REVIEWS 73W
itch hunts have always
been a tool of those in
power. As such, they shed
light, primarily, on the needs and
fears of the ruling classes. Court pro-
ceedings on witchcraft and other
devilry, however colorful, rarely tell
us much about the accused, even
when they show defendants pre-
vailed upon to confess (an admission
under duress, after all, generally
sticks to the required script). Now,
with Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lin-
coln’s OLD THIESS, A LIVONIAN
WEREWOLF (University of Chicago
Press, $25), a glorious corrective has
arrived: the full testimony, translat-
ed for the first time, of a loud, proud,
self-described werewolf.It’s 1691, a year before the Salem
witch trials, in a small courtroom in
what is now Latvia, when our hero,
aged eighty or so, saunters onto the
scene. He’s there to make a statement
in someone else’s case, a matter of
petty theft, but the proceedings take a
turn when another witness scoffs at the
notion that Old Thiess (a nickname for
Matıss) should be asked to swear an
oath, given that he is a known were-
wolf. His wolfishness, which he affirms
without hesitation, thereafter steals the
show, and the reader witnesses a rare
and fascinating reversal of the familiar
dance: instead of being trapped in a
double bind, incriminated no matter
what he says, the peasant nimbly takes
control of the discussion. Rather than̄deny the charge, he reclaims it and
schools the court in an alternative my-
thology in which werewolves are “God’s
hounds,” entering hell regularly, but
only to fight sorcerers and protect the
harvest for everyone else. When court
officials try to get him to repent his
presumed pact with the devil, he insists
that the devil “cannot bear” were-
wolves and “has them driven off with
iron goads,” and that he himself had his
nose broken by a sorcerer a few years
back, as they can check in the records
of a previous trial. He won’t name were-
wolf names, and when caught in a
white lie or forced to admit that he
hasn’t been the most observant church-
goer, he shrugs that he’s old and imper-
fect, and that “a gracious God might
still be gracious to him.”
The transcript of the trial is accom-
panied by a sampling of historians’ re-
actions to the case, and readers may
enjoy the debates in subsequent chap-
ters: the source material can be read as
evidence that bands of bloodthirsty
Aryan youth in wolf pelts once roamed
Northern Europe by night and laid the
foundations of the nation- state (as the
Austrian scholar and Nazi Otto Höfler
insisted in an uncannily influential
1934 book), or taken to suggest that
earlier inhabitants of the region es-
poused unrecorded shamanistic beliefs
about wolf-men (as Ginzburg, a micro-
historian and a son of the great novelist
Natalia Ginzburg, has argued in sev-
eral captivating works excerpted in Old
Thiess), or treated as an illuminating
snapshot of seventeenth-century social
and political dynamics (as Lincoln, a
historian of religion, more cautiously
and rather more persuasively does).
Regardless, the book’s true appeal is
the fantastical creature Old Thiess.
Though careful to show some tactical
humility, at one point hesaid that he understood [the matter]
better than the Herr Pastor, who was
still young, and he lost his temper at the
Herr Pastor’s speech, adding that what
vexed him so much was that previously
no one else had been prosecuted, al-
though he was not the first and would
not be the last who had practiced these
same things. If it was evil, why had they
let others get away with it?REVIEWSNEW BOOKS
By Lidija Haas
Design for a grotesque mask by Johann Ulrich Stapf © Victoria and Albert Museum, London