Historical SourcePublic Domain
Apologie pour la Danse aux Dames de Mastrecht (Manley, Maastricht, 1 mars 1662)
Publisher: Roger de Manley (Manle / Manlé), 'Apologie pour la Danse aux Dames de Mastrecht', signed Maastricht 1 mars 1662; printed in the same year (MDCLXII) as a 30-page octavo, A-D in eights. Two-letter epistolary format: cover letter from Le Baron de Languerac (Etre dated Valeville, 25 fevrier 1662) requesting Manley's response to a recently-printed Maastricht anti-dance tract titled 'Le Conseil de Bacham' (lit. 'Bacham's Counsel') — attributed to one of the Reformed Ministers of Maastricht, who had denounced dancing in his Sunday preches. Manley's lengthy response (the 'Apologie' proper) defends dance through five chained arguments: (I) Old Testament biblical attestation — Miriam after Red Sea (Ex 15.20), Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11.34), Saul/David return from Philistines (1 Sam 18.6-7), David before the Ark (2 Sam 6.14, 1 Chr 15.29), Isaiah on the dancing of Babylonian Lutyens / satyrs (Isa 13.21), Jeremiah on the Restoration of Israel (Jer 31.4 'la Vierge se rejouira en la Danse, et les jeunes gens, & les anciens ensemble'), Ecclesiastes 3.4 ('un temps de danser'); (II) New Testament attestation — Christ's parable of the Prodigal Son receiving feasting + dancing on his return (Luke 15.25), Christ's metaphor of 'we played the flute and you did not dance' (Math 11.16 / Luke 7.32), the wedding at Cana (John 2.1-11) implicitly involving dance; (III) ancient civilizational attestation — Greek and Roman dancing as documented in classical sources; (IV) refutation of the standard anti-dance proof-texts including Romans 12.2 ('Ne vous conformez point a ce siecle') as not specifically aimed at dance; (V) exemption argument — abuses of any practice (gluttony at table, drunkenness from wine, lust at marriage) do not condemn the practice itself, only the abuse. Concludes with a defense of mixed-sex social dance as legitimate within bounds of bonnes mœurs and lois du pays. Source: Bibliotheque nationale de France Gallica scan, DATA/LIBRARY_OF_DANCE/ABBYY TXT/1662-Manley-Apologie_(BNF).txt (30 KB OCR; early-modern French print). HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE: the EARLIEST PRO-DANCE-DEFENSE TRACT in the LOD religious-dance-polemic corpus, predating the next earliest entry (LOC-1819-IDE Buffalo NY) by 157 years and the earliest databased Francophone-Reformed anti-dance tract (LOC-1830-OBSERVATIONS Lausanne) by 168 years. The bilateral nature of the Maastricht 1662 exchange (Manley's Apologie + the lost or untraced Conseil de Bacham anti-dance source it answers) documents that the dance/anti-dance polemic genre was already in mature epistolary form in Francophone Reformed Protestant Europe during the early Reign of Louis XIV (in the same year, 1662, as the founding of Louis XIV's Académie Royale de Danse — March 1661 — by Henri Sallé / Beauchamp / Galand / Pecour / Lavalle / Beauchamps père / Beauchamps fils / Pierre Beauchamps / Le Vasseur / Mauruel / Boyer / De Lorge / Dolivet — see LOC-1661-BENSERADE). The Maastricht context matters: Maastricht was a Dutch garrison city with a Reformed (Calvinist) majority but also French-speaking Catholic and Spanish-speaking populations under the duarchy of the United Provinces and the Prince-Bishop of Liege; Manley addresses 'aux Dames de Mastrecht' (the women of Maastricht) in defense of their right to dance at French-style mixed-sex bals, against the local Reformed minister's attempt to suppress them. Manley himself (Roger de Manlé / Manley, fl. 1660s) appears to have been a French-speaking Huguenot diplomat, soldier, or court figure attached to the Languerac household; his rhetorical sophistication (citing Hebrew and Greek for biblical exegesis, Latin for civil-law texts, French for the discourse) places him in the educated Huguenot milieu that produced the 1685-Revocation-era diaspora of dancing-masters to England, the Netherlands, and Brandenburg. GENRE BRIDGE: this entry extends the LOD religious-polemic cohort [1819-IDE, 1824-MCMANUS, 1830-OBSERVATIONS, 1830-ALERME, 1849-PALMER, 1884-PENN, 1886-PENN, 1892-FAULKNER, 1893-GARDNER, 1901-PFEFFERKORN, 1904-IMMORALITY] backward into the 1660s, more than 150 years earlier, and reverses the polarity (defense, not attack) — providing the corpus's first early-modern PRO-DANCE polemic in dialogue with an (untraced) anti-dance source. Has_Step_Detail=None — pure theological-rhetorical discourse with no named-dance or step content.Year: 1662Family: manleyCatalog: local
Dance manual/reference by Roger de Manley (Manle / Manlé), 'Apologie pour la Danse aux Dames de Mastrecht', signed Maastricht 1 mars 1662; printed in the same year (MDCLXII) as a 30-page octavo, A-D in eights. Two-letter epistolary format: cover letter from Le Baron de Languerac (Etre dated Valeville, 25 fevrier 1662) requesting Manley's response to a recently-printed Maastricht anti-dance tract titled 'Le Conseil de Bacham' (lit. 'Bacham's Counsel') — attributed to one of the Reformed Ministers of Maastricht, who had denounced dancing in his Sunday preches. Manley's lengthy response (the 'Apologie' proper) defends dance through five chained arguments: (I) Old Testament biblical attestation — Miriam after Red Sea (Ex 15.20), Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11.34), Saul/David return from Philistines (1 Sam 18.6-7), David before the Ark (2 Sam 6.14, 1 Chr 15.29), Isaiah on the dancing of Babylonian Lutyens / satyrs (Isa 13.21), Jeremiah on the Restoration of Israel (Jer 31.4 'la Vierge se rejouira en la Danse, et les jeunes gens, & les anciens ensemble'), Ecclesiastes 3.4 ('un temps de danser'); (II) New Testament attestation — Christ's parable of the Prodigal Son receiving feasting + dancing on his return (Luke 15.25), Christ's metaphor of 'we played the flute and you did not dance' (Math 11.16 / Luke 7.32), the wedding at Cana (John 2.1-11) implicitly involving dance; (III) ancient civilizational attestation — Greek and Roman dancing as documented in classical sources; (IV) refutation of the standard anti-dance proof-texts including Romans 12.2 ('Ne vous conformez point a ce siecle') as not specifically aimed at dance; (V) exemption argument — abuses of any practice (gluttony at table, drunkenness from wine, lust at marriage) do not condemn the practice itself, only the abuse. Concludes with a defense of mixed-sex social dance as legitimate within bounds of bonnes mœurs and lois du pays. Source: Bibliotheque nationale de France Gallica scan, DATA/LIBRARY_OF_DANCE/ABBYY TXT/1662-Manley-Apologie_(BNF).txt (30 KB OCR; early-modern French print). HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE: the EARLIEST PRO-DANCE-DEFENSE TRACT in the LOD religious-dance-polemic corpus, predating the next earliest entry (LOC-1819-IDE Buffalo NY) by 157 years and the earliest databased Francophone-Reformed anti-dance tract (LOC-1830-OBSERVATIONS Lausanne) by 168 years. The bilateral nature of the Maastricht 1662 exchange (Manley's Apologie + the lost or untraced Conseil de Bacham anti-dance source it answers) documents that the dance/anti-dance polemic genre was already in mature epistolary form in Francophone Reformed Protestant Europe during the early Reign of Louis XIV (in the same year, 1662, as the founding of Louis XIV's Académie Royale de Danse — March 1661 — by Henri Sallé / Beauchamp / Galand / Pecour / Lavalle / Beauchamps père / Beauchamps fils / Pierre Beauchamps / Le Vasseur / Mauruel / Boyer / De Lorge / Dolivet — see LOC-1661-BENSERADE). The Maastricht context matters: Maastricht was a Dutch garrison city with a Reformed (Calvinist) majority but also French-speaking Catholic and Spanish-speaking populations under the duarchy of the United Provinces and the Prince-Bishop of Liege; Manley addresses 'aux Dames de Mastrecht' (the women of Maastricht) in defense of their right to dance at French-style mixed-sex bals, against the local Reformed minister's attempt to suppress them. Manley himself (Roger de Manlé / Manley, fl. 1660s) appears to have been a French-speaking Huguenot diplomat, soldier, or court figure attached to the Languerac household; his rhetorical sophistication (citing Hebrew and Greek for biblical exegesis, Latin for civil-law texts, French for the discourse) places him in the educated Huguenot milieu that produced the 1685-Revocation-era diaspora of dancing-masters to England, the Netherlands, and Brandenburg. GENRE BRIDGE: this entry extends the LOD religious-polemic cohort [1819-IDE, 1824-MCMANUS, 1830-OBSERVATIONS, 1830-ALERME, 1849-PALMER, 1884-PENN, 1886-PENN, 1892-FAULKNER, 1893-GARDNER, 1901-PFEFFERKORN, 1904-IMMORALITY] backward into the 1660s, more than 150 years earlier, and reverses the polarity (defense, not attack) — providing the corpus's first early-modern PRO-DANCE polemic in dialogue with an (untraced) anti-dance source. Has_Step_Detail=None — pure theological-rhetorical discourse with no named-dance or step content. (1662). Imported from local collection.