Five hundred years ago, a bizarre “dancing plague” descended on the Alsatian city of Strasbourg. People were to be seen leaping and convulsing “in the public markets, in alleys, and in the streets”. The first victim, a Frau Troffea, was spotted on July 16, 1518. Within a few days, three dozen more citizens had been affected, and by the middle of August as many as 400 people had succumbed.
Many writhed and whirled for hours before collapsing from exhaustion and a number of deaths were recorded. Modern theories have touted the role of a rye-loving psychoactive fungus (unlikely) or an episode of mass psychological trauma brought on by a prolonged period of socio-economic stress (a modish, but feasible explanation).
Back in 1518, the chronicler Hieronymous Gebwiler had no doubts about the cause of the outbreak. God was sending a none-too-subtle sign that he was appalled by the city’s moral decay. This terrible illness, which cruelly mimicked and exaggerated the movements of dance, should convince the people to “keep some moderation” in their pastimes and to “omit shameful and blasphemous dances”. At the very least, they should “never dance in the wrong place and with inappropriate persons, as when they dance in cloisters and nunneries with monks and nuns”. If Strasbourg did not take heed of God’s warning, “for our obstinacy He will let us sink in a Red Sea of sins”.
Others looked beyond supernatural explanations. The city’s medical boffins suggested that overheated blood, perhaps resulting from an imbalance in the body’s humours, was sending victims into their frantic trances. Could the madness be vanquished sooner if the afflicted were forced to continue with their gyrations? To this end, two guildhalls were pressed into service and platforms were erected in the horse and grain markets. Troops were deployed and the infected were spurred on by the sound of pipes and drums.
As one might expect, the results were disastrous. Nobody was cured and it became apparent that merely watching the diseased in their frenzied state was enough to spread the mania among the populace. Consequently, all music was banned from Strasbourg until Michaelmas, though exceptions were made for the weddings and private Masses of the city’s more well-heeled families. Even they, however, were only permitted to listen to soothing stringed instruments and “on their conscience, not to use tambourines and drums”.
It was time to prescribe piety. All preachers were to “speak out publicly from their pulpits, praying to God and pleading that he send His grace and mercy to us”. Masses were celebrated and a moral cleansing of the city was undertaken: prostitutes, gamblers, drunkards and hooligans were to be banished. Finally, a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Vitus in the nearby Vosges mountains was arranged. Holy oil and water were dispensed and, so the chronicles insist, all was soon well.
An interesting clash of perspectives can be discerned in the events that unfolded at Strasbourg those 500 summers ago. Dancing manias were not uncommon during the medieval era and divine intervention was often posited as the cause. Sometimes, lending a more sinister edge to the analysis, demonic forces came into the reckoning.
In 1374, according to one chronicle, people throughout the Rhine valley were “abused by the Devil to such a degree that they dance in their homes, in the churches and in the streets holding each other’s hands and leaping in the air”. They “cried out the names of demons” and were in desperate need of exorcism.
The maverick 16th-century medical theorist Paracelsus had little patience for such diagnoses. “Nature,” he insisted, was the “sole origin of disease”, and ascribing dancing madness (choreomania, as he termed it) to divine disapproval or the machinations of Satan was “nonsensical gossip. Humoral theory, he felt, was just as silly. An agitated imagination, sensual appetites, or basic bodily malfunction were, for Paracelsus, the culprits.
In 1518, the Strasbourg authorities were caught between two approaches to fending off disease and may have looked, with envy, to their neighbours to the south. In Italy, it was commonly held that when bitten by a certain kind of spider a person would sink into deep melancholy. The only way to rouse him was to play a little pizzica music and, if the right tune were found, the patient would embark on a wild dance that allowed the venom to be diluted in the bloodstream and seep out through the skin.
It didn’t always work but then, as readers of Samuel knew, the therapeutic power of music had always been unpredictable: at one point David plays his harp and the evil spirit possessing Saul is driven away.
A little later, the strumming irritates Saul so much that he throws a spear at David, hoping to pin him to the wall. Despite the risks, a resourceful harpist might have made a few kreuzers at Strasbourg in 1518.
The “dancing plague” was no kind of dance, but a mania that still evades explanation. Still, the comparison made excellent rhetorical sense. Christianity had often viewed dancing as a conduit for sin. It was, for Augustine, “a circle whose centre is the Devil”. Medieval theologians enjoyed quoting such warnings, and Dominicans appear to have been especially censorious.
Johannes Nider vilified dance as one of the Devil’s “many weapons for the slaying of souls”, while John Bromyard told the tale of some pious men who found a demon sitting on a city’s ramparts. When asked to explain his choice of perch, the demon replied that, inside the walls, “I do not need the help of anyone … the whole city is subject to us.” The men enter and discover the entire populace engaged in dissolute dancing: as Chrysostom had put it, long ago, “where dance is found, there is the Devil”.
When the dancing got out of hand, condign punishment, we’re told, was apt to follow. It was said that, at Maastricht in 1278, 200 people had been seized by a dancing frenzy and disrupted funeral rites. Small wonder that a bridge over the River Meuse collapsed and many of the maniacal revellers drowned.
Avoiding such pitfalls and looking suspiciously at dance would, of course, become a theme in some brands of Protestantism. Even in Strasbourg, which charted a relatively moderate theological course, it was decreed that there should be no dancing in the streets or “shameless songs” on Sundays. Perhaps the memory of 1518 helped carry through such legislation, although at least the rubrics were not as severe as those over in Augsburg. “All piping, drumming and other hitting and playing of instruments” was prohibited. If the feet began to tap, who knew what terpsichorean mischief might ensue?
Jonathan Wright is an honorary fellow in the department of theology and religion at Durham University
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