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 be...

This book re-examines spa and assembly culture as key venues for sociability in the eighteenth century.Focused chiefly on the eighteenth century, this book looks forward into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of the chapters concern aspects of the city of Bath, the book stretches beyond Bath’s confines, taking in comparative British towns such as Tunbridge Wells, European spa towns, such as Nice, and the impact Bath had on spa towns in America. The chapters n...