D.P. Curtin
Newark, Delaware, United States

In the summer of 1518, an otherwise unremarkable peasant woman stepped into the muddy streets of the Imperial city Strasbourg and began to dance. There was no music, no celebration taking place. At first, she danced alone, going on for hours, then for days. According to the famed Swiss physician, Paracelsus, her name was something akin to Frau Troffea, and she continued “dancing, jumping, and screaming” until the time when others joined her in her strange street ritual. Within weeks, hundreds of local peasants had joined her, and were dancing uncontrollably in the streets.¹ After hours of continued muscular exertion, some of them reportedly collapsed from physical exhaustion. Others died from strokes, heart failure, or from sheer fatigue under the heat of the July sun. The event, which is still viewed with some mystery, has entered history commonly under the lurid title the “Dancing Plague of 1518.” However, contemporaries to these events did not think of the classification of “plague” as being metaphorical. They believed something distinctive was happening, albeit one without a clear etiology. Postulations that these dancers were moved by some unknown supernatural, medical, social, or demonic force had overtaken the city. The Strasbourg magistrates, looking for some intervention, consulted what physicians they could find, who offered few conclusions, suggesting to the city elders that they should let the victims continue dancing until the fever burned itself out. The result was catastrophic.²

The more the city accommodated the novel mania of the dancers, the further it appeared to spread. After five centuries, its onset still remains unknown. This strange episode belongs to a broader phenomenon during the medieval and early modern period which Europeans called “choreomania.” These were collective outbreaks of ecstatic or compulsive dancing that took place seemingly at random across Western Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.³ Similar to the episode in Strasbourg, in 1374, large groups in the German city of Aachen danced through the streets “as if insane,” according to the Chronicon Belgicum. Another local observer described victims writhing in involuntary motion, who “could not stop themselves from dancing until they had broken their ribs and exhausted themselves utterly.” Details of this phenomenon appear limited or are largely unreliable. But those details that are trustworthy present a picture of social contagion or avolitional movement. Calling it “dance” is perhaps a poor metaphor, and largely imprecise, but it was drawn from the medieval vocabulary and movements similar to an upbeat jig.

The Swiss chronicler Johannes Stumpf grants slightly more insight when he wrote of participants “foaming at the mouth” and crying out for mercy as they convulsed through various public squares and township roads. Contemporary to this, the Dominican friar Heinrich von Herford described that these dancers “fell to the ground unconscious” after prolonged frenzy, sometimes after hours, sometimes days. Medieval observers frequently associated these strange episodes with the familiar cult of St. Vitus, the Catholic patron saint invoked against nervous disorders and involuntary movement. Today, St. Vitus’ dance is familiar to us and is safely classified as the neurological disorder known as Sydenham’s chorea, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the basal ganglia and causes muscular spasms.⁴ However, Sydenham’s chorea only affects individuals, and not whole groups of people. The medical mystery remains: What was affecting these people, and what was the catalyst for their behavior?

Modern historians and psychologists have sought out clinical or medical explanations to account for the peculiar presentation and symptomology of these peasants. Some have attempted to address the anomaly of a group infection by proposing that there was large scale ergot poisoning from contaminated rye. Yet, this theory has largely fallen out of favor with medical historians, as ergot hallucinations do not typically produce synchronized, prolonged dancing, the primary feature of this condition. Medical science offers little to explain the oddity of these episodes. Some have hypothesized a psychological etiology. That is to say, these symptoms could have been a feature of an unclear epidemic stress response, the confluence of anxieties over famine, disease, and religious pressure manifesting through collective psychophysiological behavior. The terminology to talk about these events still evades us. The parlance of the American Psychiatric Association speaks of folie a deux, joint psychosis, but this too is limited to only two people. There is no diagnosis in the contemporary clinical language that accounts for these types of collective symptoms.

What has been theorized is the idea of mass psychogenic events, psychical happenings that occur when psychological distress spreads socially through imitation, fear, and unconscious suggestion. Historically, there are parallels to this, often emerging in tightly connected communities under unusual pressure. Such events have been recorded as happening in schools, factories, convents, and military units throughout history. One famous case occurred in 1962 in Tanzania, where an outbreak of uncontrollable laughter spread through a girls’ boarding school and beyond, affecting over a thousand people in the region.⁵ More recently, psychologists have studied a mysterious tic outbreak among adolescents, which has been amplified through social media usage and exposure.⁵

The medieval dancing plagues appear so distinctively bizarre largely because their outward form is foreign to us. We do not encounter this type of behavior ordinarily in our society, and we have not overtly for at least a century. The closest such behavior is the appearance of hysteria, prevalent in the late nineteenth century, but largely disappeared by the middle of the last century. As alien as “dancing plagues” are to us, the underlying mechanism is not alien. Human beings, regardless of the century, remain creatures of social and moral contagion. René Girard, the French anthropologist, argued that imitation lies at the center of all human culture and is the fulcrum of civilization. As social creatures, we desire what others desire. We fear what others fear. Our cognitions are not necessarily our own. Panic moves through crowds because people are not sealed monads, but porous beings constantly absorbing the social signals that surround them. A mob, once formed, acquires a general sense of momentum despite the independent volition of the individuals within it. Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 work The Crowd, observed that “the sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction.” In other words, as individual judgment weakens, collective suggestibility increases.

Despite our pejorative retrospective analysis, the medieval world did understand this intuitively, even if imperfectly. Medieval people recognized that communities could become spiritually disordered through the selection of their virtues and behaviors. The idea of sin was not exclusively relegated to private misconduct, but a corruption capable of permeating entire nations and broadly into societies. The Hebrew prophets speak to this idea repeatedly. “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace,” as Jeremiah warns. Moral and intellectual sickness spreads socially just as any physical disease does. Self-congratulatory contemporary societies flatter themselves for having outgrown such schools of thought. However, given the nature of our communication, our own age may be more vulnerable to mass psychogenic phenomena than any previous civilization. While we might anticipate a kind of antigenic drift, the single largest difference between the medieval and contemporary world is that our dances largely occur online.

It is tempting to simply dismiss the dancing plagues as quaint relics of the medieval past. That they were products of a different age, long forgotten tokens of a superstitious world. However, this is perhaps a bit too sunny of a reading of psychological distress, fringing upon delusional hubris. It is worth noting that despite our insight into common individual psychopathologies, collective events such as mass psychogenic phenomena are still largely unknown to us. We do not understand how or why they take place. Fundamentally, they are not strange eruptions from a civilization too credulous to distinguish illness from possession. They are very much a function of our own age and our consistent human nature. The forms of collective hysteria have changed, but not the underlying human susceptibility to personal imitation. The spirit of panic and moral contagion are still alive and well. Human beings are profoundly imitative creatures whose emotions are shaped communally far more than we care to admit. We are subject to the age that we live in, the neighbors that we choose to reside near, and the social environment, which by chance or by fate, we find ourselves in. Medieval Europeans danced themselves into physical collapse in crowded marketplaces of townships of their world. Contemporary people have found an outlet for their anxieties through algorithmic rituals, not the least of which are socially transmitting pathologies at the speed of light across constantly glowing screens. The choreography has changed, but the song remains the same.

References

1. John Waller, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (London: Icon Books, 2008)
2. John Waller, “A Forgotten Plague: Making Sense of Dancing Mania,” Lancet 373, no. 9664 (2009): 624–25.
3. Douglas J. Lanska, “The Dancing Manias: Psychogenic Illness as a Social Phenomenon,” in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 4, ed. Julien Bogousslavsky and Michael G. Hennerici (Basel: Karger, 2017), 132–41.
4. Russell C. Dale, “Autoimmunity and the Basal Ganglia: New Insights into Old Diseases,” QJM 96, no. 3 (2003): 183–91; Kyle A. Williams and Susan E. Swedo, “Post-Infectious Autoimmune Disorders: Sydenham’s Chorea, PANDAS and Beyond,” Brain Research 1617 (2015): 144–54.
5. A. M. Rankin and P. J. Philip, “An Epidemic of Laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika,” Central African Journal of Medicine 9 (1963): 167–70; Luise S. Nasser, “The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic in the Age of Independence,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 100–113.
6. Tamara Pringsheim et al., “Rapid Onset Functional Tic-Like Behaviors in Young Females During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Movement Disorders 36, no. 12 (2021): 2707–13; Jessica Frey et al., “TikTok Tourette’s: Are We Witnessing a Rise in Functional Tic-Like Behavior Driven by Adolescent Social Media Use?” Psychology Research and Behavior Management 15 (2022): 3575–85.