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Werewolf Histories (Willem de Blécourt, ed.)

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.5.2.0242

2161-2196

David Winter,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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 werewolves 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 wild canines, using them for transportation. The origins of the wolf rider remain obscure, and de Blécourt concedes that the image might or might not be associated with bestial metamorphosis. The second interlude (205) focuses on the mysterious figure of the “shepherd of wolves” or Wolfsbanner, a lupine husbandman who appears to clear the early modern landscape of wolves by leading them abroad in almost processional fashion. Again, this character's motives and connection to lycanthropy are uncertain. In some variants, the wolf shepherd metamorphoses into a werecreature. Though only tangentially related to the dominant theme of the book, the Interludes constitute some of its most intrinsically fascinating material. It is therefore unfortunate that they are almost gnomic in their brevity.While the Interludes frustrate, the essays themselves are generally satisfying. In his opening rumination, “The Differentiated Werewolf: An Introduction to Cluster Methodology,” de Blécourt articulates some of the more vexing problems in relation to the study of wolf-men. Chief among these is the fact that modern popular cultural assumptions about the werewolf (particularly those derived from cinematic and televisual evocations) have seeped into academic discourse and, as a result, have so thoroughly saturated the field that scholars have great difficulty identifying the individual strands of the creature's pre-cinematic history. This has had a distorting effect, occluding what de Blécourt considers the already fragmentary, disconnected histories of the creature. In remedy he proposes the “differentiated” werewolf, a methodological contrivance that he makes available to scholars through the application of “cluster methodology.” Derived, it appears, from “clustering” in statistical data analysis, cluster methodology seeks to plot the linguistic, historical, and spatial fields of the werewolf motif, seeking continuities and discontinuities between (and indeed, among) distinct geographic and temporal werewolf populations.The first group of essays explores the clusters of the premodern era. In “Good to Think: Wolves and Wolf-Men in the Graeco-Roman World,” Richard Gordon identifies the werewolf of antiquity as a fundamentally historiographical idea, one that was built from various literary and cultural materials, including stories of the legendary tyrant Lykaon and of the supposed “wolf cults” of Hellenic Arcadia. Though early Roman authors attempted to cultivate the myth, the werewolf did not survive the shifting cultural/political priorities of the Imperial era. Gordon argues that, while wolf-men may have continued to exist at the level of folk culture, there was little interest in the motif among the literati, who, by the time of the Principate, had become far more preoccupied with divination and necromancy. Indeed, the author finds virtually nothing about wolf-men in the surviving sources after Petronius (ca. 27–66 c.e.). The next essay, Christa Tuczay's “Into the Wild: Old Norse Stories of Animal Men,” parses the various constituents of the Nordic pagan soul and identifies three distinct categories of animal metamorphosis in the sagas: the procession of the animal soul (hamför) from the human body, psychic metamorphosis (hamramr), and what she calls “genuine metamorphosis.” Tuczay's task is complicated by the extent to which complex pagan ideas of the soul's composition were later refracted through the lens of Christian confessional allegiance. Aleksander Pluskowski's “Before the Werewolf Trials: Contextualising Shape-Changers and Animal Identities in Medieval North-Western Europe” completes this first group of essays. Using archaeological and textual evidence, Pluskowski argues that, throughout the medieval period, Europeans broadly accepted animal mumming, ritualistic concealment, and various other hybrid animal-human identities. It was only toward the end of the Middle Ages, in an “emerging climate of anxiety and religious policing,” that the werewolf became a more threatening presence, one that was increasingly connected with accusations of sorcery and cannibalism. Pluskowski rejects the notion that the werewolf was a “timeless, pan-European figure” (107).The early modern group of essays commences with Matteo Duni's microhistorical “‘What about Some Good Wether?’ Witches and Werewolves in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Using depositions from an early sixteenth-century witchcraft trial in the village of La Bastia near Modena, the author uncovers a captivating story of two brothers accused of sorcery and lycanthropy. While Duni calls his meticulous reconstruction of events “impressionistic” (136), his analysis serves as a template for others doing similar close work. The section titled “Werewolves and Trance” offers an especially compelling critique of Carlo Ginzburg's analysis of the benandanti in the Night Battles. The next two essays scrutinize intersections between the high theology of the scholars and the praxis of those charged with excising the werewolf threat from Europe. Johannes Dillinger's “‘Species,’ ‘Phantasia,’ ‘Raison’: Werewolves and Shape-Shifters in Demonological Literature,” for example, reads the Renaissance discourse on bestial metamorphosis and shape-shifting against a wider discussion of the concept of “reality” in doctrines surrounding witchcraft. Dillinger asserts that sixteenth-century demonologists were primarily concerned with the devil's power to deceive rather than about the mechanisms or consequences of metamorphosis. Rita Voltmer is also interested in linkages between witch-hunting, academic demonology and shape-shifting. In “The Judge's Lore? The Politico-Religious Concept of Metamorphosis in the Peripheries of Western Europe” she discusses the extent to which early seventeenth-century Jesuit demonologists employed werewolf accusations as a political weapon against the “lewd, hateful, and rebellious” peasantry of the Eifel frontier (179). Voltmer suggests that similar calumnies were probably wielded as part of Catholic lords' “purifying policy” throughout contested territories during the Wars of Religion and beyond. The final essay of the group, Rolf Shulte's “The Werewolf in the Popular Culture of Early Modern Germany,” uses the evidence of werewolf slander trials to argue that, while many early modern Germans regarded werewolves as wicked, so long as “the dark side of werewolfism remained outside the witchcraft discourse and the judicial system of elite culture,” they were inclined to tolerate the existence of “shape-changers” in their communities (200).The three essays in the final group reflect the shifting geography of werewolf belief/accusations in the modern period. In “Estonian Werewolf History,” for example, Merili Metsvahi shows the eastern Baltic to have been a hot spot for werewolf activity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She contends that tales of wolf-men probably entered the region along with German-speaking immigrants in the early modern period. However, the two populations ultimately developed rival werewolf traditions: Germans appear to have considered the creatures diabolical, while Estonians were more willing to tolerate those who “moved between spheres.” She argues that these competing views were ultimately derived from the two groups' respective interactions with wild wolves. Michèle Simonsen's “The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark,” the shortest essay in the collection, broadly surveys the landscape of nineteenth-century Danish werewolf beliefs. Unconcerned about the extent to which Danes might have feared the creatures, Simonsen appears to understand the popularity of werewolf legends in the modern era as a means for dislocated people to have meaningful discussions about important topics such as the power of speech and human actions, the pain of childbirth, and the human tendency toward atavism. Danish werewolf narratives thus represented a kind of symbolic discourse. The final essay is Maja Pasarić's “Dead Bodies and Transformations: Werewolves in Some South Slavic Folk Traditions,” in which, using evidence from the southern Balkans, she effectively demonstrates how werewolf fears (and fears of contamination associated with corpses) represented a destabilization of human identity, endowing theriomorphic symbols with deeply negative connotations.Werewolf Histories represents an important contribution to an emerging area of study. Its essays are lively and substantial, offering specialists and students alike a deep appreciation of the extent to which the historical werewolf ought to be considered a discursive tool, one devised and manufactured from the cultural materials available to those who invented—or reinvented—the image of the shape-shifter. The collection begins to establish a distribution and taxonomy for the creatures, mapping their home range(s) and following them into new and unexpected geographic and conceptual salients. As such, the collection is a welcome addition to the history of magic and the arcane. De Blécourt's introduction serves as an especially valuable resource, helping us to reimagine the werewolf as contingent and ambiguous. It is unfortunate that he chose not to amplify these issues with a dedicated conclusion, one reflecting in a more systematic way on the importance of using cluster methodology in this kind of project. As very few of the authors consciously picked up on the idea of the werewolf cluster in their essays, it was not immediately apparent how porous, elastic, or divisible these categories were intended to be; neither is the extent to which they might have been seen as discrete or overlapping, nor how they might have been shaped by a given author's methodology or perspective. Ultimately, however, this criticism is minor. Werewolf Histories is an absorbing collection that breaks new ground and prepares the way for further investigation of a timely and fascinating topic.