The Malleus Maleficarum: What It Actually Is

The Malleus Maleficarum — “Hammer of Witches” in Latin — is among the most notorious books printed in the fifteenth century. Ask anyone why the European witch trials happened, and you will often get a one-sentence answer: because of that book. That answer is convenient, and wrong in the ways that matter.

The Malleus was vicious, methodical, and important. It was also condemned by the very theological faculty whose endorsement it claimed to carry, likely written by a single obsessive clergyman rather than two, and separated from the worst witch-hunting episodes by nearly a century. Understanding it requires separating what the text says from what later centuries claimed it caused.

The man who wrote it

Heinrich Kramer — writing under the Latinized name Henricus Institoris — was a Dominican friar and inquisitor active in southern Germany and the Alpine territories from the 1470s onward. The papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, issued by Pope Innocent VIII in December 1484, gave Kramer (and his fellow Dominican Jacob Sprenger) authority to prosecute suspected witches in Upper Germany. The bull was one of several Innocent VIII issued against various perceived threats to Christendom; it did not specifically commission a book.

What the bull did do was give Kramer institutional backing at a moment when local bishops and magistrates had been resisting his campaigns. In 1485, the Bishop of Brixen expelled Kramer from Innsbruck after a botched trial in which Kramer’s handling of a woman accused of sexual crimes was deemed improper by the court. This defeat appears to have galvanized him. By 1486 the Malleus was in print at Speyer, framed as a comprehensive answer to every obstacle — theological, legal, or bureaucratic — that a witch-hunter might encounter.

The authorship question

Editions of the Malleus printed after the first carry two names: Kramer and Sprenger. The pairing has stuck; most general references still list both men as authors. Modern scholarship has largely dismantled it.

Wolfgang Behringer and Günter Jerouschek, whose critical edition of the text is now the scholarly standard, argue that Kramer was the sole author. The case turns on several lines of evidence. Sprenger’s confirmed writings take positions that directly contradict the Malleus on key theological points. The earliest edition names only Kramer. Contemporaries who praised the text — including the Dominican inquisitor Sylvester Prieras, writing in the early sixteenth century, who cited Institoris as a vir magnus — make no mention of Sprenger as a co-contributor. Hans Peter Broedel, writing in his 2003 monograph on the text, acknowledges the arguments for sole authorship while noting that Dominican institutional culture shaped the work regardless of headcount.

Why did Sprenger’s name appear at all? The most plausible answer is strategic. Sprenger was dean of the University of Cologne and a far more respectable figure than the controversial Kramer. A second name — especially that name — lent the book an air of collaborative authority. The pattern fits Kramer’s broader approach to the text, which is built on borrowed and sometimes fabricated legitimacy.

The legitimacy gambit

The Malleus is unusually anxious about its own standing, and the anxiety shows in its front matter.

The text opens with the full text of the Summis desiderantes affectibus — the 1484 papal bull — placed as a preface. The implication is clear: the pope has approved this book. In fact, the bull predated the book by two years and authorised inquisitorial jurisdiction in a region, not the arguments of any particular treatise. Kramer inserted it without explicit permission. The Portland State University digital collection of the 1490 edition documents this prefatory maneuver in the second edition specifically.

More damaging is what happened when Kramer sought a genuine institutional endorsement. He submitted the Malleus to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne in 1487, hoping for an imprimatur that would silence critics. The faculty declined — and condemned the text on two grounds: it recommended procedures that were unethical and illegal, and its theological positions were inconsistent with Catholic demonological doctrine. In a move that should settle any question about his character, Kramer proceeded to insert a fraudulent endorsement from the Cologne Faculty into subsequent print editions anyway. The fraud was eventually noticed; it changed very little in the short term.

These two gambits — the papal bull and the forged Cologne approval — tell you something essential about the book and its author. The Malleus is not the Church’s position on witchcraft. It is one inquisitor’s position, dressed in stolen institutional clothing.

What the text actually argues

The Malleus is divided into three parts, each addressing a distinct problem.

Part One makes the theological case that witchcraft is real, that it constitutes heresy, and that skepticism about its existence is itself a heresy. This section is the most philosophically structured. It works through scholastic question-and-answer format, systematically refuting objections. Its most consequential claim is the elevation of sorcery from mere maleficium (harmful magic) to full heresy — a doctrinal move that shifted jurisdiction from ordinary courts to inquisitorial ones. This reclassification was, in practice, the Malleus’s most dangerous legacy: heresy trials ran under different rules, including the admission of anonymous accusers and the systematic use of torture.

Part Two catalogues the harms witches supposedly cause — impotence, illness, storm-raising, harm to livestock, the demonic pact, the witches’ sabbath — and offers remedies both ecclesiastical and magical. This is the section that draws most directly on popular belief, a dynamic Broedel reads as central to the text’s eventual authority. Because Kramer had actually conducted inquisitions and taken testimony from accused persons, the Malleus reads popular belief back into learned discourse. Magistrates and judges reading the text would recognize the categories from local testimony. That feedback loop between elite and popular belief systems is, for Broedel, the key to why the book worked.

Part Three is a procedural manual for prosecution. It specifies how to arrest, examine, and try a suspected witch; how to extract a confession; when and how to apply torture; what constitutes sufficient evidence; and what sentences are appropriate. The Malleus is explicit that death — typically burning — is the only certain remedy for proven witchcraft. This section is not theology. It is law office guidance.

The misogyny that is actually there

The Malleus is genuinely and systematically misogynistic, and the point requires no exaggeration. Part One’s question six — “Why Is Superstition Chiefly Found in Women?” — is a sustained argument that women are more susceptible to demonic influence than men because of their inferior reason, greater carnality, and inherent moral weakness. The argument draws on patristic sources and misreads them selectively.

Kramer connects female sexuality to witchcraft at nearly every point. The claim is not peripheral to the text; it is load-bearing. His own 1485 trial at Innsbruck, in which he interrogated a woman about her sexual history in ways the bishop found grossly improper, shadows the text’s obsessions.

Historians have nonetheless urged caution about letting the Malleus’s misogyny stand in for the entire European witch-hunting phenomenon. The Warwick University analysis of the text (drawing on Levack, 1995) notes that approximately 80 percent of witch-trial victims were women — a real and serious pattern — but that many modern scholars argue this cannot be explained solely as an expression of male misogyny, since women also accused other women at high rates. The Malleus articulates an extreme position on female nature; whether that position drove prosecutions or merely reflected existing anxieties is a question the historical record answers only partially.

Printing, spread, and actual reach

The Malleus went through six editions in the fifteenth century. By 1669 it had reached thirty-six editions — a significant run for any pre-modern text, made possible by the printing press, which was less than four decades old when Kramer first went to a printer. The book circulated across the German-speaking territories, into France, Italy, and eventually England.

But circulation is not the same as use. Behringer notes a gap that rarely appears in popular accounts: between approximately 1520 and 1580, no new editions of the Malleus were printed. This is precisely the period of the Reformation, religious wars, and the first major escalations of social crisis that would fuel the worst hunts. The text was out of print for sixty years at the moment Europe was building toward its most intense persecution episodes. It remained a reference — Sylvester Prieras cited it as authoritative well into the early sixteenth century — but its influence on the peak hunts of the 1580s through 1630s was indirect at best.

The worst documented episodes — the German prince-bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg in the 1620s, the Scottish panics of the 1590s, the Swedish Mora trials of 1669–1670 — operated under local circumstances: political fragmentation, Reformation and Counter-Reformation competition, crop failure, and social rupture. The Malleus was a century old by then. Levack’s estimate of approximately 110,000 trials and 60,000 executions across the full period (roughly 1400 to 1750) is the scholarly baseline; Ronald Hutton revises the execution figure downward to approximately 40,000. Neither number supports the mythology of a single causal text.

How historians read it now

Three revisionary frames have shaped the scholarly consensus since the 1980s.

Broedel’s argument is the most granular. In The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (2003), he reads the text as a product of Dominican pastoral culture: because Kramer’s order was dedicated to preaching and direct engagement with laypeople, the Malleus absorbed popular belief from the ground up. This made it practically legible to courts in a way that more purely scholastic demonological treatises were not. The book’s authority, in Broedel’s reading, came not from the pope’s seal or the Cologne imprimatur but from its recognizability — readers found in it what they already half- believed.

Levack’s framework emphasizes the multiplicity of causes behind the witch trials. The Malleus is one factor among many: legal changes (the shift toward inquisitorial procedure and the use of torture), political fragmentation in the Holy Roman Empire, religious crisis, economic distress, and local panics that spread through communication networks. Any single-cause account — whether it blames Kramer’s book or the Church or patriarchy as a monolithic force — misses the granularity of a phenomenon that varied enormously by region, decade, and political context. The worst hunts happened in decentralized territories with weak central oversight, not in places with strong inquisitorial control. Spain and Italy, where the Roman Inquisition operated with relatively consistent procedures, had far fewer executions than the German territories where local courts ran proceedings without central check.

Behringer’s comparative view extends the picture globally and chronologically. The Malleus contributed to an intellectual atmosphere but did not determine outcomes. Witch-hunting in early modern Europe was fed by a combination of elite demonological theory and popular accusation from below; the text provided vocabulary and legal justification, but the trials required willing accusers, receptive magistrates, and social conditions primed for scapegoating. When those conditions existed, hunts happened with or without the Malleus. When they did not, the book sat on shelves.

The Cologne condemnation and what it means

It is worth dwelling on the Cologne condemnation, because it is almost always left out of popular accounts.

The theologians of the Cologne Faculty — the top inquisitorial scholars in Kramer’s own institutional world — read the Malleus and rejected it. Their objections were specific: the procedures it recommended were illegal under existing canon law, and its theological positions on demonic capacity and female nature were inconsistent with mainstream Catholic demonology. This was not a secular objection or a modern feminist objection. It was a professional theologian’s objection that the book got the doctrine wrong and the law wrong.

Kramer forged their endorsement and published it anyway.

This sequence — professional condemnation, followed by forgery, followed by decades of print circulation — is the Malleus’s actual publication history. It did not emerge from a Church that spoke with one voice. It emerged from a single driven official who was willing to misrepresent every authority he could reach in order to make his campaign seem legitimate.

What to make of it as a practitioner

The Malleus Maleficarum killed people. Its procedural manual, even when not read directly, contributed to legal and intellectual frameworks that made it easier to arrest, torture, and execute accused persons. This is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is the causal story: the claim that a book written by one disreputable Dominican friar in 1486 caused the Burning Times. That story flatters the text with a power it did not quite have. The witch trials were produced by conditions — legal, social, economic, theological — that no single text created or could have created. The Malleus exploited those conditions; it also, in some regions, articulated a conceptual framework that courts found useful when the conditions for hunting were already present.

For practitioners, the text matters as a primary source for understanding what the people conducting the prosecutions believed — or claimed to believe — about the nature of witchcraft. It is not a reliable record of actual pre-Christian practice, of real folk magic, or of anything witches themselves thought or did. Kramer had theories about witches. He also had an agenda, a humiliating personal defeat at Innsbruck, and a printing press. The combination produced the Malleus.

Understanding the distance between that document and actual historical practice is the beginning of serious research into the European witch trials.

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Cross-reference: The Burning Times Myth — on the inflated execution figures and the broader popular narrative this article complicates.