Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recent crises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now, the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinary accountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.
Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilizing force is not new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fall on the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture and institutional weakness. They explained crisis.
This new dossier revisits those episodes of collective anxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a fine barometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.
In our third podcast, we host Ádám Mézes, with whom we discuss the fascinating topic of vampire contagion in the Habsburg Empire and its broader impact on the history of science. As in the earlier conversation with Kateryna Dysa on witchcraft trials, the discussion begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a vampire, and who has the authority to define it?
The first clear definition of vampires in the Habsburg lands comes from a medical report written in 1732. It describes the vampire as “a returning dead, a revenant, a physical corpse that (…) it is also to spread its condition to its victims”, as our guest emphasizes. Because Ádám Mézes focuses on the Habsburg case, most of the written sources he uses come from medical personnel and members of the clergy. These reports were mediated through translators and shaped by the conceptual frameworks of imperial officials. Many of them interpreted the unfamiliar beliefs through the categories of Catholic demonology. Thus, religious confessions played an essential role in defining vampires.
The conversation then moves to the specific political and epidemiological context of the Habsburg military frontier, which strongly influenced the perception about vampires. Officials stationed along the frontier were trained to watch for signs of contagious disease. When several unexplained deaths occurred in the same village, suspicion quickly spread. As John Blair emphasized in our first podcast of this series, reports of vampires often emerged as a possible explanation for the sudden wave of deaths.
In an ironic twist, the focus on vampires had an important effect on scientific investigation. Mézes brings the examples of two physicians who exhumed and dissected bodies suspected of being vampires. At that time, systematic research on human bodies was morally and legally constrained. However, by observing cases of suspected vampirism, such physicians could produce empirical insights about the human body and the process of decay.
Our discussion concludes with possible avenues for future research. Our guest emphasizes that primary sources in Orthodox and Catholic monastic archives, as well as administrative records, still require investigation. In turn, the historians should move away from the literary stereotypes created in the 18th and 19th centuries and focus instead on reconstructing the complex social worlds in which the figure of the vampire first took shape.
Ádám Mézes is a historian who defended his PhD at the Central European University in Budapest. He is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the Department of History of the European University Institute in Florence and his project is called “Living with Vampires”.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.
