Hiya, sorry to bother you, but given your reblog that's going around about vetting prokopetz' medieval magic post, this seemed as good a place as any to ask.
A while ago, I came across a meme that sought to absolve the Catholic Church of its (according to this meme alleged) involvement in witch hunts. To do so, it made 4 claims: 1] the punishments for witchcraft issued by the Catholic Church were generally light (confession, repentance, charitable work), 2] the Papal Bull issued by Innocent III to support Heinrich Kramer's witch hunts lead to an uprising by the Catholic Clergy, 3] the Clergy later forced the Vatican to rescind their endorsement of the Malleus Maleficarum and issue a formal condemnation, and finally 4] the Catholic Church would later call the book "a worse crime than heresy in its notable animus against women".
I have looked up some information myself, but didn't go deeper than Wikipedia. In reverse order: 4] That quote isn't from the Catholic Church, but mangled slightly and pulled from Wikipedia. 3] I couldn't find anything about the Catholic Church condemning the book, but I did find that the Malleus contained a possibly partially fraudulent endorsement from the University of Cologne, who later condemned the book. 2] I could not find any source for this, and it may have been confused with the situation around the Malleus. I did find that the Papal Bull didn't do much to aid Kramer, as it was apparently largely ignored. 1] I did find where this came from, as it indeed seemed to be the consequence at some point in time, but I also saw that the Catholic Church sponsored witch hunts that very much ended in executions.
I was wondering if you happened to know more about this, as well as if there was any interesting historical context that I didn't find.
Once again, thank you for your time, and sorry to disturb you.
I.... what. What. Hoo boy. Hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy hoo boy. There is, as the ancient Tumblr proverb saith, A Lot To Unpack Here, as I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh very, very deeply. Please note that my incredulity and judgment is not directed at you, but at... whoever.... wants to spend their time on the internet making memes that blithely propagate, not to put too fine a point on it, multiple levels of total nonsense.
First off, is this some coordinated social media effort to insist "the Catholic Church wasn't/isn't actually misogynist you guys!!!" or... what? Or is it that if you reveal a Shocking Truth Hidden From You By Evil Historians (TM), it's somehow more likely to be real? I am guessing possibly the latter, but given the immense alt-right influencer effort aimed at convincing young women to join reactionary conservative religious movements (i.e. the whole "tradwife" thing) the former motive can't be entirely ruled out. Either that or this idiot person put some god-knows-what question into ChatGPT and embraced the result, because that is the level of hallucinatory anti-historical thinking, illogical conclusions, terrible reading comprehension, and nonsensical source work we are dealing with here. Let us break this down. It will take a while.
(Sorry. A meme. A meme insisting Everything U Kno Of History Is Wrong, Catholic Church Good, Like Women, Very Like Women, Most Progressive, Wow. I just. Okay.)
First, as to point 1), per my last post, the clerical and ecclesiastical response to witchcraft, what it was conceived of being, who was seen as responsible for it, the necessary punishment, and how it integrated with other theological, popular, and religious beliefs varied WILDLY over the medieval and early modern periods. You simply cannot generalize about any of these cases without extensive details, such as the time and place, the institutions and individuals involved, the presumed or actual punishment that was enacted, any texts or traditions that were invoked to justify it, etc. Sometimes witchcraft punishments were comparatively light. Sometimes they were not. Once again, we are talking about a minimum of 1000 years (500-1500 CE is commonly accepted as the medieval era, and that's without the major witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries, which would be classified as early modern). You cannot just say The Catholic Church Always Did This In The Premodern World, The End.
Even without getting into any of the other weeds, the idea that "the Catholic Church only ever imposed light punishments for witchcraft and the accused just had to go to confession and then it was fine!" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how carefully we have to work with premodern sources and how any remotely good historian is careful to insist how NOT universal their examples are and how they have been repeatedly contextualized, reinterpreted, and reused in ways that might significantly change their original meaning. Likewise, The Medieval Catholic Church was not a monolith exclusively passing sentence on all witchcraft trials all the time and everywhere. There were countless individual courts and accusers who might or might not have been explicitly associated with the church, and it's nonsense to think that these all represented a coordinated and explicit effort to impose a centralized Witchcraft Response directly from Rome or other major centers of premodern Catholic power. The All Powerful Medieval Catholic Church Brainwashed Everyone, But Somehow It Was Actually Just Very Nice Too And Witchcraft Trials Didn't Really Exist? Is that what we're going for here, or... or what?
2) The papal bull issued by Innocent VIII (not the thirteenth-century Innocent III, although he was certainly very interested in militaristic-ecclesiastical responses to "heretic" beliefs given his efforts to organize the Fourth, Albigensian, and Fifth Crusades) was called Summis desiderantes affectibus; the Internet History Sourcebook helpfully has a free English translation! You will see that it is specifically concerned with reinforcing the authority of the inquisition to operate in specific regions in Germany against local clerical opposition, and names the Malleus co-authors Heinrich Kramer and Jacobus Sprenger as "beloved sons" and personal papal legates:
And, although our beloved sons Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, of the order of Friars Preachers, professors of theology, have been and still are deputed by our apostolic letters as inquisitors of heretical pravity, the former in the aforesaid parts of upper Germany, including the provinces, cities, territories, dioceses, and other places as above, and the latter throughout certain parts of the course of the Rhine; nevertheless certain of the clergy [...] assert that these are not at all included in the said parts and that therefore it is illicit for the aforesaid inquisitors to exercise their office of inquisition in the provinces, cities, dioceses, territories, and other places aforesaid.
So is this our evidence for a "clerical revolt" against the Malleus and its authors because The Catholic Church Really Wanted to Protect Women? No, it's that certain German clergy did not want the papal inquisitors to operate in their territories (for many complex reasons) and the pope was specifically ordering them to do so. Also, the Malleus was proudly published with Summis desiderantes -- once again, a from-the-very-top papal bull -- included as the in-text prologue. This doesn't exactly make the case that the institutional Catholic church was refuting it in horror, and especially not that it was specifically doing so because of the Malleus' virulent misogyny. Not least because at this point... womp womp... the Malleus wasn't even actually published. The bull was issued in 1484. The Malleus didn't appear until around 1486 or 1487. There is literally no way to use Summis as evidence of some principled clerical backlash against the Malleus, for any reason at all, when yet again, it did not exist yet.
Papal policy in the late 15th century was both individualistic (i.e. the particular pope had a great deal of latitude in deciding it) and already set by over a thousand years of canon law, encyclicals, previous bulls, expected precedents, social relations, church tradition, and other complex factors. To extrapolate from the single text of the Summis, concerned with establishing papal authority for its inquisitors to operate in Germany, that "the entire clergy of the Catholic church launched a wide-scale revolt against the Malleus specifically to decry its misogyny and the Vatican was forced to revoke its endorsement" is straight-up hallucinatory AI nonsense. The Malleus was published after the bull failed to convince clergy to let the inquisitors operate in their areas (because once again, just because the pope decreed something did not make it happen). Kramer remained popular and favored within the Catholic Church until his death in 1505, and his appointment as a papal nuncio (messenger) continued under Innocent VIII's sucessor, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). There was backlash, but it was by no means detrimental to his career.
Likewise, we aren't even sure about how popular or on-the-ground influential the Malleus actually was. Some scholars claim it was massively influential. This is true insofar as it did have almost 30 editions and reprints between 1486-1669, and other witch-hunting handbooks took it as a model. However, others point out that there's simply no way to tell how much the basic printing of a book influenced its actual practical usage beyond certain circles of clerics who were already obsessed with the topic. The academic study of witchcraft in the 18th and 19th centuries also retroactively cast a lot of importance on the Malleus that may or may not have been there in its own day, and the historiography around it is confused, contradictory, and massively incomplete (article linked is in French but you can run it through Google Translate if you want to get the gist.) So we don't even actually know how it was received other than it was both popular and controversial, which is hardly contradictory. There was, again, no such thing as a widespread Vatican revolt to get the church to disavow it specifically because of its misogyny. Objections were raised on many fronts, but that has been the case with literally every single piece of church writing ever.
Next, in the prologue where it insisted that witches were only (evil) women, the Malleus explicitly drew on hundreds of years of ecclesiastical and clerical writings about the inferiority of women. This itself was not remotely controversial. What was controversial was the Malleus' insistence that a) witches were only women (even the Summis refers to "persons of both sexes" being suspected as witches) and b) women, the "weaker sex," were capable of being so massively powerful as to overcome even God. Or, as Hans Broedel puts it in chapter 7 of The "Malleus Maleficarum" and the Construction of Witchcraft":
That witches were women was a conclusion that Institoris and Sprenger’s contemporaries would not have found especially alarming – extreme, perhaps, but not so radical as to leave the pale of accepted clerical tradition. On the other hand, what the authors of the Malleus did with this observation, how they explained it, and how they made it integral to their understanding of witchcraft, was quite unusual indeed. To explain the phenomenon they assembled a formidable catalogue of authorities, ancient and modern, to testify to feminine weakness, sinfulness, and perfidy. [...] To Nider’s traditional explanation for women’s inclination to superstitious beliefs, Institoris and Sprenger graft a veritable summa of late-medieval misogynist commonplaces.
Yet again, however, this does not mean "all medieval people were raging misogynists at all times!" The Malleus drew together all the misogynist tropes that existed in medieval culture and were often promoted by clerical writers, but the misogyny wasn't the controversy; it was what they did with it and the theological conclusions they drew. As I also like to remind people, this also does not tell us very much about how misogynistic stereotypes directly impacted the daily lives of medieval women; they certainly did, but misogynistic stereotypes directly impact the lives of modern women too. Nonetheless, yet again, there's no way in which this can be read as "the Catholic church opposed misogyny on principled/moral grounds and condemned the Malleus for it." Misogyny was baked into the teachings, writings, and practice of the Catholic church, even if this was applied unevenly or in ways other than the obvious violently misogynistic rants of the Malleus. It still is!
On that note, let's take point 4, "the Catholic Church would later call the book "a worse crime than heresy in its notable animus against women," because this one is possibly the most egregious offender in terms of Just Plain Bad Source Work, That's Not How Any of This Works, You Are Bad And Should Feel Bad. First off, as you note, this quote is lifted from Wikipedia, as follows, in the article for Summis desiderantes (the aforementioned papal bull):
That last sentence, "it was sensational in the stigma it attached to witchcraft as a worse crime than heresy AND in its notable animus against women" is, for a start, two different clauses. Taken together, they are not exactly incorrect; the Malleus was in fact notable for the way it categorized witchcraft AND for its misogyny. You may notice, however, that nowhere does this say "the Catholic church described the Malleus as worse than heresy specifically because of its misogyny," which the doctored quote wants to suggest. Not least because this text is, in turn, directly copy-pasted from the "Witchcraft" entry in the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Why the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, you ask? Because that is a favored source for Wikipedia, since it is a) free and b) open-access, so it gets cited a lot. Using a 1913 encyclopedia entry that more or less factually describes the Malleus's theological perspective to claim that "the official/institutional Catholic church formally condemned the Malleus for being worse than heresy due to its misogyny!" is nonsense. It's complete gibberish. It's not remotely what anything says! It's not remotely representative of current or interesting perspectives on the subject because, stop me if this is confusing, a lot of scholarly work has been published since the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia! EVEN IF THAT IS WHAT THE ORIGINAL QUOTE DID SAY, WHICH IT DOESN'T! JESUS CHRIST!!!
...Anyway. This is far too long already, but hopefully it gives you the most basic tools for understanding why Learning "History" Via Wildly Incorrect Memes is in fact, wildly incorrect. Also how to understand why doing history, especially premodern history with difficult and inaccessible source material, is a specialist skill that takes extensive training and cannot just be Winged On The Vibes by some internet idiot who somehow wants to discover that the most famously misogynist institution in the history of the world actually isn't, somehow. I am going to go take aspirin and drink some coffee and mutter to myself. Thank you and the end.
