He was predominantly a collector, or more properly what a later generation would call a Dancing Master: to quote the preface [by Mary Stewart Evans]of my 1967 Dover Publications edition ...

Laure Fonta, in her informed preface to the reprint of the Orchesography, published in Paris in 1888, suggests that Arbeau was animated to undertake this work, at the ripe age of sixty-nine, by the re-introduction of religious dances into the Church in France. It seems equally probable that the great wave of enthusiam for masquerades and dancing, which swept France in the wake of the Ballet Comique de la Reine, aroused in Arbeau an old love.

The text makes it plain that many of the dances were old and considered outdated by the time Arbeau notated them, and the whole book is as much a vignette of late C16th French courtly life as it is a dance tutor. It's a good read, much more of a reasonable modern read than other contemperaneous 'educational dialogues' (for example Thomas Morley's 'Plain and Practical Guide to Music' of 1599 is chock-full of absolutely fascinating musical detail but is a pretty dry read by comparison to Orchesography).

Thoinot Arbeau was an anagram of the author's real name, Jehan Tabourot, who lived 'At The Sign Of The Crumhorn': the fine Renaissance instrument maker Eric Moulder has adopted that as his address, and the mildly humorous discussions at the back of 'Early Music Today' magazine also take place at that address.

A while back I transcribed all of the Orchesography music into abc notation, which can be had from