ABSTRACT
Polish historiography has celebrated the Denounced Witch without studying it very closely, assigning to its author a heroic, enlightened status such as used to be given to Reginald Scot, Johann Wier, and Friedrich Spee. The turn of the seventeenth century saw the publication of a polemical attack on Agrippan natural magic and an abridged and bowdlerized translation of the Malleus maleficarum the earliest translation of this work into a vernacular language. The correlation of the spread of witchcraft and heresy was of course commonplace among the Jesuits. Martin Delrio’s teacher, Juan Maldonadoº, made use of this correlation to imply that just as witches are heretics, so too ‘the modern Protestant heretics were witches’. Indeed, it is probable that the very strategy which made the Denounced Witch so popular among certain factions of the Catholic church hierarchy rendered it anathema to noble or burgher reformers interested in ameliorating the plight of accused witches.
