Monahin, Nona. "Appendix: List of Extant European Dance Sources."

Monahin, Nona. "Appendix: List of Extant European Dance Sources." Journal of the Northern Renaissance 16 (2025).

URL: https://jnr2.hcommons.org/issues/16-dance-2025/ (Open Access)


From the editorial by Lynsey McCulloch and Emily Winerock:
An invaluable catalogue of extant dance sources from early modern Europe. While acknowledging that dance appears in a myriad of sources in this period—including the parish records, pamphlets, and play-texts cited by our other contributors—Monahin focuses here on notated choreographies, both published and unpublished. These include dance manuals or treatises, alongside less systematic choreographic collections and individual notes. Monahin provides us with details of these works’ contents, origins, and current location. She also points to examples of secondary literature addressing these works. Organised by geographical region, Monahin’s source list confirms, to some extent, the dominance of French and Italian dancing practice in the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. However, it also draws our attention to significant levels of dance activity in England and other parts of Northern Europe. And, in surveying the sources originating from France and Burgundy, we can see that several were created by dancing masters located in Brussels and the Burgundian, later Habsburg, Netherlands. More importantly perhaps, Monahin’s source list illuminates the way in which early dance travelled. As dancing masters moved across the continent, so too did choreographies. In meeting and merging with the dancing traditions of new territories, these choreographies no longer represented a single regional identity, if indeed they ever did. Monahin offers the example of a recently discovered early seventeenth-century manuscript, held in the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm, Sweden’s National Library. Containing the work of a French dancing master active in Brussels, the text resists classification on the basis of nationality. The difficulties we have in classifying works such as these are, in fact, a helpful warning against a reductive labelling of Renaissance choreographies. Monahin’s careful and detailed source list helps us to navigate this pan-European dance.