Summis Desiderantes Affectibus

Innocent VIII issued Summis Desiderantes Affectibus on 5 December 1484 in answer to a petition from two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, who complained that they were being obstructed in the German lands. The bull does two things. It states, in the pope's own voice, that many people in the provinces of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg and Bremen have given themselves to devils and by incantations have destroyed crops, killed livestock and made men and women barren. It then confirms the two inquisitors in their office, instructs the local clergy to assist them, and threatens ecclesiastical censure against anyone who impedes them.

It did not define witchcraft, did not create the inquisition, and did not order anyone burned. Its force was administrative. It removed a jurisdictional obstacle by putting the weight of the papacy behind two men whose authority local bishops had been questioning.

That distinction matters because of what happened to the text afterwards. From 1487 the bull was printed at the front of the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer's handbook for finding and convicting witches, where a reader would naturally take it as papal approval of the book. It was not. The bull is three years older than the treatise and says nothing about it. The pairing gave a private work the appearance of official sanction, and it is the clearest case in this collection of an instrument acquiring an authority it never claimed for itself.

For a long time the bull was read as the document that opened the European witch trials. Nineteenth century historians placed it at the head of the story, and the placement was natural: it is the earliest papal text most readers meet on the subject, it names real provinces, and it describes accusations that were really being made. Modern work has narrowed the claim a great deal. Trials for maleficium were already running in the western Alps decades before 1484, the theological apparatus that turned a witch into a member of a diabolical sect was assembled in the 1430s, and the great wave of prosecutions came a century later and was overwhelmingly the work of secular courts rather than church ones.

What the bull did contribute was a name and a seal. Bound at the front of the Malleus Maleficarum from 1487, it travelled with the book through more than twenty printings and lent papal weight to a text Kramer wrote largely alone, from which Sprenger appears later to have kept his distance, and which the theology faculty at Cologne endorsed in terms considerably weaker than the printed approbation suggests. Whether that approbation was tampered with in the printing house is still argued.

The instrument and the book are separate subjects and the atlas keeps them apart. The bull is a short administrative act about jurisdiction in five German provinces. The Malleus is a long argument about how to find and convict a witch. The trials drew on the second far more than on the first.