Abstract
This study examines the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) as a discursive event that produced and stabilized a new ideological category: the Heresy of Sorceresses. Rather than analyzing linguistic change in isolation, the project applies a historical discourse analysis to trace how language functioned as a social mechanism of control, legitimization, and punishment. Drawing on van Leeuwen’s social actor theory and Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, the thesis analyzes how lexical choices, naming practices, and intertextual references within the Malleus constructed an institutional identity for female heretics. Discursive strategies such as nomination, functionalization, backgrounding, and suppression transformed accusations into assumptions, and assumptions into legal and theological realities. The Malleus did not merely describe a social threat; it created one. In doing so, it exemplifies how language, through institutional backing and intertextual authority, shaped and reinforced the gendered power dynamics of late 15th-century Europe. This paper contributes to historical linguistics by foregrounding the social force of language in constructing ideological realities and by tracing how discourse solidifies cultural fear into enduring institutional categories.