Interview with Kristen Block, author of “Remedios for Relationships: Social Precarity and Amatory Therapeutics in the Early Circum-Caribbean”

Kristen Block is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she specializes in the cultural history of the early modern Atlantic and Caribbean worlds. Her current book project examines intercultural ideas and practices of holistic healing in the early modern Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean. You can read her article “Remedios for Relationships: Social Precarity and Amatory Therapeutics in the Early Circum-Caribbean” in HAHR 104.2.

Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles

1. How did you come to research remedies and healing practices in the colonial Caribbean? 

As a historian of the early Caribbean, I’ve always been interested in the social lives and daily woes of ordinary people. When working on my first book, which included a long investigation into an elite woman in Mompox for cruelty to enslaved women in her household, there was a reference to one of them dying of “pasmo” shortly after giving birth. Another tormented woman, who was eating dirt (which she and others said they were doing in the hopes that it would help them to die and thus escape their daily whippings), was forced to drink cow’s bile by a doctor as a “cure” for her behaviors. These strange and unfamiliar references got me fascinated with early modern medicine. I learned from my Colombian friend that pasmo is still considered a dangerous malady if you expose your body too quickly from a hot environment to a cool one—i.e., don’t go outside in the cool breeze after ironing! With some research, I learned that pasmo was likely similar to what anthropologists have called “folk diseases.” I was curious about how people explained the connections between their bodily ailments and the worlds around them. The colonial Americas are full of clashing cultures and new diseases, and I became convinced by scholarship that focused on the multiple layers of meaning behind disease names as well as the emotional and spiritual elements of healing practices. Latin Americanists like Pablo Gómez, Joan Bristol, and Martha Few are some of the biggest inspirations for my work.

2. In your article, you discuss the use of love magic and prayers to saints as remedies. Could you elaborate on the significance of these practices and their role in addressing the challenges faced by women in the colonial Caribbean?

There were so many prayers to saints that I found in Inquisition cases against women suspected of witchcraft or sorcery (hechicería o sortilegio)–prayers to Saint Ciprian, St. Erasmus, or the “Anima Sola.” Prayers to Santa Marta have been an obsession of mine since I discovered how common they were, showing up both in cases of domestic violence and where a woman wanted to attract a certain man’s affections. Then when I saw multiple references to women owning paintings or other representations of Santa Marta across the Iberian Atlantic, I knew this was an important figure. In this podcast with Nathalie Miraval (PhD student in Art History, Yale University), she describes one of those images of Santa Marta confiscated from Ines de Villalobos in Veracruz during a 1594 Inquisition investigation. (I also write about Villalobos in my article.)

All the varieties of prayers to Santa Marta (some to Marta “la Mala”) show how much women looked to her to better their relationships. Her power was not just to make a man love and desire her but also to make him respect her. A majority of residents in early Caribbean port cities were women (most of them Black or mixed-race). Most didn’t have property of their own and were subject to patriarchal double standards or were reliant on male partnerships for financial sustenance (why the prayer below asks him to “give me what he has”). Women knew their economic prospects could be enhanced by companionate cooperation (why he should “tell me what he knows” and “give her what he has”). However, intimate violence or deceit (“don’t take up with another woman!”) were real dangers for which she needed divine intercession.

3. How did you assemble the primary source base for this article? What challenges did you face in using these sources to tell the story that you do in the article?

I found Inquisition trials to be incredibly useful tools for telling bottom-up histories for my first book, which considered the Holy Tribunal in Cartagena de Indias as a key site for religious discipline in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. But there are few full trials from Cartagena that survive today—what remains are the reports and a few trials sent to Madrid for further assistance. I knew that other Caribbean ports were under the jurisdiction of the Mexican Inquisition, and so I visited the AGN in Mexico City twice (in 2013 and 2015) to see what I could find. There I discovered incredibly rich correspondence and witness testimonies, some of which led to full trials (hundreds of folios each one) from Veracruz, Campeche, and Mérida. It was in these trials (especially the “discurso de vida” that marks the first words written down from the accused) that confirmed for me both the incredible mobility of people across the Caribbean, and the plethora of magical prayers, substances, or prognostication tools to deal with love, marriage, and relationship woes.

4. How did holistic healing practices vary all across the circum-Caribbean at this time, and why? How did this affect your methodology when analyzing Beatriz de Leon’s case?

Beatriz de Leon was the earliest case I found (from 1571), and it’s only six pages long (all of which can be read from fol. 125r [image 255] to fol. 128v [image 266] at https://repositorio.agn.gob.mx/arbol-jerarquico?id=b3a9afd0-fa3b-4098-b1f6-c6cdd0d725d0). Apart from some of the pages being torn and most of it written in challenging sixteenth-century handwriting (especially for someone more comfortable with paleography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), it grabbed my attention because of the raw emotion that came out of a very short witness testimony. The second witness against De Leon was a blind woman who overheard a conversation in which she heard Ana Lopez crying and asking for a “remedy” for her love life. When Beatriz called Ana “hermana” and reassured her that they could find a way to repair things, my heart broke just a little. But when I read so many similar anecdotes about women crying with one another, reassuring one another, and offering “remedies” for their relationships, I knew there was something about the emotional care as well as the specifics of the remedies offered that I wanted to understand. When I went back and remembered that Ana’s lover was named Plata, I knew I had to open the article with this story. So many of the sorrows and ills of life in the colonial Caribbean came down to money—who had it, who didn’t, how to get more of it through advantageous marriages or temporary relations that promised some combination of love, sex, and support. Women also created homosocial relationships that promised remedies to life’s challenges, whether sickness, domestic abuse, or unrequited desires. With such direct, interpersonal networks, it’s no surprise that there was both such a wide range of prayers and potions employed in various healing practices, but also that these networks were so powerful that we see commonalities in their practices across space and time.

5. Read anything good recently?

I’m a big fan of historical fiction and have been getting audiobooks through my public library on Libby. I’m currently listening to The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, about Martha Ballard, the eighteenth-century midwife that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich made famous in the ’90s. I’ve also enjoyed recent novels like The Antidote by Karen Russell (set in a fictional 1920s town in my home state of Nebraska), The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo (about a Jewish servant girl in sixteenth-century Madrid who can perform magic) and The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron (an action-packed adventure like
Pirates of the Caribbean but starring a Black female pirate from Santo Domingo). The last two books are perhaps the least historically grounded, but they are a lot of fun regardless.