[SCA-Dance] Misc. questions from KWDS

[Justin du coeur]

(Grabbing the book and answering the easy questions offhand...)

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 2:40 AM, <tmcd at panix.com> wrote:

> Countess Judith de Northumbria (Rachel Lorenz)
> Reconsidering the lilly: Gelosia, Amoroso and Belfiore
>
> She cited Smith, A. William, _15th Century Dance and Music_, as the
> source for the Amoroso version she taught.


Smith is more or less the bible for 15th century Italian dance.  While
we've quibbled with various details over the years, it's still the
comprehensive source, giving full transcription/translations of the
introductions, and then (in Volume 2), giving a complete concordance of all
of the versions of each dance -- all of the transcriptions side-by-side,
and a single collated translation that tries to get the sense across.  We
have usually mostly ignored his translations for the dances (since they are
a deliberate mish-mash), but having the collated Italian is wonderfully
useful, since different sources for any given dance tend to give different
details, and you get a better gestalt picture by looking at all of them.

It has always been hard to find -- we spent ten years waiting while the
damned book was in pre-print, and since then it has gone in and out of
print repeatedly.  But if you can get a copy, it's one of the most useful
books in the field.


> She called that version
> the "New York Public Library" version.  Is there any more information
> on that particular source, or is it just a weird catalog number?
> I'm idly curious about this bit.
>

The citation is, "New York, Public Library, Dance Collection, Lincoln
Center, MGZMBZ-Res. 72-254".  It is one of a number of MSS attributed to
Ebreo / Ambrosio, who wrote most of the books in this repertoire.  It's
broadly similar to several of the others, and Smith only devotes a short
section to it per se, but Judith presumably used its Italian as her
specific focus for reconstructing this particular dance.  I would generally
agree with that practice: since dances *did* evolve during period, it's
usually best to focus on one specific source for your reconstruction if you
can, and use the others mainly to help disambiguate confusing passages.