Vampires of the Twelfth Century

It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony. It would be strange if such things should have happened formerly, since we can find no evidence of them in the works of ancient authors, whose vast labor it was to commit to writing every occurrence worthy of memory; for if they never neglected to register even events of moderate interest, how could they have suppressed a fact at once so amazing and horrible, supposing it to have happened in their day? Moreover, were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome; so I will fain add two more only (and these of recent occurrence) to those I have already narrated, and insert them in our history, as occasion offers, as a warning to posterity.

Bestiaries as Moral Philosophy

Today the term "Bestiary" conjures up the notion of a listing of monsters, perhaps as suggestions for devious Dungeon Masters. But in fact, the surviving historical bestiaries are a product of monastic scribes, and most of what they contain has some surprises. Many of the more exotic and legendary beasts are even stranger than you probably expected - but much of the content is descriptions of utterly mundane animals, from the goose to the bear. They are works of natural science from an era before science existed in a form we would recognize, written by clergymen and so infused with medieval Christian moral philosophy.

Dogs and Death in European Mythologies

Many pre-Christian European mythologies contain a dog or dog-like creature which is intimately associated with death, and in particular with the land of the dead. It is likely for this reason that a large black dog has often been claimed, in more recent centuries, as an ill omen, and they persist in similar forms in folklore to the present day.

Werewolves of Early Modern Europe

As Marie de France tells us, a werewolf as traditionally understood is "a savage beast when the fury's on it" - and, if we follow the reading where his wife's powerful fear of angering him is a telling one, her werewolf meets this description as much in his untransformed state as in his transformed one. But part of the point of the folktales typed as AT449 (which includes both Marie's "Bisclavret" and the Arthurian tale of Melion, which it greatly resembles) is the fact that they present the werewolf as victim rather than as monster, whereas Marie's prologue makes it clear this is an unexpected reversal.

What did a medieval audience expect from a werewolf tale?

The Witch Craze and Modern Penis Panics

It's a well-known fact that Early Modern Europe, most especially Britain and Germany, saw a wave of panicked trial and execution of an unexpectedly high number of people, mostly women, thought to be witches. What's perhaps more surprising is that this first seems to manifest, not from an attempt to destroy some subterranean magical cult as imagined by Margaret Mead, nor from a generic McCarthy-like fear of infiltration by the enemy as in Miller's famous theatrical depiction of witch trials in colonial America, but from a highly specific sort of hysterical panic on the part of men. Witch trials in sixteenth-century Europe seem, based on the writings of those involved in them, to have been about an unusual male fear which has prompted similar outbreaks of judicial or extrajudicial violence around the world, including in the present day.

The central idea of the witch panic, in its earliest days, was the fear of having your penis stolen. From this bizarre beginning, Europeans launched themselves into a frenzy of torture and execution of alleged witches which lasted centuries.

Weather Lore from Olaus Magnus the Goth

When the trees flip their leaves, it's about to rain. If the dandelions' balls of seeds are contracted and bunched up in the evening, it will rain the next day. Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. If the bees fly out and do not return to their hive, rain is coming.

Weather superstitions like these are found around the world, especially in temperate zones, and have a long and venerable history. Lately I've been reading through Olaus Magnus' "Description of the Northern Peoples" (1555) and it offers quite a lot of examples from sixteenth-century Scandinavia, both of things the weather foretells (hailstones the size of a calf's head are supposedly an omen of impending death; I assume he means more so than just death by being struck with a colossal ball of ice falling out of the sky on you) and of superstitions for predicting the weather. I haven't yet made it to the books which deal with fauna, so I haven't even read what their behavior has to say about meterological phenomena (but apparently there's a fair bit of that), and I confess when Olaus talks about "circles" and "semblances of the sun" in the sky he is not describing anything familiar to me either by other description or by personal experience, so when he tells us what kind of weather they imply, I have no idea what he is actually talking about. But even if these are ignored, Olaus Magnus is a wealth of information on early modern Scandinavian weather lore.