The Enemy Within (11 page)

 
The
Malleus
will have a place in the history of printing as well as the history of witchcraft. The invention of movable type by a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg, just a few decades earlier, has already begun to reshape the contours of European culture. Books are pouring from presses in many different countries, and the
Malleus
will move quickly into the vanguard of period “bestsellers.” By 1523 it has appeared in no fewer than 13 different Latin editions. Then come several decades during which it is not republished, as witch-hunting in general seems to stall. However, near the end of the 16th century, it inspires a new burst of printings—29 of them before all is said and done. Considered as a whole, this first century of its publication history seems to embody not only the technology but also the mind-set of a new age—when witch-hunting, like so much else, follows an increasingly secularized track.

Meanwhile, new “handbooks” come along as well. Perhaps the most influential are by the French philosopher Jean Bodin
(De la demonomanie des sorciers,
1580
),
a French judge and prosecutor, Nicholas Remy
(Daemonolatreiae,
1595
),
and a Belgian Jesuit priest, Martin Del Rio
(Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex,
1599
).
All credit the precedence, and importance, of the
Malleus.
Even skeptical authors, most notably the German physician Johann Weyer, whose
De praestigiis daemonum
appears in 1563, make similar acknowledgment, though in their case the
Malleus
is more a target than a source of inspiration.

This pattern continues into and throughout, the 17th century. Trial records from the peak craze years are sprinkled with explicit or implicit reference to the
Malleus.
And writers on witchcraft as far away as New England's Increase Mather give it mention. When parts of the book appear in Polish translation, it helps open a new front for witch-hunting in northeastern Europe. Finally, in the 18th century, and more especially in the 19th, the
Malleus
begins to fade from sight. But then, against all odds, it undergoes something of a revival in the 20th century, when an eccentric Catholic intellectual named Montague Summers steps forward to defend witch-hunting. Indeed Summers vigorously champions the entire project in which Kramer and Sprenger played such an important part: he affirms the existence, and powers, of the Devil as traditionally conceived, and affirms, too, the menacing reality of witchcraft. In 1928 he puts the
Malleus
back into general circulation and 20 years later publishes yet another “modern” edition. Summers describes it, rather grandly, as “one of the world's few books written
sub specie aeternitatis [
of eternal significance
]
.”

Still in print and widely available, the
Malleus
remains a lightning rod
for passionate debate even today. A favorite online bookseller lists no fewer than 71 “reviews” by current readers. Their opinions stretch across a wide range, from complete disapproval and disgust to equally fervent appreciation. A clear majority take one or another negative position: the
Malleus
as “a pack of myths and bigotries”; “a compendium of fifteenth-century paranoias”; or “a detestably cold and calculated book of horrors.” Some detect close parallels to “totalitarian modernity,” especially Nazism (with the
Malleus
cast as “the
Mein Kampf
of the Middle Ages”). Several seize the chance to belabor “traditional Catholicism,” for having initially sponsored “the best example of Christian sadism.” Additional commentators mix revulsion with a feeling of interest. One finds it “both special and vile.” Another gains from it “a fascinating insight . . . into the fearful mind.” A third regards it as “a history lesson . . . and a way to weed out false beliefs.” A fourth offers this extravagant encomium: “The magnificent
Malleus Maleficarum
is one of the greatest works of psychology and sociology ever written.”

Like witch-hunting as a whole, the
Malleus
has traveled a long journey. And it travels still.

PART TWO

Inevitably, the idea of witchcraft crossed the ocean with the first European colonists coming to America. And so, too, did witch-
hunting
cross over. Chapter IV presents a specific case from 17th-century Connecticut: specific, local, small-scale, altogether ordinary in its particulars, and for these very reasons a good example of the general type.

 
Chapter V zooms out and up to survey the entire landscape of Colonial-era witch-hunting, as if from a historical mountaintop. Virginia and its southern neighbors; the so-called middle colonies of New York and Pennsylvania; New England most especially (up to, but not including, the Salem trials of 1692-93): thus the scope of the view. Concern with witchcraft can be seen everywhere, albeit in widely differing proportions.

 
Chapter VI returns to ground level, and to the earliest phase of New England history, in order to follow the course of a single life, in which suspicions of witchcraft involvement played a recurrent role. As the folk themselves might have said, once a witch, always a witch—so, on both sides,
be careful.

CHAPTER IV

This sudden, shattering “misadventure” in their midst has unsettled the people of Windsor very deeply. Talk of it does not abate. Questions linger and multiply. To be sure, the surface details are clear enough: Allen's carelessness, his proximity to Stiles, all the mechanics of poorly carried gun, cocked trigger, inadvertent firing, speeding bullet, torn and bleeding body. Yet how much does this finally
explain?
After all, the two men might not have been positioned exactly so. And Allen, neglectful though he was, might still have held his gun in such a manner as to preclude its lethal discharge. And the men might have trained in a different place, on a different day; indeed, Stiles might have been sick, or traveling, or otherwise removed from the scene. Moreover—and here perhaps is the single most tormenting piece—even if everything else had been just as it was, the bullet might have gone in a thousand different directions; only one would yield such an awful result. Henry Stiles's death was the product of innumerable small and highly specific contingencies. Why—why—why had they all converged this way? Surely, such an extraordinary, and tragic, outcome cannot be ascribed to mere chance.

How best, then, to understand it? God's will, they wonder? Or, perhaps more likely, the Devil's? Does it not, in fact, bear some clear marks of
maleficium?
The good people of Windsor will ponder all this, for months—indeed, years—to come.

 
Windsor had been founded more than a decade before by a little band of settlers from Massachusetts in search of good land on which to build a new community. Most had lived for a few years in the Bay Colony town of Dorchester (adjacent to Boston). They traveled to Connecticut largely as a group. Their leader in every sense, spiritual and otherwise, was a clergyman named John Warham. They were farmers and craftsmen, wives and children and servants; for the most part, they were arrayed in families. Their surnames bespoke their solid English stock: Stebbins, Drake, Gibbons, Moore, Hawkins, Tilton, Bissell, White, Grant, Torrey, Young, Stiles (the unlucky Henry's family line), Allen (including young Thomas), and Gilbert (with Thomas as family head, and Lydia, his wife).

The fertile lands on the west side of the Connecticut River provided the opportunity they were seeking; after some negotiation with the local Indians, they staked their claim and settled in. Their village plan conformed to what would become the New England pattern: house lots arrayed from north to south along a main street, fields and pastures farther out. They grew corn, some wheat, and garden crops; later their yield would include hops and tobacco. They also raised livestock, scattering herds of cows and sheep from one end of town to the other.

Most of all, these early Windsorites were what their English peers called “Puritans.” That is, they were religious radicals of a particular kind. In a broad sense, they were heirs to the Protestant Reformation; the starting point for many of their beliefs was the 16th-century Swiss theologian John Calvin. Their English mother church had not—so they contended—sufficiently rid itself of “papist” corruptions; reform must proceed much further. Their concerns embraced doctrine, worship, and church governance, in roughly equal measure. A more direct and personal relation to God, a deepened sense of human sinfulness, simplified ritual, and a decentralized system of ecclesiastical administration: such were the goals they held in view.

Their cosmology, their picture of the universe, was a distilled version of ideas held throughout the Christianized world. Human history, they believed, unfolds in the shadow of overarching warfare: between God and the forces of righteousness on the one hand, and Satan and his own “infernal legions” on the other. At some point the struggle must end in God's complete triumph, with an all-decisive Day of Judgment immediately to follow. Many Puritans thought that point was close at hand; hence they spoke of theirs as an “End Time,” and looked eagerly for signs of its actual arrival. In such a climate of opinion, all of life was intensified; all was potentially meaningful. God's purposes, and Satan's too, informed each and every fragment of experience.

 
As the seasons pass, the people of Windsor continue to brood on Henry Stiles's death—its causes and meaning for their own lives. In so doing, they carefully evaluate key parts of the dead man's personal history. For example: during most of the previous two years, he had lived as a lodger in the home of Thomas Gilbert; he slept there in a room of his own, took his “diet” (meals) there, kept his “goods” there. This was, in itself, unusual: few, if any, other local men were similarly circumstanced. But so, too, was his bachelorhood unusual; few if any other men did not have wives and households of their own. Might this have made him—in some way hard to understand later on—also unusually vulnerable
?