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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > Classical, early & medieval
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The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R915
Discovery Miles 9 150
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The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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In a moonlit graveyard somewhere in southern Italy, a soldier
removes his clothes in readiness to transform himself into a wolf.
He depends upon the clothes to recover his human shape, and so he
magically turns them to stone, but his secret is revealed when,
back in human form, he is seen to carry a wound identical to that
recently dealt to a marauding wolf. In Arcadia a man named
Damarchus accidentally tastes the flesh of a human sacrifice and is
transformed into a wolf for nine years. At Temesa Polites is stoned
to death for raping a local girl, only to return to terrorize the
people of the city in the form of a demon in a wolfskin. Tales of
the werewolf are by now well established as a rich sub-strand of
the popular horror genre; less widely known is just how far back in
time their provenance lies. These are just some of the werewolf
tales that survive from the Graeco-Roman world, and this is the
first book in any language to be devoted to their study. It shows
how in antiquity werewolves thrived in a story-world shared by
witches, ghosts, demons, and soul-flyers, and argues for the
primary role of story-telling-as opposed to rites of passage-in the
ancient world's general conceptualization of the werewolf. It also
seeks to demonstrate how the comparison of equally intriguing
medieval tales can be used to fill in gaps in our knowledge of
werewolf stories in the ancient world, thereby shedding new light
on the origins of the modern phenomenon. All ancient texts bearing
upon the subject have been integrated into the discussion in new
English translations, so that the book provides not only an
accessible overview for a broad readership of all levels of
familiarity with ancient languages, but also a comprehensive
sourcebook for the ancient werewolf for the purposes of research
and study.
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