Endless Dance: The 1518 Plague

In the summer of 1518, one woman walked into a street in Strasbourg and started dancing. Days later, dozens of people were doing the same thing. Within weeks, chronicles claimed the number had reached into the hundreds, and city officials responded with doctors, professional musicians, a ban on dancing and eventually a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine. This week, we look at what we actually know about the Dancing Plague of 1518, why the famous death toll may not be as solid as you’ve heard, and the leading theory for what caused hundreds of people to apparently lose control of their own bodies. Then we play the Yap Yap with Comedian Jonathan Burns!

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There are stories scattered through medieval European history that sound less like historical records and more like somebody describing a nightmare after eating something questionable before bed. One of them comes from the early 11th century, in what is now Germany, where a group of people were said to have gathered outside a church around Christmas and started singing and dancing. The story accumulated religious and supernatural details as it was retold, so historians are cautious about treating every part of it literally, but it became one of the earliest stories associated with a phenomenon later known as dancing mania.

By the 1300s, though, we have much better evidence that something genuinely strange was happening. In 1374, a wave of compulsive dancing appeared around the Rhine Valley, with outbreaks reported in places including Aachen, Cologne, Metz and areas of the Low Countries. Contemporary descriptions portray groups of men and women moving wildly for hours or days, sometimes crying out, experiencing visions or eventually collapsing from exhaustion. Historian John Waller has identified the outbreaks of 1374 and 1518 as the two best documented episodes of this phenomenon, and the 1374 event spread widely enough that it was not simply the story of one strange afternoon in one strange town.

The name that eventually became attached to this behavior was choreomania. “Chorea” comes from a Greek word associated with dance, and “mania” gives you the other half of the equation. But the people experiencing these episodes obviously didn’t have that vocabulary, and they certainly didn’t have modern psychiatry or neurology to turn to for an explanation. Instead, depending on the place and period, outbreaks could be understood through religion, medicine, supernatural punishment or some combination of all three.

And one saint in particular became connected to the phenomenon: Saint Vitus. Vitus was an early Christian martyr whose cult became popular in parts of Europe, and over time he became associated with people suffering from involuntary movement and compulsive dancing. People experiencing these symptoms might travel to a shrine dedicated to Vitus and pray for relief. So if you lived in the region around Strasbourg in the early 1500s, the idea that Saint Vitus could have something to do with uncontrollable dancing was already part of the cultural vocabulary around you.

Which brings us to Strasbourg.

Today Strasbourg is in France, right on the border with Germany. In 1518 it was a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire, and the people living there had just endured a particularly ugly stretch of history. Harvest failures had contributed to shortages and high grain prices, disease was a constant threat, and the chronicles describe severe economic distress. Research into the surviving accounts describes three consecutive years of famine conditions leading into the dancing outbreak, with institutions that cared for the poor overwhelmed by the number of people needing help.

One chronicler described 1517 simply as a “bad year.” By the following summer, hospitals, orphanages and shelters were struggling with the number of desperate people seeking assistance. Strasbourg was also living through religious tension on the eve of the Reformation, while diseases that people could neither adequately explain nor effectively treat remained part of ordinary life. It was into this city, in the middle of a hot summer, that a woman walked out of her house and started dancing.

Her name, according to four of the six surviving chronicle accounts, was Frau Troffea. “Frau” is simply the German title for Mrs., so you’ll sometimes see her referred to as Lady Troffea or Mrs. Troffea. We know almost nothing else about her with certainty, which is remarkable considering that her name has survived for more than five centuries because of what she supposedly did next.

According to the Imlin family chronicle, the outbreak began on July 14, 1518, although another surviving account gives July 22. Frau Troffea went into the street and began to dance. There was apparently no celebration underway and no evidence that she was dancing for entertainment. She simply kept moving, and according to the accounts, she continued for days.

Later retellings add vivid descriptions of Troffea dancing until her feet were swollen and bloody, collapsing from exhaustion and then getting back up to continue. Some of those details come through later historical reconstruction rather than a minute-by-minute eyewitness record, so we should be careful about treating every dramatic flourish as documented fact. What the surviving chronicles do agree on is the central point: a woman began dancing compulsively, she continued for several days, and then other people began doing it too.

The Imlin chronicle says that after Troffea had danced for six days, city officials sent her to a shrine of Saint Vitus near Saverne, about 30 miles away. You can see the logic from the perspective of somebody living in 1518. If uncontrollable dancing could be the punishment of Saint Vitus, then perhaps Saint Vitus could also make it stop. The chronicle says Troffea was cured, but while she was being dealt with, Strasbourg developed a much bigger problem.

Other people had started dancing.

Within four days, according to that same account, 34 men and women were involved. As July moved into August, the number continued to increase. The Imlin chronicle eventually claimed that more than 400 people had been afflicted within four weeks, although estimates in modern accounts vary considerably because the surviving records do not provide anything resembling a modern census of patients.

At first, Strasbourg’s leaders did not respond by treating the phenomenon primarily as a religious curse. They consulted physicians, and this is where the story takes a turn that would be hilarious if you didn’t know there were actual suffering people involved. The physicians reportedly decided that the dancers were suffering from an excess of hot blood and that the condition needed to be worked out of their systems.

So the city encouraged them to dance.

Officials made spaces available where the afflicted could keep moving. Daniel Specklin’s later chronicle says arrangements were made for dancing in two public market areas, with people hired to dance alongside the sufferers. Musicians with drums and pipes were brought in as well, essentially giving people who apparently could not stop dancing professional accompaniment.

Try to imagine living across the street from this. Your neighbor starts dancing uncontrollably, then dozens of people join her, and eventually the government response is basically, “We have consulted the experts, and what these people need is a band.” This was not a random decision by people who were simply being stupid, though. It followed the medical theories available to the physicians advising the council, and if dancing was supposed to purge whatever imbalance was causing the condition, then allowing the patients to complete the process had an internal logic.

But whatever was happening in Strasbourg, adding music did not make it go away.

It apparently made the situation worse.

As the outbreak continued, the city began reversing course. Music and public dancing were restricted, and the authorities increasingly turned away from the physicians’ approach and toward a religious explanation. A surviving account based on material from Strasbourg’s archives records an August 10 decree directing guilds to identify afflicted members and send them to Saint Vitus, while some sufferers were also sent to hospitals.

The distinction matters because these people were not being described as enthusiastic participants in a festival. The accounts consistently portray the dancing as involuntary or unwanted. Whatever the underlying cause, observers understood that the people doing it were afflicted by something. They were patients, victims or sinners under punishment depending on which explanation you accepted, but they were not simply people who had decided that Strasbourg needed a month-long dance party.

The destination for many of them was a chapel dedicated to Saint Vitus near Saverne. The shrine stood in the hills outside the town, and the city arranged transportation for sufferers who could not reasonably make the journey themselves. One account says they were divided into three groups, placed under the supervision of appointed guardians and transported in three-horse wagons at Strasbourg’s expense.

At the shrine, the treatment became extraordinarily specific. An account preserved from material connected with Sebastian Brant, who served as secretary to the Strasbourg council, says the dancers were given red shoes. Crosses were drawn on the shoes with consecrated oil, the shoes were sprinkled with holy water, and the sufferers participated in religious rites associated with Saint Vitus.

They were led around the altar and made offerings. Masses were said for the groups of sufferers, and the afflicted prayed for Saint Vitus to release them from whatever had taken hold of their bodies. The surviving chronicles say that people who underwent the treatment recovered, and as more sufferers were sent to the shrine, the outbreak eventually subsided.

By September, the dancing plague was essentially over.

And this is where we need to talk about one of the most famous parts of the story, because you’ve probably heard that people were literally dancing themselves to death. You’ll often see articles claiming that at the height of the outbreak, 15 people were dying every day from exhaustion, heart attacks or strokes. You’ll also see claims that dozens or even hundreds of people died before the dancing finally stopped.

There are historical sources that describe deaths, including later chroniclers, and Daniel Specklin’s account says that “many danced themselves to death.” But the surviving contemporary Strasbourg civic records do not give us a documented death toll, and historians have pointed out that the famous figure of 15 deaths per day is not corroborated by the city’s records. So it is possible that people died during the outbreak, and later accounts explicitly say that they did, but we cannot responsibly tell you that 15 people a day were definitely dropping dead in the streets of Strasbourg.

That distinction doesn’t make the central event less real. Strasbourg’s dancing epidemic is supported by multiple chronicles and records of the city’s response. Officials really did deal with an outbreak of compulsive dancing, they really did attempt to manage the dancers, they really did restrict music and dancing, and they really did send sufferers to the shrine of Saint Vitus. The question isn’t whether something happened in Strasbourg in 1518. The question is what the hell it was.

One explanation that comes up constantly is ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that can infect rye and other cereal grains, and consuming contaminated grain can cause ergotism. Certain ergot alkaloids can produce convulsions, hallucinations and other severe neurological effects, and because some of those compounds are chemically related to substances used in the development of LSD, the ergot explanation has become extremely attractive whenever people are looking for a neat explanation for bizarre behavior in European history.

The problem is that ergotism doesn’t fit the Strasbourg evidence particularly well. Ergot poisoning can cause convulsions and serious physical illness, but sustained coordinated dancing for days is another matter. Waller and other researchers have argued that somebody suffering severe convulsive ergotism would be unlikely to remain physically capable of participating in the kind of prolonged dancing described in the Strasbourg chronicles.

There’s also a basic problem with the idea that one contaminated food supply would make hundreds of people perform one culturally recognizable behavior. Poisoning can explain people becoming sick together. It is much harder to use it to explain why the sickness would specifically take the form of compulsive dancing in a culture where compulsive dancing was already associated with a supernatural affliction. So while ergot poisoning is still routinely mentioned in popular discussions of the plague, it is not the explanation favored by many scholars who have studied the event in detail.

Another suggestion has been that the dancers were members of some kind of religious cult or sect performing a ritual. That idea also runs into trouble with the historical accounts because the people involved were described as suffering. They were not recorded as joyfully participating in an organized religious ceremony, and the authorities were treating the behavior as an affliction that needed to be stopped.

The explanation most strongly associated with historian John Waller is what today would generally be called mass psychogenic illness. Older literature often used the term “mass hysteria,” but modern terminology avoids some of the baggage attached to that phrase. Mass psychogenic illness describes situations in which groups of people develop genuine symptoms that spread through a community without an identifiable toxic, infectious or other organic cause sufficient to explain them.

That does not mean the people are pretending. The symptoms are real, and the people experiencing them can have very little conscious control over what is happening. Stress, expectation, social observation and shared beliefs can all influence how symptoms appear and spread, and episodes of mass psychogenic illness have continued to be documented long after the dancing epidemics disappeared.

Strasbourg in 1518 contained many of the conditions that could contribute to such an event. The population had endured failed harvests, hunger, disease and economic distress. Religious beliefs provided an existing model in which a supernatural force, particularly Saint Vitus, could punish people by making their bodies move beyond their control. If one person began behaving in exactly the way people already feared a curse might make someone behave, the symptoms had a cultural framework ready and waiting for them.

That explanation also helps make sense of something that otherwise looks almost impossible to reconcile with the story. The pilgrimage to Saint Vitus seems to have worked. Obviously that doesn’t demonstrate that Saint Vitus caused the outbreak, but if expectation and belief were central to the symptoms, then a treatment that carried enormous cultural and religious authority could plausibly have helped end them. The same belief system capable of giving a frightening experience its form could also provide the ritual people expected would release them from it.

There is another reason historians are cautious about diagnosing people who died 500 years ago. We don’t have clinical interviews with Frau Troffea. We don’t have blood samples from the dancers, neurological examinations, toxicology reports or even precise descriptions of every person’s movements. What we have are chronicles, administrative records and later accounts written by people who understood disease very differently from us.

Even the most famous name in the story entered it after the fact. The physician and alchemist Paracelsus visited Strasbourg several years after the outbreak and later wrote about dancing mania, attempting to classify and explain different forms of it. His interpretation was hardly modern medicine, and some of his conclusions reflected the assumptions and prejudices of his own era, but his interest in the event helped preserve the Dancing Plague as a subject of medical discussion rather than allowing it to survive solely as folklore.

The Strasbourg outbreak also arrived at an unusual historical moment. Medieval explanations centered on saints, demons and divine punishment were still powerful, while physicians and civic officials were increasingly trying to categorize bodily disorders in natural terms. Lynneth Miller Renberg has argued that the response to the plague shows those systems operating alongside one another. Strasbourg first attempted a medical response, then eventually turned to the religious treatment associated with Saint Vitus.

And after 1518, the huge European dancing epidemics largely disappeared. There were later cases and smaller outbreaks, but nothing quite like the great waves documented in 1374 and Strasbourg in 1518. Waller has suggested that changes in European religious culture during and after the Reformation weakened the particular belief system that had helped give dancing mania its recognizable form.

So we are left with an event that we know happened, described by multiple historical sources, with an explanation that remains impossible to prove conclusively five centuries later. In the summer of 1518, one woman began dancing in Strasbourg. Within weeks, hundreds of people were reportedly caught up in the same bizarre affliction, and the city responded with doctors, musicians, bans, wagons, red shoes, holy water and a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine.

And the story about an entire city being overtaken by an uncontrollable dancing plague?

The Internet Says it’s True.

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