Some may have simulated the behaviour of the demoniac as a means of eliciting positive attention (Walker, 1981), but the detailed descriptions of astute and cautious inquisitors leave little doubt that most were genuinely entranced. The hundreds of possessed nuns described in chronicles, legal records, theological texts or the archives of the Catholic Inquisition were equally subject to dissociative trance (Newman, 1998 Rosen, 1968). One noted that while ‘they danced their minds were no longer clear’ and another spoke of how, having wearied themselves through dancing and jumping, they went ‘raging like beasts over the land’ (Backman, 1952). Onlookers spoke of the dancing maniacs of 1374 as wild, frenzied and seeing visions. But we also have eyewitness evidence that they were not fully conscious. It is hard to imagine people dancing for several days, with bruised and bloodied feet, except in an altered state of consciousness. In recent decades a vogue for simple biological explanations has inspired the view that epidemic madnesses of the past were caused by the ingestion of ergot, a mould containing psychotropic chemicals (Backman, 1952 Matossian, 1989).īut scholarship in the fields of psychology, history and anthropology provides compelling evidence that the dancing plagues and the possession epidemics of Europe’s nunneries were in fact classic instances of a very different phenomenon: mass psychogenic illness.Īn important clue to the cause of these bizarre outbreaks lies in the fact that they appear to have involved dissociative trance, a condition involving (among other things) a dramatic loss of self-control. Nor did the Church, at a time when heresies were quickly suppressed, believe the dancers to be anything but victims of a terrible affliction, natural or divine. Contemporary observers, however, made clear their view that the dancing was a sickness. It has been suggested that the dancing maniacs of 13 were members of a heretical dancing cult. Writers then and now have offered various interpretations of these strange and sometimes deadly crises. Similarly, trial documents and the archives of the inquisition provide copious, in-depth accounts of nuns doing and saying the strangest of things (Sluhovsky, 2002). The dancing plagues were independently described by scores of physicians, chroniclers, monks and priests, and for the 1518 outbreak we can even read the panicky municipal orders written by the Strasbourg authorities at the time of the epidemic (Midelfort, 1999 Waller, 2008). These events may sound wildly improbable, but there is clear documentary evidence that they did in fact happen. Over the next 200 years, in nunneries everywhere from Rome to Paris, hundreds were plunged into states of frantic delirium during which they foamed, screamed and convulsed, sexually propositioned exorcists and priests, and confessed to having carnal relations with devils or Christ. Such possession epidemics were by no means confined to nunneries, but nuns were disproportionately affected (Newman, 1998). In 1491 several nuns were ‘possessed’ by devilish familiars which impelled them to race around like dogs, jump out of trees in imitation of birds or miaow and claw their way up tree trunks in the manner of cats. Not long before the Strasbourg dancing epidemic, an equally strange compulsion had gripped a nunnery in the Spanish Netherlands. Chronicles indicate that it then consumed about 400 men, women and children, causing dozens of deaths (Waller, 2008). Then it reappeared, explosively, in the city of Strasbourg in 1518. In the following century there were only a few isolated outbreaks of compulsive dancing. Within weeks the mania had engulfed large areas of north-eastern France and the Netherlands, and only after several months did the epidemic subside. They were victims of one of the strangest afflictions in Western history. Scarcely pausing to rest or eat, they danced for hours or even days in succession. In dozens of medieval towns scattered along the valley of the River Rhine hundreds of people were seized by an agonising compulsion to dance.
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