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

For 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 fifteenth-century 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 history and to identify points of contact among literature, art, and social and political realms. For example, J. K. Barret employs Sidney’s Old Arcadia to argue that Renaissance England’s literary and legal traditions together “emphasized . . . a desire ‘to feel the future in the instant.’” Integral to the constitution of early modern subjectivity, Barret suggests, is a consciousness of “future retrospection,” and the present “imagined as a past still to come” (2010, 54). This temporal positioning articulates itself through romance and legal texts’ overlapping interest in promise, debt, and suspicion (“decidedly future-oriented”). Barret demonstrates that early modernity’s law and literature “expect a future moment of looking back,” and its poetry, in particular, recognizes the value of the artistic future as encompassing “boundless possibility.”⁴ In William Engel’s Mapping Mortality, “monitory memory” and “projective memory” appear as important terms for understanding early modern approaches to the world; both terms emphasize structures of anticipation. Memory here is concerned with “what is to come,” as knowledge of the past is enlisted to make judgments about future conduct and also to project a progressive series of images of the self as one moves into the future toward death. Engel argues, “Projective memory (which is at once monitory and retroactive, looking back forward and backward—and beyond) paves the way for our reconstructing the cultural psychology of using the memory arts” in the early modern period (1995, 55–7; 67–8). Projective and monitory memory manifest themselves, according to Engel, in both canonical poetic texts (such as Paradise Lost) and in...