Precautions for Prosecutors (Cautio Criminalis)

...[I concede that there] are [some], but I add that the prudent reader will easily understand from what must be said next, that if it is handled as I shall say it is now being handled everywhere, how absolutely necessary it is—given the vast number of those burned so far—that very many innocent people are included among them. Indeed, nothing in Germany is more uncertain than whether the truly guilty women original: "reas," the feminine form of "the accused," reflecting that the vast majority of those targeted were women can even be counted.

DOUBT III.

I ANSWER. It is the most enormous, the most grave, and the most atrocious, because in it concur the circumstances of the most enormous crimes: apostasy abandoning one's faith, heresy, sacrilege, blasphemy, homicide, and even parricide original: "parricidij," the murder of a parent or close relative, and often also intercourse against nature with a spiritual creature original: "creatura spirituali," a reference to demons, and hatred against God, than which nothing can be more atrocious. These are the words of Delrio Martin Delrio (1551–1608) was a Jesuit theologian whose "Six Books of Magical Investigations" was a standard manual for witch-hunting in Book 5, Section 1; however, I shall discourse more extensively on this argument in another small book.

DOUBT IV.

I ANSWER. That it is. Note, for instance, that legal experts are accustomed to establish two types of crimes,