In this chapter Marilina Cesario addresses the subject of weather forecasting in the Middle Ages as revealed in the meteorological prognostics that survive abundantly from throughout the period but particularly from the eleventh century onwards. The chapter focuses in particular on one fifteenth-century medical manuscript from Germany containing an anthology of seven Latin weather texts. Cesario edits and translates the texts for the first time and offers detailed discussion of them. She finds that these treatises contribute to their manuscript’s overarching interest in natural philosophy and that they were mostly given theoretical rather than practical usage, having their place in a context of academic learning (eruditio). One item stands out from the others, however, a puzzling salt prognostication found uniquely here. This text relies not, it is argued, on erudite knowledge but on knowledge acquired empirically and appears to have been designed for practical use.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores particular moments of the female werewolf narrative to reveal a variety of cultural assumptions, narrative tropes and putative archetypes of femaleness and femininity. It explains folkloric records of the island of Saaremaa, Estonia, a territory in which, unusually, there are more folktales of female werewolves than male. The book examines twenty-first-century young adult paranormal romance texts, considering the ways in which such texts associate lycanthropy with contemporary idealisations and constructions of the post-adolescent female. It also explores presentations of body-centred violence in film, drawing parallels between female werewolves and other violent females in horror cinema. The book examines cinematic representations of the femme animale with an exploration of how this conceptualisation of the feminine might inform a reading of Ginger Snaps.

18

In the final chapter in the book Donald Scragg focuses on the very practical issue of the size and the layout of Old English manuscripts from the eighth century to the first half of the twelfth, in order to explore the role of books in the transmission of thought, knowledge and practical experiences of the age. The chapter considers how the dimensions of surviving books can give clues ‘about their intended use, about how they were created and about what that may tell us about the role of the written vernacular in the society of early England’.

Harriet Fletcher argues that The Vampyre uses vampirism as a vehicle for critiquing Lord Byron’s literary celebrity, specifically by drawing out the Gothic qualities of Byronic fan culture and the mutual relationship of consumption between Byron and his readers. In doing so, Polidori reconsiders the parameters of the Gothic; by attaching celebrity to the vampire, he reshapes the image of this Gothic trope in Western culture. Fletcher identifies the early nineteenth century as the advent of modern celebrity culture due to the emergence of mass culture, within which the role of Byron and the rise of industrial print culture is paramount. She combines Gothic studies, celebrity studies, and fan studies to develop what she calls ‘a Gothic celebrity reading’ that draws inspiration from Romantic literary culture. Lord Ruthven is a model of Byron, and in turn Aubrey is a model of the Byron fan or ‘Byromaniac’.

13

Nick Groom develops his earlier work on the influence of The Vampyre on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Both were conceived at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816, and Frankenstein has deep affinities with the vampire lore that was evidently aired during conversations between Lord, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and Polidori. But the influence was also reciprocal, and Frankenstein echoes through Polidori’s tale in unexpected ways. The character Aubrey has often been seen as a self-portrait of Polidori while it is generally accepted that the vampire Lord Ruthven is an audacious attack on Byron, who employed Polidori as his personal physician. However, in this chapter Groom presents a radical and unsettling close reading of the character of Aubrey, informed by Mary Shelley’s presentation of Victor Frankenstein, arguing that the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven is far more complex and uncanny than has hitherto been recognised.

This chapter explores the interactions between text, performance and venue to develop a typology of the aesthetics of the supernatural in Shakespearean productions in the Honour Court of the Avignon Popes' Palace between 1947 and 2015. A locus of conflicts, whether it actualises the hero's inner turmoil or the opposition between characters – generally between the murderer and his victim(s) thirsting for revenge – the ghost also crystallises the challenging confrontation between performance and venue, theatrical event and spectacular monument, the transient and the permanent. As a metatheatrical motif, the ghost questions not only the theatrical medium but also the theatricality of the venue and their compatibility. Shakespearean ghosts thus challenge the Avignon Festival while paradoxically confirming its vocation as a platform for experimentation, a laboratory for the performing arts and a showcase of contemporary theatre.

22

11

In the opening chapter Sándor Chardonnens focuses on medieval collections on dream divination. Taking account of a vast corpus of such writings, widely dispersed chronologically and geographically, he argues that alphabetical and thematic dream books, dream lunaries and mantic alphabets belong to the same branch of divination, that of oneiromancy, but that they were rarely anthologised in clusters within the same collection. He investigates patterns of transmission of dream divination in manuscripts and early printed texts in order to understand whether the ways in which those three types of dream divination were clustered together may give us an indication of genre awareness.