In the 5th century BC, Herodotus alluded to men capable of transforming themselves into wolves.

And in one of the earliest episodes of this podcast, slightly more recently, Dr. Jan Macloson and I examined a case from the Baskin 1609 of a 13-year-old

self-confessed werewolf, called Jean-Cranier. It remains one of my favourite podcasts to date and I urge you to seek it out if you haven't heard it.

Although by comparison to the number of accused witches in our period, werewolf trials were not especially common,

Cranier was not the only person to be formally charged. The majority of the nearly 300 cases were record-survived, however, involved people being accused and then denying the accusation.

Then they were generally tortured and subsequently they confessed to being a werewolf in ways that very closely reflected the scenarios put to them by their learned interrogators.

But the use of torture had been abolished a few years before the case understudy today. And anyway, this werewolf was out and proud.

Today's case concerns a peasant in his 80s known as Old Teas, a shortening of Matys, in the 1690s in Levenia, a region that now encompasses parts of Latvia and Estonia.

Old Teas freely emitted to having been a werewolf, but his idea of what that meant was disturbingly different from what his judges at the District Court of Wendon, today's Cercis,

88 kilometres north east of Riga, expected.

The cases translated and printed in the book Old Teas, a Levenian werewolf, a classic case in comparative perspective.

The books authors are Carlo Ginsburg and Bruce Lincoln.

Carlo Ginsburg is Professor Emeritus at the University of California LA and the Scuola, Normali, Tupiriare, Dépisa, and is famous for his books, The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles.

As they're given in their English translations, the latter about the Benendante, or the Gooddoers of northeastern Italy, who battled witches at night.

Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and a world expert on relationship between history and myth.

In their book, these two great scholars disagree about how to interpret Teas' case, and you know your infra-treat, and I tell you that they both join me today to discuss werewolves.

Well, it is a special night when I am joined by not one great scholar, but in this case two professors, Ginsburg and Lincoln in alphabetical order.

I am absolutely delighted to spend some time with you talking about this amazing case.

So, let's further get into it. I think we should perhaps think first of all about what we can learn from the transcript of the case, and then we'll move on to thinking about how we can interpret it, on which you disagree.

So, Professor Lincoln, could you introduce the case to us? Could you tell us who old Teas was, and how his claim to be, or to have been aware of, first came to the attention of the authorities?

Old Teas is a Livonian peasant, lived in what today is Latvia, who was born early in the 17th century, we don't know exactly when, but toward the end of the century he found himself in court, one of his neighbors, as he's waiting to testify in an unrelated law case, one of his neighbors expressed surprise that Teas was going to testify because he would have to swear an oath, and as this other witness says, everyone knows he's a werewolf.

And he runs around with the devil, and how could he possibly swear an oath, at which point during the losing progress, reorient itself completely to focus on old Teas, and there follows an extraordinary exchange in which they attempt to convict him of werewolfery, which is a punishable crime, and in their mind is associated with a satanic pact in which werewolves are instruments of the devil.

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