Note 26 — Front matter

“De maleficis et eorum deceptionibus.” This essay was early detached from the rest of the book and appended to the editions of the “Witch-Hammer,” and it became an inseparable addition to that work. The title-page of these reprints always calls Nider an inquisitor, and the statement has also the high authority of Trithemius. His latest German biographers deny (as do Quétif and Échard) that there is any evidence of his having been one. Mr. Lea, however, still thinks that he “seems sometimes to have acted as inquisitor”; and, in any case, all his sympathies were with this work of his order. Nider (according to Quétif and Échard) kept his book in hand for several years, and its various MSS. are of different dates; but that of 1437 seems to have been its last revision.