Introduction
The Malleus Maleficarum is undoubtedly the best known (many would
say most notorious) treatise on witchcraft from the early modern period.
Published in 1486 (only a generation after the introduction of printing
by moveable type in Western Europe), the work served to popularize
the new conception of magic and witchcraft that is known in modern
scholarship as satanism or diabolism, and it thereby played a major role
in the savage efforts undertaken to stamp out witchcraft in Western
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a series of events
sometimes known as the “witch craze”). The present work offers the
reader the only full and reliable translation of the Malleus into English,1
and this introduction has a very specific purpose: to set out for the reader
the general intellectual and cultural background of the Malleus, which
takes for granted and is based upon a number of concepts that are by no
means self-evident to the average modern reader, and to explain something of the circumstances of the work’s composition and the authors’
methods and purposes in writing it. That is, the aim here is the very
restricted one of giving the reader a better insight into how the work
would have been understood at the time of its publication. Hopefully,
this will help not only those who wish to understand the work in its own
right but also those who are interested in the later effects of this influential
work.
At the outset, a word about terminology. As is explained later (see
below in section e of the “Notes on the translation”), for technical reasons relating to the Latin text, male and female practitioners of magic
are called “sorcerers” and “sorceresses” respectively in the translation,
Darklady's Occult