Thesis Chapter 3: Caroles-et-Danses

Caroles et Danses

The juggler also made his contemporaries dance, and they didn't shy away from it; every holiday of the year was a pretext for dancing: religious festivals, weddings, births, solemn entrances, and many more... Dancing was the entertainment of choice for men of the time, and dances were performed at court, in the village and in the city streets, as soon as there was enough room for them. Most of the time, these social dances were mixed open-chain dances. At court, ladies and knights hold hands and perform relatively slow dances to the sound of love songs or musical instruments. At this time, dancing was one of the pleasures offered by the games of courtly love. Popular dance is less well known than that of the court, and only a few pastourelles provide us with information on the dances of shepherds, which appear to be more lively than those of the nobility, as jumps and foot-stamping are often evoked. The tresque, which also appears at this time, seems to be an open chain dance in which the various figures are guided by a leader, and was probably as popular with knights as with shepherds. We found it interesting that the notion of pleasure is often closely linked to medieval society dances. Indeed, whether it's the pleasure of dancing or the pleasure of watching dancing, Déduit seems to have been the dancing master of medieval men. This period saw the emergence of a number of new terms to add to the lexicon of dance names. Indeed, the word carole replaced the Latin word chorea in works in the vernacular, followed by the word danse and its derivatives, as well as numerous other dance terms.