Sorcery, deception or harmless joke. Dialogue about magical practices in Court of Equity’s cases in the first half of the 19^th century

This article examines a detailed case involving an accusation of witchcraft against peasant Ivan Dulepov, which was heard before the Court of Equity in Nizhny Novgorod in 1812. In comparison with the materials from other Courts of Equity of the first half of the 19th century the one involving Dulepov provides a window onto how the court dealt with cases of using magical, primarily healer’s, practices. Comparative analysis shows that the adjudication in cases of witchcraft was related to the process of translation of peasant’s magical practices into the legal language by a judge and their correlation with the term “witchcraft” in the texts of the documents. The judicial term “witchcraft” included the use of spells that presuppose the accused’s belief in their efficacy and any harmful magical practices, but it excluded practices of healing with prayers and without using any texts (herbal medicine) and magic “for a joke”. The appearance in the course of the investigation of a case-specific bundle of meanings (for example, “witchcraft” and “sin”, “witchcraft” and “swindle”) concretised the nature of punishment (penance, corporal punishment or others). The article shows that the variability of this system of meanings is associated with the vagueness of the laws of the 18th – first half of the 1^9th centuries and the fluidity of the concept of “witchcraft” in traditional culture. The variability of court sentences in similar cases is also associated with the dialogic nature of testimony. Dialogical structure of the evidences is analyzed on the example of two interrogation points in the testimony of Ivan Dulepov (about the invocation of evil spirits and the belief in the “healing power” of spells) and it is shown how different ways of reading similar concepts by the accused and the judge affect the understanding of magical practices by different parts of the investigation.

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