The Diabolic Werewolf

At the end of the fifteenth century, signs emerged that the myth of the werewolf had undergone a spectacular mutation. No longer was it the image of a kind nobleman trapped in the body of a wolf, to be turned into, as expressed by Leslie Sconduto, a “rough, dirty peasant who savagely attacks, kills, and then eats his victims, who usually are children”. The werewolf now leaves the world of the marvelous to join the territory of the satanic. Werewolves are considered sorcerers that must be persecuted and prosecuted as heretics. The werewolf myth converges with another great myth—the myth of witchcraft—which in Renaissance times was the pretext for an enormous witch-hunt that resulted in the burning at the stake of tens of thousands of women and men accused of having made a pact with the devil. Saint Augustine had already planted the seed of this horrendous persecution when he established that the devil was to be found behind the metamorphoses that turned men into wolves. The Penitentials are present at the origin of the Inquisition and already denounced the belief that humans could be transformed into beasts, as did Regino of Prüm in the Canon episcopi), saying it was a credence held by infidels.