Innocent VIII Issues Witch Bull

1484

The pope's Summis desiderantes affectibus authorized the Dominican inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger to investigate witchcraft in German lands. Their Malleus Maleficarum followed two years later. The bull helped industrialize witch-hunting into a bureaucratic process. The fires that followed burned, chiefly, old women who could not answer procedural questions. The Malleus Maleficarum that followed became the most widely used manual for witch-hunters across Europe for two centuries.