We have just published our work on the early phases of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the site of the shrine of St James and the end of the camino, the pilgrimage route across northern Spain from the Pyrenees. I was co-investigator on the project, funded by the regional government of Galicia, and was responsible for a stone by stone survey of the masonry of the area around the cathedral’s high altar. Other members of the project studied the sculpted capitals, and the project’s brief was to gain a better understanding of the progress of construction of its earliest parts.

Following our recent blog theme of dark wintry nights/supernatural horror/history/myth, Amanda Hopkins's piece throws a different light on the Medieval Werewolf myth. She explains that, the medieval werewolf is not a horror story, perhaps because of the Church's strict attempts to stamp out non-divine supernatural manifestations and other superstitions in narratives. Werewolf stories were frowned upon, and there is more than one Church edict insisting that werewolves are not real and that people should not believe in them. If many of the people who were writing stories down were clerics, there is a potential conflict, and indeed they would often add a Christian spin to the stories. The ‘typical’ Medieval werewolf story involves a hero-knight being locked (usually magically) into wolf form by his wife, and plays down the bestiality entirely in order to play up his obvious humanity. Completely the opposite of the modern werewolf, which (for cinematographic reasons?) depicts the humanity physically (bipedality, for instance, or demonstrations of higher intelligence) and emphasises the bestial ferocity.