Thursday, January 17, 2019

They really did dance all night …

… and all day — for days: The Dancing Plague of 1518 – The Public Domain Review. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

In full view of the public, this is the apogee of the choreomania that tormented Strasbourg for a midsummer month in 1518. Also known as the “dancing plague”, it was the most fatal and best documented of the more than ten such contagions which had broken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374. Numerous accounts of the bizarre events that unfolded that summer can be found scattered across various contemporary documents and chronicles compiled in the subsequent decades and centuries.

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