In the summer of 1518, a woman began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and couldn't stop. Within weeks, hundreds more had joined her. City officials banned music, then hired musicians, built a stage, and finally carted the dancers off to the shrine of St. Vitus in search of a cure. From a cursed Christmas Eve in 1021 to the great outbreak of 1374 in Aachen and Liège, where clergy performed exorcisms on dancers they believed were possessed by demons, this bonus minisode explores the strange history of dancing mania, also known as choreomania or St. Vitus’s Dance. How do we make sense of bodies that won't stop moving?
Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.
Music
Purple Planet - Valley of Eden
Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor 'Pathetique', Op. 13 - III. Rondo - performed by Paul Pitman
Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 1 in F minor, Op. 2 no. 1 - I. Allegro - performed by Paul Pitman
Purple Planet - Silent Tears
Purple Planet - Sense of Loss
Purple Planet - Shadowlands
Sources
Primary
d’Outremeuse, Jean. La Geste de Liège. In Corpus Documentorum Inquisitionis Haereticae Pravitatis Neerlandicae, edited by Paul Frédéricq, III. Ghent: J. Vuylsteke, 1896. Excerpted and translated in Kathryn Emily Dickason. “Decadance in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Choreomania.” In Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and their Audiences, edited by Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington, 141-160. Boydell & Brewer, 2017.
Paracelsus. “The Diseases that Deprive Man of His Reason,” translated by Gregory Zilboorg. In Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus, edited by Henry E. Sigerist, 135-212. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941.
Petrus of Herenthal. Vita Gregorii XI. Paris, 1693. Excerpted in J. F. C. Hecker. The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, translated by B. G. Babington. New York: B. Franklin, 1970 (orig. 1837): 143-44.
Platter, Felix. Praxeos medicae. Basel, 1602.
Secondary
Backman, E. Louis. Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine. London: Allen & Unwin, 1952.
Bartholomew, Robert E. “Dancing with Myths: The Misogynist Construction of Dancing Mania.” Feminism & Psychology 8, no. 2 (1998): 173-83.
Bartholomew, Robert E. Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2001.
Caldwell, Mary Channen. “Dancing in Silence in Premodern Europe.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2023): 371-391.
Dickason, Kathryn Emily. “Decadance in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Choreomania.” In Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and their Audiences, edited by Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington, 141-160. Boydell & Brewer, 2017.
Gotman, Kelina A. “Choreomania.” Dissertation. Columbia University, 2008.
Hecker, J. F. C. The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, translated by B. G. Babington. New York: B. Franklin, 1970 (orig. 1837).
Lanska, Douglas J. “The Dancing Manias: Psychogenic Illness as a Social Phenomenon.” Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience 42 (2018): 132-41.
McAlister, Neil. “The Dancing Pilgrims at Muelebeek.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32, no. 3 (1977): 315–19.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Stanford University Press, 1999.
Miller, Lynneth J. “Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague.” Dance Research 35, no. 2 (2017): 149-64.
Rohmann, Gregor. “Dancing on the Threshold: A Cultural Concept for Conditions of being Far from Salvation.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 10, no. 2 (2015): 48-70.
Rohmann, Gregor. “The Invention of Dancing Mania: Frankish Christianity, Platonic Cosmology and Bodily Expressions in Sacred Space.” The Medieval History Journal 12, no. 1 (2009): 13-45.
Rohmann, Gregor. Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
Waller, John. The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009.
Waller, John. “A Forgotten Plague: Making Sense of Dancing Mania.” The Lancet 373, no. 9664 (2009): 624–25.
Waller, John. “In a Spin: The Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518.” Endeavour 32, no. 3 (2008): 117–21.
Waller, John. A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. Thriplow: Icon Books, 2008.
