De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulus

By Michael Ranft. While discussing the corpses of disinterred vampires, Montague Summers says the following of this book: "It was not infrequently seen that the dead person in his grave had devoured all about him, grinding them with his teeth, and (as it was supposed) uttering a low raucous noise like the grunting of a pig who roots among garbage. In his work, De Masticatione Mortuorum in tumulis, Leipzig, 1728, Michael Ranft treats at some length of this matter. He says that it is very certain that some corpses have devoured their cerements and even gnaw their own flesh. It has been suggested that this is the original reason why the jaws of the dead were tightly bound with linen bands. Ranft instances the case of a Bohemian woman who when disinterred in 1355 had devoured the greater part of her shroud. In another instance during the sixteenth century both a man and a woman seemed to have torn out their intestines and were actually ravening upon their entrails. In Moravia a corpse was exhumed which had devoured the grave-clothes of a woman buried not far from his tomb." (See Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin.) A scan of the book in Latin is available at the Internet Archive.

Simon Maglore had a copy of this book. The Mannikin narrator gives the date of the book as 1734, rather than 1728 as Summers does. [RB Mannikin]

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