Odd this day
14 July 1518
It’s the 507th anniversary today of a woman (who may have been called Lady Troffea) starting to dance spontaneously in the streets of Strasbourg. Soon, she was not alone, and by the middle of August, hundreds of people were dancing uncontrollably in the streets, and starting to drop dead.
(If you have any familiarity with this blog, you will know that, of course, she may well not have been called Lady Troffea, because — to use a phrase I clearly enjoy deploying — accounts vary. Anyway…)
This was the dancing plague (or mania) of 1518, and Hans Christian Erik Midelfort’s A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany says 34 men and women were infected within four days, and that in four weeks, 400 people “were beset with exhausting, uncontrollable dancing”.
Some sources suggest the effects were concerning, but ultimately benign, like this contemporary poem (quoted in Religious dances in the Christian church and in popular medicine by Eugène Louis Backman)
Many hundreds in Strassburg began
To dance and hop, women and men,
In the public market, in alleys and streets,
Day and night; and many of them ate nothing
Until at last the sickness left them.
This affliction was called St Vitus’ dance
Others, like the Strassburg Chronicle of 1625, paint a less rosy picture:
Counting fifteen hundred years and eighteen more… a remarkable disease spread at this time among the people. Then many in their madness began to dance, which they did day and night and without interruption until they fell down unconscious. Many died in consequence.
It wasn’t the first event of its kind. The earliest one known was in the 7th century, and, according to John Waller, author of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, writing in the Lancet:
On Christmas Eve in 1021, 18 people gathered outside a church in the German town of Kölbigk and danced with wild abandon. The priest, unable to perform Mass because of the irreverent din from outside, ordered them to stop. Ignoring him, they held hands and danced a “ring dance of sin”, clapping, leaping, and chanting in unison. The enraged priest, recorded a local chronicler, cursed them to dance for an entire year as a punishment for their outrageous levity. It worked. Not until the following Christmas did the dancers regain control of their limbs. Exhausted and repentant, they fell into a deep sleep. Some of them never awoke.
There were other attacks between the 13th and 17th centuries, with the 14th being particularly stuffed with involuntary terpsichory. This one (and another in 1374) are merely the best chronicled.
(In 1374, apparently, “dozens of mediaeval authors recount the terrible compulsion to dance that … swept across western Germany, the Low Countries, and northeastern France. Chronicles agree that thousands of people danced in agony for days or weeks, screaming of terrible visions and imploring priests and monks to save their souls.”)
One of the things that makes this one stand out is the way in which the authorities responded. They had an open-air grain market and guild halls cleared, and a stage put up next to the horse fair. The apparently possessed dancers were taken to these… what? safe spaces? to dance off their afflictions. Musicians were hired to provide a soundtrack, as were sturdy chaps to hold the people upright.
We might think that this was a relatively enlightened policy — the dancers weren’t being beaten or exorcised, after all. Unfortunately, being out in public didn’t help. Those who were outside were jigging about in summer sunshine, which didn’t help their overheated exhaustion — and they could be seen, which seemed to encourage others to join in (or it spread the contagion, depending on your interpretation). One chronicle says 15 people died every day from frenzied prancing.
Why were they doing it, though? Obviously, the most logical explanation at the time was (as described in Midelfort’s History of Madness book) “a moral message straight from God”. Which made sense. After all, Sebastian Brant, writing in his satirical allegory Ship of Fools in 1494, had said
…dance and sin are one in kind,
That very easily ’tis scented:
The dance by Satan was invented …
It stirs up pride, immodesty,
And prompts men ever lewd to be.
When the dancers asked for a Mass to be said for them, however, a vicar responded that
this seemed quite unnecessary to him, seeing that the physicians had declared that it was a natural sickness
…although he did add that if natural remedies failed, he’d order some prayers.
Either way, the authorities soon cottoned on to the fact that laying on a dance floor and pipes and drums was counterproductive, and banned almost all music until the end of September.
The only exception is that if honourable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first Mass in their houses, they may do so using stringed instruments, but they are on their conscience not to use tambourines and drums.
Midelfort says stringed instruments may not have triggered “spasmodic, rhythmic convulsions”, but I wonder if there was an element of approving the refined music of the richer classes, and prohibiting the primitive stuff with a strong beat that plebs like.
Speaking of disapproval, Ship of Fools also says:
There’s naught more evil here on earth
Than giddy dancing gayly done …
If some class that as recreation
I call it base abomination
…so, would anyone like to put money on a group of people in society who should be singled out for particular blame…?
They swing their partners in the breeze
Till girls’ bare legs high up one sees,
Their other sins I will not treat.
Yes, of course: women. The apparently more rational Swiss doctor Theophrastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, writing in the early 1520s, was sceptical about the wrath of god stuff, and diagnosed instead:
chorea lasciva, a form of continuous dancing that occurred in those of loose, sinful character, [which, according to historian Lynneth J. Miller] indicates an ongoing connection with medieval perceptions of dancing plague.
…but Paracelsus adds that this is why
whores and scoundrels … take pleasure in guitar and lute playing, [to] satisfy all voluptuousness, bodily pleasure, imagination and fancy, never escape but become ill in such a way that they jump and dance … it comes from recklessness and disgraceful living in which there is neither reason nor sense.
Yes, that’s right (again): women.
Anyway, on 10 August, the council decided to send the dancers (perhaps that should be the remaining dancers) on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Vitus, whose feast day was celebrated with dancing (causing Vitus to become the patron saint of dancers and entertainers, and giving us the phrase St Vitus’ Dance, which was later used to describe a different medical contition).
Again, I’m not sure being made to wear red shoes and led round a wooden statue could exactly be described as helping, but the epidemic did fizzle out over a few weeks — not that correlation equals causation, of course.
There have been various theories of what actually prompted the dancing frenzy, such as ergotism, caused by eating food contaminated by a mould that grows on damp rye which can cause, in John Waller’s words, “terrifying hallucinations and violent twitching”. But, as he points out, twitching is not the same thing as dancing for days on end.
There is also a theory that some dancing manias may not be entirely involuntary, and that religious non-conformity/rebellion may have a role, with anthropologist Robert Bartholomew pointing out that 16 nuns were apparently possessed in France in the 1630s, which allowed them to
voice the most foul blasphemies, sexual indecencies, and contort their bodies in lustfully vulgar ways, with complete impunity
…and that they
amassed considerable wealth from gratuities left by the flocks of observers who travelled from all parts of France and even abroad to watch the theatrical confabulations.
That is: they may have been enjoying themselves, and turning a profit, but Waller thinks “the claim that the dancers were religious subversives” are
improbable … 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’.
…and it’s possible to account for that (at least in part). Waller’s Lancet article says:
High levels of psychological distress significantly increase the likelihood of an individual succumbing to an involuntary trance state. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, therefore, that the 1374 dancing plague spread in the areas most savagely hit earlier in the year by the most devastating deluge of the 14th century. The people of Strasbourg and its environs were similarly experiencing acute distress in 1518, after a succession of appalling harvests, the highest grain prices for over a generation, the advent of syphilis, and the recurrence of such old killers as leprosy and the plague. Even by the gruelling standards of the Middle Ages, these were bitterly harsh years for the people of Alsace.
We still see cases occasionally, but as religious belief has declined, so has the frequency of mass frenzied cavorting.
Mind you, as anyone will know who has looked at the news since… ooh, 2016, let’s say, it is still perfectly possible for large groups of humans to behave in ways which do not appear altogether rational.
