Behold! The Proto-Q

The Malleus Maleficarum is a textbook on witchcraft attributed to Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, two Dominican friars who, like many of that order, served as Inquisitors for the Catholic Church. How much of the blame actually resides with them is debatable; Sprenger’s only name was only associated with it decades after its original publication in 1486, and whilst he and Kramer were undeniably associated in some respect it’s suggested that his name was attached to the book to benefit from his somewhat better reputation.

You see, Kramer wrote the book whilst under a cloud: after trying to kick off some witch-hunts in Innsbruck, he had been turfed out of the city by the local bishop, who denounced him as being mentally unsound. The bishop may have had good reason to do so: Kramer’s own behaviour had been deeply questionable, including getting so fixated on the sexual habits of one of the women he’d accused of witchcraft (his grounds for suspicion being that she wasn’t coming to his sermons) that the rest of the tribunal stopped the trial. The theory goes that Kramer was so annoyed by this, he wrote a massive tome about witchcraft essentially as a Renaissance-era equivalent of posting an angry manifesto on an incel forum.

The Malleus has subsequently become infamous for its role in the witchcraft persecutions which became all the more fashionable in subsequent centuries. It should be recalled that in the era that Kramer was working in, the Inquisition wasn’t making witches the main focus of its work. The business of the Inquisition was going after heretics and apostates; even the persecution of Jews by the Inquisition was justified under this umbrella. (Specifically, the Spanish Inquisition was going after Jewish people who had converted to Christianity, or whose ancestors had converted, but were accused of continuing to hold their old beliefs anyway.)