Organized according to three themes, 'Censorship and the Body,' 'Female Authority and Legal Discourse' and 'Private Lives and Public Opinions,' the essays in this collection focus on women’s knowledge and the discursive traces of their daily concerns found in various colonial genres. Women are considered as agents of history and as authors of written records produced either by their own hand or by means of dictations, collaborations, or rewritings of their oral renditions. Inhabiting the territories of the Iberian colonies from Peru to New Spain, the women studied in this volume come from different ethnic and social backgrounds, from African slaves to the indigenous elite and to those who arrived from Iberia and were known as 'Old Christians'
The essays in this book examine how 'the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”(sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation) along with others that approximated the unnatural (hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. )