ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the different meanings given to the discourse by men and women, highlighting the particular characteristics of the Inquisition and of witchcraft in Spain and Mexico. It draws on the specific genre of sexual witchcraft, epitomized in Spain by the literary image of the witch-procuress or Celestina; in Mexico it took on a further cultural elaboration, with uncanny power being ascribed to women of the marginal Indian and mixed castes. As Michelle Rosaldo and other feminist anthropologists have pointed out, in most societies women are denied culturally legitimate authority in the public sphere. In northern Europe the illegitimacy of women's power was dealt with, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by carrying out witch-hunts, in which women were the main targets of persecution and extermination. The Inquisition did little to hinder the diffusion of sexual witchcraft among women of the various caste strata of colonial Mexico.
