The Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518

We’re fast approaching mid-summer and in the UK the next few months are marked in amongst other ways, masses of music and folk festivals with the most famous of which being Glastonbury. Well before the hundreds of thousands spent their summers dancing under the gaze of King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea,  there was an all together most deadly summer dance-off in what is now the city of Strasbourg in France.

In July 1518, a woman whose name was given as Frau (Mrs.) Troffea (or Trauffea) stepped into the street and began dancing. She seemed unable to stop, and she kept dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion. After resting, she resumed the compulsive frenzied activity. She continued this way for days, and within a week more than 30 other people were similarly afflicted.

It started with just a few people dancing outdoors in the summer heat. Arms flailing, bodies swaying and clothes soaked with sweat, they danced through the night and into the next day. Seldom stopping to eat or drink, and seemingly oblivious to mounting fatigue and the pain of bruised feet, they were still going days later. By the time the authorities intervened, hundreds more were dancing in the same frenetic fashion.

It’s one of the oddest epidemics to be recorded in world history. And it happened 500 years ago this summer in the French city of Strasbourg. It was there, over the course of three roasting-hot months in 1518, that several hundred people developed a compulsion to dance. The dancing went on and on until – to the horror of the crowds who gathered to watch – some of them collapsed and perished on the spot. Just what was happening?

According to an account written in the 1530s by the irascible but brilliant physician Paracelsus, the “dancing plague of Strasbourg” began in mid-July 1518, when a lone woman stepped outside her house and jigged for several days on end. Within a week, dozens more had been seized by the same irresistible urge.

The rich burghers who ran the city were not impressed. One of them, writer Sebastian Brant, had devoted a chapter of his work, Ship of Fools, to the folly of dance. Mystified by the chaos in the streets, he and his fellow city councillors consulted local doctors who, in keeping with standard medical wisdom, declared the dancing to be the result of “overheated blood” on the brain.

Though I can’t really guess why they came to this conclusion, the burghers implemented what they felt was the appropriate treatment – more dancing! They ordered the clearing of an open-air grain market, commandeered guild halls, and erected a stage next to the horse fair. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers in the belief that by maintaining frantic motion they would shake off the sickness. The burghers even hired pipers and drummers and paid “strong men” to keep the afflicted upright by clutching their bodies as they whirled and swayed. Those in the grain market and horse fair kept dancing under the full glare of the summer sun.

A poem in the city archives explains what happened next: “In their madness people kept up their dancing until they fell unconscious and many died.”

Finally the council sensed it had made a mistake and decided decided the dancers were suffering from holy wrath rather than sizzling brains and so they opted for a period of enforced penance, banning both music and dancing in public. Finally, the dancers were taken to a shrine dedicated to St Vitus, located in a musty grotto in the hills above the nearby town of Saverne, where their bloodied feet were placed into red shoes and they were led around a wooden figurine of the saint. In the following weeks, say the chronicles, most ceased their wild movements. The epidemic had come to an end.

This weird chapter of human history raises plenty of hard-to-answer questions. Why did the burghers prescribe more dancing as a treatment for cooked brains? Why were the dancers made to wear red shoes? And how many people died? (A writer living close to the city reckoned 15 a day, at least for a while, but this has not been corroborated.)

To a degree we can be more confident in saying what did and did not cause this strange phenomenon. For some time during the 20th century it was thought that ergotism looked like a good contender. This results from consuming food contaminated with a species of mould that grows on damp rye and produces a chemical related to LSD. It can induce terrifying hallucinations and violent twitching. But it is very unlikely that sufferers could have danced for days. Just as improbable is the claim that the dancers were religious subversives. It was clear to observers that they did not want to be dancing. The most credible explanation, in my view, is that the people of Strasbourg were the victims of mass psychogenic illness, what used to be called “mass hysteria”.

There had been several other outbreaks of dancing in the preceding centuries, involving hundreds or just a few people, nearly all in towns and cities close to the River Rhine. Along with the merchants, pilgrims and soldiers who plied these waters, news and beliefs travelled, too. One particular idea appears to have lodged in the cultural consciousness of the region: that St Vitus could punish sinners by making them dance. A painting in Cologne Cathedral, more than 200 miles downstream from Strasbourg, dramatises the curse: under an image of St Vitus, three men joylessly dance, their faces wearing the divorced-from-reality expressions of the delirious.

Such beliefs in supernatural agency can have dramatic effects on our behaviour. A classic case is “spirit possession”, in which people act as if their souls have been taken over by a spirit or deity.

The US anthropologist Erika Bourguignon has written about how being raised in an “environment of belief”, in which spirit possession is taken seriously, primes people to enter a dissociative mental state, where normal consciousness is disabled. People then act according to culturally prescribed ideas of how the possessed should behave. This is what happened in European convents before the early 1700s, when nuns would writhe, convulse, foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions, climb trees and miaow like cats.

Their behaviour seemed strange, but the nuns lived in communities that encouraged them to obsess about sin and were steeped in a mystical supernaturalism. Those who became convinced that demons had entered their souls were prone to fall into dissociative states in which they did exactly what theologians and exorcists said the diabolically possessed do. In such cases, the possession trance also spread to witnesses who shared the same theological fears.

The curse of St Vitus is just the kind of supernaturalist belief that can drive the suggestible into dissociative states. The chronicles agree that most people were quick to assume that an enraged St Vitus had caused the affliction. So all it took was for a few of the devout and emotionally frail to believe St Vitus had them in his sights for them to enter a trance state in which they felt impelled to dance for days.

If the dancing mania really was a case of mass psychogenic illness, we can also see why it engulfed so many people: few acts could have been more conducive to triggering an all-out psychic epidemic than the councillor’s decision to corral the dancers into the most public parts of the city. Their visibility ensured that other cityfolk were rendered susceptible as their minds dwelt on their own sins and the possibility that they might be next.

Life in Strasbourg in the early 1500s satisfied another basic condition for the outbreak of psychogenic illness: the chronicles record plenty of the distress that brings about a heightened level of suggestibility. Social and religious conflicts, terrifying new diseases, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices caused widespread misery. A chronicler described 1517 with poignant brevity as a “bad year”. The following summer, orphanages, hospitals and shelters were overflowing with the desperate. These were ideal conditions for some of the city’s needy to imagine that God was angry with them and that St Vitus stalked their streets.

Fortunately, the 1518 dance epidemic was the last of its kind in Europe though there had been several similar outbreaks in the preceding 500 years. In all likelihood, the possibility of further outbreaks declined along with the belief systems that had sustained them. In this way, the dancing mania underscores the power of cultural context to shape the way in which psychological suffering is expressed.

If you’d like to know more then in 2018 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Dancing Plague, John Waller released a book entitled  A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 published by Icon Books.

Other plague gristly posts of mine include this one on The Plague  and also Dancing On The Dead!