May be of interest to some.

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Subject: [JFRR] Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden (van Gent, Jacqueline)

Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden. By Jacqueline
van Gent. 2009. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers.
232 pages. ISBN: 978-90-04-17114-5 (hard cover). 

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Indiana University ([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 649 words]

Jacqueline van Gent's Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century
Sweden is a solid contribution to our understanding of witchcraft and
magic in European folk culture. It is one of a number of recent books
that provide a detailed study of witchcraft and magic in a specific
locality in the period after the major witchcraft trials, a period
that, arguably, represents the norm in the position of magic and
witchcraft in European folk culture. It is also very useful because
it examines witchcraft and magic in Sweden, an area often treated as
peripheral in studies of magic and witchcraft, and in doing so it
illuminates the social and legal contexts of magic and witchcraft in
Europe in the eighteenth century.

The folk beliefs concerning magic and witchcraft that Van Gent
describes are not unique to Sweden. They are in fact very similar to
the kinds of beliefs encountered elsewhere in Europe in that period
and later. The social dynamics that led to accusations of the use of
witchcraft or magic too are very similar to those in other areas of
Europe. Van Gent's monograph shows, as several other recent
monographs have, that there is no real periphery in European folk
beliefs about witchcraft and magic. The particular constellation of
beliefs associated with any locality is of course important in any
study of witchcraft and magic, and Van Gent does not slight these
local beliefs. She draws attention, for example, to the continuity of
medieval Scandinavian folk beliefs and eighteenth-century Swedish
beliefs, without, however, falling into the error of believing that
the survivals of medieval belief made the eighteenth-century Swedish
peasantry non-Christian. Though the connections of these folk beliefs
to Lutheran folk religion are not as strongly made as they should be,
Van Gent does not envision the peasantry of eighteenth-century Sweden
as being pagan.

The way that we think of European folk magic and witchcraft has been
conditioned mostly by studies that foreground the importance of
writings like the Malleus Maleficarum and the large-scale trials of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Local studies like Van
Gent's are rewriting those conceptions. The accused are often
imagined as older women who were a burden on their communities, yet,
as Van Gent shows, this is not the case in Sweden. The accused were,
in fact, usually relatively prosperous, and appear to have been fully
integrated into their communities. It is also becoming clear that
while the witchcraft manuals did have some influence, local
magistrates were typically using the then-current laws of the church
and state as guidance in their investigations and trials: they were,
in fact, very unlikely to have the manuals at hand or even to know of
them. Though both the state and the church remained concerned about
witchcraft and folk magic after the period of the major trials, the
late trials, like those of Sweden, also reverted to the medieval
pattern in sentencing, in which the death penalty was rare.

From the evidence that Van Gent and others have presented it is clear
that after the period of the witchcraft hysteria beliefs about magic
and witchcraft slipped back into their former role. And it is this
calmer period that seems to be truly characteristic of the
interactions of folk belief with the official church and state. Local
studies like Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
are showing just how magic and witchcraft fit into the mentalities of
early modern societies. Though Van Gent is sometimes annoyingly loose
with her use of terms and concepts from folklore scholarship (as on
page 92, where she refers to a legend as a folktale), Magic, Body and
the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden is an intriguing and very
useful addition to the growing body of scholarship on magic and
witchcraft after the period of the major witchcraft trials, as well
as to the limited body of scholarship in English on Scandinavian folk
belief.

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Read this review on-line at:

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