Placeholder text

Go to cart

Ringleaders of Redemption

By Kathryn Dickason

Ringleaders of Redemption

By Kathryn Dickason

0 - Default Title
Description
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced and prohibited dancing in religious and secular realms, often aligning it with demonic intervention, lust, pride, and sacrilege. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. This book investigates how dance became a legitimate form of devotion in Christian culture. Sacred dance functioned to gloss scripture, frame spiritual experience, and imagine the afterlife. Invoking numerous manuscript and visual sources (biblical commentaries, sermons, saints' lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography), this book highlights how medieval dance helped shape religious identity and social stratification. Moreover, this book shows the political dimension of dance, which worked in the service of Christendom, conversion, and social cohesion. In Ringleaders of Redemption, Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed.
Product details
Number of Pages:
388
Release Date:
2021-01-01
Publication Date:
2021-01-01
Publisher:
OXFORD UNIV PR
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0197527272
ISBN13:
9780197527276
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
746 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
25 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out