Dan Snow's History Hit - Dancing Mania

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

In the summer of 1518, one of the most bizarre afflictions in history struck the city of Strasburg; dancing mania. This epidemic of dancing spread, almost like a plague, through the population with many hundreds of people dancing wildly and seemingly uncontrollably often to the point of collapse and even death. Perhaps, even stranger is that the outbreak in Strasbourg is far from the only recorded incidence of this phenomenon. But what caused it? To help delve into this fascinating subject Dan is joined by Dr John Waller, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine and author of A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. John explains the atmosphere of fear and tension in Strasbourg in which the dancing mania took hold and how the power of superstition and belief can take the human mind and body in almost unbelievable directions.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. I'm just standing in Trinity House. This is an organisation over 500 years old, established by Henry VIII to look after the navigational safety of the English coast, to replace lighthouse buoys, buoys for my North American audience, and things to make sure seafarers could access ports, access the open ocean safely, skirting all the various navigational obstacles that the Creator unwisely placed in the way of British seafarers. And it is an amazing building here. I'm looking at the ship models, the Golden Hind. Wow, it's beautiful, such a tiny little ship. Very high fo'c'sle and stern castles there, sailed by Francis Drake around the world in 1577 to 1581-ish, I think.

And that was obviously the first English circumnavigation, second ever circumnavigation of the world. They've got the Foudroyer, the ship captured during the Seven Years' War, particularly bloody action, that one, in the Sauna Battle. I think it was Harvey who captured it, can't remember. The HMS Victory, obviously here, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar. There is virtually no official British maritime-connected building that does not have a model of HMS Victory in it.

Fact, fact. Today, though, this podcast has nothing to do with Britain's maritime history, which is unusual. I'm here because, obviously, I'm filming a program for History Hit, the brilliant TV channel that the team at History Hit have founded. It's going great guns. If you want to watch this latest program which I'll be announcing soon you can do so at historyhit.tv. We've just been informed by our platform provider that we have to upgrade, upgrade our payment scheme because we've got too many subscribers. Now that is the kind of news that I like hearing. It's good news. That is good

news on a Wednesday in a stuttering English summer. Anyway, this episode of History at Podcast is, you know what, properly fascinating. You're not going to believe it when I tell you, but in 1374, I tell you, but in 1374, in 1518, various other dates, there was an epidemic of dancing. European cities suffered what was described at the time as almost a plague. People danced themselves to death. It was dancing mania. What on earth was going on? This is a question I put to Dr John Waller. He's a associate professor of the history of medicine. He's, like me, absolutely fascinated with dance mania, and he's written a book about it, which you need to go and check out. He has the fantastic position of being both a historian and a doctor.

He might be able to answer some of these questions about why people dance themselves to death. I mean, we get a few people doing that nowadays, but there's usually chemical factors at play. Perhaps there were back in the medieval period as well. We're about to find out. So please enjoy this podcast. Please head over to history.tv

to make my subscription platform worries even worse. Nice problem to have. And in the meantime, enjoy this podcast with Dr. Waller. Meantime, enjoy this podcast with Dr. Waller. John, great to have you on the podcast. Pleasure to be here. This is one of those bits of history that most people think is made up. When I tell friends, they just go, I'm sorry, I simply refuse to believe this is possible.

What is dancing mania and when does it first appear, do you think? Yeah, so I think the people you speak to have a very understandable reaction. I know that when I first encountered reference to it in quite an old history of medicine text, I pretty much discounted it as the result of a chronicler's exagger, or some kind of event that was twisted into allegory to condemn dancing. I looked in a little bit more detail and was rapidly convinced that it did actually happen. There is no question that it happened. But the first recordings, the first references to a compulsive dance date from the 11th century. There are some more references during the 13th century, and then the much more detailed accounts from the 1370s. Now, one thing I would say is that the events of the 1370s are the first time that I think you can feel confident that a compulsive

dance was actually taking place. I do suspect that the earlier ones were allegorical. So you would have accounts of villagers who start dancing in a graveyard and God is so enraged at this act of sacrilege that he curses them with a dance that goes on and on and on until they're dying, they're falling over, they're begging for forgiveness. It's possible that those were based on real events that were then embellished to make for a good sermon. It's also quite possible, given the fact that the church has always had a rather dim view of dancing because of what it seemed to lead to, it's quite possible that they were just allegories from the start. But by the late 1300s, there's no question

there is such a thing as dancing mania. When I'm telling people about dancing mania, I say, well, if you heard about a group of people today in the 31st century that danced so much, some of them died, we would think that was normal because we're crazy hedonists and that's all part of the fun.

And yes, we have some substances now that maybe make that more likely. But actually, we're still talking about human beings who just want to dance and have a good time, right? I mean, in a way, there's something not surprising about wild bacchanals that actually lead to people dying. Yeah, the extent to which hedonism nearly always reflects a deep inner dissatisfaction, they had far more reason than we do now to indulge any kind of hedonistic excess.

Now, of course, they had to cope with disapproval on a much more organized scale than we typically do now. But throughout the medieval period, you've got annual events like the carnival across much of Europe. And the carnival was a lavish, extreme affair where people were expected, I mean, that it was largely sanctioned for them to drink enormous quantities, to indulge the kinds of vices that would have been proscribed for much of the rest of the year. People often talk about these carnivals as akin to pressure valves. And in fact, it wasn't just people dressing up and drinking and dancing. You would also have peasants dressing as bishops or as kings.

They would be appointed lords of misrule and that kind of title. As a reflection of the degree to which medieval people encountered hardship and degradation. And they were given these occasional opportunities for this cathartic cultural release. So yeah, there is a link here to hedonism, and they had a great deal of need for it. Yeah, I did a podcast about ancient Egypt with the Festival of Drunkenness, which makes our festivals look fairly tame by comparison. So yeah, I always think that's important to kind of establish because it makes it somehow less peculiar, doesn't it? This strange set of events. And yet there is something bizarre about these mania. What does mark them out from your country and garden religious festivals that

are going on all the time all over Europe? The first is that although the church would often approve of dancing, it was in very particular kind of contexts. So there could be a rather tame dancing celebration that the church would have absolutely no problem with. The point of these dances is that they were uncontrolled and they were wild. And although clearly it's dangerous to generalise about what the church did or didn't approve of, for the most part, wild dancing, particularly dancing which led to nudity, as the 13th, 17th dancing mania seems to have done, that they would always condemn. So I think the way to see these dances is people acting out what they feel to be sinful. And we could obviously talk more later about how that fits in with explanations for what happened.

But these people in their dancing are not doing it in a reverential way it doesn't conform to what the church would approve of at some level in their minds they know they are acting like sinners well they're not wrong by the standards of the time they're not wrong but what's striking about this particular outbreak and i use that word, is that there is a kind of medicalised agenda here, isn't there? Every time I read about it, it's like, it's hysteria, it's a plague, it's a disease, it's highly infectious, it's contagious. Now, where does that language come from? Is that us? Or is that contemporary? Yeah, that's a really interesting question, because in the Western medical tradition, which is largely derived from

Greek and Roman medical authors, there is not a very strong concept of contagion. However, in 1518 in Strasbourg, the city authorities were quite quick to realize that this dance seemed to be spreading from person to person. They didn't anticipate it, but some of the decisions that they made ensured that the dancers were extremely visible. And we have evidence both in sermons and from the decisions made by the local council that really show that they said, this is getting out of control because people can see what's happening. They themselves are now being consumed by the dance. So they have a notion of contagion, but it's not one that they would necessarily have derived from orthodox medicine.

As you mentioned, there are several outbreaks, if that's the right word, in which people collapse, possibly from exhaustion, I guess dehydration or whatever. Ecstasy, which is an ambiguous term in this context. You've chosen 1518 as the one to really focus on. Why is that? Is that because most is known about that? We can get closer to it than these other outbreaks. Yeah, that's right. The outbreak in 1374 was almost certainly much larger and of longer duration. And it swept across what is now Belgium, Germany, and northeastern France. And it went on for weeks and weeks and weeks. You even had traveling bands of dancers who would occasionally come back to their senses and then they would start again. But the 1518 outbreak is much easier to write about because we have far more sources that are reflecting on it. It helps that it occurs not long after the introduction of printing,

in fact in the city where printing was developed. But you've got physicians who are commenting on it. You've got multiple chroniclers. What for me was most exciting is that there are copies of the minutes made by the governing council as it's happening. So you've got a kind of documentary feel, which takes you through the week by week development of this plague. So that kind of immediacy you don't get for the earlier epidemics. So one can actually tell rather a rich story, I think, in reference to 1518. Well, I'm here for it, man. Tell me the rich

story. How does it begin? Who's patient zero? Does it escape from the lab? So there is obviously enormous uncertainty about the beginning of this kind of event, because at first nobody's writing anything down because it doesn't seem all that strange. But a physician who arrives in Strasbourg about seven or eight years later claims that a woman called Frau Trophia was the beginning. And it's not implausible. A couple of the other chronicles claim that it began with a lone woman stepping into the street and starting to dance. And you can imagine the first person who began this outbreak would have become rather notorious. So let's say it was Frau Trophia, and it begins around about the middle of July in 1518,

and she begins to dance. It may have gone on for somewhere between two and four days. And at first, apparently, people think this is rather amusing. There's speculation that she might be doing it to annoy her husband. But after a full day of dancing, by which stage she would have been, I mean, sweat pouring off her, her feet would have been bloodied and bruised. This was turning into much more of a diabolical spectacle. And at some point, they seem to have bundled her up and then taken her off to a shrine. We don't know what happened ultimately to Frau Trophia. What we do know is that within a few days this same compulsion had seized a number of other people.

Maybe within a week you've got about 50. Some chronicles say that at the height of this dance there were 200 dancing. Others say it was about 50. Some chronicles say that at the height of this dance were 200 dancing, others say it was about 400. What is clear though is that it was a lot of people. There's obviously a great deal of exaggeration in a medieval chronicle. Nonetheless there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that a lot of people were consumed by this urge and one of the main pieces of evidence is how much of the city they then set aside to take the dancers to. So a couple of the guild halls, the big grain market, this walled market in the middle of the city, and they even built a stage where they ordinarily sold horses and donkeys. They built a stage and they took dancers there.

So this is one of the things that most drew me into this story. The way in which the city responded was absolutely outlandish and ultimately was really counterproductive. And we don't know why they made this decision. They appear to have called in the physicians at first and the physicians drawing on orthodox medicine announced that this was mania caused by hot blood. And they could have drawn that explanation straight out of bog-standard Galen or Hippocrates. So these Greco-Roman authors who still shaped the way people thought about health and disease. But the physicians appear to have been instrumental in the attempted cure, which was more dancing. That you would not find in Hippocrates or Galen, and it's really not at all clear where it came from. But I suspect there may have been a rationale

along the lines of they need to dance out some kind of impurity or poison, or the mere act of sweating would allow them to get rid of the corruption which is in their bodies. Probably also it was blended with a notion of penance, that these people had been punished with a dance, then they could only achieve redemption by dancing themselves almost to death. But the result was that after a few weeks, you have dozens, probably hundreds of people who were dancing wildly in the streets of Strasbourg. This is Dan Snow's history.

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so interestingly this is an example of the government not cracking down and perhaps you'd suggest a more kind of recidivist 1990s tories thing there's a lot of them all up throw them in a cell make them go cold turkey well in this case there wasn't a missing period of several weeks where too little was being done. The city authorities were actually quite fast in intervening here, not least because Strasbourg was one of the great merchant cities of late medieval Europe. And having hundreds of people dancing in the streets is presumably pretty bad for business. So they actually act very fast. Unfortunately, they do the wrong thing. And it's not just that they set aside room for these people to dance in. They also hire musicians to keep them going. And then shortly after that, they start paying what they describe as sturdy men to grasp the dancers and keep them on their feet. So when they start

falling over or flagging and tiring, they're constantly being forced back so they can maintain these crazy dancing vigils. So their response is quick and also disastrous. And it's disastrous because it just encourages it. Yeah, well, it has two effects. The first is that these people are dancing so relentlessly that those with poor circulation, bad hearts, they start dying of strokes. And the summer of 1518 in Strasbourg was punishingly hot. And most of these people are dancing under the full glare of the sun. And they would have been pretty uninterested in water and food.

And they're going on and on and on. So first of all, they start keeling over and dying. But the second disastrous feature is, as I mentioned before, that it has a contagious quality. And that if you believe that you too have been cursed by the saint, I think beliefs about a particular saint drove this epidemic, you also will be sucked in. So it leads to death and it leads to contagion. Now, you are a very distinguished professor of history of medicine, and I'm going to ask a question that you won not be able to answer but just bear with me what do you think is going on here are they guzzling weird mushrooms having an actual physiological effect is this just the power

of religious ecstasy is this just people joining in because it looked fun hedonism like what's there? My first instinct here was that it was being caused by ergotism. And ergot is a mould that can grow on wheat, but particularly rye, when it's ripening. And if you ingest ergot, well, it contains a chemical very similar to the active ingredient in LSD. Well, it contains a chemical very similar to the active ingredient in LSD. This will cause wild hallucinations, deep, deep depression, and so on. This seemed quite plausible to me until I started reading more of the neuroscience literature. And it's pretty apparent that if you have ingested ergot, you might have wild visions. You are not going to be able to get up and dance. Because one of the other effects of ergot is it causes a constricting of the veins and arteries in the

extremities. That leads to extraordinary pain. Frequently, actually, it led to gangrene too. But it's inconceivable that you could have so many people acting in exactly the same way with the searing pain of ergotism. So that was a nice simple explanation, which unfortunately was quickly blown out of the water. The point at which I thought that an explanation might be possible was when I realised that if you plot all of the very likely or certain prior outbreaks of dancing plague on a map, they are all alongside the banks of the River Rhine, or one of its major tributaries. Now, once you realise that, then it makes sense that something is being spread here. And it's not a disease and it's not a chemical, but it's sets of beliefs, it's ideas. And two things are really striking about Strasbourg in the early 1500s. Number one, there was a strong belief

that a particular saint called Saint Vitus had the power to curse sinners with this compulsion to dance. And this was a belief that people were raised with, that if you are a particularly incorrigible sinner, God turns his back on you, St Vitus might inflict this compulsion to dance on you. So that's the first thing. The second is that people in this area were enduring levels of psychological and physical stress, which were unusual even for the late medieval age. And so much of my research involved reconstructing why so many people in this area were falling apart. They were losing confidence in the church to intercede for them. Many of them were on the verge of starvation because of crop failures. There were extremes

of social discord. So right in this area, there'd been a series of failed rebellions directed against the church and major landowners. So you have this convergence of religious anxiety, of hunger, starvation, but you've also got lots of disease. Syphilis has just arrived on the scene and you've got a significant number of people in Strasbourg who were suffering the appalling symptoms of syphilis in its early days. Now my argument is that all of these conditions rendered them vulnerable, more suggestible. And once one person had become convinced that she had been cursed by Saint Vitus, she could begin to dissociate, so slip into a trance state. And once in that state, she would begin acting on the basis of this belief that

you could be cursed with a dance. So to put that much more briefly, I think we're looking here at a situation of extreme psychological distress combined with a particular set of cultural beliefs that would then channel it when people began to fall apart. So the answer is far more complex than one simple eating a dodgy bit of barley or a dodgy mushroom. I should have known that was coming. But of course, that's not at all surprising, given that these events were extremely rare, even for that period. But for me, what was most striking is that they only took place in areas where we know there was this pre-existing religious belief. But we also know from hundreds of other examples

spread across history that extreme distress, which is often linked to the loss of family members to disease and malnutrition, make people much more susceptible to slipping into one of these dissociative trance states. And in those states, your ability to reality check is diminished and you can start acting on beliefs that you hold, but in normal situations wouldn't seem fully credible. But it did to these people because of what they were living through. You know, John, until I had children and experienced sleep deprivation, I wouldn't have understood that entirely, but now it makes total sense. I quite sympathise. It is just the most interesting subject. Before I let you go, just tell me, how did it come to an end? After a number of weeks of

people being allowed to dance, the city authorities realise that this isn't working. We don't know how many people died. There's a merchant who's living just outside Strasbourg, who says that 15 people a day are perishing because of the dance. That may have been true at the absolute peak of the crisis. But by early August, the city is taking a completely different approach. First of all, it's telling everybody that they've got to be penitent. So it's banning the wearing of fur coats and jewels. It's kicking out prostitutes from the city, although interestingly the official proclamation adds for a while. The clear expectation that they would be invited in as soon as it was considered safe for them to return. Habitual drunkards and gamblers are rejected from the city. They then make an enormous votive offering and they take it to a shrine which is

dedicated to Saint Vitus, which is in a town called Saverne, about 40 kilometers to the northwest of the city of Strasbourg. So that's another reason to think that this is largely a cultural phenomenon. One of the most important of Europe's shrines dedicated to the saint is very close to Strasbourg. Well, they seem finally to have bundled the remaining dancers, of whom there must have been quite a few, onto carts. And then they took them on what must have been an unbearably uncomfortable journey to this shrine. They then manhandled them up the hill to the shrine. They put red shoes on them, which is a fascinating detail because that would have cost quite a lot of money. The red dye itself was expensive in this period. And then they walked them around the shrine in a

circle, performed various other rituals, and then the chronicles seem to agree that most people then gradually recovered. But this makes complete sense, I think, from a couple of reasons. First of all, probably for the first time in their lives, these people, most of whom were poor, were the beneficiaries of the authorities actually caring about their welfare. The second, from the point of view of the beliefs that they've internalized and on which they're acting, that they've been cursed by a vengeful saint, the only way they were actually going to recover was to feel that they had done the appropriate penance to this saint and that then he would actually relieve them of this affliction. So I think the

ending of it is very, very plausible. We don't have any detail about individuals, how they recovered, but the reasonable assumption is that plenty would have been traumatized, but they got on with their normal lives in the course of the following months. That's such an interesting insight. The other one, just before we go, the whole story just makes me think about what a fascinating species we are and the contagious nature of behavior irrespective of kind of some physiological or microbial contagion it's just we behave so differently and it makes you think of those men that pulled the trigger and committed acts of genocide during the holocaust otherwise normal members of public you know like brothers, sons, husbands. We're capable of mania, given the correct circumstances and conditioning.

Yes, yeah, yeah. We are a profoundly culture-bound species. And of course, that's the basis for our amazing evolutionary success. But it also lays us open to beliefs which have absolutely no basis in reality, but that we then conform to. And die for, potentially die for. That's right. And that's one of the things that made this so interesting to me, because although I think we are rightly critical of much of Sigmund Freud's legacy, there is a profoundly important point there about the way in which

we can store ideas and beliefs in our unconscious that then can come to the fore in fascinating ways when we are in states of extreme distress. And I think in an age in which we're so keen to resort to the biological and genetic explanation. It's a useful reminder that all sorts of ways in which we break down are not narrowly channeled by our biology. There's huge latitude for our culture to influence the shape that our hysteria or our madness takes. What a place to end it. Thank you so much. There you go. Come to this podcast for ultra deep, thoughtful speculation into the nature of us as humans. John, you're an absolute hero. What's the book called? It's called A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. And it's not about the 1990s rave scene. Thank you very much indeed, John, for coming on this podcast and go and get

the book, everyone. It's magnificent. Pleasure. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it in this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial to that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners,

depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.