Witchcraft documents

Medieval Sourcebook

The really intense period of persecution of witches did not come until the late 16th and 17th centuries. The basic doctrines of the later witchcraze were laid down in documents of the later medieval period. These documents built on longstanding folk beliefs which were put in vaguely academic dress.

There has been much recent discussion of whether witches actually existed. For a long period the whole discussion was seen as a mirror of psychological anxieties. Some recent authors - notably Carlo Ginzberg - however, have argued that there were indeed groups of people who regarded themselves as witches. This whole issue is still under discussion.

Real or not, witches and witchcraft, were very real phenomena to the writers of the fifteenth century and later. Their writing tell us much about their thought worlds, and also their attitudes towards women. There can be no doubt that, whether of not there were real groups of witches, many women and a few men, suffered intense persecution and death as a result of intolerance. As Arthur Miller showed in his play The Crucible, set in Massachusetts at the time of the Salem witch trials but about McCarthyism, irrational prejudice and state action based on such, is hardly a medieval, or even a religious, phenomenon.

The three documents below include the Papal Bull of 1484, in which the pope provided his blessing and encouragement to witchhunting; an account of some beliefs about witches; and an extract from the Hammer of Witches describing the process of examination and trial. If the twists and turns to produce a confession were not so tragic, they would constitute humor worthy of Kafka.

Innocent VIII, Bull "Summis Desiderantes", December 5th, 1484
Bullarium Romanum (Taurinensis editio), sub, anno 1484. The Bull is also printed in full at the head of the Malleus maleficarum.

Innocent, bishop, servant of the servants of God, Ad futuram rei memoriam.

Desiring with supreme ardor, as pastoral solicitude requires, that the catholic faith in our days everywhere grow and flourish as much as possible, and that all heretical depravity be put far from the territories of the faithful, we freely declare and anew decree this by which our pious desire may be fulfilled, and, all errors being rooted out by our toil as with the hoe of a wise laborer, zeal and devotion to this faith may take deeper hold on the hearts of the faithful themselves.