STRANGE HISTORIES by Darren Oldridge

Author:Darren Oldridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

THE CASE AGAINST WEREWOLVES

Some of the best discussions of werewolves in pre-modern literature can be found in works on satanic witchcraft. This reflected the popular belief that witches could transform themselves into wolves and other creatures. Witches occasionally confessed to attacking their neighbours in the shape of a wolf, like the woman from Franche-Comté who abducted two children in 1580 while “being like a wolf to the sight”. More often, their accusers claimed to have seen them in animal form. In 1576 an artisan from the Italian town of Ferrara described how a woman who bewitched his young son appeared to the child in the form of an unusually large cat. Some French witches also assumed this shape in order to enter their neighbours houses, and could even savage their enemies in the likeness of “great cats”. During a stay in Flanders in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit Martín Del Rio was informed that a local witch had recently turned herself into a toad. More ambitiously, Hungarian witches appeared as wasps and bumble-bees. Perhaps the most expert practitioner of this art was the English sorceress Anne Bodenham. According to a pamphlet published in 1653, she could change herself “into any shape whatsoever, a dog, a black lion, a white bear, a wolf, a monkey, a horse, a bull and a calf”. The belief that witches could accomplish such feats persisted in folklore long after the decline of official prosecutions. It was apparently still common in English rural communities in the early 1800s, when the “peasant poet” John Clare recalled his mothers fireside tales of witches transformed into cats and hares.5

Faced with these widespread beliefs, learned writers on witchcraft asked if it was possible for people to turn into animals. At one level, the answer was simple. In the book of Daniel, the Bible appeared to provide a concrete example of such a metamorphosis: when King Nebuchadnezzar was sent into exile, he ate grass like an ox and “his hairs were grown like eagles feathers, and his nails like birds claws” (Dan. 4:33). This bewildering makeover proved that the human body could be transformed. The Old Testament king was changed by an act of God, whose ability to intervene in such ways was never questioned. It was another matter, however, to claim that the Devil could achieve the same results. All demonologists agreed that Satan was responsible for the horrors associated with lycanthropy, so the key question was whether he was capable of transforming humans into beasts. A minority of scholars believed that he could. For Jean Bodin, the overwhelming weight of past opinion suggested that the metamorphosis of witches was a physical reality. He found it strange “that many cannot believe it, since all the peoples of the earth and all antiquity agree about it”. The English philosopher Henry More agreed. It was a mistake, he argued in 1652, to assume that “changing the species of things were a power too big to be granted the devil”. Satans skill in this area was proved by his ability to change his own shape when he appeared to mortals.

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