Just as Brainard's interests and scholarship crossed several disciplines, the essays collected here acknowledge her range of influence and her inclusive spirit. Performative dance and dance history, social history, and musicological issues are all explored, touching on topics from the later Renaissance back through the Carolingian Empire. The interconnected themes are presented in three sections: first creating the repertory, by looking at the contexts of musical creation; then interpreting it, through the performance, meaning, and social identity of dances; and finally discussing potential reevaluations, based on the location of musical performances, aspects of transcription difficulties and compositional techniques, dance-historical scrutiny, and a comparison of a shared genre in music and dance.
