The demonological treatise as a space of political conflict between religious authority and emerging territorial States: the Malleus Maleficarum and the subordination of the secular to the ecclesiastical authority

Abstract

Taking into account the particular motives of the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum and the cultural conditions of its writing, this paper will focus on the thoughts expressed there about the role of secular authority, and its relationship to face the inquisitors as church representatives, in the removal of the new sect of witches. Finally it will be establish the relationship between the production of the text and the emergence of the modern territorial State. We can anticipate that in a period where begins to emerge the new state structures, our theologians exalted, above any other source of real power, the power of the Vicar of Christ, doing the demonological discourse a space for political debate between two sources of authority in conflict (although supported by the same foundation -God-)