The excerpts in this week's readings from the Malleus Maleficarum are incredibly disturbing. To me, this witch-hunting handbook is clearly not just the insane rambling of two bloodthirsty religious fanatics (I mean it totally is, it just isn't ALL it is), it's an outline for a clearly defined, meticulously organized system that led to the deaths of countless innocents.
The basis for the Malleus is already established in the readings of the last few weeks. There's already a firm theological and legal basis for the persecution of witches, and people all over Europe, including popes, clearly believe there are untold legions of witches lurking everywhere, conspiring to corrupt Christian civilization. Kramer and Sprenger technically aren't saying anything new here, they're just codifying their own opinions of a fear that's already vastly widespread.
The text itself is full of examples from theologians and court officials from around Germany dealing with the subjects of women, who to the medieval mindset were inferior to men and especially prone to spiritual corruption, and witchcraft. It seems meticulously researched, and even if Kramer and Sprenger made some or all of their examples up, the Malleus presents to the medieval reader what appears to be a scholarly, authoritative, and more importantly, thanks to the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, papally authorized method of obliterating the perceived scourge of witches from the face of Christian Europe.
Behind the scholarly veneer, though, the text is full of circular logic that provides very little in the way of justice for the falsely accused. For example, accused witches cannot be sentenced to death without a confession of guilt, no matter how much "evidence" is brought against them. Therefore, the accused must be kept imprisoned and tortured for up to a year in order to secure a confession. Even if the accused does not break under months of torture and imprisonment, they are then thrown to the proverbial wolves of the secular courts as an "impenitent heretic." They either confess and the church has them executed, or the secular courts get ahold of them, and, since the secular courts don't necessarily have to deal with the strictures of Church law, things might actually get even worse from there.
This circular logic, though, could easily have seemed sound to the medieval mind. Annihilating witches from this earth in the name of Almighty God was certainly more important than a few innocent human lives. After all, if an innocent was killed due to the system laid out in the Malleus, God would certainly save that person's soul... right?
I find the Malleus so disgusting because it starts on a foundation of pure madness and then proceeds with something a medieval person could easily see as logic and rationality from that point. Kramer and Sprenger didn't start the witch craze, but their contribution to it is so massive and thorough that it's hard not to see them as utterly dominating it.
I am also deeply appalled by the Malleus and its supposed teachings. It really is just a book teaching everyone, especially men, to be suspicious and hate women. Hello! We are the ones who take care of your household and give you children! A little more respect should be shown, don’t you think!? While the detail going into their evidence and arguments about witches is convincing, I feel some of it is farfetched. The circular pattern of their writing and arguments as to the conviction of a witch is very repetitive. There is no clear or easy way an accused woman could escape from trial with her life. She had to choose between dying a “confessed” witch or a suspected one. There was no such thing as being innocent once suspected of witchcraft.
ReplyDeletevery good points all throughout. The circular logic just seems to be the way that the higher ups manage to get into the heads of low downs. in my opinion, if someone had been accused of being a witch or something of that source and their head is on the proverbial chopping block, I think a decent bit of evidence before they are prosecuted would be greatly encouraged.
ReplyDelete