Julia van ROSMALEN

Original title: Letting the wolf in: the duality of human and animal, inclusion and exclusion and the crossing of these boundaries of the werewolves in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica

Published in

Keywords: Boundaries, Depiction of the other, Duality, Eucharist theory, Form and nature, Inclusion and exclusion, Liminality, Monsters and hybrids, Transformation.

This article shows, using a close analysis of the images and text, that despite the initial association with ‘Othering’ and monstrousness, the werewolves from the Topographia Hibernica are not a perfect Other but rather assimilated into the community. They represent a transgression between the boundaries of the human and the animal that renders them porous and allows for movement between the two and an interplay of inclusion and exclusion. The werewolves aren’t hybrids in form or nature, but rather show a discordance between form and nature: They are perfectly animal in appearance and perfectly human in nature. The deliberate parallel with theory of form and nature in the eucharist which plays a central role in both the conclusion of the story, the final image and the authors theological discourse on transformation shows that the final verdict on the wolves is one of sameness rather than otherness.