Malin Matsdotter were questioned and cautioned to tell the truth. She was thoroughly questioned regarding her religious instruction. When asked to recite the Creed, she answered that she could not bother to read and barely knew the Lord's Prayer. Her language difficulties attracted attention when she had difficulty reading the prayers the court instructed her to: she did not know them herself, and even had trouble repeating them when they were read to her. The court noted that she hesitated in a suspicious way when she was to repeat the prayers word by word. The fact that she had trouble reading was in fact uncommon in 17th-century Stockholm: since the Swedish Church Ordinance 1571, every citizen regardless of class or sex was by law required to be able to read, so that they may be able to read the bible. The fact that she seems to have preferred Finnish was not considered strange by the court, as the capital had a great Finnish minority from the nearby province who even had their own congregation; however, what was regarded suspicious for a person accused of consorting with the Devil was, rather, the fact that she had difficulty to read and pronounce words from the holy scripture.