Flight and Confinement: Female Youth, Agency, and Emotions in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

The intention of the Devil was ‘that [I] not marry, because he wanted to take [me] somewhere where [I] would rule and be a lady’.¹ These are the words of sixteen-year-old María de Ocampo – spoken by her and recorded verbatim, as far as we know – and as such a rare artefact of great importance to the history of youth.² This essay is based largely on a close reading of the 1557 Inquisition proceeding in which María, a member of Guatemala’s Spanish elite, accused herself of demonic pact. María’s case contains hundreds of pages in which the testimony of girls and