Factors Stimulating Widespread Use
The Malleus Maleficarum was able to spread throughout Europe so rapidly in the late fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century because of the innovation of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg. That printing should have been invented thirty years before the first publication of the Malleus, which instigated the fervor of witch hunting, and, in the words of Russell, "the swift propagation of the witch hysteria by the press was the first evidence that Gutenberg had not liberated man from original sin." The Malleus is also heavily influenced by the subjects of divination, astrology, and healing rituals the Church inherited from antiquity.
The late fifteenth century was also a period of religious turmoil, for the Protestant Reformation was but a few decades in the future. The Malleus Maleficarum and the witch craze that ensued took advantage of the increasing intolerance of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where the Protestant and Catholic camps, pitted against one another, each zealously strove to maintain the purity of faith.
Read more about this topic: Malleus Maleficarum
Famous quotes containing the words factors, stimulating and/or widespread:
“The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence,luxury, scepticism, weariness and superstition,are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.”
—Cyril Connolly (19031974)
“There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)