Dancing Manias and the Convent Outbreaks
Strasbourg 1518, Loudun 1634, and mass psychogenic illness.
In the Texts
The manuals know of whole houses and whole convents possessed at once: Menghi reports them, and the great cases of the century after Canale, the Ursulines of Loudun in 1634 and the nuns of Louviers, were exorcised in public before crowds. Behind them lie the dancing plagues of the Rhineland, at Aachen in 1374 and Strasbourg in 1518, when hundreds danced for days, and the tarantati of Apulia who danced out the spider’s bite each summer.
What Medicine Makes of It
Robert Bartholomew and others read these as mass psychogenic illness: the spread of symptoms through a group by sight and expectation, under strain, with no toxin or germ, which still occurs in schools and factories and in 2011 among the girls of Le Roy, New York. The convent outbreaks have the features the literature predicts: enclosed young women under severe rule, a first case of high standing, an audience, and an authority that confirmed the diagnosis by exorcising it. Ernesto de Martino’s study of the tarantati in 1959 found a ritual cure that worked for an affliction that was never a bite. The ergot hypothesis for Strasbourg is discussed in the reading on the witch trials.
The Evidence
- Bartholomew and Wessely’s review (2002) of two hundred years of outbreaks found two types: the anxiety type, with sudden onset after a perceived threat, resolving in a day; and the motor type, with convulsions, laughing, and trances, spreading over weeks in enclosed groups under strict discipline, which is the convent pattern.
- Waller’s study of Strasbourg 1518 (2008) sets the dancing plague in a year of famine, syphilis, and the fear of Saint Vitus, whose curse was dancing, and finds the city authorities made it worse by hiring musicians.
- The Le Roy, New York, outbreak of 2011–12, eighteen girls with tics in one school, was diagnosed as conversion disorder spread by social media (Dominus, 2012).
- De Martino’s fieldwork in Salento in 1959 recorded 21 cases of tarantism in one summer; none had a confirmed bite, nearly all were women in distress, and the music and dance cured for a year.
- Loudun’s prioress, Jeanne des Anges, after her exorcisms became a celebrated mystic, toured France showing the sacred names that had appeared on her hand, and wrote an autobiography that Charcot’s school republished as a case of hysteria (1886).
Where They Part
The manuals explain the spread by the demon’s malice and the clinic by contagion of expectation; both saw that the outbreaks ended when the public exorcisms stopped, which Loudun’s did, and the manuals’ own warnings against curiosity and crowds were sound epidemiology.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Bartholomew, R. E., and Wessely, S. (2002). “Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness.” British Journal of Psychiatry 180.
- Waller, J. (2008). A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. Icon.
- de Martino, E. (1961). La terra del rimorso. Il Saggiatore.
- Certeau, M. de (1970). La possession de Loudun. Julliard.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.