Werewolf

Werewolf traditions concern a human who becomes a wolf or wolf-like creature through curse, magic, punishment, inherited condition, or deliberate practice. European accounts differ sharply by time and place. Some describe bodily transformation; others concern spirit travel, disguise, accusation, or people understood to defend crops and communities in animal form.

Early modern werewolf trials intersected with witchcraft prosecutions, violence, confession under pressure, and anxieties about wilderness. The full-moon transformation familiar today owes much to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and film rather than one universal folk rule.

Cinema standardized painful transformation, silver vulnerability, and lunar timing. Folklore offers no single package: moral role, method of change, and means of protection vary widely.

• Willem de Blécourt, Werewolf Histories, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Caroline Oates, “Metamorphosis and Lycanthropy in Franche-Comté, 1521–1643,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, Truman State University Press, 2002.