The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature

2. A Survey of Reference Works

2 A Survey of Reference Works Primary Sources Lycanthropy has fascinated scholars and philosophers since the days of ancient Greece and Rome, and has been treated or briefly referred to by many authors throughout the centuries. The first important studies were written in the sixteenth century by leading theologians and senior members of the judiciary, all of whom discussed the subject in the wider context of witchcraft and demonology. The most contentious treatise , and the instigator of a lengthy debate about lycanthropy , was Jean Bodin's De fa Demonomanie des 50rciers , published in France in I580. Primarily a study of witchcraft and diabolism, it contained a controversial chapter on werewolfery in which the author maintained that it was possible for people to be materially 30 A Survey of Reference Works transformed into wolves, and, indeed, he cited examples from Scripture and history to support his dogmatic viewpoint. However, apart from Joannes Wolfeshusius, whose De Lycanthropis (1591) was the first comprehensive examination of the werewolf superstition , there was little support for Bodin's opinions among other European scholars. Opposing or alternative theories were expounded in Johann Weyer's De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563), Reginald Scot's The Discoverie ofWitchcraft (1584), Henri Boguet's Discours des Sorciers (1590), Claude Prieur's Dialogue de fa Lycanthropie (1596), Le Sieur de Beauvoys de Chauvincourt's Discours de la Lycanthropie (1599), and Jean de Nynauld 's De fa Lycanthropie (1615). In each ofthese works the authors quote from the Bible and other ancient authorities to support convoluted arguments about the true nature ofwerewolves. Opinions vary slightly, but the general consensus is that lycanthropy is a mental illness , and alleged transformations are merely a deception ofthe Devil's. Key extracts from some ofthese primary sources have been reproduced in A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture, edited by Charlotte F. Otten (Dorset Press, 1989). Modern Studies Scholarly interest in werewolfery declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and wasn't rekindled until the middle of the nineteenth century, when 31 A Survey of Reference Works Wilhelm Hertz's Der Werwolf (1862) and Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book ofWere-Wolves: Being an Account ofa Terrible Superstition (1865) brought the subject to the public's attention once more. Hertz's volume , a miscellaneous collection of myths, legends, and strange superstitions connected with the werewolf, has been described by Montague Summers as "a careful study which contains much of value." Baring-Gould's book, ofwhich there have been several reprint editions, is less erudite and concentrates on dramatized factual accounts of the lives of notorious real-life werewolves, such as Gilles Garnier, Jean Grenier, and Sergeant Bertrand . Like the more enlightened medieval scholars, Baring-Gould attributes lycanthropy to a species of madness in which the person afflicted by it believes himselfto be a wild beast-and acts accordingly. In another book from the 1860s, Eliphas Levi's Mysteries ofMagic, there is a brief but significant reference to lycanthropy when the author digresses from his main discourse to make the following observations: We must speak here oflycanthropy, or the nocturnal transformation ofmen into wolves, histories so well substantiated that skeptical science has had recourse to furious maniacs, and to masquerading as animals for explanations. But such hypotheses are puerile and explain nothing. Let us seek elsewhere the solution of the mystery, and establish- First, that no person has been killed by a wer-wolf except by suffocation , without effusion of blood and without wounds. Second, that wer-wolves, though tracked, 32 A Survey of Reference Works hunted, and even maimed, have never been killed on the spot. Third, that persons suspected of these transformations have always been found at home, after the pursuit of the wer-wolf: more or less wounded, sometimes dying, but invariably in their natural form. There are many other books from the Victorian era that give some slight reference to werewolfery. Worth singling out are two wide-ranging surveys, Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition andFolk-lore (1863) by Walter Kelly, and Curious Creatures in Zoology (1890) by John Ashton, both of which include a section on the werewolf . Also of interest is Kirby Flower Smith's monograph ''An Historical Study of the Werewolf in Literature ," published in 1894. Among the many reference works about werewolves and shapeshifting produced in the twentieth century, the first to achieve popularity was Elliott O'Donnell's Werwolves (1912). The author, a professional ghost-hunter and self-styled scientific...