In July 1518, a woman began to dance in a Strasbourg street and, according to the chronicles, kept going for days; within weeks, hundreds of people were reported to be doing the same. The council's own orders from that summer survive in the municipal archive, but the figures for how many danced and died come from chronicles and later retellings, several written decades or centuries afterward. This article sets out what each source says, when it was written, and where the popular version goes further than the record does.
The Timeline, Reconstructed
No single document narrates the outbreak from start to finish. The sequence below is assembled from chronicle and municipal-archive passages as quoted in the scholarly literature, notably H. C. Erik Midelfort's A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, E. Louis Backman's 1952 survey of religious dance sources, and historian John Waller's 2008 article in Endeavour.
| When | What the sources report | Source basis |
|---|---|---|
| 14 July 1518 | A woman known as Frau Troffea begins dancing in the narrow street outside her house, with no musical accompaniment. | Paracelsus and several chronicles, as quoted in Backman's 1952 compilation of dance sources |
| First days | Onlookers of every kind gather; imitators join. More than thirty people are dancing within days. | Chronicle passages as summarized in the literature |
| Day 4–6 | Authorities send Troffea by wagon to the shrine of St Vitus at Saverne, roughly thirty miles away. | Chronicle passages as summarized in the literature |
| Following weeks | Physicians declare a natural disease; the council has guild halls converted, builds platforms in the horse and grain markets, and pays musicians. | Daniel Specklin's 16th-century chronicle, quoted in Midelfort |
| Within a month | The Imlin family chronicle puts the number of afflicted citizens at 400. | Imlin chronicle, quoted in Midelfort |
| Later in the summer | Platforms are torn down; most dancing and music is banned until September. | Strasbourg municipal archive, vol. R3, fol. 72r, quoted in Midelfort |
| Late August or early September | The worst-affected are taken to Saverne and put through a ritual with red shoes, crosses, and holy water. The outbreak fades. | Specklin, via Alfred Martin (1914), quoted in Midelfort |
Who Wrote What, and When
The numbers are where the story loosens. The table below lines up the texts that quote the outbreak's scale or its casualties.
| Source | Date | Scale and deaths |
|---|---|---|
| Imlin family chronicle | Date not given in the sources consulted | 400 afflicted within a month; no deaths in the excerpt quoted by Midelfort |
| Manuscript poem, now lost, quoted by the jurist Johann Schilter | Quoted in the 17th century | Many hundreds danced day and night in market, alleys, and streets; many ate nothing; the sickness eventually left them. No deaths mentioned |
| Goldmeyer's astrological chronicle of Strasbourg | 1636 | Men danced in their madness until they fell unconscious and died. The one explicit death statement among these texts, written 118 years after the event |
A figure of "fifteen deaths a day" also circulates in popular retellings. It does not appear in any of the chronicle passages quoted above, and the secondary accounts consulted for this article do not identify the source behind it. That does not prove nobody died; days of unbroken exertion without food or water are plainly dangerous. It means the death toll is unknown, and that confident totals go beyond what the passages quoted here support.
Paracelsus, who visited Strasbourg about eight years later, belongs to a different category. He was not an eyewitness to the outbreak but an early interpreter of it. He read Troffea's dancing as a deliberate performance to annoy her husband, and the later dancers as women imitating a trick. His interpretation is useful as a 1520s opinion, and it does not describe what happened in July 1518.
How the Council's Cure Became Part of the Story
Strasbourg's physicians told the council that the dancing was a natural disease, caused by overheated blood. The remedy followed the logic of the era: let the afflicted dance until the condition exhausted itself. So the city gave them stages in its two main markets and paid musicians to keep them moving. The clergy, by contrast, held that St Vitus had cursed the dancers.
Waller argues that the public staging backfired. Townspeople who already believed in the saint's wrath now watched people in apparent torment in the busiest parts of the city, and more joined. The council reversed course, tore down the stages, restricted music and dancing (with a carve-out, recorded in the municipal archive, for string instruments at weddings and first Masses), and turned to the saint's own shrine. Lynneth Miller's 2017 study in Dance Research, titled "Divine Punishment or Disease?", examines the medieval and early modern approaches to the outbreak.
Five Explanations, Compared
| Explanation | Proposed by | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Divine punishment by St Vitus | Clergy and many townspeople in 1518 | A belief that shaped behavior, not a testable cause. Waller treats it as central to why the distress took the form of dancing |
| Overheated blood | The city's physicians | Period medical theory; no modern support |
| Deliberate imitation or feigning | Paracelsus, 1520s | Written years afterward; an interpretation, not a record of the events |
| Ergot poisoning | Several modern historians | Rejected by Waller: ergot restricts blood flow to the extremities, so poisoned people could not dance for days; so many people would not react identically; and outbreaks clustered along the Rhine and Moselle despite differing climates and crops |
| Stress-driven psychic contagion in a trance-like state | Waller | The most widely cited modern interpretation, though a historical reconstruction rather than a test |
Waller's case rests on conditions in the city. In his 2009 article in The Lancet, he describes a regional tradition: dread of a saint who could inflict a dancing curse was part of the shared outlook along the Rhine and Moselle, and confirmed epidemics occurred only there, usually in or near cities with earlier outbreaks. He treats the 1374 and 1518 epidemics as certain, while noting that earlier episodes at Kölbigk, Erfurt, and Maastricht may be apocryphal. A review of his book in German History describes the setting he reconstructs as one of appalling conditions for the city's population; Waller's own account, as summarized by other writers, points to a run of bad harvests, political instability, and the arrival of syphilis. He compares the outbreak to a 1960s laughing epidemic at a mission school in what is now Tanzania, where a few pupils' giggling spread until the school closed.
Readers of CurioLink's Challenger memory study will recognize a related lesson about how conviction, rather than accuracy, can organize what people experience. For another case where belief in a spirit shaped real behavior, see CurioLink's Wendigo article.
What's Confirmed, and What Isn't
Documented in the surviving sources: that an outbreak of compulsive dancing occurred in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518; that it was first attributed to a woman named Troffea in mid-July; that the council restricted music and dancing until September (a municipal-archive entry quoted in Midelfort); that a 16th-century chronicle by Daniel Specklin describes the earlier staging of dancers on platforms and the red-shoe ritual at Saverne; and that earlier dancing epidemics are attested along the Rhine and Moselle from 1374.
Unresolved or unsupported: the exact number of dancers (the figures quoted here run from "many hundreds" in a lost poem to a specific 400 in the Imlin chronicle, and no municipal head-count appears in the passages consulted); the number of deaths (no count appears in those passages, and the one explicit death statement among them dates from 1636); the "fifteen a day" figure (not found in the texts quoted here); and the cause. Waller's psychic-contagion reading is the most developed explanation, but it cannot be tested directly on sixteenth-century residents.
FAQ
Did people really dance to death in Strasbourg in 1518?
The dancing is well attested. Deaths are mentioned in a chronicle published in 1636, but no contemporary record quoted in the scholarship consulted here gives a death toll, so the number of fatalities is unknown.
Was the dancing plague caused by ergot poisoning?
Historian John Waller rejects the ergot theory. He argues that ergot restricts blood flow to the extremities, which would make days of dancing unlikely, and that it cannot explain why outbreaks clustered along the Rhine and Moselle.
Who was Frau Troffea?
She is the woman identified as the first dancer, starting on 14 July 1518, in Paracelsus's account and in chronicle passages quoted in later scholarship. Little else is known about her beyond the accounts of her dancing and her transport to the shrine of St Vitus at Saverne.
Sources
- Waller, J. — "In a spin: the mysterious dancing epidemic of 1518," Endeavour 32(3), 117–121 (2008)
- Waller, J. — "A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania," The Lancet 373(9664), 624–625 (2009)
- Midelfort, H. C. E. — A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Stanford University Press (1999)
- Miller, L. — "Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague," Dance Research 35(2), 149–164 (2017)
- German History 27(2), 286–287 — review of Waller, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (2009)