Magic, popular medicine and gender in seventeenth-century Mexico: The case of Isabel de Montoya

By studying the establishment of healing frameworks by women outside the realm of conventional medicine, and their growing popularity, this paper deals with questions of gender and religious deviance in mid-seventeenth-century Mexico. Isabel de Montoya’s case-study focuses on the interrelationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ magic, as well as the Church’s struggle to present a more precise definition of the borderline between diabolism and heresy, and the by then far less sinister superstitions. This paper aims to demonstrate that men of the Church in Mexico during this period were worried not about the practice of popular medicine in itself, but rather the misappropriation of magic and the powers to mediate with the supernatural and communicate with the saints, through alternative ritual procedures, practised mainly by women of different strata and racial affiliation in contemporary Mexican society.