In 1518, one of the strangest epidemics in recorded history struck the city of Strasbourg. Hundreds of people were seized by an irresistible urge to dance, hop, and leap into the air. In houses, halls, and public spaces, as fear paralyzed the city and the members of the elite despaired, the dancing continued with mindless intensity. Seldom pausing to eat, drink, or rest, many of them danced for days or even weeks.
Dancing Plague 1518
Perched alongside the Rhine River on the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire, Strasbourg was a busy trading city, its fairs frequented by merchants from across the continent (Figure 1). Sometime in mid-July 1518, a lone woman stepped into one of its narrow streets and began a dancing vigil that was to last four or even 6 days in succession. Within a week, another 34 had joined the dance. And by the end of August, one chronicler asserts, 400 people had experienced the madness, dancing wildly, uncontrollably around the city.
First reported Activity similar to Dancing Plague
The year was 1374. In dozens of medieval towns scattered along the valley of the River Rhine, hundreds of people were seized by an agonizing compulsion to dance. Scarcely pausing to rest or eat, they danced for hours or even days in succession. They were victims of one of the strangest afflictions in Western history. Within weeks the mania had engulfed large areas of northeastern France and the Netherlands, and only after several months did the epidemic subside. In the following century, there were only a few isolated outbreaks of compulsive dancing. Then it reappeared, explosively, in the city of Strasbourg in 1518.
Similar Events reported in History
The 1518 event in Strasbourg was not the first instance of continual, uncontrollable, and fatal dancing.
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.
Later chronicles speak of a bout of unstoppable, and sometimes fatal, dancing in the German town of Erfurt in 1247. Shortly after, 200 people are said to have danced impiously on a bridge over the Moselle River in Maastricht until it collapsed, drowning them all. Likewise, dozens of medieval authors recount the terrible compulsion to dance that, in 1374, swept across western Germany, the Low Countries, and northeastern France. Chronicles agree that thousands of people danced in agony for days or weeks, screaming terrible visions and imploring priests and monks to save their souls. A few decades later, the abbot of a monastery near the city of Trier recalled “an amazing epidemic” in which a collection of hallucinating dancers hopped and leaped for as long as 6 months, some of them dying after breaking “ribs or loins.” On a far larger scale was the outbreak that struck the city of Strasbourg in 1518, consuming as many as 400 people. One chronicle states that it claimed, for a brief period at least, about 15 lives a day as men, women, and children danced in the punishing summer heat. There were also several isolated cases during the 1500s and 1600s, from Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire, of the mania gripping an individual or entire family.
Reasons behind that Plague
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.
There were serious famines in and around Strasbourg in 1492, 1502, and 1511. Terrible cold, scorching summers, hailstorms, and sudden frosts ruined fields of grain, pulverized fruits and vegetables, and blistered ripening grapes. These were disasters to the lower echelons of Strasbourg society, made all the worse by the fact that since the mid-fifteenth century, landlords had been shoring up their declining incomes by turning free peasants into bound serfs, imposing harsh new taxes, and abolishing the traditional rights of peasants to fish in ponds and streams and to hunt game in woods. The suffering of the poor would intensify in the succeeding years.
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 grueling standards of the Middle Ages, these were bitterly harsh years for the people of Alsace.
These were terrible times even by the grueling standards of the late medieval age. And they were conducive for some traumatized people to slip into the trance state. Indeed, there is strong evidence from the surviving chronicles that the poor of Strasbourg were disproportionately affected by the dancing plague. This is a good indication that those who succumbed had been rendered susceptible by years of anguish and oppression.
St. Vitus and Dancing Plague 1518
Cursing saints According to official Church legend, St. Vitus was a Sicilian martyr tortured and tormented in 303AD by order of the emperors Diocletian and Maximilian for refusing to abjure his Christian faith. They immersed him in a cauldron of boiling lead and tar and then threw him to a hungry lion, but he came out of the cauldron unharmed and the lion affectionately licked his hands. Shortly after, Vitus was finally allowed to ascend to Paradise, dying belatedly from the wounds his torturers did manage to inflict. By the fifth century AD, there was already a shrine dedicated to the martyrdom of Vitus in Rome.
In the fourteenth century, he was made one of the 14 ‘holy helpers,’, prayed to by those suffering from epilepsy (the ‘falling sickness’) and by women unable to conceive. In the late 1400s, a modest chapel dedicated to St. Vitus was constructed on a bluff of red sandstone in the Vosges mountains about 30 miles northwest of Strasbourg. But as a holy helper, St. Vitus did not only cure. Late medieval Europeans reckoned that healing saints could inflict the same maladies they were meant to heal. And we have compelling evidence that the peoples of the Rhine and Mosel valleys believed that when the wrath of St. Vitus had been provoked, he sent down plagues of compulsive dancing.
Dancing Plague 1518 was the end
After 1518 there were no more large outbreaks of the dancing madness on European soil. The Reformation’s attack on saint worship probably had something to do with its decline. And by the late seventeenth century, a rising tide of secularism rendered epidemics of dancing virtually unthinkable. But it is worth remembering these extraordinary psychic epidemics. After all, the dancing plagues shed rich light on the fervent supernaturalism of late medieval popular religion.
References
Waller, J. (2009). The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Sourcebooks, Inc..
Carr, D. (2021). Dancing with Death: Performances of Resistance in the Virtual Churchyard (Master’s thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder).
Nasti, J. (2018). Dancing Plague.
Wright, J. (2017). Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. Henry Holt.