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8 - The Evil Eye and a Mysterious Tattoo

from Part III - The Cultural Hybrid Healer-Witch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2025

Martin Austin Nesvig
Affiliation:
University of Miami
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Summary

This chapter presents a close reading of two witchcraft trials, one against the Spanish midwife Isabel de Morales in 1537, and the second against two women in Mexico City in 1566, doña María de Anuncibay and María de Lugo. The chapter analyzes peculiarities of these cases. Morales was a low-status Spanish woman who worked as a midwife in Mexico City. The Inquisition focused on multiple suspicious behaviors. She cured the evil eye; made suspicious incantations that nobody understood; and worked as a kind of gynecologist and performed surgeries (possibly on vaginas or uteruses) with a black-handled knife. She was a hybrid tiçitl-curandera. Her curing of the evil eye caught attention because such cures were considered superstitious. Midwives were always at risk from claims that they caused the evil eye or death of infants. The other case concerned a wealthy Basque woman, Anuncibay, and a lower-status Andalucian, who was an illegitimate daughter of the adelantado of the Canaries. These women were accused of keeping a familiar (spirit) in a glass jar and of getting tattoos on their legs – of some demon or possibly of a Mesoamerican god-like Quetzalcoatl.

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Chapter
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The Women Who Threw Corn
Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
, pp. 189 - 215
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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