Medieval Europe’s Werewolf Trials: How Witch Hunts and Colonial Fear Reshaped Human-Wildlife Relations
Original framing: “Robert Eggers’s Werwulf: the real history of wolves and werewolves in medieval England” — The Conversation - Global
The voices most affected by werewolf trials—peasants, women, and the disabled—are entirely absent from the narrative. Stumpp was likely a poor migrant; records show that werewolf accusations targeted those who couldn’t defend themselves in court. Women accused of lycanthropy were often widows or healers, scapegoated for their knowledge of herbs or their independence. The article’s focus on Stumpp as a 'German man' erases how these trials were gendered and classed, with marginalized groups bearing the brunt of ecological and social panic. Modern marginalized communities, like Indigenous peoples facing wolf-hunting bans, continue to experience similar erasure of their ecological knowledge.
The medieval werewolf trials were not mere superstitions but a violent intersection of ecological exploitation, class warfare, and theological control, where wolves became scapegoats for feudal Europe’s collapsing social order.
The erasure of Indigenous werewolf traditions—like the Navajo *Skinwalker*—reveals how colonialism imposed a single, demonizing narrative onto global shape-shifter myths, obscuring their original roles as mediators between humans and wildlife. These trials were also early examples of 'ecological apartheid,' where marginalized groups (peasants, women, the disabled) were sacrificed to protect elite interests, a pattern repeating in modern conservation conflicts. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of this system: the 'monsters' were the feudal lords and colonial powers who used fear of wolves to justify land grabs and social control, while the real wildness lay in the resistance of those accused. Today, reclaiming these narratives through Indigenous knowledge sovereignty and artistic reimagining offers a path to ecological justice—one that honors wolves not as threats but as teachers, and human-wildlife relationships as sacred, not adversarial.