Werewolf Histories ed. by Willem de Blécourt (review)

The werewolf is an enduring but conceptually unstable cultural resource. Though modern iterations of the mythical beast might appear to derive from a common or readily discernible genealogy, the creature’s pedigree is not quite as transparent as might first appear. Formed and reformed in response to specific historical circumstances and/or sociopolitical tensions, and adapted repeatedly to align with deeply rooted psychosexual, religious, or other anxieties, the image of this nightmare creature has evolved significantly in its various historical and geographic presentations. Many of the creature’s supposed attributes—including such elementary properties as the mechanisms of transformation (e.g., the werewolf moon, the magic belt), the fixed or transient nature of the condition, the scope or extent of metamorphosis—vary according to localization and/or diachronic considerations. Thus, for example, the slightly tragic figure of the Breton noble Bisclavret in Marie de France’s thirteenth-century Lais was conceptualized in a substantially different manner than was the brutish and vampiric vukozlak of modern Bosnia and Croatia. Likewise, the vigorous ulfheðnar of the Norse sagas contrast sharply with the glamorous demons of Bodin’s early-modern literary reveries. Nevertheless, creatures that blur the line between animality and humanity have long pervaded European literature and myth. Adumbrations of bestial metamorphosis attach themselves to many of the root stories of the Western tradition, such as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Eddas, the Mabinogion, and many others.

The figure of the werewolf has attained new salience with the emergence of the “Animal Turn,” a scholarly movement that sets itself apart from earlier attempts to discuss the frontier between the animal and human realms in a number of ways. First, at the methodological level, the Animal Turn interacts with and builds on the work of posthuman philosophers and ethicists. It also purports to examine biological organisms not as mere allegories or tools, but as creatures that share a material and discursive world with the human animal in a variety of ways. Finally, it also seeks to dismantle the cordon that has traditionally separated humans from all other types of life. (These criteria are derived from the special issue of Postmedieval 2, no. 1 [2011], “The Animal Turn,” edited by Peggy McCracken and Karl Steel.) The first fruits of the Animal Turn have begun to appear in and between disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

In such a receptive intellectual climate, the image of the werewolf—a creature that haunts us by evoking the stubborn predilection of our species for recrudescence—is ripe for scrutiny and (re)evaluation. Werewolf Histories, a compilation of eleven essays by a diverse array of European scholars, succeeds in initiating the discussion. Indeed, the collection represents the first critical study of the historical werewolf to appear in English. It has been ably edited by Willem de Blécourt, a well-known historical anthropologist and research fellow at Amsterdam’s Meertens Instituut. De Blécourt is also one of the principal founders of the study group Hekserij en toverij in Nederland (Witchcraft and Sorcery in the Netherlands). Throughout his research, de Blécourt has exhibited a fascination with the intersection of the human and animal worlds, particularly where those intersections are mediated by the arcane. Thus, Werewolf Histories represents a natural progression of de Blécourt’s work.

Although the collection is not formally divided into sections, de Blécourt’s plan is comparatively straightforward. He opens the work with a historiographical essay that assays the state of the research; then he separates the collection conceptually into three broad chronological groups. The first deals with were-wolves in premodernity, the second covers the important legacy of the early modern era, and the third focuses primarily on the werewolf in modern times. The groups are partitioned by two frustratingly brief excursus that the editor calls “Interludes.”

The first interlude (119–20) explores “wolf riding,” a literary and artistic trope in which giantesses and witches are unaccountably (though possibly for their sexual pleasure) depicted astride...