Stunned by the language and the sentiment, I took the book home with me and read it in a single sitting that afternoon two years ago. By the time I had finished, I was convinced that I had stumbled upon a long-neglected piece of women’s history – in fact, a pathology – so important that it ranks alongside the Bill of Rights. Only it is the Bill of Wrongs for women.
As I expanded my research and sought to find out why I had never heard of it, this book changed the novel I was writing and eventually changed my view of myself.
Briefly, the medieval text is called the ““Malleus Maleficarum,’’ or ““The Witches’ Hammer,’’ written by two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. Published in 1486, it was accompanied by Pope Innocent VIII’s papal bull, which endowed the text with the highest church authority. The ““Malleus Maleficarum’’ was thereafter a lawbook for witch hunters for more than two centuries.
In the ““Malleus’’ I discovered that there were three traditional crimes of witchcraft punishable by what the authors call ““the extreme penalty’’ – burning at the stake. They are (1) using or advocating the use of contraception; (2) performing abortions, and (3) robbing a man of his virility.
Moreover, I was appalled by the way in which the words ““witch’’ and ““woman’’ were used synonymously throughout the ““Malleus,’’ not only by the authors, Kramer and Sprenger, but in countless quotations from what Pope John Paul II calls ““fundamental Church doctrine,’’ including Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint John.
Rather than merely a shameful relic of a bygone era, the ““Malleus Maleficarum’’ seemed to me to contain a hidden virus that has through the ages infected the views of not only the Roman Catholic Church’s all-male hierachy but perhaps society’s view of women in general. I wondered what to do. How could I bring it to people’s attention?
The answer was close at hand. I was working on a mystery about a woman whose father, a surgeon, is brutally murdered after he receives a grimoire – a book of black-magic spells – from a grateful patient. I had originally intended to make the novel a traditional thriller in which Beatrice, an older, more sophisticated Nancy Drew heroine, tracks down her father’s murderer and avenges his death.
Coincidentally, a grimoire, considered in the Middle Ages to be a work of the devil written by witches, was exactly the book, along with its practitioners, that the ““Malleus’’ was bent on eradicating. The ““Malleus’’ led me to revise my lead character and my plot but without making either one supernatural.
As the lawbook of the Inquisition, the ““Malleus’’ was translated into a half dozen languages and on the desk of every judge and magistrate in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. I decided to put it to the use for which it was intended, only in a modern setting, and with a very different Beatrice. It would be far more compelling to fashion a heroine who stood in direct opposition to the Inquisitors – in other words, a witch.
As I built my novel’s plot, I heard the rumblings of this medieval document in today’s headlines: the controversy over abortion and birth control at the Cairo Conference on Population; the pope’s continuing absolute refusal even to debate whether women can ever become priests; a national magazine’s portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a witch on its cover because she stepped outside the boundaries of the traditional First Lady; feminists referred to as ““witches’’ because they demand equal rights; sentiments (usually, but not always, whispered) that abused women like Nicole Brown Simpson get what they deserve because they are sexual witches who drive men out of control.
If, as, according to the ““Malleus,’’ being socially and sexually active is the definition of a witch, then in 1995 a great many women in the world are witches. I was proud to make Beatrice one. She became a woman who stands up to an all-male hierachy set on destroying her. I came to admire her, as a writer grudgingly admires a character who has taken over his or her novel. Beatrice also changed my view of myself because she made me think about the ““witch’’ inside me – the sexually and intellectually independent woman – who was, unbeknownst to me at the time, responsible for so many of the choices I made.
And I came to realize that current events in a culture, like current events in family life, are far more compelling when their pathological roots are recognized and dealt with. For it is only then that true enlightenment and change are possible.
Put aside the arguments about abortion and contraception for a moment and look at the underlying prejudice against women because of their purported connection to evil, manifested in unclean bodies and unsound minds. This view, stated with frightening bluntness in the ““Malleus,’’ has become so ingrained in church doctrine that one cannot imagine the church fathers ever seeing women as equals, no less ““empowering’’ them.
Until the Vatican and other religious institutions that discriminate against women – unfortunately they seem to span most religions – acknowledge their view of women as inferior creatures and start to come to terms with the ancient origins of that view, the ““Malleus Maleficarum’’ will reign as the ruler of the Roman church’s subconscious. And women will remain at the mercy of men in an overpopulated man’s world.
