The Book of Were-Wolves

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• The Casebook of Trials

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  Every prosecution the book describes, with year, place, charge, court and sentence — Poligny 1521, Dole 1573, the Gandillons and Roulet in 1598, Jean Grenier at Bordeaux in 1603, the Maréchal de Retz at Nantes in 1440. Two are set apart: in 1598 the Parlement of Paris sent a confessed werewolf to an asylum instead of the stake, and in 1603 the Parlement of Bordeaux held that lycanthropy was not a punishable crime and sentenced a boy of thirteen to perpetual imprisonment in a monastery. Both courts treated the confession as evidence about the man rather than about the crime.

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• Right, Wrong, Still Open

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  Ten claims and what became of each. The philology held — his account of the berserk, and of a word that meant both wolf and outlaw, is still the standard reading. The mythology did not: chapter X is comparative mythology at its most confident and the school was demolished within his lifetime. And the medicine was replaced by something much narrower than his “innate cruelty”.

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• The Norse Words

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  Berserkr, úlfheðinn, hamr, hamrammr, vargr, eigi einhamr — the vocabulary the best chapters of the book are built on, with what each means and where the sagas use it. Baring-Gould read Old Norse and assumed a reader who could follow him; this sheet is for the reader who cannot.

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• What Is in Which Chapter

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  Six of the sixteen chapters describe murders, taken from the trial records — the French prosecutions of the sixteenth century, the trial of a thirteen-year-old boy, the three chapters on the Maréchal de Retz, a Galician case of 1849 and the Paris grave-violations of the same year. This page says which and what is in them, so the book can be given to somebody else with the warning attached.

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