"The White Devil is informative and entertaining, filled with grisly anecdotes and case histories, religious, social, and medical interpretations, both credible and laughable. It leaves us wanting to know more. This is serious scholarship expressed in an easy, readable prose that examines the phenomenon from its beginnings with the tribal shaman all the way through to the legend’s popularization in film and television."

New York Journal of Books

“[Traces] the career of the werewolf from its roots in the shamanistic cults of prehistory, through its demonisation in Christian Europe, to the reclassification of lycanthropy as a mental illness . . . The stories told in this book are arresting and often bloody: the crimes of Gilles Garnier and other self-confessed ‘werewolves’ of the 16th century open a window on to changing perceptions of human barbarity in the pre-modern world. . . . This excursion into a fascinating but largely unvisited area of the past is welcome.”

BBC History Magazine

“Happily, The White Devil reintroduces us to an old fiend we thought we knew, and shows us there’s a lot more to the werewolf than a full moon and a lust for human flesh. . . . Beresford writes with a wolfish enthusiasm.”

Chronicle of Higher Education

“Beresford’s The White Devil may cause Twihards to re-examine their love of werewolves, but for the cultural historian in us all, it is a significant work on the religious and socio-cultural development of an idea that sheds light on the basic psychology of humankind. Beresford shows us that sometimes our fear of monsters is actually a fear of the world that we made.”

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