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In his extensively annotated two-volume Latin edition and English translation of the Malleus maleficarum, published in 2006, Christopher Mackay finally laid the ghost of Montague Summers, its first English translator. Summers's 1928 English translation was erroneous, tendentious and unfortunately enduring. But the name of Summers, a self-professed 'Reverend' who made a cottage industry of translating (and promoting the theories embodied in) early modern demonological treatises, does not occur in the present volume, perhaps a modern instance of justifiable damnatio memoriae. Mackay otherwise has taken full advantage of the best recent scholarship on the Malleus and its authors, and his fifty-eight-page introduction is just about the useful minimum that a scholarly translator ought to provide. It is a judicious and intelligent introduction to a complicated text produced by complicated authors and, with the text, it is now the only English translation worth using. Its paperback format makes it ideal for classroom use, and its arrangement of the text makes reference to the Latin edition very easy.
The first of two maps depicts southern Germany and a few immediately relevant and adjacent regions, from Cologne to Como and west-east from Metz to Regensburg, while the second is a detail of the first, depicting chiefly Swabia, the territory most closely associated with the life and travels of Henricus Institoris, the more important of the work's two authors.
In the first part of his introduction Mackay asserts the long-disputed collaboration between Institoris...