The Dancing Plague of 1518: What Really Happened in Strasbourg

Around July 15, 1518, a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street, and she did not stop. There was no wedding, no fair, no musician to follow. She danced through the day and on into the night, rested, and started again. Within a week dozens of her neighbors had joined her. By August the city council was writing letters about "the dance," the physicians had issued a diagnosis, public dancing was banned, and wagonloads of exhausted dancers were being driven thirty miles into the hills to pray at a cave chapel of St. Vitus.

The dancing plague of 1518 is one of the strangest episodes in European history, and in the last few years it has become one of the most retold. It shows up in podcasts, novels, a Florence and the Machine song and a short film. Most versions share a few vivid details: four hundred dancers, a wooden stage built by the city, musicians hired to keep the sick moving, and fifteen people a day dancing themselves to death.

Some of that is true. Some of it was added decades or centuries later. The real story, pieced together from the city’s own registers, is less lurid and more interesting: a frightened city government in a hungry summer, a medical theory, a saint everyone feared, and a set of public health measures that look surprisingly modern.

A rich city in a hard decade

In 1518 Strasbourg was a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire, a walled trading town on the Rhine whose cathedral spire could be seen for miles. It had printers, guilds, a large merchant class and an educated city government. One of its senior officials was Sebastian Brant, the humanist whose satire The Ship of Fools had been a European best seller since 1494. As city secretary, Brant kept the annals and signed the council’s orders. That matters, because his pen is one of the main reasons we know anything reliable about the summer of 1518.

The years before the outbreak had been brutal for ordinary people in Alsace. The historian John Waller, whose 2008 book made the episode famous in English, lists serious famines around Strasbourg in 1492, 1502 and 1511, a scorching summer in 1516 and then a disastrous harvest in 1517, remembered locally as "the bad year." Bread prices soared. Syphilis had arrived in the 1490s, and plague and leprosy were familiar. In August 1517 the city held a procession to pray against pestilence. By the summer of 1518 many of the poor were hungry, in debt and frightened.

The first dancer

The woman who started it is usually called Frau Troffea. The name comes from the physician Paracelsus, who wrote about the outbreak years later, after he first came to Strasbourg in 1526. In his telling she began dancing to spite her husband, other women copied her, and religious fear did the rest. Modern historians are wary of all of this. The Strasbourg historian Elisabeth Clementz, who transcribed and translated the surviving sources for the city’s 2018 anniversary exhibition, points out that Troffea is almost certainly an invented name. It looks like a play on a Greek word for turning.

What the records do say is simpler. Around the feast of St. Margaret in mid-July, Brant noted in his annals, "a terrible illness, St. Vitus’ dance," had spread so that about fifty people "danced day and night, which was pitiful to see." A chronicle written about thirty years later says the first dancer kept going for four days, that thirty-four people were dancing within a few days more, and that by the fourth week there were more than two hundred. Another chronicler gives four hundred. None of these numbers can be checked. Clementz puts the likely total somewhere between fifty and two hundred.

One contemporary chronicle from outside the city reports fifteen new cases a day. In later retellings, that figure seems to have turned into fifteen deaths a day.

"A natural disease"

The city did not treat the dancers as witches or heretics. A special commission consulted both the church and the city’s physicians, and the doctors gave a confident answer: this was a natural illness. In the council’s records they blame the summer heat and the alignment of the stars. Later accounts describe it as a case of overheated blood. Their prescription was barley broth and bread, and music. But it had to be the right music, played on zithers, fiddles, lutes or small organs. Drums and fifes were out.

The bishop’s vicar agreed with the doctors and thought special masses pointless. So that no one could accuse him of doing nothing, he ordered every preacher to call the faithful to prayer.

What happened next is where the popular story and the archive part ways. The famous version, drawn from a chronicle written around 1580 and repeated by Waller, says the council cleared two guildhalls and the grain market and built a wooden stage opposite the horse market, then hired musicians and strong dancers to keep the sick moving day and night in public. Waller called it a spectacle "every bit as grotesque as a Hieronymous Bosch canvas." The council’s own records tell a different story. The dancers were placed in two guild halls, rooms the guilds used for meetings, and kept out of sight to stop the spread, and the city paid people to dance with them. No contemporary source mentions a stage, and none says whether the paid dancing helped.

The curse of St. Vitus

To most people in Strasbourg, the diagnosis was obvious long before the doctors spoke. This was St. Vitus’ dance. Vitus was a young Christian martyr of the early fourth century, and by the late Middle Ages people in the Rhineland believed he could strike sinners with a compulsion to dance and could also lift it. Curses like "God give you St. Vitus" were common enough that, according to Waller, one town’s late fifteenth-century law expected a person cursed that way to fall sick with fever and the dance. The abbot Johannes Trithemius, writing in 1509, had already used the name St. Vitus’ dance for an outbreak more than a century earlier.

Belief in that curse is probably the key to the whole episode. If you thought an angry saint could seize your body, and you watched neighbors in the grip of exactly that, you had a script ready for your own fear.

So the council combined the physicians’ advice with penance. On August 2, 1518, it banned public dancing in the city until the end of summer, in an order signed by Brant that still survives in the municipal archives. Gambling and prostitution were cracked down on as well. The ban came with a revealing exception, quoted in Waller’s translation: "if honourable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first Mass in their houses, they may do so using stringed instruments, but they are on their conscience not to use tambourines and drums." Loud percussion, it seems, was considered especially dangerous.

On August 11 the council issued another order admitting that "the illness has appeared again." Every citizen was to look after his own children and servants who were affected, and every guild after its members. Dancers who could not be calmed were to be taken to St. Vitus. They were not to go out in the streets or put on jewelry or fine clothes. In effect, the city was asking households to quarantine their own sick.

Thirty miles to the saint

The cure most people trusted was a pilgrimage. Above the town of Saverne, about thirty miles northwest of Strasbourg on the edge of the Vosges, a small chapel of St. Vitus stood beside a sandstone cave known as the Holenstein. From July 23 the council sent the sick there in convoys of horse-drawn wagons. This is the best-documented part of the story, because the city’s bills for the trips survive.

At the shrine, priests sang three high masses for the dancers. Then the dancers were led around the altar and gave their alms. A chronicle written decades later adds that they wore red shoes sprinkled with holy water. That detail turns up in many retellings, but no contemporary record mentions it. A painted carving of the Virgin and Child with St. Vitus and a pope, made in a Strasbourg workshop around 1518, came from that chapel. It may be the very image the pilgrims saw.

Two days after the first convoy, the council wrote to the bishop that the epidemic was "coming to an end," and Brant recorded that most of the sick came back from St. Vitus cured. The August orders show it was not quite over. On August 31 the council arranged a candle for St. Vitus and masses for the sick. After that the dance simply drops out of the record. It had lasted most of the summer.

How many died?

The answer the sources support is that we do not know, and possibly none. Strasbourg’s contemporary archives mention no deaths at all, and they give no total count of the sick either. Only five sufferers are identified, because their families asked the city for financial help. They were a schoolmaster’s son, a servant’s son, a day laborer’s wife, a beggar’s daughter and the son of a "poor journeyman."

Those little petitions are the most human documents in the file. The schoolmaster explained that his son, who helped him teach, saw people dancing, began to imitate them and pestered his father to take him to dance, until the father had to abandon his school to look after him. The laborer said he first thought his wife had gone mad when he found her jumping on the spot at home. Then he saw her following musicians in time and decided it was St. Vitus.

The archives name five dancers by their families, and not one death.

The archives name five dancers by their families, and not one death. Deaths enter the story later. The chronicle of around 1580 makes the crowds larger and adds the stage and the red shoes, and a writer a century after that adds people who died. Paracelsus had already made the episode a moral tale about a willful wife. Strasbourg’s 2018 exhibition, "1518: The Dance Fever," at the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame, set out to separate the record from these accretions, and a 2018 French novel that turned the first dancer into a grieving mother and raised the toll to two thousand has often been mistaken for history.

Not the first dancing plague

Strasbourg’s outbreak was the best documented, but it was not unique. Waller counts as many as seven earlier epidemics of compulsive dancing in western Europe, most of them in towns along the Rhine and the Moselle. The largest began around June 24, 1374, near Aachen, and spread through what is now Belgium, the Netherlands and northeastern France. It followed a catastrophic flood. Earlier stories, like the children who danced out of Erfurt in the 1230s, are harder to pin down. Strasbourg itself had a smaller episode in the 1400s.

The best-known images of dancing mania come from the Low Countries a generation after 1518. In 1564 Pieter Bruegel the Elder drew women being half carried by companions to a shrine at Molenbeek near Brussels, where pilgrims danced on the feast of St. John in the hope of a cure. His sons and later engravers copied the scene, and those copies are the dancing pilgrims most illustrated histories reproduce.

After 1518 the big outbreaks stopped. The Protestant Reformation, which reached Strasbourg in the 1520s, attacked the cult of the saints and with it the belief that a saint could curse a body into dancing. A few local rituals survived for a while. Women were still recorded dancing each year at a St. Vitus chapel in southern Germany in the seventeenth century. The name moved on as well. "St. Vitus’ dance" became a medical label for Sydenham’s chorea, a jerky movement disorder in children that follows strep infections and has nothing to do with Strasbourg.

Ergot, or the mind?

For a long time the favorite scientific explanation was ergot, a fungus that grows on damp rye and causes ergotism, a poisoning with convulsions and hallucinations. It sounds tidy: a wet year, bad bread, a town full of twitching people. But it does not fit. Ergot poisoning restricts blood flow and causes spasms and gangrene. It does not let a person dance in coordinated steps for days. Clementz adds that Strasbourg had a hospital able to treat ergotism, then known as St. Anthony’s fire, so the illness would probably have been recognized.

Most historians now favor what psychiatrists call mass psychogenic illness, once known as mass hysteria. In this view, severe stress in a hungry and frightened population met a specific, widely shared belief, the curse of St. Vitus, and some people slipped into a trance-like state that took the form their culture expected. Waller calls it a classic culture-bound syndrome. People in trance tend to act out the scripts their communities give them, which would explain why compulsive dancing clustered so tightly in the region where St. Vitus was feared and almost nowhere else.

Modern cases show how readily that kind of contagion can travel through a group. In January 1962, at a girls’ boarding school in Kashasha, in what is now Tanzania, three pupils began laughing uncontrollably. Within weeks 95 of the school’s 159 pupils were affected, the school closed, and the laughing spread to nearby villages and other schools for about eighteen months. Nobody found a toxin. The idea that a performance can fool a crowd, or a crowd can fool itself, runs through the story of Clever Hans, the horse who seemed to do arithmetic, and through hoaxes like the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

The historian H. C. Erik Midelfort has warned that madnesses of the past "are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes." The dancers of 1518 were not having a modern panic attack in old clothes. They were living through a medieval affliction with medieval meanings, and the city’s response was shaped by those meanings too.

The dance that survived

There is still one place in Europe where people dance in procession through the streets for a saint. Every Whit Tuesday in Echternach, in eastern Luxembourg, thousands of pilgrims holding white handkerchiefs hop from side to side through the town to the tomb of St. Willibrord, to a tune that has been played for centuries. UNESCO added the hopping procession to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010. Nobody there is cursed. But it is the closest living relative of the pilgrimages that once carried dancers to St. Vitus and to Molenbeek.

What makes the dancing plague of 1518 worth remembering is not the gore of the legend. It is the portrait of a Renaissance city facing something it could not explain. Its doctors had a theory, its priests had a saint, and its officials had a filing system. They tried music, then silence, isolation, family care and a pilgrimage, and they wrote it all down. A real plague would have killed far more people. This one left behind five family petitions, a few council orders and a story that grew a little wilder every time it was told.

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