On 14 July 1518 in the town of Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea began to dance – and
she didn’t stop. Instead she carried on for 6 days straight and even more alarmingly,
her condition soon spread to those around her.
One source says that 34 people were affected by 18 July and within the month, as many as 400,
from a mix of genders, ages and backgrounds, were or had been dancing uncontrollably.
Soon, some of them began to drop dead from their exertions. This is History Calling,
where I bring you new videos every Friday on the weird and wonderful events of the past and today
we’re asking, why did people dance themselves to death during so-called dancing plagues (for
Strasbourg was far from the only outbreak) and what did our ancestors do to try to cure it?
Dancing Plague, also known by many other names including dancing mania, tarantism or choreomania,
emerged across Europe many times during the mediaeval and early modern periods.
There was an outbreak in Kölbigk, Saxony in around 1015 for instance
and others in Aix-la-Chapelle, Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, Cologne, and Metz in 1374. In a 1997
article on the phenomenon (details of which are in the description box), scholars defined it as
a psychophysical disease … always characterised by an uncontrollable impulse to dance,
and a morbid love of music; physical contact with an affected person was not a prerequisite
for contracting the disease (the sight or sound of someone already affected could be sufficient);
in its epidemic form an attack was generally preceded by premonitory nervous symptoms;
and the disease was commonly manifest by physical symptoms, including death.
Contemporaries weren’t quite sure what to make of it all and came up with a number of explanations.
Some said it was a punishment from God for sinful behaviour,
others that it was a sign of demonic possession. The idea that it was some form of epilepsy has
been mooted, but the symptoms don’t match and in any case, epilepsy is not contagious.
If you’re an arachnophobe (meaning you hate spiders) you won’t like this next explanation,
which is that outbreaks in Italy between the 15th and 17th centuries were caused by Tarantism,
or a reaction to the bite of a spider, possibly a tarantula. You may feel better though, when I tell
you that the evidence for this being the case was always very weak. Not everyone who danced reported
being bitten and it was unclear if the venom of any spider they might have reported a bite from
was actually poisonous to humans, or would have caused a reaction such as this.
Modern commentators and doctors have been unable to settle on a definitive cause either, though
one of the more intriguing ideas put forward is that it might have been mass ergot poisoning.
Ergot is a kind of mould which can grow on the stalks of rye and wheat.
When ingested (for instance by eating bread made from infected wheat), it can cause symptoms
including spasms, mental disorientation, gangrene and vomiting. Also known as St Anthony’s Fire,
it has been blamed for a number of other incidents in the past, including the hysteria around the
Salem witch trials in 1692-3, however it has been discounted by most as an explanation for
the dancing plagues, as the symptoms were too uniform amongst the sufferers. In other words,
we would expect to see different people react in different ways to the effects of ergot poisoning,
with some showing a less severe response depending on the amount of poison they had consumed and how
their bodies reacted to it and a range of symptoms present which would vary from person to person.
Those affected by the dancing plagues all had remarkably similar symptoms however and gangrene
was never among them. It’s also very unlikely that the spasms induced by this type of poison would
have allowed them to keep dancing for days on end. The scholar John Waller, in an article I’ll leave
details for in the description box, further notes that ‘The ergotism theory also fails to
explain why virtually every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers,
areas linked by water but with quite different climates and crops’.
By far, the most popular modern explanation is some sort of mass hysteria which resulted in the
dancers entering a trance state which enabled them to keep going either without noticing the pain
and exhaustion they were suffering, or without being able to stop even if they were aware of it
(and they frequently seem to have been, for contemporary accounts record that they would
often cry and plead for help when they were able to). Outbreaks seem to have been common across
the centuries in one particular part of Europe, because people were already mentally primed to
fall victim to a dancing plague, having heard stories of earlier incidents. Waller calls this
a ‘cultural contagion’ and writes that ‘Only where there was a pre-existing belief in a
dancing curse could psychological distress be converted into the form of a frantic dance’.
One of the main causes of such psychological distress is thought to have been the difficult
social, economic and political conditions in the areas where the dancing occurred.
The 1374 outbreaks happened within living memory of the Black Death, which occurred between
1346 and 1353 when huge swathes of Europe’s population were wiped out by bubonic plague.
In the 30 years leading up to the Strasbourg outbreak, the town had suffered through
failed harvests which led to famines, freezing temperatures, plagues, floods,
a comet sighting in 1492 which was seen as a bad omen and peasant revolts. The dancing mania
itself, began during a very hot summer and so, it has been argued, may have been a kind
of release of people’s pent up frustrations and fears about their lives in early modern Europe.
As for the spider bite theory, though actual bites likely didn’t cause the dancing,
fear that they might, may, in some cases, have been enough to induce the dance.
So-called cures varied. During the 1374 outbreaks, religion was apparently seen as the only potential
way out of the situation. There were religious processions and priests held masses and performed
exorcisms. In Strasbourg, methods other than religious interventions were tried first,
as initially the local council tried to get people to wear themselves out, by providing music and
taking the afflicted to special ‘dancing zones’, such as the local Guildhall and market place.
This turned out to be a disastrous approach which led to numerous deaths
and soon music and the holding of organised dances had to be banned from the town.
The populace now turned to religious cures similar to those used during earlier outbreaks
and the afflicted were taken to the nearby shrine of St Vitus. According to one chronicler:
When they were sent to the chapel of St Vitus, they were divided into three groups and conducted
by specially appointed guardians . . . There they held a mass for each group and the sufferers were
led round the altar and made a small money offering . . . The sufferers were driven out
to Zabern (which is where the chapel was) in three-horse wagons at the expense of the city.
These people were also apparently:
given small crosses and red shoes, on the uppers and soles of which crosses had been drawn with
consecrated oil and which had been sprinkled with holy water in the name of St Vitus.
This approached worked. The dancers were cured and the plague is sometimes known as St. Vitus' Dance
as a result. This would strongly suggest that the dancing was indeed caused by mental distress,
rather than any kind of poisoning or epilepsy and shows how strong religious
beliefs were at the time, that they were able to successfully combat a disorder such as this.
Dancing mania eventually disappeared as the world entered the early-modern and then
the modern eras and many people’s religious and superstitious beliefs changed or faded,
while their lives became gradually easier as food supplies and medicines improved.
However episodes of mass hysteria still crop up from time to time in the modern world.
In 1962 for instance, there was an outbreak of laughing mania in a girls’ school in Kashasha,
in Tanzania. It spread to other schools and only ceased when they were closed, having
lasted for 18 months in total. I think it would be wrong therefore to become complacent and think
that we’ve evolved beyond the possibility of mass hysteria. Given the correct set of circumstances,
we probably aren’t as different from our medieval ancestors as we might like to think.
But what do you make of these dancing plagues. Is mass hysteria a sufficient explanation for you,
or do you think something else was going on? Let me know in the comments section below and if you
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switched on so you never miss an upload. If you love a good historical mystery, I recommend you
check out my video on the mysterious disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst next, or my explorations of
the bizarre case of skeleton lake in the Indian Himalayas and an Irish countess who supposedly
lived to be 140 years old. Whatever you select, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.