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38 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
her style of writing, and the intellectual traditions to which she was
indebted are all indications of the shifts which had taken place in
the culture of scholarship over the course of the nineteenth century.
Articulated through a complex process of circulation and repetition,
science had come to operate as the only acceptable paradigm for serious
scholarship.
The increasing utilization of scientific concepts and language in
nineteenth-century texts about lycanthropy provides clear evidence
of the process by which science was installed as a hegemonic mode of
explanation during this period. Particularly from the middle of the
century, considerable energy was devoted to the production of ‘scientific’
explanations of lycanthropy, most of which stressed its origins
in primitive, superstitious societies which were temporally, spatially
or culturally removed from the modern period. Such explanations
worked to separate strategically the social group involved in producing,
circulating and reading these texts from the realm associated with
the ‘lower’ (superstitious, plebeian, corporeal, bestial, instinctive or
‘natural’) conditions of existence, where lycanthropy was generally
situated. When contests developed over which members of this social
group should be accorded the highest authority, science once again
emerged as the mode that would give one author the discursive edge
over another.
As Alex Owen has demonstrated, even the occult and psychical
researchers associated with spiritualism (a movement often portrayed
as a counterculture which challenged the assumptions of nineteenthcentury
scientism) tended to foreground their use of scientific reasoning.
The spiritualist movement flourished between about 1860 and 1880
(at the same moment that folklore research was at its height), and it was
characterized by a mixture of scepticism towards and commitment to
the approaches of rational science. C.W. Leadbeater’s introduction to a
discussion of lycanthropy as a form of astral projection, for example,
argued that
It has been the fashion of this century to scoff at what are called the
foolish superstitions of the ignorant peasantry; but … the occult student
finds on careful examination that obscure or forgotten truths of nature