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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

When many of us picture the so-called New World in the Age of Exploration,

we tend to think of conquistadors and caravals, gold and silver,

or maybe dramatic encounters between Spanish invaders and indigenous emperors.

What we don't usually imagine are the women whose lives underpin these empires,

grinding maize at dawn, negotiating marriages at court, or standing in colonial

courtrooms to defend their children's inheritance. Yet from the very beginning, the societies

that emerged in the Americas were profoundly shaped by women whose names have often slipped out of the

historical record, if they were ever there in the first place.

In the great cities of Mesoamerica, women were central to family life, religion and the economy. With the arrival of the Spanish, everything changed, and yet, in other ways,

much remained stubbornly continuous. Christian marriage, Spanish law and colonial hierarchies sought to

confine women, even as some of them learned to use these new rules and institutions to their

...