This form of "possession," then, passed out of the supernatural domain, and became known as "tarantism." Though it continued much longer than the corresponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared; and, though special manifestations of it on a small scale still break out occasionally, its main survival is the "tarantella," which the traveller sees danced at Naples as a catchpenny assault upon his purse.( 389) (389) See Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp.

87-104; also extracts and observations in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, London, 1888, pp.

321-315; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp.

73 and following.
But, long before this form of "possession" had begun to disappear, there had arisen new manifestations, apparently more inexplicable.

As the first great epidemics of dancing and jumping had their main origin in a religious ceremony, so various new forms had their principal source in what were supposed to be centres of religious life--in the convents, and more especially in those for women.
Out of many examples we may take a few as typical.
In the fifteenth century the chroniclers assure us that, an inmate of a German nunnery having been seized with a passion for biting her companions, her mania spread until most, if not all, of her fellow-nuns began to bite each other; and that this passion for biting passed from convent to convent into other parts of Germany, into Holland, and even across the Alps into Italy.
So, too, in a French convent, when a nun began to mew like a cat, others began mewing; the disease spread, and was only checked by severe measures.( 390) (390) See citation from Zimmermann's Solitude, in Carpenter, pp.