The monstrous has always been a fascinating topic for writers, scholars and readers. Leslie A. Sconduto is no exception: her study Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity through the Renaissance provides a detailed and very accessible analysis of the development of these beast men from 1700 BC to 1700 AD. Sconduto illustrates that the werewolf, after its short appearance in the Accadian Epic of Gilgamesh, transformed from a savage beast in antiquity to a victimized noble hero in the Middle Ages and then relapsed into its earlier state in the sixteenth century.
Metamorphoses consists of nine chapters. In the first two chapters Sconduto discusses several stories by Virgil, Ovid and Petronius and the vehement response to such tales by medieval theologians. The latter objected to tales that presented the metamorphosis of men into real cannibalistic beasts with the argument that the implied transmigration of souls between humans and beasts denies the notion of man made in the image of God. God alone can change the matter of his own creation, while all other kinds of metamorphosis are illusions created by demons or Satan and cannot affect homo interior. According to Sconduto, this Church-held view propagated by the Church influenced werewolf accounts written in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to various extents. In chapter three she argues that Gerald of Wales' werewolf tale in his Topographia is a Christian account of divine punishment and human penance. Here a werewolf couple has undergone only a partial metamorphosis; although their external transformation is caused by God and therefore real, husband and wife are still in the possession of their human identity. In contrast, Christian influence is less pronounced or even absent in the Latin poems De mirabilibus Hibernie and De hominibus qui se vertunt in lupos, in the Middle Irish De ingantaib Érenn (On the Wonders of Ireland), and in the Norse Konungs skuggjá (King's Mirror). In Konungs skuggjá, the members of the ruling families cursed by St Patrick have changed into real wolves. They have become cannibals, a transformation which, Sconduto speculates, may be a metaphor to express the families' ruthless policies in thirteenth-century Ireland (35). In the other accounts the men are the voluntary shape-shifters from folklore, i.e., constitutional werewolves who leave their bodies behind but can only return to them if the bodies have remained intact.
Chapters four to seven explore four texts from the late twelfth to the fourteenth century: Marie de France's lai Bisclavret, the lai Melion, the adventure romance Guillaume de Palerne and the Lain text Arthur and Gorlagon. Each analysis is given the space of one chapter with the formulaic title "[Title of tale] or a Lesson in [Virtue/Vice]". As the chapter titles suggest, Sconduto regards the tales as illustrations of one particular virtue or vice and its reward or punishment. In addition, she assigns the narratives to a common tradition. Not only do they contain the same stock motifs (e.g., the treacherous wife, the chivalric werewolf), but they also emphasize the partial metamorphosis of the protagonists. Building on the notion of homo interior, Sconduto argues that the humanity of the werewolves is preserved in all four tales even when trapped in their lupine shape. This notion is found in its purest form in Guillaume de Palerne, where the werewolf Alfonso not only lacks any bestial qualities but becomes the rescuer, provider and protector of Guillaume against evil humans and is even associated with the divine. Sconduto's analysis of the leitmotif of the goule baee is particularly interesting. The open mouth, which the protagonist uses as a chivalric weapon (113), symbolizes the contradictions of his double nature as werewolf and knight: he does not eat or bite raw flesh but cannot speak either. Guillaume de Palerne is a story of remorse, forgiveness and noble sacrifice, as Sconduto fittingly concludes; the werewolf in this romance sets a standard for noble behaviour to be emulated by its aristocratic audience.
In chapter eight Sconduto returns to a more global assessment of the figure of the werewolf and its second metamorphosis back to the terrifying monstrous being in the sixteenth century. The idealized aristocratic werewolf of medieval literature was now replaced by the peasant "real" werewolf that emerged from court documents and theoretical treatises. Sconduto links the resuscitation of the image of the werewolf from antiquity to an increased concern with witchcraft and its punishment in the sixteenth century. Although the orthodox view that only God can effect a change of nature was usually adopted, witches were seen as real, a view that was first voiced in the highly popular treatise malleus maleficarum, written by Heinrich Kramer in 1486. The physical transformation of werewolves was also a subject of debate: Lycanthropy was explained as delusion by the devil, an imbalance of the humours or the effect of drugs. The outcome, however, was the same: werewolves committed cannibalism and therefore needed to be executed. Sconduto discusses a variety of sources which emphasize the monstrous inner nature of the accused but also explores deviant views. Jean Bodin, for instance, argued that the devil can transform a man into a beast even though the werewolf's nature is still human, thus advocating a partial transformation resembling the metamorphosis in the aforementioned medieval Latin and Irish accounts. In fact, Sconduto even mentions two voluntary and benevolent werewolves in Beauvoys de Chauvincourt's Discours de la lycantropie [sic] ou de la transmutation de hommes en loups, but such accounts were less frequent and detached from the public debate.
Sconduto concludes her monograph with a discussion of the cultural and genre-related factors responsible for the two contrasting views of the werewolf as noble victim and bloodthirsty beast. In this last chapter, fittingly called "Explanations or 'Que cele beste senefie,'" Sconduto repeats some of her observations made in previous chapters but also introduces some new factors. Of special interest is Sconduto's connection between the image of the werewolf and the atrocities committed during the many wars and revolts in sixteenth-century France. According to Sconduto, the sixteenth-century werewolf "reflects the harshness of the peasant world and the reality and turbulence of the times" (200). Regardless of whether or not they performed cannibalistic acts, these accounts of wolf people diverted attention from the bloodshed committed by others in Renaissance France.
Sconduto's study has two shortcomings, of which the first is its scope. Although Sconduto claims her book to be a comprehensive investigation of the image of the werewolf as it evolved in Europe over seventeen centuries, she focuses heavily on Medieval and Renaissance France. More than half of her analysis is devoted to French texts, while less attention is given to werewolf traditions elsewhere in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. For example, Sconduto only touches upon wolf-men in medieval Scandinavia. No mention is made of the úlfheðnar "wolf-skins" in Old Norse literature, and even the two famous "werewolves" Sigmundr and Sintfjǫtli in the thirteenth-century Old Icelandic Vǫlsunga saga are only credited with a short plot summary.
The scope of Sconduto's study is one problem, her not always consistent methodology is another. In the first chapter Sconduto introduces the notions of the two werewolf types that figure prominently in the following sections: the "authentic" werewolves who can change their form freely and the "false" werewolves who are turned into a beast against their will. Sconduto finds the notion that only the involuntary werewolves retain their humanity particularly problematic but does not vigorously apply her reservations in her detailed analyses of medieval tales. Similarly, her discussion of the Church's response to the werewolf tales only partially resurfaces in chapters four to seven. While she identifies the human nature of the medieval werewolves as the product of the Christian view of metamorphosis, she does not further investigate the nature or (possible) causes of their external transformation. Finally, Sconduto's examination of possible folk elements in medieval werewolf tales is mainly restricted to chapter three. A similar analysis of such elements in Arthur and Gorlagon and the medieval French tales would have greatly benefited Sconduto's investigation of the "narrative evolution" of the werewolf and its status as a "complex and varied cultural symbol" in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (back cover).