The printing press also allowed moral panics to go viral, with consequences that were vastly more deadly than those of twenty-first-century Twitter mobs. The Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches was a wildly successful witch-hunting manual compiled by two Dominican inquisitors in 1486, which reached its ninth edition within six years.24 Books like the Malleus Maleficarum fanned the flames of witch hunts between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in which an estimated forty-five thousand people were executed.
