A City in Trance: Strasbourg’s 1518 Dancing Plague

For people in France, the 14th of July is a day of national jubilation. It brings to mind images of parades, fireworks, feasts and even concerts and public dancing. The 14th of July in Strasbourg in 1518 was vastly different from this. Not only does it predate the emblematic storming of the Bastille in 1789, but Strasbourg was not even part of France at the time; it belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. There were no parades, no fireworks, no feasts and no concerts. There was dancing, however. One woman, Frau Troffea, was dancing in public. She danced all day long through the streets of Strasbourg. This was certainly not a joyful dance: it was unsettling and frightening. After hours of these frenzied movements, she collapsed from exhaustion. Once rested, she resumed her dramatic display of movement in the streets of Strasbourg.

A few days went by and over thirty people had joined her, dancing wildly with bruised and bleeding feet. By late July, people started to die. These people are dancing day and night during the height of summer, hardly stopping to eat or drink; it is no wonder that there were deaths. By early August, more than 100 Strasbourgeois are dancing helplessly. According to one chronicler, at its peak, the epidemic struck 400 people. The people of Strasbourg believed that this was a divine intervention by a wrathful saint, St Vitus, the patron saint of dancers. Writing after the epidemic, the physician Paracelsus termed the disease ‘chorea lascivia’ and the afflicted as ‘choreomaniacs’.

A medical treatment or a divine remedy?

First, Strasbourg's privy council sought a medical solution: they consulted the physicians' guild. These leading medical experts concluded that the dancing was a result of overheated blood, which caused strange, manic and alarming movements. The remedy was straightforward: dance it out. If they kept on dancing, they would sweat out the residues of burnt blood and subsequently recover their minds. So they gathered the delirious dancers and placed them on a makeshift stage in the centre of the city, for all the people of Strasbourg to see. They hired professional musicians to play music day and night, as well as salaried dancers to ensure the afflicted did not stop moving. The council was surprised to discover that this actually made matters worse: the dancing was contagious. Making the dancing visible to all meant it attracted more dancers. The cure had intensified the problem.

Since the medical solution failed, the council decided to turn to a divine remedy. The majority of people in Strasbourg believed that St Vitus had cursed them. They thought that sin, corruption and hedonism were to blame for the dancing. Consequently, they shut down casinos and brothels, whilst also organising masses at Strasbourg's imposing cathedral to pray for the cursed. Then, they decided to send the choreomaniacs on a pilgrimage in an attempt to cure them. A shrine dedicated to St Vitus was located a day's ride away in Saverne, within the Vosges mountains. They were placed into wagons, still dancing, and sent up the mountain, where priests conducted religious ceremonies and prayed to release them from the curse. And it worked! Days after the pilgrimage, the afflicted dwindled to just a few. By the end of August 1518, the dancing had ceased.

A long, strange history of dancing outbreaks

This was not the first instance of a dancing plague, as chroniclers had documented many similar occurrences during the Middle Ages. In Erfurt in 1247, it is said that over a hundred children danced and hopped out of the town, buckling from exhaustion and were later found by anxious parents. Similarly, in Maastricht in 1278, 200 people danced inexorably on a bridge over the Moselle. Unable to withstand the rhythm of their steps, the bridge gave way, hurling them into the river below, where they drowned. Epidemics of the dancing plague afflicted settlements near the Rhine from the 11th to the 16th centuries, including Zurich, Aachen, Ghent and Metz. However, Strasbourg stands out because it took place after the invention of the printing press, making it a very well-documented case.

Explaining the epidemic

Historians have long suggested that the dancing plague might have been caused by ergot, a mould that grows on damp rye and, if ingested, can induce hallucinations, spasms, and violent convulsions. This is the same theory some historians propose to explain the Salem Witchcraft hysteria in 1692. However, the historian John Waller, specialising in the history of medicine, has more recently argued that ergot poisoning does not enable sustained dancing, as it is far too painful. Instead, he contends that extreme distress, coupled with intense religious beliefs, led them into a trance state.

In the years leading up to the dancing plague, life was arduous and miserable. Strasbourg faced a series of crises, including famine, disease and increasing discontent with the corruption of the clergy. As crop failures persisted and heavy taxes were imposed, the poor grew ever more desperate, whilst the wealthy continued to prosper. By 1518, widespread famine and disease, including syphilis and the bubonic plague, contributed to deep societal unrest. At the same time, anticlericalism swept the region, as the poor no longer trusted a sinful church to purify their souls and grant them access to heaven. Catastrophe after catastrophe signified a divine rage. And there was nothing the poor could do about it. This was in the context of the buildup to the Protestant Reformation.

People profoundly believed that a dancing curse was possible; they had heard about other cases in cities all along the Rhine. For John Waller, the phenomenon of the dancing epidemic in Strasbourg in 1518 reflects a complex interplay of psychological stress and societal beliefs. These episodes can be understood as extreme forms of dissociation, where individuals under intense strain enter a state of trance, losing control and engaging in repetitive movements. This is worsened by malnutrition. The choreomaniacs profoundly believed that St Vitus would punish them with a dancing curse. As a result, they entered a trance where their subconscious mind manifested exactly what they anticipated: a dancing curse. Their subconscious was convinced that St Vitus was the perpetrator and therefore only he could lift the curse and free them from their trance. The pilgrimage to his shrine in Saverne was therefore the appropriate remedy.

These outbreaks were expressions of hysteria rooted in the societal context of the time, illustrating how suggestibility and cultural conventions shape the expression of anxiety and distress. The Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518 is significant not for its bizarre nature, but because of what it reveals about the human mind, a society under stress and the ways people seek meaning amidst all of the chaos.

Sources: 

Crompton, Sarah. “Strasbourg 1518: reliving a 16th-century ‘dancing plague’ in lockdown.” The Guardian, 19 July 2020. Accessed: 14 July, 2025. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jul/19/strasbourg-1518-reliving-16th-century-dancing-plague-in-lockdown-artangel-jonathan-glazer-sadlers-wells-bbc

Martin, Michael, Wakeam, Kira and Sposato, Cat. “On 'Dance Fever,' Florence + the Machine explores her fractured desires.” NPR Music. Accessed: 14 July, 2025. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/15/1099021095/on-dance-fever-florence-the-machine-explores-her-fractured-desires.

Miller, Lynneth J. “Divine Punishment of Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague.” Dance Research: The Journal for the Society of Dance Research 35, 2 (2017): 149-164.

Waller, John. A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. London: Icon Books, 2008.