Malleus Maleficarum

Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum, printed by Peter Drach in Speyer in 1487, is a primary text, the first printing of the work. Its strength is that it is the actual document, cited here for what the text itself says; the atlas quotes none of its content directly. Its limit is substantial and worth stating plainly: it is a work whose claims about witchcraft and the people it targeted were never independently verified and have long been recognised as having caused real historical harm, and it is cited only as the primary record of what it asserts, never as evidence that its assertions were true.