A werewolf is the problem of animal difference expressed in monster’s flesh. This compound creature asks how intermixed with the bestial (-wolf ) the human (were-) might already be. All that is civilized, ennobling, and sacred is lost in fleshly tumult with lupine appetites, impulses, and violence. The werewolf would seem the ideal monster to query the suppression of ‘‘the animal part within us all.’’1 Yet a warning that this monstrous admixture is not so easy to make a universalizing metaphor inheres in the fact that Latin possesses no common noun for the creature. Lycaon might be transformed by an angry god into a wolf, and might (in Ovid’s narration) inhabit briefly an interstitial space where he possesses human and bestial qualities, but at transformation’s end one term replaces another, vir to lupus. When Gervase of Tilbury in the Otia imperialia is describing men who metamorphose under lunar influence, he observes: ‘‘In England we have often seen men change into wolves [homines in lupos mutari] according to the phases of the moon. The Gauls call men of this kind gerulfi, while the English name for them is werewolves, were being the English equivalent of uir.’’2 Gervase must employ French and English words to gloss his Latinate circumlocution.3 As its etymologically admixed nature suggests, the werewolf is a hy-