Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger: Malleus maleficarum

Context

Henricus Institoris, with the help of Jacobus Sprenger, composed the Malleus maleficarum in a time of transition between the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500) and the early-modern period (ca. 1500–1800). The European Late Middle Ages was a period when many began to question traditional authority, such as the monopoly the Roman Catholic Church held on interpreting the Bible and outlining religious doctrine. These concerns would be realized in early-modern Europe, when Martin Luther’s criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 sparked the Reformation. The subsequent troubled religious, social, and political environment helped to produce what have been called witch hunts, or sporadic persecution against perceived witches in certain parts of Europe, most notably the Germanic regions, between about 1550 and 1700.

Although the Malleus maleficarum clearly deals with what is now called witchcraft, it is more a product of the Middle Ages than the early-modern period. Institoris describes the harmful magic he discusses as “sorcery” and its practitioners as sorcerers or sorceresses. This terminology provides a clue to how Institoris thought of the people who, as he believed, colluded with the Devil. Sorcery, Institoris claims, was by its nature a rejection of Christianity. Sorcerers and sorceresses renounced the faith they were born and baptized into and switched their allegiance from God to the Devil. Sorcery was not just a case of harmful acts or magic practiced with the help of demons, as witchcraft would later be described, but a case where the orthodox Christian became heterodox.

Following orthodox Christianity in Europe in the age before the Reformation meant adhering to the doctrines of the Roman Church as headed by the pope, today known as Roman Catholicism. The heretic, or heterodox person, had been instructed in these beliefs but willfully rejected them. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw an emergence of heretical ideas in western Europe, for reasons that scholars are still debating. Whatever their cause, the Church quickly realized the threat such unorthodox ideas posed to its authority. Heresy, the Church argued, was like a disease that could spread and infect the larger population and so needed to be eradicated. In the course of the thirteenth century, popes created the inquisitional office, appointing clerics as inquisitors to debate and, later, seek out and prosecute heretics.

The men who served as inquisitors were trained preachers, mostly members of the Dominican and Franciscan mendicant orders. The mendicants, or friars, unlike members of traditional monastic orders, who withdraw from the world to contemplate God, vowed to live like the apostles by wandering and preaching in cities, and so they were especially qualified to serve as inquisitors. Saint Dominic (ca. 1170–1221) was admired for his preaching against heretics in Spain and southern France, and the Dominicans subsequently became the pope’s right-hand men in the war against heresy, taking charge as inquisitors in many regions of Europe. The inquisitor’s job was to persuade heretics to return to the Christian fold. Those who were stubborn and refused to do so received capital punishment, while torture was used to persuade heretics to confess. Inquisitors functioned in a loose chain of command; it was not until the Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 that there was any centralized bureaucracy. The fact that the pope personally confirmed Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger as inquisitors over a region of Germany demonstrates that there was no systematic local organization of inquisitors before that period and in other areas of Europe. The pope took further responsibility in personally overseeing their duties through a papal bull, or directive, issued in December 1484, Summis desiderantes affectibus (Desiring with Supreme Ardor), in which he instructed that all local ecclesiastical authorities must assist Institoris and Sprenger in their duties.

Institoris and Sprenger, therefore, were products of the late medieval Roman Church’s concern over heresy and its potential to draw others away from orthodox Christianity. By the late fifteenth century, this seemed to be a losing battle. England and Bohemia (in the modern-day Czech Republic), in particular, seemed to be on the verge of religious revolt. In England, John Wycliffe had gained followers, called Lollards, by criticizing corruption in the Church hierarchy and calling for the Bible to be translated from Latin into spoken languages. In Bohemia, Jan Hus was an intellectual who challenged some of the theological doctrines of the Roman Church. The condemnation of Hus resulted in fifteen years of war in Bohemia between his supporters, the Hussites, and various secular and clerical authorities, as religion and politics became intertwined. Furthermore, in southern Germany just ten years before Institoris and Sprenger wrote their treatise, a peasant boy named Hans Behem (or Böhm) instigated a religious revolt by claiming that the Virgin Mary had visited him and told him to preach against the sins of the clergy. Institoris, in particular, as a Dominican inquisitor aware of this history, was devoted to preventing the same type of turmoil in the area under his command. The Malleus maleficarum, written primarily by Institoris, details his experiences seeking heretics in eastern Germany.

It was not unusual that Institoris heard about harmful acts of magic in the course of his duties and saw its practitioners as heretics. What is unique, and where Institoris’s discussion of sorcery differs from earlier texts, is that he steadfastly believed that all the stories he heard were true: that there were people who could transport themselves through the air, ate babies, and had secret rites with demons. Previous authors, influenced by a ninth-century tract called the Canon Episcopi, claimed that there were some women who imagined that they did such things but did not do so in reality. Institoris, in contrast, repeatedly argues that magic was truly practiced with the help of demons, allowing seemingly impossible acts to be manifested in the world. So while the Malleus maleficarum was composed within the context of the Late Middle Ages, it laid the foundation for what would become the early-modern conception of witchcraft.