The Women Who Threw Corn - Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

This book tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women - the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others - routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Martin Austin Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers.

Introduction; Part I. Witches and Their Enemies in the Early Modern World: 1. Demonological and anti-sorcery theories in Spain; 2. Mesoamerican magic-medicine; 3. Inquisitions, sorcery investigations, and the law in Mexico, 1521-1571; Part II. Magic in the 1520s and 1530s: 4. Nahua women teach Iberian women how to cast spells; 5. A multi-ethnic world of magic; 6. African witches in Mexico City; 7. Bad girls club: Moriscas, North Africans, and Canarians in Mexico; Part III. The Cultural Hybrid Healer-Witch: 8. The evil eye and a mysterious tattoo; 9. Healing and magic in Oaxaca and Michoacán, 1561-1562; 10. Mulatas incorporate Peyote and Patle; 11. Catalina de Peraza, Canarian bad girl personified; Afterword; Select bibliography; Index.