Strasbourg’s Dancing Plague of 1518 - the devil, mass mania or ergot poisoning?

Pieter Brueghel the Younger
Peasant Wedding Dance, 1623
Private collection, Wiki

Strasbourg’s Dancing Plague of 1518 was not the first. Previous dancing plagues had inv­olved people who were in towns and cit­ies close to the River Rhine, along with the merch­ants, pilgrims and soldiers who plied its waters.

A] In the 1020s in Bern­burg in Saxony, a group of peasants started dancing around a church in the middle of a Christmas Eve service.

B] A 1237 outbreak involved Ger­man children walk­ing the 20 ks from Erfurt to Arnstadt, dancing and jumping uncontrol­lably en route. This was similar to the leg­end of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in Lower Saxony, where a piper led the dancing chil­d­ren from Hamelin, never to return.

C] A 1278 outbreak saw c200 people dancing on a bridge across the German River Meuse, leading to its collapse.

D] 1428 a Schaff­hausen monk danced himself to death. And

E] In 1491 nuns in a Spanish-Netherlandish convent foamed, convulsed and gestured obscenely. Strange behaviour, but it was known that their commun­ity en­couraged them in mystical supernat­ur­alism.

German engraving of hysterical dancing in a church­.

Now to Strasbourg. 1517 had been a bad year! Social and religious con­fl­icts, recurrent dis­eas­es, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices were caused by extreme weather and crop frosts. That summer, orphanages and hos­pitals were over­­flowing with the desp­er­ate. Outbreaks of small pox, syph­ilis, leprosy and English Sweat Disease occurred. John Waller exp­lained how ordinary people behaved when they were driven beyond the limits of endurance.

In Strasbourg, in mid 1518, Frau Trof­fea began to dance maniacally in public for six days! On­lookers laughed and clap­ped the lady for her energy and high spirits. With arms flap­p­ing, bodies swaying and clothes sweating, people joined in and danced all night. Within a week, 34 people had joined her; within a month, 400. Meantime res­id­ents were dying from strokes, heart attacks and exhaustion. Sel­dom stop­ping to eat or drink, and oblivious to painful feet, they continued until the authorities eventually interv­ened.

St Vitus had been a Catholic mar­t­yr, killed in 303 AD. He was ven­er­ated in the late middle ages when citizens danced before his statue. So St Vitus’ Dance became the name of a dancing plague, a form of mass hysteria that infected large groups of dancers, often with halluc­in­­ations. Sydenham’s Chorea was a condition that affected people who’d had acute rheumatic fever or ep­ilepsy in childhood, so Catholic legend also required that Chorea-afflicted peop­le be brought before a shrine of St Vitus. 

 Cologne Cath­edral down-river from Strasbourg dramatised the curse; under St Vitus’ image, three men danced joylessly and deliriously.

Hieronymus Bosch

The Garden of Earthly Delights, c1505.

Prado

Strasbourg’s leaders were disturbed by the 1518 events. Leading doctors diagnosed the hysteria as a Natural Disease i.e one not having any super­natural causes. In fact the doctors pres­c­r­ibed more danc­ing! So councillors ordered an open-air grain market cleared, commandeered guild halls, erected a huge stage next to the horse fair and paid pipers and drummers to keep peop­le dancing around the clock. To these locations they escorted the crazed dan­c­ers, hoping that the frantic motion would end the sick­ness. Alas they simply encouraged more people to join the craze.

The council sensed it was wrong only when the dancers eventually fell un­conscious or died. Seeing the dancers suffer from holy wrath and not sizzling brains, councillors opted inst­ead for enforced penance i.e they banned public mus­ic and danc­ing. Finally the dancers were taken to a shrine ded­ic­ated to St Vitus in the hills above Saverne in Alsace Lorraine. Bloodied feet were placed into red shoes and led around a wooden fig­ur­ine of the saint.

Without the dancers who went to the Saverne shrine, those remaining slowly stopped dancing as well. They ceas­ed their wild movements and the Strasbourg epidemic ended, the last of its kind in Europe.

This was one of the strangest epid­emics to be fully recorded. Brill­iant physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) detailed Stras­bourg's dancing plague. And one of city’s councillors, writer Sebas­tian Brant (1458–1521), dev­oted a chapter of his book Ship of Fools to the folly of dance.

The Church thought spirit possession “caused” people to act as if their souls have been taken over. Once Spirit Possession was taken seriously by ordinary med­ieval citizens, they could en­t­er a dissoc­iative mental state. They then acted according to culturally prescribed ideas of how The Possessed behaved. The Church was always suspicious of the strange dancing plague, see­­­ing the dancers as a band of heretics who used mad­ness to exer­cise their devilish rituals.

Under the hot summer sun, the dancing was as insane as Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, Garden of Earthly Delights 1500s. In his hell­ish vis­ions, the hum­ans lost all cont­rol over their senses, dancing in a wild collective delirium and groan­ing in agony. Soon several thous­and frenzied people in Aachen were also dan­c­ing in fits that lasted for weeks, then the mania spread to Utrecht Neth­­erlands, Liège Belgium and Metz France.

Did the medical profession believe in demonic possession and ov­erheated blood? Probably not. The danc­ing frenzy was a reaction to the years of Black Death, ex­plained by 1 of 2 possibilities. Their best explanation was that the cit­izens were the vic­tims of mass psychosis. With Stras­bourg’s mass psych­ol­ogical distress, famine had been prevalent in the region for some time, caused by extreme weather. Diseases spread rapidly and thousands died from dancing.

St Vitus Dance, 1564

Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Albertina, Vienna

And consider the ergotism/St Anth­ony’s Fire explanation. Long-term ergot poisoning, caused by the fungus that grew on rye bread, occ­urred in warm, damp conditions. Anyone who ing­ested ergot-laced rye developed seizures, viol­ent cramps, mental derange­ment, halluc­in­at­ions, twitching and later, gangrene. On one hand, it was very un­likely that really sick ergot sufferers could have danced for days. On the other hand, as record­ed in phys­ician’s notes, dan­cing seemed in some way to rel­ieve the pain of suffering ergotism.

In Oct 2018, the 1518 dancing epidemic centenary was memorialised in Strasbourg’s Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame. So read "Dance to Death" in Tudors Dynasty.