /​The pilgrims,

notes to pages 62–64  267 scandalized, cursed you, /​And cursed your gold and your shining knights” see The Lauds, LIX, trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes (Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982), 182. 73. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus, BNF ms. lat. 15970, fol. 274r. 74. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus, III.1, in CCCM, ed. Jacques Berlioz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 124B: 212–​13; Richard Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes, et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d'Étienne de Bourbon (Paris:  Nogent-​le-​Rotrou, 1877), 168–​69, translation mine after G.G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1: 89–​90. 75. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus, BNF ms. lat. 15970, fol. 274r. In certain manuscript sources from the period, teachers used masks to intimidate their pupils for pedagogical purposes, e.g., BNF ms. lat. 1173, fol. 52r. 76. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus de Diversis Materiis Predicabilibus, III.1, in Berlioz, 124B:  213–​14; Lecoy, Anecdotes Historiques, 168–​ 69, translation mine after Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, 1: 89–​90. Jean de Gobi retells this tale in a mid-​ fourteenth century work, Scala Coeli. Jean-​Claude Schmitt gives a folkloric reading of this tale ; see “‘Jeunes’ et danse des chevaux de bois,” in Le Corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 157–​75. Interestingly in his critique of Roman theater, Tertullian distinguishes between equestrian skill and the use of horses in games and the circus. The former is acceptable while the latter is in the service of the demons (ad daemoniorum officia); see De Spectaculis IX. 77. Translatio S.  Fidis, II.20, in Acta Sanctorum (Oct. 6), 3:298; trans. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 271. 78. Abbot Suger, De Consecratione S.  Dionysii, II; trans. Erwin Panofsky in Abbot Suger: On the Abbey Church of St.-​Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 89; Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage, 299, see also 300–​07. 79. La Canço de Santa Fe, ll. 15–​21, in La Chanson de Sainte Foy d’Agen, ed. Thomas, 3; trans. Clark, in Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 275. 80. Bernhard d’Angers, Liber miraculorum Sancti Fidis, esp. I.23–​ 28; Ashley and Sheingorn, Writing Faith, ch. 1; Amy Remensnyder, “Un Problème de cultures ou de culture? La Statue-​Reliquaire et les joca de Sainte Foy de Conques dans le Liber miraculorum de Bernard d’Angers,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 33 (1990): 351–​ 79; Michelle Oing, “Trickster Child and Celestial Virgin: Avoiding the Woman in Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis,” Cult and Culture: The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School 6 (2011), unpag.; Hérard de Tours, Statuta 95, in PL 21:765; Riché, “Danses profanes et religieuses,” 162, n. 15. 81. The Islamic and Jewish influences on medieval dance are indeed rich. See Temple, The Middle Eastern Influence on Late Medieval Italian Dances, esp. ch. 4 and 6; María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World:  How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston:  Little, Brown, 2002); Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); The Arts of

268  notes to pages 64–65 Intimacy:  Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, ed. Jerrilynn Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Balbale (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2008); Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie Blackburn (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001); Elena Lourie “Cultic Dancing and Courtly Love: Jews and Popular Culture in Fourteenth Century Aragon and Valencia,” in Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on his Sixty-​Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Goodich, Sophie Menache, and Sylvia Schein (New York: P. Lang, 1995), 151–​65; Lynn Brooks, “Los Seises in the Golden Age of Seville,” Dance Chronicle 5:2 (1982): 121–​155; Ninotchka Bennahum, “Space and Place in Islamic Spain: Histories of Middle Eastern Performance in Cordoba and Granada,” in Society of Dance History Scholars Proceedings (SDHS, 2006), 82–​85; Susana Weich-​Shahak, “A Dance-​Song in the Sephardic Repertoire,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 38 (1993): 110–​27; David Wulstan, “Bring on the Dancing-​Girls! (a Gadibus Usque Auroram),” Al-​Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 17:2 (2005): 221–​49. 82. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–​1350 (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 269–​80, 295. 83. Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2010), ch. 20–​21. See also Pascal Michon, Rythmes, Pouvoir, Mondialisation (Paris: PUF, 2005). 84. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 306. See also Diana Taylor’s concept of transculturation via performance, in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 10, 141–​42. With the exception of the Jews, ethnic differentiation was not a dominant trait of Western medieval dance imagery until the popularization of travel narratives, e.g., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. For its corresponding dance iconography, see especially BNF ms. fr. 2810, fols. 23r, 44r, 80r, 114r, and 214r. 85. E.g., Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians:  Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Paul Scolieri, Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing:  Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 86. The ballet St. Francis premiered in London in 1938 with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, choreography by Léonide Massine, musical score by Paul Hindemith, and sets and costumes by Pavel Tchelitchew; see Grace Roberts, The Borzoi Book of Ballets (New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 1946), 264; Brother Sun, Sister Moon, dir. Franco Zeffirelli, Paramount Pictures, 1972; Joan Acocella, “Rich Man, Poor Man:  The Radical Visions of St. Francis,” The New Yorker 88:43 (Jan. 14, 2013): 72–​77. In Snow White (1937), Walt Disney’s first full-​length animated film, the heroine’s ability to commune with wild animals apparently derived inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi; see Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of

notes to pages 65–68  269 Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 145; Edward Smith, “St. Francis on the Silver Screen,” Progress Today (Jan.–​Mar. 1935): 43–​44. 87. Hester Gelber, “Revisiting the Theater of Virtue,” Franciscan Studies 58 (2000), esp. 19–​23, 25–​29,  33–​36. 88. Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima Sancti Francisci, I.1–​2; Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time, 157. 89. André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi:  The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael Cusato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 14–​16. Interestingly, in Dante’s time, the brigata had developed into a poetic confraternity, see Teodolinda Barolini, “Sociology of the Brigata:  Gendered Groups in Dante, Forese, Folgore, Boccaccio—​From ‘Guido, i’ Vorrei’ to Griselda,” Italian Studies 67:1 (2012): 4–​22. 90. Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima Sancti Francisci, I.27, in Fontes Franciscani, ed. Enrico Menestò and Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Porziuncola, 1995), 349; trans. and ed. Regis Armstrong, J. W. Hellmann, and William Short in Francis of Assisi, Early Documents. Volume I: The Saint (New York: New City Press, 1999), 245. 91. Hester Gelber, “A Theater of Virtue: The Exemplary World of St. Francis of Assisi,” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Stratton Hawley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 15–​19; Antonio Attisani, “Franciscan Performance: A Theatre Lost and Found Again,” trans. Jane House, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25:1 (2003): esp. 52–​ 57; Marla Carlson, Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-​Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 43. See also Peter Brown, “Enjoying the Saints,” 9. 92. Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 39, 78; Bernard McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” Church History 65:2 (1996): 197–​99. 93. Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, esp. VIII.7–​10, in Early Documents, 1:591–​94. The only time when animals bothered or harmed Francis occurred during his most rigorous penitential exercises or periods of temptation, as when mice crawled over his sleeping mat, e.g., Compilatio Assisiensis, LXXXIII, in Early Documents, 2:185; Speculum Perfectionis, VIII.100, in Early Documents, 3:347. 94. For the revival of hermetic and archaic spirituality of saints in the High and Late Middle Ages, see Brigitte Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté: D’Après Jehan Bouche d’Or, Jehan Paulus et quelques vies des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 19; Thaddée Matura, “Introduction,” in Claire d’Assise: Écrits, ed. Thaddée Matura, Marie-​France Becker, and Jean-​François Godet (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985), 64; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 2–​8, 43, 51. 95. Gelber explains how Thomas of Celano’s hagiography imbued the saint’s life with a sense of timelessness and universality; see “Revisiting the Theater of Virtue,” 25–​29. 96. Thomas of Celano, Tractatus de Miraculis Sancti Francisci, VII, in Fontes Franciscani, 678; trans. in Early Documents 2:421. Punishing the father figure might be relevant as well, since Francis, due to a troubled relationship with his own father, tended to reject paternal imagery in favor of maternal identity, Gelber, “A Theater of Virtue,” 21–​23, 30; Caroline Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 154–​59.

270  notes to pages 68–69 97. Little, Benedictine Maledictions, esp. xiii, 89, 97–​98. Little notes that although monks and nuns were not supposed to curse, Benedict exemplified how cursing could constitute an action that was benedictus, not maledictus. 98. Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima Sancti Francisci, III.1, in Fontes Franciscani, 400–​ 401; trans. Early Documents, 1:291. 99. Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, III.1, in Fontes Franciscani, 401; trans. Early Documents, 1:291. Dance historian Walter Sorell seemed to have confused or conflated this episode with an earlier moment in Francis’s life. Sorell wrote that Francis danced in front of Pope Innocent III upon the endorsement of the Order in 1209. Thomas of Celano recounted instead that Francis expressed gaudium (joy, rejoicing) at this moment, but did not specify that dancing occurred; Dance in its Time (Garden City: Anchor Press/​Doubleday, 1981), 11. 100. E.g., Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, IV.10, XI. 14, in Early Documents, 2:557; Arnald of Sarrant, The Kinship of St. Francis, I.6, in Early Documents, 3:694; Jane Long, “The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle,” Franciscan Studies 52 (1992): 102–​05. As the Arles scene from the Legenda Maior continues, Francis’s forehead bore the mark of the cross. 101. For an online color image, see Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 20, 2020. Giotto painted a similar fresco for the San Francesco Basilica in Assisi, c. 1290. 102. Interestingly, the artistic program at the Bardi Chapel had less to do with the patron’s identity than with mortuary motifs; Long, “The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle,” 87–​88, 100, 106, 125. 103. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), esp. 145–​47; see also Bynum, “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols:  A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality,” in Fragmentation and Redemption, 34–​35, 49; Claude Levi-​Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Clair Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 1: esp. 229–​31. 104. For an online color image, see the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, accessed June 20, 2020. Likewise, a pictured dancer from Rufinus’s Historia Monachorum in Aegypto XVI, displays this posturing, PML MS. M 626, fol. 49r. Giotto’s Salome at Santa Croce, though gestural, does not replicate the orant image. 105. Fra Angelico, The Banquet of Herod, Musée du Louvre, R.F. 196, Italy, c. 1427–​1428. For an online color image, see Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 22, 2020. 106. Jane Long, “The Feast of Herod in Florentine Art,” 1164–​75. Long explains that Salome could have served as an example of bodily comportment for refined women, though Herodias showed women how not to conduct themselves. 107. Compilatio Assisiensis, XXXVIII, in Fontes Franciscani, 1511; trans. in Early Documents, 2:142; Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, 42; Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda Sancti Francisci, II.90, in Fontes Franciscani, 559; trans. in Early Documents, 2:331. The Assisi Compilation comes from a single manuscript housed in Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, ms. 1046. Compiled by several scribes of the early fourteenth century, the text offers insights into the early years of the Franciscan fraternity.

notes to pages 69–72  271 108. G.K. Chesterton, “Le Jongleur de Dieu,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Thomas Aquinas (Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2002), 69–​70. Chesterton’s translation of “jongleur” as “tumbler” is somewhat misleading. When comparing Francis to a tumbler, Chesterton may refer to the Old French Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, an exemplum about an unlettered tumbler who joins a Cistercian abbey and praises God with his acrobatics. Chesterton later describes Francis as the “fool of paradise,” ibid., 72. For a more detailed study of the medieval tumbler and religious dance, see Jessica van Oort, “The Minstrel Dances in Good Company: Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame,” Dance Chronicle 34:2 (2011): 239–​ 75; Jan Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, Volume I:  The Middle Ages (Cambridge:  Open Book Publishers, 2018), esp. ch. 2; Martine Clouzot, Le Jongleur, Mémoire de l’image au Moyen Âge: Figure, figurations, and musicalité dans les manuscrits enluminés (1200–​1330) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). 109. E.g., Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, I.4. 110. See also Ambrose, De Poenitentia, II.2.8, in CSEL 73; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1956), 130–​36. 111. For the historical context of Francis’s combination of hermeticism with urbanization, see McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 2–​8; Marie-​Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century:  Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester Little (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), esp. 220, 226, 239, 241–​43, 246–​47; Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 113. 112. Gregory the Great, prologue to Moralia in Job, in CCSL 143. 113. Jacques de Vitry, Sermo I  ad Fratres Minores, pars 7, in Hilarin Felder, “Jacobi Vitriacensis (1180–​1240): Sermones ad Fratres Minores,” Analecta Ordinis Minorum Capuccinorum 19 (1903): 121–​22; trans. Early Documents, 1:588. 114. Newman, Gods and Goddesses, 3–​10. Sassetta’s altar paintings depicted Lady Poverty as the theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity), a Christianized trio of the three Graces, e.g., The Mystic Marriage of St. Francis, Siena, c. 1437–​1444, Chantilly, Musée Condé, no. PE 10. 115. Barlaam and Josaphat, in PG 96:971–​72; trans. G.R. Woodward and Harold Mattingly in LCL 34:230–​31. Despite their otherwise rich annotations, editors Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short fail to make this attribution. For Jacques de Vitry’s other interpolations of Barlaam and Josaphat, see Sermones Vulgares, BNF ms. lat. 17509, fol. 69r; De la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, 176; Jacques Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur: Récits facétieux du Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 115. Zimmermann discusses an early thirteenth-​century German version of Barlaam und Josaphat by Rudolf von Ems in which Josaphat dances, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 153. 116. Eamon Duffy, “Introduction,” in The Golden Legend, trans. Granger, xx. 117. Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text,” Speculum 65:1 (1990): 70; see also Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 109.

272  notes to pages 72–74 118. The term diaeta or dieta was rarely used in medieval Latin. In Roman times, it could refer to one’s daily wages, a dietary regimen, assembly, dwelling, or lifestyle. 119. (Pseudo) Bonaventure, De Gloria Paradisi, in Dieta Salutis, X.6 (Paris:  D. Roce, 1498), fol. 98v, BNF FM incunabulum no. D -​26376, translation mine. For the purposes of this chapter, I am not concerned about the text’s questionable authorship. What is more significant here is that medieval and early modern readers attributed this work to Bonaventure, thereby bestowing onto it an authoritative status. 120. Gelber, “Revisiting the Theater of Virtue,” 33–​36; Long, “The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle,” 110–​ 13, 117; Georges Didi-​ Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 43–​49, 55; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, 18, 99. 121. The angels also play more traditional instruments: lutes, trumpets, and the psaltery. For descriptions of the Pistoia fresco, see Howard Mayer Brown, “A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical Subject Matter,” Imago Musicae 1 (1984): 214; Jessica Richardson, “The Brotherhood of Saint Leonard and Saint Francis: Banners, Sacred Topography, and Confraternal Identity in Assisi,” Art History 34:5 (2011): 895–​97; Enrica Neri Lusanna, “La Pittura in San Francesco dalle Origini al Quattrocento,” in S. Francesco: La Chiesa e il Convento in Pistoia, ed. Lucia Gai (Pistoia: Pacini, 1993), 110–​60. Giotto/​the school of Giotto created a similar vault fresco for the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi, c. 1334, as well as a fresco depicting the biblical dancer Miriam, c. 1310. 122. For an online color image, see the Alamy.com website, accessed June 22, 2020. The angelic musicians play the rebec, lute, psalter, and fiddle; see Brown, “A Corpus of Trecento Pictures,” Imago Musicae 1 (1984): 210. 123. An adjacent vault fresco at Pistoia depicts the Resurrection of Christ, also a stigmatic. 124. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 453. 125. E.g., Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, II.3; Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda, II.98–​ 100. The seraph was present before, but did not necessarily cause, his stigmata, but the two became conflated in later legends and imagery, see Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’Invenzione delle Stimmate: Una Storia per Parole e Immagini Fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1993), esp. 149, 155, 162; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 61. The term stigmata derives from the Greek word for mark, but can also refer to a sign or scar. The Vulgate employs the same term in Galatians 6:17. 126. Revelation 6:12–​ 17; Bonaventure, Prologus to Legenda Maior; Bonaventure, Apologia Pauperum, III.10. See also I Corinthians 1:22; Apocalypse 7:2–​4, 13:14–​ 17, 14:1, and 22:4. 127. Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, IV, in Fontes Franciscani, 813; trans. Early Documents, 2:559–​60. 128. According to medieval sign theory and sigillography (the study of seals), Christ was the original seal who set into motion an infinite concatenation of sealing. His stigmata impressed his imago onto created matter, see Brigitte Bedos-​Rezak, When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 235; see

notes to pages 74–75  273 also MacKendrick, “The Multipliable Body,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1:1/​2 (2010):  112–​13. Shortly after the death of the Order’s founder, the Spirituals and the Conventuals comprised its two principal factions. The former group aimed to maintain Francis’s own lifestyle and to practice their devotion to him outside the strictures of ecclesiastical authority. The latter group sought to assimilate the Order into the world while working within the institutional framework of the Church. In 1260, the Chapter of Narbonne commissioned Bonaventure (a Conventual and the elected Minister General) to compose an authoritative biography of Francis, presumably to harmonize the Order’s festering conflicts. See Susan Hubert, “Theological and Polemical Uses of Hagiography: A Consideration of Bonaventure’s Legenda Major of St. Francis,” Comitatus 29 (1998): 48–​49; Raphael M. Huber, A Documented History of the Franciscan Order, 1182–​1517 (Milwaukee:  Nowiny Publishing Apostolate, 1944), 522–​27; Damien Vorreux, “Introduction to the Major and Minor Life of St. Francis,” in St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, ed. Marion A. Habig, trans. Paul Verreux (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), 615–​26. See also Dante, Paradiso, XI: 106–​108. 129. E.g., Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, XIII. For a deeper discussion on martyrs as pieces of Christ, see Augustine, Civitas Dei, XXI.25; Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 72. 130. (Pseudo) Bonaventure, De Gloria Paradisi, in Dieta Salutis, X.6, fol. 99v, translation mine. Bonaventure concludes by distinguishing the good dancers (those on the right side) from the evil dancers (those on the left), in ibid. See also Le Mireour du monde, cited in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 112; Eduard Schulz, Das Bild des Tanzes in der Christlichen Mystik. Sein Kultischer Ursprung und Seine Psychologische Bedeutung (unpublished diss., Marburg, 1941), 148; Daniels, The Dance in Christianity, 37; Renée Foatelli, Les Danses religieuses dans le Christianisme (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1947), 95. 131. E.g., Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, I.17, III.2; Bonaventure, De Reductio Artium ad Theologiam, XXIII; Bonaventure, Commentarium ad Librum I Sententiarum, II.2; Bonaventure, De Triplici Via, I.15–​17, III.1–​14; Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, esp. I.2–​ 7, IV.1–​ 4; Apologia Pauperum, III.10; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 87–​112. 132. See also the dance patterns in Fra Angelico’s The Last Judgment, Florence, c. 1425–​ 1430, Museo San Marco. 133. Speculum Perfectionis, VIII.100, in Fontes Franciscani, 2013; Early Documents, 3:348; Compilatio Assisiensis, LXXXIII, in Fontes Franciscani, 1598; Early Documents, 2:186; E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 1:46.

Chapter 3 1. Liber Magnus Organi, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Cod. Pluteo 29.1, frontispiece, Paris, c. 1245–​1255. For an online color image, see Wikipedia, accessed June 23, 2020.

274  notes to pages 75–78 2. Edward Roesner, “Preface,” in Le Magnus Liber Organi de Notre-​Dame de Paris, ed. Edward Roesner and Michel Huglo (Monaco: Éditions de l'Oiseau-​Lyre, 1993), 1:4; Hugh Dittmer, “Epilogue,” in Firenze, Biblioteca Mediceo-​Laurenziana, Pluteo 29, I (Brooklyn: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1967), vol. 2 (unpag.). 3. James Frazer, The Golden Bough:  A Study in Magic and Religion (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1998) [1906–​ 1915]; E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 2 vols. 4. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 7–​9. 5. Ibid., 206. For a useful critique of sociological and anthropological approaches to ritual, see Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual:  Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. Thomas Warton, with assistance from Francis Douce, History of English Poetry: From the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (London: T. Tegg, 1840), 2:515. See also Lincoln Kirstein, Dance:  A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (New York: Dance Horizons, 1969), ch. 5–​6. 7. For example, see Donnalee Dox, The Idea of Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2004), 81–​86; Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 55–​56, 74; Constance Mews, “Liturgists and Dance of the Twelfth Century:  The Witnesses of John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona,” Church History 78:3 (2009): esp. 527; Philip Knäble, Eine Tanzende Kirche: Initiation, Ritual und Liturgie im Spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Cologne:  Böhlau Verlag,  2016). 8. Augustine, Sermo CXCVIII, in PL 38:1024. 9. Augustine, Confessiones, III.2; Augustine, Epistola 91, in CSEL 34:2, 427–​35. 10. Augustine, Civitas Dei, II:20, trans. George McCracken, LCL 411:214–​15. 11. Maître de François, illuminator, trans. Raoul de Presles, illustration for VIII.21, Museum Meermanno MMW 10 A 11, fol. 388v, Paris, circa 1475–​1480. BSG MS. 246 and BNF ms. fr. 18 contain similar Cité de Dieu iconography. 12. Arnold of Liège, Alphabetum Narrationum, ed. Colette Ribaucourt (unpublished diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1985), 3:545. See also Fulgentius, Liber Mythologiarum (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2005); Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, in Speculum Quadruplex (Graz:  Akademische Druck-​u. Verlagsanstalt, 1964–​1965), III.69. 13. Guy DeBord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 14. Louis Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises,” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 15:1 (1914): 6; Louis de Cahusac, La Danse ancienne et moderne, ou traité historique de la danse, (La Haye, Neaulme, 1754), 1:43. 15. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, X.6–​ 8; IV, in LCL 250; John Chrysostom, Homilia Contra Ludos et Theatra, in PG 56:263–​70; John Chrysostom, ed. Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen (London:  Routledge, 2000), 118–​25; Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers:  Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1–​2; Patricia Cox Miller, “The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome’s

notes to pages 78–80  275 Letter to Eustochium,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1:1 (1993): 35–​37; Gregory Nazianzus, Oratio II, in PG 35:490; Theodore the Studite, Oratio VIII.7, in PG 99:766. 16. Ambrose of Milan, Liber de Elia et Jejunio, XVIII, in PL 14:775. See also Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Ifficiis, I.41; Max Harris, “Claiming Pagan Origins for Carnival:  Bacchanalia, Saturnalia, Calends,” European Medieval Drama 10 (2006): 57–​107. Michel Meslin notes that the Romans performed a tripudium during the Kalends, La Fête des kalendes de janvier dans l’empire Romain: Étude d'un rituel de nouvel an (Brussels: Latomus, 1970), 73. 17. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, VI.19.6, XVIII, in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen Barney, W.J. Lewis, and J.A. Beach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147; Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama,  81–​86. 18. Caesar of Arles, Sermones, in PL 39:2239. Cassianus believed that John the Evangelist was scandalized when the disciples played, see PL 49:1312; see also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, 1989), II–​II quaest. 168.2. 19. MS. vat. lat. 492, fol. 66v, ll. 39–​41. Transcribed in Jean Leclercq, “Sermon ancien sur les danses déshonnêtes,” Revue Bénédictines 59 (1949): 196–​201. See also Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XVII, which discusses how female dancers eject people from paradise, as they have attempted with King David, King Solomon, Samson, and Job, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Renato Lioi (Ancona: Biblioteca Francescana, 1978–​ 1982), 1:307–​308. 20. The councils and statutes prohibiting and regulating dance are numerous. See Giovanni Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio (Graz: Akademische Druck-​u. Verlagsanstalt, 1960), 2:563–​74; Mansi, 9:913, 999; Mansi 11:971; Mansi 12:385; Mansi, 14:84, 895, 1008; Mansi 22:683, 791–​92, 843; Mansi, 23:216, 1033, 1204, 1270; Mansi 24:1190; Mansi 25:66; Mansi 28:1097; Mansi 32:176; Mansi 39:108; Constitutio Childeberti, I.2 in MGH Leg. 1:1; MGH Conc. Merov. Aevi, 1:19, 180, 212; Arthur Haddan, William Stubbs, and David Wilkins, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), 3:133, 369, 315; George Nedungatt and Michael Featherstone, The Council in Trullo Revisited (Rome:  Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1995), 142–​44; Caspari, Kirchenhistorische Anecdota, 176, 188; MGH Concilia Aevi Karolini, 1:16, 581–​82; A. Saupe, Der Indiculus Superstitionum et Paganiarum (Leipzig: 1891), 10; Liber de Dispensation Rerum Ecclesiasticarum XXX, in PL104:  249; Hinkmar von Reims in 852, in Capitual synodica, cap.  14, in PL 125:776, 1067; Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge (New  York:  Burt Franklin, 1970), 18–​19, App. III, 273; MGH Leges 2:2, 83; Concilia Magnae Britanniae, ed. David Wilkins (Brussels:  Edition Culture and Civilization, 1964), 4:246; Les Statuts synodaux français du XIIIe siècle, ed. Odette Pontal (Paris:  Comités de Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1971–​1995), 1: 52, 74, 86–​89, 156; Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1:199–​205, 211; Dom Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne, 1:1302; J.-​B. Thiers, Traité des jeux et des divertissements qui peuvent être permis ou qui

276  notes to page 80 doivent être défendus aux chrétiens (Paris 1686), 439; Binterim, Die Vörzuglichten Denkwürdigkeiten der Christkatholischen Kirche (Mayence:  1826), 2:2:  81–​ 82; Germaine Prudhommeau, Histoire de la danse: Des Origines à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris:  Amphora, 1986), ch. 5; Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 119–​20; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze:  Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main:  P. Lang, 2007), 30, n.  26, 49–​52; 209–​10; Ingrassia, Danseurs, acrobates et saltimbanques dans l’art du Moyen Âge: Recherches sur les représentations ludiques, chorégraphiques et acrobatiques dans l'iconographie médiévale (Diss., Université de la Sorbonne, 1990), chs. 1–​2; Paul Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet (394–​1673) (Nîmes: La Recherche en Danse, 1995), ch. 1; Michele Veissière, “Prohibitions des danses publiques les jours dimanches et de fêtes au temps de Guillaume Briconnet,” Revue de la société d’histoire et d’art de la Brie et du pays de Meaux 33 (1982): 45–​52; Pierre Riché, “Danses profanes et religieuses dans le haut Moyen Âge,” Histoires sociales, sensibilités collectives, et mentalités: Mélanges Robert Mondrau (Presses Universitaires de France), 159–​ 67; Yvonne Rokseth; Danses cléricales du XIIIe siècle (Strasbourg: Faculté des Lettres, 1947); J.G. Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological, and Practical Handbook (London: SCM Press, 1984), 50–​53; Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature (Toronto:  Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 154–​55, 161–​65, 175; Éloi de Noyon, in S.  Ouen Vita Eligii, II.5, in MGH SS. Rer. Merov. 4:705–​06; trans. In JoAnn McNamara in Medieval Sourcebook:  The Life of St. Eligius, accessed January 14, 2020; and esp. Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises,” 10–​20. 21. Peter Abelard, Theologia Christiana, II, in PL 178; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996), 266; Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France, 26–​30, 285–​86. See also Walter Map, De Diversis Ordinibus Hominum, V:153–​56; Gilbert of Tournai (d. 1284), Sermo I, in Hartung, 96.161; John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, I.8, in PL 199:405–​06. 22. Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma Animae, trans. David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 9. 23. Jacques Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and the Golden Legend (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 24. Jean Beleth, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, CXXXVII, in CCCM, 41A:267–​69; trans. Mews, “Liturgists and Dance,” 532–​33. 25. Jean Beleth, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, CXXXVII, in CCCM, 41A:267; trans. Mews, “Liturgists and Dance,” 534. 26. Elizabeth Barber, The Dancing Goddess:  Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance (New  York:  Norton and Norton, 2013), 34–​36; Michael Judge, The Dance of Time: The Origins of the Calendar, a Miscellany of History and Myth, Religion and Astronomy, Festivals and Feast Days (New York: Arcade, 2004), ch. 4; Carmina Gadelica, cited in Goeffrey Moorhouse, Sun Dancing: A Vision of Medieval Ireland (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1997), 245–​46; Filotas, Pagan Survivals, 121–​23. For additional examples of Christianized liturgical dance, see Filotas, Pagan Survivals, esp. ch. 4.

notes to pages 81–84  277 27. Jean Beleth, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, Prologus, in CCCM, 41A:1–​2; trans. Mews, “Liturgists and Dance,” 529. 28. Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale:  Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–​1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 158–​65. 29. Peter of Dacia, Vita Christinae Stumbelensis, in Acta Sanctorum, June 22 (1867) 5: 433, 439–​43, 448–​49, 451; see also Liber Exemplorum ad Usuam Praedicantium, ed. Little, 111–​12. 30. See also dancers on misericords from Cologne, Ely, Lincoln, and the Musée Cluny. 31. Christa Grössinger, The World Upside Down: English Misericords (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 11–​15, 97–​99. 32. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1996), I.18, IV.10; Peter Abelard, Sic et Non, prologus, in PL 178. 33. Beleth, VXIX, in CCCM 41A:131–​34. 34. Horace, Carmina II.7. 35. Sicard of Cremona, De Mitralis de Officiis, in CCCM, ed. Gabor Sarbak and Lorenz Weinrich (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 228:545–​46; trans. Mews, “Liturgists and Dance in the Twelfth Century,” 513. Sicard concludes this description with a passage from Honorius’s Gemma animae, recounting how the dances of heathens were, by sacred dancers of the Old Testament, turned into [converterunt] the service of the true God. For an analysis of this passage, see my ­chapter 1. 36. Guillaume of Auvergne, Sermo III, cited in Franco Morenzoni, “Les Explications liturgiques dans les sermons de Guillaume d’Auvergne,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou and Morenzoni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 267–​68. See also Pseudo Epiphanius of Salamis, Homilia I in Festo Palmarum, in PG 4343; Augustine, De Vita Eremetica ad Sororem, LXXVI, in PL 32; John Chrysostom, Sermones Panegyrici De S.  Hieromartyre Phoca, in PG 50, II; Clifford Flanigan, “The Moving Subject:  Medieval Liturgical Processions in Semiotic and Cultural Perspective,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 2001),  36–​37. 37. Cassiodorus, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.5, in PL 69; Sicard, Mitralis, V, in CCCM 228:292; Guillaume Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, VII.42.15, in CCCM, 140B:113. Though more conservative than Beleth and Sicard, Guillaume is still more tolerant of dance than other clergy, as when Bishop of Carthagene, Licianus, complained to his colleague about clerical dances, cited in Jacques Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge. Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, 1967 (Paris and Montréal:  Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969), 371. 38. Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” 364; Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet, 28; BNF ms. lat. 1136 (accompanying a rite for the wise and foolish virgins); BNF ms. lat. 1139; BNF ms. lat. 1118, fols. 108v-​114r; BL Harley MS. 4951, fol. 298v, 300v. 39. Cited in Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” 362; Pierre Bonnet, Histoire générale des danses sacrées et profanes (Paris 1723). Moreover, a Besançon document refers to a bergerette (pastoral-​themed dance), performed at Easter, the only

278  notes to pages 84–86 known reference to this dance form, and liturgical objects from Limoges (chalices, pyxis, bowls, etc.) give clues about the relationship between the clergy and secular dancers. See Mercure de France (Sept. 1762), 1952; L’Abbé Henri Villetard, “La Danse ecclésiastique à métropole de Sens,” Bulletin de la Société archéologique de Sens 26 (1911): 111–​12; Marie Madeleine Gauthier, “Danseurs et musiciens dans les arts précieux au Moyen Âge,” in Romanico Padano, Romanico Europeo:  Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Modena-​Parma, 26 Ottobre-​10 Novembre 1977, ed. Arturo Quintavalle (Parma: Centro di Studi Medioevali, 1982), 78–​88. 40. Antiphonary, Bibliothèque Municipale de Sens MS. 6, fol. 234v, early fourteenth century. 41. Jacques Chailley, “Un Document nouveau sur la danse ecclésiastique,” Acta musicologica 21 (1949): 19–​20; Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” 359–​ 60, 371–​76. 42. Compare with Pierre Legendre’s concept of the dancer’s effigy in La Passion d’être un autre: Étude pour la danse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 75–​92. See also Lior Barshack, “The Body Politic in Dance,” in Law, Text, Terror, ed. Peter Goodrich and Lior Barshack (New York: Routledge-​Cavendish, 2006), 59–​60; Sam Gill, Dancing, Culture, Religion (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 107–​18. 43. Durandus, Rationale VI.86, in CCCM 140B; see also Rather of Verona, Praeloquiorum, V.6, in CCCM 46A. 44. Guillaume Durand, Rational de Divin Office, trans. Jean Goelin, BNF ms. fr. 437, fol. 58r, French, 1374. 45. Peire de Corbian (or Corbiac), Lo Tezaurs, ll. 816–​40, in Le Trésor de Peire de Corbiac, en vers Provençaux, ed. Karl Sachs (Brandenburg:  J.J. Wiesike, 1859), 27; trans. Timothy McGee, “Dance,” in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William Kibler and Gover Zinn (London: Routledge, 1995), 547–​48; Elizabeth Aubrey, “References to Music in Old Occitan Literature,” Acta Musicologica, 61:2 (1989):  147. I  follow Page’s translation of triplar as dance, which, given the liturgical context, connotes an Occitanization of the Latin tripudium. 46. Hours of Anne of France, PML MS. M 677, fol. 128v, Jean Colombe, illuminator, Bourges, 1470–​1480. See fols. 71v, 137r for additional dance and liturgical imagery. 47. Psalm 124:2, Vulgate. Note that this corresponds to Psalm 125 in most modern Bibles. 48. See also the tenth-​century poem, Gesta Berengarii Imperatoris, in MGH P. 4:360, as well as Isidore’s discussion of hymnus and organus, Etymologiae, VI.19.17, ed. Barney et al., 147; ibid., III.20.1–​2, ed. Barney et al., 97; Bede, De Tabernaculo, II.8, in PL 91. 49. Calendar for May /​Gemini, PML MS. M 511, fol. 3r, Bologna, c. 1324–​1328. 50. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 125; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), ch. 2; Joseph Bédier, “Les Fêtes de mai et les commencemens de la poésie lyrique au Moyen Âge,” Revue des deux mondes 135 (1896):146–​72; Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1: ch. 8; Nancy Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournois de Chauvency (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308),” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and

notes to pages 86–88  279 Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art, and Architecture, ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald Guest (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 341–​52. See also Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Les Rythmes au Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), esp. ch. 6. 51. I am using the term drama generically, to refer to religious theater pieces—​including church dramas, biblical plays, morality plays, civic plays, and mysteries—​composed and performed during the Middle Ages. The term theatrum was more common in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and carried a broad range of meanings. In the Middle Ages, terms such as ludus, ordo, jeu, officium, pagina, processus, and so forth described a wide range of dramatic activity. For a discussion of this terminology, see Christina Fitzgerald, “Preface,” in The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, ed. Fitzgerald and John Sebastian (London: Broadview, 2013), x–​xii. 52. Ruth Lightbourne, “The Question of Instruments and Dance in Hildegard of Bingen's Twelfth-​century Music Drama Ordo Virtutum,” Parergon 9:2 (1991):  45–​ 65; Patricia Kazarow, “Text and Context in Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum,” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 127–​51. For discussions on Hildegard’s dramatic depictions of hell and the devil vs. Christ and the angels, see Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000–​1150 (London: Westfield College, 1986), 188; Frank Tobin, “Mechthild von Madgeburg, the Devil, and Antichrist,” in The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, ed. Robert Boenig (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 9–​15. Tobin notes (p. 15) that Herrad of Hohenburg and Innocent III warned against dangers of theatrical excess. 53. Innsbruck Ascension of Mary Play: XXVI:32–​35, trans. in Cora Dietl, “Dancing Devils and Singing Angels,” paper delivered at the SITM, 12th Colloquium, Lille (July 2–​7, 2007), 12. See also the German liturgical play, Berliner Weltergerischtsspiel ll. 694-​ 715, discussed in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 113–​14; Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel:  Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung ees Mittelalters (Bern: Francke, 1962), 203. 54. Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 59. 55. Hessian Christmas Play, ll. 167–​70. In Das Drama des Mittelalters, ed. Richard Froning (Stuttgart: Union, Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1891–​1892), 3:930. 56. Max Harris, Sacred Folly:  A New History of the Feast of Fools (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011), ch. 6–​9; see also Peter Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays (New York: Cambridge, 1994), 48–​49. 57. John Marshall, “‘Her virgynes, as many as a man wylle’: Dance and Provenance in Three Late Medieval Plays, Wisdom, The Killing of the Children, The Conversion of St Paul,” Leeds Studies in English 25 (1994): 111–​48; Malcolm Godden, “Fleshly Monks and Dancing Girls:  Immorality in the Morality Drama,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997), 205–​28. For other instances of angelic dance in medieval drama, see Faral, Les Jongleurs, 31; Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet, 24; Anne Wéry, La Danse ecartelée: De la Fin du Moyen Âge à l’Âge Classique. moeurs,

280  notes to pages 88–89 esthétiques, et croyances en Europe romane (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1992), 129; Prudhommeau, Histoire de la danse, 1:164–​67, 191; Marilyn Daniels, The Dance in Christianity:  A History of Religious Dance Through the Ages (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1981), ch. 3; Margaret Taylor, “A History of Symbolic Movement in Worship,” in Dance as Religious Studies, ed. Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-​Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 15–​32. 58. Dietl, “Dancing Devils and Singing Angels,” 12–​13. 59. Le Jeu d’Adam, ed. Willem Noomen (Paris:  Champion, 1971), 53, ll. 1005–​1007; Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 59. 60. Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 59–​60; Jane Taylor, “Que Signifiait danse au quinzième siècle? Danser la danse macabré,” Fifteenth-​Century Studies 18 (1991): 270. 61. Le Mystère de Saint Louis, cited in Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 60. 62. Le Jour de Jugement, ed. Émile Roy (Paris: E. Bouillon, 1902), 221, ll. 360–​61; trans. Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 59. 63. Le Jour de Jugement, Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms. 579, fol. 7r. For an online color image, see the French website Initiale, accessed June 23, 2020. 64. De Roy, Le Mystère de la Passion en France, 150; trans. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 258–​60. See also the Digby cycle and Frankfurt Passion Play of 1493; Freiburg Passion Play; Stralsund Christmas Play; Munich Corpus Christi Procession (1495–​1523); Ingolstadt Corpus Christi Procession (1507); Jacobus de Voragine, “Passio Christi,” in Legenda Aurea; Tabula Exemplorum, 11–​12; Jean Gobi, Scala Coeli; Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus. 65. Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 258–​60; see also Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl’s discussion on how secular dancing and music mocks the Crucifixion, in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 88; as well as Elisabeth of Schönau, Visiones, II.4, in Elisabeth of Shönau: The Complete Works, ed. Anne L. Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 46. Other plays fabricate a “Hebrew” dance style which is lustful and demonic; see Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 252–​53. In his Liber Belial (Book of the Jewish Demon), canon lawyer Jacobus de Teramo imagined a court scene in which Lucifer brings Christ to trial for trespassing his territory during the Harrowing of Hell. A German incunabulum edition shows Belial dancing before Solomon, one of the judges, Das Buch Belial (Augsburg: J Bämler, 1473), fol. 50r. See also Dietrich Schernberg, Ein Schön Spiel von Frau Jutten, a drama about Pope Jutta (Joan), in which an evil female character named Lilith dances with Lucifer and his imps at a wild party. 66. PML MS. M 263, fol. 17r, c. 1465–​1475, France, perhaps Angers. 67. Alsfelder Passionspiel, l. 5790, in The Alsfeld Passion Play, trans. and ed. Larry West (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1997). 68. Ibid., l. Alsfelder Passionsspiel, l. 5793. 69. Alsfelder Passionspiel, l. 897. 70. Willem de Volder, Acolastus, III.1, trans. Slim, “The Prodigal Son at the Whores’:  Music, Art, and Drama,” in Painting and Music in the Sixteenth Century: Essays in Iconography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 3–​6. 71. John Chrysostom, Homilia in Matthaeum XLVIII.3, in PG 58:491.

notes to pages 89–92  281 72. Yeb 95a. 73. Note that the medieval French play of the Prodigal Son, Courtois d’Arras, likely by a contemporary of Jean Bodel in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, does not contain explicit dance scenes in a tavern, though it was likely performed by a jongleur. 74. Secundum Lucam 15:25, Vulgate. 75. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, inc. 1043, fol. 481v (Lyon: Matthias Huss, 1482). For an online color image, see the French website Initiale, accessed June 23, 2020. 76. BL MS. Additional 27909 B, fol. 9v. See also. Nota de choreis, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 864, fol. 147v; Le Mireour du monde, in Book for a Simple and Devout Woman. A Late Middle English Adaptation of Peraldus’s Summa de Vitiis et Virtutibus and Friar Laurent’s Somme le Roi. Edited from British Library Mss Harley 6571 and Additional 30944, ed. F.N.M. Diekstra (Groningen:  Egbert Forsten, 1998), 163; as well as Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, ll. 12470–​77; see Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​ Engelstänze, 112, n. 59–​60. In Les Commandemens de Dieu et du Dyable, a Provençal mystery play, God asks people not to dance on Sundays, but the devil tells them the opposite; see Wéry, La Danse ecartelée 65–​66; Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XVII, in Sermones Dominicales, 1:308; Jean Gerson, De Visitatione Praelatorum. 77. Franco Morenzoni, “Les Explications liturgiques dans les sermons de Guillaume d’Auvergne,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, 267–​68, and n.  37; BNF ms. lat. 15964, fols. 23v-​24r; Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au Moyen Âge:  Specialement au XIIIe siècle d’après les manuscrits contemporains (Geneva:  Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 226–​ 28; see also the Heidelberg Illustrated Catechism, Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek Cod. Pal. Germ. 438, fol. 9v. 78. Alsfelder Passionspiel, ll. 1776–​88, in The Alsfeld Passion Play; Cora Dietl, “Dancing Devils and Singing Angels,” 1. In other contexts, Mary Magdalene performs sacred dance. For example, in the thirteenth-​century fabliau called La Court de Paradis, she dances with the Virgin Mary in heaven, ll. 409–​13. In this scene, the Magdalene cites a refrain from medieval dance-​songs, see La Court de Paradis: Poème anonyme du XIIIe siècle, ed. Eva Vilamo-​Pentti (Helsinki:  Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1953), 98; BNF ms. fr. 25532, folio 334 recto; Gaston Reynaud, Recueil de motets français des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva:  Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 1:151; Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge:  Études de littérature française et comparée, suivies de textes inédits (Paris:  H. Champion, 1925), 320; Douglas Buffum, “The Refrains of the Cour de Paradis and of a Salut d’Amour” Modern Language Notes 27:1 (1912):  7; William Paden, “Old Occitan as a Lyric Language:  The Insertions from Occitan in Three Thirteenth-​Century Romances,” Speculum 68:1 (1993):  51–​52. Zimmermann discusses German vernacular portrayals of dancing saints, e.g., Das Märterbuch and Der Heilige Georg, see Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 150–​53. 79. Compare with Origen, Homily 7 on Ezekiel, in Origen on Ezekiel, Homilies 1–​14, in Fathers of the Church, trans. Thomas Sheck (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), vol. 103, for a discussion on clothing as idolatry.

282  notes to pages 92–94 80. Alsfelder Passionspiel, ll. 1803–​1805. See also Jean Michel, Mystere de la Passion, in which Mary Magdalene asks her male companion to sing and dance with her, Colin Slim, “Mary Magdalene, Musician and Dancer,” in Painting and Music in the Sixteenth Century: Essays in Iconography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 462. In later plays and engravings, Mary performs fashionable court dances, such as bassedanse, whereas some dance musical compositions from the era were entitled “La Magdalena”; ibid., 462–​68. In the Daniel Ludus, Margot Fassler explains that the court of Balthasar, with its hedonistic overtones, contrasts with the sobriety of Daniel, “The Feast of Fools and the Daniel Ludus: Popular Tradition in a Medieval Cathedral Play,” in Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),  65–​99. 81. Peter Macardle, The St. Gall Passion Play:  Music and Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), strophes 21, 25, 31, see 201–​02, as well as the editor’s commentary on the musical structure of her dance sequences, 113–​14. Interestingly Christ’s apostles in this play sing the Victimae Paschali Laudes, 113. 82. The St. Gall Passion Play, 216–​17. 83. Peter Dronke notes that in the eleventh century, officium tended to refer to a mystery play, see Nine Medieval Latin Plays, trans. and ed. Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51, n. 136/​37. 84. Officium Stellae, in Nine Medieval Latin Plays, trans. and ed. Dronke, 46–​47, l. 119, and 51, n. 119. 85. Ibid., 48–​49, ll. 129–​37. 86. Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays,  28–​29. 87. Harris, Sacred Folly, esp. 42–​45; Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays, 29. 88. Harris, Sacred Folly, 44. 89. This chapter, capitulum 18, was part of the Ordinatio de pila facienda. In the early eighteenth century, Abbé Jean Lebeuf discovered the document in the Auxerre archives. A  subsequent chapter, capitulum 19, written in 1412, documents certain modifications that were made to the ritual, which pertain to the reduced size of the pilota. After Abbé Lebeuf ’s discovery, these chapters were published in the Mercure de France in May 1726, at a time when European clerics were preoccupied with assimilating and collecting medieval Latin sources and compiling them into published compendia. This entry comes under the title “Pelota”; see Abbé Jean Lebeuf, “Remarques sur les anciennes réjouissances eccléstiastiques,” Mercure de France (May 1726):  911–​23. An excerpt of the Auxerre document was also reprinted in Charles Fresne Du Cange’s Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, 7:253–​54. 90. Lebeuf, Mercure de France, 921–​ 22; Du Cange, “Pilota,” 7:  254; trans. Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior:  Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 139–​40. Though little is known about the source's authorship or provenance before Lebeuf 's discovery, the original text seems to be a type of local statute, perhaps resulting from a synod or ecclesiastical council. The only two specified names are Stephanus de Hamello and Johannes Clementius. The former is referred to as dominus, which in this context most likely

notes to pages 94–95  283 refers to a local political figure; see Du Cange, “Pilota,” Glossarium, 7:253; Lebeuf, 911. Here Hamellus may be a Latin rendition of the French word hameau, or the English hamlet, meaning small town or village. Consequently, the name is probably a family name and not referring to holding an office in a place called Hamello or Hamellus. The latter is titularly distinguished as magister, and thus perhaps a magistrate or burgher of Auxerre. Both however are identified as novi stagiatores (this term is unclear, but it may have some relation to the French stagiare, that is, an apprentice, probationer, or someone in training), who, in April of 1396, gave their consent to the performance of the pilota (the specific name given to this dance) at Easter. The presence of secular officials in an ecclesiastical chapter was not unusual in the Middle Ages. Rather, it contributed to the officiality of the ordinance and, as I suspect in this case, the approbation of an unusual liturgical ritual and confirmation of an eyewitness account. 91. Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research 10:2 (1992): 30–​42. 92. Clement of Alexandria, Cohoratio ad Gentes, XII, in PG 8:239–​42. According to certain Greek myths, the Corybants were the first dancers. 93. Including that of Homer, Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and Ovid; see Homer, The Iliad, XVIII, ll. 478–​608. Scholars still debate whether the dancing floor was actually housed within an edifice at Knossos, or if it referred to the dance itself. Ludwig Weniger’s 1912 reconstruction of Achilles’ shield represents a group of dancers in the outer ring performing a geranos, or crane dance, which symbolized the sinuous path one took to exit the labyrinth; see Kern, Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings over 5,000 Years (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 44–​48. 94. Roman mosaics picturing Theseus and the Minotaur within a multicursal frame inspired early medieval church labyrinths. See William Henry Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Development (Longmans: Green and Co., 1922), 54. 95. Translation mine. 96. Daniel Connolly, “At the Center of the World: The Labyrinth Pavement of Chartres Cathedral,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden:  Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 285–​314. 97. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 49. 98. Mercure de France, 923, trans. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 49. Though Lebeuf was born in Auxerre in 1687, and would not likely have retained a memory of the labyrinth from childhood, he conversed with those who did. Note that most medieval organs did not survive, and the organ currently at Auxerre is a much later instrument than the one mentioned in the fourteenth-​century chapter. 99. Eisenberg, “Performing the Passion : Music, Ritual, and the Eastertide Labyrinth,” Revista Transcultural de Música 13 (2009): 6; Knäble, Eine Tanzande Kirche; Knäble, “L’Harmonies des sphères et la danse dans le contexte clérical au Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 66 (2014): 70–​74. 100. Plato, Timaeus, 29c–​36d, in Plato:  The Complete Works, ed. John Cooper, trans. Donald Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).

284  notes to pages 95–97 101. Tessa Morrison, “The Labyrinthine Path of Pilgrimage,” Peregrinations: Inter­ national Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art 1:3 (2005): 4–​5. See also Morrison, Labyrinthine Symbols in Western Culture:  An Exploration of Their History, Philosophy, and Iconography (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009). 102. Isar, “The Dance of Adam: Reconstructing the Byzantine Chorós,” Byzantinoslavica 61 (2003): 186. 103. Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schönberg (New York: Seven Arts, 1952), 152. 104. Isar, “ΧΟΡÓΣ: Dancing into the Sacred Space of the Chora, An Inquiry into the Character of Dance from the Chora,” Byzantion 75 (2005):  199. Cosmic dance becomes increasingly structured and institutionalized by Pseudo-​Dionysius the Areopagite, whose Celestial Hierarchy formulates a complex “angelology,” or hierarchy of choirs of angels who engage in a tripartite dance while receiving and reflecting illuminations emanating from the Godhead, Morrison, “The Labyrinthine Path of Pilgrimage,” 4. 105. According to Gregor Rohmann, “Im Antike Chorus war der praesul der Reigenführer, ganz wie Ignatius von Ignocia geschrieben hatte.” See Rohmann, Tanzwut:  Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 127. See also Miller, “Christian Aerobics: The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions,” in Acting on the Past:  Historical Performance across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover:  Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 236, n.  19; Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises,” 7; Villetard, “La Danse Ecclésiastique,” 107; Du Cange, Glossarium, 5:416–​17; Forcellini Lexicon Totius Latinitatis, 4:828–​29; A Latin Dictionary, ed. Lewis and Short, 1432; Eugène Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. Ernest Classen (Hampshire:  Noverre Press, 2009), 49; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, X.P.205, ed. Barney et al., 226. Saints sometimes appear as the praesul in medieval hymns, see Analecta Hymnica, 20:178; Analecta Hymnica 21:126. For the performative context in ancient Greece, see Anastasia-​Erasmia Peponi, “Sparta’s Prima Ballerina:  Choreia in Alcman’s Second Partheneion (3 PMGF)” Classical Quarterly 57:2 (2007): 354–​57. 106. Morrison, “The Labyrinthine Path of Pilgrimage,” 1–​2; e.g., PML MS. M 925, fol. 12r. 107. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 74. Writers and illuminators liberally embraced the noncanonical Gospel of Nicodemus as a source for literary and visual representations of this apocalyptic event, for which the Cretan myth served as a precursor; Doob, “The Auxerre Labyrinth Ritual,” in The Myriad Faces of Dance:  Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference, Society of Dance History Scholars, University of New Mexico, 15–​17 February 1985, ed. Christena L. Schlundt (Riverside:  1985), 221–​22. See also Doob, “Labyrinth Dances,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 4:106–​07.

notes to pages 97–99  285 108. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 133; Edith B.  Schnapper, “Labyrinths and Labyrinth Dances in Christian Churches,” in Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch Gerstenberg, ed. Walter Gerstenberg, Jan La Rue, and Wolfgang Rehm (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 355. 109. Trans. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 144. 110. Compare with an Easter hymn from a tenth-​century hymnary from Moissaic, in which Christ conquers death through dance, Analecta Hymnica, 2:52. Cynewulf ’s Ascension poem envisions the life of Christ as a series of six leaps (descending to earth at the Annunciation, being born in the manger, mounting the cross, entering the tomb, the descent into hell, ascent into heaven with angelic jubilation). 111. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, ch. 7. Art historian Adam Cohen has shown how labyrinth images in medieval manuscripts are connected to exegesis and affective piety, “Art, Exegesis and Affective Piety in Twelfth-​Century German Manuscripts,” in Manuscripts and Monastic Culture:  Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-​Century Germany, ed. Alison Beach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) 45–​68. 112. Wright, Maze and the Warrior, ch. 5.  Wright also notes recursal techniques in Renaissance Armed Man scores, or musical war cries, that sacralize the Christian warrior and endow him with virtues that mirror those of Christ-​Theseus, ch. 6–​7; see also Thomas Greene, “Labyrinth Dances in the French and English Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 54:4 (2001): 1403–​66. 113. Nicoletta Isar, “Chorography (Chôra, Chôros, Chorós) –​A Performative Paradigm of Creation of Sacred Space in Byzantium,” Hierotopy. The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov and Glen Peers (Moscow: Progress-​Tradition, 2006), 60. 114. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth,  26–​27. 115. Michael Eisenberg, “Performing the Passion,” 5–​6. Eisenberg enumerates various interpretations of the leather ball; these include Theseus’ ball of twine, the sun, or (the most Christianized reading) the grace and humanity of Christ. Further, the Ordinatio de Pila Facienda of the Auxerre chapter indicates that the new cleric must pay for the ball, which Eisenberg interprets as a rite of initiation for new clergy. 116. Ibid., 4.  Eisenberg discusses the Decembrica ball games that were performed in various cathedrals in Western Europe for the Christmastide liturgy; see also Erwin Mehl, “Baseball in the Stone Age,” Western Folklore 7:2 (1948):  155–​56; Rosanna Brusegnan, “Les Resources du Picard: Le Jeu de la Piloke,” Bien dire et bien aprandre: Revue de médiévistique 21 (2003): 85–​92. 117. Mary Dzon, “Boys Will Be Boys: The Physiology of Childhood and the Apocryphal Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 42:1 (2011):  179–​225; Kathryn Smith, “Accident, Play, and Invention: Three Infancy Miracles in the Holkham Bible Picture Book,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.  G. Alexander, 357–​69. Moreover, Mary Carruthers discusses the act of creation as God’s game in The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21, 30–​31. 118. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, 80. 119. See capitulum 19 of the Ordinatio de Pila Facienda.

286  notes to pages 99–103 120. Performance theorist Richard Schechner refers to this nuance as “twice-​behaved behavior.” According to his logic, reiterative performances suggest a “restored behavior” that is never exactly identical to previous or future performances, see Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36. Paul Zumthor’s concept of mouvance is also apt, for it captures the play between controlled fixity and liberal mobility in textual transmission of the Middle Ages, a concept that can be applied to medieval dance; see Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 121. Du Cange, Glossarium, 6:253, and Mercure de France (March 1727):  923. The reason for its censure seemed to be more of a financial nature, however, as the new canons no longer wanted to bear the burden of supplying the costly leather ball each year. Gerard Rotarius caused a dispute when he refused to supply it, see David McCullough, Unending Mystery: A Journey through Labyrinths and Mazes (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 81.

Chapter 4 1. For Foucauldian approaches to dance studies, see Janice Ross, “Doing Time: Prison in Dance,” in Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, ed. Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-​Phim (Lanham:  Scarecrow Press, 2008), 270–​84; Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-​garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1993), 182–​87; Susan Leigh Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 235–​57; Sangita Shresthova, Between Cinema and Performance: Globalizing Bollywood Dance (Doctoral diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008), 97–​ 104; Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44–​48; Jill Green, “Foucault and the Training of Docile Bodies in Dance Education,” American Educational Research Association Conference New Orleans, 2002; Emily Wright, “Producing Christian Docility: The Female Body in Contemporary American Evangelical Dance,” Journal of Dance, Movement, and Spiritualities 1:2 (2014):  295–​310; see also Marie Françoise Christout, Maurice Béjart:  Textes de Maurice Béjart, points de vue critiques, témoignages, chronologie (Paris: Seghers, 1972), 96–​97. 2. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), [Surveiller et punir, 1975], 138. Foucault locates the modern subject within the birth of the prison: “The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus. A quite different materiality, a quite different physics of power, a quite different way of investing men’s bodies had emerged,” in ibid., 115–​16. 3. Ibid., 302–​303.

notes to pages 103–104  287 4. Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research:  The Journal for the Society of Dance Research 10:2 (1992):  30–​42; Arcangeli, “Dance Under Trial:  The Moral Debate, 1200–​ 1600,” Dance Research 12:2 (1994):  127–​ 55; Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?:  Il Dibattito Europeo sulla Danza nella Prima Età Moderna (Rome:  Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, 2000), ch. 3; Arcangeli, “De Fugiendis Coreis:  L’Organizzazione Duecentesca di una Serie di Racconti Edificanti,” in Trenti’Anni di Ricerche Musicologiche:  Studi in Onore di F.  Alberto Gallo, ed. Patrizia Vecchia and Donatella Restani (Rome: Edizioni Torre d’Orfeo), 271–​82; Arcangeli, “Carnival in Medieval Sermons,” European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 109–​17. See also Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–​1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), ch. 5; Julia Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze:  Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Berlin:  Peter Lang, 2008), esp.  49–​50, 66, 69–​ 75, 77–​91, 118–​19; Ann Wagner, Adversaries of Dance:  From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 3–​5, 7–​11, 13–​15; Franz Böhme, Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland:  Beitrag zur Deutschen Sitten, Litteratur und Musikgeschichte (Leipzig:  Breitkopf & Härtel, 1886), 1:  ch. 7; Angus McIntosh, “Some Notes on the ‘Dancers of Colbeck,’” Notes and Queries 222 (1977): 196; Fritz Kemmler, Exempla in Context: A Historical and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Handlyng Synne (Tübingen:  G. Narr, 1984), 230–​31; Valeska Koal, “‘Detestatio Choreae’:  Eine Anonyme Predigt des 14. Jahrhunderts im Kontext der Mittelalterlichen Tanzpolemik,” Francia:  Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geschichte 34:1 (2007): 19–​38; T.F. Crane, “Mediaeval Sermon-​Books and Stories,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 21:114 (1883): 68–​69, 74; Irmgard Jungmann, “Tanzen im 15. Jahrhundert der Reigen in Deutschland: Realität oder Imagination?” Music in Art 28:1/​2 (2003): esp. 105–​14. 5. Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?, 211. 6. For other versions of the accursed dancers of Colbek story, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum; Acta Sanctorum (16 September), 3:369; Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, XXVI.10; Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum Morale, III, 9.6; John Hoveden, Le Speculum Laicorum:  Édition d'une collection d'exempla, composée en Angleterre à la fin du XIIIe siècle, ed. J.T. Welter (Paris: A. Picard, 1914); Recull de Eximplis e Miracles, Gestes e Faules e Altres Ligendes Ordenades Per A-​B-​C:  Tretes de un Manuscrit en Pergami del Començament del Segle XV, ed. F.M. Aguilo (Barcelona: A. Verdaguer, 1881), CLXXXIII; Der Grosse Seelentrost:  Ein Niederdeutsches Erbauungsbuch des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Margarete Schmitt (Cologne:  Böhlau, 1959), 11, 70; Sjælens Trøst, ed. Niels Nielsen (Copenhagen:  Schultz, 1937), 3, 105; Stith Thompson, Motif-​Index of Folk-​Literature (Copenhagen:  Centraltrykkeriet, 1955), 1:493, 5:252, C94 1.1; Frederic Tubach, Index Exemplorum:  A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalinen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1981), 113; J.T. Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et eidactique du Moyen Âge (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973) 45; Edward Schröder, “Die Tanzer von Kolbigk: Ein Mirakel des 11. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 17 (1897): 126–​30;

288  notes to pages 104–106 William of Waddington, Manuel des Pechiez, XLVII, XLIX, in Arnould, Le Manuel des Péchés: Étude de littérature religieuse anglo-​normande (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1940), 79, 164–​66, 283, 292, 303; Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, A.D. 1303, With Those Parts of the Anglo-​French Treatise on Which It Was Founded, William of Waddington’s Manuel des Pechiez, ed. Frederick Furnivall, (London: Early English Text Society, 1903) 125:283–​90; Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, CCCLXXXVIII, ed. Hermann Österley (Stuttgart:  Bibliothek des Literarischen Veriens), 236–​37; Arlene Epp Pearsall, “Johannes Pauli and the Strasbourg Dancers,” Franciscan Studies 52 (1992): 212; Pearsall, Johannes Pauli: 1450–​1520 On the Church and Clergy (Lewiston:  Edwin Mellen, 1994), 202; Le Tombel de Chartrose in Brian Levy, The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabilaux (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2000), 109 and n. 56; MGH Scr. 16:313, 14:188; Gaston Paris, Les Danseurs maudits: Légende allemande du XIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1900), 732–​ 42; BL Harley MS. 3823, fols. 377v-​388r; Barletta, “De Choreis,” in De Sermones, II: fols. 141r and 142r; Jean Gobi the Younger, Scala Coeli, CCCXLII, ed. Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Éditions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1991), 312–​13; Oxford BL MS. Bodley 614, fol. 51v; BL Additional MS. 18929, fol. 86r; BL Harley MS. 273, fol. 158r; BL Harley MS. 1701, fol. 60r; BL Arundel MS. 20, fol. 57B; BL Additional MS. 11284, fol. 20B, BL Harley MS. 268, fol. 96B; BL Additional MS. 18344, fol. 138r; BL Sloane MS. 2478, fol. 37r; BL Royal MS. 12 E I, fol. 146B; BL Additional MS. 21147, fol. 115B; J.A. Herbert et al., Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: Longmans and Co., 1910), 3:272–​73, 283, 303–​14, 370–​73, 423–​30, 509, 512, 537, 700–​01; Chronicon Vilodunese, ll. 4069–​4302, in Catalogue of Romances, ed. Ward, 2:660–​61; Ingrid De Geer, “Commentary on the Legends of Saint Magnus,” St. Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-​Century Renaissance, ed. Barbara Crawford (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 264–​67; Gregor Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania:  Frankish Christianity, Platonic Cosmology, and Bodily Expressions in Sacred Space,” Medieval History Journal 12:13 (2009): 31–​38; Harald Kleinschmidt, Perception and Action in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Press, 2005), 43; Eugène Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. Ernest Classen (Hampshire:  Noverre Press, 2009), 172–​ 76; Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 35. Other fascinating documents were discussed at a recent conference in Kalamazoo, see Laura Clark, “The Tale of the Cursed Carolers in Goscelin’s Legend of Saint Edith and in the Wilton Chronicle,” Bradley Phillis, “The Kölbigk Dancers and Flemish Memory of the Second Crusdae,” Lynneth Miller, “ ‘In England, Yn a Kynges Tyme that Hyght Edward’:  Vernacular Versions of the Kölbigk Dancers Narrative in England,” all papers presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 12, 2019. For the afterlife of the Colbek story, from the Nuremberg Chronicle to the Brothers Grimm, see Gregor Rohmann, Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 488–​90. 7. Alphabetum Narrationum, French, fourteenth century, BNF ms. lat. 12402, fol. 35r.

notes to pages 104–106  289 8. Arnould de Liège, Alphabetum Narrationum, CCXV, ed. Colette Ribaucourt, L’Alphabetum Narrationum (Paris:  École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1985, unpublished diss.), 2:170; translation mine, with assistance from Hester Gelber. Note that Jacques Berlioz and Marie-​Anne Polo de Beaulieu recently published a new critical edition of this text, see CCCM 160 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). The Middle English translation of this work employs the term carals for the dances, see Alphabet of Tales: An English Fifteenth-​Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Étienne de Besançon, from Additional Ms. 25,719 of the British Museum (London: Early English Text Society, 1904), 126: 151, ll. 3–​5, 15–​16. 9. Oxford BL MS Bodley 614, fol. 51v, England, twelfth century. 10. Jacques Le Goff, L’Exemplum, in Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-​Claude Schmitt (Turnhout:  Brepols, 1982), 40: 167. 11. Gilbert Dahan, “Quelques réflexions sur les exempla bibliques,” in Le Tonnerre des exemples:  Exempla et médiation culturelle dans l’Occident Médiéval, ed. Jacques Berlioz, Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, and Pascal Columb (Rennes Cedex: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 20–​24. As Dahan explains, the penitent King David is often used as an exemplary figure in these tales. 12. Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature, 13; Bruno Judic, “Grégoire le Grand et la notion d’exemplum,” in Le Tonnerre des exemples, 133–​38; Léopold Hervieux, Les Fabulistes Latins (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1884), 4:175. 13. Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “Des Histoires et des images au service de la prédication:  La Scala Coeli de Jean Gobi Junior (d. 1350),” École Nationale des Chartes, papers, 279–​80. 14. Claude Bremond, “L’Exemplum médiéval: Est-​il un genre littéraire?” In Les Exempla médiévaux:  Nouvelles perspectives, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 22–​28; Polo de Beaulieu, in Scala Coeli, 58; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “Temps liturgique et temps des exempla,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou and Franco Morenzoni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 223. 15. Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature, 100, 110. 16. Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur: Récits facétieux du Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 6. 17. Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Education, prédication, et cultures au Moyen Âge: Essai sur Jean Gobi le Jeune (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1999), 96, 103; Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 517–​18, 523. Some theories suggest that exempla came from oral storytelling and jongleurs and were later written down by clerics, see Jacques Berlioz, “Les Versions médiévales de l’histoire de Robert le Diable: Présence du conte et sens des récits,” in Le Conte tradition orale et identité culturelle, ed. Jean-​Baptiste Martin (Association Rhône-​Alpes Conte: Agence Régionale d’Ethnologie, 1988), 149, 154, 158–​59. For an analysis of the exemplum as an imaginative discourse, see Marcello Ciccuto, “Figures et cultures des images dans les récits exemplaires du XIVe siècle,” in Les Exempla médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives, 371–​74.

290  notes to pages 106–107 18. Humbert of Romans, “Prologus,” in Le Don de crainte ou l’abondance des exemplas, ed. Christine Boyer (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2003), 29. For Humbert’s views on dance, see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 116–​17. 19. Nicole Bériou, “Introduction,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge,  20–​22. 20. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “Conclusion,” in Le Tonnerre des exemples, 368–​69. For context on the decline of exempla in the fifteenth century, see Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature, 416–​17. 21. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, IV.11, in Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Horst Schneider and Nikolaus Nösges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 2:700; trans. Charles Cooke Swinton Bland and Henry von Essen Scott, The Dialogue of Miracles (London:  George Routledge and Sons, 1929), 1:207; compare with Dialogus Miraculorum, V.7, XI.29. Editors Schneider and Nösges note a contemporary historical reference to a forbidden ring dance (Reigentanz); see Caesarius von Heisterbach, 700, n. 486. 22. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, V.2–​3, 7, XI.60, see also X.29. Caesarius’s only positive reference to dance occurs in a story in which a priest places a beautiful child (i.e., the baby Jesus) in the mouth of a brother during communion, after which the brother assumed the form of “dancing lightning,” ibid., IX.42. 23. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, V.4, ed. Schneider and Nösges, 3: 960–​66; trans. Bland and Scott, 1:319; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 124. 24. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, V.4, ed. Schnieder and Nösges, 3:966; trans. Bland and Scott, 1:320. 25. Jacques Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur, 19, 31 [rev. ed. of Albert Lecoy de la Marche, L’Esprit de nos aïeux: Anecdotes et bons mots tirés des manuscrits du XIIIe siècle, 1888]; Colette Ribaucourt, “Introduction,” in L’Alphabetum Narrationum, 1: 1–​ 2. Chroniclers, such as Vincent de Beauvais, also inserted exempla into their accounts of historical events. 26. Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “Des Histoires et des images au service de la prédication,” 280, 283, 292; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “‘Jeunes’ et danse des chevaux de bois,” in Le Corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps:  Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 153–​54. 27. Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur, 5. 28. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, CCCCLXI, in Lecoy, Anecdotes Historiques, 397–​98, translation mine, with assistance from Hester Gelber. 29. Humbert of Romans, De Dono Timoris, IV, in CCCM, 218: 66, 77; see also Humbert of Romans, De Dono Timoris VIII.10; Clifford Davidson, “Some Further Thoughts on the Devil’s Dance,” Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 13 (1990): 3. For a detailed study and race and blackness in the Middle Ages, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. ch. 4. 30. Serapeum most commonly refers to the name of a building that is associated with the cult of the bull. 31. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, CCCCLXII, in Lecoy, Anecdotes Historiques, 398–​ 99; translation mine, with assistance from Hester Gelber, after G.G. Coulton, Life in

notes to pages 108–109  291 the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1:90–​91. Coulton echoes Étienne’s dance polemic:  “All dances, almost without exception, were anathema to the medieval moralists. . . . It is difficult to exaggerate the unanimity with which medieval theologians condemn dancing as immoral, except under exceptional circumstances,” in ibid., 89–​90, n. 1; see also Lecoy, Anecdotes historiques, 162; Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 113. 32. Boyer, “Introduction,” in Humbert de Romans, Le Don de Crainte,  7–​22. 33. Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 33–​34. 34. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, CXCIV-​CXCV. Dancing in cemeteries was a popular pastime for medieval Christians, much to the annoyance of medieval clergy. For sources and studies on cemetery dancing in the Middle Ages, see James le Palmer, Omne Bonum, BL Royal MS 6 E VI, fol. 451v ; Anon., Confessional, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 801, fol. 189v; Eudes de Sully, Council of Paris 1212/​1213, canon IV:18, in Giovanni Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio (Graz:  Akademische Druck-​u.  Verlagsanstalt, 1960), 22:843; Mansi, 22:683; Mansi, 23:216, 1204, and 1270; Mansi, 24:1190; Mansi, 25:66; Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 32; Vita Eligi, II.16 in MGH SS. Rer. Merov. 4:  705; Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages:  Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2010), 54–​55; Gregor Rohmann, Tanzwut:  Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 184–​86; Nicholas de Byard, “De Choreatricibus,” in Dictionarius Pauperum, University of Ghent MS 952, fols. 26v–​27v; John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–​1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 162; Michel Lauwers, Naissance du Cimetière: Lieux sacrés et terre des morts dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Aubier, 2005); Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schönberg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937), 252–​ 53 ; Anon., Confessional, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 801, fol. 190r; Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 192; Thomas Chobham, Summa Confessorum, VI.3.1; Jeannine Horowitz, “Les Danses cléricales au Moyen Âge,” Le Moyen Âge:  Revue d’histoire et de philologie 95:2 (1989): 279; William of Waddington, Le Manuel des Pechiez, ll. 6791–​96, cited and trans. in Ulrike Schemmann, Confessional Literature and Lay Education:  The Manuel de Pechez as a Book of Good Conduct and Guide to Personal Religion (Düsseldorf:  Droste, 2000), 133; Daniels, The Dance in Christianity: A History of Religious Dance Through the Ages (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 46; Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past and Present 152 (1996): 38–​42; Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), esp. 3–​4, 141–​42, 249, 252; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 84, 117–​19, 139–​40, 182, 214–​17; Adrien Belgrano, “Danses profanes et lieux sacrés au Moyen Âge central: Les Danses dans les cimetières entre contrôle social et négociations,” European Drama and Performance Studies 8 (2016): 25–​42. See also Thesaurus Predicatorum, BSG MS 1441, fol. 36r. 35. Ibid., Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, XCVII, CCCLXV.

292  notes to pages 109–110 36. Ibid., CCCCLXIII. 37. Ibid., CCLXX, CCLXXV; see also CCLXXXI. Interestingly, medieval women apparently loved to hear Étienne preach ; see Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au Moyen Âge:  Specialement au XIIIe siècle d’après les manuscrits contemporains (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 35–​36. 38. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, CLXXXV. 39. Étienne de Bourbon, Tractatus, BNF ms. lat. 15970, fol. 274r. 40. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, BNF ms. lat. 17509, fol. 146v. 41. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, CCLXXIII, CCLXXV. In the first tale, Jacques uses Bernard of Clairvaux’s sister (preconversion) as an example of woman’s vanity, and one of the manuscripts contains a maniculum next to that passage; see BNF ms. lat. 17509, 146 verso. 42. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, CCLXXIII bis, in The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Thomas Crane (London: Publications for the Folklore Society, D. Nutt, 1890), 114. Similarly, one of Nicole Bozon’s tales includes a fable that compares damsels who lead people to dances to the huntsman’s horn, thus the moral of the story is to flee the company of women; see Bozon, Contes, XXI, in Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, Frère mineur, publiés pour la première fois d'après les manuscrits de Londres et de Cheltenham, ed. Paul Meyer and Lucy T. Smith (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1889), 27–​29, 235; John Rose, Metaphors of Brother Bozon: A Friar Minor (London: Constable and Company, 1913), 29–​31; see also Hervieux, Les Fabulistes, 2: 635–​36. For a Latin translation of this story, see Meyer and Smith, Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, 221–​22, compare with Bozon, Contes, XXVIII; Meyer and Smith, Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, 42–​45; Metaphors of Brother Bozon,  46–​48. 43. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, CCCXIV, ed. Crane, 131. 44. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, CCLXXII, BNF ms. Lat. 17509, 146 recto, translation mine. Arcangeli also notes that this passage has occasionally been misattributed to Guillaume Peraldus; see Davide o Salomè,  72–​74. 45. Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum Universale de Apibus, II.49.165. 46. Ibid., II.49.166–​168. 47. Ibid., II.57.174, 214. 48. Ibid., II.57.229. 49. Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum Universale, II.37.135, ed. Georges Colvener (Douai: Balthazar Belleri, 1627), 386–​87; French trans. Henri Platell, Les Exemples du livre des abeilles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 183–​84; English translation mine, with assistance from Hester Gelber. 50. Thomas de Cantimipré, Bonum Universale, II.49.166, ed. Colvener, 452; French trans. Platell, Les Exemples, 208; English translation mine. Platell renders choreas coniungere as noues des rondes (literally, tying rounds, or conjoined dances), which does not translate as well into English. 51. Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum Universale, II.49.161–​64. 52. H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937), 259–​60.

notes to pages 110–113  293 53. Ulrike Schemmann, Confessional Literature and Lay Education:  The Manuel des Pechez as a Book of Good Conduct and Guide to Personal Religion (Düsseldorf: Droste 2000), 45–​47, 94, 114. 54. Nicole Bériou, “Autour de Lateran IV (1215): La Naissance de la confession moderne et sa diffusion,” in Pratiques de la confession: Des Pères au désert à Vatican II: Quinze études d’histoire (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983), 91. 55. Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XV, De Confessione, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Renato Lioi (Ancona: Biblioteca Francescana, 1978), 1:274. 56. Florence Chave Mahir, “Liturgie de l’exorcisme et sermons au XIIIe siècle: Les Images de la possession dans les sermons du troisième dimanche de Carême,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, 237–​45. 57. William of Waddington, Le Manuel des pechiez, Epilogue, ll. 12704; Arnould, Le Manuel des péchés, 430–​33. The Manuel also contains a tale about how the devil became shriven, in Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, A.D. 1303, 125: 302; see also. Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 187. 58. Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “Des Histoires et des images au service de la prédication,” 280, 283, 292; Jacques Berlioz and Colette Ribaucourt, “Images de la confession dans la prédication au début du XIVe siècle: L’Exemplum de l’Alphabetum Narrationum d’Arnold de Liège,” in Pratiques de la confession, 100–​03. In many exempla, the Virgin Mary does not let the faithful die without confession, Berlioz, Saints et Damnés: Le Bourgogne du Moyen Âge dans les Récits d’Étienne de Bourbon, Inquisiteur (1190–​1261) (Dijon: Les Éditions du Bien Public, 1989), 46. 59. Berlioz and Ribaucourt, “Images de la confession dans la prédication au début du XIVe siècle,” 95–​96, 100, 110. 60. Guillaume Peraldus, “De Choreis,” in Tractatus de viciis, II.3.3.6, in BNF Ars ms. 536, fols. 33v-​34r. Elsewhere, Peraldus implies that dance is linked to the sin of pride (superbia), for lewd singing replicates the transgression of the golden calf, Peraldus, Summae de Virtutum ac Vitiorum, II.6.3.24, ed. Rodolf Clutius (Paris:  Ludovico Boullenger, 1648), 2:288. 61. Vulgate, Ecclesiasticus 9:4. Guillaume Peraldus changed the term psaltrice to saltatrice, perhaps because the latter has more negative associations. See Summae, II.3.3.6; ed. Clutius, 2:33. 62. Guillaume Peraldus, Summae, II.3.4.3, ed Clutius, 2:36. 63. Peraldus, Summae, II.3.4.3, ed Clutius 2:36–​37. In addition to Exodus, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Matthew, and Revelation, Peraldus includes passages by Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome to support his argument. 64. Peraldus, Summae, II.3.4.3, ed Clutius, 2:36–​41. 65. This reason, as Guillaume Peraldus notes, supposedly comes from Jerome. 66. Peraldus, “De Choreis,” in Summae, II.3.4.3, ed. Clutius, 2:38. In medieval mystical texts, the circle is often a symbol of perfection. Here, however, Guillaume Peraldus locates the potential for peril in the circle’s nonlinear, and therefore indirect, motion. 67. Peraldus, Summae, II.3.4.3, ed. Clutius, 2:39. 68. Peraldus, “De Choreis,” in Summae II.3.4.3, ed. Clutius, 2:39. 69. Ibid, 2:39–​40.

294  notes to pages 113–114 70. Ibid., 2:40. 71. Ibid., 2:40–​41. 72. Johannes Herolt, Sermo XXXVII, in Sermones Discipuli de Tempore et de Sanctis, cum Promptuarium Exemplorum et de Miraculis Beatae Mariae Virginis (Basel, 1482), BNF Ars incunabula FOL-​T-​1578 [in-​fol.]; see also Herolt, Promptuarium exemplorum, VII-​XIII, in ibid; Herolt, “De Choreis,” in Liber de Eruditione Christifidelium, III (Strasbourg: Jacob Eber, 1483), BNF Ars incunabula 4-​T-​1441 [in-​fol.]; Jean Gobi, “De Chorea,” in Scala Coeli, CCCXL, ed. Polo de Beaulieu, 311. Herolt often employs the word plaga (trap, hunt, injury) for dance. 73. Johannes Herolt, Sermo XXXVII, in Sermones Discipuli de Tempore et de Sanctis, BNF Ars incunabulum FOL-​T-​1578 [in-​fol.]; Herolt, “De Choreis,” in Liber de Eruditione Christifidelium, III, BNF Ars incunabula 4-​T-​1441 [in-​fol.]. 74. Alain de Lille (Insulis), Regula LXXI, from Regulae Theologicae, in PL 210:657; Rohmann, Tanzwut, 229, translation mine with assistance from Hester Gelber. 75. Charles Munier, “Introduction, ” in La Pénitence (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984), 8. 76. Tertullian, De Paenitentia, XII.8, in CSEL 76. See also Raymond de Peñafort, De Poenitentia, IV, in Summa Sancti Raymundi de Peniafort Barcinonenesis Ord. Praedictor, De Poenitentia, et Matrimonio, cum Glossis Ioannis de Friburgo (Rome: Ioannis Tallini, 1603), 501. The Egyptians, by contrast, perished for refusing exomologesis, or the Church’s instrument of removing sin. 77. M.L.W. Laistner, “Was Bede the Author of a Penitential?” The Harvard Theological Review 31:4 (1938): 268–​69. 78. Allen Frantzen, “Penitentials Attributed to Bede,” Speculum 58:3 (1983): 591–​93. 79. Abelard, in Peter Abelard’s Ethics, ed. and trans. D.E. Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. 76–​77. 80. E.g., Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Canticum Canticorum, esp. Sermo XII, XXX, in S. Bernardi Opera Omnia, ed. Jean Leclercq, Charles Talbot, Henri Rochais, and Guido Hendrix (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), 2 vol. 81. See canon 21, in Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils, 259–​60. 82. E.g., John Hovedens, Speculum Laicorum, LXVI, ed. Welter, 88–​89. 83. Allen Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-​ Saxon England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 8–​12; John McNeill and Helena Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal “Libri Poenitentiales” and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 3–​29; Jean Charles Payen, Le Motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale, des origines à 1230 (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 54–​57, 70–​83; Cyrille Vogel, “Les ‘Libri Paenitentiales,’” in Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge Occidental (Brepols: Turnhout, Belgium, 1978), 27: ch. 5; Book for a Simple and Devout Woman. A Late Middle English Adaptation of Peraldus’s Summa de Vitiis et Virtutibus and Friar Laurent’s Somme le Roi. Edited from British Library Mss Harley 6571 and Additional 30944, ed. F.N.M. Diekstra (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 62–​64. Some of these texts redirected penitence in the form of a dialogue between confessor and penitent, see Mahir, “Liturgie de l’exorcisme et sermons au XIIIe siècle” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, 249. This traditional historiography on penance has, however, been challenged

notes to pages 114–117  295 by Mary Mansfield’s The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-​Century France (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1995), which uncovers numerous post-​ Lateran IV examples of public and liturgical spectacles of penance. 84. Peter Lombard, Sententiae, IV.16, cited in Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 34. 85. (Pseudo) Augustine, De Vera et de Falsa Poenitentia, XV.31, in PL, 40:1126. A similar argument appears in Gratian’s Decretum, see Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes Towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–​ 1675 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 52–​53. 86. Raymond de Peñafort, De Poenitentia, I.5, gloss on canticis spiritualibus, in Summa Sancti, 112; Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?, 88–​89. Raymond’s discussion of feast days claims that the direst transgressions occur when people perform sortilegia on these days. He argues instead that celebrating sacred days, like the Sabbath, should be disciplined with hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs, see De Poenitentia, I.5, in Summa Sancti, 108, 111. 87. Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo X, De Ludo, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Lioi, 1:192. See also anon., Liber Exemplorum ad Usuam Praedicantium, CXCII, in Liber Exemplorum ad Usuam Praedicantium. Saeculo XIII Compositus a Quodam Fratre Minore Angelico de Provencia Hiberniae, ed. A.G. Little (Aberdeen: Typis Academicis, 1908), 110–​11. For an explanation of this passage in relation to Scandinavian dance rituals and folklore, see ibid., 152–​54. 88. Bonaventure, Commentary on Sentences, IV.13, in Doctoris Seraphici, S. Bonaventurae, Opera Omnia (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1889), 4:402; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​ Engelstänze, 92–​93, n. 136; translation mine. 89. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 129–​32; see also Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè, 83. 90. Albertus Magnus, Commentarium Super Sententiarum, VI.16.43, in Beati Alberti Magni:  Opera Omnia Ex Editione Lugdunensi, ed. Augusti Bourgnet (Paris: Ludovicum Vites, 1894), 29:632–​64. Albert continues by declaring that clerics should abstain from dancing, dancers should not execute libidinous gesticulations, and finally that the musical melody accompanying dances should be light. 91. John of Erfurt, Summa de Poenitentia, I.6.25, cited and trans. in Page, Owl and the Nightingale, 193–​94. John of Erfurt continues with a section on hystiones and uses David and St. Francis as examples of players who perform with honest intentions. 92. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de proprietatibus apum, II.49.165, ed. Clutius, 451–​52; trans. Platell, Les Exemples du Livre des Abeilles, 207–​208; trans. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, 1:129. See other exempla from this chapter for Thomas’s denunciation of games. 93. Anon., Ci Nous Dit: Recueil d’Exemples Moraux, ed. Gérard Blangez (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1979), xii-​xv, xlix, ch. 3. This text survives in eighteen manuscripts. For discussions on the relationship between text and image, see Christian Heck, Le Ci Nous Dit:  L’Image médiévale et la culture des laïcs au XIVe siècle, les enluminures de manuscrit de Chantilly (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), esp. 11–​ 12, 17, 21–​24, 37, 40–​41, 45, 48–​49, 81. For an explanation of the liturgical significance of this text, see Pascal Collomb, “Le Ci Nous Dit: Un Commentaire de la liturgie médiévale?” in Le Tonnerre des exemples, 331–​32.

296  notes to pages 117–119 94. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXXIX. For an illustration, see Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, fol. 146v. 95. Ibid., CCXXX. For an illustration, see Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, fol. 147r. 96. Ibid., CCXLIV. For an illustration, see Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, fol. 155v. 97. Ibid., DCCXVII. For an illustration, see Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 27, fol. 188r. According to Augustine, the dance of Salome forms a contrast with confession through Christ, see Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmi, XL.26, in CCSL  38–​40. 98. Ibid., CCXXXI, ed. Blangez, 1:204; Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 26, fol. 147v. 99. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XCI.2, in CCSL 39:1280. See also Augstine, Sermo IX, De Decim Chordis, in PL 38:77. 100. Anon., Tabula Exemplorum, XXXV, ed. Welter, 11–​12. See also ms. Cambridge Pembroke Coll. Lib 202, fol. 30r, in ibid., 96–​97; John Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium, I.15 (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1485), Huntington Library incunabulum 85692, in-​fol. For German sources, see Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen— ​Engelstänze,  69–​81. 101. Friar Laurent, Somme le Roi /​ Miroir du Monde, XXI.33, ed. Diekstra, 339–​40. 102. William of Waddington, Le Manuel des Pechiez, in Arnould, Le Manuel des Péchés, 68–​69, see Manuel, ll. 1485–​1508, in Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, A.D. 1303, 119:35–​37. Robert Mannyng’s Middle English translation employs the terms karol, ryng, and wrastlyng. See also. Anon., Sermon de confession, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 90, fol. 24r; Anon., confession manual, Oxford BL MS. Bodley 801, fol. 190r; Domenico Cavalca, “Devani et dissoluti balli et canti,” in Pungilingua, XXVIII (Venegia:  Comin de Trino di Monferrato, 1547), in-​fol.; Léon Gautier, Les Epopeés françaises: Et́ude sur les origines et l'histoire de la littérature nationale (Paris, H.  Welter, 1865–​1868), 2:203; Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 90–​91, n. 3. 103. Guillaume Peraldus, “De Choreis,” in Summae de Virtutum ac Vitiorum, II.3.22, ed. Clutius, 36, 39. See also Johannes Herolt, “De Chorea,” in Liber de Eruditione Christifidelium, III, BNF Ars 4-​T-​1441 [in-​fol.]. 104. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum Universale de Apibus, II.49, ed. Clutius, 451; trans. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, 1:128–​29. 105. Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XVII, De Luxuria, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Lioi, 1:303, 305. 106. Old French sources often used the phrase mener la danse (to lead the dance). 107. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXXVI, translation mine. 108. Ibid., CCXXVI, Chantilly Musée Condé, ms. 26, fol. 144r. 109. The theme of inebriation was common in medieval penitentials and exempla, which tend to illustrate the folly of drunkenness. The Vie des Pères compilation, for example, includes a story about a hermit who got drunk and accidentally committed adultery and murder. Afterward he did penance in the desert, and was honored by a pope and became a spiritual celebrity, thereby underscoring the significance of true repentance, see “Ivresse,” ll. 15160–​66, in La Vie des Pères, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1987–​1999), 2:170; Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French Vie des Pères (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005),

notes to pages 119–123  297 186–​87, 200–​01. Drawing from early modern discourses, Alessandro Arcangeli demonstrates how dance could be legitimate if done soberly and with prudence, see Recreation in the Renaissance, 40–​41, 46–​48. Incidentally, in literature on dance and etiquette in early modern England, the horse symbolized unbridled passions, see Kevin Sharpe, “Virtues, Passions, and Politics in Early Modern England,” History of Political Thought 32:5 (2011): 790–​92. 110. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXXXV, ed. Blangez, 1:207. 111. Ibid., Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 26, fol. 150v. 112. E.g., Bibliothèque Municipale de Dijon, ms. 527, fol. 1r. 113. Anon., Liber Exemplorum, CXCI, De Ludis Inordinandis, ed. Little, 109–​110; see also Levy, The Comic Text, 109–​10. 114. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCCCXXII, ed. Blangez, 2:14; Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 27, fol. 7v. Penitential literature suggests that humans are always being tested by diverse temptations. The Vie des Pères, for example, contains a story about an otherwise pious nun who forgot to say a blessing before her meal and ingested a devil hiding in her salad, “Feuille de Chou,” in La Vie des Pères, ed. Lecoy, 2:209–​14; Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue, 410–​11. 115. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CXLI, ed. Blangez, 1:146; Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 26, fol. 96v. This image conflates ­chapters 141 and 142 of the text. 116. Ibid., CXLII. 117. Ibid., CCXXXVII, Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 26, fol. 151v. 118. Ibid., LXVI, ed. Blangez, 1:84, 86. Translation mine, with assistance from Marisa Galvez. For other penitential dance content from the Ci Nous Dit not discussed here, see ch. 233, 353, and 566. For similar correspondences between dance, meditation on the Passion, and conversion, see Gautier de Coinci, in Anglo-​Norman Lyric: An Anthology Edited from the Manuscripts with Translations and Commentaries, ed. David Jeffrey and Brian Levy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 112; Marguet Convertie, in Nouveau recueil de contes, dits, fabliaux et autres pièces inédites des XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles, ed. Achille Jubinal (Paris, Édouard Pannier, 1839), 1:326. 119. Penitential literature could be critical of noble customs. In certain exempla, the knightly tournament embodied all seven of the deadly sins, see Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur, 82–​83; compare with Le Tournoiement de l’Antechrist, Faral, Les Jongleurs, 316–​17. The legend of Robert the Devil, a particularly popular exemplum, tells the tale of a bad knight who did penance and was redeemed, see Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur, 74–​77. Interestingly, Robert le Diable resurfaced in an 1831 opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer. It is also the subject of the ballet depicted in Edgar Degas’s 1876 painting of the same name. 120. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 26, fol. 42v. 121. Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Suffolk:  D.S. Brewer, 2013), esp.  30, 166–​67; Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature:  Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jan Ziolkowski, “Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology

298  notes to pages 123–124 108 (2009):  421–​48; Patrick Geary, “What Happened to Latin?” Speculum 84:4 (2009):  871, 866; Erich Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” in Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25–​66; Polo de Beaulieu, “Exemplus et vulgarization du savoir biblique aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge,” in Le Tonnerre des exemples, 28–​44; Claudio Galderisi, Diegesis: Études sur la poétique des motifs narratifs au Moyen Âge, de la Vie des Pères aux lettres modernes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 19–​23, 41. As Jerome himself wrote, “What we understand better, we also translate better,” in Incipit Prologus Sancti Hieronymi Presbyteri in Pentateucho, in Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson (Stuttgart:  Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), 3–​4. Compare with Susan Sontag, “Being Translated,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 32 (1997): 15–​18; Geary, “What Happened to Latin?,” 856; Dennis Brown, Vir Trilinguis: A Study of the Biblical Exegesis of Saint Jerome (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), esp. 55–​86; Jerome, Epistola LVII ad Pammachium, in CSEL 54:508. 122. Polo de Beaulieu, “Exemplus et Vulgarization du Savoir Biblique,” 28–​44; Polo de Beaulieu, in Scala Coeli, 72–​74; Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire Française au Moyen Âge, 107, 234–​35, 254, 269; Michel Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris: Editions Honoré Champion, 1976), 366–​76. During the Roman Empire, the vernacular referred to a language that was not yet institutionalized or orthodox. The Latin term verna referred to Roman slaves born in the empire, who used hybridized languages drawn from imperial and indigenous languages and customs. According to Cicero, using vernacular was a powerful rhetorical tool, exercising persuasive power, see Keith Bradley, “On the Roman Slave Supply and Slave Breeding,” in Classical Slavery, ed. Moses Finley (London: F. Cass, 1987), 42; Larry Scanlon, “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer, and Langston Hughes,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Post-​Medieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 226; Robert Glenn Howard, Digital Jesus: The Making of a Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2011), 4–​ 10; Howard, “Electronic Hybridity:  The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web,” Journal of American Folklore 121:480 (2008): 204; Howard, “The Vernacular Mode: Locating the Non-​Institutional in the Practice of Citizenship,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life, ed. Daniel Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2010), 249–​52. 123. Yvonee Regis-​ Cazal, “Nicole Bozon, Contes moralises,” in Les Exempla médiévaux:  Introduction à la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l’Index Exemplorum de Frederic C. Tubach, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Carcassonne:  Garae /​Hésiode, 1992), 237; Nicole Bozon, Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, Frère mineur, publiés pour la première fois d'après les manuscrits de Londres et de Cheltenham, ed. Paul Meyer and Lucy T. Smith (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1889), i-​iii; M. Amelia Klenke, “Nicholas Bozon,” Speculum

notes to pages 124–125  299 15:4 (1940): 447–​49. Bozon has received little scholarly attention, perhaps due to his “bad French,” according to nineteenth-​century French philologists; see Meyer and Smith, Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, i-​iii, ix, lii-​liv; Klenke, “Nicholas Bozon,” 452–​53; Regis-​Cazal, “Nicole Bozon, Contes moralises,” 237. 124. Nicolas Bozon, Le Evangel Translaté de Latin en Frranceys, ll. 6–​11, in Seven More Poems of Nicholas Bozon, trans. M. Amelia Klenke (St. Bonaventure:  Franciscan Institute, 1951), 19. Bozon continues by correlating a good translation to God’s commandments (e.g., love thy neighbor), as well as the creation, in which God formed us in his likeness to have the joy and everlasting life that Lucifer lost. If humankind had not sinned, it would reside forever in paradise, in Seven More Poems, 23, ll. 105–​120. Moreover, in Bozon’s Life of St. Margaret, he notes that his translation fills in narrative gaps that appear in Latin versions. In his estimation he is probably right, and thus as translator he deserves to be saved, see Bozon, La Vie Seinte Margarete, ll. 304–​314, 323–​30, in Three Saints’ Lives of Nicholas Bozon, trans. M. Amelia Klenke (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1947), 41–​42. 125. Nicolas Bozon, La Vie Seinte Marie Magdalene, ll. 463–​64, 483–​98, in Three Saints’ Lives of Nicholas Bozon, 24–​25. Bozon concludes that reading Marie’s life (vie) will save people from pains in hell and bring them to the joy in which the saints take delight, in ibid., 25, ll. 499–​504. 126. (Pseudo) Stephen Langton, cited and trans. Robert Taylor, Wendy Pfeffer, Randall Rosenfeld, and Lys Weiss, “The Bele Alis Sermon:  Homiletic Song and Dance,” Florilegium 24 (2007): 183, 186. For a transcription of the diverse vernacular and Latin versions of this text, see Tony Hunt, “De la Chanson au sermon: Bele Aalis et Sur la rive de la mer,” Romania 104 (1983): 440–​47, 450–​52. For a discussion of the musical content of Bele Aelis, see Taylor et al., “The Bele Alis Sermon,” 178, 180; Maurice Delbouille, “Sur les traces de ‘Bele Aëlis,’ ” in Mélanges de philologie romane dédiés à la mémoire de Jean Boutière (Liège: Soledi, 1971), 1: esp. 202–​03. 127. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, CCLXXIII, ed. Crane, 114; BNF ms. 17509, fol. 146r. See also Richard Axton, “Popular Modes in the Earliest Plays,” in Medieval Drama, ed. Neville Denny (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 29; Jacques Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge, Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, 1967 (Paris and Montréal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969), 370. 128. William de St. Thierry, Vita Prima Sancti Bernardi Claraevallis Abbatis, I.6.30; ed. Pauli Verdeyen and Christine Vande Veire, in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2011), 89B:I.6.30; trans. Alban Butler, Donald Attwater, and Herbert Thurston in Butler’s Lives of the Saints (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, 1981), 3:347. Guillaume Peraldus cites Bernard to demonstrate how dancing and singing can lead one to death, in Summae de virtutum ac vitiorum, II.3.23, ed. Clutius, 42; whereas the Ci Nous Dit contains a chapter (CCXXXII) on the conversion of Bernard’s sister, which in the Chantilly manuscript is nestled between two illustrations of dancers, see Chantilly, Musée Condé ms. 26, fols. 147r-​148v. 129. (Pseudo) Langton, in Taylor et al., “The Bele Alis Sermon,” 183, 186.

300  notes to pages 125–127 130. Ibid., 183–​84, 186–​87. This part of the sermon incorporates biblical passages, namely Matthew 22:37–​40, Mark 12:30–​31, Luke 10:27, Acts 1:1, and the Letter of James 2:16–​18. 131. Mary Carruthers, “Rhetorical Ductus, or, Moving through a Composition,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performances across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), esp. 99, 101, 107–​11, 116, n.  20; see also the contributions of Carruthers, Paul Crossley, and William Flynn in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). In contrast, Origen discusses prancelike rhetoric that is deceptive like women, see Homily III, in Origen on Ezekiel, Homilies 1-​14, trans. Thomas Scheck (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), Fathers of the Church 103:56–​59. 132. (Pseudo) Langton, in Taylor et al., “The Bele Alis Sermon,” 184–​85, 187–​88. These refrain lines (Por deu trahez vus en la, /​ vus ki ne amez mie) appear in Old French fabliaux and motets, see Douglas Buffum, “The Refrains of the Cour de Paradis and of a Salut d’Amour,” Modern Language Notes 27:1 (1912): 7. 133. (Pseudo) Langton, in Taylor et al., “The Bele Alis Sermon,” 184, 186–​88. 134. Indeed, Dante’s revalorization of purgatory becomes evident in the very first canto, or song, of Purgatorio: “and I will sing of that second realm where the /​human spirit purges itself and becomes worthy to /​ascend to Heaven. /​But here let dead poetry rise up again, O holy /​Muses since I am yours, and let here Calliope arise,” in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume II, Purgatorio, trans. and ed. Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18–​19, ll. 4–​9. 135. Kathryn Dickason, “Discipline and Redemption: The Dance of Penitence in Dante’s Purgatorio,” Dante e l’Arte 4 (2017): 67–​100. 136. For a comparison between David and Dante, see Theresa Federici, “Dante’s Davidic Journey: From Sinner to God’s Scribe,” in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, ed. Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 180–​209. Dance historian Jennifer Homans notes that, incidentally, Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy inspired nineteenth-​ century ballet, specifically the aesthetic program of Act II of La Bayadère, called the Kingdom of the Shades, see Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 269. 137. Dante, Purgatorio X:64–​66, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 160–​61. In this canto, the Virgin Mary and the Emperor Trajan are also set in marble to illustrate humility. The poem goes on to suggest that Michal’s behavior prefigures the punishments of the proud, see Hermann Gmelin, “The Art of God,” in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, A Canto-​by-​Canto Commentary, ed. Allen Mandelbaum et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 99. 138. Commedia, BL Egerton MS. 943 fol. 80v, Northern Italy (Emilia or Padua), early to mid-​fourteenth century. 139. Interestingly, dance historian Germaine Prudhommeau discusses how, in ancient Greek thought, the caryatids were considered priestesses of dance, see Histoire de la danse: Des Origines à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Amphora, 1986), 1:125.

notes to pages 127–128  301 140. Jeffrey Schnapp, “Introduction to Purgatorio,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 94–​96. 141. Although Foucault refers to Dante in Discipline and Punish, he associates Dante’s poetry (presumably the Inferno) with the punitive process put into laws, as well as the spectacular excess of physical violence, see Discipline and Punish, 34. 142. Jacopone da Todi, Lauda III (VII), in Laude, ed. Matteo Leonardi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2010), 22, ll. 11–​14; trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes in The Lauds (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 71–​72. Similarly, in another of his prison poems, Jacopone wrote: “I am fettered like a falcon, /​And the chains clank as I move about—​/​The attendant outside my lodgings /​Can hear me practicing my new dance steps,” Lauda LIV, in The Lauds, 174. Jacopone was imprisoned by Pope Boniface VIII, due to his open critiques of papal corruption. Incidentally, Jacopone’s own conversion involves dance. Vanna, his noble wife, died when a dance floor collapsed underneath her. Upon discovering that his wife wore a hair shift underneath her clothes to atone for his sins, Jacopone promptly became a Spiritual Franciscan, see Alessandro Vettori, “Singing with the Angels:  Iacopone’s da Todi’s Prayerful Rhetoric,” in Franciscans at Prayer, ed. Timothy Johnson (Leiden:  Brill, 2007), 221–​48. 143. According to Jeremy Tambling (Dante in Purgatory:  States of Affect [Turnhout: Brepols, 2010]), Purgatorio, given its penchant for contritionism, is the most affective part of the Commedia. In his analysis of Purgatorio, Peter Armour calls attention to this canticle’s double insistence on inner and outer modes of purgation (the interiority of penitus and the physicality of poena); see The Door of Purgatory: A Study of Multiple Symbolism in Dante’s Purgatorio (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1983), 10. In these respects, Dante’s penitential regime departs from earlier medieval authorities, such as Augustine and Gregory the Great. For them, disciplina was not only a means of maintaining a certain lifestyle (as it was for the Romans), but entailed an active process of correction that was institutionally embedded; see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 34–​35, 136–​37. 144. E.g., Tertullian, La Pénitence (De Paenitentia), ed. Charles Munier (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984); Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, in CCSL 143–​143B; (Pseudo) Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, in CCSL (Turnhout Brepols, 1971), vol. 142; (Pseudo) Augustine, De Vera et de Falsa Poenitentia, in PL 40:1113–​30. For an analysis of the spiritual value of flagellation in medieval Christianity, see Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007), ch. 1–​3. 145. Anon., The Vision of Tundale, ed. Rodney Mearns (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1985); anon., Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. Robert Easton Early English Text Society no. 298 (1991). Both of these works survive in various manuscript editions and were translated into numerous vernacular languages. Marie de France’s L’Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, an Old French translation of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, circulated widely throughout the Middle Ages and Dante was likely familiar with it; see Jacques Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris:  Gallimard, 1981), 40–​41, 54. For a

302  notes to pages 128–130 comprehensive treatment on otherworlds before Dante, see Eileen Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1988). 146. The influential penitential work by the Dominican inquisitor Raymond de Peñafort, for instance, employs criminal language, see De Poenitentia, in Summa Sancti, esp. 480–​481. 147. E.g., Limbourg Brothers, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 65, fol. 113v, French, c.  1410; Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire, 349. In contrast, Dante’s Inferno inscribes the gates of Hell with the absence of hope: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Inferno, III:9. 148. Anon., Sir Owain, in Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale, ed. Edward Foster (Kalamazoo: TEAMS Middle English Text Series, 2004), 132, ll. 328–​36. 149. Jean Gobi the Younger, Scala Coeli, CCCXXXIX, ed. Polo de Beaulieu, 310–​11; translation mine. G.G. Coulton cites a similar passage in the Promptuarium Exemplorum Discipuli by the fifteenth-​century Dominican preacher Johann Herolt; see Five Centuries of Religion: St. Bernard, His Predecessors, and Successors, 1000–​ 1012 A.D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 1:543. One of Gobi’s other works, Dialogue with the Spirit of Gui, is concerned with purgatory and the soul’s suffering, see Polo de Beaulieu, Dialogue avec un fantôme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), 69; Polo de Beaulieu, Education, prédication, et cultures au Moyen Âge,  10–​11. 150. Nicholas de Byard, in BL Additional MS. 37670, fol. 149r; Nicholas de Byard, “De Choreatricibus,” in Dictionarius Pauperum, University of Ghent MS. 952, fol. 27v; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 126; see also Johannes Herolt, Sermo XXXVII, in Sermones Discipuli de Tempore et de Sanctis, BNF Ars incunabulum FOL-​T-​1578 [in-​fol.]; attrib. John Hovedens, Speculum Laicorum, CXL, ed. Welter, 32. In some accounts, the dead girl is identified as Peter Damian’s sister. 151. Origen said that pride was the sin by which the devil fell, whereas Augustine, in his prologue to the City of God, remarked that “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” See Origen, Homily IX, in Origen on Ezekiel, 119; Augustine, “Prologus,” in Civitas Dei, in LCL 411: 10–​11. 152. Carlo Delcorno, “Exemples bibliques, exemples classiques,” in Les Tonnerre des exemples, 85; Delcorni, “Pour un Histoire de l’exemplum en Italie,” in Les Exempla médiévaux:  Nouvelles perspectives, 147–​ 48; Delcorno, “Dante e Peraldo,” in Exemplum et Letteratura: Tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 195–​227; Guillaume Peraldus, Summae de virtutum ac vitiorum, II.3.23, ed. Clutius, 41–​43. This chapter is entitled “De multitudine peccatorum choreas ducentium,” in BNF Ars ms. 536, fols. 36v-​38v. 153. Anon., Oxford BL MS Bodley 801, fol. 203v; trans. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 120, n. 47. 154. Attrib. John Hovedens, Speculum Laicorum, CXXXIX, De Choreatricibus et Cantilenis, ed. Welter, 32; see also ibid., XXI; Arnould, Péchés, 138 Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 114; Johannes Herolt, Promptuarium Exemplorum, X, in Sermones Discipuli de Tempore et de Sanctis, BNF Ars incunabula FOL-​T-​1578 [in-​fol.];

notes to pages 130–131  303 BL Additional MS. 16589, fol. 93r; BL Harley MS. 273, fol. 135r; William of Waddington, Le Manuel des Pechiez, ed. Furnivall, 119:113–​15; Levy, The Comic Text, 109–​10. A  similar anecdote occurs in the Visio Lazari, where the prideful are tortured with iron wheels, cited in The Collected Saints’ Lives:  Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, trans. Margot King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 135, n. 18. 155. Book for a Simple and Devout Woman, I.7, I.12, ed. Diekstra, 100, 104, 106, ll. 439–​ 50, 580–​99, 658–​59; see also Le Miroir du Monde, in ibid., 339–​40. 156. As Phyllis Brown reminds us (“Penance and Pilgrimage in The Divine Comedy and The Song of Roland,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 4:1 [1993]), Purgatorio was allegedly formed by Lucifer’s fall from Heaven (i.e., “matter displaced from Hell,” 21). Pride is the root of all human vice because disobedience to God—​which in itself is a form of pride—​initiates sin. Lee Yearley elaborates how pride, as a sin characterized by stealth, should be visibly and vigorously shaken off; see Yearley, “Genre and the Attempt to Render Pride: Dante and Aquinas,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72:2 (2004): 324. 157. Dante, Purgatorio XIII:133–​38. 158. Dante’s prideful reputation continued well after his death in popular literature. For example, one novella recounts how a presumptuous blacksmith chanted the Commedia. Hearing this, Dante threw his tools in the street. The blacksmith protested, “You ruin my work!,” to which Dante responded: “You are ruining mine!” In Le Novelle de Franco Sacchetti, ed. Ottavio Gigli (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1860), 1:274–​76. See also ibid., 1:276–​77; Thompson, Motif-​Index of Folk-​Literature, Index, 4:67, 92, 94, 108; Dominic Rotunda, Motif-​Index of the Italian Novella in Prose (New  York:  Haskell House Publishers, 1973), 45–​46, 57, 67; Facezie di Lodovico Carbone Ferrarese, LXIX-​LXXI, ed. Abd-​El-​Kader Salza (Livorno: Raffaello Giusti, 1900),  49–​51. 159. For an analysis of the Penitential Psalms’ conversional language, see Lynn Staley, “The Penitential Psalms:  Conversion and the Limits of Lordship,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:2 (2007): 221–​69; see also Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture:  Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 196. The language of turning is particularly potent during Dante’s confession and his encounter with Beatrice, see Purgatorio, XXXI:2, 34–​36, 43, 62; see also John Freccero, Dante:  The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 160. Ambrose of Milan, De Poenitentiae, II.6, in CSEL 73:181–​82; trans. Backman, Religious Dances, 26–​27. (Backman interprets this passage as Ambrose’s challenging of early church dance polemics). James Miller provides a provocative reading of this text by bridging early Christian devotion with queer studies, see “Christian Aerobics: The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions,” in Acting on the Past, esp. 203–​05, 207–​09, 217–​32. William of Waddington’s Manuel des Pechiez, for instance, cites Ambrose as an authority on penitence, ed. Furnivall, 125:336. 161. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22:1 (1995): 13–​15, 33.

304  notes to pages 131–132 162. Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self: Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Faithful Imagining: Essays in Honor of Richard R. Niebuhr, ed. Sang Hyun Lee, Wayne Proudfoot, and Albert Blackwell (Atlanta:  Scholars Press, 1995), 83. Another key passage on this topic occurs in Purgatorio XXV, where Statius, a converted pagan, explains the ability of aerial bodies to be seen and to suffer corporeally. The affinity between the body and soul is of course inspired by Thomas of Aquinas’s “unicity of forms.” In this formulation, “the soul contains the body and makes it one, rather than the opposite” (Summa Theologiae, 1a, q. 76, a.3, ad 1). For an accessible analysis of Thomist thought in Dante, see Manuele Gragnolati, “From Plurality to (Near) Unicity of Forms: Embryology in Purgatorio 25,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 192–​210; see also Robert Durling, “The Body and the Flesh in the Purgatorio,” in ibid., 183–​91; Étienne Gilson, “Dante’s Notion of a Shade: Purgatorio XXV,” Medieval Studies 29 (1967): 124–​42. 163. See especially James Miller’s etymology of saltare in “Christian Aerobics,” 239, n. 19. 164. Ibid., 218. As Miller explains, the term tresca is related to English verbs thrash and thresh. The vigorous, percussive motion of trescare is akin to the stamping of feet, the slapping of hands, or the beating of sheaves to separate kernels from stalks. In Italian, the word can also connote an illicit love affair. For a description of the French variant, or tresque, see Catherine Ingrassia, La Danse médiévale:  20 Reconstitutions de danses et partitions musicales (Beauchamp: Le Local, 2009), 21. 165. Dante, Inferno XIV:40–​42. 166. Pier Paolo Pasolini discusses Dante’s political and civic motivations for becoming a poet; see “Dante’s Will to Be a Poet,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1988). Mary Carruthers explains how Purgatorio and its motif of movement creates a realm of intentio auctoris; see The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013),  48–​54. 167. Robin Kirkpatrick, “Introduction,” in The Divine Comedy II: Purgatorio (London: Penguin Books, 2007), xlii. 168. Dante, Purgatorio XXVIII:37–​60, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 476–​77. 169. Within Dante scholarship, specialists on Matelda are called Mateldisti. For some scholars, her embodiment of the active life finds parallels with the early medieval saint Matilda of Saxony (d. 968) and Matilda, Countess of Tuscany (d. 1115). Others hypothesize that Dante was drawn to the embodied mysticism of St. Mechtild of Hackeborn (d. 1298) or Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1294). More secular readings of her character identify Matelda as the screen lady in Dante’s earlier work, La Vita Nuova: see John C. Barnes, “Dante’s Matelda, Fact or Fiction?” Italian Studies 28 (1973): 1–​9; Ignazio Baldelli, “Matelda e la donna giovane e di gentile aspetto molto (Vita Nuova, VIII),” Miscellanea di Studi Danteschi in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, ed. Alfonso Paolella, et al. (Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1993), 1:45–​ 52; Victoria Kirkham, “Watching Matelda,” in Lectura Dantis:  Purgatorio, 319–​ 21; M.F.M. Meiklejohn, “The Identity of Dante’s Matelda,” in Collected Essays on Italian Language and Literature Presented to Kathleen Speight, ed. G. Aquilecchia

notes to pages 132–133  305 et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 23–​28; Edmund Gardner, Dante and the Mystics:  A Study of the Mystical Aspect of the Divina Commedia and its Relations with Some of its Mediaeval Sources (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 267–​97; Barbara Reynolds, “Who Is Matilda?” in Dante:  The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London:  I.B. Tauris, 2006), 319–​22; Reynolds, “La Matilda de Dante et la Comtesse Mathilde de Toscane,” in Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune (Gembloux, 1969), 1:549–​55; Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, “Dante’s Matelda:  Queen, Saint, and Mother of Emperors,” Viator 47:3 (2016):  209–​ 242; David Ruzicka, “‘Scegliendo fior da fiore’:  Desire and the Fiorentinità of Dante’s Matelda,” Le Tre Corone 3 (2016): 25–​56; Valentina Atturo and Lorenzo Mainini, “Beatrice, Matelda e le ‘altre:’ Riflessioni dantesche tra Rime, Vita Nova e Commedia,” The Italianist 33:1 (2013): 1–​31. Jacques Goudet argued earlier for Matelda’s name as the anagram: ad letam, toward the joyous, or blessed one (i.e., Beatrice), alongside her correspondence with John the Baptist, “Une Nommée Matelda,” Revue des études italiennes 1 (1954): 28–​52. Boccaccio, like many medieval commentators, identifies Matelda as Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, for deeply political reasons; Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans. Michael Papio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 444–​45. Marian readings of Matelda appear in Rosetta Migliorini Fissi, “Da Matelda a Beatrice a Maria,” Omaggio a Beatrice (1290–​1990), ed. Rudy Abardo (Florence:  Casa Editrice le Lettere, 1997),  23–​82. 170. The dream of Leah precedes the character Matelda; see Dante, Purgatorio XXVII:91–​114. As an anonymous Lombard explained in his fourteenth-​century commentary, Matelda’s active (as opposed to contemplative) piety emblematizes the apex of worldly happiness, picking flowers as if she were selecting preeminent virtues, in Chiose di Dante le quali fece el figliuolo co le sue mani, ed. F.P. Luiso (Florence: G. Carnesecchi, 1904): 2:130. For a speculative attribution of this commentary, see B. Sandkühler, Di Frühen Dante Kommentare und ihr Verhältnis zur Mittelalterlichen Kommentartradtion (Munich: M. Hueber, 1967), 116–​31. 171. Dante, Purgatorio, XXVIII:49–​51, 64–​66. Interestingly, in contemporary artist Sandow Birk’s version of the Divine Comedy (2005), Matelda is pictured as a pole-​ dancer performing at a strip club, perhaps illustrating the notion that she is the proverbial “hooker with a heart of gold,” see Peter Hawkins, “Moderno Uso,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 13:1 (2005):  167, 180; Kristina Olson, “Dante’s Urban American Vernacular: Sandow Birk’s Comedy,” Dante Studies 131 (2013): 160–​61. 172. Kurt von Fischer and Gianluca D’Agostino, “Ballata,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 2:563–​65; Angeline Lograsso, “From the Ballata of the Vita Nuova to the Carols of the Paradiso: A Study in Hidden Harmonies and Balance,” Annual Reports of the Dante Society 83 (1965): 23–​48; Peter Dronke, Medieval Lyric (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 191; Patrizia Pizzorno, “Matelda’s Dance and the Smile of the Poets,” Dante Studies 112 (1994):  115–​32; Mary Atchison, The Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308. Essays and Complete Edition of Texts (Aldershot: Ashgate,

306  notes to pages 133–134 2005), 93; see also Timothy McGee, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 86. 173. Although this pastoral tradition in medieval literature is well established by Dante’s time, Matelda most closely resembles the bucolic poetry of Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti, see Purgatorio, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 485, n.  37–​42, app.  588–​89; Renato Poggioli, “Dante Poco Tempo Silvano, or a Pastoral Oasis in the Commedia,” Annual Reports of the Dante Society 80 (1962): 1–​20. Francis Fergusson discusses the precarious state of Matelda’s innocence in Dante’s Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 198. Moreover, Giuseppe Mazzotta argues that the pastoral scene in the Earthly Paradise is a metaphor for a corporate or civic ideology; see Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 131. In a critique of the pastourelle content, Étienne de Bourbon proclaims that the knights who ravish peasants are actually the lowest of the rustics, for they have disobeyed the rules of courtoisie, see Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur, 90, 172–​73. 174. Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XVII, De Luxuria, in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Lioi, 1:307–​08. 175. San Bernardino da Siena, Esempo XXIII, in Novellette, Esempi Morali, e Apologhi, ed. Francesco Zambrini (Bologna:  G. Romagnoli, 1868), 58–​59; Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 114. For a discussion of Italian penitential works/​exempla, see Delcorno, “Pour un Histoire de l’exemplum en Italie,” 149–​62. For a study on the relationship between Italian exempla and confraternities, see Rosa Dessi, “Exempla et pratiques sociales à la fin du Moyen Âge, à propos de l’usage des exempla dans les confrères (Italie, XVe siècle),” in Les Exempla médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives, 309–​24. 176. Funded by Mico da Lapo Guidalotti, a wealthy Florentine merchant who lost his wife to the plague, this chapel served as the meeting place for Florentine Dominicans. Passavanti was one of their distinguished members and appears in the fresco blessing the donor. Musicologist Eleonora Beck suggests that the dancers and musicians represent activities that Cathars would associate as evil, and therefore they can be construed as orthodox and virtuous, see “A Musical Interpretation of Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Allegory of the Dominican Order,” Imago Musicae 12 (1995): 123–​27,  136. 177. Peter Hawkins correlates Matelda’s psalm singing and active life as a pristine labor of love unfathomable outside Eden; see “Watching Matelda,” in Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 174–​78. For a general discussion of the role of chanting in the Purgatorio, see William Mahrt, “Dante’s Musical Progress through the Commedia,” The Echo of Music:  Essays in Honor of Marie Louise Göllner, ed. Blair Sullivan (Warren:  Harmonic Park Press, 2004), 65–​69; see also Francesco Ciabottoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 97. 178. Matelda’s physical adroitness and internal purity contrasts with an inter-​ canticle reading of Inferno XXVIII, in which the sowers of discord receive a

notes to page 135  307 fitting contrapasso (or countersuffering) of bodily bifurcation or dismemberment. Moreover, Matelda’s dance of good works signals a precursor to Paradiso XXVIII, the cosmic realm of the primum mobile, whose dancers are marked by a dazzling speed and a close proximity to God. For a rich etymological discussion of contrapasso, see Peter Armour, “Dante’s Contrapasso: Texts and Contexts,” Italian Studies 55 (2000): 1–​20. Coincidentally, the contrapasso became a court dance in fifteenth-​century Italy; see Ingrid Brainard, The Art of Courtly Dancing in the Early Renaissance (West Newton:  AMS Studies in Renaissance, 1981), 36–​37; Mauro Lo Monaco and Sergio Vinciguerra, “The passo doppio and the contrapasso in the Italian balli of the Fifteenth Century: Problems of Mensuration and a Conjectural Reconstruction,” Dance Research Journal 23 (2005): 51–​78. 179. Dante, Purgatorio XXIX:4–​9 trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 492–​93. See also Dante, Purgatorio, XXXII:31–​33, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez. 180. Benvenuto da Imola, in Readings on the Purgatorio of Dante, Chiefly Based on the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola, trans. William Vernon (New York: Macmillan Company, 1907), 2:449. For an analysis of Dante’s confession in the Purgatorio, see Kirkpatrick, “Commentary, Cantos XXX-​XXXI,” in The Divine Comedy II, 491. 181. Dante, Purgatorio, XXIX. For an illustration of the procession, see BL Yates Thompson MS. 36, fol. 19r. For context on civic processions in medieval Italy, see André Vauchez, “Patronage of Saints and Civic Religion in the Italy of the Communes,” in The Laity in the Middle Ages. Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 153–​66; see also Catherine Keen, Dante and the City (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2003), 11–​16, 192. 182. Dante, Purgatorio XXIX:121–​29, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 498–​99. An early fourteenth-​century commentary elaborates on the moral significance of the theological virtues. Charity inflames the minds of people toward the love of God. Hope, as a reminder of redemption, should reside in the minds of sinners. Faith signifies whiteness and purity, thereby enabling the faithful to return to a state of innocence, in Anon. Lombard, Chiose di Dante le quali fece el figliuolo co le sue mani, 140–​41. 183. As explained by an anonymous medieval Commedia commentator, it is through these three noble ladies that the author understands theological virtues, and wheeling toward the right, they prefigure the New Testament, while the four temporal virtues signify the Old Testament, in Chiose di Dante le quali fece el figliuolo co le sue mani, 140–​41. 184. Dante, Purgatorio XXXII, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 550–​51, l. 37. For illustrations of pre-​lapsarian dancing, see Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme, Bibliothèque Saint Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 155v; Lucas Cranach the Elder, Golden Age, c. 1530. For online color images, see the French website Initiale and Wikimedia Commons, respectively, accessed June 25, 2020. The first image is also shown and discussed in Dickason, “Discipline and Redemption,” 83, 91, also available via open-​access on the Dante e l’Arte website, accessed June 25, 2020. 185. This is not to imply that Purgatorio is an apolitical realm. On the contrary, its political underpinnings are complex. Generally speaking, Dante’s second processional

308  notes to pages 135–136 scene (canto XXXII) stages the gradual erosion of Christian authority, from the first emperor (with particular reference to the notorious Donation of Constantine), to fourteenth-​century Florence. The whore of Babylon alludes to the papacy (probably Boniface VIII or Clement V), whereas the giant represents the monarchical corruption of Philip the Fair. Their disastrous union facilitated the invasion of Italy by Charles of Valois and the transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon; see Purgatorio, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 565, n. 148–​60. Dante came from the Guelph-​dominant Florence, which supported papal authority. During Dante’s political career, the Guelph party split into the Black and White Guelphs, whose rivalry came to eclipse that of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The latter faction, to which Dante belonged, was cast out of Italy in 1302. In his years of exile, Dante developed sympathies for the Ghibelline (pro-​empire) position, which colored his major political treatise, De Monarchia; see Stephen Bemrose, A New Life of Dante (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), ix-​xxi. For a thorough treatment of the politics of the Purgatorio, see John Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 186. Dante, Purgatorio XXXI:100–​111, 130–​35, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 534–​37. Robin Kirkpatrick suggests that the Italian caribou might be related to the Occitan garip, “Introduction,” 495. 187. For a Christianized reading of Lethe, see Humbert of Romans, De Dono Timoris, ed. Boyer, ll. 289–​90. 188. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1956), 133–​36; Payen, Le Motif du repentir, 23. 189. A fourteenth-​century commentary shows how Beatrice generates her own kinesis by the shimmering, sparkling, or glittering of Hope, Faith, and Charity, in Chiose di Dante le Quali Fece el Figliuolo co le Sue Mani, 144. 190. Commedia, Oxford BL MS. Holkman misc. 48, p. 107, Northern Italy, late fourteenth century. Peter Dronke analyzes the Earthly Paradise as a poetic phantasmagoria, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 3. Medieval philosophers did not relegate phantasm to the level of frivolous fantasy, but regarded phantasms as crucial mental processes that enabled memory, sensation, and knowledge. See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas:  Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 75–​81; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19, 211; Simon Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 16. Interestingly, fantasmata emerges in Renaissance dance manuals and codifies the dancer’s transition between posing and moving; Mark Franko, “The Notion of ‘Fantasmata’ in Fifteenth-​Century Italian Dance Treatises,” in A Spectrum of World Dance:  Tradition, Transition, and Innovation. Selected Papers from the 1982 and 1983 CORD Conferences, ed. Lynn Ager and Joan Acocella (New York: Congress on Research in Dance, 1987), 69–​76.

notes to page 136  309 191. The dance of the virtues seems to operate as a trance dance. Anthropologist Erika Bourguignon explains that trance may be construed cross-​culturally as “dissociation in the service of the self.” Often employed in religious rituals as a rite of passage, trance produces an altered state of consciousness that opens up a space for modifying the body, mind, and personality through dissociation. Trance induces ecstasy and expands the potential for human experience and self-​transformation. While trance may appear unsettling, strange, or involuntary, Bourguignon understands it as empowering through its experiential freedom to inhabit desired identities. Trance can appear in a variety of stylized movements, from solemn processionals to saltatory jigs, and it is often accompanied by percussive music or repetitive chanting and can be induced by hallucinogenic drugs. Bourguignon differentiates trance from spirit/​demonic possession, arguing that trance exists as a public performance that requires an audience, whereas spirit possession, on the other hand, may occur as a private affair. In the medieval context, trance often appeared during a visit to purgatory, during a mystical experience, or during a prophetic revelation. See Erika Bourguignon, “Suffering and Healing, Subordination and Power: Women and Possession Trance,” Ethos 32:4 (2004): 558; Bourguignon, Trance Dance, repr. in Dance Perspectives 35 (Autumn 1968):  6; Bourguignon, Possession (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1991), 41; Marilyn Dunn, The Vision of St. Fursey and the Development of Purgatory (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2007); Deborah Youngs, “Vision in a Trance: A Fifteenth-​Century Version of Purgatory,” Medium Aevum 67 (1998):  212–​ 34; Barbara Newman, “Preface,” in Elisabeth of Shönau:  The Complete Works, trans. Anne Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), xii-​iv; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits:  Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. 34, 45, 76, 88–​89, 105, 112, 313. 192. Dante, Purgatorio XXXIII:145, trans. and ed. Durling and Martinez, 572–​73. Emerson Brown Jr. contends that the Pilgrim cannot purge his sins completely, but rather realizes that he can transcend them in Paradiso, see “Prosperina, Matelda, and the Pilgrim,” Dante Studies 89 (1971): 43–​44. 193. Interestingly, here Dante’s Purgatorio resonates with Foucault’s later musings on human experience. Diverging from the austere tone of Discipline and Punish, Foucault began to contemplate how certain bodily regimes could expand the modalities, possibilities, strategies, discoveries, and even liberties, of pleasure and selfhood. Foucault therefore began to relocate spirituality within immanence (as opposed to transcendence) and ecstatic “limit-​experiences.” James Miller’s provocative biography of Foucault recounts how, during his visit to Death Valley in 1975, Foucault experienced an epiphanic awakening. His subsequent relocation to San Francisco inspired new ways of thinking about body, pleasure, and truth. Moreover, embracing Socrates’ idea of the care of the self, Foucault extended the care of the self to the care of another. Indeed, his late writings reveal an optimistic curiosity about friendship and community, and their role in the circulation of values. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 250–​52, 263–​93, 322–​28; Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 1999),

310  notes to pages 136–138 ch. 5; Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living:  Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), esp. 167.

Chapter 5 1. Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500, ed. Fiona Griffiths and Julie Hotchin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); Fiona Griffiths, “Brides and Dominae:  Abelard’s cura monialium at the Augustinian Monastery at Marbuch,” Viator 34 (2003):  57–​88; Griffiths, “The Cross and the Cura monialium:  Robert of Arbrissel, John the Evangelist, and the Pastoral Care of Women in the Age of Reform,” Speculum 83:2 (2008):  303–​30; Griffiths, “‘Men’s Duty to Provide for Women’s Needs’: Abelard, Heloise, and Their Negotiation of the cura monalium,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004):  1–​24; Kimberley Benedict, Empowering Collaborations: Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2004); Frank Tobin, “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 118–​35; John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars:  The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-​Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60:4 (1991): 445–​60. 2. Female spirituality has attracted the interest of scholars of religion for some decades, see for instance Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New  York:  Zone Books, 1998); Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-​Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–​1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 3. My approach to mystical experience follows that of scholars Wayne Proudfoot, Robert Sharf, Steven Katz, and Ann Taves, see Religious Experience: A Reader, ed. Craig Martin and Russell T. McCutcheon (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2012), esp. 111–​12, 122–​27 133–​50; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1999). 4. Notable exceptions include Karen Silen, “Elisabeth of Spalbeek:  Dancing the Passion,” in Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe Before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 207–​27; Susan Rodgers and Joanna Ziegler, “Elizabeth of Spalbeek’s Trance Dance of Faith: A Performance Theory Approach,” in Performance and Transformation:  New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary Suydam and Joanna Ziegler (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 299–​355; Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily

notes to pages 138–139  311 Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-​Century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Mary Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 10–​24; Jessica van Oort, “The Physical Actions of Medieval Women’s Sacred Performances,” Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History 17:1 (2011): 3–​ 30; Julia Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen -​Engelstänze:  Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2007), esp. ch. 4; Peter Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993); Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, About Women: The Sister-​Books of Fourteenth-​Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), esp. 49, 79–​80, 121–​24; Lewis, “Music and Dancing in the Fourteenth-​Century Sister-​books,” in Vox Mystica:  Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett, Thomas Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William Pollard (Rochester:  D.S. Brewer, 1995), 59–​69; Jeffrey Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles:  Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. 52–​55, 57–​59, 99–​100, 262–​63, n. 112–​15; Jessica Van Oort, “Medieval Christian Women’s Theories and Practices of Sacred Dance,” Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS: Madison, 2007); Gregor Rohmann, Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 5. Performance theorist André Lepecki invokes “choreo-​ graphy” when examining early dance manuals and the written codification of movement; see “Inscribing Dance,” in On the Presence of the Body:  Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 124–​39; see also Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6. Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, excerpted in The Essential Feminist Reader, ed. Estelle Freedman (New  York:  Modern Library, 2007), 319; see also Charlotte Berkowitz, “Paradise Reconsidered:  Hélène Cixous and the Bible’s Other Voice,” in Religion in French Feminist Thought:  Critical Perspectives, ed. Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith Poxon (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 176, 178; Penny Murray, “Reclaiming the Muse,” in Laughing with Medusa:  Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 327–​54. 7. Luce Irigaray, “Divine Women,” in French Feminists on Religion, ed. Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith Poxon (London:  Routledge, 2002), 40–​48; Marie-​ Andrée Roy, “Women and Spirituality in the Writings of Luce Irigaray,” Ellen Armour, “Divining Differences: Irigaray and Religion,” and Judith Poxon, “Corporeality and Divinity:  Irigaray and the Problem of the Ideal,” all in Religion in French Feminist Thought,  13–​50. 8. Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection and Semiotics of Biblical Abomination,” in French Feminists on Religion, 93–​111. 9. Catherine Clément, Syncope:  The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O’Driscoll and Deirdre Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Amy Hollywood,

312  notes to pages 139–140 “Mysticism, Death, and Desire in the Work of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément,” in Religion in French Feminist Thought, esp. 148, 152–​54. 10. Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, excerpted in French Feminists on Religion, 253–​ 67; Erika Ostrovsky, “Religion in the Fiction of Monique Wittig,” in Religion in French Feminist Thought, esp. 194–​200. 11. Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 6–​25. 12. Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, (Hildesheim:  Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961), esp. 135–​56; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011). Amy Hollywood provides a helpful corrective concerning female spirituality. Although scholars often associate female visionaries with affect and embodiment, we should be careful not to essentialize gender categories: “the association of women with certain styles of mysticism is the result, then, not of some universal feminine traits but of the specific set of social and cultural constraints that women faced in the late medieval and early modern periods,” Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy:  Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 12. 13. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Le Corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps:  Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 10, 249, 253. 14. André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207–​ 10; Vauchez, “Between Virginity and Spiritual Espousals: Models of Feminine Sainthood in the Christian West in the Middle Ages,” Medieval History Journal 2:2 (1999): 354. Although Francis himself promoted the spirituality of Clare of Assisi, he did not believe that the urban, itinerant model would be successful for women. Francis urged Clare to adopt a more familiar variant of female monasticism emphasizing enclosure and virginity, which Clare supplemented with voluntary poverty and manual labor, and hence her hagiographers reported that “she was kept inside, and remained outside,” see McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 46–​48, 64–​68; Pope Alexander IV, Bull of Canonization, Clara Claris Praeclara, in Fontes Franciscani, ed. Giovanni Bocali and Enrico Menestò (Assisi:  Porziuncola, 1995), 2332. 15. For the role of Franciscan and Dominican friars in caring for women (cura monialium), see McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, ch. 4; John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority,” 445–​60; Coakley, “Friars, Sanctity, and Gender: Mendicant Encounters with Saints, 1250–​1325,” in Medieval Masculinities:  Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Claire Lees, Thelma Fenster, and Jo Ann McNamara (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 91–​110; Fiona Griffiths, “Brides and Dominae;” Griffiths, “The Cross and the Cura monialium;” Griffiths, “ ‘Men’s Duty to Provide for Women’s Needs;’ ” Jeffrey Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31:2 (1992): 108–​34. 16. Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, in Three Women of Liège:  A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies, ed. Jennifer Brown (Turnhout:  Brepols,

notes to pages 140–142  313 2008), 47–​48, n. 20; Jacques de Vitry, The Middle English Life of Marie d’Oignies, in ibid., 96. 17. Thomas Cantipratensis, Supplementum, XVI, in CCCM, ed. R.  Huygens (Turnhout:  Brepols), 252:190; trans. Hugh Feiss, in Mary of Oignies, Mother of Salvation (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2006), 156. See also Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 287; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 133. 18. Interestingly, this correlation between abundant grace and sacred dance recalls the Charites (three Graces) from antiquity, who, according to Steven Lonsdale, enabled devotees to experience mystical abandon through dance, thereby sanctifying Dionysian abduction, see Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 275. 19. Anon., French dance-​song, cited and trans. in Graciela Daichman, Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 74–​75; see also 78, 83, 91. 20. Rothschild Canticles, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS. 404, fol. 13. 21. Jeffrey Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, 52–​55. Hamburger explains that this image occurs within the manuscript’s Paradisiacal cycle of imagery. The illustrations bear a Flemish style but, according to Hamburger, exemplify the visionary motifs in German texts. 22. In the Vulgate, however, these virgins seem to be gendered male, as they have not been defiled by women. 23. Mechthild of Hackeborn, Liber Specialis Gratiae, I.19, in Sanctae Mechtildis Virginis Ordinis Sancti Benedicti Liber Specialis Gratiae: Accedit Sororis Mechtildis eiusdem Ordinis Lux Divinitatis Opus ad Codicum Fidem Nunc Primum Integre Editum Solesmensium O.s.b (Paris: Oudin, 1877), 69. See also Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​ Engelstänze, 140; Mechthild of Hackeborn, The Booke of Gostlye Grace of Mechtild of Hackeborn, ed. Theresa Halligan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 14, 108. This Middle English translation employs the term karolle. Similarly, in a fourteenth-​century German sister-​book, an anonymous Gotteszell nun expounds upon the bridal and otherworldly associations of holy dance, in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV.  und XV. Jahrhunderts,” ed. F. Roth, Alemannia 21 (1893):  135; trans. Lewis By Women, 261. 24. Apocalypse of Isabella of France, BNF, ms. fr. 13096, fol. 67. For historical context on this manuscript, see Suzanne Lewis, “The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS Fr. 13096,” The Art Bulletin 72:2 (1990): 224–​60. 25. Matthew Kapstein, “Rethinking Religious Experience: Seeing the Light in the History of Religions,” in The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Kapstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 273. 26. Thomas de Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis, Virgine in Aquiriae Brabantia, I.16, in Acta Sanctorum, June 16 (1897) 3:190; trans. King and Newman, in The Collected Saints’ Lives:  Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 232. The translators note Thomas’s

314  notes to pages 142–144 use of the three stages of the soul’s mystical journey: beloved, more beloved, most beloved (cara, carior, carissima), in reference to the three stages of mystical ascent (beginning, progressing, perfected), ibid., 232, n. 91. Lutgard dances another tripudium when she encounters Jacques de Vitry, who has died and reports to her that he now resides in heaven, in ibid., 277–​78. 27. Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, XIX, in The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, The Sparkling Stone, and The Book of Supreme Truth, trans. C.A. Wynschenk and Evelyn Underhill (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 69; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1990), 319; William McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. Hadewijch of Brabant was particularly influential for him. 28. See esp. E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast; Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1982); Mary Carruthers, “Sweetness,” Speculum 81 (2006):  1000–​ 1001; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Canticum Canticorum, XIX, in S. Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq et  al. (Rome:  Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), 1:112. In one of his Song commentaries (Sermo VII), Bernard conjures the image of a bride drinking in a cellar and asking for a kiss. I thank David Albertson for this reference. See also Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Christina Mirabilis, XXXVI in Acta Sanctorum 5; The Book of Margery Kempe, I.82. 29. Rothschild Canticles, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS. 404, fol. 30. This image occurs in the second Paradisiacal cycle. 30. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles,  57–​59. 31. John Chrysostom, Homilia XII, in PG 62:386; John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life, ed. Catharine Roth and David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1986), 47–​80. 32. Anon., De Saltationibus Respuendis, ll. 36–​38, in MS.  vat. lat. 492, fol. 67, ll. 55–​ 56, cited in Jean Leclercq, “Sermon ancien sur les danses déshonnêtes,” Revue Bénédictines 59 (1949): 200. As the sermon continues, the author ascribes dancing to evil women, such as the Pharaoh’s wife who attempted to seduce Joseph. Compare with Iacobus de Marchia, Sermo XVII, which discusses how dancers, especially female dancers, are a strong army of the devil who try to eject people from paradise, which almost happened to David, Solomon, Samson, Job, etc., in Sermones Dominicales, ed. Renato Lioi (Ancona: Biblioteca Francescana, 1978-​1982), 1:307–​08. 33. Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, in Anecdotes historiques, légendes, et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d'Étienne de Bourbon, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, Nogent-​ le-​Rotrou, 1877), 162, n. 1. 34. Thomas de Cantimpré, Les Exemples du Livre des Abeilles, trans. and ed. Henri Platell (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), see nos. 135, 165–​68, 174, 214, 229. 35. Anon., Ci Nous Dit, CCXLIV, in Ci Nous Dit: Recueil d’exemples moraux, ed. Gérard Blangez (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1979), 1:213. See my c­ hapter 4 for a discussion of the beguine who repented after dancing (Ci Nous Dit, CCXXXVII).

notes to pages 145–146  315 36. Hildegard von Bingen, Epistola CXL, in PL 197:372. 37. Jacobus de Voragine, De S.  Elizabeth, in Legenda Aurea, ed. Giovanni Maggione (Florence: SISMEL-​Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998), 2:1170; trans. William Ryan, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 698. Interestingly, in other devotional writings, a woman’s hair can signify bridal mysticism (Song of Songs 4:1), see Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece, ed. Barbara Newman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 10–​11, 180. 38. Giunta Bevegnati, Vita de B. Margarita Poenitente Cortonae in Umbria, X.16, in Acta Sanctorum, February 22 (1865) 3:355; trans. Thomas Renna in Life and Miracles of Margaret of Cortona (New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2012), 297. 39. Anon. Franciscan, Vita de B.  Angela Foligno, I.17, in Acta Sanctorum, 4 January (1863–​65) 1:203; trans. Margaret Gallyon, The Visions, Revelations, and Teachings of Angela of Foligno: A Member of the Third Order of St. Francis (Brighton: Alpha Press, 2000), 62. In her own writings, Angela of Foligno explains that the soul obtains mystical knowledge of God through grace and wisdom. She then cautions that the graced soul “does not show itself forth as an example with laughter and dancing or other like gestures,” in Vita et Opuscula: Ristampa Anastatica dell’ Edizione del 1714, III.3.28, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleta: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 2014), 212.; trans. Marg Steegmann, The Book of the Divine Consolations by the Blessed Angela of Foligno (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 124. 40. Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena (London:  Harvill Press, 1960), 92. 41. Catherine of Siena, Il Dialogo, CXLIII, ed. Gabriella Anodal (Casale Monferrato: Edizione Piemme, 2000), 280; trans. Suzanne Noffke in The Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 298. 42. Johannes von Marienwerder, The Life of Dorothea von Montau: A Fourteenth-​Century Recluse, trans. Ute Stargardt (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1997), 44, 59. 43. Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 76. 44. Jacobus de Voragine, De Sancta Elizabeth, CLXIV, in Legenda Aurea, ed. Maggione, 2:1158; trans. Granger, The Golden Legend, 689. 45. Krumauer Bildercodex, Bohemia, c. 1355–​1360, ÖNB Cod. 370, fol. 86v. Additional dance imagery occurs on the bottom of this folio and fol. 87r. For the facsimile edition, see Liber Depictus (Graz: Akademische Druck -​u Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 2 vols. 46. Bridget of Sweden, Liber Caelestis, III.12, in The Revelations of St. Brigitta of Sweden, Volume 1:  Liber Caelestis, Books I-​III, trans. Dennis Searby and Bridget Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 282–​83; Bridget of Sweden, ibid., VI.64, in The Revelations of St. Brigitta of Sweden, Volume III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127. The Swedish version reads “danzsanda riballana,” which, as the editor notes, might be a critique of contemporary court dances; ibid., n. 1. 47. Bridget of Sweden, Liber Caelestis, I.27, in Sancta Birgitta:  Revelaciones, I, ed. Carl-​Gustaf Undhagen (Stockholm:  Alqvist & Undhagen, 1977), 317–​18; trans. in The Revelations of St. Brigitta, Volume I, 98. Similarly, the mystic Henry

316  notes to pages 146–149 Suso, also of high birth, equated earthly dance to grief which ends in death, see MS Strasbourg Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire 2929; Karl Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse. Deutsche Schriften, im Auftrag der Würtembergischen Kommission für Landesgeschichte Herausgegeben von Dr.  Karl Bihlmeyer (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1961), 45–​62. 48. Niccolò di Tommaso, Visione di Santa Brigida della Natività, Florence, after 1327, Pinacoteca Vaticana, no. 37; Howard Brown, “The Catalogus: A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical Subject Matter,” Imago Musicae 3 (1986): 134–​35. For an online color image, see the Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index website, accessed June 26, 2020. 49. Anon. Franciscan confessor, Vita et Revelationes, CCXI, in Leben und Offenbarungen der Weiner Beguine Agnes Blannbekin, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Renate Voegeler (Stuttgart:  Kümmerle Verlag Göppingen, 1994), 434–​36; trans. Ulrike Wiethaus, Agnes Blannbekin: Life and Revelations (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 144–​45. This chapter is called De fide tripudiante (Concerning the Dance of Faith). 50. Book of hours, Northern France or Flanders, c. 1445, PML MS M. 287, fol. 64v. Since many books of hours were commissioned by laity, Jonathan Alexander suggests that the juxtaposition of Annunciation scenes with social dances functioned to validate procreation, see “Dancing in the Streets,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): esp. 150. 51. Ulrike Wiethaus, “Spatiality and the Sacred in Agnes’s Life and Revelations,” in Agnes Blannbekin, 192; Wiethaus, “Introd.,” in ibid., 4–​10. Some of Agnes’s bolder visions involve the consumption of Christ’s foreskin, after which she remarked that it tasted like an egg. 52. Anon., Vita et Revelationes, VI, in Leben und Offenbarungen, ed. Dinzelbacher and Voegeler, 72; trans. Wiethaus, Agnes Blannbekin,  19–​20. 53. John Freccero provides a summary of these arguments in “Dante’s Firm Foot and the Journey without a Guide,” Harvard Theological Review 52:4 (1959): 245–​81; see also Dante, Inferno I:30. 54. Anon., Vita et Revelationes, CCXXVII-​CCXXVIII, in Leben und Offenbarungen, ed. Dinzelbacher and Voegeler, 468; trans. Wiethaus, Agnes Blannbekin, 157. 55. Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Sancti Columbani Abbatis Discipulorum Eius, II.11, in MGH, SS. Rer. Merov. 4:130–​31; trans. Jo Ann McNamara in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. McNamara, John Halborg, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 162. 56. Anon., Vita et Revelationes, CCXXI-​ XXII, in Leben und Offenbarungen, ed. Dinzelbacher and Voegeler, 456; trans. Wiethaus, Agnes Blannbekin, 153. 57. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New  York:  Penguin Books, 1982), 380. 58. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. See also Sarah Olsen, “Kinesthetic Choreia: Empathy, Memory, and Dance in Ancient Greece,” Classical Philology 112:2 (2017): 153–​74. 59. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.44, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassik Verlag, 2003), 58–​60; trans. Frank Tobin in The Flowing Light of the Godhead (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1998), 50.

notes to pages 149–153  317 Mechthild calls this vision “The Sevenfold Path of Love, the Three Garments of the Bride, and the Dance.” Mechthild’s original text has since been lost. Heinrich Halle encouraged Mechthild to document her visions, whereas, years later, Henry of Nördlingen translated them into Middle High German, and other clerics translated them into Latin; Tobin, “Introduction,” 6. Interestingly, Dante’s Purgatorio features a female dancer named Matelda, who, according to some scholars, may be a lyrical embodiment of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn; see my ­chapter 4. 60. Hadewijch of Brabant, stanzic poem XIV, “The School of Love,” in Poetry of Hadewijch, trans. Marieke van Baest (Leuven: Peters, 1998), 114–​15, ll. 55–​60. 61. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.44, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe, 60; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 59. 62. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.44., ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe, 60; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 59. 63. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.44, 62. A comparable passage occurs in ibid., VI.37. 64. Pseudo-​Dionysius, The Divine Names, IV.12, in Pseudo-​Dionysius:  The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (London:  SPCK, 1987), 144; see also McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 227–​30; Constance Furey, “Sexuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 328–​40; Nancy Partner, “Did Mystics Have Sex?” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 296–​311. 65. Frederick Streng, “Language and Mystical Awareness,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 143. 66. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, III.1, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​ Profe, 152; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 104. Mechthild’s representation of holy play differs from some of the more infantilized playing that characterized late medieval devotional handbooks and Christ dolls; see Jacqueline Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination,” in Looking Beyond:  Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History (Princeton:  The Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers, 2011), 235–​36, 240; Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochraine (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1985), 310–​29. 67. Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity:  The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 1; Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81:957 (2000): 432–​45; Barbara Newman, “Contemplating the Trinity: Text, Image, and the Origins of the Rothschild Canticles,” Gesta 52:2 (2013): 135. 68. Mechthild, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, VII.1, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe, 530, trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 274. 69. Ibid., 274–​75.

318  notes to pages 153–155 70. C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love:  In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 141–​43. 71. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum, XCIV.3, 5; Robert Beonig, “Saint Augustine’s Jubilus and Richard Rolle’s Canor,” in Vox Mystica,  80–​81. 72. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.XXI, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe, 40; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 50. Tobin notes that for Mechthild, jubilus could signify the rapture or ecstasy in which the soul is raised up above earthly things, as well as the condition of the Trinity when it creates a human soul; ibid., 341, n. 33. 73. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, I.44., I.XXII, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​Profe, 40–​42; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead,  50–​51. 74. Lewis, By Women, see esp. ch. 1–​2, 6. Henry Suso, a German mystic who mentored Dominican nuns, experienced a similar sensation when his heart leapt in his body, see Suso, Buchlein der Ewigen Weisheit, IX, XVI, XXIII. The Franciscan mystic Jacopone da Todi described jubilation of the heart as “somersaults of happiness,” Lauda LXXVI.9, in Jacopone da Todi: The Lauds, trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 228. 75. Cited in Jeanne Ancelet-​Hustache, “Les Vitae Sororum d’Unterlinden,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930):  458; trans. Lewis, By Women, 79. 76. Cited in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV.  und XV. Jahrhunderts,” ed. F. Roth, Alemannia. 21 (1893): 107; trans. Lewis, By Women, 152. See also Roth, 127; trans. Lewis, By Women, 121–​22. 77. Trans. Lewis, By Women, 79. 78. Christine Ebner, Büchlein von der Genaden Überlast, ed. Karl Schröder (Tübingen:  Gedruckt von H.  Laupp, 1871), 30; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​ Engelstänze, 132–​33; trans. Lewis, By Women, 169. 79. Cited in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen,” 105; trans. Lewis, By Women, 49. 80. Interestingly, for Luce Irigaray, grace marks the essence of womanhood, endowing women with “a privileged rapport in constituting subjectivity and intersubjectivity.” In Irigaray, Le Souffle des Femmes (Paris: ACGF, 1996), 200; Roy, “Women and Spirituality in the Writings of Luce Irigaray,” in Religion in French Feminist Thought, 22. 81. Peggy Phelan, “Moving Centers,” in Move: Choreographing You: Art and Dance since the 1960s (London: Hayward Publishing, 2011), 22. 82. Cited in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen,” 119; trans. Lewis, By Women, 262. 83. Anon., Vita Beatricis, trans. and ed. Roger Ganck, The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, 1200-​1268 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 94. 84. Cited in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen,” 131; trans. Lewis, By Women,  79–​80.

notes to pages 155–157  319 85. Patricia Dailey, “The Body and Its Senses,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, 266–​71. 86. “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen. Nach der ältesten Abschrift mit Einleitung und Beilagan,” ed. J.  Konig, Freiburger Diözesan Archiv 13 (1880):  166; trans. Lewis, “Music and Dancing in Fourteenth-​Century Sister-​Books,” 168; Lewis, By Women, 261. 87. Attrib. Philippa de Porcellet, La Vida de la Benaurada Sancta Doucelina; trans. Kathleen Garay and Madeleine Jeay in The Life of Saint Douceline:  Beguine of Provence (Cambridge:  D.S. Brewer, 2001), 49, 53. For the Occitan original, see BNF ms. fr. 13503, esp. fols. 26v-​48v. Likewise, Thomas of Cantimpré reported that Lutgard levitated two cubits high on Pentecost, in The Collected Saints’ Lives: Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, trans. Margot King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), I.10; compare with Arnold of Liège’s exemplum about Mary Magdalene levitating to the heavens in contemplative rapture (Magdalena ab angelis sublevatur), in Alphabetum Narrationum, CCCCLXVII, ed. Colette Ribaucourt (Paris: ÉHÉSS, 1985), 3:355. 88. Cited in “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen,” 135–​36; trans. Lewis, By Women, 261. Similarly, the Weiler sister-​book recounts how Mechtilt Büglin, who was old, sick, and unable to walk herself, “got up off her chair, just as if she were dancing, went to the altar and said: ‘The burning Cherubim and Seraphim stand before God and sing and dance and jubilate; we should rejoice with them and praise God,’ ” in “Mystiches Leben in dem Dominikanerinnenkloster Weiler bei Eßlingen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert,” ed. Karl Bihlmeyer, Würtembergische Vierteljahreshefte für Landesgeschichte 25 (1916): 77; trans. Lewis, 261. 89. Margaret Ebner, Offenbarungen, cited in Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen:  Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Deutschen Mystik, ed. Philipp Strauch (Freiburg:  Mohr/​ Siebeck, 1882), 144; trans. Margot Schmidt in Margaret Ebner:  Major Works, ed. Leonard Hindsley (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1993), 63; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Englestänze, 133–​34, 139. 90. Epistola XLVII, cited in Leonard Hindsley, “Introduction,” in Margaret Ebner: Major Works, 36. For more on women’s influence on their confessors, see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations:  The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ch. 1. 91. Anon. and Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, I.22, ll. 1615–​19, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge:  D.S. Brewer, 2004), 135; trans. Lynn Staley, The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 38. Margery dictated her visions to three scribes. While past studies have belittled Margery as hysterical and illiterate, recent scholars view her book as a complex self-​authorizing strategy, see Staley, “Authorship and Authority,” in Staley, 236–​37. 92. Anon. and Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe, I.22, ll. 1678–​92, ed. Windeatt, 139; trans. Saley, 38–​39. 93. Simone Marmion, illuminator, Amiens, c. 1467–​70, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.1.2477.

320  notes to pages 157–160 94. For studies on the politicized authorship of female hagiographies, see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman:  Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2004); Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife:  Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) 78–​98. 95. Judith Lynne Hanna, “Patterns of Dominance:  Men, Women, and Homosexuality in Dance,” The Drama Review 31:1 (1987): esp. 22–​30; Ann Daly, “The Balanchine Woman:  Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers,” ibid., 8–​ 21; Cynthia Novack, “Ballet, Gender, and Power,” in Dance, Gender, Culture, ed. Helen Thomas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 34–​49; Lesley-​Anne Sayers, “ ‘She might pirouette on a daisy and it would not bend:’ Images of Femininity and Dance Appreciation,” in ibid., 167–​73; Jock Abra, “The Dancer as Masochist,” Dance Research Journal 19:2 (1987–​1988): 33–​39. 96. Anon., Geistliche Minne, in Gottsuchende Seelen. Prosa und Verse der Deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (Munich:  M. Hueber, 1948), 34; Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engeltänze, 142; trans. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, 58. Barbara Newman describes Christ as a “Lord of the Dance” in many women’s liturgical, visionary, and musical portrayals of mystical encounters with him, “Introduction,” in Symphonia:  A Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations], trans. and ed. Newman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 21. 97. Anon., Christus und die Minnende Seele, ll. 1800–​1804, cited in Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen-​Engelstänze, 137–​ 38; Amy Gebauer, ‘Christus und die Minnende Seele’:  An Analysis of Circulation, Text, and Iconography (Wiesbaden:  Reichert Verlag, 2010), esp. 235–​37; Werner Williams-​Krapp, “The Construction of a Mystical Self: The ‘Revelations’ of Katharina Tucher,” in Ein Platz für sich Selbst: Schreibende Frauen und ihre Lebenswelten, 1450–​1700 (Frankfurt am Main:  P. Lang, 2011), 175; Martin Leutzche, “Der Tanzende Christus,” in Tanz und Religion: Theologische Perspektiven, ed. Marion Keuchen (Frankfurt, M:  Lembeck, 2008), 113–​14; trans. Deborah Rose-​Lefman, “Lady Love, King, Minstrel: Courtly Depictions of Jesus or God in Late-​Medieval Vernacular Mystical Literature,” in Arthurian Literature and Christianity: Notes from the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Meister (New York: Garland, 1999), 156. For illustrations of this text, see Walter Salmen, Tanz und Tanzen vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Hildesheim: Olms, 1999); Helmut Hinkel, Mit Tanz und Geigenspiel:  Die Mainzer Miniaturen aus “Christus und eie Minnende Seele” (Mainz: Bistum Mainz, 2013). For a philological analysis of the German verb tretten, see Ann Harding, An Investigation into the Use and Meaning of Medieval German Dancing Terms (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1973), 342. 98. Christus und die Minnende Seele, XXVIII, Constance, c.  1490, Einsiedeln Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 710(322), fol. 18r. For an online color image, see the Discarded Images website, accessed June 18, 2020.

notes to page 160  321 99. Heinrich von Seuse, Leben V, XII; Suso, Das Buchlein der Ewigen Weisheit; VII, XII-​ III; Suso, Letter VIII to Elsbeth Stagel. In some of these passages, Suso employs the term reien (modern German reigen) for dance-​song, which was typically performed outside during the summer, see The Songs of Neidhart von Reuental:  17 Summer and Winter Songs Set to Their Original Melodies with Translations and a Musical and Metrical Canon, ed. Ronald Taylor and A.T. Hatto (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1958), 6–​7; Karen Silen, “Dance,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 188. 100. One of the more celebrated spiritual partnerships took place between Dominicans Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel (d. 1360). As an advocate of the cura monialium, Suso was preoccupied with the spiritual welfare of Elsbeth, a nun and prioress at Töss. Their partnership was both spiritual and intellectual, and several scholars believe that the pair coauthored Suso’s hagiography. Given Suso’s penchant for the vernacular and the primacy of images and embodiment in devotion, female forerunners likely inspired his mysticism. For related studies, see Frank Tobin, “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel,” 118–​35; Barbara Newman, God and Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 206–​22; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, ch. 4; Hamburger, “The Uses of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans,” Art Bulletin, 71:1 (1989):  20–​ 46; Hamburger, “Medieval Self-​ Fashioning:  Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Seuse’s Exemplar,” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans, ed. Kent Emery Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 233–​78; Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 103; Bernard McGinn, “Henry Suso’s Spiritual Philosophy,” The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, 1300–​1500 (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005), 222–​29; McGinn, “Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers,” in The Mind’s Eye:  Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger, and Anne-​Marie Bouché (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2006), 187–​207. For studies on Suso’s capacity for gender-​bending in his visions and writings, see Carolyn Diskant Muir, “Bride or Bridegroom? Masculine Identity in Mystic Marriages,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P.H. Cullum and Katherine Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 61–​68; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 243. 101. Mechthild von Hackeborn, Liber Specialis Gratiae, III.1, in Sanctae Mechtildis Virginis, 196; trans. Barbara Newman in Mechthild of Hackeborn:  The Book of Special Grace (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2017), 148. Rosemary Woolf discusses the Dance of the Cross motif in medieval liturgy and literature in The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 258–​60. 102. Richard Rolle, Incendium Amoris, XLII, in The Fire of Love, trans. G.C. Heseltine (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1935), 192; Rolle, Ego Dormio, in Richard Rolle: The English Writings, trans. Rosamund Allen (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), 139, 213, n. 9. 103. Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Mary of Oignies, I.11.40; Elisabeth of Schönau, Visiones, in The Complete Works, 138; Mechthild von Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the

322  notes to pages 160–162 Godhead, VI.4; Bridget of Sweden, Liber Caelestis, I.48. For the mystical significance of flagellation, see Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip (New York: Zone Books, 2007), esp. ch. 1–​4. 104. De B. Helena Vidua, Tertii Ordinis Eremitarum S. Augustini, in Acta Sanctorum, 12 (Apr. 23), 251–​52; trans. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 215. 105. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fleissende Gottheit, IV.1, ed. Gisela Vollmann-​ Profe, 228; trans. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 139; Das Fleissende Gottheit, VI.59. Moreover, Mechthild recounts her elevation beyond the angelic choir and her attainment of otherworldly wisdom after receiving a kiss from Christ. She promptly indicates that her confessor explicated this vision for her, as she was quite ignorant of reading and writing. Although proficient in the vernacular, Mechthild may not have learned Latin, see Das Fleissende Gottheit, III.1, ed. Tobin, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 148. Conversely, peasant women may attain literacy in Latin due to their exemplary piety, see Jacques Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur:  Récits facétieux du Moyen Âge (Turnhout:  Brepols, 1999), 152–​53; Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum Universale de Adipus, I.23. 106. Gertrude the Great, Legatus, II.23, in Tilmann Bredenbach, Insinuationum Divinae Pietatis Lib. V: Totius Christianae et Spiritualis Profectionis Summam Complectentes (Cologne: Horst, 1588), 170; trans. Margaret Winkworth, The Herald of Divine Love (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 131–​32. 107. Cited in “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen,” 154; trans. Lewis, By Women, 192–​93. Similarly, Teresa of Avila instructed fellow nuns to dance with a tambourine, perhaps recalling the biblical Miriam, see McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 79; Layne Redmond, When Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 163. Despite ecclesiastical prohibitions, nuns continued to dance in the church during Candlemas and other liturgical holidays, Lewis, By Women, 260; Amelia Carr and Michael Norton, “Sepulchers Again? Five Centuries of Easter Celebrations at Klosterneuburg,” delivered during 50th Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 15, 2015. 108. Cited in Ancelet-​Hustache, “Les Vitae Sororum d’Unterlinden,” 435; trans. Lewis, “Music and Dancing in the Fourteenth-​Century Sister-​Books,” 167; Lewis, By Women, 169. 109. Cited in Der Nonne von Engelthal Büchlein von der Genaden Uberlast, 23; trans. Lewis, By Women,169; see also Henry Suso, Buchlein der Ewigen Weisheit, XXIII. Religious women justified their dance practices by appealing to the example of King David, see Schmitt, Les Gestes, 91; Lewis, By Women, esp. 79–​80, 261–​62. 110. Legenda Versificata Sanctae Clarae Assisiensis, XXIII, ll. 9–​15, in Fontes Franciscani, 2371; trans. Regis Armstrong with my changes, The Lady:  Clare of Assisi, Early Documents (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2005), 229. Supposedly this text was Pope Gregory IX’s prayer to Clare. 111. Christina’s penitential program featured physical contortions, self-​inflicted suffering, and visits to purgatory, Jennifer Brown, “Introduction,” in Three Women of Liège, 8. Barbara Newman understands Christina as a Lady Lazarus, in “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth

notes to pages 162–164  323 Century,” Speculum 73 (1998): 733–​40. Dyan Elliott views these penitential, purgatorial women as relics, as their bodies may have technically died but they continued to exert spiritual power among the living, see Proving Woman,  74–​80. 112. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita de S.  Christina Mirabile Virgine, II.16, in Acta Sanctorum, July 28 (1868) 5:651; trans. King and Newman, 136. The Middle English translation of her vita reads that she “hoppyd and daunced,” ed. J. Brown, 68. 113. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita de S.  Christina Mirabile Virgine, III.35, in Acta Sanctorum, trans. King and Newman, 145–​46. 114. Ibid., II.18, trans. King and Newman, 137. 115. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 122–​27. 116. Elisabeth’s vita by Ekbertus recounts nearly sixty moments of ecstasy, Vita Sanctae Elisabeth Schonaugiensis, in PL 195:119–​94. Barbara Newman suggests that her trances establish a balance between passivity, perception, and prophecy, “Preface,” in Elisabeth of Shönau: The Complete Works, trans. Anne Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), xii-​iv. 117. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom:  St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 118. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita de S.  Christina Mirabile Virgine, III.26, in Acta Sanctorum, trans. King and Newman, 142. Saskia Murk-​Jansen argues that the beguines experienced an Ottonian response to the sacred (mysterium tremendem), characterized by awe and even horror at the enormity of God’s love. As she notes, many beguines incorporated Psalm 22:15 (Vulgate) [“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax”] into their devotion, see Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), esp. 13. 119. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita de S. Christina Mirabile Virgine, IV.46. 120. For studies on raptus in medieval texts, see Julie B. Miller, “Rapt by God:  The Rhetoric of Rape in Medieval Mystical Literature,” in The Subjective Eye: Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret R.  Miles, ed. Richard Valantasis (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006), esp. 236–​29, 252; Dyan Elliott, “Raptus/​Rapture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, 189–​99; Nancy Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42: 2 (2000): 268–​ 306; Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens:  Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). For ancient Greek and Byzantine motifs of dance and abduction, see Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions, trans. Derek Collins and Janice Orion (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), esp. ch. 3; Nicoletta Isar, “The Dance of Adam: Reconstructing the Byzantine Chorós,” Byzantinoslavica 61 (2003):  179–​204. Nancy Partner explores the sexual nature of mysticism more broadly in “Did Mystics Have Sex?” 296–​311. 121. E.g., BNF ms. fr. 364, fol. 24r. The Sabine story is from Livy, De Urbe Condita, II.15, 19.

324  notes to pages 164–165 122. In the context of the Old Testament, the tribe of Benjamin had become nearly extinct after the battle at Rimmon, therefore taking wives from other Israelite tribes enabled the Benjamites to survive. Since the Benjamites had become the scorned tribe of Israel, the patriarchs had already sworn that their daughters would never marry them. According to the Bible’s logic, engineering the abduction of women did not break the oath, since the fathers were not technically giving their daughters away to the tribe of Benjamin. In her study of the Hebrew text, Tammi Schneider identifies the incident as kidnapping and rape, in Berit Olam: Studies of Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Judges (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), 79, 144. 123. St. Louis Psalter, Paris, thirteenth century, BNF ms. lat. 10525, fol. 66r. For similar iconography, see the Morgan Crusader Bible, MS. M 638, fol. 17r. 124. Anon. treatise on vice and virtues, in BL Harley MS. 3823, fol. 374v; trans. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 124. See my ­chapter 1 for a discussion on the role of dance in the rape of Dinah, as written in the Ci Nous Dit. 125. Physiologus, XXXVI; Adolph Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 313–​27; Christian Heck and Rémy Cordonnier, The Grand Medieval Bestiary: Animals in Illuminated Manuscripts (New York: Abbeville Press, 2012), 404–​07. For Jewish interpretations of Judges 21, see Susan Ackerman, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen:  Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Katherine Southwood, Marriage by Capture in the Book of Judges: An Anthropological Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 160–​64. 126. Rothschild Canticles, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS. 404, fol. 51r. 127. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, 99–​ 100; Christian Heck, Le Ci Nous Dit:  L’Image médiévale et la culture des laïcs au XIVe siècle, les enluminures de manuscrit de Chantilly (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 67–​68. According to Hamburger, the Rothschild Canticles illustrates an adaptation of a story from the Gesta Romanorum, or its vernacular variant, Der Romer Tat. The tale describes how kings desired royal purple robes dyed with the blood of an elephant. Only naked virgins could capture the animal. For Hamburger, this image is multivalent; it may signify the Ave/​Eva doubleness of women, the erotic ecstasy of mystical encounter, or the relationship between Christ and Mary. 128. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, V, ll. 3132–​46, Project Gutenberg e-​book, accessed June 20, 2020. 129. Peter of Dacia, Vita Christinae Stumbelensis, V, in Acta Sanctorum, June 22 (1867), esp. 433, 439–​43, 448–​49, 451; André Billy, Extases et tortures: Vie de la bienheureuse Christine de Stommeln (Paris: Flammarion, 1957). 130. Giunta Bevegnati, Vita de B.  Margarita Poenitente Cortonae in Umbria, X.16, in Acta Sanctorum, Feb. 22 (1865) 3:355; trans. Renna, Life and Miracles of Margaret of Cortona, 296–​97. 131. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits:  Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2003), ch. 5; Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–​ 1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ch. 6; Elliott, Proving

notes to pages 166–167  325 Woman, ch. 4–​6; see also Alison Weber, “Demonizing Ecstasy: Alons de la Fuente and the Alumbrado of Extremadura,” in The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, ed. Robert Boenig (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 147–​65. 132. Anon., Compilatio Singularis Exemplorum, in Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 679, fol. 14v-​15r, c. 1300; trans. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 217, n. 55. Simon adds that this text survives in two manuscripts, and the older one includes an additional line in which master switches from Latin to French, saying, “You debauch, we dispute,” Pute is perhaps a pun here, since it could mean prostitute in Old French, thus somewhat foreshadowing the inquisitorial confrontations between masters and beguines; ibid., 132. Although the Compilatio survives in just three manuscripts, they are from different countries, illustrative of its wide dispersion; see Berlioz, Le Rire du Prédicateur, 10; J.T. Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Âge (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973), 243–​44. 133. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Mort d’une hérésie: L’Église et les clercs face aux béguines et aux béghards du Rhin supérieur du XIVe-​XVe siècle (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1978), 64–​99. 134. Book of Hours, use of Maastricht, Liège, early fourteenth century, BL Stowe MS. 17, fol. 38r. The verses above the figures are from Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 24:17, 20. Graciela Daichman cites a comparable incident in which an English nun danced all night long with friars, and then proceeded to spend the night with them, see Wayward Nuns, 21. 135. Manuscript illustrations of these characters accentuate the sexual tension between them, e.g., Le Roman de la Rose, BNF ms. fr. 25526, fol. 132v.

Chapter 6 1. In addition to the extant manuscripts and fragments, there are seven incunabula editions of the Rose. Several manuscripts are available for online consultation via the Roman de la Rose Digital Library: Le Roman de la Rose.org, accessed July 14, 2019. 2. Dante, Il Fiore, I, trans. John Took in A Translation of Dante’s Il Fiore (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 3, l.  2. The Fiore survives in a single manuscript, (Bibliothèque Universitaire de Montpellier, ms. H438). For an analysis of the Fiore’s authorship, see Took, ibid., xxxii–xliii; Took, “Dante and the Roman de la Rose,” Italian Studies 37 (1982): 1–​25; Took, “Towards an Interpretation of the Fiore,” Speculum 54:3 (1979): 500–​27; Sylvia Huot, “The Fiore and the Early Reception of the Roman de la Rose,” in The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany, ed. Zygmunt Barański and Patrick Boyde (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 153. Additional afterlives of the Rose include Chaucer’s English translation and La Querelle des Femmes, the first known literary debate. 3. The troubadours regarded love as a creative enterprise, literally a discovery through trobar (finding, troping, inventing). These poets stressed the processual, questlike quality of accessing the language of love.

326  notes to pages 168–171 4. For an analysis of the medieval troubadour movement as a religion and as a heresy, see Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74–​90. 5. Moshe Lazar, “Fin’amor,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. F.R.P. Akehurst and Judith Davis (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1995), 61–​100; Jacques Wettstein, Mezura: L’Idéal des troubadours, son essence et ses aspects (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1974). 6. Oria was one of the several Occitan terms for dance, see Catherine Ingrassia et al., La Danse médiévale: 20 reconstitutions de danses et partitions musicales (Beauchamp: Le local, 2009), 14. For other connections between troubadours and dance, see Timothy McGee, “Dance,” in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William Kibler and Gover Zinn (London:  Routledge, 1995), 549–​50; William Paden, “The System of Genres in Troubadour Lyric,” in Medieval Lyric:  Genres in Historical Context, ed. William Paden (Urbana-​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000), 21–​60; Romances et pastourelles françaises des XIIe et XIIIe siècles:  Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen, ed. Karl Bartsch (Geneva:  Slatkine Reprints, 1973), 1:17, 51, 93–​95, 98–​111, 308, 310; 2:112–​13, 135–​37, 147–​48, 153–​54, 163–​64, 179–​80, 185–​86, 194, 197–​99, 204–​05, 210; 3:242–​43, 257–​58, 259–​60, 264–​65, 268–​69, 273–​74, 292–​ 94, 297–​300, 306–​10, 323–​24, 330–​32; Faral, Les Jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 295–​96. Dance historian Carol Lee includes a section on the troubadours in her history of ballet, see Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14–​17. 7. With its emphasis on emotion, the Rose participates in the transition “from epic to romance;” see Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), ch. 5; see also C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 923–​ 1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 233; Kathryn Starkey, The Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Welscher Gast (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 4. 8. Select scholars have complicated the presumed fixity of romance, see Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Evelyn Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer: 1999); Roy Rosenstein, “‘Mouvance’ and the Editor as Scribe: trascrittore tradittore?” Romanic Review 80:2 (1989): 157–​68; María Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 164; Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–​1400 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France:  From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002); Simon Gaunt, “Orality and Writing:  The Text of the Troubadour Poem,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 228–​44; see also John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–​1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 5; Jacqueline Cerquiglini-​Toulet, The Color of Melancholy: The Uses of Books in the Fourteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns

notes to page 171  327 Hopkins University Press, 1997), 152; John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères:  The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); William Paden, “What Singing Does to Words: Reflections on the Art of the Troubadours,” Exemplaria 17:2 (2005):  481–​506; Christopher Page, “Listening to the Trouvères,” Early Music 25:4 (1997): 638–​59; Marisa Galvez, Songbook:  How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2012); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erick Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6–​12; Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), ch. 3; Seeta Chaganti, “Choreographing Mouvance: The Case of the English Carole,” Philological Quarterly 87:1/​2 (2008): 77–​103; Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 13, 29. Compare with Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose, ou Guillaume de Dole de Jean Renart (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1979). 9. For theories on the etymology and choreography of these additional dancing terms, see Anne Wéry, La Danse écartelée: De la Fin du Moyen Âge à l’Âge classique. Moeurs, esthétiques, et croyances en Europe romane (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1992), 394; Ingrassia, La Danse médiévale, 21; Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française, et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle:  Composé d’après le dépouillement de tous les plus importants documents, manuscrits ou imprimés, qui se trouvent dans les grands bibliothèques de la France et de l'Europe, et dans les principales archives départementales, municipales, hospitalières ou privées (Paris:  F. Vieweg, 1880), 1:563, 786, 2:422, 6:722, 8:47. For comparable terms in the German vernacular, see Julian Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze. Kontinuität und Wandel in Mittelalterlichen Tanzdarstellungen (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2008), 41, 45; Ann Harding, An Investigation into the Use and Meaning of Medieval German Dancing Terms (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1973). 10. Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1920). 11. Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Livre de Poche, Lettres Gothiques, 1992), 76–​80, ll. 719–​55; trans. Francis Horgan in The Romance of the Rose (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 13. For a phenomenological approach to aesthetics in the Rose, see Sarah-​Grace Heller, “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76:4 (2001): 939–​41. 12. Robert Mullally, The Carole: A Study of a Medieval Dance (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), ch. 4–​5; Paul Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet (394–​1673) (Nîmes: La Recherche en Danse, 1995), ch. 2; Jean-​Michel Guilcher, Rondes, branles, caroles: Le Chant dans la danse (Brest: Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 2003), 205–​92. 13. E.g., Le Roman de la Rose, BNF ms. fr. 1584, fol. 92r; Chantilly Musée Condé MS 42, fol. 6v; BL Harley MS. 4425, fol. 14v; PML MS G. 32, fol. 6r. For musings on its origins and choreography, see Joseph Bédier, “Les Plus anciennes danses françaises,” Revue des deux mondes 75 (1906): 399–​407; Gaston Paris, Mélanges de littérature française du Moyen Âge (Paris: H. Champion, 1912), 589; Edward Schröder, “Brautlauf und Tanz,”

328  notes to pages 171–172 Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum und Literatur 61 (1924): 27; Margit Sahlin, Étude sur la carole médiévale: L’Origine du mot et ses rapports avec l’église (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiskells Boktryckeri, 1940); Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), xxiii–​xxviii; Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1965), part III, ch. 3; Conrad Laforte, Survivances médiévales dans la chanson folklorique: Poétique de la chanson en laisse (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1981), 264; Joan Rimmer, “Carole, Rondeau, and Branle in Ireland 1300–​1800: Part I, The Walling of New Ross and Dance Texts in the Red Book of Ossory,” Dance Research 7:1 (1989): 21–​29; John Stevens, “Carole,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and George Grove (London:  Macmillan, 1980), 3:814–​15; Bourcier, Naissance du ballet, ch. 2; Guilcher, Rondes, branles, caroles, 209–​94; Yves Guilcher, “Dance as a Reflection of Society,” Choreography and Dance 2:1 (1992): 77–​108; Martine Julian and Gérard Le Vot, “Approches des danses médiévales,” Ballet danse (1981): esp. 110–​ 12; Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 32–​35; Catherine Ingrassia, Danseurs, acrobates et saltimbanques dans l’art du Moyen Âge: Recherches sur les représentations ludiques, chorégraphiques et acrobatiques dans l'iconographie médiévale (Diss., Université de la Sorbonne, 1990), esp.  289–​99; Ingrassia, La Danse Médiévale, 11–​23; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, ch. 4–​5. Robert Mullally’s recent monograph is an extensive study on this topic, providing a full account of the etymology, performance, and musical notation of the medieval carole, which attests to the carole’s inherent intermingling of sacred and secular motifs, see The Carole. 14. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 189–​91. 15. Anon., Carmina Burana, ed. and trans. David Traill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018) 1:286–​87. I have modified Traill’s translation. For other dance content in the Carmina Burana, see ibid., 1:16–​17, 212–​13, 226–​27, 272–​73, 286–​87, 298–​99, 302–​03, 308–​09, 334–​35; 2:204–​05, 208–​09, 232–​33. 16. For studies on joy in the troubadours, see Paul Zumthor, “An Overview: Why the Troubadours?” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, 14–​15; see also Daniel Poirion, Le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Hatier, 1973), 36; J. P. Getty ms. Ludwig XV 7, 6 recto; Philippe Frieden, “La Rose et le Christ:  Lecture eucharistique du Romant de la Rose Moralisé,” Le Moyen Français 57/​58 (2005):  139–​40; Georgette Kamenetz, “La Promenade d’Amant comme expérience mystique,” in Études sur le Roman de la Rose de Guillaume de Lorris, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris:  Honoré Champion, 1984), 84–​101; Jamie Fumo, “Romancing the Rose: Apuleius, Guillaume de Lorris, and Moral Horticulture,” Modern Philology 107:3 (2010):  344; Charles Méla, “Le Miroir périlleux, ou l’achimie de la Rose,” Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 61:654 (1983):  82; Raymond Gay-​Crosier, Religious Elements in the Secular Lyrics of the Troubadours, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 51, 69; Moshé Lazar, “Fin’amor,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, 97. 17. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 76–​77, ll. 721–​25; trans. Horgan, 13. See also Le Roman de Flamenca: “Love has given them such joy /​that to everyone it really seemed /​they were alive in Paradise; /​and I tell you truly, without lying, /​that never before, as long as Love has existed, /​were so many handsome people assembled. . . .

notes to pages 172–173  329 Joy and Youth [Joi e Jovens] directed the dance /​along with their cousin Lady Valor [Proesa],” ll. 742–​54, ed. E.D. Blodgett, The Romance of Flamenca (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 40–​41; see also Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 394. 18. Le Roman de la Rose, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 42, fol. 6v; BL Harley MS. 4425, fol. 14v; PML MS G. 32, fol. 6r; Oxford BL MS Douce 188, fol. 7r. 19. In the Middle Ages, both lyric and romance suggest a strong localization of medieval dance styles, e.g., Breton, Lorraine, Rheims, Paris. 20. This sense of suspension may also recall caesurae, or accented pauses particular to troubadour repertory. 21. See also Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, 90, ll. 982–​85; Roman de la Rose, Oxford BL MS Douce 332, fol. 9v. 22. Germaine Prudhommeau, Histoire de la danse: Des Origines à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Amphora, 1986), 1:182; Guilcher, Rondes, branles, caroles, 222–​23. 23. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 85–​89; Philippe de Rémi, Jehan et Blonde, in Manekine, John and Blond, and “Foolish Generosity,” trans. Barbara Sargent-​Baur (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University, 2000), 172–​73. However, clergy sometimes criticized the tiny steps and swinging hips of male courtiers, reasoning that their effeminacy exhibited their inner moral laxity; see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels:  Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–​1200 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 200; Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness, 188–​89, 192–​93. 24. Page The Owl and the Nightingale, 91–​92, 98; Geoffroi de Charny, Le Livre de chevalerie, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels:  Devaux, 1873), 1:480; Levy, The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabilaux (Amsterdam:  Rodopi 2000), 108. Interestingly, dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku notes that European ballet embodies the cultural heritage of chivalry, see “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” in Moving History /​Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 40 [1970]. 25. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 123, 116–​17. As Page notes, Guillaume Peraldus stated that elderly women could also indulge in the carole, but it was usually too strenuous for them. 26. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 104–​109; Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines, 390–​91. 27. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 123. 28. Ivory coffret with courtly dancers, showing scenes from the Châtelaine de Vergy, French, fourteenth century, Musée du Louvre, Inv. MRR77. For an online color image, see the Musée du Louvre website, accessed June 27, 2020. 29. Guillaume le Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 80, ll. 786–​94; trans. Horgan, 13–​14; see also Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1965) 1:xlvi. 30. Folques de Marseille, “Cortesia non es als mas mezura,” cited in Moshé Lazar, “Fin’amor,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, 67–​68, 92. Linda Paterson discusses the paradoxical schema behind mezura, as the poet reveals his passion but must simultaneously practice self-​ discipline; see “Fin’amor and the Development of the Courtly canso,” in The Troubadours:  An Introduction, ed. Gaunt and Kay

330  notes to pages 173–174 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 135. For an analysis of misura (i.e., balance, harmony, moderation) in Renaissance Italian dance manuals, see Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 73–​87. 31. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 31–​33, 40–​47, 98–​99, 103–​104, 113, 125–​34, 141. Jaeger gives various vernacular terms for courtesy: cortezia, courtoisie, hövescheit, etc. in The Origins of Courtliness, 147–​48, 171, 177–​78; Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 44–​45, 77; see also Starkey, The Courtiers Mirror, 108–​109, 125–​28. For an illustration of dance in Das Welscher Gast, see Gotha Memb. I 120, fols. 73r and 100v; Starkey, A Courtier’s Mirror, 336, 348. Although cortezia in Occitan remained an abstract concept, its existence was necessary for courtly love to thrive, see Deborah Nelson, “From Twelfth-​Century Cortezia to Fifteenth-​Century Courtoisie: Evolution of a Concept or Continuation of a Tradition?” Fifteenth Century Studies 25 (2000): 87–​88. 32. Amant remembers Cortoisie’s invitation to dance in a later moment of the carole with Franchise (Generosity of Spirit), in Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 100–​102, ll. 1226–​31; trans. Horgan, 19–​20. 33. For Althusserian approaches to dance studies, see Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 60–​61; André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8–​9. 34. Le Roman de la Rose, Oxford BL MS. Douce 195, fol. 7r. Interestingly, this image recalls the troubadour practice of deixis, when the poet/​performer pointed to or gestured at someone in the audience, see also Galvez, Songbook, 61; Susan Jane O’Leary, A Semiotics of Allegory (An Allegory of Semiotics): A Study of Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose (Doctoral diss., University of Wisconsin, 1980), 10–​11; Paul Zumthor and Frank Yeomana, “Narrative and Anti-​Narrative: Le Roman de la Rose,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 191. 35. Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “The Ethics of Gesture,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher et al. (New York: Zone, 1989), 2:130–​31, 139; Georges Vigarello, “The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Chivalry,” in Fragments, 2:49–​52. 36. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, “the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history.” In Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Bourdieu's concept of the habitus began as an adaption of Marcel Mauss’s initiatory thoughts on the subject. Compare with Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion:  Discipline and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 62; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self:  Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5; J.A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 128; Carine Bouillet, “Gestes et pudeur dans les romans courtois du XIIIème siècle,” in Le Geste and les gestes au Moyen Âge (Aix-​en-​Provence: CUERMA, 1998), 109–​120.

notes to pages 174–176  331 37. Le Roman de la Rose, BL Yates Thompson MS. 21, fols. 9v and 11r. Lecoy notes that Largesse belongs to Alexander’s lineage, whereas a knight of Arthurian lineage holds her hand, Le Roman de la Rose, 1:xlvii. Interestingly, in Jean de Meun’s Rose, Wealth rejects Amant from her circle of associates, ed. Strubel, 540, ll. 10081–​98; trans. Horgan 155. 38. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 148, ll. 2205–​08; trans. Horgan, 34. Moreover, as Douz Regarz (Gentle Looks) observes the dance, he keeps two arrows belonging to Amor, ed. Strubel, 86, ll. 904–​906. 39. Tracy Adams, “Performing the Medieval Art of Love:  Medieval Theories of the Emotions and the Social Logic of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris,” Viator 38:2 (2007): 55–​68; Walter Cahn, “Focillon’s Jongleur,” Art History 18:3 (1995): 354. For the feudal symbolism of the garden’s architecture, see Heather Arden, “Le Château de Jalousie dans Le Roman de la Rose:  Féodalité et Sexualité,” in ‘Realia’ dans la Littérature de Fiction au Moyen Âge, ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgange Spiewok (Greifswald: Reineke Verlag, 1993), 5–​6. For an interpretation of courtly love as a disciplina of secular religion, see Judith Ann Ramey, The Secular Spirituality of the Troubadour Lyrics of fin’amors (Doctoral diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1983). According to Ardis Butterfield, placing a canso within a romance signifies private space and personal affect, whereas the insertion of a dance-​song connotes public space and communal activity, Poetry and Music in Medieval France,  57–​65. 40. Nancy Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150–​1231) (New York: Routledge, 2001), 5–​6. 41. Le Roman de Flamenca, ll. 729–​30, ed. Blodgett, 38–​41. Elsewhere in this text (ll. 760–​61, ed. Blodgett, 40–​41), dance brings together religious and feudal association. Susan Crane argues that the virtue of largesse is central to medieval Maying rituals and the Ley de Francise; see The Performance of Self, 4, 47, 56–​57, 72. 42. Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth:  Gift, Money, Philosophy, trans. Jean-​ Louis Morhange (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2010), esp. 116–​22, 153, ch. 7. Hénaff ’s study is influenced by Marcel Mauss’s Le Don [1925] and its idea of ceremonial gift exchange as a “total social fact.” 43. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 42–​45, 57–​51, 53–​56, 65–​76; Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 106. By the mid-​thirteenth century, the trouvères of Paris and Arras enjoyed social mobility, see Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular, 81–​82; Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 44. It is noteworthy, however, that, unlike lesser itinerant entertainers, many of the Provençal poets were nobles who did not depend on financial patronage, see Nancy Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops, 8. 45. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 16–​18, 43; Faral, Les Jongleurs, 30. However, tales such as “Provost” from La Vie de pères and L’Ermite de le jongleur may suggest another social reality, in which minstrels needed money to feed their families, see Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French Vie des Pères (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 210–​11. 46. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 47–​53, 61–​64, 177–​80.

332  notes to pages 177–178 47. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 58, ll. 331–​39; trans. Horgan, 7. 48. The youthful requirement for dancing is noted in religious texts as well; e.g., the section of senectus (old man) from the Tabula Exemplorum, CCLXXX, in J.T. Welter, La Tabula Exemplorum Secundem Ordinem Alphabeti: Recueil d’exempla compilé en France à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: E.H. Guitard, 1926), 75. 49. E.g., Le Roman de la Rose, BL Royal MS. 20 A XVII, fol. 28r. 50. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, l. 735. Nancy Regalado specifies that the carole was a dance performed solely by nobility, see “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308),” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art, and Architecture, ed. Susa L’Engle and Gerald Guest (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2006), 344–​47. 51. Prudhommeau, Histoire le la danse, 1:171–​81; Wéry, La Danse écartelée,  32–​33. 52. Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 151–​53. The Zum Grundstein house in Winterthur, Switzerland, contains a mural illustrating this story, c.  1360–​1380; see also Eckehard Simon, “The Rustic Muse: Neidhartschwänke in Murals, Stone Carvings, and Woodcuts,” The Germanic Review 46 (1971): 246–​47, 249–​51. For additional dance content in Neidhart’s poems, see Neidhart:  Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript, ed. and trans. Kathryn Starkey and Edith Wenzel (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 39, 47, 53, 55, 77, 83, 103, 105, 123, 127, 137, 139, 145, 153, 155, 167, 179, 183, 185, 197, 207, 221, 223, 227. This volume of poetry also contains reproductions of medieval murals and frescoes inspired by Neidhart’s dance scenes. 53. Paul Bourcier, “Dance as the Art of the Caste,” Choreography and Dance 2:1 (1992): 3–​16. 54. For a summary on the historiographical debates on feudalism, see Richard Abels, “The Historiography of a Construct: ‘Feudalism’ and the Medieval Historian,” History Compass 7:3 (2009): 1008–​1031. 55. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 116, 191–​94; Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness, 209, 222. Likewise, the anonymous Dit de taboureurs mocks rustics who play bad instruments badly, see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 32. However, there are some instances of peasants dancing caroles in literary sources, e.g., Philippe de Rémi, Le Roman de Manekine, trans. Sargent-​Baur, 36. 56. Carmina Burana, ed. and trans. Traill, 2:120–​21. 57. Guillaume, Rose, ed. Strubel, 66, ll. 492–​96; trans. Horgan, 9. 58. In studies on troubadour poetry, the spring opening trope is called Natureingang. For studies on the relationship between medieval dance and springtime, see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 125; Crane, The Performance of Self, ch. 2; Zimmermann, Teufelsreign—​Engelstänze, 147, n.  129–​ 30; Ingrassia, La Danse médiévale, 6–​ 7; Bédier, “Les Fêtes de mai,” 146–​ 72; E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1925), 1:8; Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournois de Chauvency,” 341–​52; compare with Thomas Warton, with assistance from Francis Douce, History of English Poetry:  From the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 2:515; Lincoln

notes to pages 178–180  333 Kirstein, Dance:  A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (New  York:  Dance Horizons, 1969), ch. 5–​6. 59. Le Roman de la Rose, PML MS M.  132, fol. 7v; Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de l’âme, BSG MS. 1130, fol. 155v. Elsewhere in the text, Ami (Friend) laments the loss of dancing in the golden age; e.g., Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 460, ll. 8435–​48; trans. Horgan, 129. 60. Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love:  Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 74–​75; John Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), ch. 2; Derek Pearsall, “Gardens as Symbols and Setting in Late Medieval Poetry,” and Brian E. Daley, “The ‘Closed Garden’ and the ‘Sealed Fountain’: Song of Songs 4:12 in the Late Medieval Iconography of Mary,” in Medieval Gardens: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 237–​78. Compare with the medieval correlation between the poet as craftsman and Platonic cosmology, Charlotte Gross, “The Cosmology of Rhetoric in the Early Troubadour Lyric,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 9:1 (1991): 40. 61. Le Roman de la Rose, French, fifteenth century, Oxford BL MS Douce 188, fol. 7r. 62. Philippe de Rémi, Jehan et Blonde and De Rémi, Le Roman de Manekine, trans. Sargent-​Baur, 25, 37–​38, 72–​73, 103–​04, 159–​62, 174–​77. For an illustration of the carole in Manekine, see BNF ms. fr. 1588, fol. 15v. Interestingly, one of Michel Beheim’s poems describes a garland made for vernacular dances that acquires Trinitarian associations during a woman’s pregnancy. See Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece, ed. Barbara Newman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 164. 63. E.g., Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide; Chrétien, Yvain; Chrétien, Lancelot; Chrétien, Perceval ou le Conte Graal; anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” in Canterbury Tales; as well as numerous other chivalric romances: Le Prison amoureux, L’Escoufle; Le Chastelain de Coucy; Meliador; Durmar le Galois; Joufrois; Gilles de Chin; Blancandrin, Cléomadès; Florian et Florerte, etc. For helpful surveys on dance sequences in romances, see Ingrassia, Danseurs, 435–​44, 461; Ingrassia, La Danse médiévale, 7–​8; Guilcher, Rondes, branles, caroles, 205–​94; Mullally, The Carole, esp. ch. 5–​6; Faral, Les Jongleurs, esp.  297, 298–​99, 306–​07, 309, 316, 324; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 85–​89; Philippe de Rémi, Jehan et Blonde, trans. Sargent-​Baur, 172–​73; Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “‘Jeunes’ et danse des chevaux de bois,” in Le Corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 169–​72. For dance in German courtly literature, see Zimmermann, Teufelsreigen—​Engelstänze, 105, 108, 159–​63, 167–​76, 188–​89, 196–​97, 201–​02,  237. 64. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 152, 190, 196. 65. Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover:  Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), esp. 25–​37; Laurence Harf-​ Lancner, Le Monde des fées dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris:  Hachette littératures, 2003); Harf-​Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge:  Morgane et Mélusine:  La naissance

334  notes to pages 180–181 des fées (Genève: Slatkine, 1984); Jacques Le Goff, Harf-​Lancner, and Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Héros et merveilles du Moyen Âge: Arthur, Renart, la licorne et les fées (Paris: L’Histoire, 2013); Faral, Les Jongleurs, 100; Aucaussin et Nicolette; Jean Bodel, Le Jeu de Saint Nicholas; Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de la Feuillé. 66. Wace, Roman de Brut, l. 8176; Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannie, I.2.90; cited and discussed in Mullally, The Carole, 9–​10, 23–​25; Sahlin, Étude sur la carole médiévale, 72–​73. For an illustration of Merlin building Stonehenge, see BL Egerton MS. 3028, fol. 30r. 67. For allusions to the sexuality of the carole in the Rose, see Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ll. 982–​85, 1256–​97; see also Claire Nouvet, “Guillaume de Lorris’ Rose or the Mourning Beat of Narcissism,” L’Esprit créateur 40:1 (2000): 4–​7. 68. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 118–​120, ll. 1568–​1633; trans. Horgan, 25–​ 26. According to David Hult, the carole degrades into an “elegant orgy scene,” see “The Allegorical Fountain:  Narcissus in the Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 7:2 (1981):  129. See also Marta Powell Harley, “Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis: Ovidian Lovers at the Fontaine d’Amors in Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 101:3 (1986):  335; Joan Kessler “La Quête amoureuse et poétique: la Fontaine de Narcisse dans le Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 73:2 (1982): 135; Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43. For a dance studies approach to narcissism, see José Gil, “Paradoxical Body,” trans. André Lepecki, The Drama Review 50:4 (2006): esp. 24–​25. For a study on the relationship between the Rose’s fountain of Narcissus and medieval phantasmology, see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), esp. ch. 11. 69. Guillaume de Lorris, Rose, ed. Strubel, 44, l. 38; trans. Horgan, 3. 70. Jean-​Charles Payen and Margaret Ann Leff conclude that Guillaume’s section is too semiologically discordant for readers to deduce the author’s actual view on love, see “A Semiological Study of Guillaume de Lorris,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 180–​ 83. Taking another position, Paul Strohm suggests that Guillaume deliberately abandoned the poem; see “Guillaume as Narrator and Lover in the Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 59:1 (1968): 4. L.T. Topsfield sees the anticlimactic denouement as a restoration of Rudel’s amor de lonh, see “The Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and the Love Lyric of the Early Troubadours,” Reading Medieval Studies 1 (1975): 40–​ 54. David Hult suggests that Guillaume may have viewed his text as complete, as medieval authors did not have the same standards of closure that modern authors do, see “The Spectral Author,” in Self-​Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 71. In contrast to Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun was much more concerned with signature and authorship than his predecessor, see Noah Guynn, “Authorship and Sexual /​Allegorical Violence in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 79:3 (2004): 634; see also Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular, 29–​32; Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

notes to pages 181–182  335 72. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 1048–​1054, ll. 20271–​389; trans. Horgan, 312–​14. For Lecoy, this passage forms a contrast between the fountain of Narcissus (emblematic of death), and the fountain of life, see Le Roman de la Rose, 3:xxiv-​xxv. Genius makes a distinction between the squareness of the garden and the roundness of the park, as Guillaume’s text specifies that the garden is square (toz quarrez), and that no shepherd (bergiers) had ever been there, ll. 467–​70. 73. Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). 74. Jean-​Charles Payen argued that Jean de Meun used the figure of Genius to critique Guillaume de Lorris, see “L’Espace et le temps dans Le Roman de la Rose,” in Études de langue et de littérature françaises offertes à André Lanly (Nancy: Université de Nancy II, 1980), 289, 295. 75. Maurice de Sully, cited in Michel Zink, La Prédication en langue romane, avant 1300 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976), 373. 76. Matfre Ermengaud, Breviari d’Amor, BL MS. Royal 19 C I, fol. 204v; Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 120. Similarly, a thirteenth-​century Irish Franciscan remarked that dancing is a preparation for eternal death, see Jacques Chailley, “La Danse religieuse au Moyen Âge,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge. Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale, 1967 (Paris and Montréal:  Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969), 365; Greene, Early English Caroles, cxiii. 77. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 182–​86. 78. Lancelot du Lac, French, c. 1316, BL Additional MS. 10293, fol. 292v; Lancelot, V.150, in Lancelot-​Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-​Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris Lacy (New York: Garland, 1993–​1996), 3:165–​71; see also 3:336. 79. Jean Gerson, Le Traictié d’une vision contre le Ronmant de la Rose par le Chancelier de Paris (Treatise Against the Roman de la Rose), sixth accusation, May 18, 1402, ll. 80–​82, cited and trans. in Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology, ed. Christine McWebb and Earl Richards (New York: Routledge, 2007), 276–​77. 80. Plato, Timaeus, in Plato: The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. Donald Zeyl (Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 29c–​36d; James Miller, Measures of Wisdom:  The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). 81. Orations of St. Augustine, BNF ms. fr. 916, fol. 32v. 82. Book of hours, PML MS M. 287, fol. 64v. Compare with Neidhart’s Winterlied, which features a peasant girl named Adelbar (deriving from the terms for nobility and eagle) in a dance, see Frauenlob’s Song of Songs, ed. Newman, 196, n. 67. 83. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 1068, ll. 20659–​71; trans. Horgan, 318. 84. Henri Bate, Nativitas Magistri Henrici Mechliniensis, in BNF ms. lat. 7324, fol. 32v; cited in Nicole Goldine, “Henri Bate, chanoine et chantre de la Cathédrale Saint-​ Lambert à Liège et théoricien de la musique (1246—​après 1310),” Revue Belge de musicologie 18 (1964): 14; trans. Karen Silen, “Dance in Late Thirteenth-​C entury Paris,” in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–​1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 67. There was, however, plenty of negative discourse regarding scholars’ love of dancing; see Rainer Schwinges,

336  notes to pages 182–185 “Student Education, Student Life,” in A History of the University in Europe: I, ed. Walter Rüegg and Hilde. de Ridder-​Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 223. In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, “The Miller’s Tale” echoes this levity when discussing the Oxford dance; see Chauncey Wood, “The Significance of Jousting and Dancing as Attributes of Chaucer’s Squire,” English Studies 52 (1971): 116–​18. The Carmina Burana contains these lines: “Let’s forget our studies /​it is pleasant to fool around /​. . . . Let’s go down to the piazzas /​where the girls are dancing [Omittamus studia, /​dulce est desipere, /​. . . . Ad plateas descendamus /​et choreas virginum”], ed. and trans. Traill, 1:306–309. Sermon exempla discouraged students and scholars from composing love songs and trying to win ladies’ favors; see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 73–​75; Silen, “Dance in Late Thirteenth-​C entury Paris,” 67–​79; Jacques Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur: Récits facétieux du Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 143, 146–​ 48; G. G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1:75, n. 1. 85. Saltzstein, The Refrain and Rise of the Vernacular, esp. 36–​40, 42–​43, 62–​63, 73–​74, 79, 83, 160–​61; Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-​Century Polyphony (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1997), 13. 86. Montpellier Codex, motet CLXIX, in The Montpellier Codex: Texts and Translations, trans. Susan Stakel and Joel Relihan, ed. Hans Tischler (Madison:  A-​R Editions, 1985), 63. 87. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 2.  Grocheio’s treatise on music associates the good minstrel as a good craftsman (artifex), with his high style trouvère songs and dances: ductia, estampie, or chanson de geste; see, 69, 75, 77. 88. For example, Albertus Magnus’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics states how dancing is good for citizens; cited and trans. in Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 172–​ 73; Silen, “Dance in Late Thirteenth-​ Century Paris,” 70–​ 71; Albertus Magnus, Beati Alberti Magni:  Opera Omnia ex Editione Lugdunensi, ed. Auguste Bourgnet (Paris: Ludovicum Vides, 1894), VII. John of Freiburg’s Summa Confessorum, c.  1297/​98 likewise cites Aristotle’s position on the virtues of entertainment, in Summa Confessorum, Oxford BLMS Laud misc. 278, fol. 213v; compare with Robert Grosseteste, Durandus de Sancto Porciano and Richard of Middleton for Christianized readings of eutrapelia, see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale,  38–​39. 89. Johannes de Grocheio, De Musica, in Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio, ed. E. Rohloff (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1972), 132; trans. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 133; Silen, “Dance in Late Thirteenth-​ Century Paris,” 73. 90. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 461–​62, ll. 8449–​78; trans. Horgan, 130; see also Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 2: VI, 272. The uneasy relationship between dance and matrimony also worried preachers, since in this way dance could offend the sacrament of marriage, see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 124; see also Nicholaas van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains:  Du XIIe siècle au début du XIV siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969).

notes to pages 185–187  337 91. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 464, ll. 8522–​30; trans. Horgan, 131. Elsewhere, Ami/​Jaloux explains how his wife gets dolled up in order to be seen by other men at dances; ed. Strubel, 500–​02, ll. 9265–​323; trans. Horgan, 142; see also Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 2:ix, 277. 92. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 708, ll. 13323–​26; trans. Horgan, 205. See also Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 2:292; Ovid, Ars Amatoria. 93. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 718, ll. 13521–​32; trans. Horgan, 208. 94. Robert Harrison, “Introduction,” in Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux Translated from the Old French (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), esp. 1–​9, 13–​14, 18, 27–​28, 30–​31; Howard Bloch, “Introduction,” in The Fabliaux:  A New Verse Translation, trans. Nathaniel Dubin (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013), esp. xiii–​xxii. As Bloch explains, fabliaux were supposedly transmitted orally by jongleurs and goliards. They seemed to appear alongside the decline of feudalism and the rise of the burgher class, perhaps expressing the perspective of dispossessed knights. For a discussion on earlier treatments of fabliaux and their relationship with French nationalism, see Bloch, xiii–​xvii. 95. Rutebeuf, Freire Denise le Cordelier, ll. 258–​64, trans. Dubin in The Fabliaux, 95. See also anon., Aloul, ll. 95–​96, in Fabliaux Fair and Foul, ed. Raymond Eichmann, trans. John DuVal (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 109. 96. Anon., Les.III. Meschines, ll. 3–​9, trans. Dubin in The Fabliaux, 330–​33; see also Gautier le Leu, Les.II Vilains, ll. 63–​68, in ibid., 690–​91; Le Chevalier qui fust parler les cons; Levy, The Comic Text, 112–​13, 115–​20. 97. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 648, ll. 12123–​42; trans. Horgan, 187. 98. Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, ll. 223–​25, in Medieval French Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Steven (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 259–​ 60, 312; Ingrassia, La Danse médiévale, 20–​21; Sylvia Huot, “Intergeneric Play: The Pastourelle in Thirteenth-​Century French Motets,” in Medieval Lyric, 300, 305–​306; Dillon, The Sense of Sound, 152; Saltzstein, The Refrain and Rise of the Vernacular, 92–​94; Françoise Ferrand, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion: Robin danse devant Marion, sens du passage et sens de l’oeuvre,” Revue des langues romanes 90:1 (1986): 87–​97. Interestingly, a passage from Adam’s work seems to indicate a preferred hairstyle conducive to medieval breakdancing. Similar peasantlike pantomime dances, namely the robardel and the jeu du chapelet, appear in Jacques Bretel’s Tournois de Chauvency; see Nancy Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency,” 341–​55; Wéry, La Danse écartelée,  5–​46. 99. Daniel de Paris, in BNF ms. lat. 16481, fol. 52v, cited and trans. in Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 118. 100. False Seeming’s close rapport with Constrained Abstinence, a dubious beguine, added to the suspicions regarding beguines and heresies in the Late Middle Ages; see Jean-​Claude Schmitt, “Preface,” in Mort d’une hérésie: l’Église et les clercs face aux béguines et aux béghards du Rhin supérieur du XIVe-​XVe siècle (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1978), 6–​7. For theories on how to decipher False Seeming /​Jean de Meun, see Charles Dahlberg, “Love and the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 44:4 (1969): 569–​72.

338  notes to pages 187–188 101. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 620, ll. 11564–​69; trans. Horgan, 178. See also Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 2:287. 102. E.g., Merlin Coccaie, Histoire maconique; Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 126. 103. Schmitt, La Raison des gestes, 264; John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.21. 104. Humbert de Romans, Le Don de crainte ou l’abondance des exemplas, ed. Christine Boyer (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2003), 168. 105. Michel Pastoureau, The Bear:  History of a Fallen King, trans. George Holoch (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 106. Jean de Meun was suspicious about the instability of language, therefore preempting the nominalism vs. realism debate that would color late medieval philosophy. In Jean’s Rose, Reason and Nature fault Amant for accepting dreams as truth; see Rose, ed. Strubel, 956, ll. 18385–​91; trans. Horgan, 283; see also Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 3:xv; N. Guynn, “Le Roman de la Rose,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 48–​56. Daniel Heller-​Roazen argues that the Rose, as a “double fragment,” is ridden with contingency and incoherence; see Fortune's Faces:  The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 7–​8. Through the characters of Reason and Nature, Jean tries to restore semiotic integrity. Compare with Jean, Rose, ed. Strubel, 292; ll. 5044–​49, trans. Horgan 77; Strubel, 304, 836, 842, 1088, ll. 5276–​80, 15923–​34, 16039–​68, 21055–​59, trans. Horgan, 81, 248, 324; Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 1:liv-​lv, 2: 298. In the scope of this chapter, I  do not address the question of castration, which, according to many commentators, pervades Jean’s text. It is still debated whether Jean proposes procreation /​natural philosophy as a real possibility for restoring “natural” (re-​masculating) signification, in that productive enterprises reestablish the imago dei through mechanisms of serialization, see Sylvia Huot, “Bodily Peril: Sexuality and the Subversion of Order in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” Modern Language Review 95:1 (2000): 43. 107. Jean de Meun, Rose, ed. Strubel, 1008, ll. 19432–​42; trans. Horgan, 299. 108. Explicit for Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun and frontispiece for Le Testament by Jean de Meun, French, fourteenth century, BNF ms. fr. 24388, fols. 145r and 146r. 109. My approach synthesizes two different (typically opposing) schools of Dante scholarship. Formative Italian and American scholars, namely Bruno Nardi, Charles Singleton, Robert Hollander, John Freccero, and Joan Ferrante, have treated Dante as a theologus-​poeta. More recently, Teodolinda Barolini has emphasized the secular aspects and influences of Dante’s poetic corpus; see The Undivine Comedy:  Detheologizing Dante (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1992). Exploring Dante’s use of the vernacular to approximate transcendence, I follow James Miller’s initiative to “re-​theologize” Dante, see “Introduction: Re-​ theologizing Dante,” in Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, ed. Miller (Waterloo, Ontario:  Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005), 1–​62; see also Vittorio Montemaggi, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology:  Divinity Realized in Human Encounter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

notes to pages 188–191  339 110. Many African American readers have identified emancipation as the Commedia’s overall message. See Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers:  The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). 111. Dante supposedly first met Beatrice at a May Day festival when she was nine years old. The Italian Calendimaggio recalls the Provençal Kalenda Maya and the spring dances performed around the Queen of May. 112. By contrast, residents of Inferno exude grotesque gesticulations or frozen immobility, signifying their eternal punishments in hell. Purgatorio represents a penitentiary ethos, in which penitents are “doing time” alongside linear, processional choreography, see Kathryn Dickason, “Discipline and Redemption: The Dance of Penitence in Dante’s Purgatorio,” Dante e l’Arte 4 (2017): 67–​100. 113. However novel and imaginative, Dante’s poetry was indebted to the troubadours of Southern France, who lived over a century earlier. He admired how these Provençal poets verbalized desire and sentimentality. Troubadours populate all three canticles of the Commedia, where they exemplify diverse imbrications of love and language. Dante adopted elements of troubadour prosody—​including rhyme, meter, caesura, apostrophe/​deixis, enjambment, adynaton, and tornada (the final coda, or literally “turning line”). 114. Dante, Paradiso XXIII:55–​63, in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 3, Paradiso, trans. and ed. Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 460–​61. Compare with Dante, La Vita Nuova, I.1, XIX.2, XXI.4. Jorge Luis Borges reads Beatrice’s smile as an expression of loss and melancholy, see “Beatrice’s Last Smile,” trans. Virginia Múzquiz, Dispositio 8:45 (1993): 23–​25. 115. Rather than devise negative theological language (apophasis, or saying what God is not), the saltatory script implements vertical motion as a surrogate for unmediated contemplation. For a detailed explanation of apophatic language, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9; see also William Franke, “The Place of Proper Names in the Topographies of Paradiso,” Speculum 87:4 (2012): esp. 1091–​92, 1096–​98, 1012, 1021–​22; Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, 226–​27, 251–​52. 116. Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini (Milan:  Ulrico Hoepli, 1899), 2:1723–​24. Deriving from this verb, the saltarello was a lively medieval Italian dance. 117. Dante, Paradiso XXIV:22–​24, trans. Durling and Martinez, 478–​79, 681 n.  139; Kevin Brownlee, “Dante’s Transfigured Ovidian Models:  Icarus and Daedalus in the Commedia,” in Rethinking the New Medievalism, ed. R. Howard Bloch, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 162–​80. 118. Dante, Paradiso I:67–​69, trans. Durling and Martinez, 24–​25. 119. Dante, Paradiso I:70–​72, trans. Durling and Martinez, 26–​27. Trasumanar is one of Dante’s several neologisms. Caroline Bynum theorizes the relationship between medieval selfhood and metamorphosis in Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

340  notes to pages 191–193 120. Dante, Paradiso X:145–​48, trans. Durling and Martinez, 212–​13. 121. Dante, Paradiso XXVIII:92–​93, trans. Durling and Martinez, 562–​63. 122. Paradiso XXVIII:39, trans. Durling and Martinez, 560–​ 61. See also Ludmila Acone, “Les Âmes dansantes dans La Divine Comédie de Dante,” in Texte et contexte:  Littérature et histoire de l'Europe médiévale, eds. Marie-​ Françoise Alamichel and Robert Braid (Paris: Houdiard, 2011), 228; Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 102–​103. 123. Dante, Paradiso XXVIII:3, trans. Durling and Martinez, 559. 124. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII:133–​38, trans. Durling and Martinez, 666–​67; see also Peter Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–​4. 125. The troubadours devised a comparable rhetoric called the adynaton, or declaring the impossible, when verbalizing matters of the heart. The adynaton was the signature stratagem of troubadour Arnaut Daniel (d. 1210). Both Dante and Ezra Pound considered him the finest poet who ever lived. Daniel claimed that, by mastering the art of love in writing, his ox could outrun the hare, and he could swim against the current (chatz le lebre ab lo bou /​e nadi contra suberna). Moreover, Daniel invented the sestina, a poetic structure that conflated square and circular rhyming schemas. When Dante encountered Arnaut Daniel in purgatory, he addressed him as “the better craftsman of the mother tongue,” Purgatorio XXVI:117. See Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New  York:  New Directions, 2005), 36; Margaret Spanos, “The Sestina: An Exploration of the Dynamics of Poetic Structure,” Speculum 53:3 (1978): esp. 554–​57. 126. Abundant pre-​Christian wisdom became available in the West during the so-​ called twelfth-​century Renaissance. Transmitted via Arabian philosophers and then translated into Latin, these ideas enlivened scholastic philosophy during Dante’s time. Plato, Timaeus, in Plato: The Complete Works, ed. Cooper, 29c-​36d; Kathi Meyer-​Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1970), 12–​16; James Miller, Measures of Wisdom; Philip Knäble, “L’Harmonies des sphères et la danse dans le contexte clérical au Moyen Âge,” Médiévales, 66 (2014): 70–​74. The Christian synthesis of neo-​ Platonic thought culminated in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. 127. Plato’s Timaeus is glossed by Beatrice in canto IV. Plato elaborates further on this concept in The Laws, when discussing how and why the gods created the chorus (collective dance and song), see Plato: The Complete Works, 653e-​654a. 128. The three choruses each contain three divisions of angels: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones (first choir); Dominations, Virtues, and Powers (second choir); Principalities, Angels, and Archangels (third choir). Pseudo-​ Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy transposes the angelic strata onto clerical offices, see Françoise Carter, “Celestial Dance: A Search for Perfection,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 5:2 (1987): 7; Creighton Gilbert, “Angelico’s Dancers,” Italian Quarterly 37 (2000): 165–​71.

notes to page 193  341 129. Dante, Paradiso XXVIII:44–​45, trans. Durling and Martinez, 560–​61. Not unlike postmodern choreographers, Dante interrupted explosive movement with sudden stasis. At the center of such rapid rotations lies the prime mover, author of the universe. In Paradiso, God’s image does not bear cosmic proportions. Dante instead offers the image of a point (un punto), a static center that propagates dizzying dynamism, see Paradiso XXVIII:25–​27, trans. Durling and Martinez, 558–​59. (Similar imagery appears in Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, c. 524). However diminutive, the point radiates perfection. Its absence of dimensionality ensures its indivisible, immeasurable nature, which permeates the stratospheres with resolute velocity. (The modern poet T.S. Eliot derived inspiration from this image in his own The Four Quartets: “At the still point of the turning world . . . there the dance is.”) 130. Dante, Paradiso XXVIII:124–​ 26, trans. Durling and Martinez, 564–​ 65. Principalities and Archangels comprised the third angelic choir, responsible for earthly intercession. 131. The tripudium originated with stomplike marches of the Roman military. In the Middle Ages, it transformed into trinitarian (three-​step) liturgical processions; see Friederike Fless and Katja Moede, “Music and Dance: Forms of Representation in Pictorial and Written Sources,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 255; Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), 1901. Tessa Morrison suggests that cosmologically, the tripudium mirrored the Platonic movement of each individual sphere: turn, halt, counterturn; see Morrison, “The Dance of the Angels, the Mysteries of Pseudo-​Dionysius and the Architecture of Gothic Cathedrals,” Analecta Husserliana 81 (2004): 316. 132. PML MS M. 676, fol .124r. 133. At once infantile and sacrosanct, these angelic movers exemplify Johan Huizinga’s classic thesis: play is the origin of ritual, see Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), esp. 15–​27; see also Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Theologia Ludens:  Angels and Devils in the Divine Comedy,” in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), 219–​22. 134. Dante, Paradiso, X:139–​45, trans. Durling and Martinez, 212–​13. For another reference to dancing and clocks, see Paradiso XXIV:13–​18. 135. The rapport between hours and praying might elude modern readers, but early Commedia commentators, namely Benvenuto da Imola (d. 1388), readily observed the connection; see Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Aligherii comoediam, ed. William Vernon (New York: Macmillan, 1909) 1:362–​63. 136. Hence the alba’s repetitive versification, which attempts to stop time. 137. Paradiso, Durling and Martinez, 225, n.  139–​48. Western monks perfected the earlier timekeeping technologies of classical and Islamic cultures. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, the sundial, astrolabe (“star grasper”), and clepsydra (water-​ clock, literally “water thief ”) were common methods of telling time. Stonehenge, and other archaic monuments, helped predict the summer solstice; see Edgard Laird, “Astrolabes and the Construction of Time in the Late Middle Ages,” in

342  notes to pages 193–194 Constructions of Time in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz (Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 1997), 51–​54; David Scott and Mike Cowham, Time Reckoning in the Medieval World: A Study of Anglo-​Saxon and Early Norman Sundials (Chippenham and Eastbourne: British Sundial Society, 2010), 3. Interestingly, Aristotle defined time as motion (i.e., kinēsis; see De Physica, IV.1), a principle that informed Dante’s choreography of Paradise and his philosophy of language (Convivio, IV.2). For a more thorough discussion on clocks in Paradiso, see Kathryn Dickason, “Caroling Like Clockwork: Technologies of the Medieval Dancing Body in Dante’s Paradiso,” Dance Chronicle 41:3 (2018): 305–​15. 138. Giuseppe Boffito, “Dove e quando poté Dante vedere gli orologi meccanici che descrivi. . . .?” Giornale Dantesco, 39 (1938): 45–​61; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), ch. 2–​3; Gerhard Dohrn-​van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 4–​6; see also Marc Bloch, “L’Heure et l’horloge,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 9:44 (1937): 217–​18. 139. According to historian Jean-​Claude Schmitt, the clock invested medieval life with a new consciousness of time and variety of social rhythm, presaging the fast pace of modernity, see Schmitt, “Le Temps: ‘impensé’ de l’histoire ou double objet d’historien,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 48:189 (2005): 31, 33, 36, 47. 140. Given the circle’s perfect form, dance historians have surmised that round dances had religious origins, see Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 359. Moreover, in the Middle Ages, the wheel was multivalent, and could represent planetary movement, eternity, prophecy, and martyrdom. The wheel both historicized and essentialized the identity of the human being as imago dei (image of God), from Adam/​original to eschaton/​end. In mystical writings, the wheel (rota) stood in for the primeval act of creation. 141. According to Robert Harrison’s phenomenological approach, Beatrice is an event; see Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); see also Kenelm Foster, “Dante and Eros,” in The Two Dantes and Other Studies. Collected Essays of Kenelm Foster (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977),  36–​37. 142. Robert Harrison, “The Love That Moves,” in Critical Insights:  The Inferno, ed. Patrick Hunt (Pasadena:  Salem Press, 2012), 35; see also Thomas Werge, “The Race to Death and the Race for Salvation in Dante’s Commedia,” Dante Studies 97 (1979): 1–​21; Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante’s Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism: A Study of Style and Poetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 136. 143. Harrison, “The Love That Moves,” 35–​43; John Freccero, “The Significance of Terza rima,” in Dante:  The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Harvard:  Harvard University Press, 1986), 258–​72. 144. Church Fathers, Franciscans, and Dominicans in the Heaven of the Sun, Paradiso, canto XII, Lombardy, ca. 1400, Bibliotheca Nazionale Centrale, Florence MS B.R. 39, fol. 353v.

notes to pages 194–196  343 145. Dante, Paradiso X:76–​81, trans. Durling and Martinez, 210–​11. 146. Incidentally, Renaissance dance masters codified the alternations of moving and posing as fantasmata; see Mark Franko, “The Notion of ‘Fantasmata’ in Fifteenth-​ Century Italian Dance Treatises,” in A Spectrum of World Dance:  Tradition, Transition, and Innovation. Selected Papers from the 1982 and 1983 CORD Conferences, ed. Lynn Wallen and Joan Acocella (New York: Congress on Research in Dance, 1987), 77–​79; see also William Franke, “The Place of Proper Names,” 1112–​15. Moreover, the clergymen’s resemblance to maidens illustrate Paradiso’s penchant for gender-​bending. 147. Commedia illustration for Paradiso, canto XII, Italian, late fourteenth century, PML MS M. 676, fol. 104r. 148. For an in-​depth theorization of kinesthetic empathy, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011). 149. Along with Beatrice and St. Lucia, the Virgin interceded on Dante’s behalf, see Inferno, II:94; see also Mario Trovato, “The True ‘Donna gentile’ as Opposed to the Apocalyptic Whore,” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 177–​217. 150. Spanning from biblical to medieval times, select souls—​Eve, Rachel, St. Lucia, and Beatrice on one side, and Adam, King David, John the Baptist, and St. Benedict on the other side—​help the white rose bloom. For an analysis of the rose, see Diana Glenn, Dante’s Reforming Mission and Women in the Comedy (Leicester: Troubadour Publishing Ltd., 2008), 113–​21. 151. BL Yate Thompson 36, fol. 187r. Dante refers to the Virgin Mary as the beautiful flower (bel fior), whose name he invokes every morning and evening, Paradiso: XXIII:88–​89. The white rose might refer to Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose). (In his youth, Dante translated parts of this work in Italian with his Il Fiore.) Yet this rose will never be deflowered; it effloresces eternally (la rosa sempiterna, see Paradiso XXXI:1, XXX:124). Some scholars argue that the Gothic rose window at San Zeno (in Verona) influenced Dante’s design for the celestial rose, see John Leyerle, “The Rose-​Wheel Design and Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46:3 (1977): 280–​308; Giuseppe Scipio, The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso (Ravenna: Longo, 1984), 150–​77. 152. Dante, Paradiso, XXIII:103–​105, trans. Durling and Martinez, 462–​63. 153. In their sermons celebrating Assumption Day, medieval Italian preachers described the angelic roundelays that framed Mary’s crown; e.g., Bernardino da Siena, in Lina Bolzoni, Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 136. Moreover, Dante’s reference to Mary’s sacred maternity was perhaps also self-​referential. When exploring the constellation Gemini, Dante devised a wordplay involving the constellation’s fullness (pregno) and genius (ingegno). Most likely, this was a nod to Dante’s own skill, pregnant with poetic virtuosity; see Dante, Paradiso XXII:112, 114; Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 92–​95. 154. Dante, Paradiso XXXII:97: “la divina cantilena.” Moreover, Gabriel’s rounds protect and penetrate the hortus conclusus (sealed garden) of her chastity.

344  notes to pages 196–197 155. Harrison, “The Love That Moves,” in Critical Insights, 43–​44. Interestingly, the contrapasso (literally “counter suffering”) in Dante, resurfaced as a Renaissance court dance, see David Wilson, “Contrapassi in Fifteenth-​Century Italian Dance Reconsidered,” Dance Research 24:1 (2006): 60–​65. 156. Dante, Inferno VII:22–​24, in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume I: The Inferno, trans. Durling and Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 112–​ 13. See also Enciclopedia Dantesca, 2:1657; Acone, “Les Âmes dansantes,” 232, n. 31. 157. Dante, Inferno XXI:53–​54. 158. Ibid., XIV:40–​42. 159. Ibid., XVI:22–​27, trans. Durling and Martinez, 46–​247; James Miller, “Christian Aerobics:  The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 214–​34. 160. BL Egerton MS. 943, fol. 28v. 161. Harrison, “The Love That Moves,” 44–​45, 47–​48. For many commentators, the nature of their sin is not sexual, and it is noteworthy that Dante includes homosexuals near the top of Mount Purgatory, thus close to heaven. For creative approaches to Dante’s use of sodomy, see John Boswell, “Dante and the Sodomites,” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 63–​76; Richard Kay, “The Sin(s) of Brunetto Latini,” in ibid., 19–​31; Kay, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978); Joseph Pequigney, “Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio,” Representations 36 (1991):  22–​42; Elio Costa, “From Locus amoris to Infernal Pentecost: The Sin of Brunetto Latini,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 10:1/​2 (1989): 109–​ 32; Miller, “Christian Aerobics,” 214–​34; Miller, “Dante on Fire Island: Reinventing Heaven in the AIDS Elegy,” in Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis, ed. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 265–​305; Miller, “Rainbow Bodies:  The Erotics of Diversity in Dante’s Catholicism,” in Dante and the Unorthodox, 249–​89; Miller and Mark Feltham, “Original Skin: Nudity and Obscenity in Dante’s Inferno,” in ibid., 182–​206. 162. Dante, Inferno, XXXIV. 163. Dante, Paradiso XXV:88; Tonia Triggiano, “Dante’s Heavenly Lesson:  Education and Economy in the Paradiso,” Essays in Medieval Studies 26 (2010): 15–​16. 164. Dante, Convivio, I.i.9, I.V.2, I.viii.2, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, esp. II.2; Anne Wiles, “Dante on the Nature and Use of Language,” Review of Metaphysics, 68 (2015): 764–​77. Dante became more daring in a letter to his literary patron. The poet indicated that he wanted his Commedia to be read along four interpretive avenues: literal, allegorical, tropological (moral), and anagogical (mystical). These were the same strategies of medieval biblical exegesis. In other words, Dante wanted his poem, composed in rustic Italian, to be read on par with the Holy Scriptures—​a bold proposal indeed! See Dante, Epistola XIII a Can Grande della Scala, VII. 165. Together, their aerial bodies form what Gabriele Brandstetter calls a “kinetic ideogram,” in which bodies become text, Brandstetter, The Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-​Gardes (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015), 345.

notes to pages 197–198  345 166. BL Yate Thompson MS. 36, fol. 161r. For the exilic and Ravenna/​Byzantine connections to this imagery, see Jeffrey Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of the World:  Dante’s Poetics of Martyrdom (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1986); Eugene Vance, “Images and the Mediation of Power: Dante’s Paradiso and the Byzantine Art of S.  Apollinare Nuovo,” in The Growth of Authority in the Medieval West, ed. Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veestra (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), 332–​53; Rachel Jacoff, “Sacrifice and Empire: Thematic Analogies in San Vitale and the Paradiso,” in Renaissance Studies in Honour of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrogh (Florence: Guinti Barbera, 1985), 317–​32. 167. Dante, Paradiso XVIII:104, trans. Durling and Martinez, 364–​65. This Italian verb derived from the Latin salire, the same term with which the first biographer of Francis of Assisi’s described the saint’s fervent preaching, Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima Sancti Francisci, I.27; Arnaldo Fortini, La Lauda in Assisi e le Origini del Teatro Italiano (Assisi: Edizioni Assisi, 1961). Possibly, this Jupiter dance scene was influenced by Giotto’s allegory of Justice in the Scrovegni Chapel (Padova), and/​ or later influenced Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government fresco at the Sala dell Pace (Siena). Both of these images can be found online at Wikipedia, accessed June 27, 2020. For more on these possible connections, and a survey of relevant art historical scholarship, see Eleonora Beck, “Dancing in the Street: Fourteenth-​Century Representations of Music and Justice,” in Music, Dance, and Society:  Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G.  Brainard, ed. Ann Buckley and Cynthia Cyrus (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 173–​ 88; Kathryn Dickason, Ringleaders of Redemption:  The Religious Authorization of Western Medieval Dance (Doctoral diss., Stanford University, 2016), 359–​61, n. 174–​76. 168. Despite Dante’s poetic innovation, Paradiso is also nostalgic for tradition. Growing up in late medieval Italy, Dante and his fellow Florentines suffered from mismanaged political experiments and unstable governments. Moreover, with his love of troubadour lyric, Dante perhaps romanticized Occitania and its bygone feudal glory. 169. Dante, Paradiso XVIII:135, trans. Durling and Martinez, 366–​67. According to the translators, this critique of the corrupt papacy likely refers to Pope John XXII or Clement V; see ibid., 376–​78. 170. The political situation of Dante’s Florence was indeed complex. For further detail, see Stephen Bemrose, A New Life of Dante (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), preface, ch. 1; Catherine Keen, Dante and the City (Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2003); Barbara Reynolds, Dante:  the Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London:  I.B. Tauris, 2006); John Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), ch. 1–​ 2; Elizabeth Coggeshall, “Per lo’ nferno tuo nome si spande:  Politics of the Infernal City,” in Critical Insights: The Inferno,  88–​90. 171. Dante described the beatific vision as three circles (tre giri) of different colors, reflected in one another as if rainbows upon rainbows. Interestingly, the three-​fold

346  notes to pages 198–200 movement seems to activate perichoresis, a theological term for the mystical dance of the Trinity. 172. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII:131–​32. See also Freccero, “The Final Image:  Paradiso XXXIII,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988), 257. Ferrante notes that the only other time Dante uses the word effige is to describe the vision of Beatrice ascending to her place in the Empyrean; see Dante’s Beatrice:  Priest of an Androgynous God, (Binghamton:  Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 32. 173. See also Jason Aleksander, “The Problem of Theophany in Paradiso 33,” Essays in Medieval Studies 27 (2011): 66–​72. For the mortal poet, the flash (fulgore) of unmediated consciousness reinstated nostalgia; see Paradiso XXXIII:141. 174. Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII:142–​45, trans. Durling and Martinez, 667. 175. Dante, Inferno, I:30, trans. Durling and Martinez, 26–​27. Left (sinister) in Latin had a negative connotation. Ancient philosophers, the Church Fathers, and medieval theologians developed several explanations for the moral significance and residual sin of feet, particularly of the limping left foot; see John Freccero, “Dante’s Firm Foot and the Journey without a Guide,” Harvard Theological Review 52:4 (1959): 245–​81; Harrison, “The Love That Moves,” 43. 176. Dante, Inferno, I:1.

Chapter 7 1. Robert Bartholomew, “Rethinking the Dancing Mania,” Skeptical Inquirer 24 (Jul./​ Aug. 2000), 42–​47. The term choreomania was apparently first used to describe a group of rebellious dancers in Maastricht in 1287. 2. Wild and Tabrizi, “The Differential Diagnosis of Chorea,” Practical Neurology 7 (2007): 360; see also Kélina Gotman, “Chorea Minor, Chorea Major, Choreomania: Entangled Medical and Colonial Histories,” in Tanz und WahnSinn:  Dance and Choreomania, ed. Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger (Leipzig:  Henschel, 2011), 83–​97. 3. See especially Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus, trans. Henry Sigerist (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Paracelsus, Opus Paramirum (Volumen Paramirum und Opus Paramirum, ed. Franz Strunz (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1904), 321–​28. For more interpretation of sixteenth-​century dance mania, see Lynneth Miller, “Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague,” Dance Research Journal 35: 2 (2017): 149–​64. 4. Geneviève Aubert, “Charcot Revisited:  The Case of Brueghel’s Chorea,” Archives of Neurology 62 (2005):  155; Wild and Tabrizi, “The Differential Diagnosis of Chorea,” 361. 5. Eugène Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and Popular Medicine, trans. Ernest Classen (Hampshire:  Noverre Press, 2009) [1945], ch. 22–​23; see also Frederick Cartwright, Disease and History (New  York:  Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972), 202.

notes to pages 202–203  347 6. For studies on tarantism, see Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance Between Disease and Cure:  The Tarantella and the Physician,” Ludica 5–​6 (2000):  88–​102; Jerri Daboo, Ritual, Rapture, and Remorse:  A Study of Tarantism and Pizzicata in Salento (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010); Karen Lüdtke, Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity, and Celebration in Southern Italy (New York: Berghahn Books 2009). 7. John Waller, A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (Cambridge:  Icon Books, 2008); Waller, “Dancing Death,” British Broadcasting Corporation (Sept. 12, 2008), 2. 8. Robert Bartholomew, “Tarantism, Dancing Mania, and Demonopathy: The Anthro-​ Political Aspects of ‘Mass Psychogenic Illness,’” Psychological Medicine 24:2 (1994): 281, 289. 9. In particular, Gregor Rohmann has shown how Christianized Platonic thought helped construct dancing mania in the Middle Ages; see “The Invention of Dancing Mania: Frankish Christianity, Platonic Cosmology, and Bodily Expressions in Sacred Space,” Medieval History Journal 12:13 (2009): 13–​45; Rohmann, “Vom ‘Enthusiasmus’ zur ‘Tanzwut’:  Die Rezeption der Platonichen ‘Mania’ in der Mittelalterlichen Medizin,” in Tanz und WahnSinn, 46–​61; Rohmann, Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines Mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 10. See also Kathryn Dickason, “Deca-​dance in the Late Middle Ages:  The Case of Choreomania,” in Medieval Theatre Performance:  Actors, Dancers, Automata and Their Audiences, co-​ed. Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), 141–​ 60; Kélina Gotman, Choreomania:  Dance and Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 3. 11. Chronicum comitum Flandrensium, cited in Madeleine Braekman, “La Dansomanie de 1374: Hérésie ou maladie?” Revue du Nord 63:249 (1981): 341. 12. Jean d’Outremeuse, La Geste de Liège, in Corpus Documentorum Inquisitionis Haereticae Pravitatis Neerlandicae., ed. Paul Frédéricq (Gent:  J. Vuylsteke, 1889–​ 1906), 3:43, trans. mine after Backman, Religious Dances, 212. 13. Since some choreomaniacs shared an affinity with John the Baptist, “St. John’s Dance” became an interchangeable term for this malady. It is also noteworthy that St. John’s day was associated with heathen customs and pagan dances in the Middle Ages; see A.H. McAlister, “The Dancing Pilgrims at Muelebeek,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32:3 (1977): 319. 14. Braekman, “La Dansomanie,” 343. Medieval chroniclers writing in Latin often described choreomaniacs with the term saltare, which refers to springing or jumping, but saltare in the Middle Ages commonly referred to a lively dance (hence the Italian saltarello). However, saltator or saltatrix also denoted an itinerant, low brow entertainer; see John Baldwin, “The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France Around 1200,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 72:3 (1997): 639. 15. H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-​ Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 32. 16. Bartholomew, “Tarantism, Dancing Mania, and Demonopathy,” 289; Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker, The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, trans. G. Babington

348  notes to pages 203–205 (Boston: IndyPublish, 2009), 55; trans. Backman, Religious Dances, 201–​202, 277–​81. Given the severity of the dancer’s symptoms, Justus Hecker construed choreomania as response to the Black Death; see The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, esp. ch. 4–​5; compare with the Strasbourg Chronicle of Kleinkawel (c. 1625), cited in Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schönberg (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1937), 253. 17. Liège Chronicle of 1402, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 3: 41. 18. In ibid.; see also Petrus of Herenthal, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 1:232. 19. Bachman, Religious Dances, 203–​204. 20. Petrus de Herenthal, Vita Gregori XI, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 1:232. 21. Braekman, “La Dansomanie de 1374,” 345; see also Backman, Religious Dances, 226–​30. 22. Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 4–​5; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), ch. 5; Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:2 (2000): 268–​306; see also Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Interestingly, some studies have analyzed the associations between dance mania, demonic possession, and hysteria; see Georges Didi-​Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 176–​81; Anna Furse, “Making a Spectacle of Herself: Charcot’s Augustine and the Hysteric Dance,” in Tanz und WahnSinn, 197–​210; Dianne Hunter, The Makings of Dr.  Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research through Performance (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1998), 21–​23; Peggy Phelan, “Dance and the History of Hysteria,” in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (London: Routledge, 1996), 90–​105; compare with Charcot and Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l'art (Amsterdam: B.M. Israël, 1972), 36. 23. Master of Saint Severin, Predella to disassembled altarpiece German (Cologne?), c. 1470–​1480. This image is shown and discussed by Fredrika Jacobs, see “Signs of Faith, Signs of Superstition,” in Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 163–​94. 24. Liège Chronicle of 1402, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 3:41; Braekman, “La Dansomanie,” 351–​54; see also Radulphus de Rivo, Gesta pontificum Leodiensium, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 1:234–​35. The proper administering of exorcisms on the part of clerics reaffirmed their monopoly over rituals of dispossession, and the priest therefore became the “exclusive theurgos,” see Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania,” 35–​36. 25. Radulphus de Rivo, Gesta pontificum Leodiensium, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 1:234–​35. 26. Radulphus de Rivo, Decani Tongrensis gesta pontificum Leodiensium, 1403, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 1:232–​35. 27. See also Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research 10:2 (1992): esp. 33.

notes to pages 205–206  349 28. For studies on dance prohibitions during the Middle Ages, see Louis Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises,” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 15:1 (1914): 10–​20; Michele Veissière, “Prohibitions des danses publiques les jours dimanches et de fêtes au temps de Guillaume Briconnet,” Revue de la société d’histoire et d’art de la Brie et du pays de Meaux 33 (1982): 45–​52; Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), esp. 221, 225–​26, 229, 233–​34; John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–​1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 162. 29. John Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium, cited and trans. in Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–​1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 113. 30. Ingrid De Geer, “Commentary on the Legends of Saint Magnus,” St. Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-​ Century Renaissance, ed. Barbara Crawford (Aberdeen:  Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 264–​67. See also Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania,” 31–​38; Harald Kleinschmidt, Perception and Action in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Press, 2005), 43; Backman, Religious Dances, 172–​76; Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 35. For additional accounts of dance mania in the Early Middle Ages, see Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania,” 25–​30; Rohmann, Tanzwut, esp. 329–​55. 31. For an online color image, see Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 25, 2020. See also Backman, Religious Dances, 179–​81; Hecker, The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, 61–​62; Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum), fol. 217r. Consonant with this iconography, an edict from Maastricht forbade dancing in public places, notably the church, in Corpus, ed. Frédéricq, 3:44. 32. Rohmann, “The Invention of Dancing Mania,” 38. 33. For more details on peasants or rustici, see Braekman, “La Dansomanie,” 348–​50; see also Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 137–​38; Arlene Pearsall, “Johannes Pauli and the Strasbourg Dancers,” Franciscan Studies 52 (1992): 206. 34. Cited and trans. in Frances Rust, Dance in Society (London: Routledge, 1999), 20. The dance epidemic of 1418 should not be confused with the dance epidemic in 1518, also in Strasbourg; see John Waller, A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. 35. R.H.R. and M.P. Park, “Saint Vitus’ Dance: Vital Misconceptions by Sydenham and Bruegel,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 83 (1990): 513. 36. To build a following for cultic centers, clergy attached to particular sanctuaries would advertise spectacular miracles in collected compilations known as libelli miraculorum (little books of miracles); see Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God (Mahwah: HiddenSpring, 2003), 215. 37. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment:  Performing Gestures/​Producing Culture (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2009), 2–​3. For a theatrical and performance studies approach to dance mania, see Michael Lueger, “Dance and the Plague:  Epidemic Choreomania and Artaud,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-​Graves (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 948–​64.

350  notes to pages 206–208 38. However, it is noteworthy that there may be a dance reference in the medieval vita of Saint Vitus. Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea recounts how Vitus’s father tried to veer him away from Christianity and steer him toward idol worship: “The father brought him [Vitus] home and tried to change his son’s mind by surrounding him with music and sporting girls and other kinds of pleasure,” see “Saints Vitus and Modestus,” in The Golden Legend:  Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2012), 322. It is possible that these sporting girls are dancers. Likewise, a late fifteenth-​century altarpiece from Salzburg-​ Morzg depicts Vitus being tempted by worldly pleasure, symbolized by a dancing couple. 39. Le Charivari. Actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris (25–​27 avril 1977)  par l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales et le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-​Claude Schmitt (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1981); Natalie Zemon-​ Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule:  Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-​Century France,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 41–​75; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self:  Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), ch. 5; De Roos, “Carnival Traditions in the Low Countries, c.  1350–​c. 1550,” in Custom, Culture, and Community in the Later Middle Ages: A Symposium, ed. Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), 34–​35. Compare with Samuel Sumberg, The Nuremberg Schembart Carnival (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1941); Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New  York:  Metropolitan Books, 2007); Jose Molle, “La Moresca, Danza Teatrale ‘Armata’ dei Secoli XV e XVI: Iconografia e Rapporticon lo ‘Charivari,’” Ludica 11 (2005): 42–​59. 40. Le Roman de Fauvel, BNF ms. fr. 196, fol. 34r. 41. Timothy Husband and Gloria Gilmore-​House, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New  York:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980); Robert Harrison, Forests:  The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1992),  63–​68. 42. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: Victor Devaux, 1867–​77) 15:84–​92; Michel Pintoin, Chronique du religieux de Saint-​Denys, ed. and trans. M.L. Bellaguet (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1994), 2:64–​71. 43. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, BL Harley MS. 4380, fol. 1r. 44. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 67, 143; Élisabeth Lalou, “Le Bal des ardents et la folie du Roi,” L’Histoire 164 (1993): 70–​71. For an alternative reading of Charles’s madness, see Crane, The Performance of Self, 161. 45. The first reference to this choreographed drama is in 1149 at the royal wedding of Petronilla of Aragon and Romano of Barcelona in Lerida. The dance’s title may derive from the Spanish term morisco, a derogatory term for Muslim converts to Christianity. For studies on the moros y cristianos, see Violet Alford, “Morris and Morisca,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 2 (1935): 42; Curt Sachs,

notes to pages 208–211  351 World History of the Dance, 333; Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), ch. 3; Harris, The Dialogical Theatre: Dramatizations of the Conquest of Mexico and the Question of the Other (New  York:  St. Martin's Press, 1993); Harris, “Muhammed and the Virgin:  Folk Dramatizations of Battles between Moor and Christians in Modern Spain,” The Drama Review 38:1(1994): 45–​46; N.D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage, From Medieval Times Until the End of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1967); Glynne Wickman, The Medieval Theatre (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); Violet Alford, Sword Dance and Drama (London: Merlin Press, 1962); Lynn Brooks Matlock, The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1988), 33; Richard Wolfram, “Sword Dances and Secret Societies,” English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1:1 (1933): 34–​41; John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–​1750 (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1999); Michael Heaney and John Forrest, “An Antedating for the Morris Dance,” Notes and Queries 49:2 (2002):  190–​93; Timothy Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish Folklore (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Ingrid Brainard, “An Exotic Court Dance and Dance Spectacle of the Renaissance:  La Moresca,” in Report on the Twelfth Congress, International Musicological Society, Berkeley, 1977, ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Bärenreiter:  Kassel, The American Musicological Society, 1981), 715–​16; Rodney Gallop, “The Origins of the Morris Dance,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1:3 (1934):  128. See also Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, “Mexican Moriscas:  A Problem in Dance Acculturation,” The Journal of American Folklore 62:244 (1949): 87–​106; David Wulston, “Boys, Women and Drunkards: Hispano-​ Mauresque Influences on European Song?” in The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1994), 158–​59. 46. Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians:  Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), ch. 3. 47. For studies on the late medieval moresca, see Danielle Quéruel, “Des Gestes à la danse: L’Exemple de la morisque à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Le Geste et les gestes au Moyen Âge (Aix-​en-​Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 1998), 499–​517; Catherine Ingrassia, “La Moresque, danse au XVe siècle,” in Théâtre et spectacles hier et aujourd'hui: Théâtralisation (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1991), 131–​43; Claire Sponsler, “Outlaw Masculinities:  Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-​Class Festivities,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New  York:  Garland, 1997), 321–​47; Paul Bourcier, La Naissance du ballet (394–​1673) (Nîmes: La Recherche en Danse, 1995), 70–​73; Barbara Lowe, “Early Records of the Morris in England,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 8:2 (1957): esp. 65. 48. Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, ch. 1 and app. A. 49. Tans um den Ring showing a Moriskentanz, Israel van Meckenem the Younger, engraver German, c. 1475. For an online image, see Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 26, 2020.

352  notes to pages 211–212 50. Brainard, “An Exotic Court Dance and Dance Spectacle of the Renaissance,” 721–​ 23; Ingrassia, “La Moresque, danse au XVe siècle,” 138; Chauncey Wood, “The Significance of Jousting and Dancing as Attributes of Chaucer's Squire,” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 52:2 (1971): 116–​18; Françoise Ferrand, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion: Robin danse devant Marion, sens du passage and sens de l’oeuvre,” Revue des langues romanes 90:1 (1986): 95; Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 77; Annette Jung, “William Dunbar and the Morris Dancers,” in Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Derrick McClure and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989), 233. 51. Book of hours, PML MS. M 157, fol. 119v. 52. E.g., Moriskentänzer Erasmus Grasser Munich, c.  1450–​ 1480, Münchner Stadtmuseum. For online color images, see the Münchner Stadtmuseum website, accessed June 6, 2020. For studies on moresca imagery, see Philipp Halm, Erasmus Grasser. Jahresgabe des Deutches Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft (Augsburg: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag G.M.B.H., 1927); Robert McGrath, “The Dance as Pictorial Metaphor,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 89 (1977):  81–​ 92; Michael Kwakkelstein, “Botticelli, Leonardo and a Morris Dance,” Print Quarterly 15:1 (1998): 3–​14; Jeronen Stumpel, “Dance and Distinction: Spotting a Motif in Weiditz, Dürer, and Van Meckenem,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 32:1 (2006): 4–​16. 53. In Renaissance Italy, the moresca became increasingly politicized, and its depiction of the other promoted European’s superiority over other cultures; see Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 36, 39, 46–​47, 83, 259–​60; see also Alison Rosie, “‘Morisques’ and ‘Momeryes’: Aspects of Court Entertainment at the Court of Savoy in the Fifteenth Century,” in Power, Culture, and Religion in France, c. 1350–​1550, ed. Christopher Allmand (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 57–​74. For studies on the morris dance in Tudor and modern England, see Cecil Sharp and Herbert Macilwaine, The Morris Book (London: Novello and Company, 1912); Michael Heaney and John Forrest. Annals of Early Morris (Sheffield:  Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, 1991); E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 2:164–​65, 199; Charles Read Baskerville, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), 352–​ 56, 362; Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners: With Dissertations on the Clown and Fools of Shakespeare, on the Collection of Popular Tales Entitled the Gesta Romanarum, and on the English Morris Dance (New York: B. Franklin, 1968); Barbara Palmer, “‘Anye Disguised Persons’: Parish Entertainment in West Yorkshire,” in English Parish Drama, ed. Alexandra Johnston and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 1996), 81–​93; Jane Garry, “The Literary History of the English Morris Dance,” Folklore 94:2 (1983): 219–​28; Anne Gilchrist, “A Carved Morris-​Dance Panel from Lancaster Castle,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1:2 (1993): 86–​88; Heaney and Forrest, “An Antedating for the Morris Dance”; Heaney, “Kingston to Kenilworth:  Early Plebeian Morris,” Folklore 100:1

notes to page 212  353 (1989): 88–​104; R. Kenworthy Schofield, “Morris Dances from Bledington,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1:3 (1934): 147–​51. 54. Paracelsus outlined the causes and cures of choreomania most directly in his 1526 treatise, “The Diseases that Deprive Man of His Reason: Such as St. Vitus’ Dance, Falling Sickness, Melancholy, and Insanity, and their Correct Treatment” (Von den Krankheiten so die Vernunfft Berauben), published posthumously in 1567. For more on dance mania as possibly depicted in Breughel the Younger’s (after the Elder’s) The Dancing Pilgrims of Muelebeek, see McAlister, “The Dancing Pilgrims at Muelebeek,” 315–​16; Backman, Religious Dances, 244–​51. 55. For postmedieval representations of dance mania, see Arthur Dickson, “Browning’s Source for ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’” Studies in Philology 23:3 (1926): 327–​36; John Dirckx, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin:  A Medical-​Historical Interpretation,” The American Journal of Dermatopathology 2:1 (1980):  39–​45; Brothers Grimm, Little Snow-​White; Hans Christian Andersen, The Red Shoes; Paul Krack, “Relicts of Dancing Mania: The Dancing Procession of Echternach,” Historical Neurology 53:9 (1999): 2169; Ben Brantley, “Dance-​Struck Little Girls: Run! Run in Horror!” The New York Times (Nov. 23, 2010); Felicia McFarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1998), 14–​ 22; Alastair Macaulay, “Two Top Giselles, Back to Back,” The New York Times (May 29, 2011); Gia Kourlas, “Distorting Everyday Actions, with Movements Awkward and Active,” The New York Times (Oct. 20, 2010); Katharina Stoye, “Die ‘Tanzwut’ Bewegung von 1374:  Individueller Tanzwahn, Tanzepidemischer ‘Flashmob’ oder Performativer Höhepunkt einer Emanzipativen Laienfrömmigkeit?” in Tanz und WahnSinn, 62–​ 82; see also the contributions of Hanna Walsdorf, Annette Hartmann, Natascha Siouzouli, Nicolas Salazar-​Sutil, Sidsel Pape, Eila Goldhahn, Neil Orts, and Fabrizio Manco in ibid. Compare with Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). 56. During this ceremony, the archbishop of Echternach, parish priests, monks, nuns, and laypeople execute a hoplike choreographic sequence accompanied by a marching band playing a popular Springprozession melody. This parade traverses the city and culminates in circumambulations around the Abbey of Echternach and the tomb of St. Willibrord, located in the abbey’s crypt. St. Willibrord (d. 739), the city’s patron saint and first bishop, reportedly cured frenzied dancers centuries prior to the choreomania epidemics of the Late Middle Ages. After the saint’s death, his local cult enacted liturgical processions around his tomb for devotional and curative purposes. See Backman, Religious Dances, 172; Krack, “Relicts of Dancing Mania,” 2169–​72; “The Leaping Procession at Echternach,” The Irish Monthly, ed. Matthew Russell; Matthew, 14:155 (May 1886), 259; Erika Bourguignon, “Trance and Ecstatic Dance,” in Moving History/​Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 98; Bourguignon, Trance Dance, repr. in Dance Perspectives 35 (1968): 16; see also Aubert, “Charcot Revisited,” 156–​57. For an online video of the dance procession at Echternach during Whitsun in 2006, see YouTube, accessed July 16, 2019.

354  notes to pages 212–214 57. James Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, Son and Company, 1950), 23–​26. Other popular death imagery and literature may also have contributed to the construction of the dance of death, such as the Spanish play, La Danza Generale de la Muerte (c. 1400), The Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead, Ars Moriendi blockbooks (instructing the proper art, or craft, of dying), Vado Mori poems, and transi tombs. The macabre motif persisted beyond the Middle Ages, notably with the Totentanz woodcuts of Holbein the Younger, and later with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the film The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman. 58. Foundational scholarship on the subject includes Francis Douce, Holbein's Dance of Death Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood: With a Dissertation on the Several Representations of That Subject (London:  H.G. Bohn, 1858); Stephan Cossachi, Makabertanz:  Der Totantanz in Kunst, Poesie, und Brachtum des Mittelalters (Meisenham am Glam:  A. Hain, 1965); Hellmut Rosenfeld, Der Mittelalterliche Totentanz (Cologne: Böhlau, 1968); Pierre Vaillant, “La Danse macabre de 1485 et les fresques du charnier des Innocents,” La Mort au Moyen Âge (Strasbourg: Colloque de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur, 1977), 81–​86; Kathi Meyer-​Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. ch. 14 and 16; see also Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 5; Sister Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars moriendi (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1942); Karl Künstle, De Legende der Drei Lebenden und der Drei Toten und Der Totentanz (Freiburg im Breisgau:  Herder, 1908); Paul Binski, Medieval Death:  Ritual and Representation (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1996); Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol:  The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 59. The plague kept returning to Europe every decade or so over the next few centuries. For an alternative theory on plague epidemiology, see Samuel Kline Cohn, The Black Death Transformed:  Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). For recent DNA research on the plague, see Ellie Zolfagharifard and Ryan O’Hare, “Black Death May Have Been Lurking for Centuries: DNA of Plague Victims in France Backs Up Theory that Bacteria Lay Dormant,” Daily Mail, January 22, 2016; Ewen Callaway, “Plague Genome: The Black Death Decoded,” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, October 25, 2011, both accessed July 16, 2019. 60. Jane Taylor, “Danse Macabre and Bande Dessinée: A Question of Reading,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 25:4 (1989):  356–​ 69; see also Taylor, “Poésie et prédication: La Fonction du discours proverbial dans la Danse macabre,” Medioevo Romanzo 14:2 (1989): 215–​26; Taylor, “Translation as Reception: La Danse Macabre,” in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative, A Festschrift for Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 181–​92; Taylor, “Villon et la Danse

notes to page 214  355 macabre: ‘Defamiliarisation’ d’un mythe,” Pour un Mythologie du Moyen Age: Études rassemblées par Laurence Harf-​Lancner et Dominique Boutet (Paris: École Normale Supérieure, 1988), 179–​96, Taylor, “Que Signifiait danse au quinzième siècle? Danser la danse macabré,” Fifteenth-​Century Studies 18 (1991): 259–​77. 61. Sophie Oosterwijk, “Of Corpses, Constables, and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2004):  61–​ 90; Oosterwijk, “Of Dead Kings, Dukes, and Constables:  The Historical Context of the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Paris,” British Archaeological Association 161 (2008):  131–​62; see also Oosterwijk, “Lessons in ‘Hopping:’ The Dance of Death and the Chester Mystery Cycle,” Comparative Drama 36:3–​4 (2002–​3): 249–​87; Oosterwijk, “ ‘Muoz ich tanzen und kan nit gân?’: Death and the Infant in the Medieval Danse Macabre,” Word and Image 22:2 (2006): 146–​64; Oosterwijk, “Danse Macabre Imagery in Late-​Medieval Sculpture,” in Zum Sterben Schön:  Alter, Totentanz und Sterbekunst von 1500 bis Heute (Regensburg:  Schnell & Steiner, 2006), 167–​77. Compare with Alicia Faxon, “Some Perspective on the Transformations of the Dance of Death in Art,” in The Symbolism of Vanitas in the Arts, Literature, and Music:  Comparative and Historical Studies, ed. Liana De Girolami Cheney (Lewiston:  Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), esp. 33; Amy Appleford, “The Dance of Death in London: John Lydgate, John Carpenter, and the Daunce of Poulys,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38:2 (2008): 285–​314. 62. Elina Gertsman, The Dance of the Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval (Tallinn): The Preacher and His Audience,” Gesta 62:2 (2003): 143–​59; Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntinge: Performing the Dance of Death,” Studies in Iconography 27 (2006): 1–​43; Gertsman, “Visual Space and the Practice of Viewing: the Dance of Death at Meslay-​ le-​Grenet,” Religion and the Arts 9:1/​2 (2005): 1–​37; Gertsman, “The Berlin Dance of Death as Last Judgment,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 24 (2005): 10–​20. 63. Caroline Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 30. 64. Jean Le Fèvre, Le Respit de la mort, ll. 3078–​81, in Le Respit de la mort par Jean Le Fevre, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr-​Esnos (Paris:  A. & J.  Picard, 1969), 113; trans. Oosterwijk, “Of Corpses, Constables, and Kings,” 62. 65. For these studies, see Gaston Paris, “La Dance Macabre de Jean Le Fèvre,” Romania 24 (1895): 129–​32; Robert Eisler, “Danse Macabre,” Traditio 6 (1948): 187–​225; James Clark, “The Etymology of Macabre:  A Recent Theory,” Archivum Linguisticum 1 (1949): 140–​50; Leo Spitzer, “La Danse Macabre,” in Mélanges de linguistique offerts à Albert Dauzat par ses élèves et ses amis (Paris:  Artrey, 1951), 307–​21; Edelgard DuBruck, “Another Look at Macabre,” Romania 79 (1958): 536–​44; Hans Sperber, “The Etymology of Macabre,” in Studia Philologica et Litteraria in Honorem Leo Spitzer (Bern:  Francke, 1958), 391–​401; Armand Machabey, “À Propos de la discussion sur la danse macabre,” Romania 80 (1959):  118–​29. For more general literary accounts of the macabre, see Florence Whyte, The Dance of Death in Spain and Catalonia (Baltimore: Waverly Press, Inc., 1931); Annick Boilève-​Guerlet, “‘La Danza General de la Muerte’ dans le Contexte de l’Europe Médiévale,” in Homenaxe

356  notes to pages 214–215 ó Profesor Constantino Garciá, ed. Mercedes Brea and Francisco Rei (Santiago de Compostela:  Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1991), 2:243–​58; Aubrey Burl, Danse Macabre:  François Villon, Poetry and Murder in Medieval France (Gloucestershire:  Sutton Publishing, 2000); R.D. Drexler, “Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’ and the Dance of Death Tradition,” Studies in Scottish Literature 13:1 (1978): 144–​58; Mary Robbins, “Carnival at Court and Dunbar in the Underworld,” in History, Music, and Literature in Scotland, 700–​1560, ed. Andrew McDonald (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2002), 144–​62; Deanna Evans, “Dunbar’s Tretis:  The Seven Deadly Sins in Carnivalesque Disguise,” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 130–​41; William McDonald, “The World as Woman: Two Late Medieval Song-​ Poems on Frau Welt by Michel Beheim,” Modern Philology 111:4 (2014): esp. 627–​28; Michelle Hamilton, “Text and Context: A Judeo-​Spanish Version of the Danza de la Muerte,” in Marginal Voices: Studies in Converso Literature of Medieval and Golden Age Spain, ed. Amy Aaronson-​Freedman and Gregory Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 161–​81. 66. Heidi Gilpin, “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearing for Movement Performance,” in Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power, ed. Susan Foster (London:  Routledge, 1996), 114. 67. Peggy Phelan, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 200. 68. In La Danse macabre: Reproduction en fac-​similé de l'édition de Guy Marchant, Paris, 1486, ed. Pierre Champion (Paris:  Éditions des Quatre Chemins, 1925), in-​fol.; trans. Dodedans website, accessed March 16, 2016. For Lydgate’s Middle English translation, see The Dance of Death, Edited from MSS. Ellesmere 26/​A.13 and B.M. Lansdowne 699, Collated with Other Extant MSS, ed. Florence Warren and Beatrice White, Early English Text Society 181 (1931). 69. Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 69. 70. In La Danse macabre, in-​fol.; trans. mine after Dodedans website, accessed July 16, 2019. 71. For studies on the concept of mirroring in the danse macabre, see Josette Wisman, “Un Miroir déformante:  Hommes et femmes des danses macabres de Guyot Marchant,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23:2 (1993):  275–​ 99; Wisman, “La Symbolique du miroir dans les danses macabres de Guyot Marchant,” Romanische Forschungen 103:2/​3 (1991): 151–​71; Frances Eustache and Pamela King, “Dances of the Living and the Dead: A Study of Danse Macabre Imagery within the Context of Late-​Medieval Dance Culture,” in Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sophie Oosterwijk and Stefanie Knöll (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); Susanne Warda, “Dance, Music, and Inversion: The Reversal of the Natural Order in the Medieval Danse Macabre,” in ibid., 67–​70, 90–​96; David Fein, “Text and Image Mirror Play in Guyot Marchant’s 1485 Danse Macabre,” Neophilologus 98 (2014): 225–​39.

notes to pages 215–217  357 72. Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval,” 142–​146. The Reval cycle is very similar to the Lübeck cycle after which it was modeled, which in turn was likely modeled after Les Innocents in Paris. 73. Reval Dance of Death by Bernt Notke detail, Preacher, Death, Pope St. Nicolai Church, Tallinn, Estonia, late fifteenth century. For online color images, see the Dodedans website, accessed June 5, 2020. 74. Cited and trans. in Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval,” 154; Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 107–​08; Hartmut Freytag, Der Totentanz der Marienkirche in Lübeck und der Nikolaikirche in Reval (Tallinn): Edition, Kommentar, Interpretation, Rezeption (Cologne: Böhau Verlag, 1993), 144. 75. Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval,” 148. Moreover, as Gertsman adds, moving from the left to right side of the canvas suggests the direction toward salvation. Elsewhere Gertsman discusses a 1459 painting by Simon Marmion (Scenes from the Life of St. Bertin) that shows laypeople contemplating dance of death iconography; see The Dance of Death, 163–​64. 76. For a more substantive history, see Mai Lumiste, Niguliste Kirik (Tallinn:  Kunst, 1990); Johannes Schildhauer, The Hansa:  History and Culture, trans. Katherine Vanovitch (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1985). 77. Ariès, Images of Man and Death, 158; see also Michael Freeman, “The Dance of the Living: Beyond the Macabre in Fifteenth-​Century France,” in Sur quel pied danser? Danse et littérature. Actes du colloque organisé par Hélène Stafford, Michael Freeman et Edward Nye en avril 2003 à Lincoln College, Oxford (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 15. Interestingly, in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the performance of songs and dances (through carola, ballata, and dance-​songs) creates a contrast between the vivacity of the storytellers and the morbidity of plague victims, as the former have come to the countryside to escape the Black Death raging in Florence, see also Joan Acocella, “Renaissance Man:  A New Translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2013. 78. Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 75, 157. For musicological studies of the medieval macabre, see Georges Kastner, Les Danses de la Mort (Paris: Brandus et cie, 1852); Meyer-​Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death; Alma Espinosa, “Music and the Danse Macabre:  A Survey,” in The Symbolism of Vanitas, 15–​31; Reinhold Hammerstein, Tanz und Musik des Todes: Die Mittelalterlichen Totentänze und Ihr Nachleben (Bern and Munich: A. Francke, 1980). 79. Cited and trans. in Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 107–​08; see also Warda, “Dance, Music, and Inversion,” 83. 80. Francesc Massip and Lenke Kovács, “Les Franciscains et le genre macabre:  Les Danses de la mort et la prédication,” European Medieval Drama 8 (2004): 91–​105; Clark, The Dance of Death, esp. 102–​04; Alan Hindley, “Un Drame macabre: La Mort dans quelques moralités françaises,” European Medieval Drama 11 (2007): 187–​88; see also Lina Bolzoni, The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to Saint Bernardino of Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ch. 1.

358  notes to pages 217–221 81. Caroline Zöhl, “A Phenomenon of Parallel Reading in the Office of the Dead,” in Mixed Metaphors, 328–​29. 82. Free Library of Philadelphia, MS. Lewis E M 029.02. 83. Oxford BL MS. Douce 135, fols. 71v-​72r. 84. The artist modeled the Reval painting after a Totentanz cycle he created for Lübeck, Germany, which was destroyed by a World War II air raid in 1942, and only Wilhelm Castelli’s prewar photographs remain, see Der Totentanz der Marienkirche zu Lübeck und der Nikolaikirche in Reval, ed. H. Freytag et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993). While the two paintings share many similarities, the Preacher figure is absent from the Lübeck cycle. For an analysis of the Lübeck Totentanz in relation to modern dance, see Marcia Siegel, “The Green Table: Sources of a Classic,” Dance Research Journal 21:1 (1989): 15–​21. 85. Binski, Medieval Death, 36, 44. 86. Danse Macabre Church of Jacques le Majeur, Bar-​sur-​Loup French, fifteenth century. For an online color image, see the Association des Danses Macabres d’Europe website, accessed June 26, 2020. 87. Jean Maillard, “Danse et jugement dernier au Bar-​ Sur-​ Loup,” Revue belge de musicologie 34/​35 (1980–​81): 72–​76. 88. Cited in ibid., 79, l. 3. 89. Cited in ibid., 79–​80, ll. 22–​23, translation mine. 90. Cited in ibid., 79–​80, ll. 28–​29, translation mine. 91. Transcribed and trans. in Oosterwijk, “ ‘Muoz ich tanzen und kan nit gân?’ ” 154; Oosterwijk, “Lessons in ‘Hopping,’ ” 156. 92. Transcribed and trans. in ibid. For an analysis of the danse macabre and the medieval life cycle, see Cordelia Beattie, “The Life Cycle: The Ages of Medieval Women,” in A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Kim Phillips (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), esp. 22–​36. 93. The Heidelberg Blockbook, Basel, 1465, Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek, Cod.pal. germ 438, fol. 141r. For an online color image, see the Dodedans website, accessed June 5, 2020. 94. In Guyot Marchant, Danse macabre, ll. 73–​77, translation mine. 95. Death, the Cardinal, and the King La Danse macabre, Guyot Marchant, Paris 1486. For an online image, see the Dodedans website, accessed June 5, 2020. 96. Binski, Medieval Death, 155–​56; Taylor, “Que Signifiait danse au quinzième siècle?” 265; Oosterwijk, “Lessons in ‘Hopping,’ ” 270. Elsewhere Oosterwijk argues that the savage dance refers to the mad King Charles VI and his notorious public portrayal of a wild man (homme sauvage), see “Dance, Dialogue and Duality:  Fatal Encounters in the Medieval Danse Macabre,” 39; Oosterwijk, “Death, Memory, and Commemoration: John Lydgate and ‘Macabrees Daunce’ at Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England, ed. Caroline Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 185–​201. 97. Ingrid Brainard, “Bassedanse, Bassadanza, and Ballo in the Fifteenth Century,” in Dance History Research:  Perspectives from Related Arts and Disciplines, ed. Joann Kealiino­ homoku (New York: CORD, 1979), 64–​9 7; Antonius Arena, “Rules of Dancing,”

notes to pages 221–222  359 trans. John Guthrie and Marino Zorzi, Dance Research 4:2 (1986): esp. 8–​9, 17, 30, 44; Frederick Crane, Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth-​Century Bassedanse (New  York:  Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1986); Mark Franko, “Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse: The Kinesis of Bonne Grace,” in Persons and Groups:  Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton:  Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), 55–​66; James Jackman, Fifteenth-​Century Bassedanses (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Thomas Marrocco, Inventory of Fifteenth-​Century Bassedanze, Balli, and Balletti (New York: CORD, 1981); Jennifer Nevile, “Dance and Identity in Fifteenth-​ Century Europe,” in Music, Dance, and Society:  Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G. Brainard, ed. Ann Buckley and Cynthia Cyrus (Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 231–​37; Catherine Ingrassia, “De l’Art and manière de bien danser la basse-​danse,” in Jeux, sports, et divertissements au Moyen Âge à l'Âge Classique. Actes du 116e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes (Chambéry: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1991–​1993), 215–​34; Margaret Smith, “A Fifteenth-​Century Dancing Book: ‘Sur l’Art et instruction de bien danser,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 3:2 (1937):  100–​ 109; Seeta Chaganti, “Proleptic Steps:  Rethinking Historical Period in the Fifteenth-​ Century Dance Manual,” Dance Research Journal 44:2 (2012): 29–​47; Chaganti, “The Time of Reenactment in Basse danse and Bassadanza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 505–​24. For an analysis of the choreography in dance of death iconography, see Peter Großkreutz, “Der Tanz im Totantanz: ‘And in Most of Them Dancing Is Not Shown Either,’” Gutenberg-​ Jahrbuch 78 (2003):  67–​73; Eustace and King, “Dances of the Living and the Dead,”  43–​71. 98. The manuscript in question is Bibliothèque Albert Royal I, Brussels MS. 9085, Flemish-​Burgundian, c. 1470. 99. Le Roman de la Rose, BL Harley MS. 4425, fol. 14v. For an online color image, see Wikimedia Commons, accessed June 28, 2020. 100. Le Respit de la Mort, BNF ms. fr. 19137, fol. 46v. 101. Le Roman de la Rose, BNF ms. fr. 19137, fol. 68r. 102. Gertsman has studied a comparable iconographic motif. Early iconography of the macabre included Mors (Death) depicted as a feminized figure who, while blindfolded, strikes people with the arrows of pestilence. For Gertsman, this image portrays a parody of the Madonna of Mercy, an artistic motif that exhibited the curative effects of the Virgin Mary’s intercession; see “Visualizing Death: Medieval Plagues and the Macabre,” in Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, ed. Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester (Kirksville:  Truman State University Press, 2007), 82. 103. Pierre Michault, La Danse aux Aveugles, in Œuvres Poétiques, ed. Barbara Folkart (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1980), 85, translation mine. 104. La Danse aux Aveugles, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS. 146, fol. 56r. For a study on the symbolism of Death riding a bovine, see Sylvie Bethmont-​Gallerand, “Death

360  notes to pages 222–226 Personified in Medieval Imagery: The Motif of Death Riding a Bovine,” in Mixed Metaphors, 169–​88. 105. For theories on the performative origins of the dance of death, see Émile Mâle, see L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen-​Âge en France: Étude sur l'iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d'inspiration (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995), esp. 361; Clark, The Dance of Death, 92; Hindley, “Un Drame Macabre,” 200; Tilde Sankovitch, “Death and the Mole: Two Fifteenth-​Century Dances of Death,” Fifteenth-​Century Studies 2 (1979): 211–​17. 106. T.S.R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages:  Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance (New York: McGraw-​Hill Company, 1972), 126. 107. E.g., Hester Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300–​1350 (Leiden:  Brill, 2004); Daniel Heller-​ Roazen, Fortune’s Faces:  The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 108. Pierre Michault, La Danse aux Aveugles, in Œuvres Poétiques, ed. Folkart, 120, translation mine. Further along in the text, the character of Entendement (Reason) elaborates on the concept of bien danser, which, as he explains, is a way to die well (bien morir), avoid eternal punishment, and live on after death; see ibid., 136. 109. Holbein began the woodcuts in 1526, though they were not published until 1538 in Basel. For a study on Holbein’s dance of death imagery, see Ulinka Rublack, Hans Holbein: Dance of Death (London: Penguin Books, 2016). 110. Gertsman, The Dance of Death, 169–​80. 111. Ibid., 180. See also Libby Karlinger Escobedo, “Holbein’s Mementi Mori,” in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 381. 112. Dallas Denery, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 159. Denery argues that this crisis plays out most dramatically in the early modern courts.

Epilogue 1. Cardinal Francis Arinze, remarks during “Totus Tuus: Consecrate Them in Truth” conference in Bloomingdale, Ohio, September 15, 2007, YouTube, accessed July 16, 2019. However, the Cardinal, who is from Nigeria, goes on to say that certain dances are acceptable among African and Asian communities of worship. 2. Thomas Chesneau, Traicte des danses, auquel il est monstre que les danses sont des accessoires et dependances de paillardise, et par ainsi que d’icelles ne doit estre aucun usage entre les Chretiens (Paris: 1564), Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Staats und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Dramat.550; Guillaume Paradin, Le Blason des danses (Beaujeu: Gariis, 1566), BNF Ars Reserve 8-​BL-​32897; Natalie Zemon-​ Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-​Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 60, 66 n. 41, 75–​75, 77; Alessandro Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè?: Il Dibattito Europeo sulla Danza nella Prima Età Moderna (Rome: Fondazione

notes to pages 226–227  361 Benetton Studi Ricerche, 2000), esp. ch. 4–​6; Anne Wéry, La Danse écartelée:  De la fin du Moyen Âge à l’Âge Classique. moeurs, esthétiques, et croyances en Europe romane (Paris:  Librarie Honoré Champion, 1992), 161–​ 65, 320–​ 23, 334–​ 35; Marianne Ruel, Les Chrétiens et la danse dans la France moderne: XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle (Paris:  Champion, 2006), esp. ch. 3; Marie-​Joëlle Louison-​Lassablière, Feuillets pour Terpsichore (Paris:  L’Harmattan, 2007); Louison-​Lassablière, “La Polémique religieuse sur la danse aux XVI et XVIIe siècles,” in Les Fruits de la dissension religieuse: Fin XIVe-​début XVIIIe siècles: travaux de l'upres-​a CNRSs 5037, ed. Michèle Clément (Saint-​Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-​Étienne, 1998), 223–​ 36; Louison-​Lassablière, “La Thèse Calviniste dans la polémique de la danse, étude du Traité des danses (1579) de Lambert Daneau,” in La Bible et ses raisons: Diffusion et distorsions du discours religieux, XIVe siècle-​XVIIe siècle, ed. Gérard Gros (Saint-​ Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-​Étienne, 1996), 127–​46. 3. Ann Wagner, Adversaries of Dance:  From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 4. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, in The Ship of Fools, trans. Edwin Zeydel (New  York:  Dover Publications, 1944), esp. 61–​62, 97, 119, 204. One of Albrecht Dürer’s accompanying illustrations shows the dancers adoring the golden calf. 5. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies:  Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991); Brian Levack, The Witch-​ Hunt in Early Modern Europe (New  York:  Routledge, 2006), esp. p.  9–​10, 30, 41, 52, 57, 145, 184, 303; Thomas Robischaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg:  Murder in a German Village (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), esp. 32, 160, 164, 167, 170, 176, 295–​96, 299, 314; Margaret Murray, The Witch-​ Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology (Minneapolis: Filiquarian, 2007), esp. 90, 155, 159–​60, 189, 191, 193, 197–​98, 203, 214, 278, 282; Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–​1500 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ch. 7; Laura Stokes, “Toward the Witch Craze,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 577; Seth Stewart Williams, “[They Dance]: Collaborative Authorship and Dance in Macbeth,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, ed. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 247; Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 66–​69; Jim Hoskins, The Dances of Shakespeare (New  York:  Routledge, 2005), 2, 89, 92; Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 188–​ 193, 198–​99; Michael Bailey, “Nocturnal Journeys and Ritual Dances in Bernardino of Siena,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 13:1 (2013): 4–​17; Brett Hirsch, “Hornpipes and Disordered Dancing in The Late Lancashire Witches: A Reel Crux?” Early Theatre 16:1 (2013): 139–​49. 6. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons:  Où il est amplement traité des sorciers et de la sorcellerie, in On the Inconstancy of Witches:  Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons (1612), ed. Gerhild Williams, trans. Williams and Harriet Stone (Tempe:  Arizona

362  notes to pages 227–228 Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006); For the French original see Feuillets pour Terpsichore, 84–​86. 7. For a study on the motif of witchcraft in early ballet, see VK Preston, “‘How Do I  Touch This Text?’ Or, the Interdisciplines Between:  Dance and Theater in the Early Modern Archives,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-​Graves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56–​78. 8. Paul Scolieri, Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); compare with Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 9. Domenico da Piacenza, Il De Arte Saltandi et Choreas Ducendi di Domenico da Piacenza:  Edizione e Commento, ed. Patrizia Procopio (Ravenna:  Longo, 2014); Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, De Pratica seu Arte Tripudii:  On the Practice or Art of Dancing, ed. Barbara Sparti (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1993); Margaret Roe, Il Ballarino: Cascarde (Margaret Roe, 2009); Antonio Cornazzano, The Book on the Art of Dancing, trans. Madeleine Inglehearn (London: Dance Books, 1981); Fabritio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of Nobiltà di Dame, trans. Julia Sutton (New York: Dover Publications, 1986); Fifteenth-​Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza, ed. A.  William Smith (Hillsdale:  Pendragon Press, 1995); Ingrid Brainard, “The Role of the Dancing Master in Fifteenth Century Courtly Society,” Fifteenth-​Century Studies 2 (1979): 21–​44; Timothy McGee, “Dancing Masters and the Medici Court in the Fifteenth Century,” Studi Musicali 17:2 (1988): 202–​24; Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004); Nevile, “Dance Rehearsal Practices in Early Modern Court Spectacles,” Parergon 28:1 (2011): 135–​53; Barbara Sparti, “The Function and Status of Dance in the 15th-​Century Italian Courts,” in Of, By, and For the People:  Conference Proceedings, Society for Dance History Scholars, 11–​13 June, 1993 (Riverside, California: Society of Dance History Scholars, 1993), 221–​33; Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), ch. 1; Margaret McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 9; Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416–​1589) (Birmingham:  Summa Publications, 1986); Katherine McGinnis, “Milan and the Development and Dissemination of Il ballo nobile: Lombardy as the Terpsichorean Treasury for Early Modern European Courts,” Quidditas 20 (1999): 155–​71. 10. Stephen Kolsky, “Graceful Performances:  The Social and Political Context of Music and Dance in the Cortegiano,” Italian Studies 53 (1998):  1–​19; Jennifer Nevile, “‘Certain Sweet Movements’: The Development of the Concept of Grace in Fifteenth-​Century Italian Dance and Painting,” Dance Research 9:1 (1991):  3–​12; Sharon Fermor, Studies in the Depiction of the Moving Figure in Italian Renaissance Art, Art Criticism and Dance Theory (Ph.D.  diss., University of London, 1990); Fermor, “Movement and Gender in Sixteenth-​Century Italian Painting,” in The Body Imaged:  The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen

notes to pages 228–229  363 Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 129–​45; Mark Franko, “Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse: The Kinesis of Bonne Grace,” in Persons in Groups:  Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), 55–​66; Barbara Sparti, “Humanism and the Arts: Parallels between Alberti’s On Painting and Guglielmo Ebreo’s On . . . Dancing,” in Art and Music in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, ed. Katherine McIver (Burlington:  Ashgate, 2003), 173–​ 92. See also Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, in The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New  York:  Penguin Books, 1967); Georges Didi-​Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2:3 (2003): 275–​89; Margaret McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, 18. 11. For a study on Renaissance dance and civility, see Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, ch. 3. 12. Soame Jenyns, The Art of Dancing: A Poem in Three Cantos, ed. Anne Cottis (London: Dance Books, 1978), 31; see also Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London: Routledge, 2011), 31. 13. Certain early modern texts used the cosmic dance motif, but often to express civic, rather than religious, harmony, e.g., Sir John Davies, Orchestra: Or a Poeme of Dauncing; Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. Interestingly, Barbara Ravelhofer notes that in early modern dance, the prime mover of the cosmic dance was now the monarch, not God, see The Early Stuart Masque, 102–​103. 14. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World:  A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1997). According to Gauchet: “Religion’s demise is not to be ascertained by declining belief, but by the extent of the human-​social universe’s restructuring,” 3. Aligning medieval dance with theories of enchantment does not, however, imply that dance in modernity could not assume a religious or metaphorical sensibility. Historically speaking, dance played an increasingly marginal role in the Christian liturgy and religious life from the sixteenth century onward. See also Marianne Ruel Robins, “Dancing, Morality and the Religious Origins of Secularization in France, 1500–​1650,” European Drama and Performance Studies 8 (2017): 115–​42. 15. E.g., Anon., Apologie de la iuenesse, sur le fait et honneste recreation des danses: Contre les calomnies de ceux qui blasment (Anvers: Grégoire Balthasar, 1572), Bibliothèque Mazarine 8–​40909–​11; Claude-​François Ménestrier, Des Ballets anciens et modernes, Selon les régles du théâtre (Paris:  Guignard, 1682), BNF Ars 8-​BL-​14693; Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography, trans. Mary Evans (New York: Dover Publications, 1967); Anne Wéry, La Danse écartelée, 316–​19, 333–​34, 340; Feuillets pour Terpsichore, 33–​ 34. See also Judith Rock, Terpsichore at Louis-​le-​Grand, Baroque Dance on the Jesuit Stage in Paris (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996). 16. David Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Arthur McLendon, “ ‘Leap and Shout, Ye Living Building!’:  Ritual Performance and Architectural Collaboration in Early Shaker Meetinghouses,” Building and

364  notes to pages 229–230 Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 20:2 (2013): 48–​76; C. Allyn Russell, “The Rise and Decline of the Shakers,” New York History 49:1 (1968): 29–​55. 17. Marilyn Daniels, The Dance in Christianity: A History of Religious Dance Through the Ages (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1981), ch. 7; Michelle Summers, “Forbidden Altars:  U.S. Liturgical Dance after the Second Vatican Council,” in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies: Dancing Spaces, ed. Ying Zhu and Alexis Weisbrod (Birmingham: Society of Dance History Scholars, 2013), 10–​13. For robust examples of contemporary Christian dance, see Claire Maria Chambers Blackstock, “The Rhetoric of Ritual:  Transformation as Revelation and Congregational Liturgical Dance as Performance Theory,” Performance Research 13:3 (2008): 100–​108; Omri Elisha, “Dancing the Word:  Techniques of Embodied Authority among Christian Praise Dancers in New  York City,” American Ethnologist 45:3 (2018):  379–​ 91; Elisha, “Proximations of Public Religion:  Worship, Spiritual Warfare, and the Ritualization of Christian Dance,” American Anthropologist 119:1 (2017):  73–​85; Vivia Kay Kieswetter, “ ‘It Shows on Your Face’: The Gaze as Transformative Force in a Presbyterian Liturgical Dance Troupe,” Dance Chronicle 35:3 (2012): 338–​59; Katrien Pype, “Dancing for God or the Devil: Pentecostal Discourse on Popular Dance in Kinshasa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 36:3/​4 (2006): 296–​318; John Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological, and Practical Handbook (London: SCM, 1984), ch. 7–​9; Doug Adams, Congregational Dancing in Christian Worship (Austin:  Sharing Company, 1980); Cala DeSola, The Spirit Moves: A Handbook of Dance and Prayer (Austin:  Sharing Company, 1986); Kimerer LaMothe, “Passionate Madonna:  The Christian Turn of American Dancer Ruth St. Denis,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66:4 (1998):  747–​69; Deidre Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin:  Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Michelle Summers, “Pole Dancing for Jesus: The Healthy, the Holy, and the Sexy,” Congress on Research in Dance annual conference, University of New Mexico, November 2012; Emily Wright “Producing Christian Docility:  The Female Body in Contemporary American Evangelical Dance,” Journal of Dance, Movement, and Spiritualities 1:2 (2014): 295–​310; Julie Kerr-​Berry, “Praise Dance: An Interview with Reverend Dr. Albirda Rose-​Eberhardt,” Journal of Dance Education 8:2 (2008): 56–​ 61. It should be noted that, in general, African American congregations are more tolerant of liturgical dance. For a filmic representation of African American liturgical dance, see Chi-​Raq, dir. Spike Lee (Amazon Studios, 2015). 18. From a review of the ballet La Tempête (1834), cited in Gautier on Dance, trans. and ed. Ivor Guest (London: Dance Books, 1986), 15–​16, 53; Guest, Fanny Elssler: The Pagan Ballerina (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), 81; Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 61–​62; Lynn Garafola, “Introduction,” in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Garafola (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 6; Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View: Elssler and Taglioni Were 19th-​Century Superstars,” New York Times, May 6, 1984.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abelard, Peter, 81, 84, 116–​17, 141 Adelheit von Hiltergarthausen, 159–​60 Alan of Lille, 116 Albright, Ann Cooper, 7–​8 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Ambrose commentary on Luke, 16, 38 on David’s dance, 32–​33, 134–​35 on the myth of the labyrinth, 100 on pagan spectacle, 81 on Salome’s dance, 41–​42 Andrea da Firenze, 136–​37 Andrew of Crete, 41–​42 Angela of Foligno, 149–​50 angels, dancing in Antonio Vite’s fresco of St. Francis in glory,  73–​74 in the Apocalypse of Isabella of France,  144–​46 in Dante’s Paradiso, 199–​200,  202–​3 and female mystics, 49, 151–​52, 154–​55,  161–​63 In the Innsbruck Ascension of Mary Play, 91 In Pseudo-​Bonaventure’s Dieta Salutis, 73 Anselm of Canterbury, 43 anti-​Semitism, see Jews Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 21–​22 Arcangeli, Alessandro, 6–​7, 105, 112 Ardens, Radulfus, 42–​43 Arthurian literature, 86–​87, 176, 185–​86, 188, 193–​96, 197 Augustine on bears, 193–​96 on classical performance culture, 2,  79–​81 on dancing on the Sabbath, 121–​22

on David as signifier of Christ, 36 on grace, 5 on martyr celebrations, 60–​61 on the tympanum (timbrel), 15–​16 Auslander, Philip, 7–​8 ballet, 5, 66, 160, 163, 218, 233–​34, 235, 236, 242–​43n2, 268–​69n86, 297n119, 300n136, 362n7 Bartlett, Robert, 3–​4, 65 Bataille, Georges, 31 Bate, Henri, 189–​91 Bede,  110–​11 Bele Aeliz,  127–​29 Beleth, Jean, 82–​84 Bériou, Nicole, 115 Bernardino of Siena, 136–​37 Bernard of Clairvaux, 116–​17, 147–​49 Bernhard of Angers, 64–​65 Bible moralisée, 18–​19,  36–​38 Birk, Sandow, 305n171 Blannbekin, Agnes, 152–​55 Bonaventure, 66, 68, 69–​70, 73, 74–​75, 118 Bonaventure, Pseudo-​, 73 Botticelli, Sandro, 5 Bourcier, Paul, 6 Bourdieu, Pierre, 179–​80 Bozon, Nicolas, 126–​27 Bridget of Sweden, 150–​52, 164–​65 Bromyard, John, 121–​22, 212 Brown, Peter, 49, 52–​53 Bynum, Caroline, 7, 143, 220–​21 Byzantine studies, 6 Caciola, Nancy, 7 Carmina Burana, 177, 184–​85, 336n86 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 54, 83–​84,  107–​10

366 Index Camille, Michael, 17, 56 Cana, wedding at, 120, 149 caritas in Dante, 9, 138, 197 and female mystics, 158 and Miriam’s dance, 15–​16 and Sainte Foy’s reliquary, 52 carole, 4–​5, 126, 149, 168, 175–​86 Cassiodorus,  15–​16 Catherine of Alexandria, 50 Catherine of Siena, 149–​50 Chaganti, Seeta, 6–​7 Chailley, Jacques, 86 Chesterton, G. K., 70–​71 Chi-​raq, 363–​64n16 choreomania,  208–​18 Christina the Astonishing, 166–​68 Christine von Stommeln, 83–​84,  169–​71 Chrysologus, Peter, 42, 48 Chrysostom, John Barlaam and Josaphat,  72–​73 on classical performance culture, 2, 60–​61,  81 on David’s dance, 29–​30 on Salome, 41–​42, 92–​94 on weddings, 149 Ci Nous Dit, 22–​23, 27, 120–​27 Cixous, Hélène, 142–​43 Clare of Assisi, 166 Clément, Catherine, 142–​43 Clement of Alexandria, 97 Colbek, dancers of, 106–​7, 212 corporeal turn, 8–​9 Cyprianus, Pseudo-​,  29–​30

demonic possession, 163, 169–​71, 209, 210–​12. See also demons demons as agents of punishment, 111–​12, 113–​14, 147–​49, 188, 226 deceiving dancers, 105, 109, 113, 168 manipulating dancers, 110–​11, 122–​24,  210–​12 See also demonic possession; devils Denery, Dallas, 232 de Remi, Philippe, 56 devils as agents of punishment, 83–​84, 91, 96, 127–​28, 132, 203 dancing,  91–​92 directing dance, 122–​24 devil, the as agent of punishment, 105 associated with dance, 2, 92–​94, 188 dancing, 94–​95,  169–​71 and dancing women, 43, 112–​13, 115–​16, 149, 163 deceiving dancers, 212 as orchestrator of dance, 109 as originator of dance, 110–​11 di Bonaiuto, Andrea, 136–​37 Dietl, Cora, 91 Dionysius, Pseudo-​, 199 Dorothea of Montau, 149–​50 Douce, Francis, 78–​79 Douceline, 160 drama, Christian, 78–​79, 88–​96. See also theater, classical Dronke, Peter, 95–​96 Durand, Guillaume, 85–​86

dance mania, 208–​18 Dance Studies, 7–​8 Daniel de Paris, 193 danse macabre, 210, 218–​32 Dante Fiore, 175 Paradiso, 17, 48, 175, 197–​206 Purgatorio, 106, 129–​40, 141 David, dance of, 28–​40, 41–​42, 43–​46, 129–​30,  133–​35 death, dance of, 210, 218–​32 de Meun, Jean, 171–​73, 174, 175, 186–​96

Ebner, Christine, 159 Ebner, Margareta, 161 Elisabeth von Kirchberg, 159 Elizabeth of Hungary, 149–​50 Elliott, Dyan, 7 Elssler, Fanny, 236 Étienne de Bourbon, 63–​64, 110–​12 Fassbender, Birgit, 6 figura, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23–​24, 28–​29, 30–​31, 32, 40, 47 Florence Baptistery, 17

Index  367 Folques de Marseille, 179, 181–​82 Foster, Susan, 155–​56 Foucault, Michel, 105 Foy, Sainte, 49–​67 Francesca of Rome, 149–​50 Francis of Assisi, 49–​50, 66–​76 Franko, Mark, 7–​8 Fricke, Beate, 53–​54 Froissart, Jean, 215–​17 Gautier of Orléans, 46 Gelber, Hester, 66 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 186 Gerson, Jean, 188, 218–​20 Gertrude of Helfta, 165 Gertsman, Elina, 6–​7, 220, 222, 223, 232 Getty Apocalypse, 23–​24 Ghiberti Doors, 17 Girard, René, 41 Glossa Ordinaria, 15–​16, 31–​32, 38 Gobi, Jean, 132–​33 golden calf, 14, 21–​28, 120 Gothic art, 17 Gower, John, 168–​69 Grasser, Erasmus, 217–​18 Gregory of Nazianzus on classical performance culture, 81 on Salome’s dance, 41–​42 Gregory the Great, 30–​31, 68–​69 Grocheio, Johannes de, 191 Guilcher, Jean-​Michel, 6 Guilcher, Yves, 6 Guillaume de Lorris, 175–​86 Hadewijch of Brabant, 156 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 147–​49, 168–​69 Harris, Max, 95–​96 heaven, dance in, 4 in Jean de Meun, 175, 187–​88 in liturgical drama, 91 at Mary’s coronation, 18–​20 in mystical visions, 157, 161–​63, 165 in Pseudo-​Bonaventure,  73–​74 in the Rothschild Canticles, 147–​49 See also angels, dancing Herolt, Johannes, 116 Hildegard von Bingen, 49, 91, 149–​50, 167 Hincmar of Rheims, 193–​96

Holbein the Younger, Hans, 232 Honorius of Autun, 16–​17, 43, 81 hours, books of, 88, 91–​92, 224–​26 Humbert of Romans, 107, 193–​96 idolatry dance as corrective to, 14–​15, 16 dance associated with, 14, 21–​28, 79–​81, 111, 114, 233 images,  53–​54 Ingrassia, Catherine, 6 Irigaray, Luce, 142–​43 Isar, Nicoletta, 6 Isidore of Seville on classical performance culture, 2, 81 on the myth of the labyrinth, 100 Jacobus de Voragine, 19–​20, 50, 150 Jacopone da Todi, 130–​32 Jaeger, Stephen, 158 James le Palmer, 43–​46 James of the Marches, 27, 121–​22, 136–​37 James, William, 155, 157 Jaques de Vitry, 71–​73, 127–​28, 182–​83 Jean d’Outremeuse, 209–​10 Jerome, 38, 43 Jews and Christianization of David’s dance, 36–​38,  39–​40 and golden calf, 25–​26 in Passion plays, 91–​92 John of Erfurt, 119 John of Salisbury, 81 Juvencus,  41–​42 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 38–​39 Kempe, Margery, 161 Knäble, Philip, 6 Kölbigk, Dancers of, see Colbek, Dancers of Konrad of Waldhausen, 27–​28 Kristeva, Julia, 142–​43 labyrinths,  96–​102 Langton, Stephen, Pseudo-​, 127–​29 Largier, Niklaus, 1 Le Fèvre, Jean, 221, 228 Le Goff, Jacques, 82, 107

368 Index Lee, Spike, 363–​64n16 Lepecki, André, 7–​8 Lewis, Gertrud, 6, 159 liturgical dance, 56, 77 Lombard, Peter, 117–​19 Long, Jane, 70 lust, 41, 43–​46, 81–​82, 115–​16, 136–​37, 188, 191 Lutgard of Awyières, 147 Magnus, Albertus, 118–​19 Marchant, Guyot, 221–​22, 227 Margaret of Cortona, 149–​50, 169–​71 Marie d’Oignies, 60, 143–​44, 164–​65 Mary, Virgin Bele Aelis as, 128–​29 coronation of, 19–​20 in Dante, 202–​3 Miriam as precursor to, 14–​15, 18–​20 in mystical visions, 150–​52, 155, 164, 166 and Sainte Foy, 52–​53 Matelda,  135–​39 Mauss, Marcel, 181 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 164 Mechthild von Magdeburg, 156–​58, 164–​65 Mews, Constant, 6, 82–​83 Michault, Pierre, 228–​32 Miller, James, 5–​6 Milo of Saint-​Amand, 42 Miriam, dance of, 13, 14–​20, 118–​19 Morrison, Tessa, 99 Moses, dance of, 25 Mullally, Robert, 6 Musa of Rome, 50 mystics and mysticism, 3, 4, 9, 75, 99, 141, 207

paganism in Christian polemic against dance, 2, 24–​25, 78–​81, 97, 113 integrated into Christian performance, 81–​83,  96–​102 in interpretation of David’s dance, 29–​30 in interpretation of Salome’s dance, 40, 41–​42,  47 represented in Christian drama, 91–​94 Page, Christopher, 6, 65, 118–​19, 182–​83 pantomime Christian, 70, 147 courtly,  217–​18 Roman, 2, 5–​6, 29–​30, 42–​43, 81 Paracelsus, 208, 218 passion plays, 91–​92, 94–​95 Peire de Corbian, 86–​88 Pentcheva, Bissera, 6 Peraldus, Guillaume, 27, 110, 115, 121–​22, 133, 178 Performance Studies, 7–​8 penitence before death, 166, 220, 226 in Dante’s Purgatorio, 106 and David’s dance, 32–​33 and Miriam’s dance, 14, 15–​16 and pilgrimages, 213 role of dance in, 3, 8–​9, 105 perichoresis,  157–​58 phantasmology, 334n70 pilgrim dances, 62–​64 Pintoin, Michel, 215–​17 Pita, Arthur, 255–​56n137 pole-​dancing, 305n171

Neo-​Platonism, 99, 199, 273n1 Newman, Barbara, 7 Nicholas de Bayard, 133 Nikephoros Kallistos, 41–​42 Notke, Bernt, 223, 226

Radegunde, Saint, 50 Radulphus de Rivo, 211–​12 Rohmann, Gregor, 6–​7, 209, 212–​13 Rolle, Richard, 164 Romance of the Rose, The, 174 Rothschild Canticles, 144–​46, 147–​49,  168–​69 Rutebeuf, 50, 192–​93

Oosterwijk, Sophie, 220 Ordinary Gloss. See Glossa Ordinaria Origen,  41–​42 Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, 24–​25

Sachs, Curt, 99 Saint Stephen, feast of, 84, 86 Salome, dance of, 13, 14, 40–​48, 70, 120,  205–​6

Index  369 Satan, see devil, the Schmitt, Jean-​Claude, 4, 7, 107, 143,  179–​80 Schneider, Rebecca, 7–​8 secular dance, 4–​5, 115, 174, 214–​15 Sheingorn, Pamela, 64–​65 Sicard of Cremona, 84–​86 Siegel, Marcia, 7–​8 Silen, Karen, 6 Sophie von Rheinfelden, 166 spectacles, classical, 29–​30, 41–​42, 60–​61, 78–​81, 97. See also theater, classical Stephen, Saint, 56. See also Saint Stephen, feast of Streng, Frederick, 157 strip club, 305n171 Suso, Henry, 163–​64 Taglioni, Marie, 236 Taves, Ann, 167 Taylor, Diana, 7–​8 Taylor, Jane, 220 Tertullian on classical performance culture, 2, 81 on David’s dance, 81 on idolatry, 21 on penitence, 116–​17 theater, classical, 29–​30, 79–​81. See also drama, Christian; spectacles, classical Thomas de Cantimpré, 113–​15, 120, 166–​67 Thomas of Celano, 66, 67–​69, 74 Three Girls, The,  192–​93 troubadours, 9, 65, 70, 86–​87, 174–​86

Utrecht Psalter, 54–​56 Vézelay Abbey, 22 Vidal, Raimon, 182–​83 Vite, Antonio, 73–​75 Vitus, Saint, 58, 213 von Reuenthal, Neidhart, 183–​84 Wace, 186 Warton, Thomas, 78–​79 Webb, Ruth, 5–​6 Weston, Jessie, 176 William of Auvergne, 85–​86, 94 William of Waddington, 42–​43, 115 witchcraft, 40, 47, 109, 233–​34 Wittig, Monique, 142–​43 women associated with sinful dance, 81, 106–​7, 110–​11, 112–​14,  115–​16 Beatrice, 136–​37,  138–​40 and caroles, 178 and choreomania, 211 daughters of Shiloh, 168 Mary Magdalene, 94–​95 Mary, Virgin, see Mary, Virgin Matelda,  135–​39 Miriam, 13, 14–​20, 118–​19 mystics, 141 penitents, 124 Salome, 13, 14, 40–​48, 70, 120, 205–​6 Wright, Craig, 101 Zimmermann, Julia, 6