"Winter Trial" and the Werewolves of Early Modern France

    I read somewhere --  long enough ago that I've forgotten the source and certainly never checked it it was true --  that variations of Little Red Riding Hood were collected most densely by folklorists in the same regions in France that had the highest level of reported werewolf attacks.

    That nugget found a long term home in my brain and occurred to me again back in 2006 when I saw the engraving above, in the midst of an museum exhibit exploring facettes of melancholy (Mélancolie : Génie et folie en Occident, Grand Palais, Paris, 13 October 2005 – 16 January 2006). The explanation beside this engraving from the seventeenth century Traité de Physiognomonie by Charles Le Brun and Louis Morel d'Arleux, explained that, lycanthropism was an exagerrated form of this disease, for disease, indeed, it was.

    Recently I was turning both image and nugget over in my mind I came to the story that was kindly published 13 October (oh happy date!) this year of 2025 by Macabre Magazine, formerly Dark Harbor.

    In it I decided to leave aside the idea that recent pop culture has made of the werewolf figure and go back, back, back to what it must have been to experience a spate of slaughters in the countryside of Early Modern France, during a bitterly, cold winter near the Jura region, through the eyes of a doctor witnessing it all.

I hope you enjoy "Winter Trial."