Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society is an interesting but flawed study of Finnish witchcraft trials after the period of the major European witchcraft trials. Toivo is a historian who has paid close attention to the results of recent historical research on witchcraft trials as well as folkloristic, sociological, and anthropological research on and relevant to the social dynamics of witchcraft accusations and trials and the social structures that support them. Toivo’s first paragraph amusingly summarizes what the book is about: “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 a quarrelsome, possibly not 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 relationship to power, authority and status” (1).
Finnish witchcraft trials differ from the earlier trials in France, Switzerland, and Germany in that people convicted of witchcraft in Finland were fined, not executed, a practice that hearkens back to the medieval practice of assigning penances to those convicted of witchcraft. What is particularly interesting in the case of Agata Pekantytär is that, although she shows up in the records as a quarrelsome woman, she was fully a part of the local community, both during and after her trials for witchcraft. Indeed, as Toivo shows, she was a prosperous farmer and not, as the witch is often stereotyped, some peripheral old woman who is an economic burden to the community. The Finnish example thus immediately questions the tendency in studies of the witchcraft trials to explain the accusations based on the marginality of the accused.
Although Toivo is concerned to create a theoretical model for the analysis of the role of gender and power in European witchcraft in general, her work is best when she works most closely with the available Swedish-Finnish and Finnish data to explain the local events and beliefs. The view of Agata Pekantytär and other Finns convicted of witchcraft that arises from this close study of the sources shows that, in Finland at least, witchcraft accusations tended to be made against the middling sorts of the community: women and men who were relatively prosperous, yet not of the upper class, and definitely not marginal to the community. Toivo is very good on the structural background of the witchcraft accusations: her coverage and analyses of the legal processes, both formal and folk, as well as the relations between the genders, and the relations between the state and the peasants, are in general convincing and suggestive for future studies.
The main problem with Toivo’s book is that she often rests too much on too little evidence, sometimes to the point that her analysis of a given situation seems doubtful: the materials she presents are intriguing, but are not always sufficient to support her assertions. At times she attempts to ameliorate this problem through the use of comparison; but, without a firm base of local evidence, these comparisons only highlight the insufficiency of the local materials. She also has long passages of review of scholarship that often have little relevance to her analysis, and that are, after her summary of the scholarship, dismissed as irrelevant to the material she is discussing. These reviews of scholarship are perhaps a legacy of the book’s origin as a dissertation, but they are unfortunately very distracting from the arguments Toivo is making.
Attention to witchcraft trials and beliefs in the centers and peripheries, in both time and space, is necessary to fully understand the nature of witchcraft belief and prosecutions in Europe as a whole. Raisa Toivo’s Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society is a good study of witchcraft trials in one of the peripheral areas of Europe after the major witchcraft trials. Though flawed, it nonetheless presents suggestive ideas about the role of power, gender, and class in the prosecution of accused witches and in folk culture more generally.
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[Review length: 688 words • Review posted on May 12, 2009]