The 'Malleus Maleficarum' and the construction of witchcraft

Theology and popular belief

Hans Broedel

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719064418
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.

1
Introduction:
contested categories

On the morning of October 29th, 1485, dignitaries began to assemble in the great meeting room of Innsbruck’s town hall. They included Cristan Turner, licentiate in the decretals and the special representative of Georg Golser, bishop of Brixen, Master Paul Wann, doctor of theology and canon law, Sigismund Saumer, also a licentiate in the decretals, three brothers of the Dominican Order, a pair of notaries, and the inquisitor, Henry Institoris.¹ They were there to witness the interrogation of Helena Scheuberin, who, along with thirteen others, was suspected of practicing witchcraft. Scheuberin would have been familiar to at least some of these men: an Innsbruck native, she had been married for eight years to Sebastian Scheuber, a prosperous burger. She was also an aggressive, independent woman who was not afraid to speak her mind, a trait which on this occasion had landed her in serious trouble. From the formal charges against her, we learn that not long after the inquisitor had first arrived in Innsbruck with the stated intention of bringing witches to justice, she had passed him in the street, spat, and said publicly, “Fie on you, you bad monk, may the falling evil take you.”² Worse still, Scheuberin had also stayed away from Institoris’ sermons and had encouraged others to do likewise, even going so far, as the next charge against her reveals, as to disrupt one sermon by loudly proclaiming that she believed Institoris to be an evil man in league with the devil – a man whose obsession with witchcraft amounted to heresy.³

It is possible that Scheuberin was aware that she had a reputation for harmful sorcery, and that her fear of suspicion led her unwisely to take the offensive when the inquisitor appeared. If such were the case, her tactics were spectacularly ill-conceived. Institoris was a man who treasured his orthodoxy above all things, and we may well imagine that he was deeply offended by Scheuberin’s slander; more seriously, though, her attack upon the work of the Papal Inquisition was manifest evidence that she was herself either a heretic or a witch. A searching investigation of Scheuberin’s life and character ensued, producing additional charges: she had kept company with suspected heretics; she had caused a woman’s illness in order to have her husband as her lover; and, most seriously, in January of the previous year she had killed, either through witchcraft or through poison, a knight with whom she wished to have an adulterous affair.⁴ Scheuberin thus stood accused of using magic to cause injury and death, of causing maleficium in the jargon of the court. Since this was a charge familiar to all those in attendance at her interrogation, the various members of the tribunal must have expected to hear testimony directly relevant to this crime. If so, they were in for a surprise.

In the preamble to the charges against Scheuberin, the inquisitor alluded to sorcery only indirectly; instead he dwelt upon the relationship between witchcraft and sexual immorality, the one being, in his opinion, a necessary complement to the other. Institoris observed that,

[just as it is hard to suspect an upstanding and decent person of heresy,] so on the contrary a person of bad reputation and shameful habits of faith is easily defamed as a heretic, indeed it is a general rule that all witches have been slaves from a young age to carnal lust and to various adulteries, just as experience teaches.⁵

Helena Scheuberin was an ideal example of this principle: a woman of questionable morals, rumored to be sexually promiscuous, and with a reputation for maleficent magical power. Hence, for Institoris, she was a witch, and, by definition, once this identification was made, she also became guilty of demonolatry and of personal and sexual commerce with the devil. For Institoris, such an identification was crucial to his thinking about witches, and the function of an inquisitorial proceeding was in large part to provide a context in which this identification could be made and proved. To this end, he began his interrogation with a series of questions about Scheuberin’s virginity and sexual history that made his fellow commissioners exceedingly uncomfortable.⁶ Soon Bishop Golser’s representative asked the inquisitor directly to cease this line of questioning since it seemed to him improper and irrelevant to the case at hand. Institoris then began to question the witness about several specific points of her testimony, but again his manner was so offensive to the episcopal commissioners that they protested and called a halt to the morning’s proceedings.

When the court reconvened, it was with a telling addition: the bishop’s representatives had sanctioned the presence of Johann Merwais, whom the documents reveal to be a licentiate in the decretals and a doctor of medicine. From Institoris’ perspective, though, his calling was infinitely more sinister: he was an advocate for the defense – a lawyer. Merwais immediately raised questions about the trial’s validity, accusing the inquisitor of asking leading questions and of making a variety of serious procedural errors. Upon investigation, the defense council’s motion to dismiss was approved, and over Institoris’ vehement objections the commission vacated the process and released the suspects.

Through this little drama we see clearly revealed the extent to which the category “witch” was contested in late-fifteenth-century Germany. All the learned men at Scheuberin’s trial believed in witchcraft. If, up to this point, Bishop Golser and his representatives had supported the inquisitor with no real enthusiasm, they certainly had not interfered with his investigation. Nor did they object to prosecuting those who caused injuries through magic. They and the inquisitor simply disagreed about how a witch should be recognized, and, on a more fundamental level, about what a witch actually was. Moreover, this was not simply an isolated confrontation between inquisitorial and local authorities but rather a reflection of a much more widespread debate within the learned, ecclesiastical community over these same issues. Thus, inspired by this local humiliation, Henry Institoris retired to Cologne to write a detailed and comprehensive defense of his beliefs. And so, in a way, the insults of an otherwise obscure woman were responsible for one of the best-known, most quoted, and, indeed, most infamous of all medieval texts, the “Hammer of Witches,” the Malleus Maleficarum.

The study which follows examines the problem of the construction of witchcraft in fifteenth-century Europe, with particular reference to this text. Prior to the fifteenth century, people spoke in terms of heretics, of maleficium, of monstrous female spirits – the lamiae and strigae, but not of a single composite category, “witch.” By the mid-sixteenth century, however, educated men generally agreed upon the definitions of “witch” and “witchcraft,” definitions which drew upon, but were clearly distinguished from, older categories. Since the Malleus played a significant role in this evolution of terms, it seems reasonable to focus upon this text, and to determine how its authors arrived at their particular conception of witchcraft, how the idea of witchcraft functioned within wider cognitive fields, and where the witch of the Malleus fit into the learned discourse of fifteenth-century witchcraft.⁷

First, however, we must understand the basic arguments of the text, its origins, structure, and methods. This study, taken up in chapter 2, locates the text and its authors in space and time, as the products of both Dominican and German experience. The arguments of the Malleus are a response to failure and an answer to critics both numerous and hostile. They aim in the first place to demonstrate the existence and prevalence of witchcraft and the terrible threat it poses. Secondly, the text provides sufferers from witchcraft with a broad range of remedies, both legal and spiritual, of proven effectiveness. Finally, the text is a guide for civil and ecclesiastical authorities to the successful detection and prosecution of witches. In the course of these prolonged discussions, Institoris and Sprenger provide a remarkably complete picture of their witch, along with descriptions of her origins, habits, and powers.

Before this image could be plausible, even intelligible, to a theologically sophisticated audience, however, Institoris and Sprenger had to define appropriate relationships between witchcraft and established conceptual fields. This problem was pressing because, as will be argued throughout, the authors’ conception of witchcraft was ultimately grounded in traditional beliefs and practices, neither of which had an inherent theological component. In order to construct a category of “witch” on the basis of such beliefs, theoreticians were obligated to make it compatible with a learned, theologically informed worldview. An examination of the relationships between witchcraft, God and the devil, the projects of chapters 3 and 4, follows in the inquisitors’ footsteps, and reveals how they reconciled data from testimony and experience with their assumptions about the nature of the universe.

That witchcraft was necessary in the first place seems much the product of a peculiarly late-medieval way of looking at the devil and diabolic power. Many witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger prominent among them, embraced an oddly bifurcated devil, a being of transcendent but mechanical power for evil, and a creature whose physical presence was more often of an almost trivial appearance. This disjunction between impressive diabolic power and minimal diabolic presence demanded a mediator who could channel and direct disordering and harmful forces on earth. The witch neatly filled this void. A comparison of the beliefs of various fifteenth-century witch-theorists reveals that those who held different, more unitary, conceptions of the devil conceived of witches that were correspondingly less powerfully threatening. Their witches remained firmly subordinate to devils, fully dependent upon their masters for leadership and agenda.

A second problem faced by all witch-theorists was to explain why a just God would grant permission for witches to wreak such havoc upon the world. Here again, the belief in a powerful, aggressive, threatening witch corresponded to a mechanical and liberal view of divine permission. Where God provided meaningful oversight to demons, witchcraft was not particularly threatening. If, however, God was so offended by human sin that virtually all diabolic requests to visit punishment upon it were approved, witches were free to utilize the power of the devil almost automatically. This was a view of diabolic and divine power that was intensely anthropocentric; although the source of power was ultimately supernatural, it was deployed only by the will and effort of men and for their own purposes.

In a universe where God and the devil had to such an extent abandoned their traditional roles, learned theologians had plenty of space in which to carve out the new category of witchcraft. In the Malleus, the witch becomes the effective agent of diabolic power, a living, breathing, devil on earth in respect to those around her. On the other hand, the witch’s power was to some extent balanced by the power of the Church, which could deploy divine power in the form of sacraments and sacramentals for the protection of the faithful. While God and the devil retreated into mechanical passivity the efforts of their human followers became increasingly important. For this reason, the arguments of the Malleus focus as much upon spiritual remedies as upon the power of witches, and upon the thin but critical line that separates the diabolic power from the divine.

Although the broad contours of late-medieval learned conceptions of witchcraft were determined by basic metaphysical assumptions, the specific form these conceptions took was primarily the result of the evidence and experience available to various authors. In chapter 5 I take up the epistemological problems posed by belief in witchcraft. In the case of Institoris and Sprenger, their category “witch” responded to their experience as inquisitors, experience which included extensive familiarity with the oral testimony of victims of witchcraft and of accused witches themselves. Institoris and Sprenger did not preside over the trials of learned individuals or even of locally prominent ones; their witches were the common people’s witches, those unpleasant and unpopular individuals held responsible for damaging crops, souring milk, and causing illness out of petty malice. In their trials, rumor, hearsay, and legend played an important part. Moreover, because of their Dominican training, the authors were predisposed to accept almost any consistent body of testimony at face value. They repeatedly report as fact anything authenticated by the testimony of “reliable witnesses.” As a result, Institoris and Sprenger’s notion of witchcraft retained a congruence with traditional beliefs lacking in the constructions of authors with different experience or epistemological orientations.

For all theorists, late-medieval witchcraft was a composite – a combination of motifs derived from a number of quite different traditions: those associated with monstrous female spirits, animal transformation, demonolatrous heresy, maleficent magic, and superstition are among the most prominent. Chapters 5 and 6 set these categories in relation to one another, and show how witch-theorists combined them according to the evidence available to them and their assumptions about the world. The resulting composite figures were in no way haphazard; rather, each theorist used one of these established categories as a kind of conceptual template to provide the underlying principles around which his version of witchcraft was ordered and constructed. In the Malleus, as in some other German texts, the witch was defined through her maleficium and practice of magic. Throughout southern Europe authors tended to center witchcraft around those traditions earlier associated with the bonae res and other female spirits. Many French models of witchcraft depicted the witch more as a demonized heretic – a being defined by her willing entry into the demonic pact and her worship of the devil. In every case, however, the template originally chosen by the witch-theorist both defined and restricted the field of his inquiry and the scope of his investigation, while determining at the same time the inherent plausibility of his definition of “witch” and “witchcraft” and the extent to which these categories could be used to drive witchcraft persecutions.

I will argue that the strength of the category “witchcraft” in the Malleus was that the narrative paradigms by which evaluations of witchcraft and the identification of witches were made on the local level in daily life informed its construction. In villages, witchcraft was created within a discursive field of “words and deeds,” in narrative accounts of unexpected or otherwise unexplainable harm.⁸ In these narratives, the various threads that comprised maleficium were woven together to decide the identity of witches beyond reasonable doubt. In the Malleus, Institoris and Sprenger raised these explanatory mechanisms to the level of learned discourse, by integrating them (however uncomfortably) into a more theologically sophisticated conception of the world. In essence, the authors provided their audience with a window onto the discursive field in which their informants constructed witchcraft themselves, and in so doing gave their own construction of witchcraft a utility and persuasive force not found in its competitors.

Necessary to the success of this model was the close identification of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on translation
• 1 Introduction: contested categories
• 2 Origins and arguments
• 3 The inquisitors’ devil
• 4 Misfortune, witchcraft, and the will of God
• 5 Witchcraft: the formation of belief – part one
• 6 Witchcraft: the formation of belief – part two
• 7 Witchcraft as an expression of female sexuality
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover