Thoinot Arbeau

Thoinot Arbeau is the anagrammatic pen name of French cleric Jehan Tabourot. Tabourot is most famous for his Orchésographie, a study of late sixteenth-century French Renaissance social dance. He was born in Dijon and died in Langres.

''Orchésographie'' and other work

Orchésographie, first published in Langres, 1589, provides information on social ballroom behaviour and the interaction between musicians and dancers. It is available online in facsimile and in plain text. An English translation by Mary Stewart Evans, edited by Julia Sutton, is available in print from Dover Publications. It contains numerous woodcuts of dancers and musicians and includes many dance tabulations in which extensive instructions for the steps are lined up next to the musical notes, a significant innovation in dance notation at that time. Orchésographie was partly written as a rebuttal of Calvinist treatises published at the time which argued that dance was an immoral and vain pastime.
He also published on astronomy: Compot et Manuel Kalendrier, par lequel toutes personnes peuvent facilement apprendre et sçavoir le cours du Soleil et de la Lune et semblablement les festes fixes et mobiles que l’on doit célébrer en l’Eglise, suyvant la correction ordonné par notre Saint Pére Grégoire XIII , Langres: Jehan des Preyz, 1582,.
Thoinot Arbeau was translated into English as Orchesography by Cyril W. Beaumont in 1925, and in a modern edition in 1967.
The pavane "Belle qui tiens ma vie" was arranged by Leo Delibes for his incidental music for Victor Hugo's play "Le roi s'amuse".
Other sections were arranged or quoted by Saint-Saens and Peter Warlock
"Branle de l'Official" provided the tune for the 20th-century English Christmas carol "Ding Dong Merrily on High".