Timea Solyomvari
Timea's project explores the interaction between professional opinions with popular attitudes towards death and afterlife in the span from the late seventeenth until the nineteenth century.
Project description
This project explores the interaction between professional opinions with popular attitudes towards death and afterlife in the span from the late seventeenth until the nineteenth century. I investigate how new beliefs about the undead developed in parallel with the Enlightenment campaign against superstition, and the extent to which elite and popular discourses were in dialogue rather than in conflict with each other. My thesis uses the revenant/vampire as a central figure to analyse the popular belief at a time when the passage between life and death was being redefined by medical discourse. This cross-cultural investigation will show us how bodies and minds were understood and how this knowledge shaped everyday life, medical practice, and public health policy.