Between Cloister and Court, Virtue and Virtuosity: Gestural Discourse in Medieval Monastic Literature and Early Modern Dance

Abstract

Scholars of Early Modern dance treatises have long recognized the crucial connection in these texts between exterior manifestations of courtly behavior and interior affects. The dancing courtier is to display a virtuosic correspondence between physical and subjective grace, elegance, and virtue. Among the historical sources for this correlation are overlooked texts from twelfth-century reform movements within European monasticism. This essay examines one such treatise, Hugh of St. Victor’s De institutione novitiorum (On the Instruction of Novices), as a key source for gestural theory, representing the elite monastic body as a prototype of the Early Modern courtier.