How Medieval People Tried to Dance Away the Plague

By Sarah Durn on 01 May 2020 at 1:00AM

It was a warm June day in 1374 in the medieval town of Aix-La-Chapelle, present-day Aachen, Germany, when the dancing started. It was the holy feast of St. John the Baptist, which aligns with the pagan celebration of Midsummer during the summer solstice. Traditionally, St. John’s Day was a day of rest and worship for the quiet town of Aachen.

This was not to be the case in 1374. It began with a small group, maybe a dozen or so people. All at once, they began to flail their limbs. Some screamed or hooted. Others moved about as if in a trance.

More and more townspeople joined in the erratic dance. Serfs, nobles, men, women, old and young dashall took part in the “dancing plague” of Aachen. Some took up instruments like the stringed vielle, pipes or drums. As sociologist Robert Bartholomew notes, the afflicted sometimes even employed musicians to play. Other times music was played in the hopes of curing victims from their dancing hell. As Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker describes in his book, The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the victims would take hands forming giant undulating circles, spinning round and round in ever-quickening loops. They’d yell, calling out to God or Satan or both. Their movements were haphazard, even epileptic. For hours and hours, the townspeople danced without rest or food or water.

Then, when the sky finally darkened, they dispersed or collapsed. As Historian H. C. Erik Midelfort notes in his book, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, some never would rise again – dying from broken ribs or heart attacks. But, when the sun shined the next day, they took up their dance again. The dancing mania continued for several weeks.

Then, all at once, the dancing plague disappeared from Aachen. People returned to their homes, to their lives. Until, that is, the dancing plague spread to towns beyond Aachen, like that of Liege and Tongres in Belgium, to Utrecht in the Netherlands, to Strasbourg and Cologne in Germany. All along the Rhine, the dancing plague tormented unsuspecting townsfolk.

More:
https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2020/05/how-medieval-people-tried-to-dance-away-the-plague/