Malleus Maleficarum
A late-fifteenth-century witchcraft treatise, paired with Luther by the essay to discuss harmful as well as beneficial uses of printing.
Book · 1487Sources & confidence: Limited evidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Library catalogue evidence for the work and its reception; unsupported quantitative claims removed.
- Library of Congress: Malleus Maleficarum, 1494 edition
Indexed catalogue identifies a Nuremberg printing dated 17 March 1494.
- Library of Congress: The Malleus Maleficarum and the construction of witchcraft
Bibliographic record for Hans Peter Broedel’s study identifies Heinrich Institoris and the work as its subject.
- Wikidata entity API: Der Hexenhammer
Identifies a 1923 German translation and links its original work to Q208556; basis for correcting the edition/work mismatch.
- Wikidata: Malleus maleficarum
Identifies the Latin treatise rather than a specific German translation; identifier matching only.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Only catalogue descriptions were inspected, not the treatise or Broedel’s full study. First-edition dating and disputed co-authorship remain unresolved here; edition totals and causal execution estimates were removed.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The essay pairs this witchcraft treatise with Luther’s theses as an analogy about the mixed consequences of printing. That is an interpretive juxtaposition.
The number of editions and a causal estimate of executions attributable to this book were not established from the inspected catalogue records. The record therefore does not repeat the earlier claims of twenty-eight editions or a direct link to tens of thousands of executions.
In the essays
- You Can't Shame a Fork
Read the essay
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/works/malleus-maleficarum.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25