Pestilence, riots, lynchings and desecration of corpses. The sleep of reason produces monsters.

Vampirism has been a component of Central European and Balkan folklore since the Middle Ages and was often believed to be responsible for the transmission of serious infectious diseases such as plague and tuberculosis/consumption. Vampirism was believed to be spread within the same family or village and if the rite of the so-called second burial after death was not performed. The practice of "second burial" entailed exhumation of the body and the removal of the shroud from the mouth of the corpse, and a search for evidence if the corpse had chewed the cloth. If the shroud was chewed, a handful of earth or a brick was put into the body's mouth so that the vampire could no longer harm others. In some cases, the corpse was decapitated and an awl, made of ash, was thrust into its chest. Furthermore, the limbs were nailed down to prevent its movements. Remarkably, these beliefs were not restricted to the popular classes, but were also debated by theologians, political scientists at the height of the eighteenth century (Enlightenment). In the Habsburg Empire, this question attained such important political, social as well as health connotations as to force the Empress Maria Theresa to entrust an ad hoc study to her personal physician Gerard van Swieten with a view to determining what was true about the apparitions of vampires that occurred throughout central Europe and in the Balkans. The result of this investigation led to a ban on the "second burial" rites. Despite this prohibition, the practice of necrophilia on the bodies of suspected people continued, and both a cultured and popular literature on vampirism continued to flourish well into the nineteenth century.

[In process]. / À la recherché de la mélancolie en Mésopotamie ancienne.

This "article romancé" interprets the clinical section of the Assyrian text BAM I-234 in psychiatric terms, arguing that it describes a melancholic state with delusions of ruin and persecution. From this interpretation, the question arises of whether the words of the insane were regarded as omens.

[On the ancient and magical lesions in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries]. / Über die alten und zauberischen Geschwäre im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert.

At the beginning of the Renaissance magical, witchcraft and demonological medicine still played a large role in the poor healing ability of chronic leg ulcers. This included the general administration of magical potions and topical application. An example of the manipulation of the whole body by the devil was the Abracadabra text from Johann Christoph Bitterkraut in the year 1677. The use of bewitched ointments was particularly propagated by Paracelsus in 1622; however, even as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the invocation of supernatural powers was slowly diminishing until at the beginning of the nineteenth century the medical schools on chronic leg ulcers could be cultivated at the universities and by specialized wound healers.

[Criminal superstition, pregnancy and infants at the turn of the 19th century]. / Krimineller Aberglaube um 1900 am Beispiel schwangerer Frauen und kleiner Kinder.

Around 1900, various crimes were still caused by criminal superstition. Criminologists like Hans Gross, Albert Hellwig and August Löwenstimm were engaged in the exploration of this topic aiming at the complete explanation of criminal behaviour linked to superstition. Crimes against pregnant women and infants are particularly good examples to illustrate the problems arising from crimes motivated by superstition. When assessing superstition under scientific and legal aspects, the criminologists applied different approaches, although positivistic rationalization was the most common tendency. In the forensic and legal evaluation of crimes related to superstition the problematical questions were whether the perpetrator was criminally responsible and how the offence was to be legally qualified. In many cases, criminals motivated by superstition were treated with more lenience.

[Criminology and superstition at the turn of the 19th century]. / Kriminologie und Aberglaube um 1900.

Criminology, which institutionalised at university level at the turn of the 19th century, was intensively engaged in the exploration of superstition. Criminologists investigated the various phenomena of superstition and the criminal behaviour resulting from it. They discovered bizarre (real or imagined) worlds of thought and mentalities, which they subjected to a rationalistic regime of interpretation in order to arrive at a better understanding of offences and crimes related to superstition. However, they sometimes also considered the use of occultist practices such as telepathy and clairvoyance to solve criminal cases. As a motive for committing homicide superstition gradually became less relevant in the course of the 19th century. Around 1900, superstition was accepted as a plausible explanation in this context only if a psychopathic form of superstition was involved. In the 20th century, superstition was no longer regarded as an explanans but an explanandum.

The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment: the vampire problem.

Between 1724 and 1760, in the frontier area of the Habsburg empire waves of a hitherto unknown epidemic disease emerged: vampirism. In remote villages of southeastern Europe, cases of unusual deaths were reported. Corpses did not decay and, according to the villagers, corporeal ghosts were haunting their relatives and depriving them of their vital force. Death occurred by no later than three to four days. The colonial administration, alarmed by the threat of an epidemic illness, dispatched military officers and physicians to examine the occurrences. Soon several reports and newspaper articles circulated and made the untimely resurrection of the dead known to the perplexed public, Europe-wide. "Vampyrus Serviensis", the Serbian vampire, became an intensively discussed phenomenon within academe, and thereby gained factual standing. My paper depicts the geopolitical context of the vampire's origin within the Habsburg states. Secondly, it outlines the epistemological difficulties faced by observing physicians in the field. Thirdly, it delineates the scholarly debate on the apparent oxymoron of the living dead in the era of enlightened reason. Fourthly, the early history of vampirism shows that ghosts and encounters with the undead are not superstitious relics of a pre-modern past, or the Enlightenment's other, but intimate companions of Western modernity.

[Vampires in the village Zrnovo on the island of Korcula: following an archival document from the 18th century]. / Vampiri u Korculanskom selu Zrnovo: tragom jednog arhivskog spisa iz XVIII. Stoljeca.

The main interest of this essay is the analysis of the document from the State Archive in Venice (file: Capi del Consiglio de' Dieci: Lettere di Rettori e di altre cariche) which is connected with the episode from 1748 when the inhabitants of the village zrnove on the island of Korcula in Croatia opened tombs on the local cemetery in the fear of the vampires treating. This essay try to show some social circumstances connected with this event as well as a local vernacular tradition concerning superstitions.

[Odón de Buen: forty-five years of commitment to the university]. / Odón de Buen: cuarenta y cinco años de compromiso con la universidad.

The aragonese naturalist Odón de Buen y del Cos for twenty-two annual academic courses professor of natural history at the University of Barcelona and for twenty-three of the University of Madrid. Strong supporter of Darwin's evolutionary theory, experimental work in the field and laboratory, in this paper puts the value of their efforts, as an educator, to popularize the natural sciences and thus separated from the concerns, superstition and fanaticism, which they were basic reasons of the moral and material backwardness in which Spain was found.

Thinking with Montaigne: evidence, scepticism and meaning in early modern demonology.

In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556­1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533­1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother's side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551­1608). De Lancre confounded historians' expectations by using the revelation to defend Montaigne against his cousin's criticism. This article re-evaluates the relationships of De Lancre, Delrio and Montaigne in the light of recent scholarship, which casts demonology as a form of "resistance to scepticism" that conceals deep anxiety about the existence of the supernatural. It explores De Lancre's and Delrio's very different attitudes towards Montaigne and towards evidence and scepticism. This, in turn, reveals the different underlying preoccupations of their witchcraft treatises. It hence argues that no monocausal explanation linking scepticism to witchcraft belief is plausible.

[Traces of blood. The significance of blood in criminology at the turn of the 19th century]. / Blutspuren. Zur Bedeutung des Blutes in der Kriminalwissenschaft um 1900.

In late 19th and early 20th century, criminology became institutionalized as an independent branch of science. Methodologically it focused on the 'exact' methods of the natural sciences, but also it tried to integrate the methods of the humanities. This mix of methods becomes visible in the treatment of blood, which on the one hand was an object of then brand new methods of scientific analysis (identification of human blood by the biological or precipitin method), and on the other hand was analyzed as a product of the magic and superstitious mentalities of criminals. The methodical tension resulting from this epistemological crossbreeding did not disturb the criminologists, for whom the reconciliation of opposite ways of thinking and researching seemed to be possible. In this encyclopaedic analysis of blood early criminology tried to combine the anthropological exploration of vampirism with the chemical and microscopic detection of antibodies and haemoglobin, thus mirroring the positivistic optimism that was then prevalent.