The Werewolf , the Witch , and the Warlock : Aspects of Gender in the Early Modern Period

History: Power, Agency ûn.l E perience ftom the Síxteefith to theT\ue tieth Century (London, 1996), 39-56, quotation at 43. See also Rowlands, ,Witchcraft and old women', 69-78; Bevet, 'Witchcrâft, f€male aggression, and popular belief',956-Z 82R. B. Shoemaket, Gen¡ler in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of SeParate Spheres? (Loûdon, 1998), ch. 3; Foyster, Mønhooà ín Earty Modern E gland, chs 2-4; Amussen, ','The Pa¡t of a Ch¡istian Man,,,, 214. 83. Amussen, "'The Part of a Ch¡istian Man,,,, 222 84. Ctooke, Microcosmogophía, 276. 85. Briggs, Wit.hes and Neíghbouts,286. 86. Apps and Gow, Male Mfcft¿s, 38. Discussing witchcraft, Heide Wünder has urged the active histo¡icization of gender ¡elations, so as to resist ,the ceaseless mythologizing that seeks to pin women down,: ¡le is le Sufi, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modem Germany lcdmb¡idge MA, 1998), ch. B, quotation at 151-2. 8Z Kent, 'Masculinity ard male witches', 86. 9 The Werewolf, the Witch, and the Warlock: Aspects of Gender in the Early Modern Period

, 39-56,   The Werewolf, the Witch, and the Warlock: Aspects of Gender in the Early Modern Period Willem de Blécourt It has been suggested that the figure of the malevolent witch developed historically not merely in opposition to, but iin part, ftom, that of the male sorceret or the practitioner of dtual magic.l This idea should be questioneq however, or at least qualified. In the context of the early witch-trialt witches were otviously closely related to heretics; in terms of imagert they seem to have possessed traits in common with fairies.z In the context of medieval Europe, sorcerets have to be situated vis-à-vrs clergymen, physicians, prophets, and mystics, although these were all categories of masculine power and expettise that frequently overlapped, even during this period. Moteover, the figure ofthe sorcerer himself was complex and in need of differentiation: it might denote a court astrologer, a necromancer, an occult philosopher, a fortune-teller, a local cunning man, or merely an occasional dabbler in the hidden arts, to name just a few possibilities. Did the figure of the sorcerer slip ,in and out of various categories in disconcerting fashion, making it difficult to pin down exactly what makes him different from any other kind of magical practitioner'?3 Was a magician, to use another telm, always necessa¡ily male? The opposit¡.oIrs inherent within, and the constellations ot particular figures -..their so-called 'person fields,have to be carefully considered in terms of their histo¡ical viabilitt which is always situated in a particr ar historic4l context, and in terms of their usefulness for the present-day histo¡ian's task of elucidating past practices.
In this chaptet, I will introduce another mascr ine figure, that of the werewolf, and ask in what kind of relationship he stood to both male I ln contrast to witchcraft historiographt recent leliable academic treatises on werewolves are extremely scanty. This is due both to a lack of interest in them, and a dearth of source material.ó New presentations on the subject also have to position themselves against the many existing interpretations, which are inve$ely proportional to the research.T Within the bounda¡ies of Europe, werewolves were not omnipresent and readily available fo¡ persecution as (alleged) witches wete. In other words, the dispersion of the werewolf concept was fragmentary, or at least limited on a temporal and geographical scale.s Most werewolf historiography, neverthelest neglects this point. One encyclopaedia entry simply summadzes him as ã murderous cannibal wolf'. Another states The Wercwolf, the Witch, and the Watlock 193 that, in some trials, 'it is clearly shown that murder and cannibalism took place'.e The Amedcan literary scholar Charlotte Otten, in her turn, puts sexual aggression first noting that 'trial records of cases of tycanthropy contain detailed accounts of rape, incest, murder, savage attacks, and cannibalism'.lo Such obserations are not based on thorough research, howevet but merely on the published accounts of only seven we¡ewolf trialsfoul ftom Franche-Comté, two from elsewhe¡e in France, and one Germany The list of ftench cases statts with the werewolves of Poligny, on trial in Besançon in 1521, and continues with Gilles Ga¡nier in 1573 (also in the neighbourhood of Besançon), Jacques Roulet ofAngers and the 'cannibal' tailor ofChâlons (Nicolas Damont) in 1598, and the Gandillon family in St Claude (Franche-Comté) in the same year. It ends with Jean Grenier, who was banished to a monastery by the Parlemeíf (High Coqrt) of Bordeaux in 1603. This last trial, as Adam Douglas notes, 'marked the end of the werewolf fever in the French judicial system',lr The German case concerned Peter Stubbe frcm Bedburg, near Cologne, in 1589.12 The image of the murderous and cannibalistic werewolf already existed when Sabine Baring-Gould published lJ'is Book of Were-Wolves in 1865, in which he referred to all six of the Irancophone trials. It was confirmed in 1933, when the self-proclaimed 'Reverend' Montague Summers presented his lea¡ned tome The Werewolf fo t}re public. He had found a few tdals in the literature that Baring-Gould had neglected. But, apart from the English versior of the Stubbe pamphlet, which Summers pubÌished in full, he did not reveal much about these new cases and, in subsequent werewolf publications, they were again ignored, Among them was the 1598 trial concerning the 'warlock' Jacques Bocquet, executed with several witches who 'had shifted their shape to wolves and haunted the wood of Froidecombe' in the Terre de St Claude.l3 The published details about these trials do, indeed, convey a cannibalistic image. In the translation by Summers, the Poligny werewolves 'Pierre and Michel attacked and tore to pieces a boy of seven years old. An outcry was raised and they fled. On another occasion they killed a woman who was gathering peas. They also seized a little girl of four years old and.âté ihe palpitating flesh, all save one arm'. Giles Garnier slew a young girl and dragged her to a wood where 'he stripped her naked and not contentwith eating heartily ofthe fÌesh of herthighs and arms, he carried some of the flesh to Apolline his wife'. Other victims of Garnier included a girl, a ten-year-old boy and another boy of about 12 years. The tailor of Châlons used 'to decoy children of both sexes into his shop, ard havirg abused them he would slice their throats and then powder and dress thet bodies, jointing them as a butcher cuts up meat'. Roulet's victim was a boy, who was found ,shockingly mutilated and torn. The limbs, drenched in blood, were yet warm and palpitating,.l4 Summe¡s had a preference for the last word, whereas Barins_Gould paid more attention to feasting and desc¡ibed the children,s ilesn as 'delicious', 'eaten with great relish,. The element of shape-shifting was hardly present here, especially in the accounts of Baring_Gould. ,On this occasion,'he wrote of pietre Burgot of polign, ,he dães not seem to have been in his wolf's shape., The men who prevented Garnier from devouring his final victim said that he had ,appeared as a man and not as a wolf'. Of the Châlons tailor, Summers states only that he was convicted'for lycanthropy, and adds that ,under the shape of a wol! he roamed the woods to leap out on stray passers_by and tear their throats to shreds'.ls Finall, in Baring-Gould,s version of the inteuosation of Roulet, the man stated that he had killed and eaten a child when he was a wolf but, when questioned about the way he was dressed and about his head, answered that everything was the same as his inteûogators could observe.l6 In other words, his humanityand huma¡ ¡esionsr_ bil¡ty -was emphas¡zed, rather than his beastly traits.
Although the sources allow for these differences in presentation of the figure of the werewolt they primarily reflect the åivergenr inter_ pretation of the two authors. Both were connected to the Church, but Summersas a defrocked Anglican and a p¡etend Roman Catholic priestlTplaced most emphasis on the influence of the Devil, while the Deyonshire parson Baring-Gould emphasized the human aspects of his werewolves, Only by quoting the early-sixteenth-centu¡y wolf sermon of the German preacher Johann Geiler von Kaisersbera aì the verv end ofhis book did Baring-could indicate that ,man must t;rn to God when He brings wild beasts to do him mischief,. Badng-Gould pointed out that Geiler, 'puts aside altogether the view that fwerewolves] are men in a state of metamorphosis,. The Book of Were-Wolyes bears this out, It might contain summaries and editions of most of the then available werewolf texts, but there are also chaptets that only discuss murderers who were neve¡ desctibed as ,werewolves,, thus making it clear that its author regarded lycanthropy mainly as an extreme form of man,s ,love of destroying life', Werewolves we¡e insane: ,the naturally cruel man, if least affected in his brain, will suppose himself to be transformed inro the most ctuel and bloodthirsty animal with which he is acquainted,.l8 Summels thought that Baring-Gould wrote .graphicallf and with vigou/ and did not shy away ftom the ,terrible truth, of the subíect, but that he had also inserted,a great deal of extraneous matter,.re Against the populadzer Baring-Gould, Summers could easilv claim the The Wercwoff, the Witch, and the Wa ock .l9S weight of authority: The Werewolf islittered with (untranslated) quotations in French and Latin. Summers, howevet, accepted the reality of the Devil and did not see any ground for questioning the statements of tortured peoplein his view they were already ,wicked, and ,horrible'. Discussinþ the opinions of the French lawyer Jean Bodin, who had included material on werewolyes in his hugely influential demonology, De Iq. démonomanîe des sorciers in 1580,20 Summers noted: .it is very certain tly the common consent of all antiquity and all history, by the testimony of learned men, by expetience and fitst-hand witness, that werewolfism which involves some change f¡om man to animal is a very real and a very tertible thing'. In his bombastic style, Summers wrote as iftaking part himself in the werewolf debate that raged around 1600. Bodin's theory was based on sound Christian doctrine, Summers found, whatever his enemies might have read into it. One of Bodin,s c¡itics, Jean de Nynauld, was a 'hetetic, who contradicted ,the selse of the Scripture'.2l This makes it difficult to consider Summers, book as anything more than a jumble of werewolf matedals; his account of early modern debates is too biased to be of much lìistoriographical use.
He fell into the trap of anachronism and, as a psychiatrist observed tn the late-twentieth century, he 'would have made a superb exterminator of hundreds of fellow humans if he had ;ust been born a few centuries earlie¡'.22 But Summers would have had difficulty in holding his ground in early mode¡n times. Certainly, in his position on the werewolt he outdid the Roman Catholic demonologists, as his assessment tded to combine irreconcilable views: 'By the force of his diabolic pact he [the witchl was enabled, owing to a titual of horrid ointmerts and impious spells, to assume so cunningly the swift shagge brute Lhat save by his demoniac ferocity and superhuman strength none could distinguish him from the natural wolf'.,3 With this conclusion, Summers reduced a complex histolical debate to a personal concoction. Peter, w}licl] appeared in London in 1590. The contents of these newssheets had also found their way into jthe earþ modern demonologies.zi Summers, who translated several, consulted the lattet directly. But since demonologists had their own agenda, the use of their works did not necessarily ensure accuracy. Accounts of witch-trials that started to appear in the course of the nineteenth century could have provided a counter-balance, as they sometimes incorporated records of werewolf persecution, But they were mainly in German (which Summers shied away from) and, as the compiler of witchcraft texts Henry Charles Lea remarked on the basis of the eighteenth-cefftlfry BiblÌothecq. s¡ve acta et sciptq mqïícai 'wer-wolves arc rarely found in the witch-processes.
Of a hundred men, only three or four are accused of or confess to it' 23 Witch-trials pdmalily involved women.
Modern popular accounts reduce the seven werewolf cases to one or two. For instance, Gordon Stein discusses Grenier and Roulet, and then remarks: 'There are several other cases similar to these, but they need not be mentioned, except in passing later'. Keith Roberts thought that 'the history of Stubbe Peter is typical for the reports about wetewolves at that time'.2e These conclusions are premature. Werewolf trials might have been relatively few and fat betweer, but research into witch-trials has (especially in Germany) provided enough werewolf cases to develop a different image next to the one of the cannibal. In fact, a precise reading of the Peter Stubbe case (or Stump, to revett to his German name) aheady supplies an alternative.

II
In Germany, werewolf trials were introduced with the Stump case of 1589, situated in the area between Aachen and CoÌogne. Wdting his demonology De prestigîis dcaemonum a Íew decades earlier, Johann Wier had not reported any regional werewolves, and had to suffice with refer-Iing to the Poligny case ftom F¡anche-Comté and to Livonian werewolves.3o The accounts of the werewolf Peter Stump werc constructed out of a mixture of legal concerns and stories that had spread ftom eastern France, particularly Franche-Comté. 31  whether the pamphlets actually referred to an historical event, one ¡eason being that there are no surviving trial sources.3a Only two other contemporary reports have been found so far, one by the Cologne pastor Hermann Weinsberg. In his diary entry for 1589, Weinsberg wrote that rumours had been circulating about the case during the entire summer, and then he started citing from a pamphlet: a peasant had lain with a female devil for 25 years and, in between, with his own daughter, denoting incest, He had a belt, and when he put it on he became a werewoll but he kept his own mental faculties. ln wolf's shape he had devoured 13 children, among them his own son. To punish him, hot irons were pressed into his bodt his arms and legs were broken, and he was finally decapitated and burned. Weinsberg based this paft of his account on a German text, possibly the pamphlet from Augsburg or a similar one-In his opinion, the murders and incest perpetrated by Stump fully justified the punishment, but Weinsberg was not so sure about the 'witcheries' (meaning the shape-changing), as he could not believe everything that was told and retold about them. Who could say whether it was fraud or fantast or not?3s Two elements in this account support the existence of an actual trial: people had been talking about it, as far as can be ascertained, before any pamphlet had been published. And there is the neat legal poirit, derived from Bodin, that Stump's'mind and reason had remained intact',36 which is not mentioned in any of the other surviving pamphlets, but betrays the presence of lawyers. It was the first Getman werewolf case,37 and the F¡ench paradigms of murder, cannibalism, and deviant sexuality it echoed would not be repeated in the subsequent German werewolf cases in this combination, On the othel hand, there is no mention of ointment; instead, a belt is featured, which does not occur in the reports from ¡ranche-Comté (if the werewolves there used anything similar, it was a whole skin). Another distinctive German detail is that of a pole with a wooden $iôlf on top erected at the place of execution.
The other contemporary report was by the Dutch chronicler Arnoud van Buchell. On one ofhis iourneys to Germany, he met a member ofone of the ruling families of Cologne, who had witnessed Stump's execution and told him that the we¡ewolf had once been his seFant.38 But the possibility that these pamphlets reveal a genuine event does not make them less sensational and fantastic. The news-sheet from Nuremberg added the (French) story about Stump being recognized by his missing hand after the wolf's paw had been cut off. This latter incident was absent ftom the London version, which otherwise seems to have included every known rumour conveyed to the printer by several letteß from Germany. In the London account, the werewolf is said also to have copulated with his own sister, and deflowered several gùls before murdering them. When humans were no longer available 'then like a cruell and tirannous beast he would woorke his cruelty on brutbeasts in most sauadge lsavage] sort, and did act more mischeefe and cruelty then would be credible'.3e This could be read as cannibalism, although it can also suggest 'consumption' in the sexual sense. And, if Stump committed sexual acts, his 'working on brute beasts' points to no less than bestiality. One fragment even reads like a forerunner of the wolf from Red Riding Hood: he was straight transformed into the likeness of a greedy deuouring woolf, strong and mighty, with eyes Sreat and large, a mouth great and wide, with most sharpe and cruell teeth, A huge body, and mightye pawes.
The story about Stump's arrest provides another narative element in the London pamphlet. while hunters were chasing a wolf, they suddenly found a man, walking with a stick, where they had just seen the wolf. In 1573, a similar story was reported from Dole by a German student.ao ln its totalitt ttle Life of Petet StubÞe represents an inversion of Christian family values and, more specifically, a subversion of the preseryation of progeny. lt opens with the admoûition that those who fo¡sake the Lord and despise'his proffered grace' enter the'path to perdicion and destruction of body and soul for euer'. A decapitated Stump is shown tied to the stake between his daughter and concubine, as a mockery of the crucifixion scene.
It seems, nevertheless, strange that Stump's werewolfery could have remained undetected for so long, the more so since his name was a nickname which literally meant 'stump', and translated into English as 'stub' or 'truncated' (as a regional dialect term for'werewolf', it was still current four centuries later). If his nickname referred to his deviant sexualitt then it ironically stood for his short penis (some of the Fre¡rch werewolves had short 'tails' too).ar But according to the stories, the belt provided him with a disguise 'wherby he mi8ht liue without d¡ead or dange¡ of life, and vnknown to be the executor of any bloody enterpdse'. Thus, he could walk around in the streets of Cologne, in Bedburg, and in his hometown Erprath 'very ciuilly as one well known to all the inhabitants thereabout' without arousing suspicion. Almost The Wercwolf the Witch, and the Wa ock 199 a quarter of a century later, the notion of the wercwolf's invisibility reappeared in Cologne;4z it had obviously been kept in circulation since 1589. It is, nevertheless, debatable whether or not it constituted a more or less traditional local trait; it could also have treen taken from Bodin's demonology.a3 The contrast between the werewolf's name and the peasant Stump's appearance in nearby towns indicates that his sexual deviance was more or less tolerated on his home-ground, and that at his trial his crimes were probably aggravated and augmented. They acquired narrative properties as they were grafted onto French conceptsthe 1573 Garnier case, with its cannibalism, had also been distributed in Germany. Only in this way does it become possible to teconcile the traces of a legal event with the multitude of stories.
In the eyes of his iudges, Stump was not a man, and they underlined this by having his body taken apart by the ritual of execution. This does not imply that they considered him feminine, such as witchcraft theory deemed about sorceren;aa it is far more likely that they saw him as a werewoll the animal they were so keen to redefine. This was moreover shown by the erection of a kind of wolf statue on top of a wooden pole at the place of execution. Masculinity was not just displayed by the judges in their somatization of legal violence and thei¡ brutal exercise of power. The event was publicit was a stage on which, next to the criminal, the local aristocracy and other male authority figures paraded.

III
Understanding the Stump case in terms of masculinity involves a slightly different approach from that adopted in most other histo¡ies of manhood. Studying past masculinities amounts for the most part to juggling with const¡ucts. As a cultural entitt encompassing notions of proper male behaviour, masculinity was fluctuating, with the speed and amount of change depending on the particular times. It was also defined within specific groups, regions, and denominations. It was related to age, in the sense that there were clear delineations between young boys, a¿õièlcents, maÍied men, and widowers (even though it is debatable whether the concept of masculinity should t e applied to formative phases). It was, presumably, also a matter of class, or whatever social hierarchy was cuûent at the time. Approaching masculinity from a normative perspective, or as 'the approved way of being an adr t male in ary given society',as implies distancing ourselves from seeing it as everything that men did. ¡or the latter, essentially biological, point of view can lead to peculiar observations, such as the idea that particular 2OO Willen de Blécoutt forms of masculinity would be 'disruptive' of /patriarchal order', thereby creating an aftificial 'paradox of masculinity '.46 No society has ever been without the antagonism betweer-l prescribed and actual (or merely imagined) behaviour; what makes 'masculinity' worthwhile as a tool of historical analysis is precisely how people positioned themselves, or were positioned, within this field of tension. If actual expressions of what a man should be we¡e different between one group, or even individual, and another, then it would make more histodcal sense to treat them as different masculinities, possibly in hegemonic order,aT rather than as conflicting aspects of one ovetatching, rior-historical 'masculinity'. Stump, although clearly a man, was not portrayed as a paradigm of masculinity; instead, he represented everything a man should not be. However, his case also showed the importance of family values and the male responsibility towards the next generation.
While, for the histodcal actor, masculinity would have been a matter of learning, and of acquiring a sense of what was expected at particular times and placesnot only of men, but of women toofor-the historian it amounts to painstakingly reconstructing its patameters, details, ard vadation. Early modern Europe possessed wdtten systems of law that were meant to indicate boundaries of acceptable conduct, and to curb excessive behaviour. These were regionally different but also possessed common denominato$, dedved ás they were from Roman codices, Saxon legislation, and Canon law.a8 On a practical level, sanctioned masculinity showed itself in the pursuit of war, commerce, politics, and learning. These are certainly the subjects of male history predating the gender turn, but they can also be studied as acts in which masculinity was asserted and tested. Research, however, has concentrated on unearthing u¡Ìwritten rules of gendered behaviour, focusing or the relatively 'soft' themes of familt sexuality, and 'magical' communication.ae ln both cases, there is a severe danger of, yet again, overlooking women.so It is even morc important, ho\,vever, to recognize potential masculinity in women's discourses and femininity in men's, so as to untie the concept of gender from biological sex. Yet it is difficult to distinguish femininity in werewcilf cases.

IV
In 1595 the provincial Court of Utrecht in the Dutch Republic conducted witch-tdals against a number of inhabitants of Amersfoort, and int¡oduced the werewolf accusation. The notion of conducting a criminal trial against a werewolf could have reached Utrecht in several ways.
The Wercwoll the Witch, and the Warlock 2O1, It might have come through the pamphlet about the Stump case: the local University library there still has a copy. Another possiblã ¡oute was through the chronicler Arnoud van Buchel! who lived in Ut¡echt and who travelled along the Rhine and discussed werewolves with the Count ofNassau.sr Or it might have come directly through the Count, who was closely related to theDvtctt stqdholders. Whatever route the informatrou had taken, in the Dutch context, the addition of the werewolf accusatron to the witch-image was an audacious move by the Utrecht Court, since the High Council in The Hague had just moved in the other direction by declaring the water ordeal in witch-trials illegal and freeing an accused witch (a point ignored in Utrecht as well). Since it is possible to compare the earlier witnesses' testimonies fuom the municipal coutt of Amersfoort (where the accused had been tried before) with the testimonies and confessions made before the Court in Utrecht, the absence of werewolves in Amersfoort can be established, [n Amersfoort, a man called Volkelt Dirksz had been accused of bewitching horses, and had been compelled to bless them to lift the bewitchment. Although having married ìnto a fâmily of witches, defined in the female line, Volkert,i witchcraft was situated in the male sphere of influence.sz When his daughter was inter_ rogated, she confessed to dancing on the bleaching ground just outside Amersfoort with het female telatives, all in the shape of cats. In Utrecht, Volkert's sons were drawn into the prcceedings and wolves were mentioned for the first time. Elbert, aged 13, told the councillors that: barely half a year ago, he, his father and Hessel his brother in the presence of his father's lord and master, of whom he did not know tìow he was dressed, had all been changed into wolves, on a field near Bunschoten at the Haar, in a da¡k night, ard that he and his brother rounded the cattle up, without doing anything else, to have them bitten in the throat by his father, but that he and his brother had not bitten [the cattle].
Elbert's brother related a confusing story of how he had been with his godmother whed'ihe Devil had visited them in the shape of a naked black man, who had given him a piece of bÌack leather and a piece of blackwoollen clothwithpins. The Devil had flown up the chimnìy with him iûto another room and had also fetched the red cat [a woman]: and in that room they danced together; after the dance the evil one said to the woman, you dirty beast, now you will come with ure, and he bound a hairy belt around her body and when that was done 202 Willem de Ble.ouÌt the rcd cat changed into a woll and the evil one flew with him and the red cat out of the chimney to Eemland in the field, where he rounded up the animals, which w,ere then bitten by the evil one and the red cat, both in the shape of wolves The court also found witnesses who asserted that the brothers had admitted to them that they were the wolves that had killed their cattle.s3 These accountsrelated by children, and somewhat vague and conlusedindicate the peripheral position of the Dutch werewolves in relation to the developing German centre. ln the Northern Netherlards, the new werewolf concept was added to the existing image of the male witch, whether it concerned the bewitching of animals within the male domain, or the acquisition of wealth and power. These last two charactedstics defined male witchcraft in large areas of Western Europe to a significant extent, although the picture was confused in the seventeenth-century political trials, when men were forced to confess to attendance at the Sabbath, or to having made" pact with the Devil without havingbeen previously reputed as a male witch. When Bdggs writes, however/ 'that there is little or no sign that the male witches had been anything but masculine in their behaviour', he is rcferring to a different masculinity than I favour here.s4 When they had adhered to rorms of manliness, male witches would not have been prosecuted; they found themselves in a witch-trial precisely because they had somehow crossed masculine boundaries, Male cunning folk could also end up in climinal trials, which also signals that they overstepped certain notms, and that their witch-finding or recovery of stolen goods was not seen as particularly manlyat least, not by the authorities.ss This did not necessarily make them male witches, however, unless some of their professional identifications of (mostly female) witches had backfired and they themselves had been accused of bewítchments.s6 On an everyday level, the bewitching or enriching male witch was almost as cuüent as his female counterpart, a point supported by the as yet sparsely researched slander trials.sT During the process of turnirig a local suspicion into a persecution, however, most of tlie male witches, together with their specific brand of witchcraft, were filteted ouL V If the Stump pamphlet was meant to sensitize people to werewolves, it Senerally succeeded; if it was meant to encoutage them to hunt the beasts, it failed. No werewolf trials were initiated in southern Germany, The Were\tolf the Witch, etnd the Wa ock ZO3 England, or Denmark, despite the publication of Stump pamphlets in these places. The late-sixteenth-century we¡ewolf trials conducted in Protestant Nassau, wlthin a hundred kilometres of Cologne, were only partially influenced by the narrative from Catholic Bedburg, since the Protestants had to reinvent the werewolf yet again.ss Only to the west, in the Catholic Southern Netherlands, do we find both a version of the pamphlet text and coüesponding werewolf trials. Although it is not known what the first werewolf in 1592 in Mechelen was accused of precisely, in 1598 another one was indicted for biting little children ,behind their ears, in their side, under their armpits and finally in the throat,,se The Stump case might have acted as a paradigm and catalyst for a number of subsequent werewolf trials in the region, although its constructed werewolf was tegularly adiusted to fit both local considerations aÌìd imagery. In the Netherlands, the same combination of male witch and werewolf as had been tried out in Utrecht surfaced a few months later in Arnhem, at the trial of Hans Poeck (officially known as Johan Marterìsen van Steenhuiisen). This man was not tortured and confessed voluntarily after staying afloat during the watet ordeal he himself had demanded. It is, nevertheless, clear that he did answer questions, some of them leading. He claimed that, about three years earÌier, after his leg had been injured by a horse, he had met a man walking on the dyke. When asked for food, the man had said: 'I will give you plenty if you will do my will'. Hans had hesitated but when the exchange was repeated several timesin the meantime, two women had passed byhe finally consented to renounce God, At that moment, he had felt something like hot or warm watet on his face, the sign that his chrism was being removed. The Evil Onefor Hans had encountered no other but himhad then given him a piece of cloth, saying: As long as you have this/ you will succeed in everything'. Next/ Hans confessed that he had been 'walking as a wolf' for three years. After turning into a wolf, he was still capable of human judgement, but could not speak.
This last element of his confession points again to Bodin,s theory about the preservation of human intelligence and responsibility. The rest contains a,cctmbination of his bewitchments and his experience as a werewolf. Poeck had bewitched a woman innkeeper and several horses by hittingthem with the piece of cloth given to him by the Devil. When he put it on his own head, he became a wolf. He claimed to have a belt (although this was probably in answer to a question), but he had hidden it in some house, in a hole behind a bed. Often eight or ten wolves had crowded round him, among them the Devil, likewise in wolf's shape. Once the Devil, still as a wolf, had thrown him into a ditch because 2O4 Willem de Bl¿coutt Hans did not want to bewitch animals for him. Another time the Devil had ftightened his horses to such an extent that he had had to continue walking with him, again in the form of a wolf. They had gone to a certain place and, afterwards, he had returned to the horses, and therc he was freed by two men who happened to pass by.60 Once more,.the nickrìame is the clue to the meaning of 'werewolÍ\ poe(c)k derives from the Dutch verb poeke¡er¡, to caÍy (something or someone) on one's back (pukkel denotes a kind of rucksack). Hans Poeck was thus a man whom other people carried on their back. This indicates a homosexual act, as in all probability do his encounters with the Devil, His was the last werewolf tlial in the Northern Netherlands, but slander tdals show that the combination of werewolf and male witch was an insult in the eastetn proyinces throughout the entire seventeenth century. In a number of cases, this included the werewolf's connotation with sexual deviance.
In the course of a witch-trial in 1609, in Horst (near Gladbeck), a whole family was subjectèd to the water o¡deal. When the father stayed afloat, he ascribed it to the incest he had committed, not to witchcraft. But when he heard that his children had confessed to being witches, he admitted to being a werewolf. The Devil, whose name was Federbusch (crest of feathers), had persuaded him to denounce the Holy Trinity and had fornicated with him (in other trials against mer! the Devil is described as a woman, first). The Devil had also been with him at a dance, and had given him a belt. After this, he confessed to having'bitten' seve¡al cows and foals. As before in Bedburg, a pole with a wooden wolf on top of it was etected at the place where he was strangled and burned.ór The trial of Peter Kleikamp from Ahlen (south east of Münster) even started with an indictment for sodomy. Because the prosecutor could not uphold this, he switched to a witch-trial, for which less stringent rules of evidence applied. In this way, Kleikamp was made to confess, among other things, that in the form of a wolf he had 'bitten' a calf and 'shamed' a young ox. He had only six hours in which he could 'walk' as a wolf. More witch-like was the part of his confession whete he admitted that he and some othets had anointed themselves and therr flown in the form of ravens, a detaiï that his interrogators might have borrowed from a description of a witch-trial in Liège.ó2 In a case from Strasbourg in 1633, corcerning a 16-year old boy from Molzheim, we firrd similar elements. The boy was accused of having: killed many cattle. Among othets he had sat on the back of a cow in the shape of a raven and had pecked at it and eaten of it till it died, and as a fox he had hung on the tail of another [cow], till it had The Wercwoll the Witch, and the Warlock 2Os jumped to its death, He had made several maidens pregnant and had committed sodomy with a sheep while he was in the shape of a dog and with a pig while he was in the shape of a wolf. 63 In the commentary on her compilation, Otten based her notion of sexuality on the Stump case, which she edited and teprinted; she empna_ sized that'Stubbe' ,confessed to committing incest with his daughter and sister'. In his earlier book on ,the occult,, Wilson, ¡eferring tã the Garnier and Stubbe cases, stated that,sexually frustrated peasant; identi_ fied with werewolves'. 64 Although both authors present little futher evi_ dence, the role of sexuality was explicit ftom the start when the poligny werewolves told their iudges iû 1521 that, when they were wolves, tirey copulated with female wolves, which gave them as much pleasure as with women (it is unclea¡ whether here, as in Latin, the same word was used for bitches and whores). In the Châlons case f¡om 1S9g, the tailor 'abused' the childrenin all likelihoo4 sexually _ before killing therI, and, in 1599, the werewolf Veriuz in Franche_Comté was said to have committed incest with his mother.6s A girl who acted as a witness in the trial against the teenager Jean Grenier in 1603 stated that she had been attacked by a wild animal ,which was fatter, but sho¡ter than a wolf and which had a short tail,. Later, Grenier boasted that he was that animal, 'and that if he had managed to get her on the ground he would have given her a good bite,.66 A historian has called this a,sexual phantasm,, and I am inclined to agree with him,6i The ,shott tail,will have referred to the boy's penis and the ,bite, to sexual intercourse. VI Some pamphlets display a troubled relation with histo¡ical events. 'I\r/o years after the Stump stoty, an even more sensational report appeared in Augsburg, supposedly describing events in Jülich, only a few kilo_ metres from Erprath, where Stump had committed his crimes, It related the story of morelhan 300 women who had, supposedÌy, changed into wolves and killed fìany men, boys, and cattle. Of them, 24 were discov_ ered because a boy had found his mother,s belt, tried it on and become a we¡ewolf himself..When this frightened the other children, the neigh_ bours gathered to get rid of the wolf. But the boy implored them not to harm him; he had only put on the belt by accident, and his mother had done it every day. She was subsequently imprisoned and tortured, and confessed to having accomplices. In those days the execution of two dozen women for witchctaft was quite plausible and, when all the 2Ob Willem de BIécourI convictions fuom the area from Osnabrück to Trier are added up, the figure of 3O0 does not appear excessive either. 68 The episode about thebot howevet was clearly a legend that suryived into the twentieth centurt6e and the idea of such an extraordinary number of female werewolves was pure fantasy. The Augsburg printer who published the pamþhlet was known for his sensationalism, and he probably wanted to match the success of his colleague who had printed the.Stump pamphlet. Only very occasionally was a womar accused of being a werewolf. Moreovet the pamphlet about Jülich is extremely sexist: it ascribes a male trait to a group of women, thus rendering them less female, and describes how these manly women attacked and devoured men, and 'sucked up their blood and ate their brains'.
The existence of some of the female German 'werewolves' might only have been due to the fact that, during a witch-trial, a woman was forced to admit to having changed shape into an arimal form, or when reference to a wolf's shape was simply added on to those of the more female cats and hares by witnesses or interrogators. lf the first two women denounced in 1630 in Oberkirchen, some 60 kilometres north of Dillenburg, provide any evidence of the concept of a female werewolf outside the context of a witch-trial, then their case suggests that it seems to have been independent women who came under suspicion.?0 This was probably also the case in 1590 in Lower Hesse, where a woman was accused of having bewitched a cow. She worked her farm on Sundays and, apparently, had no husband. The oeighbours avoided her, because she was said to be 'doing her foul work as a tearing wolf at night with her children'.7l This woman might not have been called a werewolf, but her behaviour was certainly compared to a wolf. The majority of woman who wele accused of being werewolves, howevet were considered to be so because the rule of place was applied to them: they had been seen where, iust before, a wolf had been spotted. This was one of the recognized shape-shifting mechanisms ascribed to witches, usually in connection with shapes such as cats or hares; not\ryithstanding a refe¡ence to it in one of the Stump pamphlets, there is no evidence, as yet, that it applied to men. The motifwas already present in Luce¡ne in 1489, when a woman appeared in the wrong place at the wrong time, 72 In 1614, a woman was on her way back ftom the market in Wilz (iû the Eifel region of western Germany) where she had sold some cows when she saw one of her neighbours in the moonlight. When she asked her how she had got there and mentioned the name ofJesus, her neighbour had disappeared and a wolf stood in her place and had approached the horses. The woman had driven off and not seen anything furthet, but The Wercwoll the Witch, ond the Warlock ZO7 latet she had become ill. This neight¡ou¡ had also been encountered as a cat. A similar storywas told 40 years later in Sauerland, in the Electorate of Cologne. A ho¡se had been attacked by a woll and it was suggested that a woman neighbou¡ had not been far away from it, and wai pos_ sibly the wolf herself. Again, in 1668, a woman appeared where a wolf had been spotted before, and the woman who saw her was so frishtened ofthe wolf that she miscarried.T3 yet other women were deemedlo have attacked cattle in wolf fo¡m.7a Overall, however, werewolves only constituted a tiny minority amollg the witches, and the handful of female werewolves are, in their turrr, a tiny minority among the predominantly male werewolves. It might just be possible to scrape together 3OO (predominantly male) werewolves in the whole of Europe ove¡ a pedod of 200 years; the suggestion in the 1591 pamphlet that this number of female we¡ewolves would have been prosecuted in one year is absurd. Most of the few female we¡e_ wolves were accused later, after the male image had become established by the waves of witch-t¡ials between 1590 and 1630. But one should still be awate of regional variation. In Mecklenburg, in the north east of Germant a different picture eme¡ges. Trials only started there in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the werewolves constituted less than one per cent of all those accused.Ts Here, however, a substan_ tiaÌ portion of them were women. VII Men such as Stump, Poecl! or Kleikamp might have asserted their own idea of manhood in their sexual exploits and, especially when their behaviour had been mo¡e or less tolerated fo¡ a while locallv (nick_ names do need some time to settlq,76 the new trials certainlv sisnalled a tougher regime. Officially, anal sex was not aÌlowed, as it ran ðounter to the ideas of sexual uniori fot the purposes of reptoduction, which could only take place within a sanctioned marriaAe. The criminaliza_ tion of female wlrchcraft expressed similar concerns with productrvity, as witches wèré usually accused of hampering gtowth (in humans, animals, and crops), and of intetfedng with processes of matutation.TT Whereas female witchcraft was seen in terms of negative femininny, which in early modern society amounted to regatiye female sexuality, male witchc¡aft was not focused primarily within the sexual domain, but was deemed to run counter to those aspects of masculinity that were defined by honour. Far from being an individual characteristic, honout set out mar's relation to the different male communities of which he was patt or with which he had dealings. Male witches exercised unnat_ ural power that some considered feminine, but that mainly stood in oppositior to communal codes of the distribution of wealth. Sexuality seems to have been absent in male witchcraft, at least in terms of how it was seen on an everyday level.
Apart from the occasional ovetlap in marginal areas such as the eastern Nethe¡lands (although e\/en there the iuxtaposition ofthe te¡ms for male witch and werewolf did not have to make them synonyms), werewolves and malewitches thus occupied different conceptual niches.
In short: werewolves usually did not bewitch anything, neither wete they accused of enriching themselves in unbecoming ways. lt could be a¡gued that werewolves and male witches merely expressed djfferent negative aspects of masculinity; here, I want to suggest that the concept of a werewolf exceeded masculinity and femininity, and constituted a third gender, indicating those humans who had gone beyond humanity and had entered the animal tealm.
A detailed discussion of humar-animal intersection would obviously make a sepatate paper, and the possible notion of aû,animal, gender has to remain tentative. A non-man, who did not equal a woman, was pos_ sibly too abstract a concept, howeveU traditionally the wolf image did represent the manor, more specifically, the sexual ctiminal _ outside society. Someone who was an animal was not patt of humanity. The fig_ ure of the werewolf also came to combine the animal body and animal sexual behaviou¡ -such as back-riding (as in the poeck case.¡, or sodorny in general.Ts Putting on a belt sepatated the upper from the lowe¡ half of the bodt thereby stressing the sexual. When that belt was made of animal skin (although substitutes were known too), it referred explicitly to bestial sexuality.
Moreover, the conceptual relation between animals and deviant sexu_ ality will have been more current not only in werewolves, but also, fot example, in satyrt another kind of human-animal hybrid who signified excessive sexual lust.Te Goats had thei¡ connotations with the male ,sins of the flesh' as well, in precisely the same intellectual elvironment in which cledcs and sorcerers moved, ând where initiates were adorned with goat attributes, for instance,so And not only men couldbecome aru_ malized. Stories about dancing cats circulating in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, to mention another instance, pointed at sexually loose women. The notion of animalization of, in this case, incest was also Dre_ sent in the story of the pdncess who was desired sexually bv her fathe¡ and escaped clad in animal skinseither bear, donkey, or a mixture of different species.sl In addition to wolves, goats, and men, future research 3.