The Women Who Threw Corn: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.

Guardians of Idolatry:In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the *Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain* to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish *Treatise* collected diverse incantations, or *nahualtocaitl*, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is recognized as one of the most significant firsthand records of indigenous religious practices in postconquest Mexico. Yet, as Viviana Díaz Balsera argues in *Guardians of Idolatry*, the selection process for the incantations recorded in the *Treatise* reflects two sites of agency: Ruiz de Alarcón's desire to present the most flagrant examples of Nahua ""demonic"" practices, and Nahua efforts to share benign nahualtocaitl in order to preserve their preconquest traditions while negotiating with colonial Christian hegemony.

*Guardians of Idolatry* offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. Through close reading of four incantations - for safe travel, maguey sap harvesting, bow-and-arrow deer hunting, and divination through maize kernels - Díaz Balsera shows the nuances of a Nahua spiritual world populated by intelligent superhuman and nonhuman entities that directly responded to human appeals for intercession. She also addresses Jacinto de la Serna's *Manual for Ministers of These Indians* (1656), an elaborate commentary on the *Treatise*.

*Guardians of Idolatry* tells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico. Together, Ruiz de Alarcón's *Treatise* and de la Serna's *Manual* reveal the highly sophisticated language of the nahualtocaitl, and the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican epistemology.

The Women Who Threw Corn and Guardians of Idolatry