The Witches' Hammer (Malleus Maleficarum)

The Witches’ Hammer, in Latin Malleus Maleficarum, is the most notorious manual of the European witch hunts.

Published in 1486/87 in Speyer and written by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer (Latinized as Institoris), it shaped theology, inquisitorial practice, and secular criminal courts for more than two centuries. Anyone seeking to understand medieval and early modern demonology cannot get past the Malleus.

Authorship and dating

Heinrich Kramer was prior of the Dominican monastery of Schlettstadt in Alsace and had served as a papal inquisitor since the late 1470s. His first witch trials in Innsbruck in 1485 ended in scandal: Bishop Georg Golser withdrew his authority and expelled him from the diocese.

Kramer responded in writing. On the basis of the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus issued by Innocent VIII in 1484, he composed the Malleus as a defense of his method and as a textbook for future proceedings.

For a long time Jakob Sprenger, likewise a Dominican, was regarded as a co-author; more recent scholarship, in particular by Christopher Mackay and Wolfgang Behringer, shows that Sprenger’s involvement was minimal or fabricated. Kramer probably merely appropriated Sprenger’s name in order to suggest academic authority.

Structure in three parts

The Malleus is divided into three parts. The first part argues theologically that witchcraft really exists and is both permitted by God and brought about by the Devil.

The second part describes in concrete terms the practices of witches: the pact with the Devil, harmful magic, weather magic, incubus and succubus intercourse, dalliance with demons, and the infliction of harm on cattle and crops.

The third part is a procedural manual: how to bring an accusation, how to justify torture, how to elicit confessions, and which protective means are effective.

Striking is its markedly misogynistic tendency. Kramer derives witchcraft from a supposed essential constitution of woman: weaker in faith, more susceptible to carnal lust, more easily seduced by the Devil. This line of argument contradicts the older scholastic tradition and is a peculiar intensification on Kramer’s part that carried over into later witch trials.

Reception and impact

Between 1486 and 1669 the Malleus went through at least 28 editions. Alongside the Bible it was one of the most frequently printed books in Europe.

Nevertheless, its impact has to be assessed in a differentiated way: the Catholic high theology of the Salamanca school rejected it, and the Spanish Inquisition, paradoxically, banned it as unreliable.

In the German territories, in Switzerland, and in France, by contrast, it served as a central textbook for witch commissions, especially during the peaks of the witch trials around 1590 and 1630.

The Malleus is partly responsible for the shift from a canonically and legally constrained procedure toward unrestrained mass persecution. Estimates range from 40,000 to 60,000 people executed in Central Europe between 1450 and 1750, about 75 percent of them women.

Early criticism

The first systematic counter-positions were formulated by Johann Weyer in 1563 in De praestigiis daemonum. Weyer did accept the existence of the Devil, but interpreted many supposed witches as women suffering from melancholy, whose confessions were not a real deed but a symptom of illness.

Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a Jesuit and confessor of condemned witches, published Cautio Criminalis in 1631, an unsparing reckoning with the practice of torture. Both works initiated the slow dismantling of the witch trials, which ended in 1782 with the last execution in the Holy Roman Empire (Anna Göldi in Glarus).

Present-day assessment

From a religious studies perspective, the Malleus is less a source for actual witch practice than a document of the construction of an enemy image.

The pact, sabbath, and sexual practices described in it are scarcely found in independent first-hand accounts; they reflect the theological expectations of the inquisitors and the confirmations extracted under torture. Anyone working historically treats the Malleus as a source for inquisitorial imagination, not for a real folk religion.

The contemporary esoteric scene receives the Malleus in divided ways. Some neopagan currents read it as a document of a suppressed matriarchal counter-tradition, a reading that is not historically tenable.

Others use it as a negative foil in order to set their own practice apart from the demonizing point of view. In any case, reading the critical edition directly is worthwhile, because many statements attributed to the book never came from it.

Sources

• Christopher S. Mackay (ed.): The Hammer of Witches. A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Cambridge UP 2009 (critical edition).
• Wolfgang Behringer: Hexen. Glaube, Verfolgung, Vermarktung, Munich 2005.
• Jeffrey Burton Russell: Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Cornell UP 1972.
• Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld: Cautio Criminalis, crit. edition Tübingen 2000.
• Johann Weyer: De praestigiis daemonum, German edition Berlin 1991.