Why did hundreds of people dance non-stop for weeks in Strasbourg in 1518?
One July morning, Frau Troffea started shimmying in a Strasbourg street—and couldn’t stop. Within days dozens joined her; by August, perhaps 400 people were stuck in a trance-like boogie, their feet bleeding through wooden clogs. City councillors, believing music might “dance out” the fever, hired pipe-bands to play on—only fanning the flames.
Eyewitnesses reported dancers collapsing from strokes and heart attacks. Medieval doctors blamed “hot blood,” priests blamed sin, and modern scholars debate mass hysteria, ergot-poisoned rye, or collective trauma after famine and war. Whatever the trigger, for six surreal weeks a respectable Free Imperial City resembled a Renaissance rave.
The episode still fascinates epidemiologists and psychologists: it’s an early case study in how stress, belief and environment can hijack entire communities—proof that sometimes history’s strangest outbreaks don’t involve viruses at all.
