Commenting on John Knox’s view of dancing, one biography of Mary Queen of Scots wrote:
The skill of Mary, for which Knox had a particular loathing, which summed up to him everything he detested about her character, education, and upbringing, was her dancing. There was a genuine and irreconcilable difference of attitude. To Knox, dancing seemed truly an invention of the devil, something which good women never practised; in his opinion, the activities which Mary got up to whenever she was alone with her ‘French fillocks, fiddlers and others of that band’ made the whole atmosphere more like a brothel than a place for honest women. If we are to believe Knox, in December 1562 Mary danced excessively ‘beyond midnight’ out of glee, because she had received the news that the persecution of the Huguenots had begun again in France. He immediately restored to his favourite weapon of the denunciation of the pulpit, as a result of which Mary summoned him to their second interview, some eighteen months after the first.
She received him in her chamber, attended by Lord James, Maitland and Morton. Knox proceeded to qualify his condemnation of dancing with certain provisos – he said that he was prepared to tolerate dancing if the principal vocation of the dancer was not neglected, and that the dancers took care not to dance as the Philistines did, for the pleasure they took in the displeasure of God’s people. If they did fall into one of these two heinous errors, they should ‘receive the reward of dancers, and that will be drunk in hell, unless they speedily repented’. (Antonia Fraser, Mary: Queen of Scots [London: Panther, 1970], 223)
I bring this up as it reminded me of a chapter in a book I recently read:
Chapter 5: "Going Forth to Dance" in Michael Hicks, Mormonism and Music: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)
As with Knox and many others, the early Latter-day Saint attitude towards dancing and its propriety was often inconsistent and something that developed. Hicks does a very good job at discussing this issue. Furthermore, the book is a very good volume on LDS hymnody and other topics of interest.
The article on "Dancing" by Phyllis C. Jacobson in The Encyclopedia of Mormonism is a good summary of LDS attitudes towards dancing, too.
