History
Dancing Towards Death: What Historians Know About Choreomania, and the Cultural Meanings of Dancing Plagues in Early Modern Europe
From ergotism and chronic stress to racism and spiders, there’s always a reason to dance
They had been dancing for days, if you could even call it dancing.
Residents of 1518 Strasbourg began to spasm, stagger and sway. Madame Troffea began the motion, but soon hundreds filled the square, stopping only out of exhaustion. No one could explain why the dancing plagues, called choreomania, had come to Early Modern Europe. Why were peasants dancing their lives away? What did the dancing even mean?
Was this heavenly punishment for the villager’s sins? Or was there something wrong with the local food supply– a supply running low, threatening the surrounding villages with starvation if the fall harvest did not improve?
Dancing plagues, from choreomania in 1518 Strasbourg to Tarantism in southern Italy, give historians a lot of insight into the culture of Early Modern Europe. They show changing perceptions about madness, disease, culture, and prejudice across Europe. Yet in every case, one thing remains the same: where dancing begins, a community’s ability to self-regulate and avoid crisis has already gone terribly wrong.
What caused dancing plagues?
Perceptions of what caused dancing plagues changed over time. Naturally, communities attempted to explain the panic around them. They looked back to the first dancing plagues in medieval Europe for answers. Choreomania in 1021 Kölbigk began when a priest condemned a group of rowdy villagers for disrupting a sermon. In 1374 France “thousands of people danced in agony for days or weeks, screaming of terrible visions and imploring priests and monks to save their souls.” Dancing, something lighthearted and joyous, quickly became a course more directly linked with death.
These early depictions treat the dancers as sinners, plain and simple. Clearly, these people must have done something to deserve their dance of death. Until 1518, choreomania was portrayed as a divine punishment… and a death sentence.
Thus, early medieval records were decidedly critical of dancing. One text declared “dance and sin are one in kind” and that “Satan dancing still doth use [it] to hatch out evil, to abuse. It stirs up pride, immodesty, and prompts men ever lewd to be.”
Only later would physicians try to treat this disease.
Mental and medical causes of choreomania
One Early Modern Period physician, Paracelsus, tried to find a medical reason for these odd outbreaks. According to Paracelsus, choreomania could be caused by sin or an unbalance of body humors. Even though his theory on body humors might seem ridiculous today, Paracelsus’ ideas mark a shift in how and if choreomania was treated as a sickness of the body, not the soul.
Paracelsus suggested that the dancers might suffer from overheated blood. A combination of religious and physical treatments followed. Victims of choreomania were transported to the shrine of Saint Vitus. If this failed they could fast, bathe in cold water, or dance to exhaustion so their ‘burnt’ blood could leave their bodies. Musicians might be hired to hasten exhaustion, or music might be banned from the city altogether.
Was this odd dance explained by illness? Historians disagree. The dancing might have been caused by ergot poisoning, which occurred when peasants ate grain infected by a mold from which we derive the psychoactive drug LSD. Other historians such as John Waller argue that dancing manias were a social phenomenon caused by religious fear. The dancing may have been a type of mass hysteria caused by bad harvests, past crises, restructuring of governance, and the resulting social tension.
According to Waller, “The dancers of 1374 and 1518 occupied an environment of belief that accepted the threat of divine curse, possession or bewitchment. The peasants who took part in the 1518 display didn’t intend to enter trance-like states, but their metaphysical beliefs made it possible for them to do so.” Witches, spirits, and even saints could compel lost souls to act in ways that were beyond an individual’s control, and this understanding allowed for speculation: who was controlling the dancers? A belief in water spirits that could possess anyone to dance might have created the perfect climate for mass hysteria.³
Pietikainen elaborates that the dual nature of saints may have also inspired dancing, for if religious figures like “St. Vitus, were not adequately venerated, they might punish the imprudent mortals — Madonnas maimed as well as cured people.”⁴ If the afflicted called upon a saint to cure their illness, they gained the sympathy of those around them and were not cast out of their community.⁶ Armed with their preconceptions, dancers at Strasbourg moved and paraded themselves into a trancelike state where neither hunger nor cultural fears might reach them.
While this trance hypothesis might help us better understand the 1518 dancing plagues, let’s not rule out medical causes for choreomania altogether. There’s some evidence that flooding ruined Strasbourg’s main crop that year, and it makes sense that ergotism could have followed. Then there are other possible sources of spasms: acute rheumatic fever, epilepsy, nerve disorders, tarantism, and what researcher Robert Bartholomew calls Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI).
Villagers and children suffering “rampant movement, chanting, hallucinations, bodily convulsions, chest, and abdominal pains, hyperventilation, foaming at the mouth, sexually suggestive gestures, and, in later cases, even public copulation” might not have been in total control of their actions. That sounds a lot like drug use to the modern reader.
Is chronic stress a plausible explanation for such unordinary behavior? Does it explain why many more dancers joined the displays over time, or why choreomania grew to include hundreds of individuals at multiple points during the Early Modern period?
Perhaps there’s something deeper afoot, a pattern that explains what the dancing meant to those involved. How were choreomaniacs considered in their communities? Who were they, and what happened to them if they survived their tremors?
Cultural impacts of the dancing plagues
Political and religious unrest
From 1500 onward, “Modern Europe went through painful birth pangs. Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, population growth, increased poverty, social unrest, and bad harvests due to the cooling of the climate (the ‘Little Ice Age.’)” Rising capitalism restructured who had commercial power, increasing the status of merchants, moneylenders, and slave traders. In religious circles, the Great Chain of Being was broken. Everything peasants had understood about their world and the religious rules that governed it was falling to pieces. Protestantism broke away from the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century. Resentment grew towards priests as villagers began accusing them of robbing communities of vital resources.
According to Dickason, ministers accused of having mistresses or abusing church funds were to blame for hard times because these sins contaminated the sacraments.⁵ With no other safety net to turn to, these stressors needed an outlet. Some towns found release in witch hunts, and others may have found release in mass hysteria. And the line between the two often grew thin.
Choreomania represented a breakdown of individuals, and by extension, society as they had previously understood it. Choreomania was a symptom of a world gone mad.
Were choreomaniacs mad?
What did choreomania say about individuals? Were choreomaniacs mad, or just desperate? Europeans might avoid calling choreomania ‘madness’ because this term came with its own legal understanding. ‘Madness’ or ‘mania’ as a legal term meant that a person had lost all reason and autonomy, a person who could cause harm to others around them. As a result, legally mad people might lose their property and freedom. Instead, ‘melancholy’ was often used to describe changes in behavior, because this meant that a person retained their ability to make reasonable decisions. And melancholy could also be linked to humoral theory, which tied in nicely with Paracelsus’ new medical diagnosis of choreomania.⁴
Who was most affected by the dancing plagues?
Peasants of all means were the major group affected in 1518 Strasbourg, and special attention was paid to make sure the ‘plague’ did not spread to the upper classes. Priests performed makeshift exorcisms to prevent the spread of choreomania to the wealthy.⁵ Meanwhile, the lower classes fell into collective disarray: “Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder.⁶ Later cases of Tarantism describe monks with the disorder who preferred to suffer pains rather than treat their condition by dancing.⁷ For the most part, however, choreomania was a disease of the overburdened, overworked, and overstressed masses.
Gender was not a direct indicator of who might be possessed by dancing fits. Women were often “possessed” if they showed violent behavior while men were “raving mad.” According to popular belief, “Women were also more vulnerable to external influences, such as demons, because their bodies were more open than men’s bodies.”⁴ Dancing in Strasbourg began with a woman, Madame Troffea, but many men joined the procession over the next few days. Stopping the dance was not easy. Exorcisms were not standardized by the Catholic Church until 1614, and authorities might try a succession of cures (dancing, penance, or proximity to saintly shrines) to stop the spasms.⁴ ² By summer, there may have been as many as 400 dancers in Strasbourg, and the event lasted over a month.⁴
Was dancing used as a type of release?
A reasonable response to stress is acute dissociation. Evoking a trance state helps those without power to temporarily escape their situation.³ While it seems a bit of a stretch to call choreomania a type of self-regulation, it might be appropriate to say that these authors believe that regardless of the cause, these dancing spells allowed for expression and release, even as they resulted in death.
Dancing and choreomania look a lot like the release that peasants experienced during carnival. Carnival was already a time of release. While this release regularly occurred in the time leading up to Lent, repeat choreomania is often described as resuming in the summer, as peasants abandon their work to resume the frenzied rhythm of years before.⁸ ¹
The end of carnival and carnival-like celebrations in the yearly cycle marked a shift in the power of the universe, the end of devils’ power over the world, and a return to normalcy.⁸ So if a village did not return to normal, this meant that the rituals put in place to keep the year moving forward were failing. And failing systems lead to even larger conflict.
This fits with Burke’s assertion that “at all events in Europe between 1500–1800 rituals of revolt did coexist with serious questioning of the social, political and religious order and the one sometimes turned into the other. Protest was expressed in ritualized forms, but the ritual was not always sufficient to contain the protest.”⁸ We already know that choreomaniacs often rose up following wars, flooding, famine, and changing social orders. Even in non-repeat instances of dancing mania, the plague often begins with a few afflicted individuals and a party that grows in size until the whole matter grows out of hand. That looks a lot like mass protest, even if the reason behind the protest is still mass hysteria in the face of death.
Later dancing manias and tarantism
Nearly all dancing epidemics occurred between the 1400s and 1700s, but the concept of dancing plagues grew more complex over time.³ We have already covered the events of 1518, but another epidemic, tarantism, reached “its greatest height in Italy in the seventeenth century, long after the St. Vitus’s Dance of Germany had disappeared.”⁶
How was tarantism different?
Tarantism mimicked choreomania but differed in significant ways: the afflicted got the disease from a tarantula or lizard and could either become ecstatic or morose.⁶ If any venom remained in the blood, the person could become blind or fall into a stupor that lasted the rest of their life.⁶ And “neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches at the sound of the tarantella, and, as if some magic potion, restorative of youth and vigour, were flowing through their veins, joined the most extravagant dancers.”⁶. The tarantella, by all accounts, seems even more dramatic than its predecessor.
Dancing was not a cure for the ‘disease,’ but it could treat symptoms. Calm melodies could soothe. But beware hiring a novice musician, for peasants afflicted with tarantism were said to distinguish between fine music and discord.⁶ Others might demand a racket, and those around them would conclude that they had been affected by the bolder version of tarantism, which demanded clashing cymbals and harsh fifes.⁶
A hierarchy of dances could cure tarantism, and “it was generally observable that country people, who were rude, and ignorant of music, evinced on these occasions an unusual degree of grace, as if they had been well practised in elegant movements of the body.”⁶ Forbidding victims to dance might result in death. Wine might help the afflicted nerves.⁶ Where choreomania caused dissociative trance, tarantism seems to have bred picky melancholics attuned to the finer things in life.
Cultural impacts of tarantism
Here it is important to recognize where tarantism was culturally different from choreomania. Tarantism often denotes thinly disguised racism; in contemporary accounts, it often occurs in a region unknown to the speaker, or a region already recognized for its backwardness. For example, the region in Italy where the name originates from, “the city of Tarentum, or the river Thara, in Apulia” is said to have been the stronghold of the bewitched spider.⁶ It was a weird land on the outskirts of the known world, and this allowed writers to continue their prejudice against those whom they did not understand.
According to one biased historian, “Many people have heard of the tarantella and may think of it as an exotic Italian dance believed to cure the poisonous bite of the tarantula. They may also think of it as the product of ignorance, poverty, superstition, and passion — in short, stereotypical attributes of Southern Italians.”⁹ Accounts of tarantism or the causes of tarantism resurface in other unfamiliar lands: the West Indies, the Orient, Jewish rites, Egyptian ceremonies.⁷ ¹⁰ One contemporary account finishes its description of tarantism only to immediately discuss witchcraft in the next section, indicating the thin line between these two curiosities.⁷ Tarantism was often associated with foreignness and strangeness.
One factor that made tarantism so fearsome was its dual nature. Unlike the choreomaniacs, victims of tarantism might fall into a lifeless stupor or active jubilation, depending on the type of spider or animal that inflicted the bite.⁶ They might go blind and dependent on others, or they might undergo long-term psychosis (which, historians might argue, are both long-term side effects of Ergotism).⁶ ¹¹ Much like the choreomaniacs of earlier periods, the afflicted might never find a cure. These villagers could be rendered helpless, and the results might look very unnatural, even supernatural. But their plight is also as real as it gets, “natural as a hurricane or a tornado.”¹⁰ It is real because whether the dancers continued their procession out of illness or desperation, they were “too attuned” to the terrors of their time.¹⁰
In an era where mental illness or lingering disability could make it difficult for a family to support itself, or where famine seemed unavoidable, tarantism was a terrifying possibility.
Why are these stories relevant today?
“Choreomanias are the ‘mad’ theatricalization of a historical moment in time, a clash of temporalities and cultures. The madness in them is relative, performative: it shows a more global crisis,” says Gotman.¹⁰ Perhaps manic dancing remained a highlight between the 1300s and 1700s because it was a clear breakdown of society, the surest sign that those involved expected to die. While choreomania was not the same as the dance of death or dance macabre, it denoted that death was near. Death was coming for everyone left behind after flooding, plagues, and wars had snuffed out hope and replaced it with a gnawing restlessness.¹⁰
Dancing plagues are not a thing of the past. That is what makes them so interesting. Dancing is merely one expression of what is going on inside the minds of those living out their current reality. According to Gotman:
“There is a vast and rich literature about something called choreomania, and a breathtaking range of events that constitute what I call the choreomania repertoire, from late medieval and early modern St. Vitus’s dancers to Tarantini in early modern Italy… American religious enthusiasts, and factory workers… [even] Native American Ghost Dancers were understood by at least one influential government anthropologist to be participating in a variation on the same… just as the concept of the dancing disease came to be so capacious as to signal almost anything or anyone that moved too much and too erratically.” ¹⁰
This fits with the idea that dancing serves both to relieve crushing stress when groups contend with their survival, and it perpetuates the idea that some commentators are still ready to name foreign dancing movements they do not understand ‘manias’ even when there is a clear history linking dancing to class tensions and periods of conflict. Even TikTok dancing enjoys immense popularity that might reasonably be tied to the stress young people feel in a Western meritocracy. Even if the original dancing plagues of the 1300s through the 1500s were sparked by ergotism, is it not reasonable to suggest that others joined the afflicted dancers because their work no longer guaranteed their survival in the face of worsening natural and political challenges? Under these circumstances dancing is, and always has been, a means to elevate hopeless situations. A chance to protest, and a reason to take action when the next steps remain unclear.
Works Cited
[1] Waller, John. “A Forgotten Plague: Making Sense of Dancing Mania.” The Lancet (British Edition), vol. 373, no. 9664, Elsevier Ltd, 2009, pp. 624–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60386-X.
[2] Miller, Lynneth J. “Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague.” Dance Research, vol. 35, no. 2, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 149–64, https://doi.org/10.3366/drs.2017.0199.
[3] Waller, John. “Dancing Plagues and Mass Hysteria.” The Psychologist, The British Psychological Society, July 2009, https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ volume-22/edition-7/dancing-plagues-and-mass-hysteria.
[4] Pietikainen, Petteri. “Madness, Folly and Religion in Early Modern Europe.” Madness, 1st ed., Routledge, 2015, pp. 38–56, Ch 3. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315708966-3.
[5] Dickason, Kathryn Emily. “Decadance in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Choreomania.” Medieval Theatre Performance, 2018, pp. 141–60, Ch. 8 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787440784.010.
[6] Hecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl), et al. The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania. Edited by Henry Morley, Translated by B. G. (Benjamin Guy) Babington, Project Gutenberg, 1999.
[7]Charleton, W., 1619–1707. (1654). Physiologia epicuro-gassendo-charltoniana, or, A fabrick of science natural, upon the hypothesis of atoms founded by epicurus repaired [by] petrus gassendus ; augmented [by] walter charleton. London, Printed by Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath.
[8] Peter Burke, “The World of Carnival,” chap. 7 of his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
[9] Siporin, Steve. “The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (review).” Italian Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, Michigan State University Press, 2005, pp. 181–83, https://doi.org/10.1353/itc.2006.0007.
[10] Gotman, Kélina. Choreomania : Dance and Disorder. Oxford University Press, 2018. pp. 1–22 and 41–69. Ch 1–2.
[11] Sposato, Luciano A. and Fustinoni, Osvaldo. “Chapter 107 — Iatrogenic neurology.” Handbook of Clinical Neurology, Elsevier, Volume 121, 2014, Pages 1635–1671, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-7020-4088-7.00107-3.
