The Dancing Plague

A woman by the name of Frau Troffea (think of “Frau” as “Mrs.”) was a real trend-setter back in 1518. One day, she just started dancing in the street.

Nobody today knows why Mrs. Troffea began dancing on that day, but history does record that within a week, there were more than 30 other dancers joining her in her home town of Strasbourg. They all danced with incredible vigor, throwing their bodies and limbs around like someone in a 90s mosh pit.

Within a month, there were more than 400 dancers.

Today, nobody knows why they did this, but there have been some interesting guesses.

The mere fact that no answer from a dancer is recorded as to why they were dancing, indicates to me that the dancers were not capable of much (if any) speech.

One theory suggests that there was Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI for short). You might know this better as mass hysteria, the catch-all phrase I understood growing up.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Sounds like they were all on some serious drugs,”…