THROUGH a fixation on sacrilege — on protecting sacred spaces and times from profane bodies — vernacular authors shifted the status of both women and dance within the late-medieval and early-modern parish. Dance and women were both reframed as sacrilegious threats to true belief. But how and when did sexuality become the primary focal point of concern, as it had by the late-16th century?
For indeed, as vernacular authors connected dance more closely to female bodies, the sexual potential of those bodies became more important. This sexualisation of dance took place, like the transformation of dance into sacrilege, gradually. Yet it is important to note that the sexualisation of dance, while always a secondary concern for religious authors, became a primary concern only after dance had become clearly defined (like women) as sacrilegious.
The transformation of dance into sacrilege started in the 11th and 12th centuries; the sexualisation of dance in the English parish began in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Perhaps the clearest example of this transformation from sacrilege to sex appears in the reworking of Salome, the young dancing girl mentioned in the biblical accounts of the death of John the Baptist. Embedded into the Gospel accounts of Matthew and Mark, this brief episode is perhaps the best-known biblical narrative associated with dance, both in the Middle Ages and in the present.
In the narrative, King Herod has taken his brother’s wife as his own, an action for which John the Baptist rebukes him, in accordance with Levitical law. For this, Herod and his wife Herodias have John the Baptist arrested and thrown into prison. While John the Baptist is imprisoned, Herod holds a feast (according to medieval interpreters, a birthday feast for himself) at which his young stepdaughter (traditionally referred to as Salome, although unnamed in the biblical text) dances before the guests.
Herod is so well pleased with her dance that he makes an oath: to give Salome whatever she asks, up to half his kingdom. Salome consults with her mother Herodias, who urges her to ask for the head of John the Baptist. Salome does so, and Herod, bound by his hasty oath, regretfully beheads John the Baptist, delivering the head to the girl on a dish.
MODERN audiences might be familiar with this tale from Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé, in which Salome attempts to seduce John the Baptist before performing a dance of the seven veils before Herod; or from Richard Strauss’s retelling of Wilde’s play in his opera of the same name. In these modern interpretations, Salome’s sexuality is at the fore.
Yet, medieval audiences encountered this tale quite differently. For medieval lay audiences, the dance of Salome would have been presented primarily in sermons, with an emphasis not on sex but instead on other sins: on oath-taking, on birthdays, on rash speech, or on adultery.
Despite the role a dancing woman played in bringing about the death of John the Baptist, medieval authors did not use this narrative solely to talk about dance or sinful women. Instead, medieval authors focused much of their rhetoric against the sins committed by Herod rather than by the women of the text.
Even more striking than this medieval lack of focus on dance in this particularly infamous account of a biblical dancer are the ways in which medieval authors adapted and revised patristic commentary on the biblical text. Initially, patristic comments used in interpretations of Salome’s dance were both positive and negative, with varying potential elucidations. While, as Kathryn Dickason’s work notes, Salome was never a completely positive exemplum for dance in patristic exegesis — unlike her counterpart, the dancing David — these early interpretations did leave space for a sacred Salome, a Salome who danced to exalt Christ rather than to kill a saint.
Yet, patristic authors such as Origen and Pseudo-Jerome who had seen the possibility for a positive allegorical interpretation for Salome’s role gradually disappeared from late medieval interpretations. Later medieval authors chose to set aside these patristic interpretations and to present a Salome who was much less nuanced and far more culpable for the death of the saint.
A study of 12th- to 15th-century Latinate glosses, vernacular English sermons, and other vernacular didactic texts reveals that later medieval theological texts countered any mention of positive allegorical dance with an emphasis on literal interpretation of the narrative, highlighting the sinfulness of the dancing daughter. At least in medieval Latinate texts, both potential Salomes — holy and harlot — appeared side-by-side, albeit with an ever-increased emphasis on Salome as sinner in 14th-century texts.
BUT the laity encountered only the sinful Salome, for in vernacular presentations of the dance of Salome aimed at lay audiences, nuances in presentation of dance and dancing women never really existed: none of the positive patristic allegories made their way into sermons for ordinary men and women.
At the same time that allegorical interpretations of Salome disappeared from Latinate glosses, for those in the ordinary English parish, dance was presented not as a positive allegory for the Christian life or as a means of salvation, but as an act tied to literal sexual sin and death.
Consistency in the scriptural text itself between the tenth and fourteenth centuries indicates that the changes in interpretations of Salome were not driven by textual change or retranslation. These changing interpretations in glosses and then in sermons were instead driven by the same shifting approaches to dance and to women that led to increasingly gendered presentations of the tale of the cursed dancing carollers.
As dance became more closely tied to sacrilege, it became more closely entwined with sin. And as sacrilege became more closely secured to the female body, the associations between dance, sex, and women deepened and expanded.
These connections were not new. As shown through even the earliest interpretations of Salome’s narrative, the connections between sex, women, and dance were an omnipresent threat in the minds of religious theologians and authors from the patristic era forward. Furthermore, the danger of sex lurked in the background of many discussions of medieval dance.
As 13th- and 14th-century vernacular English sermons on Salome show, sex was not the primary concern of most medieval authors writing for the laity, at least in discussions of dance. Only once sacrilege had been firmly connected to dance and, more significantly, to women did discussions of dance become more sexualised.
As transgression became further tied to the female body in discussions of adiaphora like dance or gossip, dialogues about sins became more centred on the sexualised female body. The changes in Salome’s story in the 14th and 15th centuries show this shift in focus from the sins of both men and women to the sins of women, from sacrilege to sex.
This is an edited extract from Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640, by Lynneth Miller Renberg, published by Boydell & Brewer at £60 (Church Times Bookshop £54); 978-1-78327-747-6 (Books, 3 March); ebook £19.99; 978-1-80010-804-2.