The fifteenth century was particularly the age of the basse dance. This was a measured and stately dance for the nobility and gentry to display their breeding and magnificence. For the most part, they did this as couples, one or more at a time, but in north Italy more ambitious configurations were devised for varied numbers of dancers – who parted, came together, circled and executed other movements to make patterns that expressed relationships between dancers. Shows mounted for court entertainment in fifteenth-century Italy regularly included dancing. The basse dance continued into the sixteenth century, when it was generally followed by the livelier tourdion, but later these went out of fashion, being succeeded in the Late Renaissance by the pavan with galliard.

In ENGLAND, the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) ended with the establishment of the Tudor dynasty.

In SCOTLAND, Stuart kings reigned throughout (Robert III, James I-V).

In FRANCE, the English crown had held substantial territories from 1415 (Agincourt) until the early 1450s (end of Hundred Years War). Burgundy, with its dependencies Picardy and Artois (as well as Flanders), remained an independent duchy until the defeat of Charles the Bold in 1477. Thereafter France was a single realm under the Kings Louis XI (1461-83) and Charles VIII (1483-98).

SPAIN was divided between the kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Navarre, and muslim Andalusia, until Aragon and Castile were brought together by Fernando II and Isabel, who eventually captured Granada to end the Moorish occupation in 1491.

Throughout the century both GERMANY and ITALY were like mosaics made up of small principalities, duchies and lesser lordships, plus a number of independent civic republics, all competing in rivalry with one another and forming a succession of shifting alliances.

It was the rivalry of so many competing courts that fuelled the rapid development of both music and dance in the fifteenth century.

The French basse dance used tunes of which many were adapted from well-known songs of the day, and in the fifteenth century each one had its own sequence of steps. From surviving documents we know the step-sequences of 295 individual basse dances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the music for a good many of them.

In Italy, there were dancing masters who developed not only the bassa danza (equivalent of the basse dance of France and neighbouring countries) but also the ballo, a specifically Italian invention using passages in different rhythms and tempi to specially composed music. The best known dancing masters were Domenico, Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo the Jew (later called Giovanni Ambrosio), all of whom wrote surviving dance treatises. All known copies of these treatises contain sections in which examples of the dances are described. These include 56 ballos, for 27 of which the music is also given, together with 45 bassa danzas.

In Italian court entertainments, the most important dance seems to have been the moresca, which, like later masque dances, was usually composed for the occasion; but, as with masque dances, surviving descriptions are not adequate to define its character.

In England, the fifteenth-century repertoire included both basse dances composed in the French manner and dances with a more complex floor-pattern for two or three persons.

In all these countries, it is more than likely that there were traditional vernacular dances, like the round dance shown in the picture overleaf, which everybody knew so well that nobody bothered to write them down. That picture is not alone in showing that such dances were enjoyed by the well-to-do as well as the peasants.

The evidence for basse dances in the fifteenth century is collected in F. Crane, Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse (Musicological Studies, vol 16, 1968), which is now out of print, but can be found in specialist dance and music libraries. A new general study including sixteenth-century as well as fifteenth-century material is currently (1999) in preparation.

The sources for the Italian dances have been printed in A. W. Smith, Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: twelve transcribed Italian treatises and collections in the tradition of Domenico da Piacenza (Dance & Music Series, no 4, 1995). This contains (not always adequate) English translations, and the two volumes cost £43 each. A complete set of translations is also found in D. Wilson, 101 Italian Dances (c. 1450 – c. 1510) (Early Dance Circle, 1999).

The treatises of individual Italian dancing masters have been studied in the following publications:

D. R. Wilson Domenico of Piacenza (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS ital. 972) (Early Dance Circle, 1988) [transcript].

M. Inglehearn & P. Forsyth The Book on The Art of Dancing: Antonio Cornazano (London, 1981) [translation].

B. Sparti Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro: On the Practice or Art of Dancing (Oxford, 1993; 2nd ed. 1995) [edition, translation and introduction].

A collection of English dances of c.1485 was published by D. Fallows in Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 29 (1996), 1-20.

See Additional Resources for details of instruction-books and practice tapes produced by the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society and by Nonsuch/Eglinton Productions; these, amongst others, give interpretations of many dances with their music.