The Image of the Vampire in Augustin Calmet’s Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires and in Other French Texts from the Late 17th and Early 18th c.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18778/1505-9065.17.2.16Keywords:
Augustin Calmet, vampires, Enlightenment, French literatureAbstract
Although they made their spectacular literary appearance with the arrival of Romanticism, vampires were arousing a vivid interest well before the 19th century. At first, the present paper will briefly review the vampire motif in French texts from the second half of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th c., such as the articles published in Mercure Galant in 1793 and 1794 or the travel narratives published by François Richard (1657), Paul Lucas (1704) and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717). Afterwards, Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie, etc. [Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al.] (1751) by Dom Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) will be analyzed in order to examine the way in which the Benedictine tackles this controversial subject in his book. The article closes with some thoughts on the reception of the treatise after its publication and its importance for the creation and consolidation of the subsequent concept of the vampire.
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