P. G. Maxwell-Stuart - The Malleus Maleficarum

THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

edited and translated by

P.G. Maxwell-Stuart

Copyright P.G. Maxwell-Stuart 2007

The right of P.G. Maxwell-Stuart to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7190 6443 2 paperback

First published 2007

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Typeset in Plantin
by Koinonia, Manchester
Printed in Great Britain
by CPI, Bath

I am very grateful to Professor Robert Bartlett for reading the first part of this translation. His comments were invaluable. If errors remain, they must be attributed to me. I am also grateful to Jonathan Bevan of Manchester University Press for his encouragement and for his patience in waiting for the manuscript.

In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding about the terms for magical operators used by Institoris, I have translated maleficus as male worker of harmful magic, which is, in fact, its literal meaning, malefici as workers of harmful magic, intended to encompass both male and female practitioners, as the Latin word does, and have reserved witch/witch for the specifically female malefica/maleficae.

Whenever the English version needs to be expanded to accommodate the sense or implication of the Latin, I have used square brackets. Rounded brackets indicate asides in the Latin text itself.

In order to keep the translation within the agreed word-limit, parts of the text have been paraphrased. These appear in italics between square brackets. I have tried to make them full enough to give the reader a comprehensible gist of what is being resumd.

I reproduce the headings for each chapter and subdivision of a chapter as they appear in the Latin text. This accounts for slight discrepancies between the headings as they appear in the Contents and as they appear in the text. Phrases and sentences which are not in italics in the italicised paragraphs indicate that I am translating rather than summarising Institoriss text.

The text I have used is that of the 1588 Frankfurt edition.

At the end of the fourteenth century, Federico Pastore has observed, the feeling of living in a city under siege on all sides by evil spirits who, with increasing frequency, assumed forms suited to ensnaring human beings and bringing them to perdition was widely diffused and deeply rooted in all levels of the population. He exaggerates, perhaps, for we have no means of telling what was felt by those parts of the general population who had little or no voice recorded in the surviving literature; but he does not exaggerate when it comes to the literate and the powerful, since the period he designates was one full of intense debate and significant intellectual and political ferment, most of which may not have had immediate impact on the majority of people, but which undoubtedly stirred and preoccupied those circles who were able to conduct their arguments and convey their fears by means of the written word. Their sense of being encompassed by non-human hostile forces was scarcely new, of course. From very ancient times, human beings had been aware not only of the existence of various spirit- worlds divine, angelic, demonic, heroic, ancestral but also of the ease with which non-material entities could penetrate physical creation and exert an influence upon human events and everyday activities far beyond the capabilities of human power. But, as the fourteenth century came to an end and the fifteenth began its course, a combination of factors, in part beliefs, in part events, began to produce a number of reactions to humans relationship with the spirit-world, which were more emotionally intense than had been usual before.

During the late Middle Ages, too, there was a widespread belief that events, as interpreted by the Christian view of history, were following a predetermined pattern, that history consisted of a finite temporal progression from the Creation to the Last Judgement, and that in consequence, sooner or later, the Last Days would come. A signal of how near those final days might be could be found in Apocalypse 20.13 which mention a period of a thousand years during which Satan will be imprisoned until he is released to create havoc among humankind; and with

This sense of urgency was propelled, at least in part, by the Great Schism in the Church, at the end of which rival Popes in Rome and Avignon finally gave way under Imperial pressure to a single Pope, Martin V (141731) whose election restored unity to the western Church. Thereafter, preaching emphasis on the imminent arrival of Antichrist began to diminish, but the fearful figure lived on in the heresy of Wycliffe who identified the Papacy itself with Antichrist, a virulently anti-Papal stance which influenced the Czech heretic Jan Hus (c. 1372 1415). Hus preached against what he saw as the Churchs corruption, and his execution in 1415 at the end of the Council of Constance transformed his followers and pushed them into rebellion. Armed warfare broke out and preoccupied the attention of Europe for the next several years. Then in 1453 the Turks captured Constantinople and made it the capital of a new, aggressive Islamic empire which turned its attention to eastern Europe, and caused doves to flutter in almost every political and religious dovecote.

But Muslims were not the only hostile bands to menace the status quo. Heretical self-appointed holy beggars known as Beghards were wandering far and wide, claiming (rather like the Franciscans) to have embraced an austere poverty. Diverse rather than cohesive, they spread a broad range of personal interpretations of Christianity, their style of living and their multifarious messages clearly at odds with the corruption of the lower clergy in Bavaria and the orthodox teachings of the Church; and from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the Bishop of Eichsttt and the Prince-Bishop of Wrzburg were obliged to threaten both them and remnant Flagellant movements with excommunication. Nor were women absent from this blossoming of lay striving after the vita apostolica. Beguines were not quite nuns and not quite laity. They lived in small communities similar to convents, but took no formal vows, being free to leave and marry, and to own and administer property. They led, in fact, a lay existence coloured by a communal existence and a more than usually strong leaven of religious observances in their daily lives. Both they and the Beghards thus rose from an increasing tide of lay piety, which posed a potential problem for the Church. People within regulated, fully monastic communities were subject to the rigour of Church discipline. Those half in and half out ran the danger of falling into heresy, as John XXII was obliged to acknowledge, and although he recognised in a Bull of 1318 that many Beguines led irreproachable lives, he also re-enacted earlier decrees from the Council of Vienne (1311), which recognised and supported episcopal efforts to stamp out such confraternities as had become tainted with heresy.