On Night’s Wing: Bats as Vampiric Signifiers of Death, Darkness, and Disease

Abstract

Images of bats have graced illuminated manuscripts, church architecture, and funerary art throughout Mediaeval Europe, calling into question their current associations with vampires as adversaries of Western Christianity. This essay outlines the cultural development of bats originally considered strange yet innocuous animals to signifiers of vampiric evil, using an interdisciplinary survey to pinpoint how and when attributions such as darkness, otherness, and contagion arose. Drawing from mediaeval thought, nineteenth-century literature, and modern-day scientific texts, a complex development ties the bat to the vampire by way of dragons and devils, becoming the de-facto symbol of vampirism and eventually the twenty-first century plague-bringer in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.