Dance and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century

This collection challenges the dominant understandings of 18th-century sociability by placing dance, and the training and movement of the body, at its core. Rather than thinking of dance and music as peripheral ornaments to the complex business of Enlightenment society, it highlights them as important vehicles for the development and dissemination of the ideas and practices that shaped people’s social, emotional and intellectual worlds. Exploring the relationship between dance and sociability, and the development of both through the long 18th century, chapters in this collection span different practices in England, Scotland, colonial America, the West Indies, Germany, the Low Countries and Norway. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, they argue that dance, which was entangled with concerns about touch, dress and bodies, was integral to the ways in which ‘enlightened sociability’ was understood, performed and accepted.

Hillary Burlock is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool, working on the histories of British assembly rooms. She has held fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, Huntington Library, and Royal Archives, and has recently published an edited collection, Bath and Beyond: the Social and Cultural World of the Georgian Assembly Room (2025).

Ian Newman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, USA, and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He has published widely on 18th- and 19th-century British and Irish literature and culture. He is the author of The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution (2019).

Mark Philp is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick, UK, and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, University of Oxford, UK. He works on the history of political thought, social and political history in Britain between 1750 and 1850, and his most recent monograph is Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London, 1789-1815 (2020).