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

In this expansive volume, archaeologist Blair (Building Anglo-Saxon England) surveys stories of corpses rising from the dead, from classical Greece to the “corpse killing” epidemics of the 17th century. Premodern people, he writes, viewed death as a process that began with the “cessation of breath” and ended with “physical decay.” It followed, therefore, that if this liminal stage was somehow interrupted, then the deceased was not fully dead. In ancient Mesopotamia, Blair finds, “ghosts were taken entirely for granted,” but there was no belief in the corpse physically returning; that changed in late Antiquity, with the rise of Christianity and the concept of resurrection. Blair points to archaeological evidence of grotesque burials, almost all of women, their bodies contorted and their heads placed on their chests or side, signifying a “corpse-killing” had taken place. Blair attributes these “corpse killing” epidemics to the stress of society moving from a pagan world, where women were powerful, to a Christian one, where women’s power was much diminished. Such shocking violence on female corpses increased even further, Blair notes, when the bubonic plague hit in 664. Waves of corpse-killing continued to crest until the Enlightenment. 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. (Nov.)