Dance Patterns of the Early Seventeenth Century The Stockholm Manuscript and Le ballet de Monseigneur Jennifer Nevile

RESUMEN: Dancing was a very popular activity in the latter half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It could function as an evening's entertainment in the country house of the local gentry, or as an important part of the extravagant court spectacles: productions rich with political allegories and multiple layers of symbolism. For example, at the French court alone in the twenty-one years between 1597 and 1618 ninety-six ballets were performed. In spite of the prolific number of ballets and fêtes which took place in France, the choreographic record of this activity is very slim. What records do remain are also somewhat isolated. There is no French equivalent to the substantial dance treatises written by the Italian dance masters from the second half of the sixteenth century, which record the names of dozens of dance masters, pages of information on how to perform the dance steps, hundreds of galliard variations, as well as over 150 choreographies. This article, then is an attempt to establish connections between two of these scarce French choreographic records: the 1610 Ballet de Monseigneur de Vendosme, and the notebook of an unknown French dancing master, now held in the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm.