Troublesome Corpses: Vampires and Revenants from Antiquity to the Present (review)

Troublesome Corpses appears as number sixteen in the publisher's 'Dracula Library' series and boasts a suitably atmospheric cover of tombstones, in front of a Norman church, under a stormy night sky. Its subject is reanimated corpses, particularly vampiric ones, rather than noncorporeal ghosts, and its area is Europe, although the author occasionally varies his material with comparisons from other cultures. David Keyworth's inspiration is Augustin Calmet's Treatise on Vampires and Revenants (1746) and in particular Calmet's assertion that, although undead corpses and vestiges of vampirism existed in the past, the vampires of eighteenth-century Europe were a unique and new phenomenon.

The first four chapters survey the undead from antiquity to the eighteenth century and generally support Calmet's thesis. Antiquity provides us with shape-shifting, blood-sucking succubi (the Greek empousa or Latin lamia), maidens who return from the dead to fulfill their thwarted sexual destiny, and witches who either resuscitate the dead for prophetic purposes or surreptitiously remove vital organs, leaving the apparently intact victim to die shortly afterwards. There are, however, no recorded instances of blood-sucking corpses. Twelfth-century England suffered an outbreak of reanimated corpses, all of whom were dealt with by standard ecclesiastical measures. Scandinavian sagas, largely written down in the thirteenth century, abound in draugr, gruesome corpses who, at times with grim humour, violently and indiscriminately bludgeon to death both people and animals until the final destruction of their own bodies. It must be said that they are by far the most entertaining of the undead. They persist in folklore into the seventeenth century, by which time they have been joined by the spectrums of sixteenth-century Silesia and the vrykolakas of seventeenth-century Greece. Whereas both the English and Scandinavian undead offended by the stench and appearance of their decomposing bodies, the later undead manifest their unnaturalness by their apparent lack of decomposition. Nevertheless, despite spreading death and disease, none of them appear to have drunk blood. According to Keyworth, this particular depraved and insatiable appetite, which becomes the essential motive for the undead's refusal to lie down, is first mentioned in eighteenth-century accounts of Eastern European oupirs.

The remainder of the book examines the material from various thematic perspectives. Keyworth compares vampires with malign supernatural beings, including ghosts, sexual demons, werewolves, witches and their blood-sucking familiars. By the eighteenth century, alleged vampires had become the subject of judicial investigations, particularly in parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire recently acquired from the Ottomans. Whereas the earlier undead overlapped with ghosts and demons, these historical vampires conform to Keyworth's definition of reanimated corpses that feed on the blood of the living. Christian paraphernalia is of very limited efficacy in repelling these menaces. Decapitation and staking are worth trying, but only cremation can be totally relied upon. The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection and taboos on the abuse of the dead dating from furthest antiquity, discouraged these measures, but by this stage one is astonished that the afflicted did not have recourse to them sooner. Catholic belief in transubstantiation and the incorruptible bodies of saints provided a holy antithesis to vampiric abominations, while Protestants rejected the undead along with Purgatory and ghosts. The elite increasingly preferred rationalist explanations, but fear of premature burial remained a popular anxiety in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a few words on astral vampires, the etherealised, modern, noncorporeal remnants of their all too material predecessors.

The book is intended as an 'academic textbook for university students in … folklore, cultural history and religious studies' and also, of course, for the general reader interested in the supernatural. It is written in a lively and accessible style. In transforming his doctoral thesis into a potentially popular book, Keyworth has apparently chosen to concentrate on the entertaining and sensational stories while abbreviating the analysis. The historical and sociological context, which would have proved...