Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society

Finland and the Wider European Experience

Raisa Maria Toivo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351872621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How could a woman be three times accused of witchcraft and go on running a successful farmstead? Why would men use a frying pan for cattle magic? Why did witches keep talking about the children? What kind of a relation did Finnish witches have with authority and power? These are among the questions Raisa Maria Toivo addresses in this study, as she explores the gender implications of the complex system of household management and public representation in which seventeenth-century Finnish women and men negotiated their positions. From specific case studies, Toivo broadens her narrative to include historiographical discussion on the history of witchcraft, on women's and gender history and on early modern social history, shedding new light on each theme. Toivo contributes to the on-going discussion in the European historiography about whether the early modern period witnessed an improvement, decline, or simply alteration in the conditions of oppression of women within patriarchal households by using a multidimensional set of roles that could be adopted by women. Finally, she demonstrates convincingly that members of the solid peasant class were not only subject of the newly forming states, but also avid users of the court system, which they manipulated and put to work in the interests of their own individual, household, and collective affairs.

Chapter 1

Introduction

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 quarrelsome, possibly not a 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 relation to power, authority and status.

In fact, of course, there lived many women and men like her in rural Finland. The Finnish court records, forming a continuous series from the 1620s onwards, provide exceptional opportunities for historians working on the lives of men or women peasant farmers. If Agata is exceptional in representing in the Finnish early modern peasantry, the Finnish source material is exceptionally fruitful in international comparison.

The state and power among the peasants

A well-known British historian once entitled a collection of his essays The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, claiming that it was a period of cultural, political and economic crisis.¹ Historians have eagerly developed the notion to embrace the entire early modern period, defining it as a period lasting 300 hundred years with climate change and bad harvests, yet growing population and consequently growing poverty, continuous religious wars and political turmoil, and state-building, centralising government and a tightening control over the everyday lives of all.

According to sociologists from Max Weber to Anthony Giddens, the formation of new states and the struggle of new rulers to establish their power was likely to create a state monopoly of violence – local power would be channelled for the use of the rulers by the creation of a judicial system. New kinds of abstract crimes against the ruler, the state and the religion, would emerge. Whereas the previous crimes concerned the interests of individuals and kin groups in local communities, the new crimes seemed to undermine the newly established state power. The prosecution of the new crimes also enhances the influence of the judicial system and the detailed control over the lives of the subjects. This thought has persisted in historiography for as long as sociology has influenced the discipline. Historians have also been interested in Norbert Elias’s related presentation of the decline of violent crime during the late Middle Ages and early modern era as a civilising process.²

A Marxist version of the same state-building process sees the early modern period as one during which feudal power was transferred from the individual landowners to the central state. This was either simply because of the disintegration of the previous system as such or because of the needs created by the constant warfare during the period.³

Power is an ambiguous concept, especially when it concerns the common folk outside democratic institutions, or to women. Most often, theories on power and the related concepts of authority and status concern state power, forms of government and coercion at the elite level. For sociologists, the evolution of organised central government was a crucial criterion of ‘modernity’.

Historians, too, have extensively researched in the development of ‘modernity’ and the sociological framework. In the context of the macro theories of state power, historians have treated the contacts of the common man or woman with power in early modern Europe as those of oppression and restriction, exploitation and coercion, despite occasional references to the development of Diet systems. That members of the peasant population might have possessed, created and disseminated power and authority, and that, consequently, considerably finer gradations of status and authority existed among these people than the expression ‘the common lot’ would suggest, is only gradually receiving detailed consideration. This work seeks to explore the production and reproduction of power, influence and authority among the peasant population through the rhetoric of authority and status and the related values-basis.

The Weberian or Mannian macro theories of power, however, are fairly useless in a study of small peasant communities with no administrative staff and very few outspoken rules of power. Terming the early modern as a ‘traditional’ type of authority in the Weberian sense, as is often done, is misleading and anachronistic. More problematically, it also hinders further analysis on a different basis.⁴ Within a Foucaultian view of power and authority as part of all interaction between people on a daily basis without being a projection of the macro-power of the state, power and authority emerge from below, in discourse and representation.⁵

Despite continuous emphasis on history from below, discourse and deconstructive methods, Scandinavian early modern social history has rarely treated these as separate from the state power. Power and authority are seen as a chain of command distributed and delegated from above, controlling those underneath. Historians have endeavoured to study people and individuals as proactive members of the state, emphasising the input of the populace to the state instead of the other way around. However, historians very often still describe the macro-structure behind the choices of the early modern people as that of centralising state power, growing markets and economic crisis.

Ironically, present-day historians seem to emphasise the state-building process more often in connection with the peasants than the elites. Early modernists who have worked on elites and private material stress the private and the informal, friendship and patronage ties, Court factions, family strategies – in short, what Weberian sociologists called pre-modern – and have found the real structures of power there.⁶ Those who have worked on the popular masses, however, have – despite the works of such leading figures as Giovanni Levi and E. P. Thompson⁷ – still found themselves emphasising the modernisation process, the formation of central government and its legitimisation through patriarchal ideology. These factors seem, after all, evident in the bureaucratic and methodologically complicated source material. This model has been especially persistent in Scandinavian historiography, with an emphasis on the military state and the Great Power of seventeenth-century Sweden.⁸

In the power-state context, power in an early modern peasant community is usually treated in terms of patriarchal ideals. Peasants formed a household structure, which is thought to have been identical to the power structure at the top of society: husbands on the top, wives under them, and children and servants at the bottom were likened to the king and his governmental apparatus and subjects.⁹ The patriarchal ideal and its present historical treatments see power mostly as power to command others. The result is that women have been seen as lacking power, or only having power when there were no men in the households, when women were widows. Peasant men are also seen as being under the patriarchal power and control of the various levels of government. This is a very crude picture, based largely on the assumption that the elites promoted this model of household authority in order to strengthen the central power. It is a picture which needs to be modified.

The rise of the state and central government, although only one of the factors determining relationships and use of power in early modern Europe, not only brought with it stronger central control and oppression but also produced new ways for people to exert influence in matters which interested them. Other means included the judicial systems, the parliamentary estate or diet systems of many countries and forms of governmental chains from the local community to the top of the kingdom. Currently, scholars emphasise that early modern state formation would not have been possible without the co-operation of the people, and that therefore a real and continuous negotiation with them was necessary. The coercive power of Machiavellian princes was an unattained ideal, not a reality;it never could have been more than this. There is, therefore, no reason to think of the process of early modern society as one led from above. This view has led historians, following Susan Reynolds, to treat the peasants and burghers as agents with their own aims and initiatives instead of as reactionary objects of control, acculturation or civilisation. The populace took initiative against – and for – the effects of centralisation of power and the tightening grip of the state on their lives or, according to Eva Österberg et al.,¹⁰ found new channels of influence in the bodies and organisations of jurisdiction and local government which the central bureaucracy brought with it. Currently, many historians emphasise a kind of cultural negotiation between the elites and the populace. However, state formation still remains the primus motor in much historiography, especially Scandinavian and German.¹¹

The challenge for current historiography is to find a way to move beyond the modern/pre-modern dichotomy manifest in the discussion on the central state power. Instead of assuming that people reacted with more or less initiative to state control and the needs of the growing economy, we need to ask if these macro changes may have been the result of choices made by a large enough number of ordinary people in order to best secure their livelihoods. It is unlikely that the early modern peasant farmers decided to build states. However, the central state may well have been the result of what they felt necessary and preferable in terms of how to organise their lives as comfortably and securely as possible. It may equally well be that the early modern ideological rhetoric of patriarchal power was a response to a very different reality.¹² For this purpose, the Finnish early modern material is of Europe-wide interest. Recently Mary Hartman has inverted the primus motor order by claiming that the birth of many features from industrial capitalism to the new forms of power and authority we now call modern, were linked to, if not caused by, the women’s older age at marriage and the resulting nuclear type family pattern in northwestern Europe.¹³ Thereby Hartman inverts the traditionally emphasised causal relationship and the chronological order of the changes in the early modern ideology and practice of power. These and other causal relationships in something as complicated as human behaviour are more likely to be multiple and multidirectional than one-way. It is nevertheless evident from Hartman’s approach that the behaviour, thoughts and aims of the people, the town burghers and the peasants had real significance and a real effect on the history of their time.

Household is therefore not a gender question any more exclusively than is any other topic in history. Likewise, the changes, which have been explained as a 300-hundred year economic, political and cultural crisis between the Black Death and politico-religious protest of the late Middle Ages and the period of revolutions at the end of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, must be connected not only to impoverishment and oppression but also to a vigorous search for new ways to do better in each and every one’s lives. The options, it must be assumed, were somehow becoming better or more numerous than before. They supported the growing labour resources which were not only mouths to feed but could also sustain growing production. They drew on the slowly developing scientific and agricultural innovations and the global economy, which may have been more unstable but still definitely growing. These changes took place on both elite and peasant levels, in daily lives and household strategies.

The multitude of significations given to the terms power and authority illustrates how they evade precision. Definitions of power vary from the quality or property of a person or an institution that enables him or her to do or affect something to the person or institution in possession of the quality. The English term has a strong mechanical usage, and it can be used as a verb and in a multitude of phrases and combinations.¹⁴ The sociological definitions of power derive from the Weberian definition that power is the likelihood that others will obey certain or all commands or the reasonable assumption that one’s will and action will have the intended effect on others. The Weberian or Giddensian concepts of power, as well as the post-structuralist Foucaultian versions are still essentially powers-over something, relations of domination. Analyses of the gendering of power-over have shared an understanding that it is unjust or oppressive to those over whom the power is exercised. Feminist usages especially have pointed out that there are also forms of power-to.¹⁵

Authority and power have been termed synonymous or partly overlapping. According to Oxford English Dictionary, authority means, among other things, the power or the right to enforce obedience, moral or legal supremacy and the right to command or take an ultimate decision, but also a derived or delegated power and the power of influencing the actions and beliefs of others.¹⁶ In short, authority is power which is recognised as legitimate. Authority can also be thought of as power to influence action, opinion and belief. Such authority may be personal or practical influence, or a weight of judgement inspiring belief in others. A third kind of authority refers to expert knowledge of things, not considered as power as such but often producing the intended opinion or judgement.

Status, on the other hand, means an acknowledged right to expect a certain kind of treatment or respect from others. It does not necessarily imply relationships of obedience. It is connected to authority, and higher status may increase authority or vice versa, but this is not always the case. Status should not be regarded as merely a ladder, where it is better to stand on a higher rung than on a lower one, but also as a foothold in society in general. It may be stronger or weaker, steadier or shakier. Status is closely connected to the question of who or what somebody is. The concept of status broadens the scope of my analysis: whereas not all court cases where someone uses the court as a means of coercing others can be thought of as domination even if they did succeed,¹⁷ such actions can often be regarded as either affirming or challenging somebody’s status.

Terms relating to power vary in different languages, and it has been claimed that their etymology betrays the way these societies think of power. There are terms deriving from potestas and patria, such as the English power or the French pouvoir, referring to patriarchal or magisterial power. There are terms deriving from valere or volere, like the Finnish valta or German Gewalt, pointing to a form of influence drawn from force and will. There are also terms deriving from Persian or Latin magus or muge, like German Macht or Finnish mahti, referring to an almost magical might or ability.¹⁸ While the two earlier sets of terms are most often used by historian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• List of Maps
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Widow Farmer Witch: Agata Pekatytär 1670–1700
• 3 Witches and Power
• 4 Work, Status and Power
• 5 Family, Women's Status and Power
• 6 Conclusions: Mother, Wife and Witch
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index