Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) 0754664546, 9780754664543

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures and Table
List of Maps
Preface
1 Introduction
The state and power among the peasants
Witchcraft, witch trials and authority
Women in and under authority
Court records as text
2 The Widow Farmer Witch: Agata Pekatytär 1670–1700
Agata Pekantytär, the mother
The widow cotter
Inheritances 1671–1674
The plight of the heiress
Magic trials
The mother
Agata Pekantytär, mistress of the farm
Farmhold responsibilities
Family haven?
Shared representation
Envious neighbours: witches to trial
The village
Agata Pekantytär as the reputed witch
Gossip
Old age
The story of a powerful woman?
3 Witches and Power
Poor or powerful people?
Women between kin and state
Power in court
Reading the court records
Witchcraft representing power
Conclusions
4 Work, Status and Power
Work as obedience
Work as personal worth
Witchcraft and skilled work
Work and community
Gendering work and witchcraft
Ownership and control
Partnership for power
Gendering work and power
Conclusions
5 Family, Women's Status and Power
A woman's place
Spouses and protection
Exclusion from the family
Feminisms, witches and patriarchy
Regaining the body
Idealised mother and maternal power
Mothers and grandmothers
Conclusions
6 Conclusions: Mother, Wife and Witch
Women in court
Mothers, housewives
Witches
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include: From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris Gender, Economy, and Law Janine M. Lanza Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe Edited by Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall Henrietta Maria Piety, Politics and Patronage Erin Griffey Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium Helen King Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas Nora E. Jaffary

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society Finland and the Wider European Experience

Raisa Maria Toivo University of Tampere, Finland

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Raisa Maria Toivo 2008 Raisa Maria Toivo has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices.. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Toivo, Raisa Maria Witchcraft and gender in early modern society : Finland and the wider European experience. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Women – Finland – Social conditions – 17th century 2. Women – Europe – Social conditions – 17th century 3. Sex role – Finland – History – 17th century 4. Sex role – Europe – History – 17th century 5. Witchcraft – Finland – History – 17th century 6. Witchcraft – Europe – History – 17th century 7. Finland – History – 17th century 8. Europe – History – 17th century I. Title 305.4’2’094897 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toivo, Raisa Maria. Witchcraft and gender in early modern society : Finland and the wider European experience / by Raisa Maria Toivo. p. cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6454-3 (alk. paper) 1. Women—Finland—Social conditions—17th century. 2. Women—Europe—Social conditions—17th century. 3. Sex role—Finland—History—17th century. 4. Sex role— Europe—History—17th century. 5. Witchcraft—Finland—History—17th century. 6. Witchcraft—Europe—History—17th century. 7. Finland—History—17th century. 8. Europe—History—17th century. I. Title. HQ1665.5.T65 2008 305.43’6309489709032—dc22 ISBN: 9780754664543 (hbk)

2008002369

Contents List of Figures and Table List of Maps Preface

vii viii ix

1 Introduction The state and power among the peasants Witchcraft, witch trials and authority Women in and under authority Court records as text

1 1 7 10 13

2 The Widow Farmer Witch: Agata Pekatytär 1670–1700 Agata Pekantytär, the mother The widow cotter Inheritances 1671–1674 The plight of the heiress Magic trials The mother Agata Pekantytär, mistress of the farm Farmhold responsibilities Family haven? Shared representation Envious neighbours: witches to trial The village Agata Pekantytär as the reputed witch Gossip Old age The story of a powerful woman?

21 21 22 27 32 36 45 49 49 52 56 60 65 70 70 72 74

3 Witches and Power Poor or powerful people? Women between kin and state Power in court Reading the court records Witchcraft representing power Conclusions

77 78 81 90 94 101 110

4

113 114 116 120 123 128

Work, Status and Power Work as obedience Work as personal worth Witchcraft and skilled work Work and community Gendering work and witchcraft

vi

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

Ownership and control Partnership for power Gendering work and power Conclusions

137 139 145 147

5 Family, Women’s Status and Power A woman’s place Spouses and protection Exclusion from the family Feminisms, witches and patriarchy Regaining the body Idealised mother and maternal power Mothers and grandmothers Conclusions

151 152 161 168 171 174 182 188 192

6 Conclusions: Mother, Wife and Witch Women in court Mothers, housewives Witches

197 197 199 203

Appendix

205

Bibliography Index

207 227

List of Figures and Table List of Figures 1 Relationships between people in Agata’s witchcraft trials in 1675 and 1676

41

2 The Tommila family in Pomarkku

205

3 The Sawo family in Kyläsaari

206

Table Table 1 Court Record

95

List of Maps 1

Sweden and Ulvila Parish at the end of the seventeenth century (Source: Hermelin 1799)

18

2

Kyläsaari village 1688 (Source: National Archives: Land Surveyor’s office in Uusimaa Archives)

34

3 The village row 1688 (Source: National Archives: Land Surveyor’s office in Uusimaa Archives)

35

Preface During this project, I have needed and had the help and support of many people around me. I have worked the Department of History at the University of Tampere, where the professors were encouraging and helpful. Professor Pertti Haapala and Professor Irma Sulkunen have provided me with “a room and a table” with all the other necessary things that a woman researcher or writer will need, and I thank them for having me in the working community. I want to thank all those who talked over the problems of writing and teaching during those years at the department coffee room. We had an encouraging and open atmosphere. Especially I want to thank Ph.D. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Reverend (Mag. Theol.) Sami Uusi-Rauva, both of whom shared an office with me for a while and Ph.D. Kirsi Salonen, who has shown the virtue of hard work ever since we were undergraduates. The four of us have shared books and opinions of them as well as troubling methodological questions, not to mention some soothing tea at times of stress. I thank my ex-boss and currently a friend, Ph.D. Marko Nenonen, who took me seriously when I said “I’d like to have a go at the research-thingy” when I was an undergraduate. He has read and commented my scribblings along the way, providing not only the comfort which only someone, who knows the material himself, can give, but also the necessary sounding-board to compare my own ideas with. Professor Brian P. Levack has also helped me in numerous ways in making this book happen, I am truly grateful for his thoughtful comments and honored to have had his help. I also owe thanks to Professor Petri Karonen from the University of Jyväskylä, who commented my manuscript when it was still a dissertation. I have also learned a lot from the work with the Ashgate publishing team, especially from work with publisher Erica Gaffney and copyeditor Heather Dubnick. The expert reader, who remains anonymous, also gave valuable comments and hints to make the manuscript better. I have tried to act upon the advice, but wherever I still err – in thought or spelling – it must be my own fault. This work has been funded by the Finnish Graduate School of History, the Department of History at the University of Tampere, the Pirkanmaa regional fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Jalmari Finne Foundation. Lastly I want to express my gratitude for those who are closest and dearest to me. My son Kalle and my husband Janne have given reason to bear all the not so good phases of writing and working. I hope I can give them back us much as they have given me. Raisa Maria Toivo

Chapter 1

Introduction Once upon a time, at the end of the seventeenth century, there lived a peasant woman in Finland. Her name was Agata Pekantytär and, for the benefit of later historians, she was quarrelsome, possibly not a very pleasant sort of person. Her belligerence has left exceptionally many traces of herself in the legal and fiscal documents drawn up by the authorities of her locality. This work is the story of her and the likes of her, and an analysis of their relation to power, authority and status. In fact, of course, there lived many women and men like her in rural Finland. The Finnish court records, forming a continuous series from the 1620s onwards, provide exceptional opportunities for historians working on the lives of men or women peasant farmers. If Agata is exceptional in representing in the Finnish early modern peasantry, the Finnish source material is exceptionally fruitful in international comparison. The state and power among the peasants A well-known British historian once entitled a collection of his essays The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, claiming that it was a period of cultural, political and economic crisis. Historians have eagerly developed the notion to embrace the entire early modern period, defining it as a period lasting 300 hundred years with climate change and bad harvests, yet growing population and consequently growing poverty, continuous religious wars and political turmoil, and state-building, centralising government and a tightening control over the everyday lives of all. According to sociologists from Max Weber to Anthony Giddens, the formation of new states and the struggle of new rulers to establish their power was likely to create a state monopoly of violence – local power would be channelled for the use of the rulers by the creation of a judicial system. New kinds of abstract crimes against the ruler, the state and the religion, would emerge. Whereas the previous crimes concerned the interests of individuals and kin groups in local communities, the new crimes seemed to undermine the newly established state power. The prosecution of the new crimes also enhances the influence of the judicial system and the detailed control over the lives of the subjects. This thought has persisted in historiography for as long as sociology has influenced the discipline. Historians have also been



Trevor-Roper 1968.



Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

interested in Norbert Elias’s related presentation of the decline of violent crime during the late Middle Ages and early modern era as a civilising process. A Marxist version of the same state-building process sees the early modern period as one during which feudal power was transferred from the individual landowners to the central state. This was either simply because of the disintegration of the previous system as such or because of the needs created by the constant warfare during the period. Power is an ambiguous concept, especially when it concerns the common folk outside democratic institutions, or to women. Most often, theories on power and the related concepts of authority and status concern state power, forms of government and coercion at the elite level. For sociologists, the evolution of organised central government was a crucial criterion of ‘modernity’. Historians, too, have extensively researched in the development of ‘modernity’ and the sociological framework. In the context of the macro theories of state power, historians have treated the contacts of the common man or woman with power in early modern Europe as those of oppression and restriction, exploitation and coercion, despite occasional references to the development of Diet systems. That members of the peasant population might have possessed, created and disseminated power and authority, and that, consequently, considerably finer gradations of status and authority existed among these people than the expression ‘the common lot’ would suggest, is only gradually receiving detailed consideration. This work seeks to explore the production and reproduction of power, influence and authority among the peasant population through the rhetoric of authority and status and the related values-basis. The Weberian or Mannian macro theories of power, however, are fairly useless in a study of small peasant communities with no administrative staff and very few outspoken rules of power. Terming the early modern as a ‘traditional’ type of authority in the Weberian sense, as is often done, is misleading and anachronistic. More problematically, it also hinders further analysis on a different basis. Within a Foucaultian view of power and authority as part of all interaction between people on a daily basis without being a projection of the macro-power of the state, power and authority emerge from below, in discourse and representation. Despite continuous emphasis on history from below, discourse and deconstructive methods, Scandinavian early modern social history has rarely treated these as  Weber 1978, 901–4; Elias, 1994, (German original 1939); Giddens 1982; historians adopting this view very early include Trevor-Roper 1968.  Anderson 1985; Cf. Kujala 2002, 16–17; Nenonen 2007a.  See the Weberian typology of legal (or bureaucratic and, as the theory claimed, ‘modern’), traditional (often patriarchal or feudal, pre-modern) and charismatic (anarchic, if that were possible) authority with the corresponding types of social organisation. Weber 1978 (original English compilation 1968), 212–98. Giddens 1982; Wrong 1976; see also a feminist criticism about the obstacles these definitions pose to other viable interpretations by Peterson 1987.  Foucault 1991 (French original 1975); on the advantages of a Foucaultian approach for feminism, see for example Peterson 1987; Bartky 1990; Butler 1990; Butler 2000; Young 1990.

Introduction



separate from the state power. Power and authority are seen as a chain of command distributed and delegated from above, controlling those underneath. Historians have endeavoured to study people and individuals as proactive members of the state, emphasising the input of the populace to the state instead of the other way around. However, historians very often still describe the macro-structure behind the choices of the early modern people as that of centralising state power, growing markets and economic crisis. Ironically, present-day historians seem to emphasise the state-building process more often in connection with the peasants than the elites. Early modernists who have worked on elites and private material stress the private and the informal, friendship and patronage ties, Court factions, family strategies – in short, what Weberian sociologists called pre-modern – and have found the real structures of power there. Those who have worked on the popular masses, however, have – despite the works of such leading figures as Giovanni Levi and E. P. Thompson – still found themselves emphasising the modernisation process, the formation of central government and its legitimisation through patriarchal ideology. These factors seem, after all, evident in the bureaucratic and methodologically complicated source material. This model has been especially persistent in Scandinavian historiography, with an emphasis on the military state and the Great Power of seventeenth-century Sweden. In the power-state context, power in an early modern peasant community is usually treated in terms of patriarchal ideals. Peasants formed a household structure, which is thought to have been identical to the power structure at the top of society: husbands on the top, wives under them, and children and servants at the bottom were likened to the king and his governmental apparatus and subjects. The patriarchal ideal and its present historical treatments see power mostly as power to command others. The result is that women have been seen as lacking power, or only having power when there were no men in the households, when women were widows. Peasant men are also seen as being under the patriarchal power and control of the various levels of government. This is a very crude picture, based largely on the assumption that the elites promoted this model of household authority in order to strengthen the central power. It is a picture which needs to be modified. The rise of the state and central government, although only one of the factors determining relationships and use of power in early modern Europe, not only brought with it stronger central control and oppression but also produced new ways for people to exert influence in matters which interested them. Other means included the judicial systems, the parliamentary estate or diet systems of many countries and forms of governmental chains from the local community to the top of the kingdom. Currently, scholars emphasise that early modern state formation would not have been possible without the co-operation of the people, and that therefore a real and continuous negotiation with them was necessary. The coercive power of Machiavellian princes  Some examples and discussions include Stone & Stone 1984; Englund 1989; Droste 1998; Frost 2003; Koskinen 2005.  Levi 1988; Thompson 1991.  Cf. Ylikangas 1988; Karonen 1999 (Based on Tilly 1975); Ylikangas 1998, 7–128.  Roper 1989, passim, e.g.56–61; Finnish examples Karonen 2002, Eilola 2003, 187–99.



Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

was an unattained ideal, not a reality;it never could have been more than this. There is, therefore, no reason to think of the process of early modern society as one led from above. This view has led historians, following Susan Reynolds, to treat the peasants and burghers as agents with their own aims and initiatives instead of as reactionary objects of control, acculturation or civilisation. The populace took initiative against – and for – the effects of centralisation of power and the tightening grip of the state on their lives or, according to Eva Österberg et al.,10 found new channels of influence in the bodies and organisations of jurisdiction and local government which the central bureaucracy brought with it. Currently, many historians emphasise a kind of cultural negotiation between the elites and the populace. However, state formation still remains the primus motor in much historiography, especially Scandinavian and German.11 The challenge for current historiography is to find a way to move beyond the modern/pre-modern dichotomy manifest in the discussion on the central state power. Instead of assuming that people reacted with more or less initiative to state control and the needs of the growing economy, we need to ask if these macro changes may have been the result of choices made by a large enough number of ordinary people in order to best secure their livelihoods. It is unlikely that the early modern peasant farmers decided to build states. However, the central state may well have been the result of what they felt necessary and preferable in terms of how to organise their lives as comfortably and securely as possible. It may equally well be that the early modern ideological rhetoric of patriarchal power was a response to a very different reality.12 For this purpose, the Finnish early modern material is of Europe-wide interest. Recently Mary Hartman has inverted the primus motor order by claiming that the birth of many features from industrial capitalism to the new forms of power and authority we now call modern, were linked to, if not caused by, the women’s older age at marriage and the resulting nuclear type family pattern in northwestern Europe.13 Thereby Hartman inverts the traditionally emphasised causal relationship and the chronological order of the changes in the early modern ideology and practice of power. These and other causal relationships in something as complicated as human behaviour are more likely to be multiple and multidirectional than one-way. It is nevertheless evident from Hartman’s approach that the behaviour, thoughts and aims of the people, the town burghers and the peasants had real significance and a real effect on the history of their time. Household is therefore not a gender question any more exclusively than is any other topic in history. Likewise, the changes, which have been explained as a 300hundred year economic, political and cultural crisis between the Black Death and politico-religious protest of the late Middle Ages and the period of revolutions at 10 Österberg 1987 and Österberg 1989. See also various works by Dag Lindström (e.g. 1991) or Kimmo Katajala (e.g. 2002 or 2004). 11 Reynolds, 1984; Österberg 1987; Österberg 1989; Sulkunen 1999; Lamberg 2001; Katajala 2002; Matikainen 2002; Kujala 2003, 16–34; Ylikangas 1988; Lindström 2003; Einonen 2005. 12 Cf. Hartman 2004; Poska 2005. 13 Hartman 2004.

Introduction



the end of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, must be connected not only to impoverishment and oppression but also to a vigorous search for new ways to do better in each and every one’s lives. The options, it must be assumed, were somehow becoming better or more numerous than before. They supported the growing labour resources which were not only mouths to feed but could also sustain growing production. They drew on the slowly developing scientific and agricultural innovations and the global economy, which may have been more unstable but still definitely growing. These changes took place on both elite and peasant levels, in daily lives and household strategies. The multitude of significations given to the terms power and authority illustrates how they evade precision. Definitions of power vary from the quality or property of a person or an institution that enables him or her to do or affect something to the person or institution in possession of the quality. The English term has a strong mechanical usage, and it can be used as a verb and in a multitude of phrases and combinations.14 The sociological definitions of power derive from the Weberian definition that power is the likelihood that others will obey certain or all commands or the reasonable assumption that one’s will and action will have the intended effect on others. The Weberian or Giddensian concepts of power, as well as the post-structuralist Foucaultian versions are still essentially powers-over something, relations of domination. Analyses of the gendering of power-over have shared an understanding that it is unjust or oppressive to those over whom the power is exercised. Feminist usages especially have pointed out that there are also forms of power-to. 15 Authority and power have been termed synonymous or partly overlapping. According to Oxford English Dictionary, authority means, among other things, the power or the right to enforce obedience, moral or legal supremacy and the right to command or take an ultimate decision, but also a derived or delegated power and the power of influencing the actions and beliefs of others.16 In short, authority is power which is recognised as legitimate. Authority can also be thought of as power to influence action, opinion and belief. Such authority may be personal or practical influence, or a weight of judgement inspiring belief in others. A third kind of authority refers to expert knowledge of things, not considered as power as such but often producing the intended opinion or judgement. Status, on the other hand, means an acknowledged right to expect a certain kind of treatment or respect from others. It does not necessarily imply relationships of obedience. It is connected to authority, and higher status may increase authority or vice versa, but this is not always the case. Status should not be regarded as merely a ladder, where it is better to stand on a higher rung than on a lower one, but also as a foothold in society in general. It may be stronger or weaker, steadier or shakier. Status is closely connected to the question of who or what somebody is. The concept of status broadens the scope of my analysis: whereas not all court cases where someone uses the court as a means of coercing others can be thought of as 14 http://dictionary.oed.com/power (downloaded 16 January 2005). 15 Weber 1978, 212–17. Giddens 1982; Wrong 1976; Young 1990; Allen 2005. 16 http://dictionary.oed.com/authority (downloaded 16 January 2005).



Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

domination even if they did succeed,17 such actions can often be regarded as either affirming or challenging somebody’s status. Terms relating to power vary in different languages, and it has been claimed that their etymology betrays the way these societies think of power. There are terms deriving from potestas and patria, such as the English power or the French pouvoir, referring to patriarchal or magisterial power. There are terms deriving from valere or volere, like the Finnish valta or German Gewalt, pointing to a form of influence drawn from force and will. There are also terms deriving from Persian or Latin magus or muge, like German Macht or Finnish mahti, referring to an almost magical might or ability.18 While the two earlier sets of terms are most often used by historians and sociologists to conceptualise modernisation, the latter has had a stable place in anthropologically oriented studies, such as histories of witchcraft. Although all of these terms refer to slightly different modes of power, the essential element may very well be that almost all European languages today share terms from all these families in some form. All these societies also shared various modes of thought concerning power and authority. The plurality makes it possible to study power and influence with a less concentrated focus on the bureaucratic and state power than we have so far achieved. Authority and status are essential cultural phenomena, and an inherent part of the peasant community, not merely forms of government and economy. Early modern society was based on stratification and division between different estates and different statuses. Such an order required constant reproduction in an individual’s personal behaviour, appearance and dealings with other people. The survival of the community itself needed constant reintegration and enhancement of the feelings of belonging. The same situations catered for the two contradicting needs: all meetings of the wider communities of the parish in church, seasonal celebrations or court sessions, or of the smaller communities of the village, the close kin and the household in their tasks.19 There were different norms and codes of behaviour in different communities and different situations. An individual must always be a member of more than one community. Each community presents overlapping, yet different ranges of cultural models and social roles available for the participants. Consequently, the same person may fall into vastly different social roles and places in social hierarchies. One individual may then appear as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, mistress, worker, neighbour, tenant, landowner, midwife, baker, cattle keeper, adviser, pupil and many other roles with different people and in different situations. 20 Women and peasants, on the one hand, inhabited a web of stable, prescribed, structural and formal relationships. Yet they have structural, formal positions of 17 Weber 1978, 213. 18 Korhonen 1989; see also, however, Allen 2005 on a feminist usage of the etymology of potestas, potere and pouvoir to point to ability and capability to do things. 19 See for example Wrightson & Levine 1979; Vilkuna.1996. 20 Cf. Lotman 1985. For example, the collection of articles in Einonen & Karonen 2002 illustrate this situation of relatedness on power and authority without any reference to cultural semiotics.

Introduction



authority in only relatively few of their relationships. On the other hand, they also took part­­ in another web of dynamic, unofficial, changing and informal forms of power. Seen this way, hierarchy is continuously changing and developing. More importantly, it is negotiated and performed. People chose their social roles more or less consciously from the range available to them. They express their claims to authority and status, as well as their acceptance or rejection of the authority and status of others. Relationships of authority and status are processes, in a Foucaultian or Butlerian sense; they are not static. Hierarchy, status and authority must be conceived of as systems of symbols, the meanings of which are constantly created and recreated when people, cultures and symbols meet – in every face-to-face situation in daily life.21 The process of social hierarchy is undefined and endless. Some changes are slow and gradual. In some cases, however, the process is recorded, and the claims to various roles of authority and status are publicised. Through that process, it is possible to study peasant power and authority without assuming that it was merely a form of the state-building ideology. Witchcraft, witch trials and authority It is no coincidence that the historian who called his book the seventeenth-century crisis was Hugh Trevor-Roper, also one of the most famous witchcraft historians of the twentieth century. For him, the ‘witch-craze’, as he calls it, was essentially part of the confessional conflict between Protestant and Catholic – newly forming state powers. The Weberian approach to modernity was manifest in the collection of essays.22 The emphasis on confessional conflicts has subsequently attracted few supporters among later scholars, but the historiography of witchcraft has been one where the ideas of state-building and early modern crisis persist. Early modern Europe is seen as giving birth to state machineries, central governments and judicial systems not seen before. The theories of the development of the state monopoly on violence and the abstract, ‘victimless’ crimes against religion and society continue to be popular, although much debated and rarely taken as the only theoretical basis of historical works. Witchcraft has been a famous example in the historiography of the coerciveness of early modern law and abstract crimes in early modern Europe. Trevor-Roper defined as significant witchcraft the elite-led crazes and dramatic and destructive miscarriages of justice. If the activity in question was ‘of the people’, it was defined as something else – sorcery, or ‘scattered folklore of peasant superstitions’. If it did not include torture, the sabbat and an escalation into panic, if the accused were treated according to the law, punished leniently or freed, it was not important. Even though most witchcraft historians have by now dismissed Trevor-Roper’s explanation as well as his comparison between the witch-craze and twentieth-century persecutions, his definition of importance influences a great deal of the present scholarship on 21        Barthes 1993; Lepistö & Nenonen 1991; Nenonen, 1997; Nakhimovsky & Nakhimovsky 1985; Sulkunen & Törrönen 1997. 22 Trevor-Roper 1968.



Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

witchcraft history. Scholars whose approaches and interests are vastly different from Trevor-Roper’s still see the deadly panics as the most important kind of witchcraft and witch trials. Therefore, historians often overemphasise the importance of coercion, fear and desperation in the crazes. Witchcraft is seen as a weapon of the destitute, who are unlikely to survive the trials.23 The view of witch-hunts as imposing obedience and control on the populace was even clearer in the works of Robert Muchembled and Christina Larner. The witchhunts, then, were a part of the suppression of what the state saw as compromising activity and an attempt to enhance both the obedience of subjects and the efficient use of resources.24 The idea of state-formation as a factor behind the trials in some places has led several scholars to emphasise the civilisation process and the development of judicial systems as part of the power struggle in general. A considerable number of counterarguments has been presented – among them the findings that effective central control of the judicial systems seems almost invariably to have actually inhibited the escalation of the trials and the occurrence of local lynchings,25 but recently Wolfgang Behringer has pointed out that the great German persecutions were used by the princes to gain popular support for the centralising of legal government. One reason why some German territories did not experience as drastic hunts as others, he suggests, was that ‘only a few of them … embarked on the business of stateformation or confessionalisation’.26 The argument also implies the reverse: There has to be a popular interest involved in the methods by which popular support is to be gained. During the last two decades, many of us have studied witchcraft ‘from below’. It has been proven that the crazes were not elite-led and that village-level tensions were important for the dynamics of the trials. Witchcraft historians have concentrated on the village-level and everyday-magic, which many historians working on British and Scandinavian but also some German materials now find important. Gender historians especially, but also cultural historians, have also focused on the psychological dynamics of witchcraft beliefs and suspicions, with an emphasis on the different 23 Trevor-Roper 1969, 9, 12–13; this general opinion was common long before TrevorRoper; see for example. Robbins 1959, 9, who expressed it concisely into a very influential piece of writing. On current scholarship, see for example Roper 2004, pp.4–12 or Eilola 2003, whose material and, consequently, emphasis of importance remains the sabbat (Blåkulla) trials, despite an open acknowledgement that the regular maleficium trials may have been just as important as and certainly were connected to the mental world of the sabbat trials. Eilola does not write of benevolent magic. See also a very different approach by Rowlands 2003. For interpretatons of witch trials as miscarriages of justice, where the judges laboured to convict instead of finding the truth, see for example Sharpe 1997, 7; Even when Briggs 1998, 399–400, argues that the crazes did not constitute the majority of witch trials, his wording that ‘the persecution was a relative failure’ makes one think that he still considers that the trials originally aimed at a blazing and forceful persecution. This also seems to be the prevailing view among gender historians and textbooks; see, for example, Wiesner-Hanks & KarantNunn 2003, 228–30 and Wiesner 2002, 265–9. 24 Muchembled 1985 (French original 1978); Larner 1981 & 1983. 25 Monter 2002, 7–9. 26 Behringer 2002, 113, 117–19 (quotation).

Introduction



experiences of people in different circumstances. Nevertheless, many historians still point out that the elite diabolical theories – or in Cohn’s words ‘the other notion of a witch’ – and the machinery of legitimate violence were necessary for the panics, too. Only if the accused could be forced to tell stories according to demonological theories of meeting accomplices in sabbats, could the trials accumulate so that villages would be emptied.27 This still leaves intact the state-building process and the economic, political and religious crises of the early modern period as the structural background of the individual and village-level social and psychological dynamics. Witchcraft is still presented as a form of power and a discussion of identity among those who lack other, perhaps more real, forms of power. The witch trials still appear as a means of suppressing even that faint aspiration to negative power, ruthlessly used by those who could muster the real force of law on their side. The oppression view sneaks back into the history of witchcraft.28 We are now rapidly finding that most of the trials in Europe were, in fact, of the milder, endemic type, with none of the deadly excesses which Trevor-Roper felt important. These processes were moderate and meticulous according to all legal provisions. The number of trials and sentences has fallen considerably. The current estimates of English and continental trials range from 80,000 to 200,000, and the estimates of death sentences from 30,000 to 40,000. Where cases of minor witchcraft and superstition – often confused and mixed in the courts with witchcraft and maleficium – have also been studied, death sentence rates are considerably lower, for example in Finland only 10 per cent of the lower court sentences were death penalties. The remaining convictions were fines and lesser forms of corporal punishment (birching was common), but half of those accused were actually acquitted. The lower court sentences were automatically reviewed by the Court of Appeal. The Swedish and Finnish Courts of Appeal seem to have mitigated a majority of the death penalties, mostly to various fines or lesser corporal punishments.29 In this light, we should abandon the idea that the witch trials manifest the oppressiveness of state powers – or, indeed, oppression within the villages or households. Rather it seems the contrary. Yet witchcraft does reflect power and authority relationships in the local peasant communities; however, these relationships carry multiple meanings for the creation and distribution of power and authority among the peasants, instead of being mere 27 Macfarlane 1974; Cohn 1975, xii, 126ff., 252; Kieckhefer 1976, 16ff, 86–7, 105; 404; Klaits 1985, 5; Briggs 1998. 28 The from-below view started already in the 1970s with Macfarlane 1970; Cohn 1975 and Kieckhefer 1976. For later scholars, see for example Briggs 1998, 319–67, Monter 2002 and the literature cited there; for psychological points of view, see Roper 1994; Roper 2004; Purkiss 1996; Willis 1995; Zika 1989–90; Jackson 1995 and many others. 29 Behringer 1998b; also in Berhringer 2002, 157. The current European numbers can be read in any textbook, such as Levack 2006, 20–24; Briggs, 1996, 8. On the downsizing, see Monter 2002, 12–13. At the other end of the spectrum is an estimate of 200,000 trials by Nenonen 1992, 376–7, based on the inclusion of minor witchcraft and magic trials, which have in many areas not been counted in the statistics and are absent from Monter’s estimate but which should be included.

10

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

means of oppression. Witchcraft as such was not a manifestation of a desperate effort to influence when no other means was available. Nor was it necessarily a manifestation of fear. The relevant question then is this: What are the important themes in the popular stories of witchcraft? Women in and under authority One of the consequences of the interpretation of witch trials as witch-crazes is that it has kept the interpretations of the relationships between gender and witchcraft focused on effects and means of oppression. Already in the 1960s, second-wave feminists and women’s historians made use of what was thought to be known about the history of witchcraft. The supposedly violent hunt reflected the 1960s and 1970s interest in domestic and sexual violence. On the other hand, witchcraft had received some very romanticised treatment at the hands of some nineteenth-century folklorists, as well as in Margaret Murray’s controversial theories between the world wars and the neo-pagan movements after the war which had turned witchcraft into a ‘women’s religion’. Thereby, witchcraft became a symbol for active and dominant women. The conflict between these ideas seems to have enhanced the potential of the witch’s image for feminists: it could symbolise many things at the same time, and its meanings could be added, and altered when needed.30 New meanings were needed, it soon became evident, as traditional historians found out that the hunts were neither so violent, nor so misogynist or sex-specific as had been thought. Yet, the notion of their oppressiveness continued. The witch trials, as well as the growing number of fornication cases in the judicial machineries of early modern Europe, made it easy for women’s and gender historians to place the development of gender order in the context of the development of modernity and centralised control. For the ideology which promoted the king’s power and the central state’s control extended itself not only to law and judicial praxis but also to household order. Social historians claim that this ideology made husbands and fathers miniature kings, and women and children their subjects. If historians term early modern social history as one of crisis, early modern women’s history is often seen as even worse. While men could even gain to an extent from the opportunities given by civil and military careers, women were left to face the consequences of tightening control. Whereas the medieval law codes had left women some room for action, the influence of Roman law in European law codes is often interpreted as having pushed towards couverture and a secondary legal status. The new, abstract crimes of the state-building process were of the kind which is supposed to have gripped women harder than men: fornication, infanticide and witchcraft. These were also crimes which, historians suppose, became more common when poverty and population growth together with the surplus of women caused by the successive wars – unlikely though these factors are to co-exist – prevented many from marrying and forced some to resort to illegal means of livelihood. Even those 30 See for example. Daly 1978; Murray 1921. See Purkiss 1996, 7–28 and Hutton 1999 for a range of other writers.

Introduction

11

women’s and gender historians who emphasise continuity from medieval to early modern Europe often cite equally poor opportunities in both periods. Therefore, historians have concluded that early modern women could not have authority. They might have had power, but we have interpreted it as private and, consequently, in modern terms, illegitimate and more or less unimportant.31 Is this picture of the early modern period any truer than that of the 300-year crisis and oppression in general? There have also been a good many historians claiming that the early modern period was one of developing order and science, not to mention human rights and better means of livelihood through innovations in agriculture and the beginning of industrialisation and economic growth. But here, too, a central place has been given to the state power and the order it created. Historians have come to question the popular reception or adoption of the elite patriarchal models and other ideals, but they have less often asked what different values the populace had or how they influenced the elite ideological formulation, its content or interpretation. That is what we should do much more forcefully in order to get beyond the picture of the populace reacting to pressure from outside and above. 32 Only gradually are we coming to terms with the fact that most of the time women’s power was important and often thought quite appropriate. These considerations have first reached the study of the elites, leaving the peasant women to deal with the negative power of witchcraft and gossip mongering. There is no reason to think that the family, household and other strategies of the peasantry were thought of as less legitimate than those of the elites, thus, we must think of women’s power and authority among the peasants, too, as potentially legitimate. Moreover, women seem to have had a considerable amount of noncommanding influence; for women, persuasion and other informal, non-structural forms of power become important. Feminist theorists have talked about a power to do things instead of a power over things: this kind of power would not presume a chain of command. The importance of non-structural, non-commanding power may be the greater in early modern society because the farming household did not have much 31 See for example Wiesner 2002, 35–41, 288–91; Karonen 2002 (see also the rest of the articles in the collection Einonen & Karonen 2002, which as a whole gives a lot more complicated picture). The classical starting points for discussion of whether there was a Medieval Golden Age, or a Renaissance, or a better or worse early modern period for women are Kelly 1984 and Bennet 1988. 32 As examples of the different meanings given to patriarchalism by Finnish historians, see for example the articles in Einonen & Karonen 2002, Vilkuna 1996; and Karonen 2004. For the two competing lines of interpreting usages of power in Scandinavia see Österberg et al. 1997; on the oppressive state powers see for example Roper 1989; Roper 1994; Muchembled 1985; Ylikangas 1988; Taussi-Sjöberg 1996; Ylikangas 1998; Harnesk 2002; and Wiesner 2002. On the interaction between peasantry and elites, see Österberg 1987; Österberg 1989; Aronsson 1992; Villstrand 1992; Droste 1998; Frost 2003; Lindström 2003; and Hartman 2004. One of the earliest suggestions that instead of acculturation historians should discuss cultural negotiation is clearest in Burke’s article ‘A Question of Acculturation’ in Scienze, credence occulte, livelli di cultura (Olschki 1982). For this information, I am grateful for Marko Nenonen (see, especially, Nenonen 2007a). Katajala 2002 succeeds nicely in combining the two emphases in a long work.

12

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

of a chain of command. Moreover, the neighbouring households were theoretically equal; their representatives would often have to figure out among themselves the unofficial and often unspoken hierarchy in which they related to each other and gave credence to each other’s words and suggestions. Authority and power in the peasant community are much more fruitfully analysed in the context of power as discourse and representation than in the context of macro-power theories. The female roles and femininity were as much processes as the male or other social roles.33 This study will focus on the role casting and rhetoric that reveal the more general value base of society. The status and power of women is, in this work, closely connected to three themes: family, work and virtue, which are all connected to the immediate sphere of women’s lives and closely related to each other. A woman’s place in her family and kin must have affected her workload, its publicity and the kind, if not the amount, of status which could be drawn from the work. The kind of work one was able to handle would also inevitably have affected the status and authority one would have inside and outside one’s household. Also, it is evident that, as far as virtue is concerned, family position also produced expectations which work fulfilled, and most probably vice versa. Women’s virtue and honour were certainly not solely formed by sexual conduct. Mary S. Hartman has claimed that within this interconnectedness everything was dependent on the family structure: the nuclear model of families, with women marrying and consequently bearing children later, would allow them a considerably wider experience of different kinds of work and responsibility, as well as other spheres of life. It would be more similar to the lives of men. That would be bound to affect their status formation – in the long run for the good. Similarly Allison Poska’s recent work on Spain illustrates how the male migration patterns and rural cultures which emphasised women’s honour and work influenced the cultural patterns of inheritance in the direction favouring daughters and matrilocal marriages. However, a culture which in practise was relatively advantageous for women could also cause immediate anxiety in the men whose status and authority correspondingly changed, and who might therefore resort to a more rigid patriarchal rhetoric.34 The thought of the early modern patriarchal texts as, first, rhetoric and, secondly, a part of a process which was incomplete at the time, is important. It has to be considered, not only with regard to how far the peasantry ‘understood’ or adopted the views which were being taught to them in catechisms and so forth but also with regard to what was being taught in the first place. In family history, the nuclear type of family seems to have been the northwestern European type, which Hartman connects to the greater degree of rapid modernisation, industrialisation and capitalism in these areas than in eastern and southern Europe. In western Finland, the focal point of this study, the nuclear family structure was dominant. In the east, as is the European version, the extended family type was dominant. The gendered role patterns seem to follow suit; Hartman and Pylkkännen 33 Peterson 1987. On gender performativity: Butler 1990; Warhol 1999, 340–55; Allen 2005. 34 Hartman 2004; Poska 2005.

Introduction

13

have concluded that the eastern pattern was more rigidly patriarchal and that women kept within the private, domestic sphere. At the same time, the eastern family hierarchy was largely based on age, and older women might have been able to gain public power over their households when widowed. Both areas were heterogeneous, and my material from the west coast of Finland ascribes a prominent role to some multi-generational and even sibling households where the older women have a very important role, representing their households to the outside world. Although not a statistical majority, they are prominent in the court records.35 The emphasis on the individual proves especially productive for the investigation of women’s power, since it makes tangible the unofficial, non-structural forms of authority in daily life. In an agrarian society, a marital partnership was both an economic and an administrative unit, as the vast majority of households were headed by a married couple, or by a widow/widower. Husband and wife worked, raised children and headed the household together. This did not, however, mean a symmetric unity or a unity without conflicts. Negotiations over the married couple’s duties and responsibilities as the joint heads of the household are evident in documents on marital disputes. In this context, however, the household cannot be relegated to the private sphere; the whole division between public and private needs to be problematised. 36 Court records as text The Finnish lower court records have survived from the 1620s onwards and provide excellent material for various research purposes and cultural studies methods. My material is from the rural district court of Ulvila, from the period between 1660 and 1710. I have chosen to follow some individuals in the sources, and this is the period during which these people appear. It is also the period, as historians claim, of the enhancement of the centralising government and the influence thereof on judicial praxis in the form of new crimes like benevolent magic. The formally accusatorial system was gradually turning towards a more inquisitorial process, as officials and vicars adopted the role of public prosecution and the talion principle – that individuals who brought but failed to prove charges at law risked the same punishments their opponents would have suffered, had the charges been proven against them – was losing its importance. It is the heyday of what should be confessionalism as well as religious and political uniformity and control in Sweden, if such ever existed, before the phase was interrupted by the confusion of the Great Northern War which took place from 1700 to 1721 and the Russian occupation in Finland during the years 1714 to 1721. The Finnish and Swedish early modern judicial system was based on interaction within the local community on the one hand and between different governmental and jurisdictional levels on the other hand. On the lowest level of the rural district courts or town magistrate’s courts, the participants were summoned to tell their stories in 35 Hartman 2004; Pylkkänen 1990, 315, 330. 36 Erickson 2005; Pylkkänen 1990; Ågren 2004 and 2005; Toivanen 2002; Fiebranz 2005.

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Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

person. The hearings were normally oral, face-to-face, public situations, although written testimonies, contracts and so forth were also used. Along with the plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses, there was also a varied crowd of local people who could offer additional information and control the outcome of the trial. Anonymous accusations, which characterise some European trials, were simply not heard. The officials included the judge, the scribe and a jury. The two former were not locals, but rather well-educated representatives of the central government. The jury, however, was composed of prominent local farmers. Unlike juries today, the rural and town magistrate’s jurors were expected to act as local experts providing information, delivering summons and negotiating settlement, and verifying damages, payments or borders, and so forth. The judge and the jury passed the sentence together, although the judge’s influence on sentencing grew markedly towards the end of the century. Educated judges might sometimes hire a substitute law reader to act in their stead, but this was less common than office hiring elsewhere in Europe and did not occur in Ulvila, from where my data comes.37 Significantly for the keeping of court records, as well as for the functioning of the lower courts in general, all proceedings were eventually reviewed by the Court of Appeal. This is the very purpose for which the court records, which serve as the major material for my study, were drawn. All records of the handling of crimes possibly carrying the death penalty were reviewed in the Court of Appeal before the sentence – whatever it was – was carried out. For other cases, the review process took longer. The rural courts at the end of the seventeenth century in Finland operated based on a mixture of the medieval rural land laws compiled by Christopher the Bavarian in the mid-fifteenth century and a range of more recent ordinances, verdicts and statutes subsequently issued by the crown.38 The legal codification was therefore both old and fragmented. Moreover, it was not the only basis on which the courts operated: Old customary law and tradition was also used. Therefore the judicial praxis did not always follow the law as such, although it always strove for the transparency, predictability and verifiability which the Courts of Appeal demanded.39 The Finnish and Swedish court records include a mixture of both civil and criminal cases. They therefore reveal a much wider range of activities than mere criminal records would. Moreover, they are produced by relatively free discussions between the parties in front of or with the judge and jury. They are not forced discourses; there is no torture, even in most of the criminal cases including witchcraft (in the rural courts very rarely). All hearings and information were public and could be confirmed or contradicted by a wide audience. Therefore, much of the historians’ discussion of the interplay between those questioned, the questioners and the judges 37 See for example Blomstetd 1958; Inger 1980, 46–62, 70–71, 80–85; Karonen 1995, 116–24, 145–7; Letto-Vanamo 1997; Karonen 1999, 188–94. According to Karonen, the town magistrate in Pori seems to have been among the most active in these tasks. 38 Schlyter 1869; Ulkuniemi 1978 and the most important collections of statutes in Schmedemann 1706; concerning the eighteenth century see Modee et al 1742–1809 and, concerning the church, Wilskman 1781. 39 Letto-Vanamo 1992.

Introduction

15

must have had a different tone from that in the rest of Europe; the psychology was different. Trial in court is a conflict by definition, and the participants compete for persuasion in the trial but also for rights and privileges outside. Only some of the methods used can be investigated later: the voices, appearances, gestures, and so forth, are too sporadically hinted at in the records to allow investigation. Fortunately, the speeches given in court can be followed. I am especially interested in how people sought to describe events and their own and other people’s roles in them, and to express their evaluation of them: How do they express themselves, and why do they express themselves in that particular way.40 The social hierarchy is contested in the court situation, and every actor seeks to present him or herself in the best and most credible light. People chose their arguments and their rhetoric consciously and unconsciously to construct a certain image of themselves. Only part of this is expressed as arguments on the actual case. People legitimate their behaviour and their claim to a certain status both in court and in their daily lives by presenting some things as acceptable and good and others as the opposite. People present themselves in more or less premeditated roles to claim a certain status and authority pertaining to that role. They also present each other in different roles. Each person’s ways of claiming authority will roughly conform to shared social norms, but the norms may not be the same for everyone, and may even change for one person in different situations. Legitimisation needs to be generally recognised, but the recognition is not self-evident. Conflicts between these roles are most interesting; they offer insight into the value basis for claiming status and authority.41 My intention is to investigate the unofficial and informal, unstructured ways of using and recreating or redistributing power and status in the early modern peasant community, focussing especially on women’s relationship to power and status, and the way it is put forward in trials and peasant beliefs about witchcraft. Witchcraft trials are an excellent lens for such a focus. First, witchcraft is in itself about power, and therefore the discussions in witchcraft trials always concern power. Secondly, the long and detailed hearings in these trials produced long records, in which peasant people elaborated their views on many subjects. Moreover, witchcraft has been an intersection of discussions of women’s status and encounters with power (male or female) throughout the historiography of women’s, gender and feminist histories. Therefore, examining witchcraft in the context of women’s power or status, and vice versa, allows a discussion on the subject from various angles. 40 Cf. Czarniawska 2004. 41       Cf. Greimas 1976, 90; and as examples of such roles Lotman & Uskenskii 1985; Lotman 1985. The social and cultural roles may be actantial, having certain functions in the structure of the narrative, and therefore different rights and obligations, or they may be discursive and thematic, reflecting the communal and personal values of the narrator. The division in textual, there is in reality no way to distinguish between them, but it is important to know that they perform both functions at the same time. Greimas 1983, 49–65. There is a considerable body of research on trial discourse and argumentation, see for example Välikoski 2004, 25–33 and the literature referred to there.

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

16

My approach seeks to combine individual and community; it is centred on the life course and the communities of a few households whose dealings I have followed as closely as possible over the decades. These households have been selected on the simple basis of what has been most readily available: these were households that often appeared in the court records, and where there was enough of conflict either within the household or between the household and the neighbours to reveal the patterns of and values behind the argumentation over status and authority. A combination of individual life courses and theoretical interpretation makes visible the meanings of both individual personalities and life courses and different kinds of (small or local) communities and networks – the non-structural and informal portents – to hierarchy, status and authority. It may be worth noting that most of these households were connected by ties of marriage and kinship. Yet I was not able to decipher patterns of reciprocity between them in the sense of the family strategies investigated, for example, by Levi,42 although at times some connections appear. Perhaps such ties do not so often appear in court records. Nevertheless, the strategies which emerge embraced smaller groups of people. One should also not overemphasise the connections between the households: close relations were important but the in-laws of in-laws or extended blood relatives who lived farther away may have been less so. The households in this material should not be looked at as constituting one kin group but as separate households, some of which at times interacted. The most important thing about these households is that they represent a qualitative study of the whole body of the court records in Ulvila, to which only a brief comparison with the rest of the court records in Ulvila testifies. The people in these households are not so different from either the rest of their social and economic groups of farmers or the rest of the witches in Ulvila. To be able to follow their stories, I have had to read through the court record series from the mid-1660s to 1710, although I have not made systematic statistical analyses of the whole body. None of the devices that can usually be used to trace specific information from the court records was designed to follow individuals or households. The most important one of these devises is the TUOKKO Register for Court Records, or tuomiokirjakortisto. This is a massive card-file where search-words from the seventeenth-century court record material were collected during the twentieth century. It is an excellent work, but it does not include common personal or even house names. I have, however, used the TUOKKO to gain general glimpses of how often certain kinds of matters occurred in Ulvila and to trace other cases of a kind interesting to ‘my’ households. Witchcraft accusations form an important part of the stories of all the main households in this work and they also form a focus for many of the principal themes of my study. They illustrate women’s positions in the household as well as in the public sphere. The social networks in the trials and behind the accusations illuminate both the dynamics of witchcraft accusations and the social hierarchies or relationships of authority and status themselves. However, looking at femininity and feminine power through witchcraft accusations – or any other one kind of crime –would give only a very biased and distorted picture. I have endeavoured to balance the picture by 42 Levi 1988.

Introduction

17

linking it to other kinds of source materials, especially to the ideological teachings in the catechisms, and to historians’ theories. However, it has turned out that these are in need of new interpretation, too. Instead, I have found it fruitful to balance the bias by examining different events and values from different periods of life of the same people who took part in the witchcraft trials, in other words, the rest of their life stories, when possible. Instead of searching and finding as many witches as possible – a job already done by other scholars43 – I have endeavoured to find as much other information as possible about the witches I introduce in this work. I have thereby avoided seeing only the drama and animosity of witchcraft trials; instead, I put the witchcraft trials in the larger context of people’s lives. On one hand, this work is rooted in the seventeenth-century Sweden with its judicial praxis and ideological and mental climates. The social and cultural dynamics in the narratives to be analysed in Chapters 3 through 5 present important features shared across the contemporary Western Europe. On the other hand, my materials and study are rooted in the local community of Ulvila on the west coast of Finland. Seventeenth-century Ulvila was a geographically large area comprising roughly 70 kilometres from north to south (from contemporary Nakkila and Harjavalta to Merikarvia) and 30 to 40 kilometres from west to east. It was a densely populated area where settled farming had long been established. The estimated population at the end of the seventeenth century was 1,785. The parish also included a good number of small gentry and even noble manors, including the Fincke and Kurki families, who actually lived in Ulvila, at least temporarily. Neither Count Gustaf Horn nor his wife Sigrid Bielke, to whom the County of Pori belonged until 1679–1681, ever lived in the area. Looking at the eighteenth-century map in Map 1, one can see the main villages which were essentially the same as in the seventeenth century. The main roads come from the south with the Kokemäki river to central Ulvila and Pori Town (Biörneborg) and the harbour, then head north both by the seashore and more securely through the inland. Kyläsaari is situated a short distance away from the roads, close to Pori. Pomarkku is farther away.44 Structure of this study This work is divided into two parts. The first part follows the life story of Agata Pekantytär, her status and her relationships with power in different phases of her life. The first part also serves to illustrate generally the life of peasant women, where and with whom they lived, what they would and could do. The main figure, Agata Pekantytär, was the widowed mother of two daughters at the beginning of the story in 1671. She had been forced to leave her husband’s household when he died. However, she managed to regain her late husband’s share of the estate for her daughter. From then on, Agata took active part in the running of the household. During the 1690s Agata was already aged but still active on the farm and in the household. 43 For Finland and especially Ulvila see Nenonen 1992, which lists almost every court case of witchcraft in Lower Satakunta (where Ulvila is), Northern Osthrobothnia and Viipuri Karelia. 44 Lehtinen 1967, 114–23.

18

Map 1

Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

Sweden and Ulvila Parish at the end of the seventeenth century (Source: Hermelin 1799)

Introduction

19

The first part of the work seeks to raise the most important themes to be discussed in the following part. The roles relevant to Agata’s status during different periods of her life were also important to other persons, male and female, seeking their social place. The second part is a focused and more detailed study of the themes discovered in the first part. It is a thematic inquiry into how early modern peasants in Finland produced and reproduced power, authority and status. The themes are no longer limited to the life course of an individual but rather to the general cultural milieu, the values of which they both influence and stem from. The first chapter describing Agata’s life is methodologically different from the rest of the work, being a simpler, more traditional history the issues at stake and concentrating on general source criticism, case studies and the potentially unique problem of ‘voicing women’.45 I then discuss the most important arena and roles in which peasant men and women used and reproduced power: the family and work (together forming the household), and virtue, which pertains to them both. It is probably no coincidence that these are also the areas where much of current gender history and feminist studies operate. Consequently, they also provide a setting from which to discuss the feminist and gendered historiography of power, authority and status in the world of early modern peasant farmers.

45 Chedgzoy & Hansen & Trill 1996; Davis 1998.

Chapter 2

The Widow Farmer Witch: Agata Pekantytär 1670–1700 Agata Pekantytär, the mother Women who have left behind personal written material after their deaths can be found in almost all periods of history, but they always seem to have belonged to social or cultural elites. Individuals not in the elite or wealthier bourgeoisie classes usually produced very little written material of their own, and even less is extant. Women tend to disappear from source material after one or perhaps two incidents. So do men, but tracing men is still easier than tracing women. Finnish seventeenthcentury peasants appear in court records, tax rolls, parish records and perhaps parish account books or parish meeting records, if such exist. However, Agata Pekantytär, a farmer’s widow whose story this chapter will tell, seems to appear often in the records. It is possible to follow her story over three decades. Upon closer reading of early modern source material, especially court records, we find that other women – and men – like her emerge. For the researcher, tracing the peasantry and reconstructing a personal picture of their lives is easier in Finland and Sweden than in most of the rest of Europe. The detailed history of Agata’s life will serve as a structural background to the analysis which appears later in this work. It is necessary to point out the general and the individual, the macro and the micro levels in the analysis of the following chapters. The course of Agata’s life will also show how a person’s social position could change over shorter and longer periods of time. The story here is one of a strong and powerful woman, and it shows both the struggle against the limitations imposed by the legislation as well as the ideological climate and the options nevertheless open to women in early modern society. The ‘heroine’ of the story, Agata Pekantytär, was not subordinated in the manner women  Compare to the material used by Davis 1997, or many less individual focused students of early modern European women, for example, Wünder 1998. For a Finnish study with similar mental aims as Davis but with very different source material see Sulkunen 1999. Other recent Finnish examples with yet again different materials and elite subjects; see Lappalainen 2005. Usage of person centred micro-history in the history of witchcraft; see Sharpe 2001 or the early example of Levi 1988.  See Bertaux & Thompson 1997.  Names in court records are usually in Swedish, even though most (not all in the area) of the peasant population was in fact Finnish-speaking. Only the gentry and some of the bourgeoisie and officialdom were Swedish-speaking. Here the peasant names have been translated back into Finnish in a customary way as the main persons in this chapter can be

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usually are seen to have been in the early modern world. Rather, she was able to seize and exercise considerable authority in her home village and parish. She was the head of her farmstead and household, and even in many areas usually seen as male-dominated. There were obstacles in her path – she was several times accused of serious crimes and three times of magic or witchcraft – but she was not discouraged. It seems at first an extraordinary story, but it was not. The widow cotter Somewhere around 1670, Matti Tuomaanpoika died, leaving behind him his widow, Agata Pekantytär, and two daughters in the village of Kyläsaari, in Ulvila parish, very close to the town of Pori, on the West Coast of Finland. This is as close to a beginning as Agata’s story gets, pointing not only to the general fact that everyone’s life is crucially affected by the lives of others and to the fact of early modern life that women often could and had to start a publicly active life when widowed, but also to the nature of the source material on early modern women and men. The dates of Agata Pekantytär’s birth and death remain unknown. She was born; she married and moved to her home village, Kyläsaari, before 1666, when the parish records start. Burial records from the approximate time of her death survive, but they have an unfortunate tendency to identify women only via their husbands and leave some people wholly unnamed. However, Agata Pekantytär’s age can be estimated. Knowing that Agata was married to Matti Tuomaanpoika, whose father was Tuomas Mikonpoika in Kyläsaari, it is possible to look up their farm in the General Register of Settlement in Finland (GRSF). She can be found on Tommila farm in 1656. Her eldest surviving daughter was thirteen in 1676 and thus born in 1663. Although she may have lost her first children, it is unlikely that she married long before the mid-1650s. If she married at an average age, in her mid-twenties, she would have been around forty at the time shown to be Finnish. The spelling of almost all names varies both in the texts by different scribes and in different texts by one scribe, sometimes even within one and same court case: Kaarina is either Carin or Karin, Heikki is Henrich, Henrik or Hindrich; letters e and h are added here and there. Normally this will not cause difficulties in identifying the persons.  Church Records, Pori Church Records. Baptisms, Marriages and Burials II Ba 2. 24 Oct. and 2 November 1717 was the burial of an ‘old widow from Kyläsaari’ and in 14 April and 22 April 1722 ‘the widow of Matti Tuomaanpoika in Kyläsaari’ were recorded. Neither can be identified as Agata with any certainty. Agata may also have died as a victim of the plague of 1711, when 32 unnamed victims were buried in July, or she may have been one of the other unnamed persons who sometimes appear in the records.  The General Register over Population in Finland, GRSF, Ulvila, draft 1634–1654, 12; GRSF Ulvila, draft 1654–1673, 11. NA.  Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:55–v. SRA. No record of the births of Agata’s daughters survives in the parish records.  Aalto 1996, 191. Peasant farmers’ sons married in the 1600s and 1700s between the ages of 24 and 30, daughters ‘a few years earlier.’ Wealth or local economic structures influenced the age of marriage. The young married earlier in the extended family households

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this story begins. It is highly unlikely that she was much older since she still appears in the sources in the 1700s.  In any case, Agata lived to a ripe old age. Agata Pekantytär appeared in the Rural District Court, Ulvila häradsting, for the first time known in June 1671. She protested against the inheritance disposition after her parents-in-law. The matter was taken up again in September, when her brothersin-law, Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika, presented a Court of Appeal order to take up the matter in the Rural District Court. According to a written testimony from the District Court dated 15 October 1666, their father, Tuomas Mikonpoika, and his wife, Riitta, had left their landed estate to Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika, excluding their eldest son Matti Tuomaanpoika, and his children by Agata, from the inheritance. The farmstead was a sizeable rustholli,10 one of the most important peasant farms in the village, freehold, with the inheritance rights intact. The reason the other brothers gave for their father’s decision was that Matti had been twice conscripted into the army. It was customary that when sons of wealthier peasants were conscripted, a replacement would be hired for them. On his second conscription, however, Matti had really had to go to war. Although the words in the court record are ambiguous, it seems that Agata then moved away from the farm around 1671.11 Having moved out of Tommila, Agata Pekantytär set up her own household with her daughters and possibly some servants. In the General Register of Settlement in Finland (GRSF), Agata can be found as taxed under the neighbouring Mattila farm 1671–1673.12 She did not live under Mattila’s roof. In June 1671, the Kyläsaari villagers – that is, the peasant farmers – complained to the court about Agata and Jyrki Pekanpoika, who had caused a nuisance by building small cottages on village common land. Agata defended her right to village land by stating her relationship to the village landowners as the wife and mother of Tuomas Mikonpoika’s son and grandchildren. The jury agreed with her: the children were part of the land-owning community. They could not be driven out of the village, and therefore their mother had a place there, too, whether she lived in her cabin or with her father-in-law. Jyrki, on the other hand, was ordered to look for other abode, if he could not agree with

of labour-intensive slash-and-burn areas in Eastern Finland and the archipelago, where several children had the opportunity to stay at home even when married. Peasants in Western Finland married older. There are examples in this story of girls who seem to have married younger, like Agata’s sister-in-law, Aune Pertuntytär and Agata’s daughter, Riitta Matintytär.  Ages around 80 are not uncommon and ages over 90 appear, although not often.  Ulvila 20–21 June 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:85. NA. 10      Cavalry estate, in Swedish ryttarhemma or rusthåll; a peasant farmstead of considerable size, which kept a horse and a cavalry man in the army, getting tax reductions in return. If the tax reductions did not comprise a big enough sum, another farm called augment was assigned to it, the taxes of which went to the cavalry estate. 11 Ulvila 22–3. Sept. 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:135–6. SRA. 12      The General Register of Settlement in Finland (GRSF) is a twentieth-century compilation based on seventeenth-century tax records. It is held in a manuscript form in the National Archives of Finland. GRSF Ulvila, draft 1654–1673, 13 NA; GRSF Ulvila, draft 1674–1693, 42. NA.

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the landowners.13 He soon found employment and room with a farmer in the village, Juha Eeronpoika.14 Agata Pekantytär became a cotter, or, literally translated, a hill-cotter.15 The status of cotters or hill-cotters has traditionally been considered between tenant farmers, who had access to land, and itinerant labourers or dependent lodgers, who hired out their labour in exchange for lodgings. The hill-cotters, too, worked in agriculture for those who had access to land, but they lived in their own private cabins. The economic situation of a hill-cotter could indeed be better than that of poor landowning farmers: they could keep plots of field, as well as cattle, without having to pay land taxes. The crown’s need for funds, however, ensured that this category, considered unprofitable, was heavily taxed in the form of cattle and poll taxes.16 Agata tried to make herself more comfortable in her cottage. In October 1672, Agata demanded compensation for two oxen killed by a bear during the summer under the care of Juha Eeronpoika. Juha was ordered to pay her 40 copper talaris.17 Similarly Agata had had agreements with Jaakko Eeronpoika, her husband’s sister’s husband, concerning parts of a meadow which her husband had cleared.18 Afterwards Agata took from him a hired ox, for which she was ordered to pay 10 kappas19 of corn.20 A widow’s independence was legally greater than that of any other women. She could govern her own and (together with her husband’s relatives) her children’s wealth, she could pursue her own matters in court. Women’s legal rights to appear in court have been somewhat disputed by historians. The most often referred to limitation was the edusmiehyys, (målsmanskap in Swedish) – that is, the proxy system. The proxy system means the husband’s duty to sue and answer for his wife. According to some historians, it placed women under the control and de facto guardianship of their husbands in a way similar to the Anglo-Saxon couverture.21 According to others, it was only a duty to represent the wife without depriving her

13 Ulvila 20–21. June 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:96–7. SRA. Jyrki Pekanpoika’s patronym suggest he could have been Agata’s brother, but the wording of the record says they had built cabins (backstugur) in plural – in other words, they did not live together. Jyrki Pekanpoika never comes up in connection to Agata again. 14 Ulvila 30–31 Oct. 1672. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:58v–59. SRA. 15 In Finnish mäkitupalainen; in Swedish back-stugu sittare. 16 Jutikkala 1980, 164. 17 Ulvila 30–31. Oct. 1672. Bielkesamlingen vol.26:58v–59. SRA. 18 Ulvila 22 June 1672. Bielkesamlingen vol.26:24–v. SRA. 19 Kappa, kappar: a cubic measure of ca. 5.5 litres. 20 Ulvila 22 June 1672. Bielkesamlingen vol. 16:24–v. SRA. Agata also had informal encounters with her neighbours. Few of them reached Court. In December 1674 Markus Laurinpoika, a Kyläsaari villager, accused Agata of having hit his pig so that it died. Agata denied this and Markus withdrew his accusations. Ulvila 2–4 Dec. 1674. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta I, KO a4: 60v. 21 For example see also Taussi Sjöberg, 1996, 100; Sjöberg, 1997, 166; Lahtinen 2004; on England see for example Erickson 2005, Stretton 1999; on Germany the classical exposition is Roper 1989.

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of the legal capacity as such.22 Unmarried daughters were under the guardianship of their parents, but widows had no one to take the guardian’s and proxy’s position, so they had the liberty and obligation to sue for themselves – unless they hired a proxy. In criminal matters, however, the defendant was always, regardless of sex and marital status, to appear personally in his or her own defence. Historians have read more limitations in the rural law requirement that ‘all witnesses, jury and oath-takers are to be settled farming men’. 23 The text was, until the late 1990s, usually taken to mean that women were prohibited from swearing an oath and testifying. Therefore the older generation of women’s historians in the 1980s concluded that women could not effectively pursue their own matters, and they were not allowed to appear in public except when the societal and judicial change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually brought women to individual criminal responsibility so that they could be accused in court, but they could not accuse, make petitions or testify.24 The subsequent finding that they did anyway, has not, for these historians, changed the overall picture. However, the law and the limitations it imposed on women were mostly concerned with land and landed ownership. The younger generations, such as Beata Losman, Gudrun Andersson and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, have, therefore, claimed in their studies that in criminal matters reputation, settledness and gender were not so important. 25 Even though women were not mentioned in the law, this did not mean they were excluded or pushed to ‘a secondary legal status’, to use Merry Wiesner’s wording.26 In practice, both married and unmarried women were regularly permitted to testify. The practice was acknowledged to be legitimate even on the legislative level by the end of the seventeenth century; in 1697, an enactment was given to simplify the 22      By translating the Finnish edusmiehyys or the Swedish målsmanskap ‘proxy system’, I have pointed my own interpretation of its meaning: the husband had a duty to act as his wife’s proxy, but that duty did not as such diminish her legal capacity, nor did it as such prohibit her own action. That the discussions among the legislators and members of the highest judicial instances proposed such views throughout the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is unsurprising, as they seem to have been a contemporary trend, but it is also a later development, providing little information of how the matter was originally understood or even of how the law was interpreted in early modern courts. Most historians today make this distinction between an edusmies (målsman) as a proxy and a holhooja as a guardian; see for example Pylkkänen, 1990, 93–105, Pylkkänen 2005; Toivanen 2005, 37. Gudrun Andersson develops the distinctions further from Inger Dübeck’s terminology concerning the difference between the legal right to pursue a matter (behörighet) and everyday competence to handle a matter (habilitet), claiming that generally the legal rights were greatest where there were the least power and where either state or kin could have most control. As far as the everyday competence was concerned, Andersson thinks women in general were – on ideological grounds – considered incompetent (inhabil), but many individuals in each and every one’s own circle were admitted as exemptions. See Andersson 1998, 55–8. There are, however, other interpretations; see for example Sjöberg 1996, and Lahtinen 2000 or Lahtinen 2004 for an almost or quite direct translation to the English couverture. 23 ‘I alla vittnen, nämder och eder, skola vara bofaste män’, KrLL, TiB 33:1. 24 For example, see Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 100; Sjöberg 1997, 166. 25 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 89–90. Andersson 1998, 56. 26 Wiesner 2002, 35–41.

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oath of witnesses ‘so that simple-minded persons, like women, who often testified’ could better understand it.27 Women often appeared in court, both in criminal and civil, economic matters. This practice was important to individual peasant women regardless of the law. The widow’s independence largely meant the ability to make economic contracts independently, contrary to what has been said about other women. However, as has been concluded,28 a widow could use her independence in practice only if she was wealthy enough. Whether or not widows in general were wealthy enough is another disputed matter among historians. In Sweden, spouses did not inherit from each other, and some historians hold the opinion that this, together with small morning gifts, left the widows in dire straits. The practical preconditions were given extra weight, because it has been concluded that even wealthy widows would often be impoverished and gradually fall out of the social hierarchy – a note which emphasises the presumed poor lot of early modern women: when they finally had a legal chance of independence, they were deprived of all economic support. Moreover, this independence and their economic power is deemed to have only been temporary, lasting until the next male generation was old enough to take over.29 However, others have thought that the widow landowners were independent actors in their own right, not just surrogates. Normally, spouses’ rights to marital property was sufficient to allow the widow reasonable living conditions and independence.30 The rhetoric of poverty may also have been employed either strategically by the widows themselves or by those around them because the culture simply lacked better terminology.31 Lately, the post-structural generation of historians has emphasised that the fates of the gentry widows were different from those of peasant farmers’ widows. The fates of the peasant farmers’ widows were different again from those of the landless workers. A fair number of other personal and situational factors also continued to influence the lot of widows.32 The few short court record entries mentioned above hint at Agata’s power to make economic agreements. Agata Pekantytär did not have a suitable building for sheltering the animals nor anyone to shepherd the animals for the summer. Yet, she 27 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 89–90; Schmedemann 1706, 1494. 28 See for example Karlsson Sjögren 1998 and K. H. J. Vilkuna 1996 (who are already cited in note 28 + Toivanen 2005. 29 Pylkkänen 1990, 308–33; K. H. J. Vilkuna 1996, 77; Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 87–91; Perlestam 1997; Sjöberg 1996; Sjöberg 2001. 30 Erickson 2005 concludes that the comparatively small number of wills between spouses in Sweden suggests that such wills were not needed, whereas in England, where the law provided no automatic portion for the wife or the widow, such wills were common. On the other hand, in general the meaning of other economic contracts between the heirs and the old farmers were more important than formal wills in Sweden. See Perlestam 1998. 31 See Stretton 1999. K. H. J. Vilkuna points out that wealthy widows who took care of iron works manufacturing would often be recorded as dependent lodgers, not because their status and economic situations were poor, but because the estate society lacked a proper term for female merchants. Of course, such a lack of terminology speaks also for the expectations of a culture. K. H. J. Vilkuna, 1996, 59–66. 32 Toivanen 2005, 89–131.

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could access those resources by making agreements with her neighbours and at least some of her relatives. Her actions show the importance of good relations to the surroundings. Networks of good relations could procure economic as well as social and cultural capital in form of trust, reciprocity and sometimes even altruism. 33 The ability to seize resources through arrangements with other people reflects a person’s social capital and its convertibility into economic capital. Agata had to be considered trustworthy, and she had to know to whom she should turn. Agata’s economic arrangements were on a relatively small scale – that she was considered competent to agree about the care of some animals or other such small affairs of a hill-cotter’s economy was no guarantee of anything more than a hill-cotter’s economic competence. She was by no means independent or selfsufficient. When problems arose, she resorted to the courts. It is widely known that the early modern Swedish farmers and even their servants sued each other fairly eagerly, not only to demand punishment for crimes or to solve disputes but also for the publication of debts and contracts. In Agata’s case, the legal apparatus and court served as a forum to pursue her rights. Inheritances 1671–1674 Even though the village community appears important for Agata Pekantytär’s settling in her cottage, the majority of Agata’s court appearances in the 1670s involved her kin and family. The kin and family had, after all, already driven her husband to the war and herself out of the household. It was a quarrelsome lot of people. The old mistress of Tommila farm and Agata’s mother-in-law, Riitta Matintytär, passed away in late 1670. Apparently, Riitta’s death both resolved old and created new disagreements within Riitta’s family. They soon came out in court: In 1671, Heikki Tuomaanpoika and his wife told Gabriel Archtopolitanus, the Vicar of Ulvila parish, that the late Riitta had promised a coat and a cap to Agata. However, their brother-in-law, Jaakko Eeronpoika, had now taken the clothes. The other heirs resorted to the outside authority of the Vicar, and Jaakko was ordered to give the clothes to Agata. The other heirs were to compensate for his loss.34 Heikki and his wife had defended Agata’s rights. However, the disagreements between Agata and Heikki soon grew deeper than those between Agata and Jaakko. Four years earlier, Heikki had caused permanent injury to Agata’s late husband, Matti. In September 1671, Agata demanded compensation. It seems the family’s internal disputes were widely known at this point, because Agata had to assure the court that she did not suspect that this fight had led to Matti’s death. They had only fought over four loads of osiers. Heikki admitted having promised his brother the osiers after the fight. He had, however, failed to deliver them, and therefore he was now ordered to pay Agata one copper talari.35 A court hearing on a petty if violent fight from four years earlier illustrates the internal disagreements of the family. These disagreements had already lasted for 33 Elliot 1997, 211–14. 34 Ulvila 20–21 June 1671, Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:92. SRA. 35 Ulvila 22––23 Sept. 1671, Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:144. SRA.

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some time. However, the fallout in the family remained outside the public sphere of the court until both Agata’s husband and the mother of the fighting brothers had died. Family matters were kept within the family. When the mother died, the family began to disintegrate, and disputes which had previously been under the cover of family unity became visible. The death of Agata’s husband around 1670 led her further away from his family. The relations between the other siblings seem to have been in turmoil as well. In 1674, Jaakko and Heikki had disagreements serious enough to reach the court: Jaakko claimed Heikki had gathered hay from Jaakko’s meadow, which Heikki denied. Jaakko turned to the jurors, who had studied the matter. Probably to his surprise, they testified in favour of Heikki, and Jaakko’s claims were pronounced groundless.36 The seriousness of the breach between the brothers-in-law is demonstrated on the very next page of the court record. Jaakko accused Heikki of having caused ‘several wounds’ to Jaakko. He even showed the court two bloody scratches in his hand. For his part, Heikki said Jaakko had come to his drying barn wishing to get some corn, as part of Jaakko’s share of the inheritance. An exchange of words seems to have got out of hand. Jaakko followed Heikki home and had to be thrown out. Heikki sent for Eerikki Eerikinpoika from the neighbouring farm to witness the amount of corn Jaakko had taken. Jaakko, on the other hand, claimed to have gone to Heikki’s house not to make trouble but to wait for Eerikki in order to pay him some building master’s dues which he was collecting from the villagers.37 After such conflicting testimonies, the questioning had to be adjourned. The next day, Eerikki Eerikinpoika was fetched to testify as a witness. He verified both stories in their essentials: Jaakko had gone into Heikki’s house for one reason or the other and had been thrown out. Eventually the jury fined them both. Both parties were ordered not to harm each other by word or deed, or an additional fine of forty markkas would be imposed.38 The actual division of inheritance in Tommila took place in December 1673, when both Tuomas Mikonpoika and Riitta Matintytär had passed away. Handling

36 Ulvila 13–14 Jan. 1674, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:2. NA. In the early modern Swedish court system, unlike many of its counterparts in the rest of early modern Europe or the New World or its counterparts today, jurors often took an active part in the investigations of the matters in court. In addition to merely voting for a verdict of guilt or innocence, the jurors testified both what they themselves knew and what was general knowledge among the local populace; they delivered summons to court, they could be sent between the court days to fetch a written or an oral testimony from a sick or otherwise detained witness, and they were often also ordered to assess damages, wealth and so forth or to execute the court’s orders in cases concerning debts, for example. Jurors were sort of like local experts, making sure that the justice was familiar with local controversies and could not be wholly anonymous or external to the community, even during the period of central state formation. 37 Ulvila 13–14 Jan. 1674, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:3v–4. NA. 38 Ulvila 13––14 Jan. 1674, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:3v–4. NA. The events of both days are narrated in the same paragraph, although most of the time the record narrates the doings of the court in a roughly chronological order.

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inheritances in court was usual, although not compulsory.39 In Tommila, the matter caused trouble from the start, causing even further disintegration of the family. In January 1674 Agata, ‘with her co-heirs’, charged Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika of having withheld goods from the estate inventory and the division of the property. The brothers claimed they had only withheld the payment of an old loan they had given to the farm. They also added that their sister Riitta Tuomaantytär’s husband, Jaakko Eeronpoika, had not let her dowry to be counted in the inventory, either. The brothers were ordered to draw up a list of what had been left out of the inventory by the next Court session, and to verify it with an oath themselves as third.40 The other sisters also were ordered to clarify upon oath what they had got of their parent’s estate, either as a dowry or otherwise.41 The Tommila heirs did not present their lists before the next year. They were asked to, but they stalled as much as they could. In July, the scribe recorded bluntly that they could not do it.42 In December 1674 it was recorded that Simo had already left home when the matter was taken up and that Heikki was not able to produce any co-swearers. The court ordered Agata and Jaakko to draw up a list of their own. However, they were not able to give their statements because the original inventory was not available at the moment.43 Agata produced her list in January 1675, but could not get co-swearers. At that point, it turned out that Heikki and Simo were ready to testify, too. The jury said the inheritance could not be divided, but went on to hear each of the heirs. Heikki got goods worth more than 90 talaris and 14 talaris in silver. Simo admitted having taken goods for more than 70 talaris, and a ring.44 Agata had taken her husband’s 39 According to TUOKKO 35 register, there were at least 14 other inheritance cases in Ulvila courts between 1670 and 1700. 40 Swearing oneself as third, sixth or twelfth meant that one had to present two, five or eleven co-swearers, who were ready to testify upon oath that as far as they knew or had any reason to believe, the first swearer was telling the truth. This was a common form of testimony in the beginning of the century, used for all kinds of purposes from verifying financial agreements and farm boundaries to freeing innocent persons from charges of witchcraft or manslaughter. It considered not only the crime in question, but also the accused person’s social acceptability in general. The co-swearers were supposed to be familiar with the matter, but the ideal was not always reality, especially when the persons close enough to know the matter were entangled in deep quarrels. Finnish historians led by Heikki Ylikangas have classified group oaths as originally belonging to the kin society. The theory is contested: the growing importance of evidentiary assessment does not need a transformation from a kin society to the state-society as its background. Group oaths were finally abandoned by decree in 1695. Ylikangas, 1998, 51ff.; Nenonen & Kervinen 1994, 212–13. Moore 1987, 109 et passim. 41 Ulvila 13–14 Jan. 1674, Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:1. SRA. 42 Ulvila 4–6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:28v. NA. Also in Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:22. SRA. 43 Ulvila 2–4 Dec. 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I KO a4:67. NA; also Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53v. SRA. The missing inventory would suggest that the court had access to it, but it is not included in any of the records of this dispute. 44 Heikki: a coat and breeches worth 15 talaris, two cows worth 20 talaris each, a coat worth 10 talaris and either a sail or a sailing boat, as well as 14 pairs of weirs worth a talari each. Simo: two cows worth 20 talaris each, pants and knitted shirts worth 15 talaris, trunk worth 12 talaris, and a chamois shirt worth 4 talaris.

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goods worth 25 talaris and, in silver, 13 talaris. Jaakko swore an oath, but then said he did not know what his wife’s dowry included: he said he had to ask his wife, Riitta Tuomaantytär. As far as Jaakko and Riitta were concerned, the matter remained open. Some other heirs were absent, too. The matter must have continued, but there is no further record of it. 45 That Jaakko had to ask Riitta what her dowry and share included, is, however, a sign of lesser unity and greater individuality in marriage than the formal law stipulated or than what historians have often allowed for early modern women. Even though Riitta remained invisible in court, she took care of her own economic business in practice. She may have negotiated the matter with her brothers on her own. That was one of the legal rights even an unmarried woman had: to claim her share of inheritance and participate in making the division.46 The actual Tommila farmstead was not considered in the above-described inventories. Instead, in a separate case, Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika brought their father’s disposition again to court in June 1674. Since it had been made in 1666, it had already been published in to Rural District Courts (häradsting) in 1666 and 1671 and in 1673 in the Lagman’s Court.47 Now Heikki and Simo sought to execute it legally. 48 Nevertheless, Agata Pekantytär claimed her late husband’s and his two daughters’ rights. According to old customary law, they should have inherited the farm: they were the heirs of the eldest son. Tuomas had justified his disposition by stating that Matti – Agata’s husband – had been twice conscripted into the army. The court wanted to know why: Matti was the eldest son and, in all probability, it should have been the younger ones who were taken into the army rolls. The brothers said Matti was taken because their father had more manpower on his farm than was lawful for one who kept only one horseman in the army. The implication was that the other men and workers were more important to the farm than Matti. 49 The court asked for more information. The officials who had supervised the conscription – that is, the vicar and the county bailiff50 – affirmed that at first Matti had 45 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:5v–6. NA. 46 Perlestam 1997, 131; Pylkkänen 1992, 99, 102. 47 Lagman’s court or a law readers’s court was an intermediary jurisdictional level between the rural district courts and the Courts of Appeal, without a clearly specified position in the system. Sometimes the lagman’s court could take up matters previously discussed in the rural district court, sometimes such matters would be sent directly from the rural district court to the Court of Appeal and sometimes matters could be taken up directly in the lagman’s court without being taken up in a rural district court at all. See for example. Karonen 1999, 476. 48 Ulvila 4 & 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:29–30. NA. Also in Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:23–v. SRA. 49 Ulvila 4 & 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:29–30. NA. Also in Bielkesamlingen vol.27:23–v. SRA. 50 The bailiff, vouti (befallningsman in Swedish) was usually a general official of the crown in the provincial government – but in this case, Paavali Paavalinpoika was the officer and agent of the noble landlord (i.e. Sigrid Bielke) who had taken on the crown’s rights and responsibilities in the County of Pori, donated to Count Gustaf Horn and his wife, Sigrid Bielke. Paavali Paavalinpoika’s responsibilities ranged from tax collection and accounting to

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indeed been requisitioned for the farm – in other words, because of extra manpower. According to common practice, another man had been hired to go instead of him. The next time Matti was requisitioned because his father “practised bad mouth”51 at the conscription. Two jurors also testified to this. The allegation changed: the blame was no longer on Matti as a useless son but on his father, who courted trouble. The younger brothers then wished to draw attention to the work they had done for the farm. The jury, however, again turned the matter the other way and noted that Matti had worked for the farm, too. Matti had not benefited from being requisitioned, and so his sortie caused no reason for their father to favour his brothers. The jury pronounced that, according to law and custom, Matti’s oldest daughter, Riitta Matintytär, preceded Simo and Heikki. The brothers said they would appeal to a higher court, but there is no further record of it. Apparently nothing came of it.52 The verdict did not say what should happen to the other heirs. Legally they were supposed to get a share of the inheritance in money or in goods. They seem to have done fairly well. Heikki was still recorded in the Tommila tax records in 1675 and Agata was recorded separately. However, Heikki took up the säteri53 manor of Sörmarkku in autumn 1674. Indeed, in 1676, he protested against having been enrolled for taxes in Kyläsaari in 1675. The jury, too, said he lived in Sörmarkku at the time.54 Later Heikki Tuomaanpoika moved to Pori town, where Heikki lived in 1679 when he claimed that as he had paid Tommila’s taxes for the year 1674, they should be refunded to him by the other heirs.55 Heikki seems to have done well enough in Pori: according to the genealogist Selinheimo, he bought a house in the church close at latest in 1685, and he may have held some local trust offices.56 general keeping of order together with the secular and courts and other jurisdictional officials. See for example Jokipii 1953. A similar parish-level general officer is the parish bailiff, nimismies in Finnish or länsman in Swedish, originally a local office of trust, which by the late seventeenth century turned into a crown servant for a small fee. The parish bailiffs were drawn from the peasantry and they continued in their usual occupation – farming and so on – but they were more and more considered in the service of the crown and more and more separate from the local peasantry. 51 ‘Brukade und mund’ Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:29– 30. NA. Also in Bielkesamlingen vol.27:23–v. SRA. 52 Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:29–30. NA. Also in Bielkesamlingen vol.27:23–v. SRA. 53 Säteri (Finnish and Swedish) was a manor house inhabited by gentry and exempted from ordinary land taxes and cavalry service as well as crown tithes. Jutikkala 1958, 151, 155. The court record says Heikki took up the whole säteri, but probably he was only a tenant farmer, landbonde in Swedish or lampuoti in Finnish. 54 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:66v–67. SRA. 55 Ulvila 23 and 25 June 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:38v. NA. Genealogist Vilho Selinheimo (Selinheimo 1936, 163.) claims they moved to Pori in 1675, which however, is not possible: in the court records, they are recorded several times as living in Sörmarkku in 1676. Selinheimo also considers there to have been one dispute of inheritance: started by Agata Pekantytär and Jaakko Eeronpoika in January 1674. However, there is a series of trials, concerning movable goods, and another series, concerning the landed estate. 56 Selinheimo 1936, 163 also claims that Simo Tuomaanpoika moved to a rusholli in Sörmarkku, but I have not been able to verify this. Heikki served in Pori as town tax official

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Jaakko Eeronpoika had not lived in Tommila farmstead, but as a tenant on one of the neighbouring farms. The inheritance dispute over the farm therefore did not concern him. However, in the court record from 1675 Jaakko was ordered to find himself another place to live in, because the mayor’s widow in Pori, Elisabeth Johansdotter, now owned it and wanted it for her own use.57 At this point, Jaakko tried unsuccessfully to reclaim his old homestead in Eura, which he had left after marrying Riitta Tuomaantytär.58 According to the GRSF poll tax records, he continued living on the same farm in Kyläsaari until 1681.59 Then he disappeared from the court records. After 1688, one Jaakko Eeronpoika Karlö, whose wife was Riitta Tuomaantytär, appear in the poll tax records of Arvela farm in Preiviikki village, Ulvila. They have been identified as the same couple, but that remains uncertain.60 There is only one record of connections between Agata and Jaakko afterwards: in 1683 Agata had misinformed the tax officials about the wealth of Jaakko Eeronpoika of Karluoto.61 Because friendly relations are not to be found in court records, it may be no wonder that there was only this one record of their connections. Even when they lived as neighbours, relations of Agata and Jaakko stayed outside court from 1674 to 1681. The plight of the heiress The biggest part of the inheritance, the farm, passed to Agata’s daughter Riitta Matintytär. Riitta was young, and Agata took over the management of the farm. With the substantial farm came a comparably solid social status. The role of the head of the whole kin did not immediately follow the farm. It was Heikki, who represented the heirs of Tuomas Mikonpoika in January 1675, speaking for the estate when Elisabeth Johansdotter, widow of the late Mayor of Pori, demanded payment of debts of 133 and 150 copper talaris. According to the court record, the sum had been borrowed for the farm by Tuomas, yet it was Heikki who appeared in court, admitted the debt and asked for Elisabeth’s note to be sent to the inheritance division – which, apparently, had not yet taken place.62 It is, however, clear that during the next four to five years after the deaths of the old parents, the kin and side-juror. Selinheimo 1936, 169. 57 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:5. NA. 58 Eura 22–23 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:17. NA. 59 GRSF, Ulvila, draft, 1674–1693, 43. NA. 60 See for example Ulvila 2 and 4–5 Oct. 1686. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:121(901v) NA.; GRSF Ulvila, draft, 1674–1694, 74; GRSF Ulvila, draft 1694-1713, 90. NA. There is also another couple called Jaakko Eeronpoika and Riitta Tuomaantytär in the tax records of Ulvila that could have ended up in Preiviikki. Ulvila 10–11 Oct. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:452–6. NA; GRSF, Ulvila, draft 1654–1673, 153; GRSF, Ulvila, draft 1674–1693, 153; Normally persons would not be entered twice in one year’s poll tax rolls. The GRSF does include mistakes, however, so did the original tax records. Koskinen 2002. 61 Ulvila 3–5 July 1683. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180 (422–v). NA. The date of the birth of Jaakko’s son Matti in Kyläsaari matches Jaakko’s son Matti in Preiviikki mentioned in this case. Church Records, Pori: Baptisms, Marriages Burials: Baptisms 14 Sept. 1670, 26v. NA. 62 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:5v. NA.

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group disintegrated, and new family or household groups were formed. Those new groups took over the importance of the former kin group. There were also responsibilities towards the community, which influenced a person’s status. Persons in the gentry fulfilled them in magisterial offices, parliament or the military service. Peasants fulfilled them in routine local government, parish offices, mutual help and communal work. An individual farmer was to a great extent dependent on other farmers of the village in his work. Farming also included many responsibilities outside the directly agricultural sphere (land and cattle) from processing and marketing products to the responsibilities farmers had in the communal life of the village. 63 Trust or distrust in the abilities of a newcomer to fulfil the responsibilities was one of the components of social status. Within these networks, there is usually a relatively high degree of social enclosure, so that people in the network could be sure that they shared similar norms of behaviour towards each other. Modern sociology has shown that family and kinship ties are most important, especially to non-professional persons.64 In a pre-modern community the family is usually considered even more important. However, Agata’s own childhood family is almost absent from the whole story. There is a hint that her childhood home may have been in Uusikaupunki, a town about 80 kilometres south of Ulvila. When Agata moved to her husband’s home, she apparently left her parents behind. Her sister, however, is once recorded to have been with her in Kyläsaari.65 However, even though members of her childhood family rarely appear in the story, the ways and customs of her childhood home seem to have followed her. Agata Pekantytär had lived in Kyläsaari village for a long time; she was the wife and mother of the heir of Tommila farm. However, she had lived away from the farm for years, in rather humble conditions compared to those on the farm, and someone else was supposed to be the future occupant of the farm. Furthermore, she was a woman, which may have meant trouble already in the inheritance division and probably continued to do so when she began to run the farm. Like most rural villages at the time, Kyläsaari consisted of the farmers’ houses in a fairly tight row, situated between Lake Kyläjärvi and the main plot of the village’s fields. The nine farmhouses are shown in a map drawn for the purposes of the reduktion66 in the mid-1680’s (maps 2.1 and 2.2).67 In addition to this, there were some buildings, saunas, drying barns and cottages which were not drawn on the 63 See for example Aronsson, 1992, 68–110; Stone & Stone 1984, 225–6, 246–7. Amussen 1988, 51; Fletcher 1995, 266; Boulton 1987, 140ff. 64 Elliot 1997, 211–14. 65 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:9–v; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:53–54v. NA. 66 Reduktio: The king/crown rewarded military and civil services as well as sometimes settled debts by giving the rights of taxation over to members of the nobility for defined or undefined periods; the king could also revoke these donations and grants. This process began with a partial revocation in 1655 and continued as a more profound one from 1680 onwards. See for example Katajala 2002, 307–22. 67 Geometriche Afrijtning Öfwer Inderö ... Anno 1688 af Magnus Bergman. MH: Map book A1B:2. MH. (Alkuperäinen tunnus BB.3 af Finnlands och Biörneborgs lähn giordt d. 3 Maij 1709) NA.

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Map 2

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Kyläsaari village 1688 (Source: National Archives: Land Surveyor’s office in Uusimaa Archives)

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Map 3 The village row 1688 (Source: National Archives: Land Surveyor’s office in Uusimaa Archives) map, because its purpose was to show the extension of the main farms.68 Some of the cottages may have been further away. The tight village row, together with the open field system, which forced the villagers to do a great deal of field work together or simultaneously, meant that people were likely to know each other even intimately. Not everyone who was known was considered trustworthy. The intimacy of the tightly inhabited village may have had a directly stabilising effect on status relations. The rest of the community had an established opinion of each and everyone’s abilities. If that opinion was poor, it could make a person’s success very difficult. Studies on English village communities show that greater social mobility on the lower rungs of the social ladder often presumed geographical mobility.69 In rural Finland, however, social mobility was regular. Sons and daughters of peasant farmers often spent a few years in service before marrying or taking up their father’s farmsteads, although sons would often try to remain at home. The continuous wars and heavy taxation also meant that farmers lost their farms because unable to pay taxes, that farms lost their farmers to war and death. Consequently there were plenty of chances for those who would want to become farmers. One might also try to clear new fields from the village’s common forest but there probably were fewer chances of that in Ulvila, which was densely inhabited. Also, as has recently been pointed out, the existing farmers were not often willing to let outsiders form new farmsteads in the village land – they considered it theirs even if the crown considered it the crown’s.70 The village community’s confidence in new farmers was usually ensured in the process of taking up a farm. Sons worked with their fathers for some time, as Heikki Tuomaanpoika had done. They were strictly speaking not newcomers among the village farmers.71

68 Gustafsson 1933, 36 et passim Toivo 1997, 132 on the character of the farm maps in general. 69 Wrightson and Levine 1979, 107. 70 Ylikangas 2005, 506; Ågren 1992, 118. 71 Perlestam 1998, 82ff.

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Newcomers might enter the village farmers’ group by taking up void crown farmsteads. If a peasant farmer left his taxes unpaid for three years, he lost his right to the farm. Such farms were offered to other peasants, in the hope that they would succeed better. This included an evaluation of the farmstead and the possible need of tax-free years to allow for necessary reparations and clearing of fallen buildings and wooded fields. A guarantee was needed that, after a fixed number of free years, the farmer would pay his taxes in full. Legally six other farmers, from either the rest of the village or the parish, would have to swear to this and consequently answer for the taxes if the newcomer failed.72 The collective trust was ensured before the newcomer’s entry. Even though my material includes previously landless men taking up non-paying farmsteads, many of them in general seem to be those who already owned land in the parish. The meaning then seems to have been to either enhance the family property and survival of the main farm or to secure something for the younger sons and sons-in-law to inherit. Purchasing rights to land did not need the same kind of formal acknowledgement of trust, but being able to extract enough money may have been thought to imply an ability to take care of one’s economic business. However, it has been shown that land sold to persons outside kin was soon resold oftener than if the new occupants were members of kin.73 Social and geographical mobility was commonplace for women as well as for men, but in a different way. They usually entered the group of farmers as the farmer’s wife, not as the farmer. Consequently, they had different obligations and responsibilities. Their entrance to the group was marked in different ways. Marriage was often the first step on that road. Agata did not assume the role of the housewife but that of the farmer. The communal trust in Agata’s abilities to perform her duties was not affirmed in the same way. Her personal status seems to have been left insecure – in fact it was her daughter who inherited. Magic trials In January 1675, the Vicar Gabriel Archtopolitanus appeared before the court. Jaakko Eeronpoika from Kyläsaari had told him that Agata Pekantytär practised magic. According to the Vicar, someone had stolen herring and Baltic herring from Agata’s storehouse around the previous St. Bartholomew’s day. She had then taken some splinters from the storehouse threshold and tried to take them to the coffin of a woman who had apparently died in labour and was to be buried with her child in Pori. Not succeeding in this, she took the splinters back home to try another method: carving a hole into a growing tree and putting in a plug. This was supposed to make the thief insane.74 72 In practice the amount of sureties could be reduced to two. Jutikkala 1958, 115–19; KrLL TingsBalken I (Schlyter 1869). 73 Ågren 1992, 20–21. Perlestam 1998, 72–3. 74 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:9–v. NA; Bielkesamlingen vol.27:1617. SRA. Others have taken up the charges against Agata, although all with different purposes than here. See Nenonen 1992, 188, 301–33, 323–4; Nenonen & Kervinen 1994, 165, 262; Lehtinen 1967, 763 See also Toivo 1999 and 2004a.

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At first Agata denied all this but admitted having taken two splinters of the doorframe the thieves had broken to show the twelve jurors how the thieves had banged it into splinters. Nevertheless, one of the jurors, Simo Birgerinpoika, added that the people in Kyläsaari, who had seen Agata’s splinters, claimed she had loosened them herself with her teeth. Agata also admitted having carved a hole into a spruce and stuck a dry twig back into it to make the thief bring back his prize. She claimed having learned this from people in Uusikaupunki in her childhood, thinking apparently that a method in common use seemed quite lawful and natural. Sometimes the courts, too, decided on the basis of what was commonly done. The court seems to have thought of asking these people whether it was actually so common and innocent but as Agata’s childhood was forty to fifty years ago and – as the scribe recorded – ‘the Uusikaupunki people were now dead’, so there would have been little point.75 Eventually Jaakko Eeronpoika, who had told the vicar about the matter in the first place, was called to testify. He said the rumour was originally started by Heikki Tuomaanpoika’s wife in Kyläsaari – that is, Agata’s sister-in-law. According to her, Agata had accused ‘her best friend’ of the theft. A maid named Kaarina Martintytär thought it must be Jaakko. Neither Kaarina nor Heikki’s wife came to testify. However, Jaakko himself suggested that Heikki’s wife may have said what she said only out of jealousy.76 The jury voted for a verdict that, according to the inquiry and Agata’s confession, she had used ‘magic or maleficium’ (‘widskepelse eller förgörning’) and illegal methods to uncover a thief. Agata was ordered to pay a forty mark fine. The term ‘voted’, in contrast to the usual phrase that the jury ‘considered the matter’, implies that the jury was not unanimous.77 Like all matters which carried the death penalty, witchcraft or magic cases were referred to the Court of Appeal regardless what the judgement was. The Turku Court of Appeal records do not survive,78 but there is no reason to believe that 75 ‘… huilcka nu äre döda …’ Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:9–v. NA; Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16–17. SRA. 76 Ulvila 19–20. Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:9–v. NA; Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16–17. SRA. It is possible that Jaakko never meant the matter to end up in court: The vicar may have picked it up from a conversation which mentioned it only for some other purpose (like amusement). Pastors were responsible for the care of their flock’s spiritual state, and for prosecuting offences or reporting them to the bailiffs (befallningsman and länsman). Wilskman (I) 1781, 18. 77 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a 4:9–v. NA; Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16–17. SRA. 78 Nenonen 1992, 25; Oja A. 1956, 98–113. The Court of Appeal let the Provincial Government know its resolutions through letters, which are – where they have survived – a better way to follow the Court of Appeal’s decisions than the Court of Appeal’s own records would be. See Oja 1999. Unfortunately, the Finnish Provincial Government archives from the Swedish period survive only fragmentarily. Ulvila belonged to the Province of Turku and Pori, and much of the Provincial Government’s archives were lost in the same fires as the Turku Court of Appeal archives. Maakunta-arkistojen yleisluettelo II: Turun maakuntaarkisto, 19, 33. A third way to access the Court of Appeal decisions would be to look at the

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Agata’s sentence would have changed. The Courts of Appeal seem to have had a doubtful attitude towards the prevalence of witchcraft. They had the reputation of reducing punishments, especially death sentences and harsh fines. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, Göta Court of Appeal, the material of which has been systematically studied, began to mitigate sentences except in the great witchpanics in Dalarna and Göta. In the eighteenth century, the Göta Court of Appeal as a rule went one step further than the district court towards a reduced sentence or an acquittal.79 However, the forty markkas fines given for magic were rarely diminished in the fragments which have survived.80 As the trial had reached its end, the matters should have been closed. Yet the peace which followed was only temporary. In September 1676, Agata Pekantytär found herself charged with witchcraft and magic (‘Trulldom och Widskepelsse’) again. The case was – again – initiated in the court by the Vicar of Ulvila, Gabriel Archtopolitanus. The charges included supernatural ways of birth control, improving brewery and pre-selecting the sex of calves. Also, Agata was said to put her lock in water when she went to court sessions – magic with locks was commonly used to influence the outcome of a court case. The previous New Year’s Day she had taken a door lock from her lodger, Kerttu Matintytär. On St. Michael’s Eve, Agata had looked for cattle feed in nine neighbouring houses and given some of it to her own cattle to magically prevent feed shortage. Her maid said Agata had ordered her to cut out three loops from each of the neighbour’s fishing nets and tie them to Agata’s nets to improve her catch of fish. Finally, the charges claimed Agata had driven her cattle to water on Christmas Eve and tied bells on the cows’ necks, even though she usually did not do such a thing during winter – one often finds the summer pasturing rituals used as sympathetic magic to ensure cattle feed in the winter.81 Kerttu Matintytär did not speak in court, but Agata admitted taking her things – not for any magic purpose but as pawn for debt. Everything else Agata denied. The first to give evidence was Agata’s maid, Kaarina Martintytär. In a long story which included her dialogue with Agata, she described how Agata had accused her neighbours of having cast a spell on her fishing nets and told Kaarina to overcome the spell with another. The loops from the neighbours’ nets would ensure that all fish would swim into Agata’s net and none to the neighbours. Agata admitted having heard of such a method. However, she asked her maid if she did not mention God, too, when she went fishing. Apparently she hoped thereby to counter the suspicion. The maid cited indeed a spell or a prayer that ended with words: ‘In the name of the

copies that were sent to the King’s Council. Unfortunately, The Turku Court of Appeal series to the King’s Council only include judgment diaries from four years during the seventeenth century, and are therefore not helpful in following Agata. 79 Nenonen 1992, 273–5. The Court of Appeals’ legal ability to commute punishments was revoked 1684, but the courts still continued their practice. About Göta Court of Appeal: Sörlin 1999, 67. 80 Åbo Hovrätt till Kongl. Maij:t vols 2–4. 81 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–5. SRA.

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Father, Son, etc.’ Agata admitted having used it, as she had heard it had been used before she was born.82 The next witness was Juha Eeronpoika of Kyläsaari, the same village as Agata. Agata had tied bells around the necks of her cows. Juha had not seen it himself; he had only heard the noise. When he asked about it, his household and Agata’s sister, Valpuri, told him about the bells. Agata’s sister, Valpuri, had asked Juha what damage it could do; Valpuri was hinting at the same innocence of amusement as Agata, when she said her seven-year-old daughter had tied the bells. Likewise, the third witness, Antti Heikinpoika, testified that Agata had lately – at the beginning of that September – told him that the bells were intended to amuse the children. Apparently much talk of the matter sounded suspicious, as Agata reminded the jury that it had mostly been Antti who talked. 83 Antti also knew that Aune Pertuntytär of Sörmarkku had complained about her crying children, and Agata had told her ‘Had you, Aune, told me about this earlier, you would never have had any more children’.84 According to Antti, Agata had claimed to have learnt contraception from Catariina Giöös, the widow of the late Vicar in Huittinen, a nearby parish. The widow’s son, Mayor Gabriel Keckonius of Pori, immediately demanded that this defamation should be punished although Agata denied having said any such thing. Antti named Aune and Marketta Klauntytär of Pomarkku as proof of his story. Neither woman was now present. However, the juror from Pomarkku, Matti Eskonpoika, testified to having discussed Agata’s offer with Marketta: Agata had once asked her what she would give if Agata taught her how to stay childless. Agata claimed she had only been joking. Finally, one Jaakko Sipinpoika of Pori told the court that at Easter 1675 Agata had got up and dressed again after bedtime, saying she would go out and look for witches. Agata admitted having done so.85 A lot of idle amusement and jokes which were originally thought quite innocent seem to have turned against Agata. The jury voted and found Agata guilty of taking her dependent lodger’s lock and of magic and ‘illegal methods’ – not only because of the evidence given now but because she had already been fined for magic and witchcraft a year before. The word for witchcraft, trulldom, is not mentioned again. A fine of forty markkas was imposed and the matter was referred to the Court of Appeal.86 The matter was still not yet over, however. The following year, the widow of the Vicar of Huittinen, using the customs officer Lars Giers as her advocate, sued Agata for slander. She had, as had been told in the magic trial, claimed that Catariina Giöös had taught her how to make women infertile. The two women who claimed that Agata had offered them contraception came to testify. Aune repeated what Antti Heikinpoika had already testified. Agata claimed she had only remarked that the 82 SRA. 83 84 85 86

‘Nimän Isen ja Pohjan, etc.’ Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676, Bielkesamlingen vol.27:53–5. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–5. SRA. ‘Om du Agnis [Aune] hadhe sagt mig dherom förr, så skulle du aldrigh fått flere Barn’. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–5. SRA. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:53–5. SRA.

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Vicar’s widow had borne five children in a short time but had since become infertile, and she warned that the same could happen to Aune as well. Marketta Klauntytär did not return to her own experience of how Agata offered her contraceptive advice. She merely said that Agata had asked her to take some butter to the house of the Mayor at Pori and mediate reconciliation.87 Agata had denied the defamation, but the jury considered the sworn testimony of Antti in the previous court session and the reconciliation Agata had now attempted through Marketta as proof of guilt. Aune’s testimony was not mentioned as a basis of the verdict although the court had heard it, because Agata had objected it on the grounds that they had other disputes going on. Agata was ordered to clear herself of the charges by swearing she was innocent with five others.88 When she tried to take her oath during the next court session, only two of the persons she named said they would swear for her. She was given extra time to get new co-swearers, but she could not find any. A third fine of 40 markkas was imposed.89 Historians have seen the witch trials as a power struggle at two levels: that of the elite’s against the populace and among the populace itself. It has been argued that they were part of the modernising state’s programme of extending its power to the village-level populace, or the religious and cultural elite’s attempt to acculturate the populace.90 The most important Swedish terms for maleficium were trolldom and förgörning, terms which were discussed in Agata’s trials, too. These meant harmful magis; förgörning could also mean poisoning – another secret way of doing bodily harm to people or cattle and one which could not easily be distinguished from magical harm through potions and powders. Witchcraft in Sweden had little to do with diabolism according to demonological theories, with allusions to the sabbat, and so forth; it had been in the law and in the courts before Europeans wrote their treatises on flying witches, and it was not very much interested in the Devil but rather in the practical harm caused by the witch. Magic also mentioned in Agata’s trials, usually meant benevolent magic or superstitious beliefs, the most common terms in Swedish court records being vidskepelse, signeri and lövjeri. Sometimes it could also mean chanting (especially signerij) or fortune-telling. Whereas maleficium had been a crime since the law was first written down, benevolent magic and superstition came to be considered crimes only around the 1660s. The authorities soon became much more interested in vidskepelse than in maleficium, and as crown officials like bailiffs and vicars (acting under the orders of the secular law to serve the crown in courts as well as in tax assessments, army enlistings and the like) gradually took over the role of prosecutors, the proportion of vidskepelse-charges grew compared to the proportion of maleficium. The elites refused to see the possibility of good magic: it was all from the devil and the better it seemed, the more dangerous it really was. For the peasantry, too, the matter was not a simple one, making it easy for the farmers to adopt this new crime into the repertoire of crimes and negligence 87 88 89 90

Ulvila 26–27 July 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:70–v. SRA. Ulvila 26–27 July 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:51. SRA. Ulvila 11–13 Sept 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:86v–87. SRA. Larner 1980 & 1981; Muchembled 1985.

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Fig. 1 Relationships between people in Agata’s witchcraft trials in 1675 and 1675. of which they could accuse their neighbours. Benevolence or malevolence was a relative quality, begging the definitions of good and bad and from whose side is that determined. Rather of lot of benevolent magic consisted of ensuring healthier and more productive cattle, better fishing luck, more butter and beer and so on, but the rest of the villagers present this magic as theft; ‘milk thieves’ were commonly spoken of. Curing illness was often seen as transferring it to someone – or something – else. Exposing thieves and so forth might well be less than righteous and good when a petty thief – as despised and dishonoured as they were – was uncovered

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through deadly accidents. Most often maleficium and vidskepelse were confused in courts. Moreover, there is not, in the Finnish material, any way to distinguish between witches who performed malevolent witchcraft and those who performed different kinds of benevolent magic: they are the same people, even when semiprofessional, and charges were often mixed in the same trials.91 The Swedish authorities considered witchcraft and maleficium criminal throughout the 1600s. The medieval law codes of Sweden did not specify punishments for magic unless some harm came of it. In 1665 the crime of benevolent magic was added into the law code as abuse of oaths and Sabbath.92 Between 1659 and 1673, Lower Satakunta Court District’s lower courts had tried six cases of ‘benevolent’ magic: two cases ended in acquittal, fines were imposed in three cases and one result is unknown. From 1620 to 1658, only one magic case ended with fines.93 In Finland and Sweden, as well as almost everywhere else, local authorities normally prosecuted charges of benevolent magic. The same authorities might try to mitigate charges of maleficent witchcraft, which were normally local accusations by neighbours against known persons in the neighbourhood.94 The other interpretation is that these charges reflected the village neighbours’ own values and thoughts, their battle over power and status.95 Agata’s charges included both benevolent magic and malevolent witchcraft. It is, then, a question of whose views and actions were the most plausible ones in court records: those of the local people or those of the authorities. The Vicar, Gabriel Archtopolitanus, acted in both cases as the public prosecutor of the parish: it was his duty to monitor the behaviour of his flock and report crimes to secular authorities.96 The Swedish system did not yet develop so far in the inquisitorial directions as to produce separate public prosecutors, but the local crown officials, bailiffs and vicars adopted that role in the sense that they reported crimes and saw that they were handled in the court. The vicars in Sweden had a distinctly secular role, acting as servants of the crown sometimes even more than as servants of the church – partly also because the church in Sweden was headed by the King. Neither the vicars nor the bailiffs necessarily went so far as to produce evidence merely against the defendant or for the prosecution, but rather they let the matter find its ‘rightful’ solution once the charges were presented. They could also end up speaking for the defendant. Although Archtopolitanus formulated the charges, there is no sign of any attempt to influence the handling of the matter. The Vicar’s role seems to have been limited to making a rumour public. The court’s task was to 91 For a more extensive discussion of the terminology see for example Oja 1999. 92 Sörlin 1999, 63–5. 93 Nenonen 1992, 105 (Table 1), 419–20 (Appendix IV, Tables 1–2). Legally the lower courts could only acquit the accused or impose the penalty prescribed by law. Arbitration was the prerogative of the Courts of Appeal. However, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the lower courts adopted a more autonomous position, and a wider and often more lenient range of punishments both in Sweden and Finland. Nenonen 1992 and Sörlin 1999, 63–5. 94 Nenonen 1992, 198–200; Heikkinen 1969, 244, 159; Sharpe 1997, 65, 133. 95 The line of interpretations from Macfarlane 1970 to Briggs 1996 and the poststructural emphasis on individual experience. 96 Wilskman (I) 1781, 18.

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ascertain whether or not the rumour was true. The real accusers were those who had been spreading the rumour and who were called to testify. Women seem to have been in a key position among the rumourmongers, as can be seen from Figure 1. There is an important hint in the defamation case against Agata by Catariina Giöös – the alleged teacher of supernatural contraception – in 1677. Agata objected to Aune’s testimony ‘for she had with her husband been in dispute with her over the cavalry estate in Kyläsaari.’97 Aune Pertuntytär in the latter court case was the same wife of Heikki Tuomaanpoika to whom the maid Kaarina had talked about Agata’s fishing methods before the first trial in 1675 – that is, Agata’s sister-in-law. Aune’s childhood home was in Pomarkku where, according to the court records, Marketta lived in 1676. The two women had lived in the same village as children. Obviously, Marketta was on friendly terms with Agata; otherwise, it would not be plausible to believe that Agata offered her contraceptive skills. They remained on speaking terms even after the 1676 trial, as it was she whom Agata asked to bring her peace offering to the defamed Catariina Giöös in Pori. Aune’s influence becomes clear when the GRSF reveals that the juror, Matti Eskonpoika of Pomarkku, who confirmed Marketta knew about Agata’s contraception, was Aune’s brother-in-law.98 Using her influence and friendships in the community, Aune was the initiator of the rumours that led to the legal action against her sister-in-law. Just before the witchcraft accusations, Agata had won the inheritance dispute against Aune’s husband. It would seem that her accusations were the result of frustrated wrath and incredulity at the unexpected outcome of the inheritance dispute. In this respect, the ill will in the neighbourhood was the driving force behind the official actions of the vicar. Of the group of neighbours and kin, Aune alone was unambiguously or constantly hostile towards Agata. Her social position in the village had long been more secure than Agata’s, being only recently shaken, and consequently, her power to influence the village opinion may have been greater. The Kyläsaari neighbours had thus far known Aune as the mistress of Tommila farmstead. Figure does not show ties of friendship, because they cannot be assessed on the basis of the source material, although obviously all the witnesses knew Agata and most of them new each other.99 Although I suggested above that Agata’s personal position among the landowning farmers of the village was not yet well established, I do not mean to suggest, in a Thomas-MacFarlanean style, that the charges reflected hostility towards the clamouring poor. MacFarlane did, indeed, himself recant his theory. It has been shown that usually the accusers and the accused were ‘not exceptionally mismatched in terms of power’ or wealth. The categories used to describe the social standing of the witches are often too rough to show finer internal social gradations of the group

97 ‘för dhet hon med sin Man Hafwa warit j twist med henne om ryttarhemmanet j Inderö [Kyläsaari]’ Ulvila 26–27 July 1677. Bielkes. vol. 27:70. SRA. 98 GRSF, Ulvila, draft 1654–1673, 77; GRSF Ulvila, draft 1674–1693, 33. NA. See also Selinheimo 1934, 167–9. 99 These have been clarified elsewhere in Toivo 1999. See also text.

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of peasant farmers.100 If Agata was mismatched with her accusers in terms of wealth, it was because she was wealthier, not poorer, than her accusers. Yet Agata’s accusers were not doing badly either. 101 However, Agata’s wealth and status were of very recent origin. Her personal unestablished, unstable social position together with the socially and economically important farmstead she came to occupy seems likely to have created tension in the neighbourhood. The neighbours were naturally surprised that she should suddenly take over the farm, even if only acting for her daughter. Quite as naturally their surprise was followed by a certain insecurity of whether or not she could actually perform her new roles in a satisfactory way. Would she be able to pay the farm’s taxes, handle the common work in road maintenance, enclosures, milling, fishing, and so forth, or would the other farms have to take care of Tommila’s responsibilities or suffer damages for Tommila’s negligence? Would Agata’s personal leap from the status role of a hill-cotter to that of head of a farm affect the relations of others in the village? Would her possible failure or success as the head of Tommila change the status relations of other villagers and how would those changes touch each and everyone? No one could yet know. Social responsibilities and obligations could also be contested. Kustaa H.J. Vilkuna shows that bringing shame and material damage to others was part of the internal hierarchy of iron foundries. Quarrelling was part of hierarchy: hierarchy was formed and established through contesting the hierarchical obligations.102 In Agata’s neighbourhood, too, the amount of daily quarrelling at least seems to have grown. Whether it was seen as a threat or as an opportunity, the neighbourhood community united against Agata, who seemed to be shaking the established social positions in the village. The tension in the village facilitated the support for Aune, who was more likely to be viewed as an established member of the community. The struggle was about power and social status as well as – or even more than – about financial means, but, perhaps, also about continuing stability. In one respect, Agata’s wealth may even have drawn the suspicion of evil magic upon her: folklorists who have studied folk legends and narratives about parish gentry, such as Apo and Åström, have found that one of the common features in them is the connection between the devil and the gentry. The powerful and wealthy gentry, whose culture and habits were not approved by the local peasantry, created tensions. The gentry’s power position was not seen as legitimate, yet one could not get rid of it. Instead, the legends manifest an attempt to move the gentry and its illegitimate power outside the human community.103 Similarly, Agata’s position may have seemed illegitimate to some in the community, not least to her rival relatives.

100 Nenonen 1992, 201–20. Gaskill 1998, 264–5. 101 For example, Juha Eeronpoika was only little later assessed to have fairly good resources – ‘tämliga förmögenheeter’ – to take care of the dues of his farm.. Ulvila 9–10 Aug. 1682 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:153–4 (135–v); Ulvila 3 & 5–6 March 1683. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:70–71(368). NA. 102 K. H. J. Vilkuna 1996, 46ff. 103 Åström 1995, 212–22; Apo 1989.

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Not all intruders in any communities were accused of witchcraft and magic. Social quarrels other than the witchcraft itself are hinted at in the majority of Finnish magic and witchcraft cases. Many conflicts were presented in court as motives for bewitching, although it seems unclear whether it was the social conflicts which led to suspicions of witchcraft or the suspicions which gave extra weight to otherwise petty controversies.104 In both of these cases, too, there were obvious, overt signs and reasons to suspect the use of witchcraft and magic: Agata openly practised and admitted to some of the practices reported. On the other hand, not all performers of magic ended up in court. Benevolent magic especially was practised by many as part of everyday work and women’s control over the household.105 Maleficium led to court more often. Local communities united themselves to watch suspected witches, and, once convinced about the matter, to get them convicted.106 The dynamics which led to Agata’s magic trials were similar to those behind accusations of maleficium. The social conflicts suggest the reasons why. The mother In the period from 1671 to the magic trials, kin and inherited rights were important in all Agata’s claims. The very last of the three records in the court book is one about her current status in the village. The other villagers complained about her cottage. Hill-cotters were at the margins of the village both geographically as well as socially. Yet even their right to a place at the margins was contested. The map of the village in 1688 was drawn for taxation purposes, and therefore cottages were not included in it. It shows some space around the village houses, between the Lake Kyläjärvi and the village fields, where the cottages probably were based outside the actual backyards of the farmhouses.107 In the tax records–based GRSF, Agata and Yrjö can be found as work force under the heading of Mattila, a farm headed (formally) by Erik Sluuk.108 It is likely, though not certain, that Agata and Yrjö had some kind of an agreement with the owners of the Mattila farm: it is unlikely that two people would have been entered as workers into someone’s tax record without any agreement between the parties. However, Agata did not appeal to any such agreement – neither did Yrjö. On the other hand, Agata, said ‘that she was Tuomas Mikonpoika’s son’s wife and claimed that as long as her children, whom she had had by her late husband, lived, she could not be driven out of the village’.109 104 Nenonen 1992, 238–41; Sörlin 1999, 159–67. 105 Purkiss, 1996, 96–7; Stark-Arola 1998, 184ff; Nenonen 1992, 58. 106      On old and long grudges between women neighbours, see for example Holmes 1993, 55ff. Other results from Holmes results – the higher proportion of women witnesses to the charges of earlier maleficence than to those of more recent provenance or the suggestion that women were incited by men – do not seem to hold in Finland. 107 Geometriche Afrijtning Öfwer Inderö ... Anno 1688 af Magnus Bergman. MH: Map book A1B:2. MH. (BB.3 af Finnlands och Biörneborgs lähn giordt d. 3 Maij 1709). NA. 108     GRSF Ulvila, draft: 13v 1654–1673. (See esp. years 1671–1673 and 1668–1673). NA. 109 ‘Agata sade sigh wara Thomas Michelssons Son Hustru ter i byen och förmeente sigh intet kunna drifwas der ifrån så lenge hennes barn hon medh sin Sahl man aflat hafwer, lefwa’ Ulvila 20–21 June 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:96–7. SRA.

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The court and the villagers agreed – the children and Agata had a right to live in the village, whether they stayed on Tuomas Mikonpoika’s farm or elsewhere. On the other hand, Yrjö Pekanpoika, who had built a similar cabin, neither had nor claimed such rights, was ordered to get himself work and lodging with his employer. Half a year later, the court record finally noted had he had found work and lodging on Juha Eeronpoika’s farm in the village.110 The right to membership of the village community was produced through kinship, more specifically through blood ties. Agata herself did not have an automatic right to stay in the village, as she had married into the village, coming from somewhere else. She or her kin never owned land in the village. Nor did her marriage to a farmer in the village give her that right, not after his death. However, her children had been born to a village farmer, who had been a legal heir of a freeholding farmer. Her daughters – even though they were female – had a right to the land as did the rest of their father’s kin. Historians and folklorists in Finland have traditionally thought that wives joined their husband’s kin only after they had children, if even then. Especially in the east, this continued into the nineteenth century.111 The birthright did not guarantee the headship of the farm because there were other heirs to compete for the farmstead, but it gave them a right to live in the village. Because Agata was the mother and guardian of her daughters, their right extended to her. The right to membership and, in practice, to stay, may be important without any economic consequences. It has been claimed that the European trend to implement enclosures and poor relief was part of a development which led to the exclusion of old and poor women from the community and – as is sometimes claimed – to witch trials. The common lands were needed to provide a livelihood for the growing population and for the new industries. In Finland, these new industries were usually supposed to be saw mills in the south and tar production in the north. When a person was acknowledged to have a right to live in the village, however, it would mean, as in most Protestant and many Catholic countries, that the village had a responsibility to provide relief in of case poverty. Although poverty was always just a couple of coincidences away, it was more likely to strike those who had no farmstead to work on or to provide food for their families. Providing for one’s family was another reason why the peasant farms sought to control who lived in the village, especially who was allowed to take up farms or clear new ones on the village commons: the farmers wanted these chances for their own sons and sons-in-law.112 Birthright provided a kind of membership of the village community as one of the villagers, not an outsider. Researchers of witchcraft history have commonly found that accusations were usually made against neighbours in the same village, not against people who lived far away. Often the people accused of witchcraft were fairly well established in their villages in the sense that they had friends and relatives – mostly grown-ups – in the village. Still, it may be significant that Agata had to 110 Ulvila 17 and 19 Feb. 1672. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:16. SRA. 111 Eilola 2002, 109, citing Asko Vilkuna 1989, 250–54; Stark-Arola 1998. 112 On poor relief and early modern Poor Laws see for example Jütte 1994; on local farmers’ attempts to control the settlement in village commons, see Ylikangas 2005.

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point out her right to membership so many times in the early 1670s, before the first witchcraft accusation against her. The significance of kinship through children was a right to stay somewhere. Agata’s claims were not the only records referring to it in Ulvila. Moreover, men could also claim kinship right through their children.113 It is paradoxical but not surprising that the meaning of kin membership was expressed by those who did not themselves have it: the women and men who had moved from their own villages on marriage. As such, kinship did not bring power. Without it, however, it would be difficult to claim any power in the future, either. It meant a basic status: membership, even if marginal. It was what every subsequent change to the status would build on. There were other ways of gaining membership, too. If one could not inherit land, one could buy it or take up a void crown farm, rent land or form a partnership contract with some other farmer.114 For many younger people, these were not viable options, however, because of the lack of cash and because the family land had been settled on one of the other siblings. They would be obliged to hire themselves for work and live with their masters. Their self-evident right to live somewhere depended on their work and on their masters. When they grew old and would be unable to work, they might face trouble. This has been one of the traditional ways of explaining witchcraft and witch trials: the marginal and the poorest and the most unprotected outsiders of communities were accused because they caused disturbances by begging. When refused charity, their neighbours would project their guilt onto them and claim that they were really evil instead of deserving of assistance. They acted suspiciously and aggressively when angry either about being refused charity or in general over their deteriorating social status and economic means. As they were usually women who no longer had family – or to be more specific, a husband – they might easily be thought of as lacking protection. 115 This line of explanation would have fitted nicely into the framework of the early modern crisis. The problem is, however, that almost everywhere statistical inquiries have shown that many of both the accused and the accusers in witchcraft cases were of economically middling peasant families, and usually both sides were fairly well socially established in terms of having family and friends in the village. No crisis can be found. It seems, rather, that even in Agata’s case the peasant farmers sought indeed to control who lived in the village, but they did so much more directly. The magic trials came only after the economic threat of adding to the number of beggars had already passed. However, neither the witch trials nor the peasant farmers’ will to control the inhabitants of the village emerged from a crisis. A family

113 For example Ulvila 17 & 19 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180–81. NA. 114 Cf. Whittle 1998. 115 Macfarlane 1970, 158ff.; Sharpe 1997, 172; Roper 1998, 229; Roper 2004 passim. Roper’s explanation, however, has nothing to do with economy, and we shall come to it later.

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strategy which seeks to preserve the maximum resources for the immediate kin and family would have been enough.116 The kin membership right could provide access to power. After all, access to kin also provided the option to claim inheritance and property rights. In order to protect the kin’s landed estate against other kin groups or other outsiders, the Rural Laws, as well as the previous local law codes, prohibited the selling of inherited land to outsiders without at first offering it to the kin members. This had to be done thrice publicly in court, and the relatives were entitled to buy the land in the order they would have inherited it.117 Within one family, the wish to protect the kin’s landed estate also meant an attempt to keep the land in one piece by leaving it to one heir only and buying the other heirs out with some other property – the authorities also prescribed the practice, because undivided farms were thought of as bigger and therefore the owners were better able to pay their taxes.118 However, the kin competed among themselves for their inheritance. In that competition, primogeniture was an important factor, but there were other factors, too. One crucial factor was the status and place someone had inside the family household. Agata’s children were the factor that determined her status as a member of the kin and the village community. In the very first of her three court cases, in June 1671, she protested against her father-in-law’s distribution of his inheritance. She could not have acted were she not the mother and guardian of her daughters, who were heirs in direct line. Agata herself had no right to the farm she was claiming; the possible heirs of Agata’s father-in-law were her late husband and his daughters. What finally seems to have determined the court’s decision (in 1674) on the inheritance dispute in her daughter’s favour was her statement that her husband had been the eldest son, 116 Nenonen 1992, 201–17; Behringer 1998, 90–91; Gaskill 1998, 263–5. See however, Roper’s findings Roper 1998, 229 and Briggs 1998, 87, 93 who writes that both the accusers and the accused were poor. Generalisations of poverty and wealth are problematic because wealth and poverty were and are relative phenomena and the point of comparison should be specified: was someone poor compared to beggars or to overseas merchants? Poverty might also mean different things to different people: the nobility would consider other nobles poor if they were unable to live according to the lifestyle expected of them. Some beggars might be considered poor in terms of absolute poverty and destitution, peasants might face seasonal distress before the harvest or during depressions and a few of them were indeed both begging and accused of witchcraft. Nenonen 1992, 163ff. See for example Åbo Tidningar 18.5.1795. 117 Jutikkala 1958, 50–51. 118 Katajala 2002. The birthright also had a symbolic meaning because of the midseventeenth-century notions of divided property ownership, influenced by the ideologies of Natural Law. The theory was that the ownership of peasant land was always divided. The land itself, with a right to the profit and produce (in the form of taxes), would always belong to the king, unless he donated it to some noble for some service. A right to work the farm and live on it, however, might belong to the peasant if he had always paid his taxes in full; if not, the crown or the nobleman would take that right instead and could thereafter evict the farmer and take a new one instead. That right was hereditary; it was equated with the birthright, bördsrätt, or later, Skatterättighet. Those who had no birthright were in theory not considered owners of their farmsteads but only tenants. The theory was not unanimously approved however, especially not among the peasant farmers, who tended to think that the land was theirs. Ågren 1992, 17–23.

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and therefore his children should be the first to inherit. Primogeniture was by no means the only ground on which landed inheritance was settled, nor was it included in judicial codification, but it was commonly enough used. Agata gained her position as the mother of the eldest son’s eldest daughter.119 Agata Pekantytär, mistress of the farm Farmhold responsibilities Agata did not suffer long from her magic and witchcraft trials, dramatic and consuming as they certainly were. Witchcraft trials have usually been considered extremely detrimental to the accused: both the Enlightenment and Romantic interpretations of the trials and of Trevor-Roper’s first academic essays on the subject saw witch trials as an inescapable machine of destruction – almost certain to lead to execution, or at least to social and economic destitution. The view still persists in witchcraft studies, which ponder on the mentalities of those sending their neighbours to the ‘butcher’s slab’.120 This view was based on the great panics. A growing number of historians has found out that, in reality, such miscarriages of justice were rare. Some recent studies on the lives of the accused after the trials show that drastic social and economic consequences were also rare.121 Agata’s story provides more evidence for deconstructing the assumption of exclusion from community. Like most other Finnish accused, she was not taken into custody during the trials, and she was released afterwards to await punishment.122 Her reintegration into the community 119      Ulvila 4 & 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I: KO a4:29–30. NA; Pylkkänen 2005. 120 Roper 2004, 3. 121 Trevor-Roper 1969, 9, 12–13; On current scholarship see for example Roper 2004, pp. 4–12. For the opposite view, see Rowlands 2003; Briggs 1998, 399–400; Nenonen 1992, 123–51. On the life after trials, see Lennersand & Oja 2004. 122 Imprisonment was not among the punishments stated in the law, and although new customs had been added to the law both in various ordinances and in jurisprudence, imprisonment remained rare both during the trial process and as a punishment after the trial. One of the reasons for this was that most localities simply lacked suitable premises for it. In Finnish rural parishes, prison-houses began to be built only during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and even then very slowly. See Pajuoja 1992. Most of them were built only at the latter half of the eighteenth century. Imprisonment was therefore usually reserved for those who were more than usually likely to flee, and for those with a pending death sentence. In some cases, the Court of Appeal converted death sentences into imprisonment or forced labour. For obvious economic and practical reasons, imprisonment was not among the most usual methods of punishment by the Court of Appeal. Instead, it used fines and corporal punishments like whipping. Witchcraft and magic were normally not among the crimes which made people flee, or which caused imprisonment during the lower court hearings, as Agata’s case shows. There were cases in Ulvila when the trials were time and again postponed because the accused had good enough reason to stay away from court: see Risto Olavinpoika’s trials in the 1690s, which were repetitively postponed because he was on business in another town or he had his farm assessed for taxes by a land surveyor (and a couple of times because witnesses

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was also profound, as shown by the way she continued to run the farmstead during and after her witchcraft trials. After Tommila estate had been ordered to go to Riitta in 1674, Agata Pekantytär’s economic agreements became more frequent and geographically more widespread. In September 1675, Agata herself confessed to owing ten talaris to one Lisbetta Matintytär in Pori. She was ordered to pay her debt, and the juror Simo Birgerinpoika was ordered to oversee the payment.123 The matter was taken up for the community’s and the authorities’ confirmation of the debt, the sum of money and the payment of it. If no written agreements could be made, a court appearance would be the most secure way to get the matter confirmed. Similarly Agata took to court a debt of 60 talaris, which she owed to a Gabriel Johansson, a burgher in Turku.124 Taking credit from burghers was customary among peasant farmers. Agata Pekantytär may have needed financial help to assume responsibility for the Tommila farm, although the final division may still have been pending.125 Generation change in farmhold responsibility often led to heavy debts. The other heirs’ shares would have to be bought. The one who took over the farmstead also took over the responsibility for the farmstead’s debts.126 Agata’s husband was only one of at least six siblings who were theoretically entitled to be bought out. 127 Agata may have had to buy new equipment to replace what was either outdated or what belonged to Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika personally. However, not only did her need for money grow, but also faith in her ability to pay back. If Agata did not have the necessary monetary capital to run the farm, she was able to borrow it.

either were not present or were too drunk to be heard). These were deemed legitimate reasons to stay away – no extra fine or other punishment for negligence, insubordination or contempt of court was imposed. Ulvila 22–24 Sept. 1682 Ala-Satakunta II KO a2:104v (633v). Ulvila 21 and 23 Feb. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II KO a6:29–32; Ulvila 27–28 June 1702. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta Ulvila 13-16 Feb. 1704. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a20: 346–352; Ulvila 27–28 June 1704. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a20: 985–987. NA. In civil matters, staying away often meant that the person sued was fined for negligence and the matter judged in his or her absence, but in criminal matters this could not be done, the accused had to appear in person. 123      Ulvila 3–4 and 6 Sept. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:24v. NA; Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:46. SRA. 124 Ulvila 3–4 and 6 Sept. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:22v. NA. 125     Elisabeth Johansdotter demanded her payment in Jan 1675 from ‘Tuomas Mikonpoika’s heirs’, and her invoice was to be sent to the ‘division that takes place there’, ‘Jemckningen som der skeer’. Ulvila 19­–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:5v. NA. 126 Perlestam 1998, 77, with reference also to England (Spufford 1976). See also Pylkkänen 1990, 214. 127 The living children of Tuomas Mikonpoika included Heikki, Simo, Sipi, Riitta (married to Jaakko Erkinpoika) and Aune, who lived in Pori. The tax records also mention Lauri and Valpuri, but they are never mentioned in connection with the inheritance (or otherwise in court records so that they could be identified) and may have died young without issue. Daughters inherited half of what sons inherited, in Western Finland the value of land was counted in determining the daughter’s share. Pylkkänen, Anu 1990, 214.

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Agata lent to other villagers, which may warrant more concern. In the autumn court session in 1675, Juha Eerikinpoika was ordered to pay Agata four tynnyris128 of grain (korn) and ten kappas of rye. The amount of grain seems considerable, and the court record wording suggests that it had originally been greater, but Juha had already paid part of his debt.129 How the debt originated is not stated. In Swedish and English towns, widows could use lending – at moderate interest130 – as a means to gain a modest but comfortable living as long as they had the necessary starting capital. It has been pointed out that the importance of such business should not be underestimated when compared to that of farming and real estate.131 However, there is no proof in the court records that Agata’s lending to others amounted to a business, even though a great number of other people’s contracts were handled, published and approved in court. Such hints could, perhaps, be found in the records of the nearby town, but as Agata soon turned to farming, this is not likely. The right to use land was at issue in the majority of court cases between Agata and people outside the immediate kin group. Agata ran into land disputes with the widow of the late mayor of Pori, Elisabeth Johansdotter. The mayor’s widow owned rights to a nearby farm occupied by Reko Niilonpoika and Jaakko Eeronpoika.132 In autumn 1676, Elisabeth alleged that Agata had first taken one aami of hay and then let her people take even more hay from her meadows. Afterwards, they had let a pig get in to eat four kappas of her wheat. Agata was ordered to compensate the hay and the wheat. She was fined three markkas for both offences. Elisabeth also got compensation for her expenses.133 Agata may have attempted to pay this right away, because two pages later Elisabeth requested the jury to order that Agata should take back the spoilt butter she had given in payment. She also requested to distrain whatever Agata owed her. The records did not say what this payment was, which 128 A tynnyri (Finnish) or tunna, tunnor (Swedish): a cubic measure of 164.9 litres of grain (but only 125.6 litres of liquid) which roughly translates into a barrel. As of 1604, there were officially 30 kappas in one tunna (of grain), but the elder system of 32 kappas in one tunna continued in use for a long time. Kappa (Finnish and Swedish) translates roughly to a gallon is a cubic measure of 5.5 litres, mostly for measuring grain. 129 ‘Effter här i rätten oprettat Rechning blifwer Johan Erichsson i Jnderöö ännu skyldigh Agata...’ (‘According to an invoice produced in the court, is Juha Eerikinpoika still liable to Agata...’) Ulvila 3–4 and 6 Sept. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:22v. NA. Some credit relationships will remain hidden in my analysis because, had Agatas sued town burghers, the matters usually would have been dealt with in town magistrate court. The magistrate court records, however, would not change the overall picture of my work, and it is in all other respect wiser to concentrate on the rural community. 130 The Christian churches insisted that the interest should be reasonable; one could take interest to cover expenses, which would naturally grow with the risks, but usury was strictly banned. The Swedish Rural Law authored by Christoffer Bavarian frowned on taking interest, but that part of the law seems to have remained a dead letter. During the seventeenth century, the maximum legitimate interest seems to have been thought 8 per cent. Ågren 1992, 43–4. 131 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 114. 132 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I a4:5. NA. 133 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:70. SRA.

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is precisely why one is led to believe it was the same payment which was ordered earlier.134 Similar of disputes also arose among kin about plots of land and their produce or about farm animals.135 Court records reveal only Agata’s personal agreements and disagreements with her neighbours. Taking up a farm included many responsibilities both within the farm household and towards the rest of the village and parish community. Most disputes never reached court. The communal responsibilities included building and maintaining the common property, the church and the vicarage, other parochial buildings, roads and equipment for the hunting of beasts. Smaller village communities maintained fishing equipment as well as cabins and other buildings in their fishing areas. However, these facts are stated in court records as general reminders: only those who failed in their responsibilities were named, and only if there were not too many of them. Agata’s obligations must have been fulfilled, because she was not sued for negligence, but it is impossible to determine how far she was able to influence the arrangements, although some hints that she was appear later. Even less can be known of Agata’s role in local political decision-making at parish meetings. No records of parish meetings or other local self-governing bodies survive. It is highly unlikely that Agata could have acquired a role in these bodies. According to Peter Aronsson, who has studied local self-government in Småland (Southern Sweden), the sockenstämma – that is, the secular parish counsel – made the decisions alone until 1708, although the common population was usually present. Some researchers have claimed that the traditional principle of presence for a binding decision also required the presence of women, the landless and the young whenever the decisions concerned them, yet Aronsson has not found any women taking part in the action of the sockenstämma. Lyndal Roper’s Augsburg also seems to have had an all male political life.136 If we accept that performing communal duties influenced a person’s status in the social hierarchy, this would have caused difficulties for Agata. However, women who were responsible for their farms may have taken part in a more informal way, letting their opinions be known through a trusted neighbour. After all, their consent would have been necessary in most practical work.137 Family haven? Although the witchcraft trials in themselves did not pose a major obstacle to Agata’s success in managing the farm, there were other obstacles, present already before the witch trials. Agata Pekantytär had gained control over Tommila farm, which was given in the division to her daughter, Riitta. However, Agata was alone with her two young daughters, with limited ways to take care of the farm. Swedish wives’ right to pursue family business in their husbands’ absence was at times contested, but usually only as a strategic means to postpone contracts or 134 Ulvila 11–12. Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:70v–71. SRA. 135      Ulvila 11–12 Jan 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:3. SRA; Ulvila 12–13 Oct 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:109v. SRA. 136 Roper 1989, 7–13; Aronsson 1992, 141, 161. 137 Perlestam 1998, 24–5.

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payments; their rights were contested even by the wives themselves in order to avoid payments of debts or fulfilment of contracts. Widows’ rights were rarely contested. Most often, they concerned movable assets; rarely did they involve land transactions. Problems might arise with respect to authority within the household, children and servants, and the communal male work in the village and parish; even if the practical work could be performed by hired labour, the managing and contracting involved might be more difficult for a hired servant than it was for a farmer in his own right.138 The farm needed a man. Agata Pekantytär’s age did not make her unmarriageable. Moreover, remarrying was not culturally deprecated, and there were probably fewer incentives for not remarrying than in England and Southern Europe. During the seventeenth century Swedish wars, however, there were fewer chances for women to remarry than there would be later, when remarriage became common.139 The problem was that, legally, Agata could be her daughters’ guardian only as long as she did not remarry. Had she remarried, the relatives of the children’s father – that is, Heikki and Simo – would assume guardianship with all its rights over Tommila. According to the order given in 1669, the widowed mother shared the guardianship of her children with the late father’s relatives. The wording of the order uses different verbs for the mother’s tasks, now defined as daily upkeep and upbringing, and for the male relatives’ task of economic guardianship. The mother could, however, use her children’s property for the upkeep of the children. Also, when the property was a farm, it was just as essential as before the new order to keep the farm in good shape; therefore, the mother was expected to take care of the daily running of the farm. She could not sell or pawn it, or use it in any other way to increase her own property.140 If she herself remarried, the estate would have to be divided, because the new husband could not have a say in the property of another man’s children. In practice, many widows remarried, and the new husband started to run the farm. Sometimes this caused trouble, as the new husband could have established his position as the farmer by the time the children grew old enough to claim their rights.141 Agata’s fear seems to have been that, after such a contested inheritance as Tommila had gone through, Heikki and Simo would have seized the opportunity to throw her out with her husband. Agata could not legally just marry off her daughter, either. Although she was the guardian of her daughters, she did not have the legal right to make a marriage contract for them. Marriage control of daughters belonged, according to the rural law, first to the father, after his death to male relatives on the father’s side and then to 138      Perlestam 1997:132–4. Gudrun Andersson has analysed women’s roles in court in her work; see Andersson, 1998. Andersson has a somewhat different view on this: Perlestam makes a simplification. On women’s rights to testify, see above pp. 24–6. 139 On the rest of Europe, where considerable cultural obstacles in form of legal proscriptions, children’s care and religious teaching existed, see, for example, Warner 1999 and Chabot 1999; nevertheless, remarrying was still fairly common; see, for example, Foyster 1999, 108–9. On eighteenth-century Finland, see 2005, 132–46. 140 KrLL, Giftobalken B XV (Schlyter 1869); Pylkkänen 1990, 310–13. 141 Pylkkänen 1990, 308–11.

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male relatives on the mother’s side. The mother had an advisory role.142 In the case of Agata Pekantytär’s daughters, this meant that Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika had marriage control over them. Whether or not they would have married off their nieces with the same goals in mind as Agata is questionable. In town law, the mother was prioritised before other relatives.143 Kyläsaari was separated from Pori by only a small gulf; town law and practice may have influenced Agata. In any case, it seems she found a way around the legal restraints. In September 1676, Vicar Gabriel Archtopolitanus complained about Klemet Jaakonpoika of Koivuniemi village for fornication with a 13-year-old maid, Riitta Matintytär of Kyläsaari. In contrast to some other European systems, in Finnish law fornication was always dealt with in secular courts. The vicar might take initiative to bring the matter to the court, and the court would most likely sentence the offenders to a public confession and sometimes inform the cathedral chapter (or sometimes ask the advice of the cathedral chapter), but the matter would be dealt in a secular court, which, unlike church courts, could also sentence repeated offences with fines or corporeal punishments.144 Klemet admitted he had indeed slept with the girl, but that nothing sexual had happened. He only taught Riitta to read, because he intended to marry her. The Vicar, however, testified that Riitta read much better than Klemet. The Vicar had already cautioned Riitta’s mother, Agata Pekantytär, but she had merely asked the Vicar why he would not marry them. As she explained to the court, the couple ‘should in the future be married and the farm would thereby be better off with a man’s help’. The jury ordered Klemet to take an oath of purification, swearing himself as sixth.145 Klemet wished to swear immediately, but he could not find co-swearers.146 Agata Pekantytär appeared alone at the next court session. When asked, she said that having realised he could not get co-swearers, Klemet had absconded from the court. Klemet was fined 40 markkas and ordered to stand church punishment and ask the congregation’s forgiveness – meaning public confession, which was customary in fornication cases – with Riitta. According to the court records, Agata had actually forced her daughter to lie with Klemet by threatening her with whipping.147 The jury seemed to understand Agata’s intentions: to ensure her daughter’s marriage and thereby secure the farm. But no end could justify such means. It was considered a serious crime, and the jury fined Agata 40 markkas. No consideration of whether Riitta did or should have resisted her mother’s will is recorded. As underage, Riitta was not fined. The greatest responsibility lay with Agata, her mother.148 142 Pylkkänen 1990, 80; KrLL Giftobalken I (Schlyter 1869). 143 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 62. 144 Cases in Ulvila are numerous; this is just one of them. See also Aalto 1996 or Pylkkänen 1990. 145 See note 40 above. 146 ‘På dhet dhe skulle framledes wijas och hemmanet på dhet Sätt kunna medh Mans hielp bättre komma sigh för.’ Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol.27:55–v. SRA. 147  ‘Twingat med Rijs sijn dotter Riitta at liggia hoos Klemet; på dhet dhe skulle framdeles wijas och hemmanet på dhet Sättet kunde wedh Mans hielp bättre komma sigh för.’ 148 Ulvila 12–13 Oct. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:106v–107. SRA. The matter was referred to the Court of Appeal, but no record survives.

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Despite the difficult beginning, Riitta and Klemet were married a year later.149 Klemet moved into Tommila, and Agata secured the farm ‘with a man’s help’. If we are to think in the way of much Scandinavian social history, Riitta was now under her husband’s authority, but it seems Agata felt confident about the mutual understanding between herself and her son-in-law. Not only was the farm secured ‘with a man’s help’; the whole household was. The Court of Appeal added to the witchcraft sentences of 1675 and 1676 – or perhaps changed them into – a public whipping during the district court session in June 1678. Agata had run away on the first day of the session to escape the rods. As the servant of the court or the guard of prisoners,150 Henrich Hansson had gone to fetch her back, and Klemet Jaakonpoika had violently taken her from the guard’s cart. The guard demanded that Klemet should be punished as an example. In court, Klemet tried to deny everything. Yet the juror Matti Eskonpoika of Pomarkku told the court how Klemet had met the guard at Pori town tollgate and – with threats and curses – attacked him. The guard was not able to drive forward before he ‘assented to hit’ Klemet. After this testimony, Klemet could no longer deny the fight. The jury decided to notify the Court of Appeal, but the record does not state what happened to Agata or Klemet.151 Agata herself did not stand accused this time. Punishment was demanded for Klemet only. The point of the whole case was not to punish Agata for avoiding the original punishment or even to make her take it, but to punish Klemet for his crime: violence and disobedience against the local authority. Robin Briggs claims that there is little sign that kin who tried to help their relatives in times of witchcraft trials, even helping prisoners to escape and concealing fugitives or threatening hostile witnesses, were punished, but that such action was partly considered normal.152 In Sweden, however, such measures to help the accused were treated more severely: help should remain within the legal methods of testimony in court or food and the like relief in the rare cases of imprisonment. The normal practice was to impose a three-markkas fine on the negligent or disobedient subject. Using any form of violence against anyone on the crown’s business was treated more severely. Violence against authorities was also dealt with in the Courts of Appeal and, unlike in cases of witchcraft, the punishments were seldom reduced. In a way, then, Klemet risked a much more severe punishment than that to which Agata had been sentenced.153 Attempts to avoid public punishments continued in the family. Klemet was fined for having laid hands on the Vicar, although he would not state his reasons 149 Church Records, Pori. Baptisms, Marriages and Burials II Ba 1: Lists of Marriages 30 Sept. 1677. NA. 150 Kivalteri (in Finnish) or gevaldigeren (in Swedish). See note 122 above on the rarity of actual imprisonment. The kivalteri served as a general servant of the crown. The ‘prisoners’ guarded by the kivalteri were usually only being conveyed from place to place for the execution of punishments, not actually imprisoned for longer periods of time. 151 ‘Nödgades slå honom.’ Ulvila 22–25 June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I: KO a4:50. NA. Usually the Court of Appeal did not look leniently on disobedience towards the justice. 152 Briggs 1998, 255. 153 Turku Court of Appeal to Kongl. Maijt vol. 2–4. Lists of judgements 1666–1669.

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in court.154 The following September, Vicar Archtopolitanus complained that even though the Court of Appeal and the cathedral chapter had ordered Agata Pekantytär to sit on the bench of shame in church, she would not. The Vicar asked for the Court’s opinion. The jury testified that Agata had been very disrespectful (olijdig) whenever she talked about the church punishment, saying ‘she would not submit to it no matter what they tried. She would rather free herself with money, even if it cost her a hundred talaris’.155 Shared representation Once Klemet moved into the Tommila household as Riitta’s husband, he took over most of the role of the head of the household and the responsibilities of the farm. It was his legal responsibility as a husband to represent his wife in court and to oversee her wealth. He had to represent the farm in the local political bodies as well as in taxlike duties of building and maintaining parish property, roads and so on. He had the responsibilities; as a reward, he should also have authority over as well as obedience and deference from his household. Wives could act on their own and represent their households instead of the husband, but usually only temporarily.156 Agata, as the wife’s mother, no longer had formal responsibilities or rights over her daughter or the daughter’s farmstead. Indeed, from the time Klemet and Riitta married, Klemet was always recorded as the head of the household in tax records.157 Court records, too, preferred a man as the public head of both the farm and the household. When Heikki Tuomaanpoika claimed a refund for the Tommila taxes he had paid in 1674, it was Klemet who appeared for Tommila farm.158 Likewise, in 1680 Klemet claimed compensation for a 50-talari horse which had been taken for 9 talaris tax arrears.159 Agata may have attempted to take care of this before, as the regiment scribe was fined 3 mk in 1677 for not showing up to answer her for the compensation of the horse.160 Riitta Matintytär, who had inherited the farm from her grandfather, did not appear again in the court records of Ulvila after the trial for her illicit encounters with Klemet, until the 1700s. Wordings in court records suggest that Agata ran the household’s female – that is, domestic – sphere, not Riitta. Servants are spoken of as Agata’s servants, and so on. Riitta’s absence from public records is striking when compared to Agata’s activity. In public, Riitta’s husband and mother pursued matters which concerned her household; usually her name was not even mentioned. 154 Ulvila 21–23 Jan 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I. KO a4:23. NA. 155 ‘… att hon säger sig intet wilia ändå stå Kyrkioplicht, fast dhe sig hwad företogo med henne Men nog wille hon lösa sig derifrån med penningar om dett än henne skulle kosta 100 dal[e]r’ Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I. KO a4:65v. NA. Cf. Lidman 2002. 156 Pylkkänen 1990, 69–70, 120ff. 157 GRSF Ulvila, draft 1674–1693, 42. NA. 158 See for example Ulvila 23–25 June 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:38v. NA. 159 Ulvila 25–26 June 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:45v. NA. 160 Ulvila 22–23 Jan 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:33v. SRA.

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The concept of family interest, the common good of the household, is often invoked when the will of some family members remains invisible. Individual interests seem to be subjected to it. Analysis of gender division of labour and the co-ordination of activities in households reveals that even those who did not benefit (wives, daughters, and younger sons) acted in accordance with a binding notion of common goals. However, even if the family looked united to outsiders, the situation within the family might be different. The definition of the common good can be contested within the family. Linda Pollock described in 1998 how feminist scholars have used bargaining models to trace the individual interests which constitute the family interest or compete for its status, such as using studies of individual workloads to find out how power to define the family interest is conferred. Cultural and ideological concepts of family, family alliances and rhetorical methods to determine relations of obligation and power have also been invoked.161 Yet, there is little material to show what Riitta’s situation within the family was like. Later on, Riitta appeared in baptismal records as a godmother, which may be seen as an indication of friendly relations and esteemed status.162 She may have been an esteemed person both in Tommila and in the village. No disputes between either mother and daughter or husband and wife ever reached the court. Family strategies can also be seen not so much as collective but rather as overlapping individual strategies drawing on a family culture which is also only partly shared.163 Avoiding public appearances may have been a deliberate strategy; enclosure within the family was beginning to be the ideal female life. Noble and middle-class women in towns were withdrawing from physical work and from the streets and markets to demonstrate their superior status to the working women. Rural, better-off women may have done the same.164 For four years after 1678, Agata did not appear in court in any role, except as included in the village or parish community. During the following years, Klemet twice acted alone for the farm household in court, in 1679 and 1680. Naturally, when everything was all right, no court appearances were needed.165 However, Agata did not relinquish the role of a representative of the household. During the 1680s, Agata appeared in person whenever she conducted business in court. This was not uncommon; many other women did so, too, but it was not the typical course of action. Most women are said to have appeared in person only if directly called to speak – either as witnesses or as defendants – sending first the husbands or some 161 Liu 1994, 13–36; Pollock 1998, 3–21. 162 Godparents are recorded from 1688 onwards. Riitta was recorded as a godmother on 31 January 1693, 12 July 1699 and 9 March 1702 ­– only the last time without her husband. Klemet appears quite often. From the middle of the first decade of the 1700s onwards, the couple’s daughters, Riitta and Marja, and their son Heikki also stood as godparents. Church Records, Pori Baptisms Marriages and Burials II Ba 1–2. NA. 163 Thompson 1997, 43. 164 Wünder 1998, 83. 165 Ulvila 23–25 June 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:38v; Ulvila 25–26 June 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:45v; Ulvila 21–23 Jan 1678. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta I, KO a4:19. NA.

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other representatives.166 During the 1680s, Agata also seems to have been the defendant more often than the plaintiff. It is often said that although women who bore the farmhold responsibilities appear in various Swedish parishes, these responsibilities were usually transferred to a male farmer as soon as possible. It was in many ways difficult for a female farmer to pursue her business; it was impossible to take part in politics of the village, in the parish meeting (pitäjänkokous in Finnish, sockenstämma in Swedish), although often some informal way of negotiation would have to be found.167 Nevertheless, Agata Pekantytär’s court appearances demonstrate that she participated in the broader public arena beyond the the domestic household and the court arena. Agata was present in the tax enrolment of 1682 or 1683, with the result that Jaakko Eeronpoika of Karluoto was taxed for six cows instead of four. Jaakko’s underaged son, Matti, was enrolled for the poll tax, thanks to Agata’s interference.168 During the 1686 poll tax enrolment, Agata had caused Tuomas Sipinpoika’s young farmhand, Antti Sipinpoika, to be included, although he was underage. 169 Her mere presence in the tax enrolment shows that the farmhold responsibilities were not, even officially, so sex-specifically male, as has been thought. Representing the household outwardly in local decision-making allowed her to wield local power and authority. Through her position in her household, she could gain a position of power in the village community. The same is suggested by the record from 1692, which names Agata as one of the guarantors for Matti Martinpoika of Vähärauma. He wished to take over a farmstead he had previously occupied with a couple who had contracted leprosy. It also shows that Agata had access to the household’s resources. Agata and the cooper of Anoila manor guaranteed that Matti would, after the appropriate free years, pay all his taxes. As the guarantors would theoretically themselves be responsible for the taxes, it is worth noting that the district bailiff (vouti, befallningsman) said the two guarantors had the necessary resources, when normally six farmholders were needed. It was Agata who was mentioned, rather than Klemet, although the legal qualification for guarantors was ‘bofasta män­­’, farmholding men.170 In June 1692, Agata demanded repayment of a debt from two men, Juha Matinpoika of Pännäinen and Matti Laurinpoika of Preiviikki. The debts were not big – Juha owed her one copper talari and Matti 23 copper talaris – but they show her ability to extract cash sums of money, whether from her own private property or from the households. On the other hand, Matti Laurinpoika was ordered to pay his debt only ‘according to his abilities, so that he – being poor – would not lose his homestead’.171 166 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 109–14. 167 Perlestam 1998, 18–27; Perlestam 1997. About the legal restraints, see pp. 22–6 and 52–4 and the cited literature, especially Andersson 1998. 168 Ulvila 3–5 July 1683. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180 (422­–v). NA. 169 Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:176. NA. 170 Ulvila, 25 and 27 June 1992. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:254–5. NA. 171 ‘… effter hand och läägenheet att Matti som fattig inte boslystes.’ Ulvila, 25 and 27 June 1692. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:273, 275. NA.

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It can be assumed that the division of labour in the household conferred at least some forms of power on those whose work gave them direct access to economic resources and money. Both Agata and Klemet could obviously command the household resources publicly. Agata may have had her own income, too, but that is not mentioned in the sources. Rather, her standing surety shows that she was counted as a member of the group of heads of farmhold. Klemet, too, seems to have taken an active role in household management, also with respect to female servants. In February 1691, Malin Pentintytär, Agata’s former maid, sued her for the remainder of her year’s wages, as well as for compensation for a fight they had had. Agata did not appear, and was fined for insubordination. By June, Malin had agreed about the compensation with Klemet.172 Three years later, one Marketta Jyrkintytär demanded two sheep, which Agata had retained for a debt of Marketta’s mother. Again the court considered both Agata and Klemet competent to appear for Agata. Since neither was present, Agata was deemed liable to pay Marketta her sheep. If a debt had been taken by Marketta’s mother, Agata should try to get the payment from her.173 Three years later, Agata paid Marketta 12 markkas for the lambs and 4 talaris of what was left of her year’s wages.174 Some conflicts surfaced, however. The soldier equipped by Tommila had died, and his widow, Riitta Tuomaantytär, continued to farm the plot which constituted part of the soldier’s wages. In 1698, Agata sued her for some debts of her husband and the plot of land. However – as an officer from one of the neighbouring farms testified – Klemet had given her permission to use the land and loaned his horse so that Riitta’s husband could fetch Riitta from Häme. Agata denied the agreement. Either Agata did not know about the agreement and it was not discussed within the household before the trial, or she wished to contest Klemet’s agreement. However, the court adjourned to hear Klemet’s testimony. No retrial can be found; the parties probably settled out of court.175 Although Tommila’s seventeenth-century inhabitants seem to have shared their responsibilities in a flexible way, serious information gaps exist. The relationship of authority and obedience between mothers and sons-in-law was to an extent legally stipulated. According to the law, children by blood as well as by law owed deference to their parents. Crimes and violence against parents were severely punished. Children were also responsible for the care of their aged parents.176 Even if retired to syytinki,177 parents could retain the ownership of the farmstead. 172 Ulvila, 21 & 23 Feb. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:42; Ulvila, 4–5 June 1691. AlaSatakunta II, KO a6:261. NA. 173 Ulvila, 4–5. Nov. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:384. NA. 174 Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:124. NA. 175 Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:103–4. NA. 176 Perlestam 1998, 82ff. 177 Syytinki, (Finnish), sytning (Swedish), a contract between the master and mistress of the household and a person who would start working the farm and provide the previous occupants with bed and board. The one starting the farming might get the actual ownership of the farm by means of purchase (in which the syytinki might be part of or the whole of the sum of purhace), or the old couple might retain the ownership of the farm altogether, when it would be presumed that the new farmer might in time inherit the farm. In the latter case, the

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It is evident that Agata and her son-in-law shared the responsibilities of representing the household, publicly as well as privately. This may reflect the status hierarchy at home. Agata Pekantytär even appeared for the farm to answer her late husband’s sister Aune Tuomaantytär about her share of the inheritance.178 One way to look at the relations in the household is as those of authority and obedience, if purely within the household. The husband would govern; the wife would obey. When any outsiders were involved, the relationship would turn into one of companionship or partnership – as in the economic affairs of the family or in relations to neighbours and the village community. Of course, partners may cheat or disagree in marriage as well as in business. Nevertheless, this companionship is what made women competent and valid representatives of the household, at markets for example.179 This is not what we have learned to think of as the informal power which women could have within the privacy of the household, but rather the opposite: legitimate authority in the public sphere. Normally the political and legal spheres were male. However, the household order could change according to situation. The household could choose to use a woman in these roles. It was Agata’s powerful position in her family and household which let her enter the political and legal spheres of the village and parish communities. Envious neighbours: witches to trial In October 1686, Tuomas Sipinpoika, Tommila farm’s neighbour, appealed to the court because Agata had accused him of witchcraft and theft. Agata had had a calf in the woods with the rest of the villagers’ stock, and a bear had eaten her calf. However, Agata thought that Tuomas might have taken it. She asked Tuomas’s maids if the meat tasted good. When the maids claimed they knew nothing about it, Agata called them thieves and witch-maids. The matter seems to have started out as a slander suit to clear Tuomas’s name, but it was soon turned into an investigation of Agata’s character. A maid, who spoke only through a representative, swore she had heard from a neighbour’s wife that Agata rode a calf to Blåkulla, the witches’ sabbat the previous Easter.180 Including a notion of the witches’ sabbat in a witch trial was a rare incident in Finland. Normally, Finnish witch trials were about maleficium and vidskepelse – that is, benevolent magic – both intertwined. Twenty years before, trials about taking children to Blåkulla had sprung up in Dalarna, Göta, Ahvenanmaa and the Swedish-speaking northern Osthrobothnia. The Swedish Blåkulla trials were of the kind of the European crazes. A witches’ sabbat or a feast to honour the Devil was old couple could retain more security and authority in the household, whereas in the former case they might find themselves treated as a burden by the new farmers. These arrangements, however, were not always secure, as shown by the inheritance dispute between Agata and her brothers-in-law. The customs of immediate or later transfer of ownership vary regionally. Perlestam 1998. 178 Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:86 (375v). NA. 179 Pylkkänen 2005. 180 Ulvila 2 and 4­–5 Oct. 1686. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:114. NA.

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held in the Blåkulla, and the witches were explicitly said to have made an oral, sometimes physically sealed, pact with the devil. Currently, anthropologically oriented historians have stated – in line with Eva Pócs as well as some of the 1990s feminist themes – that the Blåkulla stories combined elements from learned demonology as well as popular religion and mental world, parts of which might go as far as pre-Christian or shamanistic notions or travel to the other world. In particular, folkorists working on the nineteenth century (and materials collected by the Finnish Literature Society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to investigate and identify Finnish culture) have emphasised the shamanistic features of Finnish witchcraft.181 My sources do not point towards shamanistic remnants, let alone practising shamans. These materials mention no trance or describe no magical travel to this or another world in any detail. The Blåkulla trials had the potential to expand in the way Trevor-Roperian crazes because one accused named accomplices, an otherwise rare feature in the Swedish and Finnish – and European – witch trials. On the Swedish side, even a special itinerant court was established for the purpose of investigating these panics, with the authority to use torture – something the regular lower courts were not allowed to do without requesting special permission. The panics, however, died down in a couple of years, after which Blåkulla trials became very rare.182 Ulvila was rather far from any of the centres of the panics, but the stories had been heard here, too. According to Nenonen, there were three Blåkulla-related trials in Ulvila. The first had taken place a decade after the actual Blåkulla episodes, in 1677 and when one Riitta Mikontytär and one Tuomas Eeronpoika were accused and acquitted because the whole thing turned out to have been a scary story told to children.183 The second and third cases involved Agata. It suffices here to note that in Agata’s case, too, the stories of Blåkulla and witches flying by night were circulating, more perhaps for entertainment than serious fear. The accusations which were treated as most serious seem to have been those about traditional maleficium. The claims against Agata Pekantytär were taken up again in February 1687. Liisa Pentintytär, wife of the neighbour Juha Eeronpoika Prakari, testified having heard Agata blow a horn on Easter morning a year ago. She had also found both Agata’s and her own calves, lambs and pigs outside the shed. Wolves attacked the same lambs the next summer. However, Liisa denied either having seen Agata ride to Blåkulla or having talked about it to the above-mentioned maid, Kaisa. She had only seen two calves gasping on the ground for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, Liisa claimed that one Riitta Pekantytär had seen Agata and her cattle in suspicious circumstances. Tuomas Sipinpoika’s representative Monsignor Gabriel Pryts, added that Agata had

181 Östling 2002; Eilola 2003, 152. The time span is folkloristic, but it is not my task to explore the possibilities of identifying features of pre-Christian culture from folklore material almost a thousand years younger. 182 Lennersand 2004, 63–5. 183 Nenonen 1992, 301.

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taught a wife in the village how to get cows pregnant and healthier calves of the right sex. The wife’s husband, however, had forbidden the use of magic.184 Agata said her children had blown the horn but claimed there to be no magic art involved, much less witchcraft. She also denied having taught anyone calf magic. The court was willing to believe her. However, pressured by the testimonies of two neighbouring farmers, her son-in-law Klemet Jaakonpoika had to admit having used magic against thistle in the fields. Eventually the court also decided to adjoin both matters until the next court session, although Klemet had already confessed. They were both considered responsible for the witchcraft and magic in the household.185 More witnesses were heard in July. Again, Tuomas Sipinpoika’s representative, Gabriel Pryts, took the matter up as defamation against Tuomas. However, he also brought up the fines for magic Agata had been given in the 1670s. Riitta Pekantytär, who had been absent from the previous hearings, testified that she had met Agata’s cattle out on Easter morning when the ground was still frozen. Agata had addressed her rudely: ‘What the Devil should you lure my cattle!’ or ‘What are you walking here for, go to Hell!’ The question seemed to imply that Agata was trying to prevent Riita from seeing something.186 Agata defended herself and explained that Riitta had been drunk and disturbed her cattle while the cows were drinking – therefore she had told her to go away. As the jury confirmed that Riitta was given to drinking, they chose to believe Agata.187 Monsignor Pryts, who had taken on the task of leading the prosecution, added that Agata had burned Christmas-straws (that is, straws which had covered the floor for warmth and decoration during the Christmas) in a brewing tub and offered a neighbour’s wife help to get calf luck. Agata said she had indeed used Christmasstraws to heat up a new tub, since they could serve no other useful purpose. The jury agreed that this was a common habit. Marketta Matintytär testified that Agata had mentioned a way to get cows pregnant but never offered to teach any magic, nor did she ask Agata to use magic for her.188 Marketta’s husband, the soldier Sipi Antinpoika, added that Agata had advised him to burn some of the common forest for himself to grow crops in – a fairly common way of gaining extra income. Sipi seems to have felt an accusation of laziness here, and he hinted at the damage Agata’s soldier had done when his fire got out of control. Agata had told him that if one walked nine times around the burning area it would not escape. Agata said Sipi had misunderstood her: she had only meant that a carefully watched fire would not break free.189 184 Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:183–5. NA. Wild Beasts were a recurring theme in witchcraft, but as both Agata’s story and TUOKKO 19 show, not all damages by beasts aroused suspicions of witchcraft. 185 Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:183–5. NA. 186 ‘Hwad skulle du din Diefwul dåra min Boskap!’ The verb dåra means literally ‘to lure’ or ‘to charm (into irrationality)’, but could also be interpreted as self-imposing action. ‘Hwad går du här gach till Helfwetit’. Ulvila 11–13 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225­–9. NA. 187 Ulvila 11–13 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. 188 Ulvila 11–13 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225­–9. NA. 189 Ulvila 11–13 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA.

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Having heard all these stories, the court decided that Agata could not be found guilty either of accusing Tuomas of theft and witchcraft or of practising witchcraft herself. All that could be proven – that she heated her beer tub with straws and that she took her cattle out when the ground was still frozen in the spring – was part of common practice. If she did mention supernatural ways to get calf luck, she never told anyone to use them. However, Klemet was fined 40 markkas for his superstitious attempt to get rid of thistle.190 After a year, the Court of Appeal had, as usual, reviewed the court records of the case and, not being satisfied, ordered the case to be reopened. No new evidence could be obtained. Agata said that Sipi must have spoken only out of malice, after Agata accused him of stealing fish from her catches. The juror who lived closest to the village testified that there was an ‘inextinguishable hatred and hostility among the neighbours of the village, and as this Agata understands her household somewhat better than the others, the ill will towards her is so much greater’.191 It is clear that Agata and her neighbours had fallen out badly and for many reasons. The lost cattle and fish of which Agata suspected her neighbour Tuomas Sipinpoika were mentioned in the court hearings. Other disagreements reached court in 1687, and although it is unclear whether these events took place before or after the witchcraft trial began in 1686, they show an accumulation of disputes. During the 1686 poll tax enrolment, Agata Pekantytär had caused Tuomas Sipinpoika’s young servant Antti Sipinpoika to be included, although he was underaged.192 Tax and tithe assessment have not seldom caused enough trouble to lead to court.193 As Agata and Tuomas lived practically shoulder to shoulder in Kyläsaari, it was understandable that Tuomas’s wife, Anna Markuksentytär, had mistaken some of Agata’s hemp for her own when they were drying on the same fence. Agata accused her of theft, but the act was deemed unintentional.194 Marketta Matintytär also appeared in court in 1688 in another case against Agata Pekantytär. She was ordered to pay 12 äyris and some yarn which she owed to Agata. Agata, on the other hand, was ordered to pay for some things she had broken. The record also referred to ‘accusations’, which were to be resolved in the next court session. As the witchcraft case was resolved at that very session – although it was referred to the Court of Appeal again – these accusations seem to concern something else. The disagreements between the women were legion.195 Both now and ten years earlier, envy was mentioned as cause for the accusations, at first as personal jealousy between the rival sisters-in-law, and later more generally throughout the whole village. By the mid 1680s, Agata and the whole Tommila household seem to have been doing well. Agata was, very clearly, putting her nose 190 Ulvila 11–13 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. 191 ‘… een Outhsläckelig hath och fiendskap wara emellan alle grannarne utj bem:t by och som denne Agatha sitt huus häld något bättre än dhe andra förestår är Jllwillian så myckit storre emot henne fattad.’ Ulvila 3–4 and 6–7 Feb 1688. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:58–60. NA. 192 Ulvila 21–3 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:176. NA. 193 Briggs, 1998, 152. 194 Ulvila 21–3 and 25. Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:176–7. NA. 195 Ulvila 3–4 and 6–7 Feb 1688. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:56. NA.

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into other people’s business: she suspected the cattle-raising of her neighbour and undermined his authority by insinuating to his servants that he was a thief. Her neighbour’s wife could not dry hemp in peace. Agata kept telling others what they should and should not do whether or not her advice was wanted. However, the conflicts are not presented as causal or contributory to the accusations or the suspected witchcraft. Not all conflicts in the neighbourhood ended up in court as witchcraft accusations. In fact, this case itself demonstrates that Agata Pekantytär had privately accused Tuomas Sipinpoika of witchcraft, but eventually she had to face trial herself. There must have been other reasons for the suspicion. Although no charges were proven, many in the village were prepared to believe that she had practised witchcraft. Whether they based their belief on her previous reputation as a witch, on her enviable success with her farm, on the general disquiet in the village or on the actual use of magic in the household is irrelevant to the reality of the belief. Two Finnish witchcraft historians, Nenonen and Heikkinen, use the case as an example of the disagreements which can be found behind a witchcraft accusation and as one of the rather few cases when a contact with Satan is included in an accusation. Heikkinen concludes that cases regarding diabolism in Ahvenanmaa and Northern Ostrobothnia were due to the rumours and influence of Swedish Blåkulla trials on one hand and the teaching of demonological theories by the clergy (and in Ahvenanmaa, the local judge).196 Nenonen, on the other hand, emphasises that the diabolism cases remained rare exactly because the demonological theories lacked resonance in the Finnish folklore: this prevented any wider influence of the European demonological theories despite the clergy’s teaching.197 Agata’s trials demonstrate that the populace was indeed quite familiar with the demonological theories by that time, which should come as no surprise, because the panics in Ostrobothnia, Åland and Dalarna had taken place ten years earlier and attracted wide interest. This story shows the ideas of the sabbat, Blåkulla and flying witches circulated in the peasant culture. Similar stories can be found from Ulvila: a decade ago, a Tuomas Erkinpoika was summoned to court to explain how he knew so much about flying witches. He explained that he did not, but that he had told ghost stories to children. A decade later, a bunch of young girls had spun up a story about a flying witch on a broomstick to amuse themselves and to impress some interesting young men. However, even though the sabbat stories were known among the populace, they awoke little interest in the court, both the neighbours and the officials soon wanted to drop them. Instead of taking them seriously, the peasant populace treated them as jokes, as ghost stories for the kids, as gossip which everyone knew as groundless. This also reflects the way everyone in court seemed uninterested in the Devil. If someone had been interested, the Blåkulla-connection would have been the place to start asking questions. No-one did, however. The only time the Devil was even mentioned was as a swearword. Both the neighbours and the officials seemed only interested in practical details of possible harm. 196 Heikkinen 1969, 244–52. 197 Nenonen 1992, 301 and Heikkinen 1969, 326–8. (Nenonen uses trials in 1686 and 1688, Heikkinen uses trials in July 1687 and 1688.)

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The village After the succession of Charles XI to the Swedish throne, the so-called reduktio began. Previous monarchs had donated areas of land to the nobility, who could collect taxes from the peasants who occupied the farms. This resulted in a crown income deficit. The pressure to return the grants and donations back to the crown was considerable. The crucial decisions on a partial and a more complete reduktio were made in 1655 and 1680 onwards.198 Legally, neither the original granting nor the reduktio should have had any effect of the peasant’s hereditary rights on the farmstead, if such existed, but the difference was soon blurred even in the law code. The ownership of land was divided into a right to the produce and a right to the use of the land. In the crown’s ideology, which both the peasantry and the nobility interpreted in their own ways, the king always owned the rights to the produce, paid to him in the form of taxes. The right to use the land from one generation to another belonged to the peasants, if, and only if, they had paid their taxes regularly in full. If not, the crown would assume those rights, too. Whatever the king had, he could transfer to the grantees – and take them back at his pleasure.199 In Ulvila, the greatest grant had been the county of Pori, donated by Queen Christina to Count Gustaf Horn. Gustaf Horn died in 1659, but the county was granted to his widow, Sigrid Bielke, for life. Some of the county’s farmsteads were drawn back to the crown already during the 1670s, and the rest of the county followed after Sigrid Bielke’s death in 1679, so that the taxes from 1681, along with any remaining unpaid taxes from the previous years, were paid to the crown. The farmsteads in Ulvila and Kokemäki were mostly transferred under the admiralty, which collected the taxes from then on.200 The same farmers continued to occupy the farms despite the changes of ownership. Hereditary rights, if not already lost because of unpaid taxes or other dues, were sustained through the reduktio. It has been commonly agreed in Finnish historiography that the grantees rarely resorted to over-taxing or tax farming in the European sense, and that most of the time peasants were not unfairly treated. However, it seems that some grantees sought to acquire the hereditary rights over the farmsteads. The grantees also wanted to build their manor houses on the best places, although they were already occupied by a peasant, who would then be evicted. Taxes could be reassessed although the crown tried to control this. Likewise, the crown could now put the peasants who had lost their hereditary rights in an insecure position: Taxes were reassessed, and land was needed for the purposes of the new military allotment systems, in which soldiers and officers were paid by the gift of a piece of land and certain buildings to live on in peacetime.201 The changes in ownership brought new people to the village. Some of these people changed the social construction of the village, too. In 1689 the admiralty, 198 Halila 1985, 139–41. Katajala 2002, 307–22. 199 Jutikkala 1958, 151–2; Other kinds of (ownership) rights might also pertain to the same pieces of land: Ågren 1992, 17–23. 200 Jokipii 1953, 105–10. 201 Jutikkala 1958, 155, 185–92; Katajala 2002, 260ff, 398–401.

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to which the taxes of Ulvila had been given after the reduktio, sold a rusholli in Kyläsaari to the mayor of Kristiinankaupunki, Elias Gavelius, and by 1691 he had purchased two rushollis.202 Gavelius sold the farm to Corporal Johan Spoff in 1695. He had a tenant farmer, landbonde on the farm, too, and although his sister’s child was born in Kyläsaari in 1698, it is uncertain whether either Gavelius or Spoff lived in the village. His official residence in Vähärauma was occupied by a landbonde, too.203 Juha Eeronpoika Prakari’s farm was purchased by land surveyor Olof Mört by 1695 and turned into a rusholli during the military arrangements of Charles XI. According to the GRSF, Mört lived on the farm himself.204 Mört, Gavelius and Spoff all had a direct influence on village matters. They were landowners, and as such able to participate in the local decisions. The appearances of Spoff and Mört were in some ways similar to Agata’s appearances in the 1670s (excluding the magic trials). They all used the court and the legal machinery to gain power they could not otherwise command. Shortly after acquiring the farmstead, Spoff demanded that his neighbours – especially Klemet Jaakonpoika – should repair their enclosures and ditches.205 Together with Mört, in 1697, he complained that the other villagers started fishing in advance without notifying them.206 These matters would normally be settled outside court. Spoff and Mört’s inability to achieve settlement unofficially shows lack of power in the village. That the village did not include them in its common fishing team is a sign that they were not considered full members of the village community. Another similarity was that they were also all newcomers in their communities. Spoff and Mört had moved into the village from elsewhere, while Agata was a social climber. Mört seems to have moved from the role of plaintiff or respondent in litigation against the other villagers into the role of representative or witness of the other villagers sooner than Spoff, who may have lived outside the village. Agata’s role, too, changed in time: beyond merely settling disputes in court, her appearances started to show signs of authority and representative roles in the village. In 1692, Agata stood surety for Matti Martinpoika, who wished to take over a farmstead in Vähärauma village.207 She also testified for the villagers that a man had been given permission to borrow one of the Kyläsaari villagers’ boats to get over the cove to the town.208

202 Ulvila 4–5 June 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:244­–5. NA. 203      GRSF Ulvila, draft, 1674–1693, 45. NA. Church Records Pori, Baptisms Marriages and Deaths: Baptisms 21.11.1689. NA. Ulvila 4–5. Nov. 1695 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:403–4. NA; Ulvila 12–14. March 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a15:195–205. NA. Lehtinen 1969, 288. 204 GRSF Ulvila, draft, 1674–1693, 45. NA. 205   Ulvila 21–22 May 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:143; 4–5. Nov1695; Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:408–9. NA. 206 Ulvila 9–10 June 1997. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a9:50–51. NA. 207 Ulvila 25 and 27 June 1992. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:254–5. NA. 208 The man had mistakenly taken not one of the Kyläsaari villager’s boats, but another belonging to the Pori toll scribe, who demanded he should be punished for theft. Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:114–15. NA.

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Whereas Agata had been a mere hill-cotter, the newcomers of the 1690s, Gavelius, Spoff and Mört, were of higher social origin than the rest of the villagers. Gavelius was the mayor of Kristiinankaupunki; Spoff was an army officer and Mört a civil official. This was part of a kingdom-wide social reshuffling. The number of lower civil and military officers in Sweden grew markedly during Charles XI’s reign, and the number of persons of what could be termed as half-rank grew. None of the newcomers in the village actually qualified for even the lowest degrees of the Swedish ranking lists, but they were, because of their offices, esteemed higher than the regular bourgeoisie or peasantry. However, there were plenty of such little manors in the nearby villages; the presence of such minor or half-gentry was not new to Kyläsaari villagers, only its proximity to them.209 There had also been cavalry estates in the village through out the century. Tommila was one, and the farm taxed under Oloff Pettersson equipped together with Tuomas Sipinpoika Savo in 1680 was another.210 Their social significance had been great: they had been among the wealthiest farms in the village; usually they are considered high in status, too. However, their occupants were peasants in the purest sense of the word; they were farmers. Although they had tax relief, their exemption was not total, like that of the noble gentry on their säteri manors. The newcomers were different. They stood higher on the social ladder, not least because they were crown officials. Was there a need for these people to distinguish themselves from the rusholli-farming peasants? There is very little evidence of their mingling with the peasantry. Mört stood as a godfather three times for the children of Kyläsaari village.211 He seems to have been socially active in the village. However, Mört’s own children’s godparents were bourgeoisie and officers, usually not from Kyläsaari village. Godparent relationships could even be understood as a form of patronage, bringing advantage and honour to both the godparents and the godchild’s family. Whereas the wealthier and more exalted parishioners often stood as godparents of the less fortunate, the reverse 209 Lehtinen 1967, 118, 92ff.; the ranking list of 1680 included 28 different ranks with cavalry captains and collegial assessors at the bottom. The ranking list of 1714 expanded downwards to include 40 ranks. Inkinen 1953, 210–11. Wirilander 1974, 153ff. 210 Detailed dating of the cavalry estates Lehtinen 1967. Lehtinen claims that the farmsteads that retained their cavalry status through the military arrangements of Charles XI were the same that had been able to retain their status since first obtaining it, without having to give up more or less temporarily in hard times. However, it is clear that some of the cavalry estates were new, like the Prakari estate of Olavi Mört. There is an account of the military arrangements, worthily clarifying the details of establishing new cavalry estates and peasant rotas for recruiting and allotting soldiers in Upton 1998, 71ff. Upton uses the Swedish terms indelningsverk (Jakolaitos, ‘allotment system’), knektehåll and rusthåll. 211 Church Records, Pori: Baptisms, Marriages and Burials: Baptisms 20 Feb. 1692, 1696, 17 April 1702, 12 Feb. 1704, 14 Dec. 1705. NA. In 1692 Mört was godfather to Antti Hannunpoika’s daughter Elisabeth. In 1702 he and his wife witnessed to the baptism of Simo Simonpoika’s daughter Liisa. In 1704 his daughter became godmother to Gothard Baranoff’s son together with a burgher’s daughter Maja Giers. Klemet Jaakonpoika and Reko Sipinpoika of Kyläsaari were godfathers. Klemet even served as Godfather for the above mentioned landfiscal Johan Enholm’s and also Carl Enholm’s children from another village.

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was uncommon. Spoff’s only appearance in the baptismal records was as Mört’s daughter’s godfather.212 There was also the question of language. In in Kyläsaari village, as in the whole of Agata’s story, every time a person’s language can be verified, it is Finnish – until the Swedish official emerge in the village. Some characters may also be assumed to be native speakers of Swedish or at least fluent ones, like the Vicar, the county bailiff and the aristocratic landlords of the village. The Tommila household, as well as most of the peasant households mentioned in the story, can be found in a church seating order of the ‘Finnish parish in Pori’ in 1729.213 Another sign of the language of the household – during the whole story and the whole seventeenth century – is the name of the farmstead: Tommila, which is derived from of Tuomas or Tommi, the Finnish version of the Christian name of Agata’s father-in-law. The name Tommila can be found in the seventeenth-century maps and a 1699 list of fire damages in the village. Tommila always appeared in its Finnish form, with the Western-Finnish ending -la.214 Agata herself spoke Finnish. The court records include a few short notes which verify this. The first one was a fragment of a spell during the sorcery trials in 1676; the maid testified Agata used to say ‘Kohan silmä, Sijan Slmä, Kaikin caloin silmät Minun wirkoin katzokan, nimän Isen ja Pohjan etc’.215 Unlike the rest of the record, the spell was recorded in Finnish. Spells were extremely rarely translated, partly because magic was often defined by ritual words. In another similar fragment from the 1690s, a witness was recalling a conversation he had had with someone about the possibility that Agata had been flying with a broomstick – ‘lieky se ollut Acta’ (‘it probably was Agata’), he was reported to say. Here he gave Agata a different name than the Swedish version: Acta (possibly derived from Akata) or in another point, Acka (possibly pointing to the Finnish word akka, meaning something like a hag). Agata’s son-in-law was also sometimes called Klemet Acka, giving the Tommila household two different, both Finnish names.216 Most of the villagers seems to have been Finnish before the 1690s. When the officials settled in the village in the 1690s, the languages mixed. Despite that, there were Swedish-speaking peasant villages in the parish; those who used Swedish were mostly crown or church officials and the upper bourgeoisie. All correspondence to 212     Church Records, Pori: Baptisms, Marriages and Burials : Baptisms: 21 and 25 Jan. 1698, 17 and 19 Jan. 1700. NA; see for example Klapisch-Zuber 1990, 123–9; Cressy 1999, 157–61. 213 Church Records: Pori II Ba2. NA. There is no page number. List of the 1729 seating order in Pori town church is written down after a list of graves within the church at approximately the same time with other entries of the year. The Kyläsaari men can be found in bench 15. 214 Geometriche Afrijtning Öfwer Inderö ... Anno 1688 af Magnus Bergman. MH: Map book A1B:2. MH. (Original signum BB.3 af Finnlands och Biörneborgs lähn giordt d. 3 Maij 1709) NA; GRSF Ulvila, draft 1674–93, 42–5, 153. NA.; Gustafsson 1933 knows that land surveyor Mört, who moved to the village, came from Sweden. 215      ‘Pike’s eyes, lavaret’s eyes, all fish’s eyes, look into my nets, in the name of the Father and the Son, etc.’ – Ulvila 11–12. Sept 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:53v. SRA. 216 Ulvila 2–4 May 1700, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a14: 518. NA; Ulvila 12–14 March 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a15: 195–205. NA.

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the central government, whether it was located in Sweden or in the Finnish counties, was in Swedish. Other languages, like Russian, Polish and German, were also important. Language could come to signify access to power, and it already often signified superior social status. It also became another factor which separated the newcomers from the rest of the villagers and showed their different social standing – and possibly caused some stirring in the way people saw and expressed the village social hierarchy. Attitudes towards upstarts were, towards the eighteenth century, generalising and negative. Climbing too fast too high on the social ladder was in itself suspicious, and climbers were considered to lack the traditional estate qualities. By the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a desire to prevent persons of lower rank from emulating their superiors’ lifestyle when their economy permitted it.217 This may have worked both ways in the village: the newcomers wished to separate themselves from the peasant villagers, and the established, older peasant villagers looked on them with suspicion. Total segregation, however, was no more desirable than possible. The village rushollis also expanded to include their former augments or other farms of the village. Whereas a map drawn for the purposes of the reduction in 1688 included nine houses (i.e., farming houses, crofters or hill-cotters were not included), only seven farms were mentioned when the village jointly applied for help after a great fire in 1699. Some farms merged, like Tommila and its neighbour Rieskala.218 There were two sides to this development. On the one hand, a wealthier middleclass group gradually emerged in the villages. On the other hand, the number of landless workers and servants, as well as hill-cotters and crofters or soldiers on the crofts, grew in proportion to the landholders of the village. This has been thought of as part of the early modern crisis. However, it actually seems that the amount of landless poor did not grow to an extent which would have marked the actions and relationships of the farmers, at least not before the extremely bad harvests in the whole country during the years 1696 and 1697, which led to famine. Kyläsaari survived the famine fairly well, probably because it was off the main road and could avoid some of the contagious diseases spread by beggars wandering in search of food. The burial records mention only one Kyläsaari farm.219 Death, however, was not the only consequence of the poor harvests. The court records for summer 1697 show a number of petty crimes which may reflect the preceding hunger: people confess to having stolen ‘3 kappas flour and 20 loaves of bread with some linen during the last winter’ or small amounts of ‘dried meat, some wool and herring’.220 Farmers found it impossible to pay their taxes, but they were 217 Wirilander 1974, 372–5. 218 Geometriche Afrijtning Öfwer Inderö ... Anno 1688 af Magnus Bergman. MH: Map book A1B:2. MH. (BB.3 af Finnlands och Biörneborgs lähn giordt d. 3. Maij 1709) NA.; Ulvila 26–8. June 1699, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13:546–8; Ulvila 11–13. Sept. 1699, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13:591–600. NA. The records claim that all houses and other buildings in the village except one were burnt down, naming the six petitioners and the one farm that escaped the fire. GRSF Ulvila , draft, 1694–1713, 95, 97. NA. 219 Church Records, Pori vol. Ba 1–2. Lists of burials. 220 Ulvila 9–11 June 1697. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a9:38, 41. NA. The former case was a theft from Agata’s brother-in-law Jaakko Eeronpoika Karlöö, who moved from

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often given extra time. Some still could not make it. The poorest persons were in the worst situation. Nevertheless, as altogether a third of the population seems to have died in Finland, there was much less competition for the farms. Even though the population had no chance of reaching the previous numbers again before the Great Northern War (1700–1721), it seems that daily life normalised much sooner. The growing segregation caused an uneasy situation in which risers and fallers could repeatedly come into conflict. It also put old peasant rusholli farmers into a new position: they were not really part of the new gentry and their position at the top of the community was at risk. Nor were they part of the rest of the peasantry. To Tommila owners, this might have made it important to disassociate themselves from and re-establish their power position towards the rest of the villagers – and especially the landless villagers. This may have a part to play in the quarrels with servants and soldiers in the 1690s. Agata Pekantytär as the reputed witch Gossip We have already seen how important gossip was in the village community. It circulated old and produced new information and – perhaps more importantly, provided a way of promoting the sense of community. Heretofore Agata may have seemed like a victim of gossip. She could, however, be on the other end of the chain, too. In October 1698, a Matti Tuomaanpoika Lusa of Pännäinen appealed to clear his wife, Valpuri Sipintytär, of the rumours that she had flown with a broom, allegedly to the witches’ sabbat. Matti demanded punishment for his neighbour, Olavi Juhaninpoika. Olavi said, however, that he had not initiated the rumour but heard of it from Heikki Matinpoika, a soldier from Vähä-Rauma. Heikki claimed he heard about it from Agata Pekantytär of Kyläsaari, who had been talking about it with Elsa Heikintytär, wife of the Pori Toll Scribe. According to Heikki, the wife of the bailiff in Yyteri manor, Marketta Heikintytär, overheard their discussion. Marketta confirmed that she had also heard about the flying from Mikko Pekanpoika, Lusa’s son-in-law, who was serving as a bailiff on Pännäis manor.221 Agata and Elsa at first both denied having spread the rumour, saying that it had started from Pännäis manor, where Miss Maria Klööf and three maids had started it.222 The four young women came to testify during the summer of 1700. They had had fun on Shrove Tuesday, sledge-riding with other young people. On their way home, they had decided to amuse themselves at the expense of an old woman, a servant’s widow. They tapped on the window of her cabin trying to scare her, but went away when she recognised them. Afterwards they went into the manor’s scribe’s cabin to brag about their success to the men there: they had ‘frightened the woman so badly, she would Kyläsaari to Preiviikki. The latter was a theft committed by Sipi Antinpoika in Kyläsaari, the soldier who had testified against Agata during the 1680s witchcraft trials. 221 Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11: 102–3. NA. 222 Ulvila 6–8 March 1699. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13: 92–4. NA.

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not pay half äyri for her life’. A juror had been to Pännäis to summon the young women to court. He had met there a male servant, who said the girls had also seen someone ride a broom. It turned out he had heard this from Lusa’s son-in-law, Mikko Pekanpoika, to whom the girls had been talking in the scribe’s room. When asked again, the girls said that they had indeed told Mikko about a witch riding a broom, but they had never known who it was or might have been. Mikko tried to guess who it might have been. His guess, however, had not been Valpuri, but Agata.223 Someone had passed on their conversations until Yyteri manor bailiff’s wife Margeta Mölser heard about it and told it to Agata, who then passed it on to Elsa Heikintytär. Only at some point, Agata’s name in the story was replaced with Valpuri’s. The guess everyone made was that Agata had changed the name of the witch.224 At one more court session, after more than 22 pages of court records and probably a considerable expenditure of everyone’s time and money, both Valpuri and Agata were declared free of all charges. However, even if Agata was not held responsible for initiating the rumour and was not to be punished for it, she was nevertheless ordered to pay Matti Lusa’s expenses.225 Magic and witchcraft seem to have been a constant presence in Agata’s life. In all her subsequent witchcraft or magic trials, the previous trial was also spoken of. However, the memory of past suspicion, even of past conviction most often did not lead to conviction. Witchcraft was also a constant presence in the parish in general. There were 12 charges of magic or witchcraft in Ulvila between 1674 and 1681, seven between 1682 and 1692, and four between 1693 and 1698. Many of them were heard in more than one court session.226 Some of those involved may have been familiar to Agata, even though no connection between them can be established. At least three other sets of charges concerned her acquaintance. During three court sessions during the years 1691 and 1692, Jaakko Eeronpoika Karlö charged his former male servant and neighbour Matti Laurinpoika in Preiviikki of harming his household and cattle by magic arts or witchcraft. The neighbours responded with similar accusations.227 The childhood family of Aune Pertuntytär, Agata’s enemy in the 1670s and her sister-in-law, was entangled in witchcraft trials both during the early 1680s and again over several years in the 1690s. Aune’s father, Perttu Laurinpoika, and her sister, Maria Pertuntytär, accused Maria’s son-in-law, Heikki Jankkari, of having 223 Ulvila 2–4 May 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14: 512–21. NA. 224 Ulvila 2–4 May 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14: 512–21. NA. The story is curiously similar to those retold by Favret-Saada 1977. 225 Ulvila 14–15. Sept. 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14:757–62. NA. Again, the matter was referred to the Court of Appeal, but no record of it survives. 226 Nenonen 1992, 105. If the numbers in this table (p. 105) are compared to Nenonen’s list of trials on pp. 405–10, it is evident that the table is drawn according to charges – one charge can be dealt with during more than one court session, but is still counted as one by Nenonen. 227     Ulvila 19–21 Oct. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:530–31; Ulvila 7–9. Jan. 1692. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:12–13; Ulvila 25–27. June 1692 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:270–273; Ulvila 10–11. Oct. 1692 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:471­3. NA.

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killed Maria’s son, Mikko, by means of witchcraft. As often, accusations flew in both directions, also Heikki accused Maria.228 Aune did not live in the house at the time, but some of the people who did had also appeared at Agata’s trials in the 1670s. Risto Olavinpoika, who had himself been charged during the 1680s, was also embroiled in the latter trials. His old charges were taken up separately, and he had to obtain five co-swearers. As he, too had been suspected of harming Mikko Sawo, it is worth noting that a servant and a soldier employed by Perttu Laurinpoika Sawo were among them.229 Again, this story shows the general lack of seriousness with which the idea and stories of the witches’ sabbat was treated. For the girls it was a play. Witchcraft and witch trials were part of everyone’s life, in one way or another. As many scholars have noted, the contemporaries had to find witchcraft – and charges of it – credible, otherwise court action would not have been possible. And although they treated stories of flying witches and the witches’ sabbat as jokes, everyday magic was for them real, and they encountered it daily. Old age Agata Pekantytär does not seem to have appeared in court again after Valpuri Sipintytär’s witchcraft case was settled.230 Klemet managed the farmstead’s affairs until 1709 or 1713, when his son took over. He appeared when necessary, but not enthusiastically. Between 1700 and 1707, he appeared five times: twice regarding the village’s illegal fishing, twice regarding the hiring of servants and once regarding an illegal cottage built on the village common.231 While Valpuri Sipintytär’s witchcraft case was underway, Tommila inhabitants faced even more drastic, immediate difficulties. On 31 March 1699, a fire broke out in Corporal Spoff’s bakery, destroying six of the seven farms in the village. The village applied for help from the community to rebuild. The extent of the damage was assessed for the application, but, as the houses consisted of various small buildings, it is difficult to say how much was left. The greatest damages were assessed in Spoff’s and the Tommila rushollis. Spoff lost buildings and furniture worth 324 talaris, and other things worth 120 talaris. 311 talaris worth of Tommila’s buildings burnt down, 228      Ulvila 3–4. Feb. 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:21v–22; 3–5. July 1683. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:185–6 (425–v); Ulvila 17–19. June 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180–181; Ulvila 18–20. Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:433–5; Ulvila 12–13. March 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:35–7; Ulvila 16–18. June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5; Ulvila 23 and 25. Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta II, KO a11:29–33. NA. 229 Ulvila 4–5. Nov 1695, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:368. NA. 230    Ulvila court records 1700–1707. Selinheimo claims to have found her in sources from 1707, but does not give any details where, and I have not been able to trace the record. 231     Ulvila 12–14 March 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a15:195–205; Ulvila 13–14. March 1702 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a16: 263–4; Ulvila 13–14. March 1702 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a16: annotation list only; Ulvila 23–24 Sept 1703 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a19: annotation list only; Ulvila 7 and 9 Oct 1705. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta II, KO a22:426–8v. NA.

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and 133 talaris worth of other goods was lost. Tuomas Sipinpoika Savo suffered extensively, too, with altogether 190 talaris in real estate damage and 50 talaris in movable goods. Other houses, however, seem to have fared a little better: Mört only lost three sehds, together with 59 talaris and some cattle feed. The rest of the villagers suffered damage similar to which sustained Mört.232 They were given fire help. How the rebuilding of the village went is difficult to determine. The following year the parish asked for assistance from Kokemäki parish to provide fire assistance to another village, because the assistance to Kyläsaari had been so hard on them.233 In 1703 it was uncertain whether Spoff had ever collected his assistance.234 In September 1700, a year-and-a-half after the fire, the farmer Agata had stood as guarantor for in Vähä-Rauma had run away from his farm without much intention of paying his taxes. The sureties were not questioned, nor did the court order anything to be paid, but neither were there new arrangements because of the changed situation of Agata and Tommila.235 For the following seven years, Kyläsaari farmers seldom appeared in court. In 1701 Tuomas Sipinpoika and Johan Riutta had hired a soldier, who had at the same time let himself be hired by another farmer in another village.236 In 1703, Landfiscal Enholm had hired a farmhand who already worked for Martti Martinpoika of Kyläsaari. They agreed about compensation for Martti.237 A man charged with adultery had also hired himself out to be Mört’s soldier. Therefore Mört, too appeared in the case.238 In 1705 five farmers of the village were fined for illegal fishing in the crown’s fishing areas. Klemet Jaakonpoika testified against the rest of the villagers.239 Agata did not appear in person. Agata’s age could well have made her reluctant to go through the trouble of going to court. The fact that she disappeared from the poll tax records in 1694 and did not move away means that she was considered no longer able to work.240 For a considerable while this did not affect her social position and power. However, it is likely that as her activities diminished, so also did her influence. We do not know if something happened to Agata, if she moved away, if she retired to syytinki, if she fell ill or when she died. Just as Agata’s story had no beginning, it has no end. The story simply fades out.

232 Ulvila 26–28 June 1699. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13:546–9. Ulvila 11–13. Sept 1699, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13:591–600. NA. 233 Ulvila 29–31 Jan 1700: Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14: 55–64. NA. 234 Ulvila 25–27 Feb 1703. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a18:167. NA. 235 Ulvila 14–15 Sept. 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14: 736–40. NA. 236 Ulvila 8–9 July 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a15:733–34. NA. 237 Ulvila 26–27 June 1703. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a18:590–91. NA. 238 Ulvila 26–27 June 1703. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a18:584–7. NA. 239 Ulvila 7 and 9 Oct. 1705. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a22: 426–8v. NA. Ulvila 12–14. March 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a15: 195–205. NA. 240 GRSF Ulvila, draft, 1694–1713, 96. NA.

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The story of a powerful woman? The social and legal situation of women in this story seem markedly different – and better – than those in other European countries. Agata’s story is the story of a strong woman who could and would pursue her own goals in public and private. She can be described as a winner, a fighter who could take one more blow and still get up again; even defeated, she would not be subdued, but she would get up and – rather obstinately, it seems – try again another way. It is really not so much a story of the good or bad social, legal and economic conditions for women, but rather about getting around them. Agata was not the only woman of her kind. This story is full of competent women, capable of running their affairs and their lives. Elisabeth Johansdotter took over her late husband’s businesses, and Agata’s sister-in-law, Aune Pertuntytär, used her connections to mobilise the whole village against Agata. There were also many competent women who acted much less publicly, such as Agata’s other sister-in-law, Riitta Tuomaantytär, who managed her inheritance herself. Many competent women seem to have had influence in and beyond the domestic sphere through less formal means, never ending up in court. Widows had the greater legal responsibilities, but the Swedish wife was not under couverture, nor did she necessarily have a secondary legal or social position. In fact, their formal and informal participation in the village and parish community and its management seems vital. However, there were also less assertive and perhaps less successful women in this story. Agata’s own daughter, Riitta, was forced to marry by her own mother, and she seems to have remained equally submissive throughout her marriage. Was she intimidated by the way she entered into married, adult life? She was mentioned in the court records only once after this: a litigation record in 1702 shows Klemet Jaakonpoika of Kyläsaari claimed that his wife had engaged a male farmhand, but the farmhand claimed that the sum of money handed over was not hiring money but regular wages for his last year’s work. Riitta was shown to be capable in her own domestic sphere, working in agreement with her husband, but not much more of her later life is known.241 There were also poor women and widows, scraping together a living from what was left of their husband’s land and money, fighting for a right to use the bits and pieces of land which had belonged to their soldier-husband’s wages, and so forth. Agata was in the same situation in the early 1670s – these women did not have the means to change that situation. It was not only a question of abilities; other resources had to exist and be available. People have histories and expectations which influence the way their current positions and abilities are assessed. Agata was not immediately considered capable of running a big and wealthy farm, but eventually she came to be considered a farm owner in her own right, with many of the political rights enjoyed by landowning men. It was not her gender or her birth that determined her place. John Demos has suggested that mid-life – roughly between 40 and 60 – was the time when the exercise of power usually became central to personal experience. Wealth, prestige and responsibility typically reached their zenith in these decades; while this was 241 Ulvila 13–14. March 1702. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a16:263–4. NA.

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most obviously true for men, it was bound to affect women as well.242 Even Agata, though widowed, conforms to this ideal. Her example also shows that the women accused of witchcraft were not the most vulnerable ones. Rather, it seems that power and status were the main questions which could lead to suspicion if considered illegitimate or misused. Witchcraft also had to do with personal histories. In Agata’s story, suspicions of witchcraft were a product of her unexpected success in claiming the farm, and also of her jumping from the role of a hill-cotter to that of a farmer. Witchcraft is about inversion. Uncertainty of social positions could naturally cause such suspicions. Although Robin Briggs claims that European witches were too poor to conform to Carol Karlsen’s findings in New England – that women who inherited landed property, especially if they had no brothers or sons, were most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft – Agata’s trials may have had similar origins.243 Later on, witchcraft suspicions arose from her reputation: she had been convicted before, and she had herself confessed. Reputation and the memories of people around her led to her being accused in court and in gossip, but they could not lead to her being convicted again. Witchcraft and the suspicions, gossip and trials about it, were all essentially a part of the peasant culture – not elite acculturation. Witchcraft was part of the peasant vocabulary of good and evil, the accepted or the rejected ways of working and living and, finally, of social hierarchy. In the same way, it seems that a good part of what has been seen as the central government’s initiative is also inextricably linked to the peasant farmers’ strategies of keeping their households and farms as viable as possible and providing for their families as well as possible. This is also why it makes sense, after all that is said about the growing importance of patriarchal order and rhetoric in times of social change, that Finnish farmers’ wives and widows had an ample scope of action in the interests of the household and farmstead. The peasantry shared with the rulers the quest to ensure the success of one’s own family. Sometimes the immediate aims were conflicting, but they were equally essential in defining the early modern society.244

242 Briggs 1998, 264; Demos 1982. 243 Briggs 1998, 174; Karlsen 1989. 244 Cf. Hartman 2004, 243ff.

Chapter 3

Witches and Power Whereas the early modern neighbours of accused witches saw themselves as victims of witchcraft, modern readers of history often see the accused witches in witch trials as the victims. In the way set out by already the Enlightenment, the witches were still looked down upon, not because they were considered evil but because they were so poor in standing up for themselves. Modern readers often think that witches were economically poor, badly educated, elderly and lonesome women who could not defend themselves and had no one to do it for them. Even when historians spell out in detailed studies that the witches were none of these things, the information does not seem to alter the notion that they were poor creatures, frightened and helpless in the face of an inescapable, terrible fate. As victims, they had no power. The witches were feared, however, as is clearly visible from source materials of all kinds. To make sense of the dissonance between being feared and being helpless, Jim Sharpe develops Jill Dubish’s term (female) ‘negative power’ or the ‘power to make trouble’, which witches and scolds used. As witchcraft and magic were criminalised, accusations offered a channel to level such power, and they could be assessed either in court or in rumours. Both were forms of communal usage of power through the continuous assessment of other people. Gossip especially was an informal arena with no spoken rules, open to women even when they did not have access to the public courts. Using the legal system to counteract the witches’ attempts was certainly a more acknowledged, less illegitimate and perhaps less negative way to wield power. Still, it relied heavily on similar exploitation of social ties and the power of evil words: slander and gossip. The farmers and their wives knew how to combine the two informal forms of power, gossip and witchcraft, and used them effectively. The very terms gossip and witchcraft also served to make most women’s power seem illegitimate and negative, because they were the only words available to describe the power and influence which women had, and the terms themselves were negative and diminutive by definition. That still does not spare the witches from being victims of religious bigotry, ignorant superstition or evil human nature which drove the witch trials. Must we see the witches, and possibly the women with them, as victims only?

 On the development of the theme of the victim, see for example Toivo 2007a.  Sharpe 1997, 184–5. The exercise of power through gossip is presented in Spacks 1986, (esp. pp. 172, 208, 226) and Deal 1998.

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Poor or powerful people? The first thing to consider when deciding whether or not the witches were victims is their social and economic standing. The social standing of persons who appeared in the court records once or twice is often difficult to determine. Men and women are generally recorded only by their name, patronym and home village. In the case of women, there is often, but not always, a note that they were wives or widows. Sometimes their husbands are named. I have endeavoured to establish the status of the actors in the story from tax records or the General Register of Settlement in Finland (GSRF). Some farmers can be found fairly often, others more rarely. Usually the status of the actors becomes apparent when the persons are followed over a period of time. Regardless of method, it is more difficult to find information about women than about men. The tax records were only interested in taxes, that is, the area under cultivation and the number of working adults in the household. The male farmer was enough to identify the farm. That was the main interest of also the scholars who collected and arranged the information in the GRSF. The rest of its inhabitants may have been recorded by their first names or as numbers only: such as one wife, two daughters, one son with his wife, and so on. Servants’ names were given even less often, and sometimes the farmers tried to hide their actual number, too. In the court records, the term wife could include married and widowed women whose husbands might be farmers or town burghers but also soldiers and workers. Following up on women can be considerably more difficult than following up on men, since women appear more infrequently in court. In both the control-view and the interaction view of the peasant-elite relationships, it is assumed that the proportion of elite officials increased in the court action, especially in the initiative roles of plaintiffs, as the court system turned into a more inquisitorial one. Some scholars think this increased the possibilities of interaction, as the elite actors also served as an information channel for the central government. Others think that the lower courts were being taken over by local government and officials, thus the lower courts went from being part of the peasantry’s arena to being a tool of the crown during the seventeenth century. Although certain cases increasingly attracted the attention and action of the authorities – cases of witchcraft and vidskepelse (meaning ‘benevolent magic’ or ‘superstition’), and of fornication, tax evasion and other failure in duties towards the crown – Agata’s story was dominated by the peasant farmers, and the proportion of elites remains small. The action in court remained an important characteristic of the peasant society. The classical assumption of the poor witches starts with the Enlightenment writers, and goes from Rossel Hope Robbins and Hugh Trevor-Roper to the excellent work of Lyndal Roper or Robin Briggs – all of whom work on qualitative approaches and on often highly visible case materials. This view is prevalent in generalisations

 Koskinen 2002. The GRSF started with the idea of tracing family lineages of stable farm ownership. It turned out such stable lineages did not exist, but the material is still useful for other purposes.

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by non-witchcraft historians, especially in gender-oriented textbooks. The opposing view, that in fact the witches were of average wealth and social standing, has been proposed by those whose work takes quantitative approaches, such as Marko Nenonen, Wolfgang Behringer and Malcolm Gaskill.  It is also true that often the witches were described as poor, ugly beggars or as having other unproductive and shaming or pitiable qualities, because that was the rhetoric which was used in the trials. When, however, the historian goes deeper into finding out who these accused witches were, they turn out to be quite average or even wealthy persons. Currently, many historians all over Europe and the New World emphasise that those accused of witchcraft were socially and economically average folk. They were not the richest or most powerful members of any community, and they were not elites – they were seldom noble, and only sometimes clergy. Neither were they the very poor or helpless; seldom were they crippled or chronically ill; only sometimes were they beggars. Wealth and poverty are relative terms, and there is a lot of the middle ground between the very poor and the very rich. Most of the time, peasant farmers struggled up and down somewhere in the middle, and the village witches fell in this category. It is generally acknowledged that in the Swedish rural courts, much as in Agata’s story, the actors consisted mostly of peasant farmers. Whether they dominated the action or were dominated by other actors, has been the subject of historians’ debates. The part played by the rest of the allmoge, common folk, has received considerably less attention. Their proportions, if they received attention, have been concluded to be small. Accordingly, peasant farmers and their wives form the largest social group in all roles in the rural courts of law.  Along with peasant farmers, some other groups appear to have had significant roles. In the 1670s, gentry and local government did indeed take considerable initiative in religious crimes and fornication. They acted as plaintiffs or petitioners and as witnesses, but not as defendants. It seems that Vicar Archtopolitanus thought it his duty to preside over his flock’s interests in even greater detail, as he even pursued property quarrels for his parishioners.10 Archtopolitanus’s followers, however, seemed less eager, although it may just be that the individuals in this story  Robbins 1959 and Trevor-Roper 1969; Roper 1998, 229 and Roper 2004 or Briggs 1998, 87, 96, for generalisations see for example Wiesner 2002 or Meade & Wiesner-Hanks 2004.  See Nenonen 1992, 201–17; Behringer 1998, 90–91; Gaskill 1998, 263–5; and Levack 2006.  Levack 2007.  Österberg 1987; Ylikangas 1988; Österberg 1989; Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, and so on.  Quantitative studies of court action include Sundin 1992; Andersson 1998; Aalto 1996; Karonen 2001; Ylikangas 2001.  The options for using the court system to control bailiffs and other officials was an important part of the modernisation of the judicial system. Österberg 1989; Katajala 2002. It is not, however, statistically visible in this material. 10 For example, in the beginning of Agata’s story, Archtopolitanus brought the matter of who was to get the cap and a jacket after Agata’s late mother-in-law. Ulvila 20–21 June 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:92. SRA. Usually the church and crown officials’ interest did not go quite this far. Archtopolitanus died around 1680.

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did not seek help. During the 1690s, there was an increase in the number of minor gentry and officials in all roles. This was due less to changes in the activity of the authorities than to the increase in the overall number of lower officials and minor gentry in the parish and especially in Agata’s village.11 Servants, soldiers and hill-cotters appeared in modest numbers in all roles (little more often as witnesses). This is easily explained by the nature of the court cases. Most of the cases concerned farmers. Other members of the community did not have the need or the capacity to participate in such matters. Most often servants and soldiers acted as witnesses. The servants were usually involved in disputes with their masters over wages or breaches of contract. In most of these cases, the other party was a farmer; that is also true in cases involving sexual offences, although fornication was often committed by landless people.12 Despite the gradual professionalisation of the courts, many servants sued their employers for wages, and many farmers sued crown officials for misuse or negligence of their profession and neighbours for all possible reasons – both more and less successfully. It seems that servants were well aware of their rights and how to pursue them, especially regarding wages. So were their masters, who most often succeeded in cases in which servants left in the middle of the agreed period of time or did not show up for work at all. Obviously, a servant, who was most likely suing for his or her wages, needed detailed knowledge of fewer kinds of cases than did a responsible farmer who needed to know not only the wages but also, for example, the rights and responsibilities regarding enclosures, pasturing of cattle, building roads and so on.13 Yet, matters between hired labour and masters seem to have been settled first and foremost outside the court. This is quite congruent with the fact that disagreements within a family or household were kept and resolved within the household for as long as possible. Disagreements among the landless folk seem to have been settled outside 11 Lehtinen 1967, 114–23. 12 Aalto 1996; Pylkkänen 1990; Miettinen 2003; Ulvila 12–13 Oct. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:106v–107. SRA; Ulvila 18–20 Oct 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2; Ulvila 14-15 and 17 September 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:282–3( new page number:166v–7). NA. See other stories in Ulvila 16–17 Sept. 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a15: 2–4 where the farmer’s son had seduced a maid servant; Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:376 where a farmer had seduced a maid servant; Ulvila 22–23 Sept. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II KO a2: 241–2 a couple had fornicated twice and wanted to marry, but their child had been born too early, which brought up the question whether or not their first time had occurred when her previous husband was still alive – fornicators could marry but not adulterers. A similar case on the other direction was Ulvila 14–17 Sept. 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a3: 261–6 where a married woman had had sex with a man other than her husband, but as her husband had deserted her years ago and fled to Ostrobothnia and reputedly engaged another woman there, the judge and jury wondered whether the matter should be treated as adultery or fornication. They decided to fine everyone and fetch the husband to be tried. 13 See, among others, Ulvila 14–16 Feb. 1682. Ala-Satakunta II. KO a2:55 (86); Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683 Ala-Satakunta II KO a1: 67 (366). Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683. AlaSatakunta II. KO a1: 77 (371) NA.

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the court as well. The role of defendant was the most clearly peasant-dominated, whereas the other social groups spread over the rest of the roles. In contrast to the image of the poor and helpless witches, many historians have found that, in many areas, the average witches on trial, as well as accusers and witnesses, were of the relatively average and middling sort of rural farmers or townspeople instead of the very poor. Finland is a case in point here, but other European and New World communities seem similar. Sometimes the average farmer in Finland, as well as in some other places, resorted to temporary begging to supplement his farming income after a bad harvest or some other failure, and sometimes these begging farmers were accused of witchcraft in more or less the same manner as beggars elsewhere in Western Europe. In Finland, temporary begging, however, did not necessarily have a lasting effect on someone’s social status, nor did the loss of tax-paying ability, because social mobility was still flexible and new opportunities were expected to be available.14 There is nothing surprising in the fact that the Finnish and Swedish witches on trial came from socially average backgrounds. It turns out that these were, in general, also the sort of people who appeared in court anyway. But for the Swedish farmers, court action was a form of authority, a legitimate way to influence the accepted order. The fact that a considerable number of accused witches were also freed elsewhere in Europe suggests similar circumstances. Therefore, there is no need to speak of negative power, power to cause trouble or power in the absence of authority as suggested by Sharpe. Being a party in the court of law, even in a witchcraft trial, already presumes the participants’ authority. The trials cannot be treated as destroying the social honour, status and authority of the accused. Nevertheless, witchcraft by definition is about power and influence. Women between kin and state The view that witchcraft persecution was essentially directed against women was part of a view that women’s position in society in general was deteriorating from the late Middle Ages towards industrialisation. This has been, until the last decade, the most prevalent among the three ways of interpreting the history of women or gender in early modern Europe. The view has emphasised the development of a structural, systematic subordination of women under the impact of the Reformation and the developing central government.15 The women’s deteriorating position after 14 Rummel 1985; Karlsen 1986, whose explanation rests on the witches landed property; Sharpe 1997; Nenonen 1992: 202–17; Gregory 1992; Behringer 1998: 90–91; Gaskill 1998: 263–5 (and Favret-Saada 1977 on later periods); Nenonen 2007. See however, a very different interpretation by Roper 1994, 229 for Augsburg and by Briggs 1996, 87, 93 for areas in France. Poverty is a relative term, as is illustrated by the Finnish beggar-farmer-witches. One of them was a Walpuri Kyni, who went around begging and still was said to have kept a maidservant or at least a young girl to work for her temporarily. See Åbo Tidningar 18 May 1795. 15 For example, Lawrence Stone, Lyndal Roper and Gerda Lerner could be classified here, as well as the Scandinavian works of Marja Taussi-Sjöberg and Maria Sjöberg (1996, 2001). Taussi-Sjöberg (1996, 84) writes that the question of better or worse status for women is incorrectly posed. It is clear in her writings that subordination as such is much more important to her.

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something which could almost be called a ‘golden’ medieval period has been seen as a part of the general tightening of the living conditions and cultural or social control during wartime, climatic change and state-building in Europe – things which have been emphasised by many historians, though not unanimously.16 In Swedish and Finnish scholarship the discourse on the power state and the demands set by the military efforts have been central to this line of argument. Local power was channelled for the use of the rulers by the creation of a judicial system – in Sweden this meant taking control of the local courts. In addition to the previous crimes concerning the interests of individuals in local communities, abstract crimes against the ruler, the state and the religion would emerge. These were crimes which seemed to undermine the newly established power, but the prosecution of those crimes also enhanced the influence of the judicial system. The Swedish and Finnish historians’ application of theories, the power state interpretation, emphasises that the state’s new grip on the peasantry was necessary to muster the country’s very limited resources for the constant wars of the seventeenth century. State formation and the necessary uniformity was achieved and maintained by coercive judicial and military forces. The control of the crown reached the daily lives of the peasantry. The Protestant and Catholic reformations are thought to have been part of and enhanced this process, in the service of the crown.17 This is exactly how Taussi-Sjöberg, for example, sees the development: According to her, the state control in judicial system meant that the peasant farmers lost practically all access to any power at the end of the seventeenth century. She claims that peasant farmers stopped appearing as plaintiffs when the state official invaded that role. Consequently, the farmers lost the opportunity to pursue their interests. Civil action stops, claims Taussi-Sjöberg, and criminal cases changed their nature, when they were pursued to advance the crown’s interests. For women, Taussi-Sjöberg claims, the state control of the judicial system left no place to handle domestic disputes, and women’s position in general became too weak to allow them to pursue their own interests.18 The above view has been contested from the beginning. Currently there is also a reverse line of thinking more in terms of an improvement of women’s position from the Middle Ages until a drop at the nineteenth century, and which suggests that historical development was neither uniform throughout Europe for all social groups or civil statuses, nor heading towards the same direction at all times.19 As I have explained, the peasant farmers continued to dominate the court arena at the end of the seventeenth century. As Agata’s story makes clear, the peasant farmers and their wives used the court arena for their own advantage and on their initiative. The same applies to women. No clearly marked deterioration or lack of room for popular action (of the sort suggested by Taussi-Sjöberg or Ylikangas) can be seen in the court 16 See critique by Nenonen 2007a. 17 Weber, 1978, 901–4; Elias, 1994, (German original 1939); see also Muchembled, 1985, 269 (original in French, 1978). On the Marxist standpoint, see summaries by Kujala 2003, 16­18 and Nenonen 2007a. 18 Taussi-Sjöberg 1996. 19 See for example Österberg 1997 or Stadin 1997 for good overviews.

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records. If one should look at cases of fornication and witchcraft, they most often seem to have originated among the peasantry and touched men and women alike. Marital discord belonged, at this time, to church courts and the cathedral chapter, to which such cases were turned if they appeared in secular courts. This explains why there were so few of such cases in secular courts.20 Pylkkänen generalises that in Finland and Sweden, where these matters were handled by a higher authority – that is, the church – women seem to have had better chances than where marital problems were dealt with in a body of equals (of the husband) as in Augsburg.21 During the seventeenth century, more and more women appeared in the Swedish courts. There is nothing surprising in this, since at the same time the gradual bureaucratisation of the state and local government meant that there were also more frequent court sessions. Popular women’s history has supposed that women especially suffered from the tightening of the state’s and church’s control of daily life. The reform of manners, as it is sometimes called, took the form of controlling religious behaviour and premarital sex. The popular – though flawed – assumption is that men got away by denying their part, whereas women were left with the consequences, and tried in courts for fornication, adultery, infanticide and witchcraft. These were religious and sexual crimes, but also the crimes which could be used to reinforce the central power and the hierarchy which supported it, promoting the authority of natural rulers throughout society, from the king to the father. To follow a simplification of this notion by Briggs – who does not share the belief – ‘The legal pursuit of witches [and whores or fornicators, my addition] could stand for the general purification of society,’ the need for which was the justification for the centralisation.22 At the same time, women gradually came to be considered individuals responsible for their own actions: their husbands and fathers could no longer answer for their crimes, and women had to defend themselves. In all other cases, the husband’s right and duty to act for his wife is, by the adherents of the structural deterioration/ subordination theory, taken to mean that the wife herself could not act on her own and that the husband had power over her as well as fathers had over daughters. An example of this process is the development of terminology concerning premarital sex. During the sixteenth century, the cases showed fathers seeking punishment and compensation for the lost virginity of their daughters from their seducers. The crime was called neidonloukkaus or mökränkning. The man was the one considered criminal: whether the girl was or was not willing was not an issue, nor was she a party to the trial. During the seventeenth century, however, the man and woman were treated as equally guilty, although it seems at least in the material which I have studied that men still got heavier fines. The crime was more often than before called ‘fornication,’ and the woman would have to appear publicly to defend herself; her father could no longer act in her stead.23 20 On one case, see Karlsson Sjögren, 1998, 129ff. 21 Pylkkänen 1990, 295–6. 22 Briggs 1998, 324–5. 23 Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 135; Lennartson 1999. According to my material, men were given heavier fines and did not get away by simply denying the criminal intercourse or

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Supporters of the deterioration/subordination view have maintained, however, that although exceptions occurred, the law still prescribed social praxis even 200 years after it was written: Many women were represented by a proxy in court, and appeared themselves only if they were very poor and/or defendants in criminal cases. This is why, according to Marja Taussi-Sjöberg, ‘gaining a legal capacity actually brought negative consequences on especially the unmarried women. They were inflicted by control of extramarital sexuality, the negative influences culminated in infanticide, which was to become one of the major social and moral problems a couple of hundred years later.’24 Part of the state formation was, in this view, that the state or the crown took the place of the kin as the ultimate controller of society. In the grass-root levels of society, this meant a shift towards smaller, more easily manageable units: the family or household unit took the place of the kin. In the medieval system, the husband had had a right and duty to represent his wife as well as the rest of the household, but women had been considered as part of their own kin and protected in the interests of the kin, even against the husband. The state formation, claims TaussiSjöberg along with other adherents of the deterioration view, supplanted the kin’s protection but offered nothing instead. The proxy system together with the tightened jurisdictional grip on sexuality left men – or husbands – in control of women’s reproductive ability, the workforce and their other resources as Taussi-Sjöberg has conveniently conceptualised the seventeenth century development into the central themes of 1970s and 1980’s feminisms.25 Following research in the rest of Europe, esp. Swedish historians have claimed that women’s role in the household, as wives and mistresses, and their frequent involvement in the overall economic production of the household, did not imply equality. They were as able as men in managing household affairs – ordering servants and bargaining at the market – but they had no access to formal political power, little access to law and very few opportunities

fleeing the parish. Rather, they were brought to court and tried as regularly as possible. Women were not often fined for fornication between two unmarried persons on the grounds of Queen Christina’s order on Punishments, 18 May 1653, which concentrates on the heaviers punishments of mutiple adulterers. First time fornicators, especially women, were often punished by public confession only. The same is apparent in TUOKKO 22. In some cases, women were tried and convicted while the men were absent, at war or deceased. However, the register includes many cases in which the men were brought to court after the woman’s trial,as well as cases when the woman had fled or was absent and only the man was on trial. 24 Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 158–61: ‘att bli rätslig subject fick alltså i praxis negativa följder för framför alt de ogifta kvinnorna. Kontrollen av utomäktenskaplig sexualitet drabbade dem, och de negativa effekterna kulminerade i barnamord, som blev ett av de stora socialpolitiska och moraliska problemen ett par århundraden framöver’; and earlier on p. 134: ‘Och Frågan är om inte vägen till kvinnans myndighet startade med straffrätten, paradoxalt nog, eftersom hon samtidigt kom att drabbas mycket hårt av den.’ Generalisations are very clear, although the author devotes pages before and after these generalisations to say that women of all marital statuses did act in all court-functional roles in all kinds of cases except those concerning landed estate; Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 117. 25 Taussi-Sjöberg, 1996, 162.

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for formal occupational training.26 Recently, gender historians have come to study the court material focusing on the experiences and identities of individuals in a poststructuralist fashion, and thereby uncovered that the trials were a lot more than a space of repression; they were also an arena and tool for self-expression and personal politics. Yet the same focus on individuals which has enabled these conclusions has not been brought to bear on the macro level in order to deconstruct the framework of the central state and the general repression which took place at that level. The assumption of the structures of repression still lurk behind the post-modern emphasis on difference. As far as Finland is concerned, the cultural differences between eastern and western Finland, and the local jurisdictional cultures thereof, should be kept in mind. In western Finland, it is usually said, women appeared more often in court and were recorded more often in the tax records as responsible farmers than in eastern Finland, where they rarely appeared in land tax records at all. Various explanations for this have been given: The importance of labour-dominated burn-beat agriculture for Karelian taxation meant that men as labour were more important for tax records, whereas in western Finland, the tax unit was the farm, which might sometimes fall into the hands of a woman. On the other hand, it has been noted that the Karelian legal praxis was even more dominated by the heads of farmholds than in the western culture, and that other social groups, including women, were therefore even rarer. The interpretation has been that the status of women was the weaker the more dependent the economy was on heavy physical labour.27 Anu Pylkkänen’s study of women in rural households in early modern Finland has examined the differences in social hierarchies between western and eastern parts of the country. The eastern Finnish hierarchy was significantly more formally sexand age- based. It was male-dominated, although sometimes an older woman might take the place of a man in the hierarchy. Most importantly, women appeared less often in court and in public, and were instead represented by the male head of their household. Women, therefore, did not represent their households externally in the same way as men. In western Finland, however, social hierarchy was based more on work, and left more options open for women, although it also left them more vulnerable in potentially ambiguous situations.28 It is presumably no coincidence that accusations of witchcraft and magic also differed in western and eastern Finland. In the east, maleficium charges against men played a prominent role throughout the seventeenth century, although charges of benevolent magic became increasingly common. But in western Finland, benevolent magic already dominated the trials by the 1670s, and most of the accused were female. In Karelia, in eastern Finland, women were also less often accused of other crimes, even fornication. Accusations seem to have depended on the general culture of representation in court and in public, and, women generally did not often appear in eastern Finnish courts. However, Viipuri Karelian women acted as accusers in 26 See for example Larner 1984, 86–7; Hester 1992; Aronsson, 1992, 161; Amussen 1995, 53–5; Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 162; Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 98–115 and especially 117. 27 Mäkelä 1989, 22, 75ff.; Pylkkänen 1990, 105–6, 122, 128, 247. 28 Pylkkänen 1990, 315, 330.

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witchcraft cases relatively more often than women in western Finland, although absolute numbers are small, and women acted far less often than men.29 On the other hand, to the extent that witchcraft was connected to social and hierarchical confusion, which was not always the case, the more formal eastern model of gender relations seems to have offered fewer options for communal problems concerning women’s hierarchical status. However, women, especially older women, do appear frequently as accusers and plaintiffs in the eastern Finland, which makes the explanation of the eastern lack of concern for women’s hierarchical status seem less plausible. In eastern Finland, especially in Viipuri Karelia, the demonological theories of early modern Europe never gained much support among the local authorities. According to Nenonen, demonological theory was what focused attention on women, and so the eastern authorities never developed a particular interest in female magic.30 The phenomena in question, from prosecuting fornication to witch-hunting, appear far too complex, dependent on any number of situational, social, religious and other contexts, to fall into such monothematic explanations.31 The deterioration thesis has indeed had its antithesis in the tradition emphasising even the ordinary people as active subjects, claiming that the beginnings of state formation, industrialisation and capitalism nevertheless provided many new possibilities – for women as well as people in general. Many aspects of the power state were, of course, aims and attempts of the central government rather than actual achievements. More and more frequently, historians today point out that the state formation would not have been possible at all without the cooperation of the people. Mere repression and coercion would not have produced such effective results as they came to be. The developing bureaucracies and court systems also produced new ways to deal with problems. If the local communities lost some of their independence, the authority of the state and its officials also added new tools to use in local power struggles and in influencing their neighbours. Local parish meetings and court sessions, together with the instances of appeal in both secular and church hierarchies which were formed in the early seventeenth century, no longer offered mere local arenas, but also access to interaction with the central and intermediate power.32 In Agata’s story, a rough third of those acting in the same court cases with her were women – and more if such communities and groups as ‘villagers’ are excluded from the account.33 Naturally, the number is biased by the fact that it is Agata’s story, and all cases in Agata’s story involve a household headed by a woman. Therefore, the numbers are not directly comparable to those of other historians. It is, however, useful to point out some correspondences and differences. Just as in many Swedish statistics,34 in absolute numbers, most women appeared in court as witnesses. In 29 Nenonen, 1995, 138; Mäkelä 1989, 87–93, 115; Pylkkänen 1990, 231. 30 Nenonen 1995, 143–50; Katajala 1997. 31 See. Briggs 1998, 324–5; Nenonen 2006. 32 See for example Österberg 1989; Villstrand 1992, Karonen 1999, 328ff.; Katajala 2002 and Kujala 2003, 19–22. 33 Ulvila 1670–1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I KO a:1–5b. NA; Ulvila 1670–1677, Bielkesamlingen vol. 27. SRA; Ulvila 1682–1692 Ala-Satakunta II KO a2–7. NA; Ulvila 1694–1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KOa 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14. NA. 34 Andersson 1998, 92–3.

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absolute numbers, most women appeared in court as witnesses. They were sued instead of suing – as were men.35 By comparing the general statistics of various historians to those drawn from Agata’s story, one can see how much those possibilities depended on the position of each individual woman in her own household. Even though the story included several crimes which immediately attract attention, it is also clear that a small number of women took the initiative fairly often. Between 1670 and 1680, 16 cases connected with Agata were brought by women, although twice using a proxy.36 Nevertheless, if one looks at the contents of their court action instead of the mere numbers, the emphasis changes. First of all, a fair number of the witnesses showed considerable initiative in court: some were ordered to testify, but others volunteered information both during and before the trials. Some of these volunteers caused the trials in the first place, as seen in Agata’s witch trials in 1670s. Moreover, the matters women testified about as well as the things they were accused of reveal that they actually wielded considerable power in their communities. For example, Agata’s witch trials include various remarks about how she commented on the work and offered advice on her fellow villagers. She had the public arena and the audience to do so, and it is clear that her judgement mattered enough to incite aggression against her.37 Finnish and Nordic women’s and gender history has, from the time women’s history emerged as a discipline within Nordic social history, largely focused on the strengths of women rather than on the multiple subordination emphasised so strongly in the American feminist studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Women’s history spread to Scandinavia during the 1980s, when some of Anglo-American women’s history had also moved away from the early subordination themes. At the time, Scandinavian and Finnish social history were strongly focused on work and social organisations; women’s historians also found women working and getting organised as active subjects. For a while, this even produced a Marxist appraisal of the working woman. One of the standard claims of nationalist women’s history was that in the small agrarian households, ‘women’s work’ was necessary – a view also much criticised either as ‘equal misery’ or for the naïveté of assuming that equal workload meant equal status or power.38 Emphasising women’s subordination and the deterioration of their position has perhaps also been more prominent among the early modernists because a lot of the working opportunities in proto-industrial textile and dairy production as well as the various bourgeois charity and civic organisations became significant only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather few historians 35 Andersson 1998, 85. 36 Ulvila 20–21 June 1671. Bielkesamlingen vol. 26:85; Ulvila 22–23 Sept. 1671. Bielkes vol. 26:144; Ulvila 22 June 1672. Bielkes vol. 26:24–v; Ulvila 30–31 Oct. 1672. Bielkes vol. 26:58v–59 (2 cases); Ulvila 3–4 and 6 Sept 1675. Bielkes vol. 27:26, 46; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:70, 70v–71; Ulvila 12–13 Oct 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:109v; Ulvila 26–27 Jul 1677. Bielkes vol. 17:69v–70v; Ulvila 11–13 Sept. 1677. Bielkes vol. 27:86v–87. SRA; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:57v; Ulvila 3–4 Feb. 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:26. NA. 37 Ulvila 19–20. Jan 1675. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16–17. SRA; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27: 53–5. SRA. 38 Markkola 2003, 53–63.

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of this trend base their claim on court appearances, but rather depend on economic materials of various kinds. It is, however, possible to connect what is known of the new possibilities brought within the reach of women by state formation and protoindustrialisation to behaviour in courts of law and thereby to place into context small notes that might otherwise seem irrelevant. Several gender historians today refuse to acknowledge either a systematic deterioration or a systematic improvement in the position of women in society.39 Rather, these historians see history as made of individuals who did the best they could under the circumstances they had. In a way, this view is not a synthesis but rather an antithesis of the previous ones: whereas earlier historians saw a systematic and hierarchical gender structure, this view attempts to dismiss the structural emphasis – although not all structural analysis – preferring to show individual differences among women and their situations, aims and experiences. A similar turn took place in feminist and women’s and gender studies during the 1990s.40 For Scandinavian women’s or gender history, this trend might eventually mean a break from traditional social history and the structural emphasis thereof, were there not a similar trend in social history; micro-history and historical anthropology have effectively blurred the lines between social and cultural history and structural or individual history. Historians had simply worked on the structures for so long that they seemed an exhausted subject, and therefore turned their attention to individual experience. But again, dismissing the structural emphasis has entailed an acknowledgement that although no longer as trendy as before, the structure as it was interpreted – the state, the reformations, the wars, and so on– still provides the appropriate context for discussing the more interesting phenomena. However, Agata and some other women did not conform to the modern historians’ theories. When Agata as a hill-cotter widow started to appear in court in the early 1670s, she was already acting to secure her daughter’s inheritance – the farm.41 Otherwise hill-cotters or dependent lodgers42 very seldom appear in initiative-taking roles. They were only sometimes called as witnesses. It seems that Agata adopted her assertive behaviour in the courts purposefully from the group she was aspiring to join– from the peasant farmers. Agata did not just demand the legal rights of her daughters regarding the inheritable land. She started to appear as a plaintiff and a defendant in many other, mostly small-scale economic cases. Moreover, she never used a proxy, although many widows in Ulvila did so. Initially she may not have had the funds to pay one before the mid-1670s, but she might still have been able to use 39 Bennet, 1988; Österberg 1997. 40 Jackson 1998, 27–28. 41 Ulvila 20–21 June 1671. Bielkes vol. 26:85. SRA. 42 Huonemies or huonenainen, (husman, huskvinna in Swedish), or loiset (inhysingar in Swedish) lived in peasant farmer households, although sometimes in saunas, storage cabins or other separate cabins owned by the farmer instead of the main house. Unlike hill-cotters, (Mäkitupalainen in Finnish, backstugusittare in Swedish), they were dependent on the main house and working for their rooms but often unable to perform the full workload. In this story, dependant lodgers are usually classed as servants first because of their dependent situation and second because they seem to have been former servants and servants’ widows, but sometimes they are known to have been unmarried elderly relatives.

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the patronage of one of the jurors or of someone of the local gentry. Not using one can be seen as a choice.43 Elisabeth Johansdotter, the widow of the late mayor of Pori, owned several farmsteads in Ulvila, one of them in Kyläsaari, another in Suolisto, one in VähäRauma, and so on. Elisabeth minded her landed property and her late husband’s business – collecting debts – on her own for a decade before 1684. She appeared numerous times in court disputing both against peasantry and gentry. One of the people in her debt had been the late mayor of Rauma, whose widow tried to avoid paying on the grounds that her husband’s estate had been practically bankrupt.44 Elisabeth, too, chose to handle the business herself. On the other hand, there were quite a few wealthy and gentry widows who used a proxy. It is often stated that gentry and wealthy bourgeoisie women refrained from the public sphere, whereas the same was not possible for the working women. For those gentry and bourgeois women, withdrawal from the public sphere acquired extra symbolic value because not everyone could afford to do so. Some scholars have argued that widows, especially in towns, used a proxy whenever they could. The withdrawal of wealthy widows came to be considered as a form of status-building, which at the same time limited the opportunities of using (at least public) power and authority.45 However, in Agata’s story, the wealthy peasant and bourgeois widows, Agata and Elisabeth Johansdotter, acted most independently, without a representative – while women without male relatives did not. There were, perhaps, other important symbols present in the choice between public and private than mere social ‘class’. Agata and Elisabeth did not wish to gain status as women of the upper social groups – it would have been impossible for 43 Ulvila 22–23 Sept. 1671. Bielkes vol. 26:144. SRA; Ulvila 22 June 1672. Bielkes vol. 26:24–v. SRA; Ulvila 30–31. Oct 1672. Bielkes vol. 26:58v–59. SRA. 44 Elisabeth claimed that the late Mayor of Rauma’s widow had smuggled things from her late husband’s estate with her after she moved to Ulvila to live with her father, and that therefore, she was still liable to pay her husband’s debts. On the business between widow Christina Böning of the late Mayor of Rauma and Elisabeth Johansdotter, widow of the late mayor of Pori, see Ulvila 14–15 March 1681 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:75; Ulvila 6–8. Sept 1681. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:402–5; Ulvila 14–16 Feb. 1682. 39–40(78–v). NA. Other cases by Elisabeth include Ulvila 3 – 4 and 6 Sept. 1675. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:29v., 30 (two cases); Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:70–v. SRA; Ulvila 22–23. June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:42v–43. NA; Ulvila 3–4 Feb. 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:20 (two cases); Ulvila 25–26 June 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:44; Ulvila 24–25. Sept 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:27; Ulvila 14–15. March 1681. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:62–3, 75, Ulvila 6–8 Sept. 1681. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a5:395, 395–6, 400, 401, 409–10, 411, 418; Ulvila 14–16 Feb. 1682. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:40–41(new page numbers in brackets 78v–79), 47–50 (82–3V), Ulvila 24–25 Oct. 1682. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:279 (198); Ulvila 9–10. Aug 1682. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:158 (137v), 159 (138), 172–4 (144v–145v), Ulvila 3–6 March 1683. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:82–3 ( 73v– 374), 62 (363v); Ulvila 26–28 Feb. 1684. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:1 (523), 3v (524v); Ulvila 20 – 21 and 23 June 1684. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:73 (602). NA. 45 See Karlsson Sjögren, 1998, 68–70, 109–14 on Swedish town widows; Wünder 1998 on bourgeois wives retiring from public as a way to enforce their social status.

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Agata – but by acting and being capable in their professional spheres. They adopted the behaviour of their male counterparts in those spheres. Some of Agata’s court appearances were certainly made necessary at the time by the inheritance itself. Some of the matters taken up at the beginning of the story were like those she quite probably had been involved in before: pasturing and winter care of her small hill-cotter’s cattle, small debts and so forth. Why bother to take them to court now? It is possible to think that using the court arena was an essential part of the peasant farmers’ culture, Agata took up appearing in court especially to show that she, too, could take on that part of a peasant farmer’s role. It may have been a readily available symbol of the farmer’s role, one which had all the more meaning because it was public. She adopted the procedures of the farmers when she wanted to belong to that group – not only in the way that minor gentry imitated the culture of their superiors, but also as a way of symbolically and very practically asserting her capability to act as a farmer with necessary force and authority. Likewise, Elisabeth did not choose to withdraw and hire a proxy, although she probably could have done so. Instead she appeared herself demanding payments and rents, managing her farms and requesting that borders be checked. For her, too, the essential thing was that she appeared in court as a professional landowner, instead of as a poor and humble widow deserving help. The demands of the roles Agata and Elisabeth Johansdotter took on – the roles of a responsible farmer or burger and household head – were to a great extent contradictory to the ideal of the deserving widow, and it overrode the ideological or cultural demands for modesty emphasised in the religious teaching and by historians.46 It has been argued that, whereas women claimed needing protection because of their own impotence, men tended to emphasise the power of their opponents.47 The emphasis on power rather resembles the role these two widows assumed. The rest of the community was anxious about Agata’s role, as is evident in the magic and witchcraft accusations against her. However, no similar charges can be found against Elisabeth. Agata’s new role was in greater contrast with her old ones, as she crossed not only a gender boundary, but also boundaries of wealth, status and responsibility. Unlike Agata, however, Elisabeth stayed on her original social place when she stepped from the position of an important burgher’s wife to a businesswoman. More important than a real lack of power and independence implied in the use of images of poverty and incompetence as virtues, however, is the fact that such virtues could be substituted by others if power and independence were present in the widow’s life. For the widow who aspired to be a farmer, a farmer-like aggressive court behaviour was necessary. Power in court The populace acted in court as plaintiffs or petitioners, as defendants and witnesses, or as members of the general crowd which was watching, listening and talking to 46 See for example Wiesner 2002; Toivanen 2002; Stretton 1999, K.H.J. Vilkuna 1996. 47 Stretton 1999, 206.

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each other and could always speak in the actual hearing if they thought it necessary. The trials were always public. The authorities in court were the judge and the scribe, with the help of the vicar and the crown bailiff. Between the authorities and the populace was the jury, consisting of 12 farmers. The judge and the jury of course held a tangible power in the court. Nevertheless, the others could also use the court arena for their purposes, with equally tangible results in their lives and the lives of their village competitors. The plaintiff or defendant took the initiative in taking the matter to court. Whereas taking the initiative to bring a matter to court made a good first impression and showed one to be an active member of the community, winning the case further strengthened the position of the plaintiff or petitioner. Therefore, plaintiffs and petitioners may be thought of as wielding the most effective power exempting the judge and jury. Although a many cases were beginning to be brought to the courts by crown officials of some sort (bailiffs or vicars, mostly) or professional lawyers, individual people could very well do it themselves and often did. This was a crucial decision and had to be made with careful consideration of whether or not one really had a case. The judicial system was still legally accusatorial, which curbed the accusers’ eagerness by punishing false accusations with the same penalty as would have befallen the accused. In reality, the actual talio principle was rarely applied; more often, false accusations would turn against their instigators in the form of defamation suits and end in fines. Still, the accusatorial system’s discouragement seems to have made a definitive impact on minor disputes and major charges like witchcraft.48 The accuser had to have a case, and most of them had: it seems that roughly only a fourth of the cases in Agata’s story ended in favour of the defendant.49 The options of the plaintiff and defendant were shown especially in cases of slander, such as in the cases of Catariina Giös, Tuomas Sipinpoika and Walpuri Sipintytär, who all came to court to demand punishment for those who alleged that they had anything to do with witchcraft. Each time, the court started out from the assumption that the plaintiff’s claim was just and that she or he was innocent of the rumoured crime. In the cases of Catariina and Tuomas, the court record did not enter into the question of whether the rumours may have been true. The subsequent court sessions only aimed at confirming that Agata had made such a claim, but had no interest in whether or not there was any truth in it.50 In the case of Valpuri, the beginnings of the fourth hearing record her personal assurance – apparently on being asked, but also when she was personally present for the first time – that she was not a witch. When she said she was not, the court moved on to examine who had started 48 See also Rowlands 2003, 22–9. 49 Ulvila 1670–1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I KOa 1–5b. NA; Ulvila 1670–1677, Bielkesamlingen vol. 27. SRA; Ulvila 1682–1692 Ala-Satakunta II KO a:2–7. NA; Ulvila 1694–1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KOa 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14. NA. The calculation is somewhat arbitrary, as not all cases ended clearly in favour of one party, and some other cases were divided in parts that would end in favour of one party and in other parts that could end in favour of the other. 50 Ulvila 11–12. Sept 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:54; Ulvila 26–27 July 1677. Bielkesamlingen 27:69v–70v. SRA.

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the malicious rumour. Her name was cleared although nobody was sentenced for starting the rumours.51 Defamation and counter suits were a common feature in witchcraft and magic trials all over Europe. ‘Witch’ was a common insult thrown at women and apparently also at men, and a number of these trials actually turned into witchcraft cases. How big that number was, has been debated. Briggs and Rowlands, based on the French and German material from less serious witchcraft cases, claim that the number was fairly small. Sharpe and Sörlin, however, claim that it happened often. The court started inquiring on its own after the plaintiff’s honour, and its findings could prove to be unsound as well as good. Sörlin, a Swedish scholar, claims that the plaintiff’s position in witchcraft-slander suits grew weaker during the seventeenth century.52 The court might take into account new accusations of new crimes in the middle of the trial, an example of which is the way Tuomas Sipinpoika’s defamation trial against Agata turned into a witchcraft trial against her. However, someone needed to present the new accusation in court – either one of the actors in the trials or an interested member of the public or authorities. The court in itself rarely had any interest in pursuing a magic and witchcraft trial against any of the original plaintiffs in the above cases. This means that the process by which the Swedish judicial system, originally accusatorial, gradually turned into an inquisitorial one was, at least in the Finnish regions, still far from complete: the authorities had started to take the initiative in originally presenting the charges – especially after local denunciations – for minor social disruptions like breaches between servants and masters and for more serious ones like fornication and witchcraft or magic. But their intervention was not automatic, nor constant. Some scholars have interpreted the defamation suits which turned into witchcraft cases as proof, on the one hand, of the arbitrariness of witchcraft accusations and, on the other hand, of the inescapable nature of witchcraft accusations. Rumours might strike anyone, although especially the weak. One would be socially obliged to try to clear one’s name in court, but doing so is often interpreted as a gamble. The attempt might just as well lead one to the gallows or transform into damaging evidence in a future trial.53 The supposed gamble is highlighted especially in the continental witch panics, but popularisations often extend it to trials on daily magic and witchcraft. In this model of thought, any talk of undesirable behaviour in connection with one’s name would be damaging, even if it were to clear one’s name. The reality, however, was different. The courts were able to distinguish serious accusations and serious offenders from one-time misdemeanours – it was common (and often legal) to let first offenders off with smaller punishments, and in the case of magic sometimes 51 The first hearing is missing. Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:102–103. NA; Ulvila 6–8 March 1699. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a13:92–4. NA; Ulvila 2–4 May 1700 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14:512–21. NA; Ulvila 14–15 Sept. 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14:757–62. NA. The rumours started from an unfortunate Shrovetide joke among the young people in Valpuri’s village, but as it seemed to have been Agata who had inserted Valpuri’s name in the rumour, she was ordered to pay Valpuri’s expenses during the long legal process. 52 Sörlin 1999, 110–112; Sharpe 1997:165–6; Briggs 1998, 334. 53 Eilola 2003, 256ff.

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with mere reprimand to behave better in the future. Earlier accusations and rumours might be referred to later, but the courts usually noted very carefully whether the previous accusations had been proved or disproved.54 The course of a defamation suit in this story does not seem random at all. When the defamed plaintiff had a bad reputation and contributed to it him- or herself, the defamation suits would not be likely to end in the gossipmonger’s conviction, but the contrary.55 It was, therefore, possible to predict the outcome of a defamation trial fairly accurately. The co-swearers of a purification oath were a special category of witnesses. According to an old customary judicial method, a person accused of a crime could swear himself or herself free with 5 or 11 co-swearers, who witnessed the oath of the accused and then swore themselves that they believed his oath to be correct. Some Scandinavian historians take the view that this procedure was originally part of a kin-centred judicial system, in which kin groups protected and disciplined their members. The state government is, in this contested theory, seen as taking on the judicial system and preferring evidence-based assessment, although it is possible that other legal and cultural developments would have had the same emphasis without the central state’s interest. The group oath was gradually losing its meaning from the sixteenth century onwards as evidence-based assessment grew more important until it was legally abandoned in 1695.56 In Ulvila, a group oath of purification was still in use right before its abandonment. Mostly it was ordered when no certainty could otherwise be reached, which, on the basis of the story in the previous chapter, was actually fairly often. The coswearers do not seem to have been kin members or neighbours of the first swearer. The importance laid upon their reputations varies. One of the last cases in which co-swearers were used was that of a Risto Olavinpoika (whose son married Maria Pertuntytär Sawo’s older daughter Dårdi), who was swearing himself free from magic and witchcraft in 1695. His co-swearers were thoroughly inspected and, as four out of the five men were from another parish, an additional report of them was demanded for the next court session. On failing to get such a report, Risto obtained new co-swearers. They included a burgher from the nearby town, a servant of a 54 In Agata’s magic trials in 1676 one of the reasons given for imposing fines was that she had confessed and been convicted the previous year. That was, however, unusual. See for example Nenonen 1992, 200–201. 55 An Antti Skräddare demanded punishment for the above-mentioned Heikki Janckkari for defamation concerning fornication. Heikki counter-sued. Apparently Antti had himself run around drunk and boasting that he had seduced a farmer’s daughter, the same Dårdi already mentioned in this story. Now, both Antti and Dårdi denied everything. Nothing could be established and eventually the matter seems to have been forgotten without a formal sentence. This serves to illustrate the importance of concrete proof for each and every accusation, both defamation and other. Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a3:239–41; Ulvila 14–17 Sept 1694 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II Ko a3: 282–3. NA. 56 Taussi Sjöberg 1996, 21–3, relying on Ylikangas 1988, 50–77, who, however, does not write about the actual historical development during the 1600s, but only about the influence of Olaus Petri on the course that legal assessment of proof later seems to have assumed. Andersson 1998, 102.

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relative, two soldiers, and apparently two farmers, one of whom was from another parish, but one of the jurors claimed to know him as a man of good repute. Their social status seems to have been important, because it had direct effect on Risto’s status. The Court of Appeal, however, apparently did not accept the oath and sent the matter back in 1698. It dragged on until Risto’s death in 1707, when he was granted a Christian burial because he had sworn on his deathbed that he was innocent.57 A contrasting attitude seems to have surfaced when Agata tried to take an oath to clear herself from magic; in 1676, the scribe recorded that she showed up ‘with an age-old wife, Kerttu Yrjöntytär, from Kyläsaari, and Kaarina Antintytär, ibm., who said they could not free her, Marketta Jaakontytär from Palus and Kaarina Erkintytär from Pori, who promised to swear with her – , Riitta Simontytär from Levanpelto would not free her either. Then Agata said she could not get more co-swearers at the moment.’ She was given until the next day to find the rest of the co-swearers and eventually she turned up ‘with three yokels alright but they said they could not take oath with her.’58 The condescending or almost depreciating superficiality of the descriptions of the persons who would not swear contrasts with the detailed accuracy of the information wanted from Risto’s co-swearers. It emphasises the fact that Agata was widely thought of as a witch and could not recruit co-swearers. Thus the witnesses, too, clearly held power and had to have some authority and credibility to be able to testify. Thus, witchcraft trials were not straightforwardly about the power of some over others in the context of interpreting the trials as a means of straightforward repression and oppression either by elites or by more powerful neighbours and villagers. But they were about power, if read in a way to see the struggle over who got to decide which methods were approved and which were not. Reading the court records The purpose of the court records was to transport the lower court’s dealings, together with the local people’s actions, pursuits, objectives and testimony, to the Court of Appeal. For this purpose, the oral communications were written down and made coherent, elegant and flowing according to the rules of the legal genre, and translated both into the other language and into the other culture, that is, from Finnish to Swedish language and from the local peasant farmers’ culture to the elite learned culture in the Court of Appeal. The cultural translation will obviously have its influence on the text, but that does not mean that the text lost the ‘original’ meanings and forms of the oral narratives of the court. A good translation – which the court records had to be, in order to perform their controlling function – preserves and conveys as exactly 57 Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:30; Ulvila 4–5 Oct.1695, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:368. NA. Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:30; Ulvila 27–28 June 1702. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a18: 130–132. 58 Ulvila 11–13 Sept. 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:87. SRA; Riitta Simontytär refused to swear for Agata accused at the same court session a Kaarina Erkintytär from Palus of using witchcraft to kill or ordering another witch to kill Riitta’s husband. There is no mention of it in Agata’s case, however. Ulvila 11–13 Sept. 1677. Bielks vol. 27:91v–92v; Ulvila 26–27 July 1677. Bielkes vol. 17:64v–65. SRA.

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as possible the meanings and forms of the original in a manner understandable to the other culture. Moreover, constant control by the peasant population – the court records were public, open to inspection by the populace, and they included information which was constantly needed and frequently reread – ensured that both meaning and form remained faithful enough to the original. The meanings and forms had to remain understandable to the peasantry, too. Therefore, the court records should not be read as elite-dominated distortions of peasant narratives but as peasant-influenced (if not dominated) elite narratives. The court records were written according to a fixed pattern which encompassed more and less formal parts. As in all literature, there are multiple linked situations and multiple linked narratives present on the same pages of the court records. One level of narrative is about the events in court, the trial; this is the main narrative of the court record. Other levels were formed by the sub-narratives of the plaintiff and the defendant and the witnesses, describing the events which led to the court action, including both the actual crimes or disputes or the original contracts made by the parties.59 In the example below,60 I have highlighted fragments of the main narrative by using italics. They also are the clearest phrases and forms of ritual text in court records. The sub-narratives about matters which had taken place outside the court are in normal text. The following example makes clear that sometimes the two narratives are clearly separate, sometimes intertwined. Table 1

A Court Record

Anno 1674, 4th and 6th July an ordinary Formal beginning of the court session rural district court was held in the with the dates, places and persons County of Pori, Ulvila Parish and the present. village of Vanhakylä, at the farmstead of the constable (Länsman), with the populace thereof, and in the presence of the bailiff, the trusted Påwel Påwelsson and these good men who sat on the jury: Names of 12 men Other cases

59 Assessments of different levels of narrative, narrators, authors and audiences are numerous in narratology and semiotics. Onega & Landa 1996, 10–11, 25–7; Sulkunen & Törrönen 1997. (An earlier version of Sulkunen & Törrönen in English was originally published in Semiotica.) See Czarniawska 2004. I found Marion Gibson’s reading of different kind of materials on witchcraft very inspiring, although my material seems to be only partly similar to the court records she used. See Gibson 1999. 60 Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4: 19, 29–30. NA. My translation.

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Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika of Kyläsaari told the court how their late father Tuomas Mikonpoika had 28th September 1666 by a disposition, for reasons which appear there, ordered that they should be, after his death, settled on their forefathers’ ancestral estate in the aforesaid Kyläsaari village, and as he the father, as well as the mother, now had passed away through death, the younger brothers claimed the will had thereby gained its lawful power. Moreover, as the will had been publicised in two rural district court sessions at 17th Oct. 1666 and 23 Sept. 1671 and one Lawman’s court at 26 July 1673, the younger brothers begged to be legally settled on the farm; whereas Agata Pekantytär, the widow of the eldest brother Matti Tuomaanpoika who was passed over in the will, complained that as she had by him three children or daughters and they are of closest [relation], she claimed that they should have the right to the farmstead according to the law and the custom of the land. This matter was now taken forward and as the father had justified his will by the reason which his son Matti had been twice enlisted as a soldier, it was asked how this was.?[sic] Heikki and Simo answered that he was both times enlisted for the farmstead, because their father had more manpower than he had a right to, as he only listed one horseman. The Vicar, the Learned Master Gabriel Archtopolitanus, with the Bailiff, the Trusted Påwel Påwelsson, testified that he was at first enlisted for the farm and that a substitute had been placed for him then, but at the second time he was enlisted because his father had used foul language at the enlisting.

Formal beginning of the case, with the introduction of the matter and the major participants.

The petitioner’s arguments for their case.

The formal introduction of the case continues. The introduction of a complaint by Agata, an opposing party, with her arguments.

A return to the main narrative of the course of the matters in court. The petitioners’ narrative of what had happened outside the court.

Introduction of other witnesses and their narrative of the reality outside the court.

Witches and Power Jurors Jaakko Niilonpoika of Härpä and Simo Birjerinpoika of Vähä-Rauma also confirmed this. The younger brothers thought the work they had invested in the farm should also be considered. The jury told the court that Matti Tuomaanpoika had worked his time on the farm before he was enlisted and these two brothers were smaller and under aged, [sic] In the matter the jury voted for the following decision: Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika wish to be able to exclude their elder brother Matti Tuomaanpoika’s children from settling on their fathers’ ancestral farm, on the grounds that Matti was enlisted as soldier and the other brothers had performed their work on the farm. However, likewise and because 1) it was not to Matti Tuomaanpoika’s advantage that he was enlisted but an office, and the younger brothers have no reason to go against that, even less as their father with his useless mouth was responsible for it; 2) if the younger brothers had invested some work on the farm, so have they also enjoyed the produce; 3) Matti Tuomaanpoika, too, before he was enlisted as a soldier, cared for the farm when his brothers were younger and under aged; and 4) Matti’s children have de jure primogeniture right to the inheritance, the custom of the land and many previous cases on their side. Therefore and also according to the 6§ of the Rural Laws it is judged that they and the eldest daughter, Riitta Matintytär, rather than Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika, shall settle on the same cavalry and tax farm in Kyläsaari and pay the others out. Heikki and Simo Tuomaanpoika appealed legally against this.

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Still more witnesses introduced for the matter. The younger brothers’ second argument, including another narrative of the reality outside the court. The witnesses’ response and second narrative. Return to the main narrative of what happened in court and the formal closing of the matter. ‘Voting’ replaces the more often used words ‘the jury considered the matter’ in the formula and indicates a non unanimous decision. It is said that a unanimous decision was the early modern ideal. (The arguments for the decision are not usually so minutely recorded but often omitted. That they were written down here may indicate the complexity of the matter)

The eventual decision.

A record of further action:

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The traditional way to discuss these two levels of the court records has been to assess their credibility. The first level of narrative is seen as a direct product of real action (in the court) – that is, that such and such a case had been heard and a sentence given. It is the narrative of the scribe and judge telling the Court of Appeal how the rural district court worked. A traditional assessment of the court record would normally treat this part as ‘reliable’. The other narratives, the testimonies in the court records, may be more or less biased by the imperfect knowledge witnesses might possess, their poor memory, their self-interest and all that usually impairs objectivity. During the 1990s interest in anthropology and micro-history, historians emphasised the usefulness of the narrative elements not necessarily as telling what happened but rather what was culturally deemed credible and possible. These historians emphasised the importance of the ‘descriptive narrative of the testimony’ at the expense of the merely factual – boring, as they thought – main narrative partly because that lack of variation seemed to show no ‘real’ thought or purpose behind it.61 The juxtaposition has become one between ‘factual’ (who, what, how many – information which can be provided factually and preferably quantitatively) and ‘mentality’ approaches. With the above example, the factual approach would probably focus on the fact that case involved an inheritance quarrel between two sons and a daughter-in-law, and on the sentence and the law behind the sentence. The mentality approach would probably focus instead on the grounds of the arguments, the code of law, work, language and so on. Both of these approaches focused on what the source said. However, my interest is rather in the question of how it was said, and, whenever possible, why was it said in that particular way. In the above example, why did the brothers talk of investing work instead of just working? Why did the brothers and the witnesses as well as the jury pay so much attention to work and responsibility and reliability? Why did the brothers try to emphasise that Matti had been sent to war because he – rather than one of the younger brothers – was superfluous on the farmstead? Why did the gentry and jury witnesses emphasise that Matti had worked to support others in the farm and not left for war for his own gain, but out of his obligation to ‘an office’, that is, work for the kingdom. Was this connected to their statement that Heikki and Simo had enjoyed the crops of their work? The local farmers and authorities seem to engage in a discussion of the morals of work and gain, responsibility and reward, but why did Agata herself not enter that discussion but only appeal to the position of her late husband as the eldest son? I ask questions like these to get deeper into the values of the members of the populace than mere ‘Christian’ or ‘patriarchal’ would get, and to investigate the situational and personal, historical limits of using the value-based rhetoric. With such an approach, there is no reason to read less meaning into the ritual text than into the less formal text. The ritual text derives both its form and its content from the culture. The court records convey culturally important meanings, one purpose of 61 For classical Finnish considerations of court records from the traditional point of credibility, see Renvall 1965. For examples of the turn towards the court records’ narrative section, see for example Heikkinen 1989, Nenonen & Kervinen 1994, Katajala 1995, and Matikainen 2002.

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which is to identify the text as a legitimate and official court record. Other meanings derive from other things which are considered important. However, the latter also concerns the less ritual, less formal and more varying parts of the testimony: things are expressed in the ways thought the most efficient, most widely shared, most likely to be correctly understood.62 There has, over time, been much discussion about who determines the content of stories in court – the commoner witnesses and the defendants telling a story, or the elite judge and accuser forcing it to be told? In witchcraft trials, where the role of the imagination remains greater than in many other cases, the question becomes more obvious, but it may just as well apply to any court dealings. And if the narratives are used to create and enforce power and social status, whose are they? Who determines what is said and how it is said? The question has received different answers. To take some best known examples –again from witchcraft studies – Norman Cohn has emphasised the influence of the Inquisition and traditional theories of treason on the formulation of confessions and testimony. Stuart Clark, likewise, considers it almost impossible to draw any conclusions about what the accused peasant witches thought about the witches’ sabbat. Theories of the witches’ sabbat were produced by the elites who then imposed them on the trials, constructing a kind of formula to which the accused and the witnesses had to conform. Clark’s material does indeed obediently echo the elite theories, but not all witchcraft trials do so. Nor were other kinds of trials exclusively elite driven; trials which sprung from among the neighbours, especially when they had no connection to the witches’ sabbat, seem to reflect the popular world view as extensively as the elite’s views. Nevertheless, Lyndal Roper has read the Augsburg magistrates’ records as ‘forced discourses’, which the same persons would not have used had they not been under threat of torture.63 A very different kind of reading – of a different kind of material – is that by Natalie Zemon Davis on the French pardon tales, which she claims to give insight to the people’s mental world, although their factual content may be more obscure. Carlo Ginzburg goes even further and operates largely on the basis that the suspects consciously told and phrased their own stories, describing how they saw the matters. Some more recent scholars, like Diane Purkiss and Marion Gibson, have pointed out that the stories were “negotiated” between the questioner and the accused, and coauthored by the judge, the accused, the interrogator and the scribe – and in the case of the pamphlet literature, the author and his financier.64 The texts are not purely elite or popular productions. They are always a combination of both. Court material is thoroughly influenced by the judicial system and elite views. Yet the degree to which the elites dominate the judicial system may vary. The Finnish lower court records were written on the basis of an oral hearing 62 See Onega & Landa 1996, Nenonen 1997, and Czarniawska 2004. 63 Clark 1980, 103; Clark 1997, 25; Cohn 1975; Roper 1994, 55. They are all quite right in not attributing the characteristics of the stereotypical witches’ sabbat to the thought or intentions of the ‘witches’, but the more freely given testimonies in Finnish trials about everyday magic shed more light on popular views, too. 64 Macfarlane 1970; Davis 1983; Ginzburg 1992 (Ital. orig. 1966); Gibson 1999; Purkiss 1996, 168; Monter 2002; Levack 2006.

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of mostly peasant actors, interrogated by elite judges. They were written for the needs of the Court of Appeal, which consisted of more prestigious elite members and operated mostly in writing. In the Finnish case, where the populace operated in Finnish, much of the material is translated and at least partly rephrased by the court scribe. The court records can therefore be placed at a highly complex point of intersection between popular and elite, oral and written, and some other cultures. They are neither one nor the other, but both. The categories of elite and popular are useful only as far as they serve to roughly place people in formal society, but they need to be transcended.65 The main narrative, describing the course of matters in court, is dominated by the official court authorities. Legal or criminal terminology and definitions appear most often in the presentation and judgement of the cases. The sub-narratives in the testimonies are usually dominated by the populace. Some rather common features can be observed, most of which are unsurprising. Sometimes it may be that the formal charges define the crime differently from what the testimonies suggest. For example, Linda Oja has noted that the authorities sometimes converted peasant information on maleficium into accusations and trials on vidskepelse.66 Usually the witnesses describe concrete deeds and events: that Agata tied loops from her neighbours’ nets into her own fishing nets, or that she had offered advice about how to get better luck with calves or in general talked about magic.67 They claimed that a person used some unusual method in her brewery (such as Agata’s way of burning the straw which had covered the floor during Christmas in the brewing vessel). Usually the witnesses did not openly evaluate whether or not it was witchcraft to do so, although this is implied. Sometimes a negative assertion is explicit. Oja has found a similar pattern in Sweden – the generalising terms like trolldom, förgörning meaning maleficium or signeri, lövjeri or vidskepelse are more often found in the plaintiff’s presentation, most often by the court authorities. Similar features have also been reported in England and France. Some of this may be due to the form of court records: it was the court’s task to determine whether or not something was witchcraft or magic, not the populace’s, therefore it is possible that the populace’s judgements just were written down without the terminology.68 The Finnish peasant 65 A distinction between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ traditions was made at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, today the classical discussion begins with Peter Burke’s work. The degree to which the cultures differed from, overlapped with and influenced each other has been the object of some debate, which has extended from the modern to the early modern and medieval cultures. See Burke 1978, 3–34; other classical expositions include Levi 1998 (Italian orig. 1966) or Thompson 1991; on the Middle Ages see Gurevich 1988 or Le Goff 1977. 66 Oja 1999, passim, e.g. 173ff. 67 Ulvila 11–12. Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–4v. NA. 68 For example, Liisa Pentintytär in Agata’s Blåkulla trials made it clear she only reported Agata’s curse words and the heavily breathing calves, although the maid added that Liisa had had very definite suspicions. Ulvila 11–13. July Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. Even when witnesses describe conversations or offers to teach some magic, they often refrain from the words of witchcraft or magic, speaking only of producing luck, curing illness or ‘bringing forth’ beasts or accidents. See also Oja 1999 173–7. On England (with a different

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farmers were, nevertheless, willing and able to speak in abstract and legal terms. In the inheritance dispute above, for example, Agata may not herself have used the Latin term primogeniture, but she was familiar enough with the concept to be able to evoke it successfully in her favour. Struggles over power in court thus did not only mean accusing ones enemies and losing power when losing a court case, but a much more complicated web of producing credibility and invoking authoritative social roles and values. What is interesting, then, is the different themes people chose to lift up in their arguments and the emphasis they chose to use in them when they claimed credibility and influence in matters concerning themselves and their fellow villagers, whether they were criminal or economic, related to ways of communal work or to private bedrooms. Witchcraft is a special case here, because it so clearly combines the uses of court decisions as weapons to put down enemies and as an arena to argue over contested values and personal characteristics or social roles which might bring authority and status. Witchcraft representing power Taking a case to court marked a dispute which often had implications for the power and status relationships of the participants, as the outcome of a court case had inevitable effects on them. Yet there were more symbolic aspects to this as well. As has been stated, the 1675 and 1676 witchcraft and magic trials against Agata Pekantytär seem at first to have resulted from the anger and frustration of her in-laws after the division of the inheritance in Tommila. Her in-laws, after all, seem to have been circulating the rumours on which the Vicar eventually took action. However, as I explained in the previous chapter, a closer look suggests that the whole village was thrown into a hierarchical confusion by Agata’s sudden and unexpected move from the modest cottage to one of the biggest farms in the village. The suspicions of witchcraft were not merely weapons against Agata; they also gave the villagers the imagery and vocabulary by which they could describe and understand such an inversion of the accustomed social order. In another case in 1693, the local official wanted clarification of why and how one Heikki Janckari and one Risto Olavinpoika had accused each other of having bewitched their mutual brother-in-law to death. As the matter proceeded, Perttu Laurinpoika Sawo – the grandfather of the dead boy and coincidentally father of Agata’s sister-in-law, Aune Pertuntytär – testified that, although this grandson had had nightmares about both Risto and Heikki, it was much more probable that Heikki was the person who had bewitched or paid someone to bewitch his grandson. His purpose, Perttu thought, was to get his hands on the forthcoming inheritance after Perttu himself. Perttu told the court that he would be glad to see Heikki leave his estate – Heikki had entered it against the will of the head of the household: he had seduced Perttu’s granddaughter and thus forced a marriage between them. No explanation) see Rushton 2001, 21–35. On France, where the actual diagnosis of witchcraft was often attributed to a third, preferably dead, party – if possible, the witch’s victim – see Briggs 1998, 67–8.

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domestic peace was to be found – having entered the family without the father’s blessing, Heikki stayed on. The family’s internal quarrels reached the court many times during the 1690s.69 Social conflicts have often been detected behind and presented as the prime factor of witchcraft accusations. As far as a local community and its social dynamics are concerned, social conflict and competition must seem important, although such causal explanations risk belittling the belief in witchcraft and simplifying it as a scapegoat for something supposedly more rational. However, even genuine belief and incidents often need something to precipitate them in real life. It is, however, fairly safe to assume that there was something more profound in these witchcraft cases. They marked the social turmoil within the disintegrating households, and the breach some of the household members were hoping to establish with others. Witchcraft and reports of it are often interpreted in the framework of inversion. Witchcraft, in the early modern period, was seen as a force which disrupts order in the world. As Stuart Clark puts it, ‘witchcraft was constituted by an act of revolt’ and represents the opposite of perfect government.70 In the sabbat mythology, there were features of an anti-fertility rite, representing the opposite of the desirable commonweal.71 Learned demonology as well as descriptions of Satan and Hell and the activities of witches are characterised by ritual backwardness. The whole cosmic order is inverted, the Devil is put in the place of God, and the servants of God on earth – that is, the secular and religious magistrates – are displaced. Stuart Clark has linked the notions of the world upside-down in learned demonology to a general conception of a polar world, which can be found in many areas of elite culture from literature and theatre – where much of the literary description of witchcraft and festive misrule also belongs – to science and theology. In this understanding of the world, order is dependent on both the opposite polarities.72 These were mostly elite views, but it is generally believed that they had also infiltrated the peasant culture through cheap print, street theatre and the carnivalesque festivities common in various parts of Europe. Ritual subversions of social hierarchy and power relations served, in various ways, to stabilise the existing hierarchy. At carnivals, they reminded the powerful that they had responsibilities by (symbolic) criticism and they channelled frustration and opposition. However, such rituals also had a symbolic, cultural meaning in themselves: they did not merely strengthen the established order – they created it and therefore influenced it. They could also have a subversive role directed either against the rulers, or, as forms of popular social control, against breaches of the accepted social order.73 Similarly, witchcraft trials could operate in ‘two seemingly contradictory ways. The punishment of witches could, for example, on occasion promote cohesion and unity in a community, reinforcing in the process the dominant political values of the ruling group. But equally, it might serve as a vehicle for 69 70 71 72 73

Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:433–5. NA. Clark 1980, 118–19; Clark 1997, 88. Briggs 1998, 40–41. Clark 1980; Clark 1997, 3–147. Davis, 1987 (orig 1965), 104ff.

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criticism and complaint, thus providing a valuable opportunity for malcontents to vent their dissatisfaction with, and opposition to, the ruling elite.’74 In 1674, Agata was made the head of the Tommila farm, obviously against all expectations. A woman as head of a farmhold was an inversion of social hierarchy in many senses. Agata, who had lived in a small cottage like the rest of the landless, labouring poor, became the head of the biggest farm in the village. This was more than merely the leap made by widows to farm their husband’s lands: in wartime, numerous Swedish wives found themselves in charge of their farms, either because their husbands were away or deceased, or just as a part of the normal managerial partnership of the spouses. The difference is that Agata’s leap was unexpected; she had not even been living on the farm for years, and other families had been taking care of it. The inheritance was expected to favour her brothers-in-law. Her situation was also different from those new farmers who took up empty farms: her brotherin-law had shown no signs of trouble in the managing of the farm. All the indicators which usually made people expect such transitions had been missing. Again, in Heikki Janckari’s case, the conflict goes deeper than mere disagreements in the household: there were features of social inversion. Heikki’s behaviour seems, in the court records, to be constantly reversing the relationships which could be expected between household members and between parents and children, whether by blood or by law: in 1693, before the witchcraft cases, Dårdi Matintytär, Maria Pertuntytär Sawo’s elder daughter, appealed to the court to clear her name when Heikki Janckari, her own sister’s husband, had claimed she was a whore. It was not uncommon for young women to start such defamation suits, although they might very well turn into fornication cases against themselves if there was any evidence for them.75 Against all likelihood set by ideals of mutual support within the family, Janckari did not deny having called his own sister-in-law a whore. Instead, he produced written testimony claiming that Dårdi had had two lovers at one time.76 Historians often claim that households were entities, in which each part affected the rest, in terms of luck as well as reputation. Therefore, adversarial neighbours could direct witchcraft accusations against an entire household even though the charges were presented against only one member of the household.77 Rumours concerning sexual honour worked the same way. Why did Janckari make such an accusation against a member of the same household? Perhaps he was not thinking or acting according to a strategy, but only venting his feelings in heat of the moment. It was the duty of the head of the household to control and punish the rest of the 74 Elmer 2000, 104. 75 Pylkkänen 1990, 248. Women started their own fornication cases when rumours were circulating, and especially when they had born illegitimate children. The purpose was twofold: to claim maintenance from the father for the baby and to re-establish their status in the community as unwed mothers but still members with full rights to communion, and so forth. 76 Ulvila 18—20 Oct.1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. NA; Ulvila 14– 15 and 17 Sept. 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:282–3 (new page number:166v– 167). NA.; Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:239–41 (new page number:145–6). NA. 77 See for example Gregory 1989 and Liu 1994.

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members of the household if needed. Family members usually tried to do this within the household, avoiding unnecessary public exposure, but sometimes they were obliged to ask the court’s help. The problem here was that Heikki Janckari was not the head of his household – his grandfather-in-law was. After Perttu, the grandfather, the next in line to authority seems to have been Heikki’s mother-in-law, with the grandfather’s support. Maria Pertuntytär was continuously representing the household by this time.78 Heikki may also have been using the rumours to get the neighbours to realise that there were many things wrong in the household and possibly to support him in case he might in the future try to take over the role of the master. By calling for public attention and enlisting the crown officials’ help in the matter, Janckari was suggesting that the household heads did not perform the duty properly. By acting as if he were disciplining Dårdi, he also had already assumed the role of authority which belonged to the household heads. It soon turned out that he was aspiring to something of the sort. He was inverting the power roles in the household and, by doing so in court, he may have hoped to gain the coercive backup of the court. The inversion of hierarchy and power relations was even more apparent when, during the witchcraft trials, Perttu and Maria claimed that Heikki had physically attacked his mother-in-law and grandfather-in-law. Perttu and Maria, on the other hand, had tried to stop him from fighting with other members of the household. Attacking one’s parents was a major crime, for which the Swedish law prescribed capital punishment. More importantly for this analysis, it is an inversion of the social hierarchy in the family – parents are supposed to be hierarchically superior to sons and sons-in-law. It is no coincidence that Maria emphasised her age by saying that she was old and wanted only peace, she would drop the charges if Heikki moved out.79 There was a lot of pure hate and anger in the accusations against Heikki, Dårdi and Agata. Accusation seems to have been the last violent attempt to get rid of the one who caused the chaos. It was not so in a practical sense, however. In most cases, a witchcraft case would not eliminate unwanted or unruly people: over a half of the cases in Finland ended in acquittals, and the rest of them mainly ended in fines. No confiscation of property took place, and even deportation was uncommon.80 The Sawo parents accused their son-in-law of two capital crimes, but eventually dropped the charges; Heikki was not punished for either. In Agata’s case, neither her kin nor her neighbours took the matter to court; they just spread the rumours long enough for them to reach the authorities. Instead, the talk about witchcraft and fornication marked a breach with the unwanted family members – a breech deeper than the mere 78 Ulvila 18—20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. NA; Ulvila 14– 15 and 17 Sept. 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:282–3 (new page number:166v–7). NA.; Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:239–41 (New page number:145–6). NA. 79 Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a5:26–8. NA. It is rather interesting that one can just drop the charges after making them, as this is supposed to have been a state led, by now inquisitorial judicial system. 80 Nenonen 1992, 123–36.

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separation of living space which had already taken place in Tommila and was hoped for in Sawo. The social and ownership inversions had made social hierarchies in both households not only unstable but also undefined and uncertain. As Diane Purkiss has pointed out, the uncertainty of witchcraft itself gives more power to the naming process: as witchcraft is uncertain, the vocabulary of witchcraft can be used to name, discuss and thereby control things which are equally uncertain or unwanted, such as incest, violence against parents or fraud. Literary critics have pointed to a correspondence between the children’s story of Rumplestiltskin, in which the miller’s daughter has promised her first child to the Devil. If she knew the Devil’s name, she could keep her child and with the child, her own name and honour. Significantly, a good part (but by no means all) of witchcraft and magic also worked on the principle of naming and knowing things.81 Witchcraft, with its imagery of inversion, was a natural way to name and tackle the confusion in the power relations in both the Tommila and Sawo households. It may not be deduced from this that all witchcraft cases were similar, but inversion still appears important in many cases involving peasant farmers or their families. Labelling something as witchcraft labelled it as an inversion and simultaneously marked the subversion as evil. The decision – whether conscious or not – to name and define something as unwanted brought order to the chaotic confusion. The vocabulary of witchcraft was used especially to name something which was unexpected, which seemed to invert the existing order and, especially, which was essentially uncertain. Presenting the charges in public marked a social breach from the turmoil and the people perceived to have caused it. The imagery of witchcraft fulfilled the function of opposition required for every cultural symbolic meaning, defining order through negation. With this order in place, one could identify oneself and define the desired, correct order as the opposite of witchcraft – even though the witchcraft trial would bring no concrete change to the state of things perceived as chaos. Once things were named, they could be lived with, even controlled.

81 Purkiss 2001, 82–3. See for example Agata’s fishing charm, discussed in Chapter 2, which named the fish as lavaret and spike. Like many other Finnish charms, it seems to work on the principle of naming all kinds of things (here the fish, elsewhere for example different beasts or illnesses) that would have to obey, because they were named. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–5. SRA. Not all magic worked through charms and even when it did, the charms were often not cited in the court records. Agata’s fishing charm was the only one in Ulvila court records between 1675 and 1700, although a couple of other cases hint to ‘readings’ and to the Lord’s Prayer in magic. See however, the charms collected by the Finnish Literature Society during the nineteenth century in Suomen kansan muinaisia taikoja I–IV. The principle of naming and ‘calling things by their real name’ or saying aloud how things really were also comes forward in the threats and curses typical of maleficium; see for example a case in which a man had mentioned his son’s ‘going after those who go on four legs’, after which the son committed sodomy (Nenonen & Kervinen 1994, 257) or a much more vague case in Ulvila where a thief was uncovered – the overtly spoken words only spoke of marking him, but is it clear from the context that all those involved thought they knew who it would turn out to be. See Ulvila 11—13 Oct. 1977. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27: 91v–92v. SRA.

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The vocabulary of witchcraft was thus a way to mark disorder, to say that something seemed to be amiss. Marking disorder, as such, already creates order from chaos, first perhaps only through the knowledge that things are not as they should be, and then gradually by describing how they are different from what should be. The imagery of witchcraft provided the dichotomy which is needed for every cultural symbolic meaning, defining order through negation: for there to be a proper social hierarchy, a structure of opposition must exist. The comparison between polar opposites is essential for symbolic understanding and the identification of a thing (or the self) through what it is not. Identification, predictably, is the more needed the more confused it is. The testimonies in court, which make obvious the identification of wanted and unwanted, order and disorder, reflect the rumours which were circulating in the village. Rumours as such are semi-public: known by many, but not everyone, they are mostly uncertain in their very nature. With all the imagery of inversion, the rumours tried to create a picture identical with the important points of reality, in this case the confusion over the proper order and the suspicion that the order might have been wrong. Bringing the matter into court, as far as it is the result of popular action, whether direct accusations in court or less formal denunciations to a local authority, is partly about making the subject public.82 In court, the mark of an abnormal situation was made clear and definitive, and the disorderly situation was evident. Disorder represented by witchcraft in court was not synonymous with lack of order or chaos – just with a wrong order. This is a pattern often discussed in witch trials, a pattern of labelling witches. Suspicions may have been developing for very long periods of time, latently dangerous, as some historians claim, but accumulating and finally actualising when made public. The labelling process has often been considered detrimental and inescapable once public. Evidence has been found that, like Agata, the same persons were accused again and again. Even if they were cleared of charges, the bad reputation would follow. How much this affected their lives has been assessed in various ways. Some have pointed out that distrust would accumulate, and the accused would be gradually more and more excluded from any full membership of the community. Others have shown that the socio-economic positions did not change much: those accused did not lose their wealth and did not have to (or could not) move to another place to shed their past but that they still had to face distrust from their neighbours, the emotional enmity of those who believed themselves to be the victims of witchcraft and their own feelings when they were accused by their neighbours.83 This view also makes the witchcraft accusations an inescapable machine: rumours would accumulate, and even if the target sought to clear her- or himself from the accusations, the defamation process would ultimately add to the suspicion. A public voicing of suspicion is, in this view, a step towards exclusion; bringing the matter to court would determine it. The labelling process is, however, at least in the Finnish case, only half of the matter. The court process in itself included stabilising mechanisms. The first such 82 Cf. Wickham 1998. 83 Cf. Renvall 1949, Boyer and Nissenbaum 1974; Demos 1982; Briggs 1998; Eilola 2003, 294–300. Roper 2004; Lennersand 2004, 66–8.

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mechanism appears in the very way the court interrogated witnesses and recorded their stories. In court, not only were the rumours retold and publicised, but the ways and situations in which they were born and then circulated were also described. In 1676, Agata’s maid Kaarina told the court that she was just coming from fishing when Agata had asked her about her catch and ventured on the magic tricks. A little later, Antti Heikinpoika told the court that he had met Agata on his way to church on a certain day and talked about hanging bells round oxen’s necks.84 Similar circumstantial details appear often: for example, when Heikki Janckari accused his sister-in-law Dårdi Matintytär of being a whore, he claimed he had witnesses on both Dårdi’s affairs with two men, ‘when everyone else had gone to church on Sundays and on Rogation tide’ (böne dagar) and according to another witness ‘when the sermon was about the wedding in Cana Galilee’.85 These were tiny details, often irrelevant to the matter at hand, the actual offence or agreement – it did not much matter where Agata was when she uttered the guilty words (unless it was one of the places which were pronounced as more ‘safe’, such as church, public roads, courts of law, the victims’ own home: all crimes committed in these places were dealt more severely), but these details did lend credibility to the narrative. They highlighted the reality behind the narratives, giving them more colour and familiarity – and, in the case of fornication while everyone else was at church, the defects in the virtue of the other party. However, such remarks also disengaged the narrative from the persons and situations present. They reminded the listeners that the events of the narrative were not happening at present, but somewhere else, at another time, to other people. These details also reminded the listeners that they were listening to a story, not witnessing the events themselves.86 In a seemingly paradoxical way, the court narrative’s process of making explicit what was known and how also made explicit the amount of the unknown in the narratives. Somewhere else and some other time were more uncertain and more complicated than here and now. The relationship between facts and gossip, reproducing each other, became more visible as the court dealing made the gossip public. The uncertainty was deliberately highlighted by some witnesses, who described their own conjectures regarding the matter under testimony. There were some very practical reasons for them to do so: the omnipresent danger of a countersuit, the fear that the accused would retaliate by cursing and the knowledge that they would very probably have to live with the accused in the future and it would not be easy after the accusation. The aim of the court was naturally to normalise abnormal situations. It can be doubted how deep a respect the populace had for all the actions of the authorities or all the decisions of the courts – especially when unfavourable, but in general the court also represented lawfulness and rightfulness and a viable way of pursuing the 84 Ulvila 11—12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53v, 54. NAS. 85 Ulvila 18—20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. KA. 86 Greimas, A.J. & Courtés, J: 1982, 87–91(disengagement), 100–102 (engagement) (French original 1979). See also Ferraioulo 2004 and Ricoeur 1996 (French original1984; English translation 1985).

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‘right’ course. Appeals to higher courts were made, but once a court judgement was final, it was usually, though not always, considered valid by the population as well as the educated elite, regardless of other differences of opinion and belief. In witchcraft cases, too, the court decided whether or not a wrong had been done and whether it should be punished. Thus a certain mark of lawfulness was stamped on the outcome, whatever it was. 87 The mark of lawfulness in the court sentence, even when affirming the existence of witchcraft, could actually function to unmark the situation. When Agata was convicted for maleficium and vidskepelsse, the court made a definitive statement: yes, this is what happened. Because the witchcraft suspicion was a way to name and discuss Agata’s confusing leap to head of the farm, the court’s statement worked to resolve the matter, although that is nowhere explicitly stated in the court records. Witchcraft was condemned, and Agata’s public punishment meant it was dealt with. The sentence did not, however, revoke Agata’s victory in the inheritance battle or her status as head of the Tommila farm. No confiscation of property occurred. Thus, the court sentence did not remove or undo the phenomenon which caused the suspicion of witchcraft – in this case, the inversion of hierarchy by Agata – but it named it and thereby made it understandable and controllable. A formal closing of the affair is also important in the sentences and punishment. Often the suspicion of a crime had already labelled the offender and excluded him or her from the Communion Table as a symbolic exclusion from the community. Such labelled offenders were most often quite able to carry on with their normal lives, which comes forward from all the records stating that accused witches’ trials had to be postponed because they were elsewhere minding their normal businesses.88 They very rarely taken into custody – there would not have been any suitable rooms for that, nor was it thought necessary. Yet the symbolic exclusion seems to have been enough to make many of the alleged offenders take their own matters to court, either as defamation suits or as criminal cases against them.89 87 Cf. Wickham 1998. 88 Take for example Risto Olavinpoika, whose trials were prolonged for a range of reasons: Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a3:30 states that the Court of Appeal had ordered Risto to compurgation for crimes of witchcraft and magic during the 1680s, but some of his co-swearers were not accepted. In Ulvila 4–5 Oct. 1695 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a3:368, he tried again and succeeded, but as the compurgation was abandoned, the Court of Appeal ordered the matter to be reinvestigated in the rural court once again. Ulvila 27–28 June 1702 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a16:130–132 merely records that Risto was not present because he had his taxes assessed; in Ulvila 13–16 Feb. 1704 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a20: 346–52 Risto came to court, but the crown official who acted as prosecutor did not, and the documents from the Court of Appeal were missing. The court tried to interrogate a witness from another parish, but he was too drunk, and the hearing had to be postponed. The witness was sober at Ulvila 27–28 June 1704 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a20:985–7, but Risto had gone to mind his business in Turku. The matter was never solved before Risto died a natural death. Ulvila 27—28 June 1707. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a24:356v––8v. NA. 89 See for example Pyllkänen 1990, Aalto 1996 or Lindsted Cronberg 1997 for cases where women start their own fornication trials ‘because they had for so long been deprived

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The sentences for most witchcraft and all sexual crimes also included a public penance, the publicity being only partly a deterrent warning for future offenders. Sexual offenders were ordered to ask the forgiveness of the parish as well as God. The effect was dualistic: on the one hand, it was thought of as a shaming punishment, the effect of which was the greater because it imprinted a lasting image trough repetition and visuality.90 On the other hand, the public confession as well as the private ones included absolution. This is one reason why women brought their own chastity cases to court. After the public confession, the offenders were allowed the take Communion with the rest of the parish again.91 The sentence – whether guilty or not guilty – and the punishment afterwards made the return possible. The society did not need to get rid of the witch or a whore; rather, it was capable of dealing with such unpleasant matters once it could label them. A story could be named, separated from the rest of the daily life, talked of, wondered about and dealt with. Paradoxically, such an unwinding of the narratives can make the court situation culturally even more significant.92 Whereas bringing the case to court meant, for most of those present, stamping a definitive mark of disorder on the situation, the actual trial process sought to unmark the situation, to create order out of disorder and to unlabel the accused. Because of the unmarking process, it was possible for Agata and many other witches to go on living in the village for decades; Agata successfully ran her farm, despite the magic and witchcraft trials and her conviction. The unmarking did not wipe away the memory of the trial or the suspicion, but it made it part of the community’s normal life. Obviously, this did not always happen. If the sentence was felt to be grossly unjust, or if there was someone in the neighbourhood who just would not let the matter be, he or she might not be easily silenced. With Agata, too, the first trial did not put an end to the rumours. When Aune moved out from the village, the suspicion did not surface again for ten years, and even then witnesses appeared in support of Agata’s reputation. The close of the second witchcraft case in 1677 seems to have closed debate about Agata’s abilities to run the farm as well. Thereafter, the number of petty trials about cattle and hay grew smaller. of their vehicles of mercy’, meaning that, despite the religious language, the pressure of the community was at least as important; it was, and it crystallised around the Communion even more because their daily lives usually had to carry on as before. Ulvila court records include similar cases but also rather more complicated ones in which the women came to court because they were pregnant, or thought they were pregnant. A pregnancy had to be made public, but not necessarily at court, and the child had to be supported, but pregnacy also meant some form of punishment at court (for unmarried first-time offenders usually a public confession). For emphasis on child support, see for example Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:376; Ulvila 16–17 Sept. 1701, 2–4. NA. 90 Renvall 1949. 91 Pylkkänen 1990, Aalto 1996, Lindstedt Cronberg 1997. According to TUOKKO 22, church punishments were most commonly given for fornication. The first case of magic was in 1638, but after the end of 1670s they were commonly levied also for other crimes from causing disturbances in or after church or being drunk in church to magic and even theft. 92 See similar effects in art and rhetoric by Lotman 1990, 54ff.

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Conclusions The court arena had not, at the end of the seventeenth century, turned into an eliteled inquisitorial arena of coercion and acculturation. The rural district court was still dominated both quantitatively and qualitatively by the peasant farmers. They used the arena to pursue their own aims both with each other and towards people of different social standing. There was an element of popular education in the local courts’ dealings, but the social control at work in the courts is still peer control rather than elite-led.93 The court records themselves are a product of cultural negotiation and interpretation. They were written for the purposes of the review by the Court of Appeal. The originally oral and Finnish narratives of the peasant parties were therefore translated both into Swedish and into the legal culture. This interpretation must not be thought of as elite domination or imposing elite ideals on the populace, but rather as channelling ideas and popular views upwards in the educational hierarchy. The process and its effects were like those in much educational and entertaining literature, both of which adopted themes and characters from popular folklore. The records therefore form a point of intersection between oral and written, popular and elite, lay and legal. The text was co-authored, negotiated by the scribe and the actual speakers in the court, and this negotiation can be traced. It is even possible to find parts of the text which are regularly more dominated by the elite tradition, the ritual text or the peasant discourse, which may be just as symbolic but follow different formal rules. The court case as such was often a result of an argument in which the existing hierarchies, rights and authority relationships were somehow contested. The eventual result of the court case also affected the future positions of these people. The social roles which people used to legitimate their actions also carried a certain social status position and a certain amount of authority with them. As these claims were legitimated and others disclaimed, one division of authority was enforced. Serious criminal trials concerning honour had especially profound effects on people’s future prospects. However, the court hearing also had mechanisms which deconstructed some of the damaging effects of rumours. The process of repeating not only the stories of suspicious goings-on and the magic or witchcraft which had taken place but also when and how the speaker had acquired his or her knowledge of the matter made uncertainties visible and detached the court situation from the suspicions. The peasant farmers and their families used the court arena to present themselves in different social roles, thereby legitimating their action in the court. The roles implied the reasons why they took action and why they should be regarded as experts on the particular subject at hand. Such roles might be called enunciative. On another level of social roles, the actors legitimated their previous and future actions and claims to a certain authority in their daily lives. Such roles and the authority which they carried may have been contested in the disputes or crimes which had led to court. Re-affirming or re-challenging the claims to certain social roles and the respective authority or status in the court throughout the trial and especially in the

93 Cf. Purkiss 1996; Österberg 1997; Gibson 1999.

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sentence inevitably had some effect on the range of roles which would be available to the participants in the future. Witchcraft trials sometimes have a double meaning in this process. Being convicted of witchcraft or similar crimes obviously damaged one’s social capital and general trustworthiness, even though it did not usually lead to a total deprivation of social existence in the form of execution, deportment or confiscation of property. However, witchcraft also had a symbolic meaning, which may have given people the images and vocabulary with which they could talk about unexpected and unwelcome inversions of authority and status: disputes between parents and children or bitter surprises in inheritances. Witchcraft had this potential partly because it lacked the concrete precision of some other crimes: although suspicions of witchcraft were presented by relating the practical details of something the alleged witch had said or done, witchcraft was still continuously present and everyone was its potential target or victim. It is no wonder that witchcraft accusations in Sweden and Finland seem largely to have involved the peasant farmers and their wives instead of the beggars and hill-cotters which abound in descriptions of witchcraft in folklore and popular culture today.94 Indeed, studies of nineteenth century magic and witchcraft suggest that much of the magic was at the time the prerogative of itinerant beggars and semi-professionals.95 The reason for such a difference may not be merely because magic had diminished in social standing at the end of the ‘pre-modern’ era, but also because the folklore collections and court records concern different social status groups almost by definition. The folklore collectors and some of the informers may have been educated and middle class, but the tradition which they were asked to inform was already supposedly past and lower class. The early modern court records, however, were dominated by the relatively high-status peasant farmers and may therefore have ignored much of what the landless common lot did. Servants appeared in considerable numbers only in cases concerning their service wages and contracts and fornication trials.96 However, as the peasant farmers always had a vested interest in terms of service and child support cases, it is logical that they were dealt with in the rural courts. Bringing charges against someone for a crime such as witchcraft already acknowledges that the accused has some kind of status in the community. Sometimes servants and beggars were, of course accused, but that seems to have been the exceptional last resort when all other methods to deal with the matter failed. Historians have paid too little attention to the judicial system’s effect on the social background of the accused, the accusers and witnesses in witch trials. It is of great importance and places into a new light considerations of the MacFarlanean old beggar witch versus witchcraft as an illegitimate and misused version of the normal experience of power at midlife, as well as the apparently different social backgrounds of witches in

94 Nenonen 1992, Eilola 2003. 95 Stark-Arola 1998. 96 Pylkkänen 1990, 230–232.

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Scandinavia, continental Europe and England. 97 In systems such as the Swedish and Finnish ones, the witch must have some authority to be accused at all. The court arena was strongly connected to a certain social status, that of peasant farmers and their families. Therefore, activity in court, except in some fairly limited spheres of life, could also represent belonging to this particular status group. Whether that was for good or bad depended on the original social position of the person in question. A new farmer like Agata might gain more forcefulness and authority simply by taking her dealings to court – whether she lost or won, she was always displaying her ability to take part in the culture. A local gentry official, however, might be forced to court when his normal channels of influence failed. For the local authorities, then, the court may have seemed an arena of control. For the peasant farmers and their families, the court was the arena for dealing with local and wider political and social issues and differences. Historians already know that, despite the deathly toll in some crazes or panics in different parts of Europe, most witches survived, and most witch ‘hunts’ were not panics, but rather of a milder, endemic kind: a trial every now and then showing a belief in and a fear of witchcraft, but not the kind of deadly and inescapable machinery of destruction described by Trevor-Roper and many earlier historians. Of the roughly 2,000 tried witches in Finland – an enormous amount in a populace of about 400,000 – 150 to 200 fewer were given a death sentence. That is less than ten per cent. Even those 150 to 200 death sentences were usually mitigated by the High Court, which had to review all cases concerning life before the execution or other punishment took place. The usual punishment for witchcraft and magic was 40 markkas fines. What is most important here is that more than half of the accused were acquitted. The trials used torture very rarely – that was forbidden in the lower courts, but they could have got a permission from the High Court, had they sought it. The lower courts do not seem to have been anxious to do so. There was very little coercion, as can be seen from the discussions entered into by Agata and other people in her story in court, and the publicity of trials before an audience also discouraged the use of informal violence or threats. There were not even suitable rooms for that, as the rural courts usually convened in either the church or the parish bailiffs’ farmstead. The accused were not even imprisoned – there were no prisons available in the seventeenth-century countryside.98 The situation in parts of Europe was sometimes different. Panics took place even in Finland. However, it now seems, as research in Europe progresses to trials like those in France and in Rothenburg and in many parts of England, that the endemic and mild type of trials may indeed have been a majority in most of Europe.99 It has to be concluded then, that most of the witches survived the trials, some of them fairly well, like Agata. Their fates after the trials have raised some concern, and their lives thereafter were not always easy, but re-integration to the community in one or another way was the aim and the norm. The remainder of my study purports to show how the community lived with its witches. 97 See Briggs 1998, 253; Sharpe 1996; Rowlands 2001, esp. 57; Rowlands 2006; Roper 2004; and Levack 2006. 98 Nenonen 1992, Heikkinen 1969. 99 See especially Rowlands 2006; Briggs 1998; Nenonen 2007a; Nenonen 2007b; or Nenonen 2006.

Chapter 4

Work, Status and Power Women’s and gender historians have most often considered work in the urban context; there are some notable exceptions especially in Scandinavia, but they often seem to have worked on a later period of time. The late medieval and early modern beginnings of capitalism and proto-industrialisation were conceived in towns and cities, which has made the towns seem especially important to the economic history of Europe and European women. This understanding was greatly enhanced by the new material produced by the developing urban governments produced, which made historians’ work both possible and rewarding. Among women’s and gender historians, the first question was whether or not the evolving capitalism and industrialisation meant a better or a worse situation for women. At first, Alice Clark seemed to answer the question positively. During the 1980s, when women’s history began to claim a position in the professional field of history, the answer seemed to be that capitalism and industrialisation worsened women’s plight, or at least that the early modern changes of urbanisation and market economy did not bring a marked improvement to a situation which was already rather poor. Especially in towns, where the guilds were evolving and work was become more and more specialised and skilled work, and where the new moral concerns of the Reformation were emerging, women’s options were seen to have diminished. The gradual dissolution of the household economy and the movement of work from the household out to the workshops, manufactories and markets was the crucial factor, which meant that women could no longer retain the opportunities of high status work. Therefore, women were seen to have been left with low-skilled, low-status, low-paid, temporary and sometimes illegal jobs, of which they would have to hold more than one to make the ends meet. Since the 1980s, proponents of the view that women would, after all, have gained from industrialisation, capitalism and monetary economy have surfaced again. Indeed, it has been claimed that these phenomena might indeed have been the result of changes in women’s behaviour and women’s marriage patterns which may have forced people to seek support from the new systems and communities which at that time formed what we now know as government and industry. Mediating views  For example Niskanen 1998 gives numerous examples; see also Lövkrona 1999b for a folklorist’s point of view on feminine work. As a relatively recent example among historians, see Östman 2000.  Wiesner 1986; Bennet 1988, 271, 274. Bennet’s own argument was that, because medieval women experienced a situation which was not a “golden age”, the disadvantages women faced in the early modern towns were not a great deterioration.  Hartman 2004, 236–41.

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which lie somewhere in between the two positions and emphasise variations in time and circumstances are becoming more and more common. Work as obedience When women worked in the urban household workshop of the Reformation or early modern period, they were, historians claim, submitted to a stricter and more gendered hierarchy than ever before. The male master was the ruler, backed up by peer and religious support through the enforcement of Reformation teaching and magisterial discipline. In these views, work is essentially a way of enforcing control and hierarchy. The ideology of work as enforcing obedience and displaying status was indeed present in the Reformation teaching. Work is an important part of the socalled ‘Protestant ethic’, which sociologists and historians have been discussing intermittently ever since Max Weber. This concept, emerging from Reformation thinking about work, reflects a view of diligent work as compulsory, and of success in work as indicative of the predestined justification or lack thereof of the believers, who could never know whether they would be among the saved – thus the double necessity to succeed and profit. The Weberian use of ‘Protestant’ referred to seventeenth-century English Puritans. In Sweden, however, a version of the Lutheran branch of Protestantism was dominant. This was a social ethic based on the duty of all Christians to serve God in the mundane occupation which God had chosen for each individual – that is, where one was born and raised in a family tradition. No separate Good Works – giving alms, fasting or even reading more than the regular amount of prayers – could do any good for the salvation of a Lutheran Christian, or other Protestants. Faith alone could justify people in the eyes of God; it should be manifest in the daily work. The daily occupation – as a farmer, a worker, a crafter, a father or a mother – became the individual’s highest, and perhaps only moral good. Daily work was raised to the status of service to God. For the peasant people, this usually meant the jobs of husbands, housewives and farmhands or maids. The parishes were supposed to appoint work for the unemployed poor. Begging, thieving and prostitution were among the few forbidden unworthy forms of livelihood.  See for example Smith 2005.  Roper 1989, 27–55.  Weber was not the first or the last to present the thought:some sociologists have managed to argue their own characteristic theories based on a similar view of society. Weber, however, was polemic and selective in his choice of evidence in a way that stimulated much later discussion. See Weber 1950 (German orig. 1904–1905); Tawney 1960 (orig. 1929) and the literature cited there.  Cameron 1991, 406.  Jütte 1994, 121; Geremek 1994, 133–43, 180ff. The practical measures or the mental changes – e.g. the Poor Laws that forbade begging and alms-giving – were not, of course, unique to Lutheran cities or countries but common throughout Europe at the time, among Catholics as well as among all kinds of Protestant.

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The theory was at the same time both very subversive and very stabilising. On the one hand, Luther admitted no spiritual superiority for any of the approved callings. It made no difference that some were kings and others were fieldworkers. In this sense, the hierarchy at work did not display hierarchy before God. On the other hand, all estates and occupations were instituted by God. The division of work and earthly hierarchy were God-given. Obedience, it has been argued, was at least as central to Lutheranism as it was to the household workshop. It was in agreement with the current ideas of leadership as a hierarchical chain of command: everyone had to obey someone else, at the top of the earthly chain there was God. The hierarchical chain was largely legitimated in the Fourth Commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. It has even been said that the most important thing in the Lutheran work ethic was not work in the sense of production, but the obedience it imposed on every one: only by obeying someone else could humans avoid working for selfish ends.10 In both the interpretation of work as service to God and of work as forcing obedience, the husbands’ and wives’ responsibilities were given extra emphasis and value. Not only were they working themselves and forming the prime unit of work, but the husband and the wife were also ideally the authorities to be obeyed either as real parents or in the place of the parents in the unit. Their authority was doubly reinforced, and the parental role extended over all other persons in the household, not merely children but servants and workers, too. What Luther and the other Reformers mostly seem to have had in mind was the urban household workshop, where people lived and worked close together. In such circumstances, the authority of one over all others often gains more force: therefore women’s historians like Lyndal Roper have found it possible to claim that the parental relationship – more flexible with multiple meanings in terms of gender – was subjected to the relationship between a husband and a wife, which came to embody the whole hierarchy.11 A Scandinavian reservation, however, will need to be made to all the considerations of gendered or general status which focus on urban work and economy. Seventeenthcentury Finland, like the rest of Scandinavia, was profoundly rural, and the meaning of urbanisation to any part of the population – including the bourgeoisie, let alone women – was marginal. Even during the eighteenth century, four-fifths of working people worked in agriculture, and the proportion of the population which actually lived off of agriculture was even greater. Only a small portion of the population lived in towns, and most of the towns’ burghers produced a good part of their living by farming land outside the town walls.12 Therefore, the Lutheran teaching may have been applied differently in Finland than it was in Germany (for different needs in a different society), and consequently, it produced different social consequences.  Kjellberg 1994, 170–71; Luther’s letter to Prince Frederick on Good Works 29 March.1520. I have used the Finnish Edition of Lutherin valitut teokset II 1959, 237–316, which, for my purposes, is good enough. 10 Kjellberg 1994, 170–71; Luther’s letter to Prince Frederick on Good Works 29 March 1520. Lutherin valitut teokset II 1959, 237–316. 11 Wiesner-Hanks & Karant-Nunn 2003, 88–9; Roper 1989, 36, 59, et passim. 12 Soininen 1975; Nummela 2003, 134; Kallioinen 2000, 221–2.

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Work as personal worth It is not surprising that the idea of work as a basis for personal worth also infiltrated the peasantry. Work is indeed among the things which were considered worthy of reward. When disputes arose over the harvests of newly ploughed fields or about fields which had been worked on in common by two households, the parties often tried to appeal to the work they had invested in the matter, claiming that they should have respective shares of the produce; for example,when Elisabeth Johansdotter, the widow of the former mayor of Pori, reclaimed some hay which Agata had collected from her fields, Elisabeth stated that her folk had cleared the meadows in the first place.13 Similar occasions when work created property rights occurred when the disputes touched cleared meadows on the shores, forests cleared for slash-and-burn or beasts and hunting: things the legal ownership rights of which did not exist or were confused.14 If that was not the case, however, the legal and customary rights were more important: the Tommila brothers tried to use their work as a basis for their claims in the inheritance struggle; they said they had worked the farm, and should therefore be considered the first entitled to the land. This was a good argument, too, because Agata could not claim the same: she and her daughters were women, they had not been formally responsible even when Agata’s husband had been alive, nor had they even lived on the farm for the past few years. The jury, however, remarked in Agata’s favour that her husband had also worked the farm before he had to go to war and indeed supported the younger brothers by his work. Therefore, the jury said, where the other brother’s had worked the land, they had also enjoyed the produce: they had been living on the farm and its resources, both when they worked it themselves and when Agata’s husband had worked it. 15 The above example illustrates that there was a peasant notion that work created a share in property and that the value placed on work was strong among the peasant farmers. Nevertheless, while primogeniture was not a legal stipulation, it was part of the customary law. For the judges, concerned with customary law, primogeniture was more relevant than work. It can be assumed that the Tommila brothers directed their appeal especially to the peasant jury, who were farmers themselves. They valued not just the work in itself, as ability and diligence, but also the interdependence between the village farmers: the workload of each and the success of everyone were dependent on the ability of all members to carry their shares of the load. For the peasant farmers, who depended on it, work was a virtue in a somewhat more practical sense than in the Lutheran ethic of vocation. Work was not just something which imposed obedience, duty and selfsacrifice on everyone; it was also a virtue as such. The ability to provide for oneself – in any way except those determined criminal – brought status. It is also significant 13 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676 Bielkes vol. 27:70. NA. 14 Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:73–4 (369–v). NA. Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:20. When a man had cleared a new farmstead, after which his landlord drove him away, he had a right to come back. 15 Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I:KO a4:29–30. NA.

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that the jury, which consisted of farmers, used work even when it decided against the Tommila brothers’ claim: the jury noted an equal claim for Agata’s children because their father had worked the farm, too. However, the eventual court ruling on the Tommila inheritance case put more emphasis on primogeniture: the fact that Agata’s husband, the children’s father, had been the eldest son. Work therefore meant a lot in court, but it meant more to the peasant farmers than to the elite judges. This is somewhat surprising, given that work held such an important position in the religious teaching: work was a duty. Everyone should support himself (and herself) instead of loitering about – a sin of which Luther accused the Catholic monastic life. One would think work would have had a more important place in the elite views; it seems, however, that the importance of work was greater for the farmers and ordinary people, suggesting a bottom-up influence of the popular on the elite. In the disputes of Sawo household – the home of Maria Pertuntytär, Dårdi Matintytär and Heikki Janckari already mentioned in the previous chapter – work became an issue at a fairly early stage. In 1695, when the trials for witchcraft and violence against parents were well on their way, Heikki looked for a place to move to – the parents had promised to drop the charges if he found one. At that point, he also tried to sue Maria for his wages – he claimed that as he was forced to leave the homestead and had already found himself another place, he was entitled to a fair share of the produce of the farmstead during the years he had worked there. Maria, on the other hand, said she was ready to pay for four years of work, but not more. Since Heikki’s hope for getting the inheritance had diminished, Maria explained, he and his wife had stopped working and become disobedient to her. It seems that working for the common profit of the household marked one’s belonging to it: at the same time that Heikki stopped working, his breach with the family was also marked by his accusations against his sister-in-law, as well as by the semi-public, apparently widespread rumours that he would in future be forced to leave the farmstead.16 Later that year, Heikki applied for permission to take up a farm which had had problems with taxes. Heikki’s honour was not totally tarnished by the events in the Sawo household: he was able to present his sureties. Among them was Risto Olavinpoika, father to Dårdi’s husband. Perhaps some sureties wished him gone from the Sawo household, too. Heikki’s quest for a new livelihood was, however, cut short by the doubtful honour of the previous farmer, who had fled to another parish as it had become evident to him that he would not be able to pay his taxes. The court would not give the farm to anyone else before they knew whether they could release the previous owner from his obligations. The situation was not helped by Heikki’s own reputation: the villagers in Siikainen thought someone else would be a better choice for the farm because Heikki was known to be angry and disagreeable; he could cause much trouble in the village common property.17 Refusing to work may have been a tool in the domestic power struggle in the Sawo household, but reputation as a bad workmate could spread and damage one’s future possibilities. 16 Ulvila 8––10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a5:18–19. NAF. 17 Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a5:394–5; Ulvila 9–11. March 1696. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:106–7. NA.

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One of the insults which seems to have contributed to the accusations against Agata was when she reproached a soldier for ‘going about free’ and suggested he clear himself some fields by slash-and-burn. The offence in Agata’s words was that he was not diligent enough but loitered about; loitering proved his masculine honour was deficient.18 Play, however, was not the opposite of work, or grounds for reproof, as can be seen in Agata’s repeated defence against the accusations of cattle magic with bells: the bells were used only to amuse the children, and there was nothing wrong in mixing work and play. There are also a few narratives in which people play without any special disapproval being attached to it: take, for example, the case of the unruly girls who had been sleigh-riding at Shrovetide and then decided to continue the fun by tapping on the windows of an old servant woman. On their way home, they invented a story about a witch flying through the skies on a broomstick, which eventually ended up in court in the form of a slander suit by Valpuri Sipintytär and Matti Juhanpoika Lusa.19 Sleigh-riding and even the teasing of the old servant seem to have been tolerated, and the girls were even able to stay out of trouble with their broomstick-story, as it turned out they had not claimed the witch was a real person. In general, the reproof was not for play but for avoiding the proper share of work. Historians have long considered diligence and ability as well as willingness to work hard as central for masculine honour. Along with honesty, they were the most common elements in praise and slander. As Heikki’s case illustrates, these were tightly interlinked. Women’s honour and reputation, on the other hand, was more often more closely connected to chastity and religion than to work and production. This applies at least as far as slander was concerned. Therefore, historians think of women’s honour as connected to domesticity, quietness and submissiveness. A man’s honour was thought to be based on his ability to support himself and his family, that is, on his independence.20 The independence of men’s work is, of course, a generalisation or stereotype. One must remember that slander or shaming represent only part of honour. It used to be said that women’s work did not create status or enhance women’s legal status. Either their work was different from men’s and considered of less importance or, when they performed the same work, they were not allowed to claim the same status from it.21 Recently, however, historians have found 18 Ulvila 11–12 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. See, however, Mäkelä 1989, 22, 75ff.; Pylkkänen 1990, 105–6, 122, 128, 247 on the possible emphasis the importance of physical labour put on masculine authority. 19 Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:102–3. NA. 20 Östling 2002, 264–5; Oja 1994, 51; Sharpe 1997, 153, citing his own study on slander in 1980 and other work during the 1980s, such as that of David Underdown. See also Dean 2004. On slander in Sweden, see, for example, Jarrick and Söderberg 1998, 43ff. with similar results, except that here insults against women, too, included calling them thieves. According to Jarrick and Söderberg, insults concerning witchcraft were rare in general. They may be so in comparison to other forms of slander, but in my material they are common enough. See also Andersson 1998, 35–8. 21 Bennet 1988, 271, 274. A Finnish example of this is Mäkelä’s claim that the eastern Finnish culture was more male-dominated because the slash-and-burn agriculture emphasised physical strength, although the burnings needed women’s work, too, that was considered of less value. Mäkelä 1989, ss, 75ff.

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considerable evidence for women’s work as creating status. Disputes about work and the division of labour were often a part of authority and membership disputes in households, either in the sense of preventing some persons from joining in the work or as criticising the way or amount of work they put in.22 In the stories of the Tommila and Sawo households, women, as well as men, made reference to their work as a way to enhance their status and honour. This seems to be a common feature in disputes of household membership and authority.23 Historians working on the nineteenth century have already noted that attitudes towards the domestication and confinement of women and feminitity were changing. Earlier, work, diligence and even sheer strength had been important for women’s honour as well as for men’s. Only during the nineteenth century did the situation slowly change in the rural areas as well, so that women’s honour no longer depended on work, but favoured a more delicate femininity.24 The earlier situation where work was essential and compulsory is visible in the seventeenth-century material here. In the witchcraft suit of 1686 to 1688, Agata Pekantytär’s neighbours came to court explaining that, as they came from work, four maids of Tuomas Sipinpoika, a neighbouring farmer, had been coming from work and met Agata, who asked them if the stolen meat had tasted good. Tuomas had taken the insult – the hint that he was a thief – badly and produced witnesses one by one to report any bad behaviour of Agata’s they knew of. One of these witnesses was Liisa Pentintytär, who told how Agata had taken her cattle out even though it was still winter and, as Liisa passed her, had driven her out of sight with insulting swearwords. One Sipi Antinpoika told the court that his wife Marketta and Agata were seeing the cattle in from the pastures when Agata had said she knew a magic trick to get better calves. 25 These and many other stories of magic mention many tasks of household work. They mention work in part as something for which the magic was used, and in part as something which was going on when people talked about magic. Details like what they were doing when they heard the story of magic made the testimonies more convincing and real to the court audience. Yet, the fact that the narrators of the stories picked just those details, instead of some others, is significant. It reflects the way the narrators thought they could make themselves appear in the best light – or others in the worst. This is why Agata explained she was watering her cows and the neighbour’s wife was drunk and disturbing them during the Blåkulla investigations in 1687–1688. This is also why Sipi Antinpoika said his wife and Agata had been minding their cattle when the subject of cattle luck arose in their discussions: idle talk would have sullied both their reputations.

22 23 24 25

Eilola 2002; Östman 2005; Fiebranz 1998. See for example Eilola 2002. Östman 2004. Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:183–5. NA.

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Witchcraft and skilled work The Sawo household had faced a witchcraft accusation already in the 1980s. At first, their neighbour, Matti Heikinpoika, demanded punishment for Maria Pertuntytär for calling him a witch and saying he had taken dust from another neighbour’s fields when ploughing them and thrown it onto his own. Maria denied having ever accused him or knowing anything but good of him; she apologised, and nothing came of the matter. Maria’s alleged reproach was directed against Matti’s work and his masculine honour. As Agata’s reproach against the soldier who ‘walked about free’ and did not procure for himself some slash-and-burn field work to better support his family, Maria was pointing out that there was something wanting in Matti’s work. The magic trick described suggests that Matti’s work was not only inadequate but wrong: taking dust from the neighbours’ fields to his own was likened to stealing from the neighbours.26 Likewise, however, feminine honour was continuously present in the trials and it, too, had to do with work. A couple of years later, the current disputes in Pomarkku village about collective rights in milling and fishing led the village into another magic and witchcraft trial: Maria, her mother and the wife of a neighbouring farm were suspected of cattle magic. That, however, belonged to the supposed feminine sphere. So did Maria’s tools, although not probably her temper in her response: the accuser claimed she had hit him with an iron pan when confronted with the suspicions. The meaning of cattle – probably in reality a primarily feminine sphere of agriculture – for the peasant economy has been downplayed in Finnish/Scandinavian historiography to emphasise grain production. The cattle were not of a particularly good breed; they were poorly fed during the winter and therefore very unproductive. There was no proper monetary market for the products. Consequently, the purpose of the cattle was mostly to produce manure, according to the Jutikkala tradition of Finnish agrarian history (and also by Arvo M. Soininen).27 Nevertheless, when compared to the situation since the early twentieth century, however, cattle still accounted for a significant amount of the early modern Finnish peasant farmers’ economy. Butter was what the peasant household could most regularly spare to sell for money or to trade for other products or to pay taxes with. The importance of cattle is also shown in the frequency of cattle magic: if dairy production was unimportant, people certainly would not have gone through so much trouble to ensure that calves were born safely, of the right sex, disease-free, safe from wild beasts, well-fed and productive. Cattle, milk, butter and beer are recurring themes in witchcraft and magic cases.28 The women’s tasks of cultivating butter, beer and so forth may have been small scale, but they were crucial to the survival of the household. They produced the surplus which could be exchanged for food and used 26 Ulvila 3–4 Feb. 1680.Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:21v–22. NA. 27 See for example Wilmi 2003, 176–8. 28 There are a range of such cases in, for example, Ulvila 4 and April 1674:Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I:KO a4:22; 22–v, 23; 26v; Ulvila 3–5 July 1683:Ala-Satakunta II:KO a1:425–v; Ulvila 21 and 23 Feb. 1694. Ala-Satakunta II:KO a6:29–32. NA. See also Suomen kansan muinaisia taikoja IV (1933), the volumes on cattle magic which are more than three times as voluminous as the three previous parts of the collection together.

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to pay taxes and, most importantly, which brought money to the household, where many of the farm’s products were used.29 This meant that women could control the stream of money into and out of the house. In nineteenth century Finland, women could raise their own status by raising a cattle herd of their own, which puts the movable given to women as dowry into a different light. Such goods often included the best cow of the household.30 Obviously skill and diligence in these tasks meant potential financial survival as well as status and authority in work.31 It has been argued that wives felt oppressed by the ambiguity and contradiction imposed on them by the demands of obedience to their husbands on the one hand and the need for assertiveness and capability in managing the household and selling domestic goods in the market on the other hand. Some explanations of witchcraft suspicions have been based on this quandary. A witch is a kind of anti-housewife, the accuser’s own negative side of herself. All failures and uncertainties can be projected onto the witch. Therefore the witch is seen as making milk turn sour and impossible to churn, casting spells on cows so that they give blood instead of milk and so forth. Sometimes the witches’ victims become incapable of their work. In her analysis of a story about witchcraft, Diane Purkiss notes the victim’s careful description of how she had made sure that she had done everything right. Only when no fault of her own can be found does she believe in witchcraft. The victim ‘struggles to reassert the control over spinning and dairying which has been taken from her’.32 In the testimonies against the witches in my material, however, the housewives do not claim they suffered damage: they only describe the witch trying to cause it. Purkiss analyses English cases of witchcraft to illustrate the importance of the housewife’s feminine work. Contrary to the view of women’s work put forth by women’s and gender historians of the 1980s, the peasant mistress was not left with low-status or low-skilled work, and the mistresses not even with temporary work.33 Churning butter, cooking, spinning and weaving were tasks requiring skill and vital to the survival of the household economy, especially in rural areas. The remuneration may not have been good, but it nevertheless accounted for much of the rural household’s monetary economy. Also, the work of housewives had much wider 29 On selling butter for considerable sums of money, see for example Ulvila 8–9 Nov. 1704. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a20:158v–159. NA. This is also the only time I have found that a husband tries to use his legal right to cancel his wife’s economic transaction. This case, however, speaks in itself more for the interpretation, that wives often made economic transactions. Otherwise the burgher buying butter would not have made the purchase or paid a considerable sum of money for it. Moreover, the husband (Risto Olavinpoika) had tried twice to cancel the purchase outside the court without success. He did succeed eventually, though. Tar production, of course, could also bring money, although as often it was traded with the town burghers for salt or the like. 30 Cf. Tilly & Scott 1987 (orig. 1978), 54; Stark-Arola 1998, 98. 31 Cf. Heijden 2004. 32 Purkiss 1996, 96–9. 33 The original claim is in Bennet 1988, 274; it is supported by Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, Sjöberg 1996, and Sjöberg 2001. Others have posed the question differently, suggesting that the woman’s position in her own household was crucial to her status and her scope of action outside her household. Pylkkänen 1990, 282 et passim; Andersson 1998, 64 et passim.

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cultural symbolic meanings through analogies between the body, the household and the culture: all three were defined by boundaries the crossing of which potentially produced chaos. The housewife’s duty was to guard the boundaries from within: to keep her body chaste, her household safe and the culture pure from pollution by nature. The conflict between the symbolic duty to guard the boundaries and a constant practical need to transcend the boundaries – to take products out to markets, to let visitors into the household and visit others and so forth – may have produced stress and anxiety in women. However, it also added power to the position women gained through the cultural/religious hierarchy of work and the financial economic meaning of their work in enforcing the boundaries between culture and nature, order and chaos. 34 The works in which Agata was said to have used magic were also usually part of her work as a housewife. It is clear that she herself considered both the actual tasks and her methods common and appropriate. When accused of methods to uncover thieves, she said people had done that when she was a child. Her fishing methods she defended by saying ‘Don’t I mention God, too, sometimes!’ and her maid was able to recite a verse which bid the eyes all kinds of fish to look at her nets, ‘in the name of the Father, Son &c’.35 It might be significant that in a culture which is said to have been highly visual, magic was often defined by the reading of verbal charms. When Agata was accused of burning the straws which had been on the floors during Christmas in the brewing can, she plainly said it was to heat the can. She did not consider her methods anything else but skill. The reaction was actually fairly common: many housewives did not consider their methods forbidden, if even magic. There were others, too, who thought Agata’s actions quite appropriate. In 1688, the witchcraft trial ended when a juror said she understood her household better than the others and was envied. A reverse side of Agata’s presumed ability to mind her household is that the advice she offered to others seemed to suggest that they were not quite up to their tasks but in need of advice. Psychologically, it would be easy to assume that envy could make such advice the more unwelcome. However, the hierarchical structure of the society also made it necessary to provide some explanation for why the advice of an older and more experienced woman should be refused. One explanation is that she was a witch. The same is perhaps even more explicit in Jaakko Karlö´s household, when Maria Matintytär accused Riitta Tuomaantytär of various forms of magic in treating newborn calves and in letting the cows out to pasture. Maria was Riitta’s former maid, now mistress of the neighbouring farm, married to a former farmhand of Riitta’s and Jaakko’s household. The two neighbours had frequent disputes, and apparently Maria felt that her former mistress was succeeding better than she was, but she was not ready to accept Riitta as more skilful or more diligent or herself as less so. In this case, as in those in Tommila and Sawo, the witchcraft accusation began as one against the inverter of social hierarchy: at first Jaakko and Riitta accused their neighbours, but when they countersued, the matter turned into a continued inversion. The former authority of Riitta over Maria and Riitta’s superior 34 Douglas 1991 (orig. 1961); Purkiss 1996, 96–9; Eilola 2003. 35 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676 Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–54v. NA.

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knowledge of household skills was heightened by the method of defence employed by Riitta and Jaakko: they brought their former and current maidservants to testify that they had never been taught nor had they seen anything improper in Riitta’s household, although they had been there many years. On the other hand, Maria Matintytär and her husband sought to represent Jaakko as interfering and meddling idly in things which were none of his business, merely for the purpose of disturbing his new neighbours.36 The emphasis on work skill is remarkable in all cases. Skill was obviously also important for men; this has rarely been contested, but it is still worth pointing out, because in men’s witchcraft and magic, skill seems to have played a role equally as crucial as in women’s witchcraft. This is illustrated in Maria’s accusation against her neighbour’s farming methods, in the Kyläsaari villagers’ accusation against Klemet’s way of handling thistle and even in Agata’s suggestion to walk nine times around the burn-beat fire. All of these are instances not only suspicions of magic but also discussions about what is skill and what is witchcraft. The importance of skill in accident-prone work like construction, felling wood and hunting is equally obvious. If giving birth and caring for the children and the sick was full of risks and insecurity and therefore attracted suspicions of witchcraft, so was much of men’s work. This, too, is reflected in the witchcraft accusations, like the case which was dealt with at the same court sessions as Agata’s second magic case: a Kaarina Antintytär was suspected of employing a witch to uncover a thief, with the consequence that the thief, her neigbour Riita Simontytär’s husband, had been killed by a falling tree when cutting wood in the forests. Despite the fact that both the accuser and the accused were women, it was evident that the risky male work and the unpredictability of its outcomes were central in the suspicions.37 It seems that testimonies in some of the cases about maleficium on these areas of work reflect a similar struggle to reassert control and to reconfirm one’s own skill, as Purkiss discerns in the women’s trials concerning maleficium on churning, weaving and other women’s skilled work.38 Work and community Although Luther thought of authority as God given and therefore unconditional, he also stressed the reciprocity and the importance of commonweal and self-sacrifice to authority.39 These came to be rather more important than sex or gender to the authority in peasant households, as can be seen in the argument of the inheritance 36 Ulvila 19–21 Oct. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:530–531; Ulvila 10–11 Oct. 1692. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:471–3. NA. 37 Ulvila 26–27 July 1677, Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:64v–5; Ulvila 11–13 Sept. 1677. Bielkesamligen vol. 27:91v–2v. SRA. See also a good part of the magic introduced in Suomen kansan muinaisia taikoja I for hunting magic. 38 Ulvila 3–4 Feb. 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:21v–2 NA; Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:183–5. NA; Ulvila 11–13. Sept. 1677. Bielks vol. 27:91v–2v. SRA. 39 Luther’s letter to Prince Frederick on Good Works 29 March 1520. Lutherin valitut teokset II 1959, 237–316.

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dispute at Tommila. The older brother, Agata’s late husband, had not been legally required to maintain his younger brothers, but in practice it was expected of him. However, that expectation also obliged the younger brothers to show him deference and honour – an expectation which they failed to fulfil, and their failure caused some distinct disapproval among the jury. The jury did not express disapproval as a direct reproach, but it can be seen from the record that they wanted to note that the older brother had worked the farm while the younger ones were underage, supporting them. He had been responsible, but he had had to go to war because of the uncontrolled behaviour and ungratefulness of his family.40 Authority should have been determined by the work done for the commonweal of the household, even as it eventually meant putting women in charge. Similarly, in the Sawo household, the actual performance of the work was important. It has become obvious by now that, whereas work in general was important for both status and power – both in principle and in practice – work could also provide the grounds for an attack on someone. Moreover, whereas not working diligently enough may have been a serious cause for reproof in general, in witchcraft the most important thing was a wrong kind of work. There is a distinct pattern of reversing and even stealing in the various charges of the 1676 trial against Agata. Agata’s maid told an elaborate story describing how her mistress first accused her neighbours of having done harm to her fishing nets to catch more than their natural share of fish. Agata advised the maid to counter it by stealing mesh from the neighbours’ nets, tying them to Agata’s own nets so that more fish would swim into her nets. It was not just any fish Agata charmed, but the fish which would have otherwise swum into her neighbours’ nets.41 Agata allegedly ensured food for her cattle during the winter by taking a little hay from her neighbours’ barns and feeding it to her cattle. She is presented as gaining by taking what would naturally have belonged to others. The other testimonies describe how she let her cattle out in the winter snow, putting bells on their necks as she would have done in summer, thus turning the seasons upside down. The Vicar also said that she was able make a spoilt brew good again. She was clearly represented as perverting the natural course of things – in her daily life and witchcraft and by implication also when she came to be mistress of a farm.42 In 1675 Agata admitted to having tried magic to reverse a theft, to make the thief bring back his haul. Her neighbours suspected her intention was actually to make the thief mad, but even there the inversion is present in the method: Agata tried to achieve her goal by forcing a dry twig into a growing tree: putting something dead in a living thing.43 The 1686 trial was actually a reversal even in its form, because it began as Tuomas Sipinpoika’s action against Agata, who had first accused him – outside the court – of witchery. Here Agata turned the relationships between the village farmers upside-down. This should not be surprising, because of the conflictrelated nature of witchcraft. 40 41 42 43

Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I:KO a4:29–30.NA. Ulvila 11–12. Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27, 53–5. NAS. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–5. NAS. Ulvila 19–20 Jan 1675. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16. NAS.

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The reversals were connected to the inversion of social hierarchy in the village, but they also refer to the inversion of ownership in theft. This often applies to witchcraft and magic cases in Finland.44 The polarity of the magical thinking seems to be connected to the concept of status quo of good luck found in various popular cultures. That, too, made the people think along the lines of reversal: what comes to me comes from them, and vice versa. The imagery of the fodder magic, centred on the taking of a small amount of feed from a neighbour’s barn to one’s own, suggests this. From a religious point of view – that of the Lutheran catechism teaching – God had ordered the world with its hierarchy and given everyone his fair lot; whether it was more or less, it was what God had considered adequate, and therefore should not be changed. Morally, this meant that everyone was responsible for not making anyone suffer or even fall economically behind through one’s own gain. It has been argued that even normal economic farming was guided by this moral rule to such an extent that profit optimisation could never be an explicit aim. Whether this meant that the total amount of good luck would remain the same or that it could be increased, is uncertain, but magic often was like stealing.45 A lot of the work expected from farmers was collective. One person’s ability to carry out his or her duties was dependent in the way others carried out theirs. This is especially clear in all the court cases about negligence on maintaining fences around fields. The Finnish farmers farmed their land according to an open field system. The plots of field which were commonly owned by the villagers were divided into strips for each farmer according to the amount of taxes they paid. The village plots were usually fenced off from the forests, but individual strips were not. The village farmers shared the duty to maintain the fences and ditches on the field according to taxes, like any other collective duty to build roads or church buildings etc. The result was that, if some farmers neglected their duties, the rest would suffer as well from the animals which got into the field, or the possible flood. During the eighteenth century, it was thought that this system prevented the spread of agricultural innovations. Historians have since concluded that it did not, but it is debated whether this was because there were rather few major innovations to spread, or because the system still allowed a certain amount of individual choice to the farmers and the farmers were actually able and willing to adopt more efficient ways of doing things as a community as well as individually, as even Agata’s story suggests.46 The interdependency, however, was obvious, and it did not only extend to field farming. The use of the forests, of some common grazing land and part of fishing rights, were also thought of as similarly collective. The villagers would have a share in the seines, and the catch would be divided according to the taxes paid. Seines and even weirs and nets caused frequent disputes in both Kyläsaari and Pomarkku, 44 For example, see the case of the Sawo household during the 1680s in Ulvila 3–4. Feb. 1680. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:21v–2; Ulvila 3–5 July 1683:Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:185–6. NA. 45     Klaniczay 1990, 166; For further recent discussion on how the notion of limited goods could have influenced other aspects of peasants life, see Henningsen, 2001, 271–96. 46 Jutikkala 1958; Soininen 1975; Nummela 2003; 135; Ylikangas 2005.

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as some farmers complained that others did not allow them to take part or that their equipment was damaged. A common complaint was also the very practical possibility that some villages or households spread their nets across the whole river, so that the fish from the sea would not reach the fishing spots of other households or villages upriver.47 Likewise, many households used the same mills. Matti Eskonpoika Sawo indeed had to explain to the court that he did not stop his neighbours from using the village mill for any other reason than that he did not have the tools to repair the stones.48 A good deal of Agata’s mentioned magic was attached to work in which she represented her whole household. The catch of fish and cattle feed were the household’s common property, and in magic they were explicitly compared with those of other households. Here we come back to the conclusions of Favret-Saada and Pollock on the way magic worked and Gregory on the way witchcraft accusations worked in social and political competition and finally the way some, such as Pylkkänen, have seen the early modern Swedish peasant household: it was a unit. Both ideology and practice required it to be coherent. In such a household, one member could represent the rest and could raise the status of the rest, but he or she could also stain or infect the rest. Magic and witchcraft could attack the cattle through the mistress or master of the household and vice versa, as Favret-Saada and Pollock describe. The whole household or the ambitions of any of its members could be attacked by accusing the mistress – or the master – as Gregory has claimed.49 What is important here is that people resorted to and suspected magic especially in things which actually concerned the whole household because witchcraft was about power and the household was the seat of power. A similar communality of work can be found within the household. The work was supposed to be for the common good, although the individual was also entitled to a reward of some kind. This was, obviously, also a part of the justification for patriarchal authority: it was for the common good, and therefore it could not be bad for anyone. The refusal to work for the common good of the household has been considered as one reason for why household members refused to grant status to some persons in their households, or completely excluded them from the household community – but similarly they could use exclusion as a sign of and further reason for the exclusion and refusal to grant status.50 The same can even be seen in the Sawo household’s internal disputes, when, as Maria testified in court, Heikki Janckari and his wife had stopped working for the farm, but only ‘ma[d]e a lot of noise against’ her.51 A common feature in both Janckari’s case and in the Tommila inheritance as 47 See for example Ulvila 21–23 Jan. 1678 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:19; Ulvila 3–4 Feb. 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:13v; Ulvila 12–14 March 1701. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a15:195–205. 48 Ulvila 22–23 June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:44. NA. 49     Favret-Saada 1977; Boyer & Nissenbaum 1974 80ff.; Gregory 1991, 30–66; Pylkkänen 1990. 50 Eilola 2002. 51 Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a:18–19. NAF.

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well as elsewhere in Finland is that people started claiming rewards for their work when the process of exclusion from the family community was underway.52 Heikki Janckari did not accept his duty, and it is evident from Maria’s short narrative – the noise-making – that he used his refusal to work as a weapon against Maria’s rule in the household and as a sign of his disrespect. However, it seems that most of the household members did not put on such display but rather accepted the notion of common good as real and binding. With it, they accepted the mastery of the household head. The idea of the common good or family interest cannot, therefore be dismissed as mere rhetoric, even though the common good may also have a highly contested content.53 Here we come back to the ‘Protestant work ethic’. The Reformers believed that everyone should shoulder their share of the social and economic burden. That would also provide everyone with their share of the wealth, health and social order. This was obviously the elite rhetoric which justified the whole social order, merely another way to express what the metaphor of the body politic meant. It was not a new religious or reformation ideology as such, but reflecting the general political currency of the time. However, the rhetoric also had a mirror in the peasantry’s mode of thinking in emphasising the legitimacy and the fair share of the profit and produce. Everyone should get his or her fair share; in trade the producers their share and the merchants only their legitimate and necessary part, and even the eventual buyer would profit from a fair end price – although obviously, what was necessary and legitimate was different for different social groups. This was presented as the God-ordained social order which was best for everyone, and the maintenance of which was the purpose of the calling or vocation.54 However, here we see the ideal of work for common good stemming more from the populace than from the elite. This interpretation points in the direction suggested by Hartman55 to the importance of the households growing smaller and weaker in northwestern Europe, and the struggle for survival, more than to the traditional Weberian Protestant ethic. Protestantism did not make people and households work in a certain way. Rather, the way they worked shaped Protestantism. Either way, the causal relationships of course emphasise the importance of both (religious) ideology and daily practice. The picture emerging is reminiscent of the classic theory by Marcel Mauss on the essential reciprocity of status and authority, both of which could only be retained if the reciprocity existed.56 Whereas the peasant reality was undoubtedly a lot less coherently presented, and a much more complicated web of relations of different quality, the reciprocity still seems one of the most important questions. Authority and honour, masculine or feminine, were impossible without input to the commonweal.

52 See for example Eilola 2002. 53 Liu 1994, 14. 54 See for example Luther, Trade and Usury (1524) 248; on critique of Weber see for example Lessnoff 1994, 47–58. 55 Hartman 2004. 56 Mauss 1950.

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Gendering work and witchcraft As historians have emphasised, the household and farmwork was ideally supervised by the husband (husbonde) and, in his control, the mistress. They were supposed to have power of control over the work and other goings-on of the rest of the household members in order to be able to take care of them. The husband-father especially was – as historians now interpret the ideal – supposed to have the final say and ultimate control over matters of the household: ‘Die Haustafel’ said so. He also had the task of representing the household outwards; the husbands performed the more valued tasks outside the walls and fences of the household and its cattle sheds, and the occupation considered most important, farming.57 When the beginnings of proto-industrialisation and monetary economy made certain women’s work – like dairy production and weaving – more profitable and more important – and therefore presumably more power-granting – men seem to have taken over such work, as historians point out.58 In rural Finland and Sweden, however, these particular areas seem to have remained under women’s control, as suggested by the shaming effect these tasks had on men who did them during the nineteenth century. This may be because – as Howell and Hartman suggest59 – in rural areas these tasks must remain within the household instead of moving to a separate workshop. Historians acknowledge many of the described divisions of labour between men and women to be ‘crude simplifications’. Due to the nature of the source material, it is actually very difficult to pinpoint the exact tasks spouses, servants and children performed. Such information was not usually deliberately given in any of the records kept by state officials, whose interests in keeping those records focused on the peasant household’s ability to pay taxes rather than on the daily chores. The actual division of labour has most often been studied by historians or folklorists working on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is these generalisations with which early modern women’s historians have had to work. Some more recent works, however, have already pointed out that the division of work and the related concepts, like so many other things, only emerged during the nineteenth century. Their form and content were not ancient or unchanged in pre-modern society.60 The tasks performed by different people occasionally emerge in the small details and sidelines in the narratives of all actors in court. Witchcraft, maleficium and benevolent magic trials can be good sources of information about the culture of work and sometimes about the division of work. The explanations of traditional social historians for why women formed a majority of those accused of witchcraft have relied in particular on the division of work. The most common explanation is based on the assumption that women’s spheres of work were more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft than others because they had to do with life itself: the care of animals and children, feeding and healing. As the explanation has not always 57 58 59 60

Roper 1983; Lövkrona 1999b. Fiebranz 1998. Hartman 2004, 237. See for example Östman 2004.

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needed any further clarification, it gives these women’s tasks an almost mystical nature even in the eyes of historians. Sometimes the importance of cattle-rearing, or lack of cattle, has been presented as the explanation of the gender division of magic in some areas.61 In the last ten years, however, historians have found that witchcraft was not an all-female business. A good number of men, too, performed magic and witchcraft in their spheres of work and were accused of it in court. Finland has always been an area where the majority of the witches were men, especially in the eastern parts of Finland, which, for some time, seemed to conform to what was thought of the European case: that the witches were men in the eastern peripheries, but women in the west.62 That is not the whole truth, though, and there were male witches in Ulvila as well. In fact a half of them were men. Agata’s son-in-law confessed using magic, as did her brother-in-law Jaakko Karlö. In the Sawo household, Heikki Janckkari was the witch, but actually the older sister in the youngest generation married a man whose father had a geographically as well as temporally much wider reputation for various kinds of good and bad witchcraft and whose trials lasted from the early 1680s until his (natural) death in 1707.63 The idea that witches were mostly male in the peripheries might have gone on even with the recent numbers from places like Estonia (60 per cent male) and Iceland (90 per cent male), but a growing proportion of village witches even in western Europe – which once was thought of as central and typical to witch-hunts – has turned out to be male. In the area of the Parlement de Paris and Burgundy, a little more than half of the accused were men. In Normandy, the proportion of males among the accused was even greater (73 per cent) and in Pay de Vaud a good 42 per cent almost reached the 49 per cent of the male witches in Finland. 64 Some historians have even claimed that the proportion of men among the accused has been deliberately downplayed. 65 There is a good chance that the male witches have gone unnoticed because historians have focused on the sabbat cases and the panics, which concentrate more on women, but that is not a sufficient reason, because even the sabbat cases included men often enough, and

61 See for example Briggs 1998, 265–71; Bechtel 1997, 576; Wiesner 2002, 264–82. See Nenonen 1992, 353–59 for the opposite view. 62 Nenonen 1992; Nenonen 1995. 63 On Risto Olavinpoika, the Sawo son-in-law’s father, see Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a3:30; Ulvila 4–5 Oct. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a3:368; Ulvila 27–28 June 1702. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a16:130–132; Ulvila 13–16.2.1704. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a20:346–52; Ulvila 27–28 June 1704 Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a20:985–7; Ulvila 27—28 June 1707. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II:KO a24:356v–8v. NA. For other mentioned men, see sources in Chapters 2 and 3. 64 Soman, 1978; Soman 1992; Briggs 1998, 260; Monter 1997; Apps & Gow 2003, 45. 65 Apps & Gow 2003 is a very Anglocentric criticism which also ignores the fact that witchcraft studies have only recently widened their scope from the crazes and panics of multiple chain trials, which have shaped the picture of witchcraft history, and it is natural that our interpretations change on one point as we widen our scope in another direction.

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the theoretical contemporary writing of witchcraft also discussed male witches with equal enthusiasm as female.66 The extent of a clear gender division in magic is now debatable. One of the first assumptions of this approach drew the gender line between benevolent magic and maleficium. Contrasting views on this kind of gender division have been presented: One of the earliest feminist views was that witches were female healers even when they were accused of diabolism. By implied contrast, men were involved in learned occultism or sorcery, if they had to do with magic at all. In this view, women’s work as healers would have originally given them power and social prestige, of which they were then deprived.67 The exactly contrary view, presented by many later historians, has been that men, as some sort of semi-professional cunning men, performed benevolent magic, but maleficium was thought to be performed, and sabbats attended, by women. In a widely known but not always accepted model, Eva Labouvie claims that Swedish benevolent magic was male-dominated because men as husbands were responsible for the well-being and success of people, cattle, property and work in the household, whereas women were more often suspected of harmful magic because they, in their daily work with food and caring for the sick, had ample opportunities.68 In Rotherburg, Germany, too, men were thought more likely than women to practise benevolent magic and women more likely to practise maleficium, although the actual trials always concerned more women than men. In the Netherlands, male witches or masculine witchcraft tended to be associated with acquiring status, power or money. Although healers and fortune-tellers could be men as well as women, maleficium was more often thought of as a feminine form of evil.69 These views overturn the popular division of social prestige given by work. In Finland, the situation seems somewhat different. It does seem that in Finland, most witches before 1660s were men, and that they were accused of maleficium. Women began to form a majority in western Finland after 1660s, when the stories of the sabbat spread across the country. Almost all witches accused in connection to the sabbat were women (there being an exception in Ulvila, Tuomas Erkinpoika70). After the sabbat stories, the authorities turned against ‘benevolent’ magic, and now they accused both men and women. It seems at first glance that women were more often accused of benevolent magic and men of maleficium, but that is merely a false illusion produced by the simultaneous but unrelated change of the courts’ interest 66 See Nenonen 2004 and Nenonen 2007b for a commentary on this emphasis and other fallacies created by it. 67 Echrenreich & English 1973. The view proved less than correct, as is been pointed out in Chapter 5. One might want to add here that the medieval folk healers and the vetula were not accorded much more social prestige by the contemporary authorities – and the population’s views are more difficult to ascertain. The possible suspicions against folk healers do not seem to have led to witch trials. Nenonen 1992, 158; Briggs 1998, 77–8, 71–2, 127, 185. 68 See critique in Oja 1994, 49–50. 69 Roper 2004 gives this picture at least implicitly in her examples. On Rothenburg, see Rowlands 2003, 169. On the Netherlands, see Blécourt 2004; Jones & Zell 2005; and Levack 2006. 70 Ulvila 11–13. Sept 1677. Bielkesamlingen vol 27:98v–100. SRA.

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from maleficium to benevolent magic and from men only to both men and women. In reality, men and women were accused of maleficium and benevolent magic alike.71 The question of witchcraft and power must not be asked on the basis of a benevolent/harmful distinction. In most cases of good magic, one could ask whom was it good for: if a thief was caught by making him mad, was it good? Moreover, most witches in the Finnish material as well as elsewhere seem to have performed both kinds of magic; good and bad, causing and curing illness, procuring cattle luck and stealing it, as all Agata’s trials show. The witnesses in all Agata’s witchcraft trials recounted both benevolent and harmful acts of magic, and the same is true of Risto Olavinpoika, the semi-professional witch who was the Sawo household’s favourite son-in-law’s father. It is also true of many other witches from the 1660s onwards – before that, benevolent magic was rarely prosecuted in secular courts.72 The tasks of good and bad witches were not clearly defined, and, like most Europeans, Finns, too, believed that witches, saints and in general people who could make bad things good, cure illnesses or improve bad luck could also cause the same things.73 The line between good and bad magic seems an arbitrary one, imposed from outside by contemporary elites and later historians. Moreover, harmful as well as benevolent magic may command a certain amount of respect, if it is thought of as an ability to influence things which others cannot, a knowledge which others do not have. Historians not concerned with the benevolent/harmful magic dichotomy have often been ready to admit that women operated at the village level, in popular folk magic, where as men, if they practised magic, were more directed towards occultism and learned sorcery. This willingness has been based on the older assumption that men were not usually accused in village-level trials, a notion which is currently proving to be wrong, probably caused by the emphasis put on the sabbat trials in the great German or Scottish panics and in the Hopkins affair in England.74 A Finnish variant of the same is the sometimes presumed prevalence of practising shamans or tietäjäs among those accused of witchcraft, on which folklorists and ethnologists in Finland draw. This seems partly to be because of the older line of thought that a male majority of witches was rare and needed a special explanation. The explanation was that Finnish witchcraft was different from that in the rest of Europe, but it does not seem so anymore. Another part of the reason for the prevalence of the idea that shamanism was (still) strong in Finland is that the tietäjä 71 Nenonen 1995; Nenonen 2006 and 2007. 72 The semi-professionals, or reputed witches, were sought out for assistance more widely than their immediate circles, at least in the case of Risto Olavinpoika. Ulvila 13—16 Feb.1704. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a20:346–52 and Matti Närvä Ulvila 25—26 Oct. 1697. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a9:524–8. NA. Nenonen 1992, 256ff; Jones & Zell 2005. However, see also Davies 2003 for a different view on the possibilities of distinguishing between different kinds of professionals in the magic sphere in the eighteenth century. 73 Nenonen 1992, 256–7; Sörlin 1998; Briggs 1998, 171ff. A widely known example of the same pattern with saints would be Saint Anthony, who was thought to hold the power to cause and to cure ergot poisoning, the Fire of St Anthony. 74 See Nenonen 2004 and Nenonen 2007b for a commentary on this emphasis and other fallacies created by it.

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had a strong place in the nineteenth-century folklore on magic. That folklore is richly represented in the archives of the Finnish literature society, and therefore much researched. Sometimes features of shamanistic magic can really be found in the seventeenth-century trials: sometimes witches were reported to go into a trance and to use drums of ‘measuring’ when healing. Some historians have also pointed out that the Swedish blåkulla (place of the witches sabbat) owes some of its features to the shamanistic travelling to the other world. The highly visible blåkulla trials have again, even in Finland and Sweden, attracted most of the historians’ attention, but in fact they form only a small minority of all witch trials in Finland. The rest of them show no signs or stories of travelling to the other world; such representations do not need to be shamanistic, as they abounded in cultures in southern Europe which had nothing to do with shamanism. Similarly, measuring a patient with measuring sticks or knives is also often used in non-shamanistic cultures, including the medieval Catholic believers who asked the saints to cure the patient.75 In any case, none of the trials which I have studied describes a trance; rather they spoke of spells which were cited during the normal, daily life and work. While village magic seems to have been practised by all sexes, there are differences. In the Netherlands between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, cunning women gradually disappeared from the rural areas and emerged in (market) towns, changing their overall offer of practices in the course of time, too.76 Diabolism, likewise, seems to have a gender division: it has been claimed that women were lured to serve the Devil in the sabbats against their will but men entered into deliberate contracts as equal partners with, more than as servants of, the Devil – a claim which reflects a similar division of prestige as the divide between women at the village-level and men in learned occultism.77 A gender division in the spheres which magic touched has also been found. According to Marko Nenonen, the Finnish witches who harmed either humans or animals were more often men than women, whereas women seem to have cured more often than harmed. Instead of a pattern of what men and women did, however, Nenonen sees here a pattern of what was prosecuted: women began to be prosecuted at the same time as maleficium charges in general were diminishing and benevolent magic grew more frequent.78 Rather unsurprisingly, many historians have also found that gender division in magic mirrored the general division of work in society. Linda Oja suggests that, whereas all kinds of magic and witchcraft were open to all sexes, men seem to dominate benevolent magic and women witchcraft. Even finer distinctions have been found: magic on horses and horse equipment was a male prerogative, whereas cattle and human health, household tasks and human

75 On the cult of tietäjä see for example Stark 2006 or Pentikäinen 2005. On the similar feature in seventeenth-century witches and (undated) shamanism, see Eilola 2003 or Östling 2002. On the cults of saints, see for Katajala-Peltomaa 2006. 76 Blécourt 2004. 77 Olli 2004a; Olli 2004b. 78 Nenonen 1992, 72–8; Nenonen 1993.

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relationships were of the feminine sphere.79 Laura Stark, a Finnish folklorist working on late nineteenth century women’s magic, found similar patterns in nineteenthcentury eastern Finland, where horse’s harnesses, travel equipment and grain were possibly spoiled by any woman who harakoied them by stepping or jumping over them so that they were exposed to the väki (power) of her genitals.80 It also reflects the role-gendering of church frescos in many Finnish churches, which present the witch images of women milking and churning butter with the Devil and the corresponding images of men with horses and the Devil.81 In all Agata’s witchcraft trials, the works of magic she was said to have done or known only once crossed the presumed gender line between feminine, domestic, household tasks and masculine public, political, farm-related tasks. That was when she suggested a soldier should clear some fields by slash-and-burn and that the fire would not escape to the forests if one walked nine times around it. The gender division in slash-and-burn was less clear than one might at first think: slash-andburn was labour-intensive and even in the nineteenth century required the labour of women and children as well as of men.82 It would be tempting to claim that the fact that a woman was criticising a man in his masculine work might have made the situation worse. In reality, however, the terms of correct masculinity and femininity seem to have been more often set by the same gender group. Nevertheless, in some circumstances the meddling of someone outside the peer-group control – or someone who normally would not have bothered – clearly might give extra weight to the criticism, but it is impossible to generalise the assumption any further on this basis. Court action was also a kind of work expected of peasant farmers; it was one of the recurring objects of magic. There is a hint to this in the accusation that Agata had stolen her dependent lodger’s door lock: securing the outcome of a court case was among the most important magic done with locks. As we have seen, however, court action was hardly a male sphere of life.83 The Sawo household also had a case of women engaging in magic to protect horses. During the 1690s disputes, Heikki made an accusation of witchcraft against Maria, but nobody seemed to have been interested enough to take any action on it: this included an accusation that Maria watered horses at Christmas with water pre-heated with three stones or where she had thrown her silver ring. Nothing of the reservations against women and horses or horse equipment suggested by the Finnish folklorists can be discerned in my material, either in the witchcraft accusations or in many other remarks in the court records which show women riding to other provinces, taking care of the tax coach 79 Oja 1994, 48–9. Absolute numbers are small, but no women and two men in her sample seem to have magically cured horses. 80 Stark-Arola 1998, 203ff; Heikkinen, K. 1990, 39. 81 For example, the churches of Lohja and Siuntio. 82 Ulvila 11–12 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. See, however, Mäkelä 1989, 22, 75ff.; Pylkkänen 1990, 105–6, 122, 128, 247 on the possible emphasis the importance of physical labour put on masculine authority. 83 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–4v. NA. For other cases of magic with locks, see for example Ulvila 4 and 6 July 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:22.

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(Kyyditys in Finnish, skiutsväsendet in Swedish84) and caring for horses just as well as for cows nineteenth century.85 Crossing gender lines of work cannot be said to have led to suspicions of witchcraft. Women’s encroachment on the masculine spheres of work, however, is fairly common according to historians and folklorists, even those who consider the division fairly strict. Women could, when needed, take part in hard, physical, masculine work. Changing roles was actually to the credit of the peasant women – as long as they did not claim masculine power with it, as Lövkrona states.86 However, for men to take up women’s traditional tasks is said to have been shameful and, according to folklorists working on the nineteenth century, rarely happened. Specially gendered meanings seem to have been attached to cattle and milk. For men to even go to the cowshed was shameful. During the seventeenth century, however, that hierarchical order was only just taking shape. Some clergymen tried to forbid men and boys from herding cows alone in the woods. However, this was not because keeping cattle was traditionally or God-ordained as women’s job, but because of the contemporary obsession with irregular sexuality, a suspected danger of sodomy.87 The suspicion, groundless as it certainly was, points to the fact that men often herded cattle in the woods. They were not only young boys but also full-grown farmhands – rarely husbands and farmers, however.88 Male witches, too, were often involved with cattle magic in witchcraft cases: Jaakko Eskonpoika Karlö accused his neighbour, Matti Laurinpoika, of magic against Jaakko’s cattle and cattle sheds. Matti, like many of the accused or those speaking for them, said his daughter-in-law had actually done what Jaakko judged to be magic, but it was an altogether harmless and innocent act. Some role reversals actually appear, since by the next year the issue had turned into one between Jaakko and Riitta on the one hand and Matti’s wife, Maria Matintytär, who had been serving Jaakko and Riitta some years before, on the other. During the next year, Maria Matintytär ended the relationship by accusing Riitta of using magic in her care of cattle (she let newborn calves drink actual milk).89

84 Kyyditys in Finnish, Skiutsväsendet in Swedish, was a system in which peasant households took turns to drive the crown’s officers – as well as other travellers, if they were willing to pay for it – from one inn to another as a tax-like duty. 85 Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5 (new page number:151–3). NA. Maria Pertuntytär Sawo’s daughter in skiuts Ulvila 14–15 Sept 1696. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:225. NA. Agata’s cavalry soldier’s widow fetching Clemet’s horse from Häme Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:103– 4. On the gendering of horses and travelling equipment as well as the related magic, see for example Stark-Arola 1998a and 1998b or Oja 1994. 86 Lövkrona 1990 Lövkrona 1999a; Lövkrona 1999b. 87 Lempiäinen 1967, 379; Liliequist 1991; Lövkrona 1999b; Östman 2000. 88 See for example Ulvila 10–11 Oct. 1692. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:471–3. NA. 89 Ulvila 19–21 Oct. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:503–4; Ulvila 21 and 23 Feb. 1691 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:29–32.

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Both female and male semi-professional witches, rare as they were, seem to have had cattle magic especially in their repertoires.90 There is nothing surprising in this, as cattle were essential to the survival of a peasant household.91 For example, the Sawo household’s more favoured son-in-law and Juha Ristonpoika’s father, Risto Olavinpoika, who was repeatedly accused of magic and witchcraft and reputedly asked to perform magic, was said to prevent the rest of the herd from infection with cattle disease by frying the deceased animal’s meat in an iron pan. The method probably represented the symbolical taming of natural animal disease by cultural cooking.92 To modern eyes, it also looks like a clearly feminine task with feminine tools in the taming process.93 The professional witches, however, did not always perform the magic themselves. At least as often they are described as advising in its use. In Agata’s and the Sawo households’ witchcraft cases, a gender division of labour was forming itself, but had not yet reached the state described by the historians and folklorists working on the nineteenth century. Most of the work related to feeding and caring for humans and animals was considered women’s work, and in most cases women took care of the distribution and storing and selling of any produce. Hunting, fieldwork and all kinds of building work as well as felling and chopping wood for fires or tar production seem to have been performed by men. There is a rough gender division of labour, but the boundary was regularly blurred. The important thing to note is that for the male witches, the male shepherds or the women caring for horses or driving the coaches for crown officials, crossing the gender line did not mean loss of honour or status. Even in the case of the men accused of cattle magic, their participation in the feminine sphere as such was never used as a suspicious sign – there was enough concrete evidence in the overt magic they performed. Their work in the feminine sphere did not bring them officially recognised power or status, but their help was nevertheless sought after and brought them a certain status in the community because they could exercise a considerable amount of informal power

90 For example, see the case of an Esko Pertunpoika from Eura who had taught Liisa Erkintytär in Ulvila cattle magic. Ulvila 21 and 23 Feb. 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:29– 32. Eerikki Puujumala and Walpuri Antintytär, whose hearings at the Court of Appeal were described in Åbo Tidningar Tidningar 23 Feb. 1795, no. 8, also did cattle magic, as did Walpuri Kyni. Purely professional witches were rare, but a combination of small farming, cattle husbandry, hired labour and some occasional magic seems to have occurred sometimes. As Davies (2003, 75) explains, the rarity of professional cunning folk may also be due to the probability that people much rather introduced themselves as something else than a professional witch or cunning-folk when the latter was illegal. Usually there is no information as to the witches getting paid or how much they were paid, but if someone came to court often enough and it appeared that he or she was asked to perform magic works, one may legitimately suppose that he or she had a persistent reputation for doing such things on request. It seems that the semi-professionals were slightly more often men. See Nenonen 1992, 155ff. 91 The meaning of cattle for the peasant economy has been downplayed in Finnish/ Scandinavian historiography to emphasise grain production. 92 See Purkiss 1996. 93 Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:367–8. NA.

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through gossip and persuasion in the various households into which they were invited or on which they could impose their offers of help. This may have happened partly because magic seems to have had a gender of its own. Magic could be gendered in a way which diverged from the gender of its performers. This is logical, because magic may be thought of as partly independent of its performers: it was by no means sure to work in the intended way, even though the coerciveness in the do ut des logic was part of how the contemporary learned distinguished magic from prayer. Magic gained its gender more from the objects or goals for which it was used. Even when the witch was male, cattle magic could well be laden with the imagery of feminine work: frying pans, feeding, cooking and so forth, thereby retaining a clearly feminine character. It would, however, be difficult to sustain a similar claim for magic performed on the masculine spheres of life by women – not necessarily because similar patterns did not exist but because they remain hidden in the small sample material at hand. If Maria was said to perform magic on horses by giving them water from a tub which had been heated or where a silver ring had been thrown, a gendering other than that of caring and thereby femininity is difficult to discern. Likewise, Maria’s method of lighting a small fire under the cattle-shed threshold when letting horses out and Agata’s way of walking nine times around a burn-beat fire so it would not spread to the forest were not distinctly gendered.94 Rather, it may be that these spheres of life were not, in themselves, as gendered as cattle was. Nevertheless, both men and women did magic which only vaguely referred to gendered practices and which were not directly attached to either the sex of the performer or the gendering of different spheres of life. It is clear from this that women and men shared enough of their work, even of the more strictly gendered work, to be able to appreciate each other’s input. They also had similar enough experience of the most important tasks on a farm to be able to manage it together almost interchangeably. As Hartman claims, this may have been crucial to the options and challenges women and men had. Hartman’s claim here is compatible with that of Pylkkänen, who claims that in the poor and small households of western Finland, women had to appear in court simply because there were no one else to do it, but in the multi-family households of Eastern Finland, an absent male family member could always be represented by another male member of the household and, consequently, women would have no possibilities of public action. Contrary to the assumption that women’s public participation was first and foremost a question of necessity when there were no men available for the task, in my material, the households represented by women are the multi-generational even though they were in the western coast of Finland. Together with Pylkkänen’s observation that the wealthy households in Ostrobothnia also took care of the management of the household in courts, this suggests that women’s public roles were not only dependent on economic and labour resources but also on cultural preferences.95 These households simply chose what they thought was the most advantageous and reliable way to manage their affairs. 94 Ulvila 16 and18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5. NA. 95 Hartman 2004, 111–43; Pylkkänen 1990, 340.

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Ownership and control The Finnish and Swedish social history tradition in general has been strongly structure-oriented. This has been partly due to the general influence of Weberian sociology on the one hand, and of historical materialism, which took a strong hold on social history in the 1970s, on the other. In the Finnish case, there has also been the personal influence of Eino Jutikkala (1907–2006, professor of history of Finland and economic history in Helsinki, 1947–1974), who trained most of the next generation’s professors and thereby constructed a rural social history core focusing on quantitative agricultural history: farming, crop levels and especially land ownership. The quantitative methods suited the later social history tradition, and interest in similar questions has therefore lasted through the current academic establishment.96 Women’s and gender history reflected the strongly structural trends of social history until the late 1990s. After the first wave of the histories of individual heroines and societies of the women’s movement, the emphasis on social structure was on the law and the legal position of women in society. Most often this has meant the ownership rights and the legal competence in managing them, which women either had or lacked. For the early modernists, the structure took the form of the legal relationship and property rights between the married couple. This reflects the historical-materialist tradition in Scandinavian gender history – in the wake of Joan Scott – and social history tradition in general.97 Gender and feminist histories have formed a developing and multi-disciplinary field, in which it is important and natural to be aware of, if not attuned to, the international trends of scholarship. Following non-Scandinavian works, the early Scandinavian women’s historians claim that early modern woman lacked ‘proprietary capacity; she could not sue or be sued at common law in her own name, nor could she sue her own husband’.98 In England, the early modern procedural rules in most instances prevented wives from participating in court actions without their husbands, but this did not stop thousands from suing and being sued with their husbands. In English common law, the couple’s property belonged to the husband alone. Widows, too, could be hindered by the laws which concerned wives: if widows were suing for contracts which had been made when their husband was still living, their opponents could claim that transactions had already been settled with the husband, who had had a real right to them, without the feme couvert’s [sic] knowledge. The widows, of course, could also use this against their enemies – delaying payments and sometimes denying contracts of which they claimed they did not know. Similar strategies seem to have sometimes been used in Swedish town courts by wives, too, who referred their matters to their absent husbands. The supporters of the deterioration/subordination 96 The personal influence of Jutikkala was kindly pointed out to me by Marko Nenonen. Other nations have had their own corresponding strong personalities. 97 Joan Scott seems by far the most often cited theorist in Scandinavian gender historiography. 98 In English Common law, all property belonged to the husband alone. Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 40, citing Mary Murray, Property and patriarchy in English history, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1989: 4. See also Taussi-Sjöberg 1996 and Warpula 2002, 91.

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thesis, however, emphasise that this testifies to the real guardianship of the husband over his wife in the proxy system, rather than any household tactics. This was why the courts accepted such action.99 The notions of English Common Law involved, however, cannot be applied to the position of Swedish early modern women. According to Swedish rural law, the wife had a one-third right to the marital property and her husband’s property, and the husband had a two-thirds right to the marital property and her property. The property was not joint, however, nor as a whole in the husband’s name. Furthermore, the judicial praxis was strongly influenced by the old Scandinavian customary law, in which spouses retained the property each had as their own. The only joint property was that which had been either agreed upon at the marriage contract (morning gift and portion) or had been acquired during the marriage. The wife’s property continued to be hers, even if it is assumed that she could not act alone for it. The husband could not sell his wife’s land without her (or her family’s) permission, and the wife could decide herself whether or not she gave the sum of purchase to the common household.100 Who controlled the property is somewhat debated. That controlling property and production brought power is taken to be self-evident in social history, yet at the same time, it is said that this was more certain in the case of men than in the case of early modern women.101 An explanation to this is that ideologically the household was supposed to have only one male head, as was the state. Another explanation might be that historians have failed to see the informal and non-structural manifestations of women’s power even when they control areas of production in dairying and textiles. In principle, an unmarried woman was under the guardianship of her father or – if he was dead – another person who had the right to give her in marriage. Her guardian ruled her property and took care of all her important business. Scholars agree that an unmarried woman was legally incompetent, and it may not have made a great difference to her that in rural areas her guardian could be her widowed mother. In practice, both sons and daughters began to mind their own property in court as well as elsewhere at latest when they left home for work.102 A married woman, on the other hand, was not legally incompetent, but her husband was her edusmies (målsman in Swedish), prolocutor or proxy, which meant that he should act in court on behalf of his wife. The husband’s rights were, it has been claimed, open and irrevocable, although he was legally expected only to increase the wife’s property or make it more easily manageable. Others, including myself, have emphasised that the medieval law did not explicitly exclude women from most legal action, even though it gave men certain rights. The practice in which women acted in courts does not support reading such limitations into the law. A widow could have a legally independent status because there supposedly was no man to govern the household. 99 Bennet 1987, 28–30; Pylkkänen 1990, 250; Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 117; Stretton 1999, 195, 199–203; Lahtinen 2004. 100 Pylkkänen 2005. 101 Andersson & Ågren 1996. 102 Andersson 1998, 54; Pylkkänen 1990, 144–9.

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Advocates of the structural subordination thesis explain that this independence was in practice often useless because of economic dependency.103 As court praxis differed both from the law and regionally, the proxy system does not prove much about the real, practical position of a woman in a household.104 Partnership for power Maria Pertuntytär Sawo ran the Sawo household’s daily business with an obvious consent of her husband and father. The Sawo household was an unusually large one. In an area where households usually consisted of one nuclear family,105 this one had three adult generations, with three siblings in the youngest adult generation – first one and later two of them married – and at least one dependent aunt living in a sauna. The legal head of the farm was Perttu Laurinpoika Sawo. His daughter Maria had stayed on the farm and brought her husband, Matti Eskonpoika, there. In the 1670s Matti had a good start towards becoming the head of the household. He served as a juror and established himself as a prominent member of the farmers’ group. He was by no means always successful in his dealings. In the early 1680s the farmers in Pomarkku village, Sawo household included, had multiple disagreements, especially on the use of fishing waters and some economic matters. There is a laconic note in the records in 1681 that, having lost two cases in a row, ‘Matti Eskonpoika of Pomarkku was fined 6 äyris for making noise according to the 43§ of TingzBalken.”106 Another note in 1683 recorded that Matti was fined three marks for not showing up to answer to charges of a debt but ‘staying in the village drinking’ instead. Earlier in the record, Perttu Sawo swore an oath to testify that Matti had not excluded a villager from the common fishing.107 Matti’s steady character and abilities as the (future) head of farmhold seem to have left room for improvement, but that did not seem drastic. Until the 1690s, it was either Matti or Perttu himself who appeared for the farmstead. In the early 1990s, Maria took over responsibility for the farm. The first time Maria appeared for the farmstead was in 1691. She demanded, as the household had been doing for some time, the return of some payments which Matti had been ordered to pay for damages caused by a fire which he had allegedly caused in 1685. 103 Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 110, 117 points that not only wealthy widows – everyone who could – but also wealthier wives usually retired from the public life of the court. Karlsson Sjögren connects this to women’s status in a negative light:although these women retired from the public to show their honour and status in not showing themselves, it meant that the women who were seen in public were more and more often poor and criminal. 104 Pylkkänen 1994, 374; Pylkkänen 2005. Some historians, however, claim that an individual woman’s possibly important role within her own household may not change the whole picture where ‘a woman always stood under the guardianship of a man’, as it is simplified by Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 161. See also Chapters 2 and 3. 105 Pylkkänen 2005. 106 ‘Mats Eskilsson [Matti Eskonpoika] i Påmark fälttes nu för oludh till sina 6/:böter effter det 43 Cap:Ting:B:’ Ulvila 11 and 13 June 1681. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:296. NA. 107        “uthan [un]danhölt sig här I byen med dryckenskap…” Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:70 (367v), 76 (370v). NA.

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She was not successful; it turned out they were demanding the repayment from someone who had only collected the original payment for a third party. Maria or Matti were told to claim the refund from the said third party. The opening of the case and the sentence recorded that Maria was acting for her husband, although the rest of the record speaks only of her.108 After this, Maria usually appeared to speak for the farm. However, no clear record was made as to in whose matter Maria spoke, but the business usually touches either Maria personally or the whole household. The court records offer no explanation for Matti’s withdrawal, he may have fallen ill, but he died only late in the 1690s. Maria’s old father was still alive but he was probably too old for the burdensome managing of the farm, although he, too, appeared against Heikki Janckari during the 1690s. Maria’s only son died because of witchcraft, as was suspected. One her daughters married and lived on the farm. The old grandfather, however, did not approve of Heikki, their first son-in-law. Nor, it seems, did Maria. The household seems to have had good reason. Not only was Heikki unruly and bad-tempered, as Maria and Perttu explained, but he had also precipitated a marriage by seducing the daughter of the house. Heikki also seems to have been fined 40 talaris for adultery years ago with a wife called Anna Tuomaantytär. She was sentenced to 80 talaris in fines, not because she was a woman – contrary to what is sometimes said about punishments for men and women and about what was attempted at the beginning of the century by adding the Decalogue into the legal codification, men usually got harder fines quite according to the requirements of the medieval rural law – but because she was married and consequently her crime was more severe. All this might not have been too drastic, but a child had been born, whose support was also in question. Heikki therefore claimed that two other men were also putative fathers. One of them was a Matti Eskonpoika of Pomarkku. Matti and the other man were later pronounced innocent at a special court session, but although Heikki apologised and was fined for his groundless accusation, the incident was not of the kind which would make him a more welcome addition to the household – not even a decade later. There were adult men in the household, but still Maria represented it outwards. Maria may have taken the role of the household manager as a second choice after her husband, but it is certain that she was not the last choice.109 From 1691 onwards, Maria represented the farmstead in court when relationships between the household and the neighbours, the village, the parish or any other outside party were concerned. Matti appeared only twice. Her father was the titular head in the land tax records and everywhere else. However, tax records were formulaic and not really interested in who was running the farm but rather in the successive tax payments. They very rarely recorded women as heads of farms, even when that was the reality.110 In the Sawo household, the family presumably showed all due respect for the old father, yet a considerable amount of his power seems to have 108 Ulvila 4–5 June 1691. Ala-Satakunta II. KO a6:253–5. NA. 109    Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:433–5. NA. Ulvila 23 and 25 June 1679. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta KO a5:39–v; Ulvila 3. Jul 1679. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta KO a5:41v–2. NA. 110 Perlestam 1997.

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devolved onto Maria with the practical tasks of running the daily business and with the representational rights. The court records do not reveal any concern about this. The court records never included any questions or explanations as to why the woman appeared when there were three – later four – adult men in the household, nor did the court invalidate any of her actions, whether the matter concerned herself personally as plaintiff or petitioner, or the household. Had the matters concerned some other members of the household personally, the court may have asked for clarification, or this may have been provided without asking. The problem for a historian would be that one would have to follow the household in the court records for some time to observe that it was represented by a woman in court. Even the court records, which otherwise offer an excellent glimpse of the everyday lives of peasant farmers, would not perhaps permit such following. In the case of the Sawo household, it has been helpful for the historian that eventually Maria’s headship was contested by her sonin-law. Even though the medieval law codes limit the right of wives to make economic contracts alone to small ones or to situations when her husband was prevented from doing it, in practise they ran the family business together. This, Anu Pylkkänen claims, was part of a customary way of running things in farms which had little resources and in which it was vital that the absence of the husband would not impair the whole farm. The practise was possible according to the medieval laws and customs: husband and wife were seen as partners in managing their farm.111 In Germany, Heide Wünder describes similar working partnerships between the husband and the wife which remained important despite the emerging trends emphasising the hierarchy of the early modern Europe.112 This is also what can be seen in both Sawo and Tommila households. The only difference is that in these multi-generational households, the managerial partnership was extended not only to the married couple but also to their parents if they lived on the farm. When a new law code or the various statutes issued during the seventeenth century were discussed, the considerations of marital property rights reflected continental ideas (Roman law), the growing monetary economy and the crown’s position as a creditor before many noble families after the reductio. Those supporting the new decrees were protecting the rights of a third party, a possible creditor: a legally fully competent wife made it possible to move property within the family out of a creditor’s reach. The planned law code never gained force, but individual new ordinances changed the legal position of wives in the end of the seventeenth century. According to Anu Pylkkänen, the change was in a direction which simultaneously started seeing the spouses as separate individuals and, partly because of that, needed to limit the rights of women. Increasingly, the revenues from inherited land and the land itself were considered joint property under the control of the husband. Swedish law, however, did not in principle include inherited land into the joint property before the early twentieth century; the change was in the control of the property, not outright ownership.113 The right to represent the family outwards and 111 Pylkkänen 2005; Andersson 1998, 38. 112 Wünder 1998, 38–52, 66. 113 Pylkkänen, 1990, 88, 90–91, 11–113, 116, 253–8; Pylkkänen 2005, 77, 81–2.

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make contracts which bound the whole household has usually been considered to be access to real power and authority both within the household and beyond. Therefore, the managerial partnership was, for women but also for men, a lot more meaningful than the property rights themselves.114 In practice, the changes in the law and statutes regarding wives and widows applied only to the nobility, whose women had inherited fiefs or donations which produced revenues. For the peasantry, however, the changes were smaller for two reasons: in all the various regional inheritance patterns, women rarely inherited land but rather movable goods. That property was used for the support of the family, and it could be essential in times of trouble. It constituted the liquid capital which could be important in the beginning monetary economy. Yet many scholars consider the movables of women not to be the kind of property which brought power and status. However, the judicial praxis still treated spouses as partners, and wives kept representing the household just as unquestioned as men. Pylkkänen claims that the rural farm mistresses still were wielders of local power, not dependent wives.115 The headship of a farmstead in the court records is a fluctuating, varying role, filled by different persons at different times. The headship was also shared so that several persons could perform the role if practice so required. Legally, in the eyes of the crown taxation and pure ownership, the husband and wife or other individuals acting as heads of the household, were certainly not equal. However, in practice they could act interchangeably in each other’s roles. For the rural households and their success, this fluctuation seems much more important than the legal limitations posed on all other members of the household but the nominal head. The practice was also rarely contested in the court discourse. Court records have few explicit statements about the formal or informal headship of farmsteads. Inheritance divisions and the disagreements caused by them sometimes openly state that it belonged to either the new married couple, or the old couple or the old widow or widower.116 In the rest of the court records however, the headship is usually visible through the appearance of certain members of the household in matters which concern the household, the farmstead or the other members of the household. Sometimes the court records state explicitly that someone speaks as the farmer of a certain farm. It is obvious that the managerial partnership of those responsible for the Sawo and Tommila farms was formed by an agreement between those belonging to it and most of those under that headship. Never in the story did Perttu or Matti question Maria’s rights to represent the farmstead or to rule over the management of it. As the household’s internal business also came into the public sphere during the 1690s, Maria most often represented the household. The individual members came to give their versions of what concerned them. Moreover, when the household divided into 114 Pylkkänen 1990, 338. 115            Andersson 1998, 90–91; Pylkkänen 2005. See however, her somewhat more moderate view fifteen years earlier:Pylkkänen 1990, 334. ‘Sille näkemykselle että mies ja nainen olisivat olleet maalaistaloudessa tasaveroisia kumppaneita, en kuitenkaan ole löytänyt katetta.’ (‘I have not been able to substantiate the view that man and woman were equal partners in the rural household economy’) 116        Both the Sawo and Tommila cases, as well as those described by Eilola 2002.

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camps which accused each other, and individuals were summoned to the court, Maria and Perttu always told similar stories, whereas the witnessing neighbours and others may have told conflicting stories. Maria and Perttu seem to have acted together, and to have planned their actions together, beforehand. As it was clear that someone had to be excluded from the partnership, the three at the top acted together. Only when Heikki had moved out did Matti finally appear in court to testify that really it might have been much ado about nothing. It may have been a premeditated way of backing down with minimum personal embarrassment as Maria and Perttu no longer appeared personally.117 Similarly in Tommila, Agata and her son-in-law Klemet ran the farm together. That the neighbours also took up charges of magic against Klemet during the trial against Agata might also point in the same direction, because magic and witchcraft against other households may enter the household through any of the members but most likely through the husband or his wife. That was even stated by the court during the 1687 witch trials. In this case, the court record explicitly stated the partnership of Agata and Klemet.118 The two often represented each other when they acted as plaintiffs. As defendants, they could not legally do so, even when the matter concerned the whole household. Therefore, for example, the record of a servant suing Agata for her wages noted that as Agata was absent and had not given Klemet – who seems to have been present – permission to act in the case, she was fined for negligence.119 When Agata appeared as the plaintiff or petitioner, the court records never distinguished whether it was personal business, Klemet’s personal business or the household’s common business. From the contents of the cases, we can sometimes infer that they were matters concerning the whole household and of Agata’s personal business, but not, however, Klemet’s personal business. In the Sawo household, Maria was first reported to have appeared on behalf of her husband. On subsequent occasions, the records made no notes of it or mentioned that she farmed the farm, as in 1695 when the record noted that ‘as Maria Pertutytär from Pomarkku will no longer let her sonin-law Heikki Yrjönpoika Janckari stay in the farm she occupies….”120 Such was the usual state of affairs in Finland and Sweden: sometimes the wife explained in court why she appeared instead of her husband, but more often she did not. They ran their affairs together. It is striking that the only occasion Pylkkänen has found when a woman’s incompetence and the regulations of representation were mentioned was when the court dismissed a husband who wished to contest an inheritance division because he had not been present. The court, however, noted that as it was the woman’s inheritance, she could have been there herself with a ‘god man’.121 As was made clear by the behaviour of Jaakko Eeronpoika and Riitta 117 Ulvila 23 and 25 Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:29v–33. NA. 118 Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:185. NA. See also for example Liu 1994. 119 Ulvila 4–5 Nov 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:384; Ulvila 4–5 June 1691. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a6:261. NA. 120 For example, Ulvila 8–10 Jan 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:18–19.NA ‘Såssom Maria Bertilssdotter I Påmark icke will tillåta sin Måg Henrich Joransson Janckari wijdare att blifwa på dett hemman hon åboer…’ 121 Pylkkänen 1990, 128–9, 138; Pylkkänen 2005; Andersson 1998, 35 et passim.

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Tuomaantytär, when a husband did appear for his wife, it did not always mean that he controlled the property. Riitta managed her share of the inheritance and knew it better than her husband. Jaakko may, of course, have claimed that he had to ask his wife about her share of the inheritance only to delay the process, but even the fact that it was viable to do so suggests that not all women left their property solely to the care of their husbands and not all husbands had detailed knowledge of the property of their wives. As Agata performed the duties of a household head and farmer in taxation listings and other communal management outside the court, the household’s internal flexibility seems clear.122 However, rights of representation would not always be as clear, which is probably why the laws tried to regulate them in the first place. Agata encountered this pattern when she tried to deduct from her servant’s pay a sum of money she had loaned to the servant’s mother. Agata seems to have thought the servant and her mother could be counted as one entity. They could represent each other and were also responsible for each other’s debts. Agata, however, did not succeed – the court ruled for the servant, who did not want to take such responsibility for her mother. Agata was ordered to pay her servant’s wages in full and pursue her debts from the mother as best she could. The flexibility which allowed the members of a household to represent each other was considerably narrower here, mainly because the representative and the represented themselves refused to be such an entity.123 This enforces what Pylkkänen claims: representation of the household members did not, in the seventeenth century, mean only the men representing the wives, but any member’s right to speak for the others in a legally competent way. This is the context in which the proxy system should be understood.124 Moreover, such flexibility could exist only by mutual agreement, informal or formal. Instances as the above do not have to reflect a wider notion of common household property. At the same time, individual property ownership was contrasted with a right of all the members of the household to control the produce of their own work, even if that could be separated from the common property only after leaving the household. It seems evident from previous studies that all the adult household members held their own property, separate from the household’s common property, and were able to control it themselves. Inheritance shares could be difficult to separate from the common household property before moving out of the household, but any earned property was at a daughter’s or son’s own disposal.125 The managerial partnership was part of a family strategy to ensure that the farmstead would be successfully managed at all times. In a household, the relationships of a wife and a husband, of parents and children, of servants and masters constitute a web

122     Ulvila 3–5 July 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:180 (422–v); Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:176. NA. 123 Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:384. NA. 124 Pylkkänen 1990, 140–47. 125 Pylkkänen 1990, 141, 146; Ulvila 4–5 Nov. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a5:394–5. Ulvila 23 and 25 Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a11:29v–33. NA.

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of hierarchies, as already noted by some historians.126 In such a web, the hierarchy of one relationship may be submitted to or submerged with another, wider hierarchy, if that seems persuasive to most of the people – or those with most authority – involved in the situation. As all relationships were part of such a web, none of them could, however, be separated from others. It is evident that, whereas historians have emphasised the seclusion of the relationships of women within the household, such a position would never have been possible for the Finnish farm mistresses. Their position was in the interaction between the household and its surroundings. Gendering work and power Looking at the households of both Tommila and Sawo, we see an agreed partnership of management and authority. A partnership between the spouses was often semiformally presumed. The managerial partnership could also be formed by another collective of the elder members of the household. In Tommila, the partnership seems to have consisted of Agata and Klemet, the actual legal owner’s mother and husband. In Sawo the managerial collective consisted of the old owner, Perttu, and his son-inlaw in the background and Perttu’s daughter, Maria, in the foreground. There were important characteristics pertaining to all members of the managerial collective: They were always parents and they had always been or still were married and they had to be trusted and agreed upon by the most of the other members of the household. Age as such seems important, but it was connected with marriage and parenthood. Like the Sawo and the Tommila households, the households often included aged members of the extended family, sisters, brothers and aunts who lived in the household working under the headship of another household member, even in western Finland where the nuclear-type of household was dominant. Having lost their ability to earn a living from paid labour, they might also have returned for the remains of their years to their parental home often living in a sauna or a cabin. These people were always sidelined from the centre of household power and therefore were unlikely to marry and have children. Simultaneously, marriage and parenthood were considered necessary steps towards full adulthood. The importance of the parenthood is also connected to age: the younger generation, not having children or having very young children, was, in these households, not able to compete with the elders for authority, at least as long as the elders were still able to work and perform their public duties. When Heikki Janckari tried to contest the authority of his mother-inlaw and grandfather-in-law, he was perhaps not unique – there are numerous similar instances in the court records. 127 However, the insistence with which the managerial collective repressed such attempts was hardly less regular, nor was the support the court, together with the local community, seem to have given them. Gender was less important to the possibility of accessing authority than age and parenthood; it did, however, mean a difference in the way authority was used and reproduced. Historians and gender theorists of almost all strands have seen gender 126 Toivanen 2005, 66–75. 127 Perlestam 1998, passim.

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as a hierarchical relationship of power. For Joan Scott, gender was a ‘primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated’.128 For the non-historian (with a less historical-materialist point of view) R. W. Connell, gender was defined as ‘the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes’. But gender presented itself as four dimensions, the first of which was power. This power could be institutional of discursive, both ways it defined femininities and masculinities either as hegemonic or subordinated. Despite the apparent possibility of subordinated masculinities, the ‘most masculine’ is always seen as the most hegemonic, both in the sense of being more accepted as a model and more forceful in itself.129 What is most important, however, is that, in both the mentioned theories, people can move between different identities instead of being stuck with one. This has made discussing feminine power problematic. Feminine power has often been deemed non-existent – there being no proper term for such a deviance from the definition of gender, it must be talked about as informal influence, gossip, and so on. The concept of masculine hegemony determines not only what is masculine and feminine, but also who is. It is, after all, based on an ideal type and the possibly multiple negations of it. The crudest implication is that women in power and authority must be masculine, and men lacking authority must be feminine. The definition may not be intentionally dichotomous – it is obviously the meaning of most current theory not to exclude possible third sexes – but it still too easily leads to exclusiveness from the point of view of masculinity and power. It is evident based on my material that many different kinds of masculinities and femininities coexisted – defining masculinity or femininity in terms of a hegemony should only lead one to ask what kind of hegemony. Defining gender in terms of a hierarchical power relationship would lead to a disturbing similarity with early feminist separatism: feminine is defined in a structural way, with no chance of gaining positions of power in the gendered relationship. The multiple masculinities and femininities should not be termed more or less masculine or feminine, nor necessarily more or less hegemonic or subordinated. Maria Pertuntytär and Agata Pekantytär certainly cannot be treated that way. Heikki Janckari’s masculinity may have received some serious blows, but those did not change his role within his own family. On the contrary, it is very evident that these persons did not lose their gender as they gained or lost power. Rather, the gendering of the roles they occupied was re-shaped. Maria’s and Agata’s authority as the head of the farm came to include more traditionally feminine emphases and a somewhat greater amount of rhetoric on motherhood, feeding and cattle were used to back up authority. The persons do not lose or change their gender but use it in their work – and in their witchcraft. It would be anachronistic to conclude that the early modern patriarchal rhetoric reflects an enclosure of women away from the public, inside the private household, for the household as the basic social unit in itself never could be private in the modern sense of the word. The mistress of the farming household, although deriving her authority from the household, could not but be a public figure as well, with 128 Scott 1986, 1069. 129 Connell 2002, 10, 58–60.

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public status and authority.130 In a Finnish context, the authority of the mistress of the household is most often attached to the much criticised national mythology of the strong Finnish woman and her context in the traditional agricultural world, Lutheran culture and frequent warfare. Agrarian gender relations and the heavy workload of women are seen as elements conducive to an equal society.131 Interestingly, historical research elsewhere in Europe has recently pointed to the strong positions rural women may gain in an agrarian society. The contexts provided elsewhere in Europe have been the small family sizes and the related patterns of marriage which affected the gender division of work in northwestern Europe, but also the male migration patterns and rural culture of areas like Spain which influences not only the division of work but also the cultural patters of inheritance in a direction favouring daughters and matrilocal marriages.132 The strong Finnish woman and her cultural context find surprising counterparts in areas which have heretofore been considered culturally very different. Conclusions This chapter has considered the importance of work in the creation and discourse on relationships of power and authority. This importance as such is clear from the thematic or motive overview of the court record texts, which is not as such surprising because of the importance of work to the survival of both the individual and the smaller as well as larger communities in the early modern world. Work and the urban workshop have been presented in women’s and gender historiography as part of the early modern enforcement of discipline and subordination of women and labourers to husbands and masters. The idea is certainly present in Reformation rhetoric. Nevertheless, in the early modern peasant farmer’s rhetoric, the worth and status given by work is more emphasised than the discipline and hierarchy of work. It was important to work and contribute to the household and village common good. Loitering and laziness were frowned upon – although work did not have to be ascetic or severe, but a certain amount of amusement was expected, especially of young people. However, there was also the possibility of ‘wrong kind of work’, which failed to produce status or authority. Work simply for individual gain might in some circumstances produce personal worth, but a more considerable input was expected of those in more authority – at least at the level of rhetoric. This is shown especially in the rhetoric of witchcraft as stealth and work for the good of the community. This rhetoric may be seen as the major practical implementation of the reciprocity of the patriarchal theory of authority, displayed in the catechisms teaching over family relationships. Work for the community was where reciprocity could be checked. Without work for the benefit of others instead of just oneself, authority would be difficult to attain. 130 Poska 2005. 131          See especially Julkunen 1999, 87; Sulkunen 1991; Markkola 2003; Pylkkänen 2005. 132 Hartman 2004; Poska 2005.

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Skill in work was equally important; it could establish a sense of personal capability, on which others could rely. What was skill or lack of skill and what was magic or witchcraft then became a point of argument in the struggle over status and authority. Economic and social historians have usually emphasised that skill, strength and diligence in work were essential for male honour, but women’s honour and status were dependent on their chastity and the husbands’ status. My material, however, shows, in unison with some recent suggestions by historians of rural work, that work, skill and strength were essential for women’s honour, status and authority, too. It has in fact been suggested that, even in the Mediterranean, chastity was not as important as historians have thought. Paradoxically, historians of witchcraft and femininity have for some time emphasised that a lot of women’s work demanded great skill, preciseness and cleanness. Witchcraft is seen as one form of skill and suspicion of or trials for maleficium as struggles to regain control and to reconfirm one’s skill. As witchcraft historians have been focused on the continental panics and, therefore, often think of witches as women and have been interested on femininity, they have failed to point out that the same applies to witchcraft and men.133 A good deal of magic and witchcraft was highly gendered. However, the gender division is far from clear. Men and women performed all kinds of benevolent magic and maleficium on humans and animals. It seems that women performed cattle magic more often than did men, and men performed magic on the fields, but there were also men curing cattle illnesses and women doing magic on horses. Sometimes magic was performed by male witches using highly feminine symbols, like cooking utensils or food. Magic can have a gender of its own, at least partly independent of the performer. Sometimes this enabled men to perform even decidedly feminine duties and women to perform even strongly masculine duties without losing their own feminine or masculine gender. If such a codification also extended itself outside magic and witchcraft, it would shed light on how women experienced their managerial roles and authority in the household or farmstead. The female heads of household in this study, at least, combine a feminine range of role as mothers, daughters and housewives with the authority they had gained but which ideologically was thought to be male and masculine. The household was essential to the formation of authority. One’s position in one’s own household is what all other authority was based on. This applied to both men and women. In this sense, household is not a gender question. The Finnish households also seem to have been headed not by one male farmer but by a managerial group. In the small households in western Finland, historians have claimed that this lead to a visible participation of women in legal action. In my material, however, women’s participation is visible also, if not especially, in multi-generational households, suggesting a cultural preference rather than an economic necessity. It is still, however, related to a similarity between the experiences women and men could have of different spheres of life during their own lives, which Hartman 2004 connects to late marriages and small households and Poska 2005 to male migration and matrilocality. Work had a potential to produce status and authority as such. Idleness had the possibility of diminishing it. This too, applies to all sexes. 133 Purkiss 1996, 96–9; Poska 2004.

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What may seem striking is the importance of informal or formal mutual agreement on the managerial partnership for heading the farms and the distribution of authority – the real picture is a lot less given in terms of sex, gender, age and birth than the older reading of the catechism teaching would suggest. The meaning of age is considerable, although it seems to have been more ambiguous for the creation of and discourse on power in terms of household as a work unit than it was for the creation of and discourse on power in the family relationships. As far as family relationships were concerned, age was mostly seen as a positive sign referring to parental relationships. In the case of work, the possible increase of skill would gradually be outweighed by the loss of ability to work. The gendering of authority, and the process of creating or distributing it, takes place through all these elements, emphasising that gender was not a dichotomy between male and female or merely ‘an unequal power relationship’ between the masculine and the feminine, but that the gendering of authority and status varied according to the factors which could here be called personal resources and circumstances – age, skill, support and character – but are elsewhere often called ‘class’.134

134 Race, the other classic factor in discourses on the relativity of gender, being somewhat irrelevant to early modern Finnish society, in which Russian tartars would form the only major group of a racial ‘other’.

Chapter 5

Family, Women’s Status and Power Family and immediate kin play an important role in power relationships from all the perspectives of women’s history in general, in the history of witchcraft as well as in Agata’s story in particular. In gender history, the importance of a family is a given: it has taken different forms, from the possibly contradictory meanings of sexuality and procreation to the structure of marital relationships or kin and lineage to the personal emotions of motherhood. The construction of gender and power relationships within marriage have been of special importance to the study of early modern gender history. In terms of the history of witchcraft, the meaning of the family has been twofold: in popular understanding, accusations and trials are often assumed to have hit those who lacked the support of their family and therefore to point to the accused women’s weak or otherwise problematic position. In contrast, social historians have taken the view that the accusations were often directed against the leaders of a household or at least against those among the household’s most valued members. In Agata’s story, her family and household seem to have been essential both for the legitimation of her authority and in many ways, for character-building in the witchcraft trials. The next chapter will look more closely at the meaning of family and immediate kin in Agata’s story, and at the formation and reformation of authority among the peasants. Contemporaneous social theory, which can be read, for example, in the catechisms, taught that early modern women should be wives. Modern historians, too, have found it easy to write longer chapters on wives than on daughters, aunts, widows and grandmothers, let alone nurses, cattle maids, spinsters and so on. This ease, however, may not be due entirely to the importance of wives in early modern society – important they were, although there were other significant groups of women – but it may also reflect the seemingly simple structure formed by the relationship between husband and wife in the catechism teaching and in legal codification. Historians and sociologists look for structures, and marriage is a structure which embraces the entire society. The focus on marital relationships and the household also reflects the interest of twentieth- and twenty-first century feminism in domestic relations. The earliest women’s historians in the 1970s and early 1980s saw an insecure and subordinate status of early modern women and wives as reflecting the issues of domestic violence, sexual rights and the right to control one’s own body in general. To the later post-structuralist feminist scholars, marital relationships and the household seem a sphere where women brew their identities using sexuality, maternity and occupation 

Jackson 1998, 19–20.

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(housewifery) as ingredients. However, it may well be that the important feature in marriage is not in the structural hierarchy of husband and wife, but rather in the lack of stability in that hierarchy in the Swedish – and perhaps northwestern European – family which was already shown in the previous chapters of this work. A woman’s place Women’s history began to be written in a time of social change: the society of the 1970s was only just deconstructing the post-war family boom, and women were more and more often working outside the home even when married or when they had children. The current change in society was also reflected in the emphasis historians and sociologists placed on the change: traditionally, women’s place had been the home and they lived their lives amongst the family to a much greater extent than did men. In this view, the traditional and the pre-modern were contrasted with the modern, but how long ago or for how long that ‘before’ had occurred did not attract as much interest as the change from pre-modernity to modernity itself. For early modern women, it was and is generally thought, the home meant the place and the family – the connections – in which and with which women lived their lives. Historians today claim that the family was also seen as the basic unit of patriarchal society, which enhanced the reciprocal importance of both the family and the patriarchal order for historians. However, I am not the first to point out that the interpretations historians make of family connections may be partly illusory: Not only are we finding gender relations to be what we expect them to be – the separate spheres – but those expectations may thwart our attention from other, possibly important phenomena and changes in history. Patriarchal society has often been interpreted more or less crudely as the power of the father; wives and children were under his rule. According to these crude interpretations, women in patriarchal society were thought to be both physically and mentally weaker than men, so that they needed constant protection in every  See for example Amussen 1988; Lyndal Roper 1989 or 2004; and some Scandinavian examples like Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 124–6, 139–43, and especially Karlsson Sjögren 1998, 129–49, 157–95 on the structure-oriented approach, as well as Eilola 2002 and Liliequist 2002 from an opposite angle emphasising domestic violence in their descriptions of women’s social positions according to court (secular and ecclesiastical) protocols. Karlsson Sjögren points explicitly to discussions about the modern situation (including one by Amussen). There are also various works on violence against women, with unavoidably similar themes (e.g., Farge 1993) yet, precisely because of their pronounced special focus, they do not demonstrate similar thoughts of the central role of domestic violence in general. At the other end, scholars such as Purkiss and Roper during the 1990s and the Scandinavian scholar Lennartson 1999 see marital and extramarital sexuality as part of women’s identity construction in the poststructuralist line. For Finnish research, see Tuomaala 2005.  See Hartman 2004 for a view which holds that the older age of women at the point of marriage – in fact a relative absence of marriage at certain points of most women’s lives – is the most important reasons for the wider life experiences of women, the instability of household hierarchy and the many economic changes these changes may have caused.  Hartman 2004, 14–15.

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sense: physically from dangers lurking outside the home – especially in the form of other men; intellectually because their understanding was weak; and morally because they were naturally incapable of controlling themselves. In return for – and to make possible – the protection which the husband or father would give them, women would showed obedience and deference. Those who adhere to the ‘deterioration view’ have pointed out that patriarchs in practice failed to provide the protection and, consequently, the reciprocity which was said to legitimise the power was false. Another implied criticism has been that women were not originally in need of such protection and that it may not have been a mere coincidence that the invention of that need also put men in control of women’s property, labour and sexuality, the very things which are thought to determine social structure and dependence or independence. Instead, the laws and religious instructions – despite the emphasis put on the responsibilities of the husband – left women at the mercy of their husbands, who could coerce women into obedience with their right to discipline. Interpreted this way, patriarchal society becomes patriarchy, a social system in which men define what is or is not a female role, and in which women are in every way subjected to men. The concept of patriarchy has been important to the branch of feminist history seeking the origins of women’s oppression – a branch termed by Joan Scott as ‘patriarchy-branch’, consisting most importantly of radical and non-socialist feminists and those using psychoanalysis. The most often investigated sources of patriarchy are the patterns of human reproduction, most obvious in the history of family, lineage and marital relationships. Most historians’ accounts today offer more sensitive and refined readings of early modern patriarchy or patriarchal society. Mostly this rereading has taken the form of either emphasising the mutuality and the responsibility which was placed on the patriarch – that he should not misuse his authority, that he should treat his wife lovingly as his own flesh and that although he had the ultimate authority, he was supposed to listen to and respect his wife – or the fact that even within the patriarchal model, the family offered women a position of power with respect to the children and servants. The latter emphasis has also spread among the post-structuralist studies of individual experience and identity. Historians have also focused on the point that women were at all times and in a variety of discourses and contexts also described very positively, not as weak and in need of protection, but as mothers, who raised God-fearing useful subjects, and as steady, loving, caring, modest wives who supported their husbands, saved them from temptations and worked with them in practical as well as in spiritual matters. The meaning of such praise, however, is ambiguous for historians. On the one hand, the Reformation’s new emphasis on wives and mothers and the demystification of virginity is thought to have given real women, for the first time, a sphere to gain status in. On the other hand, the praise has  ‘Patriarchal society’ differs from ‘patriarchy’ in that it describes historical societies that do not necessarily lead to the patriarchy described by radical feminists of the 1970s.  Scott 1986.  Purkiss 1996 and other psychological studies attempt to use witchcraft material to investigate how women saw themselves and their world. A Finnish example is Einonen & Karonen 2002 and the articles therein.

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been seen as a means of control: only those virtues were praised which supported patriarchy. Lyndal Roper even emphasises that the marital hierarchy between the spouses reflected the power order of the society as a whole, and that this is partly why the German Protestant rhetoric presented women as wives instead of as mothers. The emphasis on marital relationship defining all ideal relationships between men and women appears in Swedish theological teaching as well – albeit, according to Kekke Stadin, in a toned-down version. The Swedish teachers could allow women authority not only towards their children and servants but also towards their husbands. The Reformation views on women and their place in society were gathered into the catechisms and the longer texts of Luther, other reformers and their followers who more or less faithfully reproduced the views during the following centuries. Some of the texts were fairly elaborate on the subject of relations between husband and wife (for example, Luther’s To the Christian Commonweal [An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation]). The voluminous household literature, which often had religious overtones, was fairly clear, yet often abstract, on the subject. The common advice in both literary genres is that the husband should govern and protect his wife, with love and charity, as he would treat his own flesh. The wife was supposed to be her husband’s helpmate, meek and obedient, honouring her husband and offering him her understanding support. She was valued in her place, but under his rule.10 The catechisms used in early modern Sweden were drawn directly from Luther’s catechisms. The part where social hierarchy got its most clear representation was the Table of Duties, ‘Die Haustafel’. In ‘Die Haustafel’, there were collected passages from the Pauline letters to guide the behaviour of (1) bishops, pastors and listeners, (2) authorities and subjects and (3) married couples, parents and children, and masters and servants. They appeared conveniently in the order of the medieval three estates, which the Scandinavian interpretations have emphasised. The Swedish version by Svebilius (catechism with annotations 1689 was divided into three titles: kyrkoståndet (spiritual estate), politiska ståndet (political estate) and hushållståndet (economic or household estate). Each of the three orders consisted of the same groups of people who had duties towards other groups. The rhetoric of three estates was also widely used in other Swedish texts.11 Yet, in fact, the Finnish or German original versions did not have the three umbrella titles. In the Finnish Yxi Lasten Paras Tawara, written by Johannes Gezelius in 1666, headings similar to those of Svebilius’s catechism do not appear. The numerous groups to whom advice was given were named separately: ‘Opettajille’ (to teachers), ‘Sanan-kuulijoille’ (to those hearing the word), ‘Maailmalliselle esivallalle’ (to worldly magistrates), and so on, in Luther’s original manner. Similar categories of people with mutual responsibilities can be found in other Protestant and Catholic catechisms of the time, without being divided in three main categories or estates, although the idea of the three orders  Roper 1989.  Roper 1989, 32, 59; Stadin 1997. 10 See for example Roper 2004, 150; Pleijel 1951 and 1961; Aalto 1991; Lennartson 2004. 11 See Pleijel 1951, 15–41, especially 20–21, 34; cf. Luthers Werke, Band 30 Abt 1.; Svebilius 1689.

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was widespread.12 It is thus not altogether clear that having ‘Die Haustafel’ hung on the walls of peasant households inculcated the three estates into the peasant’s mental world,13 notwithstanding the popularity of the idea. Once familiar, ‘Die Haustafel’ was a natural context against which each and everyone could interpret their catechisms and build their own view of social hierarchy. In Scandinavia, historians have adopted the view of the three estates as understood by the 1950s Swedish pastor and church historian Hilding Pleijel: the three estates are seen as hierarchical mirror images of each other, the lower estates almost as (analogical or metonymical) reductions of the higher ones. The Pleijelian construction is similar to its counterparts in the rest of the Western world, but it emphasises the power state and the development of central power. The household, Luther’s order of oeconomia, has been regarded as the most important of the three estates mostly because of the often-repeated analogy between the king’s position in his kingdom and the husband’s position in his household. The bishop, pastors and parishioners formed a chain analogical to those formed by the king, state government and the subjects or by the husband, wife and the rest of their household – that is, children and servants. The catechism teaching, then, appears as firmly situated in the Swedish power state as a part of the uniform harnessing of all resources to military needs. The ideological social hierarchy in ‘Die Haustafel’ cemented the power of the king at the top of society and extend his reach to the daily lives of all the subjects by making the husbands and fathers miniature kings in their households – whose authority was just as cemented as the king’s. The woman’s place, on the other hand, was decidedly within the household, subjected to her husband, yet in a position of authority over her children and servants. Since she was present more often than her husband, and managed everyday matters, she may have had even more daily influence over the household than the master.14 Modern historians often add that, whereas the ideal was clear, in practice none of these things was possible. On the one hand, the seclusion and confinement of the household was broken by the constant needs of the agrarian economy, which required two strong partners. On the other hand, husbands might be unsuited for the ideal position of authority, and wives would have to take over. A husband who did not value his wife or quarrelled with her would also reduce her authority in the eyes of the children and servants, and undermine his own authority. Such a husband risked leaving the household without any proper authority if the he himself was unable to hold it. The cases of widows like Agata Pekantytär who would not have had a husband to obey have occasioned some discussion. The view historians adopt depends on whether they wish to emphasise the complementarity of spouses and the possibilities for women, as wives and mothers, to attain status and even power in the 12 Luther’s ‘Die Haustafel’ did not have the titles of Das Priester ampt, Die weltliche Oberkeit, Der Ehestand or the corresponding Latin titles, but they do appear in various other writings (e.g. in Vom Abendmahl Christi). Pleijel 1951, 15–45, especially 20–21 and 34; Gezelius 1859 (orig. 1666), 28–32. 13 E.g. Karonen 2002, 15. 14 Pleijel, 1970 (orig. 1961), 66–83; Amussen 1995, passim; Andersson & Ågren 1996; Einonen & Karonen, 2002; Warpula 2002.

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work and trade of the household, or to emphasise the structural oppressiveness of the ideal family relationships in line with the patriarchy-view.15 In the power-state reading of the catechisms, the processes of state formation and absolutism are crucial. Read in the power-state context, the catechism teaching of the nature of hierarchy, power and authority is presented as instituted by God, and therefore unconditional and not open to question. A place was also given to the traditional Lutheran ideal of vocation or calling – the notion that God had allotted each person his or her present duties and he or she will best serve God by fulfilling them as well as possible. The duty to obey someone in a God-given position of authority was therefore a duty towards God. Church teaching as well as political discourse were often condensed into the analogy or metaphor of a human body, in which each member has its necessary function and its importance, but the head makes decisions which bind all. Interpreted this way, the catechisms gave clear authority to pastors over their parishioners, to princes and magistrates over their subjects, to husbands over their wives, to parents over their children and to masters over their servants.16 Since it was God-given, the hierarchy was legitimated as what Weber would have called ‘traditional authority’: it described the relationships between different authorities and different subjects, the husband and wife being one such pair, natural, fixed and structural. In the power-state context, it did not matter that ideally hierarchical superiority was given in exchange for presumed physical, mental and spiritual protection: as authority was unconditional, the practice of the ideal could be wanting. There are indeed various historical records showing that the reciprocity was wanting. Historians often conclude that the authorities, magistrates, officials or husbands and fathers were rarely deprived of their power because of complaints of misuse of power. Women were put in charge over men only as a last resort. However, the same records also show that abused or non-reciprocal authority was not considered legitimate: often the records were the direct result of the questioning of the legitimacy, be it in court, in folk poetry or in private letters. The contest was, indeed, constant in the dealings of households, as shown in Agata’s story. Even though husbands and landlords were rarely deprived of their power, they were told – and sometimes forced – to use it better. Indeed, the emphasis on the ideal of reciprocity shows how important medieval feudal concepts, understood in terms of mutual, polar rights and responsibilities, persisted both in contemporary social theory and in popular thinking.17 Because of the reciprocity, cases of women bearing responsibility might actually be more easily 15 Pleijel, 1951; Pleijel 1970 (1961); Eilola 2002. 16 In other writings, Luther discussed the possibility that if the worldly authorities had neglected their duties, they might lose their God-given rights, but the catechisms never address such points. The Swedish and Finnish catechisms were very firm on points of authority and did not mention the possibility of its being illegitimate. Gezelius 1666. See also Gothus 1633, especially Chapter XXI on the fourth commandment and XXXIII on good works. 17 For example, the ecclesiastical court, as Pylkkänen has found, placed less emphasis on the power relations and more on reconciling disagreements and securing peace, emphasising the mutuality more than the hierarchy. Pylkkänen 1990, 293. On the importance of the medieval reciprocity, see Katajala 2002, 322–9.

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found in records created by other than marital disputes. The clearest authority came from mutual acceptance, not from disputes. The question for historians has been how far the elite norms presented in the literature and catechisms were actually adopted by the populace. For many historians, the answer has been self-evident. Organised religious teaching has been a source of pride to Scandinavians. It is supposed to have made the populace both pious and literate. The study of daily life, however, has proved both abilities varying among the populace.18 The first Finnish catechisms of Agricola (and Finno) during the sixteenth century were direct translations of Luther’s catechisms, and catered for the needs of the clergy. The populace rarely read them, although they may have been read aloud or used in sermons. Popular education was an important but largely unattained goal of the Finnish churchmen until the later seventeenth century when Yxi Paras Lasten Tawara by Gezelius was published.19 Gezelius’s catechism was popular and supported by the church authorities, but still not within the reach of many peasant households. Owning books was in fact rare: tales of magical books and the like surface now and then in court records,20 but not very surprisingly, no one admitted to having them. The same goes for religious literature and even more so for household literature, which was aimed at the gentry and nobility. European religious propaganda, and folk plays – in Finland too – appeared as cheap print, but very often actual books were beyond the financial reach of the peasantry. Printouts of ‘Die Haustafel’ were taken and distributed to the populace.21 Although the printed copies were short, they obviously had an effect; that effect, however, was always countered by rival views in other cheap print sources and folklore. This is not to say that the catechism teaching did not matter. It did. The memorised guidelines of conduct had to influence the behaviour of the common man and woman. The religious treatises and the household literature infiltrated the peasantry’s mental world through the sermons in church, through conversations with local gentry, in court, in the markets and everywhere else. However, there is very little reason to think that the teachings were strictly accepted as meant by the elites. Indeed, there is even less reason to think that the teachings ever, even in the elite context, were as uniform as historians have claimed. Social theory was, after all, constantly debated, even in elite circles, a striking example of which are the Swedish struggles over power between kings and various actors in the Diet or regency governments. Most expositions thereof should thus be treated as arguments in a discussion. It is, for example, clear that the Swedish as well as all western churches’ view on marriage put more worth on marriage as a contract between two persons (instead of kin groups), and thereby also emphasised the woman’s free will and mutuality in (entering) it.22 18 On the critique on the reception of ‘Die Haustafel’ and similar teaching see, for example, Österberg 1997; Aronsson 1993; Lennartson 2004. 19 Gardberg 1949, 196; Mäkelä-Henriksson 1988, 111–12. 20 For example, a witch in Ulvila said he had owned a ‘black book’ containing advice how to cure various illnesses, but as it had drawn too much attention, he figured it might not have been a good book to have and got rid of it. Ulvila 25–26 Oct, 1697. Vehmaa ja AlaSatakunta II KO a9:524–8. NA. 21 Lindmark 1992, 68–9; Karonen 2002. 22 Diefendorff & Hesse 1993; Stadin 1997; Karlssön Sjögren 2003.

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In the case of gender roles and hierarchy, that discussion most certainly also included arguments for women’s capabilities in the worldly and spiritual spheres of life. A trigger for these arguments may well have been the very different position of real women and men in real households in real society – if women’s real position was growing more important and men were feeling more insecure, it may have caused a need for a stricter rhetoric in religious teaching as well as in other household and conduct manuals.23 Historians only make the teaching seem uniform. The patriarchal society, and the hierarchical relationships within it, have for many historians been embodied in the relationships between women and men. Many Scandinavian historians have taken the nineteenth-century religious ideology about women’s place in society as their point of departure and as an example of traditional society. Pleiljel, often cited as one of the first modern authors on the subject, completed his work in the context of a national modernising project after the Second World War. Pleijel’s point was, as he explained in the introduction to his essay collection in 1970, to show how different the world had once been: a historian’s intention to explain why things which now seem odd had once made sense.24 Pleijel’s starting point was the gradual crumbling of what he called ‘the Haustafel world’ at the end of the nineteenth century, and its change into a ‘modern’ world; his main point became the difference between modernity and the pre-modernity, and this emphasis by Pleijel and other historians tended to overlook differences within pre-modern societies. Historians have followed his lead, examining the past for the birth of nineteenthcentury ideals, and found just that. Many of the Scandinavian gender historians have been working on the nineteenth century and have only made brief surveys of the previous centuries, which early modernists have then used as basis for their work. As a result, social historians have fallen into a double trap of thinking – despite out better knowledge – that the pre-industrial society somehow remained the same throughout the centuries and that Christianity somehow is essentially the same at all times. But the meaning of what we call ‘patriarchy’ has varied both geographically and over time.25 Keener attention to the works of historians of religions or ideologies or even rhetoric,26 showing the changes in those areas which social historians miss, might have saved us from that trap. Historians who have actually studied religious ideals about women and have used material of more than one kind maintain that the religious and legal elite teachings were not uniform on the subject of women’s position on household or society.27 The Pleijelian approach is a form of Weberian sociology, which draws on the difference between modern bureaucratic and pre-modern, patriarchal and charismatic forms of power. In the former, power is limited to certain spheres of life and controlled to the point of making the holder of the power eventually a (civil) servant. In the latter forms of power, such limitations do not exist.28 As neither the law nor the religious 23 24 25 26 27 28

Tague 2001; Hartman 2004, 144ff. Pleijel 1970, 7–10. Ankarloo 1999. See for example Clark 1997. Stadin 1997. Weber 1978, 217–99.

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or other ideals explicitly stated how the actions of the representative husbands and fathers could be evaluated, historians have assumed that those represented had no or little control over the decision-making. As public representation was thought to matter most, the other members of the household were assumed to have had to stay at home and quietly abide by the decisions, whether they liked them or not. In the privacy of their own households, they could hold limited power but not do anything significant, nor have any significant freedom – especially as even in the household the husband and father had the right to physical discipline.29 This, however, is a form of the pre-modern/modern polarity. For the sake of defining the modern, certain features of the past have been emphasised. Whether the same features were essential to early modern societies is a different matter. Recently, some scholars have awoken to the fact that the existence of the clear authority in the catechisms was also an ideal, which may not have materialised in all people’s lives, even though the catechisms were taught to every husband and wife in the country.30 Indeed, the abstract nature of this ideology is emphasised by the point that the king’s authority in early modern Sweden was not stable, nor cemented, but continuously fluctuating between regency governments and sovereignty,31 a fact which social historians working with the ‘from below-approach’ easily forget when they speak of the miniature kingdom of the household. Daily life historians have forgotten that social theory, in the form of either legal or religious discussion, was hardly more uniform during the period of state formation than it is today. Different views on the extent, nature and origin of the power of the king, estate, husband and wife, parents and children were continuously debated in the areas of law, politics and government. The religious teaching, too, which is depicted as simple and uniform, contained different views and emphasis even during the strictest orthodoxy.32 The competing different views may have made the effects of each other considerably less stabilising than historians usually describe. The teaching in the ‘Die Haustafel’ itself is also more ambiguous than it seems at first sight. If one looks at the reciprocal advice given to persons in relationships, the three estates can be seen not as three reductive rungs of a hierarchical ladder, but as three separate hierarchies, to which all people belong and in which they adopt different positions. The king should be a parishioner in religious matters, and the bishop a subject in political matters. The interpretation was not clear even in contemporaneous social theory. The clergy were obviously keener to see the social order in this way, whereas political leaders found it more logical that, as the secular authorities made it possible and safe for the religious authorities to work, the supreme authority was also theirs.33 Another possible way to analyse the catechism teachings might be to attach them to the other contemporaneous rhetorical and intellectual tradition of opposition as controversie or complementarity. The groups in Gezelius’s catechisms were 29 30 31 32 33

See for example Taussi-Sjöberg 1996, 140; Roper 1983; Lövkrona 1999b. This trend is already visible in Einonen & Karonen 2002. See for example Karonen 1999 or any other textbook on Swedish political history. Cameron 1991; Clark 1997; Karonen 1999. Pleijel 1951, 32; Lindmark 1993, 48ff. Cf. also Heal 1993, 7–22, 32.

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presented not as three categories – although they were presented in that order – but rather as groups of polar opposites, defined in contrast to each other. There were a few exceptions to the mutuality and contrast, such as the group of young people which in the Finnish catechisms lacked the counterpart of old people common in other European catechisms.34 Still, the principle of polar opposites in the Neoplatonic or Aristotelian tradition is obvious enough behind the categorisation.35 Because of established medieval and Renaissance tradition, contemporary linguistic taste, and the flagrant religious conflict, the early modern intellectual climate was disposed to see things in terms of binary opposition to a greater degree than were earlier or later societies. Perhaps the religious sensibilities, referring to the absolute moral polarities anthropologists refer to as primary – good and evil, sacred and profane – made the classificiation into oppositions even more profound. Admitting that in much of intellectual history – the history of witchcraft being among the clearest examples – we should also allow it to apply to the catechism teachings. Similar systems of dual classification are often expressed as two lists or categories of terms, illustrating an opposition between a term (e.g, good) and its counterpart (evil) in the other category. The lists also suggest an analogy or interchangeability within each category. The terms in one column do not share a common quality or attribute by virtue of being listed there – which has to be established – but a sense of belonging tends to be evoked. The classifications most often are asymmetrical and therefore hierarchical, positing one category as positive and superior and one as negative or inferior.36 There are complications, however. The Aristotelian ideal, which strongly influenced the early modern discussions on the subject, spoke of a square of opposition, in which things were opposed ‘as correlatives to one another, as contraries to one another, as privatives to positives and as affirmatives to negatives’. Some of these relationships are more hierarchical than others. It is also evident that, whereas both oppositions were needed for either to exist – good had to include evil, virtue consisted of rooting out vice, husband and wife defined each other, there was always also more than one pair of oppositional categories. The wife was not only defined by the husband, but also by other oppositions: in contrast to unmarried women, children and so on. Theories could endeavour to superimpose the categories on each other, but the interchangeability would still work in clusters of oppositional pairs instead of throughout the ‘whole’. The qualities and duties of these different pairs were often presented as the opposites – complementary or conflicting – each other. Too much has been made of the lists which present man as the positive and woman as the negative derivative. There were such lists, but they were only a part of the oppositional square. There were also lists of the complementary qualities or of the virtues and the derivative vices of both men and women. The classification into 34 Gezelius 1859 (orig. 1666), 28–32. Gezelius mentions teachers or ministers, parishioners, secular magistrates, subjects, husbands, wives, parents, children, the young in general, masters and mistresses, servants, widows and last of all, the common people. 35 The Aristotelian principles were also handled in Swedish works, including the catechism by Laurentius Paulinus Gothus 1633. 36 Clark 1997, 35–42.

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binary opposites was a fundamental feature of intellectual thinking, clearly visible in the catechisms and their social teaching. However, one tidy categorisation should not be expected to explain anything as complicated as human cultural artefacts. There were many categorisations operating simultaneously.37 Perhaps this is the context in which we should put Kekke Stadin’s remark about the Swedish bishop Ångermannus regarding the husband’s authority over his wife being not only instituted by God but also grounded in his stronger reason; Ångermannus also thought that, as the wives might sometimes have a stronger reason, they might legitimately also have authority over their husbands.38 Interpreted this way, the hierarchical categories in catechism teachings appear as binary oppositions of social roles, possibly but not necessarily gendered. The hierarchy thereof is no longer merely given and traditional; these roles do not stipulate a person’s place in society once and for all but rather advise how someone was supposed to act as a teacher or as a listener, as a husband or as a wife, as a child or as a parent. The roles were defined in relation to others – parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants – and usually they are presented in pairs.39 Not just the relations between each of the pair, but hierarchy in itself appeared as complementary: there was no hierarchy if either side of the pair was missing. ‘Die Haustafel’ in the Gezelian form may have even emphasised this parity and mutuality. The same person could appear in many of them. This makes the structural hierarchy stable in society. Between individuals, however, hierarchy was continuously changing, contested and reconstructed. This comes close to a Foucaultian view of power as a discourse or a process, not a thing with a stable existence of its own. As it emphasises the various roles of persons instead of their God-given places, it also allows more room for a negotiation of authority. It is created by an understanding between individuals rather than a structural model imposed from outside. Such a view shows greater diversity in peasant hierarchical relationships than the old commonplace that not all men were masters of a household and not all women had a husband to control them. Spouses and protection Most of the household communities in Finland protected their own. One could only use the protective rhetoric to legitimate authority if one was already had some authority. In the Sawo household, Heikki lost a defamation/chastity case against Dårdi in 1693 to 1694 – the one in which he had spread rumours that Dårdi was a whore – partly because Dårdi and her suitors denied all fleshly intercourse, and partly because of the support of the family for Dårdi. They refused to hear anything of either one of her alleged affairs. She had discussed marriage with one of her suitors, Juha Ristonpoika, and the court told the couple either to get married or to take a purification oath. They accordingly married; Juha moved under the Sawo roof and apparently backed up Maria’s authority in the household. The other suitor was 37 Clark 1997, 36 (with the quotation on Aristotle), 106 ff.; Wiesner 2002, 24–5. 38 Stadin 1997. 39 Gezelius 1859 (1666), 28–32.

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questioned a couple of times the following year, but nothing ever came of it. The suitor persistently denied everything. Heikki tried to press the case by claiming that Maria and her old sister had caught Dårdi and one of her suitors in a sauna where that sister lived. According to Heikki, Maria must have caught them in the act, because had slapped her daughter. However, Maria made Heikki’s testimony useless by claiming she did not know what she saw. As the old sister never showed up in court, Heikki was left completely without support. The courts were ready to sanction vice, but they were not sure about the basis of Heikki’s arguments against the rest of the household.40 One of the first assumptions about the social background of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe was that they were old widows and spinsters who lacked the support of a family. During the 25 years since the work Thomas and Macfarlane, however, scholars have asserted that witches were not poor, dependent and unsupported, that most of them indeed had families, either a husband or adult children and friends, and that they were not considerably poorer than others or socially weak but instead often well connected in their villages.41 The conclusions about the relationship between women and men drawn from this have been twofold. Traditional social historians have linked these conclusions to the questions of neighbourly competition and household power: competition was most important between the bigger and more successful households; the lonely poor would not get much attention in the neighbourly competition. Especially for those who see the early modern period as one of structural misogyny and deterioration in women’s position, however, the fact that witches had families only proves the age-old understanding of the coldness of family relationships before the bourgeois values in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in Agata’s story the families seem instead to protect the wives and mothers. In witchcraft cases as in other cases, many women in court were accompanied by their husbands or fathers or other relatives.42 Spouses appeared together more often more serious matters concerning honour, fornication and witchcraft. For example in 1698–1700, Matti Juhanpoika Lusa appeared on behalf of his wife, Valpuri Sipintytär, and demanded punishment for the persons who had invented the story that his wife flew around at Shrovetide on a broomstick – eventually it turned out that the original anonymous rumour had originally been against Agata, at which point she had herself attached Valpuri’s name to it. Matti Lusa appeared thrice in the matter alone. At the fourth court session, the court took up an enquiry as to whether Valpuri really was a witch, and the record started not as a defamation suit but as a ‘case against Matti Juhanpoika Lusa’s wife Valpuri Sipintytär from Tuorsniemi’. She was present then, 40 Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. NA; Ulvila 14– 15 and 17 Sept. 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:282–3(new page number 166v–7). NA.; Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:239–41(new page number:145–6). NA. 41 See for example Rummel, 1985, 181–90. Sharpe 1997; Nenonen 1992, 202–17; Briggs 1998, 273; Favret-Saada 1977. 42 The point has been made by various historians, for example, Briggs 1996, 225–31; Nenonen 1992, 322.

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and could answer that question in person, as she was legally required to. She came forward claiming her innocence – vehemently, as the record states – after which the record immediately turns again to the question of who spread the rumours. Valpuri defended herself, but the scribe meticulously noted that she did so in the presence of her husband, although there was no legal reason why that should be recorded. Women were, after all, expected to defend themselves in person.43 Similarly, (in a story unrelated to Agata except that it involved residents of the same parish) an innkeeper and his wife, Valpuri Mikontytär, together sued their neighbour, Esko Rekonpoika, because he had called Valpuri a whore. Esko replied to the accusation by suing Valpuri because she had called him a witch. Valpuri took the appropriate and often used course of action: he denied having ever said anything of the sort and said that she only knew good things of her neighbour, although she admitted having said he could forecast illnesses. As she withdrew the accusation and apologised, she was not convicted of defamation. Esko, however, never backed down from his allegations but insisted that because Valpuri had let him buy beer from her at night and come over to his house to bring it to him, she had ‘behaved as a light person’.44 It seems that Valpuri and her husband expected a countersuit, and Valpuri was also present to disclaim the accusations personally, as the law required.45 Both Valpuri Mikontytär and Valpuri Sipintytär left the court with clean reputations. Agata was fined for spreading the rumours about Valpuri Sipintytär. Regarding Valpuri Mikontytär, the court eventually decided that Esko Rekonpoika had ‘no basis nor the slightest semblance of a basis’ for his allegations. The husbands’ presence may have helped in procuring this outcome. Their presence represented the patriarchal protection and the honourable status enjoyed by their wives.46 The husbands were not present simply because a wife could only defend herself alone and the prolocuting husbands had to present charges against the defaming neighbour. We have seen that it would, in practice, have been possible for the wife to present the charges alone. In the defamation cases, it is of course possible that the defamed woman would try to avoid public appearance in connection with the matter as long as possible, but that cannot be substantiated here, as the wives were present often enough, too. Rather it is likely that the couple wanted to help each other, both for emotional support and to preserve the family’s status; had the rumours been found true, a household member would have been fined, which meant economic burden. It 43 Ulvila 14–15 Oct. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a11:102–3, which also point to a previous summer session; Ulvila 6–8 March 1699. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II KO a13:92–4; Ulvila 2–4. May 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14:512–21, from which the quotation ‘Saaken emot Matts Johansson Lusas i Torsnäs hustru Walborg Sigfredsdotter’. NA. 44         ‘Light’ refers to ‘light-shoed’, which in Swedish (lättfotad) and in Finnish (kevytkenkäinen) means ‘of loose sexual morals’. Lätt, or kevyt can also refer to light in the same sense as in light-minded and frivolous or even light-handed. 45 The original reads ‘sig som een Lät Menniskia förseedt blifwa’. Ulvila 26–28 Feb. 1684 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:2–v (524–v). NA. 46 The original reads ‘intet med något Skiähl, eller till det ringaste lijknelsse till Skiäll detta sitt Taal bewijssa’. Ulvila 26–28 Feb. 1684 Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:2–v (524–v). NA. Ulvila 2–4. May 1700. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a14:512–21. NA.

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was certainly easier to run a farm with a spouse who had a good reputation among the neighbours. There was also a danger that the bad reputation would affect the whole household. Similarly, it has been noted that wives not uncommonly begged for clemency for their husbands if they were found adulterous.47 The presence and the obvious support of her husband in a case concerning the wife’s honour and chastity was also expected to help procure the result the couple wanted. The husband had an ideological duty to answer for the conduct of his wife. Therefore, when the public and officials in court saw him standing by her, in the flesh, they were simultaneously reminded of his ideological responsibility for and protection of her. His presence showed them that he considered his wife righteous, or at least good enough – and who would have been in a better position to know? In addition to his legal status as the prolocutor of his wife, the husband was expected, according to ideology, to be his wife’s protector. The husband standing up beside his wife in court might be not only a functional necessity, but also a status symbol. His presence reminded the public in court of the wife’s ideological status and social positions in her household and in the community in general as a housewife who was thought to have certain good qualities – such as being God-fearing, chaste, modest and industrious, things which counteracted allegations of dishonour. Traditional social historians who are not really interested in gender have viewed family relationships as disproving a male conspiracy against women – men would naturally not conspire against their own family members. Likewise, they saw it as disproving that witchcraft trials would have been mainly enforcing the patriarchal family ideals – if emotional bonds and compassion did not exist, the men would not risk their own reputations like that.48 The honour of one member of the family did indeed influence the whole household. Many effective magical accusations were directed against the whole household through one member, and magic itself could also be directed against the whole through a member of the household.49 As we know that reactions to threats to the reputation and honour of female family members vary from culture to culture, from denial and protection to so-called honour-killings, it seems naïve to take the family protection as self-evident unless it is backed up by the specific information of how these people acted. Some feminist and gender historians of witchcraft have often read the accounts of witchcraft trials as proof of lack of family support and even of family animosity. The notions are common in various popularisations of history, but they also abound in serious works of history. For example, Lyndal Roper, like Hester and Brauner, sees most witches suffering from a lack of support or even from open hostility from their husbands during the trials. Witchcraft and witchcraft trials are then presented as specifically domestic struggles. That the husbands and fathers seemed to show ‘inability to or unwillingness … to protect’ the women accused of witchcraft, and that the details about the witches’ stories of marriage with the Devil as a better alternative than with a man, made marital relations in early modern Germany seem less than

47 Aalto 1996. 48 Briggs 1996, 225–31; Nenonen 1992, 322. 49 See for example Roper 1989, 89ff; Gregory 1992; Liu 1994.

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satisfying.50 In the same vein, witchcraft has been seen as a way to emphasise the need for submissiveness of women in marriage: the women who did not internalise the Puritan or Lutheran social order were seen, tried and suppressed as witches. According to this line of thought, witchcraft happened when women refused to submit to the control of their husbands, but were by nature unable to control themselves and resist the Devil’s lure. The husband was thus not only protecting the wife against neighbourhood rumours and defending her in court, but also defending her from the lures of the Devil in the first place.51 Roper, representing a ‘post cultural turn’ view, emphasises stories about the necessity of marriage and about the enmity between husbands and wives, pointing to women’s reports of being seduced by others (by the Devil) when their husbands had treated them badly or when they despaired of getting one in the first place. Stories of marriage and sex with the Devil serve as testimonies about the marital relationships in general. The demonological theories did not mention marriage, but women themselves were unable to think of any sexual relationship – an essential part of the witchcraft mythology of the crazes – without marriage. Once seduced, the women felt married, and once married they were bound to obey the Devil. Roper describes the stories as ‘cynically realistic about power between men and women’: for the women, marriage meant obedience and sex in return for economic support, the Devil often left his promises unfulfilled in his turn but the women still felt themselves as obliged to obey. Roper’s interpretation of women as bound to their marriages with the Devil even when their previous marriages had been broken is notable. Women themselves had internalised the power relationship in marriage: they submitted, but they did not get the expected protection from either their husbands or the Devil.52 In the Finnish court cases, such stories are rarer. The truth in Finland and Sweden, as well as in France, does, however, seem to be that families reacted with mutual protection instead of abandonment, and emotional ties enhanced that protection as far as can be detected from the cold and bureaucratic documents. Admittedly, the material mostly consists of trials against everyday (benevolent or malevolent) magic and traditional maleficium. They lack the sensational features of the German witch crazes: Considerably less – if any – attention was given to the sabbat, sex or the Devil, and the trials were therefore likely to produce very different material on sexual or marital experience. Recent scholarly work has strongly suggested that the Finnish cases are no exception in this respect: the crazes or sabbat trials in general seem now to have been a relatively minor part of witchcraft and magic trials and an even smaller part of witchcraft beliefs. Furthermore, the distinction between the two may have been much more blurred than historians have generally thought. One of the results of widening the scope of investigations from the great panics to the trials for minor magic and maleficium is that the amount of family support seems considerably greater than previously supposed. The husband’s protection of his wife could also enhance the credibility and the status of the husband. When in 1686 Agata was accused of witchcraft, one of the 50 Barstow 1995, 54; see also Roper 2004, 84–96. 51 Karlsen 1987, 75, 160–81; Brauner 1995, 51–119. 52 Barstow 1995, 54; Roper 2004, 84–96.

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witnesses was Sipi Antinpoika, who told that Agata had offered to teach his wife some arts by which to procure cattle luck. Sipi Antinpoika was not only distancing himself from all magical means when he said he had forbidden his wife to use the methods Agata had offered to teach her. At first, other people told the story in court, even claiming that Agata had threatened to bewitch the wife if she did not take Agata’s advice. At the next court session, Sipi took an oath and added more detail, taking time to tell how he had cried ‘Pray God to keep you from doing such things!’ when his wife told him about Agata’s suggestions. Sipi was referring to his power of control over his wife – he forbade her, but he also raised his own status and authority. At the same time, he managed to imply the cultural source of his authority: religion. In contrast, when the Court of Appeal returned for review in 1688, he suddenly said that he had not paid so much attention to what Agata had said about cattle luck because he was not going to use any magic anyway. By that time, it had become clear that this matter would not proceed any further no matter how much of his personal credibility Sipi or anyone used, nor could they gain any more authority through this court case.53 Sipi’s role as his wife’s protector is emphasised by the fact that it had allegedly been his wife who knew about Agata’s magic, but she did not appear herself before the court in the retrial if 1688. Her husband only stated what he had heard from her, representing her unofficially. However, if the court had been really interested in convicting Agata, they probably would have required Sipi’s wife to be present. It seems that the court formed an opinion of the dubious credibility and the vague content of the accusations at a fairly early stage. Consequently, Sipi’s wife was asked to tell her story in person only after the Court of Appeal had sent the acquittal back to be reviewed and more thoroughly investigated. All the discourse of patriarchal protection was designed to provide credibility and trustworthiness. It was important to make clear that the witnesses did not meddle with magic themselves. The details took this particular form to present the teller in the best and most credible light, in this case as a dutiful husband who watches over and protects his wife from lurking evil. In contrast, Agata was in these bits of evidence, presented as meddling and officious, threatening, cunning and evil. Widows had no husband to support them. Like Catariina Giös, 54 they might have other relatives or family to appear for them or to lend unofficial support by being present in court. Such cases are not always noted in the records. In 1686–1688, the records only name Agata defending herself against the accusations, quite as the law required. This also suited the status she wanted to have as a member of the peasant farmers’ group. Only at the end of the second trial do the records reveal that her son-in-law, Klemet, was actually present all the time. During the trial he, 53 Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. Ala-Satakunta KO a2:183–5; Ulvila 11–12 July 1687. Ala-Satakunta II KO a2:225–9 with the quotation ‘Bedh Gudh bewara dig från sådant att giöra’; Ulvila 3–4 and 6–7 Feb. 1688. Ala-Satakunta II KO a3:58–60. NA. 54     Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:53–54v; Ulvila 11–13. Sept. 1677. Bielksamlingen vol. 27:86v-87. SRA; Kokemäki 1.& 3–4 March 1684. Ala-Satakunta II KO a2:530–v (this is a page number from the new numbering because the original is unreadable); Huittinen 6–10 March 1684. Ala-Satakunta II KO a2:15v. NA.

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too, was accused of using magic on the fields and he defended himself.55 The man of the household stood by her side, if not always wisely, still trying to protect her reputation from further black marks. That at least seems to have been his meaning when he tried to prevent Agata’s public punishments and ended up in a fistfight with the Vicar in the late 1670s.56 The husbands themselves present their power over and prolocution of their wives in the same light as the catechisms, as protective. This does not necessarily prove that they themselves saw the relationship of husband and wife as one of protection and obedience – or that the roles were fixed so that one belonged to husbands and the other to wives – but at least they were able to fluently use the symbolism of the ideological roles. Of course, not all women who were freed from accusations of witchcraft or extramarital sexual relations were backed up by their husbands. Many did not have husbands but did very well on their own, as Agata proved during the 1680s. Likewise, some whose husbands were present in court did not succeed very well. There were even some persons whose own families accused them. The husband’s presence was one sign among others to use. It could work or fail. Moreover, one could use the husband’s or family’s protection only if one had it: for a marriage to be advantageous, one needed to be valued in it. Instead of the grim pictures which Barstow and Roper paint of early modern marriages on the basis of witchcraft trials, in Finland spouses usually seem to have been valued by each other. One would be tempted to claim that such would also be the case in the rest of the Europe if the aforementioned authors did not have the most gruesomely exceptional circumstances as the basis of their studies, the German witch-crazes.57 In practice, most historians have found very little evidence in the trials to support the claims that witches were either the fearless wives of whom the demonologists warned or that the witches were attacked by their husbands for other reasons. Quite the contrary, historians often claim, it should be presumed that husbands would protect their wives and family members – if not for emotional reasons, then for fear of the social stigma which might attach to the whole family, especially if the husbands were supposed to be responsible for their wives’ conduct. According to Briggs, for example, husbands in France often took an active part in defending their wives, and there were occasional allegations that kin or family members even tried to bribe gaolers or hangmen. A small minority of husbands were actively hostile towards their wives.58 The family offered both real and symbolic protection and allies for their members, sometimes even against the law. This aspect of the family was as important to men as to women. There is, for example, a 21-page-long story in the court records of Ulvila about young men fleeing military conscription when the Great Northern War had begun; their families hid them, and whole households disappeared into the forests and distracted the officials who were searching the men. The court found that some 55 Ulvila, 3–4 and 6–7 Feb. 1688 Ala-Satakunta II KO a3:58–60. NA. 56 Ulvila 22 and 25 June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:50; Ulvila 21–23 Jan Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:23. NA. 57 Barstow 1995, 54; Roper 2004, 84–96. 58 Briggs 1996, 225–31; Nenonen 1992, passim.

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men were hiding in a certain village during the actual trial, and sent court servants to fetch them. Their mothers, however, crept out to warn them during the night, so that they could not be found.59 On the other hand, family support, and the enhanced status it could provide, was not available to all. Withholding it from another member of the family could also be used as a way of raising one’s own status, and obviously it could be a way of using power over, or against, a certain member. Exclusion from the family community and its protection is therefore an important theme. Exclusion from the family The family and the sense of belonging had practical as well as symbolic significance. The family was the means of survival, in terms of lodging and nourishment as well as social survival. Despite Agata’s professed and acknowledged right to membership in the village and the kinship group, her first witchcraft trials portray an attempt at exclusion. Agata’s in-laws, Aune and her family, wondered how it came to be that Agata won the competition for the farm when it was generally assumed that Aune, her husband and her brother would end up with the farm. They also marked and noted a rift with a kin member with whom they felt angry and no longer wished to associate.60 Similar themes also come to the fore in the Sawo household: during the trials against Juha and Dårdi, in 1693–1694, Juha said he had considered marriage with Dårdi, although nothing was yet agreed upon and everything was therefore uncertain. At that point in the hearing, Dårdi presented her main defence and returned to her original accusation: Janckari was only spreading malicious rumours about her in order to prevent her from getting married and bringing a husband to the farmstead, ‘being afraid that Dårdi and her husband would drive him out of the farmstead as he was married to the younger sister’.61 The rest of the household seems to have agreed with Dårdi: Janckari’s only intention was to prevent her from marrying and bringing a husband to the farm, because he thought that as the husband of a younger sister and not approved of in the first place, his chances of succeeding to the inheritance of the farm were poor. Rather, he would be expected to leave the farm to make room for the new master and mistress couple in the customary way.62 Indeed, that was customary, but the fact that Dårdi did not leave to make room for Janckari and her sister when they married can be taken as a sign that Perttu or Maria did not intend to make Janckari the head of the farmhold. The same fear was also aired in an argument between Heikki and Juha’s father: Heikki had shouted at Risto: ‘how shall you or your son drive me out from the farmstead when I have settled there with my children!’ Both Heikki and Risto ended up accusing each other of having used 59 Ulvila 13—16 Feb. 1704, Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II: KO a20:283–304. NA. 60 Ulvila 19–20 Jan. 1675. Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:16–17. SRA; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676 Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–54v. SRA. 61 Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. NA. 62 Pylkkänen 2005.

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witchcraft to kill Mikko, the only brother of the youngest Sawo generation, to make the inheritance fall into the hands of the daughters.63 Janckari lost the case in two senses. Customarily, pre-marital sex could be hushed up and left unpunished if followed by a speedy marriage – a point which makes Janckari’s way of preventing a marriage a rather uncertain one, but by no means impossible, because the courts rarely forced marriages in Ulvila.64 Accordingly, the court ruled that unless Juha and Dårdi married, Juha would have to swear himself free with two co-swearers or take the appropriate punishment. The couple married and the court dropped the matter.65 Dårdi brought her husband to the household. However, Janckari’s fears of exclusion came true, and he contributed to this. The family accused him of having physically abused both Maria and Perttu, a capital offence. Moreover, it appears from the testimonies of all parties that Heikki behaved violently and disruptively, not to mention even more aggressively when he drank too much. Both the older persons explained to the court that they would drop the charges if Heikki moved out of the household.66 Exclusion was one household strategy: the purpose was to secure the survival of the kin or the family in the best possible way. However, the existence of the family group itself meant that there had to be exclusion from the family. The excluded did not often get their voices heard in the records; their resentment can only be imagined. Most often, the process of exclusion went totally unrecorded, as a simple withdrawal of regular communication and mutual help. Only at times of inheritance disputes and criminal investigations would the process be marked. Witchcraft accusations are among such cases.67 It was customary in Lower Satakunta that the parents and siblings moved out when the new pair of master and mistress took on the farm. This was partly a financial necessity, but also one which diminished the likelihood of domestic disturbance and authority disputes in the household.68 The Sawo household was an unusually large one, which may have contributed to the situation in the 1690s. Exclusion extended to 63 ‘Huru kommer du medelst din son Johan att trängia migh ifrån hemmanet, der jag med mine Barn är bofastblefwen …’ Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:433–5. NA. 64 There was, for example, a case in which a servant woman named Kaisa thought she was pregnant and informed the court about it, both because the child would have needed support from its father and because hiding a pregnancy was illegal. If the child died in the end of a concealed pregnancy, the likelihood of being accused of infanticide would have been considerable. Perhaps partly because of these precautions, actual infanticide cases were fairly rare at this point in time (two cases in Ulvila during the later 1600’s). Kaisa informed the court that she had ‘no intention’ of marrying the man and therefore took the customary first timer’s punishment of public confession. Similar records are numerous in the late 1600s Ulvila, showing that marriage was suggested to unmarried couples, but that, contrary to popular belief, people were able to decline if they wanted. Ulvila 20–23 Sept. 1686. Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:240. On forced marriages, see for example Aalto 1996; Eilola 2002. 65 Ulvila 18–20.Oct 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2. NA. 66 Ulvila 12–13 March 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:35–7. NA. 67 Cf. for a similar comment Levi 1988. 68 Pylkkänen 2005.

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the daughters of the household: The court records do not contain a word about what Heikki’s wife – whose name even remains unknown – thought about the goings-on in the farm or about having to move out with the husband with whom her family had found it impossible to live. The falling out of Heikki and the household leaders is highly visible in the sources, but it hides beneath it what must have been a painful relationship between the daughter and her parents. Heikki’s wife was only referred to as having refrained from work with Heikki, and as part of those belonging to Heikki when he left the household.69 Even without total exclusion from the household, some members of these households did not take part in the managerial partnership: Dårdi, who was the daughter chosen to stay in the farmstead with her husband, never spoke for the household in public; she only defended her name against the rumours that she was a whore. Agata’s daughter, Riitta, left the public representation of the farm she had inherited to her husband and mother. After her own chastity trials in 1676, she did not appear again, although there is a hint in Klemet’s court actions that she took part in managing the farmstead but not in the court: she had hired a farm hand and paid him. Riitta’s situation, too, and that of Dårdi and her more unfortunate sister in the Sawo household, may have changed later in their lives.70 The exclusion strikes those with low status and no power in the community. The frequently evinced view is that those who had no protection, especially no male protection, were in greatest danger: they had neither the power to defend themselves nor any one to protect them. One’s position in the household was crucial, whether one was a man or woman. Witchcraft accusations could reach both ends of the peasant status scale. A woman or a man who was not valued in her or his own household might be accused by her or his own people. Lyndal Roper, for example, recounts stories of orphan children who became superfluous to their families and were therefore seen as the embodiments of their families’ struggle with the scarcity of resources. The guilt their families must have felt when excluding one of their own was projected onto them in a way very similar to that described by Macfarlane and Thomas.71 On the other hand, it has been noted that many of the accused were actually the farmstead mistresses, valued by their own folk and presumably exercising some influence among the neighbours. The mistresses were bewitched and accused of witchcraft both because the social competition was between households rather than individuals and because wives might represent the household. Outsiders might attack any of the members of the household through one member, possibly the woman.72 Therefore, it is again clear that a woman’s place within her household was reflected in the status which she was accorded or refused by outsiders. However, it is not always clear that a valued role in the household would automatically ensured respect

69 Ulvila 8–10 Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:18–19. NA. 70 Ulvila 18–20 Oct. 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:431–2; Ulvila 13–14 March 1702. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a16:263–4. NA. 71 Roper 2004, 181–221. 72 Gregory 1991, 30–66.

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or authority elsewhere: quite the contrary, the more authority one had in one field, the more effort might be put into contesting it in another field. Feminisms, witches and patriarchy Our present understanding of ‘Die Haustafel’ is influenced by not only the possible nineteenth-century loophole described above, but also the 1960s and 1970s feminist theories, most often those which Joan Scott73 referred to as patriarchy theories. Often the influence takes place indirectly through the works of other historians and the media. A good part of this influence has concentrated on motherhood. ‘Die Haustafel’ and the household literature presented women as wives and mothers. Idealised as the mother was in many of these texts, it seems to have been an ideal penetrated by control – as Roper claims when stating that, despite the Lutheran idealisation of the motherly vocation, these texts still presented women as wives, who embodied the hierarchical subordination of women, children, servants, labourers and apprentices to husbands and masters. 74 The special case of the witchcraft trials in the historiography of early modern gender – or women and men – reflects the general interpretations of women’s position in early modern society. It, too, can be divided into two crude lines of interpretation: one line reflecting the structural subordination of women in that society (or lack thereof, as many traditional social historian’s views have only been refutations of the subordination views), and another line emphasising the individual experience. The distinction from the rest of the early modern women’s history is that in witchcraft history, notions of improvement or deterioration are less common. The theory of patriarchy has had a deeper impact, perhaps because of the use some feminist theorists have made of the history – or mythology – of witchcraft. In those usages, patriarchy was a continuous feature of all societies and cultures through all ages in one form or another. Therefore, any question of better or worse was bound to be futile. For the early feminist movements, the witch-hunt became an example of a continuous endeavour by the patriarchy to control women’s thoughts, rights and actions. The line of thought achieved immense popularity among feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, being used and abused in countless works of popular literature, poetry, prose and so on for education or consciousness-raising and entertaining purposes.75 The popular notions of the 1970s were put to their most aggressive uses by Andrea Dworkin76 and the radical feminist icon, Mary Daly. Daly’s interpretation of the witch, the Hag, is a woman who refuses to live according to the patriarchal rules, but speaks out and demands what she knows she needs, who intrudes where she is not wanted by males – and who is then silenced at the stake. For Daly, the Hag was ‘an example of strength, courage and wisdom’, a model of what all women should be, 73 Scott 1986. 74 Roper 1989, 36, 59. 75 See for example the works of Starhawk 1982 and, as a Finnish example, Satu Hassi 1984. For the use made of witchcraft in popular feminisms, see Purkiss 1996, 7–29. 76 Dworkin 1974.

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despite the gruesome outcome – thus Daly’s anachronistic, present-tense description of history.77 In this interpretation, the witch trials are equated to what Hugh TrevorRoper termed a witch-craze: the continental panics which escalated into multiple executions and became a ‘women’s holocaust’, a ‘gynocide’. The witch-hunt was a sex-defined woman-hunt, where men, sometimes through the influence they had to make women conform, exercised a very violent and coercive power over women. According to this view, the witch trials were instigated by men: the clergy, the learned men in the universities and monasteries, the courts of law, the witch-finders and eventually by the entire male population, mankind. As it became clear in the works of traditional social historians during the 1970s to 1980s that women were very active among the accusers and witnesses, those believing in the patriarchy theory explained that they were either forced to do so to protect themselves and their families, or that they were persuaded to believe that the demands for women’s subordination were legitimate. According to Daly’s dismissive rhetoric, these women had denied their sex and were no longer women, but fembots, female robots. The result was that the witch came to represent Woman in an all-encompassing sense. That Woman was then compared to Man. A structural sex or gender order penetrated the entire society and the relationship between any individual women and men. The relationship between individuals, however, was not essential; the structure of subordination and violence was. The question was why women were witches78 rather than why witches were women. The midwife-witch theory – as well as that of oppression through patriarchy or a women’s holocaust in general – has been largely discredited, although it survives in popular presentations of history and in some popular feminist interpretations.79 It is not my task to disprove once again the old interpretation. Nevertheless, it is worth stating that Agata Pekantytär, for example, was exactly the kind of aggressive and outspoken woman who did not conform to the supposedly meek and submissive model of women in patriarchy. The court records abound in her disputes with neighbours and relatives, and those disputes were even mentioned in the witchcraft cases. Although she had minor children, she was not a girl when she was drawn to (or did she push her way into?) the court. She had just acquired her late husband’s farmstead from other male relatives before the trials.80 Yet, it would be very hard to see her as a version of Daly’s Hag. It is very common to find other disputes behind the witchcraft trials, and naturally they arose more easily with aggressive than with peaceable individuals. The problem is that the same applied to men, too, although it is feasible to think that men could be more aggressive before those around them resorted to witchcraft accusations. However, as far as Agata’s alleged witchcraft can be studied, the accusations concerned women’s sphere of life rather than 77 Daly 1978, 14–16. Cf. also Purkiss 1996. 78 See for example. Heinemann 1998, 51ff. 79      See for example Hester, 1996; Setälä 2000, 111–22; Setälä 2002, 206–16, is, however, a lot more modern and careful, although Malleus has a very prominent place. See also Sallmann 1993. 80 See for example Ulvila 4 and 6 June 1674. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I:KO a4:29–30. NA.

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overstepping the lines. Her magic was about cattle, fishing, brewing and exposing thieves; as it was a thief who had stolen fish, and thus had to do with food, exposing the theif could also be thought of as women’s work. Both men and women could fish and brew, although in the peasant household brewing was mostly women’s work and storing food almost always women’s work. Only one piece of her magic seemed concern the male sphere of agriculture, namely that if one walked nine times around a slash-and-burn fire, it would not spread to the forests. As a much more labour-dominated form of agriculture than stable fieldwork, slash-and-burn was a less gender-specific sphere of work in general, although the hierarchies crated by the physical work may have been even more gendered.81 It cannot be said that the accused women were the ones to refute gender roles, and even less that all women who did were accused of witchcraft. Instead, it seems that women were accused of things which were expected of them as women, which may indeed show that women and their roles were considered problematic in early modern society. 82 To think of Agata as a Hag, one would have to assume that all arguments were treated alike, not only those directed against the patriarchal roles. But there were too few witch trials for that to be true. Carol Karlsen has claimed that in New England, women who had inherited land in the absence of male relatives were especially vulnerable to accusations.83 Before the witchcraft trials, Agata had just gained control over land through her daughter. In Sweden, however, women farmers were fairly common, even though it is said that women acted as farmers only when there was no other choice, at least according the tax records, but in a country constantly at war, this might happen often.84 In practice, the responsibility for the farm was in the hands of women somewhat more frequently. As seen in the relationship between Agata and Klemet, both of whom the court records considered together responsible for the farm, women’s headship did not always mean that there were no men available. Yet most farm mistresses were never accused of anything like witchcraft or magic. That most alleged witches in Finland were farm mistresses or (male or female) farmers, but that only a minority of farmers or farm mistresses were witches suggests some more complicated patterns between women’s positions of power and witchcraft. I would like to suggest that as the Swedish and Finnish lower courts were dominated by peasant farmers (and in towns, by town burghers) to the extent shown in Chapter 3, being a member of that social group was also an important criterion for whether suspicions of witchcraft or any other crime would be dealt with in court or elsewhere. Crimes and complaints of and against other socials groups were less often dealt with in court. Servants, landless poor and persons of other such groups may have been suspected of witchcraft – these 81 Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676, Bielkesamlingen vol. 27:53–4v. SRA; Ulvila 11–13 July 1687, Ala-Satakunta II, KO a2:225–9. NA. See, however, Pylkkänen 1990, 105–6, 122, 128, 247, and especially Mäkelä 1989, 22, 75ff., who claims that the physical strength required for slash-and-burn made eastern Finnish culture much more rigidly male-dominated than western Finnish culture, although women and children were required to work at the burning, too. Cf. Chapter 4 on work and status. 82 Sharpe 1997, 173–84; Briggs 1998, 251–71; Goodare 1998. 83 Karlsen 1989, 102–4. 84 Perlestam 1997.

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are exactly the groups which dominate the later folklore of magic – but they were less often taken to court for it. The connection between witchcraft trials and power is thus a much more complicated than mere gender oppression. One might even say that it was not oppression which led to suits based on accusations of witchcraft, but rather a certain acknowledged status. Regaining the body There has been an outspoken ambivalence in the feminist treatments of maternity and motherhood, which became a common theme in the 1970s feminist movement. Theorists like Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow have theorised on the importance of motherhood and reproduction for the patriarchy. For them, motherhood embodied one of the main experiences of women. It could be a source of happiness, energy and creation, of strength and power. At the same time, maternity, procreation and the ideals of motherhood were seen as an institution which worked to secure reproduction, and with it, women, their bodies and minds, in the control of men. Feminists began to criticise the heterosexual reproductive model as the basis of sex and gender inequality.85 It was customary for these feminist theorists to make use of history in the presentations of these theories, although they were never meant to be investigations into the historical ‘reality’. The oppression was deemed continuous: for Daly and many feminist writers after her, witchcraft was just one example in a series beginning from the early agriculture and continuing through witch persecution to the gynaecology and psychotherapy of the 1970s, where Daly saw men controlling female sexuality and self-awareness. Even Marianne Hester, a witchcraft historian of the 1990s, and one of the last examples of the kind, writes of continuous oppression. The story of witchcraft became a way for the feminist movements of the 1960s to the 1980s to justify themselves and to demand change in the social order. It was also a way to deal with the sense of oppression and perhaps desperation which some feminists may themselves have felt. There was a deliberate anachronism involved. The story was never meant to be history in the academic sense of the word.86 Consequently, it is no wonder that actual trial records very rarely fit to the picture. Part of regaining control of women’s bodies was a movement against medicalisation, as it was felt that male doctors were exercising control over women’s bodies. By taking back the control, it was hoped that women could gain a new,

85 Firestone 1970. 86 Daly 1978, 1–10,124. Daly points openly to her deliberate anachronism in various points of Gyn/Ecology, for example, p. 196 ‘our realization of what had been done to our foresisters and consequently to us all’ or p. 15 ‘For women who are on the journey of radical be-ing, the lives of the witches, of the Great Hags of our hidden history are deeply intertwined with our own process – the point is that they should be governed by the Witch within – the Hag within’. Hester 1998, 293. See however, equal anachronisms by historians who have had very little to do with witchcraft studies, such as Bennet 1991 or Taussi-Sjöberg 1996. On the purposefulness of the anachronism, see also Purkiss 1996.

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non-patriarchal experience of it, and thereby, perhaps recreate a feminine form of power. The ideology spread widely, even among the feminist movements, with less emphasis on the body and sexuality than on the patriarchy theories and radical feminism of Daly, Dworkin, Rich and others. For the study of witchcraft, the most important feminist example was to be the popular works of socialist feminist journalists Barbra Echrenreich and Deirdre English and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. In 1973, Echrenreich and English issued an influential pamphlet Witches, Midwives and Nurses: a History of Women Healers, which treated the history of medicalisation as male control over women’s bodies and over the nursing profession. As far as witchcraft was concerned, the view concentrated on the notion that the witch trials were an attempt to destroy the original folk-healing skills preserved by medieval and early modern women. Instead, the theory claimed, a male dominated medical science was to be established in the control of people’s health, birth, life and death. 87 There is in this interpretation a hint of the discussion of the meaning of race and class which was dawning in post-colonial feminism – apart from the radical feminist line, which produced Daly’s later interpretation.88 Many things seemed to coincide in the interpretation, making it appealing. According to Daly’s view, society’s leading ‘classes’ (Daly’s term) feared that the healers who met in groups to exchange herbs and information might breed rebellion: they wanted the lower classes, peasants and especially their wives to be kept quiet and alone, so that they would not become dangerous masses. In contrast to this, the healer-witches were represented – quite contrary to what was to become of Daly’s Hag – as quiet women who withdrew from the centres of social upheaval; they lived on the outskirts of the villages, growing their herbs and minding their own business, only coming to help when women needed them.89 There is also a partly religious mythical connection with nature: women, it was thought, were one with nature, and therefore experienced 87 Echrenreich & English 1973; Daly 1978, 195–6, although her healers were not as harmless and innocent as those of Echrenreich and English. On poetry and popularisations, see for example Starhawk or the Finnish example in Satu Hassi. The theory of the midwifewitch has also been presented without the gender and body question by Heinsohn and Steiger, who claimed that witch-hunts did indeed aim at destroying the reproductive and especially the contraceptive knowledge of folk-healers, not because men should be in control of women’s bodies, but because they wanted population growth. The rulers might well fear a demographic decline in time of constant war, despite the fact that large areas of Europe were rather over- than underpopulated. Heinsohn & Steiger 1989, 28–31, 85ff, 95 ff. However, no actual evidence for attempts to destroy the contraceptive knowledge of midwives and thereby force population growth can be found. Rather, it seems that when the rulers became involved in demographic issues, they took the more logical course of schooling midwives in breastfeeding, nourishment, vaccinations and so on to ensure that the children who were born would survive. See for example Rummel, 1985, 181–90; Harley 1990; Wilskman 1781, 41–2 (barnemoderska eller jordegumma); Wilskman 1782, 799–800 (barnmorska). 88 See for example Towler & Bramall 1986, 39. 89 Towler & Bramall 1986, 21–38; Starhawk 1982, 183–5. See also Purkiss 1996 and Hutton 1999.

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their bodies and their sexuality – and especially menstruation, giving birth and growing old – in ways which were different and more genuine than the constructed experiences women might have once they internalised male Christian or scientific religion.90 They presented a contrast between the male ruling class, who were fearful of rebellion, and the quiet but always available women healers, who were able to influence nature from within without violence. With this image, the feminist usage contrasted patriarchal power as a violent and coercive power over something, as opposed to a ‘feminine power’, power to do something, power to create, to think, to express things. In early modern reality, the peasantry’s position of influence or subordination in local and state power varied. Yet the peasantry or its women can hardly be called passive anywhere. There were institutions which allowed peasants access to state power in the forms of Diet or Estate systems. 91 There were local institutions which handled communal matters in courts, parish and town meetings, while numerous more unofficial gatherings took place daily around the markets and mills, baking ovens and after church. Some of them had an amount of coercive power and could enforce their decisions on others. Rebellions were also reality.92 However, a large number of the local formal and informal institutions also acted as bodies of equals through peer control but also by creating common opinions and aims and making it possible to attain them by influencing the upper levels of government. Having long considered leadership and power as control, historians have equally long overlooked the features of enabling power. Yet clearly, the local institutions largely worked with power to do, instead of power over. All this being so, in Agata’s cases there were no signs of political or rebellious acts against any of the upper social levels. Sure enough, Agata apparently claimed to have learnt some of her witchcraft skills from the wife of the Vicar of Huittinen, and Klemet brawled with both the parish Vicar and the guard of prisoners to avoid the punishments Agata was ordered to undergo.93 However, little was mentioned of actual rebellion. The court records also reveal no interest in the possible connections 90 Starhawk 1982, 198; also Starhawk 1989 (orig. 1979), 18. Dreaming the Dark (1982) includes a novel-like overview of the ’history’ of witchcraft. Starhawk is no historian, but a modern feminist witch. The importance of fiction in either popular feminism or in modern witchcraft should not be underestimated. In both traditions, poetry and novels are used to disseminate thoughts, and in both traditions, many of the most important texts are poetry or ‘folk poetry’. See also Purkiss 1996. 91 In Sweden, all farmers who had retained their birthright to the land had a right to send a representative to the Diet (1/parish), in Britain all peasants owning at least 40 shillings worth of land. Katajala 2002, 285ff., Rowlands 1999, 50–51. 92 See for example Wünder 1998 on such mainly female institutions; Ulvila 22–23. June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:44v on common milling or a tale of how some men had been drinking against their will with a witch Ulvila 3 and 5–6 March 1683 Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:79. Katajala 2002 for rebellions. But also the classic Cohn 1975 for conspiracytheories in general. 93 Ulvila 11–13 Sept. 1677. Bielks vol. 27:86v–87. SRA; Ulvila 22 and 25 June 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:50; Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1678. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta I, KO a4:65v. NA.

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between witches: They did not try to follow networks of who had taught what to whom, as would have been the case had they suspected a rebellious conspiracy. Echrenreich and English approached the subject from a Marxist/socialist point of view. The question was not ultimately one of reproduction but of profession. Nevertheless, for many of those who read and used the theory, reproduction and the patriarchy’s control over it were decisive; midwives were a special target of the hunt among other healers. The midwife-witch could hide the outcome of what the patriarchal society and religion considered sinful. Therefore, the theory says, healers and midwives were demonised in early modern Europe. The midwife-witch theory, although starting from a different branch of feminisms, has eventually led to the same kind of focus on reproduction and domestic relationships at the centre of oppression as radical feminism and patriarchy-theory. The problem with the midwife-witch or the repression theory in general is that it is impossible to prove with sources. As some historians have pointed out, the adherents of these early theories usually did not themselves work on court records.94 The early feminist interpretations used the relatively easily accessible materials, mostly the Malleus Maleficarum, of which an English translation has been available, although the old Montague Summers’s version is generally known to have serious flaws. Sometimes they also used early modern pamphlet literature, which often included descriptions of trials. It is fairly easy to find misogynist tendencies in medieval and early modern theology, of which Malleus Maleficarum is known to be the most obvious example – although it frequently speaks of witches in the masculine.95 Rather a lot has been made of Malleus’s reiterated interested in witches attacking marital fertility. However, the extent to which Malleus works on human reproduction should not be exaggerated. The longest part of the Malleus is a manual on how to recognise witches and put them to trial. It seems that the discourse of control over women’s bodies from the 1960s onwards focused the readers’ attention on a fairly limited part of Malleus’s content.96 The evidentiary value of Malleus is at best disputed97; as historical source material, it is far more complicated than it first seems. It would, however appear to be the most often used example of a source 94 See for example Nenonen 1992, 322. 95 Apps & Gow 2003, 104. 96 My description here does not pretend to be a definitive analysis of the contents of Malleus; it suffices for my purposes to state that the importance of both women and fertility and perhaps sex have been exaggerated. Several of the 85 questions and chapter titles mention that witches destroy the fertility of couples, yet that is a clear minority. See for example Teil I: Fragen 7, 8, 9 and 11; Teil II: Fragen 1, 4–7, 13 (Kapitel 5–7, 13); Teil III: Frage 34. Three question-answer couples or subtitles mention midwife-witches doing this:Teil I, 11 (elfte Frage,) Teil II/1,13 and Teil III Frage 34; the latter is upon a Witch who Annuls Spells wrought by witchcraft; and of Witch Midwives and Archer-Wizards’/‘Über die Form, das Urteil gegen eine Hexe, welche Schadenszauber behebt, auesserdem über hexende Hebammen und zauberische Bogenschützen zu fällen’.Malleus Maleficarum 1971, 66, 140–144, 268–9. (Latin orig. 1487) Der Hexenhammer 2000, 240–274, 286ff, 411–28, 472, 778–87. Archer wizards were archers – presumably as likely to be men as midwives were likely to be women. A few other points speak of fertility and sex in the text. 97 See for example Clark 1997, 117–18.

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material in this line of interpretation, although it is widely known to be less than representative of the genre of demonology.98 It is even more important that the Malleus was not as well known during the witch-hunts as it is now, nor was it universally accepted. Nor were most other works on demonology. In Finland, Malleus was little known, although demonological theory was familiar to some of the elite and the corresponding folklore to the common lot.99 One of the few who wrote even relative accessibly about demonology was Laurentius Paulinus Gothus in his catechism, which was directed to the clergy as well as most other Swedish works of the time and discusses witches and oracles most often in a plural which does not betray sex, but also both in masculine and feminine forms.100 Social historians since the 1970s have, in their statistics, found that the midwifehealer witch cannot be found in the courts. There simply were not enough midwives among the accused to warrant such a theory. In Finland, there are few cases mentioning midwifery and contraception or abortion. One of these cases was Agata’s case in 1676, in which the methods of birth control or abortion were mentioned but not discussed, and other arts of magic with fish and cattle predominated. A social conflict between close relatives can be found behind the accusation. Other healers can be found among the accused, but not often enough to constitute a hunt for the healers. Not all healers might be presented as such in court, because they were rarely professionals and might be better identified in some other way, but the contents of the accusers’ and witnesses’ narratives also focus on other things.101 The current feminisms and feminist historians share an interest in the body. As a post-structuralist stance, this has turned to exploring the experiences of women of their own bodies. For witchcraft historians, the focus has been on the biological body and the cultural body, which women guard as a symbolical analogy to their 98 See for example Daly 1978, 180; Hester 1998 mentions only Malleus and James I’s Demonologie; Brauner 1995 starts with Malleus but then goes on to the Lutheran writers. Many compilations of popular history and general works on women’s history use Malleus. The emphasis on Malleus is self–re-enforcing:because earlier historians have used it, the following ones are likely to have a look at it, too, either to prove or disprove earlier interpretations. 99 Nenonen 1992: Clark 1997 on Malleus: 577, on other demonologists’ not being universally accepted see, for example, 117–18, 144–7; and Levack 2006, 48–9, 54–6, cf. also 61–5. On the familiarity of demonological theory, see Nenonen 1995 and Oja 1999; on the folklore, see for example. Eilola 2003. 100 Gothus 1633, Chapters XVII, XVIII and especially XIX. 101 See Nenonen 1992, 322–6. Larner, 1984, 150–152; Larner 1981, 101; and the rather detailed presentation by Harley 1990; Briggs 1998, 77–8. However, see also 71–2 and 127, 185 on healers; Nenonen 1992, 322–6, but also 59–62, 80, 157–8, where healing appears in court cases but rarely as profession. Most often, the midwives appeared in witch trials as searching for the witches mark – see Sharpe 1997, 178–81. On the Finnish cases, see Nenonen 1992, 322–6; Toivo 1999, 205–17. In these cases, the midwives were on several occasions told that natural means were acceptable, but that magic was not. For example, one case mentioned by Nenonen and an other in Åbo Tidningar 23 Feb. 1795, no 8. There have been other cases of witchcraft in Finland which mention giving birth (usually including some abnormality) but not midwifery. On cunning folk and other occupations, see Davies 2003, 75.

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households and their culture. Witchcraft itself appears as a bodily power. The witch gained power over the victims by giving them food or touching or ‘measuring’ them (either with a measuring stick or string or by producing an image of wax or clay) or through the magical qualities of bodily extracts such as sweat, saliva or menstrual blood. These were acts traditionally seen as potent with representational meaning, and medieval cults of saints were often filled with similar acts. They were also acts which society saw as normally belonging to the power of the mother but also as bodily metaphors.102 However, whereas witchcraft and magic evolve around the body or its functioning and health, and can be thought of as forms of control over and through the bodies of oneself and others, the Finnish court records generally lack interest in the body. This is striking contrast to what Roper and Purkiss find in their different materials. Visuality is one of the features historians often think essential to early modern (or pre-modern) cultures, yet the court records more often note what was said and what it sounded like, not what it looked like. This may reflect the nature of the material as descriptions of fairly free discussion in Swedish rural courts of law, in contrast to the testimonies used by Roper, where the physical coercion emphasises the presence of the body. However, it may be equally likely that the scribe just did not bother to write down the visual things he thought everyone could imagine without help, and which were not important to the judgement. When it was directly relevant for the case, as when, for example, witchcraft had taken place in or through the body, by measuring, touching, food and so on, it was recorded for the purposes of the Court of Appeal. Why then should one still consider the old feminisms’ interpretations of witchcraft, power and women? If they have been refuted, would it not be better to forget about them and move on? A popular interest in the older theories, influencing popular parole both outside the sphere of historians and outside academia, may be a reason not to forget them. An even more powerful reason not to ignore them, however, is that a lot of the new wave feminist interpretations evolve around the same themes as the 1970s versions. Refuting the 1970s feminist views has not removed the focus on procreation and motherhood. At first, academic historians of the early 1970s started to make detailed statistical inquiries into witch trials, finding that the majority of the accused, as well as a large portion of the accusers and witnesses, did indeed seem to be women. This needed explanation, although for a while the political feminist interpretations actually functioned as a deterrent to the academic historians. A considerable proportion of the pages of academic historians was indeed used to disclaim the 1970s feminist views.103 Until the mid 1990s, the historiography of witchcraft – with few exceptions104 – 102 Purkiss 1996, 107–10; Willis 1995, 48; Stark Arola 1998; Eilola 2003 & 2004. On the biological or material givenness, see Roper 1994, 1–27. On medieval cults of sainthood, see for example Katajala-Peltomaa 2004. 103 For example, Sharpe 1996 comments on the earlier feminists:‘Their interpretation of the connection between gender and witchcraft accusations was, however, all too predictable’, without considering if it was predictable in the 1970s (169). 104 Main deviations from the professional historians’ non-theoretical treatment of the woman question include Karlsen 1987; Hester 1992; Barstow 1995; Goodare 1998. Despite the late publication dates, these cannot be read as early examples of the following wave; they lack the strong psychological or anthropological tendencies, but rather refer back to the earlier

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was characterised by a determinate refusal of any feminist theory. Common sense employed with caution was enough for a historian. The academic historians interpreted witchcraft trials in the context of the early modern change in gendered society. The birth of the centralised state power, new legal cultures and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations meant, in this view, the control of sexuality in the form of prosecuting fornication, infanticide and witchcraft, – the crimes, according to this interpretation, of women.105 The focus on the repressive influence of the central state has been criticised in many recent works. Any central government needs the support of the populace to be able to gain power, and such support cannot be gained by repression and suppression alone. The time was also one of new economic opportunities for both genders at the beginning of proto-industrialisation, which needed the order created by the central government’s control. Following Christina Larner’s lead, academic historians – again with the same few exceptions as above – rejected the radical feminists’ claim about men’s womenhunt, claiming instead that the accusations had more to do with women’s relations among themselves. For some time, the difficulties in relationships between women needed no further explanation.106 Gradually, historians started to formulate a position claiming that the areas where women were active, the household and caring for the food, health and lives of animals and people, were themselves more vulnerable to suspicion than others. As little further explanation is given, the tacit implication remains that these areas were considered, in some undefined sense, uncontrollable and almost mystical. There is again an emphasis on women’s role and power in the family, in reproduction and the maternal role. Here the emphasis did not point to patriarchy or oppressive patterns thereof, but still located women’s gendered role and power to the same sexualised sphere and to the relationships within it.107 Modern research has made it obvious that men were also involved with magic in their own spheres of action, both in labour and in human relationships within the kin and village and sometimes further afield, of which the Sawo household is a good example. Moreover, these men were tried for their magic and witchcraft in court. There is therefore no reason for such mystification of the female spheres of life, or their forms of power and authority.108 feminist theories. The interpretation of Lagerlöf-Génetay, 1990, however, presents an early example of the psychological trend. 105 Classical interpretations include Burke 1978, 207–43, on the ‘reform of popular culture’ and Muchembled 1985 (French orig. 1978). On women and central power, see Roper, 1989 and the Scandinavian scholars Mäkelä 1989, 190–193; Pylkkänen, 1990, 335; TaussiSjöberg 1996, 81–168; and Andersson, 1998. 106 Larner 1981; Larner 1981b; Larner 1983. Others not explaining why especially women’s disagreements should lead to witchcraft accusations include, for example, Sharpe 1997 or Nenonen 1992, although the latter points to the early version of psychological projection model by Lagerlöf-Génetay 1990. 107 See for example Briggs 1998, 265–71; Bechtel 1997, 576. 108 Research on male witches and magic is currently expanding fast. One of the first examples is Oja, who points out that magic and witchcraft, too, can be divided into male and female, and that both genders used magic in their spheres. Oja 1994 48–9; Nenonen 1995; de Blécourt 2004; Davies 2003.

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As social historians declined sincere engagement with the feminist theories, even though it was probably for good reasons, it took until the mid 1990s before those interpretations were refuted on their own grounds in a way which could have produced significantly different new perspectives. Still more unfortunately, Purkiss’s works seem to have remained in the shadow of other feminist writers instead of having the impact on social historians they could have. During the 1990s, a new wave of interest among feminist scholars in witchcraft became prominent, still keeping the themes of procreation and motherhood at its core. There are important and distinctive differences in the old and the new waves. The newer wave concentrates not so much on the direct control of the physical body as on the institutions, concepts and definitions which make people see the body in a certain light. The focus of research reverted to similar themes as in the 1970s – sexuality, maternity and profession – but from different perspectives. Instead of explaining ‘the witch-hunt’, feminist studies now treated witch trials and narratives about witchcraft as material to investigate how women’s roles in society and their identities were constructed. These interpretations focused not on the structural male-female comparison and the oppressive patterns thereof, but on the different experiences, concerns and options of different women: on what they thought, felt and did. It mirrors the post-structuralist turn which took place in all feminist studies. There are important points of continuation between the older and the current trends of feminist interpretations of witchcraft history, which are discussed in current historiography somewhat more rarely than the differences. All these differentiated views on different experiences, concerns and options of different women still hold in common a focus on the body and its meaning for the female identities in the form of maternity, work and sexuality. The older versions of feminisms considered reproduction the main focus of social organisation, the core of life, the core of femininity, but simultaneously the origin of inequality. Nevertheless, along with the physical reproduction, the patriarchy-oriented 1970s feminists also invested a lot of work in the values and ideals societies attached to motherhood, work and virtue, saying that the subordination and inequality lay in them, at least as much as in overt violence: in the unseen mechanisms of thought which reproduced – and changed – power in the patriarchy and which kept it in the hands of men. The psychologically oriented feminist scholars of the later wave – Lyndal Roper as the most important challenge to traditional social historians – have linked witchcraft to mother-child psychology, where the witch came to represent an anti-mother. The witch was the bad mother in the Kleinian model of a child splitting its mother in two: the one good and loved, the other bad and hated, yet envied, venomous and destructive instead of caring and loving.109 Inextricably interlinked to the bad mother was an anti-housewife, here, too destroying and stealing what a good housewife should have been able to make. Anthropologically oriented scholars like Purkiss have emphasised that there was a link between witchcraft and the analogous boundaries of a woman’s body, her household and the ordered cosmos of the culture, and that the woman’s role in upholding that order was crucial. Sexuality was therefore not only crucial to the

109 Roper 1994; Willis 1995; Roper 2004.

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social order of early modern control society – it was the ultimate form of crossing boundaries between nature and culture, chaos and order.110 The analogy between a woman’s body and society reflects the constant importance of the body both in different branches of feminism and in the early modern rhetoric of social hierarchy in the form of a body, all the members of which were vital but which had only one head. Here, too, the point of view has changed from the separatist exclusion view of Daly, who saw women being ‘dismembered’ from the body politic. According to the 1990s post-structuralist view, women guard the boundaries of their bodies, their society and culture: close to the boundary, perhaps, but firmly inside themselves. 111 It is obvious that the main themes are the same – motherhood, profession and sexuality – but women’s position in the framework has changed. Whereas previously women were considered to be controlled objects in human and cultural reproduction, the post-structural approach has given women a position as subjects in – at least some – control. Idealised mother and maternal power Treating witchcraft history as psychological fantasy has been one response to the criticism levelled at the earlier generations of historians for rationalising away the genuine belief in witchcraft and the resulting feeling of either gullibility or cynicism. When speaking of the psychological concept of fantasy, the imagery of witchcraft trials is supposed to reveal much wider and deeper currents: motherhood was a central theme to the organisation of life in early modern society. A not unwelcome side effect is the possibility of moving towards a gender approach, instead of a sexbased women-approach. Historians are currently finding out that the accused witches were men more often than has been though before, and a gender approach will better suit to these findings. Fantasy has no bearing on the truth value of the statements of witchcraft made by early modern people; it refers instead to the mental imagery with which fears and innermost thoughts are talked of, made sense of, expressed and deconstructed. If the attempt is to delve into women’s identity construction, as was the express purpose of the 1990s feminists, the male witches do not present a problem: it is possible to use the material which seems most fruitful for that purpose, although the same material would give a very distorted picture of early modern witchcraft and witch trials in general. Witchcraft, magic and questions of masculinity can likewise be explored with the most fruitful material available. In the historian’s picture of the early modern family, women seem to have two positions: the subordinated wife and the authoritative mother. The latter seems the more complicated because the position of the mother both in early modern reality and in modern feminisms has been ambiguous. The early modern social order in ‘Die Haustafel’ obviously accorded women power in one role – that of a mother – and the mother’s authority could sometimes be extended to servants. However, that authority has, for historians, always seemed subjected to the dependence and 110 Purkiss 1996, 91–144. 111 Daly 1978, 186–7; Purkiss 1996 and Eilola 2003.

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obedience of the wife vis-à-vis the husband. Moreover, the ideals of early modern motherhood have seemed to historians and other scholars even more restricting than the more modern ones. For the work on witchcraft and women’s mental world, the restrictive ideals of motherhood have been especially important. Lyndal Roper, presenting one of the most seriously taken challenges to the traditional history of witchcraft, has delved into the meaning of motherhood and thereby womanhood in witchcraft accusations in early modern Germany. Instead of concentrating on witches and what they were, or did, Roper turned the focus on the accusers and witnesses. Roper found that in Augsburg, young mothers and their newborn babies were over-represented among the victims of witchcraft and, correspondingly, among the accusers in witchcraft trials. The accused witches, on the other hand, were often the lying-in-maids, who had come to help in both the household and the care of the child after the delivery. The most common plot in these stories is that the new mother is unable to feed the baby – a source of concern both psychological and practical when there were no real alternatives to breastfeeding – because the witch had caused her milk to dry up. There were even cases in which the flow of food was reversed: nipples appeared on the baby’s body and the witch was said to suck the fluids of life from the baby.112 Roper interprets these narratives on the basis of Kleinian or Lacanian psychology in psychoanalysis. The mother is in a sensitive state after giving birth; she is insecure regarding her own and her child’s survival and, if lying-in is observed, she is confined to her own room with no efficient forms of control over her household. She is dependent on the lying-in-maid. The lying-in-maid, however, is a stranger, and the mother may look upon her as an intruder who deprives the mother of the rightful power over her own household and her child. It is central to Roper’s thesis that the lying-in maid is an older woman, with no household of her own, post-menopausal and therefore presumed envious of the new mother, her child and her household. The mother will project her own insecurities – and perhaps all the anxieties which derive from her own childhood – onto the older woman. In the event of a misfortune, the mother would suspect the lying-in-maid.113 The mother’s power over her household and her child, and the loss or possible misuse of that power, is central to Roper’s interpretation. It has been central to other feminist historians of the 1990s, too. Deborah Willis and Diane Purkiss, also, interpreted narratives of witchcraft through the Kleinian lens. The pre-oedipal child, if the term used by Roper is allowed in a Kleinian interpretation, believes the mother is omnipotent. The child also envies the mother’s power and the symbols of that power, the feeding breasts. At the same time, the child is dependent on the mother and experiences feelings of anger due to this: the mother, who is seen as omnipotent, cannot in practice respond to all the child’s needs immediately. A preoedipal child splits the other into two: a ‘good mother’ who is loved, and a ‘bad mother’ who is hated. The child will, however, understand that the two are one, and will feel guilt for her hatred and fear a possible punishment for it. Later on, the child will come to think of her mother as human instead of omnipotent, but 112 Roper 1994; Roper 1998, 207–34. 113 Ibid.

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regression is possible – according to Purkiss, perhaps more likely in early modern Europe, where breastfeeding was crucial to the survival of even two-year-old children and weaning was therefore an especially unsettling experience. Purkiss and Willis saw the witchcraft accusations as projections of the hatred of the bad mother onto an older woman – not necessarily even temporarily in the same household but preferably someone close by. In psychological fantasy, the witch is a mother who uses her power wrongly, and like the power of the Kleinian split mother, her power concentrates on the giving and withdrawing of life, either in birth or subsequently in food, care and education. Witchcraft was an explanation when something went wrong but it could also, through projection, vent the fears and quilt of the parents in front of their own insecurity or a real child abuse.114 The mother in the Roperian interpretations is not just an individual, but a cultural mother, good or bad. In these interpretations, maternity and motherhood have a double meaning. On the one hand, they show how important the themes of reproduction and motherhood were. On the other hand, they point to the insecurities of early modern women and mothers, to the many requirements which were made of ‘good women’. Women’s main task was, it is said, to produce children and care for them. The bad mother, as it is often stated, lacked the qualities of the good mother: love, care, obedience and industriousness. Instead, she was said to have been aggressive and quarrelsome. The requirements made of early modern women and mothers have, for those students of witchcraft history who have been inclined to the deterioration thesis, implied a failure to fulfil them, thus proving that women’s status in early modern society, after the continuing failures, could not be good. Women would believe themselves to be bad, if not evil. The nature of the requirements, emphasising acquiescence as opposed to self-assertion, meant that even fulfilling them would have given women very limited opportunities for exercising power or influence over their own or their families lives.115 The most obvious problem is that if witchcraft accusations are taken as narratives revealing the essence of motherhood, they are bound to give a very one-sided picture. The power of a mother will seem very problematic, and its misuse almost probable, because the sources exclude the good and unproblematic sides. During the 1676 trials, Agata was said to know contraceptive magic. Even though I have established other kinds of social dynamics as triggers for suspicion and accusation, motherhood still appears important in the character-building part of the trial. The court did not seem all that interested in contraception; there is no record that they asked whether or not someone used it or how it was supposed to work or, 114 Willis 1995, 48 Purkiss 1996, 107–10. Roper 1994 from a slightly different angle. Tausiet 2001. Real cases of child abuse occurred and, as implied in my material as shown later and in Britain, for example, they were treated severely. Cf. Hay 2005. The emotional gap between generations was present even in previous historians’ works. The Swedish historian Lagerlöf-Génetay 1990, 131–4, suggested that in the tightly inhabited Dalarna daughters stayed in the same villages as the mothers even after their marriage, and that this interrupted their process of becoming independent. The conflicts which ensued, then, were projected onto outside witches because quarrels within the family were socially and culturally unacceptable. 115 See for example Eilola 2003, 230–31. Roper 2004, 129.

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actually, even whether or not Agata really knew any. There was enough to convict her anyway. Later on, however, the matter was pursued further, because Agata had apparently said she had learned the contraceptive magic from the widow of the late Vicar of a neighbouring parish, who then sued her for defamation. Witnesses – Agata’s sister-in-law, Aune Pertuntytär and her childhood friend Marketta Klauntytär, – testified about a conversation the three of them had had when they all still lived in the same village, apparently performing their daily tasks. Aune had complained that her children cried. To this, Agata has said: ‘If you had told me about this when you were expecting, I could have made things so you would have never had more children!’116 Did this present Agata destroying– or threatening to destroy – the motherhood of others, like the Augsburg witches? Certainly, there is more than an implication in that direction. Obviously, the thought of somebody knowing illegal birth control or abortion methods was not to the credit of that individual. However, it is not quite certain that the sting was against Agata in the original conversation – which presumably had really taken place between the women: Agata herself never denied having the critical conversation. She admitted having said that Aune could become infertile even after having some children, but she denied having proposed to do anything about it. It may just as well have been that Aune’s complaint had at the time seemed inconsistent with the role of a good mother. She was supposed to love her children and to know how to keep them reasonably happy, not to complain about them. The lines between an offer of help and criticism as well as that between blessing and cursing are thin and shifting in all witchcraft, especially so when where other enmities existed.117 All mothers sometimes complained, all mothers were sometimes criticised. In the 1676 case, Aune may have found Agata’s criticism worth resenting exactly because Agata had been a relatively successful mother herself. Her daughters had survived infancy and she had in fact achieved her current social standing through being their mother. If one follows the psychological models used by the 1990s feminist historians, it would be logical to think that Aune was projecting her own guilt of not fitting the good mother’s requirements onto Agata. Although Agata was still a mother of a six-year-old daughter, as a widow she would no longer bear children herself and might, in the Roperian line of thought, be envious and evil. Interpreting only one case on these grounds, however, needs a good deal more theory than there is empirical evidence behind it – the whole matter was only mentioned in one short note in the original trials, among many other problems which received considerably longer treatment. At the same time, Agata’s mothering was also severely criticised. At the same court session, a few pages earlier, a man was accused of fornication with Agata’s daughter. The girl was still underage and therefore not on trial herself. Agata, however, was eventually convicted with the same amount in fines as witchcraft had merited, because she had ‘forced her daughter with whips’ to lay in bed with the man.118 The court fined her because she had ‘prostituted’ her daughter, which 116 Ulvila. 26–27 July 1677. Bielkes vol. 17:69v–70v. NA. 117 Rowlands 2001, 54–6; Ryan 1999. 118 The source reads ‘twingat sjn dotter med rijs’. Ulvila 11–12 Sept. 1676 Bielkes vol. 27:55–v. NA.

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was a ‘grave injury and injustice’. The court’s language and tone here are distinctly appalled; usually the sentences were very laconic compared to the testimonies of the peasantry. Agata had failed miserably in a mother’s tasks, and that opinion must have been held more widely than just in court. Even though the court, too, recognised that Agata’s intentions to get a husband for the farm may have been justified, her means were definitely not, the statement was clear: this was not what good mothers did, but rather the inversion of it.119 For the centrality of motherhood, Roper refers to the Lutheran idealisation of motherhood as a woman’s calling: the best way a woman could serve God in her life was as a wife and a mother. In the Lutheran gender order, women – at least, all married women, which all women were supposed to be – were on the one hand given a relatively prestigious place, but on the other hand, as Roper and others have pointed out, the place was securely within the household. The trend was much wider in early modern society than the Lutheran Reformation; all protestant movements shared it, and so did the ideological currents in many Post-Tridentine Catholic countries. The religious formulation of the ideology shared much with both the Humanist or Renaissance interpretation of classical social theory and the philosophy of natural law. The protestant ideology, however, is sufficient here both because it is the ideology of family which has most often been discussed by scholars and because it is supposed to have been taught in detail to the Finnish peasantry. However, one should not assume that the interpretation was as uniform as has been presented by historians. The problem in treating witchcraft fantasy as representative of the wider social currents on femininity, motherhood and other elements of the construction of femininity, or the like elements of masculinity, will be biased if they are analysed solely through witchcraft accusations. One would be analysing everyday phenomena in the deepest and widest sense of the word on the basis of very exceptional circumstances and materials. This leads to an assumption, which seems indeed to have been in the background of, for example, the Roperian interpretation of the domestic relationships, that there was something inherently troubling in the maternal power, which could be so easily usurped and misused. Witchcraft is seen as a kind of coup d’état against the real parent, and coups d’état are usually presumed to occur especially during weak government. The arguments are that the ideals of motherhood were impossible and in themselves oppressive, and that simultaneously there may have been something more deeply troubling in the idea of mothers in control – in the psychology of the repressed oedipal feelings and the loss of the self in returning to the mother’s control. 120 But settling for that would be wrong. It is deceptively easy to come to a conclusion emphasising the problems of motherhood, because power over children would show in the court records only when there was something wrong in it. Agata’s way of marrying off her daughter was a case in point. A couple of decades later, Agata’s story included another misuse of parental power – by a non-parent, however. The servant women of the household 119      The original reads ‘prostituerat’ and ‘een grof Injurie och Oförrätt’. Ulvila 12–13 Oct. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:106v–7. NA. 120 Roper 1994, Purkiss 1996.

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had incited Agata’s granddaughter to steal money from her parents for the servant women, giving her a small glass bottle of buttons (knåpnålar) in return. They did not admit actually telling her to steal, but claimed that she had given the money on her own initiative. One of them was fined anyway for theft, as she had not told to the parents that the little girl was giving her money.121 The witchcraft cases in Finland, in general, lack the continental notions of infanticide. Here, if someone was criticised as a bad mother, she was confronted directly for what she had done, as in the fornication case of Agata’s daughter or in the rare cases of infanticide. Agata’s misuse of power over her daughter was not even mentioned in any of the current or subsequent witchcraft cases. 122 Otherwise, maternal power seems not to have been problematic in any way – quite the contrary. Contrary to Roper’s findings, in my sources maternity and motherhood could be referred to in a positive sense, although not necessarily as including power in the traditional sense. When motherhood and witchcraft were mentioned in the same cases in Agata’s story, the quality of motherhood as good or bad was very rarely either explicitly referred to or hinted at in any veiled sense which could reasonably be followed by a modern reader. There were, however, a couple of cases. When in 1676 Agata was accused of various tricks of magic in order to secure fodder for her cattle, the tricks included putting bells on the necks of the cows, and in 1686 a similar work of magic included blowing a horn. The noise had obviously been heard in the village, and the villagers thought it suspicious: there was still snow in the ground, so why was she sending her cattle to the forests to feed with all the bells and horns which were used in summer? Agata’s reply was that she had tied the bells on the cows to amuse the children. In 1687, she said that the children had blown the horn – by now her own daughters were almost grown up, well in their teens, but probably still allowed to enjoy a racket, and her eldest daughter already had small children to amuse. Agata was referring to her own motherhood, or grand-motherhood, in her defence.123 The bells and horns may have had a symbolic meaning in the imagery of magic, hinting at the abundance of fodder in summer pastures and the continuation of that abundance over winter – the shepherds were often young boys and girls, too. It may also be that Agata simply meant that as children’s play, the bells and horns were not a serious matter – it would not be the only time she or someone else claimed they had said or done things in jest. However, why did she do it just that way, mentioning the children instead of just a joke? Again, because people consciously or subconsciously opt for a way of expressing themselves, which presents them in the best possible light without lying. Referring to the children and the willingness to lovingly allow them innocent amusement suggested that she also bore by implication the other good qualities which were attached to ‘good mothers’, raising her status and honour and increasing the likelihood of either a successful defence in the trial or at least a re121 Roper 1994; Purkiss 1996; Ulvila 9–11 March 1696. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a7:115–16. NA. 122 Ulvila 12–13 Oct. 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:106v–7. NA. 123 Ulvila 11–12 Sept 1676. Bielkes vol. 27:53–4v; Ulvila 21–23 and 25 Feb. 1687. AlaSatakunta II, KO a2:183–5 NA.

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integration to society afterwards. It was acceptable to do funny things to amuse children, her defence says. Maternity was here interpreted in a way which enabled women to break the model of the quiet and steady mother in an acceptable fashion. That normally mothers did well by their children was taken granted in the seventeenth-century Finnish society. Even a number of drastic cases when something had gone wrong, such as in infanticide cases, married women were acquitted because they were thought incapable of killing their children.124 The silence of the majority of court records on problems of parenthood or motherhood speaks also on the selfevidence of meeting with the norms rather more clearly than the express worry caused by the more rare accidents, deaths and other trouble ever can.125 Witchcraft cases dealt with daily magic and therefore with daily problems. Misuse of maternal power seems not to have been a daily problem. It is problematic at least to explain the sporadic outbursts of German witch-crazes, with which Roper works, by the constant and stable features of society, like the centrality of motherhood – the problem is built into the attempt at generalising from the Trevor-Roperian ‘crazes’. In this material, the rhetoric of motherhood and children seems rather to have been used in order to legitimate otherwise suspicious behaviour. Mothers and grandmothers Roper’s emphasis on problematic motherhood and the misuse of maternal power in witchcraft is part of her wider description of what witchcraft trials tell about how women were perceived in society. Idealised motherhood and the problems a one-sided idealisation included a general notion that women who were not mothers or were no longer mothers were as much demeaned as the mothers were praised. Spinsters were scorned. Old women, whether or not they had had children in their time were, according to Roper, both feared and disdained. Society’s feelings of insecurity in the constant struggle between life and death, dependent on nature’s fertility, which humans could not control, concentrated on the old woman who was visibly, as Roper emphasises, no longer fertile herself. The claim of that interpretation is that women’s status and role in early modern society was determined by fertility and procreation. The control of fertility and procreation in a patriarchal society is as central here as it had been in patriarchy theory. In Oedipus and the Devil, Roper explored sexuality and came indeed to note that when people speak of sexuality, they always also speak of status, class and honour.126 In this interpretation, sexuality and sex are the basis of status, class and honour, instead of the other way around. In the middle of the 1990s, Roper noted that even though the trend had long been that historians emphasised the social, cultural and mental discourses, sex and body were, in fact, material, and in 124 Lehtinen 1967 on the few cases in Ulvila (early seventeenth century); Bergenlöv 2005 on the general picture. 125     Roper 1998, 207–4 also states that the mothers’ concerns over the well-being of their children were taken seriously and explains why the society set out to find the culprits when something went wrong. There was also the grim possibility that abusive mothers or other parents misused this authority, as Tausiet 2001 suggests. 126     Roper 1994, 56.

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that sense, given, not constructed.127 Does this mean that feminine status could also come solely from procreation? Indeed, that is the Roperian conclusion: once past fertility, women’s use of power tends to be treated as misuse. One of Roper’s conclusions is that old women were over-represented among the accused. Although the ages of the witches are difficult to determine reliably,128 her explanation is that the image of a witch was one expression of a general fear of and contempt for post-menopausal women, shown also in early modern art and folklore. Women’s fertility and activity were as important as that of the fields and cattle were for human survival. Old women, with their sagging breasts and shrivelling stomachs, were reminiscent of and represented the loss of that necessary fertility – that is, death. Roper sees the narratives of witchcraft, the testimonies against witches and their confessions as mirroring this when they represent witches as old women who, instead of feeding infants, feed on the infants. The connection between old women and lack of fertility, even a threat to fertility, is also linked to the psychology of motherhood, and the insecurities thereof. The witch, in Roper’s interpretation, is not an old woman because of what old women were or did, but because of what old women signified, what they represented in early modern society.129 If women’s appropriate place and authority was that of mothers, one could expect that power or influence acquired through anything else than motherhood was thought of as negative in the sense of anthropologists since Mary Douglas. Jill Dubish has a similar discussion on women’s power in rural Greece: in a society which defines power as male, there is no way to talk about women’s power – the vocabulary is simply not available. Therefore, it is treated as negative, as deviant, as rebellion against rightful authority, not conducive to the aims which were defined through other forms of power, but rather as causing harm. It would be not only informal but also illegitimate.130 If early modern society assigned women’s power to the sphere of procreation and fertility, it may not have had means to discuss women’s influence outside the reproductive sphere. Therefore, it may have become evil, treated as witchcraft, slander and officiousness. This would mean that women’s influence outside the reproductive family sphere became ‘power in a wrong place’ in the same sense as dirt and pollution. There is, however, a considerable danger of continuing the very practices which feminisms have sought to deconstruct. The lack of vocabulary may have effected how people talked and made sense of things, but it does not remove the things themselves. Feminine forms of authority and power existed, and they existed outside immediate procreation – even outside the domestic sphere. They only had to be talked of in a vocabulary which existed. 127 Roper 1994, 1–27. 128 In some geographical areas, women over 50 represent as much as half of the accused; in others, women between 40 and 50 or 30 and 60 – the categories are also fairly difficult to compare. The current conclusion among historians is that, whereas the contemporary stereotype of a witch in the learned treatises was that of an old woman, in practise the witch could be of any age, from little children to the very old, although a majority the accused were of early midlife or middle aged, peasant farmers’ wives who had families. See Rowlands 2001. 129 Roper 2004, 160ff. 130 Birkelund 1983, 60, 103; Sharpe 1997, 184; Dubish 1986, 17, 25.

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Agata’s power was not perceived as negative, although as a widow Agata was no longer likely to give birth. Traditional social historians like Erik Midelfort, John Demos, Walter Rummel and Robin Briggs have rather thought that the witches were post-menopausal because mid-life was the time when the exercise of power usually became central to personal experience, and as witchcraft was misused power, it is natural that the accusation concerned the people connected with power in the first place. This explanation is exactly the contrary but not necessarily much less procreation-oriented than the patriarchy-centered psychological one: mid-life was the time for women to exercise power, because when their childbearing was over, they had the necessary time and experience for expanding the scope of their authority.131 In Roper’s interpretation, age is highly visual, marked by the breasts and the stomach, which can no longer support children. The problem in the Swedish reality is that, whereas there certainly was a culture in cheap print portraying and contrasting naked women of different ages, and although a fear of death is probably always present in every society, witchcraft trials outside the German panics show very little evidence of it. They were by no means prevalent in the visual culture – the records are usually rather more keen on what people said than what they looked like. Fear of old women as symbols of death, may have existed, but this often has no reflection in witchcraft trials. For the old women themselves, age seems to have brought more power, not a loss of it, both because age as such was important within the social hierarchy and because by that time women had established themselves as mistresses of their households and proven their abilities in work and motherhood. Whereas Agata to a certain extent experienced the power-in-the-wrong-place phenomenon, in which her newly acquire power seemed to turn evil in the 1670s, Maria Pertuntytär in the Sawo household never did. In her family, too, the struggle over power was a generational one between Maria, backed up by her husband and father on one side, and one of her sons-in-law, Heikki Janckari, on the other side. The struggle led to a witchcraft case; however, the accused was not Maria, but Heikki Janckari, the younger man who tried to challenge the existing order. Maria had once been accused of witchcraft, too, in 1683, but this was never mentioned again in any of the later trials of the household.132 Maria and her father, Perttu, were able to legitimate very aggressive behaviour through the repeated use of the rhetoric of motherhood or parenthood. They avoided the stigma of breaking the family community while accusing Maria’s son-in-law both of using witchcraft to murder and of violence against parents – both potentially capital crimes. When he made the charges, Perttu noted carefully that he was old – a hint at parental roles – and therefore unwilling to acknowledge Janckari’s offence, but still said he suspected Janckari of witchcraft, and that violence against himself and Maria had taken place. Janckari often caused disturbances by shouting and swearing and pulling Dårdi’s hair. Perttu completed his first testimony against Janckari by saying that he would gladly drive Heikki away. During the next court session, Heikki had indeed looked for a new place to settle with his wife and children, and Perttu 131     Demos 1970; Briggs 1996, 264; Rummel 1991, 311–13. 132     Ulvila 3–5 July 1683:Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:185–6. NA.

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and Maria began to draw back their charges – they were not sure what had really happened. Half a year later, however, Maria informed the court that ‘she had not wanted to see his wrong ways as she was old and as Janckari had promised to move out, leave her in peace with her husband and father and hereafter treat them with obedience, she had helped him [Janckari] as much as possible against her better knowledge. But as Janckari is not fulfilling his promise’; she felt compelled to argue that he had indeed called Perttu and Maria names and attacked herself physically so that her face had been bloody as well as indulged in verbal abuse and disobedience. The lot accused each other of various kinds of maleficium and magic, but that seemed of little importance compared to the violation of the parent/son relationship. Maria and Perttu represented themselves as parentally charitable, calm and conciliatory, and the son-in-law as drunken, quarrelsome and dishonest in his promises. They also invoked their parental role through allusions to their age. The double allusion strengthened their case when the authority struggle became public first in the village rumours and then in court: support for Janckari seems to have been minimal.133 Maria and Perttu were also able to use the rhetoric of parenthood directly against Heikki. One of the described incidents of violence against Perttu and Maria was a fight between Heikki and Dårdi, in which Maria went to calm things down and came in for some blows – of which Heikki himself told. Another one was a fight between Heikki and a farmhand, which Perttu tried to settle. Perttu was knocked over, according to a neighbour’s testimony. The protective measures of Perttu and Maria are obvious, and it may be significant that emphasis on them was included even when Perttu and Maria were actually dropping the charges: their parental and age-based seriousness and authority was contrasted with the unruliness of Heikki. A further contrast was provided by the neighbour, who described the fight between Heikki, the farmhand and Perttu: the fight had originally started when Heikki had asked the farmhand to rock the cradle of Heikki’s crying baby in the absence of the mother. The farmhand had thought it not his duty, and a fight started. Although no further discussion was presented in the court records, the story describes a double failure by Heikki: a failure to look after his child and a failure to command obedience of the farmhand. Heikki was presented as losing his status as a father, as son(-in-law)and in the farmstead. Maria’s and Perttu’s authority, however, was strengthened.134 133     Ulvila 3–5 June 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:185–6 (425–v). NA; Ulvila 12–13 March 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:35–7 (new page number: 42–3). NA; Ulvila 17 and 19 June 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180–181. NA; Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5 (new page no:151–3). NA from which comes the quotation ‘hon eij welat see Janckaris ofärd opå sin ålderdohm, utan som han låfwat hemmanet afstijga och sig om annat huusruum försee, sampt lembna henne med sin Man ochFader i roo på hemmanet qwarblifwa, och dem med lydno hädan effter till handa gåå, hafwer hon så myckit möijeligit warit, honom emot sitt bättre wetande hulpit, Men som Janckari sin låfwen icke fullgiöra…’; Ulvila 8–10. Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:26–8. NA; Ulvila 23 and 25 Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:29v–33. NA. Cf. also Heijden 2004 for a view on conflicts between children and step-parents. 134     Ulvila 3–5 June 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:185–6 (425–v). NA; Ulvila 12–13 March 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:35–7 (new page number:42–3). NA; Ulvila 17 and 19 June 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180–181. NA; Ulvila 16 and 18

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At the beginning of the court case, the rhetoric of parenthood was used to establish the legitimate authority in the family and the unworthiness of Heikki. The same rhetoric was, however, also used when they wished to drop the charges in March 1694, 1695 and especially in 1698, when Maria’s motherly emotion for her own son, the late Mikko, was also referred to as an excuse for making such accusations and her ‘motherly love’ as a reasons to drop the charges. The court seems rather unimpressed by the accusing and taking back accusations, and the eventual sentence claims that as they had first accused and then – although out of motherly love – taken back the charges, Heikki had to swear himself free from the flagrant reputation he had acquired of witchcraft and violence against parents. At the same court session, the case was finally ended by making also Maria and Risto Olavinpoika swear themselves free of the charges presented against them. The prolonged case was not to the credit of anyone, and the parental rhetoric may have been an attempt to preserve as much as possible of the authority of Maria and Perttu and the life, if not the honour, of Heikki.135 Being a mother might indeed be scary, if not awesome, in a way which may produce the kind of insecurities on which Roper, Purkiss and others ground the Kleinian interpretation. That frightfulness is due in part to the power of the mother, and in part to the even more total helplessness of the same mothers in other situations – probably considerably more frequent in the lives of early modern women than today. However, my material mostly presents women who have survived the helplessness and learned to use the rhetoric of power. Instead of young mothers, they tend to be slightly older women whose children have survived the infancy. Indeed, they can be grandmothers as well as mothers. The above example of the Sawo household also illustrates that men could equally well use the parental rhetoric for their advantage and for the disadvantage of others. Conclusions Family and familial relationships were clearly a basis for authority for the early modern peasant population. The family had a very practical importance in sheer survival, both in everyday circumstances and in deviations from daily life. The family also signified a symbolic protection which could be used as a rhetorical device in struggles against others, as in witchcraft trials. Contrary to some popular assumptions, accused witches usually had a considerable amount of support form their families. Similarly, families protected their members when they were accused June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5(new page number: 151–3). NA; Ulvila 8–10. Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:26–8. NA; Ulvila 23 and 25 Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:29v–33. NA. 135     Ulvila 3–5. June 1683. Ala-Satakunta II KO a1:185–6 (425–v). NA; Ulvila 12–13 March 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:35–7 (new page number:42–3). NA; Ulvila 17 and 19 June 1693. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a1:180–181. NA; Ulvila 16 and 18 June 1694. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a3:251–5 (new page number: 151–3). NA; Ulvila 8–10. Jan. 1695. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a5:26–8. NA; Ulvila 23 and 25 Jan. 1698. Vehmaa ja Ala-Satakunta II, KO a11:29v–33. NA. with ‘moderlig kärlek’.

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of other dishonourable crimes. Families seem to have been able to use the patriarchal ideology of husbands protecting and wives obeying to the benefit of their women in witchcraft trials. As the honour of one member would almost certainly have some effect on the reputations of other household members, the profit of such action was to the good of all household members. The court records rarely betray struggles over power between the spouses. As mentioned in the previous chapter, such struggles were most often dealt with in ecclesiastical courts. The secular district court, therefore, more often show spouses supporting each other in struggles with other households. It is significant that the peasantry, men and women, were able to use the protective rhetoric of the catechisms to enhance their credibility and status in court when they or their spouses or other family members were testifying, suing or being sued. The household members acted as partners. The claim put forward by some historians that women’s role as wives was emphasised at the cost of their role as mother in order to downplay the possibility of female authority cannot be supported by the peasantry’s own discourse on authority and legitimacy. Rather, the peasants repeatedly brought the parental roles, especially those of women, to the fore. These roles seem to have been very important for the creation of authority and credibility even outside the family, especially for women. The old rhetorical connection between motherhood and full adulthood is also apparent in early modern peasants’ court narratives. So is the equally old anthropological conclusion that children were what finally bound daughters or sonin-law to their new kin groups and that, without children, they may have remained strangers to the kin with whom they lived. The connection between full adulthood and motherhood may be related to the slow trend in northwestern Europe, where not all women married at all and those who did, often did so late. Marriage was not a self-evident fate, but an achievement of choice.136 However, even then there was a discussion of inclusion in and exclusion from the kin. Witchcraft and other criminal charges may have been a way to mark the mental exclusion and the breach with an ostracised family member, though such an accusation would rarely lead to the actual removal of that individual from society and the people would probably still be forced to live together. As married status became an achievement which would be required for a status of authority, the same happened to motherhood or parenthood. Little of Finnish magic pertains to either improving or preventing human fertility in either early modern court records and later folklore materials. Laura Stark has suggested that this was mostly because fertility was self-evident: one did not need to boost it. Rather, sexual magic centred on marital compatibility.137 However, having children and being a parent was still important to the status-building of women and men both within their households and beyond. Women especially were able to invoke the rhetoric of maternal to legitimate their behaviour, even when it at first sight did not concern childcare or education. Thus the repeated excuse made by Agata in her witchcraft trials: she did it to amuse the children. Similarly, men could use the rhetoric, although in a more severe and protective tone. Lack of parental interest 136     Hartman 2004, 21. 137     Stark-Arola 1998, 91, 132–52, 199.

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could very well be used against a person, whether male and female. The value of parental roles was definitely positive. In the Finnish popular discourse, contrary to Lyndal Roper’s findings, motherhood and the mother’s power over children do not reflect problematic attitudes or emphasis on the possible or presumed failure of mothers to fulfil idealisations of their role. Testimonies on witchcraft include many allusions to maternal roles, but they are used to legitimate one’s own – even the witches’ – behaviour rather than to vent the anxieties and insecurities of mothers or the fear of infertility and death which post-menopausal women sometimes are supposed to symbolise. If misused, the parental power over children was grave enough to be directly taken up in the courts; suspicions thereof did not need to be dressed as witchcraft. With these conclusions in mind, it is useful to look again at women’s role according to the Lutheran catechism teaching. Instead of presenting a singular, uniform picture of the one model of relationships everyone should conform to, the catechism teaching should be understood in the contemporary style of rhetoric. The same Neoplatonic rhetorics appeared in many cosmological treatises of the time in theology, demonology, and, indeed, in catechisms. The rhetoric was built on presenting pairs of polar opposites. In these oppositions, man and woman, husband and wife, formed a primary opposition. In early cultures, the male-female dualism can be coupled with such twins as right and left, sacred and profane, culture and nature – polarities also prominent in current witchcraft research. The early modern attributes of men and women also fall into the same polarising model: associating males with limit/odd/single/right/square/at rest/straight//light/good and female with the respective opposites of unlimited/even/plural/left/oblong/moving/curved/ darkness/evil or other such pairs. The attributes in either series, however, were not supposed to have been derived from each other – one could hardly deduce the female pairs from femininity, although there has been rather a lot of discussion about the breaches of the limits of a woman’s body in sexual intercourse or in menstruation or giving birth. Rather, the series should be understood as categorisations, according to Stuart Clark, ascribed to one or other side of the polarisations and associated with others on the same side. The association takes place not because of any intrinsic attributes but because of their relationships of difference from their opposites and the relationships of similarity to their analogues. The polarisation has usually been interpreted as deeply hierarchical and asymmetrical, one of superiority and inferiority, and often it was exactly that. Gradually, the terms in each category became interchangeable – or almost so. Europeans began to speak of women – and to an extent, of men – as categories rather than known individuals. This is why, Clark thinks, ‘it was literally unthinkable, at this level [for early modern demonologists] that witches should be male’. 138 Clark’s ‘commitment’ to show the binary thinking in intellectual circles has been criticised as the reason why he failed to read that many of the demonological theories literally spoke of men as well as women.139 Aristotelian modes of thinking

138     Clark 1997, 119–33, quotation from p. 130. 139     Apps & Gow 2003:95–117.

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were present in the intellectual climate of early modern Europe, including Sweden.140 They also very likely had their influence on popular thinking. But the scholastic theory of rhetoric was meant to deal with idealisations, not with real people. Whereas theoretical rhetoric on women and men in theology or in law treated them as categorisations, the same was often impossible for men and women who knew each other as individuals in certain circumstances. Popular rhetoric also used similar polarisations, but not as two interchangeable categories. Rather the polarisations appeared as sets of opposites which could be contrasted with each other and other similar pairs. The popular mode of thinking used the categories however, not as two categories, but sets of binary categories. They were divided internally and contrasted against each other. A woman was not merely defined as the ‘opposite’ of man, but also as an adult as the opposite of a child, a human as opposite to an animal. Each particular individual must also be categorised as opposite to those around him or her, and these comparisons produce other categorisations. The other categories made it possible to speak of masculine and feminine virtue and vice. Although the polarisation of things was used to define things as the opposites of each other, the peasant farmers needed a combination of more than one pair of opposites to define not only women from men but also adults from children, teachers from pupils and so on. The categorisations might also be considerably more mundane and seemingly narrow in their scope, but they might be the more important in daily life because of their concreteness. Married/unmarried, parental/non-parental roles association with the pairs of adult/child and care/neglect have come forward in this chapter. With the combination of categorisations, women as well as men may have had very different gender identities, depending on the combination of social roles and relationships through which they currently lived their lives – as parents, daughters, sons, farmers or servants, married or unmarried – and on their partners in those relationships. The asymmetry of the controversie should not be exaggerated. The dual classification, one example of which was the gender relationship, was also one of complementarity, as some historians have pointed out in the gender-question, too, although it has been pointed that mutuality or complementarity was not the same as equality.141 However, whereas the ideological thinking may have treated complementarity as the rhetorical and intellectual necessity of defining a thing through its opposite, the peasant culture seems to have thought about it in a more practical way. Spousal compatibility was of vital importance and as much folklore material is devoted to the good qualities of compatible spouses as to the poor fate of those who cannot fit together. In my material, the compatibility is emphasised not only in the relationships of the spouses but in the family and household in general, both in protection for the household members and in the more or less quiet exclusion from the household of those who do not fit. Compatibility is also a form of the mutual agreement on household and farm management. Marital complementarity, spousal protection and parental relationships were an essential part of the rhetoric through which relationships of power and status within 140     Gothus 1633, especially Chapter 15. 141     Wiesner 2002, 27.

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the family beyond. In the peasant rhetoric, however, they do not form a dualist hierarchy between men and women, always putting the husband and father on top. Rather, they are media through which gender and authority can form masculine and feminine combinations. In all this complementarity and protection, a woman’s position within her household is crucial. Valued there, she can yield considerable power outside the domestic sphere as well. Not valued in her home and family, she faces exclusion rather than protection and support. However, it must be concluded that both protection and exclusion take place between the household itself and the communities outside. It is indeed anachronistic to conclude that the early modern patriarchal rhetoric reflects an exclusion of women from the public, inside the private household, for the household as the basic social unit in itself never could be private in the modern sense of the word. The mistress of the household, although deriving her authority from the household, could therefore not but be a public figure as well, with public status and authority.142

142     See for example Poska 2005.

Chapter 6

Conclusions: Mother, Wife and Witch Women in court The peasant farmers of my study competed over power, influence and authority in their testimonies in court. The rhetoric they used also reveals some of the values which authority and status were claimed and given. The social and legal situation of women in my material seems markedly better than that of women in other European countries and in much of the scholarship on social, women’s and gender history. Agata’s story is the story of a strong woman who could and would pursue her own goals in public and in private. Widows had greater legal responsibilities than married women, but the Swedish wife was not under couverture, nor did she necessarily have a secondary legal or social position. In fact, the formal and informal participation of women in the village and parish community and its management seems vital. There were legal obstacles to the public court action of women, but historians seem to have exaggerated the meaning of these limitations even during the late seventeenth century, when the Swedish legal culture is said to have become stricter and state-oriented with the influence of Roman law. There were also ideological descriptions and prescriptions, emphasised by historians, which sought to portray women as weaker and in need of protection and associated women with the ‘other’ of a polar world order. The most important of these, to the peasant population, was obviously religious teaching. According to the popular interpretations, many of the Reformation arguments enforced male dominance and female obedience, although the same teachings also present women as laudable and essentially complementary partners of their husbands. The meaning of these arguments, however, has been overemphasised by historians. This may be partly because, we, as historians, have been stuck in the discourse of modernisation despite our better knowledge. Therefore, we have continued to be guilty of extrapolating the ‘premodern’ from the nineteenth-century loophole. The seventeenth-century reality, however, was much more complex than that. Both law and legal custom as well as the religious teaching could be and were used either to improve or to undermine women’s position and status in early modern society – and sometimes they were used for both ends by the same people. Therefore, the story of my centre figure, Agata, is not so much a story of the good or bad social, legal and economic conditions of women, but rather of getting around them. In the Finnish and Swedish judicial system, women’s options to exercise authority and manage different kinds of matters actually seem to have been fairly good. Limitations existed which mostly affected land ownership, but even they could

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be circumvented in practice. Women, like men, appeared in court actively and taking the initiative, not only as a result of having been accused of crimes. Agata was not the only woman of her kind. This story is full of competent and active women, capable of running their businesses and their lives. There were also many competent women who acted much less publicly, like Agata’s other sister-inlaw, Riitta Tuomaantytär, who managed her inheritance herself. Many competent women seem to have had influence in and beyond the domestic sphere through less formal ways, using networks of acquaintance, persuasion and gossip. One must assume that most often their actions did not lead to court but were still significant in determining the social order of the village. To use such informal networks, it was essential to have a certain basic status as a member of some basic groups, such as the family and household groups and, based on lineage or work, in the village and parish community. These groups could in turn subdivide into smaller social groups, like those of farmers or of young unmarried people. Agata was not immediately considered capable of running a big and wealthy farm, and she had to struggle to gain acceptance as a farmer in her own right, but eventually she succeeded. It was not her gender or her birth which determined her place. However, there were, in this story, also less assertive women and men, as well as those whose assertiveness did not prove successful. It was not only a question of abilities; other resources had to exist and be available. At the end of the seventeenth century, the rural district court was still dominated both quantitatively and qualitatively by the peasant farmers. The farmers used the arena to pursue their own interests both with each other and towards people of different social standing. Therefore, activity in court, except in some fairly limited spheres of life, could also represent belonging to this particular status group. For authorities or servants, appearing in court may have represented control; for the peasantry the court was an arena to pursue their own politics. The same applies to court records. For the Court of Appeal, they were a vehicle of control – not only to control the peasantry but also the local officials and rural district courts. This is the purpose from which the court records gain their first form and function: they are narratives of what happened in the court, and their purpose was to control the court’s dealings. Yet the records also show different levels of other narratives of events and circumstances in peasant life. In addition to the dealings of the court, the records also include the local actors’ testimonies, their narratives on what had happened outside the court, and the events and circumstances of their lives which had led to the court action. These narratives are in form and in content a result of continuous cultural negotiation and interpretation, channelling popular views from below and also imposing control and order from above. The values on which peasant farmers based their argumentation concerned their own immediate survival, success or comfort and family strategies rather than any implementation of central government or military demands, as is shown by how little the abstract ideas of religious and political uniformity, subject–sovereign relationships and the like were spoken of in court. These ideas were present in court, but they did not dominate the action. It seems that the populace of the Sweden did their best to lead their lives as peacefully as possible – and succeeded fairly well.

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Although the military was fighting abroad, the seventeenth century may indeed have been the century when Finnish inhabitants suffered least from war. Despite taxation and military conscription, those left at home were relatively comfortable and secure. It seems that historians have overemphasised the influence of centralisation and military needs, whether they were interpreted as repressive politics or as interaction between the populace and the elites. These factors are vital to our reading of the sources, but we must keep our own methodological interest separate from the aims and strategies of the people of the past. Their experiences, values and strategies grew from their daily life and were to them more important and considerably more immediate than the interaction with or the reaction to the elites’ pursuits. The interaction with and reactions to the elite’s pursuits were tools with which the peasant farmers pursued their own interests and values in their daily life. Mothers, housewives The peasant farmers and their families used the court arena to present themselves in different social roles, thereby legitimating their action in the court. Three prototype roles emerged from my material: parental and lineage related roles, work-related roles and virtue or reputation. People had histories and expectations which influenced the way their positions and abilities were assessed. Historians of early modern – or ‘pre-modern’ – power, and especially gendered power, have emphasised the first of these three modes. Lineage had been, after all, the most stable indicator of status and power since nobility became hereditary. For gender historians, the patriarchal rhetoric has meant a formal, ideological model of power relationships, which even now is often seen as reflecting a real life state of affairs. Historians like Merry Wiesner and Lyndal Roper see these ideologies as almost automatically putting power into the hands of men, husbands and fathers as well as princes and magistrates. The God-given hierarchy had to be incontestable. Recently, the younger generation of scholars, as well as some more established members of the historian community (including gender historians from Susan Amussen onwards and Mary Hartman as a later and more pointed example) have reminded us that rhetoric is not necessarily practice, no matter how forcibly it is argued. Rather, rhetoric can be a sign of its inverse in reality. After all, there is rarely any need to argue for the present and uncontested practice. What is most important is that the rhetoric is usually used to argue for and against something. The early modern rhetoric should be read as arguments in a series of debates on social order and politics rather than as a prescription for social uniformity. What historians have interpreted as the more or less uniformly repressive influence of the Reformation, of ‘Die Haustafel’, of Roman Law, and of the birth of the central state is only one side of the debate. This applies not only to the interaction between the popular and elite cultures, but also to the wealthy, educated and the powerful, who took different views in all such debates depending on their political, economic and cultural positions. I should like to ask whether our current reading, especially the way we emphasise the uniformity of the early modern patriarchal rhetoric in different religious, legal and other discourses, has not been misguided by the modern–pre-modern dichotomy of

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early sociology. Historians have been preoccupied either with proving or disproving the modern–pre-modern question, but less interested in how that dichotomy originally developed. It was created and employed to analyse what was though of as a new societal culture, different from social ideologies of the bourgeois nineteenth century. Particularly in the study of patriarchal ideologies, especially in Scandinavia, the influence of early sociological and religious studies has long maintained a degree of sociological anachronism. Feminist historians have often thought, like Roper, that there was something inherently disturbing in the Lutheran and Calvinist elevation of motherhood, that it set ideals which were impossible to attain and therefore would, in the end, be quite as likely to foster insecurity as self-esteem. My finding is the opposite: the peasant women and men used motherhood and parenthood, as well as their positions as husbands or wives and therefore as full adults, to their advantage in the statusbuilding discourse. Sometimes they referred more or less strictly to the values of the Catechism teaching and the fourth commandment, claiming honour and obedience as parents and for their age. Sometimes, however, the discourse was more practical: parenthood emerged as a part of character-building in other circumstances: things which could be interpreted as magic were legitimated by saying that they were really done to amuse the children. Likewise, however, images of less successful parenthood could be used against people, although usually suspicions of outright misuse of parental authority were tackled head-on rather than being disguised as witchcraft accusations, as was suggested in the psychological explanation of Lacanian feminist historians. The same applies to men and parenthood, although it may be that men referred to their parenthood slightly more often when they were aged than when they were still able to derive status from work and actual representation of the household. A man’s character could also be maligned by suggesting that he was not performing his parental or spousal roles properly. A good number of studies show that both witchcraft and witchcraft accusations were often directed against the important members of the household as a means of attacking the household in its entirety. In my study, the women who refer to their motherhood and parental roles are most often older women with older children. Rather than representing death and poisonous envy, as Roper claims, these women seem to be the ones who have had time to accept the parental power and responsibility and for whom parenthood is not as insecure as it was for the parents of small children continuously facing dangers and illnesses. By the time such women reached midlife or old age, it had become evident how successful one’s methods of bringing up children were. The older women were no longer as tied to childrearing and reproduction as younger women were. It is possible that this freedom for the more demanding duties of motherhood made it possible for them to take on a more public role, although younger mothers, too, often worked on the fields, cattle sheds and other places physically distant from their children, of whom others took immediate care. Regardless of whether the women had gathered experience in other spheres of life before their reproductive years (as Hartman recently claimed was the pivotal effect of household structure on the birth of the nation-state and industrialisation, older women whose children were grown up had time to share those spheres with men. Naturally, that was easier the more experience one already had. It is also possible

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that the rhetoric of parenthood and especially of motherhood was made possible by this combination of parenthood and the capability to work outside reproduction and childcare as the children grew up. Work has been described by historians of both Weberian and Marxists background as one of the most important areas of producing status and authority. My material seems to confirm this: work, diligence and skill are part of the most common rhetoric in legitimating claims to status or authority. This is not, however, limited to productive work by men. On the level of rhetoric, it seems not to be so much a question of attaining power by controlling the produce of work, although the peasant farmer families had a notion of the individual’s right to the fruits of his or her own work, but rather of a simultaneous duty to contribute to the survival of the household and family community. This is why the most reprehensible defects in one’s work were not connected to the Protestant rhetoric of asceticism: lack of austerity and mixing play with work were quite acceptable. The defects undermining and challenging one’s status in peasant rhetoric were linked to not supporting oneself and one’s family and not contributing enough to the common good or even stealing from it. This is connected to why so much of witchcraft and magic worked on images of stealing from the neighbours. Skill in work also showed the potential to perform well and shoulder more responsibility in the future – both for men and for women. Representing the household in public mattered, of course, for the distribution of power and authority. As representation seems to have included a good part of the control of the family property, it mattered more than pure ownership, for women as well as for men. However, household representation must not be thought of in terms of property or produce only, but also in terms of speaking for others and managing communal roles outside the household. The households were in practice, despite the legal limitations on the actions of wives, run by a managerial group partnership. This partnership might include the husband and wife or other older members of the household, regularly including women. Moreover, it seems that the managerial group agreed upon the principles and the practice of their action beforehand – the representative appearing in court did not act as a sovereign without control but rather as having a certain authority to do certain things at a certain time. Whereas family relationships and motherhood displayed a discourse on power which was based on traditional and patriarchal forms of power even though they brought power to women, too, the rhetoric on work displays a notion of contractual power – if not often clearly articulated, then at least evident in action. However, the household managerial partnership may also be seen as a form of power as will and force drawn from the support of at least some members of the household community. That household managerial groups could be and were challenged is equally obvious in my material. So is the fact that challenging the existing order may have led to suspicion of witchcraft, either because of the inversion of the challenge as such or as a mark of a breach in the relationships between household members. So far, my material agrees with the existing theories. As pointed out by a number of recent studies, including the work at hand, witchcraft and suspicions of magic as well as accusations in court were frequently also directed against men. As I have shown that the managerial groups of household included women, it is no surprise that witchcraft suspicions coincided with challenges by men or women to the

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existing household order. The successful claims of authority rested on a combination of parenthood, age, experience, work skill, responsibility and acknowledgement by others. Gender played a role, definitely, but rather in the form in which these elements were expressed than as a decisive factor over others. It is also significant the in the court record rhetoric, these can be found in the parts of the narrative which were dominated by the populace, instead of the elite-dominated parts. In particular, parenthood and work or responsibility for the ‘common good’ were more often than not emphasised by the populace, whereas the authorities betray a more financial interest. Therefore, it must be concluded that these were essentially popular values. That suggests that the central state and the religious rhetoric attached to it were not the primus motor changing the popular views, but, possibly the other way around. My material here concurs with Mary Hartman’s synthesis in claiming that the characteristics which made equality and contractual society seem as a feasible idea were grounded in the daily experience of households long before they were or could be touted in the ‘public realm’. Indeed, awareness that household power was shared more widely than the contemporaneous religious and household literature presented it may have been the very reason for the writing of both the said household literature and the alternative views of absolute monarchy, contractual society, republicanism and so forth – views which were also present in seventeenth-century Sweden, although we social historians tend to leave them to oblivion behind the absolutist state rhetoric. Hartman argues in her abovementioned synthesis, along with a few other recent scholars, that individual households should not be thought of reacting to religious, political or economic trends but rather the other way around; ideological trends should be thought of as reactions – of some interest groups – to what individual households did. What the households and their members did, on the other hand, was what they had always done. They were making their own survival and success as certain as possible. As circumstances changed, they did so in new ways which then led to new forms of division of work and authority. Recently, some historians have pointed towards different possible reasons for women’s strong public roles. Some of these rest, to an extent, on the same logic as the old Finnish myth that the women’s labour force has always been necessary and therefore women are relatively equal in Finland. For Hartman, the crucial factor was women’s later age at the point of marriage, the experience of work it allowed and the need for female workforce in the smaller households it created. According to Allyson Poska, the male migration and matrilineal inheritance patterns created a similar situation in rural Spain. The households at the centre of my study were not small nuclear households in which women married late but rather the contrary; yet in western Finnish culture the majority of households were nuclear families and women often married late. The households in my focus were multigenerational households with more than two adults to manage them, and they still included women in their management. This shows that women were expected to shoulder public managerial responsibility outside the domestic sphere as a real cultural choice and not merely because there were no males to do it, as much earlier scholarship has suggested. 

Hartman 2004, 221–42.

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Witches Virtue and reputation were most important components of the discussions on power, status and authority. Historians have often reduced their discussion of virtue, honour and reputation to things relating to chastity and religion, although in the case of men, work and ‘honesty’ are admitted a place in the discussion. However, I have not been able to see virtue, honour and reputation as separate from the rest of these people’s lives. Yes, they were mentioned seemingly separately from time to time, as the reputations of people accused of crimes and accusing others of slander were assessed. Nevertheless, most often virtue, honour and reputation appeared as general character-building and legitimation of claims in such remarks, which concerned the odd way someone cultivated his fields, caught his fish or milked her cows, or in the ways they cared for children. Virtue, honour and reputation also appear in the circumstantial details of time and place detaching and attaching the narratives of the testimony from the narration itself: things took place when everyone else was at church, on the way to church or hard at work. Witchcraft had a double symbolic meaning because it could combine discussions on virtue, family relationships and work skills. It gave people the images and vocabulary with which they could talk about unexpected and unwelcome inversions of authority and status: disputes between parents and children, bitter disappointments in inheritances or unexplained lack of success in the daily work on which both survival and status were dependent. Witchcraft lacked the concrete precision of some other crimes: although suspicions of witchcraft were presented by relating the practical details of something the alleged witch had said or done, witchcraft was still continuously present and everyone was its potential target or victim. Suspicions, gossip and trials about witchcraft were all essentially a part of the peasant culture – not elite acculturation. Witchcraft was part of the peasant vocabulary of discussing good and evil, the accepted or the rejected ways of working and living and, finally, of social hierarchy. Witchcraft provided a range of images and terms with which unknown things in the society could be named, discussed and controlled. It is ironic that witchcraft itself worked partly the same way: knowing and naming produced a power to control if not to command. Taking a suspicion of witchcraft to court was an exercise of the same power or might, naming things as either good or bad. In magic, the knowledge was private; in court, it was made public. However, the court hearing also included mechanisms which made it possible for a convicted witch or other felon to continue living in the community. These were attached to the process both of telling and of retelling the testimony so that their nature as narratives became visible, and to the reintegration process often attached to passing judgements in court: their meaning was – in the central state-led judicial system, which is said to have replaced conciliation with punishment – essentially meant to impose order in the community. Indeed, naming and knowing produced order even in this sense. It was possible to live with a witch if one knew the person to be a witch. We are accustomed to thinking that witches came from the margins of society and were further marginalised, pushed outside the community by the suspicion and trial. This may well have been the case in the trials of great panics or in the areas

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where banishment was common. In Finland and Sweden, witches continued in the community after conviction. Moreover, the witches who appeared in the trials were not marginalised or expelled from the community. As Nenonen has shown statistically, most of the accused were peasant farmers and their wives. The court arena, on the other hand, was dominated by the same social group, and it was therefore an arena familiar to all the people involved in witchcraft trials whether they were the accused, the accusers or witnesses. Being sued already acknowledged a kind of recognition of membership in the group. This acknowledged membership was why, almost 300 years later, an older woman used to stop by my own grandmother’s childhood home by Lake Laatokka and introduce herself as ‘a witch, a whore and a blood-letter’, before she sat down to have some coffee and gossip with the household members and other passersby. Having used a good number of the pages of this study to note the still current anachronistic use of the concept of the pre-modern, I now take the liberty of using my grandmother’s tale to point out that witchcraft and most other forms of authority and status cannot exist outside a community but need the community to define and legitimate them.

Appendix

Fig. 2 The Tommila family in Pomarkku

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Fig. 3 The Sawo family in Kyläsaari

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Toivanen, Jenni: Äidillinen valta, lapselle kuuluva kuuliaisuus – patriarkaalisuus, leskiäitien ja lasten välisissä suhteissa 1700-luvun loppupuolen Sisä-Suomessa. In: Einonen, Pia & Karonen, Petri (Eds.): Arjen Valta. Suomalaisen yhteiskunnan patriarkaalisesta järjestyksestä myöhäiskeskiajalta teollistumisen kynnykselle v. 1450–1860. Finnish Literature Society 2002. Toivo, Raisa Maria: Agata Pekantytär and Aune Pertuntytär ca. 1676 – Witchcraft Trial in a Local Social Context. In: Aronsson, Peter, Fagerlund, Solveig, Samuelsson Jan (eds.): Nätverk i historisk forskning – metafor, metod eller teori? Rapporter frön Växjö Universitet. Humaniora No. 1, 1999. Toivo, Raisa Maria: Kruunun ja rahvaantiet. Pohjanmaan teiden historian suurvaltaajalta Suomen sotaan. In: Salminen, Tapio, Toivo, Raisa Maria & Haavisto, Timo: Pohjanmaan kautta. Tiet ja liikenne Pohjanmaalla keskiajalta 1990–luvulle. Tiemuseon julkaisuja 15. 1997. [Crown Roads and Peasant’s Road. The History of Osthrobothnian Roads from the Height of Sweden’s Power to the Finnish War. In: Salminen, Tapio, Toivo, Raisa Maria & Haavisto, Timo: Roads and Road Traffic in Finland’s Ostrobothnia from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. Road Museum Publications 15.] Toivo, Raisa Maria: Marking (Dis)order: Witchcraft and the Symbolics of Hierarchy in late Seventeenth- and early Eighteenth-Century Finland. In: Davies, Owen & De Blécourt, Willem (eds.): Beyond the Witch Trials. Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe. Manchester University Press 2004. (2004a) Toivo, Raisa Maria: ‘Naiset roviolla’. Nykytulkinnan naisten osuudesta noituudessa ja noitavainoissa. In: Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari & Toivo, Raisa Maria (eds.): Paholainen, noituus ja magia – kristinuskon kääntöpuoli. Pahuuden kuvasto vanhassa maailmassa. Tietolipas 203. Finnish Literature Society 2004. (2004b) [The Devil Witchcraft and Magic – The Reverse Side of Christianity. Imagery of Evil in Pre-modern Europe.] Toivo, Raisa Maria: The Witch-Craze as the Holocaust. The Rise of Persecuting Societies. In: Davies, Owen & Barry, Jonathan (eds.): Witchcraft Historiography. Palgrave 2007a. Towler, Jean & Bramall, Joan. Midwives in History and Society. Croom Helm 1986. Trevor-Roper, Hugh: The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. Harper and Row, 1968. (The book was first published as Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. 1967) Trevor-Roper, Hugh: The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Pelikan 1969. Tuomaala, Saara: Yhteiskunnallisesta Äitiydestä naisten elämänhistorioihin. Suomen naishistorian suuntaviivoja 1970–luvulta 2000–luvulle. In: Katainen, Elina & Kinnunen, Tiina & Packalen, Eva & Tuomaala, Saara (eds.): Oma Pöytä. Naiset historiankirjoittajina Suomessa. Historiallisia tutkimuksia 221. Finnish Literature Society 2005. Underdown, David E.: The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England. In: Fletcher, Anthony & Stevenson, John (eds.): Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press 1985. Upton, A.F.: Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism. Cambridge University Press 1998.

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Index

The names of peasant persons are listed alphabetically under their forenames, not under their patronyms or the names of their farmsteads, since the latter were not stable. absolutism 156 accusatorial judicial system 13, 91–4 adultery 73, 80, 83, 140 age 4, 13, 22–3, 30, 32, 36, 47, 53, 59–60, 63, 64, 73, 85–6, 104, 122, 124, 129, 132, 145–9, 160, 168–9, 183–4, 187, 189–91, 200–204 Andersson, Gudrun, historian 25 Antti Heikinpoika, farmer in Ulvila 39–40, 58, 63, 107 Antti Skräddare 93 Apo, Satu (folklorist) 44 Archtopolitanus, Gabriel, Vicar of Ulvila 27, 36–7, 42, 54, 56, 79, 96 Aronsson Peter, 52 Aune Pertuntytär, Farmer’s wife in Kyläsaari. Later a burger’s wife in Pori town 23, 39–40, 43–4, 71–2, 74, 101, 109, 168, 185 Aune Tuomaantytär, Pori, 60 beasts beasts hunting of 52, 116, beasts, damages caused by 24, 60, 62, 120 beasts and witchcraft 60–62, 100, 105, 120 beer 41, 63, 120–21, 163 see also brewery and brewing Behringer, Wolfgang, historian 8, 79 Bielke, Sigrid, countess of Pori 17, 30, 65 birth control 38–40, 43, 178, 184–5 Blåkulla (se also witches’ sabbat) 8, 60–61, 64, 100, 119, 132, Brauner, Sigrid, historian 164, brewery, brewing 38, 62, 100, 122, 124, 173 Briggs, Robin, historian 55, 75, 78, 83, 92, 167, 190 butter 40 41, 51, 120–21, 133, see also churning

capitalism 4, 12, 86, 113 Catariina Giöös, Vicar’s widow in Huittinen 39, 43, 91, 166, 176 catechisms 12, 17, 125, 147,149, 151, 154–161, 167, 178, 193–4, 200 cattle 24, 29, 33, 58–9, 62, 80, 90, 109, 120–21, 128, 134, 146, 203 central state 2, 4, 10, 85, 93, 180, 199, 202–3 Charles XI, king of Sweden 65, 66, 67 Chodorow, Nancy, feminist 174 Christina, queen of Sweden 65 churning 121, 123, 133 Clark, Alice 113 Clark, Stuart 99, 102, 194 Cohn Norman 9, 99 Connell, R. W., sociologist 146 court audience 14, 87, 112, 119 court of appeal 10, 14, 23, 30, 31, 37–8, 39, 42, 49, 55–6, 63, 86, 94, 98, 100, 108, 110, 135, 166, 179, 198 cunning folk, 130, 132 Daly, Mary, feminist theologist 171–5, 182 Dårdi Matintytär Sawo, Pomarkku, 93, 103–4, 107, 117, 161–2, 168–70, 190–92, Davis, Natalie Zemon 99 defamation cases 39–40, 43, 62, 91–3, 103, 106, 108, 161–3, 185 demonology 9, 40, 60–64, 86, 102, 165, 167, 178, 194, Demos, John 74, 190 Devil 40, 44, 60–62, 64, 102, 105, 132–3, 164–5, 188, diabolism, 40, 64, 130, 132 district court (rural district court) see also lower courts 13, 23, 30, 77–110, 193, 198,

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dowry 29–30, 121 Dubisch, Jill, anthropologist, 77 Dworkin, Andrea, feminist activist 171, 175 Echrenreich, Barbra, journalist, feminist 175–7 Elisabeth Johansdotter, the mayor’s widow in Pori 32, 51, 74, 89–90, 116 Elsa Heikitytär, wife of Pori toll scribe 70–71 English, Deirdre, journalist, feminist 175–7 Erik Sluuk, farmer in Ulvila 45 Favret–Saada anthropologist 126 fertility 102, 177, 188–9, 193–4 Firestone , Shulamith, feminist 174 fishing 38, 41, 43–4, 52, 66, 72–3, 100, 105, 107, 120, 122, 124–6, 139, 173, 178 förgörning 37, 40, 100 fornication 10, 54, 78–80, 83, 85–6, 92–3, 103–4, 107–9, 111, 162, 180, 185, 187 Gabriel Keckonius, Mayor of Pori town 39 Gaskill, Malcolm, historian 79 Gavelius, Elias, Kyläsaari former mayor of Kristiinankaupunki, 66–7 Gezelius, Johannes (senior), bishop of Turku 154, 157, 159, Gibson Marion, 99 Giddens, Anthony, sociologist 1, 5 Ginzburg, Carlo 99 gossip 11, 64, 75, 77, 93, 107, 136, 146, 198, 203, 204 Gothus, Laurentius Paulinus (bishop of Uppsala) 178 Great Northern War 13, 70, 167 group oath (purification oath) 29, 36, 40, 54, 72, 93–4, 108, 169, 189, 192, guardianship of children 25, 53–4, 138 guardianship of women 24–5, 138–9 Hartman, Mary S., historian 4, 12, 127, 128, 136, 148, 199, 200, 202 Haustafel 128, 154–5, 157–9, 161, 171, 182, 199 healers, healing 128–30, 132, 175–80 Heikki Janckari (Jankkari), Pomarkku 71–2, 101–4, 117, 139–43, 145–6, 161–2, 168–9, 190–92 Heikki Martinpoika, Vähä–Rauma 70

Heikki Matinpoika, Pännäinen 70 Heikki Tuomaanpoika, farmer in Kyläsaari, later burger in Pori town 23, 27–32, 35, 36–7, 43, 50, 53–4, 56, 96–8 Heikki Yrjönpoika Jankkari, Preiviikki 71–2, 93, 101–4, 107, 117–8, 126–7, 129, 133, 140, 143, 144, 161–2, 168–170, 190–93 Heikkinen, Antero, historian 64 Hester, Marianne, historian, 164, 174 Horn Gustaf, count of Pori, 17, 30, 65 horses 30, 56, 59, 96, 132–5 housewives 114–15, 121–2, 148 Howell, Martha, historian 128 industrialisation (proto-industriaalisation) 11–12, 81, 86, 88, 113, 128, 180, 200 inheritance 12, 23, 27–43, 45, 48–53, 60, 74, 88, 90, 97–8, 101, 108, 111, 116–17, 123, 126, 142–4, 147, 168–9, 198, 202–3 inquisitorial judicial system 13, 42, 78, 104, 110 inversion, witchcraft as 75, 101–6, 108, 111, 122, 124–5, 186, 201, 203 Jaakko Eeronpoika, farmer in Kyläsaari, later in Preiviikki 24, 27–32, 36–7, 50–51, 58, 69, 71, 122–3, 129, 134, 143–4. Jaakko Sipinpoika, Pori 39 judge 8, 14, 64, 80, 91, 98–100, 116–17 judicial praxis (as opposed to law) 10, 13–14, 17, 138, 142 Juha Eeronpoika, farmer in Kyläsaari 24, 39, 44, 46, 61, 66 Juha Olavinpoika, Risto Olavinpoika’s son, Pomarkku 135, 161, 168–9 jury 14, 23, 25, 28–9, 31, 37, 39–40, 43, 50–51, 54–6, 62–3, 71, 80, 89, 91, 94–5, 97–8, 116–17, 122, 124, 139 Jutikkala, Eino, historian 121, 137 Jyrki Pekanpoika 23 Kaarina Antintytär, Kyläsaari 94, 123 Kaarina Matintytär, maid in Kyläsaari 37–8, 43, 107 Karlsen, Carol, historian 75, 173 Keith Thomas, historian 43, 162, 170

Index Kerttu Matintytär, dependent lodger, Kyläsaari 38 Klemet Jaakonpoika, farmer in Kyläsaari 54–9, 62–3, 66, 68, 72–4, 123, 143, 145, 166, 170, 173, 176 Klööf, Maria, miss, Pännäinen 70 Larner, Christina, historian 8, 180 Lars Giers, customs officer in Pori 39 Law customary law 14, 30, 116, 138 Roman Law 10, 141, 197, 200 rural law 25, 48, 51, 53, 97, 138, 140 town law 54 Liisa Pentintytär 61, 100, 119 local government 52, 59, 176 Losman, Beata, historian, 25 lövjeri 40, 100 Lövkrona, Inger, anthropologist 134 Lutheranism (orthodox) 114–15, 127 Macfarlane, Alan, historian 43, 111, 162, 170 magic, see also maleficium magic, benevolent 13, 40–42, 45, 60, 78, 85, 128, 130–33, 148, 165 magic on cattle 38–40, 41, 61–4, 71, 73, 118–19, 120–22, 124, 126, 129–32, 134–6, 148, 166, 173, 178, 187, 189, 200 magic on horses 132–6, 148 magic and witchcraft trials magic and witchcraft trials, number of 9, 112 magic and witchcraft trials, sentences 9, 38–9, 49, 112 magistrate court (town magistrate court) 13–14, 51, 99 male witches 128–37, 148, 182; see also Heikki Janckari, Risto Olavinpoika, Klemet Jaakonpoika, Jaakko Eeronpoika Karlö, Matti Närvä et al. maleficium 8, 9, 37, 40, 42, 45, 60–61, 85, 100, 105, 108, 123, 128, 130–32, 148, 165, 191, see also magic Maria Pertuntytär Sawo, Pomarkku 71–2, 93, 103–4, 117, 139–43, 145–6, 161–2, 168–9, 190–92 market economy 113 Marketta Heikintytär, bailiffs’ wife in Yyteri 70 Marketta Jyrkintytär, Kyläsaari 59

229

Marketta Klauntytär, Pomarkku 39–40, 43, 185 Marketta Matintytär, 63–4, 119 marriage 12, 30, 36, 46, 53–4, 60, 74, 101, 113, 140, 145, 147–8, 151–2, 157, 164–5, 167–9, 184, 193, 202, marriage organization 54, 74 marriage, property in 29–30, 138 married married couple 13, 137, 141–2, 154 married men married women 25, 78, 138, 139, 140, 142, 152, 160, 186, 188, 197 see also wives marrying 10, 12, 22, 32, 35, 46, 52–6, 74, 80, 93, 122, 129, 145, 161, 168, 169, 193, 202 Matti Eskonpoika farmer in Pomarkku 39, 43, 55, 126, 139–40, 142–143, Matti Laurinpoika, Preiviikki 58, 71 Matti Närvä witch in Ulvila 132 Matti Tuomaanpoika, Kyläsaari 22–3, 27, 30–31, 96–8 Matti Tuomaanpoika Lusa, Pännäinen, 70–71, 118, 162 Mauss, Marcel, anthropologist 127 Midelfort, Erik, historian 190 midwives 172, 175, 177–8 Mikko Matinpoika Sawo, Pomarkku 71–2, 101, 168–9 Mikko Pekanpoika, Matti Lusas’ son-in-law, 70 military 3, 10, 33, 65–7, 82, 155, 167, 198–9 Mört, Olof, land surveyor, Kyläsaari 66–8, 73 Muchembled, Robert historian 8 Murray, Margaret, egyptologist 10 naming and witchcraft 105–7, 203 Nenonen, Marko, historian 64, 86, 178, 204 Oja, Linda, historian 100, 132 Olavi Juhaninpoika, Pännäinen 70 patriarchal ideologies 3, 11–12, 98, 147, 164, 193, 200 patriarchal power 2–4, 6, 126, 158, 171, 175 (non–patriarchal power, 175) 176, 201 patriarchal rhetoric 12–13, 75, 146, 163, 166, 196, 199

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patriarchal society, 75, 152–3, 158, 163, 173, 177, 188 patriarchy 153–4, 156, 158, 171–2, 174–5, 177, 180–81, 188, 190 Perttu Laurinpoika Sawo, Pomarkku 71–2, 101–2, 104, 139–43, 145, 168–9, 190–92 Pleijel, Hilding theologists/historian 155–8 Poska, Allyson, historian 12, 148, 202 power–state 3, 82, 86, 155–6 professional witches 42, 111, 130–31, 135 professionalisation of courts 80, 91 proxy system 24–5, 84, 87–90, 138–9, 144 Prytz, Gabriel, monsignor 61–2 purification oath, see group oath Purkiss, Diane, literature scholar 99, 105, 121, 123, 179,181, 183–4, 192 Pylkkänen, Anu, historian 83, 85, 126, 136, 141–2, 143, 144 reputation 25, 93, 103, 117–19, 163–4, 167, 193, 199, 203 reputation of witch 64, 75, 93, 106, 109, 129, 163, 192, 203 Reynolds, Susan, historian, 4 Rich, Adrianne, feminist 174–5 Risto Olavinpoika, Kynäsjärvi 49, 71–2, 101–3, 108, 117, 121, 129, 131,135, 168, 192 Roper, Lyndal, historian 52, 78, 99, 115, 154, 164, 164–7, 170–71, 179, 181, 183–92, 194, 199–200 Rowlands, Allison, historian 92 Rummel, Walter, historian 190 rumour 37, 42–3, 64, 70–73, 77, 91–3, 101, 103–4, 106–7, 109–10, 117, 161–3, 165, 168, 170, 191 Scott, Joan, historian 137, 146, 153, 171 scribe 14, 22, 29, 37, 56, 66, 70–71, 91, 94, 98–100, 110, 163, 179 shamanism (see also tietäjä) 61, 131–2 Sharpe, Jim, historian 77, 81, 92 signeri 40 Simo Birgerinpoika, farmer and juror from Vähä–Rauma 37, 50, 97 Simo Tuomaanpoika, Kyläsaari, later Sörmarkku 23, 29–31, 50, 53–4, 96–8 Sipi Antinpoika 62–3, 119, 166, Sjögren, Åsa Karlsson, historian 25 Sörlin, Per, historian 92

Spoff, Johan, corporal, Kyläsaari 66–8, 72–3 Stadin, Kekke, historian 154, 161 Table of Duties (see Haustafel) talion 14, 91 Taussi–Sjöberg, Maria, historian 82, 84 tietäjä 131 torture 7, 14, 61, 99, 112 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, historian 7–9, 49, 61, 78, 112, 188 trolldom, troll, trulldom 38–9, 40, 100, Tuomas Mikonpoika, farmer in Kyläsaari 22–3, 28, 32, 45–6, 96 Tuomas Sipinpoika 58, 60–64, 67, 73, 91, 92, 119, 124 unmarried men, 84, 88, 109, 138, 198 unmarried women 25, 30, 84, 88, 109, 160, 198 Valpuri Mikontytär, an innkeeper’s wife 163 Valpuri Pekantytär, Agata’s sister 39, Valpuri Sipintytär, Pännäinen 70–72, 91, 118, 162–3 vicars, 13, 30, 39–40, 55–6, 68, 167, 176, 185 vicars as prosecutors and authorities in court 13, 27, 30, 40, 42–3, 54, 79, 91, 96–7 vicars as prosecutors of witchcraft and magic 36–8, 40, 42–3, 101, 124 vidskepelse 37–8, 40, 42, 60, 78, 100, 108 Vilkuna, Kustaa H.J., historian 44 War 1–2, 10, 23, 27, 35, 53, 82, 84, 88, 98, 103, 116, 124, 147, 173, 175, 199, Weber, Max, sociologist 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 114, 127, 137, 157, 158, 201 widows 3, 13, 21–2, 32, 39, 40, 51, 59, 65, 70, 74–5, 78, 88–90, 96, 103, 116, 142, 151, 155, 160, 166, 197, widows and the law 24–6, 53, 137–8, 142 widows as witches 162, 185–90, widows remarrying 53 Wiesner, Merry E., historian 25, 199 witchcraft as stealing 41, 124–5 witch-craze 7–8, 10, 60–61, 112, 129, 165, 167, 172, 188, witch-hunt, 8, 86, 129, 171–2, 178, 181

Index witches’ sabbat; see also Blåkulla 7–9, 40, 42, 60, 64, 70, 72, 99, 102, 129–32, 165, wives 3, 46, 52–3, 56–7, 74–5, 77–9, 82, 83, 102, 114–15, 121, 137, 141–2, 144, 151–6, 160–65, 167, 170–71, 175, 193, 200–204, Wünder, Heide, historian 141

231

Ylikangas, Heikki, historian 82 Yrjö Pekanpoika, 46 see also Jyrki Pekanpoika Åström Maria, folklorist 44 Åström, (folklorist) Österberg, Eva, historian 4