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The Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486 - 1487 in Latin, is also known as "The Hammer of Witches," a translation of the title. Its writing is credited to two German Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. The two were also theology professors. Sprenger's role is now thought by some scholars to have been largely symbolic rather than active.

The Malleus Maleficarum was not the only document about witchcraft written in the medieval period, but it was the best known of the time, and, because it came so soon after Gutenberg's printing revolution, was more widely distributed than previous hand-copied manuals.

The Malleus Maleficarum represents not the beginning of witch persecutions, but came at a peak point in European witchcraft accusations and executions. It was a foundation for treating witchcraft not as a superstition, but as a dangerous and heretical practice of associating with the Devil, and thus a great danger to society and to the church.

Background to the Malleus Maleficarum

During the 9th through 13th centuries, the church had established and enforced penalties for witchcraft. Originally, these were based on the church's assertion that witchcraft was a superstition and thus belief in witchcraft was not in accord with the church's theology. This associated witchcraft with heresy. The Roman Inquisition was established in the 13th century to find and punish heretics, seen as undermining the church's official theology and therefore a threat to the very foundations of the church. At about that same time, secular law become involved in prosecutions for witchcraft, and the Inquisition helped to codify both church and secular laws on the subject, and began to determine which authority, secular or church, had responsibility for which offenses.

Prosecutions for witchcraft, or maleficarum, were prosecuted primarily under secular laws in Germany and France in the 13th century, and in Italy in the 14th.

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