Heinrich Kramer

The most useful thing to know about Heinrich Kramer is that his own church stopped him. In 1485 he came to Innsbruck with a papal commission and opened proceedings against a group of local women. The bishop of Brixen, Georg Golser, looked at what Kramer was doing and intervened. The proceedings were found defective, the accused were released, and Kramer was told to leave the diocese. Golser's surviving correspondence about him is unflattering in the extreme.

That is the setting for the Malleus Maleficarum, which appeared within two years. Read against the Innsbruck failure, the book's most striking feature stops being its demonology and becomes its procedure. Its third part is an argument that ordinary criminal process is inadequate to this crime and that its safeguards must be relaxed. Kramer had just discovered, in a real courtroom, exactly which safeguards had defeated him.

He had the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of 1484 in hand before Innsbruck. He had solicited it because local clergy were obstructing his commission, and it says so: the bull complains that inquisitors are being impeded. Bound into the front of the book, that complaint reads to a purchaser as papal approval of everything inside. It is a good example of why the persecution cannot be described simply as what the church believed. Kramer's authority came from Rome and his opposition came from a bishop, and both were the church.

Kramer is worth an entry in an atlas of religion not because he was influential, which is disputed, but because his career lays out how the machinery actually worked when it worked at all.

An inquisitor arriving in a town had a commission but no local standing. He needed the cooperation of the secular authorities to arrest and to execute, and he needed the local bishop not to object. Where he got both, prosecutions could run. Where a bishop or a magistrate declined, as at Innsbruck, they stopped. That is why maps of the persecution are so uneven, with slaughter in one territory and almost nothing in the next: what varied was rarely belief and usually jurisdiction. Regions with strong central courts reviewing local verdicts prosecuted far less than regions where a village court could convict and burn without review.

Kramer went on to work in Bohemia and Moravia and died there around 1505, having spent a career pressing an argument that many of his own colleagues would not accept. The reputation that grew around him afterwards, of a man who single-handedly lit Europe, is a nineteenth century picture and it flatters him. The trials came a century after his death, in courts he never sat in, and they had their own local reasons.

None of which softens what the book did once it was in the hands of people who wanted it. Kramer supplied a shape, and a claim of authority, to anyone who later wanted a reason to set procedure aside.