Werewolves in Sheep's Clothing Blog

After reading both articles, I realized that both articles show that the werewolf became a real terror in the sixteenth century because people needed a way to explain things they were afraid of. Europe was dealing with harsh conditions, religious and political conflict, and the witch panic, so the werewolf trials gave people someone to blame. Specifically, many of the accused were beggars, hermits, or newcomers, and a lot of them confessed only after being tortured. Cases like Peter Stubbe, Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and Giles Garnier also show that real killings were being blamed on a monster. The numbers are an issue too. One source says 30,000 people were executed in France alone, but de Blécourt traced that number back to a prosecutor who counted everyone in a whole region, and he estimates the total across Europe was probably only several hundred.

I think this is why the werewolf sits between man and beast. The wolf in sheep's clothing idiom is about a predator hiding behind a harmless look. The werewolf is the opposite, a wolf hiding inside a person. That made people question how different humans really are from animals, and the torture and executions show that humans could be just as brutal.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76October 6, 2026 at 7:52 AM

    Good reflection on werewolves and wolves in sheep's clothing. I think both are about the beast inside of us. Werewolves are like wolves in sheep's clothing because, for the most part, werewolves are normal people until the full moon. Then they turn into savage beasts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Truth Confirmation Bias and Propaganda

Before this class, I would have told you I was pretty good at spotting bias in other people. The confirmation bias videos made me realize the person I should have been watching was me. Somewhere in the middle of those clips, I caught myself doing exactly what they described: gravitating toward information that already agreed with what I believed and brushing past everything else. I know it can sound egotistical to say this, but I am much more aware of it now. I haven't fixed it completely, and I doubt anyone does. What has changed is that I notice the pull. When I feel that quick satisfaction of seeing something that confirms my opinion, I now treat it as a signal to slow down, not a reason to keep scrolling. For the most part, I have learned not to only listen to the content that tells me what I want to hear. The propaganda material changed how I read the world around me, especially in three areas. Politics is the obvious one, since so much of it is built to trigger a reaction bef...
Read more

Salem's relation to today

Salem When we studied Salem, the part that stuck with me was not the courtroom. It was how quickly a community decided what it believed. Nineteen people were executed, and hundreds more were accused, and much of the damage came from the pressure to pick a side. Once an accusation had momentum, doubting it became risky. I won't share my opinion on the cases I'm about to mention, but the pattern reminded me of the way people are reacting to two current stories: the Lindsay Clancy case and the Cornell 7 case. Both involve extremely serious allegations, and both have been argued out online faster than they have moved through the legal system. In the Cornell case, none of the seven men had been criminally charged, and people are making strong opinions and judgments without even reading the full case. In the Clancy case, people were debating whether or not she committed the murder of her kids, which was not even what the trial was about.  In both cases, people form an opinion or ju...
Read more

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels I presented on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , and I'll be honest: I did not expect to like it. It's an older comedy, and I went in expecting to sit through it for the assignment. Instead, I got hooked. The movie did its job, and that is the part I keep thinking about. The two con men are charming, funny, and confident, and somewhere in the first stretch of the film I realized I wanted them to succeed. In the context of the movie, I ended up calling them heroes. The film makes you comfortable with deception by making the deceivers likeable and the targets easy to laugh at. That is strange when you think about it, because these characters lie to people and take their money, and I (plus the rest of the class) was cheering for them anyway. That connects directly to what we've been studying. Con artists succeed because people trust them, and people trust them because they are charming. The movie used the same tool on me. I was never conned out of money, but...
Read more