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Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

Hello and welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries.

I'm Rob Atar, the editor of BBC History magazine.

This is the final episode of this series, and it focuses on one of the most perplexing events from medieval Europe.

On several occasions from the 14th to 16th centuries, groups of people, for no obvious reason,

began to dance in an uncontrollable fashion. These dancing plagues could last for weeks on end and even led to the deaths of the exhausted participants.

To explore what might have caused this unusual behaviour, I spoke to the medieval historian, author and podcaster, Helen Carr.

So Helen, where and when was the first recorded instance of this medieval dancing plague?

So the first time this appears, to my knowledge, is around 1360 to the middle of the 14th century

in Lausitz, which is a historic area between Germany and Poland. And in this case, it was largely

women and girls that were described to be behaving strangely.

They were described to be flailing and dancing and throwing themselves around and sort of acting inappropriately.

And it was really every few years from thereafter and even a century after that, that these episodes kept reappearing.

And were they reappearing in the same place or were they happening throughout Europe?

Yeah, they were appearing roughly in the same place. The next one, which we have the most

information about in 1374, was in the Rhine and Arkin, which is, again, is Germany.

And again, in then 1518, it was in Strasbourg, another episode in the Rhine as well in the 1400s.

So it really does seem to be within the Germany region that they kept appearing.

And to my knowledge, I've not found anything that has

attributed any of these plagues in England or the British Charles or anywhere at all like that.

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