The Women Who Threw Corn

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

This book tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of witchcraft in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. It will interest students and scholars of ethnohistory, Latin American studies, gender history, anthropology, and religious studies.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.