161 Early Theatre 28.1 (2025), 161–4 https://doi.org/10.12745/et.28.1.6107 Lynneth Miller Renberg. Women, Dance, and Parish Religion in England, 1300–1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2022. Pp 268. Hardback $110.00 USD. ISBN: 9781783277476. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781800108042. Emily Winerock Point Park University / Shakespeare and Dance Project After decades of neglect, scholars of medieval and early modern Europe are giving dance some much deserved attention, and Women, Dance, and Parish Religion in England, 1300–1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith is a welcome addition to recent scholarship. 1 The monograph’s broad time frame — encompassing almost 350 years of English history — enables Lynneth Miller Renberg to identify both the changes and continuities that scholars examining narrower periods have either missed or misunderstood. For example, early modernists have tended to assume that Christian views of dance were always negative and gendered because they lacked familiarity with medieval records of dancing saints and dance in sacred performances and rituals. By examining both medieval and early modern ser- mons, Renberg identifies a gradual but definite shift in the rhetoric used to describe dance: whereas medieval sermons referred to dance as both a symbol of holiness and harmony and a mark of sin and transgression, by the middle of the seventeenth century, sermon writers invoked dance almost exclusively as a sign of sacrilege, especially female sacrilege. Indeed, Renberg’s emphasis on gender marks this book’s divergence from other recent works on medieval dance and religion, maintaining that ‘the dancing body is always a gendered body’ (6). In surveying ‘the collision of rhetorical concep- tions of dance with the gendering of dancing bodies’, Renberg finds that ‘shifts in theological footing … dramatically altered the intricate steps of the performance of holiness and gender’ (3). Although biblically dance was considered among the adiaphora, meaning its morality was decided by context rather than its inherent properties, theologians increasingly associated dancing with women’s bodies, and women’s bodies with sacrilege. In response, sermon authors and their auditors recategorized dance from a neutral or positive communal activity to a mark of female transgression. This transition had practical consequences in many arenas. By the late sixteenth century, dancing had become one of the distinctive activities of nocturnal witch gatherings; in witch trials, dancing, ‘already a mark of the sac- rilegious woman, also became a mark of the witch’ (102). Early modern sermons and visitation articles likewise convey harsher views from both Reform-minded