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“Mark Franko’s intellectually challenging study of the history and language of dance treatises exposes a kinetic fashioning of the body. Franko’s new preface and judicious close readings offer an indispensable guide to early modern histories and theories of dance and movement, traversing fresh insight on gesture and rhetoric as well as madness and courtesy. From popular practice to preoccupations with movement and theatricality, this work’s careful translation of aesthetic terms and values illuminates dance treatises’ and manuals’ important role in the history and theory of dance embodiment. This book is a compelling introduction to these sources and expert contribution in pre-modern dance and performance research.” —V K Preston, Concordia University, Canada

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“Franko presents dance as a signifying practice akin to literature, that calls for an interdisciplinary interpretation. The dancing body moves through texts, but also becomes itself a text, defying the elusiveness of corporeality in dance notation and constituting itself in the social world characterized by the fashioning of individual identity. It inscribes itself in its cultural context through its performative dimension.”—Sidia Fiorato, University of Verona, Italy

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