ABSTRACT
Women who have left behind personal written material after their deaths can be found in almost all periods of history, but they always seem to have belonged to social or cultural elites.1 Individuals not in the elite or wealthier bourgeoisie classes usually produced very little written material of their own, and even less is extant. Women tend to disappear from source material after one or perhaps two incidents. So do men, but tracing men is still easier than tracing women. Finnish seventeenthcentury peasants appear in court records, tax rolls, parish records and perhaps parish account books or parish meeting records, if such exist. However, Agata Pekantytär, a farmer’s widow whose story this chapter will tell, seems to appear often in the records. It is possible to follow her story over three decades. Upon closer reading of early modern source material, especially court records, we find that other women – and men – like her emerge. For the researcher, tracing the peasantry and reconstructing a personal picture of their lives is easier in Finland and Sweden than in most of the rest of Europe.
