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16 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
he promoted a model of authorship that differed from the model that
had predominated in the romantic period. Rejecting the extravagant
language of romanticism, Ranke advocated the virtues of a less ornamental
style of writing. In his view, authors should remain detached
from their subject matter, concerning themselves only with the ‘strict
presentation of the facts’. 15 Ranke’s claim that truth would emerge
from the empirical presentation of facts was a second idea that proved
influential. For Ranke, ‘facts’ were to be found primarily in historical
documents, and in this sense he resuscitated the value of the ‘books’
that had been so roundly condemned by Bordelon and later by Jean-
Jacques Rousseau. 16 His reverence for the historical text also had the
side effect of bolstering the authority of contemporary authors, who
enjoyed respect as the producers of such venerated cultural artefacts
(indeed, as Edward Said pointed out, ‘the word author itself springs
from the same etymological roots as authority’). 17 Third, Ranke sought
to apply the methods of science to his work, an approach that was
widely adopted by historians and other social commentators. Scholarship
was increasingly evaluated in terms of its ‘scientific’ credibility
as the century wore on.
Over the course of the century, all these attitudes were brought to
bear upon literature exploring the theme of lycanthropy. Indeed, by
combining respect for documentary evidence with a scientific ethos,
Ranke had posed a peculiar problem for nineteenth-century scholars
of the occult. While the reality of lycanthropy was defended in several
accounts dating from the medieval and early modern periods, the
nineteenth-century understanding of biology and physics precluded the
possibility that the transformation of a human into a wolf was possible.
Consequently, many writers decided that such texts must hold a grain
of truth, and that their task was to discover what that truth might be.
In other words, they set out to provide a rational explanation for the
phenomenon. By 1865, this attitude was articulated clearly by Sabine
Baring-Gould in the preface to his The Book of Were-wolves: Being An
Account of a Terrible Superstition, in which he wrote ‘When a form of
superstition is prevalent everywhere, and in all ages, it must rest upon
a foundation of fact; what that foundation actually is, I have, I hope,