The Malleus Maleficarum(Latin for "The Hammer of Witches", or "Hexenhammer" in German) is a famous treatise on witches, written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer an Jacob Sprenger, two Inquisitors of the Catholic Church, and was first published in Germany in 1487. The main purpose of the Malleus was to systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft does not exist, refute those who expressed skepticism about its reality, to prove that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the procedures that could find them out and convict them.