Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

John Blair

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Killing the Dead

Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

John Blair

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2025

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About this book

A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living

Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.

In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.

Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

Reviews

"Killing the Dead has laid bare a subject of exceptional importance. If the author’s argument holds, it may even be a call to action. Perhaps, in our current political moment, the time has again come for us to sharpen our stakes."---Jan Machielsen, Times Literary Supplement --- "[A] wide-ranging, absorbing study of vampires."---Malcolm Gaskill, The Lamp --- "Killing the Dead is an archaeological and anthropological study, but it is also a catalogue of how our predecessors wrestled with the problem of evil: Where do diseases come from, why do children die, why do villains rise to power?"---Rivka Galchen, New Yorker --- "A gloriously gruesome history."---Steven Poole, The Guardian --- "A big (and brilliant) book. . . . Blair gathers an enormous amount of knowledge to beautifully piece together evidence for vampire epidemics, meaning times in which people in the past (and to the present day) believed in the existence of dangerous or restless dead that had to be stopped by maiming or dismembering the dead body, and that this behaviour was not an exception."---Marion Uckelmann, Antiquity --- "Killing the Dead is a book to die for."---Simon Ings, The Telegraph --- "A fascinating study of beliefs about the walking dead from ancient times to the modern world. Blair combines archaeological evidence and historical evidence and historical expertise to produce an impressively comprehensive picture."---Levi Roach, History Today --- "A fascinating cavalcade of stories."---Colin Dickey, Chronicle of Higher Education --- "Illuminating. . . . By bringing his archaeological focus to bear on the question [of how to deal with vampires], Blair unearths some puzzling continuities and raises the stakes."---Crawford Gribben, Wall Street Journal --- "Authoritative and compelling. . . .This fascinating history shows that you can't keep a good corpse down."---Roger Luckhurst, History Today --- "Blair is to be congratulated on having produced a masterfully lucid history, filled with originality and excitement. Every page of Killing the Dead bursts with fresh insights and deliciously gory details. And, like all the best vampires, it’ll come back to haunt you long after you think you’re done."---Alexander Lee, Literary Review --- "Wonderful stories. . . .Writers will no doubt continue to disinter the undead in their fiction. . . .Let this be their handbook."---Suzie Feay, The Spectator --- "In this expansive volume, archaeologist Blair surveys stories of corpses rising from the dead, from classical Greece to the ‘corpse killing’ epidemics of the 17^th century. . . . This meticulous account sheds horrifying light on the constancy with which women have been made to pay, even in death, for society’s larger anxieties." --- "A History Today Book of the Year"

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Frontmatter
i

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contents
vii

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Preface and Acknowledgements
xi

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Introduction
1
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part i Approaches
7
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part ii Dynamics
97
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part iii From the Ancient Middle East to the Early Medieval North
155
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part iv Europe in the High Middle Ages
233
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part v Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
287
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part vi The Modern World
383
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notes
441
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bibliography
477
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Index
503
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE
521

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

September 9, 2025

eBook ISBN:

9780691226965

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691226965

eBook ISBN: 9780691226965

Keywords for this book

Corpse; Grave; Century; Beliefs; Vampire; Story; Burial; Dangerous; Blood; Death; Xxx; Cases; Human; Motif; Spirit; Soul; Culture; Witch; Corpse killing; Fears; Revenant; Regions; Roman; Modern; Demons; Evidence; Family; Animal; Narratives; Tradition; Supernatural; Christian; Plague; Epidemic; Cultural; Coffin; Evil; Medieval; Prone; Power; Restless; Popular; Shroud; Zone; Religious; Undead; Bodies; Cemetery; Heart; Central; Ideas; Mouth; Folklore; Greek; Demonic; Instance; Contrast; Sources; Ritual; Distinctive; Village; Earth; Societies; Entities; Victims; Seventh; Catholic; Bones; Walk; Folk

Audience(s) for this book

For a non-specialist adult audience

Killing the Dead

Overview

About this book

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Frontmatter

contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

part i Approaches

part ii Dynamics

part iii From the Ancient Middle East to the Early Medieval North

part iv Europe in the High Middle Ages

part v Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

part vi The Modern World

notes

bibliography

Index

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Bibliographic data