Werewolf trials began in Switzerland and lasted into the 18th century
The full moon and the infectious bite are film inventions. The older werewolf was a matter for courts: from the early 15th century, people in the Swiss Valais and Vaud were tried for turning into wolves, and the persecutions spread across Europe, fading in Austria's Alpine provinces only in the early 1700s.
The English word comes from Old English werwulf, man-wolf, with relatives in Dutch, German and Frisian. A rival reconstruction reads the Germanic root as wolf-clothed, which fits Norse terms for wolf-skinned warriors. Slavic languages built a word meaning wolf-haired, which Greek and Romanian later borrowed for vampire-like revenants. The Roman settlement name Viroconium in Britain may mean place of man-dogs, since Celtic speakers called wolves dogs. Lycanthropy, from the Greek for wolf-man, originally described a medical delusion in which a patient believed he was a wolf.
Tales of wolf-men are ancient. Herodotus heard that the Neuri, a people beyond Scythia, all became wolves for a few days each year; he said he did not believe it, though locals swore it was true. Arcadian legend held that King Lycaon was changed into a wolf by Zeus for an impious sacrifice, and Pausanias recorded a man named Damarchus who spent ten years as a wolf and later became an Olympic champion. Scholars trace the deeper root to a Proto-Indo-European initiation for young, unmarried warriors, linked to a cult of wolves and dogs.
The Christian Middle Ages gave the werewolf its devilish character, and belief grew alongside fear of witches. Lycanthropy accusations were a small part of the witch-hunts, often mixed with charges of riding or charming wolves. The case of Peter Stumpp in 1589 set off a surge of interest and prosecution in French- and German-speaking lands. The last trials of wolf-charmers took place in Carinthia and Styria in the early 18th century.
Once the trials ended, folklorists and Gothic novelists took over. Medieval romances such as Marie de France's Bisclavret were forerunners, 18th-century chapbooks built the genre, and 20th-century horror and fantasy fixed the modern image. Colonialism had meanwhile carried the belief to the Americas.
Source: Werewolf
