The slides from the last Romancing the Gothic lecture. 'Art Thou Still Living Wretch? Early Gothic Vampires'

1. Art Thou Still
Living Wretch?
The Early
Gothic Vampire
@RomGothSam
#romancingthegothic

2. A Pre-history of the Vampire in the
UK
Walter Map – De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque – c. 1182
An Anglo-Saxon tradition of blood-drinking and flesh-eating demons
• A marriage
• 3 deaths
• A stranger
• A demoness
• A key
• A double

3. A Pre-history of the Vampire in the
UK
A Buckinghamshire Vampire - 1196
• Death
• Visits wife ‘filled her with the greatest alarm
and almost killed her by leaping upon her.’
• Visits brothers
• Appears in the day
• Corpse incorrupt
• Absolution from Bishop
The Berwick Vampire
• The Squire of Alnwick castle who was ‘a
stranger to God’s grace and whose crimes
were many.’
• Prowling the streets – dogs barking, a fetid
pestilence…
• Plague
• Learned men meet
• Young men act
• ‘It was gorged and swollen with frightful
corpulence, and the face was florid and
chubby, with huge red puffed cheeks, and the
shround… was all soiled and torn.’
• Recognised as a ‘sanguisuga’ – executed
William of Newburgh – Historia Rerum Anglicarum – c. 1198

4. A Pre-history of the Vampire in the
UK
The Hounds Priest
• Irreligious chaplain
• Interred in holy ground at Melrose Abbey
• Appearance at former mistress’ house
• A priest, a monk and two ‘powerful young
men’ hold a vigil…
• Only one remains…
• The devil raises up the corpse
• A wound with a spade
• Cremation
The Ghost of Anantis
• A man of ill-repute
• Fears of an unfaithful wife
• A cunning plan…
• A failure to make confession
• A wandering corpse, a pestilential stench, a
plague
• Two brothers to the rescue
• Cut out his heart… and burn him!
William of Newburgh – Historia Rerum Anglicarum – c. 1198

5. A Pre-history of the Vampire in the
UK
Other Medieval Sources of the Walking Dead
William of Malmesbury – Gesta Pontificum Anglorum – c. 1125
Geoffrey of Burton – Vita Sancte Moduenne Virginis – c. 1140s
• Shape-shifting
Chronicon de Lanercost – c. 1346
The Monk of Byland – c. 1400
• The thin line between the corporeal ghost and the vampire
The Armburgh Papers – c. 1425

6. A Pre-History of the Vampire?
A Medieval or Early Modern Pre-History of the Walking Dead
Common Features
• The risen dead are denounced as depraved in life ‘angry and unshriven’
• There are instances of vampiric visiting which appear as sleep paralysis
• The spread of a fatal sickness is associated with the walking corpse
• State of the corpse as ruddy and fresh
• Clergy are sometimes able to lay or defeat the revenant
• Methods of eradication often include dismemberment or cremation
• Demonic agency in the resurrection – ‘By the Contrivance, as it is believed,
of Satan’

7. A Folk Tradition of the Undead?
"The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.
"I'll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.“
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?"
"'Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek."
"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;
But the call of death is strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away."

8. Anti-Sadducean vampires
Henry More – An Antidote Against Atheism - 1653

9. A Vampire in Silesia

10. A Tale from Otherwhere…

11. A Vampire Story
• As with ghost stories – experts are
appealed to
• A classic case of a criminal,
excommunicated and an island
‘frighted and disturbed with
strange and unusual apparitions’
• They found the Body ‘uncorrupted,
ruddy, and the Veins replete with
Blood’

12. A Vampire Story
Possible Cures The Sequence of Events
• The family send to the Patriarch
for remission of
excommunication
• The body is brought into the
church
• Prayers and services
• Dismember and boil in wine
• Receive absolution from Patriarch

13. A Vampire From Otherwhere
The Travels of Three English
Gentlemen, from Venice to
Hamburgh – 1734 (Published in The
Harleian Miscellany vol. IV, 1745)
Carniola (in modern Slovenia)
Mentions also: Poland, Serbia,
Hungary, Moravia, Lithuania, Russia,
Greeks (?), Austria

14. It is widely believed…
• Powered by evil spirits
• Leave their graves at night
• Suck blood
• Suffocate people
• No corruption in the grave
• Kill with stake

15. The Arnold Paul Case
London Magazine - 1732

16. The Arnold Paul Case
Today’s Vampiric Bachelor
Name: Arnold Paul
Nationality: Serbian
Profession: Hajduk
His becoming Story: Bitten by a Turk. Ate grave soil. Smeared
himself in blood. Didn’t work.
Likes: Preying on villagers in their sleep, feasting on blood,
suffocating people, spreading disease
Appearance: Blood flowing from eyes, nose and mouth. Nails
regrown. Red body. Lustrous hair and beard.
Dislikes: Being staked through the heart (will shriek), being
decapitated, being burnt into a crispy pile of ash
(Similar in detail to the 1718 Plogowijowitz case)

17. The Vampire Craze
• Vampire Investigation
• Investigation of specific events
• Expert testimony and witness
• The philosophical debate
• ‘Twelve books and four
dissertations on vampirism
appeared in 1732-3; over the next
three years, a further 22 learned
treatises were published in
European cultural and intellectual
centres such as Amsterdam, Halle,
Jena, Leipzig and Vienna.’ (Groom)

18. The Vampire as Spectacle
‘The phlegmatic English had reacted with lofty scorn from day one’ and
‘after the rash of vampire treatises in the 1730s and 1740s, the
monster ceased to provide an object of serious contemplation’ (Butler)

19. Vampire as Metaphor
The Gentleman’s Magazine – 1732 John Cleland – The Memoirs of a
Coxcomb – 1751

20. 'In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
That is Lord of they utterance…
Break the spell, ask a question!

21. Are Vampires Pure Spectacle?
• ‘The vampire entered the British consciousness as an already largely debunked foreign
curiosity, but we cannot separate the vampire entirely from previous revenants without
ignoring the ideological, and specifically theological, framework within which these
creatures were understood.’
• Vampiric law throws light on ‘ideas about body and soul, and about the relation of the
body and soul after death’. (Murgoci)
• The vampire myth was never ‘neutrally inherited; it was always an element in the
contemporary politics of belief’. (Sage)
• ‘As with the other mortal immortals of the early British Gothic, the vampiric figure was
never wholly extricable from theologies of resurrection, the relationship of body and
soul, and discourses of tolerance and damnation.’

22. Towards a Theology of the Vampire
• Vampirism as a result of excommunication
• ‘On Vampirism’ – 1823 – ‘This we apprehend is the real
source of the vampire superstition’
• Vampirism as a punishment connected with the
unshriven, the unconfessed, the condemned, the self-
murdering, the outcast
• Vampirism as the offspring of religious othering
• Vampirism as a form of embodied damnation

23. Embodied Damnation
1
For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh:
and they are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the
things that ye would - Galatians 5:16-17
Inherent Duality

24. Embodied Immortality
2
The wages of sin is death - Romans 6:23
Corruption
An inherited death

25. Embodied Damnation
3
If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life,
because of righteousness - Romans 8:10
If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do
mortifie the deeds of the body, ye shall live - Romans 8:13
Body cannot live forever
The spirit can

26. Embodied Damnation
That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die –
1 Corinthians 15:36
The necessity of bodily death

27. Embodied Damnation
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal shall
have put on immortality – 1 Corinthians 15:36
With death comes the hope of immortality

28. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
There will be a ‘resurrection of both the just and unjust’ (Acts 24:15),
both a ‘resurrection of life’ and a ‘resurrection of damnation’ (John
5:29)

29. The Archetypes of Embodied
Damnation
Adam
Brought death into the world
Ate from the ‘tree of life’
Dared to eat from ‘the tree of
knowledge’
To become ‘like one of us’
Banishment
The Perverted Second Adam

30. The Archetypes of Embodied
Damnation
Cain
• Killed his brother
• Cursed to wander
• ‘Now art thou cursed from the
earth, which hath opened her
mouth to receive thy brothers
blood from thy hand…a fugitive
and a vagabond shalt thou be in
the earth’ (Genesis 4: 11-12)
• The mark of Cain

31. The Archetypes of Embodied
Damnation
The Wandering Jew
• Refused helped to Jesus on the
road to Golgotha
• Cursed to wander
• Repentant but unforgiven

32. The Archetypes of Embodied
Damnation
The Tortured Rosicrucian
• Discovers immortality – the elixir
vitae
• A Second Adam – doubly
condemned
• Everything goes wrong…

33. The Vampire Cursed
Cain’s Curse
An eternal curse
An inherited curse
Linked to the Betrayer
Given over to the Devil
Rebels and
Malcontents

34. Gothic Immortals –
The worst immortals
Winzy
Mary Shelley - ‘The Mortal
Immortal’ – 1833
His immortal body as a ‘tenacious
cage for a soul which thirsts for
freedom’.
St Leon
William Godwin – St Leon – 1799
Hated by mankind, hunted from the
face of the earth, pursued by every
atrocious calumny, without a country,
without a roof, without a friend; the
addition that can be made to such
misfortunes scarcely deserves a thought

35. Gothic Immortals –
Tortured Immortals
Melmoth
Charles Maturin – Melmoth the
Wanderer – 1820
• Faustian pact
• 150 years of wandering
• Damned from the moment his
bargain begins
The Stranger
Matthew Lewis – The Monk –
1796
• Magical powers
• Unable to stay in one place
• Inspires hatred
• Mark of Cain

36. Wandering Vampires
‘The Gothic’s early vampires enter their texts in such a way that they
remain geographically and theologically distanced from the
contemporary English reader. The texts do not engage with a fantastic
consideration of the possibility of these figures; rather, they act as
symbolic carriers of ingrained theological meanings of religious
othering and body/soul and flesh/spirit relations.’

37. A curse on … just your house
The vampire and Infectious Destruction
Byron – The Giaour - 1813

38. Doubt as Damnation
And in that hideous light
Oneiza stood before them, it was She,
Her very lineaments, and such as death
Had changed them, livid cheeks, and lips of blue.
But in her eyes there dwelt
Brightness more terrible
Than all the loathsomeness of death.
“Still art thou living, wretch?
In hollow tones she cried to Thalaba,
“And must I nightly leave my grave
“To tell thee, still in vain,
“God has abandoned thee?”
“This is not she!” the Old Man exclaimed,
“A Fiend! a manifest Fiend!”
And to the youth he held his lance,
“Strike and deliver thyself!”
Robert Southey – Thalaba the Destroyer – 1801
‘The killing of the vampiric self dislodges the demon and ends the torturous imprisonment of Oneiza in
the space between ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual’ death. The demon of disbelief has been defeated, setting both
Oneiza and Thalaba free.’

39. When we part tonight, you no more must question…
So get your questions in now!

40. Sexy Vampires!

41. The First Literary Vampire?
My dear young maiden clingeth
Unbending. fast and firm
To all the long-held teaching
Of a mother ever true;
As in vampires unmortal
Folk on the Theyse's portal
Heyduck-like do believe.
But my Christine thou dost dally,
And wilt my loving parry
Till I myself avenging
To a vampire's health a-drinking
Him toast in pale tockay.
And as softly thou art sleeping
To thee shall I come creeping
And thy life's blood drain away.
And so shalt thou be trembling
For thus shall I be kissing
And death's threshold thou' it be
crossing
With fear, in my cold arms.
And last shall I thee question
Compared to such instruction
What are a mother's charms?
Heinrich August Ossenfelder – ‘Der Vampir’ - 1748

42. Flipping the Script
Goethe – ‘The Bride of Corinth’ - 1797
From my grave to wander I am forc'd,
Still to seek The Good's long-sever'd link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the life-blood of his heart to drink;
When his race is run,
I must hasten on,
And the young must 'neath my vengeance sink,
"Mother, to this final prayer give ear!
Let a funeral pile be straightway dress'd;
Open then my cell so sad and drear,
That the flames may give the lovers rest!
When ascends the fire
From the glowing pyre,
To the gods of old we'll hasten, blest."

43. Defying God to Get Some
Johann Ludwig Tieck – ‘Wake Not
the Dead’ – 1800
How far would you go to get laid?
a) Raise the dead?
b) Leave your wife?
c) Sacrifice every young person
on your land?
d) Let your children die?
What would you do to protect
yourself?
a) Think for half a second about
your choices?
b) Eat a nasty tasting root?
c) Stab her in the heart?
d) Not marry an obvious demon
in disguise FOR A SECOND
TIME?

44. Defying God to Get Some
• Walter the idiot
• Brunhilda the malevolent
• Swanhilda the saintly
• Disposable children
• Various assorted servants
• Mystery lady
• Sorcerer
• "It is not I who have murdered them;--I was
obliged to pamper myself with warm youthful
blood, in order that I might satisfy thy furious
desires--thou art the murderer!“
• “Why dost thou make mouths at me like a
puppet? Thou who hadst the courage to love
the dead--to take into thy bed, one who had
been sleeping in the grave, the bed-fellow of
the worm--who hast clasped in thy lustful
arms, the the corruption of the tomb--dost
thou, unhallowed as thou art, now raise this
hideous cry for the sacrifice of a few lives?--
They are but leaves swept from their
branches by a storm.--Come, chase these
idiot fancies, and taste the bliss thou hast so
dearly purchased.”

45. Introducing … the Byronic vampire (or
am I?!)
Sycophant or Critic?
‘It is usually claimed that Polidori, under Byron’s influence, slavishly
plagiarised Byron’s fragment for his narrative.’
OR
‘…he used this material creatively (even ironically) rather than
slavishly.’(Gelder)

46. The Byronic Vampire

47. The Byronic Vampire?
The vampire and infectious
damnation
‘Heretical Infection’ (Herbert)
An infectious evil
• Seduction
• Gambling and Charity
An unescaped or inescapable
damnation?
• Death offers no exit
• But it is a willed evil
• The victory of the flesh
• Catholic theology

48. A Triumph of the Flesh
Adultery, fornication, uncleanness,
lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred,
variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions,
heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness,
revellings, and such like –
Galatians 5:20-22
‘Ruthven is the flesh made
manifest, and Aubrey’s willed
subordination to his will suggests
both Aubrey’s culpability in his
own state and his entrapment in
the triumph of the flesh. It is only
when Aubrey’s suffering infected
flesh dies, that the vampiric
curse’s power over him is undone.
His natural death sets him free.
The ‘flesh’, the world and the
devil, however, live on.’

49. A Queer Theology of the Vampire
An Infectious Soul Death
Blood-drinking as a perverted Eucharist
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last
day – John 6:56
For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself – 1
Corinthians 11:29
Infectious Corruption
‘Heretical Infection’ – Christopher Herbert

50. Onan and Onanism
Genesis 38: 7-9

51. Definitional Distress
Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All its Frightful
Consequences – 1725

52. Content Warning
18th Century
Homophobia

53. Ask Onania
What is acceptable sex?
The ‘carnal commerce of the two Sexes, for the Continuance of the
Species’
So you’re just talking about ‘self-pleasure’ right?
Self-pollution and no. Also those who have relations ‘with those of our
own sex’
What happens if you engage in these activities?
‘Whenever any give themselves over to Uncleanness, they cease to be
the Temples of the Holy Spirit…because the spirit cannot dwell with
pollution’

54. Ask Onania
What actually happens to you though?
The usual – weak calves, slack jaw, staring eyes, general weakness
(‘constitutional decline, physical weakness, and, of course, ultimately in
some cases, even death’ – Roy Porter)
Ok, but it’s just you, right?
Nope… ‘the refusal to engage in reproductive sex reverses the ‘natural
order’: unable to propagate ‘naturally’, the queer subjects is ‘given up
to Uncleanness’ and ‘dishonour their own bodies between themselves’,
spreading a moral and spiritual infection.’

55. Ask Onania
Shocking stuff… but at least we get to stay ourselves? Right? Right!?
This pollution is ‘not only against Nature, but [is] a sin that perverts and
extinguishes nature’.
Transgressive sex Physical Decline/Wasting
Spirit/soul abandoning the flesh Pollution of the flesh
A spreading moral infection A perversion of their fundamental
nature

56. Queer Theology of Early Gothic
Vampires
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – ‘Christabel’ – 1816
A willed submission A shared damnation
Transgressive passion
An infectious transgression

57. Queer Theology of Early Gothic
Vampires
Young Sigismund, my once dear friend,
But lately he resign'd his breath;
With others I did him attend
Unto the silent house of death.
…
"Young Sigismund, my once dear friend,
But now my persecutor foul,
Doth his malevolence extend
E'en to the torture of my soul.
"From the drear mansion of the tomb,
From the low regions of the dead,
The ghost of Sigismund doth roam,
And dreadful haunts me in my bed!
"There, vested in infernal guise,
(By means to me not understood,)
Close to my side the goblin lies,
And drinks away my vital blood!
"When surfeited, the goblin dire,
With banqueting by suckled gore,
Will to his sepulchre retire,
Till night invites him forth once more

58. Queer Theology of Early Gothic
Vampires
The corpse of Herman they
contrive
To the same sepulchre to take,
And thro' both carcases they drive,
Deep in the earth, a sharpen'd
stake!
By this was finish'd their career,
Thro' this no longer they can roam;
From them their friends have
nought to fear,
Both quiet keep the slumb'ring
tomb.

59. The Early British Vampire
‘The vampiric figure proliferates across later Gothic texts, evolving and
gaining a palimpsest of overwritten meanings as it does so. At this
particular moment in the early nineteenth century, however, the
theological resonance of the vampiric figure remains clear. Whether
the avatar of a rapacious church, the victim of a condemning God, the
eternal consequences of a submission to the flesh, a literalisation of a
damning theology of the queer or a symbol of condemned religious
otherness, the vampire is an infectious agent of spiritual death and
embodied damnation.’

60. Where do we go from here?
• The vampire is far from static
• From villain to anti-hero to hero
• From homophobic to fluid in terms of both gender and sexuality
• From condemning to prurient to affirming (ish)
• From literal to figurative monster and back again
• From a fearful other to a superhuman self
• From an anti-semitic figure to a figure tied to no specific religion or ethnicity
• From a creature created by theological perversion to one defeated by
theological weapons to one understood through medicalised discourse (and
back again)
• The vampire, however, always sits on the borderline between fear and desire,
teetering on the line of transgression

61. Ask what you please and I will tell you everything. But my story is
simply one of bewilderment and darkness.

62. Bibliography
Primary Sources
Anon. – ‘The Unquiet Grave’
Anon. - ‘Political Vampyres’ in The Gentlemen’s Magazine – May 1732
Geoffrey of Burton – Vita Sancte Moduenne Virginis – c. 1140s
Lord Byron – August Darvell – 1819
Lord Byron – ‘The Giaour’ - 1813
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – ‘Christabel’ - 1816
D – ‘On Vampyrism’ in The New Monthly Magzine – 1823
William Godwin – St Leon – 1799
Goethe – ‘The Bride of Corinth’ - 1797
Matthew Lewis – The Monk - 1796
William of Malmesbury – Gesta Pontificum Anglorum – c. 1125
Walter Map – De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque – c. 1182
Charles Maturin – Melmoth the Wanderer - 1820
Sir Henry More – An Antidote to Atheism - 1653

63. Bibliography
William of Newburgh – Historia Rerum Anglicarum – c. 1198
Heinrich August Ossenfelder – ‘Der Vampir’ - 1748
John Polidori – ‘The Vampyre’ – 1819
Paul Ricaut – The State of the Greek and Armenian Churches – 1679
Mary Shelley – ‘The Mortal Immortal’ - 1833
Robert Southey – Thalaba the Destroyer – 1801
Chronicon de Lanercost – c. 1346
The Monk of Byland – c. 1400
The Armburgh Papers – c. 1425

64. Bibliography
Secondary Sources
Anon. – Onania – first extant copy 1725
Erik Butler - Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film - 2010
Joseph Crawford – The Twilight of the Gothic – 2014
Ken Gelder - Reading the Vampire – 1994
Stephen Gordon – ‘Dealing with the Undead in the Later Middle Ages’ in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe ed. by Thea Tomaini – 2018
Stephen Gordon – ‘Social Monsters and the Walking Dead’ in Journal of Medieval History - 2015
Stephen Gordon - Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval Europe – 2019
Nick Groom – The Vampire: A New History – 2018
Christopher Herbert – ‘Vampire Religion’ in Representations - 2002
Raymond McNally – A Clutch Of Vampires – 1976
Agnes Murgoci - ‘The Vampire in Roumania’ in The Vampire: A Casebook, ed. by Alan Dundes – 1998
Roy Porter - ‘Love, Sex, and Madness in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Social Research - 1986)
Victor Sage - Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition - 1988
Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse?’ in Folklore - 2013