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,” you’re on the right track. Historians and scientists suggest that the grains the Strasbourg residents ate every day may have become contaminated.

Ergot is a mold that grows on damp rye and produces ergotamine, a substance that can lead to hallucinations and convulsions. The symptoms of ergotism closely resemble those of LSD, which is derived from ergotamine.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of a person on LSD dancing for several days in a row without stopping, but with so many details lost to history, it’s really tough to say.

Unfortunately, none of the other theories make any more sense. Was it some kind of mass religious ritual? Is there some way everyone just kept dancing because of some kind of hypnosis?

I have my own theory, something far simpler than any of the explanations I’ve read anywhere. I think history tends to exaggerate from time to time.

I think a few people did dance, probably for several hours. I’m not convinced that anyone danced for 24 hours straight, much less for weeks in a row without rest. I think this is exactly how tall tales happen.

The Travels of Marco Polo is one very good example of how this can happen.

It certainly did contain valuable information about Kublai Khan and the opulent and powerful Chinese empire. However, The Travels is a mixture of personal experiences, hearsay, and imaginative elaborations. These elaborations were typical of medieval travel literature, aimed at providing the readers with what they expected in a travel book: exotic marvels and legendary tales.

Just as Marco Polo's tales gave the reader just what they wanted, I think this tale of the Strasbourg dancers quickly evolved into a much more interesting and magical account of what really happened.

What do you think happened all those years ago? Did 400 people really mosh nonstop for days on end?