The Cursed Carolers in Context

Lynneth Miller Renberg, Bradley Phillis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367742225
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000365603
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Cursed Carolers in Context explores the interplay between the forms and contexts in which the tale of the cursed carolers circulated and the meanings it had for medieval and early modern authors and audiences. The story of the cursed carolers has circulated in Europe since the eleventh century. In this story, a group of people in a village in Saxony skip Christmas mass to perform a circle dance in the cemetery, only to be cursed and forced to keep dancing for a whole year. By approaching the story in specific historical contexts, this book shows how the story of the cursed carolers became a space in which medieval readers, writers, and listeners could debate the meaning and significance of a surprising variety of questions, including ecclesiastical authority, gender roles, pastoral responsibility, and even the conduct of crusades. This consideration of the interplay between text and context sheds new light on how and why the story of the dancers achieved such popularity in the Middle Ages, and how its meanings developed and changed throughout the period. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval European history, literature, and dance, as well as those interested in cultural history.

Part 1
Setting the stage

1
Kinesic analysis

A theoretical approach to reading bodily movement in literature

Rebecca Straple-Sovers

Introduction

Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s account of the cursed carolers of Kölbigk in his eleventh-century Translatio Edithe closely follows the outline of the tale given in the introduction to this book, with a few key differences.¹ In Goscelin’s version, the tale is relayed by an alleged participant of the dance named Theoderic, who explains that twelve people came together “in frivolity and insanity to a place called Colbek” with the express intent to “seize a girl for one of our comrades to abuse in his pride.”² Additionally, Goscelin continues his version of the tale after Theoderic finishes his story and integrates Theoderic himself into the Legend of Edith (of which the Translatio is a part): the afflicted man, who must continue the dance and suffer spasms even after he has been separated from the other dancers, is healed by the saint, “in one day going from violent leaping to decorous stillness.”³

1 For readers without access to this book’s introduction, “The Tale of the Kölbigk Dancers: Transmissions, Translations, and Themes,” a basic overview of the tale is as follows: a group of dancers gathers in a churchyard on Christmas Eve. Their carole, complete with loud singing and dancing, disturbs the priest while he is saying mass. He comes out and admonishes them, calling them into mass, but when they refuse to listen, he prays that God would cause them to dance without ceasing for a full year for their sins. The priest’s prayer is answered, and the dancers undertake a year-long dance.

2 “in uanitate et insania uenimus ad locum qui dicitur Colebecci”; “ut uni sodalium nostrorum in superbia et in abusione puellam raperemus.” A. Wilmart, “La légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin,” Analectia Bollandiana 56 (1938), 287, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.ABOL.4.00807; Michael Wright and Kathleen Loncar, trans., “Goscelin’s Legend of Edith,” in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber Confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis with W. R. Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar, and Michael Wright (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 82. I use Wright and Loncar’s translations throughout this chapter unless otherwise indicated (many thanks to Marjorie Harrington for her knowledgeable guidance regarding Latin). See pages 17–19 of Michael Wright’s “Note on the Translation of the Legend of Edith” in the same book for a detailed explanation concerning the base texts for Wright and Loncar’s translation. The base text for their translation of the Translatio is A. Wilmart’s edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 938, fols. 1–29, which I cite throughout this article: A. Wilmart, “La légende de Ste Édith,” 265–307.

3 “hodie importune saltantem, modo oportune astantem.” Wilmart, “La légende de Ste Édith,” 291; Wright and Loncar, trans., “Goscelin’s Legend of Edith,” 85.

For a story so infamously connected with dance, the episode contains only a few details about the dance itself: the dancers “joined hands and started an unruly dance in the churchyard” and they “did not cease for one moment from dancing round, from beating the earth with [their] feet, from an exhibition of lamentable beating steps, and from repeating the same song.”⁴ Using only details about the movement given in the poem, their dance seems to be a series of steps performed in a circle, accompanied by a song. It’s not much to go on. This example neatly illustrates the challenges inherent in studying dance in historical sources, especially in literary scholarship: readers are dependent on the descriptive details provided by the author or poet to reconstruct or study the dance, and this is often a nearly impossible task. In this chapter I explore the challenges of studying dance and bodily movement in literature (particularly in early medieval literature) and the benefits of using a methodological approach grounded in principles of kinesic analysis – that is, a technique for studying bodily movement and the ways in which it makes meaning in texts. I then briefly demonstrate how using this methodology and reading Goscelin’s tale of the cursed carolers with an eye for bodily movement can help us frame the dance itself within the tale as well as understand the tale in the context of bodily movement and its implications, thus enhancing both our understanding of the dance as dance and of the tale within the larger hagiographic narrative of the Translatio.

4 “Conserimus manus et chorollam confusionis in atrio ordinamus”; “Nos nullo momento inter-mittimus chorizando circuire, terram pede pulsare, lacrimabiles plausus et saltus dare, eandem cantilenam perpetuare.” Wilmart, “La légende de Ste Édith,” 289; Wright and Loncar, trans., “Goscelin’s Legend of Edith,” 83–84.

The challenges of historical and literary dance scholarship

Dance is an inherently active, dynamic, and ephemeral art. Thus, studying dance through textual sources comes with plenty of complexities and contradictions, regardless of the period of study. Particularly before the advent of film, practitioners of dance attempted to record and describe their art in manuscript or print in a variety of ways, from diagrams and images to developing specialist notation systems and instructional manuals.⁵ Even today, those who write about dance, such as dance critics, must contend with the challenges of writing about “a moving subject without the luxury of a stable material event for repeated reference after the performance has been completed.”⁶ Video recordings help, but as Candace Feck points out, the “viewer cum writer arrives at the performance with his or her own set of preconceptions, concerns, physicality – in short, lived experience.”⁷ This lived experience, and the experience of watching, receiving, and taking part in the performance, can never be repeated and will never be captured in a recording.⁸ In her brilliant book Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Middle Ages, Seeta Chaganti points out another barrier for understanding historical dance in particular:

There is the obvious evidentiary restraint – how do we employ necessarily static vestiges of the past to understand a kinetic tradition? – but this is not our deepest problem. Rather, we need to recognize that our ability to perceive dance as a central and familiar cultural practice, one woven into various aspects of social life, might also be limited.… Whether vernacular or concert-based, many types of Western dance exist at a remove from their audience, a foundation in hard-won knowledge enforcing this distance.⁹

The challenge of decoding textual treatments of dance is familiar to any dance scholar. Studying dance in sources that are not uniquely concerned with describing and recording it – that is, historical or literary sources in which dance may play a part, but of which it is not the main focus – presents an even greater challenge.

5 Early examples of dance manuals include, to name only a few, Fabritio Caroso da Sermoneta’s Il Ballarino, published in 1581; a significant revision, Nobiltà di Dame, published in 1600; Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 Orchésographie; and John Playford’s The Dancing Master, published in several editions from 1651 to 1728. An English translation of Nobiltà di Dame is available: Fabritio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the “Nobiltà di Dame” (1600), trans. and ed. Julia Sutton (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1995); a facsimile, transcription, and translation developed by amateur volunteers of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s Renaissance Dance group are also available online at www.pbm.com/~lindahl/caroso//. The group’s home page, www.pbm.com/~lindahl/dance.html, contains a wealth of primary resources and images of historical dance. Orchésographie is also available in an English translation: Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography: 16th-Century French Dance from Court to Countryside, trans. Mary Stewart Evans, ed. Julia Sutton (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1967). Finally, an online “illustrated compendium” of The Dancing Master, hosted by the Country Dance and Song Society and compiled by Robert M. Keller, may be found at www.cdss.org/elibrary/dancing-master/Index.htm. Facsimiles of these and many other social dance manuals can be found in the U.S. Library of Congress collection An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490 to 1920, which contains over two hundred manuals: www.loc.gov/collections/dance-instruction-manuals-from-1490-to-1920.

6 Candace Feck, “What’s in a Dance? The Complexity of Information in Writings About Dance,” in Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies, ed. Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 415, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199939985.003.0020.

7 Feck, “What’s in a Dance?,” 415.

8 Feck, “What’s in a Dance?,” 414–415.

9 Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018), 4.

If we wish to analyze the movements of the dancers or reconstruct the actual steps, gestures, figures, and performance of a dance described in a textual source, we are often entirely dependent on the (usually scant) details supplied by the author – as we are when studying textual portrayals of the dance of the cursed carolers. When a poet or an author incorporates dance as part of his or her narrative, detailed description is not always provided – after all, the purpose of literary descriptions of dance is not to provide information on how to perform it. Goscelin and other medieval authors could expect their audiences to be familiar with common medieval dances in the same way that a modern American author, for example, can expect his or her audience to be at least marginally familiar with the general look and feeling of swing dance or salsa dance. The author need only mention the type of dance or a feature of it to conjure up the desired imagery in the audience’s minds. Thus, the limited descriptions of the dance in various tales of the cursed carolers most likely conjured up images of a specific type of dance for the tales’ medieval audiences.

Based on the limited description given by Goscelin, informed modern readers may assume that the dancers are probably performing a carole or ronde (also known as a carolle, a reigen in Middle High German, a chorea in Medieval Latin, a carola in Italian, and a corola in Provençal), described by Richard H. Hoppin as “round dances in which group performance of refrains alternated with lines sung by the leader of the dance.”¹⁰ Curt Sachs claims that “the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• The tale of the Kölbigk dancers: transmissions, translations, and themes
• Part 1 Setting the stage
• Part 2 Carolers and contexts
• Part 3 Dancing on
• Epilogue: dancing the spaces between
• Index