Samuel · forgotten history
Strasbourg, that summer. No music, no reason, and no cure that worked. What the records left behind is stranger than any ghost story, and sadder.
It starts with one woman in a street.
On 14 July 1518, in a narrow cobbled lane of Strasbourg, a woman known to the chronicles as Frau Troffea began to dance. There was no music. Nothing in the records says anyone asked her to. She danced until she collapsed, slept, woke the next morning on feet already swollen and bleeding, and danced again. It went on for days.
By the end of the first week, roughly thirty other people had joined her. By August, by one chronicler's count, the city had around four hundred people dancing at once. They danced through the night. They barely ate, drank, or slept. Witnesses described their limbs jerking and twisting beyond their control. Some of them fell down dead, of strokes, of heart attacks, of simple exhaustion. No one kept an exact toll, and anyone who tells you the number today is guessing.
This was not a village of credulous peasants. Strasbourg was one of the wealthiest trading cities on the Rhine, at the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire (it is in France now; in 1518 it was not). It had a printing press, a cathedral, and a city council that kept minutes. It is one of the best-documented events of its kind precisely because the city wrote everything down.
And what it wrote down was that the panic was real. The senate was alarmed. Physicians were called. Their diagnosis was an excess of "hot blood," and their prescription was extraordinary: let them dance it out. The city opened two guildhalls, hired musicians, built a wooden stage in the grain market, and brought in professional dancers to keep the afflicted company. The result, in the words of one modern account, was to exacerbate the contagion. Strasbourg had built the problem a stage.
The best answer we have is not poison and not demons. It is pressure.
The years before 1518 were brutal in this corner of Europe. Harvests failed again and again. People starved; the poor ate grass and worse. Plague had come through and would come again. On top of all that sat an old and specific fear: that Saint Vitus could curse a person with an uncontrollable dance. The fear was already in the air before anyone started moving. When Frau Troffea began, frightened neighbours read the sign exactly as their culture had taught them to read it.
The historian John Waller, who has studied the outbreak more closely than anyone, argues this was mass psychogenic illness: a real physical affliction, spread not by germs but by sight and belief. A mind under unbearable strain does something. The body follows. Once enough people had seen it, seeing it was enough.
The older explanation, that the dancers had eaten rye bread poisoned with ergot mould, has mostly been set aside for this outbreak. The symptoms do not fit, and the stricken ate from many different tables.
In early September 1518, the mania broke. The authorities loaded the worst of the dancers into wagons and carried them three days over the hills to a shrine of Saint Vitus, where priests prayed over them and gave them red shoes and crosses and holy water. They were, the records say, apparently cured. The last of them went home.
The cure never made sense except as theatre. What the journey to the shrine gave people was permission to stop: a ritual, a small distance from their own street, and an authority telling them the thing that had hold of them was over.
Eight years later the physician Paracelsus came to Strasbourg, drawn by the story, and spent years turning it over. He never solved it. Five hundred years on, we still have not, though the arguments have narrowed.
There were other dancing manias in Europe, through the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, but 1518 was the largest and the best recorded. It is also the one that stays with people, I think, because of what it says about the line between a body and a crowd. Nobody in Strasbourg wanted to dance. They were afraid, tired, hungry, and grieving, in a place where grief had nowhere to go. The dancing was not a disease of the body. It was a body doing the only thing left to it.
They danced day and night, barely stopping to eat or drink or sleep, bodies twisting in convulsions.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Dancing plague of 1518" (britannica.com). Wikipedia, "Dancing plague of 1518" (en.wikipedia.org). National Geographic History, "The dancing plague of 1518" (nationalgeographic.com). History.com, "What was the dancing plague of 1518?" (history.com). John Waller, "In a spin: the mysterious dancing epidemic of 1518," Endeavour / ScienceDirect (S0160932708000379). The Public Domain Review, "The Dancing Plague of 1518" (publicdomainreview.org). Details cross-checked against these; where the records disagree or are thin (the exact death toll, the identity of Frau Troffea) this page says so.
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