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Frau Troffea

4 stories mention Frau Troffea on DeadlyCurious.

The Footnote June 26, 2026 · Strasbourg

The Strasbourg Housewife Whose Solo Dancing in July 1518 Started a Plague That Pulled in Four Hundred Others

Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg alley around 14 July 1518 and began dancing alone, silently, for no announced reason. She did not stop. Within a week thirty others had joined her. Within a month approximately four hundred people were dancing involuntarily through the city. Several died. She is the index case of the most-documented dancing plague in European history.

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The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Corvey Abbey, Westphalia

The Saxon Abbey That Housed the Relics That Drew the Dancing Pilgrims From Aachen and Strasbourg

Saint Vitus was a 4th-century Sicilian Christian martyr whose relics were translated to the Saxon abbey of Corvey on the upper Weser in 836 AD. The Corvey shrine became the principal medieval European pilgrimage site for sufferers of involuntary collective dancing afflictions — including the Aachen mania of 1374 and the Strasbourg plague of 1518.

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The Cabinet June 23, 2026 · Strasbourg, Alsace (modern France)

The Medical Diagnosis That Connects the Strasbourg Dancers and a Tanganyikan Boarding School

Mass psychogenic illness — the modern medical term for what older eras called collective madness — has been documented continuously across Europe and the rest of the world for at least seven hundred years. The clinical pattern is the same. The cultural framing changes.

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The Footnote June 5, 2026 · Strasbourg, Alsace (then Holy Roman Empire)

The Summer Strasbourg Could Not Stop Dancing

In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.

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