The Enemy Within by John Demos

from now on the inquisitors will have free and full scope for “correcting, imprisoning, punishing, and chastising, according to their deserts, those whom they shall find guilty.”
    At about the same point, Kramer embarks on a further, and closely related, project: to prepare a book about his inquisitorial activities. Written in Latin, entitled the Malleus Maleficarum ( English translation: The Hammer of Witches), and published at Strasbourg in 1486, this work will come to be seen as an epitome of witch-hunting.
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The Malleus was not the first work of its kind—a list of witchcraft treatises from the preceding half century runs to more than three dozen—but it would become far and away the most famous. Read today, it seems very much a hybrid: part bible, part encyclopedia, part operational guide. It is long: some 400 pages in a mid-20th century reprinting. It is densely written, with lots of heavy scholastic verbiage: “Here is set forth” . . . “With reference to these words it is to be noted that” . . . “Firstly . . . secondly . . . thirdly . . . fourthly.” Its expository method is basically that of a catechism, with questions raised (and answered), objections posed (and resolved), principles stated, “admonitions” tendered, conclusions declared. Its goal is to describe and analyze the entire panoply of witch-related phenomena, and to offer judges and fellow inquisitors a comprehensive model of response.
    The book has three main parts. (Its preface is the pope’s recent bull, republished entire.) The first part lays some theoretical groundwork—by establishing that disbelief in witches is rank heresy, by showing the irrevocable connection between witches and the Devil, by canvassing the numerous harms (maleficia) they bring, and by tracing their usual biographical profile (with special emphasis on their female gender). The second part describes the leading forms of witchcraft—its causal ways and means—and declares certain general principles of investigation. And the third part provides an exhaustive account of the legal steps to be taken against witches: details of charging, examining (including the use of torture), sentencing, and executing.
    The argument builds and builds, through abundant reference to “authorities”: to the Scriptures, most of all, but also to patristic sources (especially St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) and other demonologists from around the same time period, as well as to classical writers and philosophers with something valuable to say on the subject (Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Terence, Cato, and many more). It also invokes the “credible experience” of the authors themselves in pursuing their targets. As such, the Malleus is, from first to last, a compendium of stories: here are a few representative examples.
    A young girl in the village of Breisach (near Basel, Switzerland) was “converted” to witchcraft by her aunt who “had [subsequently] been burned in the diocese of Strasbourg.” This aunt “one day . . . ordered her to go upstairs . . . where she found fifteen young men clothed in green garments after the manner of German knights.” She was then “sorely beaten” and forced to have sex with one (or more) of the men, and afterward was “initiated” into the Devil’s ranks. During the following weeks and months she “was often transported by night . . . over vast distances” in order to meet other witches “in conclave.” There she observed the ritual killing of infants; among other horrors, she recalled a time when “she had opened a secret pot and found the heads of a great many children.”
    A confessed witch “in the state of Berne” (Switzerland) also spoke of child-murder, and added to it the element of cannibalism. “We set our snares chiefly for unbaptized children, . . . and with our spells we kill them in their