This painting by the Early Modern European artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger shows a line of dancers, but they don’t look like they are having that much fun — for instance, the two women in the center are staring off into space, not paying attention to the musicians in their path. And that’s because they were likely suffering from a health condition which is thankfully no longer in existence: “the Dancing Mania.”
Multiple accounts testify to this phenomenon, in which people danced out of compulsion, for long periods of time that could extend into weeks — victims might leap and hop around until they broke bones, or even died. The earliest records of the dancing plagues come from the eleventh century, but notable outbreaks occurred in other times, such as in 1374 when chroniclers attested to thousands of people in lands from western Germany to northeastern France who couldn’t stop dancing even though they screamed and begged priests and monks to save them from their suffering.
The “cursed dancing” as it was sometimes called, was often thought to be the fault of the afflicted, who perhaps had brought the malady upon themself from a sinful past. As a poet from 1494 chimed, “. . . . Later then I called to mind/ That dance and sin are one in kind.” In the summer of 1518 in the town of Strasbourg, the clergy attributed a particularly virulent case of dancing mania to supernatural causes, and declared that the cure must also come from a divine supernatural source.
But it was during this early 16th-century outbreak that natural causes of the dancing plague first emerged. A famous physician named Paracelsus argued that it was caused by an imbalance in “humours”: bodily fluids that might be too wet, too hot, etc. Another idea Paracelsus had was that some of the dancing sufferers’ veins were overly excited. And yet a third hypothesis was that the afflicteds’ imaginations were causing the disorder. None of these ideas blamed the supernatural, even if they were wrong.
Historians have given many possible explanations for why the dancing manias happened: religious group psychosis as a response to communities stressed by famine and disease is my favorite.
Sources: “Divine punishment or disease? Medieval and Early Modern approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague,” Lynneth J. Miller, _ Dance Research_ volume 35 issue two, Edinburgh University Press. “A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania,” John Walker, _The Lancet_ Feb 21, 2009
