“Witchcraft in the Tropical Ice Age: Natural and Supernatural Adaptation in the Caribbean, 1600-1640"

Description

In the seventeenth century, European and African settlers in the Caribbean encountered an unfamiliar natural world, bringing old understandings of weather, plants, animals, and human bodies—their origins, abilities, and fixity—into doubt. At the same time, elsewhere in the Atlantic world, the climate changes of the Little Ice Age similarly challenged earlier beliefs about the environment, raising new questions about the relationship between the natural and supernatural planes.

The upheavals of both the Columbian exchange and the Little Ice Age have each spawned an abundance of scholarship, from microhistories to large-scale syntheses. The accretion of this scholarship now makes it possible to elaborate the braided narratives of climate change in the North Atlantic and climate adaptation in the American tropics.

Drawing on witchcraft cases tried by the Inquisitions of Mexico and Cartagena between 1600 and 1640, this paper examines how Caribbean newcomers adapted existing beliefs about the natural world to both the environmental circumstances of the Americas and the climatic instability of the Little Ice Age. It emphasizes how alleged witches built on the rapidly changing material and spiritual networks of the Atlantic world to alter their practices and build multi-ethnic, border-crossing therapeutic communities in the Americas.

Period	Mar 21 2025
Held at	Renaissance Society of America
Degree of Recognition	National