The 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague began with one woman dancing alone in an alley around 14 July. Approximately how many had joined her by the end of the month?
Frau Troffea's first name is unknown — only the family name survives, in a single brief marginal note in a contemporary Strasbourg chronicle. About 33 had joined within a week, about 400 within a month. Several died of exhaustion, heart failure, or stroke. The city council's first response was to encourage the dancing (hiring musicians, building stages) — which made the outbreak worse. The August reversal — transporting dancers to the Saint Vitus shrine at Saverne — substantially ended it. Modern epidemiology reads the episode as mass psychogenic illness.
Read the full story →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.
Related questions
- After the Strasbourg city council's first chosen treatment for the 1518 dancing plague (hire musicians, build stages, encourage the dancing) had visibly failed, they tried a second approach. What was it?
- Who began the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague?
- In Strasbourg in July 1518 a woman called Frau Troffea danced in the street and could not stop. Within a month several hundred others had joined her; some died of it. The city council's first official treatment, on the advice of the physicians' guild, was?
- Medieval European sufferers of involuntary collective dancing afflictions (the 'dancing plague') made pilgrimage to which saint's principal shrine — the Saxon abbey on the upper Weser?