ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explain how reading the Malleus as well as Johannes Nider’s Formicarius and Preceptorium did in fact change the mind of a man who in the years around the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century acted as intermediary between learned culture and a largely illiterate population. It attempts to relate the findings to the chronology of witchcraft persecutions in the wider region of the upper Moselle and Rhine rivers. The chapter shows what it meant to an educated and religious mind at the end of the fifteenth century to be confronted with the new demonological concept of witchcraft. It concludes with some remarks as to how this changed worldview of a member of a regional elite culture must have reached his environment as well.
