Madness after Foucault

Abstract

The nineteenth-century imagination of the Middle Ages—specifically the St. John’s Day dances that intensified in the wake of the bubonic plague, or ‘Black Death’—emphasized bacchanalian raucousness. Yet the medicalization of post-plague dances overlooks an important history of pilgrimage, processions, and pre-Christian festivities. This chapter examines the recuperation of medieval histories of dance—barely legible in Latin chronicles and annals—into a history of epidemic madness. This contributes to rewriting Foucault’s history of madness by emphasizing collective exuberance and the emergence of choreomania in the nineteenth century as a figure of ecological reverberation, benignly excessive inarticulacy, and passage, rather than confinement, difference, or danger. Further reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s recuperation of the St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dances into a critique of asceticism, the chapter suggests that the ‘genealogy’ of choreomania is found in the fantasy of a dark and orgiastic medievalism.