El Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios (1553) que ‘avisa y no emponzoña’ de fray Andrés de Olmos

In 1553, the Franciscan and inquisitor Fray Andrés de Olmos completed his Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios, a translation into Nahuatl of the demonology manual Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicherías, written by fellow inquisitor Fray Martín de Castañega and published in 1529. The existing studies on these treatises focus on the reason why Olmos chose the work and briefly examine the characteristics of the translation in comparison with the original. The aim of this article is to further the study of Olmos’s translation by connecting both treatises with his evangelizing experiences and demonological knowledge in Spain and New Spain. Thus, the article aims to demonstrate that, despite the exclusion and the occasional inclusion of new information, Olmos remains faithful to Castañega’s text. An analysis of the proselytizing purpose of the translation, as well as its audience, helps to explain why Olmos did not rewrite the original. He neither transformed it into a new manual nor produced one that complemented the original because, as he explains in his own words, his aim was to produce a translation that "warns and does not poison".