Sacrilegious bodies: Gender, race, and medieval dance in nineteenth-century missions

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 nineteenth-century Jamaica, this article shows how medieval theologies of lay dance shaped modern missionary efforts. Late medieval sermon authors and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly treated dance as a sacrilegious transgression associated with effeminacy and female bodies, drawing and reinforcing connections between dance and gender. These 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 religious othering of dancing Black bodies in British imperial contexts, as missionaries used dance 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, attempted to force Black bodies into stillness.