A place

Strasbourg

11 stories from this place.

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 · Cologne Cathedral

The Cologne Archbishop Who Stood Aside and Let the Mob Kill His City's Jewish Community in 1349

Walram von Jülich, Archbishop of Cologne from 1332 to 1349, was the senior Catholic ecclesiastical authority for the entire lower Rhineland during the Black Death. He had personal authority sufficient to prevent the 1349 anti-Jewish massacres in his archdiocese. He chose not to use it.

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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 Footnote June 24, 2026 · Regensburg, Bavaria

The German Cleric Who Wrote a Medical Defence of the Jews During the Black Death Pogroms

Konrad of Megenberg was a Regensburg canon and natural-philosophy writer who composed a tract in 1350 explicitly refuting the claim that Jews had caused the Black Death by poisoning wells. He used Aristotelian-medical argument against the popular conspiracy theory that had been justifying the Rhineland pogroms.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Regensburg, Bavaria

The 14th-Century German Cleric Who Argued the Black Death Was Not the Jews' Fault

Konrad of Megenberg was a Bavarian cleric and natural philosopher who wrote a Latin treatise during the 1349 Black Death arguing on medical and theological grounds that the well-poisoning accusations against European Jews were factually false. The treatise circulated in fewer than two dozen manuscript copies and had substantially no documented effect on the simultaneous massacres.

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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 23, 2026 · Tokyo, Japan

The 685 Japanese Children Who Were Hospitalised in One Evening by a Pokémon Episode

On the evening of 16 December 1997, approximately 685 Japanese children were hospitalised after watching an episode of the *Pokémon* television series. Most of them did not have photosensitive epilepsy. They had mass psychogenic illness propagated entirely through broadcast television — the first time the disease had ever spread that way.

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The Coroner’s Report June 11, 2026 · Old Jewish quarter, Cologne, Holy Roman Empire (modern Germany)

The Night Cologne Killed Its Jewish Quarter

Cologne's Jewish community had stood since the fourth century. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, August 1349, a mob ended it in a few hours.

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The Coroner’s Report June 9, 2026 · Jewish cemetery, Strasbourg, Holy Roman Empire (modern France)

The Strasbourg Pogrom of Saint Valentine's Day, 1349

Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.

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The Footnote June 8, 2026 · Cologne, Holy Roman Empire (modern Germany)

The Men Who Whipped Themselves Across Europe

In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.

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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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