The Werewolf in the Popular Culture of Early Modern Germany

Abstract

In early March 1613, Joachim von Wettken, lord of the manor in Trenthorst, Holstein charges a woman with the serious crime of witchcraft and hass her arrested. The accused is Gretge Hopperness, a woman who lives in a neighbouring village. Shortly beforehand, von Wettken had incarcerated a local healer, who he had accused of similar deeds and also charged with witchcraft; under torture the man had given the names of his alleged accomplices in his service of evil, among them Gretge Hopperness. Her special skills, he claimed, enabled her to transform into a wild, rapacious animal. The lord of the manor decides to confront the healer and Hopperness face to face with this accusation. The latter vehemently denies the charges, but von Wettken is still convinced that she is a playmate of the devil and decides to resort to the violent form of interrogation, to torture. Hopperness is unable to withstand the pain and confesses that she is able to perform magic and had caused the lord’s cattle to perish as well as causing his wife to fall ill. She also maintains that she is able to become a wolf and that ‘when it was so grim and cold she [had] bitten three wild deer to death’. The devil had enticed her to this act with a red apple, and to seal the pact with evil she had slept with him.¹ On 20 March 1613 von Wettken sentences Hopperness, the healer and two other women charged with the same (alleged) crimes to death by burning.