What we know of dance in the Middle Ages is tantalisingly small. It comes from rare illustrations in art and literature, and from music.

Paintings show circles or lines of dancers. Poetry speaks of singing and dancing in the same breath; and so do chronicles, which record its incidence on occasions of festival. Music brings us exciting rhythms and unusual phrasing.

We know the names: carole (circle and line dances, later to be called branle and farandole); estampie, thought to be the first solo couple dance; saltarello, trotto, istampitta, ductia. Of steps, body movements, dramatic expression, and partner interaction – the stuff of today’s dancing – we have nothing.

If we must dance – and, compelled by the music, some of us must – we have to invent; but not without first trying to think ourselves into the period.

Filling in the background with what we can learn of manners, dress and customs, and remembering what we know of later innovations and inherent characteristics, we hope to discover the essence of mediaeval dancing.

Relying only on courtesy, deportment, a feeling for spatial pattern, and a real awareness of the music, such invented dances are found to be satisfying in unexpected ways: as therapy, as theatre, above all as training in the very fundamentals of dance. And, reassuringly, we find these turn out to be just such qualities as the dancing masters of the Italian Renaissance, the first serious Western writers about dance, strained to identify.

Emergence from the Dark Ages into feudalism; and the beginnings of nationhood.

The rise of the Papacy.

The troubadour ethic of Courtly Love.

Perspective in art; vernacular languages in literature; books replacing scrolls.

The use of arabic numerals in place of roman.

The development of experimental science; the widening of the known world.

                    P. Dixon Dances from the Courts of Europe, vol. 1 (Nonsuch/Eglinton Productions, 1999).

                    C. Sachs World History of the Dance (English version, New York, 1937; reprinted, 1963).

M. Wood Historical Dances (Twelfth to Nineteenth Century) (London, 1952; reprinted, London, 1982).

Reading: general

M. Bishop The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1971).

G. G. Coulton Medieval Panorama (Cambridge, 1938).

J. Evans Life in Medieval France (Oxford, 1925; 3rd ed., London, 1969).

J. Huizinga The Waning of the Middle Ages (English version, Harmondsworth, 1976).

E. Power (ed.) The Goodman of Paris (London, 1928).

E. Power Medieval People (London, 1924; 10th ed., 1963).

                    G. B. Shaw Preface to Saint Joan (London, 1924).