In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred Kathryn Dickason brings out of the darkness a little-known period of the history of dance, revealing its significance within medieval Christianity. The author highlights the function of dance as an element of cohesion within the community of the faithful, as a means of encountering divinity, a form of penance, an instrument for moral education, or a metaphor of beatitude.

Through the study of the practices and discourses related to dance in the Middle Ages, the author challenges the widespread and erroneous idea of dance as an activity radically tainted by sin and far removed from the feelings, beliefs, and practices of Christian religion. “The mainstream assumption that denies Christianity's historical inclusion of dance is, as this book has demonstrated, a fallacy. Aesthetic, political, and philosophical maneuvers managed to overshadow a longstanding tradition of Christian thought and practice. Retrospectively, this study unveils a history that has been obscured” (236).

Dickason builds a dynamic vision of dance during the Middle Ages and shows its authorization and incorporation as part of religious practice. The author draws on a vast bibliography and on the analysis and interpretation of religious texts of a theological, liturgical, hagiographical, educational, or penitential nature. These reveal the long and inconclusive debate that took place within the medieval church in Europe about the moral valorization of dance per se, and as part of the religious practices of the clergy and laity. Other historical, literary, and iconographical sources reveal the interaction between these conceptions imbued with religious values and the practice of dance in the secular sphere.

The book is organized in two sections. In the first section, the author shows how through biblical exegesis Christianity defined two antithetical models of dance—a positive one, represented by the dances of praise for God of Miriam and King David, and a negative one, identified with the idolatrous dances around the golden calf and the dance of Salome before Herod. One of the most interesting contributions of the study is to reveal the incorporation of dance into the liturgy of the medieval Church, despite the negative connotations it had in the writings of the Church fathers. This incorporation is attributable to the performative character of the cult of the saints and the importance of gesture as part of the communication of the gospel. This shift in the valorization of dance was possible due to the identification within medieval thought of the harmony of bodily movement with the rectitude of the soul, and the symbolic power attributed to ordered movement within a sacred space.

In the second section of the book, the author brings us closer to the different aspects that dance adopted as part of the medieval religious practices: its exercise as penance in search of redemption from sin, or its inclusion as part of feminine mystical practices. In this sense, it should be noted how the practice of dance was integrated into a verbal and corporeal discourse that allowed certain beguines and nuns to formulate their own interpretation of theological dogmas, derived from the kinesthetic experience of their relationship with Christ. Another especially interesting contribution is the author's interpretation of the meaning of dance as a metaphor for the values of aristocratic society in Le Roman de la Rose, and the way in which Dante uses images of kinesthetic resonance in his Commedia, in which dance appears with an expiatory function or as a manifestation of the glory of paradise.

Through this multifaceted approach, Ringleaders of Redemption highlights the transversality of dance in the medieval world, exploring the discourses that were expressed around and through it. The different positions and valorizations that these discourses show bring us closer to important controversies that ran through European Christianity in the Middle Ages. Kathryn Dickason's study constitutes a major contribution not only to the history of dance, but also to that of medieval Christianity and European culture.