Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Church leaders tolerated, though with considerable uneasiness, the festive behavior they drove from churches. Complete repression was probably impossible and certainly unwise, since suppressed ecstatic desires could always find alternative sites for expression in the heretical, millenarian movements that sprang up again and again to bedevil the Church. In the thirteenth century, when carnival-like activities so decisively expand, the Church was facing its gravest challenges since the time of the Roman Empire. Heretical movements swept Germany, southern France, and northern Spain, threatening to splinter the Church into rival sects. So great was the danger that in 1233 Pope Gregory IX established a permanent institution for the suppression of heresy—the papal Inquisition—which was made all the more effective when, twenty-nine years later, it adopted torture as one of its tools of interrogation.

  At roughly the same time as the institution of the Inquisition, though in a less centralized fashion, Church authorities applied themselves to making Catholicism more emotionally and sensually engaging, as if to compete with the festive alternatives. Church buildings were beautified or at least physically embellished; there was a proliferation of special prayers, relics (typically, the alleged bones and other remains of saints), and indulgences. Along with the improved production values, there were new special effects, like the addition of incense to the mass. As the ecclesiastical rites grew more complex, they, in turn, encouraged the development of ecclesiastical dramas in which liturgy was expanded into narrative. New holidays were added, like the feast of Corpus Christi, adopted in the mid-thirteenth century at the urging of the order of laywomen known as Beguines. All in all, Christianity became busier, more demanding, and, especially in the larger towns, gaudier.

  The solution represented by externalizing festivities suited both the repressive impulses of the Church and its desire to be more accessible to laypeople who might otherwise be tempted by competing religious sects. Purged of disorderly behavior, church property could be devoted to rites whose solemnity was in keeping with the vast and intricate hierarchy the Church had become. At the same time, the people could have their fun—though only at times designated by the Church calendar, outside of church and churchyard, for limited periods, under of the aegis of the Church, and surrounded by the trappings and symbols of the Christian religion.

  The War on Dance

  In the centuries leading up to this compromise, the activity that most vexed Church leaders, or at least the more puritanical among them, was dancing. Just as in ancient times, the perpetrators were often female—at least it was women’s dancing that brought down some of the angriest condemnations. In the ninth century, bishops meeting at the Council of Rome complained that women were coming to church only to “sing shameless songs and perform choir dances.” According to the medieval historian E. K. Chambers: “Upon great feasts and wake-days, choruses of women invaded with wanton cantica and ballationes the precincts of the churches and even the sacred buildings themselves, a desecration against which generation after generation of ecclesiastical authorities was fain to protest.”4

  One clerical tactic was to warn of dire supernatural punishments. There was a legend—or, perhaps, as we might now say, an urban myth—of how the people of Kolbigk had persisted in dancing while the priest said mass on Christmas day and, as a result, were condemned to dance year-round without a break, causing most of them to die of exhaustion. In other minatory tales, dancers are carried away by the devil, struck by lightning, or surprised to discover that the musician to whose music they have been dancing is none other than the devil himself. Traditional “death watches,” in which the mourners danced the night away in the church’s graveyard, presented another opportunity for the devil to snatch up an errant soul.

  In fact, Satan, the purported leader of the illicit dance, resembles no one so much as Dionysus, who, like his manifestation as Pan, was sometimes portrayed with horns and tail, and his companion satyrs. As Steven Lonsdale writes:

  Like the satyr, the Devil is a rakishly handsome man with at least one cloven hoof, a long tail, horns or goat’s ears. Both are master musicians—the satyr plays the lyre or pipes, the Devil the violin. Both scamper in dance-like movements of the goat, performing caprioles. In theatrical embodiment Satan and the satyr again coincide. The Devil, dressed in a furry skin, not unlike the satyrs, performed wild antics, pantomimes and dances akin to those enacted by the chorus in the Greek satyr play. The dramatic effect was one and the same.5

  By the thirteenth century, the condemnations of dancing had grown in volume and intensity. The Lateran Council of 1215 instituted a new means of social control—the requirement of an annual confession of one’s sins to a priest—and one of the sins was dancing, and certainly dancing of the “lascivious” sort. “Immoderate” or “lascivious” dancing was again listed as a confessable sin in an important summa, or directory of sins, promulgated in 1317. For the most part, though, the Church aimed its condemnations not at dancing in general but at dancing within churches or their immediate physical environs. E. Louis Backman, a historian of dance in the Christian Church, reports:

  Shortly before 1208 the Bishop of Paris forbade dancing in churches, churchyards, and processions … In 1206 the Synod of Cahors threatened with excommunication those who danced inside or in front of churches … The Council of Trier in 1227 forbade three-step and ring-dances and other worldly games in churchyards and churches … A council of Buda, in Hungary, in 1279 exhorted the priests to prevent dancing in churchyards and churches … In Liege it was only dances in churches, porches and churchyards that were forbidden … The Council of Würzburg in 1298 attacked these dances expressly, threatening heavy punishment and describing them as grievous sin.6

  In their condemnations, Church officials sometimes described dancing—meaning especially dancing in churches or their vicinities—as a pagan custom, and this is how many medievalists have interpreted it too: Christian churches were often intentionally erected on the sites of preexisting pagan temples, so it was within them that people naturally sought to reenact their ancient rites. Thus the war on dance could be interpreted as a continuation of the Church’s war on pre-Christian folk traditions. But European pre-Christian traditions must have been extremely diverse—how did so many of them manage to culminate in an apparently widespread and uniform habit of dancing in churches? And if the lay public was so bent on performing its “pagan” dances, why not avoid ecclesiastical censure by doing so on secular turf?

  The most likely explanation is that, despite the volume and duration of official condemnations, church dancing was in fact a long-standing Christian custom. We have already seen the evidence for liturgical dancing in the early Church, and there is far sturdier evidence of dancing within or around medieval churches. For example, a twelfth-century traveler in Wales described ecstatic dancing on St. Eluned’s Day:

  You can see young men and maidens, some in the church itself, some in the churchyard and others in the dance which wends its way round the graves. They sing traditional songs, all of a sudden they collapse on the ground, and then those who, until now, have followed their leader peacefully as if in a trance, leap up in the air as if seized by frenzy.7

  In fact, there is ample evidence that priests themselves joined in or even led medieval church dancing. In the twelfth century, the rector of the University of Paris related that there were some churches in which bishops and even archbishops on certain occasions played games with their parishioners and danced openly. In other places, we learn that it was customary for deacons to dance on St. Stephen’s Day, priests on St. John’s Day, and choirboys on Innocents’ Day.8 In Limoges, the priests performed an annual ringdance in the choir of the church. In some bishoprics, a new priest was expected to enliven his first mass by performing a sacral dance.9 According to the medievalist Penelope Doob, the custom of dancing in churches was firmly enough engrained to be inscribed into the very architecture of medieval Catholicism. She offers evidence that labyrinths built into the pavements of c
hurch naves—a common feature of twelfth- and thirteenth-century French and Italian church architecture—were designed to serve as aids to a winding, circular dance performed by priests at Easter: “Labyrinth and dance together … constitute a celebratory dance performed by religious [i.e., priests and nuns] … a dance that incidentally imitates and invokes cosmic order and eternal bliss.”10

  Were there perhaps very different kinds of dances going on in the churches—decorous ones performed by clerics versus “indecent” ones indulged in by the laity? Possibly, but there is reason to believe that the clerics themselves were not always sober and restrained. Church discipline over its own priests was weak and unreliable; many lived openly with their mistresses, few were thoroughly literate in the official Church language, Latin. Priests were sometimes criticized not only for dancing in cathedrals but for certain unseemly activities involving choirboys and women that often accompanied it. Until late in the fourteenth century, newly inducted monks and nuns danced when they took their vows—an activity that was finally prohibited on account of the “wild behaviour” that ensued. So it is not really possible, Backman admitted, to clearly distinguish medieval “sacred” and “popular” forms of dancing.

  But if dancing in churches was a venerable Christian tradition, why did so many powerful elements in the Church oppose it, or come to oppose it, in the thirteenth century? One motivation was probably a fear of the disorder that could be unleashed if whole congregations were moved to get up and engage in vigorous motion. When Church authorities in Wells, in England, banned dances and games from their cathedral in 1338, they cited the damage to church property, which suggests that dancing within churches was not a reliably decorous affair. And there was good reason for the Church to be fearful of the laity, especially its low-income majority: Christian doctrine upheld the virtues of poverty, but the late medieval Church had itself become a huge concentration of wealth, in the form of farmlands, monasteries and convents, as well as the visible luxury enjoyed by ecclesiastical higher-ups. Better, given this inherent paradox in medieval Christianity, for the laity to be kept as immobile as possible, at least in church.

  Furthermore, the Church was determined to maintain its monopoly over human access to the divine. If religious dancing became ecstatic dancing—and the stories of dancers being “possessed” by the devil suggest that it sometimes may have—then ordinary people might get the idea that they could approach the deity on their own (as did, for example, the ancient worshippers of Dionysus) without the mediation of Catholic officialdom. Certainly the Church has a long history of suppressing enthusiasm, in the ancient Greek sense of being filled with, or possessed by, the deity. Consider the Church’s vacillating attitude toward the flagellation fad that swept through the Italian and German lower classes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At first Church officials encouraged self-flagellation as a form of public penance, but as the movement grew it took on ecstatic—and often anticlerical—overtones. The flagellants moved in large groups from town to town, beating themselves in a rhythm set by religious songs sung, daringly enough, in the vernacular, and perhaps achieving—if only as an escape from the physical pain—altered states of consciousness. In 1349, a papal bull outlawed the flagellant movement, which had achieved the size and militancy of an insurrection.11

  The most flamboyant form of what might be called “ecstatic dissent,” however, was the dance manias that rocked parts of northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and Italy a century later. The first outbreak sounds like another cautionary tale about the perils of dancing: In Utrecht in the summer of 1278, two hundred people started dancing on the bridge over the Mosel and would not stop until it collapsed, at which point all the dancers drowned.12 A hundred years later, in the wake of the Black Death, a much larger outbreak of dance mania again struck Germany and spilled out into Belgium: “Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, house-wives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels.” Arriving in Aix-la-Chapelle (now the German town of Aachen), “they formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the by-standers, for hours together in wild delirium, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion.”13 We have, unfortunately, no testimonies from the dancers themselves, but contemporary observers saw them in a condition ethnographers would now describe as a possession trance.

  While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions [with the exception, one might guess, of the music they danced to] … but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out … Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary.14

  Hence the Church authorities’ worry that the “manias” represented a new form of heresy: Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople’s finding their own way into the presence of the gods.

  The dance manias of the late Middle Ages have fascinated scholars ever since, most of whom have inclined toward medical explanations of this baffling and sometimes self-destructive behavior. J. C. Hecker, the nineteenth-century physician who chronicled the dancing manias, proposed that the dancers were inspired by some “inward morbid condition which was transferred from the sensorium to the nerves of motion,”15 and the search for an exact physical diagnosis has continued into the present time. A 1997 article, for example, describes the “Dancing Plague” as “a public health conundrum,” the “etiology” of which remains a mystery.16 In Italy, the dancing manias that broke out in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries were often blamed on the bite of the tarantula, although the same kind of dance (called the tarantella, after the spider) was also believed to prevent the spider’s bite and subsequent illness. Another favorite explanation is ergot poisoning caused by a fungus that grew on rye, a common grain in the German sites of dancing mania. But rye does not grow in Italy, nor do tarantulas menace Germans, and neither of these suspected agents of the “plague”—ergot or spider poison—has since been found to induce anything resembling dancing mania.

  There is another reason to rule out any form of toxin, whether ingested by or injected into the “victims” of dancing mania: The manias were contagious and could be spread by visual contact alone. Bystanders might first watch in amazement and then, overcome by the music provided by the bands of musicians who traveled with the dancers, find themselves swept up by the dance as well. As Hecker, still clinging to a disease model, put it, “Inquisitive females [in Italy] joined the throng and caught the disease, not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from the mental poison which they eagerly received through the eye.”17 At one point, eleven hundred people danced simultaneously in the city of Metz, utterly resistant to the priests’ attempts to exorcise whatever demons were driving them. All this is reminiscent of the Dionysian revels described by Euripides: a contagious mania, pulling people away from their normal occupations, and indifferent to the disapproval of authorities. But in the medieval dancing manias, we can also discern faint political overtones, perhaps even a half-conscious form of dissent. It was the poor who were most likely to be stricken, and they often experienced their affliction as a cure for what Hecker describes as “a distressing uneasiness,” marked by dejection and anxiety, or what we would now call depression. Moreover, the dancers often turned violently against the priests who tried to drive out the demons: “The possessed assembling in multitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them, and menaced their destruction.”18

  In at least one place—Italy—a public festivity seems to have been created as a way of institutionalizing and hence, to a degree, controlling dance manias. There, as Hecker reports, the mania associated with the tarantella “gradually became established as a regular festival of the populace, which was anticipated with impatient delight.”19 In other parts of Europe, the dance manias no doubt underscored to Church authorities that people, especially
people hard-pressed by poverty and terrorized by plague, were going to seek relief in ecstatic rites, whether these rites were sanctioned by the Church or not. Having such rites take place inside churches was, as we have just seen, a decreasingly attractive option. Catholicism refused to embrace the kinds of ecstatic behavior that were the hallmark of so many ancient and indigenous religions; it could only tolerate them as a kind of sideshow.

  Carnival Comes Together

  Carnival, of course, involves much more than dancing. All sorts of things, ranging from the staid and pious to the thoroughly riotous, went on at a late medieval festival. The Church’s direct contribution to the entertainment included a special mass and often a procession through town, which might be a huge affair including the local secular authorities (nobles and town council members) as well as contingents from the different guilds (tanners, coopers, plasterers, hosiers, butchers, and so forth). In addition, the Church might encourage or at least approve performances of dramas on religious themes, starring local people, like the German passion plays that have survived, in a few cases, right up to the present.

  But the spectacles offered or sanctioned by the Church were probably the least of the attractions; laypeople creatively enriched the holiday experience with their own, often less edifying, rituals. In addition to the obligatory feasting, drinking, and dancing, there would be games and sports (bowling, handball, archery contests, darts, wrestling) as well as ritual forms of cruelty to animals, possibly rooted in ancient traditions of animal sacrifice (bear baiting, for example). More striking, from a modern point of view, were the ritual activities aimed at dissolving the normal social boundaries of class and gender. There would very likely be ribald humor enacted by a man dressed up as a “king of fools” or “lord of misrule” and aimed at mocking real kings and other authorities. People costumed as nuns and priests might engage in obscene parodies. As in some ancient Dionysian rites, cross-dressing was routine. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis reports that