Sacrilegious Bodies: Gender, Race, and Medieval Dance in the British Empire

How do late medieval redefinitions of dance and gender in England persist into the modern era and shape British imperialism? This is the question this paper engages through pairing a study of vernacular religious texts from late medieval England with a case study focused on Baptist mission work and conflicts over dance in 19^th-century Jamaica. Late medieval sermon authors and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly treated dance as a sacrilegious and un-Christian transgression associated with effeminacy and female bodies, drawing and reinforcing connections between dance and gender. These connections and rhetorical moves were then applied to discussions of race, religion, and conversion during the era of British imperialism. One of the enduring legacies of medieval English discussions of dance was the othering of black bodies in British imperial contexts, as dance continued to be used as a marker of false faith, effeminacy, and moral susceptibility. White missionaries, applying the paradigm regarding dance and sin developed in the late middle ages, forced Black bodies into stillness.