An Evening with Martin Nesvig

Join us for a fascinating book talk exploring (Cambridge University Press, $39.99), a hidden world of magic, healing, and resistance in colonial Mexico. Historian Martin Nesvig discusses his groundbreaking work uncovering the stories of non-native women—witches, midwives, and healers from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and the Canaries—who blended Indigenous ritual with their own traditions. This conversation sheds new light on women, power, and belief in the early modern Atlantic world.

Presented with University of Miami Center for the Humanities

🎟 Free & open to the public — RSVP recommended.

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.

Martin Austin Nesvig is Professor of History at the University of Miami, and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author of five books including Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (2009) and Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain (2018).

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