Summis desiderantes affectibus

Summis desiderantes affectibus, (Latin for Desiring with supreme ardor), sometimes abbreviated to Summis desiderantes was a papal bull regarding witchcraft issued by Pope Innocent VIII on December 5, 1484.

Belief in witchcraft is ancient. Deuteronomy 18:11–12 in the Hebrew Bible states: "Let there not be found among you anyone who immolates his son or daughter in the fire, nor a fortune-teller, soothsayer, charmer, diviner, or caster of spells, nor one who consults ghosts and spirits or seeks oracles from the dead."

Early Irish canons treated sorcery as a crime to be visited with excommunication until adequate penance had been performed. Pope Gregory VII wrote to Harald III of Denmark in 1080 forbidding witches to be put to death upon presumption of their having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. According to Herbert Thurston, the fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses which characterized the cruel witchhunts of a later age, were not generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian era.

The early Church distinguished between "white" and "black" magic. The latter was generally dealt with through confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance.

The bull was written in response to the request of Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, after he was refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities, who maintained that as the letter of deputation did not specifically mention where the inquisitors may operate, they could not legally exercise their functions in their areas. The bull sought to remedy this jurisdictional dispute by specifically identifying the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen.

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