PETER BAKEWELL is Edmund and Louise Kahn Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and has taught in the US since 1975. His major research and writing has centered on the history of silver mining and related topics in colonial Spanish America. His previous works include Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (1971) and Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosi: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga (1988).

JACQUELINE HOLLER is Associate Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, Canada. She is the author of Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531-1601 (2003), and of articles on colonial Mexico.