What really stood out to me in this chapter, though, is how absolutely abysmally these two guys feel about women. They keep going on and on about how women are weak mentally and easily corrupted, and how they're just a necessary evil used to have children but will make your life miserable in the process. According to them, women are only good when they're gentle and subservient, and any other time they are the manifestation of Hell itself. No middle ground, no thinking "Hey, maybe she's just unhappy that I keep her chained to the stove 6 hours a day," just one or the other. Sounds to me like they had super fun home lives as kids that caused them to develop some serious mother issues.
Of course I'm getting ahead of myself, because I must mention that right out of the gate Kramer and Sprenger disable any and all possible debate by basically saying that everyone who disagrees with them is stupid and evil and needs to be punished for not acknowledging the far mentally superior beings who are lords Kramer and Sprenger. This typical type of mentality isn't uncommon in people throughout history, but the difference between modern and olden times is that a figurehead doing that today will get him super far with a small portion of the population who just so happen to have the same ideas, and exactly nowhere with the vast majority that is the rest of the world. Trying to pull that nowadays will only have the influence of getting people to make fun of him over the internet in a manner similar to this:
A large portion of the rest of the text is them trying to figure out what exactly witches are and are not able to do, such as overturning the Canon's declaration that any bodily transportation occurs only in the imagination, because nobody can ever seem to agree on any of this. Seriously though, at this point you'd think that SOMEONE would have at the very least come up with some theorem that at least most learned people could agree upon, but I guess real people don't work like the scientific community and witchcraft doesn't work like physics, so it's probably too much to think that a medieval Einstein would come along and solve the puzzle of the proverbial ether. This is why my best friend is a statistics textbook with a face drawn on the cover.
Like most of the readings I also didn't like this ones views on women either. Although this is nothing new to these men. After all, women are evil creatures full of sin and temptation obviously the devil will favor them. How could egotistic, conceited, accusing white guys with labor ability and no motherly instinct be capable of evil. Hm, something seems off. Oh right, everyone loves to play the blame game and also create elaborate reasons for someone to be guilty. I forgot the mindset of these people were extremely unstable and sexist.
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