I have long been drawn to medieval dance and dance music, even though dance historians and musicologists alike freely admit that premodern dance is confoundingly elusive as well as contentious. It’s not so much that there’s disagreement about the existence of dance, just that we have few ideas (and sometimes conflicting ones!) about how, why, and to what music people danced.

Musicologists in particular tend to think about medieval dance from two perspectives—vocal versus instrumental dance music. Although this distinction might not always be important, for me it is the vocal dance music that has long been compelling, and in fact was the inspiration for my doctoral work and my forthcoming book. Although I disagree in my book with some previous assessments of Latin dance songs in particular, there is no doubt in my mind that people in medieval Europe danced, and sometimes they also sang while they danced!

I continue to think about and research medieval dance and dance music, so it was a pleasure to be asked to update and revise Timothy McGee’s excellent entry in the Oxford Bibliographies series for Medieval Studies (an amazing resource if you don’t know about it already, although access for full entries is subscription based). It was so great to dive into dance and music scholarship of the last decade or so, and expand the entry to include gender, dance in Judaism and Islam, choreomania, and iconography, among other new material. The newly revised and expanded entry is available here; please reach out to me if you don’t have institutional access!

For the Tuesday Tune this week, here’s a song that has a fascinating history (or better, historiography!) as a Latin dance song, Fidelium sonet vox sobri, sung by Brigitte Lesne with Discantus.