Religion as an Agent of Change: Crusades, Reformation, Pietism. Per Ingesman, ed. Brill’s Series in Church History and Religious Culture 72. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 280 pp. $142.
ond half of the fifteenth century. Tinctor and the Anonymous (Du Bois) made their own contributions to that circulation around 1460, and the author of theMalleuswould be able to draw on them in the 1480s. . . . Precisely how those ideas were communicated we do not know, but they were the same ideas” (18). One could add that some of the witches’ crimes hitherto assumed to have made their first appearance in the Malleus— such as feeding toads with consecrated Hosts—already featured both in the Recollectio and in the original Latin version of the Invectives. This lends further support to the hypothesis that Heinrich Institoris, theMalleus’s author, was familiar with the Arras treatises. If this was indeed the case, it can certainly shed light on Institoris’s preoccupation with the sexual history of the accused witches that he prosecuted at Innsbruck and on his assault on female sexuality in the Malleus, because most of the first convicted witches to be executed at Arras had been prostitutes, and the descriptions of their orgiastic assemblies in the Recollectio included graphic details of their sexual transgressions. Reading this work could have convinced Institoris that lust was the key factor in leading women to join the devil’s sect. As this example makes clear, the potential of the new edition of the Arras treatises promises to transcend its already valuable contribution for classroom use. It will surely contribute to fine-tuning existing assumptions about fifteenth-century demonology, and students and scholars alike will benefit from its publication.