In this article I attempt to synthesize all the the details only about the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518. Since there are many dancing plagues throughout 700-1700 AD as well as many diverse theories on the origin of the phenomenon in general, this article fixates solely on the facts of one specific, most famous instance.
In order to keep to the whole story as detailed and accurately as possible, I have used relatively few, but most reliable sources. These are ones that have been recounted closest to the time at hand, or ones extensively cross referenced through hundreds of years of chronicles and periodicals. I hope that this compiles the “facts” as thoroughly and succinctly as possible. If you are looking for a deep study specifically of the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518, I hope you find it here.
Setting of the Time & Background
Strasbourg was a very active trading town, having frequent fairs attracting merchants all across the continent.
The later part of the 1400s gave rise to a chapel dedicated solely to St. Vitus, on some red sandstone in the Vosges mountains, which lie 30 miles northwest of Strasbourg. St. Vitus both cured and caused ailments related to dancing as well as epilepsy. In 1492 a comet hit the area as well, documented in the Nuremberg periodicals. Between 1500 and 1503 there were peasant revolts.
In 1514 Erasmus visited the city, and this was said to have been in alignment with the social order that had been changing. There was a large number of guilds, convents and monasteries, and the peasantry felt the councils did not represent them. 1516 had both an extreme summer and winter. Supplies dwindled and deaths due to malnutrition rose.
Strong Beliefs and Social Unrest
The belief in a dancing curse of St. Vitus was active during this time. This was that someone could curse you into possession to dance for days on end.
Medieval physician Paracelsus chronicled some of Strasbourg in Opus Paramirum, which he wrote after visiting the city in 1526. He noted that in the years preceding, the area experienced famine, sickness, and colder than average temperature. Bread prices had reached their highest anyone in their lives had seen. Farmers and growers were hit hard, and leprosy, plague, smallpox, and syphilis were all spreading. The syphilis was newer, carried by mercenaries returning from war in Italy. People interpreted these diseases widely as punishment to sinners. The poor were of course affected the most. People took out loans, had to slaughter their livestock. There were some attempts at rebellion as some hoards of people would arrive at the city gates in contempt at the lords and clergy. They believed the priests to have lost their way, while stories of monks keeping concubines, and monasteries monopolizing grain inventory would buy peasant debt. This made people start alienating themselves from the church for doubts of its purity and ability to intercede to actually help them.
“..from the Black Forest in the west to the Vosges
Waller
mountains in the east, people were becoming convinced
that God had abandoned His flock. New epidemic killers
had badly shaken their confidence in divine protection”
Many were beginning to lose faith, and rumors of the dead escaping purgatory, and apparitions, spread widely. In August of 1517, hundreds went to a holy procession called “contra pestilentiam“. They urgently implored the Virgin, St. Sebastian, and St. Roche to take it easy on them. Also in 1517, a new fatal disease they called “English sweat”, which, as the name implies, caused people to sweat profusely, accompanied by delirium and extreme thirst.
Early 1518 records showed hospitals and shelters were overwhelmed from the new sicknesses all at once. Most of the time, harvest failure, plague, war, and the like were constants and indeed did not precipitate huge crisis. These crises in the decades preceding 1518 worsened in part that in the mid-1400s landlords shored declining income by turning peasants to serfs and enacted new taxes and restrictions on fishing and hunting.
The Actual Events Beginning it
It is widely known as fact exactly how the dancing plague of 1518 began. Lady Troffea, (also called Frau Troffea, Frau means woman, or Ms.) began adopting odd manners. By oral story and recorded by Paracelsus, Troffea got fed up with her husband, and she reached a breaking point one day being asked to do something she didn’t want to. She acted ill then, and perhaps even concocted this whole thing to get out of whatever it was. Paracelsus did think she likely pretended that she could not stop dancing, since her husband did not like dancing.
All the Details of the Proceedings
First music and dance was specially ordered as therapy. After that didn’t help at all, officials banned music and drumming throughout the town. Forbidden as well:beautiful clothes and jewelry, since Hecker notes some of the participants were thought to be imitating the behavior for glamorous fun.
“Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. … Imposture and profligacy played their part … but the morbid delusion itself seems to have predominated [ 9 , pp 84–85].”
Hecker
It had become a spectacle. Like morbid news you can’t look away from. The issuing of musicians at the start, in the most public of spaces, had increased the epidemic nature. This occurred at the actual grain market as well as the horse fair, on raised platforms, where elite members of society had frequented. The city folk thus had to dwell their minds on the matter. There arose the strong conviction that St. Vitus was at play. Then the rhythms were awfully seductive. The measures of hiring musicians and encouraging them to “dance it out” undoubtedly made the situation worse, and many fainted from exhaustion. Even Troffea was said to have fallen to sleep in the middle of dancing nearly each day, but would rise again and continue. Some would come back up and continue dancing, but the more feeble would succumb to death.
Timeline of 1518 Dancing Plague
| July 14th, 1518 | Frau Troffea begins dancing solitary outside a church courtyard. (Another account states July 22) |
| Within 4 days | 34 men and women joined Frau (Hecker). Shortly after the council hired musicians, thinking this would hasten the end of the madness. |
| Through end of July | 34 had definitely joined (Waller). July 27th the city council banned music banned, especially drums. Stringed instruments were still allowed or in a gray area. Jewelry and beautiful clothes, also not allowed. |
| August 3rd | Sebastian Brant says: Aug 3, “our lord councilors [..] forbade, on pain of a fine of 30 shillings, that anyone, no matter who, should hold a dance until St. Michaels Day [Sept 29] in this city or its suburbs or in its whole jurisdiction. For by doing so they take away the recovery of such [dancing] persons.” This reduced the showy display. The city had a general “lockdown”-esque penance, whore and ruffians banished as well. |
| End of August/ Within 4 weeks | 400 people had joined (Waller) 400 within 4 weeks (Imlin family chronicale) |
| August 10 | Announcement that the dancers would be taken to St. Vitus shrine |
| Until end of September | Music continued to be banned |
“Every time the sick flagged, fainted, stumbled or slowed,
Waller
the musicians raised the tempo of their playing and hired
dancers held them firm and quickened their pace.”
The dancers were bound with bandages to reduce tremors and also sometimes given clacky jewelry at the start in the “hastening” phase. The council also called in strong men to try to hold some of them down.
The Ending of it
“..medieval doctors, theologians, and natural philosophers generally maintained the orthodox position that all causation can ultimately be attributed to God, whether through the ordination of the movement of the planets or through more direct action.19 Even as natural philosophy developed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onwards, this orthodox view persisted.20 Natural philosophers or doctors might explore various symptoms and remedies, but causation remained divine.”
Miller
Those of more fragile constitution suffered strokes or afflictions of the heart from the nonstop dancing. Soon after the town was completely under a “lockdown” type situation, the dancers were strapped onto wagons and taken to that St. Vitus shrine in the Vosges mountains.
The dancers encircled an altar with red shoes, given in belief of the myth of St. Vitus. Most of the dancers apparently regained control. So the whole thing lasted about 2 months, from mid-July to mid-September. The shoes had been sprinkled and consecrated with holy water, and crosses painted with oil on red shoes. The crosses and the red expelled demons, intended to repel evil. They danced around the altar. They also all had to donate a small sum of money into the collection box if they had it.
Theories and Discourse
Many of the dancers begged for relief, and there exists no exact evidence the dancers wanted to dance, or that anyone was pretending. All of that is actually pure speculation. There is only evidence of the dancers expressing fear and distress. This marks a main difference between dancing mania and ecstatic dance.
The main theories throughout the ages
- Ergot poisoning, unlikely since they had no recording symptoms known to be ergot poisoning
- Demonic possession and curses from Saints
- Psychological distress leading to mass psychogenic illness
We know that trauma and stress increase the likelihood of entering an altered state spontaneously from modern psychology. In instances of modern mass psychogenic illness, there are common threads that it often can happen in strict boarding schools, nuns in convents (especially 1600s-1800s), and workers in harsh factory conditions. Prior dancing plagues like 1374 also occurred after catastrophic flooding to the Rhine river. My personal sprinkles is that there could also be some kind of prion, unique to the bacterial conditions, overflowing from the water and contributing, though alone not the cause. But I also think of religion and spirituality as being real in materialist terms. For example, bacteria and viruses mutate under electromagnetic conditions, and spirits and dead Saints’ influences are things that are unseen and unexplained just like ambient fields, from geomagnetism or solar storms and the like.
Many ancient societies practiced ritual loss of consciousness intentionally said to commune with “spirit worlds”. For example, Haiti, Madagascar, and the Arctic people all have similar “possession” rituals, mainly enacted to intercede natural disasters or interpersonal struggles. However in Strasbourg, there were not known rituals to the experience, the cultural associations connected with strongly held beliefs and religion were very clearly still at play.
The Scholarly Consensus Agrees with Religious/Belief induced Mass Psychogenic Illness
They believed that God was forsaking them. Explained just like the other episodes of possession you have heard of that had very real effects on the minds of those afflicted. The writhing, and influencing those around them.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the pervasiveness of these beliefs comes from the fact that by the late fifteenth century, phrases like ‘God give you St. Vitus’ and ‘May St. Vitus come to you’ were well-known curses in the
Waller, “In a Spin”
Rhine region. These were not considered to be idle threats. A law from the late 1400s on the statute books of the town of Rottweil, southeast of Strasbourg, tells us that if someone ‘cursed’ another in the name of St. Vitus, ‘the cursed
person’ was expected to develop ‘a fever and St. Vitus’ dance’
“The dancing plague was sent by God to help the Strasbourg residents understand suffering, ‘so that Christ’s suffering should not be lost upon us.’ If the plague did not properly teach the residents to live pious, sober lives, with ‘moderation in their dancing’ and the cessation of ‘shameful and blasphemous dances,’ God would send more divine punishments. Gebwiler’s explicit ideological connection of the dancing plague to divine punishment for transgression seals the case for the continuation of medieval views on dancing plague in 1518 Strasbourg.”
Miller
Many scholars agree with Paracelsus’ conviction that these maladies spawned from recklessness and disgraceful living. He believed it a consequence of simple life and not innately divine in origin, but a natural causation from transgressional behavior. In medical treatment, the suggestion was fasting on bread and water that would settle the blood, throwing them into cold water could help too. He believed in “laughing veins” as the effect of the hot blood, and/or imaginative behavior, mirrored in our modern conceptions of “madness” as sort of giving into illusions. He also recommended special concoctions be absorbed into the “naturally ticklish areas of the body.”
The Most Famous 1518 Dancing Plague of Strasbourg Lives on as a Mystery
The Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518 we can see as both disease and divine intervention in the minds of those present.
Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Ship of Fools, written 20 years prior, shows up the perception of dance in Strasbourg at the time. Brant, a humanist lawyer, wrote:
“I’d take all those for fools almost
Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools
Who skill and joy in dancing boast,
Cavorting, prancing as they must,
With weary feet in dirt and dust,
But later then I called to mind
That dance and sin are one in kind.
That very easily ‘tis scented:
The dance by Satan was invented
When he devised the golden calf
And taught some men at God to laugh,
And Satan dancing still doth use
To hatch out evil, to abuse.
It stirs up pride, immodesty,
And prompts men ever lewd to be.
…
There’s naught more evil here on earth
Than giddy dancing gayly done …
If some class that as recreation
I call it base abomination;
Some crave for dances many a tide
Whom dances never satisfied.2
But religious dances were holy and important at some point, what happened? We will uncover that too.
Sources
Backman, E. Louis. “Religious dances in the Christian church and in popular medicine.” (1952).
Bartholomew, Robert E. Little green men, meowing nuns and head-hunting panics: A study of mass psychogenic illness and social delusion. McFarland, 2001.
Waller, John C. “In a spin: the mysterious dancing epidemic of 1518.” Endeavour 32.3 (2008): 117-121.
Hecker, Justus Friedrich Carl. The epidemics of the Middle Ages. G. Woodfall, 1844.
Lanska, D. J. (2017). The Dancing Manias: Psychogenic Illness as a Social Phenomenon. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, 132–141. doi:10.1159/000475719
Miller, Lynneth J. “Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague.” Dance Research 35.2 (2017): 149-164.
