In this new study that spans the late medieval and early modern periods, Miller Renberg explores the rhetorical uses of dance. Although Miller Renberg's focus is sermons, a wide variety of sources such as ecclesiastical court documents, instructional literature, biblical commentaries and vernacular religious poetry weave in and out of the study. Dance provides a fruitful way to explore changing gender and spiritual dynamics across three eventful centuries, and Miller Renberg attends to both the ruptures and continuities that shaped cultural understandings and (more importantly) discursive uses of dance. This is a lively and engaging book that raises many compelling questions.
This study is deliberately unmoored from medieval and early modern practice: Miller Renberg makes it clear in her introduction that she approaches dance as a ‘discursive rhetorical construct’ (p. 11) that clerics repeatedly deployed in the many sermons she marshals together here. In the focal shift from embodied practice to rhetorical strategy, dance becomes something abstract, disconnected from medieval and early modern bodies (even as it seeks to regulate them). As Miller Renberg acknowledges early on, dance is exceptionally difficult to ‘recover’ (p. 11), but deeper discussion of medieval and early modern practices (and their meaning and significance) would have added nuance and depth to the book's central arguments. I found myself wanting to know more about this fascinating leap from embodied practice to rhetorical strategy and why clerics turned to dance in particular as a means of exploring and evaluating sin. I wondered, too, about the clerics themselves in performance – the agitations of the ‘masse-Priest’ at the altar (p. 47), the ‘dauncing, piperly, and effeminate eloquence’ of the ear-tickling preacher (p. 177).
Laying out a compelling argument about dance, sacrilege and the increasingly suspect female body, chapter i provides the ‘chronological grounding’ (p. 14) for the book and positions dance as a ‘lens for a broad overview of reform’ (p. 25). Miller Renberg consistently homes in on dance as an example of adiaphora, an issue without a clear biblical or theological definition, but she never quite explains how or why this matters in the larger scheme of things, including what it meant for the many sermonists who took it up as a trope.
Chapter ii takes up the widespread tale of the cursed carolers, a subject that has been central to Miller Renberg's work, particularly her co-edited volume, The cursed carolers in context (Abingdon 2021). Although one can appreciate not wanting to cover the same ground twice, a conspicuous lack of description in this new context leaves lots of interesting questions unanswered. Miller Renberg assembles an impressive catalogue of dance references, but does not always step back to analyse them or consider more broadly what all this rhetorical work does or affords. The link between dancing and ‘jangling’ feels compelling and new, a rich connection with lots of potential for future study. Chapter iii pushes beyond sacrilege and space to frame dance as inherently disruptive to sacred time, particularly to the sabbath. Miller Renberg tracks the decline of ‘dancing days’ and demonstrates how women were increasingly characterised as ‘innately sacrilegious’ (p. 95), whether they were dancing or not.
Chapters iv and v focus on the story of Salome, whose dancing – though mentioned only briefly in the Gospels – captivated medieval and early modern writers. Miller Renberg's overview of medieval biblical commentaries sets the stage for her discussion of the overwhelmingly negative treatment of Salome in medieval sermons, and her important observation about an emerging distinction between solitary and collective dance has clear implications for social identities and practices in the parish. There is room for more nuanced analysis of the link between dance and female desire in relation to the book's ongoing study of gender dynamics. Looking at early seventeenth-century biblical commentaries, Miller Renberg calls attention to Salome and her mother as tools of moral instruction and illustrates the myriad uses of the Salome story by early modern sermonists. Chapter iv closes with the very different dancing of David, whose movement drew him not into sin, but closer to God. This striking comparison deserves more stage time in the book because it helps us understand the gendered evaluation of dance and the dancing body in new ways; while male bodies are associated with vertical, heaven-bound movement, women are grounded. There are important (and not always fully explored) implications here for the book's central claims about gender and access to the divine.
The concluding chapter endeavours to map the book's many themes onto the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to assess the performative ‘rubrics’ that resulted from centuries of ‘discussions about dance’ (p. 160). As Miller Renberg demonstrates, dance sets off a concatenation of sins and emerges as an emblem of sinful individualism, of the failed household, of communities in decline.
This book makes important contributions to an ongoing conversation in the field about dance and the body. The evidence that Miller Renberg marshals throughout the book is invariably interesting and evocative, but (at least for this reader, trained in literary studies) she does not always do as much with it as she could. As I write this review, I keep thinking of the arresting image of the ‘carnall Gospellers’ who think they ‘have God by the toe’ (p. 42) – what does this mean, and what are the implications for dance as a way of thinking through issues related to spiritual understanding and even ambition? The larger claims of the book can feel a bit unearned, and its expansive time frame ends up steering some of the most interesting and complex arguments into observations about ideas shifting over time. If some of the analysis and interpretation remains to be done, this is nevertheless an appealing book that consistently draws attention to new ways of thinking about the representation and discursive uses of moving bodies at a time of vast cultural and spiritual change.
