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230 of 254 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Hammer of The Witches: A Classic of Ignorance, November 25, 1999
Rating the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM is an exercise is frustration. One cannot "enjoy" this book; like MEIN KAMPF, one reads it for its historical importance. This book should form a part of every thinking person's library as a warning beacon, if for no other reason that it is a seminal textbook on the inhumanity of humanity. First written in 1484 by the Friars Kramer and Sprenger, (and reprinted endlessly), the MALLEUS was immediately given the imprimatur of the Holy See as the most important work on witchcraft, to date. And so it remains. The MALLEUS MALEFICARUM is a compendium of fifteenth century paranoias, all the more frightening for its totalitarian modernity. ("Anything that is done for the benefit of the State is Good.") In form, it is a "how to" guide on recognizing, capturing, torturing, and executing witches. In substance, it is a diatribe against women, heretics, independent thinkers, romantic lovers, the sensitive passions, human sexuality, and compassion. "Vanity of vanities" indeed. In writing the MALLEUS, Kramer and Spenger claimed to be doing "God's work"; these men, and those who followed them worshiped only their own arrogance. Read it and Be Afraid, my friends. Forming a portion of every working law library for 300 years, there is no estimate of how many women and men were put to death through the mechanism of this benighted book. Some historians estimate that the numbers may run into the millions. The text is rife with "caselaw" examples of witchcraft, some of which are clearly delusional and some downright silly, or would be, if they hadn't ended in gruesome deaths for the accused. Take the case of the poor woman who was burned for offering the opinion that "it might rain today" shortly before it did. Of note are Kramer and Spenger's assertions that prosecutors are (conveniently) "immune" to witchcraft, and their instructions to Judges to tell the truth to the witch that there will be mercy shown (with the mental reservation that death is a mercy to those prisoner to the devil). Such twisted logic is the cornerstone of the MALLEUS. The translator, Rev. Montague Summers, waxes rhapsodic on the "learning" and "wisdom" of the authors of the MALLEUS. He was apparently of a mind with Kramer and Spenger, and wrote two embarrassingly effusive and bigoted introductions (in 1928 and 1946), praising the "brillance" of this work and its importance in this "feministic" era. Summers' commentary is as frightening as anything Kramer and Spenger wrote in the text proper, the more so for being 20th century, and particularly post-World War Two. Like the Papal Bull of VIII which is now considered integral with the MALLEUS, future commentators will make much of the statements of Summers, a "modern" man. In short, the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM was a license to kill. And it was used far too often and far too freely. Kramer and Spenger's madness did not die with them; but how many have died with their madness?
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by Francesco Maria Guazzo
by King James I.
by Montague Summers
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