The Dancing Plague of 1518

In July 1518 a woman named in later sources as Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg and began to dance. There was no music and no festival. According to the chronicles, she danced for days, stopping only to collapse in exhaustion, before resuming. Within a week dozens of others had joined her, and by August the number of dancers had grown considerably. Contemporary witnesses describe them as frantic and distressed rather than joyful, with bleeding feet and swollen limbs.

Strasbourg was then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, a prosperous centre of printing and trade on the Rhine. But the years before 1518 had been grim. Harvests had failed, bread prices were high, and smallpox, syphilis and leprosy were present in the region. Many poor families lived on the edge of starvation. These conditions matter to almost every modern explanation of what happened next.

The city authorities consulted physicians, who rejected supernatural causes and declared that the affliction came from overheated blood. Their remedy was surprising: more dancing. The council cleared guild halls and a grain market, built a wooden stage, and hired musicians and strong men to keep the dancers moving, in the hope that they would dance the illness out of their bodies. The result, as the council soon saw, was that more people joined in.

By late August the council changed course. It banned public music and dancing, except for weddings and other respectable occasions with string instruments only, and ordered penance and prayer. The authorities now treated the epidemic as a sign of divine anger, and they turned to a saint associated with this particular affliction.

In late medieval Germany, St Vitus, a Christian martyr of the early fourth century, was believed to have power over compulsive dancing. Popular belief held that he could curse sinners with it, and that he could also cure them. The dancers were taken in wagons to a chapel dedicated to him in the hills near Saverne, about forty kilometres north-west of Strasbourg. There, the chronicles say, they attended Mass and were given small crosses and red shoes anointed with holy oil, and were led around the altar. By early September the outbreak had faded.

Strasbourg’s epidemic was not the first. The largest earlier outbreak spread in 1374 through towns along the Rhine and Meuse, including Aachen, Cologne, Metz and Utrecht, and in parts of the Low Countries. Chroniclers described groups of dancers moving from town to town, sometimes calling out the names of demons or saints. Smaller episodes are reported earlier, such as a story of children dancing from Erfurt to Arnstadt in 1237, though some of these early accounts are brief and hard to evaluate.

The 1518 outbreak is the best documented, because city council records, sermons and chronicles survive. They confirm the main lines of the story: the onset in July, the council’s policies, and the pilgrimage to Saverne. They are less clear on numbers. Estimates range from several dozen to around four hundred dancers, with the higher figures found in later accounts. The famous claim that fifteen people died each day comes from a chronicle written later, not from the council’s records, and historians are unsure whether anyone died at all. Some dancers may well have suffered from exhaustion, injury or illness, especially given the poor health of many of the city’s inhabitants, but the dramatic death toll repeated in modern articles has no firm basis.

Over the centuries, many causes have been proposed. In the twentieth century some writers suggested that ergot, a fungus that grows on damp rye and can cause hallucinations and convulsions, was to blame. Most historians now doubt this. Ergot poisoning restricts blood flow and causes seizures, gangrene and death, not sustained dancing over weeks, and it would not explain why outbreaks happened in particular places and among people who shared certain beliefs. Others suggested a secret religious sect, but there is no evidence of one.

The historian John Waller has argued that the outbreak was a mass psychogenic illness: a real physical response, spread through a group under severe stress, that takes a shape suggested by shared beliefs. In Strasbourg, the people knew the story of St Vitus and his curse, and fear of it may have helped produce what they feared. Others, such as Gregor Rohmann, have looked more closely at how medieval people understood dancing, illness and the cosmos, cautioning against applying modern diagnoses too directly. Either way, belief and culture played a central role.

The religious setting matters. Dance had an uneasy place in late medieval Christianity: it was part of village festivals, weddings and saints’ days, yet preachers often condemned it as a path to sin. Midsummer celebrations around the feast of St John the Baptist sometimes involved wild dancing, and in some regions the dancing affliction was called St John’s dance as well as St Vitus’ dance. In southern Italy, a related phenomenon, tarantism, was explained as the effect of a spider bite that could be cured only by dancing to special music. These parallels suggest that across Europe, communities had ready-made frameworks for understanding uncontrollable dancing as both a punishment and a path to healing. After the seventeenth century, dancing epidemics of this kind largely disappeared from European records, perhaps as beliefs about saints, curses and the body changed.

The physician Paracelsus visited Strasbourg in 1526 and offered his own theories, blaming among other things the imagination and, in some cases, a wish to escape domestic life. Later, the name St Vitus’ dance was applied to Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder with involuntary movements, which has no direct connection to the epidemics. The dancing plague has since inspired novels, music and art, and it remains one of the strangest episodes in the history of religious belief and the human mind.