Chapter 117. The Hammer of Witches: Demonology, the Malleus Maleficarum and the Great Witch Hunts (c. 1300-1750)

The previous chapter followed the Adversary as a theological figure. This chapter follows his supposed human allies. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, according to the editor of the library’s main primary-source collection, “more than 100,000 people – mainly women – were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America,” and in those centuries “the prominent stereotype of the witch as an evil magician and servant of Satan emerged. Catholics and Protestants alike feared that the Devil and his human confederates were destroying Christian society” [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, back-cover summary]. The chapter draws mainly on the documents Brian Levack collected: canon law, the papal bull, the Malleus Maleficarum, the demonologists, the trial transcripts and the skeptics. It then sets them beside later authors who disagree about the scale, the motives and the meaning of the persecution.

1. Medieval foundations: from ritual magician to diabolical witch

Levack’s Part II traces how the witch was assembled out of earlier categories. In the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kyteler at Kilkenny, the bishop of Ossory found that there had long been “very many heretical sorceresses” in the town. Dame Alice and her associates “were accused of sacrificing animals to a demon and using powders, ointments” and similar means. Levack calls the case “one of the milestones in the development of the early modern stereotype of the witch,” though it still “conforms in its essential elements to that of ritual magicians prosecuted for performing maleficium” [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 10]. Nicholas Eymeric (1376) classed demonic magic as heresy. In September 1398 the theology faculty of Paris “approved a set of twenty-eight articles condemning the practice of ritual magic,” rejecting even the claim “that such magical arts of any kind can lead us to a vision of the Divine” [ibid., chs. 11–12].

The decisive change, in Levack’s account, is that by the fifteenth century the witch’s alleged activities involved “collective Devil-worship, the murder and cannibalistic consumption of infants, copulation with demons, and the widespread destruction of life and property by occult means” [ibid., Part II introduction]. Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (1435) gives one of the first sabbath narratives. An inquisitor told him that “in the duchy of Lausanne he had seen some witches cooking and eating their own children,” and that at “a fixed meeting place” they “would see the demon in the assumed likeness of a man,” and their disciples “had to promise to abjure Christianity, never to reverence the Eucharist” [ibid., ch. 13].

2. The papal bull and the Malleus Maleficarum

In the first year of his pontificate, Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes (1484). According to Levack, “its main purpose was to give jurisdictional authority to two inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer (identified in this document by his Latin name, Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger, to prosecute witches in various parts of Germany,” where they had met resistance from secular authorities and bishops. Levack stresses that “there was nothing special about this papal bull”. It defined witchcraft “exclusively in terms of maleficia, especially the impeding of fertility,” said nothing about the sabbath, and noted “simply that people of both sexes were guilty.” The bull’s notoriety comes from the fact that “Kramer published it two years later as a preface to his witchcraft treatise” [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 24].

On authorship Levack writes that the Malleus maleficarum (1486) “was primarily the work of Heinrich Kramer.” Sprenger is named as co-author, but “it is unclear how much of a role, if any at all, Sprenger had in the production of the book; Kramer may have simply added his name to a document to which Sprenger had objected.” The book “went into fifteen printings between 1486 and 1520 and another nineteen printings between 1569 and 1669, which was the most intense period of witch-hunting” [ibid., ch. 14]. Levack identifies three themes. The first is a refutation of skepticism: Part I, Question I asks “whether the belief that there are such beings as witches is so essential a part of the Catholic faith that obstinacy to maintain the opposite opinion manifestly savours of heresy”. The second is that the Devil needs both witches and God’s permission. The third is “the highly misogynistic argument that witchcraft was practised mainly by women” [ibid.].

The full Summers translation in the library shows these themes in the text. Part I, Question VI asks “Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?” and concludes: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” Question XVI ranks witchcraft above “the other practices of Magicians and Diviners” because “there are fourteen species of magic, springing from the three kinds of Divination.” Part II includes chapters “Of the way by which a formal pact with evil is made” (ch. 2) and “How witches impede and prevent the power of procreation” (ch. 6) [Kramer & Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, #45629, Part I Q. VI, Q. XVI; Part II chs. 2, 6]. Part III, Levack notes, rests on the assumption “that witchcraft is a crimen exceptum,” an excepted crime for which Kramer “is willing to countenance just about any practice that would succeed in convicting the witch,” including stripping and searching the accused for hidden charms before torture [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 25].

3. The demonologists of the confessional age

The literature of the following century was written by Catholics and Protestants alike. Lambert Daneau (1574) gave a Calvinist account, and William Perkins (1608) wrote on “good and bad witches.” Nicolas Remy (1595) described the Devil’s mark and flight to the sabbath, and Martín Del Rio (1600) catalogued maleficia. Henri Boguet (1602) wrote on “the threat of witchcraft” and set rules for a secular judge. Francesco Maria Guazzo (1608) described the pact, and Pierre de Lancre (1612) described “dancing and sex at the sabbath.” Cotton Mather (1692) placed witchcraft within the apocalypse [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, Part III, chs. 15-23]. Jean Bodin, a secular jurist, argued in 1580 that witchcraft was an excepted crime: “Whatever lawful means may be used to bring a person guilty of treason against the king to a confession, the same is necessary to bring a witch to confession.” James VI of Scotland (1597) discussed swimming witches and pricking them for the Devil’s mark [ibid., chs. 26, 28]. Levack’s introduction to Part IV states the legal consequence: judges violated the rules on torture “on the grounds that witchcraft was an exceptional crime that had to be prosecuted at all costs,” and “without torture, courts would never have been able to convict the large numbers of witches” [ibid., Part IV introduction].

4. The trials in their own words

The transcripts show the procedure in operation. In 1628 Johannes Junius, burgomaster of Bamberg, wrote secretly to his daughter. A guard had told him: “for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture.” When he could not name accomplices he was told to “take one street after another; begin at the market,” and he named people under threat of the executioner. He closed: “Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God … I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both lame.” He added that six people who had denounced him had done so “all false, through compulsion” [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 39].

At Eichstätt in 1637 an unnamed woman of forty, mother of eight, “laughs heartily at the charge,” says “I am not a witch, as true as Christ was tortured,” and is found to have an insensitive Devil’s mark. On the strappado she confesses, retracts, is pulled higher, and confesses again, and the court then catches her in a contradiction of dates [ibid., ch. 40]. Levack also prints the confession of Niclas Fiedler at Trier (1591), a Russian trial at Lukh (1657) and the Salem documents of 1692 [ibid., chs. 35, 42, 43]. David Goss’s collection gives the Salem record in greater detail: Ezekiel Cheever’s “Examination of Tituba” of 1 March 1692, depositions such as Mary Walcott’s against Wilmot Redd of Marblehead, and Samuel Sibley’s document showing John Proctor openly doubting “those providing spectral evidence” [Goss, Documents of the Salem Witch Trials, #63474, docs. 4-10 and passim]. Possession cases ran alongside the trials, including Loudun (1634) and Mather’s Goodwin children (1688) [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, Part VI].

5. Politics, confession and the contested toll

Several authors connect the scale of the hunts to political and confessional rivalry. Martin Donnelly writes that “by 1530, Catholics and Protestants were competing not only for the hearts and minds of Christian Europe, but also to see who was most efficient at exposing the army of the damned,” and that “by the mid-point in Europe’s religious wars – commonly referred to as the Thirty Years War – witches were no longer being burnt a few at a time, but by the dozens and hundreds.” He adds that Luther “was convinced that the Devil made compacts with anyone and everyone” [Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain, #33280, ch. 8, “The Rise of the Malleus Maleficarum”]. Helen Ellerbe gives a political reading: “Any threat to social uniformity, any questioning of authority, and any act of rebellion could now be attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft. Not surprisingly, areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch hunts”. She concludes that “witch-hunting secured the conversion of Europe to orthodox Christianity” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, “The Witch Hunts”]. Theodore Millon adds that “‘Witch Finders’ soon became prominent guardians of the faith, prompted by religious authorities who sought to undo the political powers of their ostensible enemies” [Millon, Masters of the Mind, #29163, ch. 2].

The library’s sources give very different figures, and each is reproduced below with its basis. Michael Kerrigan, writing of Joan of Arc’s era, cautions that “few in the Church at this time took the idea of witchcraft seriously,” which makes the attempt to brand her a witch “unusual” [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, “The War on Witchcraft”].

[Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807; Donnelly, #33280; Ellerbe, #6699; Kramer & Sprenger, #45629, “Introduction to Online Edition”; Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, #70407]

6. The skeptics and the end of prosecution

The skeptical tradition runs through the period alongside the demonologists. Johann Weyer (1563) treated accused witches as melancholics, and Millon quotes him: “There are more superstitions in the Roman Church than in all these poor women and presumed witches” [Millon, Masters of the Mind, #29163, ch. 2]. Reginald Scot (1584) argued for “the unreality of witchcraft.” The Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías (1612) documented “the unreliability of confessions.” Hobbes (1651) wrote on the nature of demons and Spinoza on “the non-existence of the Devil,” and John Webster (1677) and Balthasar Bekker (1695) completed the “disenchantment of the world” [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, Part VII, chs. 51-57]. The Jesuit Friedrich Spee, a confessor of condemned witches, described in his Cautio Criminalis (1631) how a tortured woman “is forced to accuse others whom she does not know, whom her questioners not infrequently place in her mouth or the torturer suggests,” and how, if she died under torture, “they say that the devil broke her neck.” Levack credits his book with “a significant decline in the number of convictions” [ibid., ch. 29].

The legal endgame followed. Louis XIV’s edict of July 1682, issued “mainly in response to … the Affair of the Poisons,” reclassified witchcraft as “practical superstition and pretended magic.” It kept the death penalty only for sacrilege and poisoning, though sorcerers could still be tried for profaning the host, as at Marseilles in 1693 [ibid., ch. 32]. Christian Thomasius demanded in 1701 and 1705 that witch trials and torture end, and Prussia ended witch prosecutions fourteen years later. In 1736 a British statute repealed the English and Scottish witchcraft acts [ibid., chs. 33–34]. Donnelly records the last English execution, of “Mary Hicks and her ten-year-old daughter,” in 1716. He also records a mob at Wickham Skeith, Suffolk, swimming the peddler Isaac Stebbing as late as 1825 [Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain, #33280, ch. 8].

7. Later interpretive frameworks

Psychiatric histories read the craze as mental illness misunderstood. Andrew Sims, a psychiatrist, writes that the Roman-era accusations against Christians of “ritual killing and devouring of infants” were “adopted by the new, Christian establishment and directed against” despised groups, and that authorities found “mentally-ill people, predominantly women, guilty of witchcraft and persecuted them” [Sims, Is Faith Delusion?, #65574, ch. 3]. Millon frames the period as the eclipse of Hippocratic medicine by “superstition, demonology, and exorcism,” followed by the “resuscitating” of scientific thinking through Vives and Weyer [Millon, Masters of the Mind, #29163, ch. 2, “Medieval Madness, Witch Hunts, and the Rise of Scientific Reason”].

Esoteric and feminist writers go further. Tricia McCannon calls the Malleus “one of the greatest abominations these sadists foisted on the European populace,” compiled by Kramer and Sprenger under “the papal decrees of Pope Innocent VIII” [McCannon, Return of the Divine Sophia, #62332, “Chapter 23: A Return to the Circle”]. The online editor of the Malleus argues that its definitions “came to be widely regarded as irrefutable truth,” and that “those beliefs are held even today by a majority of Christians in regard to practitioners of the modern ‘revived’ religion of Witchcraft, or Wicca” [Kramer & Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, #45629, “Introduction to Online Edition”]. That claim leads into the following chapters on modern witchcraft and Satanism.

Key points

• Levack’s Sourcebook traces the witch from ritual magician (Kyteler 1324, Paris 1398) to Devil-worshipping, child-eating sabbath-goer (Nider 1435), and counts more than 100,000 prosecutions between 1400 and 1750 [#76807].
• Summis desiderantes (1484) was, in Levack’s words, a routine grant of jurisdiction to Kramer and Sprenger. It became notorious because Kramer printed it as the preface to the Malleus [#76807].
• Levack considers the Malleus (1486) mainly Kramer’s work, with Sprenger’s role unclear. Its key claims are that denying witches is heresy, that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,” and that witchcraft is a crimen exceptum that justifies torture [#76807; #45629].
• Bodin, Remy, Boguet, Guazzo, de Lancre and James VI built the procedural and doctrinal case, and the Bamberg and Eichstätt transcripts show how torture produced confessions and lists of accomplices [#76807].
• Donnelly and Ellerbe link the hunts to Catholic-Protestant competition and political turmoil. Estimates of the toll range from Levack’s 100,000 prosecutions to the “millions” given by Jensen; the Malleus online editor gives 600,000 to 9,000,000 for the death toll of the Inquisition worldwide [#33280; #6699; #45629; #70407].
• Weyer, Scot, Salazar, Spee, Hobbes, Spinoza and Bekker built the skeptical case. Prosecution ended in steps: Louis XIV in 1682, Thomasius in 1705, the British repeal in 1736. Donnelly gives Mary Hicks (1716) as the last English execution and records a swimming ordeal as late as 1825 [#76807; #33280].
• Sims and Millon read the craze as misunderstood mental illness. McCannon and the Malleus editor see it shaping Christian hostility to modern Wicca [#65574; #29163; #62332; #45629].