an art of women. When the notion of sex-commerce between demons and women was invented and made commonplace, the whole tradition was directed against women as basely seductive, passionate, and licentious by nature. Then the Inquisition made processes of detection and trial by torture, and these were applied against witches. The cruelest punishment known, burning alive, was applied to them. The inquisitors Institoris and Sprenger prepared a book, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). A Roman Catholic historian maintains that their purpose was to silence the priests who denied that there were any witches.[1] The two inquisitors mentioned had already been at work for five years in Constance, and had caused forty-eight confessed witches to be executed by the civil authority.[2] The Malleus "is to be reckoned amongst the most mischievous productions in all the literature of the world"[3]; "it was the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced."[4] Between 1487 (the date of first publication) and 1669 twenty-five editions of it were published: sixteen in Germany, seven in France, and two in Italy; none elsewhere. A forged approval by the theological faculty of Cologne was published with it. This won its way for it everywhere.[5] The writers profess a venomous and malignant hostility to women; they present women as extravagantly sensual and libidinous, and so as dangerous to men, and subject to seduction by demons.[6] This is their major premise, which they perhaps exaggerated on account of the deductions to be built on it. It is now not believed that women are more
