Text of page:

Page: 4

The later fifteenth century saw the increasing production of theoretical tracts on sorcery,
witchcraft, and demonological activity, written by both lay judges and clerical inquisitors and
demonologists, including the recently discovered Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores of
the Briançonnais judge Claude Tholosan of 1437, Nider's Formicarius of 1437, the
anonymous Errores Gazariorum around 1440, the Flagellum Haereticorum
Fascinariorum by Nicholas Jacquier a few years later, the extremely influential
demonological tract of Alphonsus de Spina, the Fortalitium Fidei, written in 1469 and
printed in 1471 and many times since, and the De Lamiis of Ulrich Molitor in 1489.7 These treatises often echoed each other cumulatively, but
occasionally one treatise or another would add a new dimension to the idea of the witch. In his
Tractatus contra daemonum invocatores of 1450, for example, the inquisitor Jean Vineti
identified witchcraft as a new heresy. Vineti, a Dominican, directly referred to and applied the
ideas of Thomas Aquinas to the problem of fifteenth-century demonological theory, extracting a
single part of Aquinas's complex theological universe and focusing it on a particular problem,
one that had not greatly concerned Aquinas himself. Not only demonology had its effect on
humans, but also the problems of illusion and reality in assessing the alleged acts of witches
came into these discussions. The treatise Lamiarum sive striarum opusculum by
Girolamo Visconti in 1460, and that of Bernard of Como, De strigibus of 1510,
both considered the problem of the reality or illusoriness of witchcraft at considerable
length.

In 1487, an enormous, highly detailed, and alarmist work by two inquisitors, Heinrich Krämer
(Institoris) and Joseph Sprenger, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of
Witches) was published.8 Krämer, the principal, and
perhaps the only author of the treatise, had worked as an inquisitor at Innsbruck in 1485, and the
work represents one line of the development of inquisitorial interest in the subject by the end of
the fifteenth century. But not all demonologists, judges, and inquisitors received and accepted the
Malleus in the same way. A number of sixteenth-century manuals for inquisitors
expressed considerable doubt about some of the things that it said. These are the earliest
examples of a specialized theoretical and descriptive literature with a specific focus on demonic
magic and witchcraft that is the subject of this website. From the mid-sixteenth century to the
early eighteenth, a very large literature of this kind was produced in England and on the
continent.

-notes-

7On the tract of Claude Tholosan, see Pierrette Paravy,
"À propos de la genèse médiévale des chasses aux sorcières: Le traité de Claude Tholosan, juge
dauphinois (vers 1436)," Mélanges de l'École française de Rome, Moyen Age - Temps
modernes 91 (1979), 333-379, and idem, De la Chrétienté romaine à la Réforme en
Dauphiné: Evêques, fidèles, et déviants (vers 1340-vers 1530), 2 vols., Collection de l'École
française de Rome, No. 183 (Rome, 1993), Vol. II, 775-905. On the literature in general, see
Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der
Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901), 38-359; Henry Charles Lea, Materials
toward a History of Witchcraft, Arthur C. Howland, ed., 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1939; rpt.
New York, 1957), Vol. I, 240-431; Clark, Thinking with Demons, 687-726.

8The best recent work is Peter Segl, ed., Der
Hexenhammer. Entstehung und Umfeld des "Malleus Maleficarum" von 1487 (Cologne,
1988).