The Eloquent Body Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy [Hardcover]

This book adds an entirely new dimension to the consideration of Humanism and Italian culture. It will make a welcome addition to the field of cultural studies by broadening the subject to consider an important source of information that has been previously overlooked. Timothy McGee

The Eloquent Body offers a history and analysis of court dancing during the Renaissance, within the context of Italian Humanism. Each chapter addresses different philosophical, social, or intellectual aspects of dance during the 15th century. Some topics include issues of economic class, education, and power; relating dance treatises to the ideals of Humanism and the meaning of the arts; ideas of the body as they relate to elegance, nobility, and ethics; the intellectual history of dance based on contemporaneous readings of Pythagoras and Plato; and a comparison of geometric dance structures to geometric order in Humanist architecture.

[T]his is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of theatrical dance.

Jennifer Nevile has a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of New South Wales. She has published many articles in early music, history, and dance journals, including Early Music and Renaissance Quarterly. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Music and Music Education at UNSW.

Musicologist Nevile (Univ. of New South Wales) documents the place of dance in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of 15th-century Italian elites. She analyzes treatises by three maestri di ballo (dance masters)Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano, and Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesarothat apply to dancing the precepts of proportion, harmony, and moderation that humanists applied to rhetoric, painting, and architecture. Treating dance as an extension of music, which was part of the traditional quadrivium, these men elevated dance both as a means of moral education and as an articulation of the geometrical rules by which the universe was ordered. Inl38