For decades, Jan Perkowski's The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism (1989) has remained the primary English-language source for scholars researching vampirism in eastern Europe. The translation from the German of Thomas Bohn's The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth considerably broadens our understanding of the vampire by connecting the image of the revenant in the Latin west with its counterparts in central and eastern Europe. Like Perkowski before him, Bohn addresses a vast range of primary sources to trace the origins of beliefs in the undead. By the same token, Bohn expands his subject's purview by incorporating largely forgotten or overlooked examples of revenants in the German-speaking world and contextualizing these sources alongside works from Slavic lands. Drawing upon primary sources from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, Bohn argues that the vampire functioned “as an imperial category” that both literally and figuratively developed as a “border phenomenon” in which the undead operated “on the margins of the multinational empires or in the grey zones of the Western hemisphere” (2).

Bohn begins his discussion with an overview of vampirism in the west and outlines how the ritualization of death during the Middle Ages, granted the important function of the recently deceased as “messengers to the other side” (14). With this in mind, Bohn illustrates how “living corpses” and “walking dead” appear in a variety of cultural texts, including the Icelandic Sagas of the eleventh century, early tales of vampires in Medieval England, and most importantly, in German reports featuring the “nachzehrer.” Unlike the vampires of southeast Europe who emerged from their graves to suck the blood of victims, the nachzehrer “was characterized only by the devouring of his funeral shrouds and the spreading of disease” (32).

One of the major contributions of Bohn's study is his meticulous historiography of vampirism in eastern Europe. After outlining examples of vampirism in premodern Russia, Bohn then describes reports of the dead returning to disturb the living in accounts from Poland-Lithuania and southeastern Europe. Case studies from the region help support Bohn's argument that while many believe the origin of the vampire can be traced to the Balkans, references to this figure are found only after the eighteenth century. The overwhelming evidence does support Bohn's assertion that “the Southeast European revenant has had the image of the bloodsucker superimposed on it in order to add content to the attractive terminological shell that the word ‘vampire’ represented” (234). That the vampire takes on newfound relevance in the eighteenth century is proved unequivocally in Chapter 3, “Vampirism in the Headlines,” which offers detailed account of two figures well-known to Slavists and folklorists: Peter Plogojowitz and Arnond Paole (also Arnaut Pavle). Bohn's careful study of how these two real-life individuals became “stylized in west European debates as the prototype of the vampire” underscores the lasting connection between the vampire and contagion (83). Likewise illuminating is Bohn's analysis of the legend of Michael Kasparek: returning from the grave to terrorize his relatives and fellow townspeople, Kasparek's fame grew as tales regarding his blood sucking and evil deeds ignited the public's imagination.

Scholars of eastern European and Russian folklore will find Chapter 4 (“Vampirism in Popular Belief”) an important source for new information on demonic and vampiric creatures in tales from Poland, Prussia, the Balkans, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Bohn provides extensive analysis of how belief in vampires among people in these regions moved from the realm of folklore to high literature, and thus successfully illustrates how “debates of Western physicians and theologians in the final third of the eighteenth century…found its way, as a tragic motif, into the poetry of the Sturm and Drang movement” (138). Careful observation of the intersection between popular folk belief and literary iterations of the vampire prompts Bohn to discuss Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897) from a historical perspective by tracing the origins of the work to a variety of sources, including the beliefs of German-speaking settlers in Transylvania, as well as the work of Scottish writer Emily Gerard.

Bohn concludes his study with a logical and persuasive analysis on the origins and significance of vampirism. Weaving together historical analysis with the process of Christianization, The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth offers an illuminating contribution to scholarship on the vampire figure.