Dancing Mania

Rethinking the dancing mania, through research it showed that the people with this mania where not really crazy. It shows that they were affected by something. Their urges to just up and dance was not really spontaneous because they felt a sting of some sort which then made them run out into the street and start dancing, their were also chronicles that revealed that there pilgrims who did some of those acts as described in tarantism this act in 1374 also attracted locals to the pilgrims worship they clapped there hands jumped and leaped worshiping St John the Baptist.. When they ran out into to the streets to dance the other people who also had this mania ran out in the streets and dance with them, Ones who were bitten in the previous years and ones whom were just recently bitten these episodes of dancing usually happened in the hot dry summers, months July and August. This act usually lasted for hours and even days. This mania first showed up thirteenth century and just continued on spreading on in Southern Europe. Very interesting some psychological claims made were that women were mostly affected by this tarantism (Sigerist 1943, 218; Rosen 1968, 204). Men and women were equally affected by the tarantism also.

Their clear cases that most of the manias were not cause by a spider bite, but some were bitten by the tarantula spider. Some of the symptoms included headache, giddiness, breathlessness, fainting, trembling, twitching, appetite loss, general soreness, and delusions. The cures that could be used or to deplete the poison out the blood was to dance to certain types of music. There were those people whom thought the cause of there tarantism came from other people or brushing up against the spider basically contagious.

My belief in this whole mania is that it is fiction because it does not make sense how a spider or even brushing up against a spider can cause a person to just start dancing to a certain type of music. This then would suggest