Witch, Noaidi, Galdur: How North Atlantic Peripheries Re-Gendered Early Modern Witchcraft

Early modern witchcraft scholarship often treats the “female witch” as a pan-European norm, with male suspects framed as anomalous. This article complicates that model by comparing two North Atlantic peripheries - Finnmark (northern Norway) and seventeenth-century Iceland - where the supernatural was governed through markedly different gender logics. In Finnmark, demonological frameworks helped authorities make coastal women legible as witches through narratives of household disorder, sexual anxiety, and diabolic intimacy. At the same time, Sámi men were repeatedly rendered suspect through the category of the noaidi, as Indigenous ritual expertise - healing, divination, and drum-centered practices - was recoded as diabolic sorcery and increasingly tethered to material forms of proof. In Iceland, by contrast, prosecutions disproportionately targeted men, linking witchcraft to literate and technical practices (galdur, staves, books) and to clerical and legal anxiety over unauthorized expertise. Bringing these cases into dialogue, the article argues that the “gender of witchcraft” is best understood not as a stable cultural constant but as a flexible governance strategy: courts and clergy gendered supernatural deviance differently depending on which forms of authority - domestic, ritual, or literate - they sought to discipline. The comparison also shows how colonial difference mattered: the same demonological vocabulary could feminize local social disorder while racializing Indigenous spiritual power. This North Atlantic comparison shows that gender in witchcraft prosecutions is produced through law, evidence, and colonial hierarchy - not simply reflected by them - making peripheries central to the conceptual history of early modern witchcraft.