Blod, kött och tårar : Kroppslig erfarenhet i Sverige, ca 1600–1750

Sammanfattning: The study investigates how ordinary people in Sweden understood the body to function between c. 1600-1750, aiming thereby to enhance our understanding of everyday life during this period. Questions of how the body worked was then primarily a topic for the physiological sciences, and previous research has thus largely focused on the dissemination and reworking of medical traditions within medical thought and practice, considering the body to have been interpreted either as an open, humoral entity, or in mechanistic terms. To discern the ways that ordinary men and women understood the body, this study departs from a phenomenological perspective and takes people's descriptions of their experiences as starting points. The considered period was characterized by Lutheran orthodoxy and the effects of confessionalization on legal thought and practice. It also saw a rise in popular participation in the activities of criminal courts. The empirical evidence consists of roughly 800 legal investigations into crimes such as bestiality, magic, murder, homicide, suicide, infanticide and various sexual offences, examined in order to access ordinary people's perspectives on the body and other aspects of existence. The methodological assumptions guiding the interpretation of the sources are firstly that legal statements remain within the scope of the probable and possible, and secondly that descriptions of experiences can inform on how people understood the body. The study is divided into five empirical chapters designed to capture both physiological topics and aspects of existence. The chapters deal with how people understood the body to function in relation to principles of life; sickness and health; perception and consciousness; influences from God and the Devil; and confession in court. All in all, the study concludes that the lived body was primarily understood as an entity that worked when its parts, abilities and seats of consciousness could be accessed and used. Together and in coordination, these could then form a functioning whole. In accordance with this perspective, influences that prevented the body’s usual functioning and which made a person’s existence different were generally understood as deviations from the usual way of being. In turn, restored functionality implied conforming to the previous and usual way. The identified understanding of the body thus departed from the usual state and nature of specific bodies as a starting point for how people understood change. Negations of usefulness of parts or capabilities further demonstrate both how the body was commonly understood to work, and why it needed to function as usual. The functional understanding of the body was rooted in people’s existential conditions and in the needs that they had to be able to use their bodies. They needed their bodies to be able to work and to acquire religion. The study ends with suggestions for future research, such as varieties within the identified understanding of the body, and how it transformed as its existential conditions changed.