ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between dancing and debility in print-culture projections of dance as illness. Influenced by a popular-medicine fascination with medieval dancing mania, periodical essays and excerpts reinforce British Protestant supremacism as distinct from foreign or pre-Enlightenment religious ecstasy. Understood historically, dancing mania was a collective and highly contagious event, an ocular plague that transformed watchers into entranced performers. Mysterious in its origins, it translated easily into Romantic-period anxieties about foreign influences threatening British sovereignty and culture. In popular history and periodical discussions of a craze for dancing among England’s youth, dancing mania overlaps with another gothicized remnant of pre-modern culture, the danse macabre. The notion that dancing to excess is literally dancing oneself to death enforces a break between the enlightened modernity of Protestant Britain and the darkness of Catholic Europe or the unconverted new world, even as it registers fears of Britain’s permeability by these regions. Dancing in these representations is an event both spectacular and dangerous. The safest response is the rational skepticism of the disinterested observer: satirist, medical historian, antiquarian, or gentlemanly non-dancer.
