Book Talk with Professor Martin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th-Century Mexico"
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265 Aragon Avenue., Coral Gables, FL 33134
https://humanities.as.miami.edu/public-programs/booktalks/index.htmlThe Center for the Humanities invites you to our first Book Talk of the Spring 2026 semester with Martin Nesvig, Professor of History.
The Women Who Threw the Corn 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.
Martin Nesvig is Professor of History at U of Miami. He is currently a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and serves as the Executive Director of the American Society for Ethnohistory. His work focuses on the ways that ordinary people responded to systems of law and Catholic norms in the broader Spanish Empire of the 16th century, focusing in particular on Mexico. He has published six books, of which The Women Who Threw Corn is the most recent. He has also published books on censorship by the Mexican Inquisition (Ideology and Inquisition, Yale 2009) and on the negotiation of political power on the ground in 16th century western Mexico in Michoacán (Promiscuous Power, Texas 2018). Currently he is working on a book trilogy which examines the various ways that Native Mesoamerican culture, language, and ritual influenced non-Native peoples in early post-contact Mexico (1520s-1620s). The project offers a kind of reverse ethnohistory, reversing the analytical gaze normally trained on Native responses to Spanish imperial rule, to ask how the opposite evolved. The Women Who Threw Corn is the first book in this trilogy. Currently he is completing the manuscript for the second book, The Xolotl Rite: Or, How Spanish Men Became Nahuatlized in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.
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