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  • The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
  • Alessandro Arcangeli
The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy. By Jennifer Nevile. pp. xii + 247. (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2005, $39.95. ISBN 0-253-34453-0.)

Jennifer Nevile is well known to the dance history community. Her unpublished doctoral dissertation ('The Courtly Dance Manuscripts from Fifteenth-Century Italy', University of New South Wales, 1992) was exemplary in its technical and aesthetic analysis of the surviving source material, displaying remarkable competence in both the musical and the choreographic aspects. Since then, she has given papers at international conferences and published articles in scholarly periodicals, developing specific points and making public her suggested keys for the interpretation of the story. Her first monograph is the logical and step in the development of her research itinerary. It is neither a revised version of her dissertation nor a collage of her papers and articles, but a new, substantial contribution, starting from the results of her previous work.

In her Introduction, Nevile sets the agenda by registering a lack of communication between dance history and general history. The standard secondary literature about humanism, she argues, hardly ever mentions dance; but dance was a key component of humanist culture and Renaissance educational curricula. She is surely right on this point. While her quotations from Castiglione's Book of the Courtier can be found almost everywhere, both within the existing literature on court culture and society and in studies of music and dance, it would be hard to find more than a passing reference to dance inside general works on Renaissance history: although the names of the main masters and the titles of their treatises are well known, the shared knowledge about them is generally superficial. It would not be difficult to find explanations for this situation. The history of the body is a fairly recent development in social and cultural history. The social history of the arts has grown significantly since at least the 1930s, but this has usually been confined to the territory of the visual arts; within the latter field, dance has been identified as an important interlocutor of Italian Renaissance painting only in the work of Michael Baxandall and Sharon Fermor (both duly cited in Nevile's book).

When insightful social history and Renaissance dance met, it was chiefly to produce a sophisticated Marxist interpretation of dance, movement, and the historical perception of space (Naturbeherrschung am Menschen in der Renaissance by Rudolf zur Lippe, a Frankfurt pupil of Theodor Adorno; this is not widely known, since, unfortunately, it has never been translated into any other language. We do need further research on the interface between dance and society, and three recent doctoral dissertations have begun to produce this: those by Vera Jung ('Körperlust und Disziplin: Studien zur Fest- und Tanzkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert', University of Saarbrücken, 1999; publ. Cologne, 2001), Katherine Tucker McGinnis ('Moving in High Circles: Courts, Dance, and Dancing Masters in Italy in the Long Sixteenth Century', University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001), and Marina Nordera ('La donna in ballo. Danza e genere nella prima età moderna', European University Institute, 2001). Jennifer Nevile's study offers a very welcome addition to the field.

Her broad topic is to reconstruct 'the place of dance in elite society in fifteenth-century Italy' (p. 3), the basis of her study being 'the written records of the dance masters, both choreographic and theoretical' (p. 6)—namely, the manuscript treatises by Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano, and Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro.

The main body of the book consists of five chapters. The first deals with 'Dance and Society'. The historical context of the artistic developments under scrutiny is presented with a wealth of illuminating cases (which include the testimony of a disgruntled Albrecht Dürer, tired of attending difficult and expensive dance lessons in Venice). By including in the picture such interpretative perspectives as 'dance as a sign of communal identity' (inspired by Richard Trexler's classic study of Florentine civic ritual), Nevile provides not merely a collection of anecdotes but a richly exemplified argument. Recapitulating a particularly innovative section...

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