5 Strange Science Takeaways From The Middle Ages' Deadly Dance Hysteria
As more vaccines are administered and restrictions are lifted, it feels like we may finally be on the brighter side of the year-long nightmare we've been living. While we navigate our way out of the hell that we've been living through, let's take a moment to revisit a much stranger plague: Dancing.
Yes, there was a literal dancing fever so intense that it killed people in the Middle Ages ...
The Town That Couldn't Stop Dancing
The most famous episode of this viral dancing occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, and it generally represents how a dancing epidemic played out. It began with one woman, a Dancing Queen, you might say, who is known only as Frau Troffea. She began dancing in the Strasbourg streets. There was no music and no cause for celebration; there was only dance. Her dancing seemed uncontrollable, and it just kept going.
Frau Troffea did not dance alone for long, though. As the days passed and her dance continued, other residents joined her. The dancing is often talked about like it was a virus, and that's because, in a lot of ways, it was. It spread through the town, and accounts say that 400 people joined Frau Troffea in her dance. From July to September, the dancers continued their hysteric performance. Their moves were unstoppable and often deadly, as many who continued to get down died from exhaustion, starvation, heat exposure, or any number of other possible afflictions that could come from weeks of endless dance.
This Wasn't An Isolated Incident
Strasbourg's dancing plague of 1518 is the most famous and likely the largest dancing mania incident in the Middle Ages, but it was a far more common occurrence than you might expect. The first episode of dancing mania hit Europe about five centuries prior, in 1021, in the German town of Kolbigk. According to legend, 18 dancers blocked a priest from performing mass on Christmas Eve. For doing this, they were punished with a year of endless dancing.
Now, as with many accounts from the Middle Ages, the chronicles of this being a supernatural happening are (probably) false, but the pattern of groups of people performing a dance that they could not escape from is anything but fictional.
In another incident of fatal choreography, 200 dancers were involved in an episode on a bridge over the Moselle River. According to accounts, the dancing force was so great that it led to the bridge's collapse, and all of the dancers were killed. Similar stories also spread throughout the Middle Ages as a sort of bogeyman (or boogieman in these cases). Dancing or acting in ways that were considered impious in general was perceived as dangerous in medieval society, so the act of doing so had to result in almost biblical consequences, like dancing until a bridge collapsed. However, even if the tales were used as moral panic fodder, the idea of mass groups of people dancing for weeks or even months on end was reality.
Pathology Of The Dance
As David Byrne once said while doing his own dance in the "Once in a Lifetime" music video, "Well ... how did I get here?" There is no definite answer to this, but there are sound theories.
At the time, of course, this was chalked up to demonic possession. Who could blame anyone for guessing this? Those afflicted were said to be in a trance-like state, and many of them cried out for help and were visibly in pain, indicating that the dance was not their choice. While the dancers may not have been the victims of dark magic, keep this pinned to the idea board, as it will be important later on.
One modern theory is that the doomed dancers were suffering from ergotism. Ergot is a type of fungus that grows on rye. Effects of ergot ingestion include hallucinations and tremors, and instances of ergotism in medieval Europe are well documented. While this theory does offer an explanation for why something resembling dancing occurred, it does not explain why the episodes lasted as long as they did. The 1518 dancing plague in Strasbourg may have lasted two months, while ergotism's effects typica