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Summary

The Introduction presents the central ideas of the book. The major theme is acculturation. Dominant forms of ethnohistory discuss Native peoples of the Americas and the ways they responded to Spanish political domination. This book reverses the approach by analyzing how non-Native women adapted to their predominantly Native Mesoamerican cultural environment. Witchcraft and sorcery and their suppression by inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts represent the particular entry point for understanding these processes of acculturation. Non-Native women in this book were Spanish, Canarian, North African, Basque, and Senegambian. They adopted Mesoamerican rituals, such as corn hurling (tlapohualiztli), Nahua healing and midwifery, and peyote consumption, and spoke Nahuatl in everyday lives. Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish, such as metate, tianguis, and patle, symbolize the processes of acculturation. This book studies the earliest forms of non-Native women adapting Mesoamerican sorcery, magic, and healing, limited to the period 1521–71.

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Introduction

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Introduction

Summary