Christopher Mackay

Christopher Mackay, a professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, is the translator of The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, which was written largely by a Dominican friar from Germany named Henricus Institoris. From his Q & A with Joanna Weiss at the Boston Globe's "Ideas" column:

Ideas: One thing that occurred to me, reading this book, is that human nature hasn’t changed much in 450 years.

Mackay: The thing that I find most relevant to today is how you view the world around you. You see what you think you’ll see and you don’t see what you don’t think you’ll see. On “CSI,” Grissom says that the facts speak for themselves, but the facts don’t speak for themselves. It’s how you interpret the facts. [Institoris] talks about things like, you can stick a knife into a beam into your barn and you pretend to milk it, and through some razzmatazz you steal the milk from your neighbor’s cow. This is what people really thought. Onto that kind of stuff, he wants to impose this notion of this sect of heretics who are presided over by Satan.

Ideas: Was there a lot of superstition in daily life in Europe in those days?

Mackay: It...[read on]

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--Marshal Zeringue