Introduction : contextualizing race, gender and religion in the New World / Nora E. Jaffary -- Frontiers -- Women as go-betweens? : patterns in sixteenth-century Brazil / Alida C. Metcalf -- Gender and violence : conquest, conversion and culture on New Spain's imperial frontier / Bruce A. Erickson -- The very sinews of a new colony : demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women / Ben Marsh -- Female religious -- The convent as missionary in seventeenth-century France / Susan Broomhall -- 'Although I am black, I am beautiful' : Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla / Joan C. Bristol -- Andean women in religion : beatas, 'decency' and the defence of honor in colonial Cuzco / Kathryn Burns -- Race mixing -- Incest, sexual virtue and social mobility in late colonial Mexico / Nora E. Jaffary -- 'An empire founded on libertinage' : the mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue / Yvonne Fabella -- Mediating Mackinac : Métis women's cultural persistence in the upper Great Lakes / Bethany Fleming -- Networks -- Circuits of knowledge among women in early seventeenth-century Lima / Nancy E. van Deusen -- Waters of faith, currents of freedom : gender, religion and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme / Linda M. Rupert -- Afterword : women in the Atlantic world / Patricia Seed.