Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden by Jaqueline Van Gent (review)

In Scandinavia, trials for witchcraft were conducted through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The phenomenon of witch-hunting has been linked in general to the era of Protestant reformation and demonology. In recent years, scholars such as Owen Davies, Willem de Blecourt, and others have turned their attention to popular beliefs about magic and trials of magic and witchcraft after the period of the witch hunts. However, this late period still needs further exploration; and this alone is a good reason for welcoming Jacqueline Van Gent’s book on magic and witchcraft in eighteenth-century Sweden. Luckily, Van Gent’s book does much more than just fill a gap in current research. It is innovative and persuasive in its argument, and raises a number of new research questions.

Van Gent makes it clear that she intends to challenge the functionalist view predominant in witchcraft research for decades by combining her historical analysis with an anthropological approach to embodiment and selfhood, with her key concepts being magic, body, and the self. She starts by making a convincing case that the lack of any dualistic perception of body and soul among early moderns created a view of magic that was very distinct from ours. Taking as her starting point Mary Douglas’s notion of the body as an agent of magic, Van Gent makes it the aim of her book to subject the Swedish magic that postdated the witch hunts to an in-depth analysis on the basis of the preserved trial records. Building upon recent developments in Nordic legal history, she argues that the early modern courtroom resembled a theatrical stage revealing interlocking mechanisms of social control. In the courtroom, the illness caused by the suspected witch was presented and confirmed by the witnesses and victim, and in the process the social relations of the individuals involved were revealed in public.

The Swedish court system, in many ways akin to the Danish, consisted of lower local courts and higher courts of appeal, the highest being the Appellate Court of Göta. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the courtroom was mainly a space for solving interpersonal conflicts; during the eighteenth century, it developed into a forum for solving conflicts between state and individual—a development that can also be traced in other parts of Scandinavia. In Van Gent’s estimation, these trials hardly ever included demonological features. Some alterations can be detected after 1734, when a comprehensive law code was issued—including, among other things, regulations on witchcraft and magic. As a consequence of the Law of 1734, the death penalty was restricted to those convicted of entering into a pact with the devil. Nevertheless, the law did bring about a significant increase in trials involving magic, mainly due to a rise in accusations of the use of healing magic. In addition, in this period gender distribution among those accused of magic was almost equally divided between males and females, in contrast to the former preponderance of females. Van Gent explains the increase in numbers of trials involving healing magic by reference to the greater frequency with which parish priests were engaged in trials, often as accusers. She argues that cases brought by priests were first and foremost a strategic element in a religious reform program, a view she supports by showing that the priests initiated trials only for beneficial magic.

Since witchcraft and magic always left their mark on the body, through illness or loss of sanity, for example, Van Gent argues that bodily practice and emotion have to be taken into consideration, if we are to gain a better understanding of popular perceptions of magic. Van Gent proceeds to address the identification of the self, arguing that, according to popular perceptions in the eighteenth century, magical powers were not understood to be received from an external power such as the devil or magical words, but rather inherited in the...