What is dancing of st. Jana?
ST John's Dance is a term used to refer to a frenetic and uncontrolled dance exposed to a series of "dance plague", which has swept throughout Europe in the Middle Ages as a result of black plague. These incidents were well documented because they included hundreds of people, sometimes lasted for days or weeks, and occurred in many European communities. There are many speculations about the origin of the dance plague and several theories have been submitted to explain them. The current chronicles noted that the dancers would continue to dance, even if they were tired or injured, and in a remarkable case in 1200s, the dance caused the bridge's collapse. The Church believed that the dancers were obsessed with the devil and as evidence presented the boasting of the vibrations of dancers, many of whom were scared of the color of red and shouted about the devils when they were in the grip of the dance mania. Eventually the dance Mory went and no other cases of the dance of St. Jana was not reported.
The name "St John's Dance" is a reference to one of the patron saints of movement. Some chronicles record this as a "st vitus" dance, a term that is now used to indicate chorea, movement disorders caused by brain damage. In the case of the dance of St. Jana does not indicate evidence that people had brain damage. Instead, it is assumed that it is an example of a mass psychological phenomenon.
It is remarkable that most cases have occurred in communities that have strongly influenced the plague. People experienced considerable stress in the community decimated by plague, and many people in the Middle Ages were susceptible to the suggestions that God would curse him for his sins. Scientists have suggested that the Dancing Councils were the result of a combination of stress and belief that communities can be cursed with uncontrollable dance. As evidence, they point out that dancing Morys occurred only in communities where people had contact with the myth that the dance of St. Jana was in the form of divine retribution, and dance Mory stopped when it changedThinking of God's revenge.
Other scientists believed that dance epidemics could be the result of food poisoning, such as exposure to Ergot, a fungus that can colonize grains. Whatever the causes, the dance councils were a very real phenomenon in the Middle Ages, and current accounts provide a lot of information about how people thought about medicine, the church and their communities.