The Town that could not stop dancing

Strasburg, 1518 — the long, strange history of the dancing plague

Picture a summer morning in Strasbourg, July of 1518. The city smells of baking bread, horse dung, and river water. It is the kind of morning where nothing unusual is supposed to happen. A woman steps out of her half-timbered house on the narrow cobblestones and begins to dance.

What is unusual, other than the lone dancer in the streets, is the lack of music. No marked celebration, no reason that can be named. She just dances. Hours pass, she does not stop. The sky turns dark but yet she dances until she collapses in exhaustion. But once she rises again, her feet are already moving before hunger or thirst can drive her. Only the dance.

By the end of the week, thirty people had joined her. By the end of the month: four hundred.

THE RECORD

What We Actually Know

The woman’s name was Frau Troffea. Or at least, that is what the chronicles call her. She began dancing in July of 1518 in Strasbourg. At the time a Holy Roman Empire city in what we now know as France. In a region that reeling from severe famine and even outbreaks of leprosy, smallpox, and the deadly "English Sweat". 

She danced for four to six days straight before the city’s terrified authorities intervened. They loaded her into a wagon and drove her thirty miles away to the shrine of Saint Vitus.

This is not folklore, this is a strange tales of the dancing plague and it all began with one woman. Because by the time they shipped her away, thirty others joined the dance.

The dancing plague of 1518 is the single best-documented case of choreomania. There are several names for this unusual medieval phenomenon: Dancing Plague, Dance Mania, Dancing Epidemic, St. Vitus’ Dance, St. John’s Dance, Tarantism, or Epidemic Chorea.

Multiple contemporaneous sources describe it: city council records, sermons, a chronicle by the architect Daniel Specklin, the Annales of Sebastian Brant (the same Brant who wrote The Ship of Fools), and later, Paracelsus, the physician and alchemist who visited the city eight years after and became obsessed with what had happened there.

A seventeenth-century chronicle, quoting a poem from a now-lost manuscript, described it like this: 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.

Another chronicle, from 1636, offers a darker coda: the dancers “began to dance day and night until finally they fell down unconscious and succumbed to death.”

THE RESPONSE

When the Believed Cure is More Dancing

Here is where the story takes a turn so strange it almost becomes darkly funny — if you forget that people were dying.

The city's physicians, appealing to the prevailing humoral theory of the day, declared the dance a medical condition to be overheated blood. Their prescription? The afflicted must dance it out, more movement and dancing will allow the fever exhaust itself.

So, the city council believing the recommendation would help ordered carpenters and tanners to convert their guild halls into dance floors. They built stages in the horse and grain markets. They went as far as hiring professional musicians, because why not? From drummers, fiddle players, pipers to horn blowers. Even more, to encourage those afflicted to keep on dancing they brought in healthy dancers to join the masses.

It backfired spectacularly.

The onlookers who gathered to witness this epic rager did not see a medical treatment. They only saw proof of Saint Vitus’ fury. A saint who, local belief held, had the power to curse people with compulsive, unstoppable dancing. Many in the crowed were lured into the sway of those sick dance moves. Thus the mania spread resulting in hundreds of dancers.

The four-hundred number comes from the Imlin family chronicle which tracks the outbreak’s peak. Who knew calling an official dance party could lead to this?

The council attempted to reverse course by taking down the stages along with banning dance and music across the city. It’s like medieval Footloose, but they made one notable exception as noted by Sebastian Brant, “if honourable persons wish to dance at weddings and 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.”

Because as we all know percussion is dangerous. Almost surprising no one claimed them to be of the devil.

The worst-afflicted were loaded into wagons and sent on a three-day journey to the shrine of Saint Vitus. Priests placed them beneath the carved wooden effigy of the saint pressing small crosses in their hands. They placed red shoes on their feet, the shoes were sprinkled with holy water on the soles and tops with painted crosses of consecrated oil. In an atmosphere of thick incense and Latin incantations, the ritual worked. Word came back to Strasburg that those who were sent to the shrine were cured. The city sent more and within weeks the stream of dancers slowed to nothing.

The plague lasted from mid-July to late August (or early September) of 1518. At its peak, some accounts claim fifteen people died per day. Naturally, the city records make no mention of any deaths leaving the true toll unknown.

THE PATTERN

This was not the first plague of dancing

The 1518 outbreak is the most famous, but it was not the first. In a long, documented series of dancing manias that swept across Western Europe in the areas of the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, it was the last. The outbreaks span over nearly two centuries.

It began in earnest on June 24, 1374, in Aachen, Germany. The worst outbreak the world had yet seen. Somewhere between one and two thousand people broke into compulsive, involuntary dancing across multiple cities: Cologne, Liége, Utrecht, Tongeren, and Strasbourg (yes, they had seen this before). The dancers screamed in pain as they danced as their feet bled. They would dance until collapse from exhaustion but once recovered they would rise to dance once more. The mania spread down the Rhine following the river’s path.

After 1374, the outbreaks continued at irregular intervals:

1375 and 1376 — France, Germany, and the Netherlands

1381 — Augsburg

1418 — Strasbourg (yes, again), this time the afflicted reportedly fasted for dance alongside their dancing.

1428 — Schaffhausen, where a monk danced himself to death. That same year, in Zürich, a group of women fell into the dancing frenzy.

Every single outbreak occurred in the same geographic corridor, along the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire. That pattern is one of the most puzzling features of the whole phenomenon.

THE THEORIES

What Was the Cause of the Dancing, Really?

Over the centuries, a few explanations have been offered. Some more convincing than others.

Ergot Poisoning

The most frequently cited explanation, outside of academic circles, is ergot. A psychoactive mould that grows on damp rye, which is responsible for the condition known as St. Anthony’s Fire. Ergot contains compounds that can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and intense twitching. It has been linked to other historical episodes of mass behavior. They theory has intuitive appeal.

But historian John Waller, who wrote the definitive account of the 1518 plague (A Time to Dance, A Time to Die, 2009), dismantled the ergo hypothesis systematically. Ergot does not cause dancing, it restricts blood flow to the extremities. Someone poisoned by ergot would be physically unable to dance for days at a time. And ergot poisoning would not cause different people to react in the exact same way at the same time. The geography doesn’t work either, the Rhine and Moselle river corridor spans different climates and crops. Which makes a shared rye contamination implausible.

Paracelsus’ Theory

The physician and alchemist Paracelsus, who visited Strasbourg eight years after the plague (1518), had is own theories. It’s an interesting window into how the medieval medical mind worked. He believed that Frau Troffea had been dancing…wait for it, on purpose. A ploy to embarrass her husband. Other women, watching her succeed, joined to harass their own husbands. He classified this form of dancing mania as Chorea lasciva — caused, he said, by “voluptuous desire” and “free, lewd and impertinent” thoughts.

Paracelsus was, notably, ahead of his time in locating the cause of the disease in the minds of the dancers rather than in the will of a saint. He was also, notably, a raging misogynist and his theory tells us more about the sixteenth-century view of women than it does about choreomania.

If he had been a Victorian-era physican, he would have claimed this occurrence was caused by hysteria. Because clearly, women be dancing and hysterical. A tale as old as time, he might was well have called her a witch.

Oh wait, witch trials in the greater Strasbourg and Alsace region hit their peak between 1582 and 1683 — not coincidentally, a period of intense religious turmoil and shifting legal authority. The town of Bergheim alone executed roughly forty women over that century. In the val de Lièpvre, a borderland caught between Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions, both sides found rare common ground, hunting witches.

Mass Psychogenic Illness

The most credible modern explanation is mass pyschogenic illness, what used to be called mass hysteria. The term has fallen out of favor for good reasons.

Waller’s argument is compelling because it is specific to Strasbourg in 1518. The city was under extraordinary duress from years of failed harvests, waves of syphilis and smallpox right alongside political instability. The suffering was extreme even by brutal standards of the early modern period. People were desperate and terrified (which was also the basis for most of the witch trials). They were primed by deep, genuine beliefs in Saint Vitus’ power to curse people with uncontrollable dancing. When fear is a basis, people are more likely to believe the fantastic — we see this with accounts of Lycanthropy (such as the account of Peter Stummp/Stumpf of Bedburg, German in 1530), politics, and other areas of superstition and lore.

This is the bizarre alchemy at the center of the dancing plague, the belief itself may have been enough to make it real. Waller describes the dancers as caught in a state of psychic contagion. Their minds turned inward, “tossed about on the violent seas of their deepest fears.” Once in a trance state, the perception of pain and exhaustion diminishes. Dancing for days becomes, horrifyingly, possible.

The geographic cluster makes sense under this framework as well. Every outbreak between 1374 and 1518 occurred in communities that shared the same religious culture, saint lore, and the same ambient dread of Vitus’ curse. The mania didn’t travel like a virus through the air, it traveled like an idea through a population already tuned to receive it. It’s the same concept with cult followings — whether religious, idealist or political. People are ready to believe when it aligns with their conditioning and mindset.

THE NOTE LEFT IN THE FILE

Why This Story Won’t Let Go

Mass hysteria is a real phenomenon, well-documented and studied. The evidence for it here is solid, and yet there is something about the dancing plague that resists being fully filed away. Maybe it’s the image of Frau Troffea in the street dancing to music only she could hear. The epitome of dance like no one is watching. Maybe it’s the city council acting in good faith accidentally turning the crisis into a spectacle that made everything worse. Perhaps, it’s the red shoes sprinkled with holy water, painted with consecrated oil that were slipped onto the feet of people still thrashing about like landed fish and miraculously working.

The historian, Erik Midelfort wrote that the madness of the past are like jellyfish. They collapse and dry up when removed from the ambient sea water they evolved in. We can study them, we can propose explanations, but we cannot fully hold them. Something always slips through.

Four hundred people danced until their feet bled. Some of them died. It ended when the city sent them to a saint. What we call that mass hysteria, psychic contagion, the curse of Vitus changes the shape of the story but not the fact of it.

This is the expanded field note.

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S O U R C E S & F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

John Waller, A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (Icon Books, 2009)

Ned Pennant-Rea, "The Dancing Plague of 1518," The Public Domain Review, July 10, 2018 H. C.

Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford University Press, 1999)

"Dancing Plague of 1518," Britannica; Wikipedia; National Geographic