Dance in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

The final chapter documents the demise of sacred dance at the end of the Middle Ages, c.1350–1450. Focusing on dance mania and the dance of death, it shows how dance gradually became associated with decadent and morbid, rather than religious and heavenly, motifs. The first section demonstrates how the choreomania (dance mania) epidemics of France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland befuddled clerics and tested the limits of legitimate dance. The second section focuses on the danse macabre, or the dance of death, which was seemingly related to the plague. With its penchant for self-transcendence, dance probed the realm of the unknown. By the sixteenth century, the religious tenor of the dance of death movement began to erode. This shift coincided with the professionalization and secularization of courtly dance in the Western world.