[RERUN] EPISODE 62: Plagues, Mystery and Dancing

·1 hr 52 min·8 clips

In 1518 Strasbourg, a woman named Troffea started dancing in the streets and couldn't stop—what caused this compulsive plague?

1. History on Fire episode 62 investigates the 1518 Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, a documented but inexplicable event in which up to 400 people danced compulsively in the streets over several weeks. 2. Host Daniele Bolelli, a university history professor and martial artist, draws on historian John Waller's research and the work of German physician Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker, whose 19th-century studies surveyed medieval dancing plague cases across Europe. 3. The episode opens with a philosophical framing: Bolelli argues that humans are uniquely cursed among animals in being aware of their mortality, and that the Garden of Eden story can be read as a metaphor for the moment self-consciousness expelled humanity from the flow state shared by other creatures. 4. He connects this philosophical introduction to why mysteries about human consciousness — such as the Dancing Plague — hold such enduring fascination: they tease us with an enigma that 'begs to be solved' while refusing to yield a clear answer. 5. The historical context for Strasbourg in the early 1500s is relentlessly bleak: the Black Plague had been cycling through Europe since the 1300s, with accompanying waves of anti-Semitism including the 1349 Strasbourg massacre in which hundreds of Jewish residents were burned alive. 6. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 injected widespread dread across Europe, while church corruption — including the sale of indulgences and monasteries secretly profiting from loans to destitute farmers — drove growing peasant resentment. 7. Three failed peasant uprisings in and around Strasbourg in the preceding decades ended with the ringleaders discovered and executed every time; meanwhile syphilis, described as potentially God's punishment for sin, spread rapidly through the city. 8. By 1514, frost destroyed crops around Strasbourg, thousands died of famine, mothers reportedly drowned children to give siblings a better chance of survival, and author John Waller is quoted: 'never in living memory had bread been so expensive, fuel so hard to come by, or so many peasants, artisans, and farmers burdened with so much debt.' 9. Dancing had long served in this context as a means of escape: Bolelli describes how carnival, with its sanctioned period of costume, role reversal, and abandonment, offered the poor a temporary release from misery before Lent's austerities began. 10. On July 14, 1518, a woman referred to in sources as Frau Troffea stepped out of her house and began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg; her husband initially thought she was avoiding household tasks. 11. She did not respond to questions, appeared to be in an altered state of consciousness, danced all day until collapsing from exhaustion, resumed hours later, and on the third day continued despite having bloody feet. 12. Contemporaries offered three explanations: demonic possession (women were believed to have weaker minds and more vulnerable to demons), angelic compulsion, or punishment by Saint Vitus, a Sicilian Christian martyr whose legend included miraculous healing and whose name had become associated with compulsive movement disorders. 13. Authorities eventually forced Troffea onto a wagon and transported her 30 miles to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus, with sources providing no record of her outcome after that journey. 14. Days after Troffea began, 30 more residents started dancing compulsively; by early August roughly 100 people were affected, eventually reaching approximately 400 — some voluntary, many apparently under the same involuntary compulsion. 15. Bolelli documents earlier dancing plagues: a Christmas Eve 1017 or 1027 incident in the German village of Kolbig where 18 peasants were reportedly cursed by a priest to dance for a year, with some dying and others suffering lifelong trembling limbs. 16. A 1237 or 1247 Erfurt incident involved over 100 children dancing 12 miles out of town to collapse near a neighboring city, with some dying and others suffering neurological effects — possibly the historical seed for the Pied Piper legend. 17. The 1374 epidemic was the largest documented dancing plague before Strasbourg: it spread across multiple locations in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, with thousands dancing in circles for hours until collapse, some claiming demonic possession by a figure named Friskus, with exorcists called in. 18. The episode's tone combines genuine historical mystery with Bolelli's characteristic dark humor about medieval misery; he frequently pauses to contextualize how extraordinary a given hardship would seem to modern listeners. 19. Listeners fascinated by medieval history, the history of medicine and psychology, or unexplained mass phenomena will find the episode rich with both context and genuine unresolved mystery. 20. Those expecting a definitive answer to what caused the Dancing Plague will be frustrated — the episode's appeal is precisely that it presents multiple theories and allows the enigma to stand.

As heard by us

A careful look at Strasbourg and the older dancing-mania stories that kept circling back.

History on Fire uses the Strasbourg dancing plague to explore how a medieval mystery stays alive in the record, and why older stories of dancing mania keep getting pulled back in.

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Follow the Strasbourg dancing plague as the episode moves from older stories toward a better-documented case.

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