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Of all institutions, the Christian Church has the longest historical association with dance. It is well known that this association is documented chiefly by discourses that are antagonistic toward most (if not all) forms of dance, whether vernacular or theatrical. Dance was deemed incompatible with the Christian faith, and was almost never (if ever) a part of liturgical practices. The most stringent proponents of these anti-dance discourses went as far as labeling dance as a satanic ritual, citing magic and witchcraft. This viewpoint was an important ingredient in the evolution of the fiction of the witches’ dance or witches’ Sabbath that appeared around 1400. Based on a historical overview of the relationship between Church and dance, this paper explores the following questions: To what extent does the imagination of the witches’ Sabbath align with cultural and historical facts, and what are these facts? How and why did ‘witches’ disappear from the Ballets de Cour and the Masques towards the end of the 17th century, when people were still being burned as ‘witches’? \

Hanna Walsdorf received her Ph.D. in Musicology and Dance Studies in 2009 from the University of Salzburg (Austria) and completed her habilitation (Dr. habil.) at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig in 2022. From 2009–2013, Hanna was a postdoctoral research fellow in Musicology at Heidelberg University (Germany). She was awarded the Tanzwissenschaftspreis NRW in 2011. From 2014 to 2020, she directed the Emmy Noether Research Group Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage (1650–1760), granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2020–2021, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, and at the University of Salzburg. In autumn 2021 she was appointed Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where she is now based. In 2023, she was awarded an SNSF Advanced Grant for the project The Night Side of Music (NightMuse, 2024–2029).