A Brief, Annotated History of the Werewolf — From Trial Records to Therapy Couches

There is a legal record, from the town of Dole in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, dated 1573, of a trial against a man named Gilles Garnier for the crime of being a werewolf. The charges were specific. He had, the prosecution alleged, attacked and eaten four children between the ages of nine and twelve. He had done this in the shape of a wolf. Multiple witnesses had seen him either transforming or in lupine form. He confessed to the charges, under torture, and was burned at the stake on January 18, 1574.

The Garnier trial is not a unique document. Historians working through the court archives of France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries have identified somewhere between three hundred and four hundred werewolf trials conducted between roughly 1520 and 1630. The number is almost certainly an undercount, because many local records have not survived. The number should, if you are approaching it for the first time, be shocking. Four hundred trials is not a handful of local panics. It is a sustained, legally serious, continent-wide phenomenon that lasted a hundred and ten years.

I have been thinking about these trials for about three years, on and off, since I first encountered the Garnier record in a dusty French legal history at a library sale. What I want to do in this piece is lay out what we actually know about them, why they happened, and what they tell us about the history of the category of "the human", which is, I think, what they are really about.

What the records say

A composite picture, drawn from the documents that survive: the accused werewolf is almost always a man, usually rural, usually poor, often with some kind of social marginality, a wandering laborer, a beggar, a person with what contemporaries described as "strange habits." He is accused, typically, of attacking children, livestock, or occasionally other adults. The attacks occur at night, in forests or fields. He is said to have transformed into a wolf, either through a magical ointment, a pact with the devil, or the mere putting-on of a wolfskin belt.

Under interrogation, which in this period routinely included torture, most accused werewolves confessed. The confessions are often lurid. They describe the specific pact made with the devil, the ingredients of the transformation ointment, the number and manner of their killings. They are, on their face, detailed and coherent accounts. They are also, almost certainly, not what happened.

Modern scholars have identified several different things that appear to have been going on under the legal category of "lycanthropy":

• Actual murders and acts of violence, which needed a legal framework, and which lycanthropy provided. In some cases, particularly involving serial killers, the "werewolf" framing may have been the only way contemporary courts could make sense of what they were seeing.
• Mental illness, specifically what we would now call clinical lycanthropy, a rare dissociative condition in which the sufferer believes themselves to be an animal. Cases have been documented in modern psychiatric literature, though they are uncommon.
• Community scapegoating. A marginal person, already disliked, becomes the explanation for a series of otherwise unexplained deaths, wolf attacks on livestock, children lost in the woods, unexplained disappearances. The werewolf accusation was a way of consolidating blame.
• Judicial paranoia. Once the legal category existed, it drew in cases that did not originally have anything to do with wolves, because investigators and witnesses reshaped their accounts to fit the available explanatory framework.

All four of these seem to have been present, in different proportions, in different trials. Sorting them out is one of the hard problems of the historical record.

Why the werewolf, specifically?

This is the question that has interested me most. Why did early modern Europe need a werewolf, as opposed to, say, a were-bear, a were-deer, or any number of other animal transformations that show up in the older folklore? Why was it specifically the wolf?

A few partial answers, none sufficient on its own:

The wolf was, at this period, a real and active threat. Wolves were not the mythical creatures they have since become. They were animals that killed livestock, occasionally killed children, and whose populations had not yet been hunted to near-extinction in Europe. The werewolf trials coincide, roughly, with the height of the wolf's demonization in European culture, a period in which wolf-hunting bounties were being formalized across the continent and wolves were, slowly, being eliminated from settled regions.

The werewolf trials coincide with the height of the wolf's demonization, a period when wolves were being systematically eliminated from settled Europe.

The wolf was also the symbolic opposite of the dog. Dogs were domesticated, loyal, part of the household. Wolves were wild, savage, living beyond the reach of settled life. The werewolf, by transforming from human to wolf, was transgressing not just the boundary between species but the larger boundary between civilization and wildness, which was, in the early modern period, a deeply charged cultural boundary. The forest was not a place for picnics. The forest was a place where human order ended.

And the werewolf was, in a specific way, the opposite of the witch. Witch trials in this period were overwhelmingly directed at women. Werewolf trials were overwhelmingly directed at men. Some historians have argued that the two formed a complementary pair, a gendered division of the imagined demonic threat, with women doing their damage through cursing and men doing theirs through physical predation. I find this argument partly persuasive. The numbers are suggestive; the motivations of individual accusers are opaque.

The end of the trials

Werewolf trials declined, sharply, after about 1630. By 1700 they were rare. By 1750 they had effectively ended, even in the rural peripheries of Europe. The end of werewolf trials coincides, though it does not perfectly align with, the broader decline of witch trials and other supernatural prosecutions across the same period.

The usual story told about this is one of Enlightenment rationality, the growth of skepticism, the improvement of forensic techniques, the rise of naturalistic explanations for phenomena previously attributed to the supernatural. This story is partly true but incomplete. The decline of these trials was not primarily driven by intellectual breakthroughs. It was driven by changes in the legal system, specifically, increasing judicial skepticism about confessions obtained under torture, the emergence of appellate review, and the growing willingness of higher courts to overturn lower-court verdicts in cases with weak evidence.

In other words: the werewolf trials ended not because people stopped believing in werewolves, but because the courts stopped being willing to convict on the kind of evidence that had previously been sufficient. Belief is slower to change than institutions. You can still find survey data, into the 20th century, showing significant minorities of rural populations in parts of Europe who believed werewolves existed. They just could not, after 1700, be tried for it.

What the werewolf means now

The werewolf, in our current cultural imagination, has been largely defanged. He is a romance novel love interest. He is a sympathetic teenage protagonist. He is, at most, a slightly scary horror movie antagonist. The thing he was for four hundred years, a genuine object of legal terror, a category that got real people burned alive, is almost entirely absent from how we talk about him now.

I think this is, on balance, an improvement. The world is better for not executing people as werewolves. But something is lost in the cultural translation. What the early modern werewolf trials were really about, the question of what separates the human from the animal, and what the consequences are when that separation starts to fail, is a question worth keeping present. We do not, now, burn people at the stake for crossing that line. We do, still, have categories of people we treat as not-quite-human, and we do, still, build legal and cultural frameworks around the fear of what happens when the categories break down.

The werewolf is gone. What produced him is not.