The Malleus maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger

The Malleus Maleficarum, usually rendered into English as the Hammer of Witches, came off the press at Speyer in 1486. Its author was Heinrich Kramer, a German Catholic clergyman who wrote under the Latin form of his name, Henricus Institor.

Kramer offered the book as an official statement of the position of the Church. He argued that sorcery amounted to heresy, which the law then treated as a serious crime, and that secular courts should prosecute it accordingly. He recommended torture as a means of obtaining confessions, and held that death was the only certain way to put an end to witchcraft, in a period when heretics were frequently burned alive at the stake.

The book did not go unchallenged. Theologians of the Inquisition at Cologne condemned it, saying that it recommended illegal procedures and departed from established Catholic teaching about demons, and some readers since have treated it as a gathering up of earlier fifteenth-century demonological writing rather than an original work. Kramer, for his part, was praised by Pope Innocent VIII in the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus and was never disciplined, and he kept a considerable reputation in the Church afterwards.