Episode #237 - What is the Hammer of the Witches?

October 21, 2025·1 hr 21 min·5 clips

Helena Schuberin spat at the inquisitor and called him a 'bad monk,' defying Europe's most feared witch hunter.

The end of October 1485 starts with a trapdoor creaking open. The host drops us into Innsbruck, where Heinrich Kramer, Dominican friar and papal inquisitor, has worn out whatever welcome he had. Kramer was not a harmless crank. He had spent years hunting heretics across Central Europe and, by 1485, was one of the more experienced inquisitors in Germany. Pope Sixtus IV praised his zeal, knowledge, integrity, and constancy, which makes the local disgust land a little harder. Historian Hans Brodel paints Kramer as good at pleasing bosses and bad at dealing with almost everyone else. Charming fellow. From there, the episode widens out from one abrasive inquisitor to the stranger question of how witchcraft became tied to women. Earlier ideas were less tidy. Harmful magic could look more like a secular crime than heresy, and men could be imagined as dangerous magic workers too. Scholars with books, that sort of thing. In southern Germany, surviving trial records suggest witchcraft cases were rare and not aimed only at women. Then the ideas began to blur. Night-flying and harmful magic fused into the modern witch, and Sigrid Bronner says that helped attach both ideas mainly to women. The host resists blaming the Malleus Maleficarum too quickly and points to an earlier 1400s mash-up instead. Heresy gets a careful definition, with Robert Grossetest's comma heavy version becoming both a joke and a boundary line. The point is that witchcraft and sorcery were sinful, but heresy mattered more to the Western Church. This is not a neat origin story. It is about law, theology, ego, and storytelling turning scattered fears into something much more dangerous.

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