The 'Malleus Maleficarum' ('Hammer of Witches'), written by the German Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, was first published around 1486–1487 and quickly became the definitive handbook for witch hunters across Catholic and later Protestant Europe. The work systematized theological, legal, and procedural arguments for identifying, trying, and executing those accused of witchcraft, with particular emphasis on women as the primary agents of diabolical compact. It went through dozens of editions over the following century and a half and provided the intellectual architecture for the major witch trials that devastated European communities from the late fifteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries. Its influence was vast, deadly, and culturally pervasive.

The witch-persecution culture the 'Malleus' helped institutionalize became one of the most persistent subjects in European imaginative literature, from the witch figures of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' and Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus' to the commanding ambiguity of Shakespeare's Macbeth witches. The theological anxiety about female agency, demonic knowledge, and transgressive power that the text encoded shaped the Gothic literary imagination for centuries, informing Romantic-era fascination with the supernatural and the witch as outcast visionary. Later feminist poets and scholars, from Anne Sexton to Adrienne Rich, explicitly recuperated witch-persecution as a prism for understanding gendered violence and poetic marginalization.