Pruiksma, Rose A. "Pomey rewrites Scudéry: the novel source for Pomey's rhetorical sarabande description."

Pruiksma, Rose A. "Pomey rewrites Scudéry: the novel source for Pomey's rhetorical sarabande description." Early Music 43, no. 3 (August 2015): 383-395.


Abstract:
Jesuit François Pomey's 1671 description of a danced sarabande from his French–Latin Dictionnaire royal augmenté has served as an important interpretative source for present-day musicians and dancers specializing in 17th- and 18th-century music. This article uncovers the source from which Pomey lifted his definition and description, Georges de Scudéry's 1661 novel Almahide, ou l'esclave reine, and explores the transformations and omissions that Pomey introduced as he revised the text for inclusion in his appendix of descriptions for his dictionary, including, most significantly, the regendering of the dancer, who was female in Scudéry's text but male in Pomey's description. In addition, Pomey's dictionary, rather than being a source unique to the 17th century, remained in print into the 18th century and also had a life in German-language publishing, where it was reprinted as late as 1760. At the same time, Scudéry's novel also circulated internationally, with late 17th-century English and German translations that each went through at least one re-edition. Thus, the sarabande description circulated more widely and for longer than has previously been considered in scholarship that invokes Pomey's description. A close look at Pomey's transformations of Scudéry's texts suggests further questions and broadens our understanding of the various meanings of the sarabande as a theatrical dance in 17th- and early 18th-century Europe.