Directions:
Answer TWO of the following three questions in essay form. You may interpret these questions broadly but make sure to organize your answers around a clear thesis that you defend with reference to course readings. Take some time to map out your answers before you start writing; offer nuanced interpretations of selected sources; marshal evidence in support of historical claims; and proofread the completed exam text before submission. REMEMBER: you must analyze in-class primary sources within your engagement with in-class secondary sources. Your answers will be nice and solid only if there are compelling connections between these two types of sources that solidify your thesis.
Citation:
Primary source: (Abbreviated title, page number)
e.g., (Tempel Anneke, 167).
If you have a Kindle online copy of The Trial of Tempel Anneke without page numbers, just notate folio numbers of the book. Plus, if you want, you may use the Chicago Manual of Style. If you use sources other than in-class sources, you should provide their full bibliographical information at the end of your answer.
Question 1:
In her article, “Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” historian Alison Rowlands notes, “we must accept the fact that the patriarchal organization of early modern society was not a ‘cause’ but a necessary precondition for witch-hunts that produced predominantly female victims.” She also points out that many scholars frequently quoted the feminist historian Christina Larner’s observation that “witchcraft was not sex-specific but it was sex-related,” but Larner’s subsequent observation that “the women who were accused were those who challenged the patriarchal view of the ideal women” is cited much less often. Why did witch-hunting claim a significant proportion of male victims, but simultaneously why were the overall majority (70 to 80 percent) of those prosecuted for witchcraft in early modern Europe female? What is your historical interpretation of the relationship between gender, patriarchy, and the witch hunts in Europe?
Question 2:
Historians roughly divide European areas into five large areas regarding studies on witchcraft and the witch hunts: (1) western and west-central Europe: Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Low Countries; (2) the British Isle (including Scotland and Ireland); (3) Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland; (4) east-central and eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Transylvania, and Russia; (5) southern Europe: Italy and the Iberian peninsula. In this class, particularly, we have learned about the witch hunts in Germany, the British Isle, Sweden, Iceland, Poland, and Russia in detail. There were significant differences between these countries; however, these countries also show considerable similarities regarding witch-hunting. What do you think? At least choose TWO countries (of course, you may choose more than two) and compare the witch hunts in the countries you picked. (NB: You may use primary sources used in our in-class secondary sources, e.g., the cases of Iceland, Poland, Sweden, and Russia, because we have not read separate primary sources on these four countries. As for the case of the British Isle, you may use Hopkins’s pamphlet as a primary source and the Netflix documentary as a secondary source).
Question 3:
Why did the “witch craze” fade away in Europe? What kind of factors did affect its gradual extinction? The traditional interpretations focused on the rise of modern rationalism and science in conjunction with the Enlightenment in the 18th century that had overtaken ignorance and “superstition.” However, in his article, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecution,” Brian Levack shows the serious limitations of the interpretations because “the judges and magistrates who were responsible for acquitting witches or refusing to prosecute them did not abandon their belief in the reality of witchcraft.” If so, while believing the reality of witchcraft, how and why did these elite people progressively become distant from witch prosecutions? What is your explanation for this transition? In your answer, you should use the two GHDI primary sources: “the Bavarian Witchcraft Law” (1611) and “A Skeptic Looks at Witch Hunting – Friedrich von Spee” (1631).
Introduction
The Malleus Maleficarum is undoubtedly the best known (many would
say most notorious) treatise on witchcraft from the early modern period.
Published in 1486 (only a generation after the introduction of printing
by moveable type in Western Europe), the work served to popularize
the new conception of magic and witchcraft that is known in modern
scholarship as satanism or diabolism, and it thereby played a major role
in the savage efforts undertaken to stamp out witchcraft in Western
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a series of events
sometimes known as the “witch craze”). The present work offers the
reader the only full and reliable translation of the Malleus into English,1
and this introduction has a very specific purpose: to set out for the reader
the general intellectual and cultural background of the Malleus, which
takes for granted and is based upon a number of concepts that are by no
means self-evident to the average modern reader, and to explain something of the circumstances of the work’s composition and the authors’
methods and purposes in writing it. That is, the aim here is the very
restricted one of giving the reader a better insight into how the work
would have been understood at the time of its publication. Hopefully,
this will help not only those who wish to understand the work in its own
right but also those who are interested in the later effects of this influential
work.
At the outset, a word about terminology. As is explained later (see
below in section e of the “Notes on the translation”), for technical reasons relating to the Latin text, male and female practitioners of magic
are called “sorcerers” and “sorceresses” respectively in the translation,
1
There is another modern English translation in the form of P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Malleus
Maleficarum (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). This is only a
partial translation (it merely summarizes large portions of the text in order to stay within some
arbitrary length prescribed by the publisher) and is based on a late edition of the text (Frankfurt,
1588).
1
2
The Hammer of Witches
and the term for their practices is “sorcery.” In the preceding paragraph, the term “witchcraft” was used, but this term comes with a lot of
unwelcome modern baggage that can only serve to confuse the strictly
historical discussion that follows. Accordingly, “sorceress” and “sorcery”
will henceforth be used in place of “witch” and “witchcraft” to emphasize
the point that what we are dealing with are the notions that were held
about magic and its practitioners in the late medieval and early modern
periods.
In view of the intended audience, the material here is largely laid out
very briefly as a straightforward discussion without elaborate footnotes
or citation of relevant authorities. Apart from the further reading given
at the end, the reader who wishes to learn more detail about the various
topics or to find out specific citations of sources is directed to the far
more elaborate General Introduction to be found in volume i of my
bilingual edition entitled Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
authors
According to the Author’s Justification of the Malleus, there were two
authors – Jacobus Sprenger and an unnamed collaborator – whose
respective roles in the composition of it are not specified. In the public
declaration that constitutes the Approbation of the work, Henricus Institoris indicates that he and his colleague as inquisitor, Jacobus Sprenger,
wrote the Malleus. There is some dispute about this joint authorship in
modern scholarship, but, before turning to this, we should look at what
is known of these two men.
As both men were Dominican friars, a few words about this institution
may be helpful. The Order of Preachers (the official name of the order)
was founded in the early thirteenth century to combat heresy. Though
Dominicans took the same sort of vows of poverty as monks, these friars
did not withdraw from the secular world by joining a monastery, but
lived in society as part of their mission to root out heresy and enforce
orthodoxy among the laity. Since the Order was intended to subvert
heretical opposition to Church teachings, the Dominicans soon became
involved in theological studies in order to sharpen their skills in spotting
and rebutting heretical views. Hence, there was often a close connection
between the local Dominican convent and the theological faculty at a
neighboring university. These skills made it natural for the papacy to
appoint Dominicans as inquisitors into heretical depravity.
Introduction
3
Jacobus (the Latinized form of Jacob) Sprenger was born in about 1437,
and presumably came from the area of Basel, as he is first attested joining
the Dominican convent in that city in 1452. He went on to become an
important figure in the Dominican Order, and was mostly associated
with the convent of Cologne and the university of that city. Sprenger
eventually became a professor of theology, serving as an administrator
in both the theological faculty and the university as a whole. Sprenger
was also interested in practical piety. He actively promoted the reform
movement within the Order, which advocated a return to a simpler
way of life among the residents of Dominican convents, and he was
assigned the task of imposing reform in a number of these, even in
the face of opposition from the residents. Sprenger would have been
most famous in his lifetime for playing a prominent role in the spread
of the practice of reciting the Rosary. Though he was appointed as
an inquisitor in the Rhineland in 1481, there is no evidence for any
active participation in this activity on his part (he is attested as being
consulted in a few cases). Sprenger also showed little inclination for
writing. Apart from an unpublished theological commentary written in
connection with his early academic studies, his only composition was a
short work about the society he founded to promote the Rosary. He died
in 1495.
Henricus Institoris (the Latinized form of the German name Heinrich
Kramer) was born around 1430 in the Alsatian town of Schlettstadt
(modern Séléstat). He joined the local Dominican convent, but went
on to be attached to a number of other convents in the southern Germanspeaking lands. Like Sprenger, he became a professor of theology, but
unlike Sprenger he did not pursue an academic career. Instead, Institoris
was more interested in missions among the laity, and he tended to work
on his own. He was deeply involved in the sale of indulgences, and in
particular he undertook a number of tasks connected with the defense
of papal privileges and the enforcement of orthodoxy. He spent his
last years combatting the Hussite heresy in Bohemia, where he died
in 1505.
Institoris clearly had a strong personality, and was something of an
individualist. He got into a certain amount of strife with his fellow friars,
and at one time went so far as to rebuke the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick III in a sermon, for which he himself was censured by the
Order. But none of this undermined the clear trust that was placed in
Institoris by his superiors, who continued to employ him on important
tasks. Institoris was a respected figure, who preached before the king of
4
The Hammer of Witches
Bohemia, was entertained by the wealthy Fuggers family in Augsburg,
and was consulted by the city council of Nuremberg on the correct
method of prosecuting sorceresses. Institoris was apparently a man who
enjoyed writing. In addition to the Malleus, the Memorandum written
for the bishop of Brixen, and the Nuremberg Handbook (for the latter two
works, see below), he composed works in defense of papal supremacy
and against the Hussites.
Institoris enjoyed the support of Popes Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII,
and was appointed by them as inquisitor into heretical depravity in a
number of German dioceses. Unlike Sprenger, Institoris enjoyed the
task of acting as an itinerant inquisitor. In the Malleus, he claims to have
had 48 women condemned for the crime, and in the later Nuremberg
Handbook the number rises to 200. Oddly, there is little evidence for
this activity, even in the Malleus. There are several references in the
text to the trial and execution of Agnes the bath keeper and Anna of
Mindelheim for sorcery as the result of an inquisition conducted in
Ravensburg in 1484. As it happens, a report on this inquisition written
by the burgermasters and city council of the town is preserved, and this
indicates that the inquisition was conducted by a “Brother Heinrich,”
and confirms the general outline of events as laid out in the Malleus.
Another inquisition that is reported in some detail in the Malleus took
place in Innsbruck in late 1485 and early 1486. Institoris investigated
sorcery among the population of Innsbruck and neighboring towns,
and eventually laid charges against eight women. There were objections
to his handling of the case from the start, and eventually Bishop George
of Brixen, in whose diocese Innsbruck lay, took over the proceedings.
At first, Bishop George took the line that, even though he took some
exception to his methods, Institoris’s credentials as inquisitor meant
that there was no choice but to assist him. In late October, however,
the bishop had to intervene directly in the case, which was basically
allowed to lapse. Even though the bishop made it clear to Institoris that
there were objections to his involvement, he did so diplomatically, and
Institoris turned over to the bishop the protocol of his investigations and
a memorandum (the Memorandum cited above) on the legal method of
prosecuting sorceresses, apparently under the assumption that the bishop
would go on with prosecuting the cases. In February, the bishop had to
write a letter demanding that Institoris leave the diocese. Nonetheless,
he wrote in such a way as to avoid direct criticism of the friar, who,
to judge from the positive terms in which the bishop is mentioned in
Introduction
5
the Malleus (95A, 136D2 ), bore the bishop no ill-will as a result of his
dealings with him.
The argument is frequently made that the description of the work
as a joint composition is a falsehood perpetrated by Institoris, who in
fact wrote the whole thing himself. For this claim, there is little solid
evidence. The argument was first made by the nineteenth-century German historian Joseph Hansen, who took a dim view of the late medieval
and early modern Hexenwahn (“witch craze”) and of those who carried
it out. He based his case on certain procedural irregularities in the drawing up of the Approbation, the fact that the Approbation was initially
published separately from the main text of the Malleus, and an unsubstantiated statement in a later source that two of the signatories of the
Approbation asserted that they had not in fact signed it. The procedural
irregularities signify nothing (after all, if the text were a forgery, why
would it include proof of its own falsehood?) and the separate publication is easily explained (see below). As for the evidence of a later disavowal
on the part of some signatories, this is indeed interesting, but since we
know of this only from a short and much later remark and the records
of the university have mostly been lost, there is not much that can be
made of this (even if true, the two men may have had their own reasons
for dissociating themselves from the proceedings that had nothing to do
with a forgery on the part of Institoris). Later scholars have attempted
to add small pieces to the argument, but it is fundamentally nugatory.
Only an imbecile would have fabricated a claim to joint authorship in
a sworn document that would be included with the forgery and which
it would be impossible to keep from coming to the notice of the man
who was being falsely associated with the work. In any event, what good
would it do Institoris? He was clearly a man of no little prominence in
his own right as both inquisitor and theologian, and he did not need to
steal the name of a scholar from Cologne who was most noted for his
propagation of the Rosary to validate his work about sorcery.
Is it then possible to divide up the composition among the two
authors? Comparison with the Memorandum shows very close parallels
with Pt. 3, which clearly must be attributed to Institoris. The numerous references in Pt. 2 to the prosecutions in Ravensburg and Innsbruck also suggest that it too is the work of Institoris. In addition, that
part deals mainly with the practices of sorcery and the cures for these,
and such topics are far more likely to be ascribable to the inquisitor
2
For the method of citing the text used here, see below in section a of the “Notes on the translation.”
6
The Hammer of Witches
Institoris than the academic Sprenger. That leaves Pt. 1, which is mainly
taken up with the demonstration of the existence of sorceresses and of
a particular theological interpretation of sorcery, a demonstration that
is presented in the special form of argumentation (the “disputed question,” which is discussed below) characteristic of contemporary academic
practice (scholasticism). While Institoris’s academic background must
have made him familiar with the discourse of scholasticism, surely this
mode of argumentation would have been most familiar to the academic
Sprenger (one might also note that the question at the start of Institoris’s
Pt. 3 is drawn up in a clumsy manner). As already noted, Sprenger was
not particularly given to writing, so it is conceivable he either restricted
himself to Pt. 1, or perhaps simply vetted the arguments. This is mere
speculation, but whatever the exact nature of Sprenger’s participation,
the arguments adduced in support of Institoris’s supposed concoction
of such participation out of whole cloth are not at all cogent.
purpose of the work
There was no single audience for whom the Malleus was intended, and
the three parts served different purposes. Numerous references in Pt. 1
indicate that it was meant to provide material for the correct method of
preaching on the topic of the reality of sorcery. The reason for this was
the perceived need to counteract the preaching of priests who denied this
reality. Though it may have been thought that any priest could benefit
from reading the work, presumably the main audience foreseen for the
scholastic argumentation of the Malleus were other members of the
Dominican Order, who were specifically obligated to study theology –
unlike the rather poorly educated secular (i.e., parish) clergy of the time –
and whose very purpose was to spread this learning through sermons.
The case is not so clear with Pt. 2, which deals with the procedures
of the sorceresses and the ways to counteract these. At one point, it is
stated that a certain explanation has been provided for the purposes of
preaching (106D), but at another it is indicated that some of the matter
should not be preached (142C). Finally, Pt. 3 seems to have a distinct
and separate purpose of its own. It lays out the method of prosecuting
heretical sorceresses, and an introductory passage (193D) indicates that
it is addressed to both ecclesiastical and secular judges for their practical
use.
Thus, the general purpose of the work is to demonstrate the view
about sorcery held by Institoris (and presumably also Sprenger), against
Introduction
7
the opposition of unspecified critics both secular and ecclesiastical. The
work attempts to prove the reality of sorcery, delineates the practices of
sorceresses, and lays out the way to directly counteract those practices and
to deal with the problem as a whole by exterminating the practitioners
of sorcery through their conviction in court and execution. This overall
conception is reflected in the title of the work.
The phrase malleus haereticorum (“hammer of heretics”) was a term
of approbation dating back to antiquity to designate those zealots of
orthodoxy who were noteworthy for their efforts to “smash” heretics
(adherents of Christian doctrines rejected by the Church). The term
was transferred to a literary work with the Malleus Judeorum (“Hammer
of Jews”) of the inquisitor John of Frankfurt, which appeared around
1420. This set the precedent for the title of our Malleus, with the heretical
sorceresses (maleficae) replacing the traditional heretics as the object of
its attack. The Malleus Maleficarum is thus a hammer to be used to
smash the conspiracy of sorceresses that was thought to be threatening
the very existence of Christendom (this belief is treated below).
com position and publication of the work
By a happy coincidence, it was discovered in the 1950s that some internal
business records of Peter Drach, the man whose press in the western
German town of Speyer issued the first edition of the Malleus, had been
reused as part of the backing of a book, and some of these records
relate to the Malleus. The book was already being dispatched for sale
in February 1487, and another record refers to an unnamed treatise on
sorcery being dispatched in an unspecified December; since the later
records refer to the work by name, it would seem that the December
in question was in 1486. The Malleus itself refers to events from 1485
pertaining to Institoris’s abortive inquisition in Innsbruck. Since the
task of typesetting and actually printing the work would have taken
some time, it would seem that the clean copy must have been submitted
by the fall of 1486. The actual composition of the work may date to
an earlier period, with the anecdotes about Innsbruck being added in a
final revision (it’s hard to imagine such a long work being put together
in just a few months in 1486).
The first edition of the Malleus is peculiar in that two short sections
from the front of what was meant to be a single work were actually published separately and were added to the main text only with the second
edition. Before discussing the reason for this seemingly odd procedure,
8
The Hammer of Witches
it would be useful to discuss the content of the various sections of the
work in the order in which they appear here.
Justification
The first section of the main body of the first edition is the Author’s
(Self-)Justification (apologia). This section is the equivalent of a modern
introduction and/or preface. Here, it is stated in the first person plural
that Jacobus Sprenger and an unnamed co-author had produced the
work because of their realization that sorcery forms a particular element
in Satan’s final assault on God during the End Times. The fact that the
word “author” appears in the singular has been cited as evidence that
Institoris was the real author and made up Sprenger’s participation, but
not much should be made of this. In the first place, it may simply be a
clumsy conversion into Latin of a German form (note the confusion in
English as to whether it’s Veterans’ Day or Veteran’s Day). In any event,
Institoris would have been a pretty clumsy forger if he himself left such
blatant evidence of his own fraud.
Bull
A papal bull is a form of official letter issued by the pope and authenticated with a special seal (bulla). The bull reproduced here (known
as summis desiderantes after its opening words in Latin) was issued
by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 to help Institoris and Sprenger overcome opposition that they had met in connection with exercising the
office of inquisitor. This bull follows the standard format. After the
sterotyped salutation, the document lays out the situation that led to its
issuance, and then specifies the actions that the pope authorizes or mandates. In this instance, the general harm that sorceresses are inflicting in
Germany is first described at some length, and the connection of these
activities with Satan is emphasized. It is then noted that Institoris’s and
Sprenger’s efforts to stamp these activities out had met with opposition in the form of technical objections relating to the specific offenses
that were covered by their appointment as inquisitors, which the pope
then overrides by reiterating and amplifying the terms of the inquisitors’
appointment.
Why was this document included? Clearly, Institoris believed it to be
a papal validation of the view of sorcery that he advocated. Not only
is the bull cited several times in the Malleus in these terms, but he still
Introduction
9
referred to it for the same purpose in the Nuremberg Handbook of 1491.
For the same reason, modern critics who wish to ascribe the views in the
Malleus to the Catholic Church (and censure the Church for approving these views) not surprisingly cite this bull. Given the procedures
for the production of papal bulls, the body of the text giving the background to the order at the end was taken more or less verbatim from
the petition in which the bull was requested.3 This means that both the
conception and phraseology go back to Institoris. The pope presumably knew nothing independently about the matter, though obviously
he raised no objections since he granted the request (and borrowed its
language).
Approbation
The “Approbation” is an official certification of the orthodoxy of the
Malleus plus a validation of four specific points relating to sorcery that
represent the general thrust of the work’s argument. This approbation
takes the form of a public document drawn up on May 19, 1487, at the
request under oath of Institoris, on behalf of himself and Sprenger as
the authors of the Malleus. The proceedings are then carried out under
the careful guidance of Lambertus de Monte, the head of the theological
faculty of the University of Cologne, who first states his own approval
of the questions to be approved, and is then followed with greater or
lesser enthusiasm by other members of the faculty who were present.
The proceedings were based on the faculty members’ prior reading of
the work.
Joseph Hansen made much of the fact that the notary public who
drew up the document states that he had to leave at one point, and
combined this with the now lost notice that two of the other theology
professors later objected that they had not in fact been present. As already
noted, we have no idea what these objections actually consisted of, and
it hardly makes sense to use the evidence of the document itself to prove
that the proceedings were invalid (why would someone who concocted
such proceedings put in irregularities to undermine their credibility?).
It is sometimes misunderstood that Hansen claimed that the document
was a forgery, but what he actually claimed was that the proceedings
were flawed. As it is, Hansen could give no explanation of why Institoris
should have engaged in such an effort to produce a false document to
3
Interestingly enough, the text of the petition was recently found in the papal archives (this appears
as an appendix to the bilingual edition).
10
The Hammer of Witches
claim Sprenger as a co-author, much less why the head of the theological
faculty and the notary should have co-operated in such a pointless and
dangerous fraud.
As for the actual purpose of the exercise, while Institoris could only
produce implicit papal confirmation of the views propounded in the
Malleus via the background information in the bull of 1484, here he
acquired direct validation of the work itself in the form of the approval of
one of the most prestigious theological faculties in Germany – one, moreover, that had a reputation as a staunch upholder of standard orthodoxy.
After an elaborate table of contents, the main body follows. This consists
of three parts known as books. The work has a large number of crossreferences, which for the most part hold true. There are, however, a
few that indicate that there was some reordering of the material before
the work reached its final form, and the table of contents shows a few
deviations from the actual content. On the whole, such inconsistencies
are few, and given the elaborate structure of the work and the conditions
under which it was produced, it is commendable that the signposting
of the work is so accurate.
Part 1
Part 1 is meant to demonstrate, against skepticism on the part of both laity
and certain clergymen, the reality of sorcery. After a general proof of the
reality of sorcery, the book is organized in three sections corresponding to
the elements considered to be necessary in the commission of sorcery: the
sorceress herself, the demon, and the permission of God. The argument
in this book is mostly theoretical discussion based on Thomas Aquinas,
and it consists almost exclusively of disputed questions characteristic of
scholastic argumentation (see below).
Part 2
Part 2 treats the actual practices of sorceresses and is itself divided into
two parts, the first dealing with the actions of the sorceresses themselves
and the second with legitimate methods of counteracting them. There
is some evidence that the original intention was that the second part
of this book was to be combined with Pt. 3 as a general treatment of
how to counteract sorcery by undoing the act in practical terms and
by exterminating the sorceresses themselves judicially. There are still
Introduction
11
a number of disputed questions in this book, but it gives the most
anecdotal information about supposed contemporary reality.
Part 3
Part 3 is a discussion of the judicial method of investigating and convicting sorceresses, and is almost wholly based on the Directorium inquisitorum (Guide Book for Inquisitors) of Nicholas Eymeric. Eymeric dealt
with the investigation of heretics in general by inquisitors, but Pt. 3 is
meant to be a guide to secular judges. Given the heavily ecclesiastical
nature of the procedures in Eymeric (particularly the long list of the final
sentences set out at the end of the book), one has to wonder how useful
any secular judge would have found this section. This book provides perhaps the least information about actual contemporary procedure because
of its being such a close adaptation of the source material. In the Nuremberg Handbook, where Institoris speaks more directly in his own voice
and is in a better position to shape the material to express his own views,
he talks at much greater length about the way in which the investigator
(inquisitor) is able, in fact obligated, to use his faculties of logical reasoning to divine the truth of an accusation of sorcery via conjecture on the
basis of the supposed facts of the case. This conception of the investigator’s role is certainly present in the Malleus, but it tends to get obscured
amidst all the tiresome technical minutiae deriving from Eymeric.
Separate publication of the bull and approbation
Now we can return to the peculiarity of the bull and approbation being
published separately in the first edition.4 This separate publication ends
with the words “here follows the table of contents,” which shows that
the two sections contained in it were to intervene between the Author’s
Justification and the table of contents, the first two sections of the main
body of the text in the first edition. Let us start by noting that, according
to Drach’s business records, the main body was clearly in existence by
the winter of 1487 (and probably earlier), while the approbation was
drawn up in mid May of that year. Now, the purpose of the approbation
was not to secure an attestation of orthodoxy before publication (why
should an inquisitor consider the orthodoxy of his own book dubious?),
4
Indeed, these sections were published in a small book by an entirely different (and inferior) press.
Presumably, Drach (the publisher of the main text) was simply busy with other work when it
came time to put out this small addition to the main work.
12
The Hammer of Witches
but to bolster the validity of its views. The approbation makes it clear
that the whole text was available for consultation by the members of the
theological faculty, so presumably the good theologians had been given
a copy of the printed book (this would have been cheaper and easier
than providing a manuscript version before publication). But even if
the approbation was secured after the initial publication, why was the
bull, which had been issued back in 1484, not published with the main
text? Perhaps the explanation is simply a desire to make sure that it
would be read before the approbation, which might otherwise seem
more significant by virtue of its separate publication.
Hansen incorporated the separate publication of the approbation into
his argument for a defective procedure in drawing it up,5 but now it
can be seen that this odd procedure was dictated by the exigencies of
giving the text to the theological faculty in the most convenient manner.
Certainly, the second and third editions, both issued by Drach, give the
unobjectionable order (a) author’s justification, (b) bull, (c) approbation,
(d) table of contents, (e) main text, and this order is adopted in the
present translation as most representative of the authorial intention.
outline of the work
The Malleus has a very elaborate organization with each book being
carefully divided into a number of “questions” (Pt. 2 is actually divided
into two major subsections called “questions,” which are in turn
divided into “chapters” corresponding to the questions of the other two
books). Though formally correct, this method of organization somewhat
obscures the logical progression of the arguments made in the work as
indicated by numerous introductory passages and cross-references. The
following outline gives a better sense of the overall organization of the
material.
I) Proof of the existence of sorcery (1.1)
II) The elements involved in the performance of sorcery
A) Demon
1) Demons necessarily co-operate with sorceress (1.2)
2) Demons beget humans to increase number of sorceresses (1.3)
5
Supposedly, the separate publication of the false approbation formed part of a plan to keep it
out of Cologne, but this is an absurd theory. There is no way that the subsequent circulation
of the small book could have been controlled (quite apart from the fact that the theory rests on
inaccurate information about the locations in which the two sections were published). Also, given
this theory, what sense did it make to incorporate the approbation into the second edition?
Introduction
13
3) Only low-ranking demons have sex with humans (1.4)
4) Sorcery cannot be ascribed to astrological influences or to
human evil or to the utterance of magic formulas, to the
exclusion of demonic assistance (1.5)
B) Sorceress
1) Why women engage in sorcery more than men do (1.6)
2) What sorts of sorcery women engage in
a) Women turn humans’ minds to love or hatred (1.7)
b) They impede procreation (1.8)
c) They seemingly remove penises (1.9)
d) They seemingly turn people into beasts (1.10)
e) Midwives kill fetuses and newborns (1.11)
C) God’s permission
1) Proof that God permits sorcery (1.12)
2) Incidental discussion of why God allows sin (1.13)
3) The sins of sorceresses are worse than those of Satan or Adam
and than those of regular heretics (1.14)
4) Why God allows the innocent to be harmed by sorcery (1.15)
5) Sorcery is worse than other sorts of magic (1.16)
6) Sorcery is a worse sin than the fall of the demons (1.17)
7) Refutation of seven laymen’s arguments against God allowing
the existence of sorcery (1.18)
III) The practice of inflicting and curing forms of sorcery
A) Certain people are exempted from being harmed by sorcery
(unnumbered)
B) Methods of inflicting sorcery
1) Recruitment and initiation of sorceresses
a) Methods of enticement of the innocent through sorceresses
(2.1.1)
b) Avowal and homage to Satan (2.1.2)
c) How they move from place to place (2.1.3)
d) How they have sex with demons (2.1.4)
2) Methods of infliction
a) The use of sacraments in sorcery (2.1.5)
b) Impeding procreation (2.1.6)
c) Removal of penises (2.1.7)
d) Turning people into beasts (2.1.8)
e) How demons can exist inside people (2.1.9)
f ) How demons can possess people (2.1.10)
g) General method of inflicting illness (2.1.11)
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The Hammer of Witches
h) Specific methods of inflicting illness (2.1.12)
i) How midwives kill babies or offer them to Satan (2.1.13)
j) How sorceresses cause bad weather (2.1.14)
k) Harm to domestic animals (2.1.15)
l–n) Male sorcerers (archers, enchanters, users of grimoires)
(2.1.16)
C) Methods of curing sorcery
1) Demonstration that curing sorcery is permissible
(unnumbered)
2) Cures for incubus/succubus demons (2.2.1)
3) Cures for impeded procreation (2.2.2)
4) Cures for irregular love/hatred (2.2.3)
5) Cures for removed penises and for people turned into beasts
(2.2.4)
6) Cures for demonic possession (2.2.5)
7) Cures for illnesses inflicted through sorcery (2.2.6)
8) Cures for bad weather caused by sorcery (2.2.7)
9) Cures for those who seek temporal gain (2.2.8)
IV) Judicial extermination of sorceresses
A) That sorceresses and their accomplices are subject to both ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction, and that inquisitors do not have
to involve themselves in such cases (unnumbered)
B) Initiating proceedings
1) How to begin proceedings (3.1)
2) Number of witnesses (3.2)
3) How to examine the witnesses (3.3)
4) Who is allowed to give testimony (3.4)
5) Exclusion of mortal enemies (3.5)
C) Investigation
1) Continuation of proceedings (3.6)
a) Non-legalistic nature of the proceedings
b) List of questions (Step 1)
i) General
ii) Specific
2) Number of witnesses (3.7/Step 2)
3) When the suspect is to be considered guilty (3.7/Step 3)
4) Detention and arrest of suspects (3.8)
5) How to conceal names of the witnesses from the accused
(3.9/Step 4)
6) Assigning a suitable advocate to the accused (3.10/Step 5)
Introduction
15
7) The advocate is not allowed to cite any defense apart from
enmity on the part of the witnesses (3.11/Step 6)
8) Investigating such charges of enmity (3.12/Step 7)
[Omitted issue of demand by the accused that the judge recuse
himself (would have been 3.13/Step 8)]
9) Considerations of the feasibility of extracting a confession
through torture (3.14/Step 9)
10) Sentencing the accused to questioning under torture and
initiating it (3.15/Step 10)
11) Precautions against the sorcery of silence (3.15/Step 11)
12) Ruses to facilitate confession (3.16/Step 12)
V) Twenty methods of passing sentence
1) (1) Rejection of judgment by ordeal (3.17)
2) (2) Generalities about how to pass sentence (3.18)
3) (3) The kinds of suspicion that result in passing of sentence
(3.19)
4) Methods of passing sentence if the accused is found:
a) (4) to be innocent (3.20/Method 1)
b) (5) to have a bad reputation (3.21/Method 2)
c) (6) to be subject to questioning under torture (3.22/
Method 3)
d) (7) to be lightly suspected of heresy (3.23/Method 4)
e) (8) to be vehemently suspected of heresy (3.24/Method 5)
f ) (9) to be violently suspected of heresy (3.25/Method 6)
g) (10) to have a reputation for heresy and to be generally
suspected of it (3.26/Method 7)
h) (11) to have confessed to heresy and to be penitent but not
relapsed (3.27/Method 8)
i) (12) to have confessed to heresy and to be penitent and
relapsed (3.28/Method 9)
j) (13) to have confessed to heresy and to be impenitent but
not relapsed (3.29/Method 10)
k) (14) to have confessed to heresy and to be impenitent and
relapsed (3.30/Method 11)
l) (15) not to have confessed but to be legally convicted
(3.31/Method 12)
m) (16) to have confessed to heresy but to be a fugitive
(3.32/Method 13)
n) (17) to have been denounced by a convicted sorceress and
not to have confessed (3.33/Method 14)
16
The Hammer of Witches
o) (18-20) not to have inflicted but to have broken sorcery unlawfully; to have inflicted death through affecting
weapons with sorcery; to have offered babies to Satan as
a midwife; also how to deal with those who obstruct the
inquisition (3.34/Method 15)
5) How to deal with legal appeals (3.36)
sources
The Malleus contains citations by name of seventy-eight authors (sometimes cited for multiple works) or anonymous works. This gives a
sense that the work rests on a wide-ranging reading of orthodox
authorities. After all, the Justification claims that the content of the work
is largely borrowed from earlier writers. As it turns out, this plethora of
citations gives an entirely misleading sense of the sources used in the
composition of the work.
Despite the flurry of names that are cited through the work, there
are basically three main authors whose works form the basis of the
vast majority of the text. The distribution of these three sources corresponds roughly to the three main divisions of the work. Pt. 1 is a
demonstration of the reality of sorcery, and as this is basically a philosophical, metaphysical and theological issue, it is not surprising that
the main source here is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas wrote his monumental corpus of works on theology-cum-philosophy in the thirteenth century, and later he became the most respected representative of one of the two schools of late-medieval scholasticism, namely
realism, which was associated with the Dominicans (Aquinas himself
was a Dominican). Aquinas was a very widely read man, and the large
majority of the many citations in the Malleus come from him. These
range from philosophers such as the ancient Greek Aristotle and the
medieval Jew Maimonides through the gamut of Church Fathers from
Jerome and Augustine into figures of the middle ages. These are purely
tralaticious citations. That is, they are merely carried over from the
earlier text, and this procedure means, of course, that it is unlikely
that Sprenger or Institoris ever read a word of any of those authors
directly.
In Pt. 2, which discusses the deeds of sorceresses, Aquinas continues as the sources for theoretical issues, but the main source is
Johannes Nider. He was a prominent Dominican reformer from the early
Introduction
17
fifteenth century, and two works of his are used. The main source is the
Formicarius or Ant Hill, which was a work advocating a moral and spiritual reformation in Christendom. Book Five of this work deals with
sorcery, and this is one of the four works (and the only one to appear
in print) prior to the Malleus that describes the satanic interpretation of
sorcery (see below). Nider also treated some of the same topics in his
Praeceptorium, a textbook on divine law, which is also quoted. While
a lot of the material from Nider discusses his own personal knowledge of sorcery, he also has argumentation, which sometimes includes
Aquinas. Thus, in such sections, where both the ultimate and the immediate source may not be indicated as such, we can have a passage that
gives a philosophical argument that goes back to Aquinas but is copied
out of Nider and cites earlier authorities (including Aquinas) in the
expected way.
Part 3 is based on yet another Dominican, the Spanish inquisitor
Nicholas Eymeric, who lived in the middle of the fourteenth century
and wrote a handbook, the Directorium inquisitorum, that was meant to
show other inquisitors how to track down and deal with heretics. The
Directorium provides the great majority of the content of Pt. 3 (with
appropriate adaptation to show how to deal specifically with the “heresy
of sorceresses”). Eymeric is never mentioned by name, and in only one
instance does the title of the Directorium appear in the text. Eymeric cites
large amounts of canon law, and mentions numerous canon lawyers by
name. Once more it is very unlikely that Institoris directly saw any of
this material himself.
The one other substantial source is another Dominican, Antoninus of
Florence, who wrote an encyclopedic handbook on ecclesiastical matters
in the early fourteenth century. He is responsible for the large section (Pt.
1, Q. 6) explaining the character flaws of women that is so unappealing
to modern tastes.
A list of all the sources cited in the Malleus is given below in section
b of the “Notes on the translation.”
d isputed questions
Now that the sources have been discussed, this is a good place to look at
a major effect of one source on the mode of argumentation, namely the
scholastic methodology of Thomas Aquinas. The “disputed question”
(quaestio disputata) was a standard mode of discourse in the scholastic
18
The Hammer of Witches
tradition and had its origins in actual debates that took place under the
presidency of a senior scholar. After an oral debate on a specific topic, the
presiding scholar would formally summarize the debate. This mode of
argumentation was a very convenient way to lay out an issue, and hence
came to be used without reference to any actual oral debate as a formal
way to present an issue in a written work. In the Malleus, the purely
conventional nature of these disputed questions can be seen in the fact
that the so-called question is sometimes phrased not as a question but
as a statement. The Malleus uses the form of the disputed question that
appears in the works of Aquinas. Failure to understand the conventions
of the disputed question can make the method of argumentation hard
to follow.
The disputed question normally begins with an indirect question,
which describes the issue at hand, and this is called the “title” of the
question. This title gives the correct answer to the question, which starts
by giving the incorrect negative answer that the author will eventually
refute and then presents one after the other various arguments in favor
of this false initial answer. Each argument is at most a few sentences
long and is generally based on or corroborated with a quotation from
some authority, though sometimes it appeals to some principle of reason
or to an observation from the natural world. The arguments after the
first one typically begin with the words “also” or “besides which.” After
the arguments in favor of the false answer comes contradictory evidence
in the form of a quotation or quotations from relevant authorities who
indicate that the initial answer to the question was not correct. This
section begins with the phrase “but to the contrary.” After the various
arguments pro and con have been set out in this way, the presiding
scholar (or author) gives his “determination” of the issue. Here he gives
a discussion of some length explaining his reasoning in rejecting the false
answer to the question and then answering the question affirmatively.
This section is called the “body” of the question, and is introduced
with the word “response” or a statement beginning “the response is given
that . . . ” After this, the question is concluded with a direct refutation
of the individual arguments made in favor of the false conclusion at the
beginning of the question, and these refutations are termed the “solutions
of the arguments.”
In the translation, the various sections of each disputed question
are marked out with the symbols used in modern editions of Thomas
Aquinas (these symbols are explained below in section d of the “Notes
on the translation”).
Introduction
19
intellectual context
Satanism
The great persecutions of sorcery that lasted from the fifteenth until the
early seventeenth centuries were based upon a new notion of sorcery that
can be termed “satanism” (or “diabolism”). This view saw the supposed
“witch” as participating in a malevolent society presided over by Satan
himself and dedicated to the infliction of malevolent acts of sorcery
(maleficia) on others. This new conception is known in modern scholarship as the “elaborated concept of witchcraft,” which is characterized
by six basic beliefs about the activities of those considered guilty of this
form of sorcery:
(1) A pact entered into with the Devil (and concomitant apostasy from
Christianity),
(2) Sexual relations with the Devil,
(3) Aerial flight for the purpose of attending:
(4) An assembly presided over by Satan himself (at which initiates
entered into the pact, and incest and promiscuous sex were engaged
in by the attendees),
(5) The practice of maleficent magic,
(6) The slaughter of babies.
The general area and time in which this concept arose are clear enough,
but the process by which this new conception developed from earlier
interpretations of sorcery and magic is still obscure. The new conception
is first attested in four works written in Latin and German within a decade
or so of the 1430s. There is, however, some indication that already in
the late fourteenth century certain supposed activities associated with
sorcery were being conceived of in terms of the elaborated theory.
The new conception of sorcery as a form of direct worship of Satan
that involves the infliction of harm though sorcery can be derived from
the revolting lies told about the heretical sect known as the Waldensians
by their orthodox foes.6 The logical development seems to have been
6
The origins of the Waldensians can be traced to a spiritual movement that was started in the late
twelfth century by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant in the French city of Lyon. Waldo gave away
his possessions and began to preach without ecclesiastical authorization. He was condemned
for this, but nonetheless gathered a number of adherents. At first, the dispute between them
and the established Church concerned authority rather than doctrine, but the rejection of the
movement by the Church as heresy led to a radicalization of its adherents, who for their part
refused to recognize the universal pretensions of the established Church. At the same time, the
Waldensians were grossly misrepresented by their orthodox opponents as practicing heinous
crimes in their rites, and they were bitterly persecuted by Catholic officialdom. The Waldensians
20
The Hammer of Witches
as follows. First, the heretical Waldensians were conceived of as tools of
Satan, and thus the traditional calumnies about heretics, including the
murder of babies and the practice of maleficent sorcery, were ascribed to
the Waldensians. Eventually, the Waldensians became so associated with
sorcery that deformed versions of their name could become terms for
“witch” in Romance languages. In the next step, the sect that practices
witchcraft was no longer associated specifically with the Waldensians.
Instead, the notion developed that there was a deviant group of renegade
Christians who renounced Christianity in favor of the worship of Satan,
who were led by him, and who practiced the most extreme form of
maleficent sorcery for its own sake. The texts cited above present the
earliest attestation of this new conception.
One might ask whether it is not possible that there were in fact satanic
sects that subjectively believed that they were carrying out the will of
Satan (whatever the metaphysical truth of the matter). To this the simple
answer is no, on the basis of the following considerations.
(1) There is absolutely no independent corroboration of any such
activity on the part of anyone. The sole evidence for this activity comes
from the theoretical discussions and judicial investigations conducted
by men who believed in the existence of a form of maleficent sorcery.
(2) All confessions to such activity are of no evidentiary value as they
were extracted through the use or the threat of (often extreme) torture.
(3) The stories told about the practitioners of the elaborated concept
of witchcraft were also told about any number of previous heretics in the
past, and there is no reason to believe that anyone actually engaged in
these activities. Rather, the self-image of the official forms of Christianity
necessitated the corollary notion that any deviation from orthodoxy
could only be based on adherence to Satan, and thus it was natural to
imagine that the most unspeakable crimes were being carried out by
perceived heretics.
(4) The demonological works make much of the supposed fact that
the confessions of the accused are concordant in the details given about
the practices of maleficent sorcery, but it should be emphasized that
were forced to practice their religion in secret, and set up their own ecclesiastical organization. The
Catholic persecution was largely successful, though a small group of Waldensians (later associated
with Protestantism) survived in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. It was here and in the
neighboring area of France (the Dauphiné) that the theory of sorcery first took hold on the model
of Catholic beliefs about the Waldensians as members of a secret heretical cult that practiced
magic. For the Waldensians in general, see Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution
and Survival, c. 1170–c. 1570, trans. C. Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
and for the belief in particular that they were heretical practitioners of magic, see pp. 72–78.
Introduction
21
there is in fact a great deal of variation in the specifics. While the general
outline of the practices of the “sect of sorceresses” was known in various
locations, the details were made up according to the notions held by
the local investigators. That is, there was no single “elaborated theory,”
but a number of local variations that reflect the overall notion. Unless
there were a number of such sects that operated by different (physically
impossible) methods, the logical conclusion is that the self-contradictory
nature of the various versions of the elaborated theory derives from the
fact that there was in fact no such sect at all, and that the variations
reflect the fundamental disconnect between the theory and reality.
Elaborated theory of sorcery as described in the Malleus
The Malleus should be allowed to speak for itself in terms of the detailed
version of the elaborated concept of witchcraft that is advocated in it,
but a short summary of the views of Henricus Institoris on the subject
is worthwhile.
First, a matter of terminology. In the German text of the Nuremberg Handbook, Institoris uniformly uses the term Unhold for a “witch”
belonging to the “Heresy of Sorceresses.”7 This term is in turn always
rendered in the Latin (of both the Malleus and the Nuremberg Handbook) as malefica. This terminology is significant in that this usage shows
an invariable preference over the many synonyms for “witch” in both
German (Zauberin and Giftmischerin in addition to Hexe) and Latin
(lamia, striga, venefica). As noted repeatedly in the Malleus (in the form
of the etymology of the word given by Isidore of Seville), the literal
meaning of maleficus is “evil-doer,” and it is the inherent necessity to
inflict evil through sorcery that distinguishes adherents of the sect from
mere dabblers in magic. The “Heresy of Sorceresses” (heresis maleficarum)
appears several times in the German in the literal translation ketzerei der
unholden.
The characteristics of the elaborated concept of witchcraft all appear
in the Malleus, but the Nuremberg Handbook gives a simpler definition:
“this depravity of sorceresses consists of two elements: the heresy and
apostasy from the Faith and the temporal loss that she inflicts.” The
reference to heresy signifies adherence to the tenets of the sect as a
result of the homage that they pay to Satan, while apostasy signifies the
rejection of the Christian faith that the sorceress adopted at baptism.
7
In the cover letter to the Handbook, Institoris gives as a variant the term Hexe, which is the usual
term that survives in modern German.
22
The Hammer of Witches
The second element consists of the harm that is obligatorily inflicted
by the sorceresses as a result of their adherence to the sect. Thus, the
other elements of the modern definition of the elaborated concept of
witchcraft are simply subsumed into this twofold scheme. The pact with
Satan is simply an element of giving allegiance to him, and the other
elements (flying to attend meetings with Satan and the specific forms of
sorcery) are aspects of belonging to the sect.
Sorcery is viewed as part of a constant war that is being waged between
God and his fallen angel Satan.8 This bipolar struggle of good and evil
is so pervasive in the Malleus that one could conceive of it as reflecting a form of manichaeism, that is, the view that the cosmos is divided
between the opposing and equal forces of good and evil. Yet, such a view
is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian view of the absolute
omnipotence of God, and the Malleus reconciles the apparent incompatibility by emphasizing repeatedly that the practices of sorcery are
themselves useless and seem to work only because God allows Satan to
carry out the effects that are ostensibly “caused” by those practices. Not
only is sorcery to be understood within the context of the titanic struggle
between God and his arch-enemy, but the offense that God is said to
suffer as a result of such practices is at once a prime motive in Satan’s
promotion of them and a major argument in the effort to persuade the
secular authorities to take all necessary (and drastic) steps to uncover and
exterminate the Heresy of Sorceresses. In particular, sorcery was thought
to play a special role in Satan’s war against God during the End Days.
The Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) was included in the canon of
orthodox books of the New Testament because of the erroneous belief
that its author was the same as that of the Gospel of John. In any event,
the author of Apocalypse was steeped in the tradition of the prophetical
books of the Old Testament like Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel, and thus
Apocalypse follows them in giving a rather fanciful vision (with much
bizarre imagery and numerology) of the End Days. First, Satan will
triumph (as the Antichrist in later medieval interpretation), but after
he is vanquished by Christ, there will be a thousand-year period of
direct rule by the latter (the Millennium). Next, Satan will be released
from his prison to wage a final, futile battle against God, at the end of
which the world will end, Satan being cast into eternal torment and the
Last Judgment taking place. The attempt to establish the thousand-year
8
Satan was thought to have an army of subordinate demons (lesser fallen angels), and the sorceresses
are often conceived of as acting in collaboration with one of these demons rather than with Satan
himself.
Introduction
23
kingdom of God on earth is known as millenarianism, but what we are
dealing with here is the somewhat toned down version of the End Days
that prevailed in more or less official medieval dogma. For the sake of
convenience I call this apocalypticism, and the understanding of sorcery
in the Malleus is firmly set within the context of this apocalypticism.
This context is referred to from the very start of the work in the
Author’s Justification, which notes that while Satan has always attempted
to undermine the church of Jesus with heresy, he is redoubling his efforts
at the present, since he knows that he has little time left, as the world is
now declining towards its end and human evil is increasing. The notion
that Satan angrily realizes the shortness of his remaining time comes
from Apocalypse 12:12, and the reference in the text to the cooling of
charity is derived from Matthew 24:2. Thus, the introduction suggests
that the plague of sorceresses is part of Satan’s efforts in the End Days,
and this connection is spelled out in later passages.
The crimes of “present-day” sorceresses is said to surpass all those of
the past (71C–D). The dating of this present day seems to be indicated
in a passage in which the sexual depravity of sorceresses is discussed.
In response to the disbelief of certain contemporaries that present-day
sorceresses do engage in the acts alleged against them, it is asserted (108A–
B) that, whatever may be the case of those who existed before 1400,
experience shows that since that date sorceresses have in fact engaged in
sexual misconduct with demons. The reason given for uncertainty in the
earlier period is that the literary record does not attest similar behavior
(though the existence of demons then is undeniable), but it is noted
that, whereas the sorceresses at that time apparently had to be forced to
engage in such acts, in the present day they do so willingly. Seemingly,
Institoris was aware of a novelty in the sorts of activity that he classified
as the Heresy of Sorceresses, and dated the start of this development
to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Thus, his own century was
the start of the final assault of the Antichrist predicted in the Book of
Apocalypse, and the rise of the new heresy and the unspeakable horrors
supposedly perpetrated by its adherents was the main weapon in the
hands of the Antichrist.
This sense of the approaching apocalypse brought in its wake a novel
interpretation of the common idea that sorceresses murder children. A
medieval notion held that, at the time of Satan’s fall from grace, one tenth
of the “good” angels fell with him, becoming demons (“bad angels”), and
the world will be “consummated” when the number of the elect who rise
to heaven equals that of the angels who remained there (see Caesarius
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The Hammer of Witches
of Heisterbach, Dialogue of Miracles 5.8). The Malleus directly notes this
conception in terms of the horrific notion that midwives intentionally
(and even unwillingly) murder newborns at the insistence of demons.
The reason for this is that the Devil knows that unbaptized children are
not allowed into the kingdom of heaven and thus the consummation of
the world and the day of judgment that will see the Devil cast into eternal
perdition will be put off (138C). Thus, the idea that the contemporary
world is destined to see the terrible tribulations predicted by the Book of
Apocalypse explains not only why sorcery is apparently getting worse but
also the specific rationale for some of the most heinous crimes attributed
to it.
Role of omnipotent God in sorcery
Finally, let us look at the role of God in the practice of sorcery. The
Malleus deals repeatedly with the question of how to reconcile the existence of a sect dedicated exclusively to the commission of the most
extreme evil with the presupposition of an omnipotent and wholly good
God. Not surprisingly, the answer is given in terms of the traditional
explanation that God’s grant of free will to mankind makes it perfectly
just (and necessary) for him to tolerate evil deeds (whose perpetrators
will of course then be suitably punished after death). The argument is
made several times that Satan has no power except to the extent that this
is granted to him by God, and that the magical procedures of the sorceresses themselves had no inherent efficacy and “work” simply because of
Satan’s execution of the deeds that the sorceresses ostensibly bring about
through their rites and procedures. This conception of how the magic
involved in sorcery operates is necessitated by the premise that God is
omnipotent and that nothing can be done without his permission, but
this direct involvement of God in the granting or withholding of permission with reference to specific acts of sorcery means that something
more than a broad granting of free will is needed to explain how such
evil can exist in a world governed by this omnipotent and good God.
It is occasionally asserted that God’s purposes are inscrutable, which
serves to defer judgment on the question of why he allows evil with the
assumption that there must be some greater good at issue which is simply unknown to the human observer (126A, D). Much more frequent,
however, is the idea that the existence of sorcery is tolerated by God as
a form of retribution on the human race as a whole for previous acts
of sorcery. Indeed, Satan himself is aware of this reaction on the part
Introduction
25
of God and therefore seeks both to instigate the commission of such
acts and to bring about a human failure to punish them (on account of
the false notion that sorcery does not actually exist), because he knows
that this will enrage God, who will then give continued permission for
further, more heinous crimes. In effect, the situation is a downward spiral of human crimes, the penalty for which is the commission of even
worse crimes. This situation would seem to have no end but the human
race being overwhelmed under this mounting wave of crime, and the
conception fits in with the idea that the apocalyptic end of the world is
near and that the perceived recent upsurge in sorcery plays a central role
in the downfall of humanity.
The modern view of the Christian God tends to emphasize his role
as a figure of compassion and love. This is certainly not the main characteristic of the God of the Malleus, who is portrayed as a stark and
inflexible figure, who exacts the severest penalties for acts that offend
him. He demands absolute loyalty from those dedicated to his worship
(i.e., baptized Christians) and expects to take precedence over anything
and anyone else in their affections. Disloyalty to God is equated with
treason against a secular prince, and this act deserves to be punished
with the same savage penalty on earth that the Roman emperors decreed
against traitors in the Code of Justinian. This vengeful God not only
visits punishment on the descendants of malefactors removed from the
crime by three or four generations, but also feels so affronted by the
insult made against him through the commission of the crimes associated with satanism that he allows the innocent to be harmed (Pt. 1,
Q. 15 is devoted exclusively to proving the point). Given this conception
of the dire results to be expected from the failure to suppress sorcery,
it is not surprising that Institoris felt such outrage on account of his
perception that there were both laymen and priests who endeavored to
undermine the efforts to exterminate the sorceresses through their denial
of the reality of the phenomenon.
role of women in sorcery
The Malleus has been characterized as a thoroughly misogynistic work,
and (to borrow a mode of argument from scholasticism) this is true or
not depending on what one means by misogyny. In the proper meaning
of the term, it signifies a self-conscious literary attack on the female
gender as a whole. This genre of literature is exemplified in the Greek
poet Semonides’ attack on women or the Sixth Satire of the Roman poet
26
The Hammer of Witches
Juvenal. By this standard, the Malleus is not misogynistic in that even the
main passage discussing what is taken to be the flawed nature of females
is prefaced with an overt statement that the negative characterization of
women as a group does not apply to all of them (42B), and the work
contains references to pious women who resist the allurements of sorcery
or fall victim to it.
Nonetheless, even if the Malleus is not misogynistic in a narrow sense,
the work is clearly permeated with a hostile and negative view of women
as a whole. Given the often negative characterization of women in both
the Old and the New Testaments, it is not surprising that Christian
thought of antiquity and the medieval period adopted a similar attitude.
What Sprenger’s thoughts along these lines may have been is unknown,
but Institoris’s statements in other works make it clear that the antifemale premises of the Malleus are fully attributable to him. While he no
doubt had no qualms about adhering to this point of view, the sections of
the Malleus that most directly cover the topic are derived from previous
authors. The section on why women practice sorcery more frequently
than men (Pt. 1, Q. 6) is based on several passages. Exactly the same
topic is treated in Nider’s Praeceptorium, and this material is expanded
through the addition of another passage from Nider’s Formicarius (Ant
Hill) at the beginning and a heavily reworked section of the Summa of
Antoninus of Florence that treats the mental and moral inferiority of
women.9 Thus, in Institoris’s own mind there could have been no doubt
as to the orthodoxy of the very negative view of women that underlies
his conception of sorcery.
It might be objected that men do get included in the Heresy of Sorceresses, particularly in the form of men who use incantations to improve
their archery (these are discussed in the last few questions of Pt. 1). In
fact, it would appear that these men are mentioned more as a logical
reflex of the fact that sorcery is conceived of in terms of heresy rather than
because such men form any integral part of the Heresy of Sorceresses as
understood in the work. At any rate, these archers are not mentioned
at all in the later Nuremberg Handbook. As for the Malleus itself, what
Institoris specifically has in mind is the sort of sorcery that he believed
to be practiced among uneducated peasant women, which is overtly
distinguished (91C) from the educated magic practiced by men (mainly
clerics). Another element in the portrayal of sorcery that distinguishes
9
In fairness to Institoris, it should be pointed out that the ridiculous etymology of the word femina
(Latin for “woman”) from the words fides and minus (“faith” and “less”), for which the Malleus is
often derided, is borrowed verbatim from Antoninus.
Introduction
27
the Malleus from the Nuremberg Handbook is the strong association of
female sorcery with love affairs that have turned out badly for young
women who have used their sexual wiles to entice a man into marriage
but were ultimately rejected for a more suitable spouse. This focus in the
Malleus may reflect Institoris’s recent experiences in Innsbruck, where
amatory magic seems to have played a major role in the supposed sorcery
that he investigated.
historical background
Now we can turn to the historical realities that lie behind the text, and we
will start with the legal framework. This will be discussed first in terms of
the ecclesiastical institution for dealing with sorcery, and contemporary
judicial methods.
Inquisition
Institoris and Sprenger were both inquisitors, and a large number of
the anecdotes about prosecuting sorcery involve the activities of inquisitors. The words “inquisition” and “inquisitor” are derived from Latin
terms meaning “investigation” (cf. the alternative English derivation
“inquest”) and “investigator.” The institution of the inquisition arose
in the early thirteenth century in connection with efforts to stamp out
the so-called “Albigensian heresy” (whose adherents are also known as
Cathars) in southern France.10 There was dissatisfaction with the unwillingness or inability of local bishops to stamp out heretical activities in
their dioceses, and the practice arose of appointing mendicant friars
(especially Dominicans but also Franciscans) to hunt out heretics. At
first such appointments were made on an ad hoc basis, but soon the procedure became institutionalized. Appointments could be made either by
provincials (regional administrators of the mendicant orders) or directly
by the pope, and in either case the inquisitor would act with delegated papal authority. Both Institoris and Sprenger were inquisitors by
papal appointment (as made clear in the bull summis desiderantes). The
inquisitor was empowered to conduct a full investgiation on his own and
to seek the assistance of the secular authorities (“secular arm”) for this
10
The regular medieval inquisition is not to be confused with the much more famous Spanish
inquisition, which was set up in 1478 by the Spanish crown and operated under the state control,
or the Roman inquisition, which was set up by the papacy in the sixteenth century to stamp
out any Protestant tendencies in Italy.
28
The Hammer of Witches
purpose. If the suspected heretic was deemed unrepentant or convicted
of being a relapsed heretic (that is, someone who returned to the heresy
after having previously been found out in it and having abjured or publicly renounced it), the inquisitor could turn over (“relax”) the heretic
to the secular arm. The inquisitor would hypocritically state in the sentence that he asked the secular arm not to execute the heretic, but it was
understood by everyone that the heretic was to be executed (normally
by being burned alive) in accordance with secular laws against heresy.
Though the inquisitors had full authority to deal with an accusation
as they saw fit, and could keep someone imprisoned for years if they
suspected that a person who refused to confess was guilty, they were also
entitled to make use of questioning under torture. This practice was a
standard procedure in contemporary legal procedure, so it is worthwhile
to consider it in some detail.
Torture in the “inquisitorial” method of investigation
The use of torture arose in conjunction with the revival of Roman law
that started in the eleventh century in Italy and gradually spread to
the north. In the autocratic administrative structure of the later Roman
Empire, the governor conducted criminal investigations and trials himself, and was authorized to use torture under certain circumstances as
an investigative tool. This system was laid out in the criminal procedure described in the law code of Justinian that formed part of the
Roman legal texts that were taught in the Italian universities, and as
the elaborate procedures of Roman law began in continental Europe to
drive out earlier medieval jurisprudence, which lacked any comparable
theoretical texts, the so-called “inquisitorial” procedure took root. (Here
“inquisitorial” means simply that the magistrate in charge conducts the
investigation and trial himself, and the term applies to the practices of
both secular courts conducted along such lines and those of inquisitors.)
The Roman jurists were fully aware that questioning under torture
could well lead to false answers (the innocent might admit to something
they had not done as a result of the pain, while guilty people with
strong constitutions could endure the pain without confessing), and the
medieval jurists came up with complicated procedures to overcome these
difficulties. Basically, torture was prohibited unless there was a reasonably
strong prima facie case against the suspect, and it could be applied only
twice. If the suspect survived two sessions without confessing, he or she
had to be absolved. In addition, the suspect was supposed to give factual
Introduction
29
details that only the criminal could have known. In practice, however,
the supposed procedural protections were useless if the magistrate was
convinced of the suspect’s guilt. The traditional method of examination
(known as the “strappado”) was to tie the suspect’s hands behind his back,
then haul him off the ground with a pulley attached to his hands; this had
the effect of putting all the weight of the body on the shoulders, which
would eventually become disjointed (an effect that could be hastened
by either attaching weights to the feet or letting the suspect drop and
then precipitously halting the fall before he hit the ground). This simple
but brutal method could be effective enough in extracting a confession
from anyone, but in the mania to extract confessions during the major
periods of witch hunting, the accusation of sorcery was treated as a crimen
exceptum, that is, a charge exempted from the usual legal precautions,
and extreme measures were taken to ensure that the suspects admitted
the “truth.”
But these pitfalls were not what concerned Institoris. Quite the contrary. He was concerned that the use of torture in criminal investigation
would lead to the release of genuine sorceresses. In the first place, it was
thought that the sorceresses were able to make themselves immune to
pain through the so-called “sorcery of silence” (see Pt. 3, Q. 15), and thus
would escape the torture without confessing. The reliance on Eymeric as
the main source in Pt. 3 somewhat obscures the point, but the Nuremberg
Handbook makes it clear that Institoris was very impatient with secular
courts that absolved those of whose guilt he was certain because of what
he viewed as a mere technicality (the ability to endure two sessions of torture without confessing), particularly as he thought that the very fact of
their practicing sorcery allowed them to thwart the procedure. Instead,
he advocated the use of conjecture to divine who is guilty, and argued
at some length in the Nuremberg Handbook that it is better to convict
on the basis of conjecture than on the basis of a confession extracted
through torture.
The use of conjecture to determine guilt is also rooted in the procedure
outlined by Eymeric. With regular heretics, their crime had to do with
the beliefs hidden in their mind, which they would try to conceal with
evasions and misrepresentations, and the inquisitor had to outsmart
them by formulating questions that would trap them into revealing the
truth of the heresy that was concealed in their heads. With sorceresses,
the act that caused the harm was physically removed from the effect
(and, indeed, according to the theory had no direct physical connection
with the harm, which was simply inflicted by a demon to make it seem
30
The Hammer of Witches
as if sorcery were actually effective). Thus, Institoris was applying to a
new, but in some ways comparable, situation the method of judgment
through conjecture that Eymeric advocated.11
Contemporary magical practices
Now it is time to turn to the question of the realities of practicing
witchcraft that Institoris confronted in his inquisitorial activities. First,
we have to be specific about the concept that is understood by the
terms “witchcraft” and “magic.” For present purposes, we will take it to
mean the manipulation of the physical world through the use of special
words and procedures. It could easily be argued that the practices of the
medieval Church would fall under this definition, but since most contemporaries would have excluded such practices from the category, we
will also ignore these here, and consider as “magical” only such practices
as would not have been considered legitimate rites of the Church.
In considering pre-modern beliefs about manipulation of the physical
world, we have to try and “think away” the category of “science” that
comes so naturally to our minds. Today, we think of ourselves as having
a clear and substantive understanding of the principles that underlie the
behavior of matter around us and of the objects (living and inanimate)
that are made of matter. In the medieval period, while there was some
understanding of such principles among the educated, even for them
much of the operations of the world was mysterious, and this would
have been all the more true of the general populace. The belief that
the use of mysterious words and procedures could cause real effects in
the physical world dates back to well before Classical antiquity, and
in the medieval period often involved formulas, items and procedures
“borrowed” from Christian rites. At best, such practices were considered
superstitious by the ecclesiastical authorities, and to a greater or lesser
degree they could be thought to involve demonic invocation (implicit
or tacit).
A major distinction of magical practices in the medieval period concerns a division on the basis of the status of the practitioners. There was a
sort of “high” magic that involved the educated, which in medieval reality tended to mean renegade priests. This magic was practiced with
11
The necessity of “flushing out” uncooperative heretics also explains the use of lies and deceit to
trick them. This distasteful procedure is clearly present in Eymeric and adopted without qualm
by Institoris. Clearly, the need to defend the true faith legitimized any means to unmask the
enemies of orthodoxy (who were, after all, the tools of Satan).
Introduction
31
grimoires or books of learned enchantments. The Malleus indicates
overtly (91C) that it does not deal with this sort of magic. Instead, it
treats the variety of magic practiced by illiterate, mostly female members
of the lower orders of society. To some extent this refers to the peasantry,
as is indicated by the many incidents involving farm activities in Pt. 2.
On the other hand, the amatory sorcery involving impotence and related
phenomena that figures prominently in the Malleus is often an aspect of
urban life.
Now, we have to distinguish between the objective and subjective
interpretation of the situation. Many people today (though by no means
all) would reject the reality of producing physical effects in the material
world through sorcery. But the question of whether people could actually
achieve anything through magic is entirely different from the question
of whether they thought they could. There can be no doubt that there
were people at the time of the Malleus who engaged in magical practices.
For our purposes, the issue is the extent to which the Malleus gives an
accurate picture of contemporary practices.
On the basis of modern research on sorcery, we can be sure that the
association of magical practices with satanism, that is, a heretical cult
under the direct supervision of the Devil himself, is false. The study of
actual interrogations shows that the dealings with the Devil that suspects
were eventually compelled to admit to are actually foisted onto them by
the investigators. That is, there is no external evidence to indicate that,
even when people were involved in magical practices, they conceived of
themselves as acting in accordance with the conception of sorcery laid
out in the Malleus. Rather, the sorts of views propagated by tracts like the
Malleus were imposed on the traditional nonsystematic magical beliefs
of popular culture. Basically, the peasants may well have thought that,
with the right procedures, one could steal the milk from the neighbor’s
cow or make someone impotent or give him the evil eye. What did not
exist, either objectively or subjectively, was a heretical cult of evildoers
who inflicted pointless harm at the instigation of Satan.
Now that we have discussed the reality of magical practices, it is time
to turn to the dark interpretation placed on such practices by the theory
advocated in the Malleus.
overall assessment of the malleus
The Malleus is a work that rouses strong, often emotional reactions,
and these may take a multiplicity of forms. Since at least the nineteenth
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The Hammer of Witches
century, it has been viewed by many as an example of medieval ignorance
and superstition, being associated with the later witch hunting of the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that seemed to have been instigated by it. For those who view as innocent victims the large numbers
of men and (predominantly) women who were burned alive for crimes
that are now considered to be completely bereft of substance, the work
epitomized everything that was wrong with what was thought to be a
medieval mentality. Such an evaluation is at times associated with various extraneous attitudes, both positive and negative, such as a positive
assessment of modern neo-paganism and wicca or hostility towards the
modern Catholic Church, which is held to be responsible for the witch
hunts. Those who are favorably disposed towards the Catholic Church
may themselves have rather divergent attitudes.12 Some choose to dissociate the Church from medieval beliefs that were thought legitimate in
the past but are no longer considered respectable, such as anti-semitism,
and the witch hunts can fit into this category. But the Church continues to recognize the validity of exorcism, and some Catholics, far from
disowning the Malleus, view the work as a valid reflection of Satan’s interference in human affairs.13 Given that all these views relate to people’s
attitudes about religion, and that such attitudes are matters of faith rather
than demonstrable truth, it would be a rather perilous and probably vain
matter to try and assess the Malleus in such terms. The reader is perfectly
entitled to evaluate the work in light of his or her religious beliefs, but
the following assessment is based on a materialist understanding of the
12
13
While the modern Roman Catholic Church is the linear descendant of the official state religion
established in the Roman Empire over the course of the fourth century and has inherited the
pretensions to it being the sole recognized religion laid out in Imperial legislation, it should
be borne in mind that the Church has undergone a great deal of change over the succeeding
millennium and a half. The universal Church as it existed in the medieval period has a large
amount of overlap with its modern manifestation, but there is also a fair amount of divergence. In
particular, it was only with the Council of Trent, which was held in the mid sixteenth century to
counter the challenge posed by the spread of Protestant rejection of the Catholic Church, that the
latter’s doctrine and ceremonial were given a full systemization, which was then enforced by the
administrative apparatus of the states that remained Catholic, and such enforcement of a more
or less uniform understanding of Catholicism had been impossible during the medieval period.
Thus, it is historically difficult to posit an absolute continuity between medieval doctrine and
that of the present-day Church. Of course, those who have a monolithic conception of Catholic
doctrine over the centuries may feel differently.
In an email, I was taken to task by a devout Catholic for seeming to cast doubt, in the introduction
to the bilingual edition, on the view presented in the Malleus that the world is “a place where
demons inhabit [the area above] the earth . . . and plot to ensnare humans . . . guide them in
their evil-doing and have sex with them.” I was then invited to a “Catholic Charismatic Prayer
Breakfast” at which “personal testimony” would be given in proof of the reality of such demonic
intervention in the world.
Introduction
33
world in which the supernatural in general and the demonic in particular
play no role in the affairs on earth.
The major significance of the Malleus lies in the role it played in the
dissemination and widespread acceptance of the elaborated theory of
witchcraft. Certainly, the basic elements of this theory – sorcery, heresy
and Satan’s attempt to undermine God’s world order – had existed since
antiquity, as had the notion that Satan was involved to greater or lesser
degree in both sorcery and heresy. What was new was the notion that
sorcery by itself represented a special form of heresy that played an important part in Satan’s plans for the Final Days. This connection was already
in existence in the early fifteenth century, but only one printed work (the
Formicarius or Ant Hill of Johannes Nider) had discussed this notion,
and then only tangentially and without drawing out the full implications. The Malleus takes this notion and fully argues it in terms of the
cosmological interpretation of the world (that is, the understanding of
the universe in terms of Christian theology) as propounded by Thomas
Aquinas. Thus, this notion, which had previously been inchoate, was
given full academic justification as understood by the scholastic methodology that held sway in the universities of late-medieval Europe. The
twelve reprintings of the Malleus that were undertaken in Germany and
France in the years 1486–1519 attest to a regular demand for the work, and
while, in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was the works
of other authors (e.g. Jean Bodin and Martin del Rio) that whipped up
the frenzy for witch hunting, those works were effective only because
of the shift in paradigm that the Malleus had brought about in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The notion of “shifts in paradigm” comes from Thomas Kuhn’s book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.14 In that work, Kuhn argues against
the modern conception of science as a gradual process consisting of
the cumulative building up of factual knowledge that comes incrementally closer and closer to describing the natural world. Instead, scientists
work on the basis of “paradigms,” that is, overarching conceptions of
the nature of the issue in question. This paradigm is far more than
simply a theory regarding a given set of phenomena. It is a fundamental
understanding of the nature of the issue and of the very phenomena that
are covered by it. In effect, the paradigm gives the general intellectual
framework in which the investigation of the natural world is conducted.
The paradigm holds sway to such an extent over the intellects of the
14
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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The Hammer of Witches
scientific investigators that, when phenomena arise that do not fit in
with the dominant paradigm, at first these are often either misconstrued
or even not perceived as anomalous at all in that they are interpreted,
and indeed conceived of, only in terms of the paradigm. An example of
such a paradigm-generated “distortion” comes from the late seventeenth
and most of the eighteenth centuries, when astronomers on numerous
occasions observed what we now know of as the planet Uranus. On
the basis of the paradigm that held that a set of six planets circled the
sun, however, either no motion was observed at all, in which case the
object was conceived of as a star, or, if the motion was perceived, abortive
attempts were made to explain the object as a comet. Only in 1781 was
the old paradigm rejected, when it was finally recognized that there were
more planets out there.15 When new phenomena are recognized as calling the dominant paradigm into question, there can be a more or less
prolonged crisis in which attempts are made either to salvage the old
one or to come up with a new conception, and if the new conception
wins out and a general consensus accepting it is formed, then there is a
“shift in paradigm,” and the new paradigm then serves as the basis for
further research.
Though Kuhn’s insight on the nature of human conceptualization
was put forward specifically in the context of scientific investigation, it
seems fruitful to apply the notion to other spheres of activity in which
people attempt to make sense of the world around them. After all, the
Malleus strives to explain sorcery within the context of scholastic understanding of the natural world, and thus is scientific by contemporary
standards (at that time, the study of the natural world was at most an
element in “natural philosophy”). Indeed, one of the reasons for the great
influence of the Malleus was the very fact that it does not simply argue
for the existence of Satanic sorcery but gives the notion an ontological,
phenomenological and teleological basis in the scholastic interpretation
of the world. That is, the Malleus gives an all-encompassing explanation of what sorcery is, how we can perceive its effects, and what role
it plays in the cosmic struggle between omnipotent God and his archenemy Satan. Whereas previously sorcery had been viewed as a distasteful
and illicit activity, it had not been viewed as having much significance
beyond the commission of the act of sorcery itself; now, the Malleus
15
See the discussion in Kuhn, Structure, 115–116. It is worth noting that the previously dominant
paradigm of six planets (Mercury, Mars, Earth, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn) revolving around the sun
was itself a new (Copernican) paradigm that had replaced the medieval/ancient paradigm that
saw the five visible planets plus the sun and the moon revolving around the earth.
Introduction
35
seemed to prove in a detailed theoretical fashion that maleficent sorcery was a major element in Satan’s assault on the very fabric of God’s
creation. In effect, the full formulation of the diabolic interpretation of
sorcery in terms of Thomastic scholastic demonstration created a new
paradigm – one that had very menacing implications for those who
accepted it.
Kuhn provocatively suggests that:
when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new
paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more
important, during revolutions [i.e., the breakdown of the old paradigm and its
replacement by a new one] scientists see new and different things when looking
with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if
the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet
where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar
ones as well.16
He quickly grants that no such physical transformation takes place
but maintains that “paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the
world of their research-engagement differently,” and surely this overall
characterization is applicable to the conceptual revolution propagated
by the Malleus. What had previously been simply random instances
of misguided activity now took on a far darker significance, and any
such activities could readily be taken as proof of adherence to this literally demonic conspiracy. If one truly believes that sorcery does produce
effects in the natural world, that sorceresses engage in their malevolent
activities as an integral part of Satan’s final attempt to overthrow the
divine order, that the thwarting of Satan’s evil purposes can only be
carried out through the physical destruction of his evil minions, and
that the defense of Christendom is inextricably intertwined with the
necessity of taking any steps required to track down and eradicate the
practitioners of these evil arts, then clearly the most drastic measures
would be called for. Given that the early modern method of criminal
investigation in continental Europe involved the use of torture to extract
information from the accused, it is hardly surprising that, if the officials
in charge of investigations were already convinced of the existence of
these heinous crimes and predisposed to take the guilt of the accused
for granted, the accused were often compelled not only to confess to
their supposed misdeeds but to implicate others who would in turn be
subject to the same treatment. The only problem of course was that
16
Kuhn, Structure, p. 111.
36
The Hammer of Witches
the whole new paradigm was simply a figment of the imagination of
fifteenth-century ecclesiastics.
The issue of why the witch craze died down in the seventeenth century
is not exactly germane to a discussion of the Malleus in its own right,
but since the Malleus is in large part responsible for the new paradigm of
sorceresses, a few words may be warranted. One should begin by noting
that the view advocated in the Malleus never attained universal acceptance, and there were always voices speaking out against it. Nonetheless,
a number of prominent individuals in both intellectual and administrative positions came to adopt the new paradigm wholeheartedly, and so
long as the paradigm held some sway, it was likely to lead to excesses.
In any event, the Malleus itself is deeply rooted in the scholastic understanding of the cosmos, and this understanding came to be increasingly
untenable with the various scientific discoveries that suggested a mechanistic universe, particularly the complete undermining of the Ptolemaic
conception of the heavens that gradually followed upon the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium in 1543. Now,
it took many decades for the old system to give way, but the old tidy
arrangement of an immutable cosmos circling majestically around the
earth eventually yielded to the new heliocentric system, and with that
the seemingly central role that demons and angels played in the cosmos
was likewise called into serious question. There was clearly far more to
the shift in intellectual understanding of the world that resulted in the
rejection of the paradigm advocated in the Malleus, and it would be
beyond present purposes to discuss this topic.
In addition to these external factors, the paradigm also collapsed under
the weight of its own inherent implausibility. If the new conception was
true, then there were satanic sorceresses lurking everywhere, and the early
seventeenth century saw certain small jurisdictions in southern Germany
carry out large-scale efforts to uproot sorcery in major campaigns that
fed upon the accusations of the innocent made under torture by those
already accused. One of the most famous books written against these
campaigns was the Cautio Criminalis (1631) of Friedrich von Spee, a
Jesuit priest who had acted as a confessor to those about to be burned
alive for sorcery. The work is a general denunciation of the legal abuses
that led to convictions, and while Spee does not deny the existence of
sorcery, he notes his disbelief that any of those supposed sorceresses for
whom he acted as confessor had actually been guilty.
Thus, what undermined the paradigm outlined in the Malleus was the
combination of a number of factors, such as the contradiction between
Introduction
37
the scientific underpinnings of the work in medieval scholasticism and
new understandings of the functioning of the universe, the declining
desire to see Satan as an active participant in the world around us, and
the inherent lack of substance to the great conspiracy that was presupposed by the paradigm. While it is easy to adopt an attitude of smug
self-satisfaction when considering the widespread adherence to views
that now seem (for most people) to be incompatible with a rational
understanding of the world, it is preferable to understand the work in
its own context. At the time, the views advocated in it were firmly based
in the most authoritative texts. Demons and Satan figure prominently
in the Gospels, and other parts of the Bible had been interpreted in
light of this. Demons were taken for granted in the orthodox works
of the Church Fathers of antiquity and the middle ages. Perhaps most
importantly, the role of demons and sorcery in the world was demonstrated in some detail by Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most respected
intellectual figure in scholasticism (and certainly the most respected in
the eyes of Dominicans). And as for being caught up in a frenzy of
seemingly irrational behavior on the basis of some delusional belief in
a demonic conspiracy, one does not have to go back to the anti-semitic
madness of Nazi Germany to find a parallel phenomenon in the modern
world. Less than thirty years ago in the United States, an unwarranted
belief that satanic cults were abusing children, combined with an anxiety
that children were being mistreated in daycare centers, led to egregious
miscarriages of justice in highly publicized trials involving completely
unbelievable accusations and testimony. In fact, one famous victim of
such a trial (Gerald Amirault) was released only in 2004 after spending
eighteen years in prison following his conviction for accusations that
had not the least merit. So perhaps what can be said for the modern
world is that it takes only a few years to dispel the sort of frenzy that
went on for a century and a half in early modern Europe.
Malleus as evidence for contemporary practices
To shift the question of the significance of the Malleus, it is worthwhile
to consider how far the work can be viewed as a valid reflection of
contemporary sorceresses. It is a basic concept in modern cultural studies
to make a distinction, in dealing with the pre-modern Europe, between
the “elite” culture of the educated upper classes and the “popular” culture
of the general populace. This distinction is not without difficulties – the
elite did not live in a vacuum that isolated them from influences deriving
38
The Hammer of Witches
from the beliefs of the lower orders, while for their part the non-elite
members of society could not be entirely immune from the ideas that
mainly circulated among the elites – but it nonetheless holds generally
true. In particular, most knowledge of popular culture derives in one way
or another from sources of information that either were produced by
members of the elite or at the least are preserved in media that reflected
elite rather than popular culture. What then to make of the Malleus?
Does it in any way give us access to actual practices of sorcery among
the general populace? Obviously, it is a work of the intellectual elite,
yet it overtly treats a topic that relates to the lower orders. For the most
part, the understanding of sorcery presented in the work rests on the
theoretical discussions of Thomas Aquinas, and hence sheds little light
on contemporary beliefs. Even the arguments against sorcery that are
attributed to contemporary opponents of the view advocated in the
work actually derive from the negative position that in various disputed
questions are attributed by Aquinas to the advocates of the false view
before he rebuts it, so that the Malleus is to a large extent simply an
intellectual exercise based on earlier literary precedents rather than a
reflection of the world around it.
On the other hand, the work cites a number of anecdotes from the
personal experience of (almost certainly) Institoris. To the extent that
these derive from judicial proceedings, there is no reason to doubt their
accuracy in that regard. That is, the statements about Institoris’s activities
in Ravensburg and Innsbruck seem to be reasonable enough accounts of
the proceedings (taking into account that he was dealing from memory
with events that took place several years before). But that says absolutely
nothing about the accuracy of the description of the activities that were
investigated and for which people like Anna of Mindelheim and Agnes
the bath keeper were burned to ashes. For instance, was the old woman
who was convicted of causing a hail storm out of spite because she had not
been invited to a wedding party (104B–C) actually guilty of doing so? In
a metaphysical sense, of course not. On the other hand, it is not beyond
the realm of possibility that she did in fact use magical procedures to
do so. But it is very unlikely that the activity even subjectively involved
the invocations of a demon in a self-aware act of satanism (much less
the actual participation of a demon, though again it cannot be ruled
out that the woman imagined such a thing). It is far more likely that
she was either falsely accused in the first place (the evidence that led
to her arrest is hardly compelling, and the confession is based on the
application of judicial torture). The satanic interpretation of her alleged
Introduction
39
behavior is almost certainly a construct imposed on the situation because
of the author’s adherence to the paradigm of satanic sorcery. That is, even
when there was subjective use of sorcery by peasants, this would have
been simply old-fashioned magical practice that had nothing to do with
a diabolic conspiracy. Such a process of reinterpretation on the basis of
the paradigm can be seen in the discussion of the seemingly innocuous
peasant cures for sorcery discussed towards the end of Pt. 2. These cures
are simply part of the to-and-fro of peasant magic for the purpose of
some sort of personal gain or vengeance and subjectively do not have
anything to do with the evil designs of Satan, but given the hold of
the paradigm on Institoris’s imagination, it was very difficult for him
to conceive of “innocent” magic outside of this conception. Thus, the
Malleus can safely be used as a guide to the understanding of sorcery held
in the mid to late fifteenth century by certain members of the elite. It…