The Carole: A Study of a Medieval Dance (review)

In this very close study of a single dance, the emphasis is on ‘details relevant to the history, choreography and performance of the [carole] dance as revealed in the primary sources’ (p. xv). The carole is the best-known dance name from the Middle Ages, and yet scholars in all fields use the term with a vague and sometimes contradictory understanding of exactly to what it refers. Even in the primary sources it is often unclear whether it means ‘dance’ in general or is, as Mullally claims here, a reference to a specific dance formation and choreography.

The author questions all of the inherited beliefs and reinterprets the commonly accepted conclusions about references to carole and dance in the literature, theoretical treatises, and iconography of the late Middle Ages. He concludes that most of what is commonly accepted is incorrect, and that many of the text references and iconographic images thought to be about the carole are more frequently of other, less well-known dances. While admitting throughout the book that the word ‘carole’ in the primary sources refers to a number of things: a circle, dance in general, line dances, song, dance song, etc., he insists that there was one specific dance called ‘carole’ and that it had a set choreography. He posits a dance with a single formation in the round and steps always to the left, with a musical practice that involved singing by only a soloist (i.e. no group participation in the refrains), and no instrumental accompaniment.

There is no doubt that the sources, when taken as a whole, are confusing and ambiguous. To sort through them and come to any conclusions about the various details of the carole requires a careful reading and even more careful consideration of context in order to separate those that were intended to be technically correct from those in which the word is used more loosely. This is a tricky business because the decisions concerning which references are to be taken at face value and which are to be discounted as unreliable or incorrect often seem somewhat whimsical. The implicit danger, of course, is that those decisions could be made to support a preconceived conclusion rather than each citation being weighed carefully on its own merits.

A good example of this kind of selection involves one of the most frequently cited literary references from La Mankine: ‘Such a carole had never been seen, nearly a quarter league long.’ The implication of the quote is that, at least in this instance, the carole was a line dance. Mullally dismisses the quotation as an incorrect use of the word ‘carole’, which he suggests was chosen because it is ‘metrically more suitable’ than would have been the correct dance term, ‘tresche’ (p. 61). This may be true, but it is not the only source that uses the word ‘carole’ with reference to a line dance. Mullally dismisses all of them, although he allows that the music and steps for the tresche were identical to that for the carole. In fact, he believes that the only difference between these two dances is that the carole was danced entirely in the round whereas the tresche could include both round and line.

Another case of questionable judgement involves the discussion of two illustrations in a manuscript of Li Restor du Paon (Ill. 3 and 6), which Mullally admits are intended to illustrate the carole mentioned in the text. One shows nine people in a circle, but the other has six people in a line. His explanation for the second illustration is that ‘the iconography does not always give a coherent view of the dance’ (p. 95). If I follow his point correctly, he is claiming that a contemporary artist did not know that a carole took only the round formation. Similar treatment is given to those sources that suggest instrumental accompaniment of the carole. For one reason or another, they cannot be...