| Summary: | The vakstugor were informal and armed reunions organised by the parents of Stockholm during thewitch craze that reached the city around the year 1674. They were designed to defend the children from the witches’ assaults, and included both men and women, who could carry weapons. By comparing both the ordinary violence found in ordinary court records and the violence found in the Witchcraft Commission records, this study intends to understand the phenomenon of the vakstugor, in the light of the relationship between violence and gender. The study first reassessed women’s ordinary spectrum of violence, to understand what violence looked like during the period spanning from 1667 to 1686. It then found that the experience of the vakstugor exhibits a significant widening of this spectrum. Followingly, the thesis found that, despite the fact that women were usually excluded from collective violent organisations, such as armies, militias and the like, their participation in the vakstugor was not considered illegitimate by the authorities because of theirgender. Finally, an important underlying aim of this thesis is to draw the attention on the yet unstudied phenomenon of the vakstugor, which existed not only in Stockholm, but also in northern Sweden and Norway.
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