Benedictine biblical scholarship and vampire lore

Augustine Calmet

1672 – 1757

Antoine Augustin Calmet was a French Benedictine abbot and biblical scholar who became the first systematic analyst of vampire folklore, compiling and critically examining reports of vampires, revenants, and spirits from Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia in his 1746 Dissertations on Apparitions and its expanded 1751 edition. His treatise provided the foundational scholarly documentation of vampirism that shaped both serious demonological study and literary treatments of the vampire from Polidori through Bram Stoker. Calmet's sober, evidentiary approach — presenting cases without quite believing or disbelieving them — established the template for systematic supernatural folklore scholarship.