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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Book of Were-Wolves,' S. Baring-Gould meticulously explores the folklore and historical accounts surrounding lycanthropy, presenting a comprehensive study steeped in both narrative richness and folkloric authenticity. His literary style melds scholarly rigor with a captivating storytelling approach, drawing upon a myriad of sources ranging from ancient texts to contemporary observations. The book delves into the psychological and sociocultural implications of werewolf myths, situating these narratives within the broader context of Victorian fascination with the macabre and the supernatural. Baring-Gould, a multifaceted Victorian author and theologian, was deeply influenced by his interest in folklore and the rural life of Britain. His extensive travels and research formed a foundation for understanding the complexities of regional myths, including the varied legends of werewolves across Europe. This breadth of knowledge not only informs the text but also reflects Baring-Gould's commitment to preserving cultural narratives influenced by time-honored traditions. I highly recommend 'The Book of Were-Wolves' to anyone intrigued by folklore, mythology, and the intersection of literature and the supernatural. Baring-Gould's insightful reflections and profound understanding of human fears and fantasies will resonate with both literature enthusiasts and those curious about the enduring legacy of werewolf legends. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Book of Were-Wolves
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the threshold where folklore meets the record of crime, this book probes how a civilized society grapples with the idea that the human being might, in belief or deed, become the beast, tracing the stories, testimonies, and explanations that have gathered around werewolves while confronting the uneasy tension between terror and curiosity, superstition and inquiry, communal fear and individual transgression, so that readers are led into a study not only of metamorphosis as a legend, but of the ways cultures narrate violence, otherness, and the porous boundary between the natural and the monstrous.
The Book of Were-Wolves by S. Baring-Gould is a nineteenth-century work of nonfiction that surveys the belief in lycanthropy across history and culture. First published in 1865, it belongs to a Victorian moment fascinated by the cataloging of folklore and the testing of old ideas against emerging scholarship. Baring-Gould, an English clergyman and folklorist, approaches his subject as an investigator of sources rather than a teller of fiction, situating werewolf traditions within European contexts while acknowledging their deep roots in earlier literature and legend. The result is a study that straddles cultural history, criminology, and the lore of the uncanny.
Readers encounter a carefully assembled inquiry rather than a sensational tale: a compendium of reported cases, legendary narratives, and interpretive reflections that move from antiquity through medieval and early modern Europe. The experience is at once scholarly and atmospheric. Baring-Gould writes in a measured voice, yet he does not shy from the macabre textures that adhere to the theme, producing a sober but engrossing journey through fearful imaginations and documented confessions. The mood is investigative, often somber, occasionally sardonic, and attentive to the moral questions raised whenever belief, transgression, and communal judgment intersect in the shadowed territory of the werewolf.
Methodically, the author assembles materials from chronicles, legal proceedings, travel accounts, devotional literature, and folk narratives, weighing how each genre shapes what is claimed as fact. He traces motifs of shapeshifting across regions and periods, juxtaposing mythic patterns with courtroom narratives and popular rumor. Alongside storytelling, he considers the explanatory frameworks available to past writers, including theological classifications and medical theories current before modern psychology. Throughout, he maintains a distinction between imaginative tradition and recorded testimony, inviting readers to observe how evidence is marshaled, how fear is formalized into procedure, and how the extraordinary is made legible in official and local discourse.
Beneath its catalog of cases and legends, the book advances themes still resonant today: the fragility of identity at the edge of sanctioned norms; the ease with which societies project anxieties onto liminal figures; and the capacity of belief to shape behavior, punishment, and memory. The werewolf becomes a lens for examining scapegoats, moral panics, and the rhetoric of dehumanization. Questions emerge about responsibility and possession, the relation of body and will, and the moral theater of public justice. In tracing these patterns, the study asks how communities draw lines between human and animal, sinner and criminal, patient and monster.
Stylistically, the work balances narrative vignette with analytic pause, creating a rhythm that alternates between stark incident and reflective commentary. Its Victorian prose is formal yet accessible, attentive to classification and comparison without losing a sense of atmosphere. Readers should expect period assumptions and terms that reflect its time, alongside an earnest effort to collate sources and test claims. The effect is not a modern ethnography but an early, ambitious synthesis: a document of how nineteenth-century scholarship confronted a disturbing tradition, acknowledging its allure, tracing its transmission, and scrutinizing its claims with a mixture of skepticism, moral concern, and historical curiosity.
For contemporary readers, the enduring value of The Book of Were-Wolves lies in its clear-eyed account of how cultures construct monsters and how such constructions travel from fireside tale to courtroom and page. It offers a genealogy of fear that illuminates present-day debates about rumor, stigma, and the narratives used to explain violence. Those interested in folklore, the history of ideas, crime, or the Gothic will find an informative companion that rewards critical engagement. Read with attention to context, it becomes both a map of past belief and a mirror reflecting ongoing questions about humanity’s boundaries and the stories we tell to police them.
Synopsis
The Book of Were-Wolves assembles historical, literary, and legal materials to examine the idea of the werewolf and the condition historically called lycanthropy. Baring-Gould outlines his plan: to trace beliefs from classical antiquity through medieval Europe and early modern trials, then consider medical and rational explanations. He distinguishes between legends of bodily transformation and documented cases where individuals believed themselves wolves. Using chronicles, sagas, trial records, and physicians' treatises, he presents narratives and extracts with minimal embellishment. The opening establishes definitions, principal terms in various languages, and the scope of the inquiry, situating the topic within comparative folklore and moral theology.
A section surveys Greco-Roman sources and early Christian discussions. The Arcadian myths of Lycaon and the rites of Zeus Lycaeus are recounted as archetypal transformations linked to sacrificial transgression. Authors such as Petronius relate a soldier's nocturnal metamorphosis, while Pliny, Virgil, and others note magical arts producing lupine change. Patristic writers debate whether such changes are real or illusory, often attributing them to demonic deception or the imagination. These testimonies establish a long-standing literary context, showing how the motif of the wolf-man migrated into medieval thought and furnished authorities with precedents when later interrogating supposed werewolves.
The narrative turns north to Scandinavian and Germanic traditions. Saga episodes portray heroes donning enchanted skins and entering a berserk or wolf-coated state. The Volsunga saga's account of Sigmund and Sinfjotli adopting wolf-skins exemplifies shape-shifting as both costume and altered disposition. Baring-Gould describes the ulfhednar and berserkir, warriors reputed to change temper, strength, and sometimes outward form. He introduces the idea of the ham, or shape, and second-sight beliefs that permit soul-travel or animal guise. These materials emphasize a continuum between symbolic transformation, trance experience, and the literalistic readings that later informed legal accusations.
Western European folklore is organized by themes and mechanics of transformation. Accounts describe belts, ointments, or pelts that enable change, often acquired through pacts or charms. Conditions governing metamorphosis recur: night journeys, crossroads, fixed periods, or specific prayers. Vulnerabilities are catalogued, including how a blow dealt to a wolf may leave a corresponding mark on the human body, and how removal of the assumed skin undoes the spell. The author groups variants from France's loup-garou tales to German and Slavic wehr-wolf lore, noting recurrent motifs while preserving regional differences in ritual detail and moral framing.
The work then compiles judicial proceedings from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, when witchcraft prosecutions frequently entangled werewolf accusations. Extracts from indictments and confessions outline patterns: disappearance of children or livestock, reported sightings of wolf-like figures, and the discovery of salves or belts. Torture and leading questions are acknowledged as shaping narratives, yet verdicts and sentences are recorded precisely. Cases from Franche-Comte, Lorraine, the Rhineland, and Gascony illustrate how civic authorities, ecclesiastical courts, and secular tribunals handled alleged shapeshifters, revealing procedure, evidentiary standards, and prescribed punishments such as burning or beheading.
Several notorious instances are presented in detail. The werewolf of Poligny is summarized with testimony about nocturnal prowling and attacks attributed to a recluse using an ointment. The Bedburg affair narrates a Rhenish farmer's confession to murders and a wolf-belt granted by evil powers. Proceedings against Michel Verdun and Pierre Burgot display formulas of pact, sabbat, and transformation. Contrastingly, the Bordeaux examinations of Jean Grenier record a youth's delusions and supposed excursions as a wolf, later interpreted by physicians as mental disorder. The juxtaposition underscores differing explanatory frames within the same legal culture.
Further north and east, chronicles and travel writers contribute Baltic and Slavic material. Olaus Magnus describes nocturnal companies of werewolves in Livonia, leaping over fences and raiding cellars, while later court testimonies depict wolf-men as auxiliaries in a demonological cosmology. Scandinavian sources recount were-bears and wolf-charmers, extending the theme beyond a single animal. Regional customs, midwinter gatherings, and protective practices are noted to show the social environment in which such beliefs persisted. These examples broaden the survey, linking local traditions to larger European patterns of seasonal rites, liminal times, and communal anxieties.
After the historical panorama, the book turns to naturalistic and medical interpretations. Lycanthropy is treated as a recognized form of melancholia in older nosologies, marked by individuals who imagine themselves transformed and may roam or attack. Physicians' explanations include hallucination, epilepsy, and mania, as well as intoxication from salves containing narcotic or belladonna-like ingredients that induce vivid dreams of flight and bestiality. The author also notes misattribution of wolf depredations and the role of famine, isolation, or criminal intent in shaping confessions. Physical anomalies and hypertrichosis are mentioned as possible triggers for suspicion and legend.
The conclusion integrates mythic, legal, and medical strands to present werewolf lore as a composite phenomenon. The survey argues that reports of transformation arise from overlapping sources: traditional motifs, judicial frameworks that codified expectations, pathological conditions, and occasional crimes projected through a symbolic animal form. By arranging narratives chronologically and geographically, the book conveys the endurance and adaptability of the werewolf idea across Europe. Its central message is descriptive rather than sensational: to document how belief in lycanthropy developed, how authorities addressed it, and how rational explanations illuminate records without dismissing their historical significance.
Historical Context
The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) was produced in Victorian Britain, at a moment when industrial modernity, empirical science, and Protestant moral reform shaped public debate. Its author, Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican cleric and antiquarian, wrote from England but ranged across continental archives, placing folklore under the scrutiny of history, theology, and emerging psychiatry. The book is not set in a single locale; rather, it surveys cases from medieval and early modern Europe—Germany, France, the Baltic, and Scandinavia—while situating them within a mid-nineteenth-century English climate fascinated by crime, superstition, and the scientific classification of belief. Thus it occupies two principal “places”: the historical Europe of trials and the contemporary Britain of comparative inquiry.
Central to Baring-Gould’s canvas are the demonological and judicial frameworks that defined shapeshifting as a crime. The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), compiled by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger and disseminated from Speyer, furnished a scholastic rationale for witchcraft and metamorphosis. Charles V’s Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532) standardized procedures—including confession and torture—across the Holy Roman Empire. In France, magistrates like Henri Boguet of Saint-Claude (Discours des sorciers, 1602) and Pierre de Lancre in Labourd (1612) integrated “loup-garou” narratives into criminal prosecution. Baring-Gould cites such treatises and records to show how learned demonology met local fears, turning popular werewolf traditions into capital cases.
The wave of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century werewolf trials most directly shaped Baring-Gould’s work. He gives extended attention to the case of Gilles Garnier, a reclusive weaver near Dole in Franche-Comté, arrested in 1572 and condemned by the Parlement of Dole in January 1573 after confessions—elicited under judicial pressure—of killing children while transformed by an ointment. In the Rhineland, the sensational 1589 execution at Bedburg, near Cologne, of Peter Stumpp (Stübbe/Stumpf) was broadcast in a London pamphlet, A True Discourse (1590), detailing alleged murders, cannibalism, and a magic belt that enabled lupine change; the case illustrates how print amplified local panic across borders. In 1603, the Parlement of Bordeaux tried the teenage Jean Grenier, whose avowals of roaming as a wolf led to confinement rather than execution, anticipating medical interpretations of “lycanthropia.” These prosecutions drew on ecclesiastical and secular courts, mixed torture with testimony, and often targeted marginal figures during periods of subsistence stress and confessional tension. Baring-Gould mines surviving indictments and pamphlets for concrete data—names, places, depositions—while juxtaposing them with reports of animal attacks and hysteria. He proposes that many “transformations” arose from homicidal mania, ergotism, or social contagion, reframing werewolves as products of juridical zeal, rural fear, and pathological states rather than literal metamorphosis. This cluster of cases, dated precisely (1572–1573, 1589, 1603) and located in Dole, Bedburg, and Bordeaux, provides the empirical backbone for his comparative method and his argument that superstition ossified into law can yield lethal error.
Baring-Gould also foregrounds the Baltic werewolf trials, notably the 1692 proceedings at Jürgensburg in Swedish Livonia (present-day Latvia) against Thiess of Kaltenbrun, an eighty-year-old peasant who claimed that werewolves were “hounds of God” fighting witches in Hell to protect the harvest. The court punished him for superstition, not homicide, revealing a late seventeenth-century shift in prosecutorial emphasis. By placing Thiess alongside earlier French and German cases, Baring-Gould highlights regional variance and the agrarian calendar’s role in ritual belief, while hinting at analogies with other European fertility-nightfighter traditions preserved in inquisitorial records.
Turning backward in time, the author explores warrior-cults in the Norse world, adducing saga sources to historicize the wolf-man motif. The Ynglinga saga describes Odin’s men fighting in berserkr fury, while the Völsunga saga recounts Sigmundr and Sinfjötli donning wolf-skins and prowling the woods. These ninth- to eleventh-century traditions in Norway and Iceland associate animal guise with elite violence, initiation, and liminality. Baring-Gould uses names and episodes from these texts to argue that medieval European werewolf lore inherited, transformed, or misremembered ritualized “wolf-warrior” identities, which later courts recoded as diabolic metamorphosis.
Eighteenth-century France offered another landmark episode: the Beast of Gévaudan (1764–1767), a series of attacks in Lozère and adjoining regions that left scores of victims, many of them children. Royal hunts led by Captain Duhamel and then by Jean-Charles d’Enneval failed; François Antoine de Beauterne killed a large wolf in 1765, yet deaths continued until Jean Chastel reportedly felled the creature in 1767. The affair engaged Louis XV’s court and the Paris press, blending rural terror with centralized state spectacle. Baring-Gould presents it as a naturalistic kernel—feral fauna and mismanaged hunts—over which older werewolf language was draped by rumor and print.
The nineteenth-century rise of psychiatry reframed inherited superstition within new medical taxonomies. Philippe Pinel’s Traité (1801) and Jean-Étienne Esquirol’s Des maladies mentales (1838) elaborated “monomanias,” under which clinical lycanthropy was sometimes classified. Bénédict Morel’s degeneration theory (1857) offered a hereditarian account of violent impulse, while forensic medicine and statistical criminology professionalized courtroom expertise. In Britain and France, alienists began recording patients who believed themselves animals. Baring-Gould deploys these authorities to translate werewolf confessions into psychopathology and somatic illness, aligning medieval records with contemporary case histories and arguing that what law once named “metamorphosis” could be read as delusion, epilepsy, or mania.
Although descriptive in tone, the book functions as a critique of the social and political machinery that punished imagination, poverty, and illness as diabolic crime. By collating trials from Dole, Bedburg, Bordeaux, and Jürgensburg with medical treatises, Baring-Gould exposes how torture, confessional polemic, and rural hierarchy criminalized marginal people and amplified panic through print and pulpit. His Victorian synthesis challenges the legitimacy of juridical cruelty, questions clerical and secular complicity in persecutions, and urges rational, humane responses to deviance and disease. The work implicitly condemns class-biased justice and the exploitation of peasant fears, suggesting that modern mental health and empirical inquiry should replace spectacle and superstition.
