Reading for autumn evenings

A little bat has been prowling outside my window lately, perhaps trying to inspire me to put other matters aside and blog more on posthumous magic.

I should at least mention - as hinted at in my previous post - a few more papers that are available online, and I would like to write a bit more about them, but that will have to wait until some other day. The first of the two online papers that I have not mentioned before is Bernhard Unterholzner's Vampire im Habsburgerreich, Schlagzeilen in Preussen: Zum Nutzen des Vampirs für politische Schmähungen which focuses on the 1755 vampire case in Hermersdorf which led to Maria Theresa prohibiting destroying corpses suspected of Magia Posthuma, and how it was treated in contemporary media. The second is Christian Reiter's analysis of the Visum et Repertum, Der Vampyr-Aberglaube und die Militärärzte, that I wrote a bit about in my original post on the conference.

If you do read German, the papers are well worth seeking out. If you only read English, the abstracts are available in that language as well.