Episode 19: The Malleus Maleficarum (Part 1)

Episode

17 Jun

Written By Stephanie Summar

Hammer of Witches

*One-leaf print on a witch burning in Derenburg (County Reinstein), 1555*

Tonight on the podcast, we’re burning books!

Well. Just one book. And I promise, it started it.

The early modern witch hunts represent one of the darkest chapters in European history. The latest episode of Paranormal Pajama Party cracks opn the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, a 15th-century treatise on identifying, trying, and punishing witches.

We get into the origins of the book and its misogynistic zealot of an author, Heinrich Kramer. Did the book’s anti-woman messaging cause Europe’s early modern witch-hunts? Or was it a more complex socio-political situation, with a healthy dollop of climate change mixed in? I bet you can guess.

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mentions of the death penalty, torture, and some par-for-the-course sexism. Please listen with care.
Have you heard about this newfangled printing press? It cuts all those slowpoke monks out of the communications process so we can spread ideas way faster. I’m trying to get the word out about this show, so I’m going to get a bunch of copies of this episode printed. Or you could just share it with a friend. That might be better, actually. Thanks!
[MUSIC]
Steph: My neighbour, Elsbeth, was a widow, too. Childless, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the constant traffic in and out of her yard. In and out of my yard, too, since we shared a fence and a gate. I don’t know what she was doing in there. All those visitors. They were always stepping onto my poor vegetable patch and leaving the gate unlatched. That’s how her dog got in and got to my chickens.
That’s what started it. The dog and the chickens. Truth be told, I’d never liked Elsbeth even before I found all those feathers outside the coop. She was always a bit too loud for my taste – too loud, too bold. She wasn’t even sorry for what the dog had done. For her visitors disturbing the peace of my yard, and trampling what turnips I could scrounge out of the ground. Food’s hard to come by these days. Those chickens’ eggs were dear. Life’s hard enough for old women alone, and she knew it.
I was hungrier than usual last winter, and it made my joints ache, which always makes me mean. I’d watch the visitors tramp in and out, in and out. I’d hear the unlatched gate bang open and shut in the wind during the night. I’d dig a small, sad turnip out of the ground and grit my teeth in anger the whole time. Bitterness filled my empty stomach. As the days grew shorter and the nights colder, it curdled into anger.
When that book first appeared in the village, it arrived like a dark prophecy. Some of the folks around here never had much sense, and the book, filled with tales of witches and their devilish deeds, ignited fear.
But I’ve never been a fool and I had all that anger inside me. I saw an opportunity and I took it.
I began my campaign subtly. A hushed comment here, a worried glance there. I said I’d seen Elsbeth muttering strange words under the full moon, that I’d noticed animals – my chickens! – falling ill after crossing her path. Our neighbours, already on edge, were quick to listen and quicker to believe.
The whispers spread and the visitors stopped tramping through the yard. That was all I’d wanted, really. It should have stopped there. Maybe I am an old fool.
The day came when they decided to confront her. They stormed her home, dragging her to the square where makeshift justice awaited. I watched it all happen over that foul gate.
The trial took no time at all. They read passages from that book. They took things from her home and twisted them into proof. Elsbeth tried to speak, to defend herself, but her voice was drowned out by the crowd. No one listens to a witch.
When they declared her guilty, I tried to remember the dog and the chickens, and told myself the pit in my stomach was the old hunger. But as they tied her to the stake and lit the pyre, a hollow feeling settled in my chest. I watched as the flames consumed her, and her eyes found mine. I don’t hear the open gate at night anymore. But I still see those eyes.
I hoped things would return to normal afterwards, that they’d found their devil and rooted it out, but an unease lingered. And then I began to notice the glances. The hushed conversations that ended the moment they saw me. The look of a neighbour child when I slid into my pew at church. Someone claimed I cursed their cow. Someone else said I’d been seen with a dark figure. Silly fools.
But the whispers are growing louder. It’s only a matter of time now.
[MUSIC ENDS, THEME SONG STARTS]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
[FIRE CRACKLES THROUGHOUT]
Steph: Scoot over, gals, let our latest arrival get closer to the fire. It’s so toasty! Here’s your marshmallow and a stick. As you can see, tonight we’re burning books!
Sorry, I do know how that sounds. This isn’t like a moral panic or an anti-intellectualism thing, I swear. I’m very opposed to book burning on the whole. But please believe me when I say this one had it coming.
Roasting on the open fire in front of you are the quickly incinerating remains of one of the most diabolical books ever written. That’s the Malleus Maleficarum – “Hammer of Witches”, if your Latin’s a little rusty. It was written by a 15th-century incel who mass-produced this guide to identifying, trying and punishing witches. That’s right. He used Gutenberg’s printing press for evil. Boo! Hiss!
And these lovely, sooty pyjama party guests making s’mores around the fire with us this evening are none other than some of the 40-60 THOUSAND people executed for witchcraft in Europe and the British American colonies between 1400 and 1775. Many of them were burned at the stake according to the premise that burned bodies can’t be resurrected again on Judgment Day.
So you can understand why they got pretty enthusiastic about the idea of a book burning in this one specific case. It’s a sort of poetic justice, I guess. Except that books don’t have families, or feelings, or nerve endings, and these women did.
Would you like a hotdog?
[FIRE NOISES FADE OUT]
Steph: The Malleus Maleficarum began as an extreme overreaction. Picture this: We’re in Innsbruck, Austria, in the 1480s. This was the time of the Catholic Inquisition, and a new inquisitor, a German monk, has just rolled into town. His name is Heinrich Kramer, or Henricus Institor if you’re nasty, and he is a creep.
Like, he must have been giving off major creep vibes right off the bat because as soon as he showed up, this local woman named Helena Scheuberin haaaated him. Helena is described as an “aggressive, independent woman who was not afraid to speak her mind”, and basically the moment Kramer arrived in Innsbruck, she publicly cursed him, saying, “Fie on you, you bad monk, may the falling evil take you.”
Then she had the nerve to stop attending his sermons. Worse, she was encouraging other people not to go, either. And one day, she disrupted one of his sermons, by loudly announcing that she thought he was “an evil man in league with the devil.” She also accused him of a heretical interpretation of Church doctrine and only ever preaching about witches.
Helena Scheuberin might be the only actual witch in this story, or at least the only person with access to a crystal ball because she was spot on. Heinrich Kramer was, indeed, an evil man who was fixated on witches. He hadn’t even gotten to the most evil part of his life yet.
For reasons that seem to be lost to history, Kramer hated women and was completely obsessed with sex. It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, his heart was two sizes too small. …Or maybe he was just a sociopath.
Whatever the reason, Kramer had an axe to grind with all women and Helena in particular, so he abused his power and status in town. After a local knight died – one who had been known to visit Helena’s house regularly – Kramer accused her and half a dozen other people of witchcraft.
It’s not like I would recommend early European punishment for witchcraft, but it could’ve been much worse. You might have to repent or confess and promise never to do black magic again, or you might have to stay in the stocks for a few hours, but that was pretty much the end of the matter.
At the time, Christian Europeans believed in magic, and that it could take two forms: Good magic – white magic – and bad magic – black magic. Healers, midwives and so-called cunning folk used white magic to help other people. Occasionally someone would use black magic against a neighbour, and that was when they were sent to the stocks and discouraged from getting up to that kind of shenanigans ever again.
In Helena’s case, there was a tribunal, and the whole time, Kramer was fixated on her sexual behaviour. Fixated. To the point where the local bishop who was running the trial with him basically told him to chill out because he was making a lot of extremely weird assumptions about her sex life that were unrelated to the matter at hand.
But Kramer wouldn’t stop. It sounds like he couldn’t stop. He was obsessed with sex. I think it’s worth pointing out that he’d joined the Dominican order and become a monk as a young man, so he wasn’t having any sex himself. He couldn’t see that his lust was his own problem, though, and so he found a scapegoat – women.
Eventually, the Innsbruck bishop became so disgusted by Kramer’s behaviour that he suspended the trial, called him senile and crazy, and banished him from the area entirely. Helena and her companions were freed or received light sentences of penance, and everything ended happily ever after.
Or it would’ve if this wasn’t a villain’s origin story.
First, he wrote to Pope Innocent VIII asking for permission to prosecute witches, and the Pope complied. The papal bull he issued smoothed out the jurisdictional issue he’d had at Innsbruck – now he didn’t have to listen to a local bishop because he officially had God’s authority. But otherwise, there wasn’t really anything new in the document. The Pope’s message was aligned with what Catholic theologists had been teaching about witchcraft for years.
Christianity has kind of flip-flopped throughout its history about whether or not witches are real, and if they are, what practising Christians need to do about it, but by the time Heinrich Kramer came onto the scene, it acknowledged the existence of witches. His papal bull said that unpunished, the abominations of witchcraft put everyone’s soul in danger and would result in eternal damnation for the witch.
Kramer included this message from the Pope right at the beginning of his treatise, just after the introduction. It doesn’t actually represent an endorsement of the rest of the book, but it sure looks like God’s personal stamp of approval.
Next, he included a section in which the whole Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne unanimously approved the book’s ideas and methods. This was strange because Kramer’s ideas and methods were absolutely not approved by the theologians at the University of Cologne. In fact, after it was published, they condemned its unethical and illegal approach. Kramer forged the document.
But Kramer’s big innovation – one that would change history – came next. Rather than framing witches as people dabbling in black folk magic to annoy their friends and relatives, or possessed by evil beyond their control, Kramer asserted that witches made pacts with Satan himself, sealed with some surprising sex acts. Signing a pact and having interesting sex with God’s nemesis meant you were worshipping him. And that made you a heretic. At the time, heresy was punishable by death.
I keep saying witches could be “people”, but I cannot emphasise enough how much this book directly targeted women. Its Latin name could have been the Malleus MaleficOrum, to include multiple genders, but it is very deliberately the MaleficArum because Kramer truly hated women.
He claimed that practitioners of witchcraft are more often women than men due to the weakness of our sex – we’re weaker in our faith and more carnal in our nature than the menfolk, see. We also have a “temperament towards flux”, whatever that means, and “loose tongues”. We “are defective in all the powers of both soul and body.” Also, we’re able to quickly offer children to demons, and we do it all the time. Now you know.
One translated passage I read says, quote, “If we inquire, we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women. Troy, which was a prosperous kingdom, was, for the rape of one woman, Helen, destroyed, and many thousands of Greeks slain. The kingdom of the Jews suffered much misfortune and destruction through the accursed Jezebel… The kingdom of the Romans endured much evil through Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, that worst of women. And so with others. Therefore, it is no wonder that the world now suffers through the malice of women.”
The Malleus makes its sexist point by relying on a hierarchical and binary viewpoint. According to Isaac Newton, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. According to Kramer, the universe works the same way. Everything out there has a kind of evil twin. God’s is Satan, the Virgin Mary’s is Eve, Man’s is Woman. And to achieve perfection, we have to get rid of the bad ones. So because women are men’s negative counterparts, they can corrupt men through witchcraft and therefore must be destroyed. Chill, normal stuff.
And I’ve got really bad news, ladies: Kramer said the only way to avoid becoming a witch and eternal damnation is to become a cloistered nun. But since most of us can’t do this, we’re doomed. Crazy sex pact with Satan, here I come.
I don’t want to brag, but I listen to a lot of podcasts about serial killers and the more I read, the more I assume Kramer had a dark triad personality disorder and a difficult childhood with some kind of mother-related trauma.
Is it ok to casually armchair-diagnose people who’ve been dead for five centuries, especially if you’re not an expert? I feel like it’s not. But I’m leaning towards making an exception for creepy bigots who were directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
The really freaky thing about Kramer’s book was that most of the readers realised that they knew at least one woman. And who knows with whom – or what – she’d been doing surprising sex stuff the night before? Women. They’re a problem, and they’ve got to go.
How, though? Well, don’t worry, friend. The Malleus Maleficarum is here to recommend the appropriate ways to interrogate, torture, and eventually execute a witch. Don’t skip the torture part – that’s required.
Luckily for Kramer, another German had recently come up with a different game-changing idea. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press offered a way to spread the message of the Malleus across the continent. The internet of its day, the printing press put the book into the hands of a lot of people who should’ve known better very quickly. For over 100 years, the Malleus Maleficarum was the second-most-sold book in Europe – after the Bible.
Side note: As a communication major in college, I had to answer so many quiz questions about Gutenberg and the emergence of mass media, and I can guarantee that this is not the way my professors thought I would be applying that knowledge.
After its publication, Kramer zealously applied his witch-hunting plan all over the place. I assume he called all the women he prosecuted “Helena”. Die mad, Heinrich.
I’d like to tell you that he did die mad, right after the theologians at the University of Cologne rejected his methods’ theological validity and stopped them from being used in witch trials conducted by Catholic inquisitors. I’d like to tell you that, but unfortunately, the book’s success brought Kramer considerable prestige and power. He went on to have a successful career and died peacefully in his mid-70s because life is full of unfair bullshit.
Even though the Catholic church wasn’t officially relying on the Malleus for its witch trials, the unfortunate beauty of the Malleus was that it transcended religious borders. The Protestants, who were very new on the scene, snatched up copies as quickly as their Catholic neighbours. Both branches accepted it as the treatise on witches and what to do about them.
Worse, its popularity transcended religion entirely. It wasn’t the religious courts women had to watch out for – it was the secular ones. One scholar, Montague Summers, said the book “lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate”.
But I would like to note that when Monty was doing his translation in 1928, he also wrote, “Possibly what will seem… amazing to modern readers is the misogynic trend of various passages… However, exaggerated as these may be, I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they not only divest themselves of such charm as they might boast, but lay themselves open to the sternest reprobation in the name of sanity and common-sense.” So my opinion of Montague’s opinions is… coloured.
Anyway, we can’t really gauge exactly how influential the Malleus was in the events that followed its publication, but it sort of seems like it hit Europe at exactly the right time. Or exactly the wrong time, depending on how much you enjoy being burnt at the stake.
Suddenly, witch-hunting blew up. And while we know the hyperlocal reasons for some of the trials – “Agnes from two houses down stole my pig and has a weird eye so I accused her of being a witch, of course” – we don’t really know why witch hunts took off the way that they did.
I mean, 60,000 people over a 300-year period is still an average of 200 executions a year. That’s a lot of people. Adding to the strangeness is that witch-hunting went through booms and busts like it was the oil industry or something.
There are a few theories about why Kramer’s Hammer hit supposed witches as hard as it did.
Theory number 1: While all of this was happening, the Protestant Reformation was popping off, and the Catholics and Protestants were competing for power and to out-zealot each other. Establishing your branch of Christianity as the judge and executioner of witches, responsible for the safety of a community and with a direct line to God, was a good way to make a case for the righteousness and power of your belief system. You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette. There’s an Easter joke here somewhere.
Additionally, due to the reformation, monasteries and convents were being closed and actively suppressed, which suddenly led to a lot of single women coming back to their hometowns. According to one of my sources, linked in the show notes, “Many communities saw the proportion of unmarried women climb from less than 10% to 20% and in some cases as high as 30%, whom few communities knew how to accommodate economically.”
Some scholars have argued that the prosecution and execution of witches may have been a process of eliminating the financial burdens of older, unmarried women who needed to eat. Fucking bleak.
Theory number two blames capitalism, which also came into being around this time. This theory was posited by feminist scholar Silvia Federici in her book, “Caliban and the Witch”.
To oversimplify years of history, politics and the economy, the Black Death had just killed off a third of Europe’s population, so feudal lords, who rented land to serfs who worked the fields to earn their keep, were having a tough time finding enough reliable labour. This would not do, so the economy shifted – instead of renting land to serfs, landowners began paying people to come to work. That’s why you have to go to the office tomorrow.
In the feudal system, women still had lesser status than men because, you know, entrenched social norms, but they did a lot of the same labour in the fields, and they shared care labour among a community of other women. This couldn’t happen under capitalism. Because of their lower social status, they weren’t allowed to earn money for their work. Instead, they were encouraged to stay home and do the unpaid labour of breeding and raising the next generation of workers.
Federici wrote, “The human body… was the first machine invented by capitalism.” She also points out that the Transatlantic Slave Trade and exploitation of the Americas were all happening at this time, too. More bodies turned into more machines.
Unsurprisingly, many women had a problem with this shift and weren’t afraid to do something about it. According to one of my sources, Federici writes, “Women tore down hedges and fences and reclaimed the commons, they engaged in non-reproductive sex and led peasant revolts. They met at night on hilltops, around bonfires, stole food and clothing, and they gossiped.”
This is, of course, suspiciously witchy shit.
I love this theory so much because I want to tell my boss that I’m not gossipy, I’m just dismantling the patriarchy, but Sylvia loses me with the next part.
Her theory is that Kramer and the witch-hunters who came after him were purposely spreading propaganda and pro-capitalist messaging on behalf of the wealthy so that it was easier to remove sassy, rebellious women from their paths. I don’t buy it. I’m not a good conspiracy theorist because I’ve seen I’ve seen large organisations try to put together a single event and a solid marketing plan and fall apart. I refuse to believe that billionaires and government officials can get past their own egos long enough to make anything happen successfully at so large a scale.
Theory number three explaining why the witch hunts took off is even more unlikely. This one is that male doctors wanted to run female healers and midwives out of the business. This theory was popular among feminists of the ‘70s, but I’m afraid it doesn’t hold much water. Surprisingly few healers were killed during the trials, and could sometimes even be found doing the accusing.
My favourite theory is theory number four – it was very cold. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Little Ice Age was freezing the pants off of the North Atlantic region of the world. The lower temperatures led to smaller-than-average crop yields and fish not migrating as far north as usual. Food shortages led to starvation, and if you’ve ever been hangry, you know it leads to bad decisions.
Interestingly, peak witch-hunting intensity correlates pretty neatly with temperature drops and food shortages. Witches were supposed to be able to control the weather, which meant they were responsible for all this trouble. In the first episode of this season, when we talked about Sarah Whitehead, the Bank Nun, we also discussed the ways single, older women were viewed as a burden on society. Older women weren’t seen as contributing, so the system could afford for their mouths to go.
Unfortunately, witch-huntings still happen today. According to one of my sources, in Tanzania, witch-killings happen approximately every five years. The victim is generally the oldest female member of a family. The theory is that her relatives may be eliminating the least-productive household member during a food shortage.
I suspect that the real reason behind the early modern witch hunts wasn’t any of these. I think it was probably all of them and a few more besides.
Right now, in 2024, things are hard because the Earth is melting, and there’s war in Gaza, and another war in Ukraine, and an unprecedented pandemic that isn’t actually over yet, and it’s election season in a bunch of places at the same time and democracy seems to be losing ground, and the internet is radicalising people, and artificial intelligence is moving too quickly, and there’s a stunning lack of media literacy, and a global recession creating a high cost of living, and the whole mess is controlled by a bunch of billionaires whose heads are stuck up their own assholes, and –
[DEEP INHALE]
Steph: Life is like that. Everything’s messy and interrelated and hard to unpick, which makes it hard to resolve.
Whatever the reason, witch-hunts took off, and the result was the deaths of a lot of people. And most of those people were women. Of the 30000 to 50000 people killed in Europe alone during the early modern period, an estimated 75-85% were women.
In some ways, it doesn’t matter what the cause was. Society decided that some people didn’t count as much and deserved to die. And most of those people were older women.
Again, I can’t pin this all on the Malleus Maleficarum and I don’t think it would be completely accurate to do so. But it seems like the Malleus, and the witch-hunters it inspired, who accepted it without question, were tapping into a long tradition of women as lesser-than – humans who don’t count as much as others. Kramer’s misogyny certainly didn’t help, but neither did centuries of entrenched biases against women. For more information about that, please listen to literally any episode of this podcast.
Some feminist writers have argued the early modern witch-hunts were direct attacks against women, and specifically spinsters and widows – people who’d gone against the social norms and either rejected or, quote, survived, marriage. Philosopher Mary Daly wrote that witches were “women living outside the control of the patriarchal family, women who presented an option – an option of ‘eccentricity’, and of ‘indigestibility’.”
Other scholars have argued that it wasn’t necessarily women who were targeted, just people in vulnerable economic and social positions who could be scapegoated by their communities. But wouldn’t you know it? Those people are often women. So the result is the same.
It’s interesting to note that during the same time period, in places like Ireland and Iceland, where folklore offered alternative explanations such as fairies or elves for the bad things befalling communities, fewer people were accused of witchcraft. And when they were, men had a much larger representation. Not that, you know, you want larger representation in this case. It just goes to show how important narratives are, and how they can shape the world around us.
And the narrative bolstered by the misogyny of the Malleus Maleficarum took root in our culture – and has yet to be weeded out. Next week, we’ll talk about the ways its dark legacy still echoes in society today. But forget the Gutenberg and the printing press. Modern-day versions of Heinrich Kramer have found a community online. Next week, we meet the incels.
[MUSIC]
Steph: On that terrifying note, it looks like our bonfire has died down and it’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party.
I gotta say, I was sceptical when that giant black goat showed up with the marshmallows and started talking to us, but now that I’ve tried those s’mores, I would like to live deliciously.
To learn more about Helena Scheuberin, Silvia Federici, and what else makes women susceptible to Satanic sex pacts, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

**The Malleus Maleficarum: a tool of misogyny**

One of the primary causes of the witch hunts was the pervasive misogyny and patriarchal structures of the time. Women who deviated from societal norms or who were seen as threats to male authority were often accused of witchcraft.

The Malleus Maleficarum is an infamous book that provided a framework for identifying, prosecuting, and executing witches, building a bizarre case about why women were particularly susceptible to seduction by Satan himself. It’s a stark example of how one person’s misogyny can legitimise society’s violent actions against women given the right circumstances.

Religious and social upheaval

Unfortunately, the Malleus Maleficarum resonated with people living through a period of significant upheaval.

The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation created an atmosphere of religious tension and paranoia. Religious authorities promoted the belief in witches as agents of the devil, using these fears to consolidate power and control over communities. This religious fervour, combined with widespread superstition, provided fertile ground for the persecution of alleged witches.

Economic and political factors

On top of the already tense atmosphere, the early modern period was also a time of economic hardship and political instability.

In some parts of Europe, monasteries and convents were closed, forcing nuns to return to their families, which significantly increased the number of older single women in communities. But the Little Ice Age’s colder-than-usual climate meant that food was in shorter supply.

In such harsh conditions, older single women were often viewed as non-contributors and burdens. Communities struggling to allocate limited resources saw these women as less deserving of support. Perhaps convicting them as witches provided a convenient justification for eliminating these “extra mouths to feed”.

Kramer and the incels

Next week on Paranormal Pajama Party, we’ll get into the chilling connections between Heinrich Kramer’s tactics in the Malleus Maleficarum and the present-day methods used by incel communities to perpetuate misogynistic beliefs and violence against women. We’ll unravel these disturbing parallels and discuss how we can combat these toxic ideologies today.

Until then, remember: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.