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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[Review length: 649 words • Review posted on January 19, 2010]