{"id":5013,"date":"2005-07-22T10:54:15","date_gmt":"2005-07-22T10:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-historian.html"},"modified":"2005-07-22T10:54:15","modified_gmt":"2005-07-22T10:54:15","slug":"the-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-historian.html","title":{"rendered":"The Historian"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Beliefnet, the author of the new, best-selling novel, discusses Christianity, Prince Vlad, and the Dracula legend.<\/a> I don’t know enough about the latter two to comment, but here it is for those who are interested:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Your book gets deep into the history of the Christian origins of the Dracula legend. Even his name comes from the Order of the Dragon, which was supposed to protect Christians from the invading Ottomans.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>
Yes, that’s right. <\/p>\n

It’s pretty clear in your book that the historical Dracula considered himself a pious Christian. Can you tell me anything more about Vlad Dracula’s actual beliefs? How much of this part of your book is based on history?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s very hard to know what the actual beliefs of a medieval figure were, unless that person was a cleric or a religious writer who would be likely to record those beliefs. There are stories about Dracula that were written down by his contemporaries, or diplomats who went to his court, or scribes. <\/p>\n

One thing that several different sources report about him is that he did have some doubts about where he was going to end up after he died. He seems to have been aware that his deeds of torture and murder of his own people, at least–and who knows how he felt about torturing and murdering Ottomans, he may have felt very differently about that–caused him some doubt about whether or not he could actually enter heaven, as it was viewed in the traditions of the time. He gave a great deal of money to several monasteries to rebuild them or to enrich them, including the monastery where he’s buried, as you saw in the book. <\/p>\n

It’s hard to tell from the record whether he was genuinely pious, or just a shrewd leader who was worried about what was going to happen to his soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Beliefnet, the author of the new, best-selling novel, discusses Christianity, Prince Vlad, and the Dracula legend. I don’t know enough about the latter two to comment, but here it is for those who are interested: Your book gets deep into the history of the Christian origins of the Dracula legend. Even his name comes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Historian - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-historian.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Historian - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Beliefnet, the author of the new, best-selling novel, discusses Christianity, Prince Vlad, and the Dracula legend. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}