The Invention of Dancing Mania

Abstract

Medieval ‘dancing mania’ has until recently remained an enigma in medical and religious history. This is because scholars tend to view it as an invariable medical syndrome instead of examining it as an example of the historicity of illness as semantic network. Taking the latter approach allows for grasping the phenomenon as a form of insanity specific to the Rhine basin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though one whose roots can be traced to the early medieval reception of platonic cosmology and ‘theurgy’. This paper examines the legend of the Kölbigk dancers in the above perspective and establishes that its chief motif goes back to Sulpicius Severus’ reception of ‘Iamblichus’ ‘de mysteriis’. Thus, dancing mania appears to have been a form of insanity, indeed, but one constructed through religious narratives.