Malleus Maleficarum



Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of the Witches in English, was a serious attempt by the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer to debunk rebunk a number of myths about witches and was published in 1487. The Roman Catholic Church had previously denied the existence of witchcraft at various points during the Middle Ages, relegating witch burning to a folk practice (and notably, Kramer himself had been expelled from the town of Innsbruck after a witch trial he was involved in found the "witch" innocent, as his obsession with her sexual habits and supposed guilt convinced the local bishop that Kramer had gone insane). The publication of Malleus helped launch a new moral panic over witchcraft and became a standard handbook in the prosecution and torture of "witches." It was also responsible for helping to spread sexism as it claimed that women were easily tempted into making a contract with Kyubey sleeping with the Devil and thereby being turned into magical girls witches. The book discusses recruitment practices of witches and Satan, how to identify witches, and methods of punishment torture. In a possibly unrivaled-in-history instance of complete gullibility, Kramer included a 15th-century dirty joke (with the punchline, "But the biggest cock belonged to the priest") as a factual account of witchcraft:

As described in Malleus Maleficarum, the methods to be used in the witch hunt fall into six parts: • 2