The Medieval Werewolf Model of Reading Skin

Abstract

The object of the following analysis is to determine the precise nature of the relationship between the constituents “man,” “wolf,” and “werewolf” in a corpus of six medieval French and Latin “werewolf texts.” Because this analysis will focus on the way in which skin, hair, and fiber tie these constituent elements together, both literally and figuratively, emphasis will be placed on the two texts from this corpus that make direct reference to animal skins: Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor and the anonymous Guillaume de Palerne. Reference will also be made to four further texts in which clothing, as a nexus of tissue and fiber, functions to a varying degree as a metaphor for human skin, oscillating between the poles of what one critic calls “nakedness is meaning” and “clothing is a container for meaning” (original emphasis):³ Marie de France’s Bisclavret; Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica; the anonymous Lai de Melion; and the anonymous Narratio de Arthuro Rege Britanniae et Rege Gorlagon lycanthropo (hereafter Arthur and Gorlagon).

The werewolf is proffered, not as diegetic “reality,” but as a complex, polyvalent sign in an ongoing discursive exchange: it is not the question of fictive belief that is raised, but that of reading.

Peter Haidu, The Subject: Medieval/Modern¹

[He] [s]aid he was a Woolffe: onely the difference

Was, a Woolffes skinne was hairy on the out-side,

His on the In-side

John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy²