Wonders Never Cease: Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Curiosities in Early Modern France

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues for the continuity of belief in wonders from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the Enlightenment. Even as confidence in magic and witchcraft supposedly waned, popular interest in wonders (including creatures like werewolves and vampires) continued to occupy a significant place in eighteenth-century culture. Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment never fully materialized leaving a more complicated picture of the development of modernity. Through an exploration of werewolves, vampires, and the wonders inhabiting Joseph Aignan Sigaud de la Fond’s Dictionnaire des merveilles published at the end of the eighteenth century, this article traces the evolution and development of interest in wonders that lay outside the scope of a narrowly defined Enlightenment. Long considered a lacuna between the witch beliefs of the early modern period and the spiritism of the nineteenth century, instead the eighteenth century presents both continuity of beliefs and innovation in viewing the natural world.