JENNIFER NEVILE. The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 247. $39.95

Abstract

It can prove to be a difficult mental arabesque to gather a previously excluded topic into the realm of intellectual discourse, and so it is with this book. Here, musicologist Jennifer Nevile presents to the reader the first historical monograph on the subject of court dance in fifteenth-century Italy, one that seeks to link this profoundly physical and therefore morally suspect art form to the studia humanitatis as a heretofore unappreciated and even ignored dimension of humanist erudition. Her primary sources include the earliest surviving written records concerning dance, which date from the mid-1440s to the mid-1460s and were set down in vernacular Italian. Their authors, Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano, and Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, were all celebrated maestri di ballo or dance masters, and their treatises not only include compilations of the choreography of contemporary structured dances, but also develop a specialized vocabulary of dance terminology and a tentative philosophical basis for the elevation of dance from a primarily physical activity to that of an intellectual and even moral display for the elites of society. Terms such as misura, maniera, and aiere took on new meaning when associated with the controlled movements of formal dance movement (pp. 77–85). Domenico worked primarily at the Este court in Ferrara, Cornazano was from “minor nobility” (p. 13) in Piacenza and educated in law at the University of Siena before finding his mestiere in dance at the northern city courts, while Guglielmo Ebreo was kept busy teaching dance in Milan and Venice, where he was knighted in 1469 by the Holy Roman Emperor (p. 14). Both Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo acknowledged Domenico as their teacher.