The Dancing Plague

Join Kelli as she looks back at the dancing plague of 1518, when residents of Strasbourg all started to dance for days and weeks on end - and some of them danced to their deaths.

Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric

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Chapters

• 0:32 Intro
• 2:14 Dance Mania Begins
• 5:52 Historical Context
• 19:49 The Dance of Death
• 30:35 Outro

Transcript

The Dancing Plague

Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

But it’s time to lighten the mood a bit - I’ve inadvertently spent wayyy too much time on cannibalism lately? It wasn’t intentional, really, but it’s popped up quite a lot. So instead, I want to talk about *dancing!*

In 1518, an epidemic of choreomania broke out in Strasbourg, part of the Holy Roman Empire at that time, but now in northeastern France on the Rhine River bordering Germany. Hundreds of residents took to the streets and began to dance - uncontrollably - for weeks. Several died from exhaustion!

It’s been called dance mania, St. John’s Dance, and St. Vitus’s Dance. And though this incident in Strasbourg is the most famous outbreak, there are records that show it occurred throughout the late medieval and early modern period in various places in Europe. But what could possibly explain why people were wont to break out in dance? Can we explain it away with disease? Possession?

Or was there a deeper, symbolic meaning behind it?

So today, let’s travel back to 16th century Strasbourg, that’s the 1500s, to understand why people danced to their death in this very historic little town. Today, let’s learn about the dancing plague.

Dance Mania Begins
On July 14, 1518, Frau Troffea walked outside onto the cobblestone streets of Strasbourg and began to dance. Despite there being no music, and no reason for the outburst, she danced. As night fell, she was still there. When her body no longer had the energy to continue, she collapsed. But when she recovered, she started to dance again.

On the second day, she continued, her movements becoming more erratic and crazed as her arms and legs were sore and fatigued.

By the third day, Frau Troffea’s feet were bleeding and cracked. People gathered around her to watch, speculating as to why this woman, bleeding and in pain, would not stop dancing. Was she possessed? Was she sick? Was this a message from God?

The dancing continued for a few more days, her body getting more bruised and cut up over time. And she was clearly in distress. By now, others had joined in.

To try and cure this strange disease, they first tried to get them to dance it out. The town built stages, brought in musicians, and thought that by continuing to dance but to music, they would get it out of their systems. That didn’t work.

After six or so days they brought Frau Troffea and the others to a shrine for St. Vitus high up in the Vosges [VOHJ] Mountains, hoping to cure whatever afflicted her, ending the dancing plague. But by then, it had spread - more and more people took to the streets, to meeting halls, in public spaces, dancing until they passed out from exhaustion, only to pick themselves back up the next morning and continue.

By early August, more and more fell victim to this choreomania, and at least 100 people were afflicted by an uncontrollable urge to dance. Some contemporary accounts, so people that lived in Strasbourg when this event took place, claim that around 400 people were struck with the dancing plague.

One account, found in Strasbourg’s municipal records, explains that, quote:

There’s been a strange epidemic lately
Going amongst the folk,
So that many in their madness
Began dancing,
Which they kept up day and night,
Without interruption,
Until they fell unconscious.
Many have died of it.

So was it an epidemic? It sure looked like one. It started in one woman, then slowly spread to the others around her. Another chronicle claims that during the height of it, fifteen people were dying every day in the hot summer sun, especially since they weren’t stopping to eat, drink, or rest. They just danced, violently, without a stated purpose but with some kind of intent.

It ended in early September, two months after it had begun. But why? Why were these people dancing? There has to be a reason it happened in Strasbourg in 1518, right?

Well if you’ve listened to some of my podcasts - you know what’s coming. It’s time to take a look at the historical context. To get a good sense of what happened with the dancing plague, we need to understand the time period. What is happening in Strasbourg in 1518 that might explain why Frau Troffea walked out into the streets and danced to her death, inspiring hundreds of others to do the same.

So let’s first dive into the context of what was happening that led to this event - the dancing plague of 1518 - before we sort through the various explanations for what happened here.

Historical Context
Okay, so there was actually a lot going on in the late 15th and early 16th centuries in Europe - that’s the late 1400s and early 1500s. Lots of stressors, lots of violence, lots of corruption. But it was also a time when people were becoming more literate, and the printing press was making it easier to disseminate information. I’m going to bounce around a bit by theme, here, though I won’t go over everything that happened to the people of Strasbourg. I’ll try to give you a general sense of what everyday life was like for people. Or, at least, the things going wrong for them.

So first, let’s talk about disease. My favorite! And I’ll begin with my favorite disease - the Black Death!

As many people already know, the Black Death was an outbreak of Yersinia Pestis, a bacterium that causes buboes to form on an infected person’s lymph nodes - the groin, the underarm, and the neck. Among other nasty symptoms. It raged throughout Europe from 1347 to 1351, and by the time it was done, an estimated one-third of the population was dead.

Now this left a pretty strong impression on people. Turns out it wasn’t only plague that was killing people during the quote unquote “Black Death,” but that’s a story for another episode. My point is that disease in general was wreaking havoc on Europeans who had no real way of understanding why it was happening. And the plague wasn’t limited to that one event in the mid-14th century, that’s the 1300s - recurrences of plague were actually pretty common.

If you listened to last week’s episode on corpse medicine, you learned about the four humors. This is how doctors explained away what ails us - if you are sick, or acting erratically, then one of your humors is off. For more information, go listen to the last episode. Today, we know that antibiotics will cure people who contract the plague. It’s a bacterial infection. Easy. But back then? Yikes. Doctors during the Black Death had no real way to cure people suffering from plague, though they certainly tried with things like bloodletting. And other wacky ineffective cures.

Plague and other diseases continued to run rampant throughout Europe in the early modern period - this is the period from roughly 1450 to 1750, post-Middle Ages, but before industrial technology.

In 1495, an outbreak of syphilis spread throughout Strasbourg. Now syphilis, kids, is a sexually transmitted infection. Without treatment, which by the way is taking the correct course of antibiotics prescribed to you from a reputable doctor, a person who contracts syphilis can die from organ failure. It would take a long time to kill you, but it’s still potentially fatal. Also please consider that the early modern period is not the most sanitary of times, so you also need to factor in the general dirtiness of streets, homes, waterways, etc. For more information on how modern sewer systems were invented to curtail poopy pollution, go listen to my episode on the London Cholera Epidemic.

Though contemporary doctors didn’t know much about microbes and bacteria, they did know that syphilis was contracted through sex. So those who suffered from it were labeled as adulterers and fornicators. Most believed that God must be angry with their sinful actions, so they get syphilis as a punishment.

In 1502, another bout of plague struck Strasbourg, and though it wasn’t as deadly as the famed Black Death outbreak from about 150 years prior, it still claimed some lives and caused panic.

In 1511, another short plague outbreak.

In 1517, a smallpox outbreak. For those of you unfamiliar with this one, you can thank modern science for that. Smallpox is a viral infection that can spread very easily. It’s been around since settled human civilization - basically ever since we cohabited with our livestock, allowing our gross human viruses to mutate with animal strains. It’s the disease that Europeans brought over to the Americas starting with Columbus’ voyage in 1492, the one that wiped out anywhere from 50 - 80% of all indigenous peoples, helping the Europeans to conquer and colonize. And smallpox continued to be a blight on our species until we eradicated it in 1980 - that means we vaccinated enough people around the world so that the virus could no longer spread. And for those of you who didn’t listen to the cholera episode, a virus needs a host to survive. If there are no available hosts, because they’ve all been vaccinated, then POOF. No smallpox. There have been zero cases of smallpox since 1980. Go science!

But anyway, it was certainly still around in 1517, and it killed a bunch of people.

In the same year, as people were weakened by malnutrition (more on that later), leprosy started to pop up too. Leprosy is caused by a specific type of bacteria, by the way, and can be cured if caught early. But back in the day, since leprosy was highly contagious, people who contracted it were isolated from their community and sent to leper colonies.

Then, same year, a disease rolled into town called the “English Sweat.” People would go manic, start sweating profusely, and die very quickly. We’re not 100% sure what this was, as it was isolated to a very short period of time, but it was likely a form of hantavirus, a virus that you can pick up from rats - through bites, their stool, or urine.

So as I mentioned in the opening, the event in question happened a year later in 1518. It was a rough few decades for the Strasbourgians. Strasburgers? Strasbourgeoise? Strüssels? The people of Strasbourg.

So how did everyone respond to all this bad luck? These outbreaks of deadly diseases?

Well, they believed that god was angry with them.

Now, we can trace this idea back to the Black Death. It was hard for people to rationalize what was happening to them. One day, everyone was fine, and the next, people were dropping dead from a mysterious illness. They didn’t have scientific explanations for what was happening, only religious ones. And the people of the medieval and early modern periods were intensely religious.

Here’s a contemporary source about the Black Death, someone living and witnessing firsthand the devastating effects of the plague on Italy. It comes from a man named Gabriele de Mussis [MOOSEY], a historian and town chronicler. Quote:

“I am overwhelmed, I can’t go on! Everyone one turns there is death and bitterness to be described. The hand of the Almighty strikes repeatedly, to greater and greater effect. The terrible judgment gains in power as time goes by.

What shall we do? Kind Jesus, receive the souls of the dead, avert your gaze from our sins and blot out our iniquities. We know that whatever we suffer is the just reward of our sins.

Now therefore, when the Lord is enraged, embrace acts of penance, so that you do not stray from the right path and perish.” End quote.

This short excerpt gives us a lot of information. The author says that the hand of the Almighty struck them with plague, and that he wants Jesus to avert his eyes from the sins of mankind. He further implores his fellow man to be penitent, so that God will no longer be angry with their sins and stop punishing them with plague.

Intriguing.

So without a better idea of what was happening to them, many believed that God was angry, and in his wrath, sent the plague down to punish the sinners.

If that’s what a majority of people in 1518 Strasbourg believed as well, then hoo boy they must have been sinning BIG TIME after the waves upon waves of diseases.

Now in addition to disease, the people of Strasbourg were suffering from crop failures and famine. Particularly in the years preceding Frau Troffea and her dance mania. One year, there was a drought, and the crops all dried up. Another year, there was too much moisture, and the crops all rotted in the fields. There was less and less food available, so people started to starve. All this malnutrition also caused significant death, and people were getting sick of it. Literally.

As is what happens during times of social and economic difficulties, there were rebellions. The most famous in the early 16th century (that’s the 1500s) were organized by a peasant named Joss Fritz, though there were many others. They were generally not successful. But their existence tells historians like us that there was clearly a social problem here - it was bad enough that people were succumbing to illnesses, dying from starvation, and were afraid their God was mad at them… but peasant rebellions often point to another issue - political inequality and/or corruption. Something was stirring people up.

And - shocker - it was corruption.

It was barely a secret at this point that monks, nuns and clergymen were not living the life they were supposed to live. Nuns were having *LiAiSoNs* with men in the cloisters of their monasteries and monks were profiting off of people and consuming good salted meat, fine wines, and more. Basically, living the good life. Did every monk and nun do this? No. But the Catholic Church had clearly lost its way, and some of its clergy members were very corrupt. Some church officials had been charging their flock money to get into heaven - indulgences, they were called - promises from the Pope that if they paid enough money to the Church, they were guaranteed a spot. Yeah… that’s not how that works.

So the printing press was brought to Europe in the mid 15th century, that’s the 1400s, by Johannes Gutenberg. I hesitate to use the word “invented,” because it was first a Korean device, then adapted by the Chinese, and now adapted by the Europeans. What Gutenberg’s printing press did was begin the print revolution - books, pamphlets, you name it were printed and distributed throughout Europe. And it wasn’t just in the fancy language of the elites, either. Books, like the Bible were printed in the vernacular - which means local languages that people spoke. So for the people of Strasbourg, things were printed in German.

Over time, this had the result of increasing literacy. As more and more people became literate, they read what many considered to be the most important book  - the Bible. And as they did this, they came to see that there were many inconsistencies in what the Bible said, and what their local clergyman was doing.

Long story short, disagreements over religious ideas, God, the Bible, and more came to a head with Martin Luther, a German monk who is widely held responsible for starting to Protestant Reformation, in 1517. One year before our dancing plague in Strasbourg, only 310 miles, or 500 km, away.

For the people of Strasbourg, who were already suffering from a myriad of diseases, crop failures, corrupt religious figures, and more… let’s just say that it was a time of extreme uncertainty.

But wait! There’s more!

Because not only was a looming religious conflict ahead of them, with people questioning their faith, but there were also tons of invasions happening as well!

Now back in 1453, the large commercial Christian city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. It was renamed Istanbul, became a large hub of the Ottoman Empire, and a base for the Turks to continue to invade Europe. If you listened to episode 3 on the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, I mentioned the constant looming threat of the Turks. Her husband had spent a lifetime fighting them, and taught her some of his torture methods. Which she then used to kill her servants.

These conflicts between Turks and Europeans didn’t really end until the mid 19th-century, that’s the 1800s. And they were certainly a daily concern back in the early 1500s. So not only were people worried about God hating them, about their sins, about the growing sins of their clergymen, about peasant rebellions, and about crop failures, but now they are worried about the Turks. And what did that say of them, that God would allow the Turks to conquer a Christian city? These were concerns that a lot of Europeans had.

And on top of all that, rival European powers were also at war - not just country to country, but also region to region, especially in the Holy Roman Empire, where rival princes fought over land and religious beliefs. Though the worst of these religious wars were yet to come - from 1618 to 1648, the Germanic princes of the Holy Roman Empire fought each other over their religious beliefs in the 30 Year’s War, which ended when they signed the Treaty of Westphalia, allowing each prince to choose what religion his people would follow. The Holy Roman Empire became a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant faiths.

So in short, there’s a lot going on in Europe, and more locally in Strasbourg, in the years leading up to the Dancing Plague of 1518. And Frau Troffea, and the dancers that joined her, grew up in all that chaos, uncertainty, and fear.

The Dance of Death
So in mid-July, Frau Troffea went outside her home and started to dance. To us in the 21st-century this may seem like a weird way to process fear, but it wasn’t all that strange for her world. In fact, though the Strasbourg dancing plague gets the most attention, there are several other instances of dance outbreaks on record.

In 1017, a Saxon town priest saw some people dancing in a graveyard, and he cursed them all to dance without end for a year.

In a Welsh church in 1188, people danced during a ceremony but fell to the ground in a trance-like state, writhing and moving strangely.

In the German town of Erfurt in 1247, 100+ kids started to dance, hopping their way out of town.

In Maastricht, 1278, 200 people started dancing out of nowhere on a bridge.

In 1374 in the Rhineland, pilgrims danced from town to town, hitting up holy sites along the way. The flagellants used to do this as a form of repentance, whipping themselves with spiked flails as they went, trying to curry god’s favor. These pilgrims just danced. And I said flagellants, not flatulence. No farts involved.

In 1418 women started dancing in a church, unable to stop.

In 1442, a monk in the Swiss town of Schaffhausen danced himself to death in the monastery.

In 1452, a man at a church in Zurich started dancing uncontrollably, asking a nearby armorer to help him end the misery.

And in 1463, more written testimony of pilgrims dancing while visiting holy sites.

There were also plenty of records of dancing outbreaks post-1518.

So what are we to make of this? Clearly there is a historical record of people dancing in conjunction with religion, or perhaps just in general in response to something. There is nothing in the records to suggest this was an outrageous act, or one caused by disease. The Strasbourg event we’re covering today became so widely known probably because of the number of deaths, but definitely because of the popularity of the printing press - it was easier to disseminate information, which means more people were writing and speculating on things, publishing their ideas.

Here’s another contemporary source, written by an academic named Sebastian Brant who lived in Strasbourg at the time of the outbreak. Quote:

“A dance erupted among the young and old, dancing all day and night until they fell down; with more than one hundred dancing in Strasbourg at one time. The guildhall of the carpenters and dyers was reserved and platforms in the horse market and grain market were erected while people who were paid to stay and dance with them played the fife, and drum, but the dancing continued. The dancers were then sent by wagon to the Vitus shrine beyond Saverne whereupon they collapsed at the site of the saint’s image. The stricken were given a mass, and the sign of the cross was made in St. Vitus’s name. The priest rubbed holy oil on the tops and bottoms of red shoes in St. Vitus’s name and this made them well again. This is why it is called the St. Vitus dance.” End Quote.

So when we look back on this, we have to understand that dancing was not an unusual reaction to things, and based on the evidence, it was often tied to at least religion. It also seems that it was usually peasants doing the dancing - there are not extensive records of noblemen doing this. So we have to assume, then, that the lower classes are reacting to something - divine expression? Social inequality? Fear?

Contemporary figures came up with all sorts of reasons, like demonic possession or witchcraft- both concerning topics of the day. The Malleus Maleficarum [MAL EH FICK AIR UM], or Hammer of Witches, written in 1496 by witch-hunters, asserted that, quote, “witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” So was Frau Troffea displaying witchcraft? Was she possessed, trying to convert the people of Strasbourg to her devilish ways using DaNcE?! It’s what some believed. There was a legitimate panic that witches and the devil were trying to ruin society, only bolstered by the string of diseases, crop failures, and constant invasions.

But soon after, that theory was replaced with its opposite - it wasn’t Satan here, but God. Her dancing was a message. Perhaps people looked at her as suffering some divine punishment? The general consensus was that it was a vengeful saint punishing Frau Troffea and the others - St. Vitus. And so she was forced to suffer from St. Vitus’ Dance, which only ended when she was brought to his shrine in the mountains.

Over the years, more modern historians have sought more reasonable explanations.

Just like when historians tried to pin down the root cause of the Salem Witch Trials, there are some over the years who have blamed ergot poisoning. For those of you who haven’t listened to the Salem episode yet, ergot poisoning comes from eating a fungus that infects certain cereal crops, like rye, wheat, or barley. It’s toxic and causes either convulsive or gangrenous symptoms, sometimes both. Someone suffering from ergot poisoning can display seizures, psychosis, loss of feeling in the extremities, and then the usual set of physiological responses to disease like headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, etc. And while someone suffering from ergotism may experience random spasms that could mirror dancing, it doesn’t impact everyone who comes in contact with it, and it doesn’t impact people the same way. It just doesn’t explain away the dancing, or how many people got involved. Sources make it clear that Frau Troffea and her compatriots were dancing, not spasming, so ergot poisoning is out.

Then came those who believed it was just hysterics. Something that actually mirrors a contemporary opinion of the time given by none other than Mr. Corpse Medicine himself, Paracelsus. For those of you who listened to my previous episode on Corpse Medicine, you may remember Paracelsus as the Humorist physician who came up with exceptionally strange “cures” for various ailments. He was traveling near Strasbourg in this period of time, and wrote extensively on what he thought was happening with Frau Troffea and this choreo mania that took the town by storm.

Here’s what he wrote on the subject. Quote:

“Shut the patients into a dark, unpleasant place and let them fast on water and bread for some time, without mercy. This hunger will compel them to adopt a different nature and different thoughts, so that the lasciviousness is driven out by abstinence…Some think they would die if they could not act in such a way (singing, dancing, etc.) but it is not so. It is better to take a good stick and give the patients a good beating and lock them in.” End quote.

So, faking it. He thought they were being annoying, misbehaving peasants and ought to be beaten into submission. He certainly thought Frau Troffea was just being impetuous, trying to embarrass her husband for some reason. But I remind everyone that this is the guy who encouraged people to grind up and consume the skull of a recently hanged man to imbibe his essence and grow stronger, so… you know. Things were different back then.

Later historians, after ruling out ergotism, blamed it on mass hysteria, the idea that people suffering from immense anxiety will disassociate, and that will spread contagiously, so that people will collectively react to stressors. It starts with one, and then spreads to another, and people will act out because of the immense stress and anxiety placed upon them. It can manifest itself differently, as well.

For Frau Troffea, and for others who were suffering from the immense pressures, violence, and chaos of the times, they broke down and danced. A practice common to the lower classes as a way of getting out their anxieties and nervous energy.

Does this help explain it? Possibly. By 1518, people had lost faith in the Church and its ability to save them from what they perceived as God’s wrath in many forms - epidemic disease, crop failures, corrupt clergymen, Muslim invasions from the south, and budding religious wars between rival European states.

But I think labeling this just as an instance of mass hysteria takes away the peasants’ agency, meaning we are not looking at them as players in the game. It assumes they were afflicted and had no power over what they were doing, simply victims to what afflictions were levied upon them.

It’s never good to victimize people in this way, because it removes their agency, their ability to make their own decisions.

No, Frau Troffea was not a poor woman who had no control over what she was doing. What better explains this situation is that Frau Troffea, and the others, in their own way, were protesting against the hardships of the time. They weren’t capable of rebelling, like Joss Fritz, but they were capable of causing a scene through dance, making a point, whether they were conscious of it or not.

Was this a purposeful protest against how bad things were getting? Maybe. Was it a subconscious reaction to the fear and chaos of the times? Were they suffering from some kind of mass psychogenic illness? Possibly. But regardless of whether or not they were in a trance and did this in a stress-induced mental break, or if they were doing this as a form of purposeful protest, there is no denying that it shocked the onlookers. I mean, it’s 2023 and people are still talking about this one incident.

So why dance, though? If the people were experiencing mass hysteria, or even if they were subconsciously protesting against social ills, why did it manifest itself through dance?

Well, dancing is as old as human civilization. I’d like to imagine the paleolithic peoples dancing around, entertaining themselves and their families. But to dance is part of the human experience, and dancing as a religious custom has been around for a long time. And it’s not gone, either! There are many denominations of Christianity where churchgoers are encouraged to break out in dance when the mood strikes.

During the Medieval period, dance was incorporated into Christian ritual. It was even rumored that the famed Francis of Assisi danced while he was preaching in the 13th century, that’s the 1200s. The clergy and their congregation would dance in church during public worship, especially during Christmas and Easter.

And in Strasbourg there was a nearby shrine to St. Vitus, a saint that Europeans believed would curse people to dance. So when Frau Troffea began dancing, likely in a stress-induced incident of mass hysteria, it manifested itself through this local saint.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the dancing plague. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen! For more weird European medical stuff, check out episode 12 on Corpse Medicine. As in medicine, made from corpses. For Europeans dealing with other diseases but in the industrial age, check out episode 8 on the London Cholera Epidemic.  Follow my podcast, wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned for my next episode to get a popular history of unpopular things.