Daily Quiz for August 13, 2008

Demonology. Heinrich Kraemer and Johann Sprenger, published Malleus melefircarum (The Witches’ Hammer) in 1486, which became the authoritative encyclopedia of demonology throughout Christendom. Kraemer and Sprenger, two Dominican friars, had in 1484 induced Pope Innocent VIII to issue a bull authorizing them to extirpate witchcraft in Germany. The authority of their work, which was a synthesis of folk beliefs that had until then been manifested in local outbursts of witchfinding, lasted through the European witch craze of the next three centuries.