Taking its departure from the dependence on human and equine bodies to be healthy and capable of performing their various tasks in early modern societies, the article studies what notions of human and equine health and ability ordinary people embraced, by using a large sample of court cases from Sweden. It is shown that people made sense of human and equine illness as physical weaknesses or as bodily subjugations by disease entities, and that it was not meaningful to differentiate between illness and injury, since a diminished capacity for work was at the core. Particular yardsticks of capability are also identified, in relation to which people’s and horses’ abilities to carry out alternative tasks were assessed. Importantly, it is shown that people did not depart from universal categories of human or equine physiology, but from how individual men, women, and horses used to be and be able to perform certain tasks. An implicit framework of a task-oriented functionality for working bodies is identified, which, it is finally suggested, shows similarities with and predates mechanistic physiology. It is thus suggested that working people’s task-oriented ways of understanding working bodies should be considered in historical studies of the rise of mechanism.

The chapter analyses the meanings of ‘illness’ and ‘incapacity’ in early modern Swedish criminal investigations. In so doing, it challenges the prevalence of humoral theory in previous scholarship regarding popular notions of sickness and health. The chapter shows that people described themselves as ill and ‘incapacitated’ as a way of emphasising that their bodies were of less use to them for purposes of work. Corresponding to illness and incapacity were specific measures of abledness, in relation to which a person’s varied ability to perform normal routines were assessed. It is thus argued that notions of health were based on people’s reliance upon their bodies for purposes of subsistence, and, in conclusion, that people embraced a functional understanding of both ill and good health.

The study investigates the ontological status of cows in relation to allegations of witchcraft in 17^th century Sweden, with a particular focus on the region Ångermanland in Northern Sweden. It asks what notions of cows as bodily beings people embraced in these contexts, so as to further our knowledge of the role played by cows in the unfolding of early modern witchcraft, but also to add to our knowledge of human-animal relations in specific contexts.

The legal sources (inquisitorial protocols) are approached using Philippe Descola’s relational ontology, in particular its concepts of physicality and interiority, so as to uncover what assumptions about how cows’ inner senses (their “mod”) related to their physical being.

Contrary to previous studies on magic involving animals, in which cows’ “mod” as life force have been interpreted as a symbolical prolongation of their owners’ life force or honor, in this study the “mod” is found to have been related to particular physiological and productive functions of cows.

In general, the study finds that when surfacing in the context of witchcraft, cows were temporarily understood to be animated in ways reminiscent of an animistic way of thinking. The study thus concludes that this complicates standard histories of transitions from one ontological regime to another (from analogism to naturalism), as animistic notions seem to have been meaningful to invoke in particular contexts marked by crisis.

In this article we are concerned with how faith was embodied in the non-normative body and ultimately what constituted early modern Protestant faith. We address how deaf people in early modern Sweden expressed their religious faith in such way as they were considered pious and included in the community of believers. Listening to sermons has long been considered central in the church history and cultural history of the Lutheran Reformations and Protestant religious culture. Ordinary Christians were seen as an audience above all else, and a sense of hearing was the most important of all the senses in religious practice. New research in cultural history and the history of the senses has nuanced this understanding by arguing that other senses and embodied practices remained important to Protestantism. However, the focus has been the normative body, while historians of disability have shown the precarious situation of deaf people in the religious milieus of early modern Protestantism. In this article we examine a series of court cases and other sources from early modern Sweden, charting how deaf people's religious beliefs and practices were treated in local contexts. The study finds that deafness was considered a troublesome affliction, not only because of the inability to hear, but also because it was considered to impair people's cognitive and possibly spiritual capacities. This understanding seems to have brought with it an acceptance that deaf people were unlikely to benefit from an intellectual understanding of religious education. Despite the prejudice, however, deaf people were included in religious practice and accepted as true Christians. The deaf Christians' animated participation in religious rituals such as the Eucharist or divine Service, along with embodied practices such as sighing or kneeling to pray, were seen as genuine displays of faith, physically and emotionally. Moreover, there seems to have been a general consensus that deaf people performed their faith in ways that suited them best, often expressed as `in one's own way'. These findings indicate that the early modern Protestant faith was indeed embodied and emotional, but it could be performed and expressed in many ways, depending on each Christian's personal circumstances.

This article explores ten women's experiences of being on trial for witchcraft and enduring torture in Sweden in 1757, as they were retrospectively accounted for during a review trial in 1760, at which these women sought relief and tort. Contrary to previous scholarship on both torture in general and torture in connection with early modern witch trials, which has approached torture either as a ritual of power and punishment or a ritual of forced conversion, I depart from a phenomenological stance of the body in order to understand how these women experienced the ways body, pain and mind were related with one another. Thereby, I uncover how the women experienced their torments as an escalating procedure aiming to affect their minds (förstånd), both by inciting affective movements and by inducing pain. Moreover, I connect these experiences to what the women understood to be at stake during their torments: their access to mind/reason, which, in turn, was the faculty enabling them to believe in God. Finally, I argue that the ability to believe in God through reason conditioned their various ways of explaining the relations between body, pain and mind.