What happened in the dancing plague of 1518

The dancing plague of 1518 was an outbreak of compulsive dancing in Strasbourg that ran from July to September of that year. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people danced for days or weeks, and the city paid musicians to keep them going [1]. The dancing is well recorded. How many died, and why it happened, are still in dispute.

The library's card says a whole town danced itself half to death in 1518. That last part made me suspicious, so I read its source, the Wikipedia article, and then followed it to the historian it leans on most, John Waller, whose two journal pieces are reproduced in part online [2].

How did the dancing plague start

Most accounts begin with one woman. The Public Domain Review's essay, drawing on the physician Paracelsus and the chronicles, puts her in the street on 14 July 1518: "Frau Troffea had started dancing on July 14th on the narrow cobbled street outside her half-timbered home" [3]. She had no music. She danced until she collapsed, slept, and started again the next morning.

Waller gives the same shape with slightly looser dates. A lone woman stepped into a street in mid-July, danced for four to six days, and then the numbers grew: "Within a week another 34 had joined the dance." [2] Even the name of the first dancer is not settled. The Wikipedia article notes that of six chronicle accounts, four name Frau Troffea and the rest describe an unnamed woman [1].

The authorities sent her by wagon to a shrine of Saint Vitus at Saverne, about thirty miles away, since the saint was believed to have cursed her [3]. By then it was too late to stop it spreading.

What did Strasbourg do about it

The response is the strangest part of the record, and the best sourced. The clergy blamed an angry saint. The city's councillors listened to the physicians instead, who called it "a natural disease, which comes from overheated blood" [3]. Under the medicine of the day that should have meant bleeding. They prescribed more dancing.

Waller lists what followed. The council cleared two guildhalls and the outdoor grain market, built a wooden stage opposite the horse fair, and paid for musicians and professional dancers to keep the afflicted moving day and night [2]. The idea was that the fit would burn itself out if nothing interrupted it.

It made things worse. Onlookers took the frenzy as proof of the saint's anger, and more people joined. "The Imlin family chronicle records that within a month the plague had seized four hundred citizens." [3] The council then pulled the stages down and banned almost all public dancing and music until September. One exception survives in the city's records, quoted in the essay: wedding dances at home were allowed with stringed instruments, but not with tambourines and drums [3].

The end came through the church. The worst cases were taken to the shrine at Saverne, given red shoes marked with crosses in holy oil, and prayed over with incense and Latin [3]. Word came back that it worked, and by early September the outbreak was fading [1].

Did people really dance to death

This is where the headline and the page part ways. Waller's 2008 abstract says plainly that "the chronicles agree, dozens were dying from exhaustion" [2]. In his Lancet piece a year later he is more careful: "One chronicle states that it claimed, for a brief period at least, about 15 lives a day" [4]. That single chronicle is where the famous figure of 15 deaths a day comes from.

The Wikipedia article looks at the same material and lands somewhere else. It says the city's own records from 1518 do not mention a death toll at all, and then goes further: "There do not appear to be any sources related to the events that make note of any fatalities." [1] It adds that "The sources cited by Waller that mention deaths were all from later accounts of the events." [1]

I could not read the chronicles themselves, and both pages agree on the important point: the final toll is unknown. The essay in the Public Domain Review does the arithmetic honestly. If 15 a day was true, the deaths "could have been into the hundreds", but that is a condition, not a count [3].

Why does it sound made up

It sounds fake because the details read like a folk tale. A woman starts dancing for no reason, hundreds join her, the city hires a band, and the cure is a pair of red shoes. It also has the tidy horror of a moral story: dance in the street, and you dance until you die.

It holds up because the dancing itself sits in many kinds of record at once. The Wikipedia article lists "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" [1]. The council's own ban on drums is in the municipal archive [3]. Nobody invents a by-law about tambourines. What does not hold up as well is the body count, which rests on later retellings.

What caused the dancing plague of 1518

Two explanations come up most often. The first is ergot, a mould that grows on damp rye and can cause twitching and hallucinations. Waller rejects it in The Lancet, quoted in the Wikipedia article: "this theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time" [1]. The essay adds the mechanism: ergot also cuts blood flow to the hands and feet [3].

The second, and the one Waller argues for, is mass psychogenic illness, which older books call mass hysteria. Strasbourg had been through bad harvests, political unrest and the arrival of syphilis [3]. People there also believed Saint Vitus could punish sinners by making them dance. Waller's case is that fear and belief, under extreme strain, put people into a trance shaped by what they expected to happen.

He also points out that 1518 was not a one-off. The Lancet piece describes 18 people dancing outside a church in Kölbigk on Christmas Eve 1021, and a much larger outbreak in 1374 across western Germany, the Low Countries and north-eastern France [4]. The essay counts more than ten such outbreaks along the Rhine and Moselle since 1374 [3]. A cause that only works on one river valley is a hard fit for poisoned bread.

The claim against the source

The figures in the first three rows come from the Wikipedia article [1] and Waller's Lancet piece [4].

Related facts from the library

Dancing has caused trouble in a theatre too: the library notes that the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was aimed largely at the dancing. For another medieval record that sounds invented and is not, a pope once had his predecessor's body dug up and put on trial. And for a legend that runs ahead of its sources, the way the death toll here does, there is the card on why Vikings never wore horned helmets. More sits under history facts.

Questions

How many people died in the dancing plague of 1518?

Nobody knows. One chronicle, cited by John Waller, says about 15 people a day died for a short time at the peak. The Wikipedia article points out that Strasbourg's own records from 1518 mention no deaths, and that the sources reporting deaths were written later [1]. The honest answer is somewhere between none recorded and possibly dozens.

Where did the dancing plague of 1518 happen?

It happened in Strasbourg, a trading city on the Rhine that was then part of the Holy Roman Empire and is now in Alsace, France. The dancers were in the streets, in two guildhalls, in the grain market and on a stage built opposite the horse fair. The worst cases were taken to a shrine of Saint Vitus at Saverne [3].

Was the dancing plague caused by ergot poisoning?

John Waller thinks not. Ergot is a mould on damp rye that can cause spasms and hallucinations, which is why it keeps being suggested. He argues that people poisoned by it could not have danced for days, and that it does not explain why so many outbreaks happened along the Rhine and Moselle [1]. The same article calls stress-induced mass hysteria the most popular explanation.

Were there other dancing plagues?

Yes. John Waller's Lancet piece describes 18 people dancing at Kölbigk in 1021 and a large outbreak in 1374 that spread across western Germany, the Low Countries and north-eastern France [4]. The Public Domain Review calls Strasbourg in 1518 the most fatal and best documented of them [3].