The Malleus Maleficarum is undoubtedly the best known (many would say most notorious) treatise on witchcraft from the early modern period. Published in 1486 (only a generation after the introduction of printing by moveable type in Western Europe), the work served to popularize the new conception of magic and witchcraft that is known in modern scholarship as satanism or diabolism, and it there by played a major role in the savage efforts undertaken to stamp out witchcraft in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a series of events sometimes known as the “witch craze”). The present work offers the reader the only full and reliable translation of the Malleus into English, and this introduction has a very specific purpose: to set out for the reader the general intellectual and cultural background of the Malleus, which takes for granted and is based upon a number of concepts that are by no means self-evident to the average modern reader, and to explain something of the circumstances of the work's composition and the authors' methods and purposes in writing it. That is, the aim here is the very restricted one of giving the reader a better insight into how the work would have been understood at the time of its publication. Hopefully, this will help not only those who wish to understand the work in its own right but also those who are interested in the later effects of this influential work.

At the outset, a word about terminology. As is explained later (see below in section e of the “Notes on the translation”), for technical reasons relating to the Latin text, male and female practitioners of magic are called “sorcerers” and “sorceresses” respectively in the translation, and the term for their practices is “sorcery.” In the preceding paragraph, the term “witchcraft” was used, but this term comes with a lot of unwelcome modern baggage that can only serve to confuse the strictly historical discussion that follows.