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Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
00:43:48
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg about her book titled Women, Dance and Parish religion in England, 1300-1640 negotiating the steps of Faith, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2022. Now, as the title suggests, we're going to be talking about medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance within the church. And that's interesting in and of itself. I mean, if for no other reason, then I'm probably not the only one who coming across this title was like, oh, I've never really thought about the overlap between attitudes towards dance and the church in this period. And I'm curious. So anytime I come across something I've not thought of before, I tend to be very intrigued. That in and of itself would, I think, be enough for a whole book and a conversation. This book does that and more because it turns out by looking at attitudes towards dance, that's not actually as niche a subject in examining church attitudes as we might think. It's related to all sorts of things about kind of who gets to be involved in religious practice, but also who is a good person, who has good bodies, how should one behave in all sorts of ways. It's not just about kind of the moment of prayer. It's much bigger than that. So we clearly have a lot to discuss. Lynna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I'm delighted to be able to be here and to talk.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book? I mean, why did you decide to look at kind of what the Church was concerned about in this period?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Through perceptions of dance, of course. So I am a historian. My research interests have always centered on, as you might guess, there's some personal interest in there. I grew up as a dancer performing myself, and I've always been interested in how people respond to information that you are a dancer or a performer. Sometimes you get mixed reactions on that, especially in certain parts of the country. I grew up in the south of the US where oftentimes I would say I was a dancer and this response would be, oh, but you do ballet. That's okay. So as I started into my academic research, I was interested in these questions of performance and how people perceive and think about performance and performers and has so Many of us do. I stumbled onto this project actually by working on something quite different. I was working on dance halls in the 19th and 20th century in Britain, and I kept running against these sermons that talked about how dance was a tool of the devil. Dance was indicative of the devil's presence. Dance, people who danced were always servants of the devil. And I found this really surprising in all of these comments from pastors, sermons, religious texts, because in the same sermons they would also be heavily quoting texts like the Psalms, which explicitly call people to praise the Lord with dance. And so I was curious as to how we got from these 19th century assumptions that of course, those who dance are in league with the devil and are misbehaving sexually and can't possibly be true Christians. How did we get from praise the Lord with the dance to that assumption? So I started following those questions backwards and I ended up a medievalist working on the late Middle Ages and specifically starting around the year 1200, where there's this pretty massive shift in how the church perceives dance and dancers that, as you articulated in the introduction, does tie into these really big concerns. And I think it's because dance is something that we don't often think of tied to these concerns that we see this shift happening. Dance comes up often, has an aside as an example of something that is a bigger point. But very few people write or think or explicitly develop theological frameworks entirely around dance. So as you repeatedly make these side comments, assumptions pile up around those that then lead to these broader changes over time. And that by tracing those side comments, we can actually kind of see the changes in concerns and in focus and the ways in which those shape the daily lives of people.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really interesting. As a starting point, I often am so curious when someone focuses on a particular period. You know, did you pick the period or the question? And so interesting to hear the backstory here. Within that big picture sort of interest then, that led you to this project. Are there any more specific questions that you're asking in the book that we also want to make sure to put on the table at this point?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes, the big picture question, right, was definitely what happened? How did we go from dance can be something saints do, dance is something that can be a part of this holy performance to there's a specific medieval sermon tale or saying I ran into quite early in this project that says that when a woman, like when, when you hear the bell of a cow, you know you have not yet lost your cow. Similarly, when the devil hears the bells on the skirt of a woman dancing, he says to himself, I have not lost my cow. And so it's this massive change. And so the big question, how did we get from point A to point B? But more specifically, what were the kind of theological things driving this change? How and why did discussions of dance move from this concern about sacrilege and about rightly practiced faith to this concern about sexuality that has marked so many contemporary discussions? How did these theological changes play out in real life? You know, oftentimes the rhetoric that we find in sermons is just that, it's rhetoric. So this question of how did this play out in the lives of real people, did it play out? Did what was said in sermons actually affect the experience of living in a medieval parish or an early modern one? And then how did this change over time change the experience of women in particular? Because what we see as we kind of follow this exploration of dance from 1200 up until about 1600, is that dance becomes more and more a conversation about women. And so how does that conversation then shape how women fit within kind of the early modern world?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, a whole bunch of very interesting questions there. Thank you for giving us that foundation for the rest of our conversation. In terms of, then, the Church's concern, obviously, you've laid out a number of them already that are specific to dance, but of course, there's kind of some other things the Church is worried about at this point. Some specific. But there's kind of some big overarching questions that sort of go all the way, really, from sort of the Fourth Lateran Council, we could even argue, kind of all the way up through the English Reformation. What's the kind of thread of concern, I suppose, that ties all of that.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Together very much the concern is how do you make sure that the people in your church understand what they believe and then live in a way that reflects that. And when I talk about in the book, this period, from 4th Lateran up through the English Reformations, there are a lot of things that change. There's changes in political circumstances, changes in what theology is considered correct and incorrect, changes in the structure and organization of the church. But behind all of those changes is this continuity of wanting to ensure that people can give an answer for what they believe and then live accordingly. Now this emphasis starts to really focus on laity, on the ordinary men and women within a parish or within a specific region after 4th Lateran. 4th Lateran is one of these series of medieval councils that is seeking to clarify church doctrine and then reform the behavior of the clergy and the laity and fourth Lateran is particularly important because it emphasizes making sure that clergy live in a way that reflects the standards of the faith. And we'll come back to that later. But it's also emphasizing the fact that laity need to be taught clearly and specifically the basics of the faith. And that includes things like the Apostles Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments. But then within that, how to apply all of those? How do you live in a way that keeps the Sabbath holy or that honors the Lord? So this big picture concern of clearly teaching what is true faith and then teaching how to apply that kind of shapes all of the things that are happening in this period. What we start to see happening is we see this kind of realization from clergy that it's not quite as simple to teach, quote, unquote, true faith to the laity as it is just lay out a series of philosophical principles or of theological ideas. You have to explain then what that looks like. How do recognize someone who is believing rightly and practicing rightly. And so in texts that are meant for ordinary men and women, we often see this emphasis on a principle and then its application, the way in which you see it playing out in your community. So where this becomes most relevant for our conversation about dance is this principle of true faith has in respecting the things that are holy, living in a way that shows respect for God, for clergy, for church, for sacred spaces. All of these things kind of broadly fit under this idea of rightly believing and practicing the faith. The opposite of this is what tends to be kind of referred to not just as sinful, but this emphasis on sacrilege, violating sacred spaces, sacred times, sacred rules, offending sacred persons. These are framed as things that are offenses against God himself, and thus has things that really need to be avoided. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in this is making sure that you don't do things that fall into this category of sacrilege. And dance becomes one of those things that often gets referenced in that category of sacrilegious behavior. And it becomes an action that indicates that your belief is wrong. So it's a little bit of a cycle. If you believe rightly, you won't dance, and if you dance, it indicates you believe wrongly. And so we see these actions like dance being used to identify theological issues that need correction.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting as a kind of a marker of something else going on inside that might be even more concerning. But I think the thread I most want to pick up for that explanation is the idea that it's well, in some cases it's dancing in and of itself. But it's also, as you discuss in the book, about particular spaces in which dancing can and cannot happen, particular times in which dancing can and cannot happen. So can we talk about kind of those aspects of what is of concern here?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes, that. I'm glad you picked that up. That's a thread that I certainly need to back up a second there for, because as this kind of conversation about true faith gets going after fourth Lateran, one of the things that clergy are really concerned to address are remnants of what they might term paganism or older false faiths. So they see dance as indicative of this. This is a practice that might have been used before a community was Christian, that they connect to worshiping false gods and to not respecting the true Christ faith. And so as they're kind of framing, okay, what does it mean to practice true faith, to respect sacred space, sacred time. They emphasize not just not dancing, but especially not dancing in a space that is dedicated to God, like the church or the churchyard, and not dancing at a time that is dedicated to God during the sermon or during the Mass. Now, this idea of sacred space, sacred time, it fits within this kind of broader trying to rework the medieval world to make it reflect Christianity, to make it reflect like a sacred landscape. And dance is seen as particularly disruptive to that attempt to create a sacred landscape, because it can make it both where you are not in a church service, you are not participating in proper worship, you are not taking communion or observing the service or listening to a sermon. But you are also distracting others from doing the same thing. There are a number of medieval sermon tales that talk about the problems that are caused by people who are dancing outside of a church service. In one example, there's a priest who's preparing to give communion to his congregation, and there's a group of dancers who've been singing a song and dancing outside the church all night. And the song gets stuck in his head. Has. Has happened to all of us, I'm sure. So he gets up to perform the service, and instead of saying, singing the words of the Mass, he instead sings the words of this somewhat profane dance song, thus completely destroying the sacred space, the sacred time, the sacred ceremony. And so, as we see these medieval authors trying to navigate teaching people what they can and cannot do to reflect, believing, rightly or wrongly, when they talk about dance, their initial focus is really on dance at the right time and in the right place. And there is certainly also then a time at which you should not dance a wrong time and a wrong place. And that is anything that is set apart as sacred, not in the churchyard, not during a church service, not on these holy days, that has the chance to not just endanger your own practice of faith, but the entire community's well being.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to get more clarity on kind of what the problems were considered to be in terms of the practice, but also where and when it's happening. What about who is doing it? Are these concerns and sort of prescriptions against dancing in certain ways, places and times gendered from the beginning?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
This is one of the really interesting things because the concern is initially making sure that it's just not disrupting other people's practice. And so in some of these early conversations about not dancing in the churchyard, not dancing during Mass, we have first an emphasis on your priest shouldn't be dancing because that's going to distract them from doing the thing they're supposed to be doing. But then more broadly an emphasis on just no one should be dancing. And these early accounts of this, trying to prevent people from dancing in the church during mass, emphasize men and women equally. A good example of this is a really common medieval narrative known as the tale of the curse. Dancing carolers. Now, in this tale, very similarly to the one I just told, there's a priest who's trying to perform a Christmas Mass, and there's a group of Christmas celebrators in the courtyard. It's Christmas Eve, they're singing, they're dancing, they're having a good time. The priest comes out and tells them to stop dancing in the name of God. And the carolers ignore him. They just keep going about singing and dancing. And the priest gets frustrated, so he prays that God would cause them to dance for an entire year without stopping, just as they are. And it's perhaps to everyone's surprise that this works. The dancers keep dancing. They dance for a whole year, unable to stop singing and dancing in the courtyard. And the priest is unable to stop it. A bishop has to come in and pray to a saint to kind of absorb, resolve the action. Now this, circling this back to your question about who's dancing, the earliest versions of that tale just talk about carolers. They mention men and women dancing together, hand in hand. There's no specific emphasis on men over women or women being more problematic. However, as we see repeated versions of this circulating in England, the later the version, the more it emphasizes women, has the problem. So a version from the 14th century names all three women involved in the carol and specifies that at the end of this dance, the women die, the men do not. A version from the 15th century mentions again all three women. But then after this sermon, tale goes into a much longer rant about women and how sacrilegious women are in general. And so we see this really interesting shift where the concern goes from just dance in sacred space has sacrilege to dancing. Women are really the problem here. And it's really women who are the thing that is causing this issue with dance and sacrilege.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a really interesting transition to be able to track. And it goes further than that. Right. It's not just saying that it's women are the focus of it or even, as you mentioned, that kind of women are killed for it and the men are not. There's also then a transition going from gendering it to sexualizing it.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is that a separate process? It doesn't all happen at once?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
No, that's exactly right. That is a separate process that is somewhat an outgrowth of the first. So in the transition from dance has sacrilegious to dance has a problem of female sacrilege. One thing that's really key to note is that part of why dance becomes a problem of female sacrilege is because at the same time that we have this discussion about true faith and protecting sacred space and protecting sacred time, we have two simultaneous conversations going on in a lot of these theological texts. One is about what you should not do in sacred space and sacred time. And this is where this emphasis on dance comes in. Along with this, we have an emphasis on gossiping or sleeping or playing board games in church. All things that we might think are fairly self explanatory, like probably don't do that during a church service. At the same time, though, there's this other discussion, again centered on right faith and right behavior. And this ties to that strand about the clergy that I mentioned earlier. Fourth, Lateran's goal to make sure clergy behaved and acted as people of faith should. Now, this is tied to this growing emphasis on clerical celibacy, that clerics should not be married, should not be engaged in sexual relations. And in this secondary discourse, the thing that people see as necessary when they're kind of writing these sermons, clerics articulating what needs to happen to protect priests from falling into sin, from breaking this law, and from having wives or sexual relations, what clerics see needs to happen is that women need to be kept away from clergy. And so that discourse initially is not emphasizing dance, but it's a parallel Discourse about how do you prevent sacrilege? Well, one, you keep dance out of sacred space. And in a separate discourse, you keep women out of sacred space. And so from there, it's a pretty straightforward process to collapse the two, right? You have dance and then women has these two causes of sacrilege. Well, maybe a dancing woman is a clear way to articulate that problem. And by collapsing those two discourses, you end up with not just the action of dance has a cause of sacrilege, but the body of women, like the bodies of women has a cause of sacrilege. Once you've established that the body of a woman is a source of sin and of sacrilegious behavior, it is not that difficult to take those rhetorical steps in these sermons and then say, well, that's actually because the real problem is sex. And that's what we see happening. We see this discourse about dance has a form of gendered sacrilege slipping into, as we head into the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, this idea that dance is also a problem of sexual sin. And so you see this kind of collapsing of sexual sin and sacrilege and all sorts of wrongly lived faith. These all collapse down into one singular body, and that's the body of the dancing woman.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Experian Is that also the body of the witch? I mean, it's these sorts of things are happening kind of at the same time as some of the witch trials. Is there a link?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes, I. I very much think so. Thinking about the witchcraft trials in the early modern period, it's interesting to note that the idea that a witch is also a dancing woman does not really appear in any records that we have until the late 1300s, which is the time that this collapsing of sacrilege, dance and women's bodies has taken place. So moving forward from the 14th century, we start to see this idea that if the sin of a witch is sacrilege, falsely worshiping God and problematic sexual behavior with the devil, and if the sin of a dancer is sacrilege, falsely worshiping God or not worshiping him at all, and problematic sexual behavior, then it tracks that you can identify witches by dancing and dancers might also be witches. This also circles back to what we mentioned earlier, and thinking about dance as a way to identify these deeper internal problems of either false faith or not believing or not understanding witchcraft as we see in the sources is notoriously difficult for people who are attempting to find and persecute it to identify. So if you can identify a dancer as a witch, that gives you a very tangible sign that you can use to connect these kind of prosecutions and trials. And so again, there's this kind of slippage where because we have these big theological assumptions about what it means to believe rightly, what it means to live in a way that is sacrilegious or not, that get connected to women's bodies, they start to slip out into all of these different assumptions about what we can assume about women. We can assume that a woman who dances must not be a woman of faith. We can assume that a woman who dances must be in some way in league with the devil. So maybe she's a witch. We can assume that a woman who dances is going to be pulling people away from rightly lived sexuality, and thus the woman is the problem rather than anything else around her.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, these things are very much all coming together through these explanations, which is really interesting.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
To go all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, that kind of dancing in the wrong place or time was seen as sort of indicative of something else going on. Right. We're adding these layers to sort of narrow it down. But that sort of idea of the link between the outer behavior and the inner sort of quote, unquote corruption are still sort of there. And of course, these ideas are not just kind of living in people's heads. Like they have to get there somehow. Right. So I wonder if now that we've established kind of what the ideas are and how the threads are coming together, we can talk a bit more about the sort of communication and transmission of these ideas. And of course, a big part of that is sermons. So you use a bunch of different sermons to kind of explore how these ideas are being talked about. Maybe we can use the example of sermons about Salome to kind of show how these pieces are coming together and being communicated.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes, that's great. And I think Salome is a particularly good example because in following Salome across these sources, we actually hit on kind of all of the different sources that get used in this project. So as I start this, it's worth noting in the book, I use somewhere around 400 different sermons, three medieval scripture commentaries, and around 10 different early modern Bibles that have commentaries on them to kind of unpack these ideas. So in our conversation here, it seemed like a very clear one to one to one. But it's worth noting that these ideas are kind of scattershot across sermons on all different topics. We have sermons on not just sacrilege, but also sermons on things like birthday parties or rightly celebrating, like weddings. Right. It's kind of across all these different things that we see these ideas being brought out. Salome is the figure from the Gospels. She's involved in the narrative where we see John the Baptist beheaded in Mark and Matthew. And what we see happening in this narrative, for those who aren't familiar, is we have King Herod, who has an affair with his brother's wife. John the Baptist calls him out for this, says that this is not in line with how one should live. And Herod has John the Baptist arrested and thrown into prison. So at this Point. Herod holds a party and a girl. Now, it's worth noting the scriptural text never names who this girl is. Historically, the church has referred to her as Salome, based on the writings of the early historian Josephus. But this girl, who is Herod's stepdaughter, dances at the party and, according to the account, pleases Herod so well that he promises to give her up to half his kingdom as a reward. Well, the girl goes to her mother, who is the one having the affair with Herod. And this woman, Herodias, tells her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a plate and so has a reward for her dance. The young girl is given the head of the saint on a plate. Now, unlike I said a minute ago, dance appears kind of scattershot across all these sermons. This is actually a place where we can consistently see discussions of dance because it is a part of the biblical narrative from the Gospels. And so it makes a good place to chase, trace some of these changes because it's preached often. It's in all of the Bible texts that I looked at for this. And then there's often commentary on it. What we see happening is initially the emphasis is simply on the sins of Herod and Herodias. In the text, the emphasis is on having an affair, sexual immorality, murdering a saint. One of my favorite commentaries emphasizes that this is how you know that only wicked people have birthday parties, because Herod and Pharaoh are, according to this commentator, the only two people who have birthday parties. And so a birthday party is a sign of wickedness. According to this, as we see this discourse about sacrilege and about sexuality kind of taking root, we start to see the girl in the narrative play a bigger role. Salome. So she goes from a figure in the earliest texts on this, who sometimes is allegorical, representing true faith, representing the church, sometimes is barely mentioned at all, just kind of mentioned in the course of telling the narrative to someone who is always presented as literal as a. And they start to be very clear, young woman who dances and who is sexually appealing to the guests. So the emphasis shifts from the people that in the scriptural texts are the ones having the affair leading to the beheading of the saints to the dancer. And it shifts to emphasize how dance is often indicative of a sinful environment and the cause of more sins, leading to the death of all of those around the dancer. An early modern sermon actually talks about how in our day, in the 16th century, dancing women have led to the death of many a young Male saint. And so it goes very much from this narrative about those who believe wrongly and practice sin and disregard kind of biblical principles for living to this larger commentary about the dangers of women and sexuality has, over time, we see these assumptions about dance and what it means build up around this dancing girl at the center of the narrative.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's such an interesting example because it does bring all these threads together and lets us talk about sources. So thank you for taking us through that particular piece of the book. If we then move from these sermons and from all these ideas to kind of the practical consequences of it. I mean, I think it's been clear as we've been discussing kind of what some of the consequences at least, are right. You know, you want to dance. Not here, not at this time. You know, don't do it in these ways. Or definitely make sure no witch hunters are watching you. Like, I think we can extrapolate pretty easily what some of the consequences are. But do we want to discuss further around kind of what this means not just for a single individual woman, perhaps in a particular churchyard wanting to dance, but kind of more broadly around what women as a gender can and cannot do by the time we get to the early modern period?
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes, definitely. And this is maybe a little bit. We'll start here with sources, part 2. It's very difficult to get at what's actually happening in a parish from the sermons and the kind of scripture commentaries that I just mentioned. And so in writing this project, step, step one was figuring out, how is dance taught? What are the changes in how it's taught? How does it connect to these things? And I did that through these didactic texts, through the sermons, through glosses, scripture commentaries. I then turned to the records from parishes, records from kind of life on the ground in late medieval and early modern England. And here I drew heavily on the records of early English drama and their work. For those who aren't familiar, they've gone through all of the records for various counties and parishes in a number of different parts of the British Isles. For this, I focused on their records from England. And I looked at 17 different collections and went through and kind of pulled out mentions of dance in all of these. Now, my focus here was not on dance in settings like the Inns of Court or in kind of royal court settings. I wasn't very interested in this project and looking at dance among elite groups scholarship. There's a lot more work on, like, court math and kind of dance in these noble settings. And I was more interested in what was happening for ordinary men and women. And so pulling out these mentions of dance on the ground in kind of parishes in these various diocesan court records, where you have people filing complaints or being brought up on charges, actually really complicated what I was seeing in the sources, because when it comes to the sermons, they talk pretty much exclusively about women dancing and women has the ones who are the problem. And then when you get into the record of what's happening on the ground, it's mainly men. There were a number of men who would go dance around the houses of their ministers at midnight every night for weeks because they disagreed with their sermons. So we actually have a letter from a pastor to his superior begging him to come make them stop dancing because he hasn't been able to sleep in weeks. We have men being brought up on charges of skipping church services to go to the next village over and drink and dance. We have a number of men who host dance parties in their house at the same time as the church services are going on. There are very few instances where women are the ones who are dancing, Whether during a church service or just in general. It's usually the men. And so that was an interesting kind of bifurcation in what's being preached and then what's being practiced. There's a gap there. The ideological assumptions don't line up with the reality of what's going on on the ground. And this plays out kind of in shaping people's lives in two different ways. First, we start to see this rhetoric about dance has a woman's sin and has something that shows you who a sacrilegious woman is being used to kind of other these dancing men. And so we start to see this discourse about men who dance are not not only not true people of faith, not true Christians, but also maybe they're not true men, maybe they'. Men. And so we see this kind of hardening of gender binaries when it comes to early modern behavior. Second, however, what we see happening here is because there's this concern that women who dance are sacrilegious. They're sexualized, they lead to kind of the demise of holiness in the community. We see many options for kind of communal gathering and communal public spaces for women start to be closed down. In the late Middle Ages, we often had church sponsored dance processionals through the parish as a way to raise money. And oftentimes these were put together and sponsored by women. Those start to stop because if women who dance are dangerous to holiness, like, you certainly can't have them having a dance fundraiser for your church similarly, we then start to see this emphasis on women has dangerous to holiness, particularly dancing women, being used to justify women having less and less of a space in public life. If women's bodies are inherently problematic, especially bodies in motion, then maybe women's bodies should simply stay inside. Seems to be the way the early modern logic goes. And then this sets up kind of a third trap for women, and that when they are abused or assaulted or bring up kind of things in their community that are being done to them, the question often becomes, well, what did you do to bring this upon yourself? Were you dancing? Were you in public? Were you in the wrong space? Were you in the wrong time? As we saw in the narrative around Salome, it became the dancing girl's fault, although it really isn't in the biblical text. Similarly, on the ground in the parish, any indication of sinfulness or of wrongdoing becomes the woman's fault. Because if women's bodies are really the problem here, then there's no need to look for another cause. And that's kind of the biggest picture outgrowth of this discourse that I trace out in this book, is this increased blame placed upon women in almost every circumstance because of the ways in which these ideas about sacrilege and about sin and about sexuality are so centered on women's bodies, partially through this discourse about dance.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see, kind of how this develops, and especially, as you said, the gap between kind of what's being preached and what's being practiced. That's always so interesting to excavate, partially because it's hard to excavate.
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Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So thank you for figuring all this out and coming to tell us about it. Was there anything else you came across in the process of putting all of this together that really surprised you that you want to tell us about?
- [35:47]
Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Oh, that's a great question. So I think one of the things that I think I found really interesting was even has the discourse about dance becomes so entrenched and negative in these early modern texts, we see communities fighting to keep the right to dance. Right. The dancers dancing around the house of the pastor because the sermon he preached that they objected to said that they should stop dancing. And so they use dance as a form of protest against this. We have another instance where we have kind of a split in the village between those who believe that the preachers in the early modern Reformations are right and that they need to kind of get rid of these sorts of communal, festive gatherings. Well, the neighbors gather to protest by holding basically a danced procession through the streets in costume. And so it's interesting to see that even has the didactic and prescriptive text texts really flatten out and close out all of these other potentialities for Dance on the Ground, at least in the 16th century, when this is kind of up in the air, it's very much a fraught topic. You see that initially the discourse in these sermons, when it comes to just not dancing at all, isn't accepted. The second interesting thing is that it seems that the discourse about women is. And I think that tells us something about power dynamics and power negotiation within the early modern parish. The second thing I think I want to highlight that surprised me, is not so much a bigger theme, but simply a case study. And this is what I talk about in the conclusion of the book, because there's a court case in Salisbury in this. I should have looked this up. I want to say it's around 1600 where you have a man brought up on trial for fornication and having an illegitimate child outside of marriage. Marriage. And the proof of both of those things is the fact that he's being brought up for not paying child support, and the child is sitting there in the courtroom. And so it's pretty clear, like those are factual offenses that he's being brought up on charges for. Now, he sits there and says eventually to the court, yes, I did have a child outside of wedlock, and I did do these things, but that's not the worst thing that's happened in our church. And then he started. Starts pointing at the church wardens, at the people responsible for the care of the parish. And he accuses them of two things. One, allowing the church wall to crumble and not taking fiscal care of the space of the church, and two, dancing instead of going to church. And at this point, the trial record goes off the rails. We start to see, like, people kind of, from what we can tell from the handwritten account, shouting accusations. They're writing down the names of those accused of dancing and the fines that are assessed to them. And our person, initially on trial for failing to pay child support for his illegitimate child, walks out of the courtroom that day having temporarily avoided being fined. And I just think that's really indicative of how far the discourse on dance shifts and how it shifts these ideas about sacred and sinful behavior in the early modern parish, and kind of the ramifications of that, that when you can have a trial with proof of all of these things that the church agrees you shouldn't do, and the thing that becomes the most concerning is dance and that you danced in the churchyard. I just think that's really telling as to how we need to pay attention to these things like dance and the ways in which they can be used to kind of shape who has a voice and who has a space in early modern communities.
- [39:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's absolutely fascinating. So I'm glad I asked about surprises and you had some great answers there. As a final question then, moving on, perhaps from this book, is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of, even if it's not related to what we've been discussing?
- [39:47]
Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Yes. So I'm currently working on two projects, one of which is much closer to being out in the world than the other. This exploration of dance and kind of parish life and the application of these ideas about kind of this ephemeral thing pushed me into a next book project on emotions and on how the teaching of emotions shapes the negotiation of social status and of relationships within the medieval community. And so that project looks exclusively at the medieval city of York from around 1300 to 1550, and it draws on the famous York Corpus Christi plays along with several sermon collections, psalters, lay folks, catechism, and a mass book in conversation with these kind of records of practice asking these questions about how were emotions taught, how did laypeople understand emotions, and then how did they use those ideas about emotion to negotiate belonging, community and relationship within this kind of context? The other project I'm working on is much more directly related to dance, and it's actually kind of a geographic turn as opposed to a topical turn. What I'm doing in the other book project that I'm currently in the early stages of is I'm using discussions of dance and references to movement in texts about the Sami, which are the indigenous people of far northern Europe and Finiscandia. And I'm tracing out how movement is described and how those descriptions of movement help create categories of identity and help distinguish between Sami and pre modern Scandinavian communities. And then what are the ramifications of those frameworks when it comes to, again, kind of navigating society, navigating identity, early ideas about race and race making and ideas about Sami from both kind of within the Sami community in the pre modern period, and then externally, what's read onto them through their movement and performance?
- [41:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, those both sound like absolutely fascinating projects. So hopefully at some point you can come back and tell us about them. But in the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Women Dance and Parish religion in England, 1300-1640 negotiating the steps of Fate Faith, published by Boydellen Brewer in 2022. Lyna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:18]
Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's been a pleasure and I'll look forward to coming.