In this intriguing study of seventeenth-century Finnish witchcraft, Raisa Maria Toivo reexamines several intersecting topics: gender and witchcraft; women and power; witchcraft trials as motivated by elite or popular culture; and the reliability of court records for determining popular beliefs. That she does so from a single case study centered around a Finnish peasant widow, Agata Pekantytär, is certainly courageous. Does she pull it off?
On the whole, yes. Agata, a recently widowed farmer's wife, first appeared in 1671 in the rural court of Ulvila in western Finland, then under Swedish control. She was appealing the inheritance disposition of her husband's farm, called Tommila, which had fallen to his brothers, although he had been the eldest. Agata and her daughters were forced into village cottages, resorting to the court for compensation against neighbors and kin, the latter “a quarrelsome lot of people” (27). Finally, in 1674 the court awarded Tommila to her eldest daughter Riitta Matintytär, with Agata as manager. Her socioeconomic position improved, Agata suddenly found herself as the accused in several magic and witchcraft cases.
These began in 1675 when the local Lutheran Vicar relayed a parishioner's comment that Agata was using magic to discover the thief of some herring; eventually the court discovered that the rumor had begun with Agata's sister-in-law. After admitting to some of the charges, Agata was found guilty of maleficium and ordered to pay a forty-mark fine, a light sentence for a capital offence. In the following year the Vicar accused Agata of offering supernatural means of birth control and finding winter feed for her cattle by tying bells on the cows' necks, a practice normally reserved for summer. Agata claimed that her contraception advice was only a joke, while the bells were to amuse the children. Thanks to her previous conviction, the jury found her guilty, yet she was assessed the same forty mark fine. In 1677 Agata lost a slander trial, with an identical punishment.
The bad reputation stuck, so that when in 1686 a neighbor complained that Agata had accused him of witchcraft, she quickly found herself charged with riding a calf to the witches' sabbath at Blåkulla, Sweden, where twenty years earlier confessions of children had led to that country's major witch panic. Perhaps, Toivo infers, stories of Blåkulla witches were circulating as local entertainment, or to frighten children; evidently the sabbat had become part of Finnish peasant culture, and was no mere imposition of the elites upon the populace. Testimony focused instead on maleficia, yet the local court surprisingly found in her favor, while the Court of Appeal did not object, noting instead the hostility and envy of some villagers toward the widow. In Finland, witch trials were no cynical maneuver of elites seeking to shape popular practice, but a means by which ordinary folk sought redress against neighbors. Building on Stuart Clark's witchcraft as inversion thesis, Toivo astutely concludes 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” (101).
Toivo challenges scholars to reexamine the European witch-hunts by focusing on the “normal” trials, i.e., the majority of cases that did not lead to mass persecution, and on popular magic, rather than elite demonology. She also implicitly reverses the tendency to evaluate the “periphery” of witch-hunting, such as Scandinavia, via its center, Western Europe. Finally, she dispels two popular images: first, that women lacked access to power in the courts; and second, that witches were poor, powerless women unprotected by their families. Supported by some recent scholarship, Toivo notes that accused witches were of average wealth and social standing. She is not afraid to challenge the perspectives of leading scholars, such as Lyndal Roper and Robin Briggs, although her characterization of “witch panic” scholarship as “Trevor-Roperian” seems a bit dismissive.
Toivo admits that Finnish witchcraft trials were unusual in that they saw as many men as women accused, a feature common to only a few regions, such as Iceland, Estonia, and some French provinces. Moreover, the witches' sabbat was not prominent, torture was rare, the Appeals Court frequently overturned capital sentences, and her cases fell late in the witch-hunt era. Some of her extrapolations from her Finnish sources therefore appear forced. Most irritating, however, are the large number of typographical errors; since English is not Toivo's native tongue, Ashgate Press should have provided a stronger editorial hand, and more professionally produced images. That said, Toivo's monograph seriously advances both the gender and witchcraft fields by its careful archival research and original approach to the wider questions.
