Heinrich Institoris (1430–1505)

This was an experience! Firstly, be warned. This is not the arcane text of rumour, its a complex and boring legal text with very few interesting points. Secondly, its bonkers. Its not just the entire premise is hateful and insane, but also that the philosophy is childlike and irrational. The logic is broken, torturous, or requires giant leaps to make work. It is depressing to think of how many thousands of people were murdered following this logic. So this is a boring and dense legal document whose only real point of interest is that it was a murder manual. Only occasional anecdotes about witches killed or escaped add any colour at all, and even then its depressing colour. What other observations can I make? Well, during the section on how witches steal penises (they don't, they just cause the illusion of a missing penis) a story is recounted in evidence that is actually a older joke translated from Spanish to German so that the pun is lost. This is the quality of the evidence that we're talking about.

Curiously, the authors seem to feel a burning sense of justice. They make it very clear that there are going to be people making false claims and that it is the job of inquisitors to have a set of guidelines to ensuring that innocent women are not burned to death. But at the same time, these guidelines make it impossible for most women to escape death. For example, women who confess under torture have confessed and should be burned. But women who don't confess are under the "sorcery of silence" and are guilty. There is a strict hierarchy in place. A women of good reputation accused by one or two people of bad reputation will probably be alright, as long as the two stories are not corroborated by evidence (evidence in this case not being what we might think of as evidence but actually other hearsay), but in almost every other case the accusation or even suggestion that a woman might be a witch is enough to get her burned. The purpose of torture isn't to get evidence, its to get a confession. She is doomed at the moment a man says to the inquisitor "that woman is a witch". Everything else after that is a legal fiction, right up to moment the inquisitor passes the woman to a judge recommending mercy but meaning that the judge is to pronounce the death sentance - after all, a priest shouldn't be having women killled! There are so many catch 22s that there is no way out. Going to church or not going to church, being nice or not being nice, confessing or not confessing. Once you're accused you're dead, and the only question now is are you going to take anyone else with you.

One of the interesting things about religious logic is that it appears to take an opposite form to scientific progress. Science is supposed to take the experiments of the past and improve on them by testing and retesting sing newer technology and better equipment. Here evidence is based on traditional, on appeals to authorities hundreds of years old, or even longer. If it was good enough for a thousand years ago, its good enough for now even if we don't understand it, or worse, have misunderstood it. The authors here cite thousands of pieces of earlier thinking as evidence of truth, even though they often misquote, misunderstand, or misrepresent. Furthermore they reproduce errors that these earlier authorities made. Like naughty students they quote works quoted in those they read and pass the learning off as their own when they clearly haven;t read these original works or they'd know they were making an error. Folly upon folly, nothing new to be learned that the old whoremonger Augustine didn't know!

Other observations: curiously the author is able to recognise that power imbalances exist in social relations (which is more than most liberals today are able to do), but doesn't provide any assistance for the inquisitor in ameliorating these imbalances.
There is no defence. An advocate can only be appointed if they are not going to interfere. The role of the defence is to ensure that the prosecution is done properly, not to defend the accused. The accusation is enough.
If a person is accused of being a witch, they can be defended if they have a good reputation. To have a good reputation you need not have been accused of being a witch.
If a person confesses under torture, they should be required to confess whilst not under torture. This is to prevent people just confessing to stop the torture. If they will not confess whilst not being tortured, and I swear this is true, they should be tortured again.
A person can only be tortured once for each accusation. However gaps between periods of torture within this single torture of any duration are acceptable. The difference between this and multiple tortures is unclear.
People who show signs of pain under torture are witches doing evil witch things. People who don't, they're witches too.
Aside from the great minds of the history of Catholic thought, most of the churchmen of history have been corrupt and or worldly. But the ones we have now are all fine and upstanding. It is noted that this position has been recognised by theologians throughout history, but no-one seems to have noticed the irony.

This really is a work of staggering banality, by one of the finest legal minds the medieval church could come up with. It is pure drivel, the logic is inane and often imbecilic. It is pure evil, the misogynist's Mein Kampf. Really this is only of scholarly interest, I wouldn't bother reading this out of curiosity as I did. The editor's notes on my edition were erudite and wry, and without his guidance I would have given up long before, unable to wrangle any knowledge from the dense legalistic medieval prose. Five stars to him, but minus one star to Henry Institorius and gang.… (más)

Montague Summers’ translation of Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum reproduces the 1486/1487 text in its entirety. In the book, Kramer and Sprenger outlined the theological underpinning for belief in witchcraft as well as the justifications for exterminating suspected witches. Further, the book situates sorcery among other heresies while advocating for inquisitions and torture in order to locate suspects and obtain confessions.

Sprenger’s name first appeared in connection with the book in 1519, leading some historians such as Joseph Hansen, to question this practice. Others, including Montague Summers, refute Hansen’s claims, so the book continues to be credited to both authors. The Malleus further linked witchcraft with “deviant” sexual practices between witches and demons, thereby adding to the belief among Western Christian nations that women were weaker or possessed of inherent sin. This patriarchal attitude, coupled with the chaos of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, fueled witch panics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The increase in witch trials naturally generated further works on witchcraft, including Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which attempted to critique witch trials as un-Christian, King James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which discussed necromancy and other black magic, Richard Bernard’s A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1629), which encouraged more evidence and witnesses in witchcraft investigations, and Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1692), which defended the Salem witch trials while also cautioning against overreliance on spectral evidence. For those interested in the history of witchcraft, this translation of the Malleus Maleficarum will be an invaluable resource as, like the aforementioned works, it sheds light on the cultural milieu in which the various trials occurred.… (más)

LMFAO No, but seriously, how the hell does someone come up with such whacked-out ideas and believe them to be reality? I seriously would like to know what drugs they were on when they wrote this. Now I understand some of the dumbest superstitions about witches that we still see pop up in movies and TV today (like how witches can't cry). Good grief.
What really makes me sad, is the fact that this book was used as the textbook for How to Kill Strong Women (especially midwives) 101. The witch hunting trade was BIG business in it's time and people got rich off pointing their fingers to have innocent people tortured and murdered so they could divvy up their possessions. And this stupid book with it's insane ideas helped them all do it. It's a low point in history that we see being repeated over and over. So very sad.
Despite hating this book, the authors, it's users and everything this book stood for... I would still recommend anyone interested in the subject to give it a read. It is a piece of our human history and a testament as to just how low we can go. Even though the content of this book is so horrible it's one of the most infamous books in all of history, I feel better now for having actually read it and knowing for myself exactly what's written in it. But it is pretty hard core. READER BEWARE!… (más)