Charismatic Healers on Iberian Soil: An Autopsy of a Mythical Complex of Early Modern Spain

The saludadores, charismatic healers specialised in the curing of hydrophobia, represent one of the most exceptional mythical complexes of the Iberian Peninsula. The myth emerged abruptly in the last decades of the fifteenth century. The evidence suggests that the complex of the Iberian saludador refers to an archaic substratum of Mediterranean beliefs, related to the immunity to poisonous animals attributed to certain ethnic groups or charismatic healers. In the western Mediterranean, at some later moment, the belief fused with the cult of the saints, thus acquiring its original traits. This combination with Christian mythology endowed the saludador healers with some characteristics typical of European folk possession-systems. Once the belief in the Iberian saludadores' complex was firmly in place at the beginning of the sixteenth century, many local cunning-men succumbed to the temptation of trying to incorporate the mythical subject of the saludador. By assuming some of the most spectacular features of the mythical subject, they sought to legitimise the various services they rendered to the rural communities.     

Becoming Modern: Hybrid Foodways in Early Modern Tornio,Northern Finland

This paper focuses on foodways in a small town in northern Finland between 1621 and 1800 CE. Tornio was founded in 1621in northern Finland, at that time a part of the Swedish kingdom. Tornio was a dynamic town where people of different ethnic origins came together, forming a new urban community and new urban foodways. Archaeological remains of the town’s foodways—animal remains, macrofossils, and ceramics—suggest that the food culture of Tornio was a hybrid of local indigenous and rural traditions and international fashions. The foodways underwent significant changes in the 18th century. The changes were related to modernization and changing human-environmental relationships.     

Symbol,faith, and ritual and the success of Healers: A Mexican case

Finkler, Kaja. Spiritualist Healers in Mexico: Successes and Failures of Alternative Therapeutics. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1985. xii + 256 pp. including bibliography, glossary, and index. $27.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

Tobacco,Eurasian Trade,and the Early Modern Iranian Economy

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran's agrarian economy.