The Malleus Maleficarum: The Hammer of Witches

In the autumn of 1485 a Dominican inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer (in Latin, Institoris) was questioning women in Innsbruck. One of them, Helena Scheuberin, a burgher's wife, had defied him; Kramer's questions about her sexual life scandalised the court. Her lawyers had the proceedings dismissed on procedural grounds, and the local bishop, Georg Golser of Brixen, told Kramer he had "presumed much that had not been proved" and ordered him out of the diocese, calling him, in a letter, a man who seemed to have become childish with age. Kramer left, and wrote a book. It was printed at Speyer in 1486 as the Malleus Maleficarum, "the Hammer of Witches".

The book

• Three parts. Part I argues that witchcraft is real and that denying it is heresy; Part II describes what witches do (pacts with the devil, harming livestock and crops, impotence, flight) and the remedies; Part III is a legal manual for prosecuting them, including the use of torture and of deception to obtain confessions.
• The bull. Kramer printed at the front the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, issued by Innocent VIII in 1484 at his request, which empowered him and a colleague to act against witches in German lands. Printing it made the book look papally endorsed; the bull itself endorses the inquisitors, not the book.
• The approbation. The book also carried an approval from the theology faculty of the University of Cologne. The faculty had in fact given a qualified opinion, and the printed document presents it as unanimous and unreserved; most historians regard this as manipulated or partly forged by Kramer.
• Sprenger. From 1519 the Dominican theologian Jacob Sprenger is named as co-author. Several historians argue that Sprenger had little or nothing to do with it, and even that he opposed Kramer; others defend a shared role. The question is contested.
• Women. The book insists that witchcraft is chiefly a female crime and offers a notorious false etymology: femina from fe (faith) and minus (less), "because she is always weaker to hold and preserve the faith".

How much did it matter?

The Malleus was reprinted many times: around thirteen or fourteen editions by 1520, and another burst of editions from 1574 to 1669. The Inquisition itself soon distanced itself from Kramer's procedures, and the Spanish Inquisition in 1538 warned its judges not to believe everything the book said. Its use was greatest in secular courts, especially in the German lands. How far it actually caused trials is debated: it gave prosecutors a ready-made theory and procedure, but the great waves of trials came decades later, and many courts never cite it.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The hammer. The title copies the style of inquisitors' manuals that called themselves "hammers" of heretics: the book is a weapon aimed at a category of person.

The printed page as authority. Its most powerful signs are paratextual: a papal bull at the front and a university approbation at the back, both used to make a private campaign look like the voice of the Church.

The witch as inversion. The book builds the image of the witch as the mirror of the sacraments: a pact instead of baptism, the devil's service instead of the Mass, the body given to a demon instead of to God.

Connections

The Witch Trials (ch32), with the Reformation (ch31) for the era, and Satanism (ch39) for how the accusatory "Satanism" of the trials was later confused with a real religion. Compare the Book of Shadows (V72) for modern witchcraft's own book.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/malleus-maleficarum.html