The Dancing Plague of 1518
One woman started dancing in a Strasbourg street, and within weeks crowds were dancing and couldn't stop.
What was reported
In July 1518, a woman known as Frau Troffea began dancing in a street in Strasbourg, then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire. She kept going for days. Within weeks dozens of people, by some accounts hundreds, had joined in, dancing almost without rest.
On the advice of physicians, the city at first hired musicians and built a stage, believing the dancers needed to dance it out. When that seemed to make things worse, the dancers were taken to a shrine of St Vitus. Some chronicles say people died of exhaustion, though historians doubt the numbers.
Explanations offered
The historian John Waller argues it was a mass psychogenic illness, brought on by famine, disease and fear in a community that believed St Vitus could curse people with uncontrollable dancing. Another suggestion, poisoning from ergot, a fungus on rye, is now thought less likely, because it causes convulsions rather than dancing.
- When
- July 1518
- Where
- Strasbourg, Alsace, France
- Witnesses
- City officials, physicians and chroniclers
- Status
- Partly explained
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.