Book Review

The Malleus Maleficarum

by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger

     Some people have called The Malleus Maleficarum the wickedest book ever written. I’m not convinced it has maintained that status over the years. For historical reasons, I’ll say it doesn’t deserve to be exonerated, however. Certainly the German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger who wrote it don’t deserve any praise either. These were some seriously evil medieval Catholic bureaucrats. As a work of literature in our time, it can, however, serve as an important historical document and a reference point for where we have come from intellectually since the beginning of the Renaissance.

The Malleus Maleficarum is essentially a legal document, written by the Catholic Inquisition for the purpose of punishing heretics, in this case most specifically Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft. It is written as three separate books. The first lays out a legal definition of heresy and witchcraft. The second part is an explication of what witches do, how to protect yourself from witches, and how to remove curses that have afflicted an individual. The third book is a set of guidelines for conducting trials related to the crime of heresy and the practice of witchcraft.

The first section, in which witchcraft is defined and explained, is moderately interesting as the most intellectually rigorous part of the book. In part, the authors try to explain what they believe to be motivating factors in human behavior. People can be pushed and pulled in all directions yet they still have freedom of choice because the forces that move them are sometimes not strong enough to do anything more than exert an influence over people. Free will makes it possible to resist these compulsions. The supposed power that acts on people comes from the influence of the stars. Despite this belief, regarded as a fact in medieval society, astrology is considered a forbidden practice, punishable by law. Witches attempt to seize control over these occult forces to do harm or create good fortune for the people the try to effect. Behind all this is Satan who sends his devils out to convince people to practice witchcraft so he can wreck God’s creation. Sexuality plays a strong role in this theory because the authors claim that demons called incubi and succubi transmit tainted semen to women since such semen will cause the children who grow out of it to become witches when they grow up. Or maybe the real reason is that the authors were uptight old men who were overcome by sexual frustration and anxiety so they blamed women for their own psychological problems.

This first section is not a thrilling read unless you are a highly disciplined reader. It is full of theological and philosophical arguments that mostly rely on textual antecedents, circular logic, and reference to authority figures for support. There are heavy doses of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, for example, and if they said something is true than it must be true because they are canonized saints and by theological definition, they can not be wrong. Plato and Aristotle are also heavily referenced since this was the dawning of the Renaissance, after all, when those guys were getting rediscovered in Europe right at the time the Arabs were abandoning them thanks to narrow minded dolts like Al Ghazali. On a more bizarre note, Homer’s The Odyssey is used as proof of witchcraft because it says Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs; this is proof of what witches are capable of doing. The thought that this could be imaginary never crossed the authors’ minds. There is some modicum of challenge to adapting your way of thinking to this lunacy, but at times it gets interesting because they try to explain the human psychology of motivations. There are some passages that read like a crude version of empirical philosophers like Locke and Hume, and others that are like a rudimentary version of Immanuel Kant. The passages about astrology address some of the same issues of influence and will that geneticists question in the effect of genes on our behavior, only without the scientific discipline to back up the claims.

The second section is the most interesting as it describes what witches supposedly do. While sometimes they remove curses or cure illnesses, the bulk of their activities include malevolent curses and spells. There is a lot of copulating with devils, spells cast on children by evil midwives, the raising of hailstorms, the drying up of cows’ milk, and the ultimate evil: causing male impotence. This seems to be a major preoccupation for these Catholic Inquisitors because they bring it up over and over again. They even make the strange claim that witches can cause a man’s one-eyed wonder worm to completely disappear. The most interesting part of this sections is when a man approaches a witch and asks her to restore his trouser snake; the witch tells him to climb a tree where she keeps a bunch of dicks sitting in a bird’s nest just waiting to be taken away. Instead of taking his own third leg, the guy takes the biggest one instead, but he is unable to attach it to himself because it does not rightfully belong to him. It is easy to see how the people in this pre-scientific society scapegoated witches for things they did not understand like bad weather or cow diseases, but I might offer an alternate explanation for the disappearing dork syndrome that so preoccupied the officials of the church. There is such a thing as shrinkage and if you can imagine being a middle-aged man in freezing cold Germany during the middle of a harsh winter, trying to shag a peasant girl with hairy legs, crooked brown teeth, and rancid sauerkraut on her breath while she lays with her legs spread in a barn thick with the odor of horse manure, you might understand why your best friend might not be eager to come out and play. But when these crusty old Catholics can’t get it up, they blame the witches and a bunch of them have to get burned at the stake in retaliation. The drama of human stupidity never ends. So it goes.

The rest of the second section details the ways that witchcraft can be prevented or how damage from such magic can be cured. You don’t have to think too hard to figure out that getting baptized, praying, and going to confession are the only ways to officially and effectively combat the works of Satan. These Catholic rituals draw a strict line of demarcation between those inside the church and those outside of it. In a sociological sense, Catholic ritual is a means of dominating and controlling those within the church while those outside the lines of demarcation are subject to persecution because they are outside the limits of control. Thereby the witches must be destroyed because they represent a threat to the order and power of the church by not complying with their practices. This scapegoating solidifies the autocracy of the religious institution, causing a tightly controlled community bond by giving the members a visible and tangible target to destroy. If witches did not exist, it would be necessary for the church to invent them. Every religion needs enemies in order to survive.

The third section is a horrible bore. It explains the way witches are brought to trial, how their crimes are categorized, the legal ways in which they are interrogated, and their ultimate punishment which is, in the vast majority of cases, the death penalty. The witch’s confession is the whole meat of the matter. If the accused does not confess to practicing witchcraft, they are threatened with torture. If that doesn’t work, they are tortured. If that doesn’t work, they are executed for lying. If they do confess, they are strangled before being burned at the stake so they don’t have to feel the pain of the fire. There is no way to win for anyone charged with this crime. Even the torture is a catch 22; if a person is to be tortured with hot irons, Satan will prevent them from getting burned badly enough to confess. Therefore, if being tortured with hot irons doesn’t force them to confess, it is proof that they are in the employ of the devil. Heads I win, tails you lose. If they confess, so much the better. For the most part, this section is an excruciatingly dull and repetitive recital of legal protocols and procedures that makes the rambling abstractions of modern legal tomes exciting by comparison.

Thanks to the rigorous intellectual ignorance, and sexual frustrations, of Kramer and Sprenger masses of people were burned in medieval Europe for the innocuous crime of practicing witchcraft. Probably most of the accused never did anything more occult than wish on a star or mutter a curse under their breath when they were annoyed. Aside from the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansings of the modern world, the only other comparison to our times might be the draconian laws that put millions of people in jail, most of them from minority populations, for the victimless crime of smoking dope. The powerful people of the world always seem to exert their power over others through the arbitrary and often pointless practice of penology. It makes me wonder if government and religion are forms of human sickness. But there is a twisted logic to the war on drugs; nobody denies that heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine are inherently dangerous after all and trafficking them is a bad business. But why did the German Inquisition persecute witches to such a degree? My personal thought is that the church at that time was in crisis. The dispute between the papacies in Rome and Avignon was weakening the Catholic church. At the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, scientific inquiry was gaining a foothold that challenged church dogmas. Heretical sects were springing up all over Europe. The greed, the money grubbing, and promiscuity of priests was making Christian officials look hypocritical. Germany was on the brink of the Protestant Reformation. Religion was ineffective in stopping the Black Death. My idea is that the church was in decline and needed something to reinvigorate itself to reassert its power over the European peoples. An Inquisition against the heresy of witchcraft and Satanism might have been what they thought they needed to retake control. Witches were typically old impoverished women of the uneducated peasantry who lived alone. They were the most marginalized and most defenseless members of society. That made them easy scapegoats. Hard working farmers whose crops were destroyed by hail storms and whose cows no longer gave milk needed someone to vent their anger on, and the church manipulated theses superstitious people into believing witches were the cause of all their problems.

Ultimately, I don’t think The Malleus Maleficarum fits the bill for being the wickedest book ever written. That is unless part of the meaning of wickedness involves boring the reader into a coma. If you take the text as it is and try to apply it in the modern world, it is nothing but irrelevant and dated unless you are some kind of religious fanatic or conspiracy theory crank. It probably won’t appeal much to most readers except for students of medieval, theological, intellectual, or legal history. The antithesis is that if you relate it to the context of medieval society and the resulting effects it had, meaning the burning of thousands of innocent people under the guise of witches, then there are certainly elements of evil within these pages. It wasn’t the witches who were evil, it was the Inquisitors who mass murdered them. Atrocities are so often done in the name of the good. While the Catholic church has matured some and spoken out in the name of world peace, I daresay other institutions of power in our times aren’t much different in their intent than the medieval Inquisitors were. With the current rise of fundamentalist Christianity and Christian nationalism in America, we need to be on your guard. Human nature has not changed as much as its outward appearances have. 

 

Book Reviews

The Trial Of the Templars

by Malcolm Barber

     There have been tons of books written about the Knights Templars that are filled with garbage. The Trial Of the Templars by Malcolm Barber isn’t one of them. This is a sober-minded account of how they were taken down by church and state. In fact, this book isn’t actually a comprehensive history of this most famous of all medieval fraternal orders. It is really about their persecution and destruction at the hands of the monarchy.

The opening chapter gives a short account of who the Templars were. They rose up to be the most prominent and successful order of knights during the Crusades at the turn of the 14^th century. They built castles at outposts throughout the Middle East, provided protection for people on pilgrimage to the so-called Holy Land, and set up a primitive banking network. Admission to this secret society was highly coveted because it guaranteed rapid social advancement for the lower classes and they were considered exempt from prosecution by dictate from the Catholic church.

Then Pope Clement V and Phillip IV came to power and everything went to hell for the highly revered knights. Clement V held the papacy in Avignon during the schism when France tried to wrestle the position out of the hands of the Vatican in Rome. Clement V had plans for expanding the power of the church and part of his plot involved uniting all knightly orders into one army in order to fight another crusade. The Templars, who prized their privileged status, didn’t want to share it with others so the conflict went from there. Phillip IV was installed as King of France by divine mandate according to Clement V, who was backed by the monarchy in his bid to control the church from Avignon. Phillip IV also had big ambitions to untie France into one kingdom, taking land from England, Flanders, Germany, Sicily, and Italy. His problem was that the previous king had nearly bankrupted the monarchy by building too many castles and funding too many crusades which were becoming less and less successful due to the rise of Saladin, the commander who led the Muslims to victory over the Crusaders. The battle of Acre, in what is now Syria, was the turning point and they blamed the Templars for the defeat.

Phillip IV needed money and guess who the richest and most unpopular people were at the time?The Templars. Clement and Phillip conspired together to take the order down. The pope declared them heretics and the French aristocracy was put in charge of the trial. Accusations of satanism, blasphemy, and homosexuality were leveled against the Templars and many confessions were obtained after some of the knights were tortured. Many of them retracted their confessions, and those who did were burned at the stake.

Malcolm Barber does an outstanding job of explaining the legal, theological, and technical aspects of the trial and points out how the government and church were able to manipulate the French populace and turn them against the Templars. Part of Barber’s methodology is to repeat over and over again what the Templars confessed. It was the same thing every time: spitting and walking on a cross, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, worshiping idols, kissing men’s anuses, indulging in sodomy, and practicing witchcraft. By repeating the confessions continuously, the words get seared into your brain. This is awfully annoying for the reader, but it seems Barber has done this to make his point. After reading the same thing so many times, you tend to forget that these confessions were the result of torture. We should know by now that during torture, people will confess to anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, to make the torture stop. Imagine how the medieval illiterates who watched the trials would feel after hearing confession after confession without even knowing the knights had spent so much times in the dungeons. While this might be a mind-numbing writing technique, it goes a long way in helping the author to make his case.

Barber breaks up the painful monotony with one interesting chapter that traces the folkloric roots of the accusations against the Templars. He examines myths, legends, and folk tales that were circulating at the time that contributed to the public’s perception that the Templars were Satanists. Other than that, this book is thankfully devoid of any of the occult or conspiracy theory crap that usually gets attached to the name of the Holy Order Of the Knights Of the Temple.

Malcolm Barber’s The Trial Of the Templars is a stone cold attempt at presenting the facts surrounding the liquidation of the Knights Templar. While it isn’t a thrilling read, he succeeds in demonstrating how the real evil happening in this historical legal drama was on the throne and in the church. None of the skullduggery going on had anything to do with what the Templars were actually up to; it was entirely the result of a plot hatched by those in power who were greedy for more wealth. Don’t say it can’t happen here in America during the 21^st century. Human nature hasn’t changed at all since the Middle Ages. 

 

Book Review

In the Wake Of the Plague:

The Black Death & the World It Made

by Norman F. Cantor

     I never have any luck when finding books about the Black Death. Of the handful I’ve read, the only interesting accounts I’ve come across have been chapters in history books covering a broad spectrum of issues related to the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Norman F. Cantor’s In the Wake Of the Plague is no exception. It’s difficult to even tell why Cantor wrote this dreadful book. Maybe he wanted to finish one last project before he died. Maybe he was senile. I don’t know. But I do know this book is a waste of time.

Cantor opens up with a chapter on what the Black Death actually was. His contention is that it was not entirely the bubonic plague, but a mixture of that with anthrax that had spread from diseased cattle to the human population. He doesn’t appear to know much about science, but fair enough, I’ll stay with him for the time being. But then he launches into a long, unnecessary sidetrack about plagues, pandemics, and other diseases that adds nothing of value to his discussion.

From there, he goes into an analysis of medieval society that starts with Princess Joan’s journey to Spain to get married. There is a lot about the Hundred Years War, peasant uprisings, the structure of the nobility, the relation between church and state, the disputes over the papacy, and a detailed account of Bradwardine’s progressive theology and his conflict with the more conservative and less-scientific philosophers of the day. At some points, this all reads more like a general history of the era and less like a treatise about the Black Death. In fact, the Black Death only has a tenuous connection to what Cantor actually writes about. He details the lives of people who died of the plague, but doesn’t say much about the plague itself as if it is little more than an afterthought or a way of making connections between people that aren’t really connected. Then there is some other stuff about the scapegoating of Jews and witches. It’s a mishmash of information loosely tied together by the theme of the plague, but none of it ever congeals into any kind of an intriguing narrative. It all seems quite boring and pointless.

The book ends with a couple of goofy chapters considering that the Black Death might have come from people eating snakes, something from outer space, or germs that spread from eastern Africa. There are then more sidetracks about diseases in ancient Greece and Rome, and AIDS in the 20^th century. None of this is explained with sufficient detail to be convincing or even interesting. In the afterword, Cantor tries to explain how the Black Death affected society, but all he comes up with is some abstract social theorizing and commentaries on art history; none of these claims can be supported with any kind of tangible or relevant data.

The only good thing I can say about In the Wake Of the Plague is that it has a cool picture on the cover. That and the fact that it is so short and simple that it can be read in one day. In other words, it won’t waste too much of your time if you actually bother to pick it up. It is best to pass this one by. 

 

Book Review

A Distant Mirror:

The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

     Barbara Tuchman made a name for herself by writing popular history, that is, she wrote works of historical non-fiction that were meant to be accessible to your average reader and not to a specialist. Things have certainly changed from the time she was writing to the present. Her historical book about the Middle Ages, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century, might be a bit much for today’s average reader at almost 600 pages. With the shortening attention spans and aversion to any kind of intellectualism that is all-pervasive in the age of social media, this one might be appealing to the few scholars left around today who still care about things like history. That is too bad because Barbara Tuchman put a lot of effort into this volume.

Rather than writing a bird’s eye view of a past era, Tuchman puts the reader on the ground as if the past is happening all around the audience. It involves real historical figures that come across as real people rather than abstractions defined solely by their actions. The castles, villages, and landscapes are precisely described too, at least in the beginning. France and England serve as the epicenter of the narrative, while the action, mostly warfare, spills out into the surrounding kingdoms. The central actor in all this is Enguerrand VII de Coucy, uniquely qualified for this role because he served as a noble under two French kings and married an English princess who was also partially of Italian ancestry. That last point is important because the Medieval age saw the 100 Years War which was fought between France and England. Few people these days fully understand how deeply connected these two countries have been throughout history. I’m sure even fewer people know that French was once the dominant language of England.

Tuchman does well at explaining the labyrinthine complex of alliances, intermarriages, land possessions, and rivalries that characterized the political climate of this time. In addition to this mess of battle and peacekeeping diplomacy, there was also a curious conflict going on in the Catholic church. White popes and anti-popes fought with each other over who should rightfully lead the Christian church, a conflict between the papacies in Avignon and Rome raged on as well. Theology actually fell by the wayside at times as the inner politics of the Catholic church and economic greed took precedence over religion. Meanwhile, heretical sects filled the power vacuum and the church started the Inquisition to torture and punish those who strayed away.

The spiritual shortcoming of the time is important in this book because Tuchman uses the conflict between the secular and the sacred as a theoretical framework for analyzing the 14^th century. While the high-minded ideals of Aquinas and Augustine were circulating among the intelligentsia, average citizens were paying less and less attention to the church. The knight’s code of chivalry and courtly love were also meant to be standards for righteous conduct but ended up being justifications for debauchery instead. As the Crusades began to go out of style, the orders of knights being sent to the so-called Holy Lands began resembling the outlaw bikers of our own day, more prone to getting drunk and committing crimes than performing acts of heroism. Tuchman exemplifies how the 14^th century was a time of spiritual crisis when religious people failed to follow the impossibly high standards the moralists and philosophers of their day laid out for them. Does this sound a bit like America in the past few decades? The “distant mirror” part of the title is applicable for more reason than one.

Aside from all this, there were other nasty things happening too. Witch hunts, peasant uprisings, pogroms against the Jews, enforced poverty through taxation, and the Black Plague were just some of what we learn about here. Tuchman makes some interesting comments about the military too. One is that wars were mostly fought for economic reasons, kind of like they are now, and a historical analysis of Medieval warfare is a subject that is underrepresented in academia or so she believes. Another is that military technology at that time advanced far in excess of ethical and moral progress, a permanent gap and deficit in the human psyche that could end up being our downfall in the end. In any case, we aren’t much different now since our military capacity to kill masses of people with minimal effort has outpaced our need to understand the value of preserving human life and our planet a million-fold.

Tuchman’s prose is deliberate and detailed, something that is both a blessing and a curse. While most of the book explains the doings of Enguerrand VII, mostly in relation to politics, there is also a lot of writing about warfare, most of which can be stiff, labored, and quite dull. She seems to be more interested in other subject matters and this shows in her approach. The most fascinating parts of the book are those about the side issues mentioned previously. Some of her occasional sidetracks are more interesting than the central themes. The politics of the Catholic church and the nobility are sometimes interesting, sometimes not.

A Distant Mirror will probably appeal more to readers who came of age in the 20^th century. Although a lot of it is interesting, it is long and moves at a slow pace that only patient readers will comprehend, and patient people with healthy attention spans are a dying breed. That is unfortunate because Barbara Tuchman shows how the seeds of modernity and our own times were sown. The roots of democracy, Marxism, capitalism, modern literacy and education, science, technology, and concepts of individual liberty are all here. The distant mirror of the title is there to reflect how human nature hasn’t changed in 700 years even though the outward form of society has. But a phenomenologist might question whether those roots were really there in the Middle Ages since they could be projections of the author’s mind. I propose that you put your phone away for a very long time and study what expert historians and philosophers have to say on the matter. Do yourself a favor. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1978.