The Missing Books of Magic from Sandvik: In search for hidden books and secret knowledge
Ljungström, Åsa (2014)
Ljungström, Åsa
The Donner Institute, Åbo Akademi
2014
Kuvaus
Åsa Ljungström is a retired folklorist living in Uppsala. She is a former Senior Lecturer and Docent in Ethnology at Mid-Sweden University. Among her research interests are narrativity and material culture and the themes of gender and class in life histories.
Tiivistelmä
This article aims at defining a privately-owned manuscript from the end of the eighteenth century; a notebook of charms, recipes and ritual prescriptions, presumed to be connected with known manuscripts of magic, that were kept secret and hidden away. The study attempts to reconstruct the context of ‘The Sandvik Notebook’, in order to find out who penned it, when, and why. What kind of knowledge was sought: was it collected for antiquarian reasons, for esoteric interest, or for practical use – such as curing livestock and human beings? Was it copied from books or collected from peasant informants, and could it be related to the extant manuscripts ‘The Black Book’ and ‘The Red Book’, objects of the same line of enquiry? The three manuscripts are from Sandvik Manor, of the joint parish Burseryd-Sandvik, Sweden.