The Malleus maleficarum
The Leiden edition of 1584: note that the witches in the
title have become male, or simply human: "maleficorum"
There are several reasons why historians and polemicists
have made such assertions:
1.) The work is designed to appear authoritative, being
accompanied by a papal bull from Innocent VIII, supporting the work of
Kramer and Sprenger in hunting out this vile new heresy. There is
also a supportive letter from the theologians of the University of Cologne,
which now appears to have been partly forged. Kramer also persistently
underplays the extent to which he ran into opposition from the civil and
clerical authorities in the regions where he attempted to extirpate witches.
2.) The work went through many more editions than most
demonological tracts, although it stopped being produced for long periods,
so the plethora of surviving copies make it look as though it was on the
desk of every judge at all times during the period of the trials.
There is therefore an assumption that it was followed in its views by all
judges everywhere.
3.) The pre-Malleus trials and tracts, because
they mainly pre-date the era of printed books, are relatively unknown,
so it can look as though the Malleus was the fountainhead of demonology.
4.) The virulent hostility of the Malleus towards
women, who are assumed rather than proved to be the chief culprits, is
especially intense, even by the standards of most demonological works.
This makes the book very useful in making the point that witch-hunting
was really women-hunting.
5.) There is a frequently reprinted but rather suspect
translation of the Malleus into English by Montague Summers, which
makes its text more accessible for non-specialists than those of other
demonological works. See below for a note on Summers.
Heinrich Kramer as a failed witch-hunter
Jacob Sprenger (1436-1495), the supposed co-author of the Malleus, was a distinguished theologian but he had no experience prosecuting witches. His alliance with Kramer was based on their shared obsession with asserting papal supremacy over the secular authorities, in the wake of Lorenzo Valla's analysis of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. The book's claims to resting on a large caseload must therefore depend on the labours of Heinrich Kramer (1430-1505), who conducted a campaign in the Tirol during the early 1480s. In the book, he claims to have tried nearly one hundred women, of whom half were sentenced to burn.
It has proved hard to support this claim from the surviving documents. Eight women were executed at Ravensburg, near Constance, in 1484. Kramer arrived in town, armed with papal bulls, and started to preach the dangers of witchcraft, inciting the townspeople to accuse their neighbours. Eight women were convicted and burned, for fornication with the Devil, as the town officials explained to Archduke Sigismund of Tirol, when he investigated. There certainly were sympathetic officials and intellectuals in the area, such as the mayor of Constance, Conrad Schatz, whom Ulrich Molitor portrays as a fervent enemy of witchcraft. The Archduke, however, was sceptical, as was the Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone), Georg Golser. When Kramer moved his activities to Innsbruck in 1485, interrogating fifty women, the Bishop called him "a senile old fool" and expelled him from the town.
Since it was the Innsbruck trials, and his failure to prosecute this vile nest of witches, that launched Kramer's career as an author, and his reputation among demonologists and subsequent historians as an authority, it is worth inquiring a little more closely into the case. The women were accused of causing illness through love magic, as a result of conflict between lovers and spouses or old feuds and envy. Kramer turned this into diabolical witchcraft. It was the absence of any diabolism in the original accusations that convinced the Bishop that Kramer was out of control. In the case of Helena Scheuberin, he based his entire accusation of diabolism on her supposed promiscuity, asking such detailed questions about her sex life that the bishop's representative ordered him to stop. The anger of the townsfolk and the threat of rioting forced the Bishop and the Archduke to take action, and Kramer's witch-hunting career came to an abrupt end.
The structure of the Malleus [see contents]
The book is divided into three parts. The first, after criticizing the heresy of disbelief in witchcraft (as opposed to the traditional heresy of belief in witchcraft) emphasizes the need to accept the reality of witchcraft as resulting from women dedicating themselves to the Devil, as a result of infidelity, ambition and sensuality. The second part presents a list of the crimes which women can perpetrate: sending hail and lightning; dedicating infants to the Devil or eating them; travelling through the air, either really or in the imagination; predicting the future; making men impotent, and women and cattle barren; bewitching and killing humans with a look; changing the minds of judges; causing diseases and driving men mad; transforming humans into animals... The third part provides guidelines for the prosecution of witches: accusations from all kinds of witnesses, including children, are permitted; witches are not to touch judges or stare at them; the judges' powers are absolute; a defence counsel may be appointed but is expected to work with the prosecution; torture may be used; failure to confess may be attributed to the Devil's power; impenitence is grounds for excommunication and handing over to the secular authorities; appeals may be entertained but should be denied; a witch who wishes to return to the Church may be received as a penitent. It seems reasonable to say that what Kramer was attempting to do was to summarize all previous arguments and refute all the traditional objections by addressing the issues successively from the viewpoint of each of the three major disciplines, the scientiae of the medieval university: theology, medicine (and natural philosophy), and law. Hence the tripartite structure of the Malleus.
The sources of the Malleus
If the Tirol trials were shortlived and disastrous, what were Kramer's sources for the book? The cases he heard may have confirmed his belief that witches were women, and that love magic indicated female sexuality as a prime cause, but they can hardly have brought about his beliefs in the first instance, as is clear from his conduct in Ravensburg and Innsbruck. He draws on a wide range of biblical, classical and medieval sources, but three books seem crucial.
In his Lectiones super Ecclesiastes (1380), Johannes Dominicus listed alphabetically the vices of women: animal greed, bestial foolishness, carnal desire, and so on. He associated sorcery with women because they are, like Eve, carefree and easily swayed by demons, or because they are weak of body and mind and have no other means of protecting themselves. he does not mention diabolical witchcraft or associate sorcery with female sexuality. The Malleus quotes the list of vices, but turns them all into factors inducing diabolical witchcraft. They cite Dominicus' sources as if they proved that women are witches, even though neither he nor they mention witchcraft. Vices such as faithlessness, weakness, passion and insubordination are all factors which induce women to become witches.
Johannes Nider's Formicarius (1435) associates witchcraft with gender transgression, the witches dressing as men, carrying weapons and pretending to be in touch with God, but not with female carnality. It is presumption, deception and rebellion that are his targets. In his Preceptorium divinae leges (1475), Nider attributes female sorcery to credulity, impressionability and loquaciousness. Thus, like Dominicus, he blames female sorcery on female vices, but he does not identify women as the principal culprits or attribute their participation to carnal desires. The Malleus quotes Nider at length but Kramer emphasizes over and over again the role of carnality, attributing to his sources meanings that were not in the original texts. Female sexuality and the threat which unbridled female lusts pose to the institution of marriage are at the centre of their concerns. This is why midwife-witches and witches who make the penis apparently disappear are emphasized. Thus, we can set Nider and Kramer into the context of the fifteenth-century Franciscan and Dominican preachers, such as Bernardino da Siena and Girolamo Savonarola, who preached against sodomy and prostitution in order to save the family, a moral message that was given added urgency after the advent of the French pox (syphilis) in the 1490s. The mendicant friars were not interested in educating women, but in persuading them of the positive aspects of married life. This aspect of their evangelical mission was to be taken up by the humanists and the Protestant reformers.
Women and the end of the world
Kramer and Sprenger identify, for the first time, women as the main culprits in matters of witchcraft, despite their having to rely on a host of earlier examples of male sorcery to prove their points. What they do not do is show any way for women to avoid becoming witches. Only by becoming nuns can women suppress their carnal natures, but this is not a course available to the majority of women, who are therefore doomed to become the targets of the judges and inquisitors who alone can withstand their wiles.
The context of this terrible plague of witches which they supply is that of the final battle between God and the Devil. Sin is everywhere and witches are destroying mankind and nature in the service of the Devil, to prepare for the coming of the Antichrist. The concubines of the great are usurping secular power. The midwives are destroying the population. Wives are dominating their husbands. Even the penis itself is threatened by the casting of spells that make it disappear, if only by means of illusion. Satan is stealing souls from the Lord by such means, in order to delay God's reaching the tally required to bring about the Last Judgement. The virtuous, who can dominate women, such as strong husbands, inquisitors and faithful judges, must resist Satan and his servants in order to hasten the last days.
There is an extensive literature on the Malleus,
but most of what has been written in English is not worth reading.
I would, however, recommend a recent article:
W.Stephens, "Witches Who Steal Penises: Impotence and
Illusion in Malleus maleficarum", Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 28 (1998) 495-529
MONTAGUE SUMMERS AND THE MALLEUS
Montague Summers was brought up an Anglican, and went
to Oxford University between 1899 and 1903. He took Anglican orders
but left his curacy in 1908 after being prosecuted for pederasty, in a
case involving choirboys, although he was acquitted. He initially
made a living partly from his family inheritance and partly from teaching,
an activity he disliked: "One of the most difficult and depressing of trades,
and so in some measure it must have been even well-nigh three hundred years
ago when boys were not nearly so stupid as they are today." Although
he is often said to have taken Roman Catholic orders, he was ordained to
the priesthood by Bishop Ulric Vernon Herford, known as Mar Jacobus,
Regionary Bishop of Mercia and Middlesex. Herford
was consecrated to the episcopacy in 1902 by Mar Basilius (Luis Mariano
Soares) of the Syro-Chaldean Church in India, which broke away from the
Holy See in the 1860s. Herford was a wandering bishop quite apart
from Rome, so Summers's orders were therefore "valid but illicit", according
to the Roman Catholic theology of orders. He called himself "the
Reverend Dr. Alphonsus Joseph Mary Augustus Montague Summers".
By about 1926, his success with his pen, writing about the Restoration stage and many other topics, freed him to write full-time. His real obsession was demonology. Starting in the late 1920s, he was preoccupied with the study of demons, vampires, werewolves, and witchcraft. Indeed, there were persistent rumours that he had dabbled in Black Magic during his youth. He was one of the first to produce what purported to be definitive tracts on such subjects. He believed every word in the trials and demonological tracts that he edited and translated for publication.
Throughout his life, Summers was described by acquaintances as kind, courteous, generous and outrageously witty; but those who knew him well sensed an underlying discomfort and mystery. In appearance, he was plump, round cheeked and generally smiling. His dress resembled that of an eighteenth-century cleric, with a few added flourishes such as a silver-topped cane depicting Leda being ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. He wore sweeping black capes crowned by a curious hairstyle of his own devising which led many to assume he wore a wig. His voice was high pitched, comical and often in complete contrast to the macabre tales he habitually told. He was buried in Richmond Cemetery on August 13, 1948, in full priestly garb with his breviary and a rosary.
Neo-pagans and the more polemical feminists have often taken Summers to be the voice of Catholic orthodoxy, asserting that he was a Jesuit or a Dominican. Although he was deeply religious, his was the religion of a former age, and he had a tendency to take anything said by an ecclesiastical authority at face value, however outrageous it might appear to a modern reader. There are serious problems with his translation of the Malleus, and a new version is projected. As yet, however, this is the only translation into English that has ever been made, so it is generally used and cited.
