They tried to poison the King. They enter into pacts with Satan. They struck your neighbor down with a curse in the street and he was in bed with fever for a month. They sacrifice children to Satan and use their remains to make an unguent for their rituals. They gather in meeting places only they know, transported by diabolical means to secret groves where they indulge in midnight orgies and arcane rituals with Satan, Diana, Hecate, and all the demons of hell.
Such is the image of the Witch we glean from the Malleus Maleficarum. Ostensibly the work of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the work was published in 1486 and accompanied by a 1484 Papal Bull certifying the doctrinal accuracy of its major claims. (I say ostensibly because it's possible that Kramer wrote the work himself and Sprenger's name was only added at a later date.) The Malleus was not the first witch hunting manual, nor would it be the last. But it was a uniquely popular book, one of the bestsellers of the early days of the printing press. It would go on to exercise a profound influence after the Reformation, with Protestant and Catholic witch hunters alike consulting the book in their efforts.
Most of the material on the Malleus available online introduces the book by saying it caused the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, during the centuries when it was most influential. Particular emphasis is usually placed on the innocence of these witches who weren't doing no harm to nobody. With our modern sensibilities we know witch hunts were mere scapegoating. Magic doesn't exist, after all, and even if it does it's harmless. Or the (mostly male) witch hunters were driven by an excessive and irrational hatred of women. Or the (mostly religious) witch hunters were projecting their singular vision of the world onto others and denying them religious freedom.
And so on.
We'll look at the witch hunting phenomenon from this (arguably more modern) point of view at a later date. But for the purposes of this five-part series on the Malleus Maleficarum, we will make a good faith effort to understand this pre-modern phenomenon from its own pre-modern point of view. We can take our lead here from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:
Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?' But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
In this post and the ones that follow, we will make the effort to understand the witch hunters as men who believed there were mice in the house. They understood themselves as facing a real threat to the world order they held dear. They were imperfect human beings–and many of them were clergy, so if they were sincere in their vocation they would be more conscious than most of their own human fallibility. There were mistakes. There were excesses. Some of the methods they employed, such as physical torture, are currently forbidden under the juridical practice of many nations. There is much here that the typical modern reader will find distasteful, even repellent.
But it's the novelist's duty to feel his way into the state of mind of all kinds of unpleasant people. Serial killers. Political activists. Politicians.
There's no fiction at all without a suspension of judgment. It's the reader's prerogative to judge. A novelist who judges his subject should go back to writing ad copy.
With this series of posts I will go over some of the more salient features of the Malleus Maleficarum in particular. But more generally, I want to invite you to sample the flavor of this early Renaissance world. Present you with the mental state and background assumptions of someone who believes the house is crawling with mice.
Historians explain the emergence of witch hunting in the early Renaissance in several ways. Some cite a change in climate–a "Mini Ice Age" leading to poor crop performance. Hungry people look for someone to blame in hard times… witches are changing the weather!
Some point to the Reformation as a cause. They analyze Catholicism vs Protestantism in economic terms, as two "brands" competing for market share. Somewhere in the course of this development, witch hunting became a service offered in order to gain a competitive edge.
Others say witch hunting was a matter of bureaucratic inertia. The Papal Inquisition had been formed in the early 13th century as a way to combat heresy. By the late 15th century most of the large-scale heretical movements had been eradicated, leading to a situation where Inquisitors needed to find a new target in order to justify the existence of their institution. Witchcraft became that target.
Probably all of these accounts are accurate, or at least all three factors played some role in the rise and development of witch hunting. But what these explanations do not do is answer our question, the novelist's question: how did these people understand themselves?
There may have been a mini Ice Age, but not even the best educated person of the time would know it. Protestants and Catholics may have competed, but True Believers don't think in capitalist terms of market share. Some very cynical Inquisitors might dream up a new threat to justify their position in society, but the rank and file of the Dominican Order would never accept that.
Pre-modern people did not have the same basic assumptions about the world that most moderns have. Since the 17th century, the basic common sense of educated people has been that the world is made up of physical objects. These physical objects are made up of particles, which are made up of yet smaller particles, which are made up of something quantum physicists have been arguing about these last hundred years. The world is made of physical stuff, interacting according to the laws of physics. Mind (or spirit, or the devil, or God) has no role in this modern common sense.
Part of the mistaken pseudo-conflict between science and religion is due to the scientific method's overwhelming success in discovering the secrets of the physical world. Mind has been neglected (or worse, made into the object of psychology).
The meaning-making patterns of the mind are no part of modern everyday common sense. This is part of why the crisis of meaning has been one of the major themes of the modern era, particularly in the last century. Although a soul as sensitive as Pascal's would already observe in the 1640s: "The silence of infinite space fills me with dread."
(It's not without reason that Pascal is considered one of the forerunners of existentialism.)
So. We've addressed the blindness of modernity. Now, what did pre-modern people see that our preconceptions cover over?
This question is the main theme of this essay series, so we won't have any immediate answers quite yet. But to give you a glimpse of the kind of answer I'm driving at, let's stop and visit a figure from the cusp of the modern era: the venerable don Quixote.
Overtly, Cervantes writes don Quixote with the intention that we laugh at his hero. The old Knight reads too many romances about heroic knights, wild adventures, and fair ladies being rescued. Gradually the idea forms in his mind that the world of romance and the real world are one and the same. Much of the comedy of the novel comes from don Quixote's misreading of everyday reality. The faithful servant Sancho Panza is really a cynical coward who constantly makes fun of his master and takes advantage of him. The fair lady he pines away in love and devotion for is really a common prostitute. The giants he meets in combat mortal on the dread field are really a bunch of windmills.
We're meant to laugh at don Quixote, and we do laugh. His dreams are not our own. His determination to view the world as a space for heroic adventure makes him a laughingstock and leads him to misfortune.
But, although it may not have been clear when Cervantes was writing, don Quixote was a true hero. His belief in his destiny as a knight-errant in search of adventure and opportunities to overcome the evils of the world ennobles him and those around him. He finds adventure. He does good in the world. And when our hero dies at the end of the novel, we feel the world is lessened by his loss. We may have laughed at him along the way, but we loved don Quixote.
So what is the lesson to draw from this digression on Cervantes? Simply that our beliefs about the world profoundly influence our experience of the world. And if one man's belief can have such an effect on his own experience, how much more will the beliefs of an entire civilization structure its possibilities?
The world of the early Renaissance was still a world imbued with a common sense belief in God. This is a hard thing for us moderns to comprehend. Even when a modern person believes in God, that belief is added onto a basically materialist common sense. (Originally and for the most part, at least. The cloistered nun, the Tibetan monk, or the Benedictine at the Abbey of Gethsemane might successfully get free from our age's strange addiction to matter.) The human being was endowed with reason as the mark of being created in the image of God. The age found its heroes in the defenders of Christendom and in those self-denying lovers of God, the saints. All of creation was good, and the reason it was good was that it was continuously created by God as a testament to his glory, and that we created beings could know him.
Such a world was fallen. Such a world was full of sin and iniquity. Such a world was imperfect, albeit possibly slightly less imperfect than other ages, other places, other times.
But such a world was comprehensible. Man knew he was made to inhabit this world, that it was good, and that he had a place in creation from which he could contribute to its goodness. Though individuals, then as always, could struggle to find meaning in their lives, we could never speak of this age as one that suffered from a crisis of meaning.
For all that, however, this world stood on the brink of multiple revolutions. Within the next hundred years the Reformation would occur, starting with an obscure German monk's perfectly ordinary attempt to engage in theological debate. An act which would precipitate two centuries of religious wars and open the path for later, even more violent revolutions.
Within the next hundred and fifty years alchemy (which has a complex and illuminating relationship with witchcraft) would gradually change its emphasis and become the ground of our modern scientific method.
Within the next decade an Italian sailor operating under the flag of Spain would fail to reach India, instead making landfall on a new world of possibilities.
Some would seek salvation in religious freedom, others in the conquest of matter, others in the conquest of empires.
Renaissance means rebirth. And it is with some reason that we call this period of European history a rebirth. For the first time an educated European could view himself as an heir to the dominating spirit of the Roman Empire. After a thousand years of Christian discipline, the animating spirit of Greek and Roman paganism once again found its genius in the hearts of the valiant.
But if this was the start of a new era, it was also the end of an old one. The witch hunting phenomenon emerges just as these two worlds begin to meet. In the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, we find a dying old order already beginning to defend itself against threats that would eventually overwhelm it.
(For a few fleeting centuries, at least.)
But enough stage setting. Next week we start in earnest, beginning with Part I of the Malleus Maleficarum.
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