The Malleus Maleficarum

By Manchester University Press

The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches. It was written in 1487 by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Institoris, following his failure to prosecute a number of women for witchcraft, it is in many ways a highly personal document, full of frustration at official complacency in the face of a spiritual threat, as well as being a practical guide for law-officers who have to deal with a cunning, dangerous enemy. Combining theological discussion, illustrative anecdotes, and useful advice for those involved in suppressing witchcraft, its influence on witchcraft studies has been extensive.

The only previous translation into English, that by Montague Summers produced in 1928, is full of inaccuracies. It is written in a style almost unreadable nowadays, and is unfortunately coloured by his personal agenda. This new edited translation, with an introductory essay setting witchcraft, Institoris, and the Malleus into clear, readable English, corrects Summers’ mistakes and offers a lean, unvarnished version of what Institoris actually wrote. It will undoubtedly become the standard translation of this important and controversial late-medieval text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847798053

Book preview

THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

edited and translated by

P.G. Maxwell-Stuart

Copyright © P.G. Maxwell-Stuart 2007

The right of P.G. Maxwell-Stuart to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

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Distributed exclusively in the USA by

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Distributed exclusively in Canada by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 6443 2 paperback

First published 2007

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08     10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Typeset in Plantin

by Koinonia, Manchester

Printed in Great Britain

by CPI, Bath

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Translation

Introduction

Part 1

Question 1: Is there such a thing as an act of harmful magic?

Question 2: Does an evil spirit give his support to an act of harmful magic?

Question 3: Are human beings granted the ability to procreate by means of evil spirits?

Question 4: The evil spirits – that is, incubi and succubi – who perform this kind of action

Question 5: What is the origin of the increase in works of harmful magic?

Question 6: Why does one find that women are particularly superstitious?

Question 7: Do workers of harmful magic have the power to change people’s minds to love or hate?

Question 8: Can workers of harmful magic impede the power to procreate, or sexual intercourse (an act of harmful magic which is included in Pope Innocent’s Bull)?

Question 9: Do witches employ illusion to trick people into thinking that [men’s] penises have been entirely uprooted from their bodies?

Question 10: Can witches use the art of trickery and deception to change people into animal shape?

Question 11: Midwives who work harmful magic kill foetuses in the womb in different ways, procure a miscarriage, and, when they do not do this, offer newly born children to evil spirits.

Question 12: Does God’s permission accompany the performance of acts of harmful magic?

Question 13: The question about the two permissions which God legitimately allows is discussed: that is, (i) the Devil, the originator of every evil, committed sin, and at the same time, (ii) our first parents fell. This is why workers of harmful magic are given legitimate permission to perform their activities.

Question 14: The outrageousness of witches is considered and is subject-matter for an entire sermon.

Question 15: Innocent people often suffer from acts of harmful magic because of witches’ sins, and sometimes because of their own.

Question 16: The truth of the foregoing is laid out in detail by comparing witches’ activities with other kinds of superstition.

Question 17: Fourteen comparisons between the seriousness of the crime [of harmful magic] and any sins [committed by] evil spirits.

Question 18: How to preach against five arguments used by lay people, by which they seem to prove, more or less, that God does not allow the Devil and workers of harmful magic to perform works of harmful magic of this kind.

Part II

Question 1: Those whom a worker of harmful magic cannot harm

Chapter 1: The various ways evil spirits use witches to drag and entice innocent people to them for the purpose of increasing that particular form of treachery.

Chapter 2: The method of making a sacrilegious declaration.

Chapter 3: How they are actually transported from one place to another.

Chapter 4: How they are able to have sexual intercourse with incubi.

Chapter 5: The common method used by witches to work their acts of harmful magic.

How they usually impede the power of generation, or [inflict] other deficiencies on any part of creation at all, with the exception of the heavenly bodies.

Chapter 6: The way in which they usually impede the power of generation.

Chapter 7: How they usually remove penises.

Chapter 8: The way they change human beings into animal shape.

Chapter 9: How evil spirits exist inside bodies and heads without doing them injury when they work illusory transmutations.

Chapter 10: How evil spirits sometimes take up residence in people’s essential being by means of the things witches do.

Chapter 11: How they can inflict any kind of infirmity, generally speaking of a more serious nature.

Chapter 12: How they are accustomed to inflict similar infirmities on human beings in particular.

Chapter 13: How midwives who are witches inflict greater losses when they either kill small children, or curse them and offer them to evil spirits.

Chapter 14: Here is the way witches inflict various injuries on draught-animals.

Chapter 15: How they stir up hailstorms and bad weather, and how it is their custom to cause lightning to strike human beings and draught-animals.

Chapter 16: Three ways whereby men are found to have been infected by works of harmful magic, but not women. There are three headings. The first deals with workers of harmful magic [who make use of] archery.

Question 2: The ways of removing the apparatus of harmful magic, and of curing the the injuries they have caused. Preface

Chapter 1: The Church’s remedy against incubi and succubi.

Chapter 2: Remedies for those whose generative power has been affected by harmful magic.

Chapter 3: Remedies directed at those subject to excessive love or hatred because of harmful magic.

Chapter 4: Remedies for those whose penises are removed by the art of illusion, and for those occasions when people are changed into animal-shape.

Chapter 5: Remedies for those subject to [demonic] obsession because of an act of harmful magic.

Chapter 6: The use of the lawful exorcisms of the Church as remedies for those infirmities caused by workers of harmful magic, along with the method of exorcising those suffering from the effects of harmful magic.

Chapter 7: Remedies against hailstorms and for draught-animals which have been subjected to harmful magic.

Chapter 8: Specific remedies against particular secret molestation by evil spirits.

Chapter 9: A remedy

Part III

General introduction. What kind of person is suitable to be a judge of witches?

Question 1: The method of initiating legal proceedings

Question 2: The number of witnesses

Question 3: Can witnesses be compelled [to testify under oath] and undergo examination on more than one occasion?

Question 4: The legal standing of witnesses

Question 5: Can deadly enemies be admitted to give evidence?

Question 6: How the legal process should be continued. How witnesses should be examined in the presence of four other individuals. How the accused woman should be questioned twice.

Question 7: Here I indicate various uncertainties regarding the foregoing examinations and negative answers. Should the accused woman be imprisoned? When is one to consider it obvious that she has been detected in the heresy of witches?

Question 8: (Following on from the preceding question), should the woman be imprisoned? How to make the arrest.

Question 9: What must be done after the arrest. Should the woman be told the names of her accusers?

Question 10: What kind of defence can be allowed? The appointment of an advocate.

Question 11: What will the advocate do when the names of the witnesses are not made public?

Question 12: The same subject, going into greater detail about how deadly enmity should be investigated.

Question 13: The things a judge should note before exposing [the accused] to interrogation in the place of imprisonment and torture.

Question 14: The method of sentencing the accused woman to be tortured. How she should be tortured the first day. Can one promise to save her life?

Question 15: [This is] about the continuation of the torture. The tricks and signs whereby the judge can recognise a witch. How he should protect himself against their acts of harmful magic. How the women should be shaved in the places where they usually hide their protective amulets. Various explanations of how to counteract the amulet [intended to procure] silence.

Question 16: The proper time for the second interrogation, and how it should be carried out. Devices the judge should use as a last resort.

The last part of the treatise. How these legal proceedings of the Faith are to be brought to a logical conclusion by means of a definitive sentence.

Question 17: The customary means of purgation, especially trial by red-hot iron, to which witches appeal.

Question 18: How a definitive sentence should be pronounced.

Question 19: How many kinds of suspicion are there which result in the pronouncement of a sentence?

Question 20: The first method of pronouncing sentence.

Question 21: The second method. Pronouncing sentence on an accused woman who has simply been given a bad reputation.

Question 22: The third method. Pronouncing sentence on a woman who has been given a bad reputation and is to be exposed to torture.

Question 23: The fourth method. Pronouncing sentence on a woman who has been accused upon light suspicion.

Question 24: The fifth method. Pronouncing sentence on a woman who is under strong suspicion.

Question 25: The sixth method. Pronouncing sentence on a woman who is under grave suspicion.

Question 26: The method of pronouncing sentence on a woman who has been charged as a person under suspicion, and has acquired a bad reputation.

Question 27: The method of pronouncing sentence on a woman who has confessed to heresy, but is not penitent.

Question 28: The method of pronouncing sentence on a woman who confessed to heresy, but relapsed, although she is [now] penitent.

Question 29: The method of pronouncing sentence on a woman who has confessed to heresy, but is not penitent, although she has not relapsed.

Question 30: A woman who has confessed to heresy and relapsed, and is not penitent.

Question 31: A woman who has been arrested and found guilty, but denies everything.

Question 32: A man who has been found guilty, but has run away, or absents himself in wilful disobedience [to the court’s summons].

Question 33: How to pronounce sentence on someone who has been denounced by another witch who has been, or is due to be, burned.

Question 34: The method of pronouncing sentence on a witch who removes [the effects of] acts of harmful magic. In addition to this, the method of pronouncing sentence on witches who are midwives, and on male workers of harmful magic who use archery.

Question 35: The methods of pronouncing sentence on workers of harmful magic, as far as their making an appeal [to a higher court] is concerned, whether they do so frivolously or legitimately.

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Professor Robert Bartlett for reading the first part of this translation. His comments were invaluable. If errors remain, they must be attributed to me. I am also grateful to Jonathan Bevan of Manchester University Press for his encouragement and for his patience in waiting for the manuscript.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding about the terms for magical operators used by Institoris, I have translated maleficus as male worker of harmful magic, which is, in fact, its literal meaning, malefici as workers of harmful magic, intended to encompass both male and female practitioners, as the Latin word does, and have reserved witch/witch for the specifically female malefica/maleficae.

Whenever the English version needs to be expanded to accommodate the sense or implication of the Latin, I have used square brackets. Rounded brackets indicate asides in the Latin text itself.

In order to keep the translation within the agreed word-limit, parts of the text have been paraphrased. These appear in italics between square brackets. I have tried to make them full enough to give the reader a comprehensible gist of what is being resuméd.

I reproduce the headings for each chapter and subdivision of a chapter as they appear in the Latin text. This accounts for slight discrepancies between the headings as they appear in the Contents and as they appear in the text. Phrases and sentences which are not in italics in the italicised paragraphs indicate that I am translating rather than summarising Institoris’s text.

The text I have used is that of the 1588 Frankfurt edition.

INTRODUCTION

The intellectual ambience of the Malleus

‘At the end of the fourteenth century’, Federico Pastore has observed, ‘the feeling of living in a city under siege on all sides by evil spirits who, with increasing frequency, assumed forms suited to ensnaring human beings and bringing them to perdition was widely diffused and deeply rooted in all levels of the population.’ He exaggerates, perhaps, for we have no means of telling what was felt by those parts of the general population who had little or no voice recorded in the surviving literature; but he does not exaggerate when it comes to the literate and the powerful, since the period he designates was one full of intense debate and significant intellectual and political ferment, most of which may not have had immediate impact on the majority of people, but which undoubtedly stirred and preoccupied those circles who were able to conduct their arguments and convey their fears by means of the written word. Their sense of being encompassed by non-human hostile forces was scarcely new, of course. From very ancient times, human beings had been aware not only of the existence of various spirit- worlds – divine, angelic, demonic, heroic, ancestral – but also of the ease with which non-material entities could penetrate physical creation and exert an influence upon human events and everyday activities far beyond the capabilities of human power. But, as the fourteenth century came to an end and the fifteenth began its course, a combination of factors, in part beliefs, in part events, began to produce a number of reactions to humans’ relationship with the spirit-world, which were more emotionally intense than had been usual before.

During the late Middle Ages, too, there was a widespread belief that events, as interpreted by the Christian view of history, were following a predetermined pattern, that history consisted of a finite temporal progression from the Creation to the Last Judgement, and that in consequence, sooner or later, the Last Days would come. A signal of how near those final days might be could be found in Apocalypse 20.1–3 which mention a period of a thousand years during which Satan will be imprisoned until he is released to create havoc among humankind; and with such a signal – difficult to interpret thought it was, because how did one know when the thousand-year period had begun? – the way lay open for preachers, prophets, visionaries, and mystics, not to mention others with more mundane or less exalted motives, to whip up eschato-logical and apocalyptic fears, and to propose some programme of reform which would prepare the world for the Last Judgement and provide its individual inhabitants, were they inspired or frightened by this prospect, with hope that they might escape the clutches of Satan and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, at the end of the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII (1073– 85) had sought to reform the lives of both clergy and laity for this purpose; while at the end of the twelfth, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–1202/1212) predicted that the world was about to enter the era of the Holy Spirit, and was thus in a period of trial during which the Church would be persecuted and the world subject to immense trial at the hands of Antichrist and the forces of evil, before the powers of darkness were defeated and a renovation of both world and humanity could take place.¹ By the beginning of the fifteenth century, conviction that Antichrist had been born and that the Last Times were under way was beginning to grow. The Dominican St Vincent Ferrer (c. 1350–1419), for example, wrote to Benedict XIII in July 1412 that the time of Antichrist was imminent, an urgency he had preached eight years before in Freiburg, when he told his congregation that after Antichrist had ruled the world for three years, Christ would destroy him, but that humankind would then have only forty-five days left to repent.²

This sense of urgency was propelled, at least in part, by the Great Schism in the Church, at the end of which rival Popes in Rome and Avignon finally gave way under Imperial pressure to a single Pope, Martin V (1417–31) whose election restored unity to the western Church. Thereafter, preaching emphasis on the imminent arrival of Antichrist began to diminish, but the fearful figure lived on in the heresy of Wycliffe who identified the Papacy itself with Antichrist, a virulently anti-Papal stance which influenced the Czech heretic Jan Hus (c. 1372– 1415). Hus preached against what he saw as the Church’s corruption, and his execution in 1415 at the end of the Council of Constance transformed his followers and pushed them into rebellion. Armed warfare broke out and preoccupied the attention of Europe for the next several years. Then in 1453 the Turks captured Constantinople and made it the capital of a new, aggressive Islamic empire which turned its attention to eastern Europe, and caused doves to flutter in almost every political and religious dovecote.

But Muslims were not the only hostile bands to menace the status quo. Heretical self-appointed holy beggars known as Beghards were wandering far and wide, claiming (rather like the Franciscans) to have embraced an austere poverty. Diverse rather than cohesive, they spread a broad range of personal interpretations of Christianity, their style of living and their multifarious messages clearly at odds with the corruption of the lower clergy in Bavaria and the orthodox teachings of the Church; and from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the Bishop of Eichstätt and the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg were obliged to threaten both them and remnant Flagellant movements with excommunication. Nor were women absent from this blossoming of lay striving after the vita apostolica. Beguines were not quite nuns and not quite laity. They lived in small communities similar to convents, but took no formal vows, being free to leave and marry, and to own and administer property. They led, in fact, a lay existence coloured by a communal existence and a more than usually strong leaven of religious observances in their daily lives. Both they and the Beghards thus rose from an increasing tide of lay piety, which posed a potential problem for the Church. People within regulated, fully monastic communities were subject to the rigour of Church discipline. Those half in and half out ran the danger of falling into heresy, as John XXII was obliged to acknowledge, and although he recognised in a Bull of 1318 that many Beguines led irreproachable lives, he also re-enacted earlier decrees from the Council of Vienne (1311), which recognised and supported episcopal efforts to stamp out such confraternities as had become tainted with heresy.³

Popular discontent with the clergy then found expression in 1476 in the person of Hans Böhm, a young man from Niklashausen, not far from Würzburg, who, on the strength of a personal vision of the Virgin Mary, began to preach repentance and sobriety in a manner reminiscent of Savonarola. It was not long before he was claiming near- miraculous powers and fulminating against the clergy, threatening their imminent disappearance on a Day of Reckoning, and urging people to stop paying taxes and tithes to the Church. His message struck the very note people wanted to hear, and it was not long before large areas of southern and central Germany were in turmoil. The mass- movement came to an end in July 1474 when the authorities in Würzburg managed to arrest Böhm, put him on trial for heresy and sorcery, and burn him; but he had given both the ecclesiastical and the secular establishments something of a fright, even though it is clear he was being manipulated by others for their own, entirely secular and political reasons.⁴ Little wonder, then, that in 1478 the Dominican Michael Francis de Insulis published a treatise on the advent of Antichrist, while a popular Pamphlet on the End of the World received seven printings in Germany before the reformation.

To a fair number of those living in the last half of the fifteenth century, it must have seemed that, as far back as memory would stretch, the Church had stood embattled against forces threatening to destroy it, whether those forces were immediately visible upon earth, in the form of bellicose schismatics and heretics or menacing Turks, or invisible, at least for the moment, in the person of Antichrist who had either been born already or would soon come into the world, accompanied by the end of the thousand years of Satan’s captivity, the completion of the numbers of the Just, and the Last Judgement itself – the second death, as Apocalypse 20.14 (Vulgate) expresses it. A sense of extreme danger, a simmering resentment of clerical corruption, a fearfulness, a notion that something should be done to purify the Church, identify her enemies and root out the culpable agents of degeneration – some such inchoate feelings were swirling about during the very decades in which Institoris and his fellow-inquisitors were working in the German states, and constituted some of the general psychological and intellectual conditions under which the Malleus came to be written. To present an orthodox front in opposition to such forces, and to eradicate at least some of the causes which were giving rise to these feelings, the Dominicans busied themselves partly by writing treatises to influence the learned to adopt their ideas for reform and renovation, partly (in their office as inquisitors) by rooting out heresy wherever and in whatever guise it raised its head. St Vincent Ferrer, Johann Nider, St Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, and Johann Meyer, for example, played important roles in helping to prosecute Waldensian heretics, members of a sect which quickly became identified in both propaganda and popular belief with witchcraft in particular: and, in the case of Johann Nider, not only preaching reform of the Dominican Order itself at the Council of Basel, but also formulating an expression of witchcraft-as-heresy, which was to have a long-lasting and profound effect on both subsequent theory and practice.⁵ Thus, the Malleus very frequently refers to the haeresis maleficarum, the heresy of witches, meaning the idolatry involved in their worshipping and sacrificing children to evil spirits, and the apostasy from the Faith caused by their making a pact with those same evil spirits. Dominican involvement, in the form of Papally-appointed inquisitors,⁶ with this heresy was only to be expected since, from its inception, the Order had played a major role in combating heresy and was still imbued in the fifteenth century with some of its original missionary zeal.

Idolatry and apostasy were, in fact, the two most clearly distinguishable landmarks in this shifting scene, and behind both loomed the figure of Satan. Problems inherent in the Faith since the beginning were now presenting themselves for discussion with renewed vigour. How powerful, exactly, was the Devil? What limits, if any, did God place on his power, and how independent of God was he? Could he work miracles in the proper sense of the word? If not, why not: and how could one tell the difference between supernatural or preternatural marvels accomplished by the saints and those by worshippers of evil spirits? It is just this kind of question Institoris addresses straight away in the first question of Part I when he reproduces the kind of argument used by people who doubt the existence of such a thing as harmful magic. Creation is a work of God, the argument goes, and if harmful magic (a work of the Devil) were actually to exist, it would exist in direct opposition to Creation (a work of God). But a work of the Devil cannot surpass a work of God, and so it is illicit to think such a thing as that the former can damage the latter. In answer to this, Institoris points out that (a) anything the Devil or evil spirits do is done with God’s permission, otherwise they would be unable to do it; (b) the effects of harmful magic, accomplished as a result of the pact between the practitioner and an evil spirit, are real enough; and (c) evil spirits are able to exercise power over both physical objects and a human being’s imaginative faculty. They retain the intelligence and knowledge they possessed before they fell from Heaven, and thus have a greatly superior understanding of time and of the hidden laws of nature, the former enabling them to appear to predict the future, the latter to work wonders which, to human eyes, may appear to be miraculous. Evil, therefore, flourished, although there were limits to what it could do. These limits, however, appeared to expand, and expand considerably, as the fifteenth century approached and then progressed.

St Augustine proposed that God permits evil in order to draw good from it, and that Satan is God’s instrument both of correction and conversion, an explanation which remained fairly constant during the succeeding centuries; and one upon which Institoris relies more than once as he seeks to account for the apparent freedom of witches to inflict harm and injury on both human beings and their animals and crops.⁷ But while the functions attributed to Satan remained relatively stable over the centuries, the figure of Satan in popular and learned consciousness did not. Robert Muchembled has argued that until the twelfth century, there were too many other sources of dread and alarm for the Devil to be the sole focus of people’s fears and that an emphasis on his monstrous and powerful aspects during the fourteenth century combined with new widespread theories of centralised monarchic government in many European states to produce a new, superhuman sovereign whose opposition to God is reminiscent of the rebellion of a great temporal lord against his lawful king. This came perilously near the dual divinity of Catharism, with Satan as the co-eternal evil divinity whose domain is material creation and whose natural subjects are therefore human beings, unless they can shake off their physical component and thus flee into the realm of pure spirit, which is the kingdom of the other, good God.⁸

So explanation of the relationship between good and evil, God and the Devil, was constantly treading a tightrope as the Church sought to convey the niceties of this theodical problem to the mass of the population; but who was better placed to undertake this particular work than the Dominicans, whose very foundation required that they go out and preach orthodoxy to the people? It is no accident, therefore, that Part II of the Malleus is addressed specifically to fellow-Dominicans and other preachers, advising them how best to explain and condemn the phenomenon of witchcraft in ways which will have most effect on their congregations. This drive for orthodoxy is, in fact, a keynote of the Malleus – the first question of Part I concentrates on whether it is orthodox Catholic opinion or heretical to deny the existence of workers of harmful magic – and Jérôme Baschet has pointed out that the Church’s emphasis upon punishment in the afterlife resulted not so much in a Christianity of fear as in a Church-led drive to get people to adhere to the basic principles of a moral code which was based on the notion of ‘inversion’ (that is, an opposition between good and evil), running throughout every aspect of the late Mediaeval educated clerical consciousness, and to persuade them to look to the Church as the only proper intermediary between God and humankind.⁹ Here we come to an important change in the usage of the word fides.¹⁰ Essentially, fides referred to the trust between individuals and groups of individuals which was necessary for the working of society, and it implied an acceptance of the reality of things invisible, so that, for example, fides in relation to God meant at least a tacit acknowledgement that God actually does exist, and fides in relation to angels and demons must therefore carry the same acknowledgement. Theologians such as Simon of Tournai and St Thomas Aquinas carefully distinguished between fides explicita, which rested upon the authority of Scripture and the writings of the Greeks and Romans, and which was therefore apprehensible only by the learned whose fides, founded upon consideration and cogitation, amounted to scientia, knowledge: and fides implicita, the willingness to trust authoritative sources without necessarily understanding them or needing to bring one’s intellect to bear upon them. ‘What a learned person knows, an unlearned person believes’, as Simon of Tournai expressed it. Religion, then, was for those who knew it best, in Mediaeval terminology, monks – hence their Latin designation, religiosi. For the rest, what was required was fides simplex, untrammelled adherence to a probable truth.

The opposite of fides was infidelitas, lack of such an adherence, and infidelitas was what characterised the heathen. Perfidia, on the other hand, was treachery because it bore witness, in spite of itself, to a system of fides which the perfidious, by their very existence, betrayed. Hence Institoris’s constant use of perfidia in relation to witches. They are not individuals without faith – such as Muslims – but people who know what fides implies and, of their own free will, seek to betray it – such as Jews. (The comparisons belong to Institoris.) Fides, then, was a trust founded upon the inculcation of doctrine. But heresy of one kind and another tended to pervert this trust and introduce, by its very nature, a subjective element into the notion of fides, turning it from a gift of God, which one accepted without question, into a personal commitment, a belief which might be based on a trustworthy apprehension of the truth, in which case it was a vera fides, or on an untrustworthy apprehension of it, in which case it was a falsa fides – a translation of fides into something dangerously akin to opinio. Hence the increasing need to insist upon orthodoxy of doctrine and the obligation of the Inquisition to counter the kind of subversion of the Faith represented by changes in the meaning of the word faith itself.

But a clear weakness, and a severe one, in the armoury of Christendom against assault by the Devil and his spirits was women’s carnality. Women’s bodies, it was thought, were peculiarly permeable and this made women more susceptible than men to demonic interference, whether that means possession or sexual intercourse; and women were prey to exceptional libidinousness – as Vincent de Beauvais explained in his Speculum Naturale, they were not only more full of lust than men, but more lustful than all other female creatures, with the possible exception of the mare. There were physiological reasons for this – the womb was cold and therefore yearned after the heat of a man’s semen – and their imaginative faculty (that is, the part of their brain which received impressions from exterior sources and stored these as images) was more susceptible than that of a man. Hence, for example, the frequent stories about women looking at a particular object during their pregnancy, only to have recognisable aspects of that object reproduced in their foetus.

Such a concept sprang partly from Mediaeval theories of the working of vision, partly from the logical consequences of women’s being thought of as passive receptors in the scheme of things, men being the active agents.¹¹ This polarity between male and female also meant that women were perceived to be more emotional and less intellectual than men, and Nancy Caciola has drawn attention to the way in which Mediaeval etymologies reflect this view.¹² Institoris’s etymology of femina (woman) from fe and minus (less in faith) is notorious, although it was not originally his, but may have been borrowed from St Antoninus of Florence; and of maleficae (witches) from maleficiendum (working harmful magic) or from male de fide sentiendum (‘having a wicked perception or opinion about the Faith’), emphasised what he saw as the intimate connection between women and wickedness in relation to the Faith. Nor was he alone in this. In his treatise on blasphemy, for example, Wycliffe had offered an etymology of the word, deriving it from blas and femina (stupid woman), clearly indicating a perceived disjunction between a woman and the invisible realities of the Faith to which she owed fides implicita.¹³ Such a smallness in faith, or proclivity to view or think of the Faith in a wicked manner, amounts to perfidia, that treachery to which, as Institoris keeps on saying, witches – here specifically meaning female witches, maleficae – are especially given; and this is the context in which Institoris reproduces, in a single question, the standard references to women’s frailities and deceptiveness which the Devil can exploit. Why, he asks, is the treachery which leads to the practice of harmful magic and all that that entails found more frequently in women than in men? Then he lists women’s usual weaknesses – they are backbiting, vengeful, lascivious, impressionable, and intellectually inferior – before saying that wicked women (the qualification is important), are particularly ruled by three moral failings: infidelitas, ostentation, and lust. Infidelitas, we may recall, is the opposite of fides, amounting to a lack of adherence to the probable truth of the reality of things invisible. Such an infidelitas in Catholic women was either the equivalent of, or could quickly lead to, perfidia, a betrayal of the Faith, since the vacuum thus created would not remain empty but find itself filled by adherence to other, undesirable and dangerous truths.

All this, however, is a long way from the exaggerated misogyny which is still too frequently attributed to the Malleus. As Walter Stephens has maintained, ‘hatred of women was not the sole or even the primary motive for compiling the Malleus … The Malleus’s denunciations of women as women are both perfunctory and localised’.¹⁴ The problem with women was their rampant carnality which made them such easy targets for demonic seduction, although it is not suggested that this weakness was particularly their fault, in the sense that women chose to be infirm, any more than that a person might choose to be born with blue eyes or a club foot. Women, however, were born with this unfortunate and dangerous proclivity and therefore needed all the help they could get to keep it under control. That such control was possible Institoris himself acknowledged in a brief passage in the middle of his notorious question 6, which cites both Scripture and history to show that some women have been virtuous and their actions beneficial to men; and it is interesting to note that at about the same time as the publication of the Malleus, a Ferrarese scholar, Bartolommeo Goggio, wrote a long book entitled De laudibus mulierum (The Praises of Women), in which he argued that men and women are created equal in essence, but that women are actually superior to men, in as much as they have given rise to all those fundamentals which produce a civilised society.¹⁵ There was thus a constant tension in the Mediaeval view of women, whether polarising them between the two extremes of the Devil’s gateway and the Bride of Christ, or viewing them as both at one and the same time.¹⁶ For Institoris, an appointed guardian of the orthodoxy of the Faith – one of the dogs of the Lord, as Dominican etymology of their own name expressed it – wicked women were the Achilles heel of Christendom, through whose inherent weakness the Devil was finding access to the hearts of hitherto faithful Christians. It was his duty not only to warn both ecclesiastical and secular authorities of this pressing danger – which too many of them seemed to be ignoring – but also to advise on the best and most effective ways of extirpating the weeds so that the healthy plants might flourish.

Magic in the fifteenth century

One of the principal difficulties attendant on discussions of witchcraft is that it has been alienated from other forms of magic as though it were something self-contained. Thus, it is common to find books and articles dealing with witchcraft and magic, their titles tacitly suggesting that witchcraft is somehow not magic, or has sufficient peculiarities of its own to warrant its being separated in this fashion. Earlier times, however, made no such distinction. For them, magic tended to refer to a very general intellectual concept. They preferred to speak or write of various practices – maleficium, divinatio, sortilegium, necromantia, etc. – and any separation of one from the other depended upon the context of the scholarly (usually theological) disquisition in which these terms were used. Doing harm to others or to their possessions by preternatural means (maleficium), and seeking to know the future by casting lots, or identifying thieves, or locating lost or stolen objects by the use of similar magic (sortilegium, divinatio), were practices common to both sexes.

Institoris acknowledges this (as did anyone else who wrote on these subjects in Latin) by using malefici and maleficae to designate those who work harmful magic. The latter are specifically females, the former either males or males and females together, since the Latin masculine plural may either refer to men or include both sexes. Translating both Latin words by the

Reviews for The Malleus Maleficarum

[cjyurkanin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating review to come this weekend.

[borg6mx5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The "Hammer of Witches". The instruction manual for how to detect witches. Originally published in 1489, this book is now only worthy for historical interest. The typeface is old and the repoduction is not always great. Stil very interesting reading.

[thereadingmermaid · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

LMFAO No, but seriously, how the hell does someone come up with such whacked-out ideas and believe them to be reality? I seriously would like to know what drugs they were on when they wrote this. Now I understand some of the dumbest superstitions about witches that we still see pop up in movies and TV today (like how witches can't cry). Good grief.What really makes me sad, is the fact that this book was used as the textbook for How to Kill Strong Women (especially midwives) 101. The witch hunting trade was BIG business in it's time and people got rich off pointing their fingers to have innocent people tortured and murdered so they could divvy up their possessions. And this stupid book with it's insane ideas helped them all do it. It's a low point in history that we see being repeated over and over. So very sad. Despite hating this book, the authors, it's users and everything this book stood for... I would still recommend anyone interested in the subject to give it a read. It is a piece of our human history and a testament as to just how low we can go. Even though the content of this book is so horrible it's one of the most infamous books in all of history, I feel better now for having actually read it and knowing for myself exactly what's written in it. But it is pretty hard core. READER BEWARE!

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Considered as a scholarly edition of an important historical source, this is very useful for those (like me) who cannot afford the complete new Latin text edition. It is far superior to the old Montague Summers version. Its content, of course, is fairly horrible.

[erock71 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What we have here in Kramer and Sprenger is an artifact. And as an artifact it is a splendid example of historical Christian thought. Part I; Question XIV contains a subheading that summarizes the point of this tome: "That Witches Deserve the heaviest Punishment above All the Criminals of the World." The "Hammer" was written to offer a protocol for trying and adjudicating (read: killing) alleged witches. It is safe to say that Salem and other incidences of spurious witch trials would not have been legitimized but by reference to this 15th century work of folklore. There is no doubt that Kramer and Sprenger were learned canons of the Church and they were attempting to remedy the problem of falsely accused witches being lynched by torch-and-pitchfork mobs. What they accomplished instead was bringing witch-hunts under the authority of the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum facilitated the further enmeshment of Church and State by prescribing the manner in which these cases should be adjudicated in the ecclesiastical and civil courts. If you enjoy studying mythology or Church History (they often overlap)this is a compelling read. More than any other single artifact, this book sheds light on what was plaguing the collective mind of Christendom in the late middle ages. A read well worth the time.

[brucecoulson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Certainly in the running (in retrospect) as one of the most evil books of all time. The Hammer of the Witches is a VERY serious treatise on the Catholic legal view of witchcraft; what it is, how to identify perpetrators, and how witches should be punished. A legal guide book on procedures, as well a statement as to how serious the crime of witchcraft truly is. For scholars of Europe through the 15th-18th centuries. And useful for those who think our current legal system is terribly flawed; the Malleus is a record of how the law used to be practiced.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Montague Summers’ translation of Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum reproduces the 1486/1487 text in its entirety. In the book, Kramer and Sprenger outlined the theological underpinning for belief in witchcraft as well as the justifications for exterminating suspected witches. Further, the book situates sorcery among other heresies while advocating for inquisitions and torture in order to locate suspects and obtain confessions.Sprenger’s name first appeared in connection with the book in 1519, leading some historians such as Joseph Hansen, to question this practice. Others, including Montague Summers, refute Hansen’s claims, so the book continues to be credited to both authors. The Malleus further linked witchcraft with “deviant” sexual practices between witches and demons, thereby adding to the belief among Western Christian nations that women were weaker or possessed of inherent sin. This patriarchal attitude, coupled with the chaos of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, fueled witch panics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.The increase in witch trials naturally generated further works on witchcraft, including Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which attempted to critique witch trials as un-Christian, King James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which discussed necromancy and other black magic, Richard Bernard’s A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1629), which encouraged more evidence and witnesses in witchcraft investigations, and Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1692), which defended the Salem witch trials while also cautioning against overreliance on spectral evidence. For those interested in the history of witchcraft, this translation of the Malleus Maleficarum will be an invaluable resource as, like the aforementioned works, it sheds light on the cultural milieu in which the various trials occurred.