ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what was written in the theoretical sections of the dance treatises concerning women, the choreographies themselves, the rituals associated with the preparation for a dance and contemporary accounts of upper-class women dancing in public. The position of women in early modern Europe is still a hotly disputed field of research. Women’s participation in public dance performances in fifteenth-century Italy has recently been interpreted in an article by Judith Bryce as ‘simply constituting a conscious patriarchal manipulation and exploitation of women in which the latter are positioned and, more insidiously, position themselves, as objects’. The active participation of women in the role of the hunter in dances is further corroborated by the description of the Florentine ball of 1459. The women who are participating in the festa are described as vezzose, an adjective that is perhaps best translated as ‘coquettish’.
