RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Digging Up the Dead: What Vampire Panics Reveal About Power

·33 min·2 clips

Blair ties 16th-century Saxony corpse fears to plague, the Reformation, and Luther's own response.

1. RevDem Podcast's episode on John Blair's Killing the Dead, Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World centers on restless bodies across Mesopotamia, England, Saxony, and Romania. 2. Professor John Blair, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, joins as the author of the book and the main historical interpreter. 3. The episode asks what vampire panics reveal about trauma, religious division, burial practice, and the treatment of corpses. 4. Blair says terms like strigoi, virkalakas, and upior are unstable, and he traces strigoi to Roman strix and virkalakas to a Slavic word for werewolf. 5. He argues that ideas of walking corpses are widespread but not universal, and that major trauma can intensify them into a feared social reality. 6. He connects those fears to disease, social change, political instability, and the search for scapegoats when people need causes for distress. 7. Blair uses 1970s Greece and anthropologist Julie Dubule to show one symbolic reading of vampires through blood, kinship, and endogamous marriage. 8. He then says that symbolic reading may be an incorporation of an older vampire motif rather than the original cause. 9. Blair cites England and France in the 12th century, where France had heretic burnings while England had corpse-killing but almost no heresy persecutions. 10. He uses William of Newborough's late-12th-century remark that there were so many walking corpses that talking about them was boring as evidence of a real epidemic. 11. Blair presents a feedback loop between oral and literate culture, using Carlo Ginzburg's work and a Polish vampire tract from the 1690s. 12. That tract, he says, plagiarizes a book about West Africa published 20 years earlier and copies a passage about Angola almost word for word. 13. Blair also stresses archaeology, especially cases where graves are reopened weeks or months later and the corpse is mutilated after burial. 14. He says those delayed interventions are strong evidence that people believed the corpse itself was causing trouble. 15. On burial, Blair argues that death is often treated as a process lasting several days, not a single event. 16. He gives the example of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, buried in his shoes in 687, to show how contradictory ideas can coexist in one story. 17. Blair's discussion of seventh-century England links female bodies, abbesses, and the removal of jaws or heads to fears about dangerous women after death. 18. He describes the 16th-century Saxony motif of corpses swallowing shrouds, then links its spread to plague, the Reformation, and Martin Luther's response. 19. The tone is academic and interview-based, with long explanatory answers and a question-driven structure that moves from vocabulary to case studies. 20. Listeners interested in medieval history, burial ritual, and religious change will likely stay engaged, while listeners wanting a light or fast-paced conversation may skip it.

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