Immediately after I began the reading of Kors & Peters tonight in the introduction to Part III in the Malleus Maleficarum something really stuck out. Kramer and Sprenger discuss the transfer of responsibility to try witches to secular courts along with ecclesiastical. However specifically in the case of sole heretics it is the responsibility to try and judge, "but for the secular judge to carry out the sentence and to punish; that is, when a capital punishment is in question." In any other case of sole heretics, the punishment was left to the penitential, but in the case of a possible punishment of death the secular judges were responsible to administer the punishment. I was just curious if this was for the commandment not to kill. Also, for some reason I was under the impression the the church may have been supportive of the burning of witches, if that is true then why could they not administer the punishment? In this section and later on the authors again discuss the responsibility of the secular court to try witches based on the encompassing danger, threat, and offense of witch craft not only to the church but also secular society.
In their section titled "Of the Manner of pronouncing a Sentence which is Final and Definitive," the authors explain this again saying, "It must be remembered, also, that this crime of witches is not purely ecclesiastics; therefore the temporal potentates and the Lords are not debarred from trying and judging it." While reading this I came to the conclusion it wasn't necessarily a call for a more vast court system in order to stop more witches rather, it strikes me as a plead for more support. Whenever one desires more support for his or her position, specifically in politics, the communal threat is invoked (specifically the notion that everyone's children are endangered by this "threat" if people do not join in to fight it is utilized regularly).By framing witchcraft as encompassing into the secular realm and calling for the use of secular courts to also try the witches do you, as the reader, sense the authors' plead for more support outside of the church?
I can definitely see the plea for help outside of the church. I think that one of the reasons that they went to a secular court was that the whole scope of the witch-hunts expanded past religion. At the height of the times this was nothing short of an epidemic. It was for the greater good of all society to have all hands on deck.
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