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  • Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages by Seeta Chaganti
  • Nicole Nolan Sidhu
Seeta Chaganti. Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $105.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.

Seeta Chaganti's bold, original, and brilliant new monograph, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages, calls our attention to an important and under-recognized lacuna in modern westerners' attempts to bridge the gap between their own habits of perception and those of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the fact that dance was a far more central and familiar practice in the Middle Ages than it is in the modern West, Chaganti proposes that medieval audiences' familiarity with dance had a significant effect on how poetry was created and interpreted. Modern readers who approach medieval poetry lacking the experience of a culture in which dance was pervasive, and with reading habits and values conditioned by formalist criticism, often misread poetic forms whose play on dance-based experiences communicated a very different meaning to medieval audiences from the one that modern readers perceive.

This alone is an important point to emphasize, but Chaganti's true brilliance lies in her methodology. Even as one might recognize the importance of dance, the challenge lies in how to conceptualize its influence on literary production and reception. Analogical interpretations that compare the balance and symmetry of dance with the harmonies of poetic form are an analytic dead-end, having little to say beyond the analogy itself. Chaganti responds to this limitation by abandoning analogical argument in favor of something far more challenging and productive: the recuperation of the experience of dance and the significance of this experience to medieval readers' understandings of poetic form. Medieval people participated frequently in dance, as participants and as spectators. Their abundant experience resulted in what Chaganti [End Page 454] calls "perceptual habits produced by dance" (3). Rather than emphasizing symmetry or balance, Chaganti argues, the experience of dance resulted in a "perceptual habituation to uncanniness and disorientation that translates into poetic form" (14).

The book's self-conscious emphasis on methodology is itself a great contribution to medieval studies. Chaganti's project entails many diffi-cult challenges, which she surmounts with precision and grace. To begin with, the emphasis on the experience of dance leads to a knotty problem: how can one hope to recover the experience of medieval dance accurately when the archive rarely provides complete accounts of danced spectacle? Such difficulties are enough to cause some scholars to obfuscate the problem by drawing overly broad conclusions from available evidence, or else to shift the emphasis of their arguments in a way that avoids these issues entirely (the scholarly equivalent of running away screaming). Chaganti does neither of these things. Instead, she experiments with a startling new method: using modern dance as a way to access medieval experience, a process that she calls narrative reenactment. This approach will always be incomplete, Chaganti acknowledges. There is no such thing as a completely accurate recreation. Nevertheless, careful attention to modern dance can give us insights into certain aspects of medieval experience that would otherwise be inaccessible to us, even when our available evidence actually says a lot about them.

In another rich and original contribution to medieval studies, Chaganti successfully employs key concepts from modern dance studies to shed new light on the medieval experience of dance. Central to her arguments is the concept of virtuality—the notion that the audience perceives dancers not just spatially, but as a relation of forces or a trajectory of energy. Thus, dance produces what Chaganti terms "virtual supplements" consisting of what is "around, ahead of, and behind the body in choreographed motion" (7). Medieval audiences were highly sensitized to these virtual supplements. Thus, even the most harmonious-seeming of dances will contain uncanny elements, wherein audiences can perceive forces that anticipate or lag behind the dancer's body, or that hover around it, or off its center. Chaganti argues that dance theory's conception of virtuality is particularly useful for distinguishing between medieval and modern assumptions about the disruption of poetic...

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