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

This intriguing study from historian Nesvig (Promiscuous Power) catalogs the ways in which Native and European supernatural beliefs met and intermingled in post-conquest Mexico. Drawing on Inquisition trials of women accused of sorcery in the two decades immediately following the fall of Tenochtitlan, Nesvig shows how, mostly via the socializing of newly arrived settler wives and mistresses with their Native domestic help, Iberian superstitions and beliefs mixed with Nahua (aka Aztec) spells and rituals. The Nahuans, for instance, took up the Iberian concept of the “evil eye,” and the Iberians took up the Nahuan practice of “throwing corn” as a means of casting lots and predicting the future. The Inquisition trials reveal that the church particularly targeted, from among the colonists, the Moriscan or Maghrebi women—remnants of the Muslim empire recently ousted from Iberia—who were likely mistresses or courtesans engaging in sex work. This official unease with the power women could attain through sex within lawless frontier territories stands in stark relief, in Nesvig’s account, with the openness of the women themselves, who seemed to eagerly seek to learn from other women from disparate backgrounds. “All the women in this book,” he perceptively notes, “relied on magic to assert some agency and power in a man’s political world.” While fairly academic, it’s worth checking out for those interested in the intersection of women’s history and magic. (Sept.)