Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
SLG Publishing (2011), Paperback, 136 pages
Description
The Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486-7, is the standard medieval text on witchcraft and it remained in print throughout the early modern period. Its descriptions of the evil acts of witches and the ways to exterminate them continue to contribute to our knowledge of early modern law, religion and society. Mackay's highly acclaimed translation, based on his extensive research and detailed analysis of the Latin text, is the only complete English version available, and the most reliable. Now available in a single volume, this key text is at last accessible to students and scholars of medieval history and literature. With detailed explanatory notes and a guide to further reading, this volume offers a unique insight into the fifteenth-century mind and its sense of sin, punishment and retribution.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member antiquary
Considered as a scholarly edition of an important historical source, this is very useful for those (like me) who cannot afford the complete new Latin text edition. It is far superior to the old Montague Summers version. Its content, of course, is fairly horrible.
LibraryThing member erock71
What we have here in Kramer and Sprenger is an artifact. And as an artifact it is a splendid example of historical Christian thought. Part I; Question XIV contains a subheading that summarizes the point of this tome: "That Witches Deserve the heaviest Punishment above All the Criminals of the
The "Hammer" was written to offer a protocol for trying and adjudicating (read: killing) alleged witches. It is safe to say that Salem and other incidences of spurious witch trials would not have been legitimized but by reference to this 15th century work of folklore. There is no doubt that Kramer and Sprenger were learned canons of the Church and they were attempting to remedy the problem of falsely accused witches being lynched by torch-and-pitchfork mobs. What they accomplished instead was bringing witch-hunts under the authority of the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum facilitated the further enmeshment of Church and State by prescribing the manner in which these cases should be adjudicated in the ecclesiastical and civil courts.
If you enjoy studying mythology or Church History (they often overlap)this is a compelling read. More than any other single artifact, this book sheds light on what was plaguing the collective mind of Christendom in the late middle ages. A read well worth the time.
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World." The "Hammer" was written to offer a protocol for trying and adjudicating (read: killing) alleged witches. It is safe to say that Salem and other incidences of spurious witch trials would not have been legitimized but by reference to this 15th century work of folklore. There is no doubt that Kramer and Sprenger were learned canons of the Church and they were attempting to remedy the problem of falsely accused witches being lynched by torch-and-pitchfork mobs. What they accomplished instead was bringing witch-hunts under the authority of the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum facilitated the further enmeshment of Church and State by prescribing the manner in which these cases should be adjudicated in the ecclesiastical and civil courts.
If you enjoy studying mythology or Church History (they often overlap)this is a compelling read. More than any other single artifact, this book sheds light on what was plaguing the collective mind of Christendom in the late middle ages. A read well worth the time.
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LibraryThing member Borg-mx5
The "Hammer of Witches". The instruction manual for how to detect witches. Originally published in 1489, this book is now only worthy for historical interest. The typeface is old and the repoduction is not always great. Stil very interesting reading.
LibraryThing member Cinq-Mars
(My Amazon review)
This set consists of two paperback volumes -- the first, a modern edition of the Latin text of the first edition of the Malleus Maleficarum; the second, a translation of that edition. The 700 some odd pages of the first volume begin with an extensive (approximately 189-page)
I thought long about merely obtaining the one volume edition, which consists of the translation and a (different and more popular) introduction, since for my own purposes immediate access to the Latin text is not so necessary, given its availability in a local library. However, the convenience of having the Latin text ready to hand, and the quality of the introductory material, led me to choose the two-volume set.
In either case, the very existence of Mackay's translation makes that of Montague Summers unnecessary for anyone whose primary concern is with the Malleus Maleficarum itself. However, for anyone whose primary interests lie in the reception and use of the Malleus in the English-speaking world of the last century (and after!), or in Summers himself, his translation will never be obsolete.
As a final point, I should mention that while Mackay's Malleus is published by Cambridge University Press, only the hardcover version of the two-volume version is actually printed by the Press. As is so often the case now, the paperback was printed in the US, and evidently without the care traditionally used with the products produced directly by the Press. The first set I received was missing six pages of from matter from the first volume (it began only with page vii). Amazon gave exemplary service in providing a prompt replacement set. However, it is very sensible to check for printing and binding errors as soon as possible after books are received; the distributed processes of modern book production make it easier for errors to occur, and harder for them to be caught.
This set consists of two paperback volumes -- the first, a modern edition of the Latin text of the first edition of the Malleus Maleficarum; the second, a translation of that edition. The 700 some odd pages of the first volume begin with an extensive (approximately 189-page)
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introduction -- a general introduction, followed by an introduction to the Latin text itself: in other words, what would make a respectable book of its own, if published separately. The second volume consists of the extensively and thoughtfully annotated translation (with its own brief introductory remarks). This is an updated and corrected version of the 2006 hardcover edition.I thought long about merely obtaining the one volume edition, which consists of the translation and a (different and more popular) introduction, since for my own purposes immediate access to the Latin text is not so necessary, given its availability in a local library. However, the convenience of having the Latin text ready to hand, and the quality of the introductory material, led me to choose the two-volume set.
In either case, the very existence of Mackay's translation makes that of Montague Summers unnecessary for anyone whose primary concern is with the Malleus Maleficarum itself. However, for anyone whose primary interests lie in the reception and use of the Malleus in the English-speaking world of the last century (and after!), or in Summers himself, his translation will never be obsolete.
As a final point, I should mention that while Mackay's Malleus is published by Cambridge University Press, only the hardcover version of the two-volume version is actually printed by the Press. As is so often the case now, the paperback was printed in the US, and evidently without the care traditionally used with the products produced directly by the Press. The first set I received was missing six pages of from matter from the first volume (it began only with page vii). Amazon gave exemplary service in providing a prompt replacement set. However, it is very sensible to check for printing and binding errors as soon as possible after books are received; the distributed processes of modern book production make it easier for errors to occur, and harder for them to be caught.
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LibraryThing member cjyurkanin
Fascinating review to come this weekend.
LibraryThing member BruceCoulson
Certainly in the running (in retrospect) as one of the most evil books of all time. The Hammer of the Witches is a VERY serious treatise on the Catholic legal view of witchcraft; what it is, how to identify perpetrators, and how witches should be punished. A legal guide book on procedures, as well
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a statement as to how serious the crime of witchcraft truly is. For scholars of Europe through the 15th-18th centuries. And useful for those who think our current legal system is terribly flawed; the Malleus is a record of how the law used to be practiced. Show Less
LibraryThing member SumisBooks
LMFAO No, but seriously, how the hell does someone come up with such whacked-out ideas and believe them to be reality? I seriously would like to know what drugs they were on when they wrote this. Now I understand some of the dumbest superstitions about witches that we still see pop up in movies and
What really makes me sad, is the fact that this book was used as the textbook for How to Kill Strong Women (especially midwives) 101. The witch hunting trade was BIG business in it's time and people got rich off pointing their fingers to have innocent people tortured and murdered so they could divvy up their possessions. And this stupid book with it's insane ideas helped them all do it. It's a low point in history that we see being repeated over and over. So very sad.
Despite hating this book, the authors, it's users and everything this book stood for... I would still recommend anyone interested in the subject to give it a read. It is a piece of our human history and a testament as to just how low we can go. Even though the content of this book is so horrible it's one of the most infamous books in all of history, I feel better now for having actually read it and knowing for myself exactly what's written in it. But it is pretty hard core. READER BEWARE!
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TV today (like how witches can't cry). Good grief.What really makes me sad, is the fact that this book was used as the textbook for How to Kill Strong Women (especially midwives) 101. The witch hunting trade was BIG business in it's time and people got rich off pointing their fingers to have innocent people tortured and murdered so they could divvy up their possessions. And this stupid book with it's insane ideas helped them all do it. It's a low point in history that we see being repeated over and over. So very sad.
Despite hating this book, the authors, it's users and everything this book stood for... I would still recommend anyone interested in the subject to give it a read. It is a piece of our human history and a testament as to just how low we can go. Even though the content of this book is so horrible it's one of the most infamous books in all of history, I feel better now for having actually read it and knowing for myself exactly what's written in it. But it is pretty hard core. READER BEWARE!
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LibraryThing member DarthDeverell
Montague Summers’ translation of Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum reproduces the 1486/1487 text in its entirety. In the book, Kramer and Sprenger outlined the theological underpinning for belief in witchcraft as well as the justifications for exterminating suspected
Sprenger’s name first appeared in connection with the book in 1519, leading some historians such as Joseph Hansen, to question this practice. Others, including Montague Summers, refute Hansen’s claims, so the book continues to be credited to both authors. The Malleus further linked witchcraft with “deviant” sexual practices between witches and demons, thereby adding to the belief among Western Christian nations that women were weaker or possessed of inherent sin. This patriarchal attitude, coupled with the chaos of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, fueled witch panics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The increase in witch trials naturally generated further works on witchcraft, including Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which attempted to critique witch trials as un-Christian, King James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which discussed necromancy and other black magic, Richard Bernard’s A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1629), which encouraged more evidence and witnesses in witchcraft investigations, and Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1692), which defended the Salem witch trials while also cautioning against overreliance on spectral evidence. For those interested in the history of witchcraft, this translation of the Malleus Maleficarum will be an invaluable resource as, like the aforementioned works, it sheds light on the cultural milieu in which the various trials occurred.
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witches. Further, the book situates sorcery among other heresies while advocating for inquisitions and torture in order to locate suspects and obtain confessions.Sprenger’s name first appeared in connection with the book in 1519, leading some historians such as Joseph Hansen, to question this practice. Others, including Montague Summers, refute Hansen’s claims, so the book continues to be credited to both authors. The Malleus further linked witchcraft with “deviant” sexual practices between witches and demons, thereby adding to the belief among Western Christian nations that women were weaker or possessed of inherent sin. This patriarchal attitude, coupled with the chaos of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, fueled witch panics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The increase in witch trials naturally generated further works on witchcraft, including Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which attempted to critique witch trials as un-Christian, King James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which discussed necromancy and other black magic, Richard Bernard’s A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1629), which encouraged more evidence and witnesses in witchcraft investigations, and Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1692), which defended the Salem witch trials while also cautioning against overreliance on spectral evidence. For those interested in the history of witchcraft, this translation of the Malleus Maleficarum will be an invaluable resource as, like the aforementioned works, it sheds light on the cultural milieu in which the various trials occurred.
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LibraryThing member elahrairah
This was an experience! Firstly, be warned. This is not the arcane text of rumour, its a complex and boring legal text with very few interesting points. Secondly, its bonkers. Its not just the entire premise is hateful and insane, but also that the philosophy is childlike and irrational. The logic
Curiously, the authors seem to feel a burning sense of justice. They make it very clear that there are going to be people making false claims and that it is the job of inquisitors to have a set of guidelines to ensuring that innocent women are not burned to death. But at the same time, these guidelines make it impossible for most women to escape death. For example, women who confess under torture have confessed and should be burned. But women who don't confess are under the "sorcery of silence" and are guilty. There is a strict hierarchy in place. A women of good reputation accused by one or two people of bad reputation will probably be alright, as long as the two stories are not corroborated by evidence (evidence in this case not being what we might think of as evidence but actually other hearsay), but in almost every other case the accusation or even suggestion that a woman might be a witch is enough to get her burned. The purpose of torture isn't to get evidence, its to get a confession. She is doomed at the moment a man says to the inquisitor "that woman is a witch". Everything else after that is a legal fiction, right up to moment the inquisitor passes the woman to a judge recommending mercy but meaning that the judge is to pronounce the death sentance - after all, a priest shouldn't be having women killled! There are so many catch 22s that there is no way out. Going to church or not going to church, being nice or not being nice, confessing or not confessing. Once you're accused you're dead, and the only question now is are you going to take anyone else with you.
One of the interesting things about religious logic is that it appears to take an opposite form to scientific progress. Science is supposed to take the experiments of the past and improve on them by testing and retesting sing newer technology and better equipment. Here evidence is based on traditional, on appeals to authorities hundreds of years old, or even longer. If it was good enough for a thousand years ago, its good enough for now even if we don't understand it, or worse, have misunderstood it. The authors here cite thousands of pieces of earlier thinking as evidence of truth, even though they often misquote, misunderstand, or misrepresent. Furthermore they reproduce errors that these earlier authorities made. Like naughty students they quote works quoted in those they read and pass the learning off as their own when they clearly haven;t read these original works or they'd know they were making an error. Folly upon folly, nothing new to be learned that the old whoremonger Augustine didn't know!
Other observations: curiously the author is able to recognise that power imbalances exist in social relations (which is more than most liberals today are able to do), but doesn't provide any assistance for the inquisitor in ameliorating these imbalances.
There is no defence. An advocate can only be appointed if they are not going to interfere. The role of the defence is to ensure that the prosecution is done properly, not to defend the accused. The accusation is enough.
If a person is accused of being a witch, they can be defended if they have a good reputation. To have a good reputation you need not have been accused of being a witch.
If a person confesses under torture, they should be required to confess whilst not under torture. This is to prevent people just confessing to stop the torture. If they will not confess whilst not being tortured, and I swear this is true, they should be tortured again.
A person can only be tortured once for each accusation. However gaps between periods of torture within this single torture of any duration are acceptable. The difference between this and multiple tortures is unclear.
People who show signs of pain under torture are witches doing evil witch things. People who don't, they're witches too.
Aside from the great minds of the history of Catholic thought, most of the churchmen of history have been corrupt and or worldly. But the ones we have now are all fine and upstanding. It is noted that this position has been recognised by theologians throughout history, but no-one seems to have noticed the irony.
This really is a work of staggering banality, by one of the finest legal minds the medieval church could come up with. It is pure drivel, the logic is inane and often imbecilic. It is pure evil, the misogynist's Mein Kampf. Really this is only of scholarly interest, I wouldn't bother reading this out of curiosity as I did. The editor's notes on my edition were erudite and wry, and without his guidance I would have given up long before, unable to wrangle any knowledge from the dense legalistic medieval prose. Five stars to him, but minus one star to Henry Institorius and gang.
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is broken, torturous, or requires giant leaps to make work. It is depressing to think of how many thousands of people were murdered following this logic. So this is a boring and dense legal document whose only real point of interest is that it was a murder manual. Only occasional anecdotes about witches killed or escaped add any colour at all, and even then its depressing colour. What other observations can I make? Well, during the section on how witches steal penises (they don't, they just cause the illusion of a missing penis) a story is recounted in evidence that is actually a older joke translated from Spanish to German so that the pun is lost. This is the quality of the evidence that we're talking about. Curiously, the authors seem to feel a burning sense of justice. They make it very clear that there are going to be people making false claims and that it is the job of inquisitors to have a set of guidelines to ensuring that innocent women are not burned to death. But at the same time, these guidelines make it impossible for most women to escape death. For example, women who confess under torture have confessed and should be burned. But women who don't confess are under the "sorcery of silence" and are guilty. There is a strict hierarchy in place. A women of good reputation accused by one or two people of bad reputation will probably be alright, as long as the two stories are not corroborated by evidence (evidence in this case not being what we might think of as evidence but actually other hearsay), but in almost every other case the accusation or even suggestion that a woman might be a witch is enough to get her burned. The purpose of torture isn't to get evidence, its to get a confession. She is doomed at the moment a man says to the inquisitor "that woman is a witch". Everything else after that is a legal fiction, right up to moment the inquisitor passes the woman to a judge recommending mercy but meaning that the judge is to pronounce the death sentance - after all, a priest shouldn't be having women killled! There are so many catch 22s that there is no way out. Going to church or not going to church, being nice or not being nice, confessing or not confessing. Once you're accused you're dead, and the only question now is are you going to take anyone else with you.
One of the interesting things about religious logic is that it appears to take an opposite form to scientific progress. Science is supposed to take the experiments of the past and improve on them by testing and retesting sing newer technology and better equipment. Here evidence is based on traditional, on appeals to authorities hundreds of years old, or even longer. If it was good enough for a thousand years ago, its good enough for now even if we don't understand it, or worse, have misunderstood it. The authors here cite thousands of pieces of earlier thinking as evidence of truth, even though they often misquote, misunderstand, or misrepresent. Furthermore they reproduce errors that these earlier authorities made. Like naughty students they quote works quoted in those they read and pass the learning off as their own when they clearly haven;t read these original works or they'd know they were making an error. Folly upon folly, nothing new to be learned that the old whoremonger Augustine didn't know!
Other observations: curiously the author is able to recognise that power imbalances exist in social relations (which is more than most liberals today are able to do), but doesn't provide any assistance for the inquisitor in ameliorating these imbalances.
There is no defence. An advocate can only be appointed if they are not going to interfere. The role of the defence is to ensure that the prosecution is done properly, not to defend the accused. The accusation is enough.
If a person is accused of being a witch, they can be defended if they have a good reputation. To have a good reputation you need not have been accused of being a witch.
If a person confesses under torture, they should be required to confess whilst not under torture. This is to prevent people just confessing to stop the torture. If they will not confess whilst not being tortured, and I swear this is true, they should be tortured again.
A person can only be tortured once for each accusation. However gaps between periods of torture within this single torture of any duration are acceptable. The difference between this and multiple tortures is unclear.
People who show signs of pain under torture are witches doing evil witch things. People who don't, they're witches too.
Aside from the great minds of the history of Catholic thought, most of the churchmen of history have been corrupt and or worldly. But the ones we have now are all fine and upstanding. It is noted that this position has been recognised by theologians throughout history, but no-one seems to have noticed the irony.
This really is a work of staggering banality, by one of the finest legal minds the medieval church could come up with. It is pure drivel, the logic is inane and often imbecilic. It is pure evil, the misogynist's Mein Kampf. Really this is only of scholarly interest, I wouldn't bother reading this out of curiosity as I did. The editor's notes on my edition were erudite and wry, and without his guidance I would have given up long before, unable to wrangle any knowledge from the dense legalistic medieval prose. Five stars to him, but minus one star to Henry Institorius and gang.
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LibraryThing member jeroenvandorp
An evil book from an evil writer. As the translator states, the Latin is bad, the book is a badly edited mess. So the stars go for the crisp Dutch translation. I would have preferred a hardcover; at 472 pages a paperback stretches the limit.
The deranged fantasies of a deranged man, valuable for
The deranged fantasies of a deranged man, valuable for
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all times, including ours. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition (Honorable Mention — Honorable Mention — 2006)
Language
Original publication date
1487
Physical description
136 p.; 5.51 inches
ISBN
1593622139 / 9781593622138
Other editions
Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer (Paper Book)
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