Historical scholarship on dance faces numerous obstacles, not least of which is the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach that accommodates the varied roles of this important cultural practice. In this volume, Professor Lynneth Miller Renberg addresses the methodological need for interdisciplinarity by integrating dance studies, religious studies, gender studies, and parish studies, situating her examination of dance geographically within England and chronologically between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. What Renberg offers is a deep dive into sermon literature and preaching as an avenue for better understanding the church's attitude toward dance and dancers during a period of cultural foment and religious reformations. The compiled sermons are tremendously interesting for how they reflect clerical concerns around dance; notably, the focus is not on uncovering the “real” dances or dance practices taking place in English parishes among laity, but rather the role of dance as a “discursive rhetorical construct” (11) within the context of parish preaching. Consequently, Renberg shows the concerns of clerics and preachers were often “more about perceived problems and concerns than problematic practices. Sermons against dance may inadvertently reveal certain realities of dance performance, but they do not accurately represent the reality of parish community and practice” (191).
Renberg's central argument rests on the treatment of dance as an adiaphora by premodern and early modern preachers in England (a matter on which several perspectives could be legitimately taken; 4), which enabled dance to be differently associated with ideas around theology and gender over time. As Renberg argues, “the potential holiness allowed to both dance and women shifted between 1300 and 1600” (6), with gender becoming more deeply connected to dance as a sacrilegious practice over hundreds of years: essentially, dance is at first potentially, but not unequivocally, problematic, primarily tied to ideas around sacrilege and the protection of sacred time and space. Over time dance becomes linked to the gendered, sexualized, and therefore sacrilegious bodies of women dancers. Women, Dance and Parish Religion represents a new and welcome contribution within dance historical research, bringing to light a textual archive never before mined for what it tells us about premodern and early modern attitudes toward dance, gender, and religion.
The book takes shape chronologically through an introduction, conclusion, and six chapters. The introduction constructs the theoretical frameworks employed within the body of the book around gender and its performance, parish religion and audiences, and reformations. Chapter 1 focuses on the background offered by religious studies and history, detailing Renberg's approach to religion across many centuries, the lay audiences for sermons, and the tension between continuity and change in relation to dance and gender. Chapters 2 and 3 form a pair, beginning with the exemplum of the carolers of Kölbigk in Chapter 2 and the emphasis of the church on protecting sacred spaces from sacrilege. Chapter 3 continues the theme of sacrilege but focused on sacred time, the keeping of the sabbath, and an understudied link between witchcraft, women, and dance. Chapters 4 and 5 treat the biblical story of Salome first from a premodern then an early modern perspective to show how Salome's body becomes increasingly sexualized as she dances through time. Chapter 6 narrows in on the early modern context and on the performance of gender through dance, with an emphasis on the feminization and sexualization of dance practices. Renberg introduces masculinity and effeminacy in relation to dance and dancers in this chapter. A short conclusion ties the themes of the book together and highlights the patterns emerging from the corpus of texts under consideration, while looking ahead to observe how dance as a “mechanism of misogyny” (4 and 192) continues into the twenty-first century.
One challenging aspect of Renberg's study is how sermons show both continuity and change in terms of how dance was treated by the church; as she writes, “despite dramatic theological differences and a massive chronological span, considering the years between 1200 and 1600 in toto is an exercise that highlights more commonalities than differences” (49). This tension arises repeatedly throughout the book. For instance, one of the major interventions Renberg makes is to assert the increasingly gendered identity of dance as a sexual transgression, leading to a survey of early modern sermons that uniformly identify (dancing) women as the source of all sin and evil. Moreover, Renberg notes that the ambiguous nature of dance in premodern sermons becomes far less ambiguous and far more negative in the early modern context, with rare exceptions tied to the dancing of the biblical David. Overall, Renberg convincingly argues her thesis that “attempts at eliminating sacrilegious behavior and reforming the church led to growing concern about both dancing and female bodies” (9). The sermons and other archival and historical texts Renberg draws upon unquestionably reveal this shift taking place against the landscape of relatively continuous church reform and a desire to protect the true faith, sacred time, sacred spaces, and, indeed, male bodies.
In addition to sermons, other texts appear in meaningful ways, including court cases, vernacular literature like conduct books, and parish records. Usefully, Renberg includes a list of early modern sermon authors taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (195–205), a timeline for the period under question (207–210), and an extensive subdivided bibliography. A wealth of material is found between these pages, and one senses Renberg is holding back from citing even more than she already does. Although included, the index falls short in length and depth with several absent key terms, likely the fault of the indexer and not the author. Finally, the cover design is lovely and makes a reader want to see images associated with narratives in the book—depictions exist in English sources of Salome dancing, for instance, which could have been included in Chapter 4 or 5. This absence, too, is likely due to limitations placed on the author by the publisher.
