Folklore scholarship and lycanthropy studies

Frank Hamel

1869 – 1957

Frank Hamel was a British woman scholar and London bookseller whose Human Animals: Werewolves and Other Transformations (1915) offered the first systematic cross-cultural survey of shapeshifting lore in English, covering werewolves, were-foxes, bird-women, and similar figures drawn from folklore worldwide. Organizing her material by animal type rather than region, she drew connections between transformation beliefs, witchcraft, and the concept of the animal soul that made her work a valuable comparative reference for anthropologists and occultists alike. Her book remains a standard reference for the study of lycanthropy and shapeshifting across world traditions.