When I think about the Middle Ages in Europe, one topic in particular has fascinated me for quite some time: the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. As I research my first novel, I became curious about the origins of these persecutions—and, in particular, why it was predominantly women who were persecuted for witchcraft. Reading through the historical record, it did not surprise me in the least that the original cause—much like the original sin—was tied to none other than female sexuality.
The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries did not occur out of the blue. There was no big bang, no single cause. Rather, there was a series of rough drafts—a prelude to a fugue, figuratively speaking—culminating in the convergence of ecclesiastical, social, and secular forces that transformed witchcraft into a demonic offense against Christianity, punishable by death.
There was, however, one individual who provided an intellectual framework for this mad worldview: a religious fanatic who effectively anointed himself to carry out his mission. His name was Heinrich Kramer.
Heinrich Institoris, as he was known in Latin, was born around 1430 in Schlettstadt, Alsace, modern-day Sélestat in northeastern France, about 11 miles from the German border. Despite his unremarkable family background, he received an education in Latin grammar and ecclesiastical doctrine. As a young man he joined the Dominican order and embarked on a lifelong institutional religious existence.
If you asked me what challenge a 15-year-old heterosexual male might face at virtually any point in history, I suspect the answer would be consistent: the struggle between virtue and temptation. And by temptation I do not mean a jug of German beer or a chunk of blood sausage, although I am sure the monks indulged in plenty of gluttony. I mean the biological urge to procreate with a well-endowed female.
The Dominican order to which Herr Heinrich belonged was the Order of Preachers. Its members saw themselves as defenders of theological orthodoxy and opponents of heresy. But let us not get carried away assigning collective guilt: the great majority of those unfortunate friars did not embrace religious extremism. Kramer was different. He possessed an unusual devotional intensity that became the driving force behind his eventual success.
He propagated the idea that Christianity was at war with a hidden enemy. Anything impure, blasphemous, heretical, or demonic threatened the faith. Kramer took it upon himself to root out these sources of evil.
In the medieval world, misfortune could broadly be understood as having several causes: nature, divine will, or maleficium. Maleficium meant intentional harm inflicted through magical or hidden means. Witchcraft and sorcery were often associated with specific misfortunes: something happened to a person, a crop failed, a cow died, a household suffered—and suspicion followed. Larger calamities affecting whole communities were more readily attributed to natural causes or divine punishment.
What could not otherwise be understood might therefore become maleficium. Suspicion began within a community and, under the right circumstances, developed into an accusation. Accusations could become legal proceedings, and authorities began looking for patterns among otherwise isolated events and connecting them to a particular person.
For Herr Kramer, that person increasingly became not just any individual, but a woman—and often a woman who fit a particular profile. She was not the obedient, virtuous wife but the socially troublesome, confrontational, independent woman unafraid to express herself. Sounds all too familiar!
Women already occupied an inferior position within medieval intellectual and social hierarchies. Female weakness was widely propagated and accepted in clerical writings—in intellect, faith, emotional stability, and especially sexual restraint. Never mind that throughout history a great many sexual advances have been initiated by men. Religion has a long record of turning inconvenient truths on their heads. Thus, female virtue was imagined as a necessary defense against sexual temptation, and in Kramer’s thinking uncontrolled female sexuality became intimately connected with witchcraft and evil. That worldview followed him to Innsbruck in the 1480s.
His first major foray into prosecuting alleged witchcraft in Innsbruck involved several women, among them Helena Scheuberin. She was an unusual target. The wife of a prosperous burgher, she was neither destitute nor socially isolated, nor was she known to possess supernatural powers. But something about Helena triggered Kramer.
She despised him. She rejected his preaching, avoided his sermons, publicly challenged his views, and reportedly insulted him. She became a perfect target for Kramer to flex his inquisitorial muscle, and in 1485 he initiated proceedings against her and several other women for suspected witchcraft.
Kramer did not fool around. He interrogated Helena about her sexual history. Did she have a lover? How long had the relationship lasted? Had the lover died? Fortunately, he did not get very far. Helena Scheuberin was no damsel in distress. She had legal representation, and the proceedings against her encountered serious resistance. Kramer’s questioning became so personal and his theories so far-fetched that even the local ecclesiastical authorities found him extreme. Bishop Georg Golser eventually halted the proceedings and ordered Kramer to leave the diocese.
Think about that development for a moment. Even the learned and powerful men of his own time were not prepared to accept what Kramer was selling. Which begs the question: why did he not abandon his mission—or at least reconsider its premise? Well, like every narcissistic, self-righteous asshole, he considered no one's opinion but his own.
As his frustration mounted, so did his zeal. This time, however, Kramer made certain that his authority rested on the highest possible ecclesiastical foundation: the Pope himself.
In December 1484, shortly before Kramer’s unsuccessful inquisitorial attempt in Innsbruck, Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus—“Desiring with supreme ardor”—a papal decree recognizing allegations of witchcraft and authorizing Heinrich Kramer to pursue inquisitorial work in specified German territories. It also instructed ecclesiastical authorities not to obstruct him.
In 1486, soon after his humiliation in Innsbruck, Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, which translates as The Hammer of Witches. He printed Summis desiderantes at the beginning of the work, giving readers the impression that the papal decree endorsed what followed. It did not. Pope Innocent VIII had authorized inquisitorial activity; he had not endorsed the particular doctrines, arguments, or procedures Kramer subsequently set out in the Malleus. And those arguments were truly extraordinary.
The Malleus Maleficarum constructed a theological, demonological, legal, and procedural case against witchcraft. First, Kramer insisted that witchcraft was real and that denying its existence could itself amount to theological error. He then described the acts witches supposedly committed, dwelling particularly on women's sexual relations with demons and on pacts with Satan through which women allegedly acquired supernatural powers.
Here Kramer fused existing medieval misogyny with older ideas about harmful magic. Women, he argued, were particularly susceptible to witchcraft because they were weaker in faith, more credulous, more impressionable—and more sexually voracious. Female sexuality was no longer merely a moral problem. In Kramer's construction, it became a gateway through which Satan entered the world.
The Malleus gave this worldview something it had previously lacked: an organized intellectual system. Theology, misogyny, demonology, sexual anxiety, folk beliefs about harmful magic, and legal procedure were assembled into a single coherent argument.
And then history handed Kramer another advantage. The printing press, invented just a few decades earlier, allowed his ideas to travel farther and faster than they ever could have in manuscript form. The Malleus Maleficarum appeared in numerous editions and circulated widely throughout Europe. Kramer did not invent the European witch hunt, nor did his book single-handedly cause the mass persecutions that followed. But he helped give an old collection of fears a theological vocabulary, a legal framework, and, most dangerously, a recognizable enemy. That enemy was increasingly a woman…