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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. John Blair is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His many books include Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton), The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, and The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction. "We all think we know about vampires, but John Blair brings his expertise as archaeologist and historian to reveal the disconcertingly wide range of stories and evidence about the undead across an astonishing variety of human cultures, from the ancient world to the present day. With Blair's sure guidance, we may understand better how other cultures have sought to make sense of the terrors of the world around them."-Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity
"Killing the Dead is a scholarly tour de force-a book of lasting value that will long be the definitive treatment of the subject. From the ancient through to the modern world, by way of Blair's home turf in the Middle Ages, the author finds important and exciting things to say about the walking dead at every turn."-Levi Roach, author of Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia
"This is the first historical survey of beliefs in dangerous dead humans to take in all time and the whole of the world. It is therefore also the first to identify the way in which such beliefs wax and wane, and travel. As a result, it moves knowledge of the subject up into a whole new register."-Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present "A History Today Book of the Year" "In this expansive volume, archaeologist Blair surveys stories of corpses rising from the dead, from classical Greece to the 'corpse killing' epidemics of the 17th 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." "Wonderful stories. . . .Writers will no doubt continue to disinter the undead in their fiction. . . .Let this be their handbook."---Suzie Feay, Th
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. John Blair is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His many books include Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton), The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, and The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction. "We all think we know about vampires, but John Blair brings his expertise as archaeologist and historian to reveal the disconcertingly wide range of stories and evidence about the undead across an astonishing variety of human cultures, from the ancient world to the present day. With Blair's sure guidance, we may understand better how other cultures have sought to make sense of the terrors of the world around them."-Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity
"Killing the Dead is a scholarly tour de force-a book of lasting value that will long be the definitive treatment of the subject. From the ancient through to the modern world, by way of Blair's home turf in the Middle Ages, the author finds important and exciting things to say about the walking dead at every turn."-Levi Roach, author of Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia
"This is the first historical survey of beliefs in dangerous dead humans to take in all time and the whole of the world. It is therefore also the first to identify the way in which such beliefs wax and wane, and travel. As a result, it moves knowledge of the subject up into a whole new register."-Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present "A History Today Book of the Year" "In this expansive volume, archaeologist Blair surveys stories of corpses rising from the dead, from classical Greece to the 'corpse killing' epidemics of the 17th 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." "Wonderful stories. . . .Writers will no doubt continue to disinter the undead in their fiction. . . .Let this be their handbook."---Suzie Feay, Th