During the 16th century formalised dances, like the Allemande, the Courante and the Galliard, the Minuet and the Pavane were popular throughout Europe. The Allemande was assumed to come from Germany, the Galliard and Minuet from France while the Pavane took its name from Padua in Italy. Queen Elizabeth I was particularly fond of the Galliard with its daringly intimate lavolta movement, where the male leader lifts his female partner high into the air. In the 18thcentury new dances entered the repertory, often from folk origins. These included the Gavotte and Galop from France, the Ländler and the Waltz from Austria and the Mazurka, Polka and Polonaise from Poland.

Dances and balls contributed strong social glue in polite society throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. They became the focus of the social season when well-connected debutantes were launched into the upper-class marriage market. Lord Byron realised the possibilities for illicit liaisons:

Blest was the time the waltz chose for her debut;
The court, the Regent, like herself were new;…
Hoops are no more, and petticoats not much;
Morals and minuets, virtue and her stays,
And tell-tale powder all have had their days…

Round all the confines of the yielded waist,
The strangest hand may wander undisplaced…

Thus front to front the partners move or stand,
The foot may rest, but none withdraw the hand.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Waltz, 1816

In providing an arena where young men and women could meet freely and were permitted to engage in intimate contact, they excited alarm amongst the moralists. The diarist and novelist Fanny Burney, writing in 1782, considered dancing barbarian exercise, and of savage origin. Mrs Beecher stressed the risks to health:

If young and old went out to dance together in the open air as the French peasants do, it would be a very different sort of amusement, from that which is witnessed in a room, furnished with many lights, and filled with guests, … where the young collect, in their tightest dresses, to protract for many hours, a kind of physical exertion, which is not habitual to them. During this process, the blood is made to circulate more swiftly than ordinary, in circumstances where it is less perfectly oxygenized than health requires.

Catherine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1846

And the cynical RS Surtees wrote:

These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's wife.

RS Surtees, Mr Facey Romfords Hounds, 1865

Balls are mentioned frequently in the novels of Jane Austen where encounters at balls often provide a catalyst for plot development and relationships. A masked ball also provided the venue for the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden in 1792, an event that inspired Verdis opera of the same name, first performed in 1859.