rass the Inquisitors, all who oppose them, all rebels, of whatsoever rank" would be subject to excommunication "and yet more terrible penalties, censures, and punishment . . . and that without any right of appeal" (Malleus xliv-xlv).
Malleus associates witchcraft chiefly with women. Much attention is given to why perfidious witchcraft "is found more in so fragile a sex than in men." Women, it is declared, "are found to be given to superstition and witchcraft." In particular, midwives "surpass all others in wickedness" (Malleus 41). Malleus presents a (spurious) etymological proof for the connection between women and witchery, which is that the Latin for woman, femina, is derived from fe, Latin for faith, and minus, Latin for small or weak: "Therefore a wicked woman is by her nature quicker to waver in her faith, and consequently quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft" (Malleus 44).
A careful look at the text of Malleus from the perspective of 20th-century scientific method yields a reading of misogynist subtext. It does not take much imagination to see that characterizing witches as the Devil's sex slaves (Malleus 41ff) provided repressed and careerist Inquisition clergymen with an excuse to engage in ecclesiastically sanctioned sexual torture and a sadistic form of male homosexual bonding.
A Protestant volume of stature equivalent to Malleus appeared in England in 1589, when Reginald Scot published The Discoverie of Witchcraft. In 1598, James VI of Scotland (later James I of England, who in 1620 chartered Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower) published Demonologie; he had considered himself a target of witches. Scot's work is in part a Protestant social critique of Malleus, in particular of prosecutions for witchcraft undertaken under Catholic rule. In various English cases, Scot finds "normal explanations" for such accusations, "malicious persecution, deliberate fraud, psychological disturbance, and coincid...