Between the 15th and 17th centuries, across France, Germany, and the Baltic states, people were tried, tortured, convicted, and executed for the crime of being werewolves. Not for pretending to be werewolves. Not for dressing as wolves or behaving strangely. For the actual crime of lycanthropy, of transforming into a wolf and committing murders in that form, a charge that courts of law took as seriously as any other capital offence.
The werewolf trials are among the least discussed chapters in the history of European persecution, overshadowed almost entirely by the better-documented witch trials of the same period. They deserve attention in their own right. They reveal something specific about how early modern Europe understood the boundary between human and animal, between the natural and the supernatural, and about how belief in transformation could become a mechanism for spectacular and terrible violence.
This article covers the documented trials in specific detail. For the broader history of werewolf belief across cultures and mythology, the Dark Origins of the Werewolf article covers that ground.
The Legal Framework: How Werewolves Were Prosecuted
To understand the werewolf trials it is necessary to understand the legal and theological framework that made them possible. In early modern Europe, the question of whether a human being could physically transform into a wolf was not settled in the way it would seem to a modern reader. The official position of the Catholic Church was complicated and contested across centuries of theological debate.
Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century had argued that physical transformation was impossible: God had fixed the nature of things, and a human body could not become a wolf’s body. What appeared to be transformation was either illusion, demonic deception, or a kind of spiritual experience that left the body unchanged. This position had considerable authority.
However, by the 15th and 16th centuries, a competing position had gained significant ground: that the devil, working through a human accomplice, could facilitate genuine physical transformation. The Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious 1487 witch-hunting manual, discussed lycanthropy in the context of demonic power and did not dismiss it as impossible. Secular courts, which operated with somewhat different theological assumptions than ecclesiastical ones, tended toward the view that if people confessed to being werewolves and described specific crimes in specific places, those crimes had occurred and the person before them was responsible for them.
The result was a legal environment in which a confession of werewolfery, extracted under torture or offered voluntarily, could be treated as evidence of genuine supernatural crime rather than as evidence of mental illness or false confession. The courts were not stupid or uniquely credulous. They were operating within a coherent worldview in which the devil was real, transformation was possible through diabolical means, and confession, even tortured confession, was the queen of proofs.
Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg
The most documented and most notorious werewolf trial in European history took place in Bedburg, in the Electorate of Cologne, in 1589. The accused was Peter Stumpp, a farmer in his fifties who confessed, under torture, to a catalogue of crimes that would be difficult to comprehend even if every word of it were true.
According to his confession, Stumpp had made a pact with the devil at the age of twelve, receiving in exchange a belt of wolf skin that allowed him to transform into a wolf at will. Over the following twenty-five years, he claimed to have killed and eaten fourteen children, two pregnant women, and various livestock. He confessed to cannibalism, to incest with his daughter, and to a relationship with a succubus provided by the devil. When in wolf form, he said, he felt an insatiable desire for human flesh that could not be satisfied by any other food.
The trial resulted in one of the most brutal public executions of the period. Stumpp was subjected to a process the contemporary pamphlet describing the case recounts in detail: his flesh was torn from his body with red-hot pincers in ten places, his limbs were broken on the wheel, and he was beheaded and burned. His daughter and mistress, convicted as his accomplices, were executed alongside him. A woodcut produced shortly after the execution depicted the events and circulated widely across Germany and the Netherlands, ensuring that the Stumpp case became one of the defining werewolf stories of its era.
The historical reality behind the case is harder to establish than the pamphlet suggests. There is no independent evidence for the specific crimes Stumpp confessed to. The confession was obtained under torture, which in the legal practice of the period was understood to produce truthful confession but which modern understanding recognises as producing whatever the tortured person believes their torturers want to hear. Some historians have suggested that Stumpp may have been a genuinely violent individual whose crimes were real but whose werewolf transformation was an overlay provided by the interrogators. Others have suggested the entire case was politically motivated, connected to conflicts between Protestant and Catholic factions in the region. The truth is probably irrecoverable.
What is clear is that the people who tried, convicted, and executed Stumpp believed, or at least officially maintained, that what he had described had actually happened. The werewolf was not a metaphor in the Bedburg courtroom. It was a criminal charge.
The French Trials: An Epidemic of Werewolves
Germany was not alone. France in the late 16th and early 17th centuries experienced what contemporaries described as an epidemic of werewolf activity, and the courts responded accordingly.
In 1521 in Poligny, in the Franche-Comte region, three men named Michel Verdun, Philibert Montot, and Pierre Bourgot were tried and executed for lycanthropy. Their confessions described rubbing themselves with an ointment that allowed transformation, meeting the devil in the form of a black man who had recruited them, and killing and eating children and adults while in wolf form. The ointment is a recurring element in French werewolf cases and connects to a broader tradition of witches’ flying ointments, preparations that were understood to facilitate supernatural experiences and that almost certainly contained psychoactive substances capable of producing vivid hallucinations of transformation and flight.
The most troubling French case is that of Gilles Garnier, tried in Dole in 1573. Garnier was a hermit living near the town with his wife, and he was accused of killing and eating several children in the area while in the form of a wolf. Unlike some werewolf cases where the confession seems entirely a product of torture and suggestion, witnesses reported seeing a wolf attacking children in locations where Garnier was later identified. Whether those witnesses genuinely saw what they reported, whether the wolf they saw was actually Garnier, and whether Garnier was responsible for the children’s deaths in human or animal form is impossible to establish. He was burned alive.
Jean Grenier, tried in Bordeaux in 1603, was a teenage boy who claimed to have been given a wolf skin by a man in the forest who he believed to be the devil, and who confessed to attacking and eating several children. Unlike most werewolf defendants, Grenier was not executed. The court, examining him, concluded that he was mentally deficient, that his confessions were the product of delusion rather than genuine diabolical pact, and that he should be confined to a monastery rather than executed. He died there in 1611, reportedly still believing himself to be a werewolf. The Grenier case is one of the earliest examples of what would now be recognised as a psychiatric evaluation influencing a court’s decision in a werewolf case, and it represents a significant shift in how educated Europeans were beginning to think about the phenomenon.
The Livonian Werewolf: The Case That Turns Everything Upside Down
In 1692, in Livonia, which is now roughly Latvia and Estonia, an eighty-year-old man named Thiess appeared before a court on a charge of heresy. What he told the court was so unexpected that the judges spent considerable time trying to understand it.
Thiess freely admitted that he was a werewolf. He had been one, he said, for many years. He transformed three times a year: on the nights of St Lucia, Pentecost, and St John. But what he described doing in his wolf form was nothing like the German or French cases. He and other werewolves like him, he explained, descended into hell to fight the witches and sorcerers of the devil. They fought to recover the grain and livestock that the witches had stolen from the earth, and their victories ensured good harvests. The werewolves were, in his understanding, the hounds of God, doing divine work against evil.
The judges were baffled. This was not the werewolf they knew from the theological and legal tradition. They pressed him on the point. He held to it consistently across multiple examinations. He was not a servant of the devil. He was fighting the devil. When he died, his soul would go to heaven. The werewolves were doing necessary and holy work.
Thiess was eventually convicted not of werewolfery but of superstition and heresy, and sentenced to ten lashes. The court appears to have concluded that he was mistaken about his identity as a werewolf rather than that he was a genuine werewolf performing diabolic acts. The leniency of the sentence reflects the confusion the case created.
The Livonian case became significant in the 20th century when historian Carlo Ginzburg used it as evidence for a broader theory about folk beliefs in werewolves and the night battles of benandanti, the good walkers of northern Italy who also claimed to fight witches in spirit form during specific nights of the year. Ginzburg’s argument was that beneath the demonological overlay of the witch and werewolf trials there were genuine folk belief systems in which certain individuals understood themselves to be fighting evil in transformed or spirit states, and that these beliefs had pre-Christian roots stretching back into ancient shamanic tradition. Whether his theory is correct remains debated. What is certain is that old Thiess did not fit the template, and the court did not quite know what to do with him.
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Sign up here →What the Trials Were Actually About
Reading the werewolf trials purely as persecution of innocent people by a credulous and superstitious legal system misses something important. The relationship between accusation, confession, belief, and violence in these cases is considerably more complex than that framing suggests.
Some defendants, like Thiess, appear to have genuinely believed in their own lycanthropy, describing experiences of transformation and night combat that were real to them regardless of their physical reality. The psychoactive properties of the ointments described in the French cases suggest that some confessions were rooted in genuine altered states, experiences of transformation that felt entirely real to the person experiencing them and that were then filtered through the demonological categories the interrogators and defendants both had available.
Some cases, like Stumpp’s, were almost certainly products of torture producing whatever confession the interrogators wanted. Some, like Garnier’s, involved genuine violence by individuals whose relationship to the werewolf identity is impossible to determine at this distance.
What connects all of them is the wolf itself. Wolves were the apex predator of European forests throughout the medieval and early modern period, genuinely dangerous to livestock and occasionally to people, feared and hated by farming communities in a way that is difficult to fully appreciate now that wolves have been eliminated from most of their former range. The werewolf took all of that fear and gave it human form, connected it to the other great persecutions of the period, the witch trials and the demonic pact tradition, and produced a figure that concentrated multiple anxieties simultaneously: the predator, the traitor within the community, the person who had chosen animal instinct over human reason, and the devil’s servant all in one.
The trials ended not because the courts concluded that werewolves did not exist but because the intellectual climate shifted. The same educated Europeans who had accepted werewolf confessions as evidence began to reconsider what confessions obtained under torture actually proved. The framework of demonic pact and physical transformation became less credible to educated observers, even as popular belief in werewolves persisted in rural communities well into the 19th century.
The wolf returned to the forest as a metaphor. For a century and a half, it had been something more concrete and considerably more lethal.
