Sep 28, 2026 · 49 min · 17 segments
In the summer of 1518, one woman walked into a street in Strasbourg and started dancing. Days later, dozens of people were doing the same thing. Within weeks, chronicles claimed the number had reached…
This week we're going back more than 500 years to meet a woman who started dancing in the street and how that became everyone else's problem.
There are stories scattered throughout medieval European history that sound less like historical records and more like someone describing a nightmare after eating something questionable the night before.
The story accumulated religious and supernatural details as it was retold and retold again.
But it became one of the earliest stories associated with a phenomenon later known as dancing mania.
By the 1300s, though, we have much better evidence that something genuinely strange was happening.
In 1374, a wave of compulsive dancing appeared around the Rhine Valley, with outbreaks reported in places including Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and areas of the Low Countries.
Contemporary descriptions portray groups of men and women moving wildly for days, or sometimes just hours.
Sometimes they're crying out, experiencing visions, or eventually collapsing from exhaustion.
Historian John Waller has identified the outbreaks of 1374 and 1518 as the two best documented episodes of this phenomenon, and the 1374 event spread widely enough that it wasn't simply the story of one strange afternoon in one strange town.
Chorea comes from the Greek word associated with dance, and mania gives you the other half of that equation.
But the people experiencing these episodes obviously didn't have that vocabulary, and they didn't have the modern psychiatry or neurology to turn for an explanation.
Instead, depending on the place and the period, outbreaks could be understood through things like religion and medicine, supernatural punishment of these people, or some combination of all three.
Vitus was an early Christian martyr whose cult became popular in certain parts of Europe.
And over time, he became associated with people suffering from involuntary movement and compulsive dancing.
People experiencing these symptoms might travel to a shrine dedicated to Vitus and pray for relief.
So if you lived in the region around Strasbourg in early 1500s, the idea that Saint Vitus could have something to do with an uncontrollable dancing was already part of the cultural vocabulary around you.
In 1518, it was a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire, and the people living there had just endured a particularly ugly stretch of history.
This week we're going back more than 500 years to meet a woman who started dancing in the street and how that became everyone else's problem.
There are stories scattered throughout medieval European history that sound less like historical records and more like someone describing a nightmare after eating something questionable the night before.
The story accumulated religious and supernatural details as it was retold and retold again.
But it became one of the earliest stories associated with a phenomenon later known as dancing mania.
By the 1300s, though, we have much better evidence that something genuinely strange was happening.
In 1374, a wave of compulsive dancing appeared around the Rhine Valley, with outbreaks reported in places including Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and areas of the Low Countries.
Contemporary descriptions portray groups of men and women moving wildly for days, or sometimes just hours.
Sometimes they're crying out, experiencing visions, or eventually collapsing from exhaustion.
Historian John Waller has identified the outbreaks of 1374 and 1518 as the two best documented episodes of this phenomenon, and the 1374 event spread widely enough that it wasn't simply the story of one strange afternoon in one strange town.
Chorea comes from the Greek word associated with dance, and mania gives you the other half of that equation.
But the people experiencing these episodes obviously didn't have that vocabulary, and they didn't have the modern psychiatry or neurology to turn for an explanation.
Instead, depending on the place and the period, outbreaks could be understood through things like religion and medicine, supernatural punishment of these people, or some combination of all three.
Vitus was an early Christian martyr whose cult became popular in certain parts of Europe.
And over time, he became associated with people suffering from involuntary movement and compulsive dancing.
People experiencing these symptoms might travel to a shrine dedicated to Vitus and pray for relief.
So if you lived in the region around Strasbourg in early 1500s, the idea that Saint Vitus could have something to do with an uncontrollable dancing was already part of the cultural vocabulary around you.
In 1518, it was a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire, and the people living there had just endured a particularly ugly stretch of history.
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