A handbook for detecting, interrogating and prosecuting witches, written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and printed at Speyer in 1487. It argues that witchcraft is a real and organised crime worked through a pact with the Devil, that it should be treated in court as an exceptional offence in which the ordinary protections of procedure do not apply, and that women are by nature more liable to it, a claim the book develops at length and in openly hostile terms. Read correctly the Malleus is evidence about its author and about the legal culture that bought and reprinted it. It is not evidence about anything the people later tried under it had done. Nothing described in it happened.
Facts
Disputed
How Its Legacy Is ContestedHow far the book actually drove the trials is genuinely disputed. 3 One camp, represented by Julian Goodare and by much recent regional work, finds the correlation between the book and prosecution weak: some heavily prosecuting territories show little sign of it, some owners of it prosecuted little, and the worst waves came a century and more after publication. Another camp emphasises transmission, holding that the book supplied later demonologists with a template and a claim of authority they reused, so its influence runs through the literature rather than directly into courtrooms. The reputation of the Malleus as the single engine of the hunts is older and firmer than the evidence for it. Attributed Author / CompilerHeinrich Kramer, Dominican inquisitor, who also wrote under the Latinised name Institoris. Jacob Sprenger is named beside him on many early printings. 2 Most modern scholarship, including Broedel and Mackay, holds that Kramer wrote effectively the whole book 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 of Sprenger's known role in the order. Nobody argues that Sprenger was the principal hand. Textual NoteAn approbation of the theology faculty at Cologne is printed with the work. 1 Scholars have long questioned how much of the printed approbation the faculty actually signed, and whether Kramer extended or reworked it. Mackay's edition sets out the problem. There is no consensus, and no surviving faculty original against which to check the printed text. Origins
Era of Composition Era of Composition Structure
StructureThree parts: that witchcraft is real and denying it heretical; what witches are said to do; and how a court should investigate, question and sentence. 1 Scholarship
Critical EditionChristopher S. Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 1 First PublishedSpeyer, by the printer Peter Drach, 1487. 1 TransmissionThe work was printed and reprinted repeatedly across nearly two centuries, but its editions cluster into two separate bursts, the years immediately following first publication and then a second wave beginning in the 1570s, rather than reflecting continuous steady demand across the whole interval. 2 What Counted as EvidenceThe third part argues that witchcraft is an exceptional crime in which the ordinary safeguards of procedure obstruct justice: witnesses normally disqualified should be heard, a promise of mercy need not be kept, and reluctance to confess is itself evidence. 1 Text
Literary Form Transmission
Manuscript TraditionPrinted and reprinted repeatedly across nearly two centuries, in two separate bursts, immediately after first publication and again from the 1570s, rather than reflecting continuous demand; Christopher S. Mackay's 2009 Cambridge translation is the standard modern critical edition. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteShortly after publication the theology faculty at the University of Cologne declined to give the book's methods their formal approval, yet an approbation attributed to that same faculty appears printed in later editions. 1 Sources
Textual NoteThe papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of 1484 was printed as a preface. It had authorised Kramer's inquisitorial commission and says nothing about the book, but bound in at the front it reads to a buyer as papal endorsement of the contents. 1 Textual NoteThe sixth question of the first part argues at length that women are more liable to witchcraft than men, reasoning from a supposed intellectual and moral weakness. The hostility is explicit and sustained, and is a feature of the text rather than an inference by later readers. 2 Learn More
What the Book Argues, and Against Whom
The book is in three parts and each has a job. The first establishes that witchcraft is real, that it requires a pact with the Devil, and that to deny it is heresy. The second describes what witches are supposed to do, assembled from earlier demonology and from what prosecutors reported hearing under interrogation. The third is a procedural manual for magistrates and inquisitors: how to open a case, how to question, when to use torture, how to secure a conviction.
The third part is the dangerous one. Its argument is that this crime is exceptional, and that the ordinary safeguards of criminal procedure obstruct it. Witnesses who would normally be disqualified should be heard. The accused may be told a promise of mercy will be kept and it need not be. Reluctance to confess is itself evidence of the Devil's protection. Once a court accepts that frame, an innocent defendant has no move left that reads as innocence.
The hostility to women is explicit and sustained rather than incidental, and it is set out most directly in the sixth question of the first part, which argues from their supposed intellectual and moral weakness that they are more liable to the crime. Modern editors and historians treat this as a documented feature of the text. Readers should note that it is the book's claim about women, not a description of who women were, and that the reasoning is circular: the accused were mostly women, so women must be more susceptible, so it is right to look for the crime among women.
How Much Did It Actually Cause
The Malleus has a reputation as the engine of the witch trials, and that reputation is older and firmer than the evidence for it. It went through many printings between 1487 and the seventeenth century, which shows there was a market. It does not show what the buyers did.
Historians who have looked at the question directly find the correlation weak. Prosecution was intense in some territories that show little sign of the book and light in others where it was owned. The heaviest waves of trials came a century and more after publication, driven by local courts, local panics and local law rather than by one manual. Julian Goodare and others therefore treat the Malleus as one symptom of a shift in how learned Europe conceived the crime, rather than as the cause of it. Against that, historians who emphasise the transmission of the demonological model note that the book gave later writers a ready-made template and a claim of authority they reused.
Two features of the printed object carry more weight than the argument inside it. A papal bull of 1484, Summis desiderantes affectibus, was bound in as a preface; it had authorised Heinrich Kramer's commission and said nothing about the book, but printed there it reads as papal endorsement. An approbation from the theology faculty at Cologne was printed with it too, and scholars have questioned how much of that document the faculty actually signed.
What is not in dispute is what the book is. It is a source about inquisitors and courts. It is not a source about witches, because there were none.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Authored By
Written after his witch prosecution at Innsbruck was stopped and he was expelled from the diocese.
Critiqued
The canon held the night flight to be a dream and belief in it to be unbelief. The Malleus could not overturn it and argued around it instead, holding that the canon described an older delusion while the courts faced a new sect formed by pact.
Critiqued By
Weyer granted the demonology and argued that the accused were ill, melancholic or deluded and incapable of the acts charged.
Scot went further than Weyer and argued that the crime itself was impossible.
Derived From
Nider's fifth book supplied the picture of witches as an organised sect, two generations before the Malleus.
Related To
Why this is disputed. The Malleus Maleficarum is the most notorious of the witch-hunting prosecution manuals, but historians of the European witch trials disagree over how much it actually drove the prosecutions themselves. Its printing history shows fewer editions and a narrower circulation in the immediate decades after 1487 than its later reputation suggests, and some scholars argue its status as the single engine of the trials is a later exaggeration that outran the evidence of its actual influence on courts and prosecutors at the time, while others maintain it shaped clerical and judicial thinking about witchcraft well beyond its measurable print runs.
Sources
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