Sunday 8 July 2007

Van Swieten's Vampyrismus (almost) on line



The Italian translation of Gerard van Swieten's notes on vampires have recently been made available on books.google.com. Unfortunately, access to the book is restricted, which means that you can search in the text but only view it in 'snippet view'. As yet there is no easy way to buy access to the text, so you have to find a copy that you can buy, if you need to study the text.


The 18th century German translation is unfortunately only available from the few libraries that own a copy of the original book which contains van Swieten's text as an appendix.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with it, below I present a scan of the front page of the 1768 German translation. In fact, wealthy people can currently obtain a copy of the original book, Andreas Ulrich Mayer's Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster nebst einem Anhange vom Vampirismus for the sum of € 1.250,00 at the Italian antiquarian book seller Libriantichi.it!

Van Swieten Vampyrismus 1768

1 comment:

Cecil said...

The German version of the book Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster nebst einem Anhange vom Vampirismus was recently digitalized by the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek. (link)

A transcription of Swietens text can be found here.

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