ABSTRACT
A close reading of early modern witchcraft trials demonstrates the complexity of women’s identities and communities. In eighteenth-century Sweden, magical practice and discourse provided some women with the power and agency to negotiate their social positions in the community, while it marginalized others. Women’s access to magical power and the authority to use it varied according to their social and marital status. Women’s identities as wives, widows, unmarried mothers or maidservants determined the legitimacy of their use of magic as a symbolic power. In exploring how women used magic to manipulate power relations between each other, I will discuss how the differences within the community of women shaped the discourse and the experience of witchcraft. Women’s use of magic in the early modern period raises a number of interesting questions. To what extent did the performance of female magic subvert or reproduce the early modern patriarchal gender order? How did magic accommodate women’s shared interests as well as the social conflicts between them? These questions are especially interesting to explore for the eighteenth-century witch trials which differ from the better known witch-hunts of the previous century in several important ways that impact on our understanding of women’s communities, identities and social powers.2
