Calmet’s Contribution to the Creation of Conventions in Vampire Literature

Abstract

In a time of a "vampirism plague" in the 18^th century, the Benedictine, Dom Augustin Calmet, wrote a Traité to contest the existence of vampires. His writings, a collection of other authors, paradoxically, will contribute to the creation and dissemination of the myth of these creatures, providing data on the stories that will aid in developing the literary character in vampire literature. We will focus on the study of two main topics collected by Calmet: the main characteristics of the dead in the grave and how to kill these creatures. We will contrast these two topics in the creative works of authors that developed the literary archetype of the vampire: Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker; to subsequently trace the evolution of the archetype focusing on three works of Tieck, Gautier and Tolstoi. As we will describe in our conclusions, there has been a great change in the archetype of the revenant described by Calmet; about how to kill the vampire, the different ways to kill the creature, in literary stories are the same as those Calmet will describe in his writings.