Although witch trials feature in the title, this book itself treats the trials more as material where a historian can find evidence on “the general conception of the world and the performance of supernatural forces in it” (14), as Malmstedt states. Nevertheless, the book gives an account of the Bohuslän witch trial period: its events, participants, and the construction of “witchcraft stories” in the trials’ examinations, testimonies, and confessions, where the court mixed elements taken from the local folk tradition and what Malmstedt calls “the scholarly tradition of witch belief” (14).
On this basis, the book goes on to consider dreams, dreamt-up experiences, and ideas of shapeshifting (in order to sink ships at night) that were presented in the testimonies. Personally, I found this part of the book the most interesting and insightful, as it moved between examples of the porous boundaries and entangled layers of reality, pointing to differences between things that people experienced and things that really—either in a physical or idealistic sense of the word—happened.
The next part of the book starts with emotions and witchcraft, the magical power of words and spells as well as magical objects. The first of these has recently seen considerable developments, whereas the latter topics are more traditional stock in anthropological approaches to witchcraft. Their connections are worthy of more attention than they have heretofore been given. Finally, the book returns to the layered reality of the world and popular beliefs about the roles of God and Satan in it.
The book is an English version of an originally Swedish publication, En förtrollad värld: Förmoderna föreställningar och bohuslänska trolldomsprocesser 1669–1672 (2018). While the latter part of the title translates roughly to the present English title, the first part of it is only reflected in the heading of the concluding chapter. Nevertheless, it reveals the tone of the book and the tradition to which it belongs. “En förtrollad värld” translates into English as “a bewitched world” or “an enchanted world.” It is a reference to Weber's modernization theory, part of which was disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world via rational enlightened, scientific thought. Responding to a trend by now so well established that it is beginning to feel traditional—see, e.g., Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed” (The Historical Journal 51 [2008]: 497–528)—Malmstedt points out that during the latter half of the seventeenth century, at least Sweden was not disenchanted but, rather, bewitched: the modernization process that should have started a few centuries before was progressing slowly, if not failing to do so altogether.
Nevertheless, the author does not question the connection between secularization and modernization; his critique stays firmly within the modernization model. He includes an interesting discussion on the nature of premodern reality as multifaceted, porous, and layered. From the perspective of enhanced and alternative realities in media and games studies or AI science—or even quantum physics–inspired popular culture—this might no longer seem so solely premodern as the author leads his readers to believe.
Witch trials in general, and the type of witch panics that occurred in Bohuslän specifically, were dramatic exemptions from everyday life. Do testimonies given in such exceptional circumstances reflect general everyday worldviews? This is a question the author asks often enough. Perhaps a wider picture would have been gained by further comparison to scholarly works on witchcraft in the neighboring areas that belonged, at one point or another, in the same country (Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia). Instead, Malmstedt carefully close reads the differences, ambiguities, and small additions by different narrators within his sources, qualifying his results in their immediate context. This forms one of the most enjoyable parts of reading this book. Pointing out differences caused by class, education, and other variables in exposure to learned and foreign cultures, Malmstedt concludes that the witch trial testimonies nevertheless reflect a range of opinions that were more or less generally shared.
