Whitta, James. "Between Cloister and Court, Virtue and Virtuosity: Gestural Discourse in Medieval Monastic Literature and Early Modern Dance."

Whitta, James. "Between Cloister and Court, Virtue and Virtuosity: Gestural Discourse in Medieval Monastic Literature and Early Modern Dance." Dance Chronicle 44, no. 1 (2021): 58-84.


Abstract:
Scholars of Early Modern dance treatises have long recognized the crucial connection in these texts between exterior manifestations of courtly behavior and interior affects. The dancing courtier is to display a virtuosic correspondence between physical and subjective grace, elegance, and virtue. Among the historical sources for this correlation are overlooked texts from twelfth-century reform movements within European monasticism. This essay examines one such treatise, Hugh of St. Victor’s De institutione novitiorum (On the Instruction of Novices), as a key source for gestural theory, representing the elite monastic body as a prototype of the Early Modern courtier.