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

An exploration of women from Spain, North Africa, and Canaries who adapted native magic and healing practices in sixteenth-century Mexico.

Martin Austin Nesvig (Author)

9781009550529, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 June 2025

320 pages
23.5 x 16.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.59 kg

'Nesvig's scholarship is, simply, meticulous. His careful and always transparent reading of the case files is a pleasure to read, offering a veritable clinic in the use of Inquisition records. The writing is wry, occasionally ribald, and lively … Encyclopedic, ambitious, engaging, and characteristically erudite, The Women Who Threw Corn will long reward specialist and student readership. It offers much to cross-disciplinary conversations among scholars of magic in other regions and periods and leaves this reader eager for the volumes to follow.' Jacqueline Holler, The American Historical Review

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.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]