On several occasions, particularly on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, dead people were suspected of being revenants or vampires, and consequently dug up and destroyed. Some contemporary authors named this phenomenon Magia Posthuma. This blog is dedicated to understanding what happened and why.
Tuesday, 5 August 2008
Über Vampirismus
The writings on vampires and werewolves by two 19th century folklorists, Wilhelm Mannhardt and Jan Ignáz Hanus were published in a leaflet by Superbia Verlag in Leipzig in 2004. The 52 page book reprints four papers originally published in Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde in 1859: Über Vampirismus by Mannhardt, and three papers by Hanus: Die Vampire, Die Vampire oder Vlkodlaci, and Der Werwolf (Vlkodlak). Ein slowakisches Märchen fast wörtlich aus einer Handschrift übersetzt. A lot of the material in Mannhardt's paper on vampires will be familiar, but the booklet offers a nice and cheap (€ 4.50) reprint of the original papers (in German, of course). The publisher has added an afterword, a few illustrations, and the texts have been changed in accordance with the orthography and grammatics of modern German.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment