Dogged by Destiny: Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit

During the Enlightenment, the apprehension of the feared beast within¹—that the animal lies beneath the veneer of our moral and rational comportment and thereby undermines our sense of ourselves as the exception to all other creatures that are taxonomically classified by genus and species—was stirred by tales of feral children and the discovery of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. In the nineteenth century, it was aroused by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde—and by the work that is said to have influenced him, Charles Darwin’sThe Descent of Man.² Today on our video screens, we have werewolves (for