Dancing Plague of 1518

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Dancing Plague of 1518"

Episode Title: Dancing Plague of 1518
Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg, Assistant Professor of European History at Anderson University
Release Date: May 22, 2025
Podcast: Not Just the Tudors by History Hit

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1. Introduction to the Dancing Plague

Professor Suzannah Lipscomb opens the episode by recounting the extraordinary events of July 14, 1518, in Strasbourg. A single woman began dancing uncontrollably in the streets, and within weeks, this involuntary dancing epidemic engulfed up to 400 people, leading to exhaustion and even death.

"Drenched in sweat, limbs thrashing convulsively, with swollen feet and glazed eyes... as many as 15 people a day were simply dropping dead from sheer exhaustion." (02:16)

2. The Woman Who Initiated the Plague

Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg discusses Frau Trofea, the woman believed to have started the dancing plague. According to historical accounts, Frau Trofea was likely a woman of lower social status without any elite connections in Strasbourg.

"Paracelsus theory is that she starts dancing simply to annoy her husband... However, it seems a more plausible explanation that rather than simply annoying her husband, she's dancing in response to these really dire social conditions." (05:16)

3. Spread of the Mania

The dancing mania rapidly spread from Frau Trofea to dozens, and eventually hundreds, of people. Various theories attempt to explain the rapid dissemination, including mass hysteria and divine punishment.

"Paracelsus... has a couple of different causes he'll kind of posit... one of which is that the dancing spread through the imagination." (08:17)

4. Demographics of the Affected

Contrary to initial beliefs that such phenomena were predominantly a female issue, the 1518 outbreak included men, women, and children of all ages and social statuses.

"There is not a common profession, there is not a common factor when it comes to their social status." (13:06)

5. Dance: From Religious Practice to Sin

Dr. Renberg elaborates on the evolving perception of dance from a legitimate religious practice to something seen as lascivious and sinful, particularly in Northern Europe.

"Dance is something that can be used in worship... and dance has something that might be representative of having poor theology or of pagan influences, or simply of sexual misbehavior." (15:01)

6. Medical and Religious Responses

Initially, city officials attempted to cure the dancers by encouraging more dancing, believing it would burn off excess blood as per humoral theory.

"The city erected a new dance hall, bringing in trained musicians to speed up the process." (33:15)

When medical interventions failed, they shifted to religious remedies, ultimately ending the plague by transporting the dancers to the shrine of St. Vitus.

"They load the dancers three by three into wagons... walk them three times around the altar, and then from there they end the plague." (38:43)

7. The Role of Communitas and Collective Action

Drawing on Victor Turner's concept of "communitas," Dr. Renberg suggests that the collective frenzy of the dancers transformed individual protest into a communal movement that spiraled beyond initial intentions.

"The dancers aren't disturbed by people trying to pull them out of the dance. They can't be stopped. They dance through all limits of physical endurance." (30:20)

8. Dr. Renberg's Insights and Conclusions

Dr. Renberg posits that the dancing plague was a form of protest against social injustices, clerical failures, and economic hardships. She believes it was both an intentional act of rebellion and a phenomenon exacerbated by physiological and psychological factors.

"I think the cause is ... dissatisfaction with the status quo... an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo." (48:18)

She also emphasizes the importance of understanding historical context and semiotics to fully grasp the motivations and experiences of those involved.

"There's something happening like that there as well. ... we don't know how they feel or what they think." (52:07)

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Key Takeaways

• Origins: The dancing plague began with a single woman, Frau Trofea, potentially as a response to social and economic hardships.
• Spread: The phenomenon quickly escalated, affecting a diverse group of people, suggesting factors beyond individual motives.
• Cultural Context: The transition of dance from a sacred act to a sinful one reflects broader societal tensions, particularly regarding gender and religion.
• Responses: Initial medical attempts to cure the plague by promoting more dancing failed, leading to religious interventions that ultimately quelled the mania.
• Interpretation: Dr. Renberg views the dancing plague as both a deliberate protest and a manifestation of mass psychological phenomena, influenced by the oppressive conditions of the time.

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Notable Quotes

• "Frau Trofea... is simply the instrument through which this outbreak occurs." (45:37)
• "Dance is the symbol of social order, of community. And so through this sort of disordered dancing, there's this expression that the social order is broken." (47:55)
• "The dancers do intentionally start this as a way to get their attention and to express their dissatisfaction in a way that is clearly intelligible with the semiotics of the time period." (48:18)

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This episode delves deep into the mysterious Dancing Plague of 1518, exploring its social, cultural, and psychological dimensions. Dr. Renberg provides invaluable insights into how such a phenomenon could emerge from the confluence of economic hardship, clerical corruption, and evolving societal norms around gender and religion. The discussion underscores the importance of considering historical context and the symbolic meanings attached to actions like dancing when interpreting past events.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. On 14 July 1518, a lone woman began to dance involuntarily, seemingly without cause on the streets of Strasbourg. In a matter of days, she was joined by dozens of others, also apparently unable to prevent themselves from dancing. Within a matter of weeks, as many as 400 people were cavorting wildly in the public squares and roads, forming what would become known as a dancing plague. Drenched in sweat, limbs thrashing convulsively, with swollen feet and glazed eyes, in some cases, the plague's victims danced continually uncontrollably, even as they cried out for help. As hysteria grew, theories of demonic possession and divine punishment abounded, along with cause for religious intervention and the expulsion of outsiders from the city. Medical officials, hoping to cure the fever through overstimulation, prescribed an increase of dancing. The city erected a new dance hall, bringing in trained musicians to speed up the process. Despite various treatments, accounts tell us that as many as 15 people a day were simply dropping dead from sheer exhaustion, although the numbers remain controversial until almost as suddenly as it began, Strasbourg returned to normalcy in the autumn of 1518. The precise cause of the plague has never been fully understood, but it has inspired fascination since not least Florence and the machine's song, Choreomania. Today, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Linnith J. Miller Renberg, Assistant professor of European history at Anderson University and an expert on the intersections between religious mania, gender and dance in the medieval and early modern periods, following her 2018 doctoral thesis, Satan Danced in the Person of the Damsel. Great title. Dance, sacrilege and gender, 1280-1640. Dr. Ronberg has published many books, including the award winning Women Dance and Parish religion in England, 1300-1600. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you are listening to not just the Tudors from history hit. Dr. Redenburg, welcome to the podcast.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's such an extraordinary story. What do we know about the woman who began the dancing?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

So we know from Paracelsus. As far as we can tell, her name is Frau Trofea. That is consistent in his record. And then in kind of the retellings that come out of his. Four of the six chronicle accounts that we have do indicate that there is this solitary woman who sets this all off. We don't have any documents left. In her own voice, she is likely a woman of lower status. As far as we can tell, she is not a part of the elite of the city. She does not have, as far as we can tell, the ability to leave a record of what started her dancing. Paracelsus, who is a 16th century physician, alchemist theologian, philosopher, kind of a man of all trades. If you consider it, he has a theory as to what starts her dancing. It's not a very kind one. Paracelsus theory is that she starts dancing simply to annoy her husband. He had given her an order she did not like, and thus she starts hopping and lulling and making noises and doing whatever he found most annoying simply to get back at him.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's quite a theory.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

It is. There's absolutely no backing for it unless he picked this up from oral accounts. But it fits with Paracelsus broader framing of women has social irritants that shows up in many of his works. And it is the closest thing we have to a motivation for Frau Trofea other possible causes that might have started her dancing as a woman of lower status. This is a time of famine and food shortage and social tension in Strasbourg. And it seems to me a more plausible explanation that rather than simply annoying her husband, she's dancing in a response to kind of these really dire social conditions at the time. At the time as well. There's also quite a bit of conflict between the laity of Strasbourg and the clergy. 15:18, we're right on the verge of kind of religious reformation in the Protestant sense sweeping over Europe. But we're in the midst of this ongoing series of medieval reformations. And in Strasbourg in particular, the past 40 years leading up to this point in Fratrefea's life, we don't even know her age. So she could be a young woman, a middle aged woman. She could have been watching these clerical struggles for quite a while. There have been a number of instances of clergy sleeping with laity, of clergy stealing from laity, of clergy collecting exceptionally high tithes and taxes during famines and food shortages. And so there could have been a degree of the clergy often preach against dancing. So therefore I'm going to kind of dance in a form of protest. There's not a lot of other avenues of protest open to her as a woman of lower social status, but public disturbance is one of them. It's a tried and true method to get the attention of those who are enacting policies that you do not like.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That's fascinating to get that sense of context. Can we talk a bit more about how the mania spread? Do we know why or how that happened?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

We don't have very clear records on how and why it happened. The sources we have left from 1518, Strasbourg, they're often these quite cut and dried chronicle accounts that give a sense of. Of this person did this, and then several days later we see this happening. As far as we can tell from Frau Troffea, she has about a four day long continuous dancing episode. And then at the orders of the city officials, when nothing else has worked to stop it, she is taken up the mountain to the shrine of St. Vitus, who is considered to be the patron saint for manic dancing, and cured through a mass there. However, by the time they take Fra Trofea up the mountain and get her back down, four or five other people have also begun to dance. And by the end of the first week we're up to several dozen. Then next two weeks it continues to build. There are a couple theories as to the spread. Paracelsus, again, he's the one who writes the most extensively about theories. He has a couple of different causes he'll kind of posit. One of those causes is that the dancing spread through the imagination. People whose minds are susceptible to imaginative frenzy might imagine dancing. And that then causes their blood to become excited, their veins to overreact and the dancing to begin. He compares this to much as when someone whistles a song, you again get the whistling stuck in your head and you can't stop it, right? Kind of getting that stuck on loop. This is one of his theories for how this might spread. Other theories seem to be that it's a sort of actual divine punishment, that people who are similarly maybe living sinful lives of protest against their husbands or protesting the clergy. This might be something that's spurring that dancing on. As far as we can tell, there is no clear medical components to it in the sense of like a disease that we might think of. So theories on spread, often in modern scholarship, focus on a sort of mass hysteria, kind of a psychological outbreak in the city. It seems more likely in the time itself that the dancers wouldn't have thought of it in that way. There would have been other things pulling them into the dance, maybe simply singing. We just don't have enough evidence to know precisely what that might have been.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And were the events isolated to Strasbourg.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Specifically in 1518, this episode seems to have largely been in Strasbourg. It is such a short lived episode, relatively speaking, taking place over the span of about six weeks. However, it is not the only episode we have like this. And earlier episodes, particularly that of 1374, does spread up and down the Rhine river valley, breaking out in multiple towns including Liege, Trier, Aye au Chappelle. This outbreak kind of follows the river from town to town. And we see these episodes breaking out dancing for undetermined amounts of time and then dying back down over the course of about a year and a half. Actually, that's a much longer outbreak.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And the fact that there is a saint dedicated to manic dancing tells us quite a lot about how common this is.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, it does. The fact that there is a clear saint that you go to when manic dancing breaks out in your town gives us an insight into the fact that we look at 1518. Strasbourg has quite an isolated occurrence, something that is so unusual that you just wouldn't see. And yet this has happened often enough that there is not simply one saint you might go to to cure manic dancing, but several. St. Vitus is the one appealed to in the Strasbourg plague. He's kind of the local saint. His chapel is nearby. He's associated with manic dancing and then with epilepsy. During this period, however, you could also appeal to St. John the Baptist. Much of this dancing occurs in the summer around the feast day of St. John the Baptist. And in the 1374 episodes, the dancers actually call out the name of St. John as they're dancing, asking him to help them to bring an end to their dancing. Some of these outbreaks also associate with Mary Magdalene as well, this idea of penitent dancing, dancing as a form of kind of divine punishment. Mary Magdalene has the ultimate example of medieval penance, also gets associated with some of these. So if one saint doesn't work to stop your dancing, you do have a few other options that you can appeal to.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And can you tell me if, though, are common traits among those who are afflicted with this uncontrollable urge to dance? Are they the same sex, age, background, social status?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

This is one of the things that befuddles these observers for these dancing mania, because religious understandings of dance at the time talk about it as a failing of women, as something that women in particular are disposed to because of their more sinful dispositions, because of their lack of control, control of their sexual appetites. Religious theology has increasingly, from around 1200 forward, considered dance to be a woman's domain and kind of a woman's problem. This is one of the things that, for Paracelsus, pushes understandings of Strasbourg away from a divinely punished dance towards one that is actually some sort of a medical failing, a medical issue to be solved. Because in 1518, the dance starts with a woman. But men, children, women, all ages, young and old, are all involved in this dancing. There is not a common profession, there is not a common factor when it comes to their social status. Nothing really Seems to hold the dancers together, which makes him think, this must be some sort of a disease as opposed to divine punishment. Because if you can't find a common thread in either the status or the gender or the age of the dancers, Something else has to be going on. So for Paracelsus, he points to children in particular, as an example as to why this dance has to be medical in cause. Children don't have the lascivious nature in his mind, that leads to the sexual profligacy that causes the sorts of dancing that you see otherwise. And thus, if children are involved, this has to be something else.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

This is really interesting because dance had been part of religious practice in the medieval period. So when did it become conceived as something dangerous and lascivious?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, dance has very much played a role, Particularly in certain geographic regions. France, Italy, the kind of Eastern church dances had a key role in liturgy and liturgical practice. However, there's always been this tension within the Christian church between dance as something that can be used in worship, that can be a part of liturgy, and dance has something that might be representative of having poor theology or of pagan influences, or simply of sexual misbehavior. We see from about the year 1000 forward an increased tension around this issue, A push to regulate dance to ensure that it is being used well and not in opposition with true Christian theology. And increasingly has authorities try to communicate those boundaries and different settings for appropriateness to laity, to the ordinary men and women. Throughout Europe, they start to simplify down what dance can be. That starts with saying, you cannot dance during a Mass. You cannot dance at a time when you're supposed to be in worship. You cannot dance in a churchyard. That's God's sacred space. From there, we start to kind of see that harden into. You can't really be a Christian and dance. Simultaneously with that, there's this growing discourse around women and the dangers that women pose. Two holy things. This starts to happen during the 1100s with this concern about clerical purity and about clergy and temptation trying to preserve clerical celibacy in order that clergy can effectively perform the Mass and be better priests to try to protect that clerical purity. We're going to see a series of regulations that try to keep women out of the eyesight, out of the earsight, and out of physical proximity from the clergy so that they are not temptations. It just so happens that that dialogue about women has been removed from sacred space, is happening at the same time has this dialogue about dance has been removed from sacred space. And from there, it's Not a huge step to think, okay, well, women and dance together clearly are something that is always sinful. Once that dialogue starts to crystallize into a clear position of dance has a woman's action, dance has a womanly sin, it's difficult to justify its continued use in forms of worship. And so this anti dance discourse starts to harden, particularly in northern Europe. And this is where it's worth noting that anti dance discourse is not ever as prevalent in the Mediterranean. But if you look at England, if you look at the region, that's the Holy Roman Empire. If you look at Scandinavia, dance has really become something that is associated with. With demons, with witches, and with problematic defiance of religious authority by the time we get to the Strasburg Plague.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So everything you're saying, I mean, you said that Paracelsus is trying to reconceptualize it as disease, but everything you've described suggests that the onlookers, particularly members of the clergy, would have seen it rather as a spiritual matter.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, that is certainly what seems like what they should have seen headed into this. Again, it's one of the interesting episodes of 1518 in Strasbourg and that that doesn't seem to be the clergy's first assumption. We have a letter from a clerical official in Strasbourg saying that the physicians have said this is a medical issue, so we should probably treat this like a medical issue. Let's not worry about trying to find a divine cause quite yet. So it seems that something here is shifting. It seems that perh. The scale of the Strasbourg epidemic challenges understandings of this has religious failing that again does not necessarily make sense within the history of these episodes. An episode in 1274, so prior to the 1374 outbreaks in Maastricht in the Netherlands actually involves, according to the chronicles there around a thousand different people. So some of these outbreaks have been quite big. But the diversity of people involved in Strasbourg, as well as this kind of growing humanist emphasis on medical causes, on humoral theory, seems to set the atmosphere in Strasbourg up differently. Where they're going to consider and look first for a medical cause and a medical treatment prior to going to these religious ones. I think another possible reason that the Strasbourg officials want to view this as a medical issue is that to view it as a religious issue, to view it as another religious episode would involve in some ways indicting the behavior of the clergy. And as this has already been an ongoing struggle, it seems that there might be an element of control there. If this is a medical issue, it's not the fault of the clerical officials or of the civic authorities of the city. Instead, this is a medical thing that we have not caused. And I wonder if that struggle for control that's been ongoing in the city for the past 40 years might be showing up in the response to this epidemic.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Can we talk a little bit more about those political, cultural, societal causes that you mentioned? Because what I'd like to know is in the previous epidemics of dancing, if we can call it that, in 1274, 1374, as well as in 1518, do we have similar experiences of hardship, civil unrest? You mentioned famine? You know what's going on?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes. That is a continuity across all of these episodes of manic dancing, dancing mania, to use the medieval term, dancing plague. As we go forward from 1500, they're all occurring at periods of kind of heightened tension and of heightened stressors on the people involved. So to start with the religious, as that's what we've talked about so far in each of these episodes, they're taking place in a period where clerical reform is a priority. In each of these episodes, we have accounts of people watching the dance and articulating that the dancers are doing this because the clergy have failed them. The earliest template for these episodes is actually in 1015. It's an episode attributed to a town called Kolbek in the region of Saxony. And this episode is different from these later ones in that it is probably fictional. It mainly survives in chronicle tales or in saints tales. It shows up in some surprising places, like in crusade narratives, has a reason a crusade failed. But in this 10:15 episode, a priest directly curses the dancers because they refuse his orders to come into mass. Now, it's an important contextual factor there that the priest who curses the dancers is not a good priest. He has a concubine, he has several children. He does not follow any of the proper procedures for trying to impose spiritual discipline on the people in your congregation. But in that early episode, we see both this element of protest against the clergy as well as clerical failure, and then clerical attempts to reassert control. The priest himself cannot actually stop the dance. A bishop has to come in and absolve the dancers so that their dance can stop. But at the end of the story, a bishop does intervene and kind of bring back social order. So in 1274 and in 1374, we have similar comments from those watching the dance that talk about the fact that the dancers are doing this because their clergy have failed them. 1374, those watching the dancers in Liege say that it's because the priests have been doing baptisms poorly and baptizing them incorrectly. And because the priests have had concubines, they've had women that they've been with outside of the bounds of their clerical vows. So in that episode, the priests have to perform exorcisms, they have to perform masses. And because God then intervenes, according to the chronicle accounts, the dance stops and the dancers do not follow through on what the crowd had been saying, which was, well, we need to stop this dance by killing the clergy and taking their goods. That's the way that we'll kind of write the social order. 15 18. The anti clerical overtones are not quite as clear, but there has been this ongoing controversy about the same issues. Priests with concubines, priests taking the goods of the people, priests profiting off the suffering of those around them. This is the second kind of social cause that we see happening here. There are tensions in each of these areas and in each of these episodes around food shortages. And that is a key theme. So 1370s, we're in a period where we have broad unrest. We've come out of a series of famines and food shortages. Because of the kind of impact of the Black Death moving through Europe. There have been disrupted harvests. There's simply not enough to go around. The dancers in these cases cannot be as directly tied to specific famines as they can in the case of 1518 Strasbourg, where the harvest the year previously had failed. But across each of these outbreaks, once you start putting them in social and economic context, you start to find that there are indeed issues with food supply and with food shortages, and accusations in each setting that the wealthy are profiting off of the poor. 15:18 Strasbourg. That context specifically, there have been a series of attempted peasant rebellions, in this case called bunshus, where you've seen these attempts to rise up and to overthrow those who are taxing and taking the food from the peasants. And it attempts to give the peasants ability to own land and to access the fruits of their own labor.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So that all makes sense. And I get that these are years of chaos and tension and anxiety. What I don't yet get is why is that the way to demonstrate your rebellion against those who you think are making your life more miserable than it needs to be? If you can think that the priests are responsible for famine, of course. And also, why is it depicted as this kind of uncontrollable mania? It's not like they're just like, I'm going to dance in front of you and you can't stop me. It's like I can't stop myself.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, that is a great question, and it's one that we can't fully answer with the records we have. But I do have a few theories and a few thoughts as to why this might be the chosen method of protest. First of these is simply that, but I guess I sound similar here to Paracelsus. If there's something that, you know, someone hates, it's a good way to protest them, right? It's a good way to kind of push back against what you might perceive as clerical overreach. I think a second possible cause might be that dance is often something used in medieval and early modern communities as a way to bring together a community. Right. It's this sort of social unification. It's a socially uniting action that we see people doing to kind of create communal harmony, bring people together for common causes. It's often used as a church fundraiser. Quite ironically, in the same time period, the church is preaching more and more sermons against dance and it's being moved out of liturgy. It's also a primary means of raising funding for many parishes. So it's very much something that is often communally sponsored. I think that might be some of the ideological reasons behind this. But then practically it's very public. It is very disruptive, particularly the sort of dance being performed. And I think on the fact that it is so unceasing, no sane person would dance until their feet are bleeding and until they die. I think that's some of where this element of kind of the conditions under which it's being performed come in. The original choice of dance as protest might have been quite deliberate, but I don't think the dancers foresaw the consequences of this. Sort of like large scale literal social movement has their commitment of flooding the streets and performing this.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It is quite extraordinary. See, what you're suggesting is that there's a kind of role of what Victor Turner called communitas. You know, the action of a crowd. The way a football crowd can become. I'm talking soccer. The soccer crowd can become kind of violent because being part of a crowd makes you feel less responsible for your actions or something like that. Are you suggesting that there's this kind of element of collective action that's part of it?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

I think so. I think that's a great way to frame how this moves from what I see as a form of protest to this movement that can be described as a plague where the dancers aren't disturbed by people trying to pull them out of the dance. They can't be stopped. They dance through all limits of physical endurance. I think there is a very clear initial choice to spark each of these danced outbreaks. But then I do think it moves into what Turner describes as this sort of the crowd moves you along and this becomes something it wasn't initially intended to be. Again, no rational person would choose to dance to the point at which the Strasberg dancers Go. And particularly when the medical interventions get quite painful in a lot of ways, with some of the things that they're attempting, no one would keep going past that. But at this point, it's become something the dancers probably didn't intend. And it's taken on a life of its own in the degree that the dancing proceeds to. In the physical effects on the dancers and then the length of the dancing, the duration. If you were someone involved in the Strasburg epidemic, you might be dancing for as many as two to three weeks straight with only a few hours rest each day. And that rest is insensible Rest. The records indicate the dancers collapse on the ground and twitch for a couple hours before they continue their dance in the streets.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So far we've used the term plague and the term mania. Would it have been seen or thought of as more of a curse at the time?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

By the end of the episode, it was certainly seen as divine punishment or has some sort of demonic outbreak. The term curse in Strasbourg would have only really been used to indicate a divine curse in the Old Testament. Sense of judgment upon the city. Earlier episodes that seem to be caused, like the Kolbeck episode, by the priest cursing, the dancers use that term more frequently. But there was certainly a sense by the end of the Strasberg episode that this has to be in some way judgment upon the city. Judgment upon some failing that has led God to be displeased with us. And thus it is in that framework that we do finally see a relief to the dance. It is when the civic authorities stop trying to apply these medical theories and move instead to appealing to a saint for intervention that we see the dancing finally come to an end. Which means many of the accounts of the dance, particularly kind of in the immediate aftermath, focus on the displeasure of God as a key cause.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Here let's talk about those medical interventions. Though one of the most astonishing is the encouragement of more dancing as a viable treatment. What's that about?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

The encouragement of more dancing as viable treatments has a way to stop. Endless dancing is always such a funny one to us as modern spectators, because that is not something we would ever think would be the proper response to a dancing plague. But to an early modern physician or an early modern observer, it makes sense, makes perfect sense. At the time, understandings of dancing plague involved three distinct medical causes that could be involved in manic dancing. One of these is an excess of blood in which there's too much blood in your veins and it causes the continuous motion. Another is overheated blood, where your blood is too hot. And thus again, the continued dancing, or what humoral theory calls bad blood, and in this case, it's considered to be blood that has been burned or is some way bitter, and thus causes this kind of, again, continuous motion. So two of those three causes are treated actually by more dancing. If you have too much blood, the medical theory goes, you can keep dancing, burn off that excess blood, get the amount of blood in your body back down to normal, and then you can stop. Many of us might think about bloodletting as a way to deal with excess blood. But if you think about the challenges of someone who's constantly dancing and trying to apply traditional bloodletting to them, it becomes quite clear that's not a valid option for excess blood in this situation. The blood that's burned, that's another thing, that continuous motion, because you can't let it out. By using traditional bloodletting methods, more dancing would also cure that. That blood would eventually kind of evaporate off through the heat and the motion, and thus you'd be fine. Only the third option, that of blood that is overheated, is one that is cured by stopping dancing. And so in the case of Strasbourg, the first solutions that we see the city try are hitting that 60% odds, right? Two of the three options, more dancing, will fix it. So they bring in musicians, they hire them to play in the streets. They construct a large area in the center of town for people to dance upon. They encourage people to continue to dance, and they actually bring in. This is probably a miscalculation on their port, but they encourage people to go partner with the dancers, to try to move this dance from something uncontrollable into something more recognizable, Recognizable as a social dance of the time. As far as we can tell, most of those dancers also end up involved in the plague. So the city did not have the proper approach there. But after that fails, after more music, more dancing simply continues to increase the size of the plague. The city says, okay, we need to now stop this. And so they instead ban music. They ban what they refer to as lechfortigen, which are light natured people from outside the city, or people who are moving in. They kind of lock down the city walls in a sort of quarantine to stop the dance. And then they order that each guild and each family must take care of their own dancers. And so they order that people must bring the dancers into their homes, shut the windows, shut the doors, create a dark, cool atmosphere, and from that, hopefully stop the dancing. The response to this, to having Dancers who are moving uncontrollably locked in your home is perhaps my favorite response throughout the Dancing Plague. Because we now have erect of an influx of letters and complaints from people talking about how difficult it is to live around someone who won't stop dancing and who won't respond to you when you try to move them or make them cease.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's logical by our standards, though, because if you've got something that's the result of a collective frenzy or mania, though these words seem a little dismissive. But you then think isolating them as individuals would one expects lead them to cease. Does it?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

It does not. Unfortunately. It does seem that if this is something caused by imagination, under Paracelsus understanding, or under our understanding, by a form of mass hysteria, mass protest movement, you would think that separating them would stop them. But by the time they apply that remedy, we're a couple weeks into the dancing mania and it's not effective. Separating the dancers, isolating them does not bring about the intended cure. Paracelsus advocates in his later writings far more drastic measures than simply separating them and confining them in homes. Paracelsus actually recommends that you should dunk them repeatedly in cold water and leave them in a dark, cold place without food until they become sad and depressed. And that would stop the dancing. But that remedy might take weeks, and in Strasbourg this feels more pressing. They're not applying that remedy when it doesn't work to move the people into guild halls or into private homes or even into the city hospital, which they do also attempt. At that point, Strasburg is ready to apply their religious remedy, which has worked in these past episodes. It is at that point that Strasberg gives up on these medical theories. It's been weeks there, at this point, as many as 15 people a day possibly dying. And at this point, Strasberg is no longer willing to keep seeing which medical theory might work. They decide they're going to try the one that is proven.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And the proven one is turning to saints.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Exactly. The proven one is turning to saints. And so in my second favorite choice that Strasberg makes through this pandemic, they load the dancers three by three into wagons. And this visual always amazes me. They drive these wagons of people who are still dancing insensibly with kind of monitors on each side to make sure they're not falling off the wagon up the mountainside to the shrine of St. Vitus. They put shoes on their feet with holy oil. They walk them three times around the altar, and then from there they end the plague.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So what do you think is happening there? I mean, that's a lot of ritual. The shoes on their feet, the holy water, the sort of ritual of walking around is that. I mean, I'm struggling to understand why. I mean, maybe the saint just ends it. Maybe I'm just not being credible enough here. But it seems very curious that this is enough to stop it when having been put in rooms on their own for some time, they haven't.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, it does seem that this is quite an understated end to something that's been quite a dramatic event. And the significance of kind of each of these choices is not explained in the record. It seems that the shoes with the holy oil are in some way men to apply divine intervention directly to what is seen as the root cause of the issue. Their feet, right? The kind of source of this dancing, the transversing around the altar that's not likewise explained in its direct significance, but it seems that moving around the altar in a specific direction is supposed to kind of counteract any possible motion in the incorrect direction from the dance that might be continuing this demonic intervention or this curse. This is where some of the just kind of cultural understandings around dancing become helpful here. There's a saying that gets quoted quite often that a circle dance is the devil's circle and it always goes to the left, going to the left, indicating that the dancers are moving in time with demonic, unheard unseen music or with demonic motion. And so while the records don't specify the direction in which the dancers are processed around the altar. I would assume it is going to the right. Right. This directly counter motion meant to kind of reinstill divine interaction and divine intervention as opposed to possible demonic. And so these cures don't directly explain why they work. But if you are someone coming into this with this understanding of dancing to the left, has dancing in motion with the devil, of the devil's ability, we have sermon tales about demons using dancers as puppets and kind of control their limbs as they move in ways that cause them to defy God and to sin. The shoes and kind of this, like, holy oil weight situation that's happening would also be a way to counteract that sort of activity. And so the cure seems to us quite understated. But steeped as it is in these cultural models for understanding what dance means and what these motions might align you with. It's probably quite effective for the observers and for the dancers in feeling. If at this point, again, we don't have records in their own voice. We don't know how they feel or what they think. But if they've been dancing for several weeks and they can't seem to find a way to stop, that reassurance that you are now moving in motion with divine will, that the devil's hold on your feet has been broken, might have quite a strong psychological effect with the symbolism in play with each element of the this.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Do we know what became of the first dancer, Fra Troffea?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

We do not. Fra Trofea never shows up again in the city records that we have surviving. We don't have any records of her being punished for starting this dance, which might in itself be something interesting to note that despite the chaos that comes out of this action, we don't have any records of her being brought up on charges of any sort in either church or civic courts. She just simply never shows up again. And so she remains this shadowy figure who starts this fascinating episode for reasons that we can guess at but we can't fully uncover, and then who kind of disappears back into the historical archive. We don't have evidence to know if this happens again. If this resolves her marital tensions that Paracelsus thinks are going on, she simply disappears.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, but I suppose we know about her because those who write about it after the event see her as being responsible for the plague.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Exactly. We even know her name because of that strong connection to Fra Trofea for this outbreak. And again, it's not indicated that she's punished for this because of how the episode plays out, it is seen as something that becomes uncontrollable, whether medically or because of divine intervention. And so we get a sense that she is the start of the problem, but that she is not the instigator in the sense that someone might instigate a peasant's revolt. She is simply kind of the instrument through which this outbreak occurs. But she is significant enough as the key starting point to get a name in the textual record. When has a woman of lower social status that. That's quite unusual to have.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And this association with protest, is it made at the time? Does it lend itself to broader fears of civil disobedience? Because I'm really conscious of the fact that this is just a few years before we get the German Peasants War and we get uprisings on a major scale in various parts of Europe.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Yes, I think at the time, everyone involved dancers, observers, clerics, civic authorities would have been aware of the protest element in this. We don't have the words of the dancers laying out a manifesto as to why they're doing this. The closest we have are the descriptions from outsiders who identify this is a protest against a husband, or this is a protest against the clergy. Part of that complication is that those who write down our records that we have of the dancing plague are those who are most interested in making this seem like divine punishment or a medical issue, rather than an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. And so I think the fact that the records from 1374, from 1518, that they record the frustrations in the context of the plague or of the mania, I think that in itself is a significant acknowledgment that this protest was indeed heard, it was shut down. Right. And eventually it was shut down under the guise of being for the good of the people. But it was recognized as something that was threatening to those who had authority, as something that could, through either direct protest or through the sheer disruption caused through the shutting down of a city like Strasbourg for the length of time the dancing plague goes on, it was recognized as something that could be very threatening to those who are seeking to maintain their authority as well as social order. As you noted, it's a time of significant changes and of significant challenges to social status quo. And this circles to why dance might have been the chosen mechanism. Dance is the symbol of social order, of community. And so through this sort of disordered dancing, there's this expression that the social order is broken. That in and of itself is a pretty powerful statement of protest.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It is indeed so to conclude then, I want to know what you believe about it. What do you think ultimately is the cause of it as a phenomenon and what causes its end? We've heard a lot of thoughts along the way of what they thought at the time and what people have said about it since. But you've spent so much time studying this. What do you think?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

I'll start with the fact that I do think these actually happened for a long time. Scholarship did not take them very seriously. Has actual events that happened in this way. And I think they did. I think that the fact that the word dance is consistently used to talk about the motion means this is actually a dancing plague. As unbelievable as it sounds to us, it is what the record describes. And I think we have to believe that. As to the cause, I do think the cause is this dissatisfaction with the status quo. I think the cause is not a medical issue, not simply mass panic or hysteria about things like the appearance of a comet or the incoming Black Death. But I think it's taking these moments where the world around the dancers has made them look at the way things are and question if it has to be that way. And look at those who are supposed to be governing them, providing for them, caring for their souls. And the ways in which those individuals are taking advantage of circumstances to their own profit. And I think the dancers do intentionally start this as a way to get their attention and to express their dissatisfaction in a way that is clearly intelligible with the semiotics of the time period. But also less likely to get you punished or executed than something like an armed peasants rebellion. Right. As a form of protest. I think this opens up for the dancers avenues to have their voices heard in a way that gets their point across without jeopardizing their personal well being. As to why this escalates to the scale it does. I think some of that is simply what being part of a movement can do. As it can sweep you along, it can move things past your intention. And the physical effects of dancing. Right. The ways in which bodily motion can kind of create a sort of separation from thought at times. Anyone who's done extended physical activity, I hear from people who do marathons, that is not me, but I hear from people who do these things that that sort of running can create a sort of trance state. I think this is what we see happening. I think there's clear physiological components that then lead to the ongoing nature. And I think it stops because I think the dancers feel heard. I think the dancers feel that they have had their concerns recognized. They recognize commitments from civic and religious authorities to at least in some way address the issues with clerical failure or with food shortages or with unfair treatment of their community. And I think at that point, then they're willing to accept that intervention and to come to a stop. The degree of which there's kind of that rational acceptance versus simply some of these things like the mass or the medical treatments, indicating that they've been seen in a way that they might not have felt seen before. I'm not quite sure. But I do think part of this is the attention paid to the dancers, I think is key as a way to bring this to a stop.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So one very last question then. I'm really struck by the ways in which to understand this. You first of all have to take it seriously, believe that it happened. And secondly, you have to try to think yourself into the mindset of the early 16th century. You have to understand symbiology, the semiotics of that period. And what I wonder is, when you've thought about this and spent time considering it, are there things that you think. Think we're probably missing something there, that there's a bit of discourse there we don't get. There's something there that's flying over our heads because we don't get the cultural reference points?

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Certainly. I think there are probably many elements of that that we don't notice and we don't know, partially because it may not be recorded in the textual record in a way that we can recognize. Some of this, I think, might have to do with the sounds. The assumption about, like, what the noises of this might mean. Right. Some of these shouts of protest, they're often just recorded as, quote, shouts of protest. But what were they saying? What were the references there that we might be able to then use to understand what's going on? There aren't a lot of visual descriptions. We have some of these beautiful paintings or woodcuts from Pieter Bruegel, but they're not necessarily of specific outbreaks that we have textual records for. And you have to imagine something like the attire of the dancers or the way in which they've kind of set their hair is communicating something. In much the same way that we have kind of visual codes that we use to interpret how we interact with others today. I think there's something happening like that there as well. And there are just these spaces where until we can figure out how to cross read sources from the early modern period to fill some of those gaps. Gaps. Or simply think about how we might get creative in hearing silences and understanding what might be being shouted. There's going to be this element where we're clearly missing something and it's going to remain unexplainable. And that's part of what makes it so endlessly interesting to study and to research and to ask questions about.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you Dr. Lynneth Miller Remberg, for taking us through this extraordinary moment and helping us start to parse it and understand it at least a little. Thank you for your time.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

Thank you for having me.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode episode of Not Just the Tudors from history hit.

[Dr. Linneth J. Miller Renberg]

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