Negotiating the Steps of Faith: Dance, Lay Religion, and Gender in English Parishes, 1300-1600

This paper uses parish dance practices and vernacular sermon literature to explore the interplay between theology and parish practice in the lives of late medieval laity. Sermons were a part of the fabric of daily life for the laity, and the voice of the preacher resonated through English parishes. Parish priests constructed a theological vision of lay belief that revolved around not only key doctrinal points as laid out by ecclesiastical authorities, but also around how to live: how to worship, how to conduct business, how to engage one’s community, and peripheral questions like when and how to dance. Late medieval presentations of dance show this use of preaching to define, negotiate, and communicate moral standards. This negotiation took place alongside lived faith in the form of parish dancing, for dance played a role even larger than that of sermons in the late medieval English parish. Dance was a part of church fundraisers, processionals, and social gatherings. Dance–like sermons– was part of the rhythms of daily life for parishioners. In this paper, I contend that for the laity, the religious ideologies of the medieval church were not negotiated in theological debates but in discussions and discipline of actions like dicing or dancing and in regulations placed on earthly gendered bodies. Through carefully framed mentions of dance in medieval sermons, preachers and sermon authors created rhetorical and theological structures that functioned as mechanisms for the perpetuation of misogyny within religious practice, mechanisms often challenged by the laity.

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