Discussion Questions for Social Disciplining

1) What does Reinhard mean by "confessionalization"?

2) What is the relationship between religious reform and the development of the modern Western state?

3) What is "social disciplining"?

4) Are there any ways in which social disciplining is still prevalent in modern society?

Vampires in Renaissance Venice

The belief in vampires was not limited to Transylvania, Romania, and the extremes of Eastern Europe. They survived longer there because the social and cultural trends that dismissed these beliefs as superstitions - the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution - were not as prominent there as they were further west. For this reason, folk beliefs that were commonplace in pre-modern Europe persisted longer in Eastern Europe, and became a form of exotic entertainment for Western audiences.

It is not unusual for archaeologists to find evidence of vampire beliefs in burial rituals throughout Europe. Vampires were not as clearly defined (or sexy) as they are in modern popular culture rather, they were part of a larger system of belief in the ability of certain dead to harm the living. This was not unusual in a world where the boundary between this life and the next was conceived as thin and easily crossed, and where the dead in the form of saints and ancestors could also protect the living.

This article from National Geographic is about a burial from the sixteenth century that was uncovered in Venice. It is evidence of the persistence of these types of beliefs in a time and place where we might not expect them, as well as the fluidity of definitions of witchcraft and the undead.