Anything from the 14th century is by definition speculative. I know that some of it's out there (I published most of it), but keep in mind that it's *very* loose guesswork at best. As siderea said, we don't have hard information for anything before the mid-15th century.
Leaping from there to many centuries earlier isn't really useful, I'm afraid -- dance tends to change fairly quickly, and beyond a couple of centuries the chances of seeing much that's similar are poor. The examples of dance apparently remaining unchanged over the centuries are often illusory: for example, modern English Country is more a revival of the period form, based on documentation, than a surviving tradition. It's even worse in this particular case: the early SCA stuff is mostly Renaissance Italian, when dance was in deep ferment and changing rapidly. So it's a poor choice for trying to extrapolate backwards.
If you want a recommendation for a couple of millennia go, I'd check out "The Antique Greek Dance", by Maurice Emmanuel (1916, John Lane Co.). The scholarship is pretty dated by now, and it's still deep guesswork based on pictures, so I'd take it with a huge grain of salt, but it's at least from something like the right historical era. I think it's more likely to have relevant ideas than anything you're going to find from SCA period...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-03-27 09:34 pm (UTC)Leaping from there to many centuries earlier isn't really useful, I'm afraid -- dance tends to change fairly quickly, and beyond a couple of centuries the chances of seeing much that's similar are poor. The examples of dance apparently remaining unchanged over the centuries are often illusory: for example, modern English Country is more a revival of the period form, based on documentation, than a surviving tradition. It's even worse in this particular case: the early SCA stuff is mostly Renaissance Italian, when dance was in deep ferment and changing rapidly. So it's a poor choice for trying to extrapolate backwards.
If you want a recommendation for a couple of millennia go, I'd check out "The Antique Greek Dance", by Maurice Emmanuel (1916, John Lane Co.). The scholarship is pretty dated by now, and it's still deep guesswork based on pictures, so I'd take it with a huge grain of salt, but it's at least from something like the right historical era. I think it's more likely to have relevant ideas than anything you're going to find from SCA period...