Histoire d’un imaginaire effrayant : loups et lycanthropes entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne

Fear of wolves is a totemic fear found in almost all cultures, starting with the Indo-European civilisations. From the imaginary of the werewolf, which is found throughout Europe but documented even among the Native Americans, to current folklore and the countless versions of Little Red Riding Hood circulating around the world, fear of wolves seems to dissolve in an anthropological dimension, hardly reducible to the chronological divisions created by historians. A container for the projection of fears and unease that has been used throughout all of human history, at first glance the wolf might seem more like a Jungian ‘archetype’, linked to aggressiveness, than a subject for historical investigation. In fact, it is indeed possible to identify a few junctions and reconstruct a few cultural processes that codified this fear in the Middle Ages and early modern period and updated its meanings, shaping the imaginary upon which we are still largely dependent today.