story 006 · culture · strasbourg, 1518
in 1518, a city hired a band to cure a dancing plague.
the short, written out
in 1518, a city hired a band to cure a plague. the plague was… dancing.
it began in july, in strasbourg, with one woman dancing alone in the street. she kept going for days.
within a week, more than thirty people had joined her. within a month, as many as four hundred.
doctors blamed hot blood. the cure, they said, was to dance it out. so the city opened its guild halls, and hired pipers and drummers to keep them going.
it only spread.
so they banned music, and sent the dancers to a saint’s shrine in the hills, in red shoes.
by september, it was over. legend says people danced to death. the city’s own records don’t mention a single death.
historians think it was fear: a hungry city that believed a saint could curse you to dance.
the print that goes with it
blue figures
one figure pulling the other up by the hand, flat silhouette, azure blue on hot pink
no. 430 · 12″×18″ to 24″×36″ · from $38.40 · see the print
sources
- wikipedia, dancing plague of 1518 and dancing mania
- john waller, a time to dance, a time to die (2008) and “a forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania” (the lancet, 2009)
- ned pennant-rea, “the dancing plague of 1518” (the public domain review, 2018)
- national geographic (2025)
pictures
- albrecht dürer, the bagpiper and peasant couple dancing (1514, national gallery of art)
- strasbourg in the nuremberg chronicle (1493)
- hendrick hondius after pieter bruegel, the dancers of molenbeek (1642, rijksmuseum)
- jacques callot, saint vitus (c. 1635, rijksmuseum)
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
