Strasbourg in 1518 was a free city of the Empire. Several chronicles put a dancing sickness in the streets that summer, in a hot year after failed harvests. They do not tell it in one order.

A family chronicle under the name Imlin starts it on 14 July. A woman began to dance and kept on for six days. The council then had her taken to the chapel of St Vitus near Zabern, the town now called Saverne, and there, the chronicle says, she was cured. After that, others began. Thirty-four men and women were in it within four days. Drummers and pipers were forbidden to play. Some of the dancers were taken to the guild halls. At the end they were taken together to St Vitus. In spite of that, the same chronicle says, more than four hundred people were afflicted within four weeks. Four of the six chronicle accounts name the first woman Frau Troffea.

Sebastian Brant was secretary to the council from 1503 until his death in 1521. A later compiler, Jacques Wencker, worked from Brant’s notes and from council papers that have since been lost. That compilation, headed as a marvelous cure for St Vitus’s dance, starts the outbreak on 22 July, not the 14th. It says the people sent to the shrine were given small crosses and red shoes, with crosses drawn in consecrated oil on the uppers and the soles, and the shoes sprinkled with holy water in the name of St Vitus. It also records a ban on music, and a decree of 10 August that each person look to his own household, that the guilds examine their members, and that those who were ailing be sent to St Vitus. When women and boys afterward did what it calls the evil dance, people were told to play for them at home. The city later sent sufferers to the hospitals as well, and still sent others to the chapel.

A note in Brant’s own hand, dated 3 August 1518, is the piece that does not depend on a later copy. The council forbade anyone, whoever they were, to hold a dance until 29 September, in the city, the suburbs, or the whole jurisdiction, on pain of a fine of thirty shillings. The reason written down is that by dancing they take away the recovery of the sick. The bishop’s vicar, asked for a mass because some of the dancers had requested one, said a mass seemed unnecessary: the physicians had declared it a natural sickness, and natural means should be tried.

Another chronicle, Daniel Specklin’s, has a different civic measure. Arrangements were made for them to dance in two marketplaces, and people were paid to dance with them to drums and pipes. Specklin says this did no good, and that many danced themselves to death. He does not give a number. No surviving ordinance counts deaths by the day, or names heart attacks and strokes. A poem copied from a Strasbourg chronicle, the manuscript now lost, says many hundreds danced and hopped, women and men, in the market, the alleys, and the streets, day and night, and that many of them ate nothing until the sickness left them. It calls the affliction St Vitus’s dance.

One later chronicle of the council’s turn to the shrine, under the name Schiltern, says that when they were sent to the chapel they were split into three groups, each with guardians appointed for the purpose. A mass was held for each group. The sufferers were led round the altar and made a small offering. They were taken out to Zabern in wagons with three horses, at the city’s expense.

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, wrote about the outbreak in the 1520s and 1530s. He was not in the street in July 1518. He would not grant that St Vitus sends the disease, and he split later cases among sin, the blood, and the imagination. That is his medicine after the fact. What the summer itself leaves on paper is a woman dancing for days, then dozens, then a chronicle figure of more than four hundred, a secretary’s ban on dances so the sick might recover, a shrine at Zabern with crosses and red shoes, and one chronicle that says the paid dancing in the markets ended in deaths it does not count.