ABSTRACT
In the age of the European witch hunts, Scandinavia consisted of two major political entities: the kingdom of Denmark, or Denmark – Norway as it is often known, with its dependencies Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; and the kingdom of Sweden, or Sweden – Finland. Allegations of maleficium, however, were to dominate the sixteenth-century witch trials, often regarded as the precursor of the wave of Scandinavian persecution that peaked in the seventeenth century. The records of more than 400 Scandinavian witchcraft trials survive from the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century, Scandinavian royalty continued to figure surprisingly large in the stories of witchcraft. The sources for the sixteenth century are so fragmentary, however, that they hardly permit a quantitative study of the nature and scope of the witch trials. Several of the necessary conditions for the persecution of witches were in place in the Middle Ages.
