Malleus Maleficarum

The witch hunt craze that enveloped Europe and the New World throughout the 13th-16th centuries resulted in the senseless murders of countless people through horrifying methods of torture and execution, and all for seemingly no reason. Women constituted the vast majority of victims of the witch hunt craze that enveloped Europe and the New World throughout the 13th-16th centuries, with up to 80% of all witchcraft victims being women (Barstow, page 7), for a wide variety of reasons that can all be…

Don’t Fear the Witch There are many things that can come to mind when one hears “witchcraft”. Classic films like “Hocus Pocus”, “The Craft”, “The Blair Witch Project” and many more are famous for their plots that revolve around the antics of witches. The witches are shown to have supernatural abilities such as being able to shapeshift, levitate objects, turn people into animals, and invoke spirits. Delving into the darker side of the topic, the taboo word can incite thoughts of animal sacrifices…

The first part of this assignment is to compare and contrast how the women in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth impact the titular character and how they can be compared or contrasted to women, through the looking glass of Malleus Maleficarum. The Malleus Maleficarum is a real legitimate historical document written as a guide to identifying and persecuting people (mostly women) who are perceived as witches. If you take a moment and think about this, imagine if someone; particularly a man came up with a…

It could be argued that the main reason why so many of the accused were women is due to widespread misogyny in the 16th and 17th century. This can be supposed by the statistics of people persecuted during the period of 1550-1660. Trial records within Hungary and Essex show that the gender of a witch was traditionally a female as 91%-92% of women were convicted of being witches. Other larger countries such as France and Germany were thought to have 80% of female witches , whilst the Holy Roman…

Also known as ‘The Malleus Maleficarum’, The Witch’s Hammer was a book, arguably one of the most infamous books ever written, by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. The actual translation of it is “Hammer of Witches”. It was published in the year of 1487. During the Inquisition, it served as a guidebook for Inquisitors and was designed to aid them in the identification, prosecution, and dispatching of Witches. It came to be widely regarded as irrefutable truth and are held today by a majority of…

Torture played a critical role in the development of witchcraft from the thirteenth century and the centuries to follow. The use of torture had been very limited and was almost always illegal in the early Middle Ages, but attitudes on torture to get confessions from witches began to change by the beginning of the fourteenth century. Torture was universally condemned by early canonists such as St. Augustine and by Popes such as Gregory the Great and Nicholas I. However the use of torture was…

occurred during the creation of nation-states, because rulers of said new nations were required to prove their faith, not only to the people, but to the church as well. The popularization of the printing press helped put documents such as Malleus Maleficarum into circulation, so the contents of them were readily available across Europe to anyone who could read them. They provided communities with means of ridding themselves of harmful persons within their community by simply accusing them of…

“I’m Not Good. I’m Not Nice. I’m Just Right. I’m the Witch.” In the 2014 film Into the Woods, Rob Marshall, the director, whimsically incorporates what used to be classic tales of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Little Red Riding Hood into a modern musical with a twist. All of the characters travel into the woods for their respective reasons on intertwining paths, and they meet because of a curse placed years ago by The Witch. Although these characters may cross paths, they…

The Witches Hammer/Hammer of Witches The Witches Hammer is the English Translation for the Malleus Maleficarum (Latin) or Der Hexenhammer (German) this is the infamous book which was written in 1486 by two monks and theology professors, Heinrich Kramer, an inquisitor of the Catholic Church, and Jacob Sprenger, it was first published in 1487 in Germany. It is now believed by many that Sprenger was not an author of the book, with his input being more symbolic than it was active. The Witches…

This essay will asses how appropriate the label ‘gendercide’ is in reference to the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In order to do this, this essay will discuss in detail how ‘witches were found and tried, what exactly a ‘witch’ was, and what their punishments were. Witch-hunts were widespread in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe had seen many changes within societies; this was mainly due to religion,…