Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages By Seeta Chaganti

Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

A new understanding of medieval poetic form as articulated through its relationship to dance.

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

As a ballet dancer, I know that many types of dance are somewhat marginal cultural practices now, but dance wasn't marginal in this way during the Middle Ages. I was interested in how a medieval audience, much more dance-literate than we mostly are, found their ways of seeing the world -- and particular poetry -- shaped by their encounters and familiarity with dance.

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

I wish everyone who reads my book could see one of the contemporary dance pieces I discuss in it, Mark Morris's “L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato” (1988). This work can help us to understand the complexities and disorientations that existed everywhere in the intersection of dance, poetic text, and other media in the Middle Ages.

Strange Footing came out in May from the University of Chicago Press. You can find it here.