Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
A chilling portrayal of fear and prejudice, 26 Mar 1999
By A Customer
The really scary thing about this book is that people believed it. It's mysoginist, poorly researched, paranoid, and uses all manner of nasty rumours and impossible conundrums to trap its targets - "witches" who may or may not have been heretics or non-Christians.The translation is stodgy reading and it's more useful as a study aid or reference than as something to browse, but still a standard work on medieval witchcraft from the Church perspective. As a previous reviewer said, it has the feel of "Mein Kampf" about it. Nasty.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Essential for any student of the witch-hunts in Europe., 9 Nov 2005
This infamous text is essential for any serious student of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer were two Dominican monks who wrote this ‘guide’ to witchcraft in 1486. It served as a guide book for inquisitors during the Inquisition, providing information on identifying witches, wringing confessions from them and discussing suitable punishment of offenders.
This text has become the definitive example of misogyny in the witch-hunts. Throughout the book there are negative references to women such as ‘When a woman thinks alone she thinks evil’, ‘She is a liar by nature’, ‘she is more carnal than a man as shown by her carnal abominations’. It also goes on to describe women as defective, weak, and basically claims any misfortune from illness through to crop failure was due to malign magic. Nothing had a natural cause in their view. Witches, according to Kramer and Sprenger, were responsible for all this plus infanticide, cannibalism, consorting with demons and any other abominable behaviour they could imagine.
Putting the misogyny aside, this text gives an in depth, if somewhat harrowing, view of what was involved when identifying, interrogating and punishing the unfortunate accused. It is not a comfortable read to say the least, showing as it does mankind’s complete inhumanity to fellow man during this period. This is no lightweight, quick read but it is divided into manageable sections that make it less onerous to study and an excellent contents section makes it very simple to find particular topics. As a primary source it is an invaluable study aid and is a book that is a ‘must have’ on any historians bookshelf.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Scary, but not easy to read, 13 Mar 2004
For Medieval Witch Hunting, this is the book to read. Established in 1484 by a Bull (something like a decree) by the Catholic Pope Innocent VIII, this would be the handbook for witch procecution. Originally in Latin this is the turn of the 1900 century translation into fairly old English.Heavy to read and almost impossible to do so in one go, the book is seperated into 3 chapters. 1st part is Church Philosophy debating if witches can exists in the face of God and why he allows them to be (the answer is of corse positive since its authors are witch hunters), 2nd is about the powers of witches and how to counter them and the 3rd is about how witches should be brought to justice. The second and third chapter are more interesting than the first (unless you are into medieval Church Philosophy) and incredible due to the fact that its authors truely believe what they write! It is in their belief that most of the horror of the book is to be found. In the 2nd Chapter there are surprisingly detailed descriptions of witch activities and I imagine this to be an interesting handbook for those interested in such matters. Do not expect much about interrigation methods of what would become the Inqusition but there is a pharagraph that states that all witches should be interogated at least twice, once with torture and once without, for it is possible that persons interrogated under torture will admit to things they are innocent of. I also feel it helps the translation that the translator also believes the text to hold much truth as is made clear by the foreword. Lastly as a point of scary coinsidence. I live abroad and must pay custums and VAT (yes of books too) on arrival of the package and I ordered this book by itself and had to pay a total of... yes, you guessed it... *666 kronas*. I glued the invoice to the inside cover of the book.
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