[SCA-Dance] MS Lansdowne 1115?

[White,John]

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From:  Aaron Macks [upelluri at gmail.com]

A couple of notes on Landsdowne:
1.  None of the dances there have names in the MS, all names are
reconstructed from cognate dances in playford or others.  I think
Cunningham was the first to do this
2.  Cunningham's transcriptions are not without error, and omit an
information about pagination.  I don't have any reason to expect errors
in this one, but they are known to be imperfect.
3.  There's a complete transcription including the diagrams in Ian
Payne's _The Almain in Britain_, it's the appendix.  This one includes
page info and notes about editorial choices.  All around a better one
then Cunningham, and comes in a useful, if dense, book

GunDormr

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Yes, my transcriptions are from Payne's book - there *are* errors in Cunningham that
Payne fixes.

My thoughts:  The dance Cunningham equates to Lull Me Beyond Thee is nothing like
that dance except for the arrangement of the couples.  The first dance in Cunningham
is *exactly* like a Playford dance from the 1670 (I think) edition - not just the words, 
but the layout too, which in Playford makes sense but in the reproductions in both
Payne and Cunningham does not.  Since the tentative dating for Lansdowne 1115
is approx. 1648 (a year before Lovelace/Church at 1649), this is really troubling.

I taught a class on Lansdowne at (I think) the Indiana KWDS, where we actually
danced one of the dances (I wanted to do two, but we didn't complete them both).
The write-up of that class should be in the notes, and details some of these findings.

        \\Dayfdd Cyhoeddwr