Proleptic Steps: Rethinking Historical Period in the Fifteenth-Century Dance Manual

Abstract

F or some time now, scholarly medieval studies have been preoccupied with questions about the relationship between the modern and the premodern, and even about the very meanings of these terms. 1 Medievalists in different fields have thoughtfully re-examined the critical paradigms that rely on a break between the medieval as premodernity, on the one hand, and the early modern as an initiation of modernity, on the other. 2 Such new perspectives on periodization and the Middle Ages have tended to originate in studies of literature, theater, history, and art. The discipline of medieval studies has not, for the most part, considered what dance might contribute to our understanding of the constitution of historical periods such as "medieval" and "early modern." 3 And yet, basse danse and bassadanza, due to their placement in a fifteenthcentury moment variously claimed by both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, potentially offer much to such discussions of periodization. As a performance, this fifteenth-century dance situates itself in a dynamic transition between the medieval and the early modern, raising questions about the nature, location, and even existence of this periodization boundary. At the same time, however, the instructional and codifying techniques associated with basse danse and bassadanza reinforce a more traditional periodization dynamic, whereby a culture looks back mainly in order to look forward, organizing its ideas about time and history around the mechanism of anticipation. I shall argue in this essay that basse danse and bassadanza reveal a suggestively conflicted perspective on time through the distinction they establish between the temporality of execution and that of instruction. Furthermore, in their espousal of anticipatory strategies, the instruction manuals in particular show how representations of early dance can construct perspectives on historical periodization. Casting into relief thus an occluded narrative about how period borders form and solidify, basse danse and bassadanza additionally offer early period scholarship some new ways to reconsider and dissolve such borders.Before proceeding to my readings of the dances and manuals, I will first say a few words about the anticipatory impulse to which I refer above, as this concept recurs throughout my argument and will benefit from some explanation at the outset. In scholarly studies of early modernity and its construction, one increasingly finds readings that identify an impulse toward anticipation and futurity in the culture at large-an impulse that helps to define early modernity's sense of its relationship to Seeta Chaganti is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis. Her first book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance, was published in 2008. She spent 2009-2010 as a Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, beginning a second book on memory and representations of dance in late-medieval northern Europe. Her articles on Eng...