# The Malleus Maleficarum prints scholastic demonology that cites Thomist headings

Date: 1487

## The fact

In 1486–87 the Malleus Maleficarum was printed, a completed inquisitorial handbook that leans on scholastic angelology and the Summa’s demonology cluster. Aquinas did not write the Malleus. Reception is the path.

## Context

Witch manuals are not the Summa. They are a later judicial use of scholastic permission to take spiritual harm as a crime. Confidence medium on unique causal share, high that the handbook names scholastic authority.

[Thomas Aquinas](/people/thomas-aquinas) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official edition, Holy See, or archive page and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Malleus Maleficarum (public-domain English) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29631; Project Gutenberg).

## Significance

A printed witch-handbook using Thomist headings is a judicial-harm reception, not an autograph.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is justice-[judicial-independence](/drivers/justice-judicial-independence-erosion)-erosion. The welfare reading used in this dossier is worsening. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Thomas Aquinas: https://factrail.ai/people/thomas-aquinas

## Drivers

- Judicial independence erosion (court capture): https://factrail.ai/drivers/justice-judicial-independence-erosion

## Sources

- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29631
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/aq-malleus-1487-reception