Doctoral researcher Minna Heinonen is working on her PhD dissertation under the preliminary title “Lived Religion and Meanings of the Feminine in the Nordic Discourse of Magic”. The thesis examines medieval legal texts and church paintings from the 13th to the 15th centuries and the structure of the discourse of magic through them.
The research on Nordic legal material has remained relatively inadequate, as has the research on church paintings. Heinonen’s dissertation partly fills this gap in Finnish medieval research.
The theoretical starting point of the dissertation is the understanding of magic as a socially produced behavior that was constantly negotiated, modified and lived out. Examining legal material and church paintings side by side opens an interesting perspective to the study of Nordic magic, which can be used to analyze the background and use of the meanings connected to the feminine. Thus, we can better understand how the boundary between religion and magic has been produced and how these phenomena are related to gender. The source material enables an examination of lived religion from the perspective of magic and religion, and at the same time produces information about how visuality in the form of church paintings was connected to the production of the discourse of magic and the experience of faith.