Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Woman Hating

be entirely removed and separate from the Body (Answer: Yes)

Question XL That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, and Procure Abortion; or if they do not do this, Offer

New-born Children to the Devils (Answer: Yes)8

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of

witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. They write “of the several Methods by which Devils through Witches Entice and Allure the

Innocent to the Increase of that Horrid Craft and company” ; “of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made”; “How they are Transported from Place to

Place”; “Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with those Devils known as Incubi, ” 9 etc. They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men,

change themselves into animals, change animals into

people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The

main concern of the Malleus is with natural events,

nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine —the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology,

sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.

Before we approach the place of women in this most

Christian piece of Western history, the importance of

the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark

Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by.

Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was

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found in every courtroom. It had been read by every

judge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.

T h e Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It was

theology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge its

authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f wisdom, ” 10

wrote Montague Summers in 1946, the year I was born)

was to commit heresy, a capital crime.

Although statistical information on the witchcraft

persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:

In almost every province of Germany the persecution

raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said

to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg,

where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine

hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year.

So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was

author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted

of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in

three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at

Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single

execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single

year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the

Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that