In July 1518, a woman in Strasbourg stepped into the street and started dancing, and she didn't stop. Within weeks, by one chronicle's count, hundreds of people were dancing day and night on bleeding feet. The city's expert solution? Hire a band.

This is the true story of the Dancing Plague of 1518: Frau Troffea, a city council that built dance stages in the horse market and then banned the drums, a saint believed to curse sinners with dancing, a pair of holy red shoes, and the famous "15 people a day" death toll that the 1518 records don't actually support. Plus the two big theories, ergot poisoning and mass psychogenic illness, and which one holds up.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Strasbourg, July 1518

1:00 Welcome to Now Your Dumber

1:21 A very bad time to be alive

3:05 Frau Troffea

4:26 The doctors prescribe more dancing

6:09 It gets worse

7:51 Red shoes and Saint Vitus

8:50 Did people actually dance to death?

10:01 So what actually happened?

12:01 The echo

12:41 What gets me about this one

13:10 Wrap-up

SOURCES

• John Waller, "A Time to Dance, a Time to Die" (Icon Books, 2008)

• John Waller, "A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania," The Lancet, 2009: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60386-X

• Public Domain Review, "The Dancing Plague of 1518": https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1518

• H. C. Erik Midelfort, "A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany" (Stanford UP, 1999)

• Lynneth J. Miller, "Divine Punishment or Disease?", Dance Research 35(2), 2017

• Élisabeth Clementz, review in Revue d'Alsace 142 (2016): https://doi.org/10.4000/alsace.2457

• Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/dancing-plague-of-1518

• History.com: https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dancing-plague-of-1518

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518

Where sources disagree (number of dancers, deaths, dates), the narration says so.

IMAGES & FOOTAGE (Wikimedia Commons)

Public domain / CC0: Hendrik Hondius after Pieter Bruegel, "The Dancing Mania" (1642, Gothenburg Museum of Art); Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to Molenbeek (1564; plus a later copy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0); Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Dance at Molenbeek; Paracelsus after Quentin Matsys; Hans Burgkmair, Sebastian Brant; Albrecht Dürer, Ship of Fools woodcut (Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0); Das Narrenschiff (1549); Hans Holbein, Dance of Death (Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0); Théodore de Bry, Daniel Specklin; Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493); Braun & Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum; Abraham Hogenberg, Argentoratum (BnF Gallica); Janssonius, map of Alsace (1644); W. R. Shepherd, Holy Roman Empire maps; Dürer (attr.),

Attribution required (Creative Commons):

• "The dancing mania" (M0014846), Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0

• "Strasbourg Cathedral Exterior" by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0

• "Strasbourg Maison Kammerzell 06" by Ralph Hammann, CC BY-SA 4.0

• "Kashasha school" by Tanzania (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0

• "Musée de Saverne, Saint Ambroise, Vierge et Saint Vit" by Fab5669, CC BY-SA 3.0

• Video: "Strasbourg (Ville) (Alsace) (France) (Cathédrale) (2015) (4K Ultra HD)" by Siberbox 31, CC BY 3.0

• Video: "Lighting And Blowing Of A Candle (Slow Motion)" by Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0

Images and footage were cropped, color-graded and animated for this video.

Licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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