Read an Excerpt

 INTRODUCTION

The intellectual ambience of the Malleus

‘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 nonmaterial 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 20.1–3 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 such a signal – difficult to interpret though it was, because how did one know when the thousand-year period had begun? – the way lay open for preachers, prophets, visionaries, and mystics, not to mention others with more mundane or less exalted motives, to whip up eschatological and apocalyptic fears, and to propose some programme of reform which would prepare the world for the Last Judgement and provide its individual inhabitants, were they inspired or frightened by this prospect, with hope that they might escape the clutches of Satan and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, at the end of the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) had sought to reform the lives of both clergy and laity for this purpose; while at the end of the twelfth, Joachim of Fiore (c.1130–1202/1212) predicted that the world was about to enter the era of the Holy Spirit, and was thus in a period of trial during which the Church would be persecuted and the world subject to immense trial at the hands of Antichrist and the forces of evil, before the powers of darkness were defeated and a renovation of both world and humanity could take place. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, conviction that Antichrist had been born and that the Last Times were underway was beginning to grow. The Dominican St Vincent Ferrer (c.1350–1419), for example, wrote to Benedict XIII in July 1412 that the time of Antichrist was imminent, an urgency he had preached eight years before in Freiburg, when he told his congregation that after Antichrist had ruled the world for three years, Christ would destroy him, but that humankind would then have only forty-five days left to repent.

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 (1417–31) 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 Church’s 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 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 Eichstätt and the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg 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.

Popular discontent with the clergy then found expression in 1476 in the person of Hans Böhm, a young man from Niklashausen, not far from Würzburg, who, on the strength of a personal vision of the Virgin Mary, began to preach repentance and sobriety in a manner reminiscent of Savonarola. It was not long before he was claiming near- miraculous powers and fulminating against the clergy, threatening their imminent disappearance on a Day of Reckoning, and urging people to stop paying taxes and tithes to the Church. His message struck the very note people wanted to hear, and it was not long before large areas of southern and central Germany were in turmoil. The mass- movement came to an end in July 1474 when the authorities in Würzburg managed to arrest Böhm, put him on trial for heresy and sorcery, and burn him; but he had given both the ecclesiastical and the secular establishments something of a fright, even though it is clear he was being manipulated by others for their own, entirely secular and political reasons. Little wonder, then, that in 1478 the Dominican Michael Francis de Insulis published a treatise on the advent of Antichrist, while a popular “Pamphlet on the End of the World” received seven printings in Germany before the reformation.

[…]

The Malleus was not his first foray into this particular topic. Two years previously, he had published The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, ‘the result’, he claimed, ‘of more than thirty years’ close attention to the subject’, in which he inveighed against the figure of the witch with considerable venom. ‘I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver; a social pet and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organisation inimicable to the Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed … a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption; battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age’ (Introduction, xiv). This was followed by The Geography of Witchcraft which, in accordance with his prior notice in the History, surveyed witchcraft in various localities such as Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States of America. His translation of the Malleus therefore sprang out of a period of intense absorption in this aspect of occult history and preceded several other works of a related kind, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), The Vampire in Europe (1929), and The Werewolf (1933).

But his claim to have rendered ‘the special formularies [of the Malleus] plain and understandable by any average reader’ is perhaps over-confident. He adopted (in company, it must be said, with other contemporary writers on and translators of esoteric texts) a high-flown, pseudo-Biblical prose style which in fact merely serves to render his translation both difficult and tedious to read. It also has the unfortunate consequence, in many instances, of failing to translate the Latin properly and of giving the reader a misleading set of nuances, sometimes fatal to a proper understanding of the text. Thus, ‘I know everything they did in the house’, becomes, ‘I knew their fine pranks and practices, secret and secure though they thought they were’; and ‘After placing tables and setting them in order, they sit and start to eat the food the evil spirit has provided, or which they themselves have brought’, becomes, ‘Tables are laid and duly furnished, whereupon they set themselves to the board and begin to gobbet piecemeal the meats which the Devil provides, or which each member of the party severally brings with him’. Summers also inadvertently feminised the Malleus more than the text warrants by translating maleficus / malefica / malefici indiscriminately as “witch/witches” and turned all male references in Part III into female. Since the English word “witch” almost inevitably produces the image of a female in the English-speaking consciousness, this has given, and continues to give, the impression of a text more targeted upon women than it actually is. Hence the need for a fresh translation.