Liv Helene Willumsen / The Witchcraft trials in Finnmark

LIV HELENE WILLUMSEN

Liv Helene Willumsen participates as keynote speaker and she will introduce the history of the Witchcraft Trials in the North.

Willumsen has written the 91 exhibition texts for the Memorial Hall at Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, commemorating the 91 people who lost their lives during the Finnmark witchcraft trials in Vardø.

Liv Helene Willumsen is Professor Emerita of History, University of Tromsø (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway), with a Ph.D in history (Edingburgh, 2008) and a Ph.D. in literature (Bergen, 2003) Her books include Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden, 2013) and The Voices of Women in Witchcraft Trials: Northern Europe (Abingdon, 2022).
She was awarded the Norwegian King’s Medal of Merit in 2019.

The voices of women in witchcraft trials

Steilneset Memorial commemorates those who lost their lives during the seventeenth-century Finnmark witchcraft trials. Steilneset Memorial consists of three components: Art, Architecture and History.

The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois has created an installation; around a chair with a burning flame in the middle, seven mirrors are placed, reflecting the flame from different angles. The installation is placed inside a glass pavillion, which is drawn by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. He has also drawn the Memorial Hall, a 135 metres long building.

Inside the Memorial Hall there is an exhibition of 91 texts, one text for each individual who lost her or his life during the Finnmark witchcraft trials. These texts are written by historian Liv Helene Willumsen, on the basis of original court records from the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials. The exhibition texts are also published in a book, provided in four languages; Norwegian, English, German and Finnish.