Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St John’s Dance and, historically, St. Vitus’ Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. The outbreaks of dancing mania varied, and several characteristics of it have been recorded. Generally occurring in times of hardship, up to tens of thousands of people would appear to dance for hours, days, weeks, and even months.

Robert Bartholomew notes that some “paraded around naked” and made “obscene gestures”.[1] Some even had sexual intercourse. Others acted like animals, and jumped, hopped and leaped about. They hardly stopped, and some danced until they broke their ribs and subsequently died. Throughout, dancers screamed, laughed, or cried, and some sang. Bartholomew also notes that observers of dancing mania were sometimes treated violently if they refused to join in. Participants demonstrated odd reactions to the color red; in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Erik Midelfort notes they “could not perceive the color red at all”, and Bartholomew reports “it was said that dancers could not stand… the color red, often becoming violent on seeing [it]”.[2]

Bartholomew also notes that dancers “could not stand pointed shoes”, and that dancers enjoyed their feet being hit. There are at least three drawings after a lost original painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with three groups of figures in a single composition, in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna. This print is part of a series of three plates showing the annual pilgrimage of epileptics to the church of St. John at Molenbeeck, outside Brussels.

Hendrik Hondius is an engraver and publisher in The Hague. He established his own business in 1597 and trying to find the most beneficial location for his business he moved to the port city of Amsterdam around 1603, and then to Leiden in 1604. In his last phase of his career, from around 1640 to his death in 1650, Hondius once again took a more active role in the publishing business.

[1] Robert Bartholomew, Little green men, meowing nuns, and head-hunting panics, 2001, pp. 132-136

[2] Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, 2000, pp. 32-39