Research Paper On The Malleus Maleficarum

639 Words2 Pages

It was the 1880’s, in this time there were “witches” running all around Germany, which started The Salem Witch Trials. A lot of people were being mistaken for witches, so the Puritans were arresting many people. How were the Puritans able to tell if there witch suspect truly used witchcraft before they took action and killed the “witch”? The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the main tools used to prove a person was a witch. Used as a helpful tool for the Puritans in The Salem Witch Trials, the Malleus Maleficarum was used often.
The Malleus Maleficarum, Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”, is one of the most famous medieval treatises on witches. It was written and first published in Germany 1486, by writers Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Springer. Its purpose was to counteract all arguments of witchcraft and to tell people how to identify, interrogate and convict witches (The Malleus Maleficarum). The change of view the Malleus Maleficarum gave led to an aggressive and gruesome acts, that ended in the deaths of hundreds of people assumed of the religion of witchcraft, which was illegal in that time (Malleus Maleficarum).
The Malleus Maleficarum is broken in to …show more content…

The third part of the book entails how to punish witches by trial and execution. The instruction given by the book was created to separate the truth from lies, assuming that they thought witchcraft and magic, truly existed, other than it being a superstition. Another way the book was used was to tell them what to look for in examination. One object they looked for in a physical examination was "any instrument of witchcraft." These included any type of unusual body marks such as moles and birth marks. The Malleus Maleficarum also had the methods such as not being able to drown or burn the suspect they were under the protection of other witches. In other words, if a woman could be drowned or burned, she might be innocent, and if not she was probably guilty

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