Malleus Maleficarum - The Hammer of Witches; a complete translation with woodcut illustrations from the 15th-18th centuries

Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, is the preeminent and most famous manual on witch-hunts. The book was first published in Speyer, in 1486. The Malleus Maleficarum was read and used in both Protestant and Catholic regions throughout the period of witch hunts and witch trials, from the late 15th to the 18th century.

Contrary to popular understanding, the first true witch hunts, involving mass trials of ordinary men and women, began only during the Renaissance and Early Modern Period - not during the Middle Ages - and the Malleus played a key role in the emergence of these new persecutions. The book was for centuries the key point of reference for many of those involved in the pursuit of witches. At its peak, the Malleus was the second-best-selling book in Europe (after the Bible).

The Malleus Maleficarum is the most well-known text representing a new synthesized theory that attempted to consolidate various theories relating to witches under a single framework and the first work to widely disseminate this framework across Europe. The Malleus brings together several theological ideas, provides a large number of "real-life," contemporary examples of witches and witchcraft, and, finally, outlines how the threat of the witches must be dealt with in practice. Although the material presented in the Malleus Maleficarum is not in itself truly novel-many other treatises containing many of its ideas already existed at the time when it was written (such as Johannes Nider's Formicarius)-it is nonetheless the most powerful and explosive synthesis of folkloric fears and Catholic theology to have ever been written. The speed with which the work spread may have been partly due to the then-recently invented printing press.

The book is divided into three main parts:

The first part is an attempt to combine the ideas of the Bible, the opinions of Church Fathers, and other theological authorities-along with scholars from antiquity and pre-existing folk beliefs about witches and evil magic-in order to provide "irrefutable proof" that witches exist.

The second part of the book provides an overview of the phenomena of witches and witchcraft based on personal observations by the author and stories told to him by "reputable sources." Although the Malleus draws heavily on Johannes Nider's Formicarius - for its theological discussion as well as its "ethnographic" source material-it diverges from the latter by introducing and elaborating the concept of the "witches' sabbath." This new concept would later become the cornerstone of most witch trials in continental Europe.

The third and most problematic and consequential part of the book is concerned with how to prosecute witches. In the Malleus, Kramer argues that the threat posed by witches is so pervasive that it must be dealt with principally by the secular authorities; he considered it too large a threat to be left solely to the Inquisition. The Malleus argues against any kind of lenience towards witches; they should preferably be tortured, and the authorities should at all costs avoid setting them free. In light of the new theory, the witch was no longer a mere human but a tainted servant or vessel of the devil. However, Kramer and Sprenger did not create this witch-entity purely out of their imagination or merely from the theological sources on which they drew but built their image of this new threat to a large degree on pre-existing folk beliefs.

The main section of this new edition of the Malleus Maleficarum is a facsimile reprint of Montague Summers' 1928 translation. The book also includes a new 18-page introductory foreword and an updated list of references by anthropologist Nikolas Arhem. The new expansive introductory foreword helps contextualize the Malleus Maleficarum in light of more recent witchcraft and witch-hunt research.