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.

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.

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.