HISTORY: A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518By John Waller Icon Books, 267pp. £12.99 - THE TITLE OF this book is inspired by the well-known passage from chapter three of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is the second of two epigraphs; the first is: "Madnesses of the past are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes. They appear, perhaps, more like jellyfish that collapse and dry up when they are removed from their ambient sea water." (A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, (1999)), by HC Erik Midelfort.
On July 14th, 1518, a Frau Troffea began to dance uncontrollably in Strasbourg. Her dance continued day and night, with occasional interruptions of exhaustion and fitful sleep. Within days, other citizens were seized by the craze to dance. Eventually 100 citizens were affected; indeed one chronicle reported the number waxing to 400. In late August or early September, however, the outbreak waned.
Conscious of "modern microscopes", John Waller places the craze in its historical context, both religious and social, so as to find an explanation for what seems inexplicable. His sources are "several published chronicles which were either written at the time or, more typically, compiled later from contemporary documents".
A principal source is a 1531 work by Paracelsus. In addition, the Strasbourg incident is not the sole example of the craze but what makes it particularly significant is that it is the second-largest recorded. It also occurred after the invention of the printing press when Strasbourg had the rudimentary beginnings of a formal bureaucracy. It therefore is better documented than its predecessors.
As the craze developed, the "burgherlike quiet" of Strasbourg was disrupted, which provoked the citizens' governing body (known as "the XXI") to act. It consulted with local physicians who advised that a cure lay in making specific areas available so that the dancers could more easily dance.
As Waller states, "nothing could have been better calculated to turn the dance into a full-scale epidemic than making its victims perform their dances in the most public spaces".
By the beginning of August, given the failure of the dance cure, the XXI began to treat the craze as a moral punishment as well as a moral contagion. In order to atone, homage needed to be paid to St Vitus at his shrine, which was about 30 kilometres from Strasbourg, at which a series of rituals were to be undertaken by the dancers.
In the chapter entitled Holy Magic, the dancers (or "choreomaniacs") are literally carted to the shrine and according to a chronicle by one Specklin they were given "small crosses and red shoes and a Mass was said for them".
Waller debates the significance of the red shoes and gives a detailed description of the ceremonies at the shrine, all of which appears to have had the desired effect as the pilgrimage to Saverne, according to Specklin, "helped most of them".
However, Waller does not leave it at that and draws the conclusion: "In addition to the psychological effect of the healing ritual itself, the choreomaniacs had another reason to recover and to remain free from the St Vitus curse, at least for a time. Many of them had experienced years of neglect, misery, want and exploitation but in the previous days or weeks they had been subject to the earnest attentions of civic and religious leaders who would normally have treated them with unmitigated contempt. To many of the alienated and the marginalised, the response of the authorities must have felt deeply gratifying. Reflecting on the assiduity with which the Church and government had sought to cure their ills, many were emotionally fortified against a relapse."
This appears suspiciously like the use of the modern microscope on the dried-up jellyfish.
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John McBratney is a barrister