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The article uses narratology as a tool to examine the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials in Finland and the area of Finnmark, Northern Norway, to analyse how experience as a category of knowledge and expression surfaces in original court records. This article focuses on courtroom discourse in witchcraft trials: the interrogation, what the accused confessed to in terms of ideas about witchcraft, and how the personal and collective experience of witchcraft may be traced in court record narratives. A narratological approach to courtroom discourse provides an understanding of the legal practice, contextual conditions, and complexity of the entire trial. By focusing on the confession as a narrative, the analysis unearths the ideas about witchcraft expressed by the individual accused person as well as the echo of the questions posed during interrogation, but also a personalized approach traced by features of orality. Thirdly, the narrative voices that we found were used to investigate how they all contribute to the narrative by exchanging information, knowledge, and interpretation so that, eventually, they create a shared understanding of the experience of witchcraft – or lack thereof.

Heikki Pihlajamäki, Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia (ca. 1630-1710). A Case of Legal Pluralism in Early modern Europe, Leiden: Brill 2017 (The Northern World 77), ISBN 978-90-04-33153-2, 299 pp.

Naiset puhuvat vallasta Miten naiset vaativat ja käyttivät valtaa uuden ajan alussa? Ulvilalainen Agata Pekantytär ajettiin pois miehensä tilalta jäätyään leskeksi 1671. Hän kuitenkin taisteli perintötilan tyttärelleen, selvisi kolmesta noitasyytteestä ja jatkoi kaiken aikaa tilanhoitoa ja puuttui vielä naapurienkin töihin. Agata ja hänen kaltaisensa naiset vetosivat rooleihin, jotka heille vallan antoivat: vanhemmuuteen tai äitiyteen, ikäänsä ja työhönsä erityisesti muiden hyväksi. Naisten vallasta käydyt keskustelut sekä uuden ajan alun talonpoikien että myöhempien tutkijoitten ovat olleet kiihkeimmillään noitaoikeudenkäynneissä. Tutkijat ovat kuitenkin nähneet tämän liian kielteisesti: noita ei ollut uhri eikä osoitus siitä naisten vallankäyttöä olisi hyväksytty. Naisen tai vaimon asemaa ja mahdollisuuksia vallankäyttöön rajoittivat monet tekijät lainsäädännössä ja oikeuskäytännössä sekä ideologisessa opetuksessa muutenkin. Käytännössä useimmat näistä rajoituksista kuitenkin säännöllisesti ohitettiin ­ eikä pelkästään pakon edessä miesten poissa ollessa, vaan jatkuvasti. Naisten mahdollisuudet auktoriteettiasemaan ja arvostettuun statukseen yhteisössä näyttäytyvät käsillä olevan tutkimuksen pohjalta parempina kuin aikaisemmin on korostettu. Talonpoikaistaloutta johtivat kumppanit, isäntä ja emäntä, jotka joskus olivat mies ja vaimo, joskus vaikkapa äiti ja vävy tai isä ja tytär. Kun tutkimuksen päähenkilöt puhuivat itsestään ja kilpailijoistaan käräjillä, käräjäjuttujen aiheista riippumatta heidän puheessaan usein toistuivat viittaukset vanhemmuuteen ja ikään sekä työhön ja niihin liittyvään hyveeseen. Nämä teemat ovat olleet tärkeitä naishistoriassa eivätkä vähiten siksi että ne ovat tärkeitä nykyäänkin. Uuden ajan alussa kaikkiin näihin liittyi suuria vaatimuksia ja riskejä. Noidat on usein nähty sekä syntipukkeina epäonnistumiselle ja sijaiskohteina, joihin epävarmat äidit ja emännät voivat projisoida pelkonsa ja ahdistuksensa. Suomalaisessa talonpoikaispuheessa sekä työ että vanhemmuus useammin ovat statusta tuovia tekijöitä, joita saattoi käyttää perusteluna poikkeavallekin käyttäytymiselle: noituudesta syytetty saattoi sanoa tehneensä sen minkä muut tulkitsivat noituudeksi vain lapsia huvittaakseen. Naisten aseman ja vallankäytön mahdollisuuksien tutkimus kulminoituu noitaoikeudenkäynteihin. Noituuden ja naisten yhteys mytologisoitui ns. toisen aallon feminismien tulkinnoissa noitavainoista naisvainoina. Viime vuosikymmenen feminististä noitatutkimusta taas yhdistävät psykoanalyyttiset teoriat ja kiinnostus erilaisista kokemuksista ja identiteeteistä, mutta siinä toistuvat edelleen toisen aallon teemat. Suomalaisen tasa-arvon juuria on usein haettu vähäväkisiltä pientiloilta, joiden naiset ovat aina tehneet työtä ­ ja kritisoitu sitten ettei työ välttämättä tuota valtaa tai arvostusta. Monien kohdalla ei, mutta tämän tutkimuksen päähenkilöille se oli hyväksytty keino vaatia molempia. This study maintains that the options of early modern women were considerably better than has been claimed by traditional social and gender historians. The work follows a number of early modern Finnish households which were publicly represented and headed by women. The book thereby provides a contrast to the traditional view of women in early modern history, which has presented the influence of early modern social theory, religious teaching and Roman law as forcing women into what has been called a secondary legal position , secluding women from the public spheres into the domestic household and depriving them of authority outside the home. For the households in this study, public representation by women was a cultural choice rather than a necessity, because there were other adult men who could have performed the task. However, the choice was not always uncontested. The conflicts in these households were marked by witchcraft accusations. The arguments for and against the leadership of particular household members reveal that rather than prescribing a male-dominated model of authority in early modern society, the patriarchal rhetoric formed a general ground on which both men and women could claim authority. Family and parenthood as well as work were central to the rhetoric of authority. The study of women's or feminine authority and power culminates in witchcraft trials. A mythical link between women and witches was weawed into the fabrique of second wave feminism Rhetoric. The last decade and a half has seen a new wave of feminist interest in witches, marked by psyhoanalytical theories and interest in the different experiences and identities of different women. Nevertheless, the second wave themes still survive in it. The emphasis has been on the restricting demands and insecure nature of both motherhood and women's work. The roots of the equality between sexes in Finland have often been searched in the small agrarian households that could not afford women's seclusion from work and public. The critique often presented against it, too, has been that not all work - or parental obligations - produces power or authority. For some, maybe not. For the women in this study, work and motherhood were legitimate grounds for claiming authority.

This chapter offers an interpretation of extended families as communities of experience in a rural area close to the eastern border of the Swedish realm. Through a case study of lower court records, Kuha examines the social and religious life in a 17th-century farm culminating in the crisis of an extended family. The chapter explores how practices of lived religion shaped the relationship of the community and the individual, and how experiences were negotiated within families and local communities. The analysis highlights the importance of protecting the boundaries of the household as well as the meaning of religious practices in creating cohesion within the community.

In this introductory chapter Katajala-Peltomaa & Toivo analyse historiographical changes from the history of popular religion to the history of religion as lived. They lay out the framework and discuss the tradition of studying the history of experience and religion as a cultural and time-bound phenomenon. The chapter introduces three analytical levels, namely everyday experience, experience as a process and experience as a social and societal structure arguing for a situational nature of experience. The three levels of experience are approached via the concepts of cultural scripts, communities, embodiment, materiality and agency. Finally, the introduction explains the structure of the rest of the volume.

Pihko examines inquisition records from medieval Languedoc in order to investigate experiences related to the ritualized and allegedly heretical practice of blessing bread. The chapter provides an overview of the evidence regarding this often noted but insufficiently researched phenomenon. It highlights the materiality of lived religion and the active part played by lay people as participants in religious rituals, as well their role as consumers, interpreters, and distributors of blessed bread. The case study is inserted into wider discussions related to the history of medieval lived religion and the history of experiences. To illuminate their inner dynamics, the chapter proposes that historical experiences and lived religion can be understood as complex, emergent phenomena.

This chapter discusses the role of lived religion in interpreting and forming the experience of illness, disability, and pain. The focus is on two cultural scripts that were inherent to early modern Italian culture: miracles and witchcraft. By using canonization process records and records of the Roman Inquisition as the source, the analysis focuses on the ways the veneration of saints and the belief in miraculous healing as well as the idea that witchcraft could make a person ill played into the lived religion of the period.

Markkola examines religion as lived and shared by working-class women in an industrial town in Finland. Her chapter explores women’s daily practices as well as various Lutheran and nonconformist revivalist arenas to practice religion at the turn of the twentieth century. These arenas constituted scenes of experience where individual experiences were acquired, interpreted, shared, confirmed, and turned into collective resources. The scenes of experience provided working-class women an institutional setting to give meaning to their religious experiences and taught them how to talk religion. The chapter shows that religious experiences and meanings given to faith by urban working-class women were full of nuances. Lived religion might have brought about obedience to authorities, as the labour movement assumed, but it could also encourage resistance.

In this chapter the various levels of experience are scrutinized within the context of interaction with a saint, namely Saint Birgitta of Sweden. The focus lies on a case of a punishment miracle leading to demonic possession and eventually conversion to penance. The chapter combines the analysis of intimate sensorial elements, embodied enculturation, and a production of a cultural script scrutinizing how a model for experiencing was produced in the context of Vadstena Abbey’s miracle recording and later preaching.

The protagonist of the chapter Sarah Wheeler, daughter of British Quaker family lived in Russia near St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 19th century until the year 1838. Using as a source material Sarah Wheeler’s correspondence the chapter analyses her spiritual life, her faith on the God and how she lived through her bereavements and how her emotions like sorrow and fear gradually evolved into an experience which gave a direction and security in his life. This is the first study in which the correspondence between Sarah Wheeler and Margaret Finlayson has been utilized.

Johanna Annola opens up a view on a modernizing society by analysing the ways in which the experience of a ”good death” was negotiated in two early twentieth-century Finnish poorhouses. In particular, the chapter focuses on procedures that took place in the liminal stage between death and burial. Exploring two different poorhouses, Annola discusses the intersection of a traditional and modern experience of death.

Toivo’s chapter systematizes prayer as experience on three levels, as everyday encounters, as social processes and as structures. It shows the material and the corporeal nature of the early modern prayer to play an essential part in the ways the religious experience of a prayer was simultaneously constructed and personalized and shared. Praying was ‘doing’ in a much more holistic sense than merely saying words or even less thinking thoughts to God. The body and the material surroundings of the prayer form a space where the experience takes place, even ‘a tool’ to experience with.

‘Parricide in Nineteenth-Century Finland’, by Raisa Maria Toivo, places nineteenth-century parricide cases in the context of changing concepts of authority and masculinity, and the devaluation of traditional forms of authority.

The essay shows a remnant of Catholic practice in early modern Finland that only a hundred years after the reformation slowly began to be treated as ‘papist superstition’. It discusses how such practices were, in the beginning of the seventeenth century considered reprehensible but essentially harmless superstitions, but by the middle of the century began to be treated as forms of magic or even witchcraft. The rosary practices are looked at as a crossroads of the beginnings of history of the Confessionalist Lutheran church in Sweden and the religious life of early modern lay people. The essay uses church popular education material from the early seventeenth century with the model sermon collection of Bishop Ericus Erici Sorolainen to see what it teaches about Catholicism and Rosaries and then contrasts it with (secular) court records in order to look at popular attitudes in practice. These are then put in the context of historiography on magic and superstition in Sweden and Finland.

This book breaks with three common scholarly barriers of periodization, discipline and geography in its exploration of the related themes of heresy, magic and witchcraft. It sets aside constructed chronological boundaries, and in doing so aims to achieve a clearer picture of what ‘went before’, as well as what ‘came after’. Thus the volume demonstrates continuity as well as change in the concepts and understandings of magic, heresy and witchcraft. In addition, the geographical pattern of similarities and diversities suggests a comparative approach, transcending confessional as well as national borders. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the orthodoxy of the Christian Church was continuously contested. The challenge of heterodoxy, especially as expressed in various kinds of heresy, magic and witchcraft, was constantly present during the period 1200-1650. Neither contesters nor followers of orthodoxy were homogeneous groups or fractions. They themselves and their ideas changed from one century to the next, from region to region, even from city to city, but within a common framework of interpretation. This collection of essays focuses on this complex.

The essay deals with magic spells, charms and rituals in Scandinavia during the later Middle Ages and early modern period, that is, approximately 1300–1600, especially the relations between Christian and non-Christian elements. The essay takes its starting point in the Norwegian Vinje book from the 1480s which is the first extensive collection of spells in Scandinavia, preserved from the Middle Ages. This unique collection is introduced for the first time in an international context. The borders between religion and magic, religion and natural science, Christian and non-Christian elements, were fluctuating during the later Middle Ages. The spells were used in a functional way, no matter who the practitioners were. Ordinary people simply searched for a solution to their problems. Origin and content of the spells were of lesser importance. People were pragmatic in their choice: what did work and what did not.

Internationaliseret version af dansk artikel This essay investigates the correlation between heresy and witchcraft in a Danish context. In sixteenth-century Denmark theologians, most prominently Niels Hemmingsen, condemned witchcraft by referring to it as heresy and false beliefs. Still, as a consequence of the Lutheran Reformation the Church had no legal influence in the prosecution of witchcraft and related offences. This essay investigates the link between heresy and witchcraft in theological writings, legal regulations and in trials for witchcraft. It argues that although Danish trials for witchcraft were an issue for lay authorities, an analysis of the link between heresy and witchcraft provides new insights in what can be characterized as a ‘trichotomy’ of theologians, legislation and judicial regulations put into practice.

Mitä väliä on historialla? – kirja kartoittaa historian ja historiantutkimuksen mahdollista impaktia, merkitystä ja yhteiskunnallista tai tieteellistä relevanssia. Toimittajien (Tiina Miettisen ja Raisa Maria Toivon) yleistajuisen johdannon jälkeen kirja tarkastelee erilaisten tapausesimerkkien kautta, mitä hyötyä erilaisista historiantutkimuksista voi olla erilaisille historian käyttäjille. Kirja on poleeminen keskustelunaloitus: pikemmin kuin kattamaan kaikki mahdolliset historian alat se pyrki tarjoamaan odottamattomia näkökulmia ja uhkarohkeita vertailuja. Mitä väliä on historialla (“What good is history?”) is edited by Dr. Tiina Miettinen and Dr. Raisa Maria Toivo. Can history be useful and if so, what is it useful for? This book explores the impact of history and historical research. It gives a general introduction and various case studies – together with a piece of fiction – on how different parts of society can benefit, or have used, the study of history.

This chapter discusses the process of constructing religious experiences as pathological and ‘mad’ in early modern Sweden, during an era of great religious plurality but also strict Lutheran orthodoxy. By using two case studies of envisioned angelic encounters from early 18th century as examples, it shows the participation of several actors and discursive authorities in shaping and negotiating personal spiritual experiences. Medicalization of deviant religious experiences was one way of controlling faith and upholding the discursive hegemony of the Swedish Lutheran state Church over religion. The focus is on the process-nature of experiencing and the power dynamics in play in invalidating norm-breaching experiences.