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More Than We Think: A New Approach to Medieval Religious Dance

Dance in the European Middle Ages is often studied in binary terms: sinful or holy, devil’s dance or dance of the cosmic harmony, Salome’s sacrilegious dance or King David’s doxological dance. But it can be understood in many different ways—and this is what Kathryn Dickason demonstrates with her latest book. Through compelling analyses of different manifestations of dance in religious contexts in the High and Late Middle Ages, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred shows how dance became a form of Christian piety. Dickason is a scholar interested in Western medieval Christianity. Her research explores topics connected to performance, embodiment, gender, and dance. However, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred is her first book that encompasses all these topics. While the topic of dance as a part of religious practice has been studied before, Dickason provides many more contexts and a new approach: analyzing dance as ritual. The main goal of the book is to prove that dance (understood in different ways) used to be an integral part of medieval religious life. Dickason starts from the statement that modern Christianity is “one of the few religions that excludes dancing from any integral part of its devotional program” (p. 2), then asks when and why this happened. In the introduction, Dickason briefly summarizes the current state of research on medieval dance, medieval music, performance, and body studies. She also enumerates various methodological approaches used in researching medieval dance and points out that, even using written sources of different kinds, we are not able to fully understand numerous forms of dance as artistic expression, nor, because of a lack of choreographic sources, can we reconstruct the dance (p. 4). Dickason emphasizes that modern definitions of dance are limited, and that they cannot capture the richness of pre-modern performative contexts.