Raisa Maria Toivo

Abuse of Parents in Early Modern Finland Structures and Emotions

In the early modern courts of law in Finland—then a part of Sweden—physical and verbal violence by (teenage or adult) children against their parents was theoretically a capital crime. Nevertheless, in practice, extenuating circumstances were sought and punishments were mitigated. One of the common extenuating circumstances was that the parent had provoked the abuse through overdisciplining the child or misusing parental authority in the household. In the trials, each party tried to excuse and if possible legitimize their own behavior. In this article, I investigate the phenomenon of the abuse of parents in the law courts of seventeenth-century Finland and the argumentation of parental power and its refutation in those trials. In the trials, values and expectations of parenthood and parental authority were discussed, used, and played on by different parties in cases dealing with the abuse of a parent.

Violence between parents and children: courts of law in early modern Finland

This article studies the attitudes and significance of violence between parents and children as they appear in court records of lower courts and Courts of Appeal in early modern Finland. The paper discusses four kinds of violence: 1) the deliberate killing of children by their parents, 2) neglect of children or their upbringing by the parents and 3) physical or verbal violence by the children towards their parents. These were categories of forbidden violence between parents and children. Fourthly, 4) this paper discusses instances when violence was considered legal and even accepted, the so-called disciplinary violence committed by parents against their children. The important concepts in talking about violence are codes of honour and social hierarchy, the emphasis placed on social order and peace in society. The importance of peace and order emerge particularly when discussing concealment and publicity, responsibility and guilt, as well as of hierarchy. Emotional considerations seem to have been extremely important in violence between parents and children.

Introduction: Gender, material culture and emotions in Scandinavian history

The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together articles from scholars working in different time periods in Scandinavian history to discuss the relation between gender, material culture and emotions. Historians are increasingly becoming interested in exploring material culture as an alternative source that complements our more traditional sources of written texts. Historians’ interests in the material aspects of society and history are not restricted to the later time periods, but include the medieval and early modern periods as well. Such a ‘material turn’ is now a growing international trend, as the reception of the pioneering book by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds, Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), shows. In Scandinavia, there is equally an increasing interest among historians and other scholars in material culture, as the work by Saphinaz-Amal Naguib and Bjarne Rogan, eds, Materiell kultur & kulturens materialitet (Oslo: Novus forlag, 2011) and the recent publication by Anna Maria Forssberg and Karin Sennefelt, eds, Fråga föremålen. Handbok till historiska studier av materiell kultur (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2014) indicate. The close collaboration between historical materiality research and museums is a strong feature in the emerging Scandinavian research. Other significant recent Scandinavian research on materiality has been undertaken by historical archeologists on processes of cultural exchange and the associated change in meanings of objects. Much of this work successfully employed the theoretical frameworks of object biographies and earlier work by Appadurai on the social life of objects. This Special Issue, ‘Gender, Material Culture and Emotions in Scandinavian History’, is part of this development and will make current Scandinavian research available to a broader English-speaking scholarly community. The contributors explore in their articles how emotions and their historical performances and meanings are influencing gendered practices and the social life of objects. Historians are discovering the importance of material conditions, exchanges and productions for identity processes, forms of power and social formations such as households, communities and social hierarchies. Initially, this historical materiality research was mainly concerned

Religion and emotion

In early 17th-century Finland, then part of Sweden and pronouncedly orthodox Lutheran, several people in the south-west regions were found to possess and use rosaries. This article discusses rosaries and rosary practices as material objects in the context of performing emotion and gender, on the basis of the ensuing court cases. The court record cases of rosary practice show that a Marian devotion channelled religious feelings in 17th-century Finland and that the experience or performance of these feelings had not changed as much as church teaching on the subject had. In reading of these emotions, however, one has to take into account the nature of the source material: court records were not meant to create a religious affect, but rather the opposite. Therefore they create emotions that support the authority of the legal system. The materiality of the rosaries themselves is abstracted in the court record text. Something of the materiality, and the emotions carried by it, can, however, be read from the narratives as recurring topics and repeated remarks; these methods of creating religious emotions used by the people were bodily and physically active techniques. The emotions thus created spread on a wider range than would be suggested by the interpretations of (medieval) Marian devotion, from displays of indifference and detachment to compassion, building the feeling of communality and belonging.

“Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”: A History of Violence against Parents

With the fifth commandment (in the Catholic Church and in some Scandinavian Catechisms the fourth commandment), European societies have promoted and supported parental authority as a guarantee of proper social and political order. Any disruptions, either in the form of disobedience or in the form of direct assault—including physical abuse and murder—have been described in apocalyptic terms to ensure such behavior never happens again. Numerous homilies based on Ham’s despicable treatment of his father (Genesis 9:21) and the consequential curse of Canaan, Ham’s son (Genesis 9:24), set a standard of behavior toward parents that excluded any possibility of disrespect. The normative side of the attitudes toward parents is well represented in didactic and legal texts, and there has recently been a focus on childhood and children as objects of violence, which is significant for the contemporary agenda of child protection. What the norms meant for parents—and even more so what failures to fulfill the normative ideals of parenting meant for the parents and the family community in early modern and modern societies—is a topic that has received less attention. However, even didactic descriptions of parental vulnerability—especially in old age or after surrendering economic power to their children (mostly sons)—provide a glimpse at situations of the neglect and abuse of parents. In one of these well-known didactic examples, a father hands over his entire estate to his son upon his son’s marriage. The son subsequently refuses to feed his poor father, and, as punishment, his food transforms into a large toad that he must feed for the rest of his life. From this tale, we learn about the main threats of old age: not only poverty but also humiliation and disrespect. Some parents did not meet with violence only in their old age; they also experienced it earlier in their midlife prime when their children were growing up—a phenomenon less visible in the didactic narratives. This special issue explores lethal and nonlethal violence against parents in Europe and beyond between the late middle ages and today. The collection of articles brings a comparative perspective to how normative models of parental authority were questioned and challenged in different sociohistorical settings. Parricide and nonfatal violence against parents are rare but significant forms of family violence. They have been perceived to be a recent phenomenon related to bad parenting

Parricide in Nineteenth-Century Finland: Cultures of Violence and a Crisis of Authority

‘Parricide in Nineteenth-Century Finland’, by Raisa Maria Toivo, places nineteenth-century parricide cases in the context of changing concepts of authority and masculinity, and the devaluation of traditional forms of authority.

Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This book breaks with three common scholarly barriers of periodization, discipline and geography in its exploration of the related themes of heresy, magic and witchcraft. It sets aside constructed chronological boundaries, and in doing so aims to achieve a clearer picture of what went before, as well as what came after. Thus the volume demonstrates continuity as well as change in the concepts and understandings of magic, heresy and witchcraft. In addition, the geographical pattern of similarities and diversities suggests a comparative approach, transcending confessional as well as national borders. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the orthodoxy of the Christian Church was continuously contested. The challenge of heterodoxy, especially as expressed in various kinds of heresy, magic and witchcraft, was constantly present during the period 1200-1650. Neither contesters nor followers of orthodoxy were homogeneous groups or fractions. They themselves and their ideas changed from one century to the next, from region to region, even from city to city, but within a common framework of interpretation. This collection of essays focuses on this complex.

Ignorant Superstition? Popular Education on Magic in Early Seventeenth-Century Confessionalist Finland: The Case of Mary and the Rosaries

The essay shows a remnant of Catholic practice in early modern Finland that only a hundred years after the reformation slowly began to be treated as ‘papist superstition’. It discusses how such practices were, in the beginning of the seventeenth century considered reprehensible but essentially harmless superstitions, but by the middle of the century began to be treated as forms of magic or even witchcraft. The rosary practices are looked at as a crossroads of the beginnings of history of the Confessionalist Lutheran church in Sweden and the religious life of early modern lay people. The essay uses church popular education material from the early seventeenth century with the model sermon collection of Bishop Ericus Erici Sorolainen to see what it teaches about Catholicism and Rosaries and then contrasts it with (secular) court records in order to look at popular attitudes in practice. These are then put in the context of historiography on magic and superstition in Sweden and Finland.

Religion as Experience

Using lived religion as its conceptual tool, this book explores how the Reformation showed itself in and was influenced by lay peoples everyday lives. It reinvestigates the character of the Reformation in what later became the heartlands of Lutheranism.

Eastern Orthodox Influence and Its Demonization in Finland

Under the terms of the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo, the provinces of Ingria and Kexholm were ceded by Russia and annexed to Sweden. Thereafter, the eastern part of Finland accommodated two different cultures: the Lutheran one in Savonia and Vyborg Karelia, and the mixed Lutheran and Russian Orthodox one in the annexed areas. These cultures came to influence each other much beyond the border regions (see Map 4.1).