The Hammer of Witches
A best-selling book authorised by the Vatican incited the capture, torture and burning of some 50,000 innocent women. I dedicate this essay to their memory.
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Socrates and the first ‘self’; Digiselves versus Bioselves; Theocracy versus Democracy
ONE MORNING, while out for a walk, Helena Scheuberin passed the visiting inquisitor, a Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer, whose sermons had disgusted her.
She spat at his feet and cried, ‘Fie on you, you bad monk, may the falling evil take you.’
Earlier, Scheuberin had stood during one of Kramer’s sermons and denounced him as a bad man in league with the Devil, who nourished an unholy obsession with witches. She refused to attend his church services and urged others to join her boycott.
We’re in Innsbruck, in 1485. Scheuberin, while married to a wealthy local burger, appears to have squandered her bourgeois respectability on at least one adulterous affair. Rumours suggest that she’d poisoned a local knight who’d rejected her sexual advances.
Gossip about her adultery and her dabbling in poisons swirled around this prominent woman and fanned her reputation for sorcery.
She was a witch, concluded Kramer, who also went by the pompous Latinate title of ‘Henricus Institor’. His job, which enjoyed the pope’s blessing, was to hunt down and condemn sorcerers, witches and demons in the Swiss diocese.
Kramer came from a long line of inquisitors who entertained sado-erotic fantasies about the women they intended to drag before the Inquisition. Scheuberin’s body and the details of her sex life obsessed him.
His austere, uncompromising piety disguised a diabolical hatred of this influential and attractive woman, who publicly loathed him and appears to have spurned him. Not only was she a witch; she was a seductress!
On 29 October 1485, Helena Scheuberin and thirteen other alleged witches were summoned on Kramer’s orders before a tribunal in the Town Hall. It was a grand affair, conducted in the presence of a representative of the local bishop, a doctor of theology, three brothers of the Dominican order and two notaries.
Kramer led the hearing, as befitted his office. To the tribunal’s acute discomfort, he began by probing the details of Helena’s sex life. When had she lost her virginity? With whom? How? He justified this line of interrogation on the grounds that ‘all witches have been slaves from a young age to carnal lust and various adulteries’.
The local dignitaries were aghast. Who knew where such an investigation might lead? To them? A defence lawyer (and the bishop’s representative) intervened, finding Kramer’s questions unseemly and intrusive, and his procedure in error. The tribunal unanimously dismissed the case against Scheuberin.
Kramer refused to accept the verdict and stayed in town to press his case. His malevolence lingered over Innsbruck like a shroud, compelling the bishop of Brixen, Georg Golser, to expel the monk on the grounds of insanity and for harbouring a disgraceful infatuation with the defendant.
Kramer returned to Cologne, pursued by the furies of vengeance. His rage ran deeper than a single ‘witch’. In Kramer’s mind, women were weak, lustful and immoral. They placed spells and curses on the ‘gentlemen’ they wished to seduce. The worst-afflicted cases were satanic, demon-obsessed, and must be stopped lest they poisoned the decent society of men.
In 1486 Kramer completed a long treatise proposing a solution to ‘the witch problem’ which he called Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’). The 1519 edition would carry the name of fellow inquisitor Jacob Sprenger as a co-author, perhaps to give the book added credibility. Their 700-page set of instructions to identifying, interrogating and punishing witches received the imprimatur of the Catholic Church at the time, and would serve as the definitive secular guide to Catholic and Protestant witch-hunting for the next 120 years. Its early editions sold more copies than any other book except the Bible.
The Malleus Maleficarum inflamed society against anyone accused of sorcery. Perhaps the defendant had spoken her mind, outbrained the men around her, brewed a healing potion, fallen in love with someone she shouldn’t have, spurned the advances of the powerful, or displayed signs of eccentricity or ‘hysteria’. Beneath its tone of patriarchal pomposity growled the cruelty of men of the cloth for whom the interrogation and torture of ‘witches’ satisfied the blame they placed on all women for exciting the demon of lust in their notionally celibate lives.
Women were more likely to be witches, according to Kramer, because women were more impressionable than men – they were ‘prone to believing’ – and hence were easily corrupted by the Devil. Since they lacked the physical strength to defy men, they sought to avenge themselves ‘secretly through acts of sorcery’.
Women were vain, capricious beings, he wrote, ‘governed by carnal lusting’: ‘they even cavort with demons to satisfy their lust’. For hundreds of pages Kramer snarls away in this tone, the pall of his humiliation overhanging every sentence.
Witches, he claimed, were empowered by the Devil. Witches caused infertility and miscarriages, they turned babies demonic, and they cast spells that changed men into beasts. In fact, Kramer and Sprenger devoted an entire chapter to the penis and the question of whether sorceresses worked ‘on the male member’ – to make it erect or flaccid, or to try to remove it altogether.
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The Malleus Maleficarum luridly details ‘the method of exterminating’ witches. The accused would be granted a defence lawyer and witnesses, but Kramer’s prejudices negated any hope of justice. Women were often deceived into thinking that if they confessed, they would not be executed.
Torture was designed to force a confession, whatever the truth. One method was to strip the accused naked and bind her body to a pulley called a strappado. Her hands were bound behind her back and her body winched into the air, facing down. Her body weight would dislocate her arms. The agony usually elicited a swift confession.
If this failed, the torturer tried other methods: she might be forced to carry a red-hot iron or drink boiling water or ‘dunked’ repeatedly in a river. After the inquisitor had secured a ‘confession’, the ‘witch’ would be condemned to death or imprisonment, depending on the severity of her case. All this was done ‘in the name of Our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ’.
By these means, inquisitors and their Catholic agents believed they were cleansing society of witches and salvaging the souls of the accused, who were encouraged to repent. If a convicted witch proved impenitent, the judge would damn her with these words:
‘Since we desired with all our heart, as we still do, to bring you back to the Unity of the Holy Church and to remove this heretical depravity from your bowels, we employed our efforts to make you save your soul and escape the death of your body and that of your soul in Hell applying various appropriate methods to make you convert to salvation, but you . . . led astray by an evil spirit, preferred to be tortured with the savage and everlasting torments in Hell . . .’
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The Vatican firmly approved of the methods recommended by the Malleus Maleficarum. Pope Innocent VIII (1432-1492) was the father of at least seven illegitimate children, the devious backer of the French army against Naples, and the instigator of a failed crusade against the Turks. Yet his most lethal gift to posterity was the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, published on 5 December 1484. This authorised Kramer’s and Sprenger’s book (and published many of its recommendations), and sanctioned the arrest, prosecution and execution of anyone found guilty of witchcraft. According to Innocent:
‘It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany . . . many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the Catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions . . . ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth . . .’
Innocent’s papal bull fulfilled the work of popes Eugene IV in 1437 and 1445, Callixtus III in 1457 and Pius II in 1459, and inspired future witch hunts under popes Alexander VI in 1494, Julius II and Leo X in 1521, Adrian VI in 1523 and Clement VII in 1524. All were committed to ridding the world of demons they believed had possessed the souls of countless women and a few men.
The year after Summis desiderantes affectibus was issued, forty-one women were found guilty of witchcraft and burned alive in Como, Italy. The black-robed Dominicans were the engineers of the persecution in Germany and the border regions with Italy, including Milan and Bologna. Before long the craze had swept all Europe and extended to the colonies.
Kramer’s wretched book guided the capture, torture and execution by burning or drowning of 40,000–50,000 innocent women and around 6000 men. Most were over forty, and were often single, cleverer than average and creatively minded. Many had dared to express a thought of their own, to do the work of men, to write or teach, to oppose an injustice, to dabble in healing or ‘science’, or to refuse to submit to laws and customs that entitled her husband to coerce or rape her. Many others were poorly educated, depressed or mentally ill, and unable to understand what they had done wrong.
A few were women of striking talent and character, with a strong sense of their own minds, who would have enriched any healthy society that valued the intelligence and creativity of its citizens. Alas, Europe in the seventeenth century was not such a society. The tribal savagery unleashed by the Reformation ratcheted up the hysteria against witches, whose persecution peaked during the Thirty Years’ War, a time of superstition and intolerance.
One victim was Agnes Samson, garotted then burned for witchcraft in Edinburgh on 28 January 1591. The report of her confession stated:
‘Agnes confesses that after the death of her husband the devil appeared unto her in the night [while] she was [thinking of] her bairns [babies] . . . promising that if she would serve him she nor they should lack nothing. And being motivated with her poverty and his fair promises of riches and revenge of her enemies, took him for her master and renounced Christ.’
She was accused of having made a ‘wax image’ and ‘raised a spirit’ against her hated father-in-law, who had appeared to her in the likeness of ‘a black dog’, and who, she told the court, had violently abused her sisters.
Nearly a hundred years later, little had changed: the witch hunters were still at it. In 1672, Elizabeth Tibbots, aged eighteen, of the parish of Stoneleigh, near Coventry, was seen acting ‘incredibly strangely’ by a male observer. He grew convinced that she had been ‘bewitched’ by the Devil.
‘Credible witnesses’ had seen Tibbots in the grip of ‘strange fits’, according to his letter of 2 November 1672. During these seizures, she reportedly ‘vomited up . . . pebble stones near as big as eggs, knives, scissors, pieces of glass, some of them two or three inches square, pieces of iron, an iron bullet of at least eight inches round . . . and several other things, many whereof are now at our Mayor’s, and have been evidently seen to come out of her mouth’.
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The craze reached the American colonies with the Puritan settlers, whose extreme susceptibility to accusations of heresy led to the rounding up and interrogation of hundreds of women accused of witchcraft. Only a few were condemned to death – by hanging (burning was the preferred method in Europe).
The female body lacked ‘the strength and vitality’ of a man’s, the Puritans believed, and this made women more vulnerable to the malign influence of Satan, as they were unable to shield their souls from the Devil’s corruption. The Puritans branded African American and Native American women ‘inherently evil’ and ‘unable to control their connection to Satanic wickedness’.
The apotheosis of this hysteria was the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, in which nineteen innocent people were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One died under torture, and at least five died in prison, for ‘practising witchcraft’ on the strength of the ‘evidence’ of a group of young girls, who persuaded the court that the accused were demonically possessed and had caused their fainting spells and convulsions. The Salem witch trials were the ‘defining example of intolerance and injustice in American history’, writes Anna K. Danziger Halperin, curator of a 2023 exhibition about the trials.
The events at Salem were the consequences of fear and stupidity allied with rank superstition. Consider the examination on 22 April 1692 of Mary Esty, a well-spoken, exemplary citizen who was blamed for inflicting fits and shortness of breath on the children.
When Esty held her hands, a child copied her, crying that she couldn’t free her hands until Esty did. The same girl claimed Esty’s ghost had crept into her bed and laid a hand on her breast. When Esty bowed her head, the children did the same, then cried that she was trying to break their necks. A halfwit could see through these childish games, but not the good folk of Salem, as this transcript shows:
Magistrate [to the children]: Doth this woman hurt you?
Many mouths were stopt, & several other fits seized them. The children accused Esty of hurting them . . .
Magistrate [to Esty]: What have you done to these children?
Esty: I know nothing.
Magistrate: . . . How far have you complyed w’th Satan whereby he takes this advantage ag’t you?
Esty: Sir, I never complyed but prayed against him all my dayes, I have no complyance with Satan, in this. What would you have me do?
Magistrate: Confess if you be guilty.
Esty: I will say it, if it was my last time, I am clear of this sin.
Magistrate: Of what sin?
Esty: Of witchcraft.
Magistrate [to the children]: Are you certain this is the woman?
Never a one could speak for [their] fits.
One who spoke out against the Salem madness was thirty-four-year-old Thomas Brattle, the son of the town’s richest citizen. Brattle was a well-travelled merchant with a respect for science and no agenda other than the pursuit of truth.
By the time he gave his deposition, nineteen ‘witches’ had been hanged and another fifty had ‘confessed’ (of some 300 accused), variously, to ‘flying through the air’, casting spells and signing pacts with the Devil in their own blood. One admitted to having a cloven hoof.
Should the mania continue, Brattle argued, the justices themselves would be remembered as being in league with the Devil, and the Massachusetts authorities exposed as being plagued by ‘ignorance and folly’.
The child accusers were acting through their imaginations, not their ‘visions’, he submitted. He dismissed as risible the idea of ‘spectral evidence’ – images the girls claimed to see that no one else could see.
Nor were the events at Salem an ‘unprecedented, infernal assault’ on the piety of New England, as the justices believed. ‘The blind nonsensical parties’, Brattle charged, were not the colluding children or the ‘witches’ but the eminent adult members of the Salem community who had validated the hysteria.
In time, the Malleus Maleficarum, the ultimate source of all this madness, would be condemned as a despicable tract, a monument to groundless suspicion, moral depravity and institutional fantasy practised by a mob of old monks in whom the pope had endued the power of life or death over anyone accused of sorcery. The one book Rome should have burned had directly led to the burning, hanging, torture or imprisonment of tens of thousands of innocent women.
Next Thursday, 10th October 2024: Socrates, the first ‘self’
Selected sources and further reading:
Broedel, H.P. (2003) The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brooks, R.B. (14 January 2104) ‘Mercy Lewis: Orphaned Afflicted Girl’, History of Massachusetts Blog.
Burckhardt, J. and Middlemore, S. (transl.) (1990) The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London: Penguin Classics.
Carroll, M. and Stone, J. (2002) ‘Mercy Lewis’, Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, Charlottesville: University of Virginia.
Danziger Halperin, A.K. (23 October 2022) ‘The Salem Trials Challenge Us to Resist Moral Panic and Suspicion’, History News Network.
Demos, J.P. (2004) Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halsall, P. (ed.) (1996) ‘Witchcraft Documents (15th Century)’, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, New York: Fordham University.
Kramer, H. (2000) The Malleus Maleficarum, New York: Dover Publications.
Lea, H.C. (2020) A History of the Inquisition of Spain (Vol. 1–4), Prague: e-artnow.
Maxwell-Stuart, P.G. (2011) Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings, London: Continuum.
McMillan, T.J. (September 1994) ‘Black Magic: Witchcraft, Race, and Resistance in Colonial New England’, Journal of Black Studies, 25(1), pp. 99–117.
Papal Encyclicals: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/ (5 December 1484) Innocent VIII: ‘Summis desiderantes affectibus’.
Pollock, N. (ed.) (2000) ‘Newes from Scotland’, Archives and Special Collections, Glasgow: University of Glasgow.
Ray, B. (ed.) ‘Mary Esty Executed, September 22, 1692’, Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, Charlottesville VA: The University of Virginia.
Reis, E. (June 1995) ‘The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England’, The Journal of American History, 82(1), pp. 15–36.
Roach, M.K. (2004) The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community under Siege, Lanham MD: Taylor Trade Publishing.
Samson, A. (1590) ‘“A Witch’s Confession”: Confession of Agnes Samson’, London: The National Archives.
Schiff, S. (2016) The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, Boston: Back Bay Books.
Shahar, S. (2003) The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge.
Trevor-Roper, H. (2001) The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, Carmel IN: Liberty Fund.
Wilson, P.H. (2010) Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War, London: Penguin Books.