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The Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook for detecting, interrogating and prosecuting witches printed at Speyer in 1487, carries three debated facts in this atlas's own record, tied for its most internally contested entries. Checked individually rather than assumed to repeat, all three turn out to be genuinely separate arguments: who actually wrote it, what it actually caused, and whether its own printed authority was ever real.

A Borrowed Name, and an Approval Nobody Can Check

The book was written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Most modern scholarship, including Broedel and Mackay, holds that Kramer wrote effectively the whole text and attached the name of Sprenger, a more respectable Cologne Dominican, to borrow his standing; a minority of historians defend a genuine collaboration on the basis of the early title pages and Sprenger's known role in the order, though nobody argues Sprenger was the principal hand. A separate, narrower dispute sits in the printed text itself: scholars have long questioned how much of the printed faculty approbation was actually signed, and whether Kramer extended or reworked it, a question Mackay's own edition sets out, with no surviving faculty original left to check the printed text against.

A Reputation Older and Firmer Than the Evidence for It

The third dispute is about consequence rather than authorship. One camp, represented by Julian Goodare and much recent regional work, finds the correlation between the book and actual prosecution weak: some heavily prosecuting territories show little sign of it, some owners of it prosecuted little, and the worst waves of persecution came a century and more after publication. Another camp emphasises transmission instead, holding that the book supplied later demonologists with a template and a claim of authority they reused, so its influence runs through the later literature rather than directly into courtrooms. The atlas's own record is direct about what the book itself is and is not evidence of: read correctly it is evidence about its author and about the legal culture that bought and reprinted it, not evidence about anything the people later tried under it had actually done. Nothing described in it happened.

Where To Read More

• Malleus MaleficarumWitchcraft, Demonology, and Folklore TextsThe text itself, tied for this atlas's most internally contested entries, three genuinely separate disputes