524 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
devices for exposing guilt was a sheet of paper of the length of Christ's body, inscribed with the seven words of the cross. This was to be bound on the witch's body at the time of the mass, and then the ordeal of torture was applied. This measure almost invariably brought forth a confession of guilt. The ordeal of the red-hot iron was also recommended, but it was to be used with caution, as it was the trick of demons to cover the hands of witches with a salve made from a vegetable essence which kept them from being burnt. Such a case happened in Constance, the woman being able to carry the glowing iron six paces and thus going free.
Of all parts of this manual, none is quite so infamous as the author's vile estimate of woman. If there is any one who still imagines that celibacy is a sure highway to purity of thought, let him read the testimonies about woman and marriage given by mediaeval writers, priests and monks, themselves celibate and presumably chaste. Their impurities of expression suggest a foul atmosphere of thought and conversation. The very title of the Malleus maleficarum — the Hammer of the Female Malefics — is in the feminine because, as the authors inform their readers, the overwhelming majority of those who were behagged and had intercourse with demons were women.^ In flat contrast to our modern experience of the religious fidelity of women, the authors of this book derive the word/(?mma — woman — f rom/e and wiwits, that is, Jides minus, less in faith. Weeping and spinning and deceiving they represent as the very essence of her nature. She deceives, because she was formed from Adam's rib and that was crooked.
A long chapter, I. 6, is devoted to showing woman's inferiority to man and the subject of her alliance with demons is dwelt upon, apparently with delight. The cohabitation with fiends was in earlier ages, the authors affirm, against the will of women, but in their own age it was with their full consent and by their ardent desire. They thank God for being men. Few of their sex, they say, consent to such obscene relations, — one man to ten women. This refusal was due to the male's natu-
^ Hceresis dicenda est non maleficornm sed maleficaruyn, vt fiat a potiori denominatio. See Hansen: Quellen, 410—444, and Zanbencahn, 481-490.
§ 59. WITCHCRAFT AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 525
ral vigor of mind, vigor rationis. To show the depravity of woman and her fell agency in history, Institoris and Sprenger quote all the bad things they can heap up from authors, biblical and classic, patristic and scholastic, Cato, Terence, Seneca, Cicero, Jerome. Jesus Sirach's words are frequently quoted, "Woman is more bitter than death." Helen, Jezebel and Cleopatra are held forth as examples of pernicious agency which wrought the destruction of kingdoms, such catastrophes being almost invariably due to woman's machinations.
It was the common representation of the writers of the outgoing century of the Mediseval Age that God permits the intervention of Satan's malefic agency through the marriage bed more than through any other medium, and for the reason that the first sin was carried down through the marital act. On this point, Thomas Aquinas is quoted by one author after the other. ^ Preachers, as well as writers on witchcraft, took this disparaging view of woman. Geiler of Strassburg gave as the reason for ten women being burnt to one man on the charge of witchcraft, woman's loquacity and frivolity. He quoted Ambrose that woman is the door to the devil and the way of iniquity — janua diaboli et via iyiiquitatis. Another noted preacher of the 15th century, John Nider, gave ten cases in which the cohabitation of man and woman is a mortal sin and, in a Latin treatise on moral leprosy, included the marriage state. 2 A century earlier, in his Be planctu ecclesice, written from Avignon, Bishop Alvarez of Pelayo enumerated 102 faults common to women, one of these their cohabitation with the denizens of hell. From his own experience, the prelate states, he knew this to be true. It was practised, he
1 Com. ad Sent., IV. 34, qu. I. 3, quia corruptio peccati prima . . . in nos per actum generantem devenit, ideo mnleficii potestas permittitur diabolo adeo in hoc actu magis quam aliis. See Hansen : Quellen, pp. 88-99. In answering the question wliy more women were given to sorcery than men, Alexander Hales declared that it was because she had less intellectual vigor than man, minus hahet discretionem spiritus.
- See Hansen : Quellen, p. 423 sqq. Wyclif does not seem to have had so low an opinion of woman as did the writers of the century after him. And yet he says, Lat. Serm. II. 161, Femina superat in malicia multos viros . . . Veritas est quod natxira feminea est virtute inferior, etc.