Ghost Dancers

This chapter considers the role of dance in the cult of the saints, tracing the evolution of dance vis-à-vis sanctity and cultic worship. For some saints, dancing became part of their iconic image. Within the context of saintly devotion, dance helped to induce conversion, animate miracles, and promote social cohesion. Insights from performance theory help conceptualize the connection between death and dancing bodies. The first section explores the cult, relics, and reliquary of Sainte Foy, who imbued sacred dance with a significance that was at once regional and international, religious and political. The second section examines the hagiographies of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis—as a prancing preacher, jongleur saint, and living phantom—authorized a new spirituality that diverged from mainstream monasticism, yet bore the mark of apostolic, authentic piety.

Epilogue

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?”...

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....

Dance Typologies

The opening chapter explores the relationship between medieval biblical interpretation and dance. The Vulgate was the urtext by which medieval authorities developed and justified their ideas concerning dance and its place in Christianity. Biblical glosses, as well as visual representations of the Bible, constructed the archetypes of sinful and holy dancers, thereby creating influential paradigms of Christian dancing bodies. Moreover, these exegetical strategies reveal particular political underpinnings of late medieval theology, including anti-Judaism, sacred kingship, and crusader ideology. The first section examines interpretations of Miriam and her dance of praise. The second section focuses on interpretations of the dancers around the golden calf and their idolatry. The third section explores interpretations of the dance of David, including its foreshadowing of the Passion of Christ and bolstering of the Crusades. The last section scrutinizes interpretations of the dance of Salome through the perspectives of sacrilege and misogyny.

Romancing the Dance

This chapter addresses the relationship between religion and dance in popular, vernacular literature. While some scholars view secular and religious works as separate, unrelated phenomena, I demonstrate how medieval romances co-opted sacred dance motifs. In these texts, dance functioned as a ritual, deifying courtly love (including troubadour lyric) and conferring a sacred aura onto courtliness. The first section uses Guillaume de Lorris’s section of Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) to show how dance in romance championed aristocratic values (including the chivalry of medieval knights), the gift economy, and enchantment. The second section focuses on Jean de Meun’s section of Le Roman de la Rose. It shows how Jean co-opted the Rose’s dance content to critique the project of courtly love. The third section analyzes Dante’s poetry from the Paradiso (Paradise), in which the poeticization of dance enabled Dante to best express divine love.

Discipline and Redemption

This chapter examines dance from the perspective of medieval penitence. In a study of sermons, exempla, penitentials, treatises on vice and virtue, and moralizing literature, this chapter demonstrates how lay culture and clerical mentality informed one another. Together, they produced new discourses on dance that pivoted around intention and contrition, thereby opening a window on the medieval moral conscience. The first section examines pastoral sources that forged equations between dance and sin. While these pastoral sources always deemed dance as sinful, this section explains the variety of sins—including lust, pride, gluttony, and anti-sacramentality—that supposedly motivated dancers. The second section shifts to penitential and philosophical sources that reflect a growing sophistication concerning sin and agency. The third section considers how dance could represent or enact penitence. By analyzing Dante’s Purgatorio, it shows how the poet’s imaginative rendering of ritualized movement in purgatory inverted the pastoral paradigm.

Dance in the Late Middle Ages

The final chapter documents the demise of sacred dance at the end of the Middle Ages, c.1350–1450. Focusing on dance mania and the dance of death, it shows how dance gradually became associated with decadent and morbid, rather than religious and heavenly, motifs. The first section demonstrates how the choreomania (dance mania) epidemics of France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland befuddled clerics and tested the limits of legitimate dance. The second section focuses on the danse macabre, or the dance of death, which was seemingly related to the plague. With its penchant for self-transcendence, dance probed the realm of the unknown. By the sixteenth century, the religious tenor of the dance of death movement began to erode. This shift coincided with the professionalization and secularization of courtly dance in the Western world.

Partnering Divinity

This chapter investigates the use of dance in evoking and transmitting ineffable religious experience. While earlier chapters examined group dances performed in public, this chapter turns to more intimate or private performances within the mystic’s imagination. Focusing on female mystics and so-called brides of Christ (including saints, nuns, and beguines) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it reveals how these women created a new repertoire of choreography (dance-writing) that privileged the body and the imagination. Mystics’ dance language opened creative and subversive avenues to access the radical alterity of God. The first section analyzes the kinetic content of bridal mysticism. The second section takes a closer look at women’s own writings and the (de)privatization of performance. The choreography of intimacy marked a state of interiority and ecstasy; it manifested the privileged, personalized moment of encounter. The third section presents evidence for the gender politics of certain partnerships, in which women were victims of divine domination.

Dance of the Hours

This chapter demonstrates the formative role dance played in the Christianization of the liturgy and the sacralization of time. Using evidence from liturgical manuals, musical notation, and rituals, it traces how devotional choreography recuperated pagan motifs, impressed itself onto the regular rhythms of the liturgical calendar, and partook in the dance of the cosmos. In church dramas, dance exerted a didactic function, reinforcing the theme of Christian salvation alongside anti-Judaic rhetoric. The first section traces the authorization of liturgical dance in the Western Middle Ages. Through its ritualization of dance, the Western Church reinvented ancient rites within the discipline of the Latin liturgy. The second section illuminates the use of dance in liturgical drama. On the liturgical stage, the reenactment of Christian history offered a space for the ambivalence of dance to be worked out and re-signified. The third section offers a close reading of one specific liturgical dance ritual in Auxerre. This rite reconciled a pre-Christian myth with medieval eschatology and the Christian ordo.