Abstract:

Between 1400 and 1780, the early modern witch hunts led to tens of thousands of persecutions, incarcerations, and executions across Europe. Inquisitors were guided in their work by demonologies, witch-hunting manuals that helped them to identify witches. The most infamous of these texts is the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches, 1486) written by Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. A best-seller, the Malleus Maleficarum was translated into multiple languages and was on the desks of jurists, philosophers, and inquisitors for centuries thereafter. Its inclusion of vividly described anecdotes from witch-induced abortions to stolen penises in birds’ nests captured the imagination of readers. It also contributed to fueling the moral panic that resulted in mass violence and death.

Three kinds of bigotry run through the Malleus Maleficarum. First, sexism. Prior to its publication, women and men were accused of witchcraft in roughly equal numbers, and the devil did not play a role in understandings of witchcraft. Kramer changed this. He developed a theory of womanhood that purported to show women’s inherent moral weakness. Kramer sought to establish a link between femininity and evil.

Second, anti-semitism. The text ties Jews to evil by the repeated invocation of accusations of blood libel, the medieval conspiracy theory that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.

Third, anti-Black racism. Kramer’s invocation of the “Curse of Ham” creates a link between Blackness and evil. According to the Book of Genesis, Ham saw his father Noah drunk and naked. Ham’s punishment was that his own son, Canaan, was cursed so that his descendants would be “the lowest of slaves,” marked by darker sin. Kramer claims that Ham was actually Zoroaster, the 6th century BCE Iranian religious reformer, and that Zoroaster was the first inventor of magic. By asserting the identification between Zoroaster and Ham, Kramer forges yet a link in the imaginations of his readers: the genealogical inheritance of Blackness is a genealogical inheritance of evil.

As long as there have been demonologies, there have been skeptics of demonologies. Three stand out for the way that they mounted their skeptical attacks: 17th century English philosopher John Webster, 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and 17th century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. All three focused on the bad scholarship, bad arguments, and bad reasoning of texts like the Malleus Maleficarum. They argued that the authors of demonologies, the demonologists, bore moral responsibility for the violence that their publications enabled. This assignation of moral responsibility for the propagation of dangerous ideas by way of faulty reasoning is a remarkable example of epistemic accountability.

I argue that these three authors understood something that we are still struggling to come to terms with today: debunking false beliefs requires something over and above mere logical argumentation. Successful debunking comes from addressing the social dynamics that make false beliefs appealing. In today’s online communication environment, this means paying particular attention to the way that networks feed and accelerate emotional contagion. The Malleus Maleficarum did not succeed because it was a paradigm of logic and reason. It succeeded because it appealed to the emotions of its readers. This is something the three skeptics worked to highlight, and in their work we can find guidance for managing our own present-day misinformation crisis.