Medieval Mystery
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Strasbourg
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1518
They Started Dancing. Then They Couldn't Stop.
Watch the Odd Past
In the summer of 1518, something strange happened in the streets of Strasbourg.
A woman began to dance.
There was no festival. No celebration. No music.
And according to historical accounts, she kept going.
Soon, other people began dancing too.
Within weeks, Strasbourg’s government was dealing with an outbreak of compulsive dancing serious enough that officials consulted physicians, restricted public dancing and eventually sent sufferers to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus.
Exactly how many people danced is uncertain.
Whether the outbreak actually killed anyone is disputed.
And more than 500 years later, we still don’t know what caused it.
Welcome to the Dancing Plague of 1518.
It Started With One Woman
Several historical chronicles describe the outbreak beginning with a single woman in July 1518.
Four of six chronicle accounts examined by historian Lynneth Miller identify her as Lady—or Frau—Troffea.
Even here, however, the sources don’t agree perfectly.
One chronicle dates the beginning to July 14. Another account based on material associated with Strasbourg official Sebastian Brant gives July 22.
So the safest thing we can say is this:
Sometime in July 1518, a woman began dancing in Strasbourg—and other people soon joined her.
One chronicle claimed that 34 men and women had become involved within four days and that more than 400 were afflicted within four weeks.
Those numbers shouldn’t be treated as a precise census.
But multiple historical accounts agree on the essential point:
The dancing spread.
The City Tried to Stop It
Strasbourg’s authorities had a problem.
And their first response sounds almost unbelievable today.
Physicians apparently regarded the condition as a natural illness rather than simply a supernatural affliction. Medical thinking at the time included ideas about bodily humors and overheated blood.
One response was to allow the sufferers to continue dancing.
Historical accounts describe officials providing spaces where the afflicted could dance. Musicians played drums and pipes, and people were reportedly paid to dance alongside the sufferers.
The apparent reasoning was that the condition needed to run its course.
It didn’t.
So the city changed tactics.
Then Strasbourg Banned Dancing
By August, authorities were trying almost the opposite approach.
A surviving note written by Sebastian Brant and dated August 3 records Strasbourg’s council prohibiting public dancing until September 29 because officials believed dancing was interfering with the sufferers’ recovery.
Music was restricted.
Public dancing was forbidden.
And eventually the authorities turned toward a very different solution.
Religion.
Enter Saint Vitus
The choice wasn’t random.
Saint Vitus had long been associated in European religious culture with involuntary or compulsive dancing.
Some sufferers were transported to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus near Saverne, outside Strasbourg.
And this is where the story gets even stranger.
Accounts derived from Strasbourg records describe sufferers receiving red shoes marked with crosses, which had been treated with consecrated oil and sprinkled with holy water.
Religious rituals were performed.
Offerings were made.
Masses were said.
The surviving accounts report that sufferers sent to the shrine recovered.
Eventually, the extraordinary outbreak ended.
THE ODD PART
Did People Really Dance Themselves to Death? You've probably heard this part of the story. People supposedly danced until they collapsed. Some died from exhaustion. At the height of the outbreak, 15 people were supposedly dying every day. It's an incredible story. There's just one problem. We can't establish that it happened. Later historical accounts do describe deaths. One later chronicle says that many dancers danced themselves to death, and historian John Waller's influential reconstruction of the outbreak accepts that deaths occurred. But surviving contemporary records do not provide a reliable death toll, and a modern medical-historical review notes that no deaths are mentioned in the records from the time. So did people die during the Dancing Plague? Maybe. Can we confidently say that 15 people died every day—or that hundreds danced themselves to death? No. The evidence simply isn't strong enough. And strangely enough, removing the legendary death toll doesn't make the real story much less bizarre. Because Strasbourg's dancing outbreak itself is historically documented.
So What Caused It?
That’s where the mystery really begins.
There is no universally accepted explanation.
One theory involves ergot.
Ergot is a fungus that can infect rye and other cereal grains. Eating contaminated grain can cause ergotism, a serious poisoning capable of producing neurological symptoms and convulsions.
Since rye was widely consumed in this part of Europe, ergot poisoning has sometimes been proposed as an explanation for the Dancing Plague.
It’s an intriguing possibility.
But it has serious problems.
Ergot poisoning does not neatly explain the apparently prolonged, socially spreading pattern of dancing described in Strasbourg. Historian John Waller considers ergot poisoning an inadequate explanation for what happened.
So ergot remains part of the discussion.
It isn’t the answer.
A City Under Enormous Stress
Another explanation begins not with fungus, but with the people themselves.
Strasbourg had endured difficult years.
Historical chronicles describe repeated harvest failures and famine before the outbreak. Disease, economic hardship and religious anxiety were part of life in the region.
People were living under enormous stress.
And they lived in a culture in which supernatural forces—and Saint Vitus in particular—could provide an explanation for uncontrollable dancing.
That combination matters.
Could the Mind Have Caused It?
Waller argues that the Dancing Plague may be understood as a form of mass psychogenic illness.
That doesn’t mean people were pretending.
Psychological distress can produce very real physical symptoms. Under certain circumstances, symptoms can also spread through groups whose members share fears, expectations and cultural beliefs.
Waller argues that Strasbourg offered unusually fertile conditions for something like this to happen: severe hardship combined with a cultural expectation that a supernatural affliction could cause uncontrollable dancing.
It’s one of the most compelling modern explanations for the outbreak.
But it remains an interpretation.
Nobody examined the dancers using modern neurological or psychological methods.
We are trying to understand people who lived more than five centuries ago through surviving records that are incomplete and sometimes contradictory.
There is no diagnosis we can make with certainty.
What We Actually Know
Strip away five centuries of retelling and something remarkable remains.
An outbreak of compulsive dancing really did occur in Strasbourg in 1518.
Historical sources document people dancing.
They document the involvement of Strasbourg’s authorities.
They describe attempts to accommodate the dancers and the use of musicians.
A surviving municipal note records the subsequent prohibition of public dancing.
Accounts describe sufferers being sent to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus.
Then the outbreak ended.
What the historical record doesn’t tell us with certainty is just as important.
We don’t know exactly how many people danced.
We don’t know whether the dancing itself killed anyone.
And we don’t know what caused it.
Maybe that’s why the Dancing Plague remains so fascinating.
The mystery isn’t an excuse to fill the gaps.
The gaps are part of the history.
One Mystery Leads to Another
There is one theory we aren’t quite finished with.
Ergot.
A fungus growing on rye doesn’t sound like the beginning of a historical rabbit hole.
But centuries after Strasbourg, ergot would be proposed as an explanation for another famous episode involving strange behavior, fear and accusations.
This time, the setting wasn’t Germany.
It was colonial Massachusetts.
And the place was called Salem.
But that’s a story for another day.
From the Archive
Dance Research, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2017.
Miller’s study is especially valuable because it examines multiple historical chronicles of the outbreak, the Strasbourg authorities’ response, contemporary medical interpretations, the connection to Saint Vitus and the surviving Sebastian Brant material.
https://doi.org/10.3366/drs.2017.0199
John C. Waller — “In a Spin: The Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518.”
Endeavour, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2008.
Waller provides one of the best-known modern reconstructions of the epidemic and develops the argument that extreme social and psychological stress may have contributed to a mass psychogenic illness.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18602695/
“1518 – épidémie de danse mortelle à Strasbourg.”
Modern medical-historical review.
Useful particularly for distinguishing the documented outbreak from later claims about mortality. The review notes that contemporary records do not mention deaths, while later writings report as many as 15 deaths per day.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352007823000811
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