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The myth of the werewolf, with its rich history, was an ideal motif
for the expression of such changing attitudes. Interpretations of lycanthropy
as ‘a form of insanity’ 45 gained wide currency in the early to
mid-nineteenth century, and accounts of lycanthropy surviving from
the early modern period were reconsidered in this light. Maturin’s
lycanthrope, for example, is eventually revealed to be a person deserving
of sympathy rather than ostracism. Along similar lines, an article
in an 1849 edition of Reynolds’s Miscellany condemned the judgements
of the sixteenth-century demonologist Henri Boguet, arguing that
‘[t]he statements made by the accused were of a most extraordinary
character … and such as no person in possession of common sense could
consider as other than the ravings of insanity.’ 46 Likewise, a column
from Household Words in 1857 opined that those burned for the crime
of lycanthropy had been the victims of mental illness, stating ‘That
many people have been executed, owing to the popular impression that
they were wehr-wolves, is … only another instance of the fatal facility
with which superstition has turned disease itself into food for her love
of cruelty.’ 47 Presented along similar lines, a whole chapter of R.R.
Madden’s work Phantasmata or Illusions and Fanaticisms of Protean
Forms Productive of Great Evils (1857) was dedicated to the argument
that lycanthropy was a form of insanity which often manifested in
epidemic form, 48 and, as late as 1871, Edward Tylor commented that
‘in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite
and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into
wild beasts … and physicians apply to them the mythologic term of
lycanthropy.’ 49
Following the assumption that lycanthropy is a mental illness, many
nineteenth-century writers focused on the trial of Jean Grenier, heard
in Bordeaux in 1603. On this occasion, the offender was judged to be
mentally deranged, and was sentenced to imprisonment in a monastery,
‘so that he might receive moral and religious instruction’. 50 As Baring-
Gould concluded with approval, after Jean Grenier’s case
the courts referred the whole matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation,
to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain.
From this time medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental
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