When dance is mentioned in the Old Testament it is distinguished by its joyousness. Words such as leaping and whirling describe the energy and vitality of ancient Hebrew dances. As in other early societies, dancing is most often connected with ritualistic activity. Ring dances may have been performed in the worship of the golden calf; the prohibition against making graven images that resulted from this worship explains the lack of evidence of Jewish dances in the visual arts.

Hebrew dances were performed by both men and women, though usually the sexes were separated. Victory dances were performed by groups of women; men participated in ecstatic whirling dances designed to evoke prophecy. Festival dances were performed by both groups—one of the most important was the water-drawing festival on the first night of Sukkoth, which was celebrated by a torchlit procession dance that lasted through the night.

Weddings provided another important occasion for ritual dancing. Dancing with the bride was considered an act of devotion, and the officiating rabbi always complied with pleasure. During the Diaspora of the early Christian Era many of the ritual dances disappeared, but the bridal dance continued as a tradition. In the Middle Ages wedding dances were performed in which men danced with the bridegroom and women with the bride because of the segregation of the sexes. Later, men could dance with the bride either by wrapping their hands in a cloth or by holding a cloth between them to signify their separation.

Ecclesiastical attitudes and practices

The attitude of the Christian Church toward dance was not unanimous. On the one side there was the ascetic rejection of all manifestations of lust and ecstasy, and dance was seen as one of the strongest persuasions to sexual permissiveness. On the other side, some early Church Fathers tried to find functions for pagan dances in Christian worship. St. Basil of Caesarea in 350 called dancing the most noble activity of the angels, a theory later endorsed by the Italian poet Dante. St. Augustine (354–430) was strictly against dancing, but, despite his great influence in the medieval church, dancing in churches continued for centuries.

Charlemagne, the Holy Roman emperor at the beginning of the 9th century, officially prohibited all kinds of dancing, but the ban was not observed. The Teutonic peoples were accustomed to dancing as part of their religious rites. On Christian feast days, which coincided with their ancient rites of expelling the winter, of celebrating the arrival of spring, and of rejoicing that the days grew longer again, they revived their old ritual dances, though these were camouflaged with new names and executed to different purpose. In this manner previously sacred dances became more and more secularized. After such secularization, two lines of development were open: the social dance or the assimilation of dance into theatrical spectacle by the joculators, travelling comedians who combined the arts of dancer, juggler, acrobat, singer, actor, mime, and musician in one person.

Dance ecstasies

There were two kinds of dance peculiar to the Middle Ages, the dance of death, or danse macabre, and the dancing mania known as St. Vitus’ dance. Both originally were ecstatic mass dances, dating from the 11th and 12th centuries. People congregated at churchyards to sing and dance while the representatives of the church tried in vain to stop them. In the 14th century another form of the dance of death emerged in Germany, the Totentanz, a danced drama with the character of Death seizing people one after the other without distinctions of class or privilege. The German painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) made a famous series of engravings of this dance.

The St. Vitus’ dance became a real public menace, seizing hundreds of people, spreading from city to city, mainly in the Low Countries, in Germany, and in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a kind of mass hysteria, a wild leaping dance in which the people screamed and foamed with fury, with the appearance of persons possessed. In these convulsive, frantic, and jerky dances, religious, medical, and social influences probably interacted in response to such things as the epilepsy-like seizures of persons suffering from the Black Death. Italy was afflicted with tarantism, an epidemic presumably caused by the bite of venomous spiders. Its effects had to be counteracted by distributing the poison over the whole body and “sweating it out,” which was accomplished by dancing to a special kind of music, the tarantella.

Dance and social class

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In western Europe by the 12th century, society had developed into three classes, the nobility, the peasantry, and the clergy. This separation contributed to the development of the social dance. The knights created their own worldly and spiritual ideals, exemplified in tournaments and courtly entertainments that were praised in song and poetry by the troubadours and minnesingers. The couple dances of the knights expressed the polished and aristocratic notions of courtly love. The round dances of the peasants were executed by circles or lines of people, often singing and holding each other by their hands. The rustic choral round had strong pantomimic leanings and unpolished expressions of joy and passion. And while the choral rounds almost always were executed to the singing of the participants, the court dances of the knights generally were accompanied by instrumental playing, especially of fiddles, and when there was singing, it emerged from the spectators rather than the performers.

From the late Middle Ages, graphic artists frequently recorded what dancing looked like in all its different manifestations. How dancing adapted to the idealism of knightly love is shown in manuscript illuminations and tapestries. Paintings of the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30–69) leave no doubt that the peasants enjoyed celebrating with dances of uninhibited stamping and cavorting.