60 aiming at reconciliation between parties where disputes were ultimately dissolved with the help of oaths. Besides the epistemological changes in the European early modern age, I have suggested above that the concentrating royal power was another central factor that contributed to the modification of the lawof proof in seventeenthcentury Europe. This factor is clearly present in Sweden as well, where it was - ideologically - closely connected to another one which ought to be considered first. Besides being the century of growing absolutism and territorial expansion, the seventeenth century in Sweden was also the era of Lutheran Orthodoxy. The expanding and centralizing state spoke with the divine authority of the post-reformation state church; it used biblical authority to strengthen criminal sentences," although in legal practice the harshness of the statutes was greatly alleviated.Furthermore, the church, its priests and its ecclesiastical disciplinary jurisdiction acted as efficient agents of correction at the parish level.The interaction between the harsh criminal law and the church culminated in a massive amount of witchcraft cases in the seventeenth-century.'"^ Just as the attempts to toughen criminal sanctions in the late 1500s and the 1600s were justified by the Mosaic law, so too could the adoption of legal rules of proof borrow part of its authority from religion. The statutory theory of proof was essentially based on confession, and it was also for religious salvation that confession was necessary. Among the first spokesmen for the statutory theory of proof was, in fact, the Lutheran reformer Olaus Petri (1490s1552). >5 The reception of the statutory theory of proof can be understood, thus, against the background of the Swedish seventeenth-century “judicial revolution,”’^ and the attempts to establish a systematic and harsh penal repression, together with the help of a hierarchically organized court structure. Despite these pretensions, which favored a strict reading of the rules of proof, the law of proof soon acquired characteristics similar to its continental counterparts; ways of evading the strictness of the statutory rules developed in legal practice and were, in fact, regulated later on (and already partly in the Lawof 1734) in legislation. Considering the changed view of the world and the altered epistemological concepts of later seventeenth-century Swedish society, it would have been odd if the rules of proof had been received in their strictest medieval form. Thunander 1992 pp. 12-16. Thunander 1993 pp. 55-60. Tiihonen 1994 (a) pp. 44—15. On the Finnish and Swedish witchcraft cases, see Heikkinen 1969, Ankarloo 1984, Sörlin 1993, and Nenonen 1994. It is not know'n for certain whether Olaus was born in 1493 or 1497. Schmidt 1966 pp. 246304; Ylikangas 1988 pp. 55-58. On the “judicial revolution” in general, see Lenman — Parker 1980; for Sweden and especiallv on the role of high courts in the judicial revolution, Thunander 1993 pp. 282-285.
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