McCarty, Tamara Joy. Marginalized Motion: Dance in Late Medieval Germany in Law, Practice, and Memory.

McCarty, Tamara Joy. Marginalized Motion: Dance in Late Medieval Germany in Law, Practice, and Memory. PhD, Ohio State University, 2024.

URL: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1713114415335035


Abstract:
This dissertation examines how late medieval dance serves as a medium for creating and performing communal belonging in Augsburg, Germany and the surrounding region in southern Germany. I analyze how the regulation and practice of dance in Augsburg between 1300 and 1550 C.E. helped define the city’s urban communities in the late medieval period, and how the ongoing remembrance of premodern dance today in southern Germany helps reaffirm or redefine Germanness in the cultural imaginary. Employing methods from dance, performance, history, and critical race studies and building upon recent work on racialization in medieval studies, this dissertation challenges predominant narratives of late medieval dance that centers elite Christians as the main agents of dance and other movement practices. By plumbing the legacies of medieval dance—in archival traces, reenactments, and popular imaginings—my work further examines how the memory and practice of medieval dance continues to transmit the multi-layered embodied politics of medieval southern Germany.

Through archival methods and discourse analysis, I examine city laws, chronicles, and pictorial sources to ascertain how people in the medieval era approached, practiced, and regulated dance. Municipal records evidence that elite, Christian city leaders legislated dancing to construct and enforce a patriarchal and hierarchical social order within the city. Examining Jewish archives, the spatial landscapes of medieval cities, and depictions of the moresca dance in Jewish and Christian sources, I trace how Jewish and Christian residents used dance to form their own communities and how dance fostered Jewish-Christian relations. Finally, by working through these archival tracings of medieval dance, I consider how the reception and interpretation of medieval dance archives shape understandings of historical and contemporary community in the Bavarian region. In particular, I examine how medievalist narratives, built partially from the fragmented archive and nationalist projects in the modern period, inform present-day reenactments of medieval dance. I argue that these reenactments, as the embodied renderings of medievalist imaginaries and archival bias, perpetuate medieval and medievalist politics, which elide lower social orders’ and Jewish contributions to German cultural identity and uphold an elite and Christian-dominant narrative of German cultural origins. At the same time, the imaginative spaces of the reenactments provide fertile ground for participants to foster new communities that span international borders while playing with their identity expressions and finding new choreographic possibilities that challenge the presumed heteronormativity of premodern dance forms. Through this work, I demonstrate medieval dance’s central role in formulating and disseminating hegemonic ideologies in the medieval period that continue to shape the landscape of racial and social relationships within the dance field and society at large today.