Before Nosferatu

Long before vampires entered literature and film, they were not creatures of fiction, but a serious problem.

In the towns and villages of early modern Central Europe, the dead did not always remain at rest. Graves were opened. Bodies were found unnaturally preserved, their mouths and noses stained with blood, their limbs still flexible. Villagers reported illness, suffocation, and nocturnal visitations. In response, theologians, physicians, and magistrates were called upon to investigate this unexplained terror.

What they left behind was a rare collection of real cases preserved in German, Silesian, Moravian, and Habsburg texts on vampires, revenants, and mysterious but widespread nocturnal assault.

Before Nosferatu presents thirteen primary vampire documents from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, drawn from the German-speaking and Habsburg world. It includes Dracole Waide, the seminal Magia Posthuma, the Silesian horror case of Johann Cuntz, Visum et Repertum - the military report on the vampire epidemic of Medvedia - and a series of eighteenth-century dissertations on 'blood sucking corpses'. These texts trace the emergence of the vampire as a phenomenon that challenged the boundaries between life and death, nature and the supernatural.

Positioned at the crossroads of folklore, demonology, and early science, these writings reveal a world in which the dead could act and the living were forced to respond. Carefully translated and presented with scholarly annotations, this volume offers direct access to the original sources behind one of the most enduring and misunderstood figures in European culture.

This is not a mythology of vampires. It is their true history...