The Deetjen Collection on Witchcraft
The Malleus maleficarum [The Witches' Hammer] was the foremost legal and theological handbook on witchcraft and demonology. It describes the operations of witches, remedies against spells, and the judicial proceedings of ecclesiastical and civil courts against witches and heretics. Twenty-eight editions of the Malleus maleficarum were produced before 1600, and it was still consulted in the eighteenth century.
There are eight different early editions of the Malleus maleficarum in the library’s collections—four are incunables, including a copy of the first edition from Speyer in 1487—and the latest is a 1620 Leiden printing. Five of these editions of the text are from the Christian Deetjen collection.