Les Chrétiens et la danse dans la France moderne

Dancing generated some important political and religious debates in the early modern france. This work analyzes those debates, beginning with their precedents in medieval sermons and in the danse macabre. During the sixteenth century, the quarrel became confessional in nature, as the rejection of dancing became a means to define the protestant community. Over the next two centuries, that confessional dimension of the debate intersected with complex social and cultural trajectories. Differing attitudes toward dance often reflected contrary understandings of the body. For the courtly tradition, the body offered the best means to literally incorporate signs of high birth and proper education and training. For many religious authorities, the body was a veil rather than a telling sign. While the debates about courtly or elite dancing raged, a movement to repress popular dancing swept across the kingdom. Authorities of both church and state argued that dancing was contrary to social and moral order. It was an occasion for unruly social gatherings, and therefore violence, as well as an occasion for sexual encounters, and therefore promiscuity. The repressive measures directed against dancing did not however succeed in ridding the french of their ingrained habits. Dancing continued to function as a ritual that reflected, enhanced and projected visions of the social order within rural communities. As a form of courtship, it also aided the social body in its need to reproduce itself. Finally, dancing as religious ritual expressed an inclusive understanding of the realms of the living and the dead, and a familiarity with god and the saints that opponents of dance read as irreverence. Indeed, it was on the latter front, the attempt to convince its flock that dancing was irreverent and inappropriate for worship, that the church was perhaps most successful. And that very success deprived the church from one its most significant religious rituals

Art · Political science · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

• Women and Consistorial Discipline

  Open Access•Judith P Meyer, Judith Meyer•Church History•2019

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