Even Jove sometimes nods

Abstract

Translators and editors of early dance instruction books face a formidable task. Anyone who has ever tried knows this only too well. One has to be familiar with the language of the manual as such. One has to be alert to irregularities of spelling, since most European countries did not codify their written words until the sixteenth century or later. Punctuation in the fifteenth-century manuscripts and even more so in the printed books of the late sixteenth century can be puzzling indeed, yet on its proper interpretation the meaning of an entire passage or directive may depend. The terminology for both the dance and the music is often ambiguous (tempo and misura are two cases in point), there are idiosyncrasies of style in the writings of the dancing masters, dialects make themselves felt-the list goes on and on.1 No translator and/or editor in modern times has taken lightly the task of converting an Italian or French text about dancing into English. All deserve our collective thanks for making available precious documents that without their labors would not be accessible to the interested reader who may be lacking in viable foreign language skills. However, for anyone who works with dance manuals either as a theorist or for the purposes of dance reconstruction, there comes a time when the original text must be consulted, to confirm a passage that arouses one's curiosity or to obtain the exact wording of a step