Customer Reviews

Malleus Maleficarum

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a lawyer, I was surprised just how modern this book was in terms of both its reasoning and its procedure.

While clearly today the inquisition is a matter of history the beliefs that made up the inquisition remain. People still have and act on superstitious beliefs.

Likewise the procedures outlined in this book are not at such a variance with modern legal procedure respecting the selection of judges, decorum in the court, general reasoning procedures to be used in arriving at conclusions and reliance on precedent for making future decisions.

While it's admittedly unsettling to see just how easily law courts can be co opted by the inquisition (or more recently by the Nazis or the Stalinists), it's reassuring to know that as a litigator I have both the ability and the sworn duty to use law not to abet but to combat ignorance.

It is quite weird giving a high mark to a book as famous and as evil as this book is and yet this book is definitely a "must" for any civilized person to read, or at least browse and consider-- at least once during their lifetime. Hence the high mark. If you haven't read it you haven't a complete western education. It's the pits of our (western) mind. At one level the book reads a little like any current pompous sociological dissertation and is surprisingly modern in this respect even although written hundreds of years ago. Essentially, it describes how a "good Christian" detects the carrier of a threat to ones population's souls (the witches) and then how to deal with these threats. The murderous, but bare-faced lunacy of this book is breath-taking. The summary of its contents, like the 1928 summary that accompanies this Amazon page for the book makes one realize that real ropy, medieval madness was still quite strong in the early 20th century Western Christian. One thing that does surprise me is that I appear to be the first reviewer. Are there so few other Amazon browsers that can "bother" to be outraged by it?
More coolly, the historically minded will find this book a pathway into the mind of the educated and sincere christian in the late 15th century. The book is famous enough to be worth its own entry in the Wikipedia and those interested in the history of morality and ethics should certainly read it. For example, those interested in the history of the battering that science has received and still receives from the Churches should notice how the book takes care to ban artificial insemination as witch-craft. Check me, but I think they ban this technology more than once. Until I read it I was not aware that artificial insemination existed over 500 years ago!