Monstrous Bodies

Abstract This chapter turns to the example of werewolf stories, with a particular focus on one storyteller, named Marie Bouzats. It situates Marie’s werewolf stories in a wider shared French culture of shapeshifters and monsters. The chapter argues that werewolf stories were rarely as violent or as extreme as the later popular cultural representations of werewolves in films and literature would be. Instead, stories of shapeshifters express subtle anxieties about boundaries and interpersonal relationships in face-to-face communities. Werewolf stories explore issues of religion, gender, and family, and in the case of the moorlands of Gascony, of changing landscapes.