Prior to the nineteenth century, dance in Western cultures mostly represented political systems or cultural practices. Displays of dance activities – as social dance and as ballet – are found in instruction books as well as in descriptions of festivals, triumphs and balls. Balls and festivals thus no longer represented mere occasions for social get-togethers, but became locations of (body) education. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the search for a (new) identity of dance began by continuously developing and implementing the existent techniques and styles of ballet and other dance forms. Editor Jennifer Nevile rightly states that reflections on the relationship between dance, body and politics for the time between the late Middle Ages and that watershed of the mid-eighteenth century represent ‘lacunae in dance history scholarship’ (p. 2). Historical dance research tended to focus on the history of individual artists, locations and ballets. Her publication is thus an attempt to provide a new perspective. The twelve essays from the fields of dance studies and musicology are consistently devoted to a specific as well as a general contextualization of dance as a social practice within a defined historical time period.

The introduction focuses on structural as well as methodological explanations which break down the central topics of the collection's five sections: dance at the court and in the city; dance and the public theater; choreographic structure and music; dance and the state; dance, society and the cosmos. The attempt at (re)defining key dance-historical terms such as Renaissance, baroque, formal and theatre dance remains, however, all too superficial. In this context a historiographical reflection would have been particularly appropriate. The compilation of the essays itself is well considered. The individual articles are mainly informative, well founded and inspiring. Hence exemplary individual studies (for example on Pierre Beauchamp and the public theater by John S. Powell) as well as systematic articles (on choreographic structure in baroque dance by Ken Pierce), or cultural-philosophical treatments (on Plato's philosophy of dance, by Graham Pont) come together well. Also, Nevile's own introductory text ‘Dance in Europe (1250–1750)’ offers to students and beginning dance scholars a good overview of larger historical coherencies and of the state of material. A list of dance treatises and manuscripts, modern editions and translations supplements the essays, offering a solid basis for further research. While this ambitious anthology thus attempts and manages to fill an academic void, one aspect of contemporary dance studies remains neglected: a historiography of the performative that would further differentiate and explore the relationship between, on the one hand, in actu concepts of body and movement as collective staging practices and, on the other, society and politics.