The hammer of the witches

The manual that hunted witches for four centuries.

The Hammer of Witches , or Malleus maleficarum , was the most famous manual written during the "witch hunts" of the Middle Ages. The inflammatory epidemic that persecuted and condemned women, whether for their knowledge or behaviors that deviated from the moral and religious standards of the time, or for pure revenge and misogyny, is a stain on the history of humanity.

Written in the 15th century, the book benefited from the invention of the printing press for its dissemination, having several re-editions across the European continent and, despite numerous controversies and doubts regarding the validity of its teachings, it reached the 16th and 17th centuries with prestige among the persecutors of heretics.

Widely used by secular courts, the manual can be held responsible for the more than 100,000 executions, mostly of women, carried out by the Inquisition over at least four centuries, as historians point out.

How to identify witches? How do witches act? How to judge witches? These are the central questions answered in this treatise by inquisitors Herinrich Kraemer and James Sprenger, who, among other fanciful claims, attribute to women the practice of witchcraft through intercourse with the devil.

The foundations of neurotic thinking, misogynistic practices, control over bodies, sex, and medical knowledge, combined with secular and religious power, are systematically demonstrated here. The book also became a model for modern criminal prosecutions, with its inquisitorial judgment and its punishments based on the atonement of the flesh. The Malleus maleficarum is a document of historical, philosophical, and legal importance.

This revised edition of the text established by Rose Marie Muraro, published by Rosa dos Tempos since 1991, includes Muraro's own magnificent introduction. Brilliantly, the Patron of Brazilian Feminism analyzes the foundations of the manual, which have enabled centuries of oppression and institutional violence against women's bodies. The book also features a foreword by renowned psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Carlos Amadeu B. Byington.

As Muraro states in his introduction to The Hammer of Witchcraft , it is hoped that from the knowledge of a tragic past today this ""reinsertion of the feminine into history, rescuing pleasure, solidarity, non-competition, union with nature, is perhaps the only chance our species has to continue living.""