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Abstract
The Dause macabre has long mystified historians of literature and the arts. The very origin of the term is obscure, as is the nature of the dance. Nobody imagines that skeletons actually accompanied the living to their graves but numerous pictorial representations from the fifteenth century do show what appear to be gloating figures reminding the living of their eventual demise and miming a dance, if not on their graves, at least on the way to it. The most famous of these was in the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, painted in 1424 and reproduced in print half a century later. These, and other cultural manifestations tending to stress the horrors of life, have led historians to see the period as an unremittingly gloomy one. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate by recourse to contemporary texts that it is possible to see the age in a very different light. In the second half of the fifteenth century, a time in France of renewal and increased prosperity, dancing and good living were very much on the agenda, to the delight of some and the consternation of others. While moralising poets such as Jehan Regnier, Guillaume Alexis, Eloy d’Amerval, and Nicolas de la Chesnaye rail against ‘plaisirs mondains’ (and by implication, good food and drink, fashionable clothes, dancing, and sexual enjoyment), others, such as the anarchic Guillaume Coquillart, revel in the fun to be had by those who joyfully take part in the dance of life.