An immanent history. Symbolic elements of menstruation in love potions. A study of the judicial proceedings carried out on new hispanic women (17th century)

Abstract

One of the central components in the recipes elaborated within love magic was the menstruum. Its early presence in New Spain sustained the existence of a parallelism between European and American love magic. Here, it’s analyzed how this parallelism is not so clear when reviewing the self-denunciations and denunciations made by women before the Holy Office at the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. Through the documents of the Inquisition, we can recognize that the recommendation to use menstruum in recipes to attract the love of a man came from the world of witchcraft of Spanish, mulatto and black women, and later transited to the world of indigenous women. The indigenous women were preponderantly specialists in the handling of herbs and other resources. To account for this, I propose to place myself in an area of intersection between humoral theory, European love magic and indigenous herbalism.