Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This analysis studies the presence of traditional motifs around the elves, exist­ing in a self-denouncement made in the city of Guatemala in the 18th century. The story found in a letter addressed to the Inquisition, shows the situation of oppression of a woman in her society, but also the influence of a magical imaginary that was quite strong at that time and in the centuries previous, and also remains until our time. This file also, as we shall see, may have a degree of implicit mischief and eroticism, both according to the de­scriptions of the supernatural beings.

Cultural considerations about men and women depend greatly on the religious and social control exercised in every age. In the Colonial stage of the New Spain the discourse of the Church was decisive in the way in which people built their relationships according to socioeconomic level, family conventions, the social and cultural norms reli­gious traditions, geographical environment; so the ideal love was subject to social norms, religion and magic. Magic was the unorthodox way conducive to relationship issues and concerns. It was a tool that is intended to get at least a portion of the power to manipulate the craving of sex, get married, hold extramarital affairs, or was simply the comfort of many women that had suffered the manifestations of male power through physical abuse.

This work’s purpose is to examine the function of New Spain recogimientos and their functioning as female prisons in the 17th and 18th centuries. Through an inspection and analysis of three cases of women locked up in two recogimientos, that of Santa Maria Magdalena in the cities of Puebla and Mexico City, the text demonstrates the persecution and sentencing of women for trifles without distinguishing between sinful and unlawful acts. There was a confusion between secular and eclesiastic justice which provoked the disregard of these people for years in jail.

This article shows how the Testimony and the Summary of the Faith Process followed by two nuns from the convent of Santa Clara de Trujillo in the Kingdoms of Peru resembles a hagiographic narration that proposes the nun Luisa Benites as an aspirant to the altars in the already proven land of sanctity that was the Viceroyalty of Peru. In this work, only references to Juana Luisa Benites, the first nun to give indications of possible demonic possession, will be addressed in the aforementioned convent.

This article examines the state of the question on magic and witchcraft in La Celestina. It does so by focusing on a very symptomatic silence: the silence around Silvia Federici’s seminal intervention on the matter in her already classic Caliban and the Witch, which in my view is nothing short of a scandal. I argue that Fernando de Rojas’ masterpiece cannot be properly assessed without paying full and thorough attention to the complex historical processes underlying the dynamics of witch-hunting in late-medieval Europe. Witch-hunting is not a religious or even a political phenomenon, or (to be more precise) it is a religious and a political phenomenon only insofar as it partakes in the broader economic landscape of primitive accumulation during the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. By obsessively putting all the blame on the Catholic Church and its repressive apparatuses (i.e., the Inquisition), liberal criticism is underscoring this very sim­ple fact. In my critique to this critical trend, originally espoused by José Antonio Maravall in the 60s and arguably hegemonic today, I show how La Celestina cannot but be under­stood as a nostalgic testimony for the not-so-distant economy of the medieval commons.

This article aims to give insight into an episode that was very important in the life of the visionary Juana de la Cruz, since it appears in two manuscripts: in her vita and in the Libro de la casa of her convent. Analyzing this scene —where Juana shows her power over a sculpture of the Virgin by authorizing it to function as an object of devotion— allows us to draw out some conclusions on the relationships between visionary women, spiritual authority, images, the doctrine of the Inmaculate Conception, and, eventually, heretic groups. The first version of this episode is reproduced here as an appendix to the article.

Between 1700 and 1758, about 800 women were punished for practicing the law of Moses in Spain. This article shall study the role of the crypto-Jewish women in the historical context of the first half of the 18th century in order to investigate the rea­sons why the Inquisition considered them as their main threat and objective of persecu­tion. Initially, this paper will offer a brief political-cultural context of the first decades of the 18th century to understand the reasons of the awakening of inquisitorial harassment against crypto-Jewish cultures. Hence, this study will focus on the importance of women in crypto-Jewish cultures and will study the public trials, the presence of women in them and the propaganda power of the publications of the trials in the form of news pamphlets.

The Spanish Golden Age mentality believed in the existence of one sex only, which gave rise to a great sexual and gender diversity, a quite heterogeneous gradation that went from the male perfection to the female imperfection, with a specific division of roles from a social point of view. Therefore, in this article we will delve into the concep­tion of gender identity, to what consideration the female body was held, how sex changes were admitted with normality, and we will outline a classification of these transexualiza­tions differentiating four types. In conclusion, noting the disruption that the arrival of the Enlightenment assumes by imposing sexual and gender binarism, whose consequences we still drag to this day.

The witch called la Camacha de Montilla had the capacity, according to Cervantes, to make fresh roses bloom in her garden in December and to reap wheat in January. This essay analyzes these magical capacities according to his documents in other tales of magic, witchcraft, wonders, travels, miracles, epics, romances, lyrical and satir­ical poetry, etc. Comparisons are made with works by Ovid, Seneca, Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas, chroniclers of the Indies and many more authors. Above all, the relationship with Faust’s narrative cycle is analysed. Some Spanish versions of Faust’s narrative prior to the one documented in Germany in 1587 are revealed.

In addition to the feelings, mentality and anthropological and social circum­stances, which are discovered in an inquisitorial process by bigamy, the accusation of bigamy, above all, entailed social exclusion, if one takes into account that marriage was the element that structured the society of the West. One family in La Mancha understood this perfectly and used the Inquisition to accuse a woman who had married her son in second marriages, to segregate her socially and prevent her from joining his social level, which was superior.