book is written because of the hindrances thrown in the way of the

inquisitors by skeptics. His whole work is but one long refutation of
the canon _Episcopi_; and, while drawing as largely as his predecessors
from the Bible and from Thomas Aquinas, he, too, finds his most
irrefutable arguments in the fresh confessions of tortured witches. In
the following year--1459--the Spanish Franciscan, Alonso (or Alfonso)
de Spina,[31] brought out his “Fortalitium fidei,” and lent a climax
to its refutation of Jewish and Saracen errors by making its fifth and
last book treat “Of the war of the demons”--“De bello daemonum.”

But the diffusion of the literature of witchcraft was no longer to
wait on the slow work of the copyist. The new art of printing soon
availed itself of so tempting a topic. Before 1470, Mentelin, of
Strasburg, turned out from his exquisite press a fine edition of the
“Fortalitium fidei”; and, about 1476, Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, followed
it with the “Formicarius” of Nider. Not all of their fellow-treatises
were so fortunate. A “Tractatus contra daemonum invocatores,” by the
Carcassonne inquisitor Joannes Vineti,[32] got itself printed; and a
lecture on the subject delivered at Paris, in 1482, by the Saragossa
canon Bernard Basin,[33] was given to the press in the same or the
following year. But the book of Jaquier had yet a century to wait;
and fresh monographs by the Poitou theological professor Petrus
Mamoris[34] and the Italian inquisitor Girolamo Visconti[35] must lie
in manuscript for a decade or two, while more than one other has never
been printed at all.[36] For there now appeared a work which made all
such trifles needless: the terrible book which has been said, and
perhaps truly, to have caused more suffering than any other written by
human pen--the “Malleus maleficarum,” or “Witch-Hammer.”

The inquisitors charged with the spread of the persecution in Germany
had found no easy task. Not only had they the obstinacy of the
secular courts to contend with, but, still more, the jealousy of the
bishops, who till now, in the Empire, had succeeded in keeping the
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in their own hands. In vain, from pulpit
and professor’s chair, did the Dominican brotherhood promulgate the
theories of Thomas Aquinas and of Eymeric. The German bishops declared
that there were no witches in their territories.[37] In despair
the baffled inquisitors of Germany, Heinrich Krämer[38] and Jacob
Sprenger, at last turned their steps toward Rome. There, on December
5, 1484, they won from Pope Innocent VIII. the famous bull _Summis
desiderantes_. Portraying in the most startling colors, and at much
length, the calamities to man and beast, vineyard and harvest, brought
by the witches, who, he is grieved to learn, swarm throughout Germany,
the head of the Church enjoins all the faithful, on pain of the
indignation of Almighty God and of the apostles Peter and Paul, to lend
aid to the inquisitors in the extirpation of such monsters. Thus armed,
the two Dominicans turned homeward; but their preparation was not yet
complete. Men must be taught not only what to do, but how to do it. So
Sprenger and Krämer set themselves at the compilation of a hand-book
of arguments, rules, and procedure for the detection and punishment
of witches which should henceforth make every man his own inquisitor.
Completed in 1486, the book was probably given to the press in the same
year.[39] As motto, it bore on its title-page the menacing sentence:
“Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.”[40] Edition
followed edition with striking rapidity, and with the issue of the
“Witch-Hammer” began a new era in the history of witchcraft and of its
literature.

It is not my purpose to discuss book by book the literature whose
beginnings I have tried with some fulness to describe. The barest
mention of only its epoch-making titles would more than fill the space
remaining to me. Many of them are familiar to all English readers,
through the classical chapter of Mr. Lecky[41]; and the story of
their influence may be studied in more detail in the great German
works of Soldan-Heppe,[42] of Roskoff,[43] and of Längin.[44] I can
now but briefly characterize what seem to me the main epochs in its
development. But let me, in passing, remark that the opponents of
the persecution seem to me neither so few nor so feeble as one might
infer from the pages of Mr. Lecky. Its defenders are never weary of
complaining of the numbers and influence of the skeptics; and, though
most found it wiser to hold their tongues, or preferred to speak out
only in private, the open assaults upon the delusion are more numerous
than the historians of witchcraft have known.

The “Malleus maleficarum” appealed to readers of every class. The
question could no longer be ignored. The book’s appearance began
a period of controversy, which lasted till the outbreak of the
Reformation distracted all attention to itself. Jurists like Ulrich
Molitor,[45] Alciati,[46] and Ponzinibio,[47] philosophers and men of
letters like Cornelius Agrippa[48] and Hans Sachs,[49] dared to oppose
the superstition[50]; and a cohort of theologians like the inquisitors
Bernard of Como[51] and Hoogstraten,[52] their fellow-Dominicans Dodo
and Theatinus,[53] the historian and scholar Trithemius,[54] the
Spanish mathematician Ciruelo,[55] the papal masters of the palace
Prierias[56] and Spina,[57] even a half-monkish layman like the younger
Pico della Mirandola,[58] appeared in its defence. The briefs of Leo