What was the dancing plague of 1518 in Strasbourg?

The dancing plague of 1518 was an episode of dancing mania in Strasbourg, Alsace, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and now in France. It ran from July to September 1518, and estimates of the number of dancers range from about 50 to 400. Strasbourg's is the best-known case of a wider phenomenon called choreomania, and it remains unexplained. [1] [2]

According to National Geographic, on July 14, 1518, a woman called Frau Troffea was seized by convulsive movement outside her home and danced until she collapsed. Her husband reportedly begged her to stop, but she began again the next day on swollen, bloody feet. Over 30 people had joined her by the end of the week, and within a month the group was said to number 400. Some accounts say several dancers died each day of heart attacks, exhaustion or starvation. [2]

The Guardian's account, by historian John Waller, draws on a report written in the 1530s by the physician Paracelsus. Local doctors told the city council that the dancing came from overheated blood. The councillors, following that reasoning, prescribed more dancing and cleared a grain market for the purpose. In September the dancers were taken to the shrine of St. Vitus for divine healing, and they were apparently cured. [3] [2]

The event produced six chronicle accounts and inspired artworks such as engravings, which is why it is better documented than other outbreaks. Dozens of similar incidents have been cataloged between the 7th and 19th centuries, most often in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. [2]

People of the time generally saw the dancing as supernatural: a curse from saints angry that their festivals had been corrupted by paganism, demonic possession, or divine punishment for sin. Historian Lynneth Miller Renberg notes that treating continual dancing was seen as the church's task alone. [2]

One modern theory, put forward in the 1950s by the pharmacologist Eugene Louis Backman, blames ergot, a psychotropic fungus that could have infected grain after floods. Medical historian John Waller objects that rye was not a main food everywhere dancing outbreaks were recorded. There are also no reports of the gangrene typical of ergot poisoning. Encephalitis, epilepsy and typhus can cause erratic movements but not what could be called uncontrollable dancing. [2]

The most promising theory, proposed by scholars in the 1980s, is mass hysteria, and no explanation is considered definitive. Strasbourg had suffered floods, extreme temperatures, bubonic plague and three years of famine before 1518, and the dancing began in an extremely hot summer. Dickason reads choreomania as a collective response to this upheaval and a way of expressing trauma, while Renberg stresses the role of ritualized religious behavior. Dickason also suggests gender and class played a part, since peasant women were the main targets of witch hunts and appear more often among later victims. [2] [4]