Dark and Deepest Red(75)

The dancing plague of 1518 is far from the only one in historical record. It’s not even the only one that happened in Alsace. But it was one of the largest, affecting hundreds, and, thanks to both contemporaneous accounts and the invention of the printing press, one of the best documented. This novel is a work of fiction, drawing on the accounts of several dancing plagues in the region during the Middle Ages. But the occurrence in Strasbourg in 1518 always was, and remains, the central inspiration for the story, and the guiding framework for its historical reference points.

I came to Strasbourg for three reasons: to research the parts of the book I hadn’t yet written, to fact-check the ones I had, and to learn what today’s Strasbourgeois think of la fièvre de la danse.

The answer to the last one turns out to be not much. Several people I’ve met had no idea what I was talking about. Some looked on in fascination at the French articles I pulled up on my phone. Others thought I was talking about “dancing fever,” the kind more fit for disco movies, and wondered if I was old enough to have seen any. (This was, I will admit, likely due to the shortcomings of my fledgling French.)

In the days I’ve been here, I have breathed in rhythm with this landscape. I have walked its forests. I have stood beneath what remains of Strasbourg’s first astronomical clock. I have been shamed out of the same church that shuns Lala from its pews (as modern of a city as Strasbourg is, it has, as every city does, those who would rather not see a girl of color and her trans husband beneath its sacred stone arches). I have grown dizzy under the spire of its enormous cathedral, and I have climbed to the top of it, so high that I could see far-off mountains in one direction and distant forest in another.

And I have found the generous spirit of those who want to share the history of this place. Some have helped me access information about medieval Strasbourg that had previously seemed impossible to find. A few not only knew about la fièvre de la danse, but have dedicated significant scholarly energy to the varied sources that tell its story.

Before I changed where the first affected woman began to dance, from city lane to country road, I had to know what the historical record said about her (sadly, very little; even her name is recorded differently depending on the chronicler). Before I centralized the locations of the great dance Strasbourg officials put on to try to cure the fever, I had to learn about the Marktplatz and guildhalls they filled with dancers. Before I went after the recorded detail of the red shoes at Saverne, I had to find out how sure historians were that it was true.

The answer is both maddening and realistic in its ambiguity: We don’t know. We may know that impossibly large hail fell on a particular day in a particular year, but we don’t know how important the color red truly was in the story of la fièvre de la danse, just as we don’t know for sure what caused the fever itself. The detail of the red shoes became part of historical record within the same century, so it’s possible that the color red played as strong a role as chroniclers suggest. It’s also possible that some mentions are exaggerated, fabricated, or drawn more from rumor than fact. And if red shoes were in fact given at Saverne, the reason why such a cure was put forth is lost to the last five centuries.

But I still followed that bright-dyed thread. I followed the path of historical records that note these red shoes. I still wondered if perhaps Hans Christian Andersen had, at the back of his mind, a little piece of history that mentions red shoes, and an Alsatian city gripped by dancing as though it was a plague.

Those possibilities remain the blazing heart of my story. And held within that same heart, at the center of this book, is my own heart as a queer Latina woman, with all that means today, and all it would have meant five hundred years ago.

As far as historical record states, Romani people were not blamed for the dancing plague. Neither were queer or trans Strasbourgeois, as far as we know. And as much as historical record states, there were no witchcraft trials associated with la fièvre de la danse. But none of these is whole-cloth invention. The persecution and expulsions of Romani communities referenced in the story, the barring of Romani people from whole cities and kingdoms, are tragically real. Brutal laws punished LGBTQ+ identity. And the historical period in which the dancing plague occurred saw thousands if not tens of thousands executed on charges of witchcraft.

History, no matter who writes it, cannot hide the blood on its hands.

But neither can it hide those who lived it.

People of color existed in medieval Europe. As did the LGBTQ+ community, though their conception of their own identities would likely have been far different from today. Affrèrement, the supposedly platonic pledge in which two men joined their lives, was well acknowledged in medieval France.

Girls like me were here five hundred years ago. So were boys like the one alongside me right now.

Much has changed in five hundred years. And so much has held. Both the good in the human heart, and the vicious insistence on finding someone to blame.

Tomorrow, I will fly back to a country that so often blames my communities for that which they do not like, and that so often hates us for what we are. I love it, my country, even as I sometimes fear it. I go back to it knowing a little more about women who walked this earth before me. I carry their history home with me, on my fingertips that have brushed cathedral stone, on the soles of my shoes that have walked these narrow, cobbled lanes, in my heart that is growing a spark into a story and that led me across an ocean to follow it.