i

THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH

COMPANION TO THE WORKS OF
SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

Called by her contemporaries the “Tenth Muse,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–​1695) has
continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican
schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing
received consistent scholarly attention, focused on complexities of female authorship in the
political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those
areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin
American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism.
By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide
serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America,
colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women’s and gender studies. The chapters are
distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana’s life and
work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception his-
tory; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the
reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the
academic debates within each field.

Emilie L. Bergmann is Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, with

fields of specialization in early modern Spain and Spanish America.

Stacey Schlau is Professor of Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies at West Chester
University of Pennsylvania.
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THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH

COMPANION TO THE WORKS OF
SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau

iv

First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-1-472-44407-3 (hbk)
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By Out of House Publishing
v

CONTENTS

List of figures viii

Introduction: making and unmaking myth in Sor Juana studies  ix
Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau
A note about conventions xxi

PART I
Contexts 1

1 The empire and Mexico City: religious, political, and social

institutions of a transatlantic enterprise 3
Alejandro Cañeque

2 The Creole intellectual project: creating the baroque archive 12

Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel

3 The gendering of knowledge in New Spain: enclosure, women’s

education, and writing 23
Stephanie Kirk

PART II
Reception history 31

4 Seventeenth-​century dialogues: transatlantic readings of Sor Juana 33

Mónica Díaz

5 Readings from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries:

hagiography and nationalism 40
Martha Lilia Tenorio
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Contents

6 Twentieth-​century readings: Schons, Pfandl, and Paz 53

Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling

7 Passionate advocate: Sor Juana, feminisms, and sapphic loves 63

Amanda Powell

8 Translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ideology and interpretation 78

Isabel Gómez

9 “My original, a woman”: copies, origins, and Sor Juana’s iconic portraits 91

J.Vanessa Lyon

10 Contemporary Mexican Sor Juanas: artistic, popular, and scholarly 107

Emily Hind

PART III
Interpretations of and debates about the works 119

A:  Prose works 121

11 The afterlife of a polemic: conflicts and discoveries regarding

Sor Juana’s letters 122
Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling

12 Challenging theological authority: the Carta atenagórica /​ Crisis sobre

un sermón and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea 133
Grady C.Wray

B: Verse 141

13 Sor Juana’s love poetry: a woman’s voice in a man’s genre 142

Emilie L. Bergmann

14 Sor Juana’s Romances: fame, contemplation, and celebration 152

Rocío Quispe-​Agnoli

15 Philosophical sonnets: through a baroque lens 164

Luis F. Avilés

16 Primero sueño: heresy and knowledge 176

Alessandra Luiselli

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Contents

C: Theater and public art 189

17 Writing for the public eye: theatrical production, church spectacle,

and state-​sponsored art (the Neptuno Alegórico) 190
Verónica Grossi

18 Sor Juana as lyricist and musical theorist 205

Mario A. Ortiz

19 Loa to El divino Narciso: the costs of critiquing the conquest 214

Ivonne del Valle

20 The Autos: theology on stage 227

Linda Egan

21 Los empeños de una casa: staging gender 238

Susana Hernández Araico

22 La segunda Celestina, a recently discovered play, and Amor es más laberinto 250
Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora

PART IV
Future directions for research 259

23 Understudied aspects of canonical works and potential

approaches to little-​studied works 261
George Antony Thomas

List of contributors 269

Works cited 276
Index 313

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FIGURES

9.1 Gregorio Fernández, St.Teresa de Ávila, 1625. 95

9.2 Lucas de Valdés, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Engraved frontispiece.
Segundo tomo de sus obras (Sevilla, 1692). 96
9.3 Clemens Puche after José Caldevilla, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Engraved frontispiece. Fama y obras posthumas (Madrid, 1700). 98
9.4 Miguel Cabrera, Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1750 (oil on canvas). 101
9.5 Don Juan Carreño de Miranda, Queen Mariana of Austria, in mourning
(oil on canvas). 103
10.1 Sor Juana Surreal. 111

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INTRODUCTION
Making and unmaking myth in Sor Juana studies

“Pero lo auténtico de Sor Juana no está en las anécdotas sino en la obra.”1

Rosario Castellanos, “Asedio a Sor Juana,” Juicios sumarios 18

Nun, rebel, genius, poet, persecuted intellectual, and proto-​feminist, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(1648–​1695) has been written and re-​written as these fabrications and more. These images
arise from a handful of her works. The essays in this volume offer a corrective, a panorama of
approaches to the full range of her writings: the development of the field, the filiation of its
central issues, and how discoveries and debates have questioned and modified our assumptions.
Their authors reflect the diversity of scholarly perspectives on the most distinguished intel-
lectual in the pre-​Independence American colonies of Spain. This collection aims to provide
resources and a scholarly apparatus for study of Sor Juana’s canonical and other, less well-​known
works, for those interested in exploring the complex thought of this remarkable early modern
intellectual. Each essay provides a historical trajectory of scholarship, while dismantling the
iconic stereotypes in which the fame of a major intellectual has been cast and making visible
the rich complexity of the writing that earned her renown.
Despite the relevance of her work to literary, colonial, and feminist studies, as well as his-
tory, theater, and theology, those who work on her constitute a relatively small community.
However, her writing is so complex in its conceptual framework that it requires intervention
from different angles. Our contributors unfold possibilities for further exploration from diverse
academic disciplines, the most prominent being colonial Latin American studies. This field is
growing exponentially; its disciplinary boundaries are constantly shifting, and yet this extraordi-
nary writer of colonial New Spain is ironically confined to a corner of the field.The dynamic
between indigenous and Creole subjectivities constitutes a primary critical concern in colonial
Latin American studies in general and Sor Juana studies in particular. Throughout this volume,
contributions from a historian, an art historian, and a musicologist, as well as literary scholars,
represent the interdisciplinary approach necessary for reading the Mexican nun-​poet’s work in
its colonial intellectual context.
Debates regarding Sor Juana’s world view are central to the field: to what extent can we read
her as American? There is little doubt that her literary models were European and she wrote
for a European audience. Nevertheless, some of her works evince an American conscious-
ness: scholars often cite the representation of the violence of the conquest in the loa to El divino
Narciso (Divine Narcissus) and her use of Nahuatl in the villancicos as examples. She epitomizes
the Creole appropriation of the Baroque and yet she weaves a recognition of the humanity of
indigenous peoples into her poetry and theater.

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Introduction

With few documents available, many scholars, including some of the most distinguished,
misunderstand and misinterpret, thus demonstrating the difficulty of navigating the labyrinth
in order to clarify doubts and questions. Despite the publication of the four-​volume complete
works (1951–​1957), as well as subsequent discoveries, her significance has still not been fully
evaluated. Sor Juana easily invites readers, but it is no simple matter to acquire the expertise nec-
essary to map the baroque conceptual frameworks and decode the language. Most scholars enter
the field through three points of access: early modern Spanish poetry, colonial Latin American
literature, and feminist studies, each of which brings distinct skills and limitations.
Although most of the scholarship discussed in this volume was produced after the 1980s, the
mid-​twentieth-​century insights of writer and public intellectual Rosario Castellanos (1925–​
1974) are astonishingly prescient, despite occasional lapses into acceptance of common myths.
She constructs Sor Juana as a feminist precursor, who must deny her physical womanhood in
order to think and write. Her essays, “Asedio a Sor Juana” (The Seige of Sor Juana) and “Otra
vez sor Juana” (Once Again Sor Juana), for example, invoke Sor Juana as a feminist intellectual
foremother; ironically, in doing so, she also furthers the Mexican national agenda that has so
consistently laid claim to the baroque poet. Castellanos reminds us that accepting the challenge
of reading Sor Juana is rewarded with glimpses of the colonial poet’s wit and humor. Her play,
El eterno femenino (The Eternal Feminine), responds in kind.

Historical trajectory of critical trends

Since the publication of the Inundación castálida (Castalian Inundation) in 1689, controversy has
surrounded Sor Juana’s life and work. As a woman and baroque writer, she has been the object
of intellectual evaluation, both positive and negative. She remains an enigmatic figure who
resists simple categorization. Constructed and reconstructed, created and re-​created, more often
misunderstood than understood, her status as a Mexican and feminist icon can divert attention
from the complexity, subtlety, and beauty of her writing. Encouraged by the lack of documents
and their potential for contradictory interpretations, scholars since the seventeenth century have
attempted to fill in the gaps with speculation and distortion. And the Mexican nun’s writings
provide additional fodder for invention of proliferating Sor Juanas.
The challenging stylistic and intellectual difficulty of her writing, as well as her status as a
colonial woman, present barriers to understanding her work. The resulting lacunae allow for
misleading premises and conclusions. What seems like absence or lack may paradoxically con-
ceal an excess of meaning. Baroque style provided hiding places for meanings so well encoded
that they can only with great difficulty be deciphered. She embodies in her person and in her
writing the convoluted situation of late seventeenth-​century New Spain. She wrote at a dis-
tance from the metropolis and yet belonged to a pan-​European intellectual elite. Confronted
with limited choices because she was both female and illegitimate, she entered the confinement
of convent walls and exceeded not only hegemonic gendered expectations, but also rose to
unparalleled intellectual heights.
Enthusiastically recognized in her time, the Sor Juana we know today is the product of three
centuries of fluctuating reception. Her legacy and the worth of her achievements have been
perennially reshaped by ideological currents. Shifts in her literary reputation reflect changing
views of the Baroque, ideas of empire and nationhood, and attitudes about women’s capabilities.
Tenorio argues that three prejudices emerged in what was presented as literary criticism and
historiography: women’s inability to achieve the same artistic and intellectual heights as men;
the European view of Hispanic literatures as second-​rate; and finally, Spain’s refusal to recognize
the quality of its colonial writers.

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Introduction

As Tenorio observes, following almost universal accolades in the seventeenth century, by

the mid-​eighteenth century, with the triumph of neo-​Classicism and its theory of good taste,
came a period of neglect. In a 1726 defense of women, for example, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo
disparaged her talent for poetry. The nineteenth century continued that trend:  both liberal
and Catholic conservative critics rejected her poetry. Not only did Spain refuse to recognize
the merit of writers from its former colonies, but the European view of Hispanic literatures as
second-​rate hindered appreciation. In newly independent Mexico, appropriation by a national-
ist agenda kept her visible, if only through a distorting lens.
In the twentieth century, scholarly interest in Sor Juana began in 1910, with the publication
of Juana de Asbaje by the poet Amado Nervo. It is no coincidence that this volume, the first
book-​length study of the nun-​writer, appeared at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.
Of far greater significance, as Bénassy insists, Dorothy Schons’ 1926 pioneering article, “Some
Obscure Points in the Life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” offered new information about Sor
Juana’s life, from biographical documents she discovered.
Groundbreaking in terms of critical orientation focusing on social, religious, political con-
text in which she was working, Schons made prescient deductions regarding the importance
of the patronage of the viceroys and motivations for Sor Juana’s selling of her books, although
she did not have access to the documents discovered since 1980. She described the clerics who
had significant influence on the Mexican nun’s life and works: Antonio Núñez de Miranda and
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. Also, Schons became the first to challenge the misconception that
Sor Juana entered the convent because of unrequited love.

Mythmaking and scholarship

Because so little is known about Sor Juana’s life, much scholarship on this topic is biographi-
cal speculation. Most of what we think we know really falls under the rubric of reception.
The author’s rhetorical strategies in the Respuesta (Answer), intended to persuade her critics,
have come to be accepted as truth. Thus she initiated a three-​century project of mythmaking.
She herself talks back to readers across time and space, anticipating the inventions so prevalent
among Sor Juana scholars as well as the general public. Frederick Luciani details in Literary
Self-​Fashioning how she fabricated her image using such anecdotes as her sacrifice of her hair
and abstention from eating cheese to demonstrate that her desire to learn originated in God’s
will. The narrative of her fleeting desire to dress as a boy in order to attend university became a
cross-​dressing episode signaling gender nonconformity. In Romance 49, she protests her admir-
ers’ construction of a prodigy to be displayed, but she is complicit in this construction. Coherent
narratives of her final years necessarily contain an element of extrapolation, because they are
based on Calleja’s hagiographic portrait published as the introduction to the posthumous third
volume of her works (1700).The credence lent to his view arose from the paucity of documen-
tation partly attributable to her gender and social condition. Since 1995, scholars have recovered
new documents that answer some questions and pose others, regarding the disposition of her
library and the polemic stirred up by the Carta Atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena) and the
Respuesta.
Marie-​Cécile Bénassy’s essay chronicles the conflicts during Sor Juana’s time, which origi-
nated in her conversations with distinguished ecclesiastical visitors, one of whom transferred
her written argument into print. From the documents generated by participants in the ear-
lier polemic, current scholarly debate has developed regarding the authenticity and interpre-
tation of the seventeenth-​century documents. Bénassy explains the impact of discoveries of
previously-​unknown, rescued manuscripts, including one discovered in Lima’s national library,

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Introduction

an indication of how widely distributed Sor Juana’s writing was. Since 1980, the discovery of
eight texts have challenged prevailing opinions, casting doubt on the traditional view of a self-​
abnegating martyr who abandoned her intellectuality in favor of piety. A key piece of evidence
of her continuing intellectual activity is the rediscovery and publication of the Enigmas (1994),
poetic riddles sent to nuns in a Lisbon convent. Another revelation was a 1682 letter in which
she dismissed her confessor (the Carta de Monterrey), ten years before the 1691 crisis arising from
the Carta atenagórica.
Grady Wray disentangles the theological complexities of the Carta atenagórica, a critique
ordered by the Archbishop of Puebla, of a sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Vieira.
This letter is less studied than The Answer, but Wray reads it as a portrait of Sor Juana’s later
life. Pointing out that most of the significant research has been carried out since 1982, he sifts
through an extensive bibliography, unraveling the tangled threads of critical discourse about the
two letters, including Sor Juana’s choice to critique Vieira’s sermon; how it became the focus
of so much polemic; the substance of her letters; significance to Sor Juana of the theologi-
cal concept of Christ’s favors; and questions of genre and gender. Wray discusses the trope of
silence that has become emblematic of the consequences of Sor Juana’s daring to venture into
theological topics.
In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith), Octavio
Paz casts doubt on the myth of Sor Juana’s complete silence in the last years of her life. Since
publication in 1982, it has shaped Sor Juana scholarship; the influence of his monumental study
is evident in the essays in this volume. A thoughtful study of Sor Juana’s writing and its cultural
context, the book is a product of more than three decades of research. Praising her as a poet, he
gives more attention to the Sueño (Dream) than previous scholars. At the same time, as Bénassy
points out, Trampas constitutes a highly subjective reading of Sor Juana, the artifact of Paz’s need
to be the spokesperson of Mexican culture. His project aims to demonstrate her significance
in Mexican cultural history. He attempts a restitution of Sor Juana as both woman and brilliant
intellectual. Ludwig Pfandl’s 1931 book, the most extensive study before Paz’s, had disparaged
Sor Juana’s literary talent. In addition, some of his assertions were based on inaccurate readings.
In response to Ludwig Pfandl’s neo-​Freudian claim that Sor Juana’s intellect made her mascu-
line and neurotic, Paz asserts her femininity. Pfandl had written the study in the 1930s, but it
was not until 1963, when Mexican historian Francisco de la Maza discovered, translated, and
published it in Spanish, that the book gained any influence. Citing Pfandl’s absurd belittlement
of Sor Juana’s poetic abilities, Bénassy critiques his reliance on a Freudian model, including
what he called a “feminine Oedipus complex.” She decries the undue influence that his psy-
choanalytic approach continues to wield, despite disparaging reviews by prominent Hispanists.
Although Bénassy critiques Paz’s reading of her confrontation with ecclesiastical authorities
through the lens of Soviet persecution of poet Ana Akhmatova, noting that he sees Sor Juana
as an accomplice of her tormentors, she acknowledges his enormous contribution. Not only
did he depict Sor Juana’s femininity as inseparable from her genius, but he also re-​established
her fame.

Mythmaking in art and popular culture

Sor Juana’s fame is in no danger of fading, but popular-​culture versions of her image overshadow
her writing. Objects of visual, material, and virtual culture  –​tattoos, shopping bags, jewelry,
blogs, mouse pads, and iPad apps –​reproduce her figure, dressed in the familiar wimple, veil, and
shield. Two ideological tendencies shape contemporary appropriations: feminist and nationalist.
She draws feminists, who would like to be her. And nationalists stake a claim to a glorious past;

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Introduction

reclaiming her as Mexican occludes the conflictive aspects of Mexican history. Because she is a
national icon, the debates about interpretation of her life and works have political implications.
In addition, her biography and writings have become the focus of competing ideologies.
In Mexico, Sor Juana occupies an uncertain space between the sanctity of the Virgin of
Guadalupe and the betrayal of La Malinche. Currently, popular culture represents her as a time-
less peer. Generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her poem, the satirical verses
“Hombre necios, que acusáis” (Foolish men, who accuse). Emily Hind’s essay exposes the shift-
ing postmodern landscape in which Sor Juana has become interchangeable with Frida Kahlo as
an icon of Mexican female identity. Hind demonstrates the distortions –​sensationalized sexual-
ity, fetishized buildings, the search for relics –​in events, exhibits, and awards, and contemporary
children’s books.The writer, she argues, is used in ways that have nothing to do with her literary
or cultural legacy. What could be more ubiquitous than the image of the youthful Sor Juana on
the 200-​peso bill? Both Emily Hind and Vanessa Lyon deconstruct the “monetized Sor Juana.”
Lyon points out the pictorial paradox of the sexualized enclosure conveyed through the illustra-
tion. Still, not all Mexicans buy into the myth. Jesusa Rodríguez parodied the national myth
in her performances of Sor Juana: Primero Sueño (Sor Juana Striptease), in which she removed
several layers of restricting clothing while reciting the 975 verses of the poem from memory.
Second-​wave feminist recognition of Sor Juana opened the way for her portrayal as a woman
who escaped the prison of gender. This depiction of her daring makes her both a hero and a
martyr. Feminists claim her as an audacious foremother who defied ecclesiastical authority and
challenged the violence of colonization; and scholars are fascinated by the subtlety of her philo-
sophical wit. She inspires creative work that affirms women’s autonomy. Daniel Crozier and
Peter Krask’s With Blood, With Ink (1993) focuses on her interpretation of theology, as a dying
Sor Juana reflects on the triumphs and trials of her life. In Carla Lucero’s opera about Sor Juana
(in development), on the other hand, she fits well into the classic operatic plot of the destruction
of the female protagonist. Indeed, Lucero describes the piece as the story of a “lesbian genius
destroyed by the Inquisition.”
Much of the scholarship on Sor Juana in the U.S. academy emerged as a result of feminism
as a political movement. Academic feminists, both male and female, regarded themselves as the
cultural arm of the second wave. The choice of the Feminist Press to publish Electa Arenal and
Amanda Powell’s bilingual edition of The Answer/​La Respuesta (1994, 2009) exemplifies this
direction. Before second-​wave feminists claimed Sor Juana as a precursor, she was framed as one
of the seventeenth-​century “Tenth Muses” studied by Tamara Harvey. Arenal appropriated this
myth in the play, This Life Within Me Won’t Keep Still, which brought together two of these Tenth
Muses, Sor Juana and Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, first performed in 1979. More recently,
Paul Anderson’s 1,300-​page Hunger’s Brides (2004) explores in depth the multifaceted power
relationship between Sor Juana and her confessor.
Feminist reappropriations and the myth of the sexualized Sor Juana led to a defiant les-
bian nun. Argentine María Luisa Bemberg’s 1990 film, Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All)
depicts her moment of glory as inevitably followed by humiliation, as she scrubs a floor on her
knees at the feet of her confessor. Amazon categorizes it among LGBT films. In Alicia Gaspar
de Alba’s novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream, a lesbian Sor Juana is subjected to interrogation by
the Inquisition. As she prostrates herself before her persecutors, she privately takes pleasure in
the relief it gives her from the back pain caused by her long hours of writing. That Gaspar de
Alba imagines her as harboring a female fugitive, a cimarrona, connects the poet with rebellious
Others.
Perhaps the most telling example of mythmaking of myriad Sor Juanas is the twentieth-​
century forgery by one J.  Sánchez circulating on the internet, purporting to be a baroque

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Introduction

depiction of Sor Juana as a fifteen-​year old lady-​in-​waiting. Here we see the paradigmatic
youthful, sexualized girl; the pattern in the fabric of the dress seems to caress her dramatically-​
highlighted breasts.

Contextualizing the life

Almost everything about Sor Juana’s life has at one time or another been the subject of
debate, beginning with the date of her birth. Most but not all scholars now accept the
earlier date of 1648 (not 1651), based on the twentieth-​century discovery of her baptismal
certificate. We have already noted the myths that Sor Juana herself initiated about events in
her early life. More historically accurate events include her knowledge of Latin, self-​taught;
the erudition she gained from her grandfather’s library; and her arrival at the viceregal
court in 1664, at the invitation of the newly-​arrived Marquis and Marquise of Mancera.
Aristocratic women’s patronage, beginning with this vicereine, would prove crucial to her
literary career.
Although she was celebrated as a prodigy at court, she decided to profess as a Discalced
Carmelite in 1666. After three months, she returned to court. Her earliest biographer, Father
Calleja, described what has become a legendary oral examination, in which she proved her
erudition before a panel of learned men (1668). In 1669, she again professed, this time in the
Convent of St. Jerome, where she remained until her death. In the Respuesta, she asserted her
desire to study and aversion to marriage as motives for becoming a nun. Indeed, the convent
did provide a space for intellectual pursuits. The height of her productivity and fame occurred
during the years that the Condesa de Paredes was vicereine (1680–​1688). Privileged to be the
recipient of succeeding vicereines’ patronage, she rewarded them with her artistic output.
Beginning in 1688, Sor Juana’s life circumstances changed dramatically: the departure of the
viceroy Marqués de la Laguna and his wife María Luisa Manrique de Lara, Condesa de Paredes
left her vulnerable. Bénassy offers a plausible narrative of the events that led up to Sor Juana’s
eloquent refutation of criticism of her intellectual pursuits, in a sequence from oral exchange
in the convent locutory with intellectuals and theologians, one of whom encouraged her to
write a theological critique of Vieira’s sermon. The progression to written and then publication
in printed form as Carta Atenagórica with a chastening preface authored by the Bishop of Puebla
under the pseudonym Sor Filotea, heightened the precariousness of her position. It is to this
situation that we owe Sor Juana’s most-​studied work, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Answer to Sor
Filotea), her rhetorically brilliant self-​defense (1691).
Although Sor Juana’s literary productivity was sharply curtailed after the polemic, some
evidence exists of her continuing intellectual activity, most notably the unfinished Romance 51
found in her cell after her death, a spectral echo of the poet’s voice. In the twentieth century,
more evidence was discovered to indicate that Sor Juana was not completely silenced. Díaz dis-
cusses the significance of two manuscripts found in Lisbon and subsequently published in 1968,
of her “Enigmas ofrecidos a la discreta inteligencia de la soberana asamblea de la Casa del Placer
por su más rendida y aficionada Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa” (Enigmas offered
to the wise intelligence of the sovereign assembly of the [Literary Academy called] House of
Pleasure, by its most devoted Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, Tenth Muse”).
Essentially, as Kirk points out, Sor Juana’s conflicts with authority figures arose from her
claims to education, knowledge, and wisdom.The men who wielded their authority against her
were powerful ecclesiastics with links to the institutions of church and state, and they were well
known to her: the Archbishop of New Spain, the Bishop of Puebla, and the Jesuit who served
as confessor not only to Sor Juana but to the viceroys.

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Introduction

Barely two years after the reprimand of “Sor Filotea,” Díaz remarks, officials of the Inquisition
in Spain joined other clerics to praise Sor Juana’s writings in the preface of the Segundo volu-
men of her works in 1692. In general, the praises in this second volume consolidated the two
almost-​epithets that would accompany each mention of Sor Juana: the universal nature of her
knowledge and her manly intelligence. Tenorio singles out Padre Juan Navarro Vélez’s praise. He
recognizes her stylistic brilliance as well as the radically original theme of the Sueño: the impos-
sibility of absolute knowledge, while at the same time demonstrating what she has succeeded
in knowing.
Scholars differ as to what extent Sor Juana’s near silence can be attributed to pressure exerted
directly upon her by the misogynistic Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas,
the Bishop of Puebla, or her former confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda. The role of other
ecclesiastics in Mexico City is a matter of speculation. Increasingly detailed knowledge of the
economic, political, and social history and its major players in New Spain contributes a fuller
understanding of the dynamics of this period.
Historians have greatly advanced our attempts to situate Sor Juana in the institutional set-
ting in which she worked. Alejandro Cañeque’s essay, which presents a chronological survey
of trends in historiography about colonial New Spain, traces a move away from institutional
history to social and ethnohistory since the 1960s. This means, he argues, that historians are
using outdated models when discussing such administrative and juridical institutions as the
cabildo, audiencia, and Indian Court. He finds an exception in the return to institutional history
among Spanish and Portuguese historians in the 1990s. Much of that work has focused on the
Inquisition. A constitutive ambiguity gave the Holy Tribunal room for political maneuvering,
which led to endless clashes between inquisitional and state officials. This can be clearly appre-
ciated in the history of the Mexican Holy Office and its relations with royal authorities in the
seventeenth century. In addition, insights of the most recent historiography of early modern
political culture have been incorporated into the study of the viceregal figure as a representative
of the Spanish monarch. Cañeque proposes that the recovery of the imperial perspective will
allow scholars to better understand the ways in which ideas and practices circulated around the
empire and contributed to shaping Sor Juana’s literary universe.
As scholars in both Mexico and the United States plot the connections among gender,
education, and knowledge, we follow Sor Juana’s lead. Since the 1982 publication of Josefina
Muriel’s groundbreaking Cultura femenina novohispana (Female Culture of New Spain), the pro-
ject of contextualizing Sor Juana has gained momentum. Several contributors address the gen-
dered politics of knowledge that Sor Juana confronted in her writing. Kirk traces the feminist
critical history of studies related to women, education, and convents, including Mexican femi-
nist scholars Josefina Muriel and Pilar Gonzalbo, as well as U.S. critics, beginning in the 1980s
(Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters and Merrim, Feminist Perspectives, among others). Research on
women’s education continues to contribute a fuller view of the environment in which women
learned and claimed authorship, including the important role of intellectuality in the convent
(Howe, Education; Cruz and Hernández, Introduction), and the relationship between knowledge
and mysticism (Arenal and Schlau, “Leyendo yo”; Franco; Ibsen; McKnight). Three books on
Sor Juana and the pursuit of knowledge have added depth and specificity to the case of Sor
Juana (Merrim, Early Modern; Grossi, Sigilosos; and Martínez-​San Miguel, Saberes americanos).
Transatlantic studies, which provide additional insights into Sor Juana’s circumstances and writ-
ings, are currently shifting away from a masculinist bias and toward using gender as a category
of analysis. Díaz gives credit to scholars such as Harvey, Martínez-​San Miguel, and Vollendorf
in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana, and more recently, Díaz and Kirk, Morales, and
Gillespie, for exploring the gendered transatlantic perspective. It is worth noting that the three

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Introduction

volumes of Sor Juana’s works were published in Spain (1689, 1692, and 1700), due to the efforts
of a former vicereine. Díaz concludes, “Through a female network of support, Sor Juana travels
across the Atlantic.”
Against the claim that feminist or lesbian approaches are anachronistic, Powell reasons that
it is impossible to read her in the twenty-​first century without the lenses of gender and sexual-
ity. In her lifetime, Sor Juana owed her literary acclaim not only to her brilliance, but also to
the longstanding misogynist exclusion of women from intellectual activity. Powell brings out
elements of Sor Juana’s feminist arguments that participate in the querelle des femmes. Tracing
feminist approaches beginning with the contributions of Dorothy Schons in the 1920s through
the present, Powell discerns a period of “re-​erasure” during the mid-​twentieth century, when
the history of women’s intellectual accomplishment was forgotten, and then the resumption of
research on Sor Juana with the second wave of feminism. In the last decades of the twentieth
century, postmodern deconstructions of subjectivity challenged the focus on Sor Juana’s femi-
nine and feminist identities.
Latinas today, however, invoke Sor Juana as a founding mother of Latina feminism, in the acad-
emy especially through cultural studies and theology. Michelle Gonzales’ Sor Juana, Beauty and Justice
in the Americas (2003), for instance, examines the seventeenth-​century nun’s poetry and theater as
theological discourse, re-​creating her as a precursor of Latina and other liberation theologies. In
literary studies, Alicia Gaspar de Alba has devoted many years to writing about Sor Juana: nov-
els, poems, and scholarly works. Her latest book, (Un)framing the Bad Woman: Sor Juana, Malinche,
Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels With a Cause (2014) presents Sor Juana in a group of women, each
of whom was considered unruly in her time, thereby envisioning possibilities for empowerment.

Situating the work

Since the majority of scholarship on Sor Juana addresses her literary works, most of the essays
in this volume approach her as a writer. Long considered the “greatest” poet of colonial Spanish
America, only a few of her works are frequently cited or thoroughly read. The essays in this
volume trace major trends in research on Sor Juana, while at the same time they exemplify
innovative developments in the field. Because colonial Latin American studies grew as an inter-
disciplinary field, its tools and knowledge can readily be applied to enriching Sor Juana studies.
Martínez-​San Miguel reads Sor Juana through a conceptual framework that emphasizes the
ambiguity of criollo discourses and perspectives, insofar as they reflect “the desire for assimila-
tion and equality with European subjects,” at the same time as they seek a distinct regional
identity. For Díaz, this constitutes Sor Juana’s colonial hermeneutics. Recent studies, Quispe-
Agnoli observes, analyze Sor Juana’s “subtle contestation of the Spanish imperial rhetoric about
its colonial possessions and alternate responses as an emerging Creole subject in New Spain that
engaged in transatlantic conversations.”
Several essays, among them Martínez-​San Miguel’s and Powell’s, challenge traditional cat-
egories separating secular from religious, personal from public, and prose from poetry. Although
lyric poetry, for instance, is commonly framed as intimate, it was widely used as public perfor-
mance. Antonio Maravall’s still-​influential La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica
(1975), translated as Culture of the Baroque (1986), has shaped early modern Hispanic studies in
its view of the arts as hegemonic propaganda to distract the population of seventeenth-​century
Spain and its colonies from the problems of empire. Contemporary Sor Juana scholars recognize
the limitations of this view.
Baroque displays suspended time and social boundaries; they also constituted sites of political
contestation (Quispe-Agnoli, following Ruiz). Of Sor Juana’s many literary interventions into

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Introduction

public life, perhaps the most visible, and until recently the least studied, was the triumphal arch
she designed for the welcome ceremonies of the new viceroy and vicereine in 1680. Verónica
Grossi emphasizes the dearth of primary resource materials, now much more accessible than
a decade ago, which has made analysis difficult. She also notes the interlinking of written and
visual imagery in the Neptuno, characterizing the ephemeral edifice as a quintessentially baroque
display.The critical tendency to compare Sor Juana’s arch to Siguenza y Góngora’s, produced for
the same occasion, rounds out the thorough study.
Kirk and Thomas question the marginalization of non-​canonical genres, such as letters and
occasional poetry. Nuns drew on “spiritual rhetoric,” to use Díaz’s phrase, in order to legitimate
their use of the written word. Sor Juana forges a hybrid rhetoric, often making ironic use of
formulae to make herself heard. Quispe-Agnoli stakes a claim for Sor Juana’s innovative use
of poetic genre, in the context of her “knowledge of intertextual relations and use of dialogic
tensions with other poems written by her and other authors of her time, and her process of
self-​fashioning as a woman writer in her time.” Powell comments Sor Juana’s Neoplatonic view
of the “neutrality” of non-​gendered souls evokes possibilities outside physical, and thus socially
mandated, masculinity or femininity.
As Sor Juana’s powerful mind expands the possibilities of knowledge, she enters into debate
with theologians of her time, as Bénassy-Berling describes and as her most significant –​and
difficult –​poem, the Primero sueño (First Dream), demonstrates. In Luiselli’s essay, the Sueño
emerges as a quintessentially baroque artifact drawing upon the philosophical context of neo-
platonism and the visual culture of emblem books, and as a proto-​feminist epistemological
exploration. In exploring the epistemological limits imposed by the academy, Sor Juana hedges
her arguments “in such a way that leaves them open to dialogue” (L. Powell 15–​16; quoted in
Kirk). In the process, she transgresses gender boundaries. In a decidedly feminist gesture, Egan
argues that Sor Juana is, more than anything, a philosopher. Following Hill’s model, Thomas
insists on integrating the Mexican nun-​author into the long eighteenth century, emphasizing
her concern with rationality and intellect. These interpretations build upon the pioneering
work of Arenal, Bénassy-Berling (Humanisme), and Sabat-​Rivers.
Currently, sorjuanistas are engaged in opening up areas of inquiry that will shed new light
on her writing. Source studies, a traditional methodology, continue to grow and become
more sophisticated, as they question the filiation with Calderonian autos and focus not only
on Christian, but also African, Asian, and indigenous intertexts. While textual analysis remains
a cornerstone of the field, a series of alternative approaches increase in number and impor-
tance:  reading across genres, comparing Sor Juana with other early modern European and
colonial American writers, using digital means of finding new texts, and looking beyond geo-
graphic boundaries (see Thomas). Additional topics for future investigation include: more bilin-
gual translations and comparative approaches, more thorough studies of her theology from
cross-​cultural perspectives, and exploration of Sor Juana’s transatlantic participation in religious
matters as evidenced in lesser-​known works.
Sor Juana herself was aware that she was bound to be read as a woman. Powell addresses not
only this consciousness in her work, but also the gendered history of reception. While some
have imposed a separation between Sor Juana’s poems of friendship (whether grateful, fond,
or laudatory), and those of amorous love, treating the categories as mutually exclusive, Powell
proposes an approach that inscribes her poems to women in a larger context of texts by women
celebrating female friendship, and, drawing on recent historical research, recovers the pres-
ence of homoerotic relationships between women in early modern Europe. This enables her
to examine not only Sor Juana’s witty feminist arguments in her poetry and prose, but also the
gender relationships in her secular dramatic work, Los empeños de una casa (House of Desire).

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Introduction

One extraordinary aspect of Empeños is how much it has to teach us about the culture of the
theater because unlike most extant texts, the diverse elements of the performance have been
preserved. Martínez-​San Miguel explains the staging of equality and subordination; America,
Africa, and Europe appear not only in the Loa but in another section of the “Festejo,” the Sarao,
while Ortiz asserts that dramatic genres gave her an opportunity to explore musical tools and
stage directions manifest her concern with the musical aspects of performances of her work and
Gómez compares the translation and adaptation strategies of Boyle, McGaha and Hernández
Araico, and Pasto.
Whether or not Empeños was performed in Sor Juana’s lifetime, critics have analyzed the
protagonist as the author’s alter ego. Also, they have often insisted on Calderón de la Barca’s
influence on Sor Juana’s secular theater. Hernández Araico regards as equally important the
unique preservation of the accompanying short pieces, the play’s “festejo,” which allow scholars
to study the baroque theatrical imagination. Having been involved in the production of several
performances of the play, and familiar with others, she sheds light on the production aspects, as
well as translation issues (into English), in particular warning readers of a tendency to presentism
that should be avoided.
One of Sor Juana’s secular plays, long forgotten, was the object of decades of archival research
in the United States, Spain, and Mexico. Schmidhuber narrates the recovery of the Segunda
Celestina (Second Celestina) as a bibliographic mystery in which the scholar is the detective.
He communicates the excitement with which scholars follow clues regarding the existence
of works by Sor Juana, and the process and debates over authentication. Schmidhuber places
Sor Juan in a transatlantic community of writers; he advocates for accepting her greater col-
laboration in writing another secular play and its loa, Amor es más laberinto (Love is the Greater
Labyrinth) than earlier scholars had claimed.
Among her religious plays, most attention has gone to the loa introducing El divino Narciso
(Divine Narcissus). Del Valle reads the loa in light of the auto; the relationship between the two is
not always obvious because the play is based on a European (Classical) myth and the loa drama-
tizes the historical encounter between Europeans and indigenous populations. Their confronta-
tion results in conversion to Christianity, presented in the play as a rational exchange between the
allegorical characters of Religion and America. In their discussion of the loa of El divino Narciso,
both del Valle and Martínez-​San Miguel rely on Jáuregui’s account of the development of a cri-
ollo consciousness through his analysis of cannibalism as a metaphor of the act of communion.
Among the three religious plays written by Sor Juana, Divino Narciso has attracted the most schol-
arly attention. Egan accounts for this preference: the Ovidian figure is transformed into a divine
human capable of loving others; the emphatic presence of female figures further humanizes the
play; and Sor Juana’s language displays an extraordinary maturity, ingenuity, and beauty. Yet, as
Egan explains, all three autos explore God’s relationship with humanity using different heroes. El
cetro de José (Joseph’s Staff) and San Hermenegildo (The Martyr of the Sacrament: St. Hermenegild)
explore Catholic dogma and Eucharistic teaching in historical settings.
Like her theater, the romances are both dialogic and performative. Several essays in this
volume single out Romance 51 as an ironic response to the exoticizing praise of the poet (Díaz,
Martínez-​San Miguel, Quispe).This poem, Martínez-​San Miguel argues, as well as # 48, 49, and
50, addressed to readers in Peru and New Granada, exemplifies Sor Juana’s constant “correc-
tion” of readings of her work not only in metropolitan circles, but also in colonial and American
networks. Another instance of literary dialogue is the intertextual rewriting that transforms a
medieval genre into a baroque one (what Quispe-Agnoli, following Alatorre, calls the “baroqui-
zation of ballads”) and a skillful blend of popular song and lyric poetry aimed at praising social
values associated with noble and admirable characters.

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Introduction

Perhaps no other genre of Sor Juana’s work has elicited as much critical debate as her love
poetry. Bergmann (Chapter 13) offers a comparative analysis of notable approaches to the two
issues that have most troubled scholars: how to understand a nun writing love poetry and the
traditional insistence on attaching a biographical interpretation of Sor Juana’s verses addressed
to ficticious male subjects, while either ignoring or misunderstanding those addressed to living
women. The work of scholars such as Stephanie Merrim, Octavio Paz, Lisa Rabin, and Arthur
Terry demonstrates the poet’s infusion of new life into petrarchist tropes (a literary tradition in
decline) with the mythological and metaliterary, while that of Dugaw and Powell offers a his-
toriographic context for understanding the love poetry.
Sor Juana fully exploits the conceptual possibilities of the quintessential baroque poetic form,
the sonnet. Avilés comments that editors group Sor Juana’s sonnets differently, without explain-
ing their criteria for defining specific sonnets as philosophical (Glantz, González Boixo, Méndez
Plancarte, and Sabat-​Rivers). He describes three of the most common critical approaches to the
philosophical sonnet, “Este, que ves, engaño colorido” (This object which you see, a painted
snare): the relationship to the Spanish Baroque and identification of literary models; feminist
interpretations as a rewriting of the trope, carpe diem, and specifically of Góngora’s “Mientras
por competir con tu cabello” (While to compete with your hair); and early modern conceptions
of visual perception, art, and portraiture. Invariably in the literature, the point of departure is that
this is a poem about a portrait. However, the only mention of a portrait is in the title, which may
or may not have been composed by Sor Juana. The title is enigmatic, and Avilés offers an over-
view of interpretations. More important than speculation about her having painted her own
portrait or the authenticity of the five existing portraits, is their connection to the European
tradition of portraiture and the context of Sor Juana’s poetry (Lyon).
Portraits are created myths, stagnant in time, and then we read them as “accurate and psychologi-
cally revealing” (Lyon). But what of the majority of Sor Juana’s five portraits, only one of which
(Juan de Miranda’s) may have been done during her life, in which the sitter’s agency as co-​constitu-
tive subject is, in all probability, nominal if not non-​existent? Two frontispieces, the most circulated
of her portraits during Sor Juana’s life, and generally the least discussed in the critical literature,
receive due attention in Lyon’s essay. In comparing Miguel Cabrera’s painting with Miranda’s,
Lyon finds that both masculinize and therefore empower their subject. Lyon’s detailed analysis of
Miranda’s painting reflects the complexity of interpretation possible because of the context of his-
torical uncertainties. Whereas Octavio Paz perceives Miranda’s painting as highlighting Sor Juana’s
femininity, for Pamela Kirk the portrait implies subversion of the “limiting dynamic of male gaze.”
For Lyon, each has its limitations, although she finds Kirk’s more comprehensive and provocative.
Translation studies and musicology offer two other interpretative approaches to Sor Juana’s
work. Gómez offers a history of renderings of Sor Juana’s work into English. Initially, interest
in her work sprang from a fascination with the rara avis; translators created an image of her as
a “charming Mexican lady.” She argues that, despite the literary prestige of two of her mid-​
twentieth-​century translators (Samuel Beckett and Robert Graves), they had little initial impact.
Two shifts in perspective were required: a re-​evaluation of the Baroque and feminist awareness
and activism. Focusing on the Respuesta, “Este que ves,” devotional exercises, enigmas, villancicos,
canonical and non-​canonical sonnets, and theater, Gómez (Chapter 8) describes contemporary
translators’ various strategies: whether to use meter, imagery, etc. given the difficulty of translat-
ing baroque poetry. After discussing Grossman, Pamela Kirk, Sayers Peden, and Trueblood, she
undertakes a detailed comparison of her own translation of a villancico in guineo with Vicuña
and Rothenberg’s.
Only recently have musicologists begun to devote attention to colonial Latin American
music; consequently the field has begun to add a new dimension to the study of Sor Juana’s

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Introduction

villancicos and theater. Scholars agree that Sor Juana was an accomplished lyricist, since the
villancicos were composed to be set to music, but there is no consensus about whether or not
she composed music or played an instrument. Ortiz’s essay situates the study of Sor Juana as
lyricist and musical theorist in the context of the growing scholarship on colonial conven-
tual culture, an area pioneered in Muriel and Lledías’ La música en las instituciones femeninas
novohispanas (2009). He charts the currently known musical settings of Sor Juana’s villancicos,
some of which were discovered in Guatemala and Bolivia. Although attributing authorship
presents difficulties, a few scholars have managed to authenticate some musical settings,
among them Aurelio Tello. Sor Juana displays her knowledge of music theory in Romance
21 and in loa 384 to the Condesa de Galve. She mentions a now-​lost musical treatise, Caracol
(Conch Shell), in the Romance 21. The spiral form becomes a spatial figuration of musical
intervals.
Until the end of her life, Sor Juana remained fascinated by mathematical and other logical
conundrums. Many authors here at least mention the Enigmas, those curious literary riddles
whose re-​discovery in 1968 went practically unnoticed until recently. In her essay on the trans-
atlantic dimension of Sor Juana’s writing, Díaz focuses on them as well as Romance 51: she
compares significant interpretations of Sor Juana’s and some of her contemporaries’ conscious-
ness of the transatlantic nature of her knowledge, writing, and renown. Beyond the sheer dif-
ficulty of solving these puzzles, they raise significant questions regarding the future of research
on Sor Juana’s work. Díaz asks:

are there more texts composed by Sor Juana or other American women waiting to be
unearthed in archives on the other side of the Atlantic? What are the many possible
interpretations of the Enigmas? Which other readings of Sor Juana’s work in the Iberian
Peninsula can we locate?

Increased scholarly interest in Sor Juana is evident in the upsurge of writing about her,
including eleven peer-​reviewed articles and three dissertations filed in 2014 and 2015, com-
parable to the number devoted to the work of Luis de Góngora, whose poetry is commonly
regarded as stylistically similar to Sor Juana’s.These studies are not necessarily written by coloni-
alists or early modernists; several recent publications are comparative or linked to contemporary
representation.
We view this volume as a living document, not intended to be complete in terms of top-
ics covered. In choosing to concentrate on the literary, we celebrate the primary source of her
fame and the state of the field. Although other disciplines offer productive possibilities, literary
approaches dominate Sor Juana studies. One area of activity is the creative response: fiction, film,
poetry, performance, and visual arts. Mexican and Latina feminists occupy the forefront of these
interpretations. What remains certain is that this woman, this poet, this intellectual adventurer,
will always incite new avenues of exploration.

Note
1 What is authentic about Sor Juana is not the anecdotes, but rather her work.

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newgenprepdf

A NOTE ABOUT CONVENTIONS

We have tried to make this this volume as easily accessible to readers as possible. Consequently,
we offer translations into English of all quotations and titles in Spanish. Quotations in Spanish
are followed by page numbers in parenthesis, then the translation in brackets.When referring to
a published translation, page numbers for that work are also included.
When the abbreviation OC appears in parenthetical citation, it refers to the standard four-​
volume edition of Sor Juana’s work published 1951–​1957 and edited by Alonso Méndez
Plancarte and Alberto G.  Salceda, Obras completas (Complete Works). The volume number
appears first, followed by a period, followed by the page number: e.g., 1.278. Parenthetical cita-
tions of all multi-​volume works are formatted in the same manner.

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1

PART I
Contexts
2
3

1
THE EMPIRE AND MEXICO CITY
Religious, political, and social institutions of a
transatlantic enterprise

Alejandro Cañeque

Following a well-​established tradition, when the count of Paredes arrived in Mexico City in
1680 as New Spain’s new viceroy, he was welcomed by two triumphal arches, one erected by
the municipal council and the other by the cathedral chapter. The cathedral arch had been
designed by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and depicted scenes from the life of the Roman god
Neptune, whom Sor Juana had chosen as the incarnation of a good ruler. As part of the wel-
coming rituals, a few days before his solemn entry into Mexico City, the viceroy had had the
opportunity to receive the representatives of the most important institutions of colonial and
imperial rule. These corporate bodies were the Real Audiencia (high court), the Cabildo Secular
(municipal council), the Cabildo Eclesiástico (cathedral chapter), and the Tribunal del Santo Oficio
de la Inquisición (the Holy Office of the Inquisition).These were the most important institutions
of colonial and imperial rule, and they dominated the political and religious life of seventeenth-​
century Mexico City.
Despite its significance, the historiography on the viceregal institution is, for the most part,
rather antiquated. In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of historians published
biographical studies of the viceregal post in the Habsburg period, focusing on the two or three
more “important” viceroys –​those who were thought to have decisively contributed to estab-
lishing royal authority in the American territories, especially in the sixteenth century  –​and
ignoring the rest (Aiton; Levillier; Zimmerman). In the 1950s, José Ignacio Rubio Mañé pub-
lished his Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de Nueva España, the most complete biographical
and institutional study of New Spain’s viceroys, and, in the 1960s, Jesús Lalinde Abadía authored
two of the most exhaustive studies of the viceregal figure from an institutional and juridical
perspective. Approximately in the same years, John Leddy Phelan and Mario Góngora published
their studies of the structure of Spanish colonial administration in which they saw the viceroy as
an instrument of absolutism and of the expanding modern state in its struggle against corporate
privileges and the network of patron-​client relationships. In this administrative structure, the
viceroys constituted the political layer of the imperial bureaucracy, while the oidores (justices of
the high court) formed the professional level.
Regarding the role of the audiencia in the government of New Spain, institutional historians
pointed out its importance in limiting viceregal power. This key political role of the high court
led Clarence Haring and Rubio Mañé to argue that the audiencia was the most important and

3
4

Alejandro Cañeque

the most characteristic institution in the government of the Spanish possessions in America.
But John Parry, in his study of the audiencia of Guadalajara, found it difficult to determine
where real authority lay in the Indies. He contended that the whole system was deliberately
devised to prevent the growth of a strong colonial government. These historians argued that
the division of authority among different individuals or institutions exercising the same powers
(executive, legislative, judicial) was the cause of the many conflicts over matters of jurisdic-
tion that characterized colonial society. For Haring, “Spanish imperial government was one of
checks and balances,” secured by a deliberate overlapping of jurisdictions to prevent any one
institution or individual from becoming too powerful (110–​13).1 For his part, John Elliott has
claimed that the absence of major open challenges to the Crown was the result of the develop-
ment in Habsburg Spain of a strong bureaucratic structure and an administrative class of letrados
(lawyers) to staff it. These letrados were the ones who really held the Spanish monarchy and
empire together (Elliott, “Spain and America” 63). In the 1970s, Mark Burkholder and D.S.
Chandler tried to bring the methods of quantitative history to the study of the audiencias by
examining the backgrounds and careers of hundreds of judges appointed to the American high
courts between 1687 and 1821. According to the authors, the systematic sale of appointments
that started in 1687 and did not end until around 1750 heralded an age of royal weakness, as the
sale of these offices allowed Creoles to dominate these fundamental institutions of imperial rule.
Although often quoted, the study of Burkholder and Chandler was not followed by others of a
similar nature, as historians of Latin America were quickly moving away from institutional and
quantitative history towards social history and, above all, ethnohistory.
Another fundamental institution of the imperial system of government was the cabildo secular
or municipal council. The traditional narrative maintains that the absolute monarchy and the
imperial bureaucracy had reduced the cities of the Spanish Empire to the role of mere followers
of the dictates of the Crown and its representatives.The appointment of corregidores (magistrates),
the sale of town council positions, and closed elections (only members of the council were
entitled to vote) made city government the preserve of a narrow circle of wealthy, influential
families, an oligarchy in which the private interests of the regidores (aldermen) did not always
coincide with the general interests of the community they represented (Merriman 1.183–​94;
2.144–​52; 3.637–​39; Haring 147–​55).2 The cabildos gradually lost their autonomy through the
increasing centralization of the Crown’s authority, with corregidores or, in the case of Mexico
City and Lima, viceroys interfering in their affairs. This made Haring conclude that “as the
cabildos were gradually deprived of whatever initiative and independence they may have pos-
sessed in the beginning, the office of regidor became politically of less and less consequence”
(163). However, Jonathan Israel has argued that in New Spain, municipal councils, especially the
cabildos of Mexico City and Puebla, provided positive political leadership for a broad combi-
nation of Creole groups. The cabildo, in fact, represented local interests and was the principal
political institution of the Creole population. The cabildo of Mexico City claimed a special
preeminence among the Mexican cabildos, considering itself the representative of all Mexican
Creoles, a claim vehemently contested by Puebla (Israel 94–​98).3
In the early 1980s, Woodrow Borah published his study of New Spain’s Indian Court, a
court of law presided over by the viceroy and specifically geared to administering justice to
the indigenous population. This book probably was the last significant study of an institution
of colonial rule written by a North American historian, as since the 1970s historians of colo-
nial Latin America have abandoned the study of political and imperial history, concentrating
their research on the study of indigenous peoples and the population of African descent under
Spanish rule. The consequence of this abandonment has been that many scholars still rely on
outdated views of the political and institutional structure of the Spanish Empire.4 Around the

4
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The empire and Mexico City

same time that North American colonial historians were abandoning institutional history, his-
torians working on the early modern history of Europe on both sides of the Atlantic started
to develop a series of new approaches for studying political history, which have contributed to
transforming in profound ways our understanding of the system of governance of early modern
societies. These historians have, to a large extent, eschewed the study of the state and formal
institutions, in order to focus on the analysis of informal institutions and the political culture
of early modern polities. They have criticized the previous emphasis on the emergence of the
“modern state” and contend that it is actually hard to find such a political entity anywhere in
early modern Europe. These new political historians have concentrated their attention instead
on the royal court, which had been practically ignored by institutional historians, arguing that
the royal or princely court, not the state, was the site where politics and power in the early
modern period were located.
Interest in the court was spurred by a rediscovery of Norbert Elias’s work in the 1980s.5 Elias
saw the court as a “civilizing” tool which facilitated the conversion of medieval knights into
refined courtiers. The early modern court was a crucial step in the development of the modern
state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. An institution used by monarchs to
centralize and increase their power (for Elias, Louis XIV’s court was the paradigmatic example),
the court was also the center of a propaganda machine aimed at persuading or indoctrinating
the king’s subjects. Although still highly influential, many historians have criticized Elias’s main
arguments, contending that the court system was much more fluid and complex than the sim-
plified and rather rigid scheme he presented. New court history calls into question the notion
of “state building,” based on the contention that the modern concept of the unitary nation-​state
was practically non-​existent in the seventeenth century. John Elliott, in a highly influential arti-
cle published in the early 1990s, contributed to popularizing the notion of “composite monar-
chy” as a way to define the heterogeneous nature of early modern polities.6 As John Adamson
has observed, “early modern sovereignties were often an untidy composite of disparate territo-
ries and subjects; they took their coherence not from territorial boundaries or ‘national’ identity
but primarily from religious and dynastic allegiance” (40). Instead of the nation-​state, what we
find is the “realm” (the reino in the Spanish case), which is not a clearly defined territorial unit
but a collectivity of subjects owing allegiance to a ruler. The monarch, not the state, constituted
the prime focus of loyalty.7
In the course of the 1990s, Spanish and Portuguese historians proceeded to revise the his-
tory of the Iberian monarchies and the Spanish Empire along these lines. With their studies,
they contributed to revitalizing the study of political history. Avoiding teleological approaches,
these historians understand the past in terms of its alterity, as a time essentially different from
ours, a period which was not simply a prologue to our own time but one which needs to be
reconstructed according to its own categories and not to ours. They have questioned the still-​
common view that the early modern period was already dominated by the power of the state as
a centralizing power.These historians have identified a political system dominated by a plurality
of jurisdictions, a system which was very different from the unitary power of the modern state.
They have also emphasized the study of the royal court and argued that informal relations were
much more effective than institutional ones in the governance of the early modern Iberian
monarchies, as these relations helped create and develop networks of patronage and clien-
telism through which power was effectively exercised (Hespanha, Vísperas and Gracia; Fernández
Albaladejo; Martínez Millán).8
For these historians, the court was a system of political organization essentially different
from the one constituted by the modern state. To begin with, its model was the house-
hold, something that contributed very much to the blurring of the distinction between

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Alejandro Cañeque

the “household” (serving the ruler) and the “bureaucracy” (serving the government). One
important effect of the household model was that a large part of the business of govern-
ment was determined by the “politics of proximity.” Proximity to the monarch, or the abil-
ity to control access to his private apartments, was fundamental in determining the amount
of power enjoyed by an individual (Adamson 13). As noted by the Portuguese historian
Antonio Hespanha, who has made some excellent observations on the political nature of the
court system, the court model drew its legitimacy from such concepts as love and friendship,
which were very different from the ones used in modern forms of political organization. For
the subjects of the Spanish empire, love and friendship were not, as we nowadays tend to
assume, personal feelings devoid of political meaning, but rather very strict forms of codify-
ing power exchanges and of conditioning social behaviors. For sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​
century Spanish political writers, it was clear that the political community was founded on
reciprocal love between the vassals and their ruler. The language of love and friendship was
rooted in the thought of Aristotle and Cicero, whose ideas were still profoundly influential
in the seventeenth-​century Hispanic world and for whom friendship gave rise to and sus-
tained the most long-​lasting of political bonds.9
The court model was also distinguished by informal systems of power deeply enmeshed
in patron-​client relationships. Although the workings of the patronage system in the Spanish
Empire still await systematic study, some historians have started to explore these practices (Feros;
Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, ­chapter 5; Rosenmüller). Tamar Herzog’s important study of
the administration of justice in Quito between 1650 and 1750 is, in many ways, related to this
new understanding of how power operated in the early modern era. Highlighting the extraor-
dinary importance of the notion of justice in the system of governance created by the Spaniards
in the New World, Herzog revises the traditional institutional interpretation that assumed that
audiencia judges constituted a professional bureaucracy that helped develop the modern state.
Her study suggests that seventeenth-​century institutions were qualitatively different from mod-
ern ones. Herzog shows how colonial institutions functioned through networks of patronage
and personal ties and loyalties, even in the act of administering justice, rather than through the
use of coercive or legal means. Her work questions the common idea that sees colonial society
made up of well-​defined and separate entities like the “state,” the “bureaucracy,” or the “society.”
Herzog’s work problematizes the nature of the colonial state as an autonomous entity with
independent goals and programs and shows that there was no radical separation between “the
institutions” and the “public.” The real division lay not in the formal political structures but in
the networks of social relationships.
The insights of this new political history of the Habsburg monarchy also allow us to see the
cabildo of Mexico City in a very different light, as an institution that fulfilled a role very similar
to that of the Castilian cities represented in the Spanish Cortes (parliament). At its foundation,
the Crown had awarded Mexico City the title of “metropolis” or “head” of the kingdom of
New Spain, which, in fact, was a status similar to the one enjoyed by the cities represented in
the Cortes. The Crown and the Mexican regidores were well aware of the position that the
Mexican cabildo occupied in the monarchy’s “constitutional” order. When levying new taxes,
the Mexican cabildo fulfilled the same role as the cities of Castile that voted in the Cortes: the
Crown had to ask the city for its consent, without which it could not proceed. On the other
hand, and similarly to the Castilian Cortes, the predominant political discourse of the Mexican
aldermen was one of love, loyalty, and cooperation with the monarch. This, nevertheless, did
not prevent the regidores from showing a high degree of independence and, occasionally, even
obstructing the king’s wishes. Like their Castilian counterparts, the Mexican regidores would
use obstructionist and dilatory practices when the time came to vote new subsidies, at the same

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The empire and Mexico City

time using the opportunity to strengthen their preeminent position or to obtain material ben-
efits (Cañeque, The King’s Living Image 66–​77).10
Recent historiography has also reassessed the meaning and significance of court magnifi-
cence, which included such ephemeral displays as triumphal arches, fireworks, and masques. If
an older historiography saw these displays as mere “propaganda,” as a way to project a political
message or to impress the populace, more recent historians tend to be more skeptical about the
propagandistic qualities of these displays, since, very often, its promoters were not interested at
all in reaching a wide audience. These displays were more about the classical Roman concept
of fama and bolstering the reputation of the ruler among his peers than about inculcating some
political message in the populace (Adamson 34–​35).11 In the case of the many triumphal arches
erected in Mexico City in the seventeenth century to welcome the viceroys, they were actually
a way of visually reminding the incoming viceroy of some of the basic political principles upon
which the Spanish empire was built (Cañeque, The King’s Living Image 26–​36; and Cañeque
“Espejo de virreyes”).
Sor Juana would have certainly agreed with recent historiography’s emphasis on the court,
as so much of her personal and literary life revolved around the viceregal court. The viceregal
courts established in Mexico City and Lima were very similar to the royal court in Madrid,
fulfilling almost exactly the same functions.12 The existence of a court in Mexico City was not
an expression of the viceroys’ vanity and pomposity, as Irving Leonard contended in his still
influential study of “Baroque” Mexico (22), but was rather the logical manifestation of a politi-
cal system in which the viceroys were seen as the “living images” of the Spanish monarch.13 The
creation of viceregal courts also became an effective mechanism to compensate for an always-​
absent king (Gil Pujol). In this regard, the language of love and friendship and patron-​client
relationships are aspects of colonial society and politics that scholars of Sor Juana should always
take into consideration when approaching the question of her relationship with the vicereines
of Mexico. Little is known of the role played by the vicereines in the social and political life of
New Spain, although we know enough to be able to assert that their role was certainly not a
negligible one.14 Manuel Rivero Rodríguez has recently explored the role played by vicereines
in the viceregal courts of Naples, Sicily and Mexico and has made some illuminating observa-
tions in this regard. His book is also an excellent example of how the insights of the most recent
historiography of early modern political culture have been incorporated into the study of the
viceregal figure (Rivero Rodríguez 164–​73).
As in the case of the Spanish queens, the vicereines created a court parallel to that of the
viceroys, one which wielded considerable power and influence. Perhaps there is no better exam-
ple of the significance of this influence than the literary career of Sor Juana, which always
depended upon the favor of the vicereines and the close relationship established between her
and several of them. This was already noted by Octavio Paz in his study on the life and career
of Sor Juana (Trampas 248–​72; Traps 186–​205).15 Paz’s book was one of the first serious studies
of the court culture of the viceroyalty and the significance of patron-​client relations. He also
dedicated his attention to the viceregal arches, which had theretofore been all but ignored by
scholars. His interest in the viceregal court was clearly influenced by the work of Norbert Elias.
His study also shows the influence of Max Weber and the institutional historians who we have
been discussing in this chapter (Haring and Rubio Mañé, in particular). But his study displays an
excessive fixation with the alleged “backwardness” of modern Mexico. He uses the arguments
and findings of these scholars to express the conventional idea that Spain and Mexico were lack-
ing in regard to those European states seen as the models of the modern world: because there
had been no Protestant Reformation and no real Enlightenment in the lands of the Spanish
Empire, the Hispanic world had missed the train of modernity.

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Alejandro Cañeque

In regard to the Church, although historians have for long recognized its essential role in
colonial society, there have been surprisingly few institutional studies of the colonial Church.16
Those scholars who studied this subject in the past tended to concentrate their attention on the
crisis created in the Church by the Bourbon reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century.
Traditionally, historians have seen the Church as an administrative branch of royal government,
it being common to argue that the Spanish king was in a very real sense the secular head of the
Church in colonial Spanish America.17 José Antonio Maravall argued that in the early modern
period a progressive nationalization of the Spanish Church took place, which helped the process
of formation of the absolutist state. This process was characterized by an increasing incorpora-
tion of the Church into the structures of the state and by a utilization of the Church by the
state (Maravall 1.215–​45). Against these arguments, however, it could be claimed that had the
Church been subject to the Crown’s power so thoroughly, the level of conflict and antagonism
between Church and secular authorities that characterized Mexican society in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries would have never been so high and widespread.18 Furthermore, the
Church did not constitute a monolithic structure, as it was profoundly divided, especially in
Mexico, by a prolonged conflict between the secular and the regular clergy, which made it very
hard to impose, in any effective way, the dictates of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.19
Although it is undeniable that the Habsburg monarchs tried to control the clergy of their
kingdoms, they never thought of dispossessing the clergy of its autonomy. Such an action
would have gone against some of the most basic principles on which the Spanish Empire was
founded: that power was separated in two spheres, the temporal or secular, whose head was the
monarch, and the spiritual or ecclesiastical, whose ultimate authority resided with the pope
(Fernández Albadejo, “Iglesia y poder”). In the context of New Spain, these two powers were
embodied in the figures of the bishop and the viceroy.The ideal was a close cooperation of both
powers in the government of the commonwealth, each one within its own sphere or jurisdic-
tion. According to the doctrine of the “two swords” or the two powers, Church and clerics
were exempt from the secular ruler’s jurisdiction, since the prince lacked spiritual power and
could not impose temporal power over non-​temporal institutions. In this regard, it is erroneous
to affirm, as Ramón A. Gutiérrez has done, that “the legal reality was that Spain’s sovereign was
both rex et sacerdos, king and high priest over the Indies” (Gutiérrez 99).
Though never attempting to suppress Church autonomy, the Spanish monarchs would try
to limit it through different means. One of the most effective ways was through the develop-
ment of the Patronato Real (as the ecclesiastical patronage of the Spanish monarchs was known),
which, among many other things, established the monarchs’ right of presentation to all benefices
in the Indies, the approval by the Council of the Indies of all the documents issued by the Holy
See related to the American territories, and the right to appeal to the royal courts the deci-
sions of the ecclesiastical judges (Padden; Schwaller; and De la Hera). However, in the view of
Antonio Hespanha, while this regalism served to recognize symbolically the preeminence of the
Crown as head of the body politic, in the everyday practice of power, Church autonomy was
still of enormous significance in the seventeenth century.20
As Oscar Mazín and the author of this chapter have shown, in New Spain bishops and
cathedral chapters acquired great power and authority. Bishops were conceptualized in terms
very similar to those used to depict a viceroy. Church writers tended to emphasize the political
aspects of the episcopal office and to place bishops at the same level as viceroys and audiencia
presidents. In the entries of the archbishops of Mexico, as in the viceregal entries, a triumphal
arch was erected in front of the cathedral in which the archbishop was usually depicted as a
god or hero of Antiquity. This exaltation of the figure of the bishop (plus the remoteness of the
monarch) would lead to continuous confrontations with the secular powers, not only in Mexico

8
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The empire and Mexico City

but throughout Spanish America. Some of these confrontations were so intense that one occa-
sion in 1624 would lead to the overthrow of New Spain’s viceroy. A  majority of historians
have attributed these conflicts to the system of “checks and balances” created by the Crown to
prevent colonial institutions from acquiring too much power by allowing, even encouraging,
overlapping institutions and jurisdictions to compete with and check one another. However, it
would have been unthinkable for the Crown to foment discord and conflict among institutions
and individuals; it would be more correct to see these conflicts as the result of the autonomous
power of the Church, which was embedded in the political culture of the Spanish Empire
(Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, Chapter 5). In addition, Oscar Mazín has shown that in the
final decades of the seventeenth century, the Church in New Spain, besides being dominated by
three powerful figures (Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, archbishop of Mexico; Manuel Fernández
de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla; and Juan de Ortega y Montañés, bishop of Michoacán), saw
the economic, social, and political consolidation of the cathedrals of New Spain.This consolida-
tion would have allowed the bishops and the cathedral chapters to enjoy, in general, a position
of predominance vis-​a-​vis the secular authorities (Mazín Gómez 252–​55).
Another fundamental institution of imperial rule present in Mexico City was the tribunal
of the Inquisition. Unlike the Church, the Holy Office has attracted the interest of numerous
historians, who have been debating for many years about the nature of inquisitorial power and
the extent to which the tribunal was an instrument of the state.21 In his classic and monumental
study of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea had already observed that what distin-
guished the Spanish Inquisition from its medieval counterpart was its dual nature (the medieval
Inquisition was clearly an ecclesiastical institution) and that this duality gave it a considerable
degree of autonomy (Lea 1.289). On the one hand, the Spanish Holy Office was an ecclesiastical
tribunal because any authority and jurisdiction exercised by the inquisitors came from Rome.
On the other, it was also a secular tribunal, exercising power delegated by the Crown. In that
sense, it was, in the words of Francisco Tomás y Valiente, a “somewhat ambiguous mixed entity”
(16–​18). The Inquisition itself always claimed dual jurisdiction, because it represented both
Pope and king (Kamen, Spanish Inquisition 163–​65).22
The Inquisition’s relative dependence on the Spanish Crown has led many historians to
contend that the Inquisition was an instrument of royal absolutism. According to Antonio
Domínguez Ortiz, the king would have imposed his will on the tribunal while at the same time
respecting the institution’s ecclesiastical character. Royal control would have focused on three
aspects: naming the inquisitor general, financing the tribunal, and resolving the many jurisdic-
tional conflicts that arose as much with secular courts as with their ecclesiastical counterparts
(Domínguez Ortiz “Regalismo” 113–​21; “Inquisición y estado” 157). Nevertheless, other histo-
rians have argued that it would be difficult to demonstrate that, thanks to the Inquisition, royal
power was strengthened in any way. Henry Kamen has contended that the Inquisition was only
rarely an instrument of royal absolutism, more often acting in pursuit of its own interests.Very
often, the representatives of royal power (the corregidores and alcaldes mayores, the audiencias,
and the royal councils) saw the Inquisition more as an obstacle than an asset to royal power
(Kamen, Spanish Inquisition 163–​65).23 It was the peculiar dual nature of inquisitorial power that
allowed the tribunal to claim that neither the Crown nor the Church courts could go against
its papal privileges. This constitutive ambiguity also gave the tribunal a lot of room for political
maneuvering, leading to endless clashes between the Inquisition and the civil authorities.This is
something that can be clearly appreciated in the history of the Mexican tribunal and its relations
with royal authorities in the seventeenth century. As in the case of the bishops, the great distance
that separated the Mexican inquisitors from the monarch would increase their tendency to act
autonomously from secular power.

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Alejandro Cañeque

In accordance with the popular image of the Inquisition, some historians have argued
that because of its powers and secret activities and deliberations, the Inquisition was able to
inspire fear and terror in the general population.24 However, many works on the Inquisition
tend to contradict the popular image of the Holy Office as an all-​powerful and fearful tri-
bunal in the service of the absolutist state. In his analysis of the Catalan Inquisition, Henry
Kamen affirms that the tribunal never developed into a tool of repression, ready to be used
by Church or state for their own ends. Furthermore, he contends that the vast majority of
Catalans never saw an inquisitor in their lives nor had any contact with the Holy Office
(Kamen, Phoenix 245, 250, 265).25 Speaking of the tribunal in Santiago de Compostela,
which kept the northwestern part of Spain under its control, Jaime Contreras has similarly
argued that Galician villages and countryside never saw the Inquisition (Contreras 481, 491).
Some historians have gone as far as to speak of “the failure of the Inquisition,” since it was
unable to impose its will upon a reticent population, while at the same time being domi-
nated by local interests (Dedieu 355–​59).
The historians of the Mexican Inquisition have reached similar conclusions. If in Spain the
Inquisition never reached much farther than the big cities, things were much worse in the
Mexican case, where one single tribunal and three inquisitors who never left Mexico City
were expected to control, with a handful of comisarios (commissioners), a territory that was six
times bigger than the peninsula (which counted on sixteen tribunals) and where the immense
majority of the population was not subject to its jurisdiction.26 In her now classic study of the
Mexican Inquisition, published in the 1980s, Solange Alberro portrayed the tribunal as a highly
inefficient and sloppy institution of social control, asserting that in repressive matters the figures
were almost ridiculous (Alberro 23–​29, 589–​93). In a recent work on the ideology and prac-
tice of inquisitorial censorship, Martin Nesvig also shows the Mexican Inquisition as a rather
inefficient repressive institution. Nesvig demonstrates that censorship and the law were applied
with flexibility and that the enforcement of the Index of prohibited books depended heavily on
the personal idiosyncrasies of the inquisitors. After decades of research on the subject, we now
have a much clearer image of the Inquisition. It was not an institution isolated from the rest of
society and entirely devoted to its repressive work, but rather it was enmeshed in relationships
of kinship, friendship, and clientelism that closely linked it to New Spanish society. All too often,
the inquisitors seemed to be more interested in administering their private businesses than in
systematically repressing the inhabitants of New Spain, spending more time utilizing inquisito-
rial power to obtain economic benefits for themselves than to secure a strict orthodoxy among
the populace.
As we have seen in this chapter, in the last twenty-​five years or so, historians have revised
many aspects of the political, religious, and institutional history of the Spanish Empire, although,
in reality, the majority of these historians are not interested in the study of the Spanish Empire
in and of itself.They have usually adopted the perspective of the nation-​state, concentrating, for
example, on the study of early modern Spain, Italy under Spanish rule, colonial Mexico, colonial
Peru, and so on. However, developments in one Spanish territory cannot be fully understood
without understanding the extent of this territory’s linkages with the rest of the empire. In other
words, we need to approach the study of the Spanish Empire as an integrated and coherent unit
of analysis, instead of separating it into nation-​state fragments. The inhabitants of Mexico City,
including Sor Juana, saw themselves as inhabitants of a polity that was larger than the viceroyalty
of New Spain. In this regard, reuniting what the historiography has separated should be the next
step in the development of the scholarship of the Spanish Empire. The recovery of the impe-
rial perspective will allow scholars to better understand the ways in which ideas and practices
circulated around the empire and contributed to shaping Sor Juana’s literary universe.

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The empire and Mexico City

Notes
1 See also Elliott, “Spain and America” 64–​69.
2 The first corregidor in Mexico City was appointed in 1573.
3 A recent, rather exhaustive study of the Mexican cabildo, using a mixed approach of institutional and
social history, is Pazos Pazos. Frances Ramos, more in tune with recent approaches, is the author of
a work on the political culture of the Puebla cabildo. For the cabildos of Mexico Tenochtitlan and
Mexico Tlatelolco, the two Indian cabildos of Mexico City created by the Spaniards after the conquest
and whose mission was to govern the indigenous population of the city, see Connell.
4 See Cañeque “Political and Institutional History” for a discussion of some negative effects of the lack
of research on imperial politics. Some Spanish historians have continued to publish traditional studies
on individual viceroys, with an approach that mixes institutional and social history. See Sarabia Viejo;
García-​Abasolo; Gutiérrez Lorenzo; LatasaVasallo.
5 Although Elias had started to work on this subject in the 1930s, the complete study in German would
not be published until 1969. The first English translation appeared in 1983.
6 Elliott,“Europe.”  The editors of a recent collection of essays go as far as to reject the traditional division
between center and periphery, speaking of “polycentric monarchies” to emphasize the fact that the
Spanish and Portuguese monarchies “allowed for the existence of many different interlinked centers
that interacted not only with the king but also among themselves, thus actively participating in forging
the polity.” See Cardim et al, 4.
7 For an overview of the most recent approaches to the study of the early modern princely courts, see
Adamson.
8 On the Spanish court, see also Elliott, Spain and its World, ­chapter 7; and Elliott, Spain, Europe, and the
Wider World, ­chapter 13.
9 See also Feros 118–​24; Cañeque “Emotions of Power.”
10 See also Alvarado Morales.
11 See also Elliott, Spain and Its World chapter VIII.
12 For the Mexican viceregal court, see Escamilla González.
13 See also Cañeque, The King’s Living Image.
14 For a recent study on New Spain’s vicereines, see Rubial García, “Las virreinas novohispanas.”
15 See also Luiselli, “Sobre.”
16 This scarcity does not apply to studies on nunneries and female religious institutions, which, since the
1980s and especially in the last fifteen years, have experienced a veritable explosion.The analysis of this
historiography is beyond the scope of this chapter, but interested readers may consult Chowning for a
review of the literature. By now, the social, economic, and even political importance of female convents
in colonial society should be abundantly clear.
17 See, for example, Haring 167–​69; Farriss 10, 15, 32, 89; Poole 211–​12.
18 On these conflicts, see Israel; Poole; and Cañeque, The King’s Living Image.
19 On the conflicts between the Church hierarchy and the religious orders in New Spain, see Padden;
Poole 66–​87; Rubial García, “La mitra y la cogulla.”
20 See also Thompson 82–​84.
21 The scholarly literature on the Inquisition is enormous, and historians have investigated many top-
ics that are beyond the scope of this chapter. For a review of this historiography, see Hossain and
Bethencourt, Introduction.
22 See also Bethencourt 316–​20.
23 See also Thompson 84.
24 See, for example, Bennassar 337; Alcalá 838, 956.
25 See also Kamen, Spanish Inquisition 280–​82.
26 After the creation of the Mexican tribunal in 1571, the indigenous population was formally removed
from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. The Indians’ religious offenses were punished by the bishops
through an episcopal court known as the provisorato. See Moreno de los Arcos.

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2
THE CREOLE INTELLECTUAL
PROJECT
Creating the baroque archive

Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel

Criollismo and criollo discourses have been central topics in Colonial Latin American studies.The
traditional definitions of the term “criollo” coincide in a series of key points. Initially, this term
was adopted in the colonial Spanish world from the Portuguese context to refer to African slaves
that were born in the Americas (Mazzotti 11).The term was later reappropriated in the Spanish
colonies to refer to individuals of European descent who were born and raised in the Americas.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries criollismo became a central concept in the forma-
tion of a distinct American identity that manifested itself in a series of proto-​nationalist and
Americanist discourses that eventually led to the independence movements.1
There are several problematic aspects of criollo identities in the colonial period. On the one
hand, there is a vast literature on how criollos were conceived as intellectually and ontologically
inferior to their European counterparts in the early modern period (Bauer and Mazzotti 22–​32,
Mazzotti 11–​13). On the other hand, criollo discourses and perspectives occupy an ambiguous
space in the colonial world, since they represent simultaneously the desire for assimilation and
equality with European subjects, and the formation of a distinct regional identity that claims
to be acknowledged as more organic within the local circuits of power and administration in
the Americas (Bauer and Mazzotti 32). Throughout this chapter I will use “criollo” to refer to
Spanish creole subjects and “criollismo” to denominate their particular discursive formation of
colonial negotiation with European and Spanish metropolitan discourses.2
The study of criollo discourses and perspectives has been enriched by an array of recent
studies that focus on the consolidation of a perspective that is neither totally different from
nor an imitation of Spain’s literary discourses. In The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora, Kathleen Ross redefines seventeenth century literature produced in the Americas as a
criollo reappropriation and rewriting of the colonial narratives written in the sixteenth century
(7).This was a foundational gesture in Colonial Latin American Studies for its recognition of the
ambivalence of discourses and literary expressions that take place outside the frameworks of the
nation. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti take this question a step further in their study
of the particular agencies of criollo discourses in the Colonial Americas, combining subject the-
ory with comparative studies on the Anglo and Ibero American colonialities. Antony Higgins
and John Beverley have also developed important theorizations about the differences between

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The Creole intellectual project

criollo discourses in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In their work they
distinguish between regional impulses that can still be subsumed under a Transatlantic impe-
rial perspective in the seventeenth century, and the gradual development in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries of a separate viewpoint that will culminate in the liberal and national
discourses from which Latin American national literatures eventually emerge.
Juan Vitulli and David Solodkow summarize these internal distinctions in the definition of
“lo criollo” by proposing three historical periods: (1) 1563–​1600, in which the term is coined
and it is understood as “the invention of a conceptual framework that assigns particular charac-
teristics […] over a broad array of individuals, with the goal of fixing an identification that regu-
lates the representation of social identities” (9);3 (2) 1600–​1700, in which the term is redefined
by a baroque aesthetic that some critics have conceived as protonational; and (3) 1700–​1810,
the moment in which proto-​nationalist and Enlightenment identities emerge and eventually
lead to the constitution of modern national states. One important consequence of this proposed
periodization is that it evidences the internal transformations of criollo identities and discourses
during the three centuries in which Latin America was a Spanish colony.
In the case of Mexico, the study of criollo discourses in the seventeenth century has been the
focus of important studies by Kathleen Ross and Anna More, who analyze the American appro-
priations of the Baroque mostly in the works of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Herman Bennett
(Africans, Colonial Blackness) interrogates the usual conflation of criollismo with Europeanness
and whiteness by focusing on Afro-​Creole identities in the New Spain, while Karen Graubart
interrogates criollismo and indigeneity in Peru, using the notion of creolization as an alterna-
tive to signal the multiple racial connotations of the notion of criollo in the colonial Americas.
This chapter reviews how critics have studied Sor Juana as a literary icon that exemplifies
seventeenth-​century criollo discourses in the New Spain. We will review critical assessments of
Sor Juana’s development of a criollo perspective through: (1) a brief review of her representations
of  “lo mexicano” (Mexicanness) including her depiction of indigenous and African voices; (2) the
development of a problematic representation of the transatlantic colonial relationship between
America and Europe; and (3) an overview of her criollo performance of the Baroque of the Indies.

Representation of lo mexicano in Sor Juana

In her illuminating essay “The Mexican Sor Juana,” Stephanie Merrim interrogates the tendency
of Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Octavio Paz, two foundational sorjuanistas, to Westernize
instead of Mexicanize the nun’s work (78). Merrim proposes instead a reading of Sor Juana’s
works that elucidates the local references in her writing. As a consequence of this kind of study,
the corpus of texts by Sor Juana that could be considered part of her criollo archive has been
consistently growing. Scholarship on Sor Juana’s criollismo includes all of her texts that make
references to local cultures and ethnicities in the Americas and New Spain, as well as depictions
of voices that represent the members of colonial societies in the Americas. These texts include
her villancicos (carols) –​especially the ensaladas in which different voices discuss a particular the-
ological or evangelical concept, the loas (short dramatic introductions) to her autos sacramentales,
and several poems in which Sor Juana makes reference to her American origins and compares
them with European identities. Merrim points out that the ensaladas are a “comic medley of
Indian, Afro-​Hispanic, European and Creole voices [that] conveys Sor Juana’s consciousness of
Mexico’s racial and ethnic diversity” (“ ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana” 77).
Sor Juana includes Nahuatl in only a few of her poems: the tocotín that ends the villancico
to “Asunción” (1676) and the ensalada of the villancico to “San José” (1690). George Baudot
and Frances Karttunen have studied these poems to assess her knowledge of indigenous cultures

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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

and languages. They both suggest that Sor Juana most probably was competent in an oral ver-
sion of the language that she learned while she was young or through texts such as Torquemada
(Baudot,”Trova” 858–​59; Karttunen). Recently Salvador Díaz Cíntora found a bilingual loa
written in Spanish and Nahuatl by a very young Sor Juana in 1682, which is believed to be
the “Loa de infancia” mentioned by her biographer Calleja (Flores “Sor Juana” 41). Stephanie
Merrim and Frances Kennet focus on her poem dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe (sonnet
206, 1: 301). Merrim also proposes that the Virgin of Guadalupe serves as the model for many
other depictions of the Virgin Mary in Sor Juana’s poetry (“ ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana” 83).
Other critics have also argued that “criollo” writing is defined not only by its explicit refer-
ence to American identities, but that “criollismo” is instead a particular perspective that vindi-
cates people of Spanish descent born and raised in the Americas by representing them as equal
to people of European descent born in Europe.This definition of criollismo allows us to include
her secular theater, the “Answer to Sor Filotea” and even her triumphal arch, the “Neptuno
alegórico” (Allegorical Neptune), in Sor Juana’s “Mexican” archive. Catalá and others advance
criollo readings of canonical texts written by Sor Juana by deciphering the American dimensions
of references such as the eagle or the pyramids. In this context, critics also study the American
dimensions of her Primero sueño (The Dream) and her romances (ballads). Finally, Stephanie
Merrim has expanded the Mexican corpus of Sor Juana’s works by including her engagement
with a “contingent of Creole and radicado/​a (Spaniards with deep roots in Mexico) writers and
with Creole political issues” (“ ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana” 79).
Furthermore, several critics have studied in detail the portrayal of New Spain as repre-
sentative of a unique American identity. For example, some scholars have noticed the consist-
ent reference to Mexican and New World topics, perspectives, and voices in Sor Juana’s works
(Merrim, “Sor Juana Criolla” and “ ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana”; Martínez-​San Miguel, Saberes, and
Catalá, among others). This is particularly evident in Sor Juana’s villancicos, poetic and musi-
cal representations held during the feasts of the Catholic calendar, which include a diverse
array of indigenous, African, criollo and mestizo voices that join the religious celebrations, and
sometimes even make reference to regional adaptations of religious beliefs. Georgina Sabat (En
busca) and Mabel Moraña have studied in detail the strategies used by Sor Juana to incorporate
American voices in her villancicos to represent different ways of knowing, as well as distinct
identities that complicate our conceptualization of Colonial cultures and societies in Latin
America. Stephanie Merrim, the leading scholar in the study of the Mexican and criollo ele-
ments of Sor Juana’s literary oeuvre, proposes that Sor Juana becomes a “paradigmatic creole in
a richly positional sense, that is, a colonial subject divided between Mexico and Spain and as a
broker of Indian, African, and feminine subalterns to the metropolis” (“Sor Juana criolla” 195).
The autos sacramentales and their loas are also another key space for the dramatization of
Catholic evangelization as a point of encounter and resistance in the configuration of colonial and
criollo American perspectives. Sor Juana appropriates the auto sacramental, a very specific genre
that at the beginning of the sixteenth century was composed of a series of plays usually devoted
to explaining the miracle of transubstantiation or to celebrate communion, in order to entertain
a theological debate that ultimately vindicates American subjects and knowledges as an integral
part of the Spanish Catholic community (Martínez-​San Miguel, Saberes 171–​203). In her loas to
“El Divino Narciso” and “El mártir del Sacramento,” Sor Juana recreates the violent encounter
of Religion and the American indigenous population to culminate in a syncretic celebration that
represents indigenous religion and their rationality as comparable to their European counterparts.
Carmela Zanelli and Luis Leal have studied the indigenist and mestizo dimensions of these loas.
Carlos Jáuregui proposes an analysis of the ambivalent theological discourse of the autos sacra-
mentales that interrogates Americanist and indigenist readings of these works to conceive them

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instead as dramatic translations and incorporations of American otherness into Catholic imperial
universalism (“Plato” 217). He analyzes the development of a criollo consciousness in the loas to
the “El Divino Narciso” and “El cetro de José.” Jáuregui focuses specifically on the use of canni-
balism as a metaphor of the act of communion and reads this as a syncretic gesture in Sor Juana’s
writing that exemplifies criollo agency. He invites readers to resist the conflation of criollismo
and proto-​nationalism, since doing so confuses the incorporation of difference that is a common
strategy in the Baroque of the Indies with the celebration or vindication of an American alterity
that will be characteristic of separatist and independence movements in the nineteenth century
(Jáuregui 210). For some critics, such as Jáuregui, Martínez-​San Miguel (Saberes), and Patterson
(“Jesuit”), Sor Juana’s loas are not trying to vindicate religious elements of the indigenous cul-
tures, but they rather advocate for the incorporation of the Amerindian through Catholic evan-
gelization to the Spanish metropolitan order. Criollos are specifically located as mediators who
translate indigenous otherness into Catholic and Spanish “universality.”4
Sor Juana also refers to the particularity of American identities in her secular theater. For
example, in Los empeños de una casa (House of Desire), Castaño, the gracioso (comic) in the play,
showcases his racialized and American condition when he tries to dress as a woman to pass as
Leonor, the protagonist of the play (Johnson 98–​104). Many critics have studied how Castaño
represents an embodiment of racialized, American otherness.5 A significant group of scholars
have also analyzed the intersections between “criollismo,” “americanismo” and Sor Juana’s very
explicit defense of women’s intellect. Aside from the monumental recovery of Sor Juana’s intel-
lectual context advanced by Marie Cécile Bénassy-​Berling in Humanisme et religion chez Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Humanism and Religion in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), Josefina Ludmer’s
“Las tretas del débil” (The Tricks of the Weak) is still a classic for the study of subaltern strate-
gies, relating knowledge, gender, and speech in colonial Latin America. Margo Glantz, Georgina
Sabat de Rivers, Alessandra Luiselli, Mabel Moraña, and Stephanie Merrim have studied how
Sor Juana imbricates Americanism and gender in her vindication of women’s voices and per-
spectives in her poetry, her secular theater, the “Answer to Sor Filotea” and her other letters.
In her romances Sor Juana also refers consistently to American otherness and marginality.
Among the best known are her “Romance a la Duquesa de Aveyro” (Romance 37), closely
studied by Georgina Sabat de Rivers, and Romance 51 (“Cuándo, númenes divinos”). In both,
Sor Juana develops one of the most common strategies of criollo discourse: to vindicate the
equality of American subjects in terms of her rationality and intellect, by challenging the alleged
inferiority of criollos because of their place of origin. Another interesting aspect of this poem is
the depiction of the relationship between American criollos and Europeans through an explicit
reference to Europe’s economic and physical exploitation of the mines in Mexico (Merrim,
“ ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana” 80). Significantly, the vindication of Spanish criollos in the Americas is
not presented to justify a separation from the metropolitan centers. Quite the contrary, in Sor
Juana’s texts, the argument of human equality among criollos and Europeans is developed to
further incorporate the Americas into Catholic religion and the western episteme. Yet in this
defense, criollo voices, perspectives, and knowledges are depicted as ideal mediators between
metropolitan centers and local populations, to guarantee the proper incorporation of the New
Spain into the Old Spain.

America vs. Europe: Sor Juana’s transatlantic criollismo

Another important theme developed in Sor Juana’s oeuvre is the rich and complex epistemic,
cultural, social, and political exchange between the Americas and Spain or Europe, which cul-
minated concretely with the publication of her Inundación castálida (1689) and her Segundo tomo

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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

de las obras de soror Juana Inés de la Cruz (1693) in Madrid and Seville respectively. Yet beyond
the actual publication or distribution of her works outside New Spain, Sor Juana consistently
included references to Europe and Spain as important (yet often problematic) interlocutors in
her work. This is to be expected, given that the Viceroyalty of New Spain was conceived at the
time as an administrative extension of the Spanish Crown for the administration of the insular
and continental possessions in the Americas and beyond.6 The consistent engagement of Europe
and Spain from the Americas constitutes what I would like to denominate as Sor Juana’s “trans-
atlantic criollismo.”
Sor Juana and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora were chosen as the two artists and intellectuals
who would represent the criollo and peninsular sectors of New Spain in their celebration of
the arrival of a new viceroy, Don Tomás Antonio de la Cerda, Count of Paredes and Marquis
of Laguna to Mexico City on November 30, 1680, with triumphal arches. Many studies have
compared Sor Juana’s use of Greek mythology as the subtext of her triumphal arch with Carlos
de Sigüenza y Góngora’s reference to Aztec cosmology and history that conceives the new vice-
roy as the culmination of a succession of leading figures in the New Spain. Some critics have
lamented Sor Juana’s apparently weak connection with American and Mexican history (Paz,
“Homenaje”), while others have celebrated the feminist and subversive aspects of her address
to the viceroy (Arenal, “Sor Juana’s Arch” and “Introduction”; Grossi). A third group of critics
focuses on the ambivalent position occupied by Sor Juana’s criollo discourse, at times assuming
an hegemonic (i.e., imperial, Catholic, European) discourse, and at other times interrogating
European and imperial epistemic and power systems to understand and contain the complex-
ity of the American or New Spain social, historical and cultural experiences (Bokser; Jáuregui;
Martínez-​San Miguel, From Lack;). According to Bokser, “[w]‌hile her works were later used to
support nationalism and independence … in her own time she could support both Spain and
Mexico without perceiving schism” (157).
The autos scramentales are another textual and performative space in which Sor Juana
rethinks the relationship between Europe and the Americas. Combined readings of the loas and
the autos sacramentales recover the criollo and American dimensions of the autos and point to
the ambiguities and contradictions of Sor Juana’s writing. In some cases the references to con-
quest and evangelization are quite explicit, as was the case in the loas to the autos sacramentales
that I have briefly mentioned before. Yet some critics have argued that if the loas are read in
conjunction with the autos sacramentales, a theological criollo and American perspective can
be discerned from these texts, making Sor Juana’s discourse simultaneously resistant and accom-
modating to colonial authority (Martínez-​San Miguel, Saberes 234; Patterson).
Another key example of Sor Juana’s transatlantic conceptualization of American and criollo
identities is the “Sarao de cuatro naciones que son españoles, negros, italianos y mejicano” (Sarao
of Four Nations: Spaniards, Blacks, Italians and Mexican) a short piece that serves as closure
for Los empeños de una casa. In this text, Sor Juana represents Mexican characters in a dialogi-
cal exchange with Spaniards, Italians, and Africans. She analyzes the subordination of viceregal
power, by representing it through a debate about the vassal’s “obligation” towards his master
versus the loving will that should guide a vassal’s obedience. In this reflection about power and
subordination, Sor Juana locates criollo and indigenous American subjects on an equal footing
with European and African subjects. Interestingly, equality and submission are linked in this
short play, and as a result the Americas are simultaneously incorporated in and subsumed to
Europe as a metropolitan center.
Crucial to Sor Juana’s transatlantic criollismo are her villancicos which include dialogues
among indigenous, mestizo, African, and Spanish voices. In the villancicos Sor Juana disguises
her inclusion of the Americas into the Spanish and European episteme in a message about the

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universality of Catholic evangelization.Yet it is still significant that in her conceptualization of

American voices and knowledges, she consistently insists on her mediating role as a criolla who
translates and connects American, African, and European voices and perspectives. Several critics
have studied the different relationships established among the diverse popular voices that are
depicted in the villancicos as part of their evangelizing mission. For example, Mabel Moraña
has noticed that in these texts the African and indigenous voices do not communicate among
themselves, but are linked instead through the imperial and metropolitan centers and knowl-
edges (93). Martínez-​San Miguel interprets the villancicos as a space in which inter-​cultural
knowledges establish a dialogue facilitated through a criollo perspective (Saberes, 151–​64). John
Lipski and Jorge E. Porrás have studied the representation and linguistic validity of the African-​
inflected Spanish in these villancicos, while Arteaga has linked the dialogic or heteroglossic
gestures in Sor Juana and Shakespeare.
Perhaps the most important text for the analysis of Sor Juana’s criollo transatlantic dia-
logue is Romance 51, her last poem, left unfinished. First published posthumously in Fama
y obras póstumas (1700) edited by Juan de Castorena y Ursúa, the poem is a response to the
readers of her works by European admirers. Although this text is well-​known among sor-
juanistas, only a few scholars have proposed a critical reading that engages its criollo and
transatlantic content. Margarita Zamora analyzes the strategies of resistance used by the
colonial subject to confront metropolitan systems of domination in her essay “América y
el arte de la memoria” (America and the Art of Memory). Frederick Luciani proposes a
thought-​provoking reading of the use of optics in the poem. Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel
builds on these previous readings to analyze Sor Juana’s interrogation of the European circuit
of reception of criollo and colonial American poetry in Europe (From Lack 164–​77). The
poem represents Sor Juana’s writing as a discourse that exceeds the transatlantic signifying
matrix:

¿Cuándo, Númenes divinos,

dulcísimos Cisnes, cuándo
merecieron mis descuidos
ocupar vuestros cuidados?
¿De dónde a mí tanto elogio?
¿De dónde a mí a encomio tanto?
¿Tanto pudo la distancia
añadir a mi retrato?
¿De qué estatura me hacéis?
¿Qué Coloso habéis labrado,
que desconoce la altura
del original lo bajo?
No soy yo la que pensáis,
sino es que allá me habéis dado
otro ser en vuestras plumas
y otro aliento en vuestros labios,
y diversa de mí misma
entre vuestras plumas ando,
no como soy, sino como
quisisteis imaginarlo. (OC 1. 224–​27)

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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

(When, Oh divine Inspirations, sweetest Swans, when did my careless writings deserve
your attention? Whence has all this praise come to me? Whence such tribute? Was dis-
tance so able to enhance my image? Of what stature do you make me? What Colossus
have you built, whose height belies the lowness of the original? I am not who you think;
your pens have given me a different being, and your lips have given me a different spirit;
I go among your pens, different from myself, not as I am but as you wished to imagine
me. [Luciani 140])

Stephanie Merrim, Electa Arenal, and other critics have focused particularly on the ambiva-
lent relationship of a criollo discourse with the indigenous referents and social sectors in the
process of producing a differentiated American discourse. Merrim has noted, for example, that
Sor Juana procured, exploited, and depended on the metropolitan interpretive circuit, and that
she “labors to present herself simultaneously as the communicating vessel between Spain and
New Spain and as that baroque novelty, a flamboyant, distinctively ‘American’ rara avis from
exotic Mexico” (“Angels of History” 72). Margo Glantz, on the other hand, has studied the
introductory poems and texts included at the beginning of the Segundo volumen as an orches-
trated defense of Sor Juana that questions the censorship of her writing and secular works after
the publication of the Letter Worthy of Athena (207–​09). Romance 51 is also one of the best
examples of Sor Juana’s constant “correction” of readings of her work not only in metropolitan
circles, but also in colonial and American networks, as is the case in her romances 48, 49, and 50,
addressed to readers in Peru and New Granada.
One of the passages that has elicited more interest from critics is Sor Juana’s reference to the
influence of indigenous magical infusions in her writing: “What magical infusions did Indian
herbalists of my homeland pour to enchant my lines?” (Obras completas, I: 159, 160).7 In her
reference to the American indigenous populations, Sor Juana ventures beyond the traditional
representation of criollo discourse as a mediating instance between local cultures and imperial
readings and indexes the ambivalence of a criollo subjectivity vis-​à-​vis American indigeneity
(Arenal and Martínez-​San Miguel 191). In the case of this poem, Sor Juana argues that the local
and regional inflections of her poetry contribute to the illegibility or to the “epistemological
failing” that takes place when the poem is read in Europe (Luciani 144). In this specific context,
Sor Juana invokes indigeneity to create distance from an European transatlantic reading, while at
the same time the reference to Indians through the metaphor of the “magical infusions” trans-
forms these local populations into an abstract and elusive motif in the poem.
Sor Juana’s work insists on the irreducible meanings of colonial and American discourses
for a transatlantic imperial or metropolitan reading network. Criollo discourse is represented
as a problematic instance that goes beyond a simplistic opposition of the Americas and Europe.
On one hand, Sor Juana’s discourse represents the Americas as an exploited and subordinated
space within the Spanish Empire. Criollo voices and perspectives become crucial mediators
between local perspectives and experiences and metropolitan interests. On the other hand,
criollo discourse becomes illegible within a transatlantic reading network that cannot but alter
and disfigure the original intent and content of the American references. Ultimately, Sor Juana’s
prose and poetry recognize the uniqueness of colonial and American modes of representation
to accomplish the effective integration of the Americas to the metropolis. In order to produce
an authentic transatlantic reading, Sor Juana’s final poem demands the decodification of clas-
sical rhetorical strategies, the analysis of European genres and referents as well as Amerindian
discursive genres such as the “flor y canto” (flower and song) and the tocotín (an indigenous
festivity that included dance and lyrics), and the ways of knowing inscribed in practices such
as the teocualo (an indigenous ritual in which a representation of the deity is eaten), invoked in

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those “magical infusions” that lie beyond a superficial Occidental praise of Sor Juana’s ouevre.8
It is precisely from this juxtaposition of traditions, knowledges, and references that Sor Juana’s
works make their lasting contribution to the Baroque of the Indies.

Baroque in the Americas

The Baroque is an important time period in Europe and the Americas. For many scholars,
the Baroque is the moment in which the modern subject is constituted at the expense of an
array of other subject formations that were neither univocal nor rational (Judivitz 5). This is
also the same time period in which human knowledge becomes secularized, and as a result
empirical data and the modern scientific method became paradigmatic.Yet the baroque subject
questioned the certainty of human knowledge by exploring the deceitful boundaries between
perception and representation, reality and appearances:  “It was at that tension between the
modern individual –​newly endowed with Cartesian free will, cogito, consciousness as thinking
subject and creator of knowledge –​and the artistic representation of the individual through
baroque visual practices that the emerging modern self confronted previous notions of subjec-
tivity, the Counter-​Reformation, and a semifeudal society at a moment of crisis and transition”
(Bryan 107).
The baroque aesthetic promotes the representation of a diversity of voices, ethnicities and
ways of knowing that establish an interesting dialogue with the imperial centers of power.
Allegory, hyperbaton (alteration of logical order of words in a sentence), difficult language,
conceptismo (play of words or concepts), culteranismo (complex syntactical expressions using Latin
as the foundation) and chiaroscuro (the contrast between light and shadows to refer to the
complexity of human perception) are some of the trademarks of the baroque aesthetic. Many
scholars still take as a point of departure José Antonio Maravall’s characterization of the Baroque
as an aesthetic with a massive reach but produced according to the expectations of the ruling
sectors and the centers of power. Maravall’s theory is then used to define the baroque aesthetic
in colonial Latin America. John Beverley, for example, proposes the notion of the Baroque as
a literature of the imperial age (14), while Octavio Paz reflects on the relationship between
centers of imperial power and aesthetic and cultural productions emerging from the popular
sectors in the Americas (in Las trampas and “Homenaje”). Kathleen Ross and Anna More focus
their analysis of the Baroque in the Americas on the figure of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a
contemporary of Sor Juana.They study his reappropriation of sixteenth-​century imperial narra-
tives about the Americas and his criollo redefinition of imperial reason to focus on Amerindian
cultural expressions and forms of knowledge as legitimate inflections of colonial discourses.
Both scholars note the ambivalent relationship of the criollo archive produced by Sigüenza y
Góngora to the imperial state.
Another group of scholars questions Maravall’s lack of distinction between European and
American baroques by advancing the idea of a Baroque of the Indies (Acosta, Chiampi, Roggiano,
Theodoro). These scholars have studied how colonial Latin American artists and writers used
architectural, religious, and cultural syncretism as a strategy to incorporate indigenous and local
forms of knowledge and cultural expression in the literary and artistic manifestations of the
period. This has been a fertile ground for the analysis of baroque and neobaroque aesthetics
to propose a unique Latin American perspective that emerges in the seventeenth century and
culminates in the twentieth century.9 In The Spectacular City, Merrim focuses on representations
of colonial cities to conceptualize a baroque aesthetic that showcases multiplicity and excess as
an ideal artistic and discursive space for the incorporation of American otherness. I have pro-
posed three general tendencies in the study of the Baroque in the Americas: (1) the distinction

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between mestizo visual and architectonic arts and a white creole written production; (2) the
analysis of the links between the baroque aesthetic and the emergence of a creole consciousness,
and (3) the Baroque of the Indies as an example of how modernity develops differently in the
Americas (Martínez-​San Miguel, “(Neo)Barroco de Indias” 438).
In the specific case of the New Spain, the Baroque functioned as a cucial aesthetic project
to validate the voices of several criollo writers. Sor Juana, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and
Juan Ruiz de Alarcón were some of the best-​known writers of this time period. Typical of
other creole writers of the same time period, their baroque writing legitimized and questioned
the colonial relationship between the New Spain and Spain. Using the difficult syntax and the
complex neologisms in vogue as part of the baroque aesthetic, (Latin) American writers interro-
gated issues of identity in a colonial context that included race, gender, ethnicity, and particular
ways of knowing that emerged in the viceroyalties in dialogue with the metropolitan centers.
The Baroque became a very productive literary and creative space for the articulation of an
American voice that gave an account of the formation of regional interests in the Viceroyalty of
New Spain as an alternative center of power of Spain in the Americas.
It is in this context that Sor Juana’s works have been studied as a unique expression of the
baroque aesthetic. Octavio Paz, for example, studied the links between Sor Juana and Góngora’s
poetry, as well as her adaptation of Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales (Sor Juana 338–​87).
Most of the studies about Sor Juana’s baroque aesthetic focus on her philosophical poem
“Primero sueño,” love sonnets, and triumphal arch, “Neptuno alegórico,” as well as the com-
plex rhetorical strategies in the “Answer to Sor Filotea.” Several interpretations of “Primero
sueño” focus on the multi-​layered structure of the poem, which includes references to indi-
genous American motifs such as the pyramids and the eagle (Catalá, Velasco), the use of optics
to explore the crisis of human knowledge typical of the Baroque (Avilés; Bergmann, “Optics”;
Luciani), the feminization of the cognitive subject (Franco; Sabat de Rivers, En busca), and
the vindication of a feminine baroque intellectual perspective in the poem (Bergmann, “The
Sueño”; Sabat-​Rivers, “A Feminist Rereading”). Other critics have proposed comparative read-
ings of Primero Sueño and Góngora’s Soledades, as well as comparative analyisis of their sonnets
(Bergmann, “Optics and Vocabularies” and “Sounds and Silences”; Luiselli, El sueño manierista;
Perelmúter;).10 Some scholars have also focused on the representation of indigenous, African,
and other regional voices in Sor Juana’s and Góngora’s poetry to draw a distinction between
the two that would allow us to identify the criollo representation of American voices (Lipski;
Moraña; Porras, “Mexican Bozal”; Sabat Rivers, “Blanco, negro”).
Recent studies of Sor Juana’s autos sacramentales as an expression of the Baroque of the
Indies also focus on the constitution of a criollo voice in these pieces. Many of these analyses
focus on the loas to the autos sacramentales, where the reference to American colonization and
evangelization is more explicit (Hernández Araico; Jáuregui; More, “Soberanía y violencia”;
Zanelli), while others reconnect the loas with the autos sacramentales to analyze the criollo
perspective in the play as a whole (Bokser; Martínez-​San Miguel, Saberes; Patterson). On one
hand, Carlos Jáuregui has proposed a close reading of the syncretic representation of indigenous
cannibalism as a criollo metaphor for communion that paradoxically assimilates American sub-
ject into imperial Catholicism (210–​18). On the other hand, Anna More has analyzed the loa
to El Divino Narciso to propose that the conversion represented as a rational exchange between
Religión and America is part of Sor Juana’s criollo reappropriation of the scenes of imperial
conquest and colonization (“Soberanía y violencia”).
Studies of Sor Juana’s triumphal arch have also questioned the alleged lack of American ref-
erences in this piece, by focusing on the political implication of the advice and requests that Sor
Juana extends to the new Viceroy. Electa Arenal has studied the arch to identify the moments

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in which this text represents subaltern voices. Verónica Grossi links politics and knowledge to
the allegorical dimensions of the “Neptuno alegórico,” and her reading complicates the analyses
that insist on the subversive aspects of Sor Juana’s work at the expense of her negotiations with
an imperial order (Chapter 4).
At the core of most of these readings that link the Baroque of the Indies with a criollo per-
spective is a desire to explore the complex web of meanings that constitute the feminine, colo-
nial, and American discourses in Sor Juana’s work. The growing corpus of Sor Juana’s criollo
archive is founded on several key characteristics of the baroque aesthetic, such as the cultivation
of an artistic style that is founded on the representation of the excessive, multiple, and abigarrado
(disjointed or uneven). Perhaps one of the most unique characteristics of Sor Juana’s engage-
ment with the Baroque is her inclusion of silence as a powerful strategy to allow for subaltern
perspectives to emerge in her texts (see Ludmer and Mabel Moraña, Viaje). In her love poetry,
Sor Juana feminizes the baroque themes of appearance vs. reality, deceit, and the production
of human knowledge from the marginal space of the American colonies, as well as the verbal
strategies of Góngora’s culteranismo (Luiselli, “Trípitico virreinal”; Sabat-​Rivers “A Feminist
Re-​reading”).
Sor Juana also takes advantage of the syncretic strategies that were so common in the rein-
terpretation of Spanish and European textual, visual, and architectural arts in the performance
of these modes of representation by indigenous persons, mestizos, and criollos. The resulting
product is a literary corpus that vacillates between the regional perspectives and knowledges
produced by criollos in the Americas, and their paradoxical aspiration to become part of the
“universality” represented by the European modern episteme and Catholic religion. Sor Juana’s
work is undoubtedly one of the most important examples of seventeenth-​century criollo dis-
course, but her perspective should not be conflated with the proto-​nationalist discourses that
will emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the main task of the critics and
scholars who study Sor Juana’s work and her colonial context is to maintain the central ambiva-
lence of her work as a signifying element in the analysis of her performance of baroque and
criollo discourses in the Americas. Reading Sor Juana’s works while fully accepting the inherent
difficulty of interpreting its wavering alliances between New Spain and Spain is the best way of
honoring the baroque dimensions of her engagement with a criollo archive.
The study of Sor Juana’s engagement with criollo and baroque archives still has many
productive avenues to explore to better define how these two notions were configured in
the context of the Americas-​Europe colonial relationship. For example, it would be interest-
ing to engage in comparative studies about the emergence and development of creole voices
in the other viceroyalties. Are there some specific characteristics that would differentiate
Sor Juana and New Spain from other colonial regions in the Americas in the seventeenth
century? Is the baroque archive produced in New Spain radically different from the baroque
archive of the viceroyalty of Peru? It would also be interesting to study further how criollo
discourses of the seventeenth century are different from criollo voices in the eighteenth
century. How are Sor Juana’s writings representative of the specific formulations of a criollo
voice in the Americas in the seventeenth century? Can we propose comparative studies
focusing on how the baroque aesthetic was used in Sor Juana’s religious writings as well as
in her secular poetry, drama and prose? Finally, recent studies have focused on Sor Juana’s
transatlantic projections to Portugal in her Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del placer (S. Kirk) and
to Brazil, through her response to Padre Antonio Vieira (Bijuesca et al.), as well as the points
of contacts between her poetry and similar texts produced by Gregório de Matos (Ruiz
Pérez). It would be interesting to explore further the Iberian dimension of Sor Juana’s creole
and baroque archives to take advantage of the comparative focus that has recently enriched

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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Colonial Latin American Studies in general (Costigan, Voigt). By the same token, it would
be useful to extend the comparative study of women’s writing in Europe and the Americas
(North and South) to incorporate Sor Juana into a corpus of writers who made their gender
a significant element in their artistic and intellectual productions (Aldridge; Harvey; Jed;
Merrim, Early Modern; Scott). Some of these studies will undoubtedly require an engage-
ment with the differential meaning of creole and criollo in the Anglo, French and Spanish
colonies, complicating even more how we conceive criollo and baroque archives of the
seventeenth century from a hemispheric perspective.

Notes
1 Good examples of the proto-​nationalist interpretation of colonial criollo discourses are the works of
David Brading, Jacques Lafaye, Irving Leonard, and Mabel Moraña.
2 I reserve the use of creole and creolization to comparative studies including Anglo, French, and Dutch
imperialisms in the Caribbean and the Americas in which notions of race, nationalism, and language
developed different meanings to the ones usually used to refer to criollos under Spanish colonialism
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
3 The translation is mine.
4 On the autos sacramentales, see Egan and del Valle in this volume.
5 For a review of the existing scholarship on Castaño’s racial and American identity, see Martínez-​San
Miguel, Saberes 126–​28.
6 The Viceroyalty of New Spain also mediated the commercial relationships between Spain and the
Pacific through the Manila Galleons, which connected Europe with the coveted Orient between 1565
and 1815, bringing silver from the Americas to the Pacific, and transporting silk, exotic spices, and
other products from China via Manila-​Acapulco-​Veracruz-​the Caribbean-​Canary Islands and Europe.
7 Translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, personal conversation.
8 I develop this argument in more detail in the fifth chapter of From Lack to Excess.
9 The Baroque of Indies is also linked to the Neobaroque aesthetic that emerges in the Caribbean and
Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. For a review of scholarship on the links between the Baroque
of Indies and Latin American Neobaroque see Martínez-​San Miguel, “(Neo) Barrocos de Indias.”
10 A classical comparative study of Sor Juana and Góngora is Dorothy Schons’ essay “The Influence of
Góngora on Mexican Literature during the Seventeenth Century” (1939).

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3
THE GENDERING OF
KNOWLEDGE IN NEW SPAIN
Enclosure, women’s education, and writing

Stephanie Kirk

In her famous Autodefensa espiritual (Spiritual Self-​Defense, circa 1681; known also as the Carta
de Monterrey), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz argues against the censure of her confessor, the Jesuit
priest Antonio Núñez de la Miranda, who strongly disapproved of female education and eru-
dition. Reading Sor Juana’s accusations, it appears that Núñez claimed her dedication to a stu-
dious life jeopardized her path to salvation. Sor Juana challenges him to defend the dichotomy
he draws between study and salvation, citing the famous examples of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose,
and all the rest of the Church Fathers.1 She even invokes the example of Núñez himself –​“car-
gado de letras” (19) [bowed down under the weight of so much learning, 435] as he was.2 She
knows, however, that Núñez will not accept the comparison of men with women since, as she
says, he believed men to be governed by “otra razón” (19) [other rules, 435]. She turns, then, to
examples of erudite women of the past. Unlike in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Answer,
1691), where she will propose a lengthy list of scholarly women in support of her right to a
studious life, here she lists just three: St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Gertrude, and St. Paula. It
is St. Paula (307–​404), the patron of her convent –​“my Mother Saint Paula” –​upon whom she
focuses to challenge Núñez’s opinion about both the moral propriety of women’s study as well
as their capacity to follow the example of these praiseworthy women:

¿No estudió Santa Catarina, Santa Gertrudis, mi Madre Santa Paula, sin estorbarle a su
alta contemplación, ni a la fatiga de sus fundaciones, el saber hasta griego? ¿El apren-
der hebreo? ¿Enseñada de mi Padre San Jerónimo, el resolver y el entender las Santas
Escrituras, como el mismo Santo lo dice? (19)

(Did not St. Catherine, St. Gertrude and my mother St. Paula study without harm-
ing their lofty contemplations, and was the latter’s travail in the founding of convents
impeded by her knowledge even of Greek? By having learned Hebrew? By having been
instructed by my Father St. Jerome to understand and interpret Holy Writ, as the Saint
himself tell us?) (Scott 435)

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Stephanie Kirk

While Sor Juana might have felt symbolic kinship with Paula through the name of the con-
vent where she professed and the Hieronymite order to which she belonged, of which Paula
was co-​patron along with St. Jerome, radical differences drew them apart.3 Belonging to one of
the few moments in Christian history when men of the Church encouraged women to attain
knowledge, the saint of the early Church was permitted to freely enjoy the type of intellectual
life that, for Sor Juana, seemed constantly under threat. As a member of St. Jerome’s inner circle,
Paula lived a life of deeply-​intertwined spiritual worship and intellectual ardor. She learned
Hebrew and aided Jerome in his translation of the Vulgate Bible. She collaborated with him
on his writings by acting as a learned interlocutor whose questions allowed Jerome to work
through intellectual problems. She also founded monasteries for men and convents for women
in Bethlehem, all the while living a life of the most extreme piety and asceticism.
In Sor Juana’s day, however, the ecclesiastical authorities took a different approach to female
education, and women’s pursuit of knowledge found itself confined to an almost mythical past.
Challenging this situation, Sor Juana turns to Paula and reconnects piety and female learning
as practiced by her foremother. In the Respuesta, she stakes a claim for the cloister as a suitable
space for the acquisition of knowledge within a Catholic framework:  “pareciéndome men-
guada inhabilidad, siendo católica, no saber todo lo que en esta vida se puede alcanzar, por
medios naturales, de los divinos misterios” (52) [Being a Catholic, I thought it an abject failing
not to know everything that in this life can be achieved, through earthly methods, concerning
the divine mysteries]. Here Sor Juana connects gender, education, and knowledge, situating the
cloister as a privileged space for intellectual pursuits.
Since the 1980s, scholars in both Mexico and the US have attempted to follow Sor Juana’s lead
and plot the connection among these three issues, reconstructing women’s access to education
in the early modern Hispanic world both within and without the convent. In Mexico, Josefina
Muriel pioneered this field in her landmark book of 1982, Cultura femenina novohispana (Female
Culture of New Spain). Bringing together a group of primary sources culled from public archives
and private libraries, Muriel presents an in-​depth look at the literary and intellectual production
of Spanish and Creole women (criollas) in New Spain.The book focuses primarily on the cultural
works of criollas, with a lengthy section dedicated to an analysis of Sor Juana’s works. Muriel does
address the issue of education, although only for a few pages of the lengthy volume. Establishing
that educated women of the period were most often self-​taught, she investigates female reading
practices which she offers as female education, the details of which she extracts primarily from
the all too prevalent manifestations of male censure and criticism of these same practices (21–​22).
Five years later, the Mexico-​based Spanish historian, Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, built on and
expanded Muriel’s work, publishing the first in a series of books dedicated to education and fam-
ily life in the colonial period. Gonzalbo’s 1987 book, Las mujeres en la Nueva España: Educación y
vida cotidiana (Women in New Spain: Education and Daily Life) offers a comprehensive look at
the education of various groups, including Creole and indigenous women. Gonzalbo details one
of the only widespread opportunities for women’s education, that of the “escuelas de amigas”
(teachers’ schools) inspired by similar spaces in Spain and made famous to the contemporary
reader by Sor Juana’s discussion of how she learned to read at three at one such place (127–​47).
Gonzalbo describes how the schools offered a religious and domestic curriculum that varied
greatly in quality since no official oversight regulated these spaces. In sum, Gonzalbo’s survey
of female education was capacious, including a chapter on indigenous women. Apart from a
brief introductory discussion of pre-​conquest female education, Muriel made elite Spanish and
Creole women the focus of her book.
In the United States, similar pioneering work to that of Muriel was carried out by Electa
Arenal and Stacey Schlau in Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works (1989; revised

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The gendering of knowledge in New Spain

edition 2010). The volume brings together a series of invaluable archival documents that offer
examples of the different genres nuns from both Spain and the New World employed in their
writing in the service of female agency. Alongside the texts, Arenal and Schlau offer a careful
analysis of the women’s textual and rhetorical strategies of self-​representation and in the pro-
cess elucidate the varying contexts in which nuns were educated or succeeded in educating
themselves. The authors highlight the wide variety in the level of instruction that nuns enter-
ing convents in Spain and the New World possessed. In contrast to Sor Juana, many Hispanic
nuns had not received more than an elementary education upon entering the convent (147).
Arenal and Schlau stress the barriers that all women faced –​even those who arrived in the
convent highly-​educated –​in expressing themselves through the written word. The authors
identify the presence of  “ignorant, timorous or fanatical clerics” (4) who warned women away
from intellectual pursuits. In response, the nuns of Untold Sisters “pay lip service” in their writ-
ings to the incompatibility of female virtue and learning for women, demonstrating the unfa-
vorable gendered power dynamic to which they were subject. Arenal and Schlau are keen to
point out, however, that these same women used their writings to turn the tables on men and
critique their pedantry and the vacuity of men’s writing and preaching (4). Sor Juana’s texts
are not reproduced in this volume as her writings require no excavation, having not suffered
centuries of neglect unlike those of her untold sisters. As Arenal and Schlau assert, however,
more commonalities than one would think exist between Sor Juana and other writing nuns. In
her Respuesta, she “uses narrative attitudes common to most writing by nuns and to women’s
autobiographical works: self-​effacement and proclaimed humility, which disguise self-​assertion,
competitiveness, and ambition; veiled irony and commentary –​at times self-​criticism on the act
of writing itself ” (337). They also use the Respuesta to plot the presence of other women, lost
to posterity, citing Sor Juana’s reference to other intellectual nuns in Mexico City whose name
were lost to posterity (338).
In Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Stephanie Merrim, on the
other hand, places Sor Juana squarely at the center of her study, in order to examine connec-
tions between the Mexican nun’s writings and those of other early modern female authors from
Europe and what is now the United States. Although the writers with whom Merrim compares
Sor Juana are almost all secular and educated women, the desire to not view Sor Juana in isola-
tion but instead see her as part of a community of women writers echoes the goal Arenal and
Schlau establish. Departing from the shared standpoint of the querelle des femmes and the “pan
Christian imaginary,” Merrim’s well-​educated writers evince an “unceasing, unwitting, almost
inevitable, textual sorority” despite the fact these women were, for the most part, unaware of
each other’s existence and worked in isolation (xxiii). A common struggle for the right to edu-
cation also bound these women writers together. Merrim spends only a few pages on the specif-
ics of female education but the issue is present throughout the book as the author demonstrates
how women used their knowledge to access the power of the word. Merrim demonstrates how
these writers give voice to what she terms the seventeenth-​century “crisis” in women’s educa-
tion, expressing “defiance and circumvention of patriarchal structures” (193). A key point in
Merrim’s analysis is the decline in women’s educational and intellectual possibilities from the
sixteenth century to the seventeenth century: “The scores of women humanists with a broader
training of earlier years had shrunk in the seventeenth century to the exceptional Tenth Muses
–​sometimes to one icon, if any, per country” (199). This decline in educational possibilities, on
the other hand, stimulated what Merrim terms “extremely significant developments in feminist
activism” as privately or self-​taught women rebelled against these exclusionary practices and
made their thoughts known in published writings (201). Merrim is particularly interested in
Sor Juana’s autodidacticism, identifying the crucial role it plays in her works, and situating the

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Stephanie Kirk

Primero sueño (First Dream) as the most concrete manifestation of this “poetics of the autodi-
dact” (229). The education Sor Juana gave herself through her book collection allowed her, as
Merrim tells us, to both “piece together her own world of knowledge,” as well as profit from
her exclusion from the University “with its restricted intellectual atmosphere committed to
Scholastic philosophy” (Merrim, and León qtd in Merrim, 231). At the same time, Merrim
shows how Sor Juana was also able to reproduce the methodology employed by erudite men
and displayed, in all her works, “totalizing encyclopedic spectacles of knowledge” (231).
More recent scholarship has taken women’s education in the Hispanic world as its sole focus.
Teresa Elizabeth Howe’s Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World, for instance,
uses a variety of literary texts and primary sources to synthesize a picture of female education
in the early modern Hispanic world. Howe seeks to create a genealogy of women authors and
intellectuals who might have served as alternative exempla to other women seeking education
when all that had been previously offered were male role models. Like Merrim, she begins
with Christine de Pizan and the querelle des femmes, and moves on to Isabel la Católica, who
perhaps was the first substantive example of a highly-​educated Spanish woman. Teresa de Jesús
provides a different example and offers Howe the opportunity to engage with the strategies
Teresa employed to navigate questions of authority with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Howe
demonstrates how the saint succeeds in promoting the role of women as educators of women
while humbly acknowledging the superiority of the figure of the male letrado (68) (learned
person). She dedicates her final chapter to Sor Juana and in this regard shows particular interest
in Sor Juana’s challenging of the ironic contradiction in which men condemned women for
their ignorance but refused them access to education. Howe demonstrates Sor Juana’s mobiliz-
ing of a series of exemplary male and female figures including St. Catherine of Alexandria and
St. Jerome in defense of her access to education and knowledge.
In their co-​edited volume, Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World,
Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández examine women’s literacy in an early modern Hispanic
comparative context. In her introduction to the volume, Cruz examines the very different
meanings knowledge, education, and writing held for men and women in the early mod-
ern Hispanic world. Reading and writing did, she argues, at least in principle, represent
the “means through which both men and women acquired knowledge and entered into a
literate world” (1). For men, however, the attainment of basic literacy signified the comple-
tion of a first step, permitting them to continue their studies and gain access to Latin and
“the humanist legacy of the European Renaissance” (1). Women, on the other hand, almost
always ended their studies at this point, having gained sufficient literacy for the “devotional
and domestic purposes” that their lifestyle required (1). This basic literacy would not enable
women to become erudite, nor acquire the scholarly knowledge of the day. Cruz defines
the relationship between knowledge and literacy as “presupposing the possession over time
of diverse kinds of knowledge, experiences, and skills proffered through written sources
such as literary, devotional and philosophical treatises, and cultural and historical documents,
many of which were written in Latin” (1). Writing of this kind served as a “vital rhetorical
and social tool” and in the early modern Hispanic world women struggled and fought both
to become authors and to attain this level of literacy (1–​2). At the same time, because of
restrictions on education, many women’s access to literacy focused exclusively on quotidian
activities (2).
Three books produced in the last two decades examine the fruits of Sor Juana’s educa-
tion in the form of her pursuit of knowledge through her works. Of particular interest to all
three authors is how the question of knowledge might intersect with a particularly female
subjectivity. For Stephanie Merrim, again in Early Modern Women’s Writing, the skills Sor Juana

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The gendering of knowledge in New Spain

acquired through her auto-​didactic efforts enabled her to challenge her exclusion from the
“City of Knowledge,” an all-​male preserve that took the creation of the University as its defin-
ing moment (195). Sor Juana along with the other seventeenth-​century women whom Merrim
studies, demonstrates a desire to “storm the world of knowledge” and make a mark (194).
Merrim terms this world the “City of Knowledge,” describing it as “seductive, institutional-
ized, male-​controlled, and almost exclusively male” (194). Describing the Primero Sueño as “Sor
Juana’s fable of the woman’s struggle for knowledge,” Merrim identifies textual practices in Sor
Juana’s famous work that, drawing on the theorizing of the French feminist Luce Irigaray, she
genders as feminine (238). Verónica Grossi also identifies the production of female knowledge
in Sor Juana’s work in her 2007 book, Sigilosos vuelos epistemológicos en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(Secret Epistemological Flights in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). Through a close reading of three
of Sor Juana’s key texts: Neptuno Alegórico (Allegorical Neptune), the loa and auto sacramental of
El Divino Narciso and Primero Sueño, Grossi uses an analysis of allegory in the nun’s work in order
to situate it within the rhetorical, philosophical and ideological context of the day (151). Grossi
positions Sor Juana’s use of allegory as facilitating the insinuation of a feminine discourse within
the parameters of her participation in established discourses: “En El Neptuno, el poder imperial,
asociado retóricamente con el poder divino, se contrapone al entendimiento femenino … Las
figuras mitologicas de Isis y Minerva, se sobreponen en importancia al propio Dios de las Aguas,
que representa al nuevo virrey” (148) [In the Neptuno, imperial power, associated rhetorically
with divine power, comes up against female understanding … The mythological figures of Isis
and Minerva take on more importance than the God of the Seas himself, who represents the
Viceroy].
Colonial epistemologies and their relationship to a feminine subject lie at the heart of Yolanda
Martínez-​San Miguel’s 1999 analysis of Sor Juana’s work, Saberes americanos: subalternidad y episte-
mología en los escritos de Sor Juana (American Knowledges: Subalternity and Epistemology in the
Writings of Sor Juana). Martínez-​San Miguel focuses on those texts which most clearly reveal
what she terms a “transgresiva preocupación epistemológica” [a transgressive epistemological
concern] in Sor Juana’s work. The nun demonstrates a multi-​faceted subjective self in which
she draws on her feminine, colonial, and Creole condition. These subjectivities come together
in order to undermine the “hegemonía de una solo paradigma del saber” [hegemony of a single
paradigm of knowledge] and, in turn, the idea that knowledge can exist as a “categoría inmuta-
ble y absoluta” (48) [immutable, absolute category].
The most recent scholarship examining Sor Juana’s life and work from the standpoint of
knowledge appears to have taken a theological turn, proving that an exploration of this most
masculine of epistemologies provide a fertile area of investigation for scholars for theologians
and literary scholars alike. In her 2011 article “Sor Juana’s Critique of Theological Arrogance,”
Lisa D. Powell analyzes Sor Juana’s theological engagements from the standpoint of the nun’s
call for “epistemic humility” from male theologians (15). Analyzing the way Sor Juana frames
theological debate in the Carta atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena) and the Respuesta a Sor
Filotea de la Cruz, Powell demonstrates how beyond “the modesty clauses and claims of igno-
rance,” Sor Juana challenges the “expectations of women’s writing by exposing the overween-
ing arrogance of the theological academy of her day, as it stands in contrast to her intelligent,
learned arguments hedged in such a way that leaves them open to dialogue” (15–​16). Indicating
a new reason for the writing of the Carta atenagórica, Powell shows how Sor Juana’s inten-
tion was not to critique Vieira’s theological position but rather “demonstrate that Vieira’s
declarations about the superiority of his thought, interpretation, and position on the topic
were inappropriate, unwarranted, and even deserving divine punishment” (17). Powell reads
“passion and frustration” in Sor Juana’s words, as she demonstrates her displeasure that one

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Stephanie Kirk

such as Vieira –​a renowned preacher and theologian –​would make such bold claims about his
knowledge into the divine mysteries and his ability to articulate them” (23).
Stephanie Kirk offers a close reading of a 1727 Portuguese text Apologia a favor do Reverendo
P. Antonio Vieyra da Companhia de Jesu da Provincia de Portugal (Apology to Support the Reverend
Father Antonio Vieyra of the Company of Jesus of the Province of Portugal). The lengthy
theological tract ostensibly written by a nun, Sor Margarida Ignácia, but in fact authored by
her brother, a cleric, Luis Gonçalves Pinheiro, offers a defense of Vieira’s theological posi-
tion as challenged by Sor Juana in the Carta atenagórica. Kirk demonstrates the longevity and
geographic extension of the dispute as well as shedding further light on the intricacies of
the theological and gender questions surrounding Sor Juana’s engagement with Vieira in her
Carta atenagórica. In “San Jerónimo en el eje de la polémica en torno de la Carta atenagórica de
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (St. Jerome in the Center of the Polemic Surrounding the Letter
Worthy of Athena by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), Fernando Riva also examines Sor Juana’s
engagement with patristic theology, as she grappled with St. Jerome’s texts in the last years of
her life. Although a woman, her status as a Hieronymite nun would have allowed her to have
access to these texts and use them as models in her own writing. Riva sees the circle of female
disciples surrounding Jerome, particularly St. Paula, as obviously holding a great attraction for
Sor Juana. In New Spain, patristic theology was accessed through the neo-​scholastic intellec-
tual framework that infused the work of the Jesuits, and that, according to Charles Patterson,
wielded influence over Sor Juana and other members of the intellectual elite. Drawing on the
work of a number of scholars, including Octavio Paz, in his article “Jesuit Neo-​Scholasticism
and Criollo Consciousness in Sor Juana’s El mártir del sacramento, San Hermenegildo,” Patterson
highlights the criollo element of this intellectual movement, showing how this proto-​patriotic
gesture intersected with the Jesuit belief of Christian Universalism (423). Through an analy-
sis of the two autos and their attendant loas, Patterson demonstrates how Sor Juana’s work
drew heavily on this Jesuit framework. At the center of this erudite network of scholars was
the Jesuit Athanasisus Kircher, whose work wielded significant influence over Sor Juana. The
Mexican nun was attracted to Kircher’s polymathic sensibilities and attempts to attain total
knowledge. Sor Juana also drew inspiration from his theological interests, particularly in regards
to the material she chose for each of her three autos, as Patterson explains: “Each [auto] finds
Eucharistic typology in a different context: in El cetro, she demonstrates the exegetical process
of finding Christian types in the Old Testament (i.e., Jewish tradition). In El divino Narciso, she
shows that the same process can be applied to the Greco-​Roman myth of Echo and Narcissus.
In El mártir del sacramento (The Martyr of the Sacrament), she applies the same methodology to
decisive historical events in Spain’s history” (425).4
Many nuns produced writing from the convent in genres that did not fit within the officially-​
recognized paradigms Sor Juana so ably reproduced. In their article “Leyendo yo y escribiendo
ella: The Convent as Intellectual Community” (2006), Arenal and Schlau tackle the question
of knowledge produced by women outside the male intellectual sphere. They highlight how
the realms of affect, dream, intuition, and inspiration, “to which women were largely confined
anyway,” became “vehicles for knowing” (130). The authors also stress that women’s practices of
knowledge production differed from those of men, being often collaborative and not produced
with publication and wide dissemination in mind (130). Arenal and Schlau offer an alternative
way of thinking about intellectual activity, one that encompasses more “integrated” and interior
ways of knowing (141–​42). The exclusionary practices of male education did not stop women
from enjoying a rich intellectual life of a different sort: “kept from the aula of universities and
colegios, some women were avid students in the castillo interior” (141). Beginning in the United
States with Arenal and Schlau’s Untold Sisters, over the last couple of decades scholars have edited,

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The gendering of knowledge in New Spain

analyzed, and translated the writings of nuns whose voices introduce us to the complexities of
convent culture. Many of the writings to which we have access detail the visionary and mys-
tical experiences of nuns. In almost all of these cases, these texts exist because male confessors
ordered women to write them, and as “escritoras por obediencia” (writers due to obedience),
nuns were not always able to claim authority or ownership over their own works. At the same
time, women found strategies to assert their subjectivity through their writings and the work
of scholars such as Arenal and Schlau has been invaluable in helping us to decode and identify
these techniques. The writings of Madre María de San José, a nun from Puebla, offer a compel-
ling example of this type of the recounting of this type of female authorial agency. Anthologized
in Untold Sisters and in two volumes edited by Kathleen Myers (1993; 1999), María de San
José’s diaries present invaluable access to the spiritual journey beginning in childhood of a
devout but independent woman who overcame internalized anxiety regarding authorship and
ecclesiastical censure to display self-​confidence as a writer (Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters
369). From Sor María’s texts we gain invaluable insight into the experiences of a visionary nun
while learning much about the life of a woman in rural colonial society (she did not profess
as a nun until she was 32). Further examples of nuns’ spiritual autobiographies are analyzed in
Kristine Ibsen’s Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (1999). Particularly
compelling in this study is Ibsen’s discussion of the writings of the Mexican nun Sebastiana de la
Santísima Trinidad, whose written accounts of her extreme penitential regime allow us to access
to women’s understanding of the role of the body in the representation of agency through what
was understood by her as “heroic virtue” (157). In her study of Colombian mystic nun and spir-
itual writer, Madre Castillo, Kathryn McKnight also examines the discourse of power that the
nun develops through the representation of a humble and often abject self. In her The Mystic of
Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671–​1742 McKnight places Madre Castillo within both
the female mystical tradition and the specificities of her colonial condition in order to unravel
the complexities of a writing subject whose self-​representation evinced both sacred humility
and, conversely, affirmations of agency.The analysis carried out by the aforementioned critics in
their studies of visionary, mystical and ascetic nuns locate power and resistance at the heart of
these women’s writings. Jean Franco, it is important to mention, takes a very different approach
in her examination of the writings of mystical and visionary discourse. Discarding the possi-
bility that an alternative female production of valuable knowledge could be located within the
recounting of these experiences, Franco sees these mystic and visionary women as writers who
felt no pleasure in the act, “forced as they were to write a pale form of recollection carried out
as an unpleasant task in the hangover deadness that followed the rapture” (3).
Nuns also wrote a wide variety of texts as they administered their convent duties. These
responsibilities gave women a measure of independence and agency they most probably would
not have enjoyed outside the convent walls. Nuns penned many letters regarding convent busi-
ness, but also addressed issues which demonstrated how deeply attached they were to the char-
acter of the communities into which they had professed, and how reluctant they were to allow
the ecclesiastical authorities to modify or reform their way of life. In Indigenous Writings from
the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico, Mónica Díaz takes a close look at
why and how nuns wrote letters from the convent. Identifying conventual letters as a subgenre
within a larger epistolary category, she highlights the mix of classical rhetoric and what she
terms “spiritual rhetoric” in nuns’ letters. Díaz looks closely at the letters that the indigenous
nuns of the Convent of Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cosamaloapan sent to
the commissary general of the Franciscan order in New Spain. This was the second convent
founded for indigenous women and as in the first foundation, that of Corpus Christi, criolla
nuns were given positions of authority in what was supposed to be a convent for noble Indian

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Stephanie Kirk

women. This deviation from the intent of the convent founders culminated in the production
of ethnic strife within the cloister. In their letters, the indigenous nuns infuse their discourse
with the “stereotypes imposed upon them by the Spanish colonial system, thereby participat-
ing in the construction of ethnic identity in play during the years of the colonial presence in
New Spain” (153). Díaz terms this strategy the “rhetoric of Indianness” and demonstrates how
women used this textual space to gain autonomy in their living space (136). In her Convent Life
in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (2007), Stephanie Kirk brings another case study
of convent letter writing to the fore, presenting a series of letters that tell of opposition to the
eighteenth-​century vida común (collective living) reforms.5 In the convent of the Santísima
Trinidad in Puebla, nuns claimed authority through textual resistance in the form of the care-
fully-​crafted letters they wrote to the Viceroy, detailing their suffering at the hands of a hostile
bishop (104). In their writing, the nuns mobilized a strategic vacillation between abnegation
and authority as they sought to persuade the Viceroy to put a stop to the vida común reforms and
allow them to return to the life under which they professed (115).
As the above analysis has shown, over the last few decades scholars have produced stimulating
and wide-​ranging studies addressing the education of women in New Spain and the convent as
locus for the production of knowledge(s) and writing. The rich complexity of Sor Juana’s work
continues to challenge scholars to understand how knowledge and gender intersect and how
these two concepts play out when women gain access to the written word. Recent archival
discoveries –​ the Carta de Serafina de Cristo, the Carta de Puebla, the sermons of Palavicino and
Muñoz de Castro on the Carta atenagórica and its detractors –​have provided challenges to exist-
ing scholarship as well as creating conflicts between scholars, particularly in Mexico, that stand
to rival those surrounding Sor Juana in her own day. Scholars with expertise in gender studies
might want to examine more closely the ideological arguments that dismiss decades of valu-
able feminist scholarship and summarily deem them offensive, in particular those of Alejandro
Soriano, who finds this area of inquiry antithetical to Sor Juana’s religious status. Studies that
engage in a deeper cultural contextualization of Sor Juana’s intellectual milieu would also be
welcome, in order to further understand to what extent her own epistemological practices
coincided with those of the men alongside whom she wrote. Such inquiries would pick up
where the valuable work of Octavio Paz left off and, at the same time, stand as a corrective to his
harsh critique of some of the intellectual currents of the day. Studies examining neo-​scholastic
thought, and the Christian humanism of the Jesuit tradition as reflected in Sor Juana’s work
would help us know more about the intricacies of New Spanish baroque erudition and its con-
tribution to early modern networks of knowledge in the Americas and beyond.

Notes
1 “¿Las letras estorban, sino que antes ayudan a la salvación? ¿No se salvó San Agustín, San Ambrosio y
todos los demás Santos Doctores? Y Vuestra Reverencia, cargado de tantas letras, ¿no piensa salvarse?”
(19) [Does learning now prevent, when in other times it furthered salvation? Were not St. Augustine, St.
Ambrosius and all the other Doctors of the Church saved? And Your Reverence, bowed down under the
weight of so much learning, do you not plan to be saved?] (Scott 435).
2 All translations from the Autodefensa are Nina M. Scott’s.
3 Teresa Howe also addresses the “special attention” Sor Juana pays to Paula in her discussion of female
educational opportunities (169).
4 Both Octavio Paz and Paula Findlen have also studied Kircher’s influence on Sor Juana’s work.
5 Vida común refers to a series of reforms instigated by Spanish bishops in eighteenth-​century New Spain
in which church authorities attempted to force nuns to radically change their lifestyles and live a more
communal and austere life.

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PART II

Reception history
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4
SEVENTEENTH-​CENTURY
DIALOGUES
Transatlantic readings of Sor Juana

Mónica Díaz

The vast scholarly production of the last thirty years dedicated to early modern religious
women has positively influenced the routes taken by scholars working on the life and writ-
ings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. As information accumulates, so too does the need to find
innovative methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks that would aid in the study
of aspects of the Hieronymite nun’s writings. A transatlantic paradigm offers unique possibili-
ties for the study of Sor Juana’s writings, adding a new dimension to understanding her texts
and also providing ways to better appreciate the fluid exchanges that took place in the Iberian
Atlantic during the early modern period, particularly in terms of women’s cultural production
(Cañizares-​Esguerra 215). A transatlantic focus generally seeks decentralized readings of cultural,
social, and economic exchanges, rather than privileging nationalistic approaches. In this way, it
provides a comprehensive and more accurate picture of how social space was conceived during
a given time and area of intense activity.1
While in the last two decades the scholarship on the Atlantic has increasingly incorporated
the geographical areas and peoples under Iberian control, British and male Atlantic history con-
tinue to dominate the field (Owens and Mangan 3). As Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf
argue in the introduction of their coedited volume, Atlantic studies that engage with women
and religious studies will still focus on “the migration of ideas and people that resulted in trans-
actional, dynamic relationships among and between people and institutions” (8).
Recent important contributions, however, contest the limitations embedded in traditional
approaches to the transatlantic paradigm, underscoring the importance of using gender as a
method of analysis, and a focus on women and religion to unveil key cultural transformations
in the Iberian Atlantic.2 Scholars working in the subfield of conventual women’s writing have
been establishing links between the Americas and Europe since the late 1980s, most notably
with the publication of Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works by Electa Arenal and
Stacey Schlau and translated by Amanda Powell, which compiles writings by early modern
nuns on both sides of the Atlantic.3 As the subfield of women’s religious writing grew, more
detailed questions about the nature of conventual life arose. In Early Modern Women’s Writings
and Sor Juana Inés, Stephanie Merrim asserts that convent walls were more porous than we had
previously thought. Using Sor Juana’s case to illustrate the permeability of the cloister, Merrim

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Mónica Díaz

refers to Sor Juana’s rich correspondence with people outside of the convent, her contact with
members of the court, and her knowledge of contemporary intellectual developments (xi). In
addition to making evident the relationships that Sor Juana established in the Respuesta a Sor
Filotea de la Cruz (Answer to Sor Filotea) with her mention of two Spanish nuns, Carmelite
reformer Teresa de Ávila (1515–​1582), and Franciscan abbess María de Ágreda (1602–​1665),
Merrim explores the connections between Sor Juana’s writings and those of other early women
writers in other European countries. The imagined and possible intellectual communities that
Merrim identified paved the way for scholars to undertake close transatlantic readings of Sor
Juana’s work and to place her in a broader intellectual context, in which she ceased to be seen
as an anomaly.
A major milestone in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s scholarship was the edited volume by
Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
in the Modern Language Association’s series on teaching world literature.Three chapters in par-
ticular endeavored to look at Sor Juana in a transatlantic context. Building on Merrim’s thesis,
Lisa Vollendorf ’s essay focuses on the Respuesta to chart some possible intellectual transatlantic
relationships. From Sor Juana’s text,Vollendorf extracts two additional names of women across
the Atlantic mentioned in the nun’s text: María de San José Salazar (1584–​1603) and María de
la Antigua (1566–​1617).The transatlantic relationship created through the text served Sor Juana
as a strategy to place herself within a larger cohort of women writers who had been recognized
by the Catholic Church for their exemplary lives and were allowed to write. Vollendorf goes
further by comparing Sor Juana’s plea for women’s rights to study with the strategies used by
Spanish writers María de Zayas and Mariana de Carvajal. In her chapter, Vollendorf argues for
a sorority of women writers who employed similar rhetorical strategies on both sides of the
Atlantic in their fight against the misogyny of the time. However, there is no certainty that
any of these women actually read the others, except for the cohort of women writers who
participated in what Stephanie Kirk has called a “virtual writing community” (143). Later,
in “Navigating the Atlantic Divide,” Vollendorf returns to the subject of the Iberian Atlantic
focusing on women, education and literacy. She mentions not only Sor Juana’s textual mention
of women across the Atlantic but also her engagement with “people, books, and ideas in the
seventeenth century” (19).
The chapters by Tamara Harvey and Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel offer additional interpreta-
tions of transatlantic readings of Sor Juana. Harvey’s essay places Sor Juana in a larger cohort of
women who had been labeled as the Tenth Muse, similarly to Merrim (in Early Modern). By placing
Sor Juana alongside the Europeans Anna Maria van Schurman, and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess
of Newcastle, Harvey underscores the similar ways in which these women responded “to common-
places about women while registering distinctive regional and personal differences” (115).4 Harvey
suggests that comparative work on early modern women can shed light not only into the discursive
strategies they used but also on the kind of learning they displayed in their works.
The work of Stephanie Kirk more clearly engages transatlantic readings of Sor Juana’s work,
and not only with instances of shared knowledge and writing strategies, but also with actual
exchanges among members of a community of readers and writers. In Convent Life in Colonial
Mexico, Kirk dedicates a chapter to Sor Juana’s participation in the Casa del Placer in Portugal –​
an intellectual community of religious women across the Atlantic.5 As Kirk asserts, other than
the texts left to posterity, little is known about this female literary academy. Thanks to the
Countess of Paredes’ relationship with the Portuguese Duchess of Aveiro, Sor Juana was invited
to join the group. Eight aristocratic Portuguese nuns were involved in the literary academy,
along with the Countess and Sor Juana. The resulting text, “Enigmas ofrecidos a la discreta
inteligencia de la soberana asamblea de la Casa del Placer por su más rendida y aficionada Soror

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Seventeenth-century dialogues

Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa” (Enigmas Offered to the Discreet Intelligence of the
Sovereign Assembly of the House of Pleasure by their most Humble Follower Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz, the Tenth Muse), is little-​known, which reflects that their activities were meant to be
secret and their texts read only by members. Indeed, Kirk states that only two known copies of
the text exist in Lisbon and the text never arrived in Spain or Mexico (216).
The creation of an autonomous female textual space, Kirk argues, sought to reproduce com-
munity in an ideal form (144). Taking the imagined community to another level, this kind of
activity challenged many of the axes of the overarching socio-​religious infrastructure: the con-
finement of religious women to the cloister, their restriction to write only in certain accepted
genres and with certain rhetoric, and the overall patriarchal power imposed on these women
as a whole. Through their literary activities, by writing to other women, they transformed
the community life dictated by the Catholic patriarchal power structure into a utopian space
where their members could express themselves creatively. This is illustrated by the content of
the Enigmas, a collaborative book composed of two approval texts by two different nuns, three
permissions written in verse by three nuns, and twenty redondillas or riddles on the nature of
love composed by Sor Juana.
The content and structure of the Enigmas mirrors that of a published book, which usually
included prefatory texts such as permissions and approvals from high-​ranked members of the
Church. In this case, the nuns wrote their own liçensas (licenses) to approve the poems authored
by Sor Juana.The liçensas are a tangible example of the active reading of Sor Juana’s work across
the Atlantic. The nuns of the Casa del Placer defended the value and propriety of Sor Juana’s
poems in the texts that preceded them. Kirk states that the Portuguese nuns’ experiences of
reading and writing created a network of texts that functioned as an act of solidarity “in opposi-
tion to those written against Sor Juana” (160). Kirk’s insights about transatlantic readings of Sor
Juana’s Enigmas respond to earlier scholars’ inquiries about female intellectual networks beyond
the convent walls. Furthermore, it is a welcome development in the field that triggers additional
lines of inquiry. For example, questions such as these might guide future research:  are there
more texts composed by Sor Juana or other American women that need to be unearthed in
archives on the other side of the Atlantic? Are there other possible readings and interpretations
of the Enigmas? What other readings of Sor Juana’s work in the Iberian Peninsula can we locate?
These questions and others have already guided recent inquiries with regards to Sor Juana’s role
in a transatlantic intellectual community.
Additional scholarship has discussed the publication in 1689 of the Inundación castálida by
Sor Juana’s friend and former patroness, the Countess of Paredes, as the act that triggered Sor
Juana’s fame in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as her inclusion into the Casa del Placer literary
academy. Through a female network of support, Sor Juana travels across the Atlantic. In Literary
Self-​Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Frederick Luciani notes that the Spanish editors of
the Inundación castálida use the prefatory texts, the aprobación and the prologue to: “position Sor
Juana and her work strategically” (27). Luciani bases his argument on the rhetorical strategies
and symbolic language used by the clerics in charge of the prefatory texts, in which Sor Juana
was presented as a Tenth Muse, an exceptional jewel from the New World. These clerics, mainly
Diego Calleja and Luis Tineo de Morales, also endeavored to justify Sor Juana’s literary voca-
tion by underscoring the propriety of her literary activities and the fact that her writing never
distracted her from her religious life. In short, she was presented to Spanish audiences in a very
different light from that of New Spain, where the highest authorities of the Church regarded
her with suspicion.
More recently, Stephanie Kirk and Mónica Díaz have focused precisely on a comparative
approach to the readings of Sor Juana’s work on both sides of the Atlantic. In “Theorizing

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Mónica Díaz

Transatlantic Women’s Writing: Imperial Crossings and the Production of Knowledge,” Kirk

and Díaz explore the reception of the controversial Carta Atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena),
in which Sor Juana disputes a sermon preached by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira regard-
ing what the latter perceived to be Christ’s greatest gift to humanity. In 1690 the Bishop
of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz published Sor Juana’s text without her consent.
He prefaced the publication with an admonitory letter signed with a female pseudonym, and
changed the title that Sor Juana had originally given to her work. In contrast, in 1692 the same
text opened the publication in Seville of the Segundo volumen (second volume) of Sor Juana’s
works with its original title “Crisis de un sermon” (Critique of a Sermon).The laudatory prefa-
tory materials that accompanied the 1692 publication of the Carta Atenagórica differed greatly
from the harsh letter that accompanied Sor Juana’s text in 1690; this as well as the texts’ crossing
the Atlantic had a profound effect in the subsequent reception of Sor Juana’s oeuvre published
in Spain.
For Díaz and Kirk, the strikingly different reception of Sor Juana’s text in Spain stems from a
combination of factors, namely “the nun’s successful deployment of male intellectual language,
together with the singularity of her colonial locus of enunciation and textual transatlantic cross-
ing” (78). Twenty-​two distinguished theologians, some Jesuits and several Inquisition officials
came together in the preface of the Segundo volumen to praise Sor Juana’s writings. All shared
the same opinion: there was no wrongdoing in Sor Juana’s critiquing the position outlined in
Antonio Vieira’s sermon. Engaging with Sor Juana’s theological opinions and commenting on
them, they placed Sor Juana’s text precisely in the intellectual space where she wanted it to
be: that is, one among theologians who would share her interests and understand her reflec-
tions on the matter. It is possible to hypothesize that Sor Juana always intended the Crisis to be
published in Spain, especially after the positive reception her Inundación Castálida (1689) had
received (Díaz and Kirk 81).
The erudite men who wrote the various licencias and censuras in the Segundo volumen make
frequent reference to Sor Juana’s singularity as a woman, but they also mention her unique
American origin. Prevalent ideas about the Americas prevented people from believing that such
genius could be found across the Atlantic, thereby making her even more worthy of praise. Her
locus of enunciation, and her condition as a criolla mentioned in these texts link the Segundo
volumen with “Romance 51,” studied by Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel.
In her essay in Approaches to Teaching Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and in more detail in a subse-
quent book, From Lack to Excess, Martínez-​San Miguel offers a transatlantic perspective based
on a reading of Sor Juana’s last poem, “Romance 51,” also known by its first line: “Cuándo,
Númenes divinos?” This poem was published in the volume edited by Juan de Castorena and
Úrsua, Fama y obras póstumas (1700). Building on Margo Glantz’s reading of the prefatory texts
included in the Segundo volumen, Martínez-​San Miguel argues that “Romance 51” is a response
to the laudatory texts included in the Segundo volumen, where the lyrical voice, “questions,
through a series of rhetorical questions, the transatlantic hermeneutic horizon” (From Lack to
Excess 165). Martínez-​San Miguel reads Sor Juana’s rhetorical questions as exposing the lack
of understanding on the part of her European readers. She states that the poem establishes a
spatial opposition between New Spain and Europe that challenges the idea of the Atlantic as a
fluid space of cultural exchange; furthermore, she echoes Margarita Zamora’s interpretation of
this poem as an act of resistance from a colonial subject against the system of domination that
emanated from Europe (166).
Moreover, Martínez-​San Miguel interprets Sor Juana’s mention of the “mágicas infusiones
de los indios herbolarios de mi Patria” (magical infusions of my country’s indigenous herbal-
ists) as a gesture of “strategic essentialism,” quoting Gayatri Spivak; which is to say, Sor Juana’s

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Seventeenth-century dialogues

inclusion here stresses difference between the metropolis and the colonies, rather than equiva-
lence (167). Although Martínez-​San Miguel acknowledges the value of a transatlantic approach
when analyzing Sor Juana’s writings, she departs from a position in which she questions the
traditional transatlantic method that seeks equivalency between the two sides. In her view,
these new approaches consistently displaced “the use of the notion of “colonialism” to refer
to “the cultural productions of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in Latin America,”
which in turn minimizes the significance of their colonial contexts (Approaches to Teaching 86).
Elaborating further on this notion, with Electa Arenal, Martínez-​San Miguel elsewhere makes
reference to the “magical infusions” that Sor Juana mentioned in her poem as a reference to the
ambivalence of a Creole subjectivity vis-​à-​vis American natives. The authors suggest that Sor
Juana “portrays herself as a representative of an alternative system of knowledge production”
(“Refocusing” 191).
Sor Juana is cognizant of the indigenous world, familiar with the Nahuatl language and
many of their traditions. Yet the meaning of its presence in several of Sor Juana’s works, such
as the villancicos and the autos, is open to debate. Was Sor Juana displaying a knowledge that
made her even more unique? Was she identifying with certain characteristics that she knew
would be considered exotic in Europe? Or was she stressing difference from the indigenous
and the European worlds and establishing a unique criolla identity? By privileging Sor Juana’s
criolla identity and anchoring it in the Americas, the possible dialogue with European coun-
terparts seems limiting. However, that identity does not necessarily mean that she needed to
be restricted to the American space. Martínez-​San Miguel and Arenal’s reading of Sor Juana’s
“Romance 51” emphasizes precisely the “complex transatlantic networks within which her
texts were published and read” (“Refocusing”190).
The hermeneutical exercises that elicited the textual exchanges between the colonies and
the metropolis resulted in texts such as the laudatory licencias and censuras authored by erudite
male authorities in Spain, in addition to “Romance 51” by Sor Juana. Interpretations of these
textual exchanges, in light of the transatlantic paradigms, have opened new possibilities for stud-
ies of Sor Juana. Still, further research is necessary to better grasp the dimensions of these and
other transatlantic exchanges, as well as the kind of hermeneutical dynamics involved in them.
Interested in the possibilities of a transatlantic reading, Monica Morales looks at another
romance, number 37,“Aplaude lo mismo que la fama en la sabiduría” (Celebrating her wisdom as
much as her renown), dedicated to the Duchess of Aveiro by request of the Countess of Paredes.
Morales describes Aveiro as a “transatlantic figure,” and recognizes in Sor Juana’s poem an inten-
tionality that demonstrates agency in crossing the Atlantic (19). Her essay builds on ideas put
forth by Mabel Moraña, Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel, and Georgina Sabat Rivers in relation
to Sor Juana’s colonial condition and her locus of enunciation, with a particular emphasis on the
nun-​poet’s heterogeneity and American identity. However, Morales does not find this aspect of
Sor Juana’s identity in conflict with a transatlantic reading of her cultural crossing.
While Martínez-​San Miguel placed Sor Juana’s American reality in opposition to the trans-
atlantic paradigm, Morales puts them both in dialogue. Her focus on Sor Juana’s use of Neo-​
Thomistic ideas allows her to successfully argue that in the case of Romance 37, Sor Juana is
able to overcome the differences between center and periphery and present the Atlantic as a
symbol of equality (21). Morales does not contradict what scholars have already stated about
Sor Juana’s criolla identity and political intentions in denouncing the intellectual subordination
of the colonial world. Rather, she builds on Martínez-​San Miguel’s ideas about Sor Juana’s mar-
ginality as a colonial subject by underscoring her use of the rhetoric of contrasts to illustrate the
difference between “here and there,” or as the author herself argues, Sor Juana uses the image of
distance to illustrate difference (27).

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Mónica Díaz

Morales goes even further by establishing that Sor Juana’s use of the rhetoric of affected
modesty (humildad falsa) allows her to exercise agency in claiming America as a site where
new epistemologies are produced. In this way, Sor Juana changes the traditional structure of
power while convincing the reader that she has been molded by that same structure (27). In
her poem, Sor Juana inverts the climatic and moral values that traditionally define the center
and the periphery. Morales argues that the writer nun achieves this inversion by characterizing
New Spain as another center from where reason and good deeds emanate. There, the author
argues, the Atlantic becomes an equalizing space where Christian morality not only emanates
from Europe but also from the Americas (29). The figures of the Duchess on one hand, and
Sor Juana on the other, embody virtue and reason and become part of a transatlantic imagined
community.
The argument and transatlantic reading of Romance 37 carried out by Monica Morales
proposes a fluid exchange of readers, writers, and producers of different kinds of cultural inter-
ventions across the Atlantic. Sor Juana crosses to Europe with her writings, while the writings of
the Duchess of Aveiro take hold in the Americas thanks to her relationship with the Countess
of Paredes and with the several Jesuits who received her favor in support of missionary work.
Can there be other similar readings of texts that we already know yet have failed to fully grasp,
especially with regards to the rhetorical dimensions, as in the case of Romance 37? What
becomes evident is that beyond the reading and interpretation of texts, it is necessary to explore
the networks of support and the intellectual sisterhoods that could have existed, such as that
of the Casa del Placer in Portugal. The relationships and exchanges between Sor Juana, the
Countess of Paredes, and the Duchess of Aveiro give insight into some of these rather elusive
female networks of knowledge.
In a recent article examining the transatlantic impact of the Duchess of Aveiro, Jeanne Gillespie
traces her presence in Sor Juana’s writings. She begins by locating Sor Juana’s American gaze “on
female agency in the Iberian empire” (304). Gillespie, like other scholars before her, is interested
in identifying the women whom Sor Juana most likely admired and who could have formed
part of a transatlantic network of readers and writers. The author identifies three additional
contemporary women mentioned in the Respuesta, who as Gillespie contends, “rebelled against
the molds created for them and operated outside male restrictions”: Christina of Sweden, the
Countess of  Villaumbrosa, and the Duchess of Aveiro, all of whom exercised power in untradi-
tional ways (304).
These three noble women are mentioned in Sor Juana’s Respuesta and participated in intel-
lectual Jesuit circles, as did Sor Juana. Christina of Sweden, the Countess, and the Duchess were
well educated and interested in scientific innovations –​a position that becomes evident when
we consider, for example, their participation in transatlantic discussions concerning the appear-
ance of Halley’s comet in 1680 and 1681 (306). However, the role of the Duchess of Aveiro in
transatlantic and transpacific affairs went beyond intellectual exchanges. As Gillespie points out,
the Duchess was well known for her role in the evangelization campaigns, especially those of
the Jesuits. Both the Duchess’ correspondence as well as some Jesuit reports allow us to learn
about the ways in which she “wielded considerable power and influence” during her lifetime,
especially regarding financial support in faraway missionary outposts such as in Asia and the
Americas (307).
Sor Juana was informed about the Duchess’ political influence; on her part, the Duchess
knew about Sor Juana and read her work as well. Was there, as Monica Morales suggests, an
ethical, perhaps even theological, dimension to the admiration that these women had for
each other? Gillespie touches on that possibility too when she points to the many coinci-
dences between them, especially their participation in Jesuit circles. Might there also exist

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Seventeenth-century dialogues

a transatlantic and transpacific participation in religious matters on the part of Sor Juana,
one that perhaps has not been explored thoroughly since it is not linked to one of her well-​
known writings? Could Sor Juana’s influence be linked to the Duchess’ missionary efforts
in Asia?
Morales’s and Gillespie’s work develops transatlantic cultural readings of Sor Juana, not
only to textual evidence of readers’ reception in the Iberian Peninsula. In both cases, we
see evidence of the existence of female networks of power and intellectual activities. They
highlight what could have been Sor Juana’s influence across the Atlantic, and her impact in
some important areas that might need further exploration. As we move forward, we might
want to seek both cultural and textual readings of Sor Juan and aim at better understanding
of the way the Atlantic was conceived: as a space marked by utopian fluidity where differ-
ence had to be marked, as Martínez-​San Miguel argues; or rather as a symbol of equality,
as Monica Morales’ reading suggests (21). Further studies focusing on the reception of Sor
Juana across the Atlantic, both with a textual and a cultural focus, prove necessary in light
of these and other similar inquiries. Perhaps we should not focus our attention so much on
finding direct references to Sor Juana’s work as we should seek places where her influence is
undeniable, whether in Spain or in Portugal. The transatlantic paradigm should be used as a
tool to further push the boundaries of our research efforts and allow for diverse readings and
interpretations of texts such as the Enigmas and romances, in addition to studies of female
reception and cultural participation.

Notes
1 Here I  follow Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as a social relationship bound to the forces of
production (85).
2 See for example, Cruz and Hernández, Dinan and Meyers, Jaffary, Kostroun and Vollendorf, Owens and
Mangan, Corteguera and Vicente.
3 In addition to the edition of La Respuesta by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, other scholarship has
established links between women on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g., Arenal, “Convent as Catalyst” and
Scott).
4 She also includes Anne Bradstreet in the cohort of women to argue in favor of trans-​American
comparative work.
5 There is limited scholarship focusing on the Enigmas, for example, Martínez López, Sabat Rivers, and
Sabat Rivers and Rivers.

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5
READINGS FROM THE
SEVENTEETH, EIGHTEENTH,
AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
Hagiography and nationalism

Martha Lilia Tenorio

The reception history of Sor Juana’s life and work is surprising. Praised by some and criticized
by others, the Hieronymite nun captured the attention of her contemporaries and of intellectu-
als in the centuries that followed. Her fame –​because of her life and work –​had no geographic
or temporal borders. Discovering what succeeding generations saw in Sor Juana, how they read
her, what they praised, what they critiqued, which ideology they used to view her, is a fascinat-
ing lesson in reception history, and especially in reading baroque discourse.
In the prologue to Inundación castálida (the first volume of her works, published in Madrid in
1689), Francisco de las Heras, secretary to the Countess of Paredes (vicereine of New Spain and
good friend and protector of Sor Juana), said that several “sugetos ya en dos sentidos Grandes” (peo-
ple great in both senses of the word) –​that is, aristocrats who were also wise and virtuous –​who
have been to Mexico and spoken to Sor Juana, and who have “cursado su conversación” (listened
to her conversation) –​and he explains that he uses the verb “cursar” to indicate that a conversation
with Sor Juana “is learning” –​can “certify” the truth of what she is saying.1 De las Heras notes that
there are, “forasteros que suelen a su visita no más destinar su camino” (n. p.) [foreigners who tend
make Mexico their destination in order to visit her]. This may be an exaggeration, but Francisco
Álvarez de Velasco from Bogotá (see below) wrote to Sor Juana about how much he has wanted
to come to Mexico; he explains that in antiquity people from “los últimos confines del mundo”
(the farthest parts of the world) traveled to Rome not to see the city but to meet Tito Livio, “cosa
mayor que Roma” (of greater importance than Rome). He, Álvarez de Velasco, would like to do
the same; he has always been very anxious to visit Mexico City, because it is a great metropolis,
but now that he has read the two volumes of Sor Juana’s works, he has changed his focus, because
“ay oy en México una cosa mucho mayor que el mismo México” [today there is something much
greater in Mexico than Mexico] (qtd. Alatorre, “Un devoto” 157–​76).
In sum, Francisco de las Heras, extraordinary witness to things Mexican since the beginning
of Sor Juana’s golden years, says that the nun-​writer lived surrounded by a true “popular aura”;
and, in case anyone understands that this means a poor reputation, of those who like to parade
before the masses, he explains that this “aura,” this rare atmosphere, “sólo convierte en humo
luzes pequeñas” (only transforms small lights into smoke), but speaking about a bonfire such as
Sor Juana, instead of obscuring her, “le aviva más la luz” (n.p.) [the light makes her more alive].

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Such is, then, the admiration that intellectuals who were acquainted with the nun have, that even
the masses, ordinary people, share in it [the admiration], as if she were contagious.
Most noteworthy are the approbations of Father Luis Tineo de Morales and Francisco de las
Heras. Both work the trope of praise through an intelligent and subtle defense of female genius.
Morales exclaims:

Pues si todo esto junto [las cualidades intelectuales de sor Juana que ha enumerado] en
un varón muy consumado fuera una maravilla, ¿qué será en una mujer? ¿Esto no es digno
de inmortales aplausos? ¿No merece eternas aclamaciones? Fuera el negarlo una torpe
ignorancia, fuera una rústica grosería. (7)
(Well, if all of this together [the intellectual characteristics of Sor Juana that he has enu-
merated] would be a miracle in a very accomplished man, what could it be in a woman?
Is this not worth unending applause? Does it not merit eternal acclamation? Denying it
would be stupid ignorance, an uncouth rudeness.)

De las Heras is even more forceful and emphatic:

No pienso gastarte, lector amigo […], ni las admiraciones en ponderar con bisoñería
plebeya que sea una mujer tan ingeniosa y sabia, espanto que se queda para la estolidez
rústica de quien pensare que por el sexo se han las almas de distinguir… (14)
(I don’t plan on wasting your time, friend reader […], neither the admiring phrases that view
such a witty and wise woman with plebeian ignorance, nor fear that remains of the uncouth
stupidity of those who think that souls can only distinguish themselves through their sex…)

In the second volume of Sor Juana’s works, published in Seville in 1692, several peninsular
luminaries appeared: a veritable bouquet of well-​argued praises, some of which are authentic
works of fine literary criticism. The jewel among them is Father Juan Navarro Vélez’s testi-
mony. Educated in the aesthetic ideals of the Baroque, he recognized the two works that, after
the publication of this Second Volume and while those ideals continued to dominate, would be
unanimously recognized as Sor Juana’s masterpieces: the Sueño (The Dream) and the Crisis de
un sermon (Letter Worthy of Athena):

Pero, donde a mi parecer, este ingenio grande se remontó aun sobre sí mismo es en el Sueño
[…] porque el estilo es el más heroico y el más propio del asunto; las translaciones y metá-
foras son muchas, y son muy elegantes y muy propias; los conceptos son continuos y nada
vulgares, sino siempre elevados y espiritosos; las alusiones son recónditas y no son confusas;
las alegorías son misteriosas, con solidez y con verdad; las noticias son una amaltea de toda
mejor erudición, y están insinuadas con discreción grande, sin pompa y sin afectación. (4)
(But, in my view, where this great genius supercedes even itself is in the Sueño […]
because its style is so heroic and so appropriate to its topic; there are many translations and
metaphors, and they are quite elegant and very appropriate; the concepts are continuous
and not at all vulgar, but always elevated and spiritual; the allusions are profound and not
confusing; the allegories are mysterious, solid, and truthful; the news are an amalgam of
all the best erudition, and are implied with great discretion, without pomp or affectation.)

What Father Navarro Vélez does is no small thing: he recognizes the radically original theme
of the Sueño and the perfection and formal complexity with which Sor Juana works the difficult

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subject, a poem that speaks about the impossibility of absolute knowledge. At the same time, he
argues, the poem demonstrates what its author has succeeded in knowing. It not only speaks
about Sor Juana’s desire, a desire that she retained from her earliest years (to know everything),
but also offers us the measure of her verbal and lyrical ability, creating poetic images of sugges-
tive beauty with the most “prosaic” content, such as digestion and the physiology of the brain.
Don Pedro Ignacio de Arce’s testimony is also valuable. He is one of the first to point out an
aspect that later would become part of the legend: Sor Juana’s intellectual precociousness and
autodidactism (which she would corroborate in The Answer):

…A personas de autoridad que la han tratado, he oído que antes que supiese leer ni
escribir hacía versos con elegancia […] No había (por la cortedad de la población adonde
nació sóror Juana) quien le enseñase, y, haciendo maestra a su aplicación ella propia, pre-
guntaba a los pasajeros los caracteres y juntaba las voces con maravillosa advertencia…
(92–​93)
(Persons of authority who knew her, told me that before knowing how to read and write
she created elegant verses […] There was not [because of the small size of the town where
Sor Juana was born] anyone to teach her, and, becoming her own teacher, she asked pas-
sersby about the characters and mixed in their voices with admirable caution.)

In addition, Arce undertakes an important exercise: he refutes, apparently, the prerogative of

sex. That is, it appeared that, after Father Luis Tineo’s and Francisco de las Heras’s defenses, the
idea prevailed that Sor Juana’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic faculties were even more
admirable because she was a woman. On the other hand, Arce asserts that “la prerrogativa del
sexo no sea motivo para crecer la admiración” (the prerogative of sex should not be a reason
for greater admiration); what should really underpin that admiration is that “todo cuanto ha
confirmado por especiosos a muchos varones en sus facultades, ha sobresalido con excelencia
en nuestra autora” (94) [everything regarded as admirable in many men’s faculties, has stood out
with excellence in our author]. Sor Juana is not a rara avis because she is a woman, but rather
because in her work she alone unites “Ovid’s softness,” “Virgil’s courage,” “Garcilaso’s sweet-
ness,” “Lope’s ease of expression,” “Góngora’s lyricism,” “Quevedo’s wit,” “Zárate’s seriousness,”
“Argensola’s concepts,” “Hortensio’s locutions,” and “Pantaleón’s jocosity.”
In general, the praises in this second volume consolidated the two almost-​epithets that
would accompany each mention of Sor Juana: the universal nature of her knowledge and
her manly intelligence (perhaps the most commonly used adjective to describe her genius). It
would seem that, by definition, there was no way of speaking about “feminine intelligence.”
The concept of the “manly woman” is very much a part of Hispanic culture, inherited
from the Judeo-​Christian tradition that characterizes woman in an extremely limited way
(to say the least). So much so, that a woman who does not conform to gendered expecta-
tions, behaves as a “man” and usurps his functions or roles in society. Malveena McKendrick
explains, in this regard, that “by mujer varonil is meant here the woman who departs in any
significant way from the feminine norm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She can
take the mujer esquiva who shuns love and marriage, the learned woman, the career woman,
the female bandit, the female leader and warrior, the usurper of man’s social role, the woman
who wears masculine dress or the one who indulges in masculine pursuits” (ix). Not a few
of the characterizations of this definition are related to Sor Juana: she made her rejection of
marriage explicitly; she was a learned woman who had a true professional career with her
poetry (she was paid 200 pesos for the Neptuno alegórico [Allegorical Neptune], not a small
sum at that time, and she also earned money from her carols); her admirers of the period

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compared her to Camille, the Amazon in the Aeneid who killed the frightful Órnito;2 she
took on masculine roles (she competed with several men and was chosen to compose the
arch for the arrival of the viceroy de Paredes); worked all the poetic themes of her period,
no matter how masculine: portraits of women (especially the beautiful ballad, “Lámina sirva
el cielo…” [May heaven serve as plate for the engraving…]), misogynist poetry (“Aunque
eres, Teresilla, tan muchacha…” [Although you are, Teresilla, such a girl]), etc. Finally, in The
Answer, Sor Juana confesses that, on one hand, she had no interest in matrimony, and on the
other, that since she was a child she was inclined to intellectual activity, and that she bothered
her mother to allow her to dress as a man, in order to study at the university.3 Sor Juana may
well represent best this Hispanic idea of the “manly woman.”
The second volume of her works brought Sor Juana even more fame: that same year (1692)
the Letter Worthy of Athena was reprinted in Palma de Mallorca; she was paid homage by a
“gentleman newly arrived in New Spain,” the Count of la Granja, living in Peru, a neighbor of
the Peruvian Juan del Valle Caviedes; to which the most substantive homage was by the afore-
mentioned Francisco Álvarez de Velasco in 1703 (a letter in prose, two letters in verse, and ten
poems):

A vos, divina Nise (mas ¡qué susto!),

tiritando la pluma entre los dedos,
toda anegada de miedos,
descolorido el gusto…
de pensar que es a Nise (¡oh, qué vergüenza!)
a quien quiere escribir un poeta raso…4 (n.p.)

(To you, divine Nise (but what a fright!) With my pen trembling in my hand, completely
drowned in fear, my happiness fading … to think that it is to Nise (Oh, how embarrass-
ing!) to whom a hack poet dares to write).

In another example, Álvarez de Velasco calls her “paisanita querida” (dear little compatriot)
and articulates his American pride, affirming that they and their compatriots:  “somos como
gente, /​que hablamos y sentimos, /​y que somos también inteligentes” (we are social creatures;
we speak and feel, and we are also intelligent). Álvarez de Velasco’s homage moves beyond the
“Latin Americanist fraternity”: it is motivated by an authentic understanding of the vocation,
and, therefore, a reasoned admiration of Sor Juana’s true dedication. From connoisseur to con-
noisseur, the Colombian honors the poet from New Spain in works that, in their way, honor the
metric discoveries of the nun-​poet “con sus mismas armas” (Diego 8) [with the same weapons]
(eleven-​syllable dactylic romance (ballad) eleven-​syllable endechas, and his “Second Laudatory
Letter,” which closely follows the “Ovillejos a Lisarda” by Sor Juana).
Thus, not only in Mexico from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the
eighteenth, but in the entire Hispanic world of that time, everyone knew of and admired Sor
Juana. Those intellectuals surprised by the Hieronymite nun shared with her the same aesthetic
ideal, admiration for the same models, the same love and appreciation for book culture and
erudition. Therefore, they felt no need to omit or add characteristics to the figure of the nun
nor to construct a figure (in accordance with ideologies, aesthetic convictions, etc.) in order to
openly declare their admiration.
The eighteenth century, which was so uneven in its reception of Sor Juana’s work, began
with the publication of the third volume of her works, edited by Juan Ignacio de Castorena
y Ursúa:  Fama y Obras pósthumas (Madrid, 1700). In that volume, the first biography of Sor

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Juana appeared, written by the Jesuit Diego Calleja. It confirms what we already knew: that the
nun was “amada con veneración de personages muy insignes” (loved with veneration by very
important personages), “and that those who knew her affirmed “que jamás se avrá visto igual
perspicacia de entendimiento” (n.p.) [that never had such perspicacity of understanding been
seen before]. Castorena y Ursúa himself boasted of having been one of those who knew Sor
Juana; for him, those who read her will have the pleasure of knowing a prodigy, but “[somos]
más felizes los que merecimos ser sus oyentes” (we who deserved to listen to her are happier).
And he remembers that Sor Juana spoke:

Ya, silogizando conseqüencias, argüía escolásticamente en las más difíciles disputas; ya

sobre diversos sermones, adelantando con mayor delicadeza los discursos; ya componiendo
versos de repente, en distintos idiomas y metros, nos admirava a todos, y se grangearía las
aclamaciones del más rígido tertulio de los cortesanos. (119)
(At times, using logical strategies, she argued scholastically in the most difficult disputes;
on a variety of sermons, presenting with great delicacy her speeches; at times suddenly
composing verses, in different languages and meters, she amazed everyone, and captured
the acclamations of the most rigid participant in the conversations of courtiers.)5

Aside from the Life by Father Calleja, The Answer is also included in Fama; the two texts
that corroborate how precocious she was, that applied autodidactism suggested by don Pedro
Ignacio de Arce. So, a good part of the praise focuses on these two facts. As Feliciano Gilberto
de Pisa Fernández de Heredia y Carvi’s sonnet states that Sor Juana learned without a teacher,
because her intellect and wisdom were such, that she herself was her only possible teacher (45).
Calleja exclaims in his eulogy: “…su maestro fue solo su talento. /​¡Oh gran fecundidad de
suficiencia, /​nacer sin padre tanto enseñamiento” (her teacher was her talent itself. /​Oh, such
fruitfulness of skill, /​for such knowledge to be born without a father). As is to be expected,
several of the anecdotes recounted in The Answer, for their value as portending what Sor Juana
would become, were celebrated in lyric form: sonnets (one by Pedro María Squarzafigo y
Arriola [46]; another by Francisco de León y Salvatierra, to the young age of three at which she
learned to read [66]; another to Sor Juana’s request to her mother that she dress her as a man
and send her to the university, by Juan Cabrera [49]; some liras to the self-​imposed punishment
of Sor Juana’s cutting her hair when she did not learn her lessons, by Francisco Bueno [53–​55];
some décimas to the same event, by María Jacinta de Abogader y Mendoza [90–​91], to mention
a few examples).
As a sign of that time, Fama, The Dream, and Letter Worthy of Athena became her most cel-
ebrated works. Nevertheless, as we have already seen, the biographical issues was the most
discussed. Authors of the testimonies in Fama already knew of Sor Juana’s end (her inexplicable
withdrawal in 1693, her death in 1695). It would have been difficult for any of them to intuit its
tragic dimension; because of this the lucidity and analytical depth of these verses by Jerónimo
Monforte y Vera stand out. He claims that renouncing studies and poetry was the same as dying
(85). Jerónimo Monforte’s clairvoyance is admirable: he does not see Sor Juana’s abandonment
of her books and verses as her finest hour, the time at which she finally decided to live for God
and eternal life, “volando a la santidad” (flying toward sainthood); on the contrary, he sees it as
her darkest hour, the time of unease, uncertainty, and desperation. On the other hand, other
writers read the event piously; there are, for instance, several texts “Al deshacerse la madre
Juana Inés de los libros, y socorrer con su precio a los pobres” (95) [Upon Mother Juana Inés’s
selling her books, and helping the poor with the proceeds], the epigraph of the sonnet by the

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nun Catalina de Alfaro Fernández de Córdoba. But the greatest purveyor of the unfortunate
hagiographic legend is Castorena y Ursúa in his prologue. He thinks that her abandonment of
her books and poetic activity is the brightest and most lucid moment in Sor Juana’s life, the
beginning of her glorious “conversion” (as if she had been Protestant, and suddenly converted
to Catholicism); and he dedicates heartfelt décimas to this decision. He presents the poems with
the following epigraph: “El aver escrito la madre Iuana con sangre de sus venas la Protestación
de la Fe y voto en defensa del felicíssimo triunfo de María Santíssima en el primer instante de su
ser inmaculado” (127–​28) [Mother Juana’s having written in her own blood the Protestation of
Faith and vow of defense of the joyous triumph of the Most Sainted Mary in the first moment
of her immaculate being]. The first décima describes (and this hagiographic tone is apparent in
all the others as well) how Sor Juana gave her blood in defense of the Immaculate Conception
(she signed the Book of Professions of the convent with her own blood). He compares her, in
her uniqueness, with the Phoenix, and for having offered her life, with the pelican.6
Fifty years later, the bibliographer Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren, in an article titled, “Ioanna
Agnes a Cruce,” what Sor Juana’s reputation was in Mexico fifty years after her death (Quiñones
Melgoza 529–​36). Eguiara was certainly able to speak with Castorena, who died in 1733. But
many would have died by around 1750, when he was writing; in any case, oral tradition flour-
ished. There remained very concrete memories of how the men who constituted the cream
of the nobility and of the intellectual classes (“doctioribus viris … et nobilioribus”) used to
visit the nun and give her extremely valuable books. He does not recount purely literary con-
versations  –​surely, around 1750 no one was interested anymore in The Dream (nor in the
Soledades by Góngora) –​, but he does transcribe conversations about ecclesiastic sciences. When
Neoclassicism came to dominate and the baroque aesthetic came to be seen as an aberration,
Góngora was officially the most criticized Spanish poet. Sor Juana’s case is different:  when
Góngora was “no longer read,” all baroque poetry was forgotten. Sor Juana, doubly marginalized
as a woman and a colonial, was, if not completely ignored in Spanish literary history, at least seen
as very minor. And in her own country, she was seen, as we shall see below, as representative of
Spanish imperialism.
Up to this point, I have discussed testimony about how the figure and work of Sor Juana
were viewed with admiration. But she did not lack detractors. It is symptomatic, if not of
scorn, of a guilty and prejudicial ignorance, that, Sor Juana, the most important poet in the
Spanish language of the second half of the seventeenth century, whose fame extended well
into the eighteenth century, did not appear at all in the Poética (Poetics) of Luzán (1737), the
Diccionario de Autoridades (Dictionary of Authorities), 1726–​1737 (in which examples are given
with very second-​rate poets, much more minor than Sor Juana, and today mostly unknown), or
the Poetics (circa 1776) of his compatriot, Father Alegre. Doubtless, the double marginalization
I mentioned carried weight.
In spite of everything, the most irrefutable proof of the literary authority that the nun-​
intellectual was obtaining was her inclusion in the canon: in 1699, the Polish scholar Miguel
von der Ketten, in his Apelles symbolicus, included Sor Juana as the author of some symbols. This
geographic expansion of Sor Juana’s fame has been much commented by Mexican intellectuals,
proud nationalists, from Cayetano Cabrera in 1746 to José María Vigil in 1784. More impor-
tantly, in such an erudite and exhaustive work as the Apelles symbolicus, the number of symbols
referring to Neptune increased from two to six, thanks to Sor Juana.
A few years later, in 1703, Joseph Vicens, who added to Rengifo’s Arte poética (Poetic Art),
turned to Sor Juana as a source of metric innovations. In 1741, in his Divertimento erudito (Erudite
Entertainment), Father Joao Pacheco, in the chapter on puns and punned verses, offered sev-
eral Spanish, Latin, and Italian examples, and used four poems by Sor Juana; in addition, as an

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example of what he calls the lyric or sung mode, in a series containing Greek and Latin authors,
and Camoens, Sor Juana appears (despite the inexplicable absence of other Spanish authors).
There were other isolated cases, but the poetic consecration of Sor Juana was the appear-
ance, still in the seventeenth century, of the Ilustración al “Sueño” de la Décima Musa Mexicana
(Illustration of “The Dream” by the Mexican Tenth Muse), in the most genuine humanistic
genre of commentary, in the style of Herrera and el Brocense with Garcilaso or of Salcedo
Coronel and Pellicer with Góngora.
I have already said that in the eighteenth century reception of Sor Juana fluctuated. This was
in large part due to the triumph of Neoclassicism and its theory of good taste, which disdained,
without understanding, anything that smacked of the Baroque. Along with the projection of
this new aesthetic is the beginning of Enlightenment criticism. Related to Sor Juana, the first
Enlightenment commentary is from 1726, by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, in his Theatro crítico uni-
versal (Speech XVI: “Defense of Women”):

Sólo diré que lo menos que tuvo fue el talento para la poesía, aunque es lo que más se
celebra. Son muchos los poetas españoles que la hacen grandes ventajas en el numen, pero
ninguno acaso la igualó en la universalidad de noticias de todas facultades. (378)
I will only say that her least talent was as a poet, which is what is most celebrated. Many
Spanish poets have a great advantage over her in inspiration, but perhaps none equaled
her in universality of knowledges of all faculties.

The judgment has two lines of thought:  on one hand, it is a commonplace that women
cannot be as well-​educated as men; Sor Juana demonstrates that this is not true (“desengaño
de un error común” [contradiction of a common error]); on the other hand, there is a general
opinion that Sor Juana was a good poet, but she was not (“desengaño” de otro “error común”
[“contradiction” of another “common error”]).
It was not until 1804 that other European (not Portuguese or Spanish) mentions appeared,
but all with the Enlightenment attitude of Feijoo. For instance, the tone of the article that
Friedrich Bouterwek dedicates to her in his 1804 Geschichte der Poesie (History of Poetry),
is fairly ambivalent: on one hand, he discusses her “masculine spirit” (558) –​which we must
assume is a compliment; on the other, he states that Sor Juana holds first place among Spanish
women who wrote poetry.7 Nevertheless, this is no great honor because in the list of female
poets, the Spaniards do not stand out; he emphasizes that she had more imagination and acuity
than sentiments, but he misses “a critical preparation.” He praises the Divine Narcissus enthusias-
tically: “The Spanish public had never seen such a daring dressing up of Catholic religious ideas
in the guise of Greek mythology” (562), but at the same time, he points out that its “composi-
tion is oversized, at times in poor taste.”8 In short, Bouterwek’s praise is somewhat restrained, as
was typical of the period.
This is also the case for another German scholar, Friedrich Buchholz (Handbuch der spa-
nischen Sprache und Literatur [Manual of Hispanic Language and Literature], 1804). According
to Buchholz, Sor Juana’s poetic genius cannot be denied, but she does not deserve “the high
praise that she has had,” because, like her world, her thematic content is very “narrow.” Like
Bouterwek, but with an even more misogynist stance, he places her among the best female
poets, except Sappho, but like all “poetesses,” “also, what she lacks is what female writers always
lack” (426).9
The majority of foreign mentions from this period demonstrate the same reticence. Juan
Nicolás Böhl de Faber: “most of her poems do not go beyond the mediocre: some are, as the

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products of a nun, offensive” (núm. 854).10 Ticknor (History of Spanish Literature, 1849):  Sor
Juana was a notable woman, but not as a poet; nevertheless, we must question his scholarship,
because according to him, she was born in Guipuzcoa (549–​50).
Up to this point, we have seen three prejudices expressed in the supposed “literary criti-
cism” and historiography:  women’s inability to achieve the same artistic and intellectual
heights as men; the European view of Hispanic literatures as second-​rate; and finally, Spain’s
refusal to recognize the quality of its colonial writers. Now we shall also see how the national-
ist goal of those who constructed the newly independent Mexico, needing to give the country
ideological and political cohesiveness, so unfairly (and blindly) distorted appreciation of the
figure of Sor Juana. Although she remained present, and not only in the cultural past of the
former colony, but also in the imaginary of all educated readers (including those nationalists
who rejected her).
In spite of the rejection of the Baroque being a symptom of the time, nineteenth-​century
Mexican liberals and conservatives went beyond this rejection and demonstrated a complete
inability to understand the work and the figure of Sor Juana. In general, as intellectuals, they
did not skimp on praises to her erudition, and seemingly, that erudition is the only reason that
they included her in their accounts of Mexican cultural history. Even knowing that the period
was subject to a particular aesthetic goal, it seems that for Mexican critics, it was much more
difficult than for foreigners to put aside their canon, such as the Baroque, in order to be able to
appreciate Sor Juana’s work.
Guillermo Prieto, for example, wrote:

Sus poesías pertenecen desgraciadamente a la mala época a que dio su nombre Góngora,
y en sus metáforas extravagantes y en pensamientos ampolludos y ridículos puede com-
petir con los más disparatados escritores del tiempo de Quevedo. (357)
(Unfortunately, her poetry belongs to the terrible period to which Góngora gave his
name, and in her extravagant metaphors and blistering, ridiculous thoughts, she can com-
pete with the most dimwitted writers of Quevedo’s time.)

For his part, Francisco Zarco stated that:

[sor Juana] adolece de todos los defectos y del mal gusto [cuando…] El juego de palabras
había sustituido a la nobleza de ideas. [Con todo] sus obras deben contarse entre nuestra
literatura, y es lástima que fuera monja, que se dejara llevar del mal gusto de su época y
que tuviera que escribir tantas alabanzas… (ii)
(Sor Juana suffers from all the defects and poor taste from when word play substituted for
nobility of ideas. Nevertheless, her works should be counted as part of our literature, and
it is a shame that she was a nun, that she was carried away by the poor taste of her period,
and that she had to write so many praises.)

Zarco shows somewhat more pride in Sor Juana’s work than Guillermo Prieto; the two hold
onto the Neoclassical tyranny of “good taste,” but at least Zarco gives her a place in Mexican
literary history. Like Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano is somewhat radical:

no seré yo quien recomiende a usted a nuestra sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, […] a quien es
necesario dejar quietecita en el fondo de su sepulcro y entre el pergamino de sus libros,
sin estudiarla más que para admirar de paso la rareza de sus talentos y para lamentar

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Martha Lilia Tenorio

que hubiera nacido en los tiempos del culteranismo y de la Inquisición y de la teología

escolástica. (s.p.)
(I will not be the one to recommend to you our Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who should
be left quiet in her grave and in the parchment of her books, without being studies except
to note in passing the rarity of her talents and lament that she was born during the time
of the Baroque and the Inquisition and scholastic theology.)

To this close-​mindedness in some critics, it is necessary to add the burning nationalist ques-
tion (on the other hand, a sign of the troubled Mexican nineteenth century). For Francisco Sosa,
among others, Sor Juana remains doubly guilty, for being a baroque writer and for not being
Mexican:

Era un talento privilegiado, era una inteligencia superior[…] pero esto nada más. La actual
juventud literaria de México, la que se afana por la creación de una escuela nacional, no
puede encontrar en los escritos de la célebre monja un modelo digno de ser imitado; pero,
lo que es más triste todavía, no puede con justicia colocarla entre los escritores mexicanos,
cualquiera que sea su mérito, porque pertenece legítimamente a la nación española.11
(Hers was a privileged talent, a superior intelligence, but nothing more. Today’s literary
youth in Mexico, who endeavors to create a national school, cannot find in the famous
nun’s writings a model worthy of being imitated; but what is even sadder, it cannot jus-
tifiably place her among Mexican writers, however meritorious she may be, because she
truly belongs to the Spanish nation.)

Perhaps, among all the liberal nationalist critics, Ignacio Ramírez presents her greatest opposi-
tion, but in reality his attack was not against Sor Juana, but his enemy: José de Jesús Cuevas, a
conservative Catholic who in 1872 wrote a book about her. In 1874, Ramírez wrote:

¿Por qué ha merecido la pobre monja tan altos elogios del señor Cuevas? Porque su poesía
es la plenitud del amor humano y la piedad. La traducción de esta frase me da esta otra: sor
Juana era muy enamorada y muy devota”, y, como poeta, fue más bien “mediana” y “franca-
mente prosaica.” (473)
(Why has the poor nun deserved such high praise from Mr. Cuevas? Because her poetry is the
epitome of human love and piety. The translation of this sentence leads me to another: “Sor
Juana was very much in love and very pious,” and as a poet, she was more or less “mediocre”
and “frankly prosaic.”)

Catholic conservative critics, led by José de Jesús Cuevas, turned out to be as unreceptive
as their liberal rivals. Cuevas’ debatable claim to fame is having written the first book about
Sor Juana (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–​1695), 1872). The volume, written in a florid lan-
guage that frequently becomes tasteless, is plagued with absurd discourses about religion and
morality. As might be expected, Cuevas comments on Sor Juana’s religious work; he ignores
the love poems, The Dream, the carols, etc. He considers her prose (more the Exercises of the
Incarnation, Offers for the Holy Rosario, and other devout writings than the Letter Worthy of
Athena) superior to the poetry, since, in his opinion, “la versificación es en último término una
debilidad mental” (349) [versification is ultimately a mental weakness]. Obviously, in Sor Juana’s
final renunciation he sees the beginning of her path toward saintliness (as did many of her

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contemporaries). One can look no further than what he says about the sinister Father Núñez,
Sor Juana’s confessor (whom she rejected as spiritual director in an energetic and decisive
“Letter to Father Núñez [Alatorre, “La Carta…” 591–​673]): “varón ilustre, hermoso tipo de
sacerdote, que presentaba en sí ese bello consorcio de ciencia y de virtud […] Las conferencias
de Juana con su confesor deben haber estado llenas de edificante piedad y de sutil espiritual-
ismo” (illustrious man, wonderful kind of priest, who joined in his being science and virtue.The
meetings of Sor Juana with her confessor must have been filled with edifying piety and subtle
spirituality). In the same vein, with the same myopia, he calls Aguiar y Seijas, who “convinced”
(read, “forced,” “tricked”) Sor Juana into selling her library and her scientific instruments to give
alms to the poor, “prelate and friend of Sor Juana” (emphasis mine). More than a study of Sor
Juana’s life and work, his book is a poorly documented attempt at hagiography and a diatribe
against the liberals of his period.
Another great hagiographic storyteller was the U.S. scholar Harold Dijon. A curious case, in
1871 in a first article he showed himself to be well informed: he had read the laudatory poems
in Fama, unheard of in the history of Sor Juana studies; he had translated several of her texts; and
he had defended her from the negative assessments of Bouterwek and Ticknor. Nevertheless,
several years later, in a 1890 article, he invented the idea that Sor Juana learned Latin at ten
years of age, and Greek at twelve; that her life and works had been written about in several
European languages, almost as much in English and German as about Shakespeare. Finally, in
a last article, in 1893, at the height of delirium, Dijon went so far as to say that Sor Juana gave
away her large fortune for the establishment and reading of devotion to the Sacred Heart which
he deduced from the sonnet, “Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba” (This afternoon, my love,
when I spoke with you), whose last line offers the image of a broken heart).12
Not all was rejection, of course. From the moment that the Baroque began to fade, and with
it Sor Juana, several excellent studies appeared from some writers who did not allow themselves
to be swept away by poor taste and the Enlightenment fad of unreservedly condemning every-
thing Baroque. Among them, a few critics stand out. A book by Juan María Gutiérrez (Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz. Escritora americana, siglo xvii [Sor Juana: American Writer, Seventeenth Century],
Buenos Aires, 1865) does not lack inaccuracies (he confuses the Jesuit preacher Vieira, whom Sor
Juana critiqued in the Letter Worthy of Athena, with Hortensio Félix Paravicino) or curiosities
(he says that Sor Juana was the first American revolutionary, because she skipped spelling and
went directly to reading).The speech by the academic don Santos Pina y Guasquet (“Discurso,”
Zaragoza, 1870) was well-​thought out, informed, and attentive to the intellectual and bookish
character of Sor Juana’s poetry, and had a perceptive innovation: his clear vision of envy as the
true martyrdom of Sor Juana’s life. Juan León Mera (Biografía de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poetisa
mexicana del siglo xvii, y juicio crítico de sus obras) [Biography of Sor Juana, Seventeenth-​Century
Mexican Poetess, and Critical Judgment of Her Works] Quito, 1873), in whose work it is pos-
sible to see the first glimmerings of defense of Sor Juana’s gongorismo and of Góngora himself: it
was apt whoever called the Córdoba poet “angel of darkness,” because even in darkness, he
remained an angel, and he fell, bringing with him many followers. José María Vigil (in a speech
read in the Liceo Hidalgo, 1874, at the same event in which Francisco Sosa participated); based
his vision of Sor Juana on her as a fit intellectual whose primary occupation and preoccupa-
tion was the free exercise of her intellect:  if what characterizes the free thinker is not what
s/​he thinks, but how s/​he thinks, it is not too much to say that Sor Juana had an emancipated
intelligence, because of her philosophical training and sharp irony, proof of a reflective mind.
Amado Nervo, began to re-​evaluate Góngora in an article, “Los restos del Pensador Mexicano y
de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (The Remains of the Mexican Thinker and of Sor Juana), which
appeared in El Mundo in 1899; there, he called Sor Juana, “luna divina de ese sol hispano que

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se llamó don Luis de Góngora y Argote…” (s.p.) [divine moon of that Hispanic sun who was
called Don Luis de Góngora).Then, in Juana de Asbaje (1910), he wrote, “¿Que sor Juana se dejó
influir por un hombre [Góngora] de este calibre mental? ¡Pues hizo bien, Dios de Dios!” (73–​
74) [That Sor Juana was influenced by a man {Góngora} of such mental caliber? Well, she did
well, God of God!]. Less well-​known, another of Góngora’s rescuers, Nemesio García Naranjo
(“Biografía de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” Anales del Museo Nacional, 1906), curiously saw in her
gongorismo a demonstration of free thinking, because, like Góngora, she remained free of the
“chains” of Classicism. García Naranjo was also a predecessor of Ezequiel Chávez, regarding the
battle of souls between Sor Juana and her confessor, Núñez de Miranda.
Of course, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo cannot be omitted. In the prologue to his anthol-
ogy of Latin American poets (1893), despite his anti-​Baroque sentiments, he was able to see the
enormous poetic worth of Sor Juana, “in spite of her time”:

En tal atmósfera de pedantería y de aberración literaria vivió sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
y por eso tiene su aparición algo de sobrenatural y extraordinario. No porque esté libre
de mal gusto […], sino porque su vivo ingenio, su aguda fantasía, su varia y caudalosa
(aunque no muy selecta) doctrina, y sobre todo el ímpetu y ardor del sentimiento, así
en lo profano como en lo místico […] que dieron a algunas de sus composiciones valor
poético duradero y absoluto. (lix)
(Sor Juana lived in such an environment of pedantry and literary aberration, and therefore
there is something supernatural and extraordinary in her appearance. Not because she is
free of poor taste, but because her lively wit, sharp fantasy, varied and cautious (although
not very selective) doctrine, and above all the impetus and strength of feeling, as much in
secular as in mystical matters, gave some of her works enduring and absolute poetic worth.)

And he always proved his high estimation of Sor Juana’s writing.

One more testimony regarding the lack of consideration of poetry, from a Mexican aca-
demic, is needed. For the celebration of the four-​hundredth anniversary of the discovery of
America (1892), the Royal Academy of the Language decided to put together an anthology
of Hispanic poetry. Menéndez Pelayo directed the project. The respective academies of the
Hispanic world collaborated, each submitting an anthology for their country. In Mexico, the
academics Casimiro del Collado and José María Roa Bárcena headed the project. Despite
them having accomplished the task, when Menéndez Pelayo published the first volume of his
Anthology, he completed ignored Roa Bárcena’s volume. The Mexicans were offended, with
reason: their selection included seventy-​six poets, while Menéndez Pelayo included seventeen.
In the Mexican anthology, Sor Juana was preceded by a fragment of the anonymous Triunfo
de los santos (Triumph of the Saints), a sonnet by Francisco de Terrazas (“Dejad las hebras
de oro ensortijadas…” [Leave the Golden Threads On the Spool]), and fragments of Fernán
González de Eslava, while Menéndez Pelayo began with Sor Juana. The greatest difference
between the two anthologies is in the selection of works by Sor Juana, to the great shame of the
Mexicans. Her compatriots included only two poems: the romance “Finjamos que soy feliz…”
(Let’s Pretend I Am Happy) and the sonnet “¡Oh famosa Lucrecia, gentil dama…” (Oh famous
Lucretia, gentle lady). Menéndez Pelayo included thirty-​one; further, there are more poems by
Sor Juana than by any other poet (Alatorre, “Menéndez Pelayo y los poetas mexicanos…” 151).
Nevertheless, Sor Juana’s greatest poem, The Dream, remained out of public view.
We should also address the fictional works in which Sor Juana appears as a character. These
works, as much as critical essays or mentions in literary history, reflect how Sor Juana was
viewed, as much in what the author did with the character as what readers or the public

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expected the author to do, or, more simply, what they were prepared to accept. We now know
that the phenomenon of fictionalizing Sor Juana has become quite frequent. I do not know
how much attention this literature has received from critics, but undoubtedly it would be a
very productive approach within Sor Juana studies. This is another line of research entirely.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but bring up three examples, quite illustrative of the perspective
from which Sor Juana was viewed. First is the puerile eulogy by Eduardo Asquerino (1853), in
which the cloister saved Sor Juana from incest, since César, her beloved, turns out to be, just as in
any Mexican soap opera, her half-​brother. Second, in the successful play by José Rosas Moreno,
which opened in the Teatro Principal in 1876, Sor Juana falls in love with the viceroy Mancera.
In these two works the sonnets of “requited and unrequited love” appear: “Que no me quiera
Fabio, al verse amado” (May Fabio not love me, when he sees himself loved), “Feliciano me
adora y le aborrezco” (Feliciano adores me and I detest him), y “Al que ingrato me deja, busco
amante” (For the ungrateful man who leaves me, I seek a lover). Third is an anecdote that first
appeared in the newspaper El Mundo in 1891 (and was repeated two or three times): a prioress
“of little education” scolds Sor Juana for her dedication to study; Sor Juana responds, “Be quiet,
Mother, you are a fool.” The Prioress submits a report to the Archbishop, Father Payo, who
writes back, “If the Mother Superior can prove it is false, justice will be done.”13 The story is
completely made up, but shows surprising clairvoyance in its understanding of the spirit of the
three characters –​there is more awareness here than in the so-​called serious essays.
Biographical readings of Sor Juana’s poetry have been a terrible obstacle to a true under-
standing of her work, and even of her life. It is a problem of reading related to the contamina-
tion that the lyric of Romanticism brought:  poetry before Romanticism, especially that of
the Renaissance and the Baroque, was more bookish, nurtured through other poems, from
the ancient classics to those of the same era. The Renaissance or baroque poet pretended feel-
ings: Sor Juana could never have fallen in love, and even so, she spoke passionately of love. She
pretended feelings, but they were authentic, because they actually articulate the emotion of love.
Throughout history, depending on the historical moment and the scholar, Sor Juana has
been portrayed as an intellectual, saint, victim of the Inquisition, representative of the Spanish
monarchy, indigenist, first nationalist, first feminist, etc. None of these categories characterizes
her completely and none is completely false. Sor Juana was a poet, author of some of the most
memorable verses in the Spanish language. Each time that we make her a standard bearer for
a particular ideology or mouthpiece for our own concerns (social, sexual, religious, aesthetic,
etc.), we forget what is most important: discovering the voice of such an outstanding poet. We
also forget that we know of her existence because of her poetry; her saintliness, nationalism,
“reactionary” stance, feminism, or vast erudition would not have allowed her to be remembered
in history. Even when artistic and aesthetic concepts changed and her work was no longer liked
or read, Sor Juana remained present thanks to only one poem, the famed redondillas, “Hombres
necios” (Foolish men). It is useful, therefore, and especially enlightening, to review the specula-
tions that have always surrounded her figure.

Notes
1 Translations from the Spanish are by the editors of this volume.
2 Virgil’s Camila is the Italian version of the Greek Amazons (Hipolita, Pentesilea) who were feared for
their deeds in war. It is a stereotype. Just as every woman who has been distinguished as a poet since
Sappho has been called the “Tenth Muse,” every woman who acts like a man is called an Amazon.
Garcilaso called his beloved Isabel Freire “Camila” because she did not behave like a woman with him,
but rather retained her will and independence. Father Luis Tineo compares sor Juana to Camila in the
“Approbation” in Inundación castálida, and then in the sonnet he dedicates to her (“Aunque preste, jamás

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Martha Lilia Tenorio

presté el testuz…”), whose last line is: “…bien que sois de Camila fiel espejo” (since you are a true
mirror of Camille). Sor Juana is the paradigm of all women who have competed favorably with men.
(See Alatorre, “Un soneto” 12–​13).
3 Let us avoid at all costs psychoanalyzing Sor Juana’s desire to become a man: she did not want to be of
the male sex, but rather a homo sapiens. Not “man” versus “woman,” but “man” versus “animal.” In 1763
(many years after sor Juana!), when Boswell told Dr. Samuel Johnson that in the English colonies of
North America there were religious groups in which women preached, he commented,“Sir, a woman’s
preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it
done at all” (116).
4 Rhýthmica sacra, moral y laudatoria (Sacred, Moral, and Laudatory Poems). Instead of the publisher’s name
on the title page, there is a note that says, “Adviértase que, aunque van algunas poesías a otros asuntos
sin coordinación de números y sin su legítima colocación, es por haberse impreso las obras de que se
compone por distintos impresores, en diferentes lugares y tiempos” (Be advised that, although some
poems on other subjects appear without coordination of numbers and out of place, it is because the
works come from different printers, places, and times). Some parts were printed in Burgos and others
in Madrid; and, in fact, there are up to six different paginations and many pages without pagination in
the Rhýthmica.
5 This last thought, so emphatic, is curious: the tertulio, the “man of general culture,” given to high-​flown
conversation and serious debate, is, according to Castorena, the most exigent critic.
6 It was said that the pelican gave its own blood to feed its children, as Sor Juana gave hers to the
Immaculate Conception.
7 “Überdiess spricht aus den Werken del Inez [sic] de la Cruz eine eigene Art von männlichem Geist.”
8 “Eine so gewagte Umkleidung der katolischen Religionsideen in das Gewand der griechischen
Mythologie hatte das spanische Publikum noch nicht gesehe.” On the other hand, German critics
almost unanimously praise El divino Narciso.
9 “Es ist nicht zu leugnen, dass die Schwester Juana Inés de la Cruz poetisches Genie besitzt; aber die
grossen Lobsprüche, welche man ihr zu allen Zeiten gemacht hat, verdient sie nicht aber es fehlt ihr
auch alles, was den dichtenden Weibern immer gefehlt hat.”
10 “Ihre meisten Gedichte erheben sich nicht über das Mittelmässige: einige sind als Erzeugungen einer
Nonne anstössig.”
11 “Discurso” (speech) read during the literary event of the Liceo Hidalgo, dedicated to Sor Juana, 1874.
12 Article titles are: “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” “Some Notes on Mexican Poets and Poetry,” and “The
First Mexican Promoter.”
13 Fray Payo was Sor Juana’s first great protector, and her scribe. He commissioned her with the design
for the arch to receive the viceroy and Vicereine de Paredes, the Allegorical Neptune, the work that
propelled Sor Juana to fame, and thanks to which she met the vicereine, María Luisa, her great friend.

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6
TWENTIETH-​CENTURY
READINGS
Schons, Pfandl, and Paz

Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling

“La pasión ideológica ciega a los más sabios.”

(Ideological passions blind the wisest.)
Octavio Paz

During the twentieth century, three influential critics have had an enormous impact on the
trajectory of Sor Juana scholarship during their time and after. For more than two hundred
years, the “famous Mexican nun” was celebrated, without anyone really knowing why she was
so famous. Her works were not re-​issued and very little was known about her life. In this last
aspect, the pioneer was the American Dorothy Schons, who in 1926 published her first article
about Sor Juana’s biography. After World War II, a book about Sor Juana by the German Ludwig
Pfandl reflected the great prestige of Freudianism at that time. The greatest book about Sor
Juana, though, was The Traps of Faith: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, published in Spanish in 1982. For
decades, the poet had been an assiduous reader of his seventeenth-​century compatriot.

Dorothy Schons
In 1926 and then in 1929, two articles by Texan Dorothy Schons established a new direction in
the study of Sor Juana’s biography. The first one, “Some Obscure Points in the Life of Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz,” begins with the following statement: “The biography of Juana Inés de la Cruz
is yet to be written.” In fact, the scholar clarified several important points, and also questioned
the quality of the final conversion.
Schons was greatly privileged to have in Austin the Libro de profesiones (Book of Professions)
from Sor Juana’s convent.1 She confirmed the lack of available documents in Mexico or in
Spain. She sagely delved into the colonial biographies/​hagiographies of the two bishops that
influenced Sor Juana’s life, that of the Jesuit confessor Antonio Núñez de Miranda and that of
another priest. She read the works of the chronicler Antonio de Robles, of the traveller Gemelli
Carrieri, and of bishop Palafox, among others.
Schons was not aware of Sor Juana’s illegitimacy, which would be revealed in 1947.2 At the
time when she took her vows, the novice falsely declared herself legitimate.3 The lie did not

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fool anyone, but the young woman was a “protégée” of the viceroys, and she had to be treated
with decorum. Schons studied the alternation of last names in Sor Juana’s case:  often, Sor
Juana used her mother’s last name, Ramírez; in the Libro de profesiones the last name used was
her father’s, Asbaje Vargas Machuca. The reader learns that the Convent of the Order of Saint
Jerome only admitted Creoles, not peninsulars.Then Schons challenges a persistent nineteenth-​
century legend: that a disappointment in love was Sor Juana’s reason for joining the convent.
The American states that this romantic illusion has no foundation. Sor Juana’s only passion was
“learning,” and her origins were humble. The explanation given in the article about Sor Juana’s
taking vows is almost definitive: “The deep, underlying reason for Juana’s retirement from the
world is to be found in the social conditions of her time” (148). For a poor young woman, a
somewhat worldly convent was the best option to continue studying.4 Actually, Sor Juana was
“even lucky.” Schons also mentioned the influence of the confessor Don Antonio, but without
scrutinizing his reasons.
Another important subject is the subsequent argument with this Jesuit. Since Carta al confe-
sor (Letter to Her Confessor) was not discovered until 1980, Schons believed, as did everyone,
that the confessor was responsible for the rupture with Sor Juana, but she correctly dated the
incident in the most worldly period of Sor Juana’s life:  the years of the vicereine Countess
de Paredes, 1680–​1688. Her review of the relationship between Sor Juana and the viceroys is
excellent. Many scholars did not take into account Schons’s dating;5 they continued placing the
“abandonment” after the Carta atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena). Another well-​established
date in the article is that of the conversion:  February 1693. Sor Juana celebrated her “silver
wedding,” twenty-​five years after taking her vows. She declared in her Petición causídica (Forensic
Petition) that she would begin a new (symbolic) novitiate.6 Now, what made Dorothy Schons
famous was having related Sor Juana’s selling of her books to help the poor (around 1693) in
response to a possible request from the clergy, first from the obsessively misogynist Archbishop
Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, and later from her former confessor, and others. Schons read in the
prologue to the homage to Sor Juana (Fama y obras póstumas, 1700), what Castorena y Ursúa
wrote: “dio de limosna hasta su entendimiento” (121) [she gave as alms even her understand-
ing], and in her biography by Father Calleja, that she kept “solo tres libritos de devocion” (32)
[only three small devotional texts]. If taken literally, it seems that Sor Juana got rid of her entire
library, and that she entrusted it to the Archbishop. Schons used quite strong language: the Carta
atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena), from 1690, was a “crime in the eyes of the church” (155);
“She must have many enemies” … “Slowly but surely the criticisms of friends and enemies
destroyed her peace of mind” (159).7 In her conclusion, Schons acknowledged that “the suf-
ferings in Mexico had much to do with her renunciation” (162), but the previous quotes were
repeated.To what degree was Sor Juana pressured? Who was mainly responsible? The debate has
lasted for almost a century.
Three years later, Schons published another article, “Nuevos datos para la biografía de
Sor Juana” (New Information for Sor Juana’s Biography) in the prestigious Mexican journal
Contemporáneos.8 There, Schons put in context her previous statements. She began by giving
a detailed description of the extraordinary charitable activities of the Archbishop. She notes
that, at the time of her death (1695), Sor Juana had a respectable fortune and that it was in
that moment, not before, when the Archbishop took several of her “jewels.” In 1698, when
Aguiar y Seijas died, the nuns from the Hieronymite Convent presented their receipts and
filed a complaint. Thanks to Schons we can read the only archival text known until recently
about the selling of Sor Juana’s books: the nuns refrained from asking for “otras alhajas, preseas
y libros que vendio vuestro muy reverendo Arzobispo por haberse muerto el licenciado José
de Lombeyda difunto y el dicho José Rubio su secretario por cuya mano los vendio y no

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saberse las cantidades ni poderse verificar” (169–​70) [other jewelry, precious items, and books
that our reverend Archbishop sold after the death of the attorney José de Lombeyda, and of
his secretary, the aforementioned José Rubio, who sold the pieces, so we cannot verify the
quantity or certify].9
The (greedy) nuns seemed not to give much importance to the subject, and no other work
of that time mentions the selling of the library, which may not have had the 4,000 books that
the legend says, although it was certainly remarkable. In the capital the sale was not considered
an “event.” The chronicler Antonio de Robles did not mention it. It is true that the Archbishop
urged Sor Juana to give alms. He did the same with many people. The nun gave a certain num-
ber of books for alms to the poor, which hagiographers transformed into a complete disman-
tling. Schons added that the Tenth Muse was a “sharp Business woman” (171), the “accountant”
of her convent until her death, and that, ultimately, the complete destruction of the library was
simply not that plausible.10 It seems that we sorjuanistas have read the 1666 text much more than
the one from 1669.

Ludwig Pfandl
In 1963, the publishing in Mexico of the Spanish translation of a German book inspired by psy-
choanalysis offered a new interpretation, which was widely accepted for a few years.Thirty years
had passed since Schons’s first article, and interest in Sor Juana among intellectuals had greatly
increased. In Barcelona in 1931, the Mexican Ezequiel Chávez dedicated an important book
to Sor Juana. Several members of Contemporáneos and others edited her works. The most active
was the anticlerical Ermilo Abreu Gómez.11 Two Mexican newspapers published words of high
praise in celebration of the 300th anniversary of her birth, according to the date accepted by
scholars at that time, with the participation of Alfonso Reyes, Gabriela Mistral, Pedro Henríquez
Ureña, and other major literary figures.12 In 1951, Octavio Paz published his first article about
Sor Juana in the famous journal Sur from Buenos Aires. Intellectuals of great stature wrote about
the Mexican nun-​intellectual: Gerardo Diego and Matilde Muñoz in Madrid;13 Pedro Salinas,
Irving Leonard, and Elías Rivers in the United States; José Lezama Lima and others in Cuba;
Karl Vossler and Marianne West (1931 and 1930) in Germany; Darío Puccini and then Giuseppe
Bellini in Italy; and Robert Ricard in France. Above all, in the 1950s, the much-​needed and
invaluable annotated edition of Sor Juana’s Obras completas (Complete Works) was finally pub-
lished, the work of just one man and one man alone: Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (after his death,
in 1957, Albert Salceda published volume 4).14
In that environment, Mexican historian Francisco de la Maza published several works about
his country’s convents. Among other skills, he spoke German, and discovered an old book
(written in the 1930s), published posthumously in 1946, which attempted to explain Sor
Juana from a psychoanalytic perspective. He had it translated and, in 1963, published with
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Su vida. Su poesía. Su
psique. [Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Her Life, Her Poetry, Her Psyche], accompanied by a long,
enthusiastic prologue and also a detailed (and very useful) bibliography.15 De la Maza admitted
that “Habrá muchos que no estarán de acuerdo con el historiador en algunas afirmaciones,
en algunas interpretaciones, pero tendrán que rebatirle con sus mismas armas” (XVII) [There
will probably be many who will not agree with some of the historian’s assertions, with some
interpretations, but they will have to refute him with their own weapons]. He offered some
criticism, but was very enthusiastic about Freud’s works, his disciples, and the theories that
Pfandl applied to Sor Juana. Also, the new book was, after Chávez’s (1931), the most extensive
work that had ever been written about the Tenth Muse, larger in volume than Amado Nervo’s.

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De la Maza admired Pfandl’s great expertise, even while noting the flaws in his knowledge
about the viceroyalty.
Ludwig Pfandl (1892–​1942) was a renowned historian of the Spanish Golden Age, a distant
disciple of Menéndez y Pelayo, who probably introduced to him the figure of Sor Juana. He had
never visited Spain or Mexico. Nazism became an obstacle to his academic career. It was impos-
sible for him to publish a book while he was alive; Hans Rheinfelder and other German friends
did it for him in 1946 without approving the content, wanting to give voice to a sad dead person.16
Pfandl denied that Sor Juana had been a woman of genius and a great poet. He saw her pas-
sion for studying as an unhealthy “tendency toward reflection.” He attributed the relative lack
of organization in her knowledge not to the circumstances, but to her lack of ability. Ignoring
the fact that she had never met her father, he insisted on a “feminine Oedipus complex.”
According to his analysis, the despair at not having been born male and sexual repression were
the sources and key to all of her work: she was more a clinical case than an object of literary
criticism. Moreover, she was selfish, and dominated by the impulse to “hacerse presente por
todas partes en cosas intelectuales para experimentar siempre el goce de lo varonil” (69) [be
heard everywhere regarding intellectual matters, in order to always experience the joy of mas-
culinity]. Inspired by C.G. Jung, Pfandl devoted a long chapter to the Sueño (Dream), which he
saw as simply a product of the unconscious, “un ardiente y centelleante haz de rayos divergentes
de deseos que saltan del núcleo ígneo de un único anhelo de raíz primordial: el deseo infantil
reprimido y el desenfrenado afán de saber” (207) [a sparkling beam of divergent rays of desires
that spring from the igneous nucleus of a single desire with primordial roots: repressed infantile
desire and untamed ambition to know].
According to Pfandl, the only balanced woman was a “pyknic,” a woman who belonged
at home, dedicated to her family and unaware of male occupations, such as studying. In other
words, he perceived Sor Juana’s “masculinization” as completely neurotic. In his opinion, having
written an auto entitled Divino Narciso (Divine Narcissus) is proof of Sor Juana’s strong narcis-
sism.The historian does not seem to care that the character of Narcissus is Jesus and that Echo is
human nature. But since the character of Narcissus is not very narcissistic (rather, he resembles
Orpheus), it was difficult for him to find reliable quotes. Finally, he saw the conversion as a kind
of healing, linked to menopause (290) and a return to the womb (301). At times, Sor Juana’s text
was not even reflected: for example, Pfandl stated that, in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Answer),
Sor Juana asked that girls have access to elementary studies. Actually, primary schools already
existed in New Spain, fortunately for the child Juana; what she wanted was access to secondary
education.
In 2017, it is useless to give more details about such an unconvincing explanation, but the
book had strong repercussions, despite international critics such as Marcel Bataillon, Helmut
Hatzfeld, and Alexander Parker noting immediately that the author was a novice and amateur
psychoanalyst.17 In México, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte ignored Pfandl in his editorial work. In
1970 the eminent scholar Antonio Castro Leal was quite severe in his criticism.18 But Pfandl’s
book is still influential. “Psychoanalysis” continues to be a magical word. In 1978, Octavio Paz
deemed it convenient to refute the German in the journal Vuelta. This allowed us to read some
beautiful pages about Sor Juana’s relationship with her learned grandfather, pages that reappear
in Las trampas de la fe (115–​18; Traps 78–​79). It is worth borrowing from the poet’s conclusion:
“Estamos ante un caso de delirio de interpretación” (Trampas 95) [We have before us a case of
delirium of interpretation] (Traps 504–​08).19 It has been some time since Pfandl had an impor-
tant supporter. A parenthesis opened and closed in sorjuanismo. It will not be the last one.20
Scholars will keep delving deeper into the Tenth Muse’s psychology, but probably they would
have continued doing so even without the German’s book.

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Octavio Paz
In 1982, the field took a turn: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (Sor Juana: Or the
Traps of Faith), an enormous tome, was released in Spain and Mexico. Paz’s knowledge about
Sor Juana, Mexican cultural history, and the international present and past, is impressive.21 He
discusses Dante or Petrarch, as well as Calderón or Lope de Vega. His is an ambitious global
study, which aims to be a restitution. It includes a complete introductory section about New
Spain and its literature that includes descriptions of intellectual and religious life, celebrations,
and other events. At the same time, the author admits from the beginning that this, his restitu-
tion, is “relativa, parcial” (Trampas 18) [relative, partial] (Traps 7). Then his impressive tone allows
the reader to forget, but the initial caveat is valid. Las trampas de la fe is a subjective work, but
it is a subjectivity that seeks to dominate other views of Sor Juana. It is possible to see in it an
“intimation of power” (Santi, qtd Luciani, “Octavio Paz” 25).
The enthusiasm about the book was remarkable in Europe, exceptional in Latin America and
the United States, and prolonged by the translations and celebrations of the tercentenary of Sor
Juana’s death in 1995. In Paris, on January 15, 1988, the newspaper Le Monde, in its review of
the French translation of the book, published an image of Octavio Paz but none of Sor Juana.22
In Germany, where Sor Juana was less studied after the war, Marlene Zinn de Rall and Dieter
Rall, quoting Sabine Groot, stated that, in the 1990s, Sor Juana appeared to be a “subproducto
de Octavio Paz” (317) [by-​product of Octavio Paz].
Historians had been busy between 1950 and 1982. In the first part of Trampas, Octavio Paz
carefully corrects the view of a “petrified” New Spain, as he had stated in El laberinto de la soledad
(The Labyrinth of Solitude). His perception of the connection with Spain is relatively positive.23
The chapters dedicated to Sor Juana’s childhood, youth (already partially published in Vuelta),
and entry into the convent were probably Paz’s favorites, and they are as incisive and enjoyable
as they are scholarly. It is hard to forget the grandfather as a “sublimated paternal figure” for
the child. We (readers) see an “anti-​Pfandl” attitude. Sor Juana is a well-​balanced person: “… lo
que he llamado, no muy exactamente, su ‘masculinidad’: convive con la más intensa feminidad”
(Trampas 160)  […what I  have called, somewhat inexactly, her ‘masculinity’ … exists along-
side the most intense femininity] (Traps 112). She has a “tino político poco común” (Trampas
177) [rare political acumen] (Traps 127). Paz adds, “Si algo la distingue es la lucidez” (Trampas
289) [“If anything sets her apart it is her lucidity” (Traps 218). Her library is enormous, but her
areas of reading are “más extensas que profundas” (Trampas 180) [“more broad and varied than
profound”] (Traps 129). Paz does not see her as a great thinker; he does not take her seriously
as a theologian (Trampas 453; Traps 343). But he admits that, if Sor Juana’s information is rather
old-​fashioned, “la idea que tenía de la cultura era singularmente moderna” (Trampas 543) [her
idea of culture was eminently modern] (Traps 419). He expands on the nun’s artistic talents;
oddly enough, he sees her as more selfish than what the extant documents might lead us to
believe.
Paz addresses the issue of a possible homosexuality and resolves it by negating its existence
or by means of a hypothesis suggesting Sor Juana’s platonic feeling towards the Countess de
Paredes.24 He explains that in the seventeenth century, the most passionate verses belong to a
baroque and worldly convention, and that they are not based in reality. He notes that religious
censors were not at all scandalized (Trampas 368; Traps 277). Her best love poems deserve
particular attention and admiration, he avers. The entire fifth part of Trampas is a wonderfully
designed course in literature. Jaime Alazraki speaks of “vivacious conversation,” of “Intellectual
Feast” (227). Paz separates the wheat from the chaff; he praises the exceptional talent of Sor
Juana as a poet, and the unusual variety of genres used. He explains and comments on the best

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poems. He specifies the particular circumstances of many plays. He compares what is sorjuanino
(originating in Sor Juana) with the Hispanic poetic production of the moment and he unravels
some difficult points. He does not even reject some lesser, obscure and circumstantial works. His
judgments are sometimes more debatable regarding religious themes.
For Paz, like many others, El Sueño (First Dream) is the most significant of Sor Juana’s
works: “Poema barroco que niega al barroco, obra tardía que prefigura a la modernidad más
moderna” (500) [A baroque poem that negates the Baroque, a belated work that prefigures the
most modern modernity] (381). But it presents certain problems and Paz sees the poem as a
challenge. In 1971, 1973, and 1975 he had given lectures at Harvard about this poem. It is a
difficult, highly erudite text, which has generated and will continue to generate an enormous
bibliography. Paz examines numerous kinds of literary dreams; Sor Juana’s dream is something
different, “poesía del intelecto ante el Cosmos” (470) [poetry of the intellect confronting the
cosmos] (358). For Sor Juana, “El sueño pone en libertad al alma” (485) [sueño liberates the
soul (369)], but the dangerous mental journey is undertaken without guidance. Paz masterfully
expresses the sinuous composition of the poem. He sees it, maybe exaggeratedly, as “black and
white,” in an extremely “geometrical” way, comparing it to Góngora’s splendid Soledades (The
Solitudes). He notes a mixture of Scholasticism and Neoplatonism. He expands on the numer-
ous sources, all of them ancient. One is evident: Athanasius Kircher; others are more difficult to
identify, such as Corpus hermeticum and Giordano Bruno. Of course, the key point is the meaning
of the Phaeton episode and his final defeat: “En verdad, el poema no termina: el alma titubea, se
mira en Faetón y, en esto, el cuerpo despierta” (499) [Actually, the poem does not end at all: the
soul hesitates, recognizing itself in Phaethon, whereupon the body awakens] (380). Paz ignores
the great joy of this rebirth and notes a parallel between Sor Juana’s poem and Alberto Durero’s
Melancolía (Melancholy).
The most spectacular aspect of Paz’s book that, in the 1990s, caught the attention of his read-
ers was his perspective on Sor Juana’s final destruction, persecuted by the high clergy. At that
time, Paz was not original; he served as a spokesperson for a widely accepted belief (Bénassy,
“Afterlife”). Two perspectives were his own: first the absurd idea that the nun was a victim of
the enmity between the Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seijas and his neighbor, the bishop of
Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz (523 ff). Second, the vision of the Tenth Muse: ulti-
mately an accomplice of her tormentors, who, because of her fear, turns to her enemy, the ex-​
confessor Núñez de Miranda, as her “protector,” replicating the eternal model of the woman
who is by nature psychologically dependent on the male.25 The chapter of Trampas titled “La
abjuración” (The Abjuration) has some inconsistencies.26 Paz says that Sor Juana “había caído
enteramente bajo la dominación” (598) [had fallen completely under the domination of Núñez
de Miranda and Aguiar de Seijas] (464). At the same time, he suggests that Sor Juana never
abjured her literary works, that she preserved much wealth until her death, including books,
“que pudo esconder ciertas cantidades” (598) [she was able … to hide away certain sums] (464).
The latter pattern would soon be challenged by Carta al confesor (Letter to the Confessor),
discovered almost at the same time. Sor Juana appeared not only as very brave, but also per-
fectly lucid when confronting Don Antonio’s “dominant” character. Paz never acknowledged
it, but many readers did. The idea of hatred between the prelates, suggested by the sorjuanista
Darío Puccini, lacked any documentary base. And there is evidence of agreement, if not a close
friendship. Don Manuel consecrated Don Francisco as bishop. The King had proposed him as
Archbishop but he refused to accept.27 He did not have any reasons to envy Aguiar, and the lat-
ter could not forget he owed his high position to his neighbor, now a patron.There is a stronger
reason, stated by Antonio Alatorre: according to Canon law the power of the Archbishop of
Mexico over the nuns of his diocese was absolute.When his neighbor from Puebla intervened in

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Sor Juana’s spiritual affairs, it had to be with Don Francisco’s approval. Paz’s theory is strange: the
Carta atenagórica is actually an attack on Aguiar in which Santa Cruz and Sor Juana are accom-
plices; later on (in March 1691), the bishop of Puebla was upset with the tone of the Respuesta
a Sor Filotea and abandoned Sor Juana. Paz refrains from mentioning that the nun’s Villancicos a
Santa Catarina (Carols to St. Catherine) –​sung in Oaxaca –​were published in Puebla at the end
of 1691 with the required approval of the bishop.
Octavio Paz complains about his opponents’ “white lies.” He is merciless about a few not-​
so-​obvious ones of the great editor Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (Trampas 366; Traps 468–​70). But
then he imitates them, mostly by omission. Father Antonio Núñez’s term as Jesuit Provincial
lasted seven months in 1680 (Oviedo 101) and his successor destroyed his work. Paz asserts that
he lasted two years and omits the marginalization of the aging man within his Order from that
moment on.28 The book includes many illustrations, but not the engraving from the second
volume of Sor Juana’s works, in which the trumpets of Fame are extraordinarily glorious.29
Another absence is rather shocking: in the addendum to the French translation it is possible to
find Paz’s judgment about recently found Carta al confesor, but not the Carta itself. In this case,
the critic suppresses the words of the valiant Sor Juana.30
It is also possible to criticize his attitude towards other scholars. He is rather disdainful
towards the pioneer sorjuanista, Amado Nervo (11). Worse is the case of Alfonso Reyes, who
was quite benevolent toward the young Paz. In El laberinto de la soledad from 1950, when Reyes
is old, the future Nobel Prize winner dedicates two flattering pages to him. Certainly, Reyes saw
Sor Juana’s conversion as the culmination of her life. But he does not deserve the near-​disdain
with which Paz treats him in 1982 (Trampas 471; Traps 359).
What was more shocking to the average reader was the comparison of the high clergy to the
Soviet system. In contrast to the situation in New Spain, the victims of the latter did not survive
with a large fortune after their sentence, nor were they regularly interviewed by the “major-
domo,” the business manager of the convent. Regarding sorjuanistas, in 1991 Antonio Alatorre,
one of her most important critics, rejected some ideas he considered unacceptable. In a tribute
to Sor Juana he accepts the title Primero Sueño (First Dream) instead of just Sueño, but negates
the possibility that this means Sor Juana had the project of a “second” dream, a poem that would
have been unavailable to readers because of her “conversion” (“Lectura”). If that were the case,
the poem would have been called Primero sueño. Moreover, it is a “finished” work. Alatorre
also strongly criticizes the comparison with Melancholy by Albrecht Dürer (103). Nor does he
believe that the Dream is an astronomical poem. He refers to the comments of the first readers,
such as, in Fama (Fame), the incomparable Father Calleja, whom Paz quotes frequently while
asserting his disagreement with him. Briefly, Alatorre doubts the influence of Giordano Bruno’s
work and of the Hermetic tradition. He reminds the reader of the “very certain” influence of
Fray Luis de Granada (110–​11). He berates Paz (110, note 14) for not having perceived the dis-
creet presence of Jesus’s incarnation in verses 693–​703. He concludes by discussing the poem’s
“disillusionment”: “Es el sensato desengaño de cualquier ser humano que se plantee seriamente
la posibilidad de saberlo todo y de entenderlo todo” (It is the sensible disillusionment of any
human being who seriously seeks the possibility of knowing and understanding everything). He
adds, Primero Sueño “es un poema entusiasta” (an enthusiastic poem), not a defeat (126). Alatorre
does not study Paz’s volume as a whole and, of course, refrains from any praise; he upholds his
reputation for derision.
In 1995 José Pascual Buxó says of Paz’s work that it is a “libro magnífico y apasionado, eru-
dito y arbitrario” (103) [magnificent, passionate book, erudite and arbitrary], and then carefully
disassembles the unlikely thesis of the enmity between the two prelates. But the other great
subject of debate regarding the book is the specific role of hermeticism that Professor Pascual

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Buxó regards as much less central than Paz had presumed.31 In 1982 Manuel Durán had said
in New York: “Kircher and through him the Hermetic and Pythagoric traditions have pro-
vided important materials, allusions and even the fuel which propels Sor Juana’s magic rocket
into space and towards the remote stars. Yet this influence is incapable of pointing at the most
important message contained in Primero Sueño” (112). As is Kant a hundred years later, Sor Juana
is lucid about the imperfection of the human spirit. And other sorjuanistas are passionate about
this matter.
Something fascinating about Paz’s monumental book is its long gestation and the deep aspect
of the bond with the subject. In El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Country), he writes,
“Yo no podría decir como Flaubert de Madame Bovary: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Pero sí me
reconozco en Sor Juana” (“Conversación” 462)  [I could not say, as Flaubert does of Madame
Bovary: Madame Bovary is me. But I do recognize myself in Sor Juana]. Margo Glantz discussed
Sor Juana as the “The primeval mother of his genealogy” (130). It seems that it was essential for the
poet to have a lifelong conversation with Sor Juana. Juan Bruce Novoa noted that Sor Juana was
the Ariadne of this Theseus (13). Once the final work was completed, it was not possible to make
any substantive changes. Paz accepted the authenticity of Carta al confesor; nevertheless, in suc-
ceeding editions and translations he continued blaming the Jesuit for the rupture. In the English
translation he added a preface, omitted some information not interesting to foreigners, added an
appendix of earlier editions of Sor Juana’s work, and moved some passages about certain critics to
another appendix.32 He shortened the index quite a bit, suppressing references to the works, and
removing above all, Bukharin, Lenin, and Trotsky (and also Alatorre), in spite of their continuing to
appear in the text. It is not just that he did not want to recant: his “reconstitution” was complete.
In 2008, ten years after the Nobel Prize winner’s death, it did not seem that Trampas would
be his most remembered work.33 In 2014 the same attitude was apparent in the well-​attended
celebration of the centennial of Octavio Paz’s birth. Many critics avoid speaking about Traps.
Manuel Ulacia omitted the book in a list of prose works by Paz that is supposedly complete
(406). In his book Octavio Paz en su siglo, the talented Christopher Domínguez Michael devotes
a single paragraph to Traps –​and Sor Juana does not appear in the index. On the other hand,
some great writers celebrate the book. On December 30, 2007, in the Madrid newspaper El país,
Mario Vargas Llosa expressed his enthusiasm. In 2014, another Nobel prize winner, Jean-​Marie
Le Clézio, has seen in Las trampas de la fe “la obra más significativa” (the most important work) of
the author, “un libro total que abarca la historia, la reflexión filosófica y la creación poética…” (a
complete book, which includes history, philosophical reflections and poetic creation).34 It would
be a shame for scholars to deprive themselves of reading a great book because of its flaws.

Notes
1 Oddly, she did not cite with precision the location of the wonderful quotes she included, and she did
not review the treasure she had in her hands. According to Paz, she had bought it with her own money.
2 “Decent people” of that time would have been astonished and scandalized, forgetting how frequent
this kind of situation was.
3 This was a requirement of canonical law, but it was not always obeyed in the New World. Later, when
Sor Juana was the convent secretary, her niece declared that she was illegitimate when she professed.
4 Sor Juana’s failed attempt to join the Discalced Carmelite convent was already known. To Schons, the
repeated willingness to profess as a nun reinforced her thesis. She saw as likely the influence of the
viceroy. In the reckless desire to become a Carmelite, we might imagine the influence of the pious
vicereine, who probably played a larger role than the viceroy.
5 See Bénassy, “Afterlife,” in this volume. Octavio Paz’s perspective in Las trampas de la fe (The Traps of
Faith) is strange: initially, he says that the abandonment took place after the Carta atenagórica and then

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says he is not sure and that he does not want to choose between the two periods (Trampas 552–​53;
Traps 426). He quotes Dorothy Schons on several occasions, but does not draw any conclusions from
his reading.
6 The undated penitential text in which she says she deserves to go to Hell a thousand times but then
assumes that God will forgive her (Fama, 129–​31; OC 4.520–​21). It does not state that she signed it
with her blood (as was the case with the Protesta de su fe, 124; OC 4.518–​19).
7 Until then, following Castorena, the main influence was considered to be that of “Sor Filotea,” Don
Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla. Schons dismissed that blame. Where she went
astray was when she saw the powerful Society of Jesus as a united front. See Bénassy, “Afterlife” (in this
volume).
8 This journal served as the voice for the important Mexican literary and cultural movement of the
same name. Schons published two other essays about Sor Juana, “Bibliografía” (translated into Spanish
1927) and Algunos parientes (Some Relatives).
9 See Bénassy, “Afterlife,” in this volume: a recently found document corroborates this text.
10 Dorothy Schons wrote a biography about Sor Juana that Georgina Sabat de Rivers found handwritten
in Austin. See “Biografías.” See also Schmidhuber, Amigos.
11 Alfonso Méndez Plancarte patiently corrected several mistakes (see Crítica de criticas). Regarding
Octavio Paz, he judged “his uncertain erudition” (Trampas 92; the only references to Abreu Gómez in
Traps are to three instances in which Paz accepts his erudition).
12 But nothing compared to the flood of writing for the 300th anniversary of the death of the “Phoenix
of Mexico” (1995).
13 In addition to those Spaniards who lived in exile in Mexico after the end of the Civil War: Ramón
Xirau, Manuel Durán, José Gaos.
14 He was not an academic and he did not belong to the fashionable literary circles. He was a clergyman
in an era dominated by anticlericalism. His good literary taste and command of both Latin and Golden
Age Spanish poetry contributed to a work praised as incomparable by Marcel Bataillon, Octavio Paz,
and others. Antonio Alatorre said: “Méndez Plancarte tiene un lugar único que nadie ha vuelto a ocu-
par” (“Avances” 660) [Méndez Plancarte occupies a unique place that nobody else has filled]. Several
attempts at publishing other Obras completas of Sor Juana have failed, both before and after. But even
the Méndez Plancarte edition cannot be perfect or definitive.
15 There are two bibliographies, Pfandl’s (who knows Schons’s 1926 article, but does not mention the one
from 1929) and de la Maza’s, which covers the period between 1946 and 1963.
16 It was necessary at that time to have the permission of the American occupation army. This was
a book written “with his heart’s blood” [XXIII] (“Mit seinem Herzblut geschreiben”). In 1999
Heinrich Merkl revealed that, in 1922, Pfandl was removed from this position as a professor because
of his homosexuality. He separated from his wife in 1930 (Sor Juana, Pfandl y la mujer masculina,
note 12).
17 One only need peruse the appendix to The Traps of Faith 504–​08. For further information, see Bénassy-​
Berling, Humanismo 95–​103.
18 In La vida literaria, October 9, 4–​7. “Explicaciones … generalmente arbitrarias, por momentos absur-
das, o superficiales o exageradas y casi siempre basadas en interpretaciones abusivas de los textos”
(Explanations [that are] generally arbitrary, at times absurd, superficial, or exaggerated, and almost
always based on interpretations that violate the texts).
19 Paz reorganized this section of Trampas when it was translated; his critique of Pfandl appears in the
Notes on Sources, and doesn’t include a concise equivalent of delirio de interpretación.
20 See Bénassy, “Afterlife.” This phenomenon of collective error, which seems incomprehensible, is not
exclusive to Mexico.
21 Sometimes it can be “second hand.” And Paz confessed that he did not know Latin, which limited his
significant knowledge of classical literature.
22 Some negative reviewers talked about cannibalism. But this only occurred during the period in which
the book was advertised. Much has been written about the complex “Otherness” of Paz.
23 The discourse about the Spanish heritage that Octavio Paz proffers to other Mexicans in c­ hapter 8
richly merits study, but it does not have a place here.
24 See Part 4, ­chapter 2, “Concilio de luceros” (Council of Stars [Part 4, Chapter 14]). For debates about
this topic, see Bénassy, “Afterlife.” It is worth noting that the vicereine gave birth to her first living son
in 1683, at the age of thirty-​four, after two miscarriages.

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25 On page 500 of Las trampas, Paz evoked the Cimetière marin by Paul Valéry, Muerte sin fin (Endless
Death) by José Gorostiza, Altazor by Vicente Huidobro, and especially Un coup de dés … by Stéphane
Mallarmé.
26 This title is deceptive. In Petición causídica, Sor Juana imitates the Introduction to Devout Life by St. Francis
of Sales, Part I, chapter XX. This book was translated from the French in 1608 and its devout woman
was named Filotea. Paz’s chapter title is abusive. Sor Juana says: “I am a great sinner”; she does not
say what her sins were and she does not “abjure” anything in particular, nor does she condemn her
writings.
27 Paz uses as his source the biography of Santa Cruz by Manuel de Torres, which he considers not very
reliable (and with reason). Regarding the official document, he claimed it was not authentic.
28 See Bénassy, “Afterlife.” He writes:  “No hay la menor alusión a la renuncia a las letras humanas”
(Trampas 596) [Nowhere in the rather brief declaration is there any reference to giving up the study
of humane letters] (Traps 463). To a wider public he writes with less restraint: “Firma con su sangre la
renuncia de las letras” (El País, Dec.1982) [With her own blood she signs the renunciation of literary
pursuits].The same sentence can be found in French in the prologue of Le Divin Narcisse et autres textes
by Sor Juana in Gallimard, 1987 (16),
29 There are fewer illustrations in the English translation (8 instead of 30).
30 In the United States, the same year that Traps was published, a translation of the letter to the confessor
was published (Scott). It was not wise to pretend. The Letter appears as an appendix, with a commen-
tary (Traps 491–​502).
31 We leave aside the topic of Sor Juana’s Thomism, strict, according to Méndez Plancarte, and flexible
according to many others. Paz sees her as a staunch neo-​Platonist, and he is not the only one.
32 For example, a large part of pages 432–​33 in Trampas does not appear in the English text, essentially the
pages on Pfandl. Georgina Sabat-​Rivers called attention to this issue (“Biografías”).
33 In Paris, the volume of Paz’s selected works in Gallimard’s famous collection “La Pléiade” does not
include Les pièges de la Foi (The Traps of Faith). We need more information about other countries.
34 See La Jornada, March 30.

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7
PASSIONATE ADVOCATE
Sor Juana, feminisms, and sapphic loves1

Amanda Powell

Introduction
A middle-​aged taxi driver muses, on learning I am a Sor Juana scholar, “Do you say she was a
feminist? Or do you call it something else?” Over roaring Mexico City traffic, we agree that if
a writer stands up for women and challenges unearned male privilege, why not call her femi-
nist. He recites stanzas of “Hombres necios” (Foolish men) and says that visiting her childhood
home in Amecameca, as well as her urban convent, illuminates the world that shaped her. He
adds, “One more thing –​was she a lesbian?” Not prurient or discounting, he wants to know:
what does the research say? Taking my cue from my esteemed interlocutor of many years ago
and from numerous students over time, I here consider responses to these two questions, in turn.
Sor Juana’s writings –​secular and religious –​repeatedly subvert values and authority that
assert a gendered hierarchy. Her liturgical songs, devotional guides, philosophical reflections,
and lyrics on (or dissecting) love frequently celebrate female ability while performing an often
humorous interrogation of social, cultural, and religious male dominance. Her critiques state
forthrightly or whisper in asides their advocacy for women. Bold declarations and subtle allu-
sions interweave in the “double-​voiced” discourse of a writer both privileged and precariously
placed, as Electa Arenal and Emilie Bergmann observe.2 The woman-​centered sphere that her
writings present includes love lyrics that passionately address other women, underscoring yet
transforming the conventional Petrarchist imagery of sensual enthrallment and amorous devo-
tion. While Sor Juana’s texts display additional facets and fascinations of mind, they consistently
do more than reveal the absurdities of gender in a binary sense, but rather in a way that resists
reduction to simple binaries. Challenging structural misogyny ethically, they oppose moral good
to injustice; intellectually, they propose access to education for women and deeper ways of
knowing for men; politically, they evoke female figures both biblical and historical who wield
civic and judicial powers.
Are feminist and lesbian interpretations of early modern texts timely or anachronistic? Does
politically committed scholarship restore accuracy or distort a culturally and ethically remote
past? Inquiry into the past that counters present-​day inequality receives special scrutiny:  for
instance, anti-​misogynist readings have called up bristling accusations of political correctness.3
Yet if inquisitive, accusatory, or ironic critiques of patriarchal authority are not feminist, what do
we call them? Again, what do we make of Sor Juana’s lavish and witty love poems addressed to

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women: was the writer in love? With her addressee, or with poetry itself? Baroque in lexicon
and syntax, these texts resonate “modernly.” How can we, now, talk about feminism and lesbian-
ism back then? How can we not?4

Sor Juana’s feminisms and ours

What stands as recognizably feminist in the past? Many historians identify feminism as a dis-
tinctly modern political ideology and call earlier challenges to codes and practices that excluded
women from full humanity “proto-​” feminist or “avant la lettre.” However, in texts retrieved from
obscurity, premodern thinkers consciously and strategically critiqued masculinist hegemonies.
Theories that conceptualize pre-​Enlightenment “feminisms” supply a grounding for under-
standing a feminist Sor Juana. Linking feminist with poststructuralist literary theory, while
applying nuanced understanding of historical contexts, overturns timeworn “universalized”
definitions of (men’s) literature and reinserts women’s cultural production in literary history. Iris
Zavala conceptualizes a canon in which writing women as subjects make the most of nested
contexts juxtaposing privilege and disempowerment: “se rehúye el yo monológico y autori-
tario/​autorizado, y se abre la cultura a la heterogeneidad” (31) [a monolithic and authoritarian/​
authorized self recedes, as culture opens to heterogeneity].5 Alison Weber proposes that plural
feminisms characterize religious writings by early modern European Catholic women: “ ‘state-​
of-​emergency’ feminism, or the conviction that God calls upon women as reserve troops, espe-
cially when men have let him down”; “ ‘ecclesial feminism,’ or the conviction that women have
been unjustly deprived of their role as Christ’s legitimate disciples; and ‘matriarchal feminism,’
a sense of spiritual authority, based on identification with a holy foremother, that supersedes
patriarchal laws” (“Literature” 42, 45). Each of these views arises at some juncture in Sor Juana’s
texts. Investigating early modern (North) American women’s writings, Tamara Harvey applies
the concept of gynesis, that is, “the metaphoric use of femininity and female bodies to con-
stitute male subjectivity,” to distinguish recent from past feminisms (412).6 Harvey examines
period theory arising in critiques that both enlist and counter elements of pre-​Enlightenment
discourse, such as femmes fortes imagery, that work alternately to celebrate and suppress women.
Thus writing from the past manifests tensions ongoing today, between rights-​based and libera-
tory feminisms.
This chapter applies four categories applicable to early modern thought, concerning Sor
Juana’s anti-​misogynist, pro-​woman discursive strategies: querelle des femmes, spiritual-​matriarchal,
courtly, and Sapphist feminisms.7 Ongoing scholarship illuminates these directions in Sor Juana’s
texts, revealing coherence in apparent contradictions. Employing strengths within subordina-
tion, she enlists secular humanist strategies, doctrines, and genres from her religious context and
female allegiances, idealized precursors, and pragmatically invoked powerful women she knows.

That old dispute (“querelle” feminism)

The “querelle des femmes” contextualizes Sor Juana’s advocacy for women and also most his-
torical and literary studies of her feminism. Initially biographical and thematic, these studies
move into discursive and genre examinations. In the fifteenth to eighteenth-​century European
and colonial querelle debate, one side gave vent to misogyny. The other formed the primary
discursive field for articulating late medieval and early modern support and advocacy on behalf
of women across Protestant and Catholic, north and south, metropolitan and provincial milieus.
Sparring sides argued women’s lack or possession of moral “virtue” and intellectual “reason”
and educability. Joan Kelly demonstrates in the pro-​woman querelle a “sense of the richness,

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coherence, and continuity of early feminist thought” (“Early Feminist Theory” 66), notably in
gendered understanding of “the sexes (as) culturally, not just biologically formed.Women were a
social group.” Writers opposed mistreatment by conveying “knowledge and confidence to reject
misogynist claims” (67, emphasis hers).8
Some scholars see the querelle as a static rehearsal for a more vital modern feminism.
Women’s anti-​misogynist responses, in Katherine Romack’s view,

rarely stepped outside the logic of the debate itself to pressure its terms, framing their
responses not as systematic attempts to reimagine their status by attacking the political,
religious, and cultural institutions grounding their subjection, but rather as “defenses”
that, though gradually increasing in sophistication, could not ultimately shatter the terms
of the dialectic itself. (220)9

Yet as Arenal notes, Sor Juana “aimed unrelentingly … at stimulating changes in the social
relations between the sexes” (“Speaking the Mother Tongue” 99). Writings by Sor Juana and
various contemporaries argue in a political, often satiric mode to expose misogyny; the most
intelligent of these systematically challenge systems of thought oppressive to women. Where
nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century feminisms tend toward earnest analysis, emphasizing
oppression borne with long suffering, a parodic, ironic, sometimes comic baroque exposure
of the power play and invested self-​interest of masculinist positions has often eluded modern
analysis.10 Not all liberatory consciousness is oppositional. We ought not discount resistance,
survival, and selectively productive collaboration, and we misread, if we seek feminist meaning
only in suffering and protest.

Biography and “thanatography”

Through the mid-​twentieth century, studies citing Sor Juana as the “first feminist of the
Americas” routinely read a largely construed biography (including standard, semi-​fictionalized
versions of her death), plus themes from select texts (“Hombres necios,” Respuesta [Answer]), as
“rights” manifestos. We find two kinds of hagiography: Sor Juana met a saintly end through a
supposed self-​rededicating conversion (following the account of Spanish Jesuit Diego Calleja,
1700); or she died a feminine martyr to thwarted love. After her death, Sor Juana received more
recognition for the outlines of her life than the details of her work: she embodied a hazily speci-
fied defiance to patriarchal and ecclesiastical forces rather than scholarly erudition, philosophi-
cal rigor, esthetic quality, theological expertise, or prolific output.
Implicitly, these accounts follow definitions dating “feminist consciousness” from modern
collective movements for social change (Lerner 274). They capture yet distort vital truths: Sor
Juana certainly advocates for women. But reading intricately rhetorical, allusive texts as transpar-
ently autobiographical or political declarations minimizes their artistry and their challenge to
how philosophy, theology, and science are explored and by whom. Stephanie Merrim observes
that pervasive romanticizing emphasized “ ‘domestication’ of Sor Juana’s person or life story
… to a more acceptable female mode” (“Toward a Feminist Reading” 17). In 1966, Rosario
Castellanos noted that although prominent male writers constructed an image of Sor Juana
that appropriated fiction-​worthy aspects of her life and work, scholars remained inattentive
to “her intellectual and religious calling, the environment that shaped her, the obstacles that
endowed her with resilience … the way her writings spring from tradition and in turn subtly
enrich it” (19).11 Within a patriarchal literary-​cultural framework, Sor Juana served more as a
cautionary note than a vaunted model for young women aspiring to literary or intellectual

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achievement. Julia Álvarez for instance notes that her mother threateningly brandished Sor
Juana as an example of ill-​fated female intellectualism: “When I was a girl, and I would speak
out of turn, especially in my own defense or in defense of some supposedly indefensible person
or idea, my mother would caution me, ‘No te pongas tú de Sor Juana!’ Don’t you try to be a Sor
Juana! I had no idea who Sor Juana was […] but Mami knew the outlines of this famous nun’s
story. A female who also couldn’t hold her tongue and came to a bad end…” (x). Despite the
much-​reproduced image and eponymous primary schools, her iconic presence in the Spanish-​
speaking world does not convey her specific achievements.
In the brief but flourishing “New Woman” period of the 1920s, historian Dorothy Schons
set a methodological standard by examining scant surviving documents for evidence of
choice exercised by a decisively rational subject (“Some Obscure Points”).12 Prior accounts
had explained the poet’s monastic profession as lovelorn reaction (e.g., Nervo, cited in Schons
39). By contrast, Schons finds not “feminine” debility but a poet-​scholar’s quest to build her
strengths. She analyzes Sor Juana’s writings alongside social conditions such as marriage and
dowry practices to explain convent “retirement” not as a lonely-​heart’s retreat but a prestigious
setting better suited than matrimony to a woman’s life in letters (Merrim, Feminist Perspectives
46). Asking “Why did Juana, when she was at the height of her fame, renounce fame?” (46),
Schons rejects explanations of simple capitulation to pressure from powerful churchmen in
direct authority over Sor Juana. She accounts for apparent “penitence” and silence by seeing Sor
Juana in a “struggle in which she was as a house divided against herself ” (52). To date, Schons’s
approach orients much interpretation of the starkly under-​documented end of Sor Juana’s life.
The 1995 tercentenary of Sor Juana’s death brought a rethinking of her final years, in his-
torian Elías Trabulse’s multiple essays portraying a resilient, optimistic Sor Juana who, far from
capitulating, opts to endure and survive a period of persecution by church authorities but is cut
short by illness.These claims, if accurate, resonate with feminist import: Trabulse’s interpretation
sees the writer steadily maintaining her creative and intellectual focus and temporarily obliged –​
rather than persuaded –​to maintain strategic silence. He believes she intended to wait out the
controversy. His analysis counters imagined narratives of Sor Juana’s victim status, weary capit-
ulation, or abandonment of her intellectual project for spiritual self-​sacrifice.13 Frustratingly,
Trabulse has not yet published full documentation revealing sources for these articles.

Thematic approaches
Schons was among the early twentieth-​century scholars whose research uncovered early mod-
ern women’s literary history. The mid-​twentieth century U.S. academic context to an extent
re-​erased that history, while a handful of European and Latin American philological studies
comprised almost all the scholarly bibliography on Sor Juana. Applying new “mentalités” and
social history, a few critics appreciated baroque style and accepted the convent as a venue for
intellectual and creative advancement (perspectives less available to U.S.  scholarship), while
repeating the unexamined title “first feminist.” In 1967, Ramón Xirau underscored “la ironía, el
humor y a veces la gran alegría con que Sor Juana defiende a las mujeres” (36) [the irony, human
and at times great joy with which Sor Juana defends women], while Dario Puccini viewed
her “premature” feminism as consistent with her vital intelligence and profound learning.14
In Mexico, Rosario Castellanos expressed complicated admiration for a compatriot dwell-
ing at “the eye of the storm”: “la patria de Sor Juana … [es] el ojo del conflicto” (“Asedio”
24). Castellanos affirms her precursor’s achievement but rejects as sterile and unfulfilling the
“calculated” choice (20) for what she sees as celibate asexuality: “se entabla entonces la lucha
entre la cabeza y el sexo. Este ultimo es negado … Define su cuerpo como neutro y se atreve a

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experimentar afectos que serían equívocos si ella no se situara tan por encima de su carne” (24)
[and so the struggle between head and sexuality ensues. Negating the latter … she defines her
body as neuter and risks experiencing affections that would be wrong if she did not hold herself
above her own flesh]. The 1960s heterosexual paradigm prevailed; celibacy as itself a creative
sexuality would not (re-​)enter the scholarly imagination for decades.
In the 1970s and 1980s, with women’s movements surging internationally beyond and
within the academy, feminists recognized in Sor Juana a forebear. Initially, her writings received
attention as presumably transparent representations of lived experience contesting male social
privilege and masculinist ideologies, the inherited paradigm of earlier scholarship. Perelmuter
lists articles praising Sor Juana as a “first feminist” within a modern rights-​based definition
(147 n 1), as in Rosario Hiriart, “America’s First Feminist” while in “Sister Juana: The Price of
Genius,” Judith Thurman calls the Respuesta “one of the greatest documents of Spanish prose,
and perhaps the first manifesto for the intellectual rights of women” (cited by Perelmuter 147 n
2). Sor Juana’s themes compelled feminist attention, even if her style appeared inimical: baroque
artifice and religious content ill suited the self-​revealing, “truth-​telling” documentary mode
of mid-​twentieth-​century “second-​wave” feminist commentary. However, literary scholars and
historians across Europe and the Americas increasingly cultivated approaches grounded in con-
cerns, worldviews, genres, and rhetoric of neglected women’s texts. Research drew on varied
methodologies to re-​assess premodern women’s life and work within institutions, thinking, and
cultural production. Hispanists uncovered numerous spiritual writings and fewer but significant
secular texts to open fresh views onto the formerly “lone,” uncontextualized icons, Teresa of
Avila and Sor Juana.

Discursive analyses
Postcolonial theory in the 1990s made subaltern voices audible against hegemonic powers,
while diverse feminist approaches, especially gynocritical explorations of convent genres and
Foucauldian-​ influenced readings of discursive practices enforcing male domination, took
strength from a new historicism that synthesized poststructuralist, reader-​response, feminist,
cultural, and Marxist-​materialist criticisms. Latin American baroque culture commanded atten-
tion as a medium expressively heightening indigenous and European elements while vocalizing
aspirations of a criolla/​o (white, American-​continent-​born) caste.15
In this newly energized field, feminist re-​visioning has discovered “new” neglected texts and
challenged the assumed familiarity of the well-​known, now seen in a complex and transform-
ing context. Incisive analyses took up the Respuesta to move discussion of Sor Juana’s femi-
nism beyond theme into discursive and then stylistic dimensions. Rosa Perelmuter specifies the
methods and tools of seventeenth-​century advocacy for women in this text. Sor Juana handles
multiple registers of secular rhetorical convention, including formulas for legal self-​defense,
epistolary address, and persuasive oratory. Perelmuter highlights these to contest prevailing, ste-
reotypically gendered interpretations of the Respuesta as showing “naturalidad, sencillez, ter-
nura” (148, citing Pimentel) [naturalness, simplicity, tenderness] or charming “espontaneidad”
(149, citing Wallace) [spontaneity]. She implicitly argues for Sor Juana’s feminism, suggesting
that Sor Juana crafts a seemingly personal and familiar tone by deploying learned, deliberate,
powerfully argued positions.
Sor Juana’s participation in querelle tradition explores multiple “cultural repertoires” that
support women’s intellectuality and writing, as Stephanie Merrim demonstrates in Early Modern
Women’s Writing (xlii). This study focuses centrally on Sor Juana’s participation in the querelle,
while the volume Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz republished essays by Schons,

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Ludmer, and Asunción Lavrin, with new work by Arenal, Sabat-​Rivers, Gimbernat de González,
and Merrim herself. The book includes both historical-​cultural analysis and literary studies
of secular and religious genres, invoking “woman-​centered stances” both in critics’ views and
Sor Juana’s texts themselves, which cast nets of classical and biblical allusion to heroic women,
overturn objectifying and disempowering Petrarchan paradigms, and emphasize female intel-
lect (Merrim, Feminist 7). Merrim’s introduction, “Toward a Feminist Reading of Sor Juana,”
reviews useful and misleading (“androcentric”) perspectives in twentieth-​century critics, espe-
cially Octavio Paz. To analyze the inherent feminism in poetry that “argues for the female as a
bastion of reason” (in villancicos [carols], sonnets, and the famous “Hombres necios”), she calls for
“situating Sor Juana’s work within the traditions of women’s writing, both universal and within
her own milieu” (25–​26), thus building on the contextualizing provided by the discovery of
other women writers.
Subsequently, in Early Modern Women’s Writing, Merrim examines how early modern wom-
en’s writing enlisted “aspects of the dominant cultures that in fact lent themselves to feminist
appropriation” (xlii), to exploit “malleable spaces, tacit fissures, and ironic returns” with con-
sciousness heightened, not limited, by the “extreme misogyny of the times” (89). Merrim’s
reading of Sor Juana’s final years finds an “auto-​machia” (self-​trial) involving the writer’s willed
grappling with the limits of knowledge and language in a “civil war of self-​representations”
(Early Modern Women’s Writing 167) that ultimately vaunts a gender-​defying, “New Promethean”
consciousness. While she compellingly explores Sor Juana’s “melancholic” philosophical medi-
tations such as the Romance 2, “Finjamos que soy feliz …” (163–​67), Merrim downplays Sor
Juana’s recurring humor, parody, and satire. Seemingly needing to “account” for an end assumed
to be self-​sacrificial, the interpretation hovers close to biographical fallacy (similar to the prem-
ises of Jean-​Michel Wissmer’s Las Sombras de lo fingido: Sacrificio y simulacro en Sor Juana Inés de
La Cruz).
Sor Juana’s lyric achievement stands paramount in her oeuvre. In her poetry, enactments
of baroque aesthetic both intrinsically and explicitly forward her advocacy for women and
her questioning of gendered hierarchies, as Emilie Bergmann explores in “Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz:  Dreaming in a Double Voice.” Georgina Sabat-​Rivers also demonstrates how Sor
Juana’s contestatory power relies on lyric skill plus the erudite handling of classical and con-
temporary literary discourse, demonstrating the powerfully female-​centered significance of the
poetic opus Sueño (Dream) and notably departing from interpretation of the poem as ending
in defeat. This close reading notes discursive feminism in a “preponderance and importance
of feminine characters and of feminine nouns” (“Feminist Re-​reading” 146). The “baroque
language becomes scientifically analytical and precise” (149) to exemplify “in a single complex
reflection two different aspects of her own personality:  her concern about being a woman
and her concern about being an intellectual” (152). In gendered terms, the poem “reveals the
impossibility … of comprehending the universe and at the same time urges persistence in the
face of defeat as a sufficient compensation for that impossibility” (157). Concluding that Sor
Juana used “every recourse available to women” in order to “inscrib[e]‌herself fully within a
universal human problematic” (157), Sabat-​Rivers’s argument suits the two foci of the pro-​
feminist querelle, proposing women’s intellectual equality and a humanist vision of betterment
for both sexes.16
Now assuming the feminist significance of Sor Juana’s writings, critics examined sources
and expressions of empowerment as well as oppression. Stating that “Sor Juana’s legacy rests
ultimately in the beauty, weight, and complexity of her literary art” (vii), Arenal and Powell
translate the Respuesta with selected poems to show both poetic virtuosity and philosophical
erudition, key to her intellectual and creative feminism. The introduction and annotations

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detail rhetorical strategies and humanist and religious allusions moving from a “debate on
women” into a re-​g rounding of thought itself, in terms that are imaginatively familiar with
both sexes.
Frederick Luciani provides a new view of the fascination with Sor Juana’s biography as a
querelle des femmes issue, applying feminist criticism and subjectivity theory to examine not
historical reality but a constructed “textual ‘self ’ fashioned by the writing subject” through
multiple voices and genres, pointing out that for the baroque period an engagement with mul-
tiplicities, including plural representations of the self, was “one of the guarantors of her fame
in her own lifetime” (18, 19). This discussion implicitly indicates recurring tensions between
feminist and other poststructuralist criticism, such that where feminist criticism emphasizes
heeding previously silenced female subjects, poststructuralism questions the very concept of
locatable (or, in queer theory, distinctly gendered) subjects; Luciani aptly resolves his approach
by emphasizing baroque preference for the prolific, generative of multiply represented selves.
Luciani scrutinizes both imitatio and innovation in close-​g rained readings of various genres.The
Respuesta passage that advocates cooking as empirical philosophy draws on no lesser patriarchal
authorities than Aristotle and St. Paul, so as to

engage the querelle, on behalf, needless to say, of the intellectual and physical worthiness
of women. It also serves as a complement to [Sor Juana’s] rereading of St. Paul: it similarly
questions the unreflective use of textual authority to justify the inferiority or the bound
existence of women. (122)

Surveying the sparsely documented end of Sor Juana’s life, Luciani questions both hagio-​
Catholic versions of eventual saintliness and also heroic notions of absolute resistance. He
hypothesizes that, despite “imposed silence and banishment from commerce with the world –​
the Church’s equivalent of a gag order” (157, emphasis his), Sor Juana capitulated only ironi-
cally, leaving traces of having achieved an “individual, interior freedom” earlier hindered by
obligations (159), the “private moral and intellectual autonomy” she consistently asserted in her
writings (160).

Genre
A number of studies investigate how Sor Juana re-​crafts genre formulae to feminist pur-
pose. Merrim opens her religious and secular theater to detailed feminist analysis, finding
parallels between the theatrical works and nineteenth-​century women’s fiction treated in
Gilbert and Gubar’s influential Madwoman in the Attic (1979), whereby “the woman writer
encodes and (melo)dramatizes her own problematic” in an “angel/​monster polarization”
(Merrim, “Mores geometricae” 99–​100). In Empeños de una casa (House of Desire), Merrim
analyzes the dual female presence of a luminous protagonist, Leonor, and darkly manipula-
tive counter-​heroine, Ana, as a troubled split in the writer herself. This nineteenth-​century
conceptual frame sits uneasily with Sor Juana’s baroque manipulation of genre and ironic
female characterizations in Empeños. Susana Hernández Araico indicates that Sor Juana, a
“creative transmuter,” sweepingly re-​garbs the outmoded comedia de capa y espada as a then-​
in-​vogue courtly zarzuela:

poking fun at the genre itself by disguising it and undoing it, Sor Juana flaunts her mas-
tery over established forms [… in ways that] distinguish her, the playwright, as a colonial
female subject. (xxiii)

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Hernández Araico’s introduction identifies complexly innovative genre-​reworkings in the

play, beyond such evident features as the protagonist Leonor’s introductory (auto)biographi-
cal monologue and the hilariously laborious female self-​presentation by cross-​dressing gracioso
Castaño (xxii). Christopher Weimer applies gender theories of “transvestism” versus “drag” to
show Castaño’s “unmistakably drag” performance exposing “sexist, oppressive attitudes” (91).
Julie Greer Johnson studies humor itself as feminist tool: “the playing and telling of jokes [as]
a way of proving oneself, establishing one’s authority, and extending one’s influence over oth-
ers”: in Sor Juana’s work, “the ingeniousness of her humor … lies in her ability to criticize men
by reinventing their own literary representations of women. Role reversals and the deconstruc-
tion of female stereotypes are her primary strategies” for gender-​contention (38).
Previously overlooked as minor occasional works, Sor Juana’s villancicos and loas (brief dra-
matic introductions) stir interest as well for transgressive and feminist uses of these genres. Sabat-​
Rivers identifies Sor Juana’s use of these popular forms to combine a religious message with a
social critique rooted in Spanish-​American Christian humanism, establishing a carnivalesque
“diálogo transgressor entre la cultura del poderoso y la del sometido” (“Sor Juana:  Barroco
de Indias” (41) [transgressive dialogue between the culture of the powerful and that of the
oppressed] on behalf of Mexican, African, and female subjects. The villancicos dedicated to
Catherine of Alexandria, “la expresión más exaltada y rotunda de su defensa sobre la igualdad de
los sexos y del derecho de la mujer … a la intelectualidad” (the most impassioned and strongest
expression of her defense of equality between the sexes and women’s right to intellectuality)
confirm by date and circumstances of composition that Sor Juana’s withdrawal from literary
activity was not a renunciation of her convictions (Sabat Rivers, “Barroco” 42), as Marie-​Cécile
Bénassy-​Berling also notes, in “Más sobre la conversión de Sor Juana.” Georges Baudot simi-
larly explores numerous villancicos as a genre allowing expression of a specifically Baroque and
popular feminism (“Barroco”).
To profoundly feminist ends, the Respuesta borrows from, reshapes, and repurposes mul-
tiple genres:  although still less recognized, these include the philosophical essay, in addition
to secular and religious genres as indicated above. Josefina Ludmer’s rewarding “Tricks of the
Weak” analyzes the Respuesta as the embattled but effective utterance of “a woman in the field
of knowledge under particular historical and discursive circumstances” (86). Sor Juana’s treatise
explicitly claims to resort to “silence,” as though despairing of effective speech from a position
marginal to patriarchal philosophical discourse; but subtly, the text indicates the central signifi-
cance of women’s ways of knowing. To show this, Ludmer analyzes the force-​field between
“(not) knowing and (not) saying” that lucidly reveals what the text knows and wishes to say
while (apparently) obeying imposed decorum:  for women, the capacity to know and to say
stand mutually opposed. Sor Juana effects an ironic exposé that defines a disempowered space
to which society relegates the speaker and demonstrates a silent “space of resistance vis-​à-​vis
others’ power” (89). Alert readers apprehend the extensive knowledge and eloquence veiled by
her status. Joining gynocriticism, structuralism, deconstruction, close reading, and historicized
period understanding of rhetoric like the humility topos, Ludmer shows a “space delimited by
classical philosophy” (93) expanded by Sor Juana’s polemic.17
Further analyzing the Respuesta as a powerful “moment in early modern philosophy,” Donald
Beggs agrees with Ludmer that generalized “hermeneutic blindness” leaves the text “unrecog-
nized” as philosophical and compares it to work by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray
(109): both seek to change the nature of philosophy itself. Although Sor Juana strikes readers as
presciently modern, her intellectual freedom rests in “ironic obedience” (114); employing but
exceeding a rhetorical stance, this avoids the metaphysical dualism characterizing early modern
philosophies of freedom (e.g., Descartes, Luther). Beggs sees her narrative of “inclination” to

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letters enlisting yet questioning Aristotelian “natural law” by synthesizing it with Neoplatonism,
to enlist but challenge the generation of knowledge under “modes of patriarchal power” (116–​
18). In Beggs’s reading of a radically grounded “ungroundedness,” Sor Juana (akin to Irigaray)
ultimately proposes simultaneous yet distinct forms of equality for women, which acknowledge
possible female empowerment-​with-​difference while refuting essentialist gendered distinctions.

Our lady of wisdom (spiritual-​matriarchal feminism)

Connected (like many seventeenth-​century luminaries) to an earlier Christian humanism pre-
ceding the Council of Trent and Counter-​Reformation, Sor Juana wrote from a cosmos hos-
pitable to classical antiquity, biblical and doctrinal learning, practical scientific exploration, and
cultivated wit. Brilliance, creativity, defiance, learning, literary mastery, and worldly fame: how
could she have done it? In a convent, of all places! The question and attendant surprise deserve
notice. Why does a brilliant, witty, sexy, and devout intellectual don a nun’s habit? Modern,
dominantly secularist (in the United States, often unconsciously Protestant) intellectual para-
digms know  –​correctly or not  –​that Catholic institutions “oppress women.” Her religious
milieu makes Sor Juana appear paradoxical unless we identify conditions, institutions, persons,
and cultural spaces that permitted as much as hindered achievement. Since period feminisms
enlisted religious concepts and institutions, assuming that the convent was merely the least grim
among limited options distorts our view of life, work, and contexts.
In the imperial Spanish territories, Catholic spirituality infused intellectual life; theology
reigned as “Queen of the Sciences,” as the Respuesta avers. Investigation of prolific convent writ-
ings corrects a modern impulse to read as idiosyncratic, in an individual author, such widespread
conventions as the seemingly self-​abasing humility topos or presumptuous invocations of imi-
tatio Christi. The cultural purpose and innovative features of Sor Juana’s liturgical villancicos for
cathedral feast-​day Masses, religious dramas, and lyric poetry on religious themes, once largely
dismissed, now receive critical attention. In theological, philosophical, and devotional modes
Sor Juana’s disciplined, learned, inquisitive spirituality is central to her thinking.
Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling identifies an essentially Christian feminism in Sor Juana’s
achievements, engaged with historical, cultural, and religious viceregal contexts and, although
most visible in defense of female learning in the Respuesta and villancicos to St. Catherine of
Alexandria, equally sharp in the solidarity of “une femme parmi les autres, (qui) demande jus-
tice pour toutes” (Humanisme 278) [one woman among others, demanding justice for all] in
“Hombres necios” and Empeños de una casa. Bénassy-​Berling suggests that Sor Juana ultimately
applied these ideas to both lay and religious spheres of life, although her early death curtailed a
full and explicit development of this vision (Humanisme 290).
Numerous writings by nuns form a necessary background to Sor Juana’s life-​choices and lit-
erary strategies. Electa Arenal brings tools of feminist literary analysis to writers’ achievements to
show the convent as a challenging but not always negating space at diverse class levels. In “The
Convent as Catalyst,” Arenal identifies resources in Catholic religious life –​literacy, solitude and
contemplation –​through early twentieth-​century feminist insight: Emily Jane Putnam’s “free-
dom of development” in the cloister that allowed intellectual-​creative work for medieval and
early modern women (The Lady, 1910) and Virginia Woolf ’s “room of one’s own” (1929). Arenal
juxtaposes Sor Juana with an obscure convent author in “The Convent as Catalyst,” a contex-
tualizing project she furthers with Stacey Schlau in their co-​authored Untold Sisters: Hispanic
Nuns in Their Own Works. These studies, and others that have followed suit, identify period and
genre conventions like the humility topos and emphasis on suffering common to spiritual auto-
biography, providing tools with which we can on the one hand correctly distinguish Sor Juana’s

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feminist (or other) innovation from conformity, without on the other reading as individually
expressive or even neurotically symptomatic on the author’s part what is in fact conventional.
In “Unlike Sor Juana?,” Asunción Lavrin analyzes Sor Juana’s degree of conformity or excep-
tionality by examining features of her writing in the historical context of an array of her con-
temporary convent figures documented in their or others’ words.18 Delineating period standards
for education, religiosity and vocations, devotional practice, confessor-​penitent relationships, and
writing, Lavrin shows that Sor Juana’s adaptively transgressive stance made use of, yet stood out
from, her environment. Analyzing Sor Juana’s literary uses of conventional religious language,
Kathleen Ann Myers in “Sor Juana’s Respuesta:  Rewriting the Vitae” examines strategies for
self-​defense in the Respuesta as grounded in their milieu rather than uniformly set in opposition.
Myers demonstrates Sor Juana’s use of elements standard to nuns’ auto-​hagiographies: tropes
of obedience, humility, confession, and the call to religious life (reframed from spiritual voca-
tion to intellectual-​literary “inclination”). She leaves aside how use of this then-​prized format
underscores Sor Juana’s boldly confident dexterity. A masterfully ironic “humble” address to the
bishop as “Sor Filotea” exceeds straight allusion; humorous parody of the convent genre ironi-
cally marks the writer’s confidence and literary worldliness (Arenal and Powell 21).
Moving beyond a paradigm of hierarchical subjection, Myers elsewhere poses the nun-​
confessor relationship as a complex, potentially empowering opportunity. Feminist readings
focus on “oppression” and “resistance to and subversion of [the] ecclesiastical power structure”
(“The Mystic Triad” 482), but nuns did not always suffer conflictual, hierarchized relations
to supervising confessors; some assumed authoritative, indeed instructional roles. A “triad” of
God as creative initiator, writing nun, and mediating convent texts indicates that, in practice,
“lowly” nuns sometimes actively mediated God’s word for receptive clergy (483). The context
of invoked and manipulated discursive conventions clarifies how Sor Juana’s writings to confes-
sor Antonio Núñez and Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz demonstrate the battery of
rhetorical stances earlier seen in Teresa and others (489–​98). Drawing on scholarship and criti-
cism especially by Caroline Walker Bynum (“The Mystic Triad” 484 n 7), Jean Franco (486 n
12), and Alison Weber (“Literature” 488 n 14) as conceptual sources for feminist work on Sor
Juana’s and other convent writings, Myers concludes:

Women were controlled, but so, too, were their male confessors. If the context and extent
of the dialogue surrounding the representation of religious women in period texts as well
as in women’s own writings can be recuperated, then the richness of the confessional
relationship and the resultant textual discourse may emerge at last. (524)

Myers elsewhere probes the controversy that Sor Juana’s incursions into theological discourse
incited. Prohibited from public theological commentary, Sor Juana made the most of “church
and society’s desires to capitalize on the phenomenon of a bright woman who could serve as a
cultural or spiritual icon for the colony” (Neither Saints Nor Sinners 95). Thus she “carve[d]‌out
a unique role for herself in the church” (108), at once audacious, contestatory, and enshrined.
Considerations of Sor Juana’s oeuvre long ignored explicitly religious writings, thus missing
their feminist thinking.Theologian Pamela Kirk examines the “exuberant” corpus of Sor Juana’s
religious writings –​two-​thirds of her total work, which “for the most part occupy a middle
place between literature and theology”  –​as integral to her feminist artistry (10–​11). Critics
long assumed the Ejercicios devotos (Devotional Exercises) to have been obligatorily written, “pro
forma” rather than creative, although Sor Juana rated this prominently among her works. Such
esteemed yet popular texts, by saints or venerable church figures, received multiple printings
and best-​seller distribution. Grady Wray’s critical study and bilingual edition of the Ejercicios

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explicates the concern with dynamics of gender politics heard in the Respuesta and elsewhere.
Enlisting the (oft-​misunderstood) theology of the Immaculate Conception, Sor Juana gives
learned and eloquent treatment to the power and wisdom of Mary as “Sovereign Queen of the
Heavens” standing next to God before “all creation.” Wray surveys the Ejercicios in relation to
their genre, the works of the massively influential María de Ágreda, the cultural resonance of the
figure of the Immaculate Conception, and Sor Juana’s references to key scientific issues of her
day. For Sor Juana, Catholic spirituality centers on a female figure, Mother of God, created prior
to all other human or natural existence and unparalleled in grace and wisdom.
In this vein, Michelle A. González finds in Sor Juana “not only a substantial source of creative
philosophical and theological thought but also a vital historical resource for feminist scholar-
ship,” supplementing a missing “intellectual history” for Latina Americans that restores beauty
to reasoning and agency to women (4). In particular, González finds Sor Juana’s writings a rich
source for theological method and theological anthropology, showing precedent and affirma-
tion for present-​day feminist and egalitarian theologies that emphasis inter-​subjectivity, egali-
tarianism, and community (18–​19).

“Illustrious lady, my lady” (courtly feminism)

Diverse settings nurtured Sor Juana’s pervasively woman-​identified consciousness. Her single-​by-​
choice criolla mother ran the sizable rural hacienda where young Juana knew Nahuatl-​speaking
indigenous laborers with traditions revering the goddess Tonantsi –​or Tonantzin, as Sor Juana’s
1676 villancicos for the Assumption call the Virgin Mary (Kirk 55; OC 2:17).19 Adolescence
brought her to the sumptuous viceregal court, where aristocratic circles fomented bonds of alli-
ance and patronage between women while conserving female cultural memory of earlier pow-
erful queenships.20 Her Hieronymite convent, named for the learned Roman scholar-​matron
St. Paula, formed a vital and prosperous female community of nuns, servants, and young pupils.
The intellectual and literary dialogism that stimulated Sor Juana’s interrogation of gen-
dered hierarchies invites feminist study. The literary, philosophical, and scientific background
reveals a genealogy of sources that supported her thinking, enabling her to inform, define, and
defend feminist (and other) insights. To support advocacy for women, her texts reference pre-
cursors both male and female, respected and contested. Not uniformly claiming that their works
directly support the ideas she espouses, she nevertheless supports her asseverations with theirs.
Of many classical models, she cites Ovid in particular as “poeta de mujeres,” with reference to
the female heroes of mythology that he voices in the Heroides (“Ovillejo”).
Sor Juana famously summons female predecessors as advocates for women. Nina Scott
(“La gran turba”) examines the list of forty-​two illustrious “Foremothers” in the Respuesta, a
catalogue of exempla renowned for intelligence and power, and characteristic of pro-​feminist
querelle texts, which argue by precedent for women’s rational and moral prowess. Georgina
Sabat-​Rivers notes that friendships, correspondence, and indeed collaborations with noble-
women served for enjoyment, and the sharing and extension of knowledge (“Mujeres nobles”).
Inquiry into early modern networks of correspondence, influence, and power among noble-
women, including in their role as cultural patrons, reveals evidence that refutes the perva-
sive isolation that historians such as Kelly and Lerner previously assumed to have fragmented
and curtailed women’s view of female knowledge and achievement. These connections pro-
vided cultural memory with which learned women (as friends or patrons) alerted interlocutors
or protégées to the existence and ideas of precursors. Scholarship confirms such networks,
supporting cultural and political agency between women of the aristocratic and upper
bourgeois classes.21

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“Transiting to the sumptuous gardens of Venus”

(sapphist feminism, Sor Juana’s lesbianism)
Sor Juana addressed to three vicereines more than forty passionate, often playful, love poems,
which long stirred uneasy critical reactions. Indeed, Nina Scott lists comments that range from
flat condemnation to “explaining away” the poems (“this is not what it seems”), by Juan León
Mera (1873), Ludwig Pfandl (1946), Rosario Castellanos ([1966] 1984), Octavio Paz (1982),
and others (“Ser mujer, ni estar ausente” 160–​61). But recent lesbian, gay, transgender, queer,
and intersex advocacy, activism, scholarship, and cultural criticism has sparked reconsideration
of this work by a poet whom many consider sympathetically gender-​queer: a nun, dwelling in
her chosen homosocial world and therefore unregulated by many normative enforcements that
governed social expectations outside. These poems demonstrate active cultural agency: rework-
ing longstanding lyric vocabularies, they claim a female authority of learning, wit, engagement,
and soul. Scott was first to investigate the body of poems addressed to the vicereine María Luisa
Manrique (which, as Scott notes, make up more than 15 percent of Sor Juana’s lyric corpus) in
both an aristocratic and a female homosocial context (“Ser mujer, ni estar ausente” 159). Scott
concludes that the primary love that Sor Juana expresses is for the woman patron who served
as midwife to her poetry, allowing it to see print and accrue plaudits: “el que una mujer salve la
obra de otra, me importa mucho más que resolver si hubo o no hubo relaciones eróticas entre
Sor Juana y María Luisa” (168) [the fact that one woman saved another’s work matters far more
to me than resolving whether or not erotic relations took place between Sor Juana and María
Luisa]. For Scott and other readers, these must be either poems of friendship (whether grateful,
fond, or laudatory), or of amorous love; the categories remain mutually exclusive, absent proof
of passionate physical contact between poet and addressee. As Martha Vicinus notes, such critical
readings hold research into women’s love for women to a “higher evidentiary standard” than
presumptively standard or normal (that is, male-​to-​female) lyric (59).
Similarly, non-​heteronormative critical approaches meet accusations of anachronism where
models presuming poetic heterosexuality do not (Powell, “Sor Juana’s Love Poems” 211).
Sophisticated thinkers occasionally forget, where sexuality is concerned, that phenomena and
terminology are not coterminous.The past reveals copious evidence and expression of same-​sex
erotic and affective energy; since Foucault’s History of Sexuality, literary and historical scholar-
ship wrestles with concepts for erotic love before modern sexual-​identity formation. Terms
include “same-​sex love and desire between women” (Sautman and Sheingorn); “the silent sin”
(Saint-​Saens); “female homoeroticism” (Brooten; who notes “Lesbia” in a second-​century man-
uscript “on women marrying other women, making ‘lesbian’ etymologically the oldest of any
of the terms currently used for persons in same-​sex relationships,” 22); “queer desire” (Traub);
“female intimacy” (Wahl); as well as “Sapphism.”
As Linda Garber observes, “The accusation of presentism … dogs the progress of all lesbian
historical work” (189). Historian Judith Bennett favors the capacious, much-​cited term lesbian-​
like, recommending that a first step

toward understanding the antecedents of modern sexual identities must be to examine

how well and how poorly our modern ideas of “lesbians” and “heterosexual women” and
“bisexuals” and “queers” works for the past. If we avoid these terms altogether, we will
create a pure, inviolable, and irrelevant past: a fetish instead of a history. (14)

Meanwhile, for the passionate address in these poems by Sor Juana, the allusive term Sapphic
aptly summons both lesbian love and this poet’s interest in literary predecessors. Without

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asserting anachronistic textual or sexual identity, or any direct connection to the classical lyricist
Sappho, one must employ some terminology, or succumb to suffocating wordlessness.22
Conversely, some interpretations literalize a version of Sor Juana’s passionate lyric address to
the countess by imagining steamy encounters between nun and noblewoman, such as María
Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (I The Worst of All) enacts.23 As Bergmann notes, the script
of Bemberg’s film includes poetic fragments without any of the poems in fact written to the
countess, although it was these that gave rise to the view of –​and critical consternation over
–​Sor Juana’s lesbian amorousness (“Abjection” 235–​40). This erasure of potent texts accompa-
nies the film’s displacement of “sexual desire and agency from the criolla poet to the powerful
condesa” (242). Once again, an idea of Sor Juana’s life displaces a reading of the actual work.The
“show me” conventions of films and novels –​rooted in while also formative to modern notions
of “real love” –​consistently demand and supply an eventual, literal, climactic display of tangled
bodies. (And why not!) However, courtly lyric empowers a figurative suggestiveness, developed
in premodern spheres constrained by sex-​and class-​segregations. Convent reality underscores
such constraint. Meetings between nun and visitor required supervision, behind iron locutory
bars; poetic intercourse, in its full sense, is not thus limited.
Although critics assume this passionate aspect of Sor Juana’s work to be exceptional, women’s
love poems to women constituted a widespread fashion in baroque Europe and its colonies, an
international Sapphic discourse employing a wide range of rhetorical modes: tender friendship,
playful wooing, and eroticism. Petrarchan topoi articulated passionate, woman-​to-​woman eroti-
cism in what our era views as paradoxically conservative and liberatory ways, voicing female
homosociality and amorousness in privileged aristocratic and bourgeois contexts. This poetry
frequently serves feminist purposes, satirizing the objectification and silencing of women while
opening a space for female passion and sexuality.24 Wittily underscoring the supposed impos-
sibility of female-​to-​female address, the poems “open up the very topic they appear decorously
to shut down: one woman’s passionate, sexualized love for another woman” (Powell,“Sor Juana’s
Love Poems to Women” 217–​18).
The woman-​centered vision of Sapphic lyric draws strength from cultural sites that modern
feminism eschews as retrogressive, irrational, or unscientific. Laudatory address to a woman
beloved evokes powers and privileges of the nobility. Further, the classical allusions that under-
score this highly cultivated cultural site of the courtly Petrarchan lyric serve another purpose
as well: they offer an alternative to strictly binary sex-​gender positions. As Dugaw and Powell
discuss, Sor Juana’s Neoplatonic view of the “neutrality” of non-​gendered souls evokes possibili-
ties outside physical, and thus socially mandated, masculinity or femininity (130).
Since the 1990s, various studies have brought focus and context to Sor Juana’s homo-​amo-
rous and gender-​bending writings, enlisting queer theory to correct past distortions and to cel-
ebrate poetry that languished seemingly illegible to critics. Emilie Bergmann critiques Octavio
Paz’s attempt to create versions of Sor Juana’s life in order to explain aspects of her writings,
including these poems of loving friendship, in terms of the very norms of “lo femenino” –​in
gender and sexuality –​that the poems work to defy or break open (“Ficciones,” see especially
175–​79). Georgina Dopico Black examines Los empeños de una casa as interweaving homo-​and
heteroerotic desire: the love-​triangle competition of Leonor and Ana, Castaño’s transvestism that
sparks Pedro’s longing, and even the admiringly rendered authorial “alter ego” that Sor Juana
presents in Leonor’s self-​description. Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel and Electa Arenal explore
the “queer bird” (rara avis) that Sor Juana knows herself to be: a woman defying sex-​gender
categories in achievement and fame. Their essay questions the incompletely theorized deploy-
ment of critical categories that often relegate Latin Americanists’ studies of “gender” to the
female, while focusing “sexuality” studies on male categories, in ways that maintain invisibility

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of female sexualities both lesbian and heterosexual.Velasco’s Lesbians in Early Modern Spain jux-
taposes representations from high and low culture, from a dildo shop to Neoplatonic verse, to
situate a view of “Looking Like a Lesbian” (162–​78) that includes Sor Juana’s noble and ribald
poetry (175–​77). Although not directly addressing Sor Juana, Giffney, Sauer, and Watt’s The
Lesbian Premodern richly and with deft insight offers historiographic and literary ways of fram-
ing and understanding lesbian-​like experience across cultural and ontological borders that mark
the self-​imaginaries of different epochs. This collection should be a new point of departure for
theorizing and investigating past and present views of sexualities.
Further work on the feminist and lesbian Sor Juana will likely apply queer theoretical
approaches to her early modern convent context and habit to clarify how these freed her
from the constrictions of binary gender. Historical, sacramental celibacy will emerge as another
sexual orientation among several –​not merely an absence or refusal. Exploring women’s corre-
spondence networks, arts patronage, and other intellectual work may reveal to what degree and
by what sources Sor Juana could know, directly or by report, of predecessor feminist thinkers,
and of the vital poetic practice of Sapphic address between women, across languages.
Investigation into Sor Juana’s biography, and how her writings reflect her life, continues to
date. Still troubling is the way her life is read against her imagined death. Central questions
remain unanswered, especially regarding her last years, and the meaning to be drawn from them.
Response and reception theories encourage us to remain alert, to paraphrase Judith Bennett, to
what is “feminist-​like” as well as “lesbian-​like” in Sor Juana and other early modern women. As
their writings testify, spirited, intelligent, and strong women countered patriarchal restrictions
to thought and action, then as now.

Notes
1 I thank editors Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau for the invitation and Dianne Dugaw, Elise Hansen,
Analisa Taylor, and Alison Weber for critique and camaraderie assisting this chapter.
2 See Arenal, “Reclaiming” and Bergmann, “Dreaming.”
3 A prominent review of Arenal and Powell’s edition of The Answer /​La Respuesta complained of hearing
“the tread of the thought-​policewoman” in the “emphasis on gender” cited in introduction and notes
(Tomlinson 28).
4 Juan Carlos González Boixó observes, “lo que sí es seguro es que Sor Juana tuvo una conciencia muy
clara de su derecho como mujer al estudio y al desarrollo de su intelectualidad en igualdad con el varón.
Sin duda que bien le corresponde … el calificativo de ‘feminista’ ” (“Feminismo” 34) [what is certain
is that Sor Juana was clearly aware of her right as a woman to study and to develop her intellectual life
just as men could. Without doubt, the term ‘feminist’ is well applied to her”]. Following her provocative
essay title, “Did Mystics Have Sex?” medievalist Nancy Partner asks, how can scholars responsibly not
investigate, theorize, and represent whatever seems to be going on in erotically charged texts? (303–​02).
5 Although Zavala does not explicitly identify premodern feminism (she calls Sor Juana and her coevals
“precursoras”), she traces an autonomous women’s literary history to the sixteenth century with roots in
the medieval (33).
6 The postmodern neologism gynesis originates with Alice Jardine (Gynesis). Harvey notes the importance
of distinguishing work on forms of feminism in the early modern and work by feminists on the period.
Because many writings by Sor Juana scrutinize gender imbalance, the distinction dwindles.
7 Sor Juana’s thinking overlaps but varies from the categories that Weber sees in nuns’ writings generally,
just as her literary-​humanist production exceeds the common array of convent genres.
8 Neither “feminist” nor “anti-​feminist” are exclusively gendered querelle positions; male authors con-
tributed to both sides. Margaret King and Albert Rabil Jr. broadly survey querelle issues in “The Other
Voice.”
9 We might note that such critiques set the definitional bar rather high; modern feminisms still struggle
to render shattering transformation.

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10 See Powell, “Revisiting the Querelle,” for a discussion of this point. For expressions of an early
modern feminist worldview generally omitted from critical consideration, see Dugaw and Powell,
“Feminist Road.”
11 My translation. Castellanos affirms that “lo novelesco” replaces “su vocación intelectual y religiosa, del
ambiente en que se forjó, de los obstáculos ante los que adquirió reciedumbre, … de la manera como
su obra entronca con la tradición y de los matices con que la enriquece …”
12 The article is reprinted in Merrim, Feminist Perspectives 38–​60. Merrim terms Schons “the mother of
feminist studies on Sor Juana” (8).
13 See “La muerte,” “Años finales,” and “Silencio final.”
14 Puccini notes both “fervor feminista” (85 n 148) [feminist fervor] and this “ ‘prematuro’ feminismo”
(85 n 149) [premature feminism] in an admiring discussion of the courageously, socially nonconformist
attitudes she expresses in the Respuesta.
15 Octavio Paz’s extensively detailed study (see Bénassy-​Berling’s chapter in this volume,) claims
Sor Juana as early Mexican nationalist emblem, complexly focusing and blurring her apogee and
her end.
16 See also Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory.”
17 Ludmer’s influential article is widely cited within and beyond Sor Juana studies, across feminist literary,
rhetorical, social science, and philosophical fields. See, for example, Bartow: “[As Ludmer explains] Sor
Juana does not say what she knows and knows what not to say” (41).
18 Lavrin’s extensive research, including the monograph Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico
(2008), gives vital context on viceregal Mexican nuns.
19 Kirk cites anthropologist Alan R.  Sandstrom on use of the name by Nahua today, when speaking
Spanish, for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is seen as the same as Tonantsi: “one female deity is the most
important member of the Nahua pantheon.This is the goddess Tonantsi, whose name can be translated
from Nahuatl as ‘our sacred mother’ ” (Sandstrom 26, cited by Kirk 165–​66 n 6).
20 Systemic changes in early modern courtly contexts prompted women of courtier and upcoming bour-
geois classes to occupy new cultural spaces contingently open to them, in a transitory shift that later
disappeared in the modern and capitalist patriarchal system. See Giulia Calvi; Joan Kelly, “Did Women
Have a Renaissance?”; and Clarissa Campbell Orr (esp. 1–​36).
21 See Powell, “Revisiting the Querelle,” especially 211–​14.
22 See Lanser, as well as Bonnet.
23 See also Bergmann, “La cineasta pinta a la poeta.”
24 See Dugaw and Powell, “Sapphic Self-​Fashioning.”

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8
TRANSLATIONS OF SOR
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Ideology and interpretation

Isabel Gómez

She who is my original

has forwarded me to you,
and although you see her drawn,
you will never see her withdrawn;
completely transformed in me,
she hands you the conquest: her love;
Décima 102 (1692)
Translation by Edith Grossman (45)

Sor Juana’s Décima 102 comments on the relationship between an “original” woman and her
portrait, but it also prompts consideration of the relationship between the figure of the poet and
her translators. The terms offered to conceptualize a work of art –​originality, transformation,
conquest, and love –​resonate with the work of Lori Chamberlain to demonstrate the metaphoric
links between discourses around translation and gendered concepts of power. Translations of Sor
Juana’s works into English can be divided into two phases of activity: anthologized selections
(1890s–​1970s), followed by the addition of collected translations and critical editions (1980s–​
present). The diverse practices of translation represented in both phases provide fertile ground
for work in translation history, comparative descriptive translation studies, gender in translation,
translating literary representations of oral speech, and translation as performance. This literature
review considers scholarship on translations of Sor Juana’s works alongside translators’ statements
and analyzes selected translations that either fulfill or swerve away from translators’ stated goals.1
I trace the transition between these two phases to critical parameters that continue to influ-
ence interpretations by her translators, either through adherence or resistance. The early, and
sparse, anthologized translations pre-​date the work of feminist Hispanists, including Marie-​
Cécile Bénassy, Georgina Sabat, and Electa Arenal, who, starting in the 1970s, drew attention to
Sor Juana’s writing. Feminist readings signal contemporary translators to take gender into consid-
eration, whether or not they choose a feminist translation approach, as I will discuss in the case
of two recent translations of her devotional exercises. The landmark biography by Octavio Paz
Las trampas de la fe (1982) [The Traps of Faith (1988)] led many translators to understand her works
through his conception of the silences her writing contains.2 Some challenge these paradigms;

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Susana Hernández Araico, for instance, objects to Paz’s strategy of defining Sor Juana’s life in
terms of a power struggle with the ecclesiastical power structure (xix). Yet his reading proved
an appealing challenge to translators, who tend to describe their task as working past silences in
her texts.
In the field of Translation Studies, a variety of approaches have been applied to translations
of the Mexican Hieronymite’s best-​known texts. Fritz Hensey uses syntax analysis to compare
an Italian translation of Primero Sueño (The Dream) by Insel Marty (1985) with an English ver-
sion by John Campion (1983). Focusing on tactics for translating hyperbaton, he concludes that
Marty utilizes the device in different places and with less complex syntax, whereas Campion
translates with Latinate diction to achieve distancing effects through other means. Barbara
Fiorellino compares three Italian translations of Primero Sueño, showing how each subsequent
translation increased the degree of metric mimesis. Margaret Sayers Peden analyzes versions of
Sor Juana’s most frequently translated work, Sonnet 145 “Éste, que ves, engaño colorido” (This
that you gaze on, colorful deceit, “Building a Translation” 22). Sayers Peden compares nine
translations, from the version by Muna Lee first published in 1925 to her own, from 1983. She
discerns a pattern in which all translators maintain the structural relationship between the first
word and the final line: “Éste…. es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada” (This … is but cadaver,
ashes, shadow, void). She claims the diverse versions that translators create for the rest of the
conceits demonstrate their “softness” or “imprecision” (27).
In addition to comparative descriptive translation studies, translations of Sor Juana have
attracted scholarship in feminist reader response theory. Anthony Potter finds divergences in
nearly every sentence when comparing the translation of The Answer by Trueblood (1988)
and the feminist version by Arenal and Powell (1996). Trueblood breaks apart her long
sentences and paragraphs; Arenal and Powell maintain the source’s stylistics. Drawing from
feminist reader response theory, Potter understands the different paratextual and translation
decisions to stem from ideological positions. For example, one sixth of Trueblood’s notes
correct errors in Sor Juana’s references, an interest that the scholarly apparatus by Arenal
and Powell does not reproduce. Potter also identifies their ideological intervention within
translation choices that emphasize “a collective rather than an individual conception of the
world” (Potter 27). He concludes that neither translation is adequate: “one reproduces an
oppressive male perspective and the other produces a limited, fixated perspective on one
aspect of a richly multiple text” (33). Further comparative analysis of the subsequent transla-
tion by Edith Grossman could determine whether retranslation has yet produced a version
that avoids these limitations.
The analysis of translations of Sor Juana is also useful as a tool to understand baroque aesthet-
ics and philosophies. Daniel Hunt teaches with intralingual translations to oblige students to
slow down: unraveling the same hyperbaton multiple ways, even within Spanish, demonstrates
their complexity and warns against settling on any one reading (185). Amanda Powell uses her
experiences translating Sor Juana to approach Neo-​Platonic and Stoicist philosophical tropes in
“Traveling in Place: Baroque Lyric Transports.” These approaches to translation studies (com-
parative descriptive, feminist reader response, pedagogical, philosophical) are not exhaustive, and
I point towards other possible directions in what follows.

Early portraits of Sor Juana: translation history of the Americas

All of the analyses above focus on translations produced after the advent of feminism and the
Paz biography. Georges L. Bastin argues for the need to map out the history of translation in
Latin America beyond well-​known highlights in the colonial period and by contemporary

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masters Paz and Jorge Luis Borges (117) and independent of European periodization (124–​
25). In addition, translations of Latin American texts from the centuries between these
periods need more study. Research into the translation history of Sor Juana could inform
understandings of early twentieth century discourses about Pan-​American culture, transat-
lantic culture, or global Catholicism, and fill in an under-​examined era within the translation
history of the Americas.
The bibliographical source by Remigio Ugo Pane (1946) compiles translations into
English before the consecration of Sor Juana’s works to a central place in Mexican and
World literary canons. His work shows that she was published in anthologies of Spanish
poetry, Hispanic American poetry, and World Literature; in literary journals of the United
States; in cultural affairs journals aimed at a “Pan-​American” audience; and in Catholic
publications.3 These early translations –​selections of poetry and excerpts from dramatic
works –​frequently began with a biography and account of the nun-​poet’s disappearance
from the canon for two hundred years.4 Before Paz’s reading made her into an enigma,
she figured more simply in these different spaces and discourses. For example, in the 1897
Library of the World’s Best Literature:  Ancient and Modern Volume XVII:  MAI-​MOM, she
circulated under the label “The Mexican Nun” (Malone 9956–​64). Unlike most authors,
she was indexed not by her last name, but rather by a country of origin that did not exist
in her time. Thomas Walsh, editor of the Catholic Anthology, translates her title as “Sister,”
in contrast to the contemporary convention to name her “Sor Juana” even in English-​
language texts. Muna Lee (1895–​1965), an American writer based in Puerto Rico, pub-
lished the biographical essay “A Charming Mexican Lady” in American Mercury (January
1925). Lee embeds translations of “Hombres necios” (Foolish Men) and “Éste, que ves”
(This that you gaze on) in her sketch of the “brilliancy and color of life” of this “wise and
passionate woman, capable of complete detachment in the analysis of her own emotions”
(105). While wisdom and passion fit the contemporary persona of the author, detachment
does not.
Robert Graves is the first translator to match her with other female poets in his essay “Juana
de Asbaje” (1955), comparing her to Sappho and the seventh century Irish poet Liadan.5 He
does not base his connections between Juana and Liadan solely on their female experience
or tragic biographies. Instead, he emphasizes their satirical humor and resistance to religious
and linguistic norms of their day, which he attributes to their subaltern status in colonized
New Spain and Ireland. His essay includes translated selections from “Hombres necios” and
“Villancico for Saint Peter, 1677.” Graves associates her “satire of the scorching Irish sort” with
her Basque heritage, her “Vizcayan blood” (180). As if he were anticipating the translations by
Samuel Beckett, he compares her internal rhymes in the villancico (carol) to St. Peter to “the
purest Bardic tradition” of Gaelic verse (180).
These early translations of Sor Juana into English, even the prose glosses by Elias J. Rivers
(1966), “apparently fell into oblivion” (Maier 10). The translations by Samuel Beckett for the
1958 Mexican Anthology edited by Octavio Paz did not meet the same fate. Editors Cecilia
Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-​Grosman selected Beckett’s translations for the Oxford Anthology of
Latin American Poetry (2009).6 He titles his minimalistic translation of the villancico “Aquella
Zagala” (from “Asunción, 1676” OC 2.9) “Christmas Hymn”:

She who made boast

her dusky hue
was kindled by
the Phoebean rays.

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For whom her Spouse

in ardent vigil
sped his way
o’er hill and dale. (Beckett 89)

Beckett achieves a pared-​down effect through the construction of a syllabic verse form in
English of four syllables to approximate the hexasyllabic Spanish. He eliminates the refrain
in which a chorus interrupts this lyrical communion between the Spouse and beloved. Alan
Trueblood and Powell also translate this villancico; neither eliminates the refrain, and they use
slightly longer lines of accentual rather than syllabic verse. The first two lines cited here read,
respectively: “she grows dark and comely /​as she notes with pride” (Arenal and Powell, Answer
… Second, 175) and “who was proud to say /​she was black but comely” (Trueblood 123).

Contemporary translators recreate the Baroque

Contemporary translators of Sor Juana’s major texts use divergent means to construct a repre-
sentation in English of her Novohispanic baroque aesthetics. In A Sor Juana Anthology (1988),
Trueblood describes his approach as honoring the importance of rhyme in her lyric. Powell
and Arenal wrote the first feminist translation of La Respuesta (1994) and prioritize a “woman-​
centered vision” (xx) when translating her poetry. Sayers Peden (1997) describes her method of
using meter, rhyme, and diction “with a suggestion of time past” (vi). Edith Grossman (2014),
Sor Juana’s most recent English translator, invents a syllabic meter for her versions. All four
draw from Paz’s biography, defining their goals as translators: to reproduce the poetic forms
that are “the signs of the society they represent … rigid, strict, tortured, pedantic –​baroque”
(Peden 1985, 6); to “preserve meaningful ambiguities intact” (Arenal and Powell xix); or to “to
reproduce ‘the silence of the things that cannot be said’ in another language” (from Paz, cited in
Grossman xx). Trueblood orders his translations as the poems appear in The Traps of Faith (xiv).
Unlike the other three widely available contemporary translations, Grossman’s publisher does
not include any of the source texts. Trueblood’s provides the shorter lyric but not Primero Sueño
or the Respuesta; the Arenal and Powell and Sayers Peden volumes are fully bilingual facing-​page
editions.
Grossman understands her task as crafting a poem in English without using archaic vocabu-
lary for effect and justifies retranslating Sor Juana because translations age while “works of
literary art” do not (xvii). Her method differs significantly from previous versions: where the
majority of Sor Juana translators have worked with accentual-​syllabic meter, typical of English
lyric, she creates syllabic verse in English that preserves the number of syllables in each line
(xix–​xxii).7 She also strives “to place the stresses in the English line where they are found in
the Spanish” (xxii). The lines of my epigraph include two versos agudos, where the accent falls
on the final syllable:

She who is my original

has forwarded me to you,
and although you see her drawn,
you will never see her withdrawn; (45)
(A tus manos me traslada
la que mi original es,
que aunque copiada la ves,
no la verás retratada) (OC 1.239)

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In her translation focused on metric echoes, Grossman sets up a metric emphasis on “you”
and “drawn” parallel to that of “es” and “ves.” Her syllabic verse recreates the tension between
essences and appearances thematic of this romance (ballad).
Trueblood emphasizes the importance of rhyme, with some trepidation. He writes: “it
became clear that I could not ignore in English the decisive role played in [Sor Juana’s verse] by
rhyme. This despite a conviction that primacy given to rhyme is probably the commonest error
of judgment a translator can make when the receiving language is English” (xiii). This choice
marks a major difference from other translators –​Grossman avoids rhyme and Peden deploys
archaic diction as her nod to the past. His translation of the epigraph demonstrates how distant
his translation is from Grossman’s avoidance of rhyme:

My original, a woman,
sends me on to you;
though here you see her copied,
her feelings still are true.
Though converted into me,
her love remains your due. (Trueblood 63)

While the terms “original, copied, true, converted” relate to translation metaphors as
much as in Grossman’s version, his rhymes “you, true, due” give the work a more quotidian,
oral register.
Peden describes translation as identification with the authorial figure: she translates “out
of love and fascination” (v) and makes choices based on her perception of what “would have
pleased Sor Juana” (vii). Her 1997 collection Poems, Protest, and a Dream combines and adds
to two previous publications: A Woman of Genius (1987) and Poems: An Anthology (1985). She
cites George Steiner’s claim that “Art dies … when we lose or ignore the conventions by
which it can be read” (qtd in Peden, Poems, Protest vi), concluding that: “The baroque can-
not come to us. We must go to the baroque; we must attempt to recreate it by means of that
backward reach” (vi). I describe her method with the Haroldo de Campos term “transcrea-
tion.”8 She reconstructs complex figures in English rather than attempting to reproduce all
the semantic content of Sor Juana’s poems.9 From this premise, she explains her title “First
I Dream” for Primero Sueño rather than the standard translation, “First Dream.” She invents
a baroque conceit in English for a title that contained a first person verb hidden within the
noun “sueño,” claiming this idea came to her “not precisely in a dream” (Poems, Protest vii).
For Sayers Peden, this daring title highlights Sor Juana’s challenge to a male establishment
through her claim to knowledge (Poems, Protest vii). Trueblood also considers the hidden
gender of the speaker in “First Dream”: he ponders the same ambiguities as Sayers Peden,
but comes to a different conclusion. Where she makes the “I” explicit in the title, he does
not gender the speaker in his final lines: “flooding with light whatever had been opaque /​
throughout the world, and summoning me awake” (Trueblood 195). He describes the final
line as “an author’s signature” which confirms the poem is about “the ‘sexless’ soul” and
the final feminine note only “demonstrates that her pen’s creation is indistinguishable from
that of a man” (21). While none of the available translations mark the gender of the poetic
speaker in this final line, I think the version by John Campion (1983) best recreates the sur-
prise of “y yo, despierta” through spacing: “The World illuminated, /​and I, awake”
(n.p.).10 The pause Campion creates by placing “awake” at a distance from the “I” of the
speaker effectively reconstructs what Trueblood calls her signature.11

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Feminist interpretations of Sor Juana: a gender-​neutral soul

Sor Juana’s work demands careful considerations of gender, as we see in the case of Primero Sueño
where the poetic speaker is genderless until the final line.12 The question of whether to translate
her work using a gender studies framework has not been resolved, including how to translate
Sor Juana’s conception of what we now call gender roles.13 In the introduction to the expanded
second edition of the Respuesta (2009), Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell point out that a focus
on texts with perceived feminist themes had the unintended consequence of drawing scholars
to secular genres, prose writings, her philosophical, historical, love poetry, or other social modes.
This discouraged interest in her theological and devotional works and reinforced the idea of
Sor Juana as the Novohispanic or New World feminist rather than one of many. They reference
Kathleen Ann Meyers as one to correct this critical blind spot (Arenal and Powell xi–​xii); in
Neither Saints Nor Sinners, Meyers puts Sor Juana’s writing together with the self-​fashioning texts
of other women writers.
Electa Arenal, Dianne Dugaw, and Amanda Powell work at the intersection of gender stud-
ies and feminist early modern scholarship. By translating with gender in mind, they at times
emphasize the interest that Sor Juana expresses in the Neo-​platonic concept of the gender-​
neutral soul; at other times a translation emphasizes gender awareness by maintaining the
presence or absence of a gendered subject or pronoun. For example, Dugaw and Powell draw
attention to the distinction between the Spanish word “sexo” and their choice to translate it
as “gender”:

Ser mujer, ni estar ausente,

no es de amarte impedimento;
pues sabes tú, que las almas
distancia ignoran y sexo. (OC 1.57)
(Your being a woman, your being gone
cannot pose the slightest hindrance
to my love, for you know our souls
have no gender and know no distance.) (Dugaw and Powell 126)

Citing this passage in source and target languages draws a parallel but maintains distance
between the Neoplatonic philosophy of a gender-​neutral soul and the contemporary language
of gender construction: “Sor Juana engages a neoplatonic understanding of the ‘sexless’ –​we
would say genderless  –​soul that elides masculine and feminine” (Dugaw and Powell 126).
Powell and Dugaw perceive a “sapphic mode” of poetry that creates a “hermaphroditic self ” that
“represents a philogynist ‘road not taken’ by later modernity” (123).
Electa Arenal expresses the same desire to center the feminism and the gender politics of
Sor Juana’s work through acts of translation in her 1989 review article evaluating Trueblood’s
anthology, the translation by Sayers Peden of Paz’s The Traps of Faith, and the translation by
Luis Harss of El sueño. Arenal praises Paz, Trueblood, and Harss for their detailed depiction of
the author, yet she critiques a lack of “gender consciousness” in the translations (469). Arenal’s
review offers suggestions for translations that leave gender identity generalized.
Translators make choices about gender based on factors including grammatical gender in
Spanish, Sor Juana’s poetic ambiguity, gender-​aware readings of these choices, and more. Arenal
draws attention toTrueblood’s introduction of a male subject in Sonnet 151,“Diuturna enferme-
dad de la esperanza” where the source does not specify gender (“Review of Sor Juana” 468–​69).
His translations can be usefully compared with earlier and subsequent versions by Beckett

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and Sayers Peden: the earliest translation is the only one with consistently gender-​neutral
language:

Diuturnal infirmity of hope,

thou that sustaineth thus my fainting years,
and on the equal edge of weal and woe
holdest in equilibrium the scales
forever in suspense, forever loath
to tilt, thy wiles obeying that forbid
the coming ever to excess of measure
either of confidence or of despair.
Who rid thee of the name of homicide?
For thou art crueler still, if well we mark
that thou suspendest the deluded soul
between a wretched and a happy lot,
not to the end that life may be preserved,
but to inflict a more protracted death. (Beckett 83–​84)

While Beckett does not gender the speaker in his translation, the adjective in “my fainting
years” is more associated with femininity than Trueblood’s “my weary years.” As Arenal points
out, Trueblood’s translation casts the stakes of the poem in a masculinized light by putting
“men’s lives” at risk and accusing the personification of hope of having “killed a man,” which
Beckett translates with the gender-​neutral “name of homicide”:

Hope, long-​lasting fever of men’s lives,

constant beguiler of my weary years,
…
Who was it claimed you never killed a man?
That you’re a slayer anyone can tell
from the suspense in which you keep the soul
poised between lucky and unlucky chance.
Nor is it true your aim is multiplying
our days on earth: it’s to protract our dying. (Trueblood 99)

The final couplet reflects Trueblood’s use of rhyme; the pair “multiplying/​dying” emphasizes
the relationship between enchantment and disenchantment, reproduction and destruction.
While Sayers Peden does not describe her translations as feminist, they demonstrate a con-
cern for treating instances of gender with care. Her version feminizes the personification of
hope as “Murderess” compared to Trueblood’s “slayer” and Beckett’s “homicide”:

  Still, Murderess is how you must be known,

for Murderess you are, when it is owned
how between a fate of happiness or strife
  my soul has hung suspended far too long;
you do not act thus to prolong my life
but, rather, that in life death be prolonged. (177)

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Sayers Peden constructs a beautiful hyperbaton in the final line, where “life death” comes
together, almost one entity, in the center of the iambic pentameter line. She relies less on anti-
quated diction than Beckett and more on mixed syntax.

Translating baroque genres beyond lyric:

devotional exercises, enigmas, and villancicos
Sor Juana worked within secular and sacred literary genres: elite lyric forms imported from Italy
such as the sonnet or the silva;14 the popular carol, or villancico, perfected in New Spain (Martínez-​
San Miguel); rhetorical and theological prose; and occasional writing such as the Allegorical Neptune
(1680). Despite this diversity of forms, the lyric poems, particularly sonnets, are among the most
frequently translated of her works. The sonnets inspire stand-​alone volumes, such as the early
collections Ten Sonnets from Sor Juana (Elizabeth Anderson, 1943) and The Pathless Grove (Pauline
Cook, 1950), and those translated later by Sandra Sider (1987, 1991) and Carl W. Cobb (2001).
Cobb adheres to the Petrarchan sonnet, seeing that precise form as essential. Willis Barnstone
matches her sonnets with those of Francisco de Quevedo, Antonio Machado, Federico García
Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel Hernández. Other editors classify some works as “love
poetry,” producing free translations (Larkin and Manrique) and an art book (Glantz and Marin).
As translators increasingly devote themselves to other genres, translation studies can follow; her
devotional exercises, enigmas, and villancicos have all attracted multiple recent translations.15
Two translations of her theological prose were published in 2005, and both display the
necessity of choosing how to translate gendered language regardless of the translator’s identi-
fication with a feminist translation method. Grady C. Wray decides not to alter references to
“el hombre” or “los hombres” when referring generally to humanity. While he infers that if Sor
Juana were writing today, “she would pay close attention to inclusive language that does not
discriminate against members of her sex,” he contends that the first translation should be more
literal than reconstructive: “because this is the first English translation of the Ejercicios/​Exercises,
I have chosen to maintain the references to ‘man,’ ‘men’ and ‘mankind’ that reflect the original
Spanish of the period” (Wray, Devotional 131). For example, from the Sixth Day:

¡Ea, Señores! … Consideremos que si una imagen de leño o bronce, por ser del Señor
nos mueve a veneración y reverencia, ¿cuánto más lo debe hacer la imagen y semejanza
viva que está en nuestros prójimos? ¿Atreviéraste tú a un hijo de Dios y de la Virgen,
y hermano de Cristo a desearle mal? Pues todos los hombres (aunque no naturales)
hijos son de Dios y de María y hermanos de Cristo nuestro Señor; imágenes son hechas
a la similitud de Dios, y Cristo es imagen hecha a semejanza del hombre. (OC 4.493,
bold is mine)

Wray maintains the masculine gender for the general category of “man,” translating this
passage:

Oh, ladies and gentlemen! … Let us consider that if a wooden or bronze image of
the Lord moves us to veneration and reverence, how much more should the live image
or likeness that is in our fellow man move us? Would you dare wish anything bad on a
child of God and the Virgin and a brother of Christ? Well, all men (although they may
not be true kin) are children of God and of Mary and brothers of Christ our Lord; their
images are made in the likeness of God, and Christ is the image made in the likeness of
man.(Devotional 169, bold is mine).

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In the case of “our fellow man” as a translation for “nuestros prójimos,” Wray has perhaps
overcommitted to his translation choice to maintain the masculine gender of humanity.
Pamela Kirk Rappaport meets Wray’s historical approach with a theologically-​based method
in her translation collection, published in the Paulist Press series “The Classics of Western
Spirituality.” Kirk translates the same passage:

Come, gentlemen! … Let us consider how if an image of the Lord made of wood or
bronze moves us to veneration and reverence, how much more the living image and like-
ness which is that of our neighbors? Do you dare to wish evil to a child of God and
of the Virgin, and a brother or sister of Christ? Furthermore, all of us are, although not
naturally, sons and daughters of God and Mary and brothers and sisters of Christ
our Lord. They are images made in the likeness of God, and Christ is the image of God
made in the likeness of humankind. (191, bold is mine)

Kirk views the religious exercises in the context of other creative works in order to com-
ment on Sor Juana’s view of the “relationship of the artist and the representation of doctrine
in art” (25). Aiming for a “clear and readable” style, she describes her process as focused on
line-​by-​line translation and using alliteration rather than meter (41). Unlike Wray, Kirk chooses
a gender-​neutral term whenever possible as a “decision to use inclusive language in certain
cases” translating “el hombre” as “humanity” and “hermanos” as “brothers and sisters” because
“Sor Juana was acutely aware of the power of language to define women, and it seems to me
appropriate that a contemporary translation of her works would follow her” (41–​42).Yet where
Wray silently corrects Sor Juana’s form of address, consistently using the inclusive “ladies and
gentlemen” for her mix of “Señores y Señoras” and “Señores,” Kirk maintains Sor Juana’s direct
address to her readers, even when she merely includes “gentleman.” While neither Wray nor
Kirk describe their translation methods or motivations within the parameters of feminism, both
demonstrate the imperative for translators to make a conscious choice when translating Sor
Juana: whether to intervene into her discourse when it lacks gender neutrality.
In addition to the devotional exercises, Sor Juana’s enigmas have received new attention
from translators in the twenty-​first century. Enrique Martínez López discovered and pub-
lished them in 1968; they were not translated until 2006, first by Glenna Luschei and again
in 2015 by Chicana poet Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal. Written in Spanish for a Portuguese
convent audience, the enigmas require the translator to fill in gaps to interpret the text, since
the riddles do not include solutions. When selecting a tone for her translations, Luschei
weighs the dramatic monologue of Pope and the Romanticism of Keats before choosing
Emily Dickinson’s style: “simple and rigorous like Sor Juana’s, and share[s]‌her ecclesiastical
echoes” (22–​23). While Luschei had assumed the choice of tone would be her most difficult
task, she writes that decoding the enigmas proved the greater challenge (23). Conversely,
Villarreal resists choosing, because “Sor Juana does not force the reader to decide between
either yes or no, but rather facilitates the coexistence of yes and no to illustrate the viscera of
an oxymoron on paper” (25).
In her villancicos, Sor Juana writes within literary conventions for representing the oral
speech patterns of different sectors of society. These diverse voices often require additional
interpretive and creative acts from the translator. Her representations of orality and subalternity
can be doubly indeterminate because of the required act of interpretation in order to under-
stand these representations of orality, even within the source language, or because of the use of
doubled meanings created through non-​standard Spanish. Sor Juana constructs different oralities
to match character types, representations that sometimes perpetuate stereotypes about races and

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Translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

classes other than her own. These voices fulfill genre conventions of the ensaladilla section of
a villancico song cycle (Martínez San-​Miguel 151). Cecilia Vicuña and Jerome Rothenberg’s
translation for the Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry (2009) highlights indigenous and
Black voices in Sor Juana’s villancico for Saint Peter Nolasco, only including the two sections
of the carol cycle that include subaltern voices. I translated the same villancico, and our versions
reveal the degree to which translations interpret.16 The difference hinges on one word: “conga”
could be a drum or a Congolese woman, and in Sor Juana’s text it could be read as both at once.

Hoy dici que en las Melcede

estos Parre Mercenaria
hace una fiesa a su Palre,
¿qué fiesa? como su cala.
  Eya dici que redimi:
cosa palece encantala,
por que yo la Oblaje vivo
y las Parre no mi saca.
  La otra noche con mi conga
turo sin durmí pensaba,
que no quiele gente plieta,
como eya so gente branca. (OC 2.40)

Editors Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-​Grosman include “multiple poetics of Latin America over
five hundred years” (xviii) in their anthology, where Spanish and Portuguese serve as intermedi-
aries for indigenous languages reflected through them.Vicuña defines “mestizo poetics” as “the
dialogic exchange between two ethos,” broadly meaning European and indigenous (xix). The
translation by Vicuña and Rothenberg reads the word “conga” as a drum.

Sez today that in Melcedes

all them mercenary fadders
makes fiesta for they padre
face they’s got lak a fiesta.
Do she say that she redeem me
such a thing be wonder to me
so ah’s working in dat work house
& them Padre doesn’t free me.
Other night ah play me conga
with no sleeping only thinking
how they don’t want no black people
only them like her be white folk. (Rothenberg and Vicuña 33)

The “conga” in this poem, in my translation, refers to a Congolese woman, about whom the
poetic voice, himself a black slave, is speaking, reporting on an earlier conversation:

Ah was sayin in Las Mercedes

that da Mercedarian Order
gwan have a party for der Father.
Her face asked, Wha party?

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Isabel Gómez

  She say ta me, Wha Redeemer?

thing seem ta entertain her.
Cause ah live in da Oblaje
an don no Padre come an save me.
  Da other night wit mah conga
ah didn sleep for thinkin
dey don wan dark folk like her;
jus whites are to der likin. (Gómez 132–​3)

I read the female voice of the “conga” as articulating a different position than the male
voice narrating the encounter. Instead of interpreting this representation of oral speech with a
uniform speaker playing his drum, my interpretation emphasizes the possibility of the second,
female voice as an expression of greater ironic resistance to accepting spiritual salvation when
material salvation is denied. My interpretation fits a reading of the whole villancico song cycle
as a performative reflection of all sectors of Novohispanic society, which includes the voices of
an affected Latin-​obsessed student as well as the Black slave and the Nahuatl speaker, around
whom the Vicuña and Rothenberg translation centers. Comparing two translations of this
villancico demonstrates indeterminacy in translating literary representations of orality.

Translating the dramatic works for page and stage:

performance as translation
Translating theater requires confronting a basic problem in performance:  any staging puts a
work to the test of a particular public, which exposes a translation to many potential altera-
tions, new norms, and adaptations for a new public. Two translations of Los empeños de una casa
resulted from performances: David Pasto translated and directed The House of Trials for an inter-
national theater festival in El Paso and at the University of Oklahoma in 1997 and Catherine
Boyle for the Spanish Golden Age season at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004. Neither
translates the festejo interludes. Boyle describes reducing rhetorical flourishes, or “what I had
come to call ‘Sor Juana’s indulgences’ ” (14), in rehearsals to accommodate expectations audi-
ences bring to theater today. Early modern audiences were standing or mobile, entertained by a
broader carnival atmosphere, while contemporary theater-​goers remain seated. Boyle posits the
former created space for verbal flourishes the latter cannot tolerate (14–​15). In their bilingual
scholarly edition, translator Michael McGaha and editor Susana Hernández Araico take the
opposite approach and translate for the page. McGaha’s translation, unlike the others available,
includes the festejo elements which may be less recognizable to contemporary audiences: the
loa, the parodic songs sainetes and tetras, and the sarao, all composed in rhyme and meter that
approximate these festive genres. McGaha translates the octosyllabic meter of the acts into prose
because 80 percent of the play is in this form: he reads the romance form as neutral. Translators
for the stage and the page adapt for contemporary audiences, yet McGaha’s translation solutions
result in foregrounding the interludes.

A laboratory of texts: Sor Juana translation futures

The practice of translating Sor Juana as a mode of research can be expanded into different gen-
res of her work and into different genres of translation. For example, Julio César Santoyo incor-
porates Sor Juana’s translation of her own Latin epigram into Spanish coplas “Nomine materno,
mutate parte” (Maternal name, partly changed) into his history of self-​translators (43–​44).

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Translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Haroldo de Campos describes Sor Juana and Brazilian baroque poet Gregorio de Matos (1636–​
1696) as hemispheric poets, interconnected across political or linguistic boundaries more than
any contemporary poet. He describes their baroque aesthetics of imitation as cannibalizing the
literary forms of the center to produce something new (Campos 49). Sor Juana’s works could
be studied through Campos’s model of a “laboratory of texts” where the translator draws on
insights achieved through the translations of her work into any language and where intercultural
and linguistic approaches to translations inform one another.
The homophonic translation of Primero Sueño by Language poet and conceptual writer
John M. Bennett is an extreme example of what Campos calls a “transcreation.” He describes
his Prime Sway (1996) as the result of “forgetting Spanish” to write through the poem, where
he matches the sounds of Sor Juana’s Spanish words with English homophones. His translation
chapbook includes creative responses by five other authors in the form of essays, poems, and
palimpsest-​like text art. By comparison, these experimental “readings through” make Bennett’s
homophonic translation appear closest to the source text. In one of many echoes with the
source, in meaning not just sound, the final line reads:  “the Mundane illuminated, and you
despair” (30). In one response essay, Jim Leftwich describes Bennett’s method: “transduction is
reading strategy as writing procedure” creating “a new hybrid capacity of reader/​creator” (33–​
34). Examining his “transduction” as a performance of readership could illuminate the poem
through a lens different from semantic meaning.
Maria Tymoczko expresses concern that heterogeneous translation norms are increasingly
limited by “cultural hegemony operating at an international, multinational, or global level,”
calling the “contraction of the conceptual domain of translation” a form of “epistemicide”
(174). The disparate and incompatible translation methods applied to Sor Juana’s works dem-
onstrate the strength of a translation community. Reminders of the multiple publics for whom
Sor Juana wrote, these different translations allow her work to reach a diverse group of audi-
ences today. Translations may age, but new translations need not replace older versions. To the
contrary:  retranslations of Sor Juana produce new readings and invite comparison between
moments and locations across her translational afterlife.17

Notes
1 My underlying premise is W.O.V. Quine’s “principle of indeterminacy in translation” (qtd in Kristal
37–​39). He posits that potentially infinite translation methods could produce infinite translations, all
mutually incompatible but individually acceptable. Presuming that a translation cannot be judged by its
source, Quine’s principle of indeterminacy invites analysis in relation to its own translation methods, in
comparison to the ideologies of other methods, and with attention to the ways in which re-​translation
sheds light on the varied trajectories of the source text.
2 “An understanding of Sor Juana’s work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work
confronts. Her speech leads to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the ortho-
doxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence” (Paz, Traps 6).
3 The literary magazines include Fantasy:  A  Literary Quarterly (1931–​ 1943) and American Mercury
(1924–​1981); the Catholic publications Catholic Anthology (1942) and Commonweal (1924-​present); and
political or cultural affairs magazines Bulletin of the Pan American Union (1893–​1948), Inter America
(1917–​1926), and Survey or Survey Graphic (1921–​1948).
4 In this model, her English-​language translators follow a pattern set by Spanish philologist Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo.
5 Judith Thurman incorporated Beckett’s translations into I Became Alone:  Five Women Poets (1975),
alongside translations of Sappho and Louise Labé and works by Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson.
Angel and Kate Flores include Sor Juana in The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems from the Middle
Ages to the Present (1986). Frank J. Warnke matches her with French and Italian Renaissance poems by
Louise Labé (1522?–​1566) and Gaspara Stampa (1524?–​1554) in Three Women Poets (1987).

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6 As I will discuss further, the editors showcase Latin American “mestizo poetics”; this selection identifies
Sor Juana as a Novohispanic poet whose popular verse represents the Beloved of the Song of Songs as
a black or dark-​skinned woman.
7 Grossman uses syllabic meter to translate other Spanish poems, including The Solitudes by Luis de
Góngora.
8 For Campos, “every translation of a creative text will always be a ‘re-​creation,’ a parallel and autono-
mous, although reciprocal, translation –​‘transcreation.’… Of course, in a translation of this type, not
only the signified but also the sign itself is translated, that is, the sign’s tangible self, its very materiality
(sonorous properties, graphical-​visual properties)” (315).
9 For example, Peden translates a comic epigram about an ill-​fated sergeant using “sword/​word,” “cut-
less/​cutlass,” and “scabbard/​bared/​scab” for Sor Juana’s different wordplays “Alabarda/​Albarda” and
“Sargento/​Argento/​Sar/​Sarna” (158–​59). Instead of translating Sor Juana’s words, she reconstructs a
similar conceit in English. She also transforms Sor Juana’s octosyllabic meter into a galloping mix of
iambic pentameter and hexameter.
10 Beckett (1958): “committing to surer light /​the world illuminated and myself awake” (92). Harss
(1986): “the world, made visible, /​is clarified, and I awake.” (72); Peden (1997): “… an affirmation that
left /​the World illuminated, and me awake” (129). Grossman (2014): “… the world illuminated with
more /​certain light, and I, awake” (110).
11 To my knowledge, Campion’s is the first complete English translation. Beckett translated the end, lines
895–​975; Cunningham translated the first sections but died before completing the poem. His transla-
tion of lines 1–​150 was first published in 1968; for a 1995 publication, Alatorre transcribed the whole
unfinished manuscript including lines 1–​411.
12 Emilie Bergmann compares Sor Juana to Santa Teresa, another author facing the “dangerous project of
constituting a female subject in the context of Counter-​Reformation Hispanic discourse,” and con-
cludes that her “solution was androgyny rather than anonymity” (169).
13 Feminist thought had an impact on translation studies:  first through research to make visible the
contributions of translating women, then through feminist translation theory and practice, where re-​
translation intervenes into patriarchal language (Von Flotow, Translating Women 1–​5). Rosemary Arrojo
questions a feminist translation theory that criticizes ideological interventions from other perspectives,
yet celebrates when they are feminist (157).
14 The silva is a verse form containing eleven-​and seven-​syllable lines, mostly rhymed, but with no
fixed alternation of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables, and with a varying number of lines in each
stanza.
15 The Allegorical Neptune remains an uncompleted challenge to translators. Sor Juana’s early modern
approach to citation, mixing Latin quotes, loose translations, and paraphrases, is one obstacle. Vincent
Martin and Electa Arenal translate her Latin citations into Spanish in Neptuno Alegórico; Anna More
includes a selection in English.
16 I translated a longer selection, which appears in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works. A Norton Critical
Edition, edited by Anna More, before reading the Vicuña and Rothenberg version.
17 I thank everyone who read drafts of this chapter for their valuable contributions: Efraín Kristal, the
Revolutionary Women writing group at UCLA, Kristal Bivona, Jenny Marie Forsythe, Mariana
Grajales, and especially the editors of this volume.

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9
“MY ORIGINAL, A WOMAN”
Copies, origins, and Sor Juana’s iconic portraits

J. Vanessa Lyon1

Whether or not, as some believe, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was an amateur painter herself, the
baroque poet practiced the art of portraiture throughout her written works. Even when she
does not engage specifically artistic or aesthetic subjects, Sor Juana is a visual, one could say,
empirical, writer with a keen interest in how sight shapes knowledge and experience. Emilie
Bergmann has established her investments in contemporary optics and color theory (“Optics”).
But beyond the desire to apprehend and relate/​to the world by means of vision and representa-
tion, several of Sor Juana’s poems (e.g., décimas 61, 102, 103, 126, 127, and especially 89) lament
the false and seductive nature of portraits in general and painted women in particular.
An austere and fictively candid form of naturalistic portraiture had dominated the Spanish
court in Madrid since the arrival in the 1620s of Seville-​born Diego Velázquez (1599–​1660).
But poetry did not necessarily parallel painting. As late as the mid-​seventeenth century, in fact,
a Neoplatonic compulsion to endow the beloved with unearthly qualities and divine inacces-
sibility often mitigated poetic distrust of idealized images and deceptive beauty (Merrim, Early
Modern 48). Along these lines, as Lisa Rabin has shown, Sor Juana mobilizes Petrarchan tropes in
the tender and adulatory poetic portraits addressed to the vicereine of New Spain, her “friend
and patron,” the Condesa de Paredes and Marquesa de la Laguna, María Luisa Manrique de Lara
y Gonzaga. In these poems the unbridgeable gap between a portrait’s presence and the sitter’s
absence both echoes and activates longing, frustration, and other “vicissitudes of identity and
desire” (Rabin, “Speaking” 148). Perceptual tensions similarly inflect the first line of a poem
in which the poet ostensibly speaks while viewing her own portrait. Sor Juana’s much-​quoted
sonnet 145 begins: “Este que ves, engaño colorido” (“This object which you see –​a painted
snare”) (Arenal and Powell 159) or, in an alternate translation: (“These lying pigments facing
you”) (Trueblood 95). Here and elsewhere in her works, this insistently visual and pictorial
language consciously subverts Sor Juana’s wariness of portraiture’s ability to fool even the most
learned eye.
Perhaps it is fitting that few if any contemporaneous portraits remain of a woman whose
feelings for the genre were ambivalent at best. Indeed, Sor Juana’s choice to write portraits
might have more to do with a wish to situate her work within the protracted humanist paragone
of painting and poetry than with any affinity or affection for portraiture as such (Vitagliano
905). As Mary Garrard has shown, Giorgio Vasari, among other Renaissance and baroque art

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J. Vanessa Lyon

writers, confirmed a woman’s role as the implicitly desired and beautiful object of the male
subject-​viewer who portrays and thus “creates” her (571). Sor Juana’s critiques of the conceit
of portraiture seem crucially related to a broader protofeminist program in which she associ-
ates portraiture’s compulsive lying with the patriarchy’s need to make up, represent, and contain
women’s bodies and identities as it chooses. As Pamela Kirk concludes, it is difficult not to detect
this impulse in certain poetic descriptions of Sor Juana’s portraits by her twentieth-​century
biographer and champion, Octavio Paz, about which more will be said below (154). During
her own lifetime, Sor Juana faced numerous attempts by ecclesiastical censors to mute her
voice, to transform a speaking intellectual into yet another of portraiture’s gratifyingly “silent
ladies.” However, as Stephanie Merrim argues, despite her efforts to “ ‘decimate the portrait”
into “cadaver,” “dust,” “shadow,” and “nothing” in order to “destroy not only the object but the
subject herself ’ ” the poet seems unable, or ultimately, unwilling, to succeed (Early Modern 176).
It is appropriately, baroquely, paradoxical that Sor Juana’s wish to reduce to polvo, or dust –​to
pulverize –​any residual traces of her mirror image calls to mind not only the Ash Wednesday
biblical admonition “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (KJV Gen. 3:19)
but the very manner in which some of the most precious of an artist’s “lying pigments” are
ground into life with a mortar and pestle.2
As Sor Juana knew well, it is one of portraiture’s great ironies, and greatest charms, that no
matter how mendacious or mannered, a painted likeness will likely outlive and re-​define the
sitter by virtue of its very materiality and objecthood. A  portrait’s mere existence resurrects
the dead; likenesses made during a sitter’s lifetime are thus generally assumed to be the most
accurate and psychologically revealing. Yet many an art historian has bristled in her seat as a
colleague from another field launches into a discussion of some major historical figure by gra-
tuitously projecting a period portrait (too often unattributed and undated) in order to remind
the audience “who the person was.” On these occasions the likeness becomes what Harry
Berger Jr. has termed an “allegory of the archive.” Failure to acknowledge the work of art as a
visual means of speaking otherwise not only for but to the archive obscures the portrait’s status
as a representational index or “effect of the painter’s interpretation of the soul” rather than an
objective document of the sitter’s appearance or social position (89). Berger is intent on repo-
sitioning the early modern sitter’s agency, the “fiction” of his or her self-​conscious pose, within
a creative dynamic triangulated between sitter, artist, and beholder. But what of the majority of
Sor Juana’s portraits, in which the sitter’s agency as co-​constitutive subject is, in all probability,
nominal if not non-​existent?
Even the richest and most powerful female sitters were at an obvious cultural disadvantage
where Berger’s presumption of self-​constructed identity was concerned. But the literary his-
torian is right to complain that studies of early modern portraiture remain methodologically
dominated by artist-​centric and archive-​driven interpretations. One might accordingly expect
studies of Sor Juana’s images to emphasize the artistic effects achieved by a handful of identifi-
able and quite inventive European and Mexican artists for whom Sor Juana’s physiognomy, not
to mention her soul, were always already a fiction. With few exceptions, however, the small
and generally brief number of art historical studies of the portraits dwell mainly on Sor Juana’s
biography, typically devoting a few subsequent paragraphs to attribution, and fewer still to true
formal analysis. Although there may be as much or more than a century between the earliest
and latest portraits, literary and art historians alike often focus on the two major paintings, or
survey the larger group as if identical in age and origin, moving between and among them
with little investment in the artist’s response to established and/​or current artistic conventions
beyond viceregal Spain, or even to historical and literary relationships between Sor Juana and
other Hispanic sitters.

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The approach I wish to propose here is, by contrast, one that suggests further avenues for
examining the portraits both on their own formal and stylistic grounds and within a broader
art historical, rather than almost exclusively biographical, archival, or connoisseurial context.3
This chapter therefore primarily considers the artistic strategies as well as the scholarly reception
of the modest number of extant seventeenth and eighteenth century portraits of the Creole
Mexican poet-​nun. Surveying these paintings and prints as chronologically as possible, I also
suggest some formal and conceptual links between the Mexican images and canonical as well as
lesser-​known works produced by the European, mainly Spanish, artists with whom they were
undoubtedly in creative conversation.
Of the five known canvases, only one, Juan de Miranda’s standing full-​length portrait, may
have been executed while Sor Juana was alive.4 With the qualification that his conjecture was
“plausible” but “highly speculative,” Octavio Paz advanced the possibility that Miranda’s paint-
ing, long the property of Hieronymite nuns in Mexico City, could have been completed by
the artist during a visit to Sor Juana’s convent of San Jeronimo and Santa Paula, as early as
1680–​1688 (Traps 238). As Rogelio Ruiz Gomar notes, in view of what is now known about
the career of Juan de Miranda, who was associated with a Mexican painter’s guild by 1694, Paz’s
suggestion, long dismissed, now seems more possible.5
Paz began studying Sor Juana in the 1930s, returning to her poems with renewed energy in
the 1950s, and again, in the 1970s, when the baroque poet became the subject of his teaching
at Harvard (Paz, Traps v–​vi). Published in English in 1988, Paz’s influential biography, Sor Juana
or, The Traps of Faith, introduced the seventeenth-​century Mexican writer and her portraits to
many Anglophone readers for the first time. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990, Paz
took seriously the problem of dating and attributing the known images of Sor Juana. All subse-
quent studies are indebted to the Mexican poet for his astute, if not always completely accurate,
historical contextualization of the paintings and their makers. Perhaps not surprisingly, however,
Paz, the modernist academic, did not approach the paintings as a contemporary feminist might.
Pamela Kirk has sharply criticized him for training his analytical sights on the nun’s appealing
femininity and attractive physical features –​as imagined by the artists who portrayed her –​in
“projections of male fantasy” (154). Paz’s descriptions of the major paintings indubitably tend
toward the erotic.Yet in foregrounding Sor Juana’s fate as a victim of the “limiting dynamic of
the male gaze,” Kirk may unwittingly limit the beholder’s capacity to recognize what might be
regarded as the portraits’ more subversive qualities –​regardless of, or despite, the sex of their
creators. Balancing her numerous insights between poems and images, however, Kirk’s econom-
ical survey of five of the painted and printed portraits (which includes English translations of all
relevant inscriptions), is still the most comprehensive and provocative account of the images of
Sor Juana known at the time. In the book’s concluding section, “Iconographic Reduction,” Kirk
suggests more than one alternative to the widely accepted dating of the paintings. The most
important of her observations in this arena is that Miranda’s portrait presents three volumes
of Sor Juana’s published works, including the Fama y obras pósthumas (Fame and Posthumous
Works) of 1700 (152).Thus, as she suggests, while the painting may have been started during the
sitter’s lifetime, it seems not to have been completed –​or altered –​until after her death.
Ultimately, however, knowing that Miranda’s painting could have been executed from life
offers little revelation of Sor Juana’s true appearance or personality as even a Mexican contem-
porary understood them. In his portrait of the nun purportedly in situ in her convent library,
Miranda wisely moderates the essential flatness of his dry, linear technique and imbalanced,
text-​saturated composition with a pale and pleasingly pyramidal, though far from solid, female
form. Rather than the lived-​in attire of an active religious woman, the starched contours of Sor
Juana’s habit resemble the characteristically conical saya dresses worn by elite Spanish women

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J. Vanessa Lyon

of the previous century. With no feet to visibly ground her, the painter suggests Sor Juana’s
weightlessness (female exceptionalism or spirited otherworldliness?) via the dense teardrop folds
of her cream-​colored hanging sleeves, rendered by Miranda as oddly stiff, wing-​like append-
ages. Neither as detailed nor as expressive as her clothing, Sor Juana’s placid, inscrutable face
hovers mask-​like above a painted vellum shield, or escudo, displaying a colorful rendering of
the Annunciation, with Mary’s reading interrupted by the angel Gabriel. The prominent black
scapular, massive rosary beads, and pale blue border of her flared white tunic identify the grace-
ful but grand nun as a member of the Hieronymite order.
As Elizabeth Perry has explained (“Sor Juana Fecit”), beginning in the 1630s, Conceptionist
and Hieronymite nuns commissioned and displayed painted or embroidered escudos often
sumptuously framed in tortoiseshell (16–​17).6 Escudos are painstakingly depicted in portraits of
monjas coronadas, or crowned nuns, executed at the time of a young woman’s profession to a con-
vent, an act that the Catholic Church viewed as a metaphorical betrothal.7 As is often remarked,
there is no known portrait of Sor Juana coronada. This lacunae or visual silence may say some-
thing about the radical manner in which Sor Juana conceived her relationship to and role
within the Church –​and her possible rejection of more orthodox portrayals that would inevit-
ably undermine her reputation as a unique and learned woman, rather than another ostensibly
docile and submissive bride of Christ.
The original, even daring, quality of Miranda’s composition is therefore worthy of reassess-
ment. To suggest that the Mexican painting draws on various conventions of Spanish portrai-
ture, both painted and sculpted, in no way diminishes its claims to distinctiveness but rather
acknowledges Miranda’s deft engagement of earlier and peninsular artistic traditions. In the six-
teenth century, for example, court painters Alonso Sánchez-​Coello and Sophonisba Anguissola
had portrayed Habsburg women as the regally upright mistresses of similarly solitary architec-
tural spaces. Isabel Clara Eugenia, Isabella of Valois, and notably, Spain’s onetime Regent, Juana
of Austria, are the majestic subjects in portraits by these artists where the elaborately attired,
leftward-​oriented women typically extend their right hands toward a parapet or a throne-​like
crimson chair in a show of stability and power. Following his predecessors at court, Velázquez
repeatedly depicted Spanish royal women in compositionally similar full-​length formats, as
intimidatingly near life-​size single ladies accompanied by little more than the symbolic presence
of a chair or draped table.Though far from uncommon in seventeenth-​century Castille, painted
portraiture of standing and by implication, self-​possessed, women, was generally reserved for
female royalty, or, less frequently, for female nobles, saints, and religious.
In the latter category,Velázquez is again the author of a remarkable portrait (and subsequent
copies) of the indomitable Spanish missionary to Manila, the Franciscan, Madre Jerónima de la
Fuente, c. 1620. Like Miranda’s Sor Juana, the Spanish painting was a gift commissioned for their
convent by Madre Jerónima’s admiring fellow nuns (Burke 355). There are basic compositional
similarities between Velázquez and Miranda’s portraits, i.e., recalling allegorical personifications
of fides, or faith; both nuns hold attributes that help define them: crucifix and book, quill, and
rosary, respectively.8 But the two paintings also rely on the insertion of lengthy hagiographical/​
biographical texts to bring their subjects to life for the viewer (Zirpolo 17).The name Jerónima,
a feminized version of Jerome, further links the patristic saint’s Spanish namesake with his
Creole disciple.Velázquez’s painted Jerónima may even have influenced one of the best-​known
contemporary Spanish sculptors, Gregorio Fernández, a favorite of Philip IV.The lively, actively
inspired pose of Fernández’s polychromed wooden statue of St. Teresa of Ávila (1625) might
be expected in a representation of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican Doctor of the Church,
but it was highly unusual for a female saint to wield both the quill and the Bible, or, perhaps,
as in Rubens’s earlier painting of the saint in Vienna (1615), the quill and a book presumably

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Sor Juana’s iconic portraits

Figure 9.1  Gregorio Fernández, St.Teresa de Ávila, 1625.

Source: © Museo Nacional de Escultura,Valladolid

containing her own writings. As Merrim and others have observed, though quite different in
their theological and literary orientations, St. Teresa of Ávila is the Hispanic woman of letters
with whom Sor Juana is most often paired –​and compared (e.g., Merrim, Early Modern xii).
Madre Jerónima decided to take the habit after meeting the zealous Carmelite reformer, which
provides a further link in this associative chain of indefatigable Hispanic nuns.
Another early image of Sor Juana, this one securely dating from her lifetime, appears not on
a painted canvas but on the frontispiece engraved by Lucas de Valdés for the Segundo volumen de
las obras (Second Volume; Seville, 1692). In Valdés’ quintessentially baroque print, two allegorical
figures, Hermes to the poet’s right and Athena to her left, stand astride a bust-​length image of
the nun that they jointly crown with laurels. Disproportionately large in relation to the Greek
gods of communication and wisdom, the girlish-​looking poet subtly advances her right hand,
and with it, the point of her quill pen, into the viewer’s space before her.This tactful emergence
into the “real” world relies on the artist’s presentation of the poet inscribing the letter “o” onto

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Figure 9.2  Lucas de Valdés, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Engraved frontispiece. Segundo tomo de sus obras
(Sevilla, 1692).
Source: © Edward E. Ayer Collection. The Newberry Library, Chicago
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Sor Juana’s iconic portraits

a larger ellipse that forms the frame in which she is herself inscribed. Looking closely we realize
that the oval surround is figured less as mirror or canvas than a dimly lit, egg-​like cell within
which the body of the foregrounded Sor Juana, lit from both an internal and external light
source, casts a shadow on the feigned wall beside her. Aloft in the print’s upper region, a female
figure of fame, her massive wings studded with eyes and ears, trumpets the poet’s celebrity in –​
or perhaps, by –​Athena’s direction. On the ground level of this shallow, architectonic space,
symbols of the liberal arts including a lyre, mask, books, compass, and globe lie scattered before a
plinth bearing a Latin inscription that translates as: “Behold a virgin in genius and piety without
equal in the world” (Kirk 156). Given the print’s emphasis on Sor Juana’s chastity, it is tempting
to interpret the “o” which the nun inscribes in the word “profesa” (professed) as a visual pun
emphasizing her virginal state.9
Eight years later, a second portrait accompanied the frontispiece to Sor Juana’s posthu-
mous works (1700). While little time had passed between them, taken in concert, the prints
represent a conceptual and rhetorical sea change between old world Spanish and new world
Creole identity constructions via the book arts. Stylistically, the first image is clearly indebted
to seventeenth-​century engravings by the erudite Flemish painter and sometime frontispiece
designer, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–​1640). A  Spanish subject himself, Rubens appropriated
Hermes and Athena (Mercury and Minerva) as a kind of symbolic, quasi-​heraldic embodiment
of his artistic and intellectual concerns. Interestingly, he sometimes combined the two figures
as a single, bi-​gendered, ‘hermathena,’ a seeming expression of his commitment not only to the
coupling of reason and eloquence but of fealty to his married patrons, the “Archdukes” Albert
and Isabel Clara Eugenia (the same Infanta mentioned above) (McGrath 233–​45). Rubens went
so far as to install statues of Hermes and Athena on the gateway to his Antwerp palazzo –​a
material frontispiece of sorts. But the iconographic formula of dynamic, meaning-​making per-
sonifications set within classicized architectural facades became a standard formula for baroque
frontispieces, even beyond Rubens’ numerous engravings for Counter Reformation treatises
and histories, precisely because the artist might select from a variety of mythological figures as
the book’s ideologies and title dictated.
Designed by José Caldevilla and engraved by Clemente Puche, the second frontispiece origi-
nated in Madrid rather than Valdés’ Seville. Perhaps for this reason, the propagandistic print can
be viewed as a visual rhetoric of Spanish court culture and Habsburg cultural hegemony. The
“bewitched” Charles II had died in November of 1700, the same year Sor Juana’s posthumous
works were published. The replacement of Hermes and Athena with “Europa” and “America”
and the inclusion of the (awkwardly reversed) imperial motto “plus ultra,” or “ever forward”
of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) thus likely alludes to the two spheres
of the Spanish Empire, of which Philip IV’s weak and unstable son, Charles II, would be the
last Habsburg ruler. Freighted with Latin phrases, heraldic symbols, and a blandly perfunctory,
wreathed portrait of Sor Juana, Puche’s print is chiefly, as Kirk writes, “a funerary monument”
(156). With the War of the Spanish Succession looming in the near future, Puche’s artistically
undistinguished Madrid print aptly marks the end of a decadent reign born of insularity and
disorder.
The printed frontispieces, like many works on paper, are the least discussed of Sor Juana’s
portraits. An important exception is Ryan Prendergast’s consideration of the two works as
a coincidence with and challenge to Sor Juana’s “rhetorical self-​ fashioning” (30). While
Prendergast repeats some questionable and outdated art historical claims (and fails to cite Kirk),
the article presents a usefully comparative and visually keyed analysis of the prints. Again, how-
ever, unsubstantiated references, e.g., to Hermes and Athena as both “standard mythological
figures” and “relatively popular choices” in early modern frontispieces foreclose more nuanced

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Figure 9.3  Clemens Puche after José Caldevilla, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Engraved frontispiece.
Fama y obras posthumas (Madrid, 1700).
Source: © Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library and the Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations
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Sor Juana’s iconic portraits

and historically accurate responses to artistic decisions which are anything but coincidental
as Prendergast implies we might otherwise suspect (41). Given its provenance (Seville), for
example,Valdés’ print may allude to another surreal likeness that perpetually threatens to escape
the bonds of representation:  the famous self-​portrait of his countryman Bartolome Esteban
Murillo. In Murillo’s London canvas, painted a generation earlier, around 1670, the power of
art is made manifest as the painter-​subject curls his four fingers over the edge of the frame as
if he is about to reach for the tools of his trade, the loaded palette and brushes, resting on the
ledge below. Moreover, Valdés must have included Athena at least in part as a reference to Sor
Juana’s famed “Carta Atenagorica” (“Letter Worthy of Athena”). A variant on this wise warrior
woman returns in Puche’s engraving in the form of an unexpectedly androgynous Europa,
who, like Renaissance representations of Amazons –​and Queen Elizabeth I, who was similarly
portrayed well into the seventeenth century –​wears a cuirass and shield over elaborate classical
robes. While Kirk describes Europa as a “he” who “makes a boyish, not to say, girlish, impres-
sion” (Kirk 156), it seems more likely that Europa, usually gendered female in early modern
cartographic prints, is no less allegorically female-​bodied, albeit androgynously so, in Puche’s
engraving.
Indeed, in both prints, Sor Juana’s compositional location as a poetic persona centrally placed
between male and female personifications may speak to a generally ignored interpretive pos-
sibility shared by all three of the portraits just discussed, namely, her intellectual status as a manly
woman. Since Athena was already androgynous by nature,Valdés’ fondly glancing goddess might
serve to heighten the implication of female same-​sex, fittingly Sapphic, poetic desire between
subject (Athena) and object (Sor Juana). But Sor Juana is also seemingly masculinized in another,
less allegorical fashion in Miranda’s painting. There, as Marcus Burke tantalizingly remarks in
the catalogue for 1990s watershed Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries exhibition, the painter’s
presentation of Sor Juana “is of another type altogether, reminiscent more of the portraits of
male prelates and literary figures” (354).Though frequently cited, this pithy and suggestive aside
has not received the elaboration and exploration it deserves.
One might begin with the portraits of the prelates and literary figures themselves. As a
genre, the solitary monk-​author in his library owes its fame, though not its origins, to Albrecht
Dürer’s encyclopedic and richly detailed engraving St. Jerome in his Study of 1514. In a short
but informative study describing the five known painted portraits of Sor Juana, the Italian Latin
Americanist, Mario Sartor, refers in passing to “the context of St. Jerome in his study, precisely
the eponymous convent in which the Mexican nun lived” (522). The studious site is articulated
in detail in Dürer’s Jerome print as well as an even earlier depiction of the Church Father in the
strange and beautiful painting by Antonello da Messina (1475). That Miranda should choose to
place Sor Juana in the intellectual, therefore allusively male, and monastic, spaces of a study or
library was, according to Aristotle’s authoritative gender binaries, inevitably to masculinize her.
Yet to depict the nun as if caught in the act of writing was to go even further than Antonello’s
portrayal of Jerome and to approach more closely Dürer’s aged saint, who, with knitted brow,
crouches heavily over a quill and Bible, his bald pate illumined by a halo of blessed inspiration.
No such divine light filters into Sor Juana’s library, nor is she similarly surrounded by the
symbols of vanitas, with the possible exception of a clock. By contrast, not only does poor old
Jerome seem distracted by the tiny crucifix near the edge of his desk, but his own bony head is
doubled by the sightless, jawless skull on the windowsill. Jerome’s limited time on earth is fur-
ther signified, and measured, by the massive hourglass that hangs over his head like the sword
of Damocles. Conversely, Sor Juana’s study or library displays few mundane objects beyond the
mysteriously half-​full beaker, conceivably symbolic of mid-​life, but also apparently used as a

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weight with which to secure a curling paper diagram of a geometric, or possibly cosmological
nature.
In that Sor Juana’s body simultaneously occupies two very different spaces in his portrait,
Miranda uses subtle compositional tricks to curiously dislocate the traditionally valorized, right/​
writing hand from her torso. Sor Juana’s dexterous right arm thus belongs in the world of books,
words, and their production. But the nun’s heart, head, and the Annunciate escudo between
them occupy a shadowy and more mystical, devotional interior marked by the ubiquitous red
curtain and darkly inchoate background. In fact, the canvas is virtually divided in two. Moving
downward from the top center of the frame, the eye thus traces an almost uninterrupted line
from the edge of the bookcase to the rhythmic, but rigid fall of Sor Juana’s golden rosary beads,
continuing along the edge of her black fabric scapular whence it is a short visual jump to the
ground. Miranda effects what might be interpreted as a hybrid image of the active/​contempla-
tive life by allowing Sor Juana’s body to bridge these discretely symbolic, and gendered spaces.
The portrait offers a complex vision of Sor Juana, whom Miranda presents as a decorous, even
regal, female Jerome invested in the life of letters as well as the life of prayer.
Historically speaking, it might be observed that the first “female Jeromes” were the saint’s
companions in Bethlehem, the patrician nuns Paula and her daughter, Eustochium, who sit
attentively in the presence of an elderly Jerome in Zurbarán’s intriguing painting (c. 1640–​
1650), today in the National Gallery in Washington. Like Sor Juana, the two learned Romans
were known for combining intellect and piety. Both learned Hebrew, and Paula’s letters to
Jerome remain crucial to our knowledge of fourth-​century monastic life and praxis in the Holy
Land. But while it might seem logical to cast Sor Juana as a new Paula, the Mexican painter
seems to take a more surprising, even unorthodox approach that allows the viewer to elide the
nun’s identity with that of the scholar-​monk himself.
When the skillful and original painter Miguel Cabrera confronted Sor Juana as a subject,
she had been dead for nearly half a century. Cabrera was a popular painter whose output for
Mexican, and on occasion, Spanish, religious institutions was massive. As Manuel Toussaint,
long the foremost historian of colonial Mexican art, remarked at a time when the painter was
much less known than he is today: “there is almost no colonial church with doesn’t have one
or two or more of his paintings.” Toussaint was among the first to point out Cabrera’s reliance
on Miranda’s portrait, for him, the work of “a mediocre painter” (337). To be sure, Cabrera’s
dazzling and memorable image was born of different technical competencies and aesthetic
concerns, so much so, in fact, that it can hardly be considered a sincere or successful copy of
Miranda’s earlier painting.
The primary compositional difference between the two works is Sor Juana’s seated position.
Cabrera had himself made full-​length portraits of solitary, standing nuns, so the portrayal of the
nun sitting at ease in the luxurious confines of her library does not indicate a stylistic evolution
beyond Miranda so much as a considered artistic choice. In iconographical terms, however, per-
haps the most obvious implication of Sor Juana’s stately seated pose is an even greater formal
affinity with the aforementioned pictorial tradition of studious St. Jeromes. Whereas Miranda’s
bookish setting undoubtedly gestures to works by Dürer and Renaissance Italian artists, Cabrera
makes the connection more emphatic not only by incorporating Sor Juana in a library more
vividly adorned with cardinal red fabrics but also by providing the scholar with an open book
from which to turn upon the viewer’s interruption, in the vein of Velázquez. Jerome is nearly
always shown in a similar fashion. In fact, he is far more frequently depicted in the act of
reading than writing. Yet certain elements remain unchanged. One carry-​over from Miranda’s
composition is the nun’s touching –​or by implication, praying –​of her rosary beads. While
in both paintings, contact with her rosary might be reasonably understood as a show of piety

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Figure 9.4  Miguel Cabrera, Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1750 (oil on canvas).
Source: Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico /​Jean-​Pierre Courau /​
Bridgeman Images
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J. Vanessa Lyon

and devotion –​as an indication that prayer was never far from Sor Juana’s brilliant mind –​the
gesture has been viewed more often as a disinterested, even suggestively erotic reflex.To Héctor
Perea, Miranda’s Sor Juana takes the rosary in hand “sin demasiado cuidado” (32) [“without
much care”]; Rogelio Ruiz Gomar writes that she “fingers” the long string of beads “like a
great necklace” (209).
As in other cases, Paz is partly responsible for introducing the chauvinistic and objectifying
interpretative strategy embodied in his famous characterization of Sor Juana as a “syllogism in a
gown” (274). In a much more recent and otherwise informative analysis of the two major paint-
ings, Ruiz Gomar takes a similar tack. The art historian commends Cabrera for painting “a syn-
thesis of all we admire in her –​physical beauty, elegance, intelligence, culture, refinement” (208).
Bracketing her intellect between putatively more estimable qualities such as her appearance and
good manners, Ruiz Gomar’s account is laden with not-​so-​subtly gendered language –​e.g., Sor
Juana caresses, she strokes, she turns pages delicately –​meant to underscore his suggestion that
refined, culturally appropriate femininity is the poet-​nun’s primary claim to fame.
As did Paz, however, Ruiz Gomar also identifies many of the books surrounding the painted
Sor Juana in her study. The range of largely theological and doctrinal texts represented in
Miranda’s portrait, among them works by Jerome, Augustine, and Peter Lombard, is aug-
mented in Cabrera’s painting, which adds seventeenth-​century treatises by the Jesuit polymath
Athanasius Kircher (much admired by Sor Juana), and most interestingly from an art historical
standpoint, seventeenth-​century Spain’s authoritative defense of portraiture, the Art of Painting
(1649) written by Diego Velázquez’ father-​in-​law, Francisco Pacheco (Ruiz Gomar 210). It is
unlikely that either artist could have first-​hand knowledge of Sor Juana’s library. Nevertheless,
literary historians continue to find evidence in her poetry that Sor Juana was deeply familiar
with many of these devotional, theological, and ecclesiastical texts –​as well as works by Aristotle,
Virgil, and Cicero, who also make an appearance on her shelves.Yet as Ruiz Gomar stresses, the
titles present may “simply indicate what a learned person of the time might have read and what
Sor Juana may have owned” (210). Not unlike the woman depicted, the library is an idealized
symbol rather than a realistic or naturalistic rendering of a specific person or place.
Despite its chronological distance from the sitter, however, Cabrera’s portrait strikes many
viewers as the most truthful and compelling. Perhaps this is not because it fixes Sor Juana as
an exemplarily feminine personage by suavely endowing her with slender hands, pale skin,
and a shapely waist, but because it is offers a synthesis of a more dialectical kind. Miranda
and Cabrera’s Jerome-​like treatments of Sor Juana inevitably masculinize, and therefore, tacitly
empower her. Yet further interpictorial associations embedded in the portraits may frame Sor
Juana’s power in terms other than, or differently related to her gender.
In view of their intimate interior settings as well as in the majestic poses and sober attire of
the sitters, the paintings by Miranda and Cabrera, for example, closely resemble royal portraits of
Queen Mariana of Austria executed in the 1670s by the Habsburg court painter, Juan Carreño
de Miranda (1614–​1685). Familiar to many for her enormous guardainfante skirts in Velázquez’
portraits of the 1650s, Mariana, mother of Charles II and later Regent, was typically portrayed
by the artist’s successor wearing a black veil over a white wimple in a form of mourning
attire that closely resembles a nun’s habit. In portraits of her widowhood, Carreño depicts the
Queen mother both standing before a draped table with one arm extended in a manner akin
to Miranda’s Sor Juana, and seated at a desk, as Cabrera will choose to show her. Indeed, the
Mexican painter’s seated Sor Juana closely echoes Carreño’s Prado Mariana of 1670, who lifts
the corner of a sheet of paper on her desk as if she has just replaced the nearby quill in its rest.
Carreño’s visual mini-​narrative likely suggests his patron’s industriousness in the face of numer-
ous administrative responsibilities, analogous to, though undoubtedly more extensive, than Sor

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Sor Juana’s iconic portraits

Figure 9.5  Don Juan Carreño de Miranda, Queen Mariana of Austria, in mourning (oil on canvas).
Source: Private Collection /​Bridgeman Images

Juana’s duties as accountant, or contadora, of her convent. While the intellectual and courtly Sor
Juana is confined to a scholarly, monastic, setting pious and much-​besieged Mariana, the first
woman to serve as head of state since Isabella the Catholic, occupies art-​filled rooms of her own
making in the Royal Palace (Davies 47). Professed to no religious order, Mariana was none-
theless deeply devoted to her Jesuit confessor and a fervent advocate of Dominican causes. If
Carreño emphasized the Queen’s nun-​like attire to mitigate or defuse her problematic worldly
power, Sor Juana’s similarly imperial poses may have been intended to signal her innate nobility
and taste, if not her courtly connections to Madrid through the vicereine and her husband –​in
fact, Sor Juana’s Famas y obras posthumas includes a dedication to Queen Mariana by her friend
and supporter, later bishop of Yucatan, Don Juan Ignacio y Costorena y Ursua.

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Multivalent rhetorical strategies such as these are largely absent in the remaining trio of
three-​quarter-​length portraits of Sor Juana, all made by less technically gifted artists than those
discussed. The complicated business of dating and attributing these works has been the main
occupation of scholars who mention the three known eighteenth-​century canvases, all of which
appear to be copies of lost works.The Philadelphia portrait, now attributed to Nicolás Enríquez
de Vargas, a Mexican painter (active c.  1722  –​died after 1787), holds a special place in the
group.The portrait is inscribed with its own provenance, which may be translated as: “a copy of
another (portrait) of herself, made by her hand, by the R.M. [Revered Mother] Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, phoenix of America.” With the recent attribution in mind, Guillermo Schmidhuber
de la Mora has proposed that the Philadelphia portrait may date from the end of the second
decade of the eighteenth century, which could make it “closest to the physical figure of Sor
Juana” (474). Regardless of its date, however, the notion of Sor Juana as a creator of portraits in
paint as well as print derives from the inscription in the Mexican painting.
Sartor succinctly traces the formal relationships between the five known painted portraits,
helpfully illustrated, noting that the portrait by Miguel de Herrera (now in Seville) seems to be
derived from the same portrait (or putative self-​portrait) on which the Philadelphia painting
is based (523). The Seville and Philadelphia portraits are quite alike. In both paintings, the nun
faces forward, her right, unoccupied hand emerging from artistically bunched sleeves as she
marks her place in a small missal or Bible by inserting her left index finger between the pages.
In both works Sor Juana wears a detailed escudo of the Annunciation. Although the shield-​like
shape of her face is similar in these paintings, Sor Juana’s mien is slightly more serious in the
Herrera, which has been dated as early as 1732. Despite her serious, heavily shadowed eyes, the
circumspect visage in the Philadelphia portrait registers the faintest of Mona Lisa smiles.
A third portrait by Andrés de Islas, today in Madrid, dates from the second half of the eight-
eenth century.10 The most interesting of the later copies, this portrait brings together aspects
of all the others. In it, Sor Juana sits at a draped table to which the painter has added a densely
printed leyenda (inscription) describing her accomplishments. As in the portraits by Miranda
and Cabrera, Sor Juana’s library forms a noteworthy backdrop, yet the sitter is more agential
here than in any previous likeness. Seated with a freshly inked quill in her hand in a heavy chair
clearly based on Cabrera’s, Sor Juana seems poised to return to the act of writing. Steadying
the partially empty pages of an open journal or account book balanced table-​like on two other
volumes, she regards the viewer rather absently, her luminous face hovering above her requisite
Annunciate escudo.
Except by the museums that house them, the smaller-​scale canvases mentioned above have
received scant scholarly attention. As works of derivative and arguably minor artistic value, the
copies are of little interest to connoisseurship-​minded art historians, who tend to focus on big
names and autograph works. As versions of instrumental and idealizing images executed dec-
ades after her death, the paintings appear to convey little about Sor Juana as a woman or a poet,
which makes them less than captivating, if not irrelevant to literary and feminist historians. As
Sartor observes, however, their very existence testifies to Sor Juana’s widespread impact and last-
ing fame throughout the century following her death (523).
If the questionable faithfulness of a handful of early modern portraits seems to remove the
poet-​nun ever further from the ken of today’s scholars, the most quotidian of modern copies,
each “original” indistinguishable from its predecessor, has kept her current and vital in another
way. The mechanical reproduction of Sor Juana’s visage on Mexican money often goes unmen-
tioned in discussions of her portraiture, yet Sor Juana’s presence on the one-​thousand peso note
from 1969 until 1992 and on the two-​hundred peso note beginning the same year has undoubt-
edly created a new vantage from which to consider the visual construction of her identity.

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In a fascinating study of Sor Juana’s works as a “poetics that operates in accordance with
monetary logic,” Alina Sokol describes the manner in which she employs the imagery and
language of currency –​gold, silver, coinage, seals, stamps, shields –​to suggest tensions “between
intrinsic and extrinsic values,” between “money as a poetic device and money as a historical
reality” (460). Similar tensions exist between the two portraits constructed for the Mexican
banknotes, which between them mark the advent and expansion of Mexican second wave
feminism and the transition beyond it during the massive political shifts of the 1990s. The art-
fully engraved Sor Juana of the earlier, one-​thousand peso note is clearly a copy, and a sensitively
executed one, of Cabrera’s painting. Cut to bust-​length, Sor Juana’s softly contoured, mono-
chromatic figure flows like a landscape over two thirds of the surface as she reaches her right
hand to turn the pages of an open book now cleverly overlaid with the signatures of Mexican
bank officials. No quill, inkwell, or library is present, yet Sor Juana’s escudo is exquisitely ren-
dered. Her piety is further emphasized by the bank’s insertion of a halo-​like oval behind a serene
face with a slightly less piercing gaze than we have come to expect.
The Sor Juana most often seen by Mexicans today is further deconstructed. Represented as
a floating head, similar in scale to the faces of American presidents on U.S. currency, her image
is no longer recognizably derived from any previous portrait. The black veil is page-​boyish and
abbreviated, the shape of her face is fuller, newly naturalistic, and more “modern.” Far from
androgynous, neither is she sweetly “feminine.” Sor Juana’s signature arched brows remain in her
new incarnation, but her skin tone, conveyed through innumerable stippled points, is potentially
swarthier than in the past. Cabrera’s quills are visible in this smaller denomination, along with an
open book of “poemas” thrust forward at the viewer from the mid-​g round. Here, for the first
time –​in line perhaps with the new era of religious tolerance –​the escudo is nearly excised, or
more accurately, broken into a bite-​sized piece; all that remains of the erstwhile Annunciation
is the soaring dove, a subtle heuristic for divine inspiration. Perhaps it is no coincidence that for
her well-​received Allegorical Neptune of 1680, “an elaborate comparison of the new governor
[the count of Paredes] to the mythological sea ruler” (Sokol 455), Sor Juana herself was paid
two hundred pesos.
Despite these artistic liberties, however, this monetized Sor Juana is tightly wound and tightly
bound –​by the strangling folds of her wimple and the constraining bars of the convent window
in her midst. Floating in an indeterminate pictorial economy, she is at once a woman on the
money and a disembodied “sexy nun”; a pretty face and sheer intellect; free spirit and caged
bird. It is difficult, but lately, not impossible, to imagine what further form her oscillating image
might take (Perea 32). Recent internet searches yield a patently spurious portrait of Juana de
Asbaje “at the age of fifteen, before she entered the viceregal court.” Close examination of
this rather garish, sartorially improbable “portrait,” reveals it as a pastiche of Zurbarán’s richly
adorned female saints and, as it happens, the “modern” Sor Juana on the two-​hundred peso note.
Reverse the painting’s orientation, lighten and reduce the almost cartoonish eyes –​but keep
the money’s soft cheeks and perky little nose –​and the regression is complete. Is this fantasy of
her early days –​the nubile youth of the woman who would become the nun –​meant to satisfy
the now-​familiar desire to eroticize Sor Juana, to allow the viewer to delight in the girl without
ogling the nun? Or does the twenty-​first century artist merely wish to provide our heroine
with a longer life in pictures as an exercise in revisionist history?11 In either case, the image falls
flat, its would-​be guilelessness belied by anachronously shapely breasts, perfect princess hair, and
inauthentic Renaissance fayre finery. A forgery, a fake, a painted snare of another, baser order, the
prequel portrait is simply not a lie worth telling; this is not a Sor Juana we needed to see.
The fictive likeness of Juana de Asbaje as an already world-​weary-​teenager exposes, I think,
a yearning to discover more about the woman she became through visual culture. But while

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“authentic copies” of Sor Juana may yet be found, much remains to be done with the portraits
known to us today. Rather than retroactively reading authorial agency or self-​fashioning into
visual identities Sor Juana may not have constructed, and works she may never have seen, future
scholarship might fruitfully examine the reception of her portraits by viewers both contempo-
rary and early modern. Further comparative studies of Sor Juana’s portraits and those of other
Spanish and Mexican nuns and elite women might be undertaken; the female patrons behind
these and other convent portraits also deserve further attention. Feminist scholars in particular
have deeply enriched our understanding of Sor Juana’s portraits; sustained cross-​culturally-​
attuned art historical analysis may yet yield new interpretations of these misleadingly unyielding
likenesses.

Notes
1 I am grateful to the editors –​whose pioneering feminist studies brought me into the fold of Hispanic
convent culture and visuality  –​for including an art historian in this project. My thanks as well to
Grinnell College for generous assistance in acquiring the images and permission to publish them.
2 Ronderos discusses the theological allusion to dust (135).
3 For further reading about early modern Hispanic portraiture, see Burke and Portús Pérez.
4 The painted portraits discussed here include those by Juan de Miranda, Rectoria de la Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico; Miguel Cabrera, Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico;
Andrés de Islas, Museo de America, Madrid; Nicolás Enríquez de Vargas, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Pennsylvania, USA (Collection of Robert H. Lamborn); and the anonymous portrait now owned by
the convent of Santa Paula and San Jerónimo, Seville, Spain.
5 For a clear and succinct summary of the debates see Pierce, Ruiz Gomar, and Bargellini, 296–​97,
note 4.
6 On the history and representation of nun’s shields see Perry, “Escudos”; see also Armella de Aspe and
Tovar de Teresa; Egan.
7 See e.g. Córdova 31.
8 See Tiffany 49–​76
9 On the female “O” in Shakespeare, see Parker 115.
10 See Oettinger 127.
11 My thanks to Emilie Bergmann for discovering that the artist responsible for this painting, in fact,
one of a series of fifteen portraits purportedly tracing Sor Juana’s life before, during, and after her
fame, is the Mexican painter, Jorge Sánchez Hernández (b. 1926?). Sánchez Hernández credited
one of his prequel portraits as the inspiration for a poster publicizing the Mexican television
miniseries Juana Inés, which debuted on March 26, 2016 (Canal Once). See www.facebook.com/​
jorgesanchezhernandezpintor.​

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10
CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN SOR
JUANAS
Artistic, popular, and scholarly

Emily Hind

“Neurotic, perfectionist, player (convenciera), narcissist, lesbian, enlightened, saint, coward, per-
jurer, great poet,” recites Sergio Salazar in a description of the polyfacetic Sor Juana for an
academic collection eerily titled Sor Juana: 300 Years of Immortality (16). The 1995 publication
celebrates the 300th anniversary of Sor Juana’s death, which given her “immortality,” supplies
an interesting tension. Is she dead or ain’t she? I prefer to hedge the answer, at least when writ-
ing about versions of Sor Juana narrated for young Mexican readers: “Oddly, since Sor Juana
never dies in a definitive way in the recent histories of the colonia for children, she belongs to
a strange temporality of inimitable, transcendent exception” (“Children’s” 223). I can illustrate
this point with a picture book that I did not know existed when I drafted the previous analysis
of uses of Sor Juana in literature for children (“Children’s Literature”). In Hear Me with Your
Eyes: Sor Juana for Kids (2012) Carmen López Portillo writes:

There [Nepantla] I was born many years ago, so many, that if I had only spent my time
counting, I would have reached the number 11 billion, 360 million, 476 thousand 800 and
then some, so that I could meet you. If you were to count one by one all those numbers
you would spend more than 361 years counting. Imagine! Now you can figure out the
year I was born, [sic] subtract 361 from the year this book was published, and voilà! (7)1

Sor Juana narrates for herself here, in the year 2012, and she eventually cites her testament
regarding her desire to be buried in the Convent of San Jerónimo; the introduction ends with
her narratively confusing demise:  “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz died in the Convent of San
Jerónimo on 17 April 1695 at 4:00 am in the morning, [sic] there lie her remains” (20). This
data jars with the first-​person narrative, and thus Sor Juana seems more undead than buried.The
fairy-​tale treatment evident in literature for children on the subject of Sor Juana anticipates the
tendency among contemporary texts for adults to represent Sor Juana as a kind of timeless peer.
Some celebrations of Sor Juana manage to sidestep the inconsistent life-​after-​death anniver-
saries by appropriating the poet’s name for a new event and counting forward from there. Hence,
the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Sor
Juana Festival in 2014. Also in that year, the city of Austin in Texas organized a Sor Juana-​themed

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“Tribute to Mexican American Women,” which honored the poet’s legacy and “the creativity
of incarcerated women.” Oddly, the organizers insinuate a parallel between the cloistered seven-
teenth-​century intellectual and twenty-​first-​century inmates. Both the Chicago and Austin fes-
tivals view Sor Juana as a feminist symbol, and the museum in Chicago bestows a “Sor Juana
Woman of Achievement” and a “Sor Juana Legacy” prize on select women of Mexican descent.
Sor Juana was, of course, neither Mexican American nor Mexican, but a criolla (Creole) subject
of New Spain. Historical technicalities aside, her polyglot image today invokes Mexican-​ness and
cultural –​if not genetic –​hybridity. In fact, in the twenty-​first century Sor Juana’s image is nearly
all-​encompassing. If my reader is not of Mexican descent, nor a woman, rest assured that you
may still be eligible for a Sor Juana prize. For example, the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana
in Mexico City bestowed the 2011 Sor Juana award on Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. Since
1993 the Guadalajara International Book Fair has been conferring a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
literary prize, USD$10,000, on a novel by a Spanish-​language woman writer. Straightforward
bestsellers such as Marcela Serrano and Almudena Grandes have claimed the prize, along with
cryptic novelists Angelina Muñiz-​Huberman and two-​time winner Cristina Rivera Garza. Sor
Juana herself already anticipated this colorful trafficking of her influence: “diverse from myself /​I
wander among your quills /​not as I am, but rather /​as you wanted to imagine” (l. 159).
Indeed, the list of adjectives applied to the contemporary Sor Juana stretches in many, occa-
sionally opposing directions. In an interview for the magazine Siempre!, Mónica Lavín, novelist
and cookbook editor of the sorjuanista persuasion, describes the nun as an astute, widely selling
writer, politically adaptable (acomodaticia), and “surely” traitorous at times due to her ambition
(Alvarado 83). In July 2009 Lavín’s novel Yo, la peor (I,The Worst of All) ranked as the top-​selling
book in Mexico, with 18,000 copies printed (Aguilar Sosa). Oswaldo Estrada incisively critiques
Lavin’s invented epistles: “As readers, we may not like the end product, especially if we com-
pare the literary caliber of these imagined letters to Sor Juana’s actual writing” (85). (Ouch.)
Still, it is an achievement that Lavín’s novel managed to rival the brisk sales of her Sor Juana-​
themed cookbooks. Efraín Barradas laments the cookbook strain of sorjuanismo as antifeminist
and objects, “Between the library and the kitchen, there is no doubt that Sor Juana picked
the first. Only the defeated Sor Juana, the one from the last days of her life, would find refuge
in the kitchen and the sick ward” (364). (Ouch again!) From the most elementary historical
angle, certainly, the sorjuanista cookbook phenomenon is a hallucinatory debate. Even in the
introduction to the earliest contemporary version of the recipes, published in 1979 and in a
fourth edition by 2010, Josefina Muriel de González Mariscal admits that according to tests of
the paper conducted by the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office, the manuscript dates from
the eighteenth century –​after Sor Juana’s death in 1695, as Muriel breezily recognizes (7). Faith
in Sor Juana’s cooking interest may benefit from her undead nature with its implied transcend-
ence of linear chronology. For his part, Barradas submits a twinned negative review that will be
familiar to watchers of Mexican kitsch; he also groans at a cookbook that purports to reproduce
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s culinary handiwork.
Culinary seduction aside, particularly that of the sugary confections that constitute the major-
ity of the recipes that Sor Juana allegedly compiled, it remains interesting that contemporary Sor
Juana is sexy even in portrayals that downplay her possible appetites. Examples of an attractive
but not sexually hungry Sor Juana appear in an interview that Anna Nogar cites: Lavín explains
that she decided to assume that Sor Juana was not homosexual (87). In 2012, as Nogar wrote her
article, Yo, la peor saw its sixth reprinting, in the style of other sex-​suppressing bestsellers on the
poet, such as The Traps of Faith, the biography by Octavio Paz that has exerted tremendous influ-
ence since its release in 1982. The present chapter will conclude with a review of the lesbian
materials; first I explore the noncommittal stance in Mexican textbooks.

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For an example of the silent treatment when it comes to Sor Juana’s sexual orientation, any
of the textbooks issued free of charge to Mexican students will do. I have already commented
on the racism reprinted for decades with Gabriela Mistral’s praise of emphatically white Sor
Juana in the sixth-​grade literature textbook (“Sor Juana” 248). From the recent Libros de texto
gratuitos, the strangest use of the poet appears in the second-​g rade textbook on Civic and Ethical
Formation (2008), which asks the young reader to strive to become a “better person” and leaves
blank lines for the reader to list the “values and qualities” of four figures from Mexican history,
one of whom is Sor Juana (Formación 47–​48). In the context of a second-​g rader’s imagined Sor
Juana, which probably covers a range of stereotypes but may not contemplate sexual orientation,
the exercise means to inspire self-​improvement goals based on the projected poet’s example,
which is largely left up to the reader to determine.The loose approach to Sor Juana in that text-
book might relieve non-​sorjuanista teachers, as children’s imaginations may cultivate a figure at
least as coherent to them as the adamant and self-​serving versions proposed by some experts.
Speaking of sorjuanista authorities, it may unsettle the reader to realize that just about anyone
who has published on Sor Juana turns out to be an expert in the popular press.
A data-​filled poster produced in 2014 by Notimx (News Agency for the State of Mexico),
in celebration of the 319th anniversary of Sor Juana’s death credits sources such as the potboiler
lesbian tale by Francisco Martín Moreno, Arrebatos carnales (Carnal Eruptions, 2009) [Aragón
Domínguez]. Because of the poster’s “popular” approach I will review in (relative) depth the
superficial information reproduced on this list of “10 things you didn’t know about Sor Juana,”
which I first discovered on the well-​stocked blog “Sor Juana La Décima Musa.” Five of the ten
items quantify the poet’s biography and refer to dates, ages, and sums; for instance, Sor Juana’s
personal library held 4,000 books; she learned to read at age three and to write at age five; she
entered the nunnery in 1668 [other sources say 1667, but I digress]; and she wrote forty poems
to the Vicereine María Luisa Manrique de Lara. The numbers may not prove as insightful as
desired, despite their air of objectivity, and so the other five points compensate with non-​
mathematical interpretation. The first point asserts, “Her real name was Juana Inés de Asbaje y
Ramírez.” To say the least, this statement ignores controversies over the spellings of the poet’s
paternal last name that favor Asuage or Asuaje (Soriano Vallès 46). Carlos Elizondo Alcaraz
summarizes another controversy over the poet’s name when he agrees with critic Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo that Amado Nervo should have titled his early study “Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz” rather than “Juana de Asbaje,” because that second variation improperly came to deter-
mine the secular slant in the public school names (159–​60). The most common street name in
Mexico City in honor of a historical woman is “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” and of course that
version of the name lends the title for the “University of the Cloister of Sor Juana,” so some
traditions linked to public and semi-​public space do bear the religious title. In an additional
cautionary note, I worry that English-​language sources don’t always make it clear that “Sor”
means “Sister” and is not capitalized in Spanish. English-​language custom seems to condition
the term sorjuanista employed by Mexican press, which sticklers for Spanish-​language spelling
might argue should be written sorJuanista. At any rate, the poster ignores such finer points, and
aims to keep things simple by hinting that “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” is a sort of stage name or
nom de plume, next to the “true” one, “Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez.”
A second simplification, point number four, proves even more revelatory of the shortcuts
taken in the media to spread Sor Juana’s wisdom:“Her most famous sonnet is called ‘Redondillas’
and it begins: ‘Stubborn men who accuse women unjustly …’” Of course, “Redondilla”
is not the title of the poem but the form –​a popular Spanish verse style distinct from the
Italian-​influenced sonnet –​and this mistake helps to frame the flippant citation in play with
that verse, which has become a glam-​feminist meme. Elsewhere, I described a dress that in

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2004 actor Susana Zabaleta wore on the red carpet, a black gown inscribed with the first lines
of the poem, “Stubborn men who wrongly accuse women …” (“Sor Juana” 247). Some eight
years later, television and movie star Ana Claudia Talancón recited these same words as proof of
her passion for reading in a video produced for a Mexican pro-​reading campaign sponsored by
the private Council of Communication. To find this video, search for Talancón’s name and the
slogan “Diviértete Leyendo” (Have Fun Reading). The slickly produced spot features a glossily
lit Talancón inexplicably laughing through the first words of “Hombres necios,” after which a
jerky splice shows the actor with lowered eyes as she bashfully professes, “I love Sor Juana.” This
performance may fail to convince the audience that Talancón can recite more of the poem, just
as the poster and Zabaleta’s dress hinted that the abbreviated text suffices. “Stubborn men who
unjustly accuse women” now seems to operate as catchphrase. Possibly, more verses might get in
the way of the sex appeal of a star who stays pithy while she seduces the camera.
Another poster that evinces complacent shorthand regarding Sor Juana as evocative even in
abbreviation of “literacy” appears on behalf of the San Luis Potosí Central State Library. This
pro-​reading poster, reposted without commentary on the blog “Sor Juana La Décima Musa,”
employs a truncated and misspelled quotation by Sor Juana: “No estudio por saber más, si no
[sic] por ignorar menos,” (I don’t study to know more, butt [sic] to overlook less). The accom-
panying illustration of Sor Juana depicts her lower half as a purple mermaid and gives her upper
half a disproportionately huge, childlike rounded face, nevertheless framed by a purple nun’s
habit, which seems to double as a mermaid suit. The scrambled age of a childish-​looking Sor
Juana who already has taken the (waterproof?) veil returns me to the point about Sor Juana’s
confusing non-​linear or undead temporality, which seems especially emphatic in texts created
for children. Then again, even in depictions aimed at adults, Sor Juana never appears in elderly
form, which perhaps says something about what an audience imagines forty-​something to
mean today.
Contemporary tinkering with Sor Juana’s image, when not simply assigning the poet a
child’s face, favors the possibility of confusing her with a twenty-​or thirty-​something knockout,
and sometimes even a sexy teenager.
Iván Escamilla makes this point nicely in an essay titled “Sor Juana’s ‘Facelift,’” which com-
plains –​perhaps out of paranoia, given the similarity of the portraits he compares –​that in the
transition from one version of the Mexican 200-​peso bill to another, the official portrait of Sor
Juana shed weight and wrinkles, along with abandoning the sunken eyes and gaining a more
upturned nose.This “facelift” that Escamilla perceives suggests that the reception of official por-
traits of Sor Juana assimilates them with the smoothly attractive alternative images that in the
1990s imagined the poet as a queer rebel.Thus, despite Anna Nogar’s argument that the portrait
of “La Poeta” as part of 1998’s “Lotería Jotería” created by U.S. artist Ana Lilia Salinas (image
available at www.cafepress.com/​joteria) contests the image of official Sor Juana of the 200-​peso
bill, readers may fail to register the difference (Nogar 80). Sor Juana looks blankly unblemished
in both images, just like the Frida Kahlo of the contemporary 500-​peso bill, who also appears
at Diego Rivera’s side as the fresh-​faced half of “La Pareja” in the Lotería Jotería. Arguably, the
official 500-​peso bill merely repeats the queer Chicano/​a lottery project by pairing Frida with
Diego; one artist anchors each side of the bill. Students of Mexican history will scratch their
heads over the presence on Mexican post-​NAFTA cash of such a contentious couple, who were
members of the Communist party. (Is the Communist sympathy or the dramatic marital discord
the more bizarre factor for the Mexican government to overlook?) Compared to that decidedly
odd couple for official capitalist ends, Sor Juana as the face of “money” may make more sense.
Álvaro Enrigue analyzes “Juana Inés de la Cruz, Accountant,” as she once signed her name,
and examines the poet’s vocabulary and metaphors in terms of economic language and, more

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Figure 10.1  Sor Juana Surreal.

Source: © Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Mexico City

specifically, a canny understanding of credit. Enrigue measures Sor Juana’s financial skills with
the case of the slave she inherited from her mother; the poet ends up “doubling” the original
investment because by the time she sold the slave to one of her sisters, the enslaved woman had
a newborn in tow (151). New areas for cultural critique may open with study of the suggestive
relationship between a savvy seventeenth-​century bookkeeper and the contemporary Mexican
economy that trades on Sor Juana’s image with the 200-​peso bill. I can’t help but think of Sarah
Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy (2014) and her frustration with the cultural

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worker in neoliberal reckoning when I contemplate innovative directions for Sor Juana scholar-
ship. Brouillette pleads for change: “we need to identify and articulate alternative visions of a self
not sufficient to itself, a self whose anti-​egoism and need for sympathetic community are no less
essential or natural than the predilections of the flexibly creative individual” (5). The not-​infre-
quent contemporary vision of Sor Juana as an individual genius rebel, a bohemian sexualized
visionary, an independent talent who trampled the rules, perhaps finds a tempering detail in her
role as accountant. Certainly, it should be difficult to reconcile the image of a credit-​holding
accountant slave-​owner with the self-​directed poet rebel without also taking into account the
complexities of interdependence that make a cloistered life possible.
The reverse of Sor Juana’s official Mexican bill depicts the convent where she lived for more
than half her life, as Stephanie Merrim’s academic article reminds us (193–​94). In a well-​circu-
lated tweet, Cristina Rivera Garza succinctly frames the vow of the cloister for the contemporary
mind: “And to think that Sor Juana never saw the ocean” (Téllez, “Sor Juana”). This totalizing
home base in the convent lends support to Catholic interpretation of the poet. For instance,
Alejandro Soriano Vallès’s vision of the Doncella del Verbo, which can be roughly translated as
“Damsel of the Word,” identifies Sor Juana as a well-​adjusted and devout maiden. This version
of the poet might be less interesting to liberal academics if it weren’t for the press coverage
that it attracts. In 2011 Proceso, a magazine best known for its audacious reporting on organized
crime and political corruption, published a three-​page spread regarding Soriano Vallès’s interest
in a newly discovered document, a will, dated July 15, 1695. Priest José Lombeida declares in
his testament that Sor Juana donated various (“distintos”) books to him for charitable resale.
Soriano Vallès cites this document to argue against the theorized misogynist conspiracy against
the nun that took away her library and coerced her into silence: “Those [feminist critics] who
support the idea of a conspiracy against the nun have no proof. None!” (Vera 78, 80). Soriano
Vallès seems to issue a mass invitation for the audience of Proceso to consult the evidence for
themselves: “Well, any researcher can look up the document, since it’s in the General National
Archive. Concretely, it’s file number 44, box number 877, in the area of National Properties”
(Vera 78). This explicit instruction on how to become a sorjuanista reminds the specialist that
Sor Juana figures as a public good through the national archive (as reported in the press), the
copyright-​elapsed oeuvre (as traded in memes), and the surviving geography (now open for
business). Perhaps because of Sor Juana’s importance as a public good, Proceso promptly pub-
lished a liberal reply to the interview with Soriano; José Pascual Buxó mocked the researcher for
posing Sor Juana as the “Virgin of Nepantla”: “as if there were a need now for another Virgin
who could protect the cultured and intellectual classes from falling into the error of free think-
ing” (Pascual Buxó, “Sor Juana, entre” 66).
This matter leads me to discuss the national historical site of the convent of San Jerónimo, which
the Catholic Church during Vicente Fox’s presidency (2000–​2006) unsuccessfully attempted to
reclaim through the court system (Espinosa). Rather than a story fit for “Architectural Digest,”
the Convent of San Jerónimo, now the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana in the Historic
Center of Mexico City, might be best described as “Digested Architecture,” in acknowledge-
ment of intensive remodeling. Nonetheless, this highly processed geography holds power over
some fans. In Sor Juana’s Presence in the Twenty-​First Century, Elizondo Alcaraz channels the aura
of landscape when he speculates that Sor Juana’s spirit, haunting her hometown of Nepantla,
inspired Amado Nervo to write a book about the poet: “And I have always wondered: Couldn’t
Sor Juana’s soul, pained by so much oblivion, have broken down [Nervo’s] locomotive and,
from the place where it [her soul] was born, at the foot of the volcanoes, had Nervo heard the
song of the celestial nightingale?” (161). Tourists can test this idea, should they wonder whether
Sor Juana’s soul might speak to them, by visiting the museum built on the site of Sor Juana’s

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birthplace, located in the State of Mexico, which now features an open-​air amphitheater, a
library, and a cafeteria. Pictures available on the web indicate that at least at one time the exhibits
included a life-​size mannequin in a habit, standing near a table and chair and in front of fully
loaded bookshelves. In support of Sor Juana’s suspended, “undead” image, it is relatively difficult
to visit her grave, which is more or less located at the University of the Cloister, as noted in the
cited introduction to Sor Juana for Kids, which was funded by the very same University. One
English-​language tour guide describes the campus in terms of its common grave: “Although
it’s a bit off the usual tourist path, visitors are free to tour the school grounds (particularly the
beautiful two-​story cloister) and see the old chapel, where Sor Juana and the other nuns of the
convent are buried” (Humphrey 37). The longer version of the tale complicates the story, as
the reader should learn to expect with all things Sor Juana.
The guidebook recognizes that around the mid-​twentieth-​century, among other enterprises,
a dance club named “La Smyrna” came to occupy part of the remains of the convent, and
therefore, “Prompted by complaints of people appalled that the burial site of the woman who
is practically Mexico’s national poet was being thus abused, government authorities intervened
and expropriated the property in 1975, and shortly thereafter the university opened” (37).
Wikipedia clarifies the dates: the excavations and explorations of the site took place between
1976 and 1982, largely due to Margarita López Portillo’s influence, who was not only a pas-
sionate admirer of Sor Juana but also the sister of José López Portillo, president of Mexico
from 1976–​1982 (Wikipedia contributors, “University”). Margarita López Portillo’s niece –​the
daughter of the ex-​president –​Carmen Beatriz López Portillo, now heads the University; she
also wrote the introduction to the children’s book that I cited. The family connection makes
discussion of this subject highly sensitive. On the one hand, Carmen López Portillo has driven
efforts to publish sorjuanista texts and celebrate the poet’s legacy in other ways, which include
the reconstruction of the poet’s cell in the cloister.The University inaugurated the cell as a tour-
ist attraction in 2011, on the alleged 360th anniversary of Sor Juana’s birthday, and this room
is featured on the iPad app “Seducciones de Sor Juana,” created in 2013 with funding by the
governmental Conaculta and the expertise of UCSJ faculty. However, the López Portillo-​driven
efforts sometimes flirt with “vanity” projects, and –​for starters –​experts might question the
wisdom of investment in the app. Efforts from the U.S. in January 2015 to download the free
application never resulted in a functional experience, but the project appears in coverage from
Proceso. In theory, the app not only allows a virtual tour of the nun’s reconstructed cell, but also
hosts such interactive experiences as a cookbook, with recipes (allegedly) copied by the poet
and invented by Guadalupe Pérez, who created the degree in gastronomy for the University of
the Cloister of Sor Juana, as well as video demonstrations of the recipes by cooking students
of the institution (Vértiz de la Fuente, “De la universidad” 70). Additional interactions span a
“Create your own sonnet” section that allows users to compose a poem, and “Sor Juana for kids”
activity that allows the user to draw “Juana de Asbaje” (70). Fans who visit the University of the
Cloister in non-​virtual tourism can watch a fifteen-​minute multimedia presentation and view
a portrait of the nun that, according to a newspaper account from El Universal, Carmen López
Portillo painted (González Bernal).
The sustained involvement of the López Portillo family with the legacy of Sor Juana risks
insufficient checks and balances.The story of the medallion or escudo best illustrates this concern.
A 2011 report in El Universal remembers that the medallion, like the one evident on Sor Juana’s
chest in portraits of her, was discovered in 1978 during the excavations of the San Jerónimo
convent and by 1995 ended up in Patricia Moisén Lechuga’s administrative custody. Photos
record that event, as Margarita López Portillo, who for years had “borrowed” the escudo from
the archeologist in charge of the convent excavation, at long last returned the item to public

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property (Ventura). The medallion promptly became part of the collection held by the obscure
Legislative Museum of the Feelings of the Nation. In an academic article, Ryan Prendergast
refers tangentially to the return of the medallion as conducted by “a private citizen” (49). By
contrast, scholar Elizabeth Perry names Margarita and writes in no uncertain terms, “She took
possession of the escudo, bringing it home for, as she later explained, ‘safekeeping.’ During the
1995 celebrations surrounding the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Sor Juana’s
death, the theft became a public scandal” (62). After dropping this word “theft,” Perry continues
in blunt fashion: “At the ceremony celebrating its return, [Margarita] López Portillo presented
the […] contested and ruined escudo, swaddled in a bed of lace and linen like some precious
relic, to the directors at the ex-​convent” (62). Evidently, Perry does not share López Portillo’s
reverence for aura or Prendergast’s political caution.The saga endures: the medallion languished
until 2011, when it once again made the news because Carmen Beatriz López Portillo asked
for the piece to be returned to the place where it was found, the institution that she now runs.
Related newspaper coverage publicized the plan to test the human remains extracted from
the convent, believed by some to be those of Sor Juana. A follow-​up report, or more exactly a
blurb, published in the Reforma newspaper updates the results of a genetic test, or so seems the
implication: Sor Juana’s (alleged) remains were deposited once again in the “Ex Templo” of San
Jerónimo on the evening of Friday, Abril 17, 2015 (“Descansa Sor Juana”). The slight coverage
given to the event, with a single photo, a smallish headline, and one large-​font sentence above
the banner on the front page of the “Culture” section, reinforces the suspicion that what really
interests newspaper readers is Sor Juana’s “undead” quality. In the long run, her gravesite may
resist mainstream tourism because fans prefer to imagine her as an animated being.
In that sense, I point to the Day of the Dead tableaus sponsored by the University of the
Cloister that tend to feature Sor Juana. In 2014, the University sponsored a “Labyrinth of
Solitude” altar that featured Sor Juana and Octavio Paz, in arts-​and-​crafts skeleton form. In
2012, the University featured a larger-​than-​life-​size exhibit that showed skeletal Sor Juana and
María Félix, along with a dozen other iconic women, including Frida Kahlo. In 2011, the
exhibit explored the theme of “Sor Juana in Mictlan,” the realm of the dead from indigenous
mythology. I might term this “hands on” interaction with undead Sor Juana as the “Popular
Mechanics” approach. Virtual realities facilitate this tinkering. Jorge Téllez tallies the undead
Sor Juana’s twitter accounts as totaling at least four, the earliest (@Sor_​Juana) dating from
October 2009, and readers can count for themselves the latest tally of Facebook pages honoring
Sor Juana.
Besides the tweeting and Facebooking Sor Juana, the Day-​of-​the-​Dead arts-​and-​crafts Sor
Juana, the cooking Sor Juana, the “Write your own Sonnet” Sor Juana, and the other interactive
samples that I have reviewed, non-​expert literary interpretation propels Sor Juana into reanima-
tion. For example, an issue of Proceso from 2012 reports that Américo Larralde Rangel, a civil
engineer by trade, published a book that supplies an interpretative key that the pros overlooked.
Larralde Rangel uses data backed by NASA to argue the thematic influence of an eclipse, which
helps him to identify “the exact date and hour that Sor Juana gave birth to her Primero sueño
[First Dream]” (Ponce 76).This naïveté regarding the possibility of knowing with certainty “the
exact date and hour” on which Sor Juana did anything characterizes the “Popular Mechanics”
angle. This tradition also inspires the national press to publish Sor Juana fans’ answers to the
“enigmas” or riddle poems, written for Portuguese nuns, published in 1695, and relaunched
in 1968 after surfacing in a Lisbon archive. The solutions to these allegorical lyrics have been
lost and thus they form a kind of parlor game for sorjuanistas. For instance, Proceso reported
poet Gabriel Zaid’s answer to the fourth enigma (“fame”), and the newspaper Excélsior pub-
lished Roberto Reyes’s proposed solutions (Elizondo Alcaraz 146). López Portillo’s coauthored

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children’s book answers the “5th Enigma” with “Knowledge” (Entendimiento) (70). At times, fans
propose markedly divergent answers, which hints at the hobbyist nature of the guessing game.
As for more expert work on Sor Juana, names of the “pros” also circulate in the press –​
astonishingly given the concomitant Mexican news stories that fret over national low reading
skills and rates, as well as shrinking numbers of bookstores. The coverage in Proceso of Larralde
Rangel’s NASA-​backed analysis gives the names of sixteen Sor Juana critics and concludes the
list with the phrase, “and a long etcetera” (Ponce 76). The honor roll of sorjuanistas in Proceso
recognizes mostly male critics, including figures known for other reasons, such as poets Amado
Nervo and Octavio Paz, but these names sometimes span women academics, such Sara Poot
Herrera (whose name is misspelled), Georgina Sabat de Rivers, and Margo Glantz (Ponce 76).
In order to harness academic theory that might explain why the national press circulates lists of
relatively obscure sorjuanistas –​the most obscure of whom I do not name here—it helps to cite
philosophy professor Avitel Ronell’s proposal that literary criticism serves as a veil for literature.
This veiling works to define risky art as “decent” (57). Ronell structures this idea around the
obscenity trial for William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch (1959) and the U.S. Supreme Court
reasoning that opted to protect the text out of admiration for the existence of “many reviews
and articles in literary and other publications discussing seriously this controversial book” (56).
Mexican discourse tends to circulate the names of sorjuanistas, possibly as a defense of the
poet’s oeuvre as not only decent, but also legible. In evidence of this logic, the ritualistic request
for the addition of Sor Juana’s name in gold lettering to the “Honor Wall” in the Mexican
Congress found legislator Serafín Núñez Ramos in 1995 naming five “renowned scholars”
who took an interest in the poet’s work; the list ends with Noble-​winner Octavio Paz, but the
other four men’s names might be much more difficult for professional politicians to recognize
(“Letras” 15).
So which Sor Juana might my reader want to buy into, in case you are short on time
and decide to eschew both the “Popular Mechanics” hobbyist approach and the professional
critics’ scholarly method? The models available for immediate consumption almost neces-
sitate a graph of pros and cons, like the spreadsheets used to compare appliances in Consumer
Reports, because advantages and disadvantages characterize each of the Sor Juana types and
none of them exacts quite the same costs. As I have stated, fans can choose versions that are
quite young or somewhat older; militantly gay or adulterous and straight; rationally secular
or fervently Catholic; rebelliously feminist or obsequiously accommodating. Consumers
can even opt for one of a variety of “name-​brands,” depending on the degree of religiosity
and unusual spelling twists desired. From the U.S.  then, easily purchased options include
“La Poeta” from Lotería Jotería, reprinted by ALLGO (Austin Latina/​Latino Lesbian Gay
Bisexual and Transgender Organization) on tee-​shirts, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs. From
Mexico City, a friend and I  in early June 2014 bought handmade retablo boxes from the
gift shop of the Museum of Popular Art. Unlike the more typical homages to the Virgin of
Guadalupe or Frida Kahlo, these kitschy three-​dimensional items featured a flat image of
Sor Juana, arranged with either an elaborate miniature Day-​of-​the-​Dead altar, or in a less
expensive option, a simpler gilded collage. By late February 2016, El Péndulo bookstores
in Mexico City were selling Sor Juana stuffed cloth dolls for US$26 (MX$455) –​a price
that tips the doll toward adult collectors. (I bought one, but left the Frida Kahlo doll on the
shelf.) El Péndulo admits on its website advertisement for the “Little Thinkers” product that
the Sor Juana doll is not suitable for children under age five, probably due to the fragile felt
lightning bolt attached to one hand in the style of a quill, and the delicate bead necklace
with a wooden cross that hangs around the doll’s neck and reaches to her knees. The “Little
Thinkers” company that makes the doll may have taken a cue from the website Etsy, where

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Emily Hind

Mariana Ramos (“Mayeb”) advertises a thirty-​centimeter Sor Juana doll made by request.
As of November 11, 2014, Ramos reported in a personal email having made a total of three
dolls for clients in the State of Mexico and Mexico City. Other modes of consumption can
be found on “Sor Juana La Décima Musa” blogspot, and include screen savers, songs, and
a range of poster art. Or, the adventurous consumer can buy a DVD, novel, or ticket to a
performance in order to observe Sor Juana as her newly reanimated self.
As promised, I conclude with a review of the narrative options that postulate the lesbian
Sor Juana. Contemporary novels can be judged by their covers when it comes to the sala-
cious promotion of lesbian Sor Juana. In this vein, see José Luis Gómez’s El beso de la Virreina
(The Vicereine’s Kiss, 2008, 2011), Kyra Galván’s Los indedibles pecados de Sor Juana (Sor Juana’s
Unspeakable Sins, 2010), and the previously mentioned Carnal Eruptions (2009, 2011) by Martín
Moreno, which sold 160,000 copies in the first year of its release (“Arrebatos”). In the same
video interview that claims those sales, Martín Moreno boasts that the sequel, Arrebatos carnales
II (2010), enjoyed a first edition of 100,000  –​almost incredible numbers in the constricted
Mexican publishing world. For a quick dip into Martín Moreno’s artless handling of lesbian
sex scenes in Arrebatos carnales, skip to pages 390 to 392. In his article on Lavín’s less sexy novel,
Oswaldo Estrada mentions Gómez’s and Galván’s texts, plus Mónica Zagal’s La venganza de Sor
Juana (Sor Juana’s Revenge, 2007) as all departing from Sor Juana’s 1691 autobiographical letter
Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz (83). A perhaps necessarily incomplete but always expanding list
of sorjuanista novels in English and Spanish can be found on Wikipedia, along with a lengthen-
ing list of plays on the poet (Wikipedia contributors, “Juana Inés”).
Perhaps more salient for Mexicanist scholars than the English-​and Spanish-​language drama
is performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez’s now-​serious, now-​cheesy oeuvre. Rodríguez tends
to emphasize Sor Juana’s queer sexuality, as evident from a photograph of her and Patricia
Saldarriaga standing next to a nude cardboard cutout of, purportedly, a naked “Sor Juana” as
published in La Jornada, on 12 November 2008. (One always wonders about the lack of body
hair on these otherwise diversely designed nudie pics … Do we imagine that the busy nun
found the time and motive to shave her legs?) Feminist scholar Marta Lamas remains untroubled
by such details and writes for Proceso about Rodríguez’s 2008 performance on the occasion of
Sor Juana’s birthday, “357 or 360 years ago?” (55). On that questionable occasion, Rodríguez
added to her sorjuanista repertoire of the “Sor Juana Striptease,” for which she used to undress
while reciting part of the poem First Dream, and “Sor Juana in Almoloya,” in which the titu-
lar lesbian poet wisecracks from the contemporary prison. According to Lamas’s enthusiastic
review, Rodríguez’s new performance is a recitation (presumably without the striptease) of the
entirety –​nearly a thousand lines –​of First Dream (Lamas 55). Should the reader care to investi-
gate the older works, the first two performance pieces can be found on video among webpages
hosted by the Hemispheric Institute Digital Library.
Other, probably even kitschier, performances of Sor Juana are lost, as discussed in a 2004
interview with television and film producer Ernesto Alonso, a.k.a. “Mr. Soap Opera.” Again,
Proceso covers the latest “news” on Sor Juana by publicizing Alonso’s desire to remake Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, the telenovela that he shot in the 1950s, in his words “without fiction,” which
cast Amparo Rivelles as Sor Juana (Vértiz, “Ernesto” 80). Alonso admits the poor quality of that
early effort and cannot remember the details of the soap opera, which he speculates no longer
exists –​even if could bring himself to watch it –​due to the highly perishable tape used (80).The
interview with Alonso compiles the filmography on Sor Juana. In 1935 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
directed by Ramón Peón cast Andrea Palma as Sor Juana and lasted only one week in theaters.
In 1979 Constelaciones (Constellations) directed by Alfredo Joskowicz gave Ana Ofelia Murguía
the role of Sor Juana and also failed to attract much interest (Vértiz, “Ernesto” 80).

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The film that hit the distribution jackpot follows on Paz’s biography. Argentine director
María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All, 1990)  starred Argentine actor
Assumpta Serna as a lesbian Sor Juana and struck a chord, to judge from the IMDB fan rating,
which in January 2015 stood at 7.2 out of 10 possible stars, as rated by 425 users.
In spring 2016, in fulfillment of the yearning for another soap opera on Sor Juana, the
seven episodes of “Juana Inés” debuted on Channel 11, with Arecelia Ramírez in the lead
role; the announcement for the program anticipates muckraking interests and describes Sor
Juana as an “illegitimate daughter” of “humble origin,” who “was coerced by the Inquisition
into signing with blood the ban on publishing her ‘profane verses’ ” (Notimex, “Canal
Once”). Perhaps another film on Sor Juana will eventually appear as well. Internet rumor
spurs hope that such a movie will star Ana de la Reguera as Sor Juana, and base the plot on
Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s 1999 novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream (de la Reguera). U.S. professor
Gaspar de Alba fictionalizes the nun as a “queer hero,” which for at least one scholar marks
a “second moment” in Chicano/​a sorjuanismo (Vivancos Pérez 19). However, the rumor of
the new film indicates contemporary overlap between Mexican and U.S. Sor Juanas, if there
ever was a true division.
As more sources come to light, it seems that strict demarcations between Chicano/​a
visions and Mexican handlings of Sor Juana may never have existed. Vivancos Pérez defines
the first moment of Chicana thought with Estela Portillo-​Trambley’s play Sor Juana (1980),
which emphasized the nun’s sacrifice for the community. However,Vivancos Pérez’s analysis
omits Jovita González de Mireles’s short story “Shades of the Tenth Muse,” which Nogar dis-
cusses. The Texan’s story was not published until the year 2000, and it champions Sor Juana
as wittier than her interlocutor, poet Anne Bradstreet (Nogar 89). Not even the dialogue-​
with-​an-​English-​speaker is unique to a Chicana writer, though. Guillermo Schmidhuber
de la Mora, according to popular report from 2013, plans to convert his theatrical dia-
logue between Sor Juana and University of Texas sorjuanista Dorothy Schons into a novel,
Finjamos que soy feliz (Let’s Pretend that I am Happy); the plot apparently has something to
do with Schons’s suicide (Valdés Medellín 83). A  thoroughly Mexican dialogue with Sor
Juana hit the stage in 2013, but the production of poet Salvador Novo’s imagined conver-
sation between Sor Juana and diva poet Guadalupe (“Pita”) Amor attracted an ambivalent
review (Leñero Franco 68).
Contemplation of “immortal once-​upon-​a-​time Sor Juana,” “queer and barely cloistered
Sor Juana,” “politically conniving Sor Juana,” “glamour feminist Sor Juana,” “do-​her-​art-​
yourself Sor Juana,” and “just-​buy-​into-​it Sor Juana” is, if not radically educational, at least
highly entertaining. Although Sor Juana always represents supreme intelligence, the contem-
porary interpretations of her genius participate in a comedy of human error. For one last
example, check the video titled “Billete de Sor Juana ríe al hacerle cosquillas” (Sor Juana’s
bill laughs if you tickle it). In a slick trick uploaded on 17 September, 2014 by “vidafeliz,”
a folded 200-​peso bill shows Sor Juana turn sad and, in response to tickling, smile as the
jokester tickles her fancy. So far, the tombstone for this undead poet should most appropri-
ately read not RIP but LOL.

Note
1 All translations are mine.

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PART III

Interpretations of and debates

about the works
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A: Prose works
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11
THE AFTERLIFE OF A POLEMIC
Conflicts and discoveries regarding
Sor Juana’s letters

Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling

“The biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is yet to be written.”

Dorothy Schons, 1926

Almost all commentary about the unexpected change of direction in the life of the great poet
Sor Juana during her last years is in agreement regarding the importance of the lively debate
that the Carta atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena) engendered in 1691, two years before her
famous “conversion.” It is impossible to separate this period from the last surprising phases of
her biography, until her death in 1695. First, this chapter will address the conflicts during Sor
Juana’s time, and subsequently, will focus on perceptions about the debates in our time. It makes
sense then to present the timeline of the research chronologically, following the appearance of
new documents. Since 1980, eight successive texts have challenged prevailing opinions. This
exposé does not focus on the progressive resurrection of her poetic work during the twentieth
century, which has created the most debate, but it is important to pay attention to the succeed-
ing incarnations of the Phoenix of Mexico as an exceptional woman of her time.
The origin of the Carta is an oral debate that occurred midway through 1690 in Sor Juana’s
parlor. A  possibly inaccurate translation of several sermons by the well-​known Portuguese
preacher Antonio Vieira had been published in Mexico. One, the Sermão do Mandato (Maundy
Thursday Sermon), examined Christ’s favors of love.1 In the Iberian world, the vigilance of the
Holy Office prevented serious theological debates. Baroque society found a way of practicing
ingenious intellectual diversions, by for example debating which was Jesus’s greatest favor of
love for humankind. In this matter, the world champion was the brilliant Vieira. His unsur-
passed eloquence and exquisite style allowed him to occasionally present paradoxes and par-
alogisms that would not have been accepted from others. In the Sermon he dared to claim that
he was capable of contradicting the opinions of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, and Saint John
Chrysostom about Christ’s greatest favor of love, and that no one would be able to refute him.
Here is a likely scenario of how the events unfolded:  one summer day of 1690, in front
of the attendees of her renowned locutory/​salon, Sor Juana offered her deep admiration and
high regard for Vieira, while also stating that she could not accept this kind of arrogance. Using
Biblical quotes, and armed with the resources of the scholastic logic of her time, she contra-
dicted all of the Portuguese theologian’s arguments, one by one. She added that others should
have the right to criticize her in turn.2

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By chance, the debate moved from the oral to the written, when an unknown listener and
admirer asked the nun to put her arguments in writing. Sor Juana added a personal opin-
ion: God’s will would be to grant us continuous favors, but knowing that sometimes we will
not use them correctly, He refrained. Christ’s greatest favors of love are these “negative benefits.”
The text was most likely distributed in handwritten copies, as was usual at that time. Many
readers were enthusiastic, but some offered somewhat severe condemnations.3 One copy of Sor
Juana’s text reached the hands of Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla,4 who
published it in December 1690 without the author’s permission.The bishop gave it the ostenta-
tious name of Carta atenagórica, that is, worthy of Athena5 and included a letter as a prologue,
signed by Sor Filotea de la Cruz.The pseudo-​nun stated that she greatly admired Sor Juana, but,
considering that she had just demonstrated her prowess in theological matters, she advised that
Sor Juana dedicate her exceptional gifts to religion, disregarding the “rateras noticias de la tierra”
(unworthy notice of earthly matters). “Sor Filotea” went on: “ya que se humilla al suelo, que no
baje más abajo considerando lo que pasa en el Infierno” (OC 4.69) [having already stooped to
the Earth, may it {Sor Juana’s intellect} not descend farther to consider what comes to pass in
Hell] (qtd. Paz, Traps 396). The allusion to Hell sounds unpleasant in the midst of the avalanche
of compliments. The audacity of editing a work of that nature without the author’s permission
is somewhat shocking, but much less than it would be today.6
Sor Filotea’s true identity is well known. On March 1, 1691, Sor Juana signed the Respuesta a
Sor Filotea (Answer to Sor Filotea), one of her most famous texts.7 Meanwhile, between January
and February 1691 a dispute had taken place between Sor Juana’s supporters and adversaries.
Both literary and clerical circles, which were practically the same, were in upheaval. Until the end
of the last century, only two written testimonies about this debate were known: the Respuesta
and La fineza mayor (The greatest favor of love), a sermon that Francisco Javier Palavicino
Villarasa preached on January 26, 1691 at Sor Juana’s convent and published in Mexico the
same year. This text reveals that the most important and implacable enemy of Sor Juana, who
signed as “el Soldado” (the Soldier), issued a worthless publication which we now know was
titled Fe de erratas. We still do not know the content of this text or the author’s identity. Sor
Juana called him “Su Paternidad” (OC 4.468, l. 1171) [His Paternity]; that is, she knew him and
knew that the crudeness of the document did not suit its author’s high position in the clergy.
By 1682 Sor Juana had fired her highly-​placed confessor, Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda;
hence, his authorship has been assumed. Actually, Sor Juana wrote that the same “Soldado” made
several copies of his pamphlet, something that Don Antonio could not have done, as he was
almost blind. He was also referred to as Spanish and as blonde, which would not have worked
to describe Núñez. But he had several former students, and had served as confessor and direc-
tor of conscience for many. All were obligated to him, willing to write a libelous statement to
please him, maybe without even showing it to him before. Also, Palavicino’s sermon had some
theological peculiarities. A Dominican, who was a good friend of Father Antonio, denounced it
to the Holy Office.8 Certain moral responsibility on the part of the old man is highly probable.
Thanks to Peruvian professor José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido’s good instincts, great tal-
ent, and patience, we now have access to two new texts from the famous debate (La Carta
atenagórica). The most unexpected is the revelation of an unsuspected role of the young Jesuit
Antonio de Oviedo, already known as the biographer of Núñez de Miranda. Until then he
was seen as “loyal” to Father Núñez. We owe to him the survival of these texts from Lima.
As an admirer of the nun, he sent the texts to his uncle, the Count de la Granja, who lived
in Lima. And, later, after the “conversion,” he acted as an intermediary for an exchange of
secular romances.9 In them, Sor Juana answered some extravagant compliments with ingenious
false modesty.

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The first rescued text is the anonymous Discurso apologético (Apologetic Discourse) until
then wrongly classified, and damaged in 1943 during a fire at the National Library of Lima.10
This Discurso gives us a great deal of information. First it reveals dates and titles of the principal
contributors to the Atenagórica debate, both pros and cons (42–​43). Unfortunately, it does not
give us the content of the texts, or the identity of the authors, but its brief comments confirm
our opinion that Sor Juana’s supporters were more numerous and more important than her
adversaries. From the latter group, only “el Soldado” was important. From among Sor Juana’s
supporters, there is extant an enigmatic letter, Carta de Serafina de Cristo (Letter from Serafina
de Cristo), lost for centuries, and revealed to sorjuanistas in 1995 for the 500th anniversary of
Sor Juana’s death.11 This letter was difficult to interpret before the appearance of Discurso, which
provided some clues, specifically references to other texts from the debate, such as that of a
pseudo “María de Ataide.”
The author of Discurso calls himself “trompeta” (trumpet), but he seems to be a good theo-
logian.12 Like the preacher Palavicino, he feels compelled to write in order to prevent those of
the public not privy to the debate from thinking that he was involved in the shameful libel. He
strongly defends the Phoenix of Mexico, and also studious women in general: “Si se les entre-
garan los libros, huviera [sic] muchas Minervas para un Apolo” (156) [If they were given books,
there would be many Minervas for one Apollo]. In addition, he defends the freedom to criticize.
He states that “ha oído muchas veces a Sor Juana” (he has heard Sor Juana many times), but that
he was not present the day of the controversial sermon. He knows who the “Soldado” is, but
he refuses to name him because of the “ministry” of the author. He notes that, unavoidably, this
points to the editor-​bishop. Thus, he confirms the feelings stated in Respuesta a Sor Filotea: the
Fe de erratas is, in itself, a despicable publication, but the author is a respectable member of the
clergy whose attitude shocked those versed in the matter. As Rodríguez Garrido supposes, it is
possible that this Mexican Discurso, whose only extant copy remains in Lima, is the copy of the
lost text that Sor Juana sent to the bishop. We see an intelligent, careful criticism of the argu-
ments of the “Soldado” and thus we manage to see him almost as if we were in front of a mirror.
Above all, a woman contradicting a “shrewd” member of the church shocks the “Soldado.” He
remembers the famous Mulieres in ecclesia taceant (Let women keep silent in church) of Saint
Paul, and he even accuses Sor Juana of heresy.
The second text discovered in Lima completes the picture. This time, we know the name of
the author: the notary Pedro Muñoz de Castro. Because of his profession, he sometimes met Sor
Juana in the convent where she served as accountant. On January 19, 1691, the day on which
the text was dated, he signed some papers with her.13 Some friends advised him to defend some
of Vieira’s opinions, and he claimed to have done so reluctantly. Almost half of his Defensa del ser-
món del Mandato (Rodríguez Garrido 127–​51) –​not intended to be published –​strongly lauds
the poet, sometimes in verse, and corroborates her enormous prestige in the capital: “imán de
los coraçones, hechiso y embeleso admirable de los mexores entendimientos” [sic] (Rodríguez
Garrido 132) [magnet for hearts, spellbinder and admiring fascination for the best minds]. He
does not see himself as a great theologian. Indeed, he says that the only person able to refute
Sor Juana is Sor Juana herself.
Apparently, the debate did not last long. In any case, the dramatic changes that Sor Juana
made in her life in February 1693  –​the locutory/​salon’s closing; end of the literary work;
important alms; her reconciliation with former confessor Antonio Núñez de Miranda; and
writing the penitential text Petición causídica (Forensic Petition) –​would make such discourse
improper.14 Inversely, public opinion in the capital may have voiced a complaint that the Tenth
Muse had gone on strike, without offering her audience visions, miracles, or impressive pen-
ances. Her funeral would be a worthy tribute, complete with the presence of the faithful clients

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who ordered her Villancicos (Carols), the canons of the cathedral, but not as grand as those
of other nuns celebrated for their great piety.15 In Antonio de Robles’s local chronicles, the
description of the burial only covers a few lines. A poet, González de la Sancha, wanted a tribute
in Mexico, but he did not have enough funds and the delayed Fama y obras posthumas (Fame
and Posthumous Works) was published in Madrid in 1700. In 1713 a nun from the Convent
of the Order of Saint Jerome asked Juan de Miranda for a portrait, but the nuns did not write
an inspirational biography. Mexicans who contributed with poems in Fama praise Sor Juana’s
poetic genius more than her sanctity. Then, aside from “Hombres necios que acusaís…” (You
foolish and unreasonable men), Sor Juana the poet was also forgotten. The name of “la famosa
monja de México” (the famous Mexican nun) was known, but it was not clear for what reason.
Her prestige was a trend; literary taste had changed dramatically. The long purgatory of Sor
Juana began. In 1726 the Galician Benito Feijoo; in 1755 the Mexican Eguiara y Eguren; and
in 1758 Father Isla, from León, remembered Sor Juana only as a wise woman; these are the last
sparks of a dying fire.
Let us turn now to what happened in the Iberian peninsula. Between 1688 and 1692 Sor
Juana’s poems and plays were published, with great success. In 1692 her book began with Crisis
de un sermón (Opinion About a Sermon), and several prologists, including two Jesuits, praised
it. The 1700 tribute (Fama) included a beautiful biography by a Jesuit friend, Diego Calleja,
who corresponded with Sor Juana for many years. Sor Juana owed this posthumous tribute to a
wealthy Mexican priest, Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, who took advantage of a long stay
in Spain to gather Sor Juana’s manuscripts, while condemning the ill will of his compatriots.16
He was able to have printed Respuesta a Sor Filotea (until then unpublished), several devout
texts, including Petición causídica, a penitential text, three religious poems, the already mentioned
romance, and another, similar romance.
In his prologue, Castorena praised Sor Juana’s final conversion, seeing in that event the
effect of Carta de Sor Filotea (Letter from Sor Filotea), without considering that two years had
already passed. Regarding Pedro Calleja, he remembered the debate and severely condemned
the “Soldado”: “Con la satisfacion que dà la Poetisa al P. Vieyra, queda mas ilustrado, que con la
defensa que le hizo quien lavó con tinta la nieve” [sic] (With the praise that the poet gave Father
Vieyra, it is apparent that he defended him by washing snow with ink).17 Calleja also listed the
Spanish Jesuits who defended Sor Juana’s critique of Vieira. Fama had five editions, the last ones
in 1714 and 1725. There was even an edition published (in Spanish) in Lisbon, in 1701 by the
French publisher, Deslandes. Also in 1748, Crisis was published by itself. Only in Portugal was
there still some enmity, as well as admiration, because of the desire to defend Vieira, a national
hero. In 1727 the game of masks continued: a male religious disguised himself as a nun, and,
using the name of his sister, Sor Margarida Ignacia, published a long defense. There was a
Spanish translation from 1731: Vieyra impugnado por la Madre Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz… (Vieyra
contested by the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). The author complained bitterly about the lack
of solidarity of Mexican and Spanish Jesuits. In Portugal, the popularity of Crisis lasted until the
middle of the eighteenth century. Importantly, the protagonist did not participate; Vieira, who
was eighty-​two years old in 1690, died eight years later, in 1698. He still wrote sermons, but
lived in Brazil and probably never found out about what happened in Mexico.

The debates today
After a long silence, the debates of our time are very different, but the main focus is still the
Atenagórica and the years 1690–​1691, which are seen as an essential prelude to later drama.
Amado Nervo’s book, Juana de Asbaje,18 exemplifies Sor Juana’s resurrection as a great poet in

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Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling

Spain and Mexico from 1910 on. In Chapter 7 of this volume we saw that the academic work
of Dorothy Schons, from Austin, Texas rekindled interest in Sor Juana’s biography in Mexico.
Over the next few decades, she was not fully embraced either by the great Mexican biogra-
pher Ezequiel Chávez (Barcelona, 1933), or by Alfonso Reyes (Letras de la Nueva España, 1948
[Intellectuality in New Spain]); but Dorothy Schons had many readers, including some fervent
Catholics such as Alfonso Junco.19 In 1947, from Guillermo Ramírez España’s La familia de sor
Juana (Sor Juana’s Family), “decent people” in Mexico learned that Sor Juana was illegitimate.
In the 1950s the priest and editor Alfonso Méndez Plancarte rejected the persecution thesis,
and refrained from dealing with the dating problem of the “Romance” to Count de la Granja. If
this very worldly poem dates from after the 1693 “conversion,” then “being dead to the world,”
the “contemptus mundi” is only partial, and Sor Juana continued to correspond discretely with
several people. Also, the enigmas “published” in 1695 must have been written after February,
1693. Other works were probably lost. In addition, the closing of the locutory/​salon might be
explained by a moral crisis among those who attended after the popular uprising of 1692 –​it
was better to end than to participate in a decline.
In any case, after Méndez Plancarte’s death in 1955, a successor (Alberto G. Salceda) edited
the Carta Atenagórica and the Respuesta. During the years before the 300th anniversary in 1995,
and before the avalanche of new documents, the opinion of sorjuanistas was almost unani-
mous: at the end of her life, Sor Juana was a victim of persecution by some high clergy. Most
agreed that the Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas forced her to sell her library and give the proceeds to
the poor. Even many Catholic scholars shared the same opinion.20 The only discrepancies were
about the role each of the main characters played.
This is easily explained. Several years after the death of the Tenth Muse (circa 1700–​1702),
the Society of Jesus unsuccessfully tried to spread veneration for the penitent nun of the last
two years, at least partly motivated by dreading the idea of the emergence of an Eleventh Muse.
Sor Juana was seldom a topic of discussion and sometimes she was remembered with a modi-
cum of suspicion.21 Her own nephew, Miguel de Torres, when writing the biography of Don
Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, did not mention the Respuesta a Sor Filotea. For him, what
was important was that the bishop, Don Manuel, converted Sor Juana.22 In 1698, the Franciscan
Agustín de Vetancurt wrote a chronicle about Mexican convents titled Teatro mexicano (Mexican
Theater), and Sor Juana was not even mentioned. It seems that traveler Gemelli Carreri did not
hear about her when he visited Mexico in 1697. Actually, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (1909–​
1955) was important as an eminent defender of Sor Juana; among Mexican clergy, he and a few
others were pioneers.
During the nineteenth century, the high clergy of Mexico did not refer much to Sor Juana.
In the large number of works that Antonio Alatorre compiled (2007, t. II, 420–​24), there is only
one interesting text, the collective homage of the Academy of Mexico to Alarcón, Balbuena,
and Sor Juana, on April 17, 1884, in the “La Profesa” church in Mexico City. The speaker was
Ignacio Montes de Oca y Obregón, Bishop of Tamaulipas. Another Catholic defender of Sor
Juana, confronting the merciless disdain of the liberals, was the newspaper, El Tiempo. With its
readers, it unsuccessfully attempted, in 1884–​1885, to save the house in which Sor Juana was
born and her cell in the convent. On the other hand, the Company of Jesus seems to have lost
interest in the nun-​intellectual rather quickly.
In the last century, the most influential and specific facts are expressions of remorse, espe-
cially the “Yo la peor que ha habido” (I, the worst of all) document found in an archive, and
the Petición causídica: I deserve “infinitos infiernos” (many, many hells); I have lived “peor que
pudiera un pagano” (Obras 4.520, l.16 and 521, l.7) [worse than a pagan]. Few people interpret
these statements as devout linguistic formulae of the time, remembering that even Saint Teresa

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saw herself as a great sinner. Her signature with blood (a few drops from a finger) on Protesta que
hizo de su fe (Declaration of Faith) appears as something shocking and unworthy of Sor Juana
(OC 4.518). To all this, it is necessary to add the unsavory reputation of both the Archbishop
and the confessor Antonio Núñez de Miranda. Aguiar y Seijas avoided women, was quite aus-
tere, and an enemy of the theater; possibly, he found Sor Juana’s case extremely unpleasant.
Regarding the powerful Jesuit Don Antonio, he also preached austerity in convents, and his own
hagiographer admitted he was “pagado de su propio juicio” (Bravo Arriaga 232) [blinded by his
own judgment].Then there is the lack of information about the year 1693. If those in authority
remained silent, it must be because they had something to hide. The credibility of persecution
is such that it becomes “doxa.”
Scholars overlook other facts, even an essential one: in 1693 and 1695 the Mexican Church
refrained from celebrating a seemingly spectacular conversion, of worldly glory transformed
into divine glory. In baroque times, many opportunities for wonderful sermons were lost. Also,
it is odd that Sor Juana continued as the accountant of the convent until her death; kept her
fortune; and even bought her cell in 1692, with the approval of the Archbishop; conventual
finances, however, are not a well-​studied matter. Also, Palavicino’s high praise of Sor Juana in
the middle of the debate about Carta Atenagórica seems strange, but, although his sermon was
housed in two Mexican libraries, it was rarely read. Two other extraordinary publications merit
mention: Divino Narciso (Loa to Divine Narcissus) in Mexico in 1690,23 and the Villancicos a
Santa Catarina (Carols to St. Catherine) (very feminist) in Puebla in 1691. Probably, these were
on Fernández de Santa Cruz’s initiative. At least he must have given permission. Also, the jux-
taposition of the persecution in Mexico and the enormous literary success of the poet in the
Peninsula may seem surprising.24
In the following years there was nothing interesting to add: the discovery in Lisbon in 1968
of Sor Juana’s Enigmas did not attract attention, nor would it have produced much change in the
“debate.”25 Then, in his lengthy book, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz,or the Traps of Faith) first published in 1982, Octavio Paz stated his surprise
that her persecutors did not demand from the nun a formal retraction of her literary work, but
he noted that the editorial success arrived late, and the death in Spain of Marquis de la Laguna,
her protector, was terrible for Sor Juana. The objective of the book, to portray Sor Juana as a
victim of the conflict between two prelates and, in the last years, as “cómplice de sus verdugos”
(an accomplice of her persecutors), the Archbishop and the confessor, did not convince all read-
ers.26 But the author’s fame, the importance of his information, and the beauty and wit of so
many pages contributed to the great influence of Traps among scholars and the educated public.
Paz’s denouncing of the “Asedio” (Harassment) and the unfortunate “Abjuración” (Abjuration)
particularly resonated.
The first of a series of “new documents” appeared in April 1980. Monsignor Aureliano Tapia
Méndez found a copy of a letter from Sor Juana to Don Antonio Núñez de Miranda in the
library of the seminary in Monterrey.27 Its content allows us to date it in 1682, when Sor Juana
was a friend of the vicereine Countess de Paredes. The reader learns with great surprise that it
was not the confessor who fired the nun, but the reverse. Sor Juana’s main motivation for the
dismissal was not disagreements about nuns’ duties, but some poisonous gossip in society.28 She
had good informants. In these harsh but polite pages, she manifested not only great integrity,
but also perfect lucidity before the Jesuit’s “cariño del propio dictamen” (affection [he] feels for
[his] own advice) of the Jesuit. Also, she defended nuns’ right to study and write, stating that it
was less immoral than using free hours to spread rumors (Scott, Madres 63, 73).
Then, in 1995, two sensational documents for sorjuanistas were discovered. One came
from the private archive of a relative of Doña Teresa Castelló Yturbide, who presented it on

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November 15 at the ex-​Convent of the Order of Saint Jerome, today a university. Before the
secularization in 1863, the Convent of Saint Jerome preserved many archival materials, includ-
ing the content of cells when nuns died. In 1843, the Count de la Cortina, a Mexican scholar,
asked the priest of the convent to copy the inventory of Sor Juana’s cell.The final count was 180
books and fifteen notebooks of “versos místicos y mundanos” (mystical and secular poetry).The
document revised the vision of Sor Juana’s conversion. Calleja had already said that Sor Juana
had preserved “tres libritos de devoción” (19 v) [three small devotional books] and this may be
an understatement, but the new document did not state the content of the works. The famous
sale could have been incomplete, or Sor Juana could have lied or changed her behavior after
1693. New debates emerged.
And something even more extraordinary occurred. Seven months previously, in Toluca, the
capital of the Mexican state, the same week of the 300th anniversary of Sor Juana’s death (April
22, 1995), Elías Trabulse revealed a document that generated long-​lasting enthusiasm. It was
the Carta de Serafina de Cristo (Letter from Serafina de Cristo), rescued from a Mexican archive.
A defense of Sor Juana against the “Soldado,” written in verse and prose and in an amusing style,
it added to Palavicino’s sermon, the only known text of the debate until then. In addition, the
new Carta mentioned other unknown texts, both in favor and against. This finding constituted
significant progress in the study of the mysterious wake of the Carta atenagórica.
Unfortunately, the text is quite difficult. In his first presentation the “inventor” quoted
around thirty lines, reserving the complete edition for 1996 in Toluca.The document was dated
February 9, from the Convent of the Order of Saint Jerome. Trabulse did not take into account
the complexity of masquerade balls from that period. He added “Sor” to the name of Serafina,
attributed the text to Sor Juana, and affirmed that the recipient was “Sor Filotea.”29 He also
elaborated the idea that the target of the attacks was not Vieira but Antonio Núñez de Miranda,
Sor Juana’s former confessor, and his ideas about frequent communion. All of this was new and
ingenious. It allowed scholars to think that Don Antonio’s hatred towards Sor Juana at the end
of his life had increased. Many scholars praised it.30 A new line of investigation emerged, which
lasted three years. It ended abruptly in 1998, with Antonio Alatorre and Martha Lilia Tenorio’s
refutation in Serafina y Sor Juana. Trabulse had misinterpreted both the text and Comulgador
penitente (Penitent Taker of Communion), Núñez’s work. The author of Carta is unknown. The
recipient was Sor Juana. The target was Vieira, no one else. The effect was overwhelming. In
1998 and 1999 the “victim” (Trabulse) published two works about other topics: Sor Juana as an
accountant, and the circumstances of her death, but refrained from answering the attack. And
then he became silent. He eliminated from his own bibliography the 1995–​1997 writings about
Serafina.31 A parenthesis closed.
In 2004, the little miracle of the discovery in Lima reinforced the previous refutation, if it
were necessary, although it did not reveal the name of the author of the Carta de Serafina. We
learned that it was not signed in the Convent of Saint Jerome, but in the “Discalced convent.”
And then more documents appeared, this time about Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. In
Puebla, in the bishopric archive, researcher Jesús Jöel Peña Espinosa discovered the copy (or the
draft) of a long letter of seven folios, intended for Sor Juana, dated March 20, 1691, a few days
after receiving the Respuesta a Sor Filotea.32 Fernández de Santa Cruz did not answer the nun’s
feminist arguments; he claimed that he had published the Letter without permission because
he wanted to contribute to Sor Juana’s glory in Spain. He stated that the “Soldado” was despic-
able. Once again, he encouraged Sor Juana to reject profane subjects: if she did not want to
devote herself to theology, then there was mysticism. But he was not upset with her; he treated
her with much respect and expressed his loyal admiration.33 He acted “in good faith.” And the
text proves that Sor Juana did not have a confessor, which had already been intimated in the

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ending of the Carta al confesor (Letter to the Confessor). If that were the case, the bishop would
necessarily have alluded to the opinions of his colleague. Moreover, if we examine canonical
rules, to intervene without permission in the spirituality of a nun from a neighboring diocese
would have been a shocking irregularity. Fernández de Santa Cruz would have had to have the
permission of the Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas. A  true collaboration in “Sor Juana’s case” was
most likely; maybe the Archbishop’s tolerance towards Sor Juana was mainly because of Don
Manuel’s good advice.34
Peña Espinosa also revealed the brief content of another message sent from Puebla the fol-
lowing year, on January 21, 1692 (Soriano Vallès, Sor Juana 483–​84). The bishop referred to a
specific messenger between himself and the nun, which allows us to assume that there was an
almost regular correspondence between the two dates. And we learn something previously
completely unknown: at that time, Sor Juana studied Greek (which seemed to displease the
bishop), and also had some disagreements with those Mothers Superior who required her to
accomplish many tasks.There is also an illustrative sentence regarding the quality of their friend-
ship: “los favores que debo a V. md., q[u]‌e me obligan a desear muchos órdenes de su serbicio,
que sin cruz o con ella las exequtaré, pidiendo en recompensa su memoria, y oraciones” [sic]
(482) [the favors that I owe you, which obligate me to desire many orders to serve you, which
without a cross or with one I will carry out, asking that in recompense you remember me, and
your prayers].
What favors can a prelate owe to a nun like Sor Juana? They were probably intellectual,
rather than spiritual or social. Actually, it seems that Don Manuel was fascinated by the Mexican
Phoenix, whom he had not seen since 1676.35 He could not disregard the intelligence of
women because in his youth he had been influenced by an aunt, a nun in Salamanca. And he
admitted to sharing Sor Juana’s insatiable passion for books and study.
Last but not least: the recently found will and testament of José de Lombeyda, chaplain of the
Carmelites. Clause number 20 states: “la madre Juana Inés de la Cruz… ya difunta me entregó
ciertos libros para que los vendiese…” (Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz, now deceased, gave me
some books to sell for her) and he entrusts them to the Archbishop.36 The idea that Aguiar y
Seijas stole Sor Juana’s entire library has become more farfetched.
The eight recently-​found documents clearly depict Sor Juana’s social position. She did not
lack advocates in the embattled last years of her life.37 But we do not know what future dis-
coveries will bring. And the assessment of the moral pressure that the nun received from both
prelates depends on the religious position of each scholar. There are some uncertainties that
still remain regarding Sor Juana’s conversion, and new problems arise. Did she continue study-
ing Greek? What was the exact role of father Oviedo? Perhaps the young and brilliant Jesuit
was much more than the mail carrier between Mexico and Lima, and the future biographer
of Father Antonio (1702).38 Previously, some claimed that he had lied in the biography, saying
that it was the confessor who had fired the nun, but another person is responsible for that lie,
a Jesuit of a higher rank, who wanted to promote Sor Juana’s image on a cloud of incense. In
the prologue, Oviedo stated that “da a luz por orden de la obediencia la Vida y virtudes del Padre
Núñes” (f. 1) [from obedience, he gave birth to the Life and Virtues of Father Núñes]. Father
Calleja’s biography reveals the same obedience.
To Antonio Alatorre it seemed evident that young Oviedo was the secretary/​guide of old
Don Antonio at the end of his life, and that he also served as informant to Padre Calleja
(Alatorre and Tenorio 117). He based himself on Núñez’s biography. Possibly the young Jesuit
Oviedo had fostered a discreet reconciliation between Núñez and Sor Juana in February 1693,
without the elderly priest’s permanently resuming his role as confessor.39 Also Oviedo hid him-
self when he contributed with Latin verses to Fama y obras posthumas because he did not want

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to appear in public as a disloyal disciple of Don Antonio, despite being one. By the end of 1680,
the Society of Jesus had prevented Núñez from gaining any important position, but it had three
significant reasons to treat him with great consideration: his prestige in the city, the important
donations his “clientele” gave to the Society, and the willingness to hide from the public the
divisions inside the Order, because Don Antonio had supporters.40 In any case, a nun’s rebellion
against her confessor was an unpleasant event, and it was better to erase it. What was important
was that Núñez appear at Sor Juana’s “silver wedding” ceremony. Oviedo lived for many years
and had a brilliant career. If his role was the one we suppose here, we can regret that he would
have taken so many secrets to his tomb.
We also need to think about future research. The archive of Fernández de Santa Cruz at
the bishopric of Puebla urgently needs an in-​depth study. The man deserves a true biography.
He has been seen as an extension of the famous Bishop Palafox too many times. Nonetheless,
Don Manuel’s devotion to the Saboyan François de Sales, whose works were characterized by a
tendency toward peace rather than violence, is well-​known. Another murky area is that of the
Jesuits, whom we should not always perceive as all the same, even if the Order knows how to
successfully conceal its disagreements from the outside world. We have noted that many Jesuits
in the Peninsula and in Mexico did not agree with Father Núñez. A difficult subject, so impor-
tant in the seventeenth century, is free will in relation to divine grace. Some view Sor Juana
as a Molinist, others, as a disciple of Báñez. We regret that in his erudite book, Pérez Amador
Adam did not comment on the newly-​found opinions, in particular on the content of Discurso
apologético.
Finally, we remember that these debates from the past and those in the future belong to the
scholarly world. We cannot expect to change the perception of the Mexican public any time
soon. The image of the nun victim of the clerical “traps” is widely accepted. It was reinforced
at the end of the last century with unfounded reasons, but it is, from a literary and sentimental
point of view, too charming to disappear in the near future. It has been completely incorporated
into the national imaginary.41

Notes
1 There were actually three in Spain: 1662, 1664, and 1678. Sor Juana probably had access to the last one.
2 There is no space here to burden the reader with the details of the somewhat outdated debate, about
Christ’s greatest favors of love. The importance of the subject lies in the participants’ attitude. See Works
cited at the end of this volume.
3 The matter of negative benefits or favors of love was not the focus of debate at that time.
4 Puebla was the second city of the viceroyalty, and very prestigious. Fernández de Santa Cruz was held
in high esteem in New Spain. He had refused the Archbishopric of Mexico and, in 1698, he refused the
position of viceroy. Oddly, many sorjuanistas have claimed that he asked Sor Juana to put her “criticism”
in writing.
5 Refer to Obras completas 4. 412–​39. Some scholars have given another meaning to the title: worthy of
Athenagoras, theologian and philosopher of the Greek Church from the 3rd century C.E. The editor
reproduces in the appendix a translation into Spanish of Vieira’s sermon, but he does not mention the
edition (673–​96).
6 The writer complained that she could not review her text. It is unknown if she was truly upset. Actually,
the Carta was published in Seville two years later, with a simpler title, Crisis de un sermón and without
any major differences. It is the first item in the Segundo Volumen (Second Volume) of Sor Juana’s works,
published in Seville in 1692. To sorjuanista Alberto Pérez Amador Adam it seems odd how quickly the
editor received it and that there is no reference to the edition in Puebla (see De finezas … 27–​29). It is
unlikely that her Spanish friends (primarily the Countess de Paredes, ex-​vicereine) had acted against the
author’s will by taking advantage of having a copy, but maybe she would have appreciated rereading her
text before it was published.

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7 The letter and the answer are published in Fama y obras posthumas, 1–​7 and 8–​60. See also OC 4.440–​75.
8 The Dominican wrote a prologue for father Oviedo’s biography of Núñez (1700). He reproached
Palavicino for his praise of Sor Juana during a religious ceremony she attended. The Holy Tribunal
moved slowly: the sentence (exile from the capital) took place eight years later, when Sor Juana was
already dead. Possibly, while she was alive, she served as a “lightning rod” for the preacher.
9 Both poems appear in Fama y obras posthumas 142–​57. The Count praised the second volume of
Sor Juana’s works (in the latter part of 1692). Peru is so far away that he had to have read the book
after February 1693 and Sor Juana answered closer to 1694. See Ballón Aguirre 149–​51. Oviedo was
Núñez’s secretary, but he had chosen another confessor, Father José Vidal, to whom he dedicated an
affectionate biography in 1752.
10 The text is reproduced in Rodríguez Garrido 155–​86.
11 See below.
12 It cannot be Oviedo. In 1691 he was still a novice in Tepozotlán.
13 He takes the opportunity to affirm that Sor Juana is an excellent businesswoman, and that her convent
owes her quite a bit.
14 See Bénassy, “Schons” ­chapter 6 in this volume.
15 For example, the funeral of the prior and author Sor Águeda de San Ignacio, held in Puebla, in 1756.
See Bénassy-​Berling, Humanisme, Part 3, c­ hapter 1.
16 Other than Sor Juana, the most praised writer in Mexico was Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. They
collaborated in contests and collective works, but the nature of their relationship is unknown. After her
death, he refused to submit a manuscript he possessed, and none of his poems appeared in Fama.
17 It was the “Soldier” who washed snow with ink, in his awkward defense of Vieyra. See the facsimile
edition of the Fama póstuma (28). For more details about the editions and the extent of the debate
about Crisis in the Iberian Peninsula, see Alatorre and Tenorio 17–​27.
18 This Mexican poet and diplomat gave lectures and published in Madrid.
19 Junco, a partisan of the Falange in Mexico, authored Al amor de sor Juana (To the Love of Sor Juana, 1951).
20 I witnessed Robert Ricard’s caution: “Only God knows, etc.” Of course, he did not rant against the
clergy. He dealt with other matters.
21 See Peña 203–​09 for the strange case of Sor Agustina de San Diego, who was reprehended for her
friendship with Sor Juana when they were younger. See also Soriano Vallès 338, note 21.
22 A chapter of his Dechado is dedicated to Sor Juana.
23 This required the authorization of the Archbishop.
24 See Bénassy-​Berling, Humanisme Part 3, c­ hapter 1.
25 At the Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas de México in 1968, the presentation of the “inventor,”
Enrique Martínez López, was sparsely attended and few readers took advantage of the text published
in the Revista de literatura in Madrid the same year. Antonio Alatorre edited the document in 1994
(Enigmas). That charming literary exchange with European nuns, which might have been prolonged
after the conversion (the parodical edition is dated 1695), was a sort of “secret garden” that remains
outside the debates. The manuscript was not published, but rather copied and distributed among the
nuns of a religious academy that functioned through correspondence, called a “Casa do prazer,” and
certain selected others, but it carries the trappings of a publication: a publication date, editor’s name
(el más Reverente Respeto) [the most revered Respect], publisher’s name (la Majestuosa Veneracion)
[Majestic Veneration], censors, and a license in Portuguese.
26 The phrase “cómplice de sus verdugos” was Rosario Castellanos’; see Cárdenas 26. Several sorjuanistas
noticed the internal contradictions (for e­ xample 92–​93).
27 Also an expert in Sor Juana’s portraits, this cleric was Alfonso Méndez Plancarte’s nephew. He did
not make public his discovery until 1986, in Boston, at a meeting of the Latin American Studies
Association, in a session chaired by Nina Scott.
28 For instance, something like “hay que rezar mucho por el alma de Sor Juana que está en peligro” (we
must pray a great deal for Sor Juana’s soul, which is in danger). Clearly, as confessor, Núñez should not
have been speaking about a penitent publicly. The style, less polished than the one in the Respuesta a
Sor Filotea, initially surprised sorjuanistas, but its content has convinced them of its authenticity. See all
the details of its reception history in the 1992 edition of the Carta.
29 Of those attending, Professor José Pascual Buxó was the only one who, at that moment, discretely
expressed his disagreement. The style of the cited verses seems unworthy of Sor Juana.
30 Others denied or doubted and some supporters lost interest after some time. An attack of Sor Juana
on her former confessor seems useless and quite imprudent. One should note the lack of rigor in the

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researcher’s language: “no parece improbable” (it does not seem improbable), “todo parece indicar” (all
indications are), etc. Trabulse announced that he had discovered a secret process of the Archbishopric
against Sor Juana, but was unable to present any documents.
31 This omission was corroborated in Wikipedia.
32 See the reproduction of this text as an appendix in Soriano Vallès, Sor Juana 469–​82.
33 In the same year, a cleric of her bishopric published in Puebla, Villancicos a Santa Catarina (Carols to St.
Catherine), a highly feminist text.
34 The Bishop of Puebla was “suffragan” of the Archbishop of Mexico, but Fernández de Santa Cruz had
consecrated Aguiar y Seijas as bishop and he owed his position to his “godfather’s” resignation. Both
events modified hierarchy.
35 The year of his consecration as bishop. Private journeys were unthinkable for a prelate, and official ones
were quite solemn events.We note here that Dorothy Schons, in “Some obscure Points …,” had already
portrayed Don Manuel as a “lover of learning” (55).
36 Cited in Soriano Vallès, “Caprichos” 7. Lombeyda died a few months after Sor Juana.
37 See the debate on the recent books of Soriano Vallès and Pérez Amador Adam, De las finezas,
chapter III.
38 He was already a literature professor at the prestigious school of San Pedro y San Pablo.
39 Oviedo could not be Sor Juana’s confessor during her conversion period: he was not yet a priest. He
was ordained in 1694, that is, after the famous conversion. See also Lascano.
40 But not at court: when Sor Juana was in favor, he had lost his.
41 If Queen Marie Antoinette of France had not been guillotined, she would be far less famous worldwide.

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12
CHALLENGING THEOLOGICAL
AUTHORITY
The Carta atenagórica /​ Crisis sobre un sermón and
the Respuesta a Sor Filotea

Grady C. Wray

The Carta atenagórica /​ Crisis sobre un sermón and Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de
la Cruz are two of the most controversial and complex pieces of correspondence that Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz (1648/​51–​1695) wrote. The bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz
y Sahagún, published the Carta atenagórica (Athenagoric Letter /​Letter Worthy of Athena) without Sor
Juana’s consent in Mexico in November of 1690. It was republished with her permission in Spain
in 1692 as Crisis sobre un sermón (Opinion or Judgement About a Sermon) in her second volume of
works.1 Sor Juana sends the Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (The Poetess’
Response to the Most Illustrious Sister Filotea de la Cruz) to the same bishop, Fernández de Santa
Cruz, on March 1, 1691, but it was not published until 1700 in Madrid in Fama y obras pósthumas
del Fenix de México (Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico).2
Although both circulated during her lifetime, it is doubtful that she originally intended them
for mass publication, as was the case with much of her poetry and drama.3 In recent decades these
two works have undergone much scrutiny, and many scholars have diligently researched the ways
in which they paint a portrait of Sor Juana’s last years (1690–​1695), especially her relationship with
the ecclesiastical elite of late-​seventeenth-​century New Spain.4 While difficult to separate, each
work can stand alone and has received individual interpretation. The Atenagórica has undergone
less analysis than the Respuesta, and most literary specialists have tended to view it as another link
in a chain of documents that serves to decipher the reasons why Sor Juana composed such a cri-
tique and the controversy that ensued afterwards.Yet it is a complex, theological text that depends
on other works that predate and influence it. Likewise, it has an impact on the commentaries that
critique it after its publication. Some studies have focused specifically on its theological aspects,
while others have described its relation to similar lines of thought in other, mostly earlier (1687–​
1690) writings by Sor Juana. The latter underscore that the ideas she developed in such a direct
and specific way in the Atenagórica were part of her consciousness for many years. The Respuesta,
on the other hand, has received a great deal of attention, because it provides a glimpse into the
possible personal history of this Mexican genius, told from her own perspective. The Respuesta
also serves as a well-​argued treatise that addresses issues of women’s participation in study and

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intellectual discourse, making it, for many, a groundbreaking proto-​feminist text that takes its place
alongside other women-​authored works that advance the status of women as active contributors
to culture and knowledge.5 Other research on the Respuesta, although related, has tended to exam-
ine rhetorical matters, such as autobiographical or “life” writing (vidas), hagiography, apologetics,
judicial defenses or forensics, and silence. Sor Juana’s auto-​didacticism, her understanding of sci-
ence and theology, and her place in the intellectual world to which she contributed and in which
she participated has further broadened investigations into the Respuesta. Both documents weave
together diverse but related elements that make their study rich and rewarding.
When reading the scholarship on the Atenagórica and the Respuesta, one cannot help noticing
the influence of Dorothy Schons, Ludwig Pfandl, and Octavio Paz as twentieth-​century fore-
runners of late-​twentieth-​and early-​twenty-​first-​century analyses (see Bénassy, Chapter 6 in
this volume). The majority of research regarding both works, as well as other Sor Juana studies,
comes after Paz’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982) and its English translation,
Sor Juana; or,The Traps of Faith by Margaret Sayers Peden.While the scholarly community owes a
debt of gratitude to Paz for renewing interest in Sor Juana, scholarly challenges to some of Paz’s
assumptions have led to deeper and broader studies. Furthermore, the discovery of letters and
other documents (since 1982) continues to have an impact on interpretations of the final years
of Sor Juana’s life and clarification of the context within which she composed these two works.6
Of importance for English-​speaking analyses are the translations of the Atenagórica and the
Respuesta. As of now, the only translations of the Atenagórica appear in Pamela Kirk Rappaport’s
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings and Franchón Royer’s The Tenth Muse: Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz.The Respuesta appears in English in Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell’s The Answer /​La
Respuesta (Expanded Edition); Edith Grossman’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works; Margaret
Sayers Peden’s A Woman of Genius:  The Intellectual Biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and
Poems, Protest, and a Dream; and Alan S. Trueblood’s A Sor Juana Anthology. Arenal and Powell’s
bilingual edition is the most exhaustive critical edition of the Respuesta, and it gives readers a
thorough background of the text and its intricacies.7
Sor Juana penned the Atenagórica at the behest of someone she addresses as “Muy señor
mío”/​”My dear sir” who had heard her comments about the famous Portuguese Jesuit
preacher Father Antonio Vieira’s Sermón Tercero del mandato en la Capilla Real, año 1650 (a
Maundy Thursday sermon) (1650). Perhaps Bishop Fernández de Santa Cruz, who published
the Atenagórica without Sor Juana’s consent, made the request, but it is still up for debate. At
any rate, Sor Juana did not have the opportunity to edit it as she did with her other works.8
Whether the Atenagórica was originally meant to challenge theological authority still raises
questions. Perhaps Sor Juana intended merely to respond to the request to write down her
comments as an exercise in criticism about a sermon in which she found rhetorical and inter-
pretive flaws. However, it is also possible that she was doing more than giving her opinion.
Certainly much scholarship has presented the Atenagórica as a challenge to the New-​Spanish
religious hierarchy as a whole and the Jesuits in particular.9 When Bishop Fernández de Santa
Cruz published the Atenagórica, he also included a letter he wrote under the female pen name
of Sor Filotea de la Cruz.10 Although his letter imposed the familiarity of another sister in reli-
gion, it admonished Sor Juana to dedicate more time to religious pursuits rather than secular
literary readings and composition. Three months lapsed from the time Fernández de Santa
Cruz published the Atenagórica and his letter until Sor Juana responded with the Respuesta,
addressing him as Sor Filotea. Like the Atenagórica, the Respuesta can be read as a piece of cor-
respondence that reflects the obligatory discourse of humility of the period; however, there
is much more written between the lines. Women’s quest for knowledge becomes a major
theme in the Respuesta, and the opinions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy who strongly opposed

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women’s studying and writing greatly influenced the Respuesta. Sor Juana’s carefully crafted
arguments had to confront this atmosphere in strategic ways.
No matter who asked Sor Juana to offer her now-​famous critique, the main thrust of the
Atenagórica centers on her opinion of Vieira’s sermon expounding on Christ’s final favors of love,
or finezas, offered to humankind.11 As part of his interpretation he focuses on the opinions of three
church forefathers and other theological writings. The theme of finezas was indeed a popular one,
and Saints Augustine,Thomas Aquinas, and John Chrysostom had stated their opinions on the sub-
ject, as had several other New-​Spanish writers, including Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sor Juana’s
previous confessor, and Francisco Xavier Palavicino.12 While Sor Juana stated that she admired
Vieira’s abilities greatly, she found his statements against the opinions of Augustine, Aquinas, and
Chrysostom to be flawed. She refuted all of Vieira’s arguments against the church forefathers and
went against his supposedly irrefutable opinion about Christ’s greatest fineza. She argued her case
well, but did not stop there. As requested, she continued to offer her opinion on the benefits, or
finezas, that humankind receives from God, stating that God’s ability not to give benefits because
of humankind’s ingratitude was God’s greatest act of love. Because God understands human nature
and knows that humans work harder and strive more without gifts, God goes against the natural
divine desire to give and withholds good. God’s negative benefits become positive in humans.
Sor Juana’s choice to critique Vieira’s sermon has been questioned. She was familiar with Vieira’s
other sermons because she mentions them in other writings. Richard Vernon states that 12 per-
cent of Vieira’s sermons were about women and that Vieira valued women and their accomplish-
ments.Vernon wonders whether Sor Juana used Vieira for protection since he was a powerful figure.
Rebelo Gomes describesVieira well and suggests that Sor Juana was told to choose the Sermón Tercero.
Most critics agree that Sor Juana argued with more finesse and greater clarity of logic
than those who defended Vieira, although some assert that she dismissed certain arguments
without much explanation or interpreted the church forefathers, such as St. Augustine, to suit
her own analysis. Soriano Vallès (“Un género”) tackles the topic of divine finezas and argues
that Sor Juana has misinterpreted St. Thomas Aquinas. He further suggests that Fernández
de Santa Cruz pointed this out to Sor Juana in the letter he included with the Respuesta
and that the bishop subtly admonished her to study the forefathers more in order to better
understand the negative benefits of divine love. Stephanie Kirk clearly describes both Vieira
and Sor Juana’s arguments and flaws on finezas (“Sor Margarida”). She further evaluates in
detail another text that refutes Sor Juana’s Atenagórica: the Apologia a favor de R.P. António
Vieyra da Companhia de Jesu da Provincia de Portugal … (Defense in favor of R.F. Antonio Vieyra
of the Company of Jesus from the Province of Portugal…). Given the various titles of the works
and the meanings they convey (see note 1), different genres and subgenres could describe
the Atenagórica and the Respuesta. The titles Athenagoric Letter and The Poetess’ Response to
Sister Filotea de la Cruz suggest an epistolary interpretation. Introductory salutations and
closing remarks fit standard letter writing techniques. However, what takes place between
the beginning and the ending falls into and combines with several other categories, creating
hybrid texts. Sor Juana draws upon many philosophical, theological, hagiographic, apolo-
getic, and forensic influences to craft both her works.13 While the Respuesta has been used to
draw conclusions about Sor Juana’s childhood, adolescence, decision to enter the convent,
natural ability, and desire to learn, scholarship has also noted that the text, although autobio-
graphical, does not follow the modern idea of autobiography. Sor Juana’s style follows a pat-
tern for recounting one’s life based on St. Augustine, St. Teresa, and other “life” writings or
vidas.14 Whereas this style serves to support her objectives, it may not always reflect a specific
experience but rather fill in the blanks of a prescribed discourse that allows her to continue
to write even from a less powerful and/​or humble position. Women’s conventual documents

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have attracted attention as a source of female writing in the purest sense (écriture féminine),
but the restrictions placed on women who wrote in the convent kept them from expressing
themselves freely outside patriarchal boundaries, and Sor Juana was not immune from these
restrictions. At times she includes elements that reflect the appropriate incidents that meet a
confessor or reader’s requirements. Examining the Respuesta, Frederick Luciani warns that,
“[i]‌t is important to consider that (1) the purpose of the letter is rhetorical, to persuade; and
(2) its primary referent is not so much the historical Sor Juana but rather her intellectual and
literary vocation, her erudition itself ” (“Dressing” 56). As many have explained, the use of
humility, modesty, and self-​deprecation topoi reflect period rhetoric and “serve as a smoke
screen behind which Sor Juana can protect herself and as parodic repetition that affirms that
which later she will deny” (Beaupied, “Revelación” 122). Julie A. Bokser cautions that “the
intimacy projected in Sor Juana’s letter is something readers today need to be wary of –​the
self-​image she shares is more clearly a public relations gesture than sincere autobiography”
(“Sor Juana’s”10).15
Many scholars have shown how both the Atenagórica and the Respuesta belong to the essay,
as well as to other genres. Ana Kothe describes the Atenagórica as an essay disguised as a let-
ter: “Its epistolary appearance is a rhetorical strategy Sor Juana designed to dissemble an act
of transgression” (356). Rosa Perelmuter in “The Answer” describes how the Respuesta follows
two models: “the forensic oration” that one would present before a judge and jury, and “the
familiar letter” (186). I have noted that certain parts of the Atenagórica function as a sermon, and
in a similar vein, Pamela Kirk evaluates the homiletic elements and compares both Vieira’s and
Sor Juana’s exegetical style. Kirk signals that Vieira argues from his position of power, while Sor
Juana’s position remains on the margins. Koldobika Josu Bijuesca remarks that exegesis goes
hand in hand with preaching and examines the exegetic passages in the Respuesta.16 Constance
M. Montross follows the influence of Thomistic thought in Sor Juana’s sermonic style in both
the Atenagórica and the Respuesta.
Free will and women’s empowerment become central to Sor Juana’s argument. Related
to the theme of finezas or divine benefits found in the Atenagórica, Sor Juana finds fault with
humankind for not responding appropriately to God’s benefits, but, as many critics have under-
scored, Sor Juana recognizes that humans have free will, and the ability to act on a favor lies in
the person who receives it. As mentioned above (note 9), some have alleged that Sor Juana’s
New World theology rests, in part, on a critique of the Jesuit influence in the Americas, because
it inhibited the free will of indigenous cultures. Florbela Rebelo Gomes considers that Sor
Juana implies that just as God gives negative benefits (withholds rather than gives so that peo-
ple can have a choice), the Jesuits should not force religious beliefs on native peoples. This line
of argument also leads to the study of several other Sorjuanine texts such as the Letras de San
Bernardo (Saint Bernard’s Verses), El divino Narciso (Divine Narcissus), El mártir del sacramento, San
Hermenegildo (Saint Hermenegild: The Martyr of the Sacrament), El cetro de José (Joseph’s Scepter), and
their respective loas, as well as her poetry written in Nahuatl.17 The most obvious defense of free
will surfaces in the Respuesta when Sor Juana advocates for women to study. She elegantly uses
St. Paul’s arguments that typically keep women from preaching (“mulieres in ecclesiis taceant”
[“let the women keep silence in the churches”], I Corinthians 14:34). She goes beyond, con-
textualizing them with examples from St. Jerome and others to mark differences and, in her
estimation, to correct an accepted misinterpretation of church teachings.18 Along with what
Fernando Riva has claimed, Pamela Kirk shows that Sor Juana relies on St. Paul but also on St.
Jerome to support her argument that “the lack of appropriate higher education for women of
her own society goes against the accepted tradition of the Church” (135). The use of imitatio
further allows Sor Juana to appropriate exemplary lives and to stress her similarity to those

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who have come before her and have served as pillars of the church. She compares herself to
St. Paul and his abilities to write and preach, Christ who suffers because of the ignorance of
those around him, and St. Peter who is persecuted because he denies Christ just as Sor Juana
denies wisdom.19
Along with free will, themes of envy, pride, obedience, and humility occupy the lines of the
Atenagórica as well as the Respuesta. Sor Juana’s critique of envious and prideful behavior could
have multiple meanings. Pablo A.J. Brescia has suggested that she attacks Vieira’s arrogance when
he claims he will surpass the opinions of the church fathers. Brescia also highlights Fernández
de Santa Cruz’s potential envy of Sor Juana, especially because she received the commission to
oversee and compose the text that described the triumphal arch to welcome the new viceroy,
Tomás Antonio de la Cerda y Aragón (the Third Marquis de la Laguna and Count of Paredes)
(“El ‘crimen’ ”). José Pascual Buxó reviews the possible envy and competition among Fernández
de Santa Cruz, Aguiar y Seixas, and Núñez de Miranda that Sor Juana could be underscoring
with the Atengórica and the Respuesta, but he also stresses that conclusive evidence is lacking to
support these envious relationships (“Monstruo”). Returning to the theme of women’s intel-
lectual pursuits, Riva points out that pride is worse than studying for women according to the
Jeronimite tradition and that it was far more important for women to be obedient than for them
to refrain from study. In fact, Riva supposes that in the Carta de Sor Filotea, Fernández de Santa
Cruz is concerned that Sor Juana’s knowledge of things other than religion could make her
more prideful. Asunción Lavrin contextualizes the relationship between confessors and women
religious and explains how the tension surrounding obedience, disobedience, and the elements
of imposed subordination within the convent influenced Sor Juana’s arguments. Typical humil-
ity topoi are present in both works, but Sor Juana proceeds past them and calls for humility in
matters of theology. Like Riva, Lisa Powell has argued that Vieira’s bold claims of knowledge and
arrogance bother Sor Juana. She states that “…Sor Juana is in fact directly rejecting combative
tendencies in theology that would seek victory over alternative views and would seek domina-
tion of voice and perspective” (19). Powell goes on to say that in both the Atenagórica and the
Respuesta, Sor Juana “exposes the arrogant rhetoric of others” (28). Sor Juana wants humility,
not competition. While all of the aforementioned theorists argue their points well, Sor Juana’s
critiques of arrogance and her awareness of those who envy her cannot be ignored or stressed
enough. They are evident in both of these texts and in her other writings.
The ways in which Sor Juana specifically complicates the issue of silence in the Respuesta has
drawn close attention.20 As mentioned above, Sor Juana remained silent for three months before
she officially responded to the bishop. One reason Sor Juana gave for the delay was her confu-
sion and amazement at the publication of the Atenagórica. Under such conditions, she claims
that she simply did not know how to respond. However, an ironic reading of this silence shows
that she chose not to say what could not be said against the bishop because he betrayed her in
publishing the Atenagórica.21 Bokser sees beyond typical rhetorical turns of phrase and describes
Sor Juana as a rhetorician who has constructed her own rhetorical theory around silence and
aposiopesis, or silences for interruption or insertions. Silence can be an effective irritant: “…Sor
Juana interrupts the bishop in order to justify her past reticence and to announce her impending
silence so that she herself will be listened to –​by those who know how to hear” (18). Bokser
adds that “there is an intended ribbing in the way in which Sor Juana refutes the Pauline tradi-
tion that taught girls and women that silence was fitting for them, and then endorses its use in
new and subversive ways by sketching a positive rhetoric of silence that she, a woman, enacts”
(11). Perhaps Sor Juana says it best when she explains silence as follows: “de manera que aquellas
cosas que no se pueden decir, es menester decir siquiera que no se pueden decir, para que se
entienda que el callar no es no haber qué decir, sino no caber en las voces lo mucho que hay

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que decir” (“of those things that cannot be spoken, it must be said that they cannot be spoken,
so that it may be known that silence is kept not for lack of things to say, but because the many
things there are to say cannot be contained in mere words”) [qtd. and trans. in Arenal and Powell
42–​43].
The Atenagórica and the Respuesta provide rich sources for intellectual intrigue and satisfac-
tion. By no means have the possibilities for further research been exhausted. No doubt new
documents will surface that will enhance the hypotheses of how Sor Juana spent her final years.
Each new discovery will require a rereading of both works to adjust their fit into new analyses.
The themes of autobiography, hagiography, theology, apologetics, divine demonstrations of love,
envy, pride, obedience, humility, imitatio, free will, women’s intellectual pursuits, and silence will
arouse further interest not only in these works but in Sor Juana’s other writings, and a more
comprehensive picture of Sor Juana’s thought will continue to develop. New readings will sur-
face as more people from various disciplines such as history, women’s studies, religious studies,
theology, musicology, and philosophy evaluate these multilayered texts. Many of the most inno-
vative interpretations that have led to deeper comprehension of these works have come from
those who have taken the time to read them in different frameworks outside of typical literary
studies. This scholarship has presented Sor Juana’s works within a broader cultural context and
has clarified and enlightened the world in which she lived. While much research has described
whom Sor Juana elected to include in her writings, what types of arguments upon which she
drew, and how she crafted her discourse, deeper investigations into her influences, choices, and
their history will augment and enrich the understanding of this intriguing woman and her
complex but fascinating works.

Notes
1 Most scholarship accepts the standard translation of Carta atenagórica as Letter Worthy of Athena,
although here I  have chosen to add Athenagoric Letter to imply other interpretations. Ezequiel
A.  Chávez first theorized about the bishop’s title defining “atenagórica” as related to Athena/​
Minerva, the goddess of wisdom: “atena” refers to Athena; “agora” refers to “arenga” or a persuasive
speech; and “ica” refers to “propio de” or pertaining to; thus “worthy of.” However, some scholars
(Bandeira and Schmidhuber, “Hallazgo”) have written that the title given by Fernández de Santa
Cruz suggests Athenagoras, a second-​century Greek philosopher who defended Christianity. For
further references to these possibilities see Brescia, “El ‘crimen’ ”; Rebelo Gomes; Soriano Vallès,
“Un género”; and Amy Williamsen. Kothe also argues for a double reading of “atenagórica” when
she states in footnote four that “[t]‌he etymology of ‘agórica’ in ‘atenagórica’ can be traced to the
Greek ‘agora,’ or public speaking place” (358). It is still uncertain if Crisis sobre un sermón is Sor
Juana’s title or if an editor chose it (See Myers, “The Tenth Muse”). “Crisis” carries the following
definition in Spanish: “Juicio que se hace sobre algúna cosa, en fuerza de lo que se ha observado y
reconocido acerca de ella” (Diccionario de autoridades) or “Judgement that one makes about some-
thing after one has made an effort to observe and examine it closely” (my trans). Thus, “opinion,”
“judgement,” or “critique” may serve as translations.
2 For more on the publication history see Sabat-​Rivers, Bibliografía, Inundación, and “Sor Juana”; and
Trabulse, Carta de Serafina. For brevity’s sake I will refer to the Carta atenagórica /​ Crisis sobre un sermón
as the Atenagórica and the Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz as the Respuesta.
3 The idea of a completely private or intimate correspondence was different in the pre-​modern period.
Sor Juana was probably aware that these writings would circulate among a small group, but more than
likely she did not expect their vast diffusion (See Bokser, “Sor Juana’s”; Castro; P. Kirk, Sor Juana …
Religion; Kothe; and Myers, “Tenth Muse”).
4 Many scholars use documents from the period to explain the context in which Sor Juana wrote the
Atenagórica and the Respuesta. See, for instance, Alatorre, “La carta” and “Una Defensa”; Alatorre and
Tenorio; Brescia, “El ‘crimen,’ ” “Sor Juana y el Padre Vieira,” and “Towards a New Interpretation”;
Camarena Castellanos; Junco; Kirk, “Sor Margarida”; Myers, “The Tenth Muse”; Pascual Buxó, “Las

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lágrimas”; Poot-​Herrera, “La caridad,” “Una carta,” and Los guardaditos; Pérez-​Amador Adam, De fin-
ezas; Riva; Rodríguez Garrido, Carta atenagórica; Soriano Vallès, Doncella, La hora, and “Un género”; and
Trabulse, Los años, Carta de Serafina, “Carta,” La muerte, and “El silencio.”
5 See Aldridge; Arenal, “The Convent” and “ ‘This life’ ”; Arenal and Powell; Arenal and Schlau; Calvo,
“Sor Juana”; Castro Ponce; Chang-​Rodríguez; Cortés Timoner; Cortés-​Vélez; Durán, “Escritura”;
Harvey, “Seventeenth-​Century”; Howe, “Sor Juana”; Jaffe, “Sor Juana”; Jed; Merrim, Early Modern;
Myers, Neither Saints; Peraita; Quiñones Melgoza, “Algunas semejanzas”; Riva; Scott, “ ‘La gran turba’ ”
and “The Tenth Muse”; Siegfried; Spitzlei; Torras; and Vollendorf, “Across.”
6 Bénassy-​Berling’s “Actualidad” and Scott’s “Three Hundred Years” address these problems. Bénassy-​
Berling updates these issues and debates in chapter 6 of this volume.
7 For a comparison of Arenal and Powell’s translation of the Respuesta with Trueblood’s, see Potter.
L. Powell also comments on various translations (“Sor Juana’s”).
8 For doubts about whether Bishop Fernández de Santa Cruz originally asked Sor Juana to write the
letter see Alatorre and Tenorio; Beaupied, “Revelación velada”; Peña, “Teología”; Pérez-​Amador Adam,
“Acerca”; and Soriano Vallès, “Un género,” and Aquella.
9 Most of the people involved in the controversy were Jesuits, and while it has been suggested that Sor
Juana went against a certain individual, thus offending all of the Jesuits, it has also been argued that
she did not favor some of the Jesuit expansion and forceful evangelization policies in the New World/​
Americas (Marín). However, Brescia (“El ‘crimen’ ” [86–​88]) and Junco (296–​303) point out that there
was support for Sor Juana among the Jesuits.
10 Arenal and Powell define the bishop’s pseudonym as follows: “Literally, ‘Philo-​thea’ (from the Greek)
means Lover-​of-​God; thus the whole name means Sister Lover-​of-​God of the Cross” (106). For a
Bakhtinian analysis of how the Respuesta dialogues with the Carta de Sor Filotea (Sister Filotea’s Letter)
see Téllez Vargas, “Elementos.” Also Susan Stein closely examines Fernández de Santa Cruz and his
Carta de Sor Filotea in regards to the controversy surrounding the Atenagórica and the Respuesta.
11 Pérez-​Amador Adam lists other definitions for finezas such as “muestra de cariño” (“token of affec-
tion”) “ingénieuses tendresses” (“ingenious affection”) in French, “delicadeza amorosa” (“loving
kindness”) and Sor Juana’s own definition “demostraciones del amor” (“demonstrations of love”) in
“Acerca” (26).
12 Núñez de Miranda discussed finezas in the Comulgador Penitente de la Puríssima (a theological-​doctrinal
explanation of confession and communion), and Palavicino gave a sermon on finezas in Sor Juana’s
convent on January 26, 1691.
13 See Bijuesca, “Una mujer”; Cortés-​Vélez; Cortest; Feder; Luciani, “Anecdotal” and “Sor Juana”; Myers,
“The Tenth Muse”; Montross; and Perelmuter, “The Answer” and “La estructura.” For how Sor Juana
uses satire see Johnson, “Obra satírica.” For linguistic approaches to the Respuesta see Ballón Aguirre,
“Los incidentes”; Guillon Barrett; and Urzúa.
14 See Beaupied, “Revelación”; Bergmann, “Sor Juana”; Bokser, “Sor Juana’s”; Bénassy-​ Berling,
Humanismo; Cortés-​Vélez, “Letras”; Feder; Franco; Glantz, Sor Juana … ¿Hagiografía?; P. Kirk, Sor Juana
… Religion; Luciani, “Anecdotal” and “Sor Juana”; McKnight; Merrim, Early Modern; Myers, “The
Tenth Muse”; A. Powell, “Making Use”; L. Powell, “Sor Juana’s”; and Sabat-​Rivers, En busca.
15 For other studies that specifically treat the Respuesta as autobiography see Malsch; Martínez-​San
Miguel; and McDonald.
16 Also see Feder and Montross.
17 Castorena y Ursúa also mentions Discursos a las finezas de Cristo Señor Nuestro (a theological treatise that
has been lost). See Pérez-​Amador Adam, “Acerca” and De finezas.
18 See Scott, “ ‘Let your women.’ ”
19 For more on imitatio see Beaupied; Cortés-​Vélez; P.  Kirk; and Myers, “The Tenth Muse.” P.  Kirk
emphasizes that Sor Juana even personifies the Atenagórica itself and compares it to Moses who was
rescued from the waters by the pharaoh’s daughter (Sor Filotea or Bishop Fernández de Santa Cruz).
The pharaoh in this case, Aguiar y Seixas, would have had the child (the Atenagórica) killed. McDonald
examines the comparison of Moses with the Atenagórica also.
20 See Arenal and Powell; Beaupied; Bergmann; Bokser; Cortés-​ Vélez; Feder; Ludmer; McDonald;
Merrim, “Narciso”; Pascual Buxó, “Monstruo”; and Téllez Vargas.
21 Beaupied (119–​24) analizes Paz and Bénassy-​Berling’s interpretations as well as giving her own.

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B: Verse
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13
SOR JUANA’S LOVE POETRY
A woman’s voice in a man’s genre

Emilie L. Bergmann

From her contemporaries to present-​day readers, Sor Juana’s witty insights into the emotional
stages of desire, devotion, jealousy, rejection, and absence have inspired admiration. Electa Arenal
asserts that “her originality lies in this combination: in the literary forms she gave to her insatia-
ble, gender-​conscious, intellectual curiosity” (“Introduction” 18).The number of poems devoted
to the topic of love –​approximately one-​fifth of her lyric poetry –​is almost as impressive as
their brilliance. For a secular poet this proportion would not be remarkable, but it has surprised
some readers, considering the cloistered, celibate life that Sor Juana chose after five years at the
viceregal court. For medieval and early modern poets, however, love and poetry were inseparable
(Luciani, “Courtly Love” 183). To be a poet was to participate in the courtly practice of lyric
poetry in the Petrarchan tradition, in which the speaker was cast as a male lover addressing his
adulation and complaints to a silent female object whose assigned role was to reject his entreaties.
The asymmetry of gender in this tradition required women poets to create new voices and
gender roles in the love lyric. Ester Gimbernat-​González asks, “What does the male lover say to his
female beloved when the poet is a woman?” (163, italics in original). Ann Rosalind Jones answered
Gimbernat’s question for French and Italian women poets, who devised strategies of imitation
and adaptation to circumvent the passive role of the female beloved as object, “contestatory
responses to signifying practices” that destabilized the genre (Jones 2). Stephanie Merrim’s study
of Sor Juana proposes a recuperation of the feminist implications of Sor Juana’s “contestatory
designs” in the context of early modern women’s writing (Early Modern 53). The present essay
primarily addresses scholarly approaches to Sor Juana’s powerful refashioning of Petrarchan
tropes and lyric voice in love poetry. A secondary topic related to that of poetic voice is the
recurring speculation regarding Sor Juana’s experience of love, based on the eloquence with
which she wrote about the topic.
Key to Sor Juana’s approach to the problem confronting women poets is her examination
of a range of situations through diverse voices and perspectives. In his introduction to Volume
IV of Obras completas (XXII–​XXVI), Alberto G. Salceda proposes that a treatise on love could
be compiled from the detailed analysis of multiple facets of the subject in Sor Juana’s poetry
and theater: its causes, development, complications, effects, passions, and circumstances (OC 4,
XXII). Georgina Sabat-​Rivers explores Sor Juana’s innovative use of lyric speakers, not only to
invert the status quo, but to explore diverse perspectives on love. Sabat-​Rivers points out that
the poet uses female and male voices to address love objects of the opposite sex, and a voice,

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gendered masculine, feminine, or lacking identifiable gender markers, to reflect upon the situa-
tion, or act with the authority of judge or counselor (“Veintiún sonetos” 397). To demonstrate
the originality of Sor Juana’s poetic challenges to gender roles, Sabat-​Rivers traces the origins
of love lyric from Greek and Latin poetry to the courtly conventions of Castilian love poetry
in the cancionero tradition and Petrarch’s influence on Spanish peninsular poetry beginning with
Garcilaso and Boscán. Ironically, the earliest known voice that shaped European lyric, in contrast
to epic, is Sappho’s: “a voice that was personal and introspective, focused on intimate emotions,”
in which woman “occupies the center of the stage … subtly analyzing a great variety of affective
states” (Sabat-​Rivers, “Love” 101).
In the poetry of the second half of the seventeenth century, as Arthur Terry observes, the
tradition that had flourished in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries appeared to have
“diminished possibilities,” in the process of “reaching inevitable extinction,” with the significant
exception of Sor Juana, whose work reveals, “with startling clarity,” the possibility of renewal.
Terry notes the “contrast between the almost line-​by-​line derivativeness of many of her poems
and the extraordinary freshness of the whole … precisely because her imagination is able to
find new patterns in traditional clusters of thought without accepting them schematically”
(Seventeenth-​Century 238, 240).1 In fact, a salient feature of most scholarly approaches to these
poems is to highlight the originality with which Sor Juana used lexicalized figures of speech to
reveal the mental processes and effects of love.That Sor Juana’s poetry received so much acclaim
during her lifetime derived not simply from a recognition that a woman could write, but that
she wrote brilliantly, surpassing male contemporaries.To achieve this level of literary distinction,
she adapted metaphors and conceits and deftly recycled images and lines of poetry from her
predecessors.
Regarding the diversity of situations in Sor Juana’s poems, Terry asks, “Are they merely
examples of Sor Juana’s skill in arguing both sides of a case, or is she arguing with herself in
a more responsible sense, as part of a constantly shifting dialectic?” (Seventeenth-​Century 240).
Octavio Paz refers to “un saber codificado por la tradición: una retórica, una casuística y hasta
una lógica” (Trampas 146) [learning codified through tradition rather than the result of experi-
ence: a rhetoric, a casuistry, and even a logic] (Traps 103). For Alan Trueblood, this “casuistry of
love” provides a rhetorical framing of Sor Juana’s love poetry that ties it to her arguments in the
Respuesta a sor Filotea (Answer) and the epistemological quest in Primero sueño (First Dream) (4).
Stephanie Merrim weighs the conventional views of Sor Juana’s motivation in writing
love poetry, and finds an alternative to the polarities of “genuine emotion” and “showcase for
Scholastic argumentation or conceptista wordplay.” She considers the love poetry to “entail her
exploration of the counter-​realm to the Primero sueño, to be the counterpart and conceivably
the prelude to that work, her masterpiece.While in the Sueño Sor Juana exhaustively investigates
the pure world of reason and knowledge, in her love poetry she extensively interrogates the pas-
sionate world of unreason and not-​knowing” (Early Modern 54). To illustrate this point, Merrim
chooses Sonnet 184, “Que consuela a un celoso, epilogando la serie de los amores” [Which
consoles a jealous lover, with an epilogue to his series of loves”], which begins:

Amor empieza por desasosiego,

solicitud, ardores y desvelos;
crece con riesgos, lances y recelos,
susténtase de llantos y de ruego. (1.297–​8)
[Love begins with unease, supplications, ardor, and insomnia; it increases with risks, quar-
rels, and rejections; it feeds on tears and pleas.] (Merrim Early Modern 55)

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The sonnet exemplifies how “[r]‌epetitively, systematically, and exhaustively, Sor Juana will
probe every corner of the dark side of love as she erects the abhorrent underworld of passion
into a universe unto itself ” (Early Modern 55).
Merrim draws upon Luciani’s study of courtly love in Sor Juana’s poetry, pointing out that
the poet “favors not the initial and hopeful stages of enamorment, but the later phases of the
precador and servidor,” that is, the lover’s suffering, complaints, and laments. She concludes, “What
emerges from an examination of the corpus of poems is an overriding picture of male-​female
love as a battleground that produces suffering; in other words, love as strife” (57). Terry cor-
roborates Merrim’s view, suggesting that “it is possible to detect a preference for certain types
of situation rather than others,” with scant representation of “mutual love,” or the “character-
istic neo-​Platonic progression from sexual love to spiritual love” (Seventeenth-​Century 241). Paz
locates Sor Juana’s love poetry in the history of ancient, medieval, and early modern philoso-
phies of love (Trampas 280–​81, 136–​37; Traps 94–​95, 212–​13).

Approaches to a sonnet: “Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo”

The strikingly original concept of love in sonnet 165 “Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo”
(OC 1.287–​8) [Don’t leave me, shadow of elusive love] (Arenal and Powell 161); has attracted
almost as much attention as the philosophical sonnet 145, “Este, que ves, engaño colorido”
(These lying pigments facing you).2 Carlos Blanco Aguinaga compares the defiant affirma-
tions in this sonnet and Francisco de Quevedo’s famous “Cerrar podrá mis ojos” (The final
shadow may close my eyes) as examples of a rare form of “amor-​locura” (love-​madness) in
which both poets rebel against their own concept of the world as consistent with the logic
of cause and effect, and death as irrevocably extinguishing love along with life (161). In the
quartets of Sor Juana’s sonnet, the female speaker implores a fleeing lover. References to love
as enchantment (“hechizo”) and illusion surround the scientific imagery of iron irresistibly
drawn to a magnet. In the first tercet, “Mas blasonar no puedes satisfecho /​de que triunfa
de mí tu tiranía” [But your vain declarations cannot flaunt /​the triumph of your mandate
over me] (Powell and Arenal 161) Blanco notes how the speaker appears to reject the amo-
rous tyranny that triumphed over her (158). And yet, in the last two lines, the lyric speaker
turns the tables on the evanescent shadow: “poco importa burlar brazos y pecho /​si te labra
prisión mi fantasia.” (OC 1.288) [it little matters that arms or breasts may fail /​if my imagi-
nation frames your jail.”] (Arenal and Powell 161). While his physical body may escape her,
she affirms the power of her love, capable of imprisoning him in her imagination. Blanco
contrasts the willful physical force and unruly diction of Quevedo’s rebellion, against Sor
Juana’s quiet interiority: “Frente a la violenta expresión masculina, una sutil y paradójica-
mente obstinada afirmación del espíritu” (159) [a challenge to violent masculine expression,
a subtle and paradoxical affirmation of the spirit].3 The rhythm of Sor Juana’s poem is bal-
anced, with a smooth musicality, in contrast to the vehement turbulence of Quevedo’s son-
net. As she begins to affirm her victory, Sor Juana’s lyric speaker appears to lower her voice,
closing the poem without a trace of disruption in the extraordinary affirmation of the final
line (Blanco 160).
Dario Puccini noted the originality of this sonnet, comparing the initial situation with a
similar one in Francisco de Quevedo’s “A fugitivas sombras doy abrazos” (I embrace fleeting
shadows), and refers to other literary passages cited in Méndez Plancarte’s notes, but he points
out that in none of these examples is there a hint of such an assertive reaction to the situation
(117). Puccini also points out the “contenida aunque vigorosa sensualidad” (contained but vig-
orous sensuality) of the repetition of “pecho” (breast) three times in the sonnet (118).

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Imagery drawn from early modern emblem books and references to visual technologies
provide the key to Frederick Luciani’s reading of Sonnets 165, “Detente, sombra de mi bien
esquiva” and 152, “Verde embeleso de la vida humana” (Green allurement of our human life),
which Méndez Plancarte groups with philosophical and moral sonnets. Luciani considers the
epigraph to Sonnet 165, “que contiene una fantasía contenta con amor decente” (which con-
tains a fantasy content with decent love), to be “a bit of a moralistic whitewash,” as are numerous
other editorial additions to the titles of her poems. He agrees with Paz that the poem inverts
the theme of “the beloved who, sexually elusive, takes on, in the mind of the lover, a (necessar-
ily) fictive or fantastic reality” (167). His contribution to the understanding of this sonnet is the
comparison with an emblem from Hernando de Soto’s Emblemas moralizadas, titled “La castidad
verdadera,” in which a faithful wife paints an image of her absent husband, a “sombra detenida”
(captured shadow) to watch over her behavior. The “optical image” of the painted figure adds
a different dimension to Sor Juana’s sonnet, which “unfolds as an apostrophe to a portrait.” The
portrait “exerts a tyranny over the viewer” and mocks the viewer’s desire to embrace the figure
portrayed.The lady, however, “has the ultimate revenge. If she cannot physically possess the real-
ity represented upon the canvas, she can ‘re-​paint’ the image with fantasy’s ‘paintbrush.’ ” (169).
While the male “thou” is objectified, the female “I” sees “insightfully,” perceiving the illusory
nature of such simulacra. Luciani continues a process initiated by Puccini, illuminating Sor
Juana’s images by interpreting them in the context of the visual culture of her time.
The reader becomes the interlocutor in Arenal and Powell’s metaliterary interpretation of
the poem:

[T]‌his sonnet at a deeper level anticipates many readers’ puzzled or prurient interest: how
and what does a nun, sworn to celibacy, know of romantic love? […] The poem seems
aimed to remind us that for everyone, love –​or all that we know and can report of it –​
occurs in language, in the ways we think of and discuss it. Not only the lyric addressee, the
beloved “you,” but also the reader her-​or himself is reminded that s/​he cannot “triumph
over” the poet. […] As if in a “fantastic” fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, in this lyric frame
the reader too exists only because the poet has imagined her or him” (148).

Paz considers this sonnet the epitome and the key to Sor Juana’s love poems: “es el com-
pendio –​y más: la cifra” (Trampas 380; Traps 288). He reads the references to illusion, shadow,
and phantom in the context of cloistered life, and the Western erotic tradition: “la búsqueda, en
el cuerpo, del fantasma y, en el fantasma, del cuerpo” (the search, in the body, for the phantom
and, in the phantom, for the body), which he associates with physical experiences that Western
culture views with fascination and horror: “la polución nocturna, la masturbación y la copula
mental acompañada de orgasmo solitario” (nocturnal ejaculation, masturbation, and mental
copulation accompanied by solitary orgasm), and, further, with “los íncubos y súcubos con los
que se copulaba durante el sueño y que eran los causantes de las poluciones” (Trampas 381–​82)
[incubi and succubi that were sexual partners during dream and the cause of forbidden pleas-
ures] (Traps 290). As if drawing back from the association of these corporeal phenomena, Paz
ends his discussion of the sonnet by comparing it with one of Baudelaire’s, a gesture that links
her writing with a quintessentially modern poetics in a long tradition.
A recurring motif in Paz’s analysis of Sor Juana’s love poetry is the context of her complex,
ambivalent emotions toward the absence of her biological father, who seems to have left the
household early in her life, and the stepfather who replaced him (Trampas 110–​14; Traps 74–​79).
He singles out two poems voicing the impassioned grief of widows: liras (poem 213) and an
endecha (poem 78) to posit an inversion not only of gender roles in a Freudian model, but also

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the roles of wife, mother, father, and husband in the Egyptian myth of Osiris in which the god-
dess Isis revives her brother-​husband Osiris and marries him (Traps 75). He connects these poems
with a more general observation about the love objects in other poems, in particular, “Detente,
sombra de mi bien esquivo”:  “Sus poemas amorosos no giran nunca en torno a la presencia
del amado sino de una imagen, forma fantástica ceñida por la memoria o el deseo. La persona
querida aparece como un ser de humo, una sombra esculpida por la mente” (Trampas 111) [Her
love poems revolve around an image, an imaginary form held by memory or desire, not a physi-
cal lover. The beloved appears as a creature of smoke, a shadow sculpted by the mind] (Traps 74].

A diversity of verse forms
In addition to exploiting the resources of the sonnet, Sor Juana used the full range of available
verse forms, from the most common, traditional Castilian eight-​syllable lines of romances (bal-
lads with assonant rhyme in alternate lines), redondillas (rhyming abba), ten-​line décimas with the
challenging abbaaccddc rhyme scheme; and endechas (laments in four-​line stanzas of five, six,
or seven syllables); to Italianate sonnets and liras (with seven-​and eleven-​syllable lines rhyming
aBabB), and difficult, rarely-​used verse forms such as the romance decasílabo (ten-​syllable ballad).
While the tightly-​structured sonnet would seem the most challenging with its fourteen hen-
decasyllabic, or eleven-​syllable lines arranged in two quatrains and two tercets, Sor Juana’s wit
and virtuosity are displayed in traditional Castilian meters. Although the romance was, and con-
tinues to be, most often used for narration, Sor Juana adapted it to develop complex philosophi-
cal analyses of jealousy and “fated inclination versus true sentiment” (Merrim, Early Modern
55). The lira, introduced by Garcilaso de la Vega (1501–​1536) was used almost exclusively by
sixteenth-​century poets, in particular Fray Luis de León and Saint John of the Cross, and had
fallen into disuse by the seventeenth century. One of the only verse forms missing from Sor
Juana’s impressive repertoire is terza rima, the eleven-​syllable pattern of interwoven three-​line
stanzas well known from Dante and popular in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century lyric and
theater (Trampas 621; Traps 480).
Stephanie Merrim elaborates on the relationship between form and theme, observing in
detail how Sor Juana’s “thoroughgoing investigation of love appropriates the poetic resources
of each metrical form with the result that each form treats the subject in a discernibly different
way.” She finds that the endechas “serve as the vehicle or channel for intensely felt and candidly
expressed emotions.”While redondillas “lend themselves to light battles of opposing terms,” and
décimas “escalate the small battles of the [redondillas] into full-​scale wars against love,” in which
“contentiousness often swells into ripe invective,” glosas, which incorporate and elaborate upon
lines from other poets, are used to “translate courtly love and traditional popular themes into
the idiom of the baroque” (Merrim, Early Modern 55).

Editions and editorial interventions

In his introduction to the first volume of Sor Juana’s complete works, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte
points out the impossibility of establishing a chronology for Sor Juana’s poetry. Two poems can
be dated during the five years she spent at the viceregal court, but the first volume of her writ-
ings, Inundación castálida (The Overflowing of the Castalian Spring), including numerous love
sonnets and poems in other verse forms, appeared in 1689, twenty-​two years after she entered
a convent for the first time.
The ways in which editors organize Sor Juana’s love lyric bring with them distinct approaches.
Méndez Plancarte organized these poems first by verse form –​ballad, décima, endecha, glosa,

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sonnet –​and within each of these categories, he distinguished the poetry addressing aspects
of love –​“poemas de amor y discreción” –​from poems dedicated to Sor Juana’s patrons, most
significantly those celebrating the beauty and intelligence of the vicereines, Leonor Carreto,
Marquesa de Mancera, and María Luisa Manrique de Lara, Countess de Paredes.
Georgina Sabat-​Rivers and Elias Rivers added thematic categories to the table of contents
of their edition of Sor Juana’s complete works, Poesía, teatro, pensamiento (2004): twenty-​one love
sonnets, five poems about “Heroines of tragic love” (four married women who proved their vir-
tue through death, two of them by suicide, celebrated in Ovid’s Heroides), “Other love poems,”
“Jealousy,” and “Absence.” In a section titled “Poesía civil y cortesana” (Civic and courtly poetry),
Sabat-​Rivers and Rivers separate the poems dedicated to the viceroys and vicereines, includ-
ing her patrons Leonor Carreto and María Luisa Manrique de Lara, Countess de Paredes, from
compositions to honor other noble men and women; poems to celebrate birthdays; “Poemas
de petición y discreteo” (Poems requesting favors or displaying subtle wit); and portrait poems
(which include Petrarchan portraits of the Countess).
In “Veintiún sonetos de Sor Juana y su casuística del amor,” Sabat-​Rivers further divides
the love sonnets into two groups: those that maintain the traditional concepts of Provençal and
Petrarchist poetry, with a “personal perspective,” and those that present a dissenting view of
Petrarchist convention, through parody or taking them lightly. Sabat-​Rivers regards the “het-
erodox” group as most characteristic of Sor Juana (407). Within the group of ten traditional or
“orthodox” sonnets, she creates sub-categories according to theme: requited and incorruptible
love, the sufferings of unrequited love, rational love, absence, the “rhetoric of tears,” and the
power of imagination.The eleven “heterodox” sonnets address sympathies and correspondences,
love and hate, condemnation of love, and love’s impermanence (407).
Rejecting Méndez Plancarte’s editorial arrangements and punctuation of the poetic texts
but retaining their ordering, Alatorre omits divisions by genre, verse form, or theme. Works dis-
covered since the 1980s, notably the Enigmas, are included in the Obras completas edited by Elias
Rivers and Georgina Sabat-​Rivers, and the Lírica personal edited by Alatorre.
From their first publication in Inundación castálida in 1689, the writings of this brilliantly
gifted woman of colonial New Spain were acclaimed by European readers. In his chapter on Sor
Juana’s love poetry, “Óyeme con los ojos” (“Hear Me With Your Eyes”) Paz noted the unique-
ness of Sor Juana’s love poetry and its reception: “No hay en la historia de nuestras letras otro
ejemplo de una monja que haya sido, con el aplauso general, autora de poemas eróticos y aun
de sátiras sexuales que podrían haber sido firmadas por un discípulo de Quevedo” (Trampas 368)
[There is no other example of a nun who, with widespread approval, published erotic poems
and even sexual satires that could have been signed by a disciple of Quevedo] (Traps 278).4 Paz
points out how odd this is: “Y más extraño aún es que la crítica no se haya extrañado” (Trampas
368) [Even more surprising is the fact that critics did not find it strange] (Traps 277).
There is, however, evidence that the authorship of the love poems by a nun troubled early
editors. In the introduction to his edition of Lírica personal, Antonio Alatorre noted changes to
the 1690 edition of the first volume of Sor Juana’s works, including the omission of some earthy
sonnets and the revisions and additions to the epigraphs of some love poems. These epigraphs
disavow any “indecency” and shift the emphasis from the deceptions of love to didacticism
about the deceptions of love, anticipating readers’ doubts regarding the propriety of a nun writ-
ing about the secular topics of amorous desire and jealousy (“Introducción” XII–​XIV).5
Beyond the concerns about a nun writing about love between men and women, Sor Juana’s
poems to her patrons the vicereines, and to the Countess de Paredes in particular, have fas-
cinated readers for centuries. The first of Sor Juana’s panegyrics to the Countess de Paredes,
Romance 16, was written on the occasion of the Viceroy’s birthday, but it addresses the vicereine.

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An Advertencia (Explanatory Note) precedes the poem, explaining why a woman poet chose
language ordinarily used to express a male subject’s desire for a female object:

O el agradecimiento de favorecida y celebrada, o el conocimiento que tenia de las rel-

evantes prendas que a la señora virreina dio el Cielo, o aquel secreto influjo (hasta hoy
nadie lo ha podido apurar) de los humores o los astros, que llaman simpatía, o todo junto,
causó en la poetisa un amar a su Excelencia con ardor tan puro, como en el contexto de
todo el libro irá viendo el lector (OC 1.68; Lírica 68).
(Either her appreciation for being favored and celebrated, or her acquaintance with
the illustrious gifts bestowed by Heaven on the Lady Vicereine, or that secret influence
(which until today no one has been able to verify) of the humors or the stars, known as
sympathy, or all of these together, generated in the poet a love utterly pure and ardent for
her Excellency, as the reader will see in the whole of this book.) (Traps 199).

Alatorre attributes the authorship of the Advertencia to Francisco de las Heras, formerly sec-
retary to the Conde de la Laguna and Countess de Paredes in Mexico (Lírica 68).

The biographical fallacy

Sor Juana explores desire, absence, and rejection from male and female perspectives: the lyric
voice is not always gendered as male, and the beloved is not always female. The prevalence of
absence and unrequited love in this author’s love poetry, and the paucity of documentation
regarding her life, gave rise to the fiction of a failed love affair as the motivation for Sor Juana’s
taking the veil.Thus, one recurring question that arises among readers of Sor Juana’s love poetry
is biographical: how could a nun write so eloquently about amatory passion? In 1910, Amado
Nervo recounted the legend that an unfortunate love affair, broken off because of inequality
of social rank or by the untimely death of the young man, drove the intellectual darling of the
viceregal court, the “Tenth Muse,” to the convent (78).
Dorothy Schons definitively refuted this persistent myth in 1926: “That she sought refuge
in her books because of a broken heart is impossible […] Her books were her first love, and
they were probably one of the reasons that impelled her to seek the seclusion of a cloister”
(39). Schons’s reading of the Respuesta and her research on the historical period in New Spain
led her to conclude that “the deep, underlying reason for Juana’s retirement from the world is
to be found in the social conditions of her time” (46). Despite Schons’s convincing arguments,
Alberto Salceda, editor of the fourth volume of Sor Juana’s complete works (1957), reverted
to the legend, imagining two flesh-​and-​blood lovers as the models for the fictitious “Silvio”
and “Fabio” addressed in some of her love poems (Paz, Trampas 144).6 Paz upholds Schons’s
account, dismissing the legend as a romantic reading of a baroque text, a variant of the “viejo
tema romántico del Obstáculo” (Trampas 141) [the old romantic theme of the Obstacle] (Traps
100). In “Los empeños de Juana Inés” (Trampas Part 2, Chapter 3) [“The Trials of Juana Inés”]
(Traps Part 2 Chapter 7), he elaborates upon and modifies Salceda’s cultural reference to the
“galanteos de palacio” (palace flirtation) that were typical of the court in Madrid (Trampas 133–​
39, citing Salceda, OC 4, XXIII–​XXVI; Traps 91).7 In this chapter, Paz discusses of the game of
courtship in the context of the history of courtly love and the impermanence of extramarital
sexual relationships, including homosexuality, at the viceregal court, but he can only speculate
regarding the likelihood of Juana Inés’s participation in these activities during her years at the
court (Trampas 134–​39; Traps 93–​96). While scholars have abandoned the biographical fallacy

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when interpreting the love poems, novelists and filmmakers continue to use lines from her
poems to construct elaborate fictions upon the scant details of Sor Juana’s life.
In the Respuesta a sor Filotea, Sor Juana defends herself against the accusation that she has
spent too much time on secular studies, and that she has become too worldly, by explaining
that all her writings, except Primero sueño, were produced at the request of others: “yo nunca
he escrito cosa alguna por mi voluntad, sino por ruegos y preceptos ajenos; de tal manera, que
no me acuerdo haber escrito por mi gusto sino es un papelillo que llaman El Sueño” [“I have
never written a single thing of my own volition, but rather only in response to the pleadings and
commands of others; so much so that I recall having written nothing at my own pleasure save
a trifling thing they call the Dream”] (Arenal and Powell 96–​97). Thus, she implicitly disclaims
any personal motivation for writing secular love poems. Paz, however, thoroughly rejects the
literal reading of this disclaimer, arguing that Sor Juana would not have published under her
name a collection of love poems written on behalf of members of the viceregal court for their
flirtations (Trampas 368–​69; Traps 278). José Pascual Buxó offers a possible justification for her
disclaimer in the Respuesta: evidence of literary academias (salons) and poetic competitions in
colonial New Spain suggests that some, or all, of Sor Juana’s love poems might have been writ-
ten for such occasions (“Sor Juana” 264).
Paz conceded that Sor Juana might well have fallen in love, or believed she was in love, but
“es imposible que esos amores, desdichados o no, profundos o frívolos, hayan sido la causa de su
profesión en el convent” (Trampas 143–​44) [No loves, happy or unhappy, profound or frivolous,
drove her to the convent] (Traps 100–​01). He considers the “authenticity” of the love poems in
aesthetic rather than biographical terms (Trampas 370; Traps 280). Terry argues that “whether or
not [Sor Juana’s love poems] are based on real experience […] no longer seems crucial. What
is more to the point is the type of situation Sor Juana creates in such poems and the way she
responds to it” (239).

The poetics of passionate friendship

It is important to note the differences between the love poems in which the speakers and
interlocutors are fictitious and those written for flesh-​and-​blood women for whom Sor Juana’s
first-​person address was biographically grounded. The latter reflect an emotional and sensory
engagement that distinguishes them from the imagined relationships that illustrate philosophical
abstractions of unrequited desire, abandonment, and jealousy in the love poems. Editors of the
earliest editions of Sor Juana’s lyric poetry may have added the disclaimer to the poetic portrait
of the Countess in Romance 19: “Puro amor, que ausente y sin deseo de indecencies, puede
sentir lo que el más profano” (OC 1.54) [“Pure love, however distant, eschewing all unseemli-
ness, may feel whatever the most profane might feel”] (Trueblood 37), but Sor Juana’s eloquent
tribute affirms the strength of this love:

Ser mujer, ni estar ausente,

no es de amarte impedimento;
pues sabes tú, que las almas
distancia ignoran y sexo. (OC 1.57)
(That you’re a woman far away
is no hindrance to my love:
for the soul, as you well know,
distance and sex don’t count.) (Trueblood 39)

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Despite the division between Sor Juana’s love poetry and the courtly poetry in hom-
age to women, discussed by literary critics and by editors since the first printings of Sor
Juana’s poetry, twentieth and twenty-​first century readers have been puzzled by the use of
Petrarchan formulations of love in both types of poetry. Lisa Rabin explains the use of these
poetic models in terms of the production of a literary identity in the poems portraying and
celebrating the vicereines of New Spain. She demonstrates that the poems not only follow
the tradition of laudatory poetry but also were used as a platform to seek self-​promotion and
deploy political strategies (“The Blasón,” 30–​31; “Sor Juana’s”). In this context, Luciani also
pointed out the performative characteristics of these poems: “Whatever their affective quo-
tient might have been, their intellectual content is spectacular: a performance, something
meant to be seen” (22). Nina Scott, however, points out quotidian details in another sub-
genre of Sor Juana’s poetry: the light, playful poems that document the friendship between
the poet and the Countess (365).
Paz bases his discussion of Sor Juana’s passionate poems written to the vicereines Leonor
Carreto and María Luisa Manrique de Lara on close readings of the poems in the context of
early modern formulations of love, conventions of courtly devotion, and the subservient rela-
tionship of the poet to her noble patrons in “Concilio de luceros” (Trampas 260–​82) [Council of
Stars] (Traps 196–​213). He devotes much of the chapter to the language of love from Arabic and
classical Greek and Latin poetry, through the conventions of courtly poetry and Neoplatonic
philosophy of love, in order to explain “las encendidas expresiones y las imágenes eróticas”
(Trampas 266) [blending of eroticism and vassalage] (Traps 201) in Sor Juana’s poems to women.
While recognizing the inclusion of homosexuality in classical Greek philosophy of love, Paz
points out brief historical moments of women’s sexual and intellectual freedom, and locates the
basis of correspondences and sympathies in Sor Juana’s poetry to women in Neoplatonism and
early modern “natural philosophies.” He also distances the seventeenth-​century poet from these
roots of early modern love lyric, praising the uniqueness of Sor Juana’s poems to the Countess:
“debo repetirlo: los poemas de sor Juana a María Luisa se apartan muchas veces del género cor-
tesano y constituyen un mundo aparte y del que no hay otros ejemplos en la poesía de la época”
(Trampas 270) [I must repeat: Sor Juana’s poems to María Luisa are often at variance with the
courtly genre and constitute a world apart, of which they are the only examples of the poetry
of the period] (Traps 204).
As Amanda Powell and Dianne Dugaw have revealed through their research, these
poems are not unique; they belong to a genre of passionate poetry written by women to
women (cf. “Sor Juana’s Love Poetry to Women,” “Baroque Sapphic Poetry,” and “Sapphic
Self-​Fashioning”). In a series of articles dating from 2006, Powell and Dugaw recover the
seventeenth-​century context for these poems, a distinctly female courtly convention, includ-
ing poems by the Portuguese poet Sor Violante do Ceo and English poets Katherine Philips
and Aphra Behn. Rather than “evidence of physical lesbianism,” they argue that these poems
“evince a markedly erotic sapphic sensibility across the culture of baroque Europe, in the
prevalence of this lyric fashion” (“Sapphic” 131), that they “frequently stress ambiguities
and shifting boundaries between friendship and erotic relations, accentuating and reworking
inequities of gender on the one hand and forwarding expressions of homosexual desire on
the other” (“Sapphic” 130).

Future directions
Méndez Plancarte’s heavily annotated edition of Sor Juana’s secular poetry made possible the
serious scholarship of the last half-​century. His formidable study of classical and early modern

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European sources provides a rich source for further intertextual connections. Elias Rivers and
Georgina Sabat-​Rivers’s organization of poems into smaller thematic grouping suggests that
there are other possible links, not only among the love poems, but with other genres and verse
forms as well. A fairly narrow selection of poems has represented Sor Juana’s work in antholo-
gies and translations; there is still significant work to do on the full range of her love lyric.
Merrim’s and Luciani’s perception of self-​fashioning, and Arenal and Powell’s meta-​literary
reading of “Detente, sombra de mi bien esquiva” point toward a view of Sor Juana’s writing as
she imagined its reception by her readers. Research following Buxó‘s suggestion regarding liter-
ary academies and contests may or may not prove Sor Juana’s claim that her secular poetry was
commissioned by others, but it can further integrate her witty inventiveness into the cultural
life of the viceregal capital. Paz’s stated purpose was a “restitution” of Sor Juana in the cultural
history of colonial New Spain; since the 1980s, research on colonial writing provides a broader
and more detailed view of the experience and expectations of contemporary readers.

Notes
1 It is worth noting that Terry’s perceptive analysis of Sor Juana’s poetry first appeared in his 1973 article
“Human and Divine Love,” and was incorporated into his 1993 monograph.
2 See Luis Avilés’s essay on Sor Juana’s philosophical poems, including Sonnet 145, in this volume. Also, all
page numbers for Arenal and Powell refer to the second, expanded edition.
3 Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
4 Chapter numbers differ between Spanish text and English translation.“Óyeme con los ojos” is Chapter 1
in Part 4 of Trampas; “Hear me With Your Eyes” is Chapter 19 in Traps. The first four and a half pages of
the chapter, on editions of Sor Juana’s poetry, appear in Traps in “Notes on Sources” (508–​11).
5 Some bibliographic confusion can arise from Alatorre’s designation of his 2009 edition of Sor Juana’s
Lírica personal (Secular lyric poetry) as the first volume of her Obras completas (Complete Works). Alatorre
made significant revisions to the text, notes, and organization of the Lírica personal, but did not publish
editions of the remaining three volumes. He lists his edition, reprinted in 2012, as “Second Edition” and
Méndez Plancarte’s 1951 first volume of his four-​volume edition of Obras completas as “First Edition.”
The four volumes edited by Méndez Plancarte and Alberto Salceda (1951–​57) were reprinted in 1976
and 1994.
6 Paz’s reference to Salceda’s hypothesis was omitted from the English translation.
7 Salceda is not referring here to Sor Juana’s love poetry but to the short entre’actes of Sor Juana’s play Los
empeños de una casa (The Trials of a Noble House). See Susana Hernández Araico’s essay in this volume.

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14
SOR JUANA’S ROMANCES
Fame, contemplation, and celebration

Rocío Quispe-​Agnoli

In 1688 María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess of Paredes and Marquise of La
Laguna, friend and patron of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, left Mexico after having spent several
years as vicereine of New Spain. She brought along many of Sor Juana’s creative works with the
purpose of making them known among readers in Europe. One year later, Inundación castálida
(Castilian Flood) was published in Madrid by the press of Juan García Infanzón; it included a
“Prólogo al lector” (Prologue to the reader) attributed to Francisco de las Heras, secretary of the
Counts of Paredes (Alatorre, Obras completas 19; Luciani, Literary Self-​Fashioning 27). Thought
of as the first of three volumes, Inundación castálida was a great success for its time and soon
brought fame to the Mexican poet in the intellectual and artistic circles of Spain, its colonies,
and Portugal. This volume incorporated seventy-​nine texts, including eighteen romances (bal-
lads) written for the most part as occasional poetry to celebrate noble, literary, and religious fig-
ures of Europe and Mexico. One of these poems, categorized by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte as
a philosophical ballad (romance 2, “Finjamos que soy feliz” [Let’s pretend I am happy]), expressed
the poet’s love of learning and subsequent torment of unsolicited fame.1 The poem seemed to
conclude that it was better to remain ignorant than have knowledge: “Aprendamos a ignorar,
/​pensamiento, pues hallamos /​que cuanto añado al discurso, /​tanto le usurpo a los años”
(OC 1.8) [Let us learn about not knowing /​O Thought, for we then discover /​that for all I
add to discourse /​I usurp as much from my years] (Grossman 13). This reflection about the
author’s work and her intellectual and creative self anticipated other romances that appeared
in subsequent editions and volumes. One, Romance 51 (“¿Cuándo, Númenes divinos” [When,
divine Numina?]), has been much-​studied as Sor Juana’s late reflection about celebration, fame,
and self-​representation.  The poem has been also seen as an example of the poet’s awareness of
Creole subjectivity in the colonies of Spain and its place in the imperial political map of the
seventeenth century. This innovative approach to Sor Juana’s ballads resonates with the consid-
eration of Spanish American baroque literature as a space to contest imperial conceptions of the
other in the colonial world.
Sor Juana’s ballads have been seldom studied as one unified set of poetic texts. Most scholars
have analyzed her romances in relation to other writings of the Mexican nun or other authors
of her time. For the purpose of this chapter, I distinguish three areas of common interest in
the study of this genre in Sor Juana’s production: (1) the poet’s contribution to the “baroquisa-
tion” of ballads, (2) the dialogic nature of ballads, intertextual performances, and evidence of

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self-​fashioning, and (3) the expression of a seventeenth-​century Creole subjectivity and its place
in the politics of the empire. The scholarly works that I address here constitute a representative
sample of the study of Sor Juana’s ballads. Most of them analyze themes and approaches that
extend beyond one area. In addition, these critical approaches reveal changes of direction in
the study of writings by colonial Spanish American women since the 1970s. Such changes are
related to the conceptual expansions of “literary canon” and “author,” which pay attention to
women’s presence in literary histories and historical archives; relations among women, the writ-
ten word, and political power; and women’s participation in reflections about the empire and
its colonies (Myers, Neither Saints; Schlau, Spanish American xi–​xxv). The history of Sor Juana’s
literary production, its editions, and archival findings in the last half-​century, have also contrib-
uted to the development of these areas.2 A brief review of this history will help contextualize
the discussion of the ways in which Sor Juana’s ballads have been studied, as well as pointing out
themes in need of attention.
In 1690, one year after the publication of Inundación castálida, a revised edition of Sor Juana’s
poems included new romances. In Poemas de la única poetisa americana, musa dézima (Poems By
the Only American Woman Poet, the Tenth Muse), the poem-​prologue by de la Heras was
replaced by Romance 1, written by Sor Juana with the title “Prólogo al lector” (Prologue to
the Reader). Here, the poet used the expected formula of author’s modesty to gain the reader’s
favor, while explaining that her works are being published at the behest of her patron, the
Countess of Paredes. However, the poetic voice seemed to oscillate between a humble and a
proud tone, ending with an attitude of dismissal and challenge. She suggests that if readers have
not enjoyed what they have read, they are not expected to continue reading: “Y a Dios, que
esto no es más de /​darte la muestra del paño: /​si no te agrada la pieza /​no desenvuelvas el
fardo” (1.3–​4) [And farewell, for this merely shows /​you a sample of the cloth: /​but if the piece
does not please you, /​then do not unroll the whole bolt] (Grossman 6).3 The revised edition
of Inundación castálida also included romance 36 “Salud y gracia. Sepades /​Señor…” (Greetings
and grace. Know, you Sir), an epistolary ballad dedicated to de las Heras, the editor of the first
edition.4 The next volume of Sor Juana’s works was published in 1692 as Segundo volumen de sus
obras (Second Volume of Her Works), followed by a third one published after her death, Fama y
obras posthumas (Fame and Posthumous Works, 1700). Segundo volumen included new romances
and was accompanied by several panegyric texts in which court poets, priests, and intellectuals
of Spain and Spanish America celebrated her work. Such texts most likely responded to the
Countess’s request to support Sor Juana’s works (Glantz, Sor Juana:  La comparación 161–​62).
Romance 51, in which she addressed the praises from Segundo volumen, was published in Fama.
Its editor, Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, included a note indicating that this poem was
found in draft form in the poet’s cell after her death.
Up to the third volume, Sor Juana’s literary production includes sixty-​nine ballads. For more
than two centuries, these volumes were considered the sum total of the Mexican nun’s works.
The texts were collected as part of a four-​volume critical edition that appeared between 1951
and 1957. In 1968, however, Enrique Martínez López announced his discovery of an additional
work by Sor Juana in the National Library of Lisbon. Sponsored by the Countess of Paredes and
a group of learned religious and aristocratic women in Portugal, Enigmas ofrecidos a La Casa del
Placer seemed to have been written in 1692–​1693 and circulated in manuscript among readers
of this intellectual group. It included one romance written by the Mexican nun as a prologue
that announced this work, “A vuestros ojos se ofrece” (I offer before your eyes).
Sor Juana’s literary status has been acknowledged since the late seventeenth century. Alison
Weber has pointed out that, at least until the 1980s, the Mexican nun and Saint Teresa of Ávila
were the only two women “regularly included in the canon of early modern writers” (“The

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Literature” 33). To understand the position of Sor Juana’s romances in the canon, her use of
this poetic genre and role in the development of ballads as baroque poetry must be examined.5
Up to the 1970s, most studies of Sor Juana’s poetry focused on her use of literary devices and
themes that excelled in Spanish Golden Age and baroque literature. Although Luis de Góngora’s
poetry was one of Sor Juana’s primary literary sources she not only reproduced the forms of
Spanish poets, but also she played a significant role in what Antonio Alatorre called the “bar-
roquización del romance” (baroquisation of ballads).6
In the 1970s, Alatorre reviewed the critical literature on meter in Spanish poetry, and dem-
onstrated Sor Juana’s role in the baroquisation of ballads. The critic provided a brief history of
ballads in Spanish tradition and their entry into canonical letters. Through this process, nar-
rative popular songs from Spanish medieval oral tradition became a source for early modern
courtly written poetry, and eventually developed into a genre within baroque literature. The
oldest known collection of ballads in Spain, Cancionero musical de Palacio (Musical Songbook of
the Palace), was recorded in writing between the mid-​1470s and the early 1500s. The thirty-​
four ballads in this collection referred to a poetic-​musical genre whose limits were still unclear
enough to include texts with a similar structure, such as villancicos (carols). Alatorre called atten-
tion to Luis de Góngora’s use of quatrains in his first lyric ballads written in 1580 and 1595
(“Avatares” 350–​52).7 He argued that when Góngora started writing them, he contributed to,
if he did not initiate, their baroquisation.8 The critic also observed that, in Spanish literature,
lyric ballads did not lose their original purpose of celebration; rather, they received different
names according to their format, metric structure, and capacity to be performed in public
(romances, endechas, letras, villancicos). The act of celebration that took place in seventeenth-​
century lyric ballads should be understood in its relation with laudatory and encomiastic
poetry that praised high and exemplary values of noble characters. Sebastián de Covarrubias’s
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish language) defined
“celebrar” (celebrate) as the act of exalting an event by exaggerating its features, as well as the
making of feasts to honor solemn occasions (269). “Alabar” (praising) and “encomio” (enco-
mium) were associated with praise and commemoration of a person’s life events respectively
(28v, 349). In the baroque context of Sor Juana’s writings, occasional and encomiastic poetry
provided the textual space to develop panegyrics, public poetic displays of praises for some-
one with a singular and exemplary life (Covarrubias 576v). Special events like royal births or
the arrival of the viceroy were occasions that opened the space for festive celebrations that
included the writing and performance of encomiastic poetry. Sor Juana’s writing of ballads
demonstrates that she knew variants of lyric ballads as well as early popular romances, and she
used them all in her poetry.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, ballads had experienced many changes as a
result of poetic experimentation and innovation that started with Góngora. Eventually up to
ten and eleven syllables were added to their lines and epistolary ballads developed as long poetic
celebratory narrations. This is the case of many ballads by Sor Juana, among which Romances
36, 37, and 38 are mentioned later as examples of encomiastic poetry. In the process of “baroqui-
sation of ballads,” the Mexican nun’s poems contributed to a greater variation of forms, to the
point that Alatorre characterized her romances as the best examples of the increasingly baroque
nature of this genre. He noted that Sor Juana was “el poeta más representativo del Barroco espa-
ñol, su culminación más visible” (“Avatares” 342) [the most representative poet of the Spanish
Baroque and its most obvious culmination]. In similar terms two decades later, Poot Herrera’s
study of the dialogic nature of the nun’s romances concluded “el romance barroco y virreinal
tiene en la poeta mexicana a su máximo exponente” (“Diálogo” 213) [The Mexican nun is the
greatest exponent of the Baroque and viceregal ballad].

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Since the late 1980s, scholarly studies of Sor Juana’s encomiastic literature have agreed that
the romances constituted textual spaces in which the Mexican author engaged in a dynamic
dialogue with her readers, as well as the intellectuals and writers of her time. Then and now, the
romances have demonstrated her development of this genre for a variety of occasions, as well
as reflections about love, knowledge, fame, and representations of her persona and work. Sor
Juana’s romances celebrated worldly and divine characters, in addition to providing a space to
display the poetic persona of a learned subject who also reflected upon issues of representation.
This group of Sor Juana’s ballads was written as poetic portraits epitomizing Horace’s ut pictura
poesis (as is painting so is poetry). Celebration, intertextual dialogues, and questions about their
performance bring us to the second area of studies of Sor Juana’s ballads, perhaps the most pro-
lific since the 1980s.
Sara Poot Herrera has examined in detail the dialogic nature of Sor Juana’s romances
(“Diálogo,” “Sor Juana,” “¿Que mi tintero?”); her work provides an important foundation
for understanding the role of intertextuality and performance in the romances. Considering
the dialogic character of ballads, and celebration and fame as main themes, Sor Juana studies
have paid special attention to three kinds of romances:  representations of characters cel-
ebrated by the poet; responses to the celebration of the poet in the poems by other authors;
and self-​ representation. Romances that praise important figures and events are usually
referred to as occasional poetry, panegyric, or encomiastic literature. Frederick Luciani (Self-​
Fashioning) and George Thomas, among others, have examined Sor Juana’s ballads in this
light, pointing out the writer’s construction of self-​representations and political discourse
respectively. We must add to these a significant number of studies on Sor Juana’s poetic por-
traits and her knowledge about literature, other arts, and elements of a theory of representa-
tion (e.g., Chirinos; Clamurro; Prendergast; Quispe-​Agnoli; Rabin, “The Blasón” and “Sor
Juana’s”; Sabat-​Rivers, “Sor Juana y sus retratos poéticos”; Tenorio, “ ‘Copia divina’ ”). These
approaches share common ground, such as the analysis of the poetic rendering of visual acts
that produce portraits, especially of noble ladies or praiseworthy male heroes of the author’s
time. Also, these essays call attention to the nun-​author’s splendid poetic celebrations and
outstanding occasional poems as efforts beyond the clichés of poetic flattery.9 In “Diálogo,”
for example, Poot Herrera has provided a detailed discussion of Sor Juana’s romances writ-
ten to celebrate birthdays and festivities, extend greetings and good wishes, accompany or
announce gifts, and commend the beauty and intelligence of men and women. These texts,
argues Poot Herrera, exemplify the dialogic nature of Sor Juana’s ballads, as well as offering
reflections on love, yearning and its effects, and a glimpse into the poet’s reflection about her
own social position.
The focus on the celebratory nature of Sor Juana’s romances invites us to keep in mind their
potential for public performance as it may have happened during seventeenth-​century recita-
tions in the viceregal capital. Among all original features of romances in the Spanish tradition,
its performative nature made it the perfect vessel for the expressions of praise, admiration, and
celebration of royal and viceregal entries or visits, events pertaining to the life cycle of the vice-
regal family (or great noble families), and religious festivities. Although, studies of encomiastic
poetry have included allusions to their potential performance, and the role of music on her
works (cf. Ortiz, “Musical Settings”), the actual performance of the poet’s ballads in her time
remains to be studied in detail. During the colonial period, many of the poet’s romances could
have been components of larger spectacles that included plays and dances.10 In these ballads,
Sor Juana commemorated the attendance of the viceroy and vicereine, the Counts of Paredes,
with a fiesta including songs and dance at the nun’s convent. In Romances 64, 65, and 66, the
viceroy was honored with references to his noble attributes as an epic hero and an emphasis

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on his royal Spanish lineage, while the vicereine was exalted for her beauty and intelligence,
in addition to celebration of the birth of their son José. Romances 67, 68, and 69 highlighted
the divine beauty of the vicereine (Lysi in Romance 67), following the rhetoric of courtly love
tradition. Interestingly, the title of the last poem in this group, dedicated also to emphasizing the
divine nature of the Countess of Paredes, is “Letra,” which refers to a kind of ballad intended
to be sung and not only to be read. Furthermore, Romances 65, 66, and 67 were named after
European aristocratic dances (turdión, españoleta, and panamá), while Romance 68 was titled a
jácara, a popular song close to the villancico (OC 1.468–​71).
Similarly to Romance 67, three additional ballads, Romances 8, 9, and 10, were also desig-
nated by the poet as “letras para cantar” (works meant to be sung). However, unlike other texts
presented as “letras,” editors and critics have considered these as examples of Sor Juana’s personal
lyric poetry, most likely not intended for public performance (OC 1. 371). This position is
based on the topic that these ballads have in common: the suffering of love, the pain caused by
the beloved’s absence, and the ensuing jealousy when the one who is loved is no longer close.
In terms of their content, these ballads would have been included not among the occasional
poems of celebration but among those in which the author reflected about intimate concerns.
However further examination is necessary to confirm whether the public reading of personal
lyric poetry may have been considered appropriate in Sor Juana’s time. An explanation to the
apparent discrepancy between the poetic genre and its intended performance, either public or
private, is still needed.
Likewise, festive and celebratory poetry per se has not received much critical attention
in the last decades, except when studied in terms of themes and concerns such as self-​
representation (Luciani, Self-​Fashioning 21)  and political discourse (Thomas 1–​8). In his
analysis of ephemeral celebrations in Golden Age Spain, Fernando de la Flor argues that
festivals in which members of the royal family and nobility were celebrated could be seen
as moving beyond their political goals, because they opened up a space for social expres-
sion and appeared as a way of dealing with social anxieties or concerns (463). Celebratory
poems and ballads could be understood within the context of suspended temporality during
festivities, since everyday concerns were postponed in favor of celebration. Furthermore, the
space and time of these social rituals could be experienced as a special setting in which cel-
ebration allowed participants to connect to instances beyond daily events. In this way, those
who participated as the object or agent of praise and those who watched such a performance
could set aside their routines and “live” the victories and wonders of those who were at the
center of celebration.
This helps to explain the frequent poetic mentions of Greek and Roman mythology to
exalt the qualities and power of those who were being celebrated, as we read in Sor Juana’s
romances dedicated to noble women, men, and intellectuals, and in the studies about ballads
and celebration that have been cited so far. Descriptions and narratives involving ancient Greek
and Roman characters provided a means of attributing divine features to human beings with-
out violating the tenets of the Catholic Church. Another feature of this poetry was the use of
historical events, especially when the poet wanted to approach a nationalistic theme. Likewise,
prophetic discourse, astrology, good wishes, and gifts provided the occasion and the language
to flatter the person while casting him/​her in a role above that of the average man or woman,
demonstrating that s/​he could embody an epic or divine hero.
The purpose of Sor Juana’s festive romances, similar to that of other occasional poetry of
her time, as several studies have indicated, was to project an image of the subject that would
magnify and glorify him/​her in a utopian space and time (Luciani, Self-​Fashioning; Morales; Poot
Herrera,”Diálogo”; Prendergast; Quispe-​Agnoli; Thomas). These texts did not simply point

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toward utopias, but rather to real places in which events could be recreated outside the regular
order of things. This approach to analyzing the space created by Sor Juana’s poetry corresponds
to Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia”: a site in which events were “simultaneously rep-
resented, contested, and inverted” (“Of Other” 24). The role of “heterotopias” is, according to
this critic, “to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well
arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled” (Foucault, “Of Other” 27). Sor Juana’s
celebratory romances opened spaces that could be understood today as “heterotopias,” places
in which seventeenth-​century subjects who belonged to different groups and hierarchies could
interact for the time limited by their performance.
One can also observe the space opened by celebratory occasions and their literary expression
not only a suspension of time or certain social boundaries, but also as spaces of contestation. In
La cultura del barroco (The Culture of the Baroque), José Antonio Maravall argued that increased
attention to celebrations and festivals was to a large extent a propagandistic strategy designed
to distract both the elite and the masses from the problems of the empire and its colonies and
helped in keeping control over its dominions. Nevertheless Teófilo Ruiz has demonstrated that
festivals offered more than entertainment and royal propaganda. They could provide “places of
contestation between political forces within the realm” (36). Ballads as spaces of contestation
have been addressed in studies about Sor Juana’s awareness of fame and self-​representations
(Bergmann, “Sor Juana”; Clamurro; Nieto; Prendergast; Rabin, “The Blasón”;Thomas) and self-​
fashioning (Luciani, Literary; Chirinos),11 as well as her apparently subtle opinions about the
political and the social in the colonies.
In relation to ballads in which Sor Juana responded to the celebration of her literary gift by
others, Poot Herrera has concluded that these poetic dialogues constituted a space of solace to
display Sor Juana’s wit and an opportunity to clarify perceptions and ideas about her literary
persona (“Diálogo” 217). In a similar line of reflection about the Mexican nun’s poetic works,
Thomas, Luciani, and Rabin (“The Blasón,” “Sor Juana”) proposed in their respective studies
that romances became textual spaces for Sor Juana not only to clarify ideas about her liter-
ary persona but to create one. Luciani has utilized “self-​fashioning,” a concept borrowed from
Stephen Greenblatt in his study of More’s and Shakespeare’s literary personas, to address the
construction of the Mexican nun’s identity and public persona constituted by her various intel-
lectual and artistic roles in her own works (16–​22). Greenblatt, in turn, has been influenced by
Foucault’s observations on self-​construction and representation that appeared in Technologies of
the Self after the sociologist’s death. Unlike other authors of her time, however, Sor Juana did
not always seek to fulfill social expectations, especially when it came to her gender and intel-
lect together. Luciani’s study is not limited to the analysis of ballads, among which Romance
51 takes center stage, but also their relation with other works authored by the baroque writer.
Pointing out a link among the processes of producing a literary identity through the use of
Petrarchan poetic models to celebrate the vicereines of New Spain, Rabin demonstrates that
Sor Juana’s poems that portray and praise the vicereines of New Spain not only followed the
tradition of laudatory poetry but were used also as a platform to seek self-​promotion and
deploy political strategies (“The Blasón,” 30–​31; “Sor Juana’s”). Additionally, Rabin explains,
the dialogic romances, characterized by poets and critics as epistolary ballads, used references to
the author at her desk in the act of writing and underscored the writing woman as an unusual
occurrence in the seventeenth century, a prodigy and a wonder similar to the destiny of the
mythical phoenix. Luciani has also pointed out the performative characteristics of romances
that, as I indicated earlier, needs further study: “Whatever their affective quotient might have
been, their intellectual content is spectacular:  a performance, something meant to be seen”
(Literary Self-​Fashioning 22).

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Among all ballads penned by Sor Juana, those included in the 1700 publication of Fama
seemed to provide the latest exchange of praises between the Mexican nun and other writers
of her time. Indeed, Romance 51, “A las inimitables plumas de la Europa” (To the inimitable
pens of Europe), appears in this volume. After the publication of the first two volumes, not only
had her works passed Spanish censorship and required approvals by intellectuals and ecclesi-
astics, but they became widely known in Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Peru, and New Granada.
Segundo volumen started with a series of panegyrics to Sor Juana’s poetry and also included
the poet’s responses to such celebrations in, for instance, Romances 38 and 49. However, in
Romance 51, the Mexican nun expressed her concern with the fame that had positioned her
as the center of attention, unwanted in the context of her problems with the clergy of New
Spain. The unfinished nature of this poem may explain critics’ fascination with it. Among oth-
ers, Romance 51 has been analyzed as an example of transatlantic intellectual and intertextual
exchange in the late seventeenth century (Glantz, Sor Juana:  La comparación; Poot Herrera,
“Diálogo”), and as evidence of an evolution in Sor Juana’s understanding of the meaning of
fame and a cryptic announcement of the nun’s renunciation of her literary activity (Luciani
Literary 25, 139–​51).
Romance 51 starts with a series of questions that will be asked again later in the text.
Such questions imply the poet’s intention to reconsider the reasons for her fame and others’
ensuing praise. Luciani explains that, according to this ballad, both perception and repre-
sentation were visions and images mediated by physical and geographical distance and the
circulation of her publications among Iberian-​American readers:  “¿Tanto pudo la distancia
/​añadir a mi retrato?” (OC 1.158) [Was distance /​so able to enhance my image?] (Luciani,
Literary140). Both distance and viewpoint distorted the original object and produced inac-
curate representations of that object: “¿Qué siniestras perspectivas /​dieron aparente ornate
/​al cuerpo compuesto solo /​de unos mal distintos trazos?” (OC 1.160) [What sinister per-
spectives gave apparent ornamentation to a body composed only of some indistinct outlines?]
(Luciani, Literary 141). In Luciani’s analysis, hers is a “cuerpo opaco” (opaque body) that cannot
be actually known or penetrated by the light rays she imagines as emanating from her poetic
admirers, flatteringly portrayed as suns. Even if the purpose of their praise is to imply that
they have explored the complexity of her writings, the result is only a “superficial contacto”
(superficial contact) that keeps the distance between them and points out how illusory their
representations of her are. The elusive and illusory portrait of the poet, and the projections of
expectations on the poetic persona, have been expressed in one of the most famous quatrains
of Sor Juana’s poetry: “y diversa de mí misma /​entre vuestras plumas ando, /​no como soy sino
/​quisistéis imaginarlo” (OC 1. 159) [I go among your pens, different from myself, not as I am
but as you wished to imagine me] (Luciani, Literary 148).12 In alignment with the theme of
self-​fashioning and Luciani’s analysis of multiple genres within Sor Juana’s writings, Chirinos
has discussed their relation to Sor Juana’s famed sonnet “A su retrato” (To Her Portrait). In this
critic’s study, the poet refashioned visual representations of her own image. As a gifted poet and
scholar in seventeenth-​century Mexico, the Mexican nun sought to defend the autonomy of
her craft by creating a self-​portrait that would redirect the external gaze towards the internal
beauty of the intellect and the soul.
Luciani’s study also reminds us of the ambivalent and playful attitude of Sor Juana in her
Romance 1 (“Prólogo al lector” in the Segundo volumen) and compares it with her stance in
Romance 51. In the first one, the poet offered her poems as a gift to her readers but also chal-
lenged them not to read them if they were not pleased by what they saw. In the second, any
ambivalence is placed on the object (or subject) of representation itself and the poem questions
processes of representations and their illusory outcomes. After expressing her surprise for what

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she considers excessive praise from other authors of her time, the poem not only expressed an
“elaborate show of modesty” (Luciani, Literary 142), but also claimed that she was not what
others thought she was. Luciani has argued that there was a change in Sor Juana’s understand-
ing of fame and its effects on perceptions of the nun-​poet and others (Literary 25, 143–​45). In
other words, in this ballad, the Mexican nun conveyed a tension between her own sense of self
and that one created by others (150). Romance 51 may or may not be taken as evidence of her
renunciation of literary activities, but it does reveal Sor Juana’s gained awareness of her liter-
ary portraits and fame as the distorted outcome of an imperial and patriarchal mimicry that
may have praised her as a prodigy but also positioned her as the colonial other.13 In a slightly
different approach to Romance 51, Poot Herrera has asserted that the exchange of ideas and
impressions that took place in Sor Juana’s ballads became an ongoing circular process from the
poet, to her readers, and then back to herself (“Diálogo” 218). Praise of her literary produc-
tion continued after her death, as is evident in the twelve funerary and panegyric romances
included in Fama.14
In addition to self-​representation and dialogic nature of ballads like Romance 51, other
scholars have analyzed this poem –​and other Sor Juana’s ballads –​from the point of view of
transatlantic postcolonial studies and political discourses about coloniality. Theirs constitutes
the third scholarly approach to romances. Contrary to the encomiastic and festive poems that
she wrote about others, in Romance 51 the Mexican nun questioned the difficulties of con-
structing images and representations of others. Martínez-​San Miguel has suggested reading
Romance 51 as an example of colonial heterogeneity in a transatlantic context (“Otra vez Sor
Juana” 59). Transatlanticism in this context refers to Mexican (and Spanish American)-​Spain
intellectual exchanges and encounters, which set the stage to think about the place of Mexican
history before imperial Spain (Martínez-​San Miguel, From Lack; Merrim, Specular; Morales;
Poot Herrera, “Diálogo”). This encounter included subtle reflections of a political nature in
Sor Juana’s ballads as well as other poems (Martínez-​San Miguel, From Lack; Morales; Thomas).
Martínez-​San Miguel has extended this idea to study the expression of female Creole sub-
jectivity as an example of a “minor literature,” a concept she uses to address the subordinated
position of creole discourse in colonial Mexico (From Lack 36, 143). In a direction similar to
Martínez-​San Miguel’s reading of Romance 51, Stephanie Merrim has pointed out the poet’s
realization of the deceptive nature of the Baroque as a force of plurality that might offer a
space of enunciation for those in the colonies of Spain (193).15 Likewise, Kristy Nieto’s dis-
cussion of the ethics of representation and the construction of the other, with a focus on Sor
Juana’s construction of Mexico’s “Indios herbolarios” (Indian herbalists), demonstrates that the
Mexican nun’s poetry contested imperial and patriarchal expectations of Spain’s colonies and
their citizens (157–​58).
While Romance 51 has been studied from different angles, there are other ballads that have
been used as examples of transatlantic postcolonial readings of discourses of power. Such exam-
ples can be found in scholarly approaches to Romances 37, 38, and 49. Romance 37 “Grande
Duquesa de Aveyro” (The Great Duchess of Aveyro) praised a learned woman who was referred
to as the goddess of wisdom (“Minerva de Lisboa” [Minerva of Lisbon]) and beauty (“Venus del
mar lusitano” [Venus of the Lusitanian sea]). Additionally, this poem also established a transat-
lantic dialogue between two intellectual women, a Mexican Creole and a Portuguese aristocrat.
In the dialogue, the poetic voice expressed political concerns about the colonial system and the
rise of Creole identity (Martínez-​San Miguel, From Lack; Merrim, Specular; Morales). According
to Mónica Morales, this ballad used the Atlantic as a space that made possible potential equal-
ity between Europe (center) and its American colonies (periphery) (31–​32). In the opinion of
this critic, Sor Juana’s praises of the Duchess of Aveyro were richer than those from other poets

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because hers originated in Mexico, a place full of material resources and human treasures such
as the Creole intellectuals and artists, one of whom was precisely the poet herself. As Morales
suggests, in this romance Sor Juana remains aware of imperial and colonial centers and margins,
which were questioned and reversed while her Creole identity was placed at the center of vir-
tue, reason, and knowledge (29–​31).
In a similar vein, Romances 38 and 50 constitute examples of Sor Juana’s use of colonial
discourse as an alternative to the triumphant imperial rhetoric of seventeenth-​century Spanish
poetry and thus as an example of political discourse (Thomas 9). In these ballads, the Mexican
nun replied to the praises of Doctor Josef de la Vega, and a Peruvian aristocrat, the Count of
La Granja, respectively. Poot Herrera has studied these ballads as examples of literary dialogues
between Sor Juana and other writers (“Diálogo” 214–​17). The poet’s reflections on perceptions
of her persona in her literary and social contexts are clearly inferred in these poems (“¿Que
mi tintero?” 25–​27). Poot Herrera’s analysis of the dialogic nature of these poems has been
expanded by Luciani’s study of these texts as examples of the author’s self-​fashioning (Literary,
16, 20), as well as by their convergence with the concept of “minor literature” and mimicry of
the empire (Martínez-​San Miguel, From Lack 142–​43).
George Thomas has approached Romances 38 and 50 by paying attention to Sor Juana’s
subtle challenge to the imperial tradition of ceremonial literature (38). In addition to writing
ballads with the apparent purpose of celebrating events that promoted Spanish hegemony
in the colonies, the Mexican nun also displayed a discourse written from the viewpoint of
colonial Mexico as different and opposite to the Spanish imperial one. Thomas argues that
Sor Juana positioned herself as an ambivalent poet of empire and intended to advance an
Americanist and Creole agenda (54–​54). To do this, she appropriated classical models, spe-
cifically the classical Roman author Horace whose poetry, like hers, addressed to an elite
and assisted him in launching a public persona in his writings and developing relations with
patrons (38–​40). In Romance 38 Sor Juana praised de la Vega, a lawyer and intellectual of
New Spain, and equated him with classic poets who had served European kings and emper-
ors. Modestly, the Mexican nun excluded her literary art from such a tradition while carefully
positioning herself below the glory achieved by a series of women poets in the past, includ-
ing the muse Clío, the poet Sappho, the goddess of knowledge Minerva, and the Duchess
of Aveyro, whom she praised in Romance 37. However, a parodic nuance is added in this
ballad that brings us back to the poet’s self-​fashioning. There is a change in tone from cel-
ebratory and solemn to comic, when she compares de la Vega’s poem to a pyramid built for a
mosquito like her (OC 1.111). Thomas interprets the last stanza of this romance as an ironic
contrast between the author’s status as the colonial Phoenix of America and as an imperial
parrot (54). The use of the bird metaphor (phoenix/​parrot) is not unusual in Sor Juana’s
responses to those who celebrated her poems, as we observe in Romance 49 addressed to a
gentleman who just arrived to New Spain. One of the principal images utilized by others to
celebrate Sor Juana’s literary gift was her comparison with the mythical phoenix, an unex-
pected prodigy found in the colonies of the Spanish empire. Moved by the extreme praise of
being called the Phoenix of America, Sor Juana responded with her knowledge of falconry.
However, her poetic voice seemed concerned with being perceived as a monster at the center
of spectacle, and thus questioned the meaning of wonder and prodigy while combining the
qualities of the phoenix and the parrot’s capacity to speak loudly in a parodic representation
of herself: “¿Cómo? ¿Eso se querían, /​tener al Fénix de balde? /​¿Para qué tengo yo pico, /​
sino para despicarme? (I: 147) [Oh-​ho, so is that what you wanted? /​to have the Phoenix for
free! /​Why then I am equipped with a bill, if not /​to collect on what you owe me?] (Arenal
and Powell).16

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In a similar vein, Romance 50 is the poet’s response to the laudatory poem by the Count
of La Granja, who had read the first two volumes and called her “Archi-​Poetisa” (Grand
Poetess). The discussion of this poem in Thomas’s study highlights again the poet’s aware-
ness of her fame and her decisions to build a public literary persona. In Romance 49 bis,
published in Fama along with Romance 50, the Count wrote a representation of Sor Juana
as a poet from the colonies who challenged and conquered her literary counterparts, and
even exceeded her Spanish and classic models.17 In her answer, the Mexican nun expressed
her pleasure about such praise, spoke of her poetic endeavors in apparent humble ways, listed
the muses as her sources of inspiration, and ended the romance by addressing the anonymity
of the admirer, revealing his name in the last stanza. To understand Sor Juana’s path towards
the revelation of the identity of her admirer, and glimpse her reasons for writing ballads, we
should consider her lines about the ambivalent and even tricky nature of romances, which
this gentleman intended to use in order to keep his name secret: “Pero el diablo del Romance
/​tiene en su oculto artificio, /​en cada copla una fuerza /​y en cada verso un hechizo” (OC
1.153) [But the devilish nature of ballads has /​in its hidden artifices /​strength in each stanza
/​and a spell in each line].
I finish this review of critical approaches to Sor Juana’s ballads with a reference to one
romance placed in the prologue to her latest known work, Enigmas, probably written two or
three years before her death (Arenal and Powell xi). In this poem, Sor Juana presented, with an
affectionate tone, her riddles to the Portuguese nuns and learned women of La Casa del Placer
(House of Pleasure) with the support of her patroness María Luisa Manrique. She celebrated
their beauty, intelligence, and love of learning, knowing, and writing. She also invited them to
participate in the search for answers to the riddles and ended her ballad with an anticipated
praise: “Y si, por naturaleza /​quanto oculta penetráis, /​todo lo que es conocer /​ya no será
adivinar” (Alatorre, Enigmas 76)  [And if nature allows you to penetrate its secrets, all that is
there to know, will no longer be guesswork].18 Once more Sor Juana opened the door to the
performance of her works; her romance served as an announcement for the literary and social
spectacle that would be the search for answers to her riddles. However, in contrast to previ-
ous festive occasions that merited the writing of her celebratory ballads to the sacred figures
of Christianity, the king of Spain, the viceroys of Mexico, the nobles, intellectuals, and poets
of Spanish America, Spain and Portugal, and her answers to the celebrations that others made
of her, Sor Juana invited a specific circle of female readers to participate in a literary game that
seemed to be an exclusive fête des femmes in which learned women celebrated learned women
and their love of knowledge.
Sor Juana’s writing of romances demonstrates her skill in using this poetic genre as both a
popular song and a lyric poem aimed to praise social values associated with noble and admirable
characters. The author’s contribution to the “barroquisation” of this genre, her knowledge of
intertextual relations and use of dialogic tensions with other poems written by her and other
authors of her time, and her process of self-​fashioning as a woman writer in her time, speak to
her awareness of the interaction between identity and writing. Additional studies point out Sor
Juana’s subtle contestation of the Spanish imperial rhetoric about its colonial possessions and
alternate responses as an emerging Creole subject in New Spain that engaged in transatlantic
conversations. Her latest known production seems to sum up all these developments and uses
of popular and lyric ballads in baroque literature. Sor Juana’s celebrations of others, transatlantic
dialogues, and playful game of secrets with other women’s works in her time are all present
in her romance included in Enigmas. This late ballad shows that the poet’s self-​fashioning, as
Luciani has explained it, was an ongoing process that took place in spite of her official renuncia-
tion to writing in 1694.

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Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, citations from Sor Juana’s works in this chapter are from volume I of her
Obras completas (Complete Works). English translations come from various sources and are cited appro-
priately. If no translation is available in print, translations to English are mine.
2 See, for example, “Autodefensa espiritual” (Spiritual Self-​Defense) and Enigmas a la Casa del Placer
(Riddles Offered to the House of Pleasure) dated 1682–​1683 and 1692–​1693 respectively.
3 George A.  Thomas refers to this text as a “dedicatory sonnet.” While discussing Sor Juana’s poetry
as a space of self-​construction, he interprets the unexpected turn of this poem as an example of “the
shift from the patron-​client structure of early modern poetry to the “free market” of later poetic
production” (79).
4 “Salud y gracia, sépades” corresponds to a Latin formula of salutation “[Wishing you] health and grace
of God” while the verb “sépades” addressed “Vos,” the respectful pronominal form for the second
person “you.”
5 For the purpose of this chapter, I work only with those poems that have been titled “romance” in Sor
Juana’s initial three volumes. In some cases, “letras” are included in the corpus of Sor Juana’s romances
(Romances 8, 9, 10, and 69). Further on, I explain the slight differences among “letra,” “romance,”
“endecha,” and “villancico.”
6 See his “Avatares barrocos del romance” for a discussion of this concept.
7 In his analysis of meter, rhythm and rhyme of popular ballads, Alatorre observed that they may or may
not include a refrain and were organized in quatrains as early as 1421 (345–​49). He also noted that
Góngora’s use of ballads as lyric poetry escaped the attention to meter in Golden Age treatises of poetry
such as Díaz Rengifo’s Arte poética española (Spanish Art of Poetry, 1592); Luis Alfonso de Carvallo’s
Cisne de Apolo (Apollo’s Swan, 1602), and Gonzalo Correas Iñigo’s Arte grande de la lengua castellana
(Great Art of the Castilian Language, 1626).
8 By the seventeenth century, lyric ballads were written in quatrains, each line had between six and eight
syllables, and they could or could not include refrains. If refrains were part of ballads, these would not
repeat consistently as it was the case in popular songs and, if they were used in a ballad, refrains were
written in parentheses.The rhyme of lyric ballads became consistently assonant in the even lines, while
only octosyllabic ballads kept the name romances. At this point, the term endecha was reserved for those
ballads with six syllables, while others with eight or six syllables that were written to be sung or per-
formed aloud, were known as letra or even villancico (“Avatares” 363–​65).
9 Writing poems about ephemeral occasions may be deemed of minor importance because of the pecu-
niary interest attached to them. Poets would produce flattering texts to polish the image of kings,
nobles or other personages and/​or to please wealthy and powerful patrons (de la Flor 461). In spite
of any personal or material interest of the writer, panegyric poetry to nobles and wealthy sponsors
did not necessarily lead to poetic works of lesser quality. Sor Juana’s romances celebrating such figures
constitute a good example of high-​quality occasional poetry.
10 This was the case of Romances 64–​69.
11 Self-​fashioning projected images of individuals that were displayed in both poetic and artistic portrai-
ture. Chirinos’s study follows closely Luciani’s proposal.
12 In addition, in this romance we observe how Sor Juana utilized the tenets of Baroque (deception of
appearances, cryptic messages, hidden essences that are not visible to the naked eye, ambivalent shapes)
to protect herself in a conflictive situation with the Church in New Spain.
13 I use “mimicry” here as proposed by Homi Bhabha: “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (125). This is
another area of potential study of Sor Juana’s ballads: her use and awareness of mimicry.
14 In his comments about the reception of her works in Spain after her death and the publication of Fama,
Thomas confirms that this process of colonial mimicry operated in representations of Sor Juana in
imperial discourse: “It is ironic that, despite Sor Juana’s eschewal of imperial discourses … her literary
success was packaged as evidence of the success of Spain’s civilizing mission in the New World” (54).
15 According to Merrim, romance 51 “can be construed as Sor Juana’s renunciation of her European
project, on the wings of ever more fragile paper. The piercingly conventional penitential documents
(#408–​410, OC:4) of her alleged conversion to orthodoxy and the reunion with her strict Jesuit con-
fessor date from the period in which she wrote the romance” (193).
16 The English translation of this romance by Arenal and Powell follows a metaphorical rendering for
the last two lines, and therefore the meaning of a bird’s beak is not obvious in English. To follow my

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reasoning about phoenix/​parrot, a potential English translation of these two lines might be: “Why then
I am equipped with a beak, /​if not to talk as much as I want?”
17 “The strength of Sor Juana’s writing is described as dethroning the model imperial poet of Rome
(Virgil) and, likewise, causing the peninsular master Góngora to seek refuge in the impenetrable verses
of his Soledades. In this romance, the Count of La Granja recounts her triumphs over several other poets
as well (Quevedo, Ovid, Camoens)” (Thomas 40).
18 This romance was followed by a sonnet also written by Sor Juana that introduced the work to the
reader. Both poems were accompanied by endechas and one romance authored by Portuguese nuns
and the Countess of Paredes respectively, as well as three texts written by Portuguese religious women
writers that provided the censorship, approvals, and recommendations for its publication (Poot Herrera,
“Sor Juana” 65–​66).

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15
PHILOSOPHICAL SONNETS
Through a baroque lens

Luis F. Avilés

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote very few sonnets with moral and philosophical content. In his
edition of the Obras Completas (Complete Works), Méndez Plancarte includes a total of eight
in this category. In a more recent edition, González Boixo selects six of those sonnets, but adds
four others not chosen by Méndez Plancarte, for a total of ten. These new additions, however,
remain highly debatable, since they can be logically inserted into other categories. The nun’s
restricted use of sonnets as a vehicle for deeper reflection is surprising, considering that many
critics agree that these compositions, despite being so few, are some of the best poems that Sor
Juana ever wrote and are among the best-​known. Octavio Paz states, “Some of Sor Juana’s moral
sonnets are among her finest work” (Traps 299), a critical assessment that, unfortunately, did not
translate into an expanded commentary by the Mexican poet and critic, who devoted scarcely
two pages to the eight sonnets selected as philosophical by Méndez Plancarte.
We must also reflect on the category of “philosophical sonnets” and how it has been con-
ceived by the most important editors of Sor Juana’s works. What is philosophical about these
sonnets? What are the critical parameters used in order to group them together under a “moral
and philosophical” heading? In his edition of the complete works, Méndez Plancarte organ-
izes the first volume (Lírica personal; Secular Poetry) by poetic meter, stating that chronology
would be impossible and that thematic considerations will result in unevenness and confu-
sion. However, in the case of the sonnets, he divides them thematically and begins the section
with the eight “filosófico-​morales” I already mentioned (numbers 145 to 152 in his edition).
Unfortunately, he does not provide critical parameters for his selection. In her edition of
Inundación Castálida (Castalian Flood), Georgina Sabat de Rivers points out the absence of a
rigorous sequence of texts in the original edition of 1689. She also reflects on the difficulties
of grouping poems by thematic content due to the fact that many begin with an initial topic
but end up shifting to another, making it hard to select a single topic as an organizing principle
(“Introducción” 31–​32). Sabat de Rivers decides to follow the existing sequence in the original
volume of Inundación, but does not relinquish her desire for a logical scheme based on specific
topics. In her introduction to the edition she groups together all the texts in the volume under
different thematic clusters. She identifies as philosophical six of the eight sonnets chosen by
Méndez Plancarte. However, she adds a different sonnet with a religious topic, a poem that
refers to Pontius Pilate, #78 in her edition, which Méndez Plancarte includes in the category
“Sacred Sonnets” (#207). Sabat de Rivers also includes as philosophical a romance, a glosa, and

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the famous redondillas which begin with the line “Hombres necios” (“Foolish men”) (page 38 of
her “Introducción”). It is obvious that for her such thematic considerations are important as part
of any critical commentary on the poet. Her schema also supersedes formal distinctions, allow-
ing her to include different poetic genres under a single thematic rubric. In her edition of Obras
selectas (Selected Works), Margo Glantz follows the criteria of older editions and does not organ-
ize the poems by topic. In fact, her edition is closer to Sabat de Rivers’, but Glantz takes various
liberties in the poetic sequence. Hers is a more personal approach, based on critical reflection
and the content of the poems according to a possible sequence that would compensate for the
lack of order in all the early editions of Sor Juana’s works (XCI). The more recent anthology
edited by González Boixo published by Cátedra, on the other hand, returns to the criteria of
themes as an organizing principle. Under the heading “Poesía filosófico-​moral” (Philosophical-​
moral poetry) González Boixo includes a total of eleven poems (ten of them sonnets and the
ballad “Finjamos que soy feliz”) (For a little while, sad Thought). As stated before, of the sonnets
he has chosen, numbers 76 to 79 are different from the ones that appear in Méndez Plancarte’s
edition. Contrary to Sabat de Rivers, he does not include: “Firma Pilatos la que juzga ajena”
(#207) [Pilate, sentencing another, condemns himself].
Unfortunately, none of these editors identifies in a clear manner the criteria they follow in
order to include or exclude poems from the category of philosophical and moral writing. They
share a reluctance to organize the poems thematically (some more than others), but the relation-
ship between the chosen poems and philosophy should have been theorized more fully. Critics
should not assume that a distribution of poems under thematic headings and following tradition
should be considered logical. It would be productive to ask what precisely is philosophical about
these sonnets, and beyond a general view of what is meant by “Sor Juana’s philosophy,” what are
the specific instances of philosophy that are articulated in each poem.The answer to this question
is highly complicated, as I will hope to show in the following pages. Throughout this chapter
I will refer only to those texts chosen by Méndez Plancarte as philosophical sonnets (numbers
145 to 152), with the caveat that such a classification ought to be critically revisited in the future.1
Most critics seem to agree that among the philosophical sonnets, #145 (“These lying pig-
ments facing you”) is the best.2 Of the eight sonnets, it is the one that has garnered the most
critical attention, especially after the publication of Paz’s book on Sor Juana. It also appears in
almost every anthology of the nun’s works. In fact, the majority of studies dedicated to this
group of sonnets is devoted primarily to sonnet 145. However, I have found no publications
specifically devoted to the eight poems as a whole. That is why I believe that the best way to
approach these poetic compositions is by paying close attention to the reception and commen-
tary of sonnet 145. By doing so I will be able to give a proper account of some of the major crit-
ical approaches to this particular sonnet, as well as the other works both within and outside of
the philosophical cluster. For the sake of clarity, I will divide the diversity of critical approaches
to this sonnet into three distinct categories, beginning with a philological identification of the
possible sources of the sonnet and its close ties to the Spanish baroque tradition. Second, I will
consider a feminist approach that is centered on an interpretation of the sonnet as a re-​writing
of Góngora’s sonnet “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” (While, to compete with your hair)
and several baroque topoi. Finally, I will conclude by focusing on the relationships that the son-
net has to early modern conceptions of visual perception, optics, art, and portraiture.3

Philology and the Baroque

For Octavio Paz, sonnet 145 is “a perfect verbal construct” that, in the sextets, “slightly
improves” on Góngora’s celebrated sonnet. He further states that despite “its rigorous and

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deliberate impersonality, this sonnet grows out of a deeply personal theme that is often
a motif in her poetry: the portrait” (Traps 299). The categories of the personal and the
impersonal that Paz found to be so prevalent in her love poems are also invoked in order
to comprehend what is supposed to be a philosophical sonnet. Examples abound of Paz’s
struggles with his own interpretation, due to the contradictions and inconsistencies among
his chosen categories. For example, he makes a general assessment of Sor Juana’s love poetry
when he says that she “does not attempt to express herself ” because in reality she “constructs
verbal objects that are emblems or monuments that illustrate a vision of love transmitted by
poetic tradition” (Traps 279). These “monuments” are not “expressions of an experience or
a personality,” but simply poetic objects that follow an “archetype of amorous sentiments”
(Traps 279). However, Paz immediately corrects himself: “I do not mean that the poetry of
Sor Juana contains nothing personal.” Those aspects that he characterizes as the personal suf-
fer a deep transformation in the baroque writing process due to the constraints imposed by
a “traditional form, from meter to metaphor to conceit” (Traps 279). What remains of the
personal should be considered a mere trace, not to be confused with a “confession or confi-
dence, in the modern meaning of the words” (Traps 279). According to Paz, not only do the
majority of Sor Juana’s amorous works suffer from this impersonality, but “the same is true of
her sacred writing and the rest of her poetic works,” deemed as “mere exercise, ostentation,
exhibition of skill” (Traps 279–​80).
Paz concludes that Sor Juana is no different from other baroque poets, since in all of them
the personal is always sacrificed when it is expressed in poetic form. Still, he cannot avoid
identifying traces of the personal in some of her other philosophical sonnets, and the same
contradictions emerge when he proposes that sonnet 146 “is also personal” because “it is a
defense of the love for letters that was the source of the persecutions she suffered” (Traps 300).
This is also the major theme of sonnet 150. For Paz, sonnet 149 “expresses the shattering experi-
ence” of choosing a state that was to last her entire life, adding that “more than once she must
have repented of having taken the veil” (Traps 300). These are decidedly personal conjectures
from a scholar and intellectual who defined baroque poetry as a highly impersonal artistic
form. Stephanie Merrim comments on these struggles between the personal and impersonal
in Octavio Paz’s book: “At various moments in his book (…) he emphasizes that Sor Juana
did not write directly confessional poetry, since the poetic norms of the times precluded
direct confession. Instead, the writer conformed personal experience to poetic convention”
(“Toward” 29). Merrim has criticized (with good reason) the attempts by Paz “to penetrate
the nun’s most intimate psychology” (“Toward” 13), part of another conflict that stems from
the “biographical focus” of the Mexican poet’s book (“Toward” 19). Paz’s conflict between the
personal and the impersonal illustrates the choices he made as a critic. On one hand, he closely
follows a philological approach that does not lose sight of historical genealogy and literary his-
tory, and on the other, he shows a strong interest in biography and psychological description.
This critical point of view may produce exceptional readings, but it confronts serious difficul-
ties when it comes to providing a solid historical and theoretical framework for the subject
and her poetic voice. As I will try to describe later on, this conflict was dealt with head-​on
in feminist approaches to Sor Juana. In any case, the problems experienced by Paz illustrate
vividly that impersonality, literary form, and philosophical inquiry cannot be entirely sepa-
rated from the personal and intimate. Even in its minimal “residue” in the poem, the personal
remains strong enough in Sor Juana’s poetry, dislocating a reductive view of literary production
and authorship on the part of the critic.
One of the more important comments made by Paz regarding sonnet 145 is the parallels it
may have to specific paintings within the baroque tradition. He mentions Juan de Valdéz Leal’s

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Jeroglíficos de las postrimerías (Hieroglyphics of the Final Stages) and Antonio de Pereda y Salgado’s
vanities (for example, Alegoría de la vanidad [Allegory of Vanity]).4 The emblematic appearance
of skulls and images of death in these paintings make possible this comparison. Georgina Sabat
de Rivers has published two important articles that comment on sonnet 145, including other
philosophical sonnets.5 The main purpose of these studies is to contextualize Sor Juana’s poems
as part of the baroque tradition, identifying the most significant sources of her poetry. In Sabat
de Rivers’ publication devoted to the tradition of poetic portraiture, she classifies sixteen texts
as poetic portraits, and she includes sonnet 145 among a category of texts that represent the
confrontation of the poetic self with a portrait. Sabat de Rivers proposes a reading of the son-
net based on Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas on imitation and art. For her, the first quatrain refers
to the multiple levels of deception characteristic of the Platonic conception of an image as a
copy of an already existing copy, with no access to reality. The second quatrain illustrates a shift
towards Aristotle and the capacity of mimesis to produce an effective imitation of an original
and, at times, improving on the subject being represented. In the process, the image conquers
temporality (“defying the power of passing years”), or at least pretends to do so.6 The tercets’
progressive destruction of the painting (or the incapacity to defy the power of temporality) sig-
nifies a return to Plato’s rejection of images. In her reading Sabat de Rivers manages to respond
philosophically to a philosophical sonnet, bringing together two major classical thinkers and
their divergent conceptions of mimesis and representation.
In her later essay “Tiempo, apariencia y parodia,” originally published in 1990, Sabat de
Rivers expands the Baroque context of the sonnet by closely following texts written by
Baltasar Gracián and quoting the historian José Antonio Maravall. baroque culture conceived
reality as difficult to apprehend, since the subject was confronted with a mutability continu-
ously affected by time (183). In sonnet 145, the painting becomes an unstable object, formed
by successive moments of time. According to Sabat de Rivers, the painting suffers continuous
change in front of the observer; what is seen becomes mere appearance. This approach allows
her to postulate the problem of the sonnet not as a contradictory sequence of philosophical
positions with respect to the image (between Plato and Aristotle), but as an epistemological
representation of an experience of knowledge (184). Instead of the Platonic rejection of the
image in her previous essay, Sabat de Rivers states that Sor Juana is able to express a knowl-
edge acquired through baroque experience and the conclusion that the image is deception.
This relationship between the author, the constitution of her poetic voice, and the possibil-
ity of expressing an experience of the Baroque’s deceptive reality also operates in Sor Juana’s
other philosophical sonnets. Sabat de Rivers states that the three sonnets devoted to the rose
(two of them philosophical, #147 and #148), work in a similar fashion, since they represent a
specific form of knowledge acquired by Sor Juana and conveyed in a moral and pedagogical
tone (183–​84). The same is true of sonnet 152, “Verde embeleso” (Green allurement). Sabat
de Rivers registers an important comment on this sonnet when she proposes that Sor Juana
distinguishes her vision and perspective from those who wear “green lenses in their specta-
cles” (“con verdes vidrios por anteojos”), acting instead “more wisely” (“más cuerda”). These
essays by Sabat de Rivers are groundbreaking in three important ways. First, they provide key
sources that help explain Sor Juana’s treatment of poetic portraiture in the baroque tradition.
Second, they recognize the importance of the status of the image in the Baroque. Third, they
begin to contextualize Sor Juana as an author affected by tradition but, at the same time, one
who is able to imprint a “personal” experience of knowledge in her poetry (how this personal
knowledge has affected her conceptions of what a portrait, a rose, and hope may mean to her).
In other words, she paves the way for an effective solution to Octavio Paz’s conflict between
the personal and the impersonal.

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Expanding philosophy: feminist approaches

Despite the clear contributions by Sabat de Rivers, she was unable to expand on the writing
of the poetic subject in the philosophical sonnets from the perspective of a feminine voice and
from a more solid theoretical ground. There is a difference between giving a poetic account of
epistemological experience and giving the same account from the point of view of a woman
and nun confronting a myriad of limitations and obstacles in baroque culture. Two essays writ-
ten almost simultaneously with Sabat de Rivers’s article “Tiempo, apariencia y parodia” are
crucial in this sense: Emilie Bergmann’s “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Dreaming in a Double
Voice” and Stephanie Merrim’s “Toward a Feminist Reading of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,”
included in her important volume, Feminist Perspectives (1991). Both essays began to reshape
how Sor Juana’s work was understood, and they influenced subsequent scholarly approaches
in highly significant ways as well. In the case of Bergmann, she makes a distinction between
“verbal portrait” (defined according to “the medieval blason or the Petrarchist representation of
the lady’s attributes”) and the literary “self-​portrait,” conceived as “a representation of the sub-
ject’s consciousness –​not how the writer appears to others, nor the events in her life, but what
she knows and how she explains her knowing it” (163). For Bergmann, and this is crucial, Sor
Juana’s texts devoted to portraiture are understood as responses to a male-​dominated tradition
and as a re-​writing of such a tradition, whether in the form of a resistance to objectification or
by means of a manipulation of existing topoi. In this way, sonnet 145 “confronts and demystifies
the enigmas of time and desire in the tradition of carpe diem poetry, traditionally urging the lady
to enjoy her transitory beauty by yielding to her suitor’s desires” (166). The poem goes beyond
the revelation of a new and personal definition of what a portrait is, contesting literary tradition
in order to reveal “the irrationality of the genre” (167). Consequently, what is destroyed is not
necessarily painting but both carpe diem itself and Luis de Góngora’s paradigmatic baroque son-
net “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.” Thus Sor Juana articulates her own poetic agency
by usurping “the male role of observer of women” and showing herself  “capable of mimicking
the same [male] discourse in a disconcerting way” (167–​68).
Although Merrim does not deal specifically with the philosophical sonnets, she must nec-
essarily be included here because her essay is fundamental for understanding the readings and
interpretations that will follow in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. One of the singular
contributions of this chapter is to identify the limitations of previous approaches to Sor Juana’s
work, especially those framed within a male-​ centered perspective. Furthermore, Merrim’s
approach is feminist and at the same time historical. She is able to recognize the obstacles of
living in an “institutionalized literary culture” that was “overwhelmingly masculine” (21) and
from there posit an author that negotiates with this social reality. In order to participate in colo-
nial court society, Sor Juana had to immerse herself in the “reigning (masculine) tradition” (22).
Merrim identifies how her voice is constituted by other voices that are “introjected” in order
to “negate their difference, to introject or appropriate the masculine realm for the feminine and
to place them on the same continuum” (23; emphasis by Merrim). She recognizes originality in
Sor Juana, but an originality understood as a specific borrowing of culture. Merrim finds useful
Arthur Terry’s concept of “swerve” or the possibility of proposing “new patterns in traditional
clusters” (qtd. 23). She identifies these moves as “the verbal stratagems of the oppressed,” sur-
reptitiously adding new content to traditional forms (23–​24). Merrim thereby sets the stage for
a historical feminism that is able to better contextualize the poetic subject created by Sor Juana.
From my perspective, this is the necessary ground for understanding in all its complexity the
personal, philosophical, and epistemological knowledge communicated by the poet. It deter-
mines the way in which a subject of knowledge is culturally constituted.

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In 1997, Betty Sasaki expanded Emilie Bergmann’s main ideas with an article on sonnet 145,
“Seizing the Gaze:The Carpe Diem Topos in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s ‘A su retrato.’” Contrary
to critics who have emphasized the importance of painting and visual culture in Sor Juana,
Sasaki’s analysis depends on a highly negative conception of portraiture in the Renaissance,
equivalent to the worst types of seizure of a subject of representation within the tradition of
carpe diem and naturaleza muerta (still life), or as one that is captured, objectified, and silent (8–​9).
For Sasaki, Sor Juana is responding to an underlying reality of artistic portraiture: its capacity
to trap the subject of representation in a frozen, more or less lifeless state. Consequently, the
nun’s poem is a response that gives voice to the voiceless. It even “undermines the very notion
of ‘seeing’ all together,” causing what Sasaki calls “a disruption of the gaze” (10). Sor Juana, in
this poem, “breaks the cultural mirror, creating a visual void,” articulating a voice that is able to
“remain genderless and disembodied, eluding, in a sense, the reader’s desire to attach the poet
herself to the poetic voice she creates” (11). Portraiture, then, cannot escape patriarchy, render-
ing the female body always as an object and, consequently, “infinitely subordinated to a larger
masculinist truth.” But in the tercets of the sonnet, Sor Juana is able to interrupt the temporality
of carpe diem, disrupting the tension between present and future (13). Sasaki’s approach could
be understood as a response to a response. As Sor Juana responds to the poetic tradition of carpe
diem and at the same time creates her own personal voice, in a parallel gesture the critic is also
responding to the European visual and artistic tradition, generating another voice herself. It is
as if the critic had to respond forcefully, even destructively, to those forces of containment so
prevalent in the baroque period and that may well persist today. But Sor Juana’s opinions on
painting and representation were never visually phobic, judging from her letters, her poems,
and her clear interest in perspective and optics.7 Regardless, the article does emphasize the
importance of understanding some of Sor Juana’s significant poetry as responses to cultural
restrictions and as the expression of a poetic voice in her encounter with institutions, politics,
and patriarchal culture in general.
Another important contribution to Sor Juana studies was the publication of Saberes america-
nos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (American Knowledges: Subalternity
and Epistemology in Sor Juana’s Writings), by Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel.The book explores
how a subject of knowledge is constituted in colonial Latin America, in particular the ways in
which a feminine subject intervenes in epistemological discourse. For example, sonnet 147
(“Rosa divina”) condenses academic and pedagogic language in order to construct a cognitive
feminine voice that produces knowledge on fleeting time (66). In the sonnet, the Rose teaches
that spiritual knowledge is superior to material knowledge. Following closely the arguments
of Bergmann, Luiselli (“Tríptico”), and Sasaki, Martínez-​San Miguel reads Sonnet 145 as a
re-​writing of carpe diem. The sonnet is also a resistance to absolute categories of knowledge
by means of a contextual knowledge based on the body and historicity (67). In her reading of
sonnet 148 (“Miró Celia una rosa” [“Celia gazed at a rose”]), the feminine voice (Celia) appro-
priates the masculine discourse in order to present a different perspective on the topos of carpe
diem.8 The end result is a feminine subjectivity that is able to gain her own voice in a tradition
that excludes her, allowing for a significant change in poetic language (68).These new meanings
materialized within the institutionalized culture in which women lived.

Baroque vision and painting

As I have shown, feminist approaches to the philosophical sonnets of Sor Juana (especially sonnet
145) were able to build the foundation for a speaking subject with a woman’s perspective. They
were able to combine baroque culture with a distinct voice that responded to male-​dominated

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discourse, poetic tradition, and the sometimes overwhelming institutions of colonial Mexico. A
third approach to sonnet 145 has centered on topics related to painting, portraiture, and visual
representation. I must remind the reader that there are no absolute distinctions among the three
critical approaches I have identified.We must rather understand them as intersecting and mutu-
ally dialogic. Sabat de Rivers cannot be solely conceived as a philologically and historically
oriented critic, the same way that we should not understand the work of Bergmann, Merrim,
and others as avoiding entirely other preoccupations such as painting, colonial culture, or the
Baroque. The division I am proposing is solely for illustrative purposes and helps me avoid a
purely chronological discussion.
As early as 1986, William Clamurro published his article entitled “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Reads her Portrait.”This important and detailed article has several merits. First, it recognizes the
importance of portraits, since they are a “figure for the heightened self-​consciousness and the
acute sense of the contrary pressures and expectations that surrounded [Sor Juana’s] identity”
(27). In other words, portraits are cultural artifacts that reveal the personal within a social milieu.
Inherent in them is the “potential for distortion” and the power to acquire a life of their own
as an autonomous object (28). Clamurro is aware of the contextual pressures of baroque society
in a female subject, and how these forces (individual and social) coalesce in the portrait as a
powerful metaphor for the appearance of the self. Furthermore, he adds the complexities of a
criollo culture to his analysis. However, Clamurro’s approach depends on significant similarities
between Góngora’s “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” and Sor Juana’s sonnet (29). This is
due to the attention paid to the final line of Góngora’s poem and to visual beauty in both son-
nets (although Sor Juana selects a portrait with a beautiful image rather than physical beauty).
Clamurro is also sensitive to the various speaking positions expressed by the poem, postulating
that the voice in the sonnet “seems to be speaking to itself –​and also to an imagined reader, who
in effect ‘overhears’ this self-​directed meditation” (33; Clamurro’s emphasis). The article is the
first detailed analysis of the poem in all its verbal complexity. It also identifies the significance
of the phrase “bien mirado” (well-​seen), “the vehicle of true and ultimate knowledge as sight,
the clear seeing of the object but also the problematic that surrounds the object” (36; emphasis
in the text). Clamurro ends his essay with a reflection on Sor Juana in a criollo context, echoing
the ideas of Octavio Paz. However, this criollo subjectivity is defined mostly as “isolation and
marginality” from the European baroque tradition and not understood within the institutions
of colonial Mexico, the pressures exerted by convents, or the simple fact that she was a woman.
Nevertheless, this chapter (along with Sabat de Rivers’ critical articles, already discussed) paved
the way for a richer and more sustained focus on painting and visual representation in Sor Juana.
The first scholar who explored the deep relationships between sonnet 145 and painting
was Frederick Luciani, in “Anamorphosis in a Sonnet by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (1988).
Luciani begins his essay by stating that Sor Juana’s works “give ample evidence of the nun’s
strong interest in the science of optics” (423). He quotes important passages from the Respuesta
(Answer) that deal with perspective, and correctly points out the centrality of the pyramid in
Primero sueño (The Dream) and its close ties to geometric perspective in art (424–​25). Sor Juana
was also aware that our eyes can deceive us. Luciani argues, with Octavio Paz, that Sor Juana
“was well acquainted with the contributions of Athanasius Kircher” to optical theory and, in
particular, to anamorphosis.The anamorphic distortions found in early modern theories of vision
were highly popular in the baroque era, and their uses found corresponding articulations in dis-
course, as is the case of Gracián’s reflections on “agudeza” or wit (426). Paintings such as Hans
Holbein’s The Ambassadors and its anamorphic skull are fundamental from a visual perspective
because of the close relationships with Sor Juana’s sonnet. Luciani comments, “viewed obliquely,
or rather, viewed correctly, the gorgeous youth and power of the French ambassadors are but a

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reminder of the transience of futility of the things of this world” (426). The painting becomes
a memento mori, a moral warning. The relationship of the anamorphic skull to the painting not
only underscores the deception of our senses, but also appears as a painted commentary within
the painting itself (426–​27). Luciani’s reference to Holbein’s portrait allows him to compare
Sor Juana’s sonnet to anamorphosis and postulate a link between painting and poetry, between
image and discourse. The first line of the sonnet also recalls other examples of memento mori
or the inscription on tombs. According to Luciani, Sor Juana combines memento mori and
ekphrasis (“poetic description”), with the typical baroque theme of “the ephemeral nature of
physical reality” that manifests itself in the last line borrowed from Góngora’s sonnet (427). Sor
Juana’s sonnet articulates the view that “What you see is nothing; it describes an optical illusion”
(428). Holbein’s painting, like all anamorphic art, is constituted by two viewing perspectives: the
moment we see the picture but cannot yet make out the skull, and the recognition of the skull
once the viewer has changed her stance, which implies a temporality that allows for an accurate
interpretation of what is represented in the canvas. In a similar fashion, the sonnet proposes
another temporality, the fourteen lines that it takes to read it (428).The crucial phrasing is “bien
mirado” (well seen), which implies intellectual reflection and understanding: “In both Holbein’s
painting and Sor Juana’s sonnet, the work of art’s representation of time and the viewer/​reader’s
temporal absorption of the work of art are necessary components of the psychological process
of desengaño which the viewer/​reader is meant to undergo” (429). In the  end, painting and
poetry unite, allowing Luciani to propose that “Este, que ves” is in reality the sonnet itself,
offered as “the ultimate engaño” (430).
In 1993, Jorge Checa published an important and seldom-​quoted article, “Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz: La mirada y el discurso,” (The Gaze and Discourse), which focused on the conflict
between the sense of vision and reflection in discourse in Sor Juana’s sonnets 145, 152 (“Verde
embeleso de la vida humana”), and Primero sueño. Checa’s main purpose is to study the conflict
that arises when vision specifically implies a deception of the senses that needs to be corrected
by intellectual reflection. He identifies two modalities of vision, one falsified by desire and the
other “desengañada” (disillusioned) and “cuerda” (sane). This second modality of visual percep-
tion is represented in the sonnet by the metaphoric addition of the sense of touch, understood
as a necessary supplement or aid in order to avoid deceptions caused by the sense of sight (127).
Checa makes reference to Alciato’s famous emblem #16, a picture of the oculata manus (ocular
hand) that symbolizes prudence. Furthermore, sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century doctrines
that questioned the accuracy of optical experience are also important for understanding the full
meaning of the sonnet, especially in the writings of Huarte de San Juan, Saavedra Fajardo, and
Baltasar Gracián (128).9
According to Checa, this background is also fundamental for an understanding of Sor Juana’s
sonnet 145. He proposes a reading of the poem as a response to the narcissistic effects inher-
ent in the act of contemplating a portrait of one’s own self (if we follow the directions of the
title given to the sonnet), resulting in a poetic discourse that distances itself from a mute and
complacent visual experience (129). This idea expands and further problematizes Clamurro’s
references to the beauty of the portrait. In other words, the subject that sees the portrait appears
to resist the allure of her own image, evading seeing with an uncritical gaze by resisting the
seduction of the “false premises of color.” In fact, Checa cleverly distinguishes between “ver” (to
see) and “bien mirar” (to see well), or the moment when prudent sight becomes an intellectual
reflection on the object’s potential to foreshadow the “inevitable destruction of the person por-
trayed” (129). The argument convincingly unites Alciato’s prudent eye of sonnet 152 with the
intellectual gaze of sonnet 145 (“bien mirado”). It is a gaze that is inseparable from language
and discourse. The poetic self, through this second visual experience, is effectively transformed

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into a Janus face (Alciato’s emblem #18), another symbol of prudence (the ability to be aware
of the past, present, and future).
After proposing Alciato’s two emblems as possible grounds for understanding both sonnets,
Checa transcends a mere study of sources in order to identify, at a more theoretical level, an
emblematic function or operation that works in both emblems as well as in sonnet 145. This
function is centered on the inscriptio and the subscriptio that frame and explain the image of the
emblem (130). Sor Juana’s sonnet works in a similar way with respect to an image that, even
though it is not present to us, is still an object defined in moral terms by discourse. Equivalent
to the emblem’s subscriptio or explanation through language, the sonnet works as a discursive
comment on an image that has been transformed into something other (it has lost its capacity
for temporal duration and the improvement of the self; 130–​31).
Another important contribution of the article is that, contrary to previous interpretations of
the sonnet, many of them focusing on the last line borrowed from Góngora, it pays close atten-
tion to the first line, identifying liaisons with another important baroque theme: poems devoted
to ruins.10 The destruction represented in the sonnet contrasts with the beauty of the object rep-
resented, but in Sor Juana the destruction is accomplished by means of an “interpretation” of an
object that wants to suppress death and the passing of time (131). The emphasis on the first line
allows Checa to make a second association with the tradition of epitaphs. His approach to both
sonnet 145 and 152 yields important insights with regards to visual representation and baroque
sources previously not taken into consideration. It significantly expands Sor Juana’s complex
representation of an intellectualized vision and for the first time puts in productive dialogue two
of the most significant philosophical sonnets written by the nun-​poet.
Two articles that explore the rose in three sonnets of Sor Juana need to be mentioned
here, although they do not focus on sonnet 145. Alessandra Luiselli’s “Tríptico virreinal: Los
tres sonetos a la rosa de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (Viceregal Tryptych: Sor Juana’s Three
Sonnets to the Rose) appeared in the same volume as Checa’s article. In her essay Luiselli
provides a full overview of the poetic tradition centered on the rose as subject. She also
proposes changing our focus from the Baroque to Mannerism in order to fully comprehend
the subtle changes suffered by Renaissance topics in Sor Juana’s poems. For example, she
points out how Sor Juana subtly transforms carpe diem and the topic collige, virgo, rosas. Luiselli
argues for the recuperation of the woman’s voice previously silenced in male poems devoted
to these topics. Pablo Brescia, in his “Raíces filosóficas en las rosas de Sor Juana y Borges”
(1998), has also focused on this trio of poems, but with a stronger connection to philosophy.
According to Brescia, Sor Juana follows an Aristotelian understanding of reality as concrete
and sensible, in contrast to the Platonic forms, conceiving a rose as a particular object that
manifests itself in a diversity of ways (157–​58). The sonnets also reproduce the baroque topos
coincidentia oppositorum, and each poetic manifestation of the rose has its own particularity, its
own experience (158).
My contribution to the critical responses to sonnet 145 appeared in 2000: “Sor Juana en
el punto de fuga: La mirada en ‘Este que ves, engaño colorido’ ” (Sor Juana in the Vanishing
Point: The Gaze in “These Lying Pigments Facing You”). This essay provides an account of
the visual richness of the sonnet, following the path of critics who recognized the impor-
tance of sight and optics in Sor Juana’s writings. The title assigned to the poem in Inundación
castálida refers to a portrait: “Procura desmentir los elogios que a un retrato de la Poetisa
inscribió la verdad, que llama pasión” (She endeavors to expose the praises recorded in a
portrait of the Poetess by truth, which she calls passion).11 As Octavio Paz noted, “No one,
to my knowledge, has addressed the question of the title; a pity, because it forces us to read
the sonnet as an oblique confession” (Traps 299). Here, once again Paz recovers the personal

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(confessional) content of the poem, but this time through the title, an element that somehow
remains outside the poem itself but accompanies it nonetheless. Paz proposes the following
reading of the title: “The truth –​in other words, the fidelity –​with which her beautiful
face has been portrayed on the canvas is a passion, something that passes” (Traps 299). My
article provides a detailed reading of this title and considers it one of the first interpreta-
tions of the poem (414–​15). The social significance of the poetic voice is that it creates a
dialogue between the speaker in the poem and a second person (“tú“) who listens to the
revelation of what this (“este”) portrait really means. Gadamer provides my basis for under-
standing the intellectual gesture of the poem, the fact that the poetic voice “points” at an
object and simultaneously “points out the meaning” of the object (416). The poetic voice
gestures toward the resistance of the object to be defined (which could be masked by its
alluring beauty) and at the same time conquers this resistance by giving an account of its
real nature vis-​à-​vis the person represented. However, since we do not have access to the
identity of the person to whom the lesson is directed, nor to the painting, resistance is still
inscribed in the poem as visual absence and lack of identity (416). This by necessity explains
the multiple approaches one can follow and the complexity of the verbal construct in the
sonnet, from considering the addressee as the poetic voice itself (Clamurro), or Sor Juana as
object of representation, an allusion to the reader, or a fictional other included in the visual
scene. Another aspect of the poem is the possible responsibility of the author for the exist-
ence of her portrait, which would mean a reaction to the narcissistic considerations that
are so important in Checa’s analysis (417, 419–​20). This interpretation would closely follow
the situation and context described in the title that appears in Inundación castálida. I also agree
with Checa that words and images compete with each other (420–​21).
My interpretation differs from Luciani’s excellent reading by considering, together with
the “visuality” of the sonnet, the placement of the sound /​es/​as a frame created by words (the
anaphora), and also as a visual analogy of the lines in perspective, directing our eyes to the van-
ishing point (the word “nada” at the end of the sonnet).The ending in nothingness corresponds
to Brian Rotman’s understanding of the vanishing point as corresponding to “zero” (an organ-
izing principle and location that is “unnoccupiable by a person or indeed any physical object,”
quoted in 423–​24). A last section of the article (425–​27) deals with the social pressures suffered
by Sor Juana, and her life as a center of attention that can be compared to the vanishing point
(a subject that is interpreted as someone other than what she is). By understanding her as a
center of attention, I intended to recover the social and contextual scene of Sor Juana that was
so important to feminist approaches.

Future directions
It would be impossible to do justice to all the diversity and depth of critical perspectives that
have enriched our understanding of Sor Juana’s philosophical sonnets. However, after review-
ing the critical works devoted to these eight sonnets, we can postulate a preliminary idea of
what a philosophical baroque sonnet could mean for Sor Juana. It is a cultural instrument in
which to express a complex experience of knowledge, tradition, and morality. It is surprising
that there is not a single article written that explores the group of eight sonnets originally clas-
sified as moral/​philosophical by Méndez Plancarte. Sonnet 145 has received a disproportion-
ate amount of attention. There has been a tendency to concentrate on a single sonnet at the
expense of other compositions that are equally important. Some of the essays I have reviewed
do include discussions and comparisons with other poems, which helps expand our approach
to Sor Juana’s work.

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Baroque perspectives should be further supplemented with recent scholarship and theo-
retical publications, for these could deepen our understanding of both Sor Juana’s works and
the Baroque itself. For example, Deleuze’s notion of “pliegue” or fold, in Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque, could provide new insights. The recent (and long awaited) translation of Christine
Buci-​Glucksmann’s study, The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics, as well as her previous
book Baroque Reason:  The Aesthetics of Modernity could also shed new light on these poems.
Walter Benjamin’s The Origins of German Tragic Drama should still be taken into consideration,
especially because Benjamin read many of the Spanish Golden Age’s most important baroque
authors. Consulting the recent work on the Baroque published by Fernando Rodríguez de la
Flor (Barroco: Representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–​1680) and Imago: La cultura
visual y figurativa del Barroco) would most definitely be productive. These theoretical contribu-
tions to the Baroque should not exclude historical perspectives, especially those related to
colonial Latin America.
Finally, a note on feminist approaches. I believe that a feminist perspective is crucial for a more
thorough and complete understanding not only of Sor Juana’s work, but also of her significance
in colonial Mexico and beyond. Merrim’s call in Feminist Perspectives for a historicist and feminist
approach was highly important for the development of Sor Juana studies; it is also crucial for a
complete understanding of what happens to philosophy under the pressures suffered by gender
difference. To follow Rancière, I would argue that Sor Juana effectively disturbed the ethical and
moral distribution of the sensible in colonial Mexico. Her existence as a writer and social being
went against the grain of those limitations imposed by political and communitary formations,
such as who is allowed to talk about certain topics, what can be said about religious doctrine
and knowledge, and what a specific subject can say in her own community. Sor Juana should
be considered as a poet that destabilized the colonial agora because of her strong desire to speak
and produce discourse. Some of her less-​explored philosophical sonnets (#s 146, 149, 150, and
152) deal precisely with this perspective. Sor Juana’s poetic voice is a product of these unequal dis-
tributions within a given community. She negotiated the forces that, similar to the organizing lines
of perspective, forged new and innovative pressures that in turn resulted in new cultural artifacts.

Notes
1 To limit this review to a manageable length, I will restrict it to critical works published in the same year
and after the appearance in 1988 of Octavio Paz’s book in English translation, The Traps of Faith.
2 “Este, que ves, engaño colorido” (277 in Méndez Plancarte’s edition). All quotes and numbers of poems
refer to this edition. All translations of Sor Juana’s poems are from Alan Trueblood’s translation. For
Octavio Paz, this sonnet is the best of the group, calling it “a monument of fourteen lines” (Traps 299).
Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell consider it the most famous sonnet written by Sor Juana (147).
3 This ordering in no way proposes a hierarchy with regard to the evolution of criticism. On the contrary,
all these approaches illuminate the diversity inherent in the works of Sor Juana, although I do admit that
the contributions based in feminist frameworks have had a significant impact, as I will try to show.
4 See reference in the Spanish edition (Trampas 392). The English translation does not include the name
of the painter Pereda.
5 The articles were published in succession. The first appeared in 1986: “Sor Juana: La tradición clásica
del retrato poético” (Sor Juana: The Classical Tradition of the Poetic Portrait). It significantly expands
on a previous publication with a similar title that she published in 1984. In 1990 she published a third
essay, “Tiempo, apariencia y parodia: El diálogo barroco y transgresor de Sor Juana” (Time, Appearance,
and Parody: Sor Juana’s Baroque Transgressive Dialogue). The two later essays appeared in the volume
Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y otros poetas barrocos de la colonia (Studies
in Latin American Literature: Sor Juana and Other Baroque Poets of the Colonies); I quote from both
essays.
6 The line refers to “venciendo del tiempo los rigores.”

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7 Sabat de Rivers, among others, makes clear Sor Juana’s taste for poetic portraits. Clamurro is right
when he states that “the notion of portrait (…) reappears significantly throughout her writings”
(27). He identifies in Sor Juana “a fascination with the picture as iconic representation” (30). Luciani
(“Anamorphosis”) documents Sor Juana’s knowledge of optics and anamorphosis. See also J. Checa,“Sor
Juana” and Avilés.
8 Luiselli makes this argument in “Triptico,” her article on the three poems dedicated to the Rose.
9 Luciani made the same argument with regard to deception, but he based it solely on theories of optics.
10 Checa mentions the poem by Rodrigo Caro, “A las ruinas de Itálica” [To the Ruins of Itálica], which
contains the same structure: “Estos Fabio ¡ay dolor! que ves ahora” (131) [These that you now see, alas
Fabio]. Luciani also pays close attention to the beginning line.
11 Translation by Arenal and Powell 153.

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16
PRIMERO SUEÑO
Heresy and knowledge

Alessandra Luiselli

Somnio Ergo Sum1

Sor Juana’s most captivating poem, Primero Sueño (First Dream), was also her most personal.
In the autobiographical epistle dated March 1, 1691, Respuesta a Sor Filotea (The Answer), she
confirmed the importance she ascribed to the composition: “No me acuerdo haber escrito por
mi gusto sino es un papelillo que llaman El Sueño” (OC 4.471) (I recall having written nothing
at my own pleasure save a trifling thing they call the Dream [Answer 97]). The “trifling thing,”
as a rhetorically humble Sor Juana called her greatest work, has proven to be one of the most
significant philosophical poems not only of the Golden Age but of modern times as well; it
has generated an enormous amount of critical bibliography.2 This chapter highlights some of
the most significant directions pursued by critics in their quest to illuminate the poem’s most
controversial or intricate passages. Scholars have used five thematic and theoretical approaches
to analyze the poem in the past few decades: Sor Juana’s imitation of Góngora; scientific, philo-
sophical and emblematic models; feminism; theology; and contemporary philosophical poems
vis-​à-​vis Primero Sueño. These are not, of course, the only aspects of the poem discussed by crit-
ics, but they are the most often revisited.

Preliminary considerations
Because the wealth of critical publication regarding Primero sueño is potentially overwhelm-
ing, this chapter focuses on scholarly research produced since 1970, with greater emphasis
on the past twenty years, beginning with the mid-​1990s surge of interest that coincided
with the tercentenary of the poet’s death in 1695. Scholarship on the poem between 1920
and 1940 is covered in a 1998 essay by Rosa Perelmuter. The most prolific period of schol-
arly attention to the Sueño begins in the late 1970s, with significant contributions through
the 1980s and early 1990s groundbreaking essays by Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling, Rosa
Perelmuter, Georgina Sabat-​Rivers and Octavio Paz. In 1969, Sabat-​Rivers completed her
dissertation on Primero sueño, and in 1977, published the first monograph on the poem, trac-
ing the tradition of the philosophical dream vision from classical, medieval, and renaissance
literature, and pointing out the uniqueness of Sor Juana’s exploration of the cosmos without
a guide. Bénassy-​Berling’s dissertation on Sor Juana in the intellectual tradition of Christian

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humanism, completed in 1979, was published in 1982, and Perelmuter’s dissertation on the
lexical and syntactical difficulties of the poem in the context of seventeenth-​century liter-
ary theory was completed in 1980 and published in 1982, the same year that Octavio Paz
published his monumental study, Sor Juana, o, las trampas de la fe (Sor Juana, or, The Traps of
Faith [1988]). His book is the product of an impressive biographical and historical project
with extensive discussion of the mythological and philosophical context of Sor Juana’s work.
Paz’s reading of Primero sueño has been considered by some scholars a dialogue between two
of Latin America’s most important poets.
None of these studies would have been possible without the scholarly work of Alfonso
Méndez Plancarte (1909–​1955), who edited the first three volumes of Sor Juana’s four-​volume
Obras completas, including the first volume, Lírica personal (Secular Lyric Poetry, 1951), in which
the Sueño appears. Méndez Plancarte’s erudite annotations, indispensable for any serious study
of Primero Sueño, occupy forty-​two pages in small font (575–​617), in addition to his prose
version of the silva. Octavio Paz rendered homage to this edition: “Por mi parte diré que sin
las versiones depuradas de los textos que nos ha dado Méndez Plancarte, sin sus notas a un
tiempo eruditas e inteligentes, sin su sensibilidad, yo no habría podido escribir estas páginas”
(Trampas 365) (For myself, I can say that without the versions of the texts established by Méndez
Plancarte, without his erudite and intelligent notes, without his learning and sensitivity, I would
not have been able to write this book [Traps 511]).
Méndez Plancarte’s edition was reprinted in 1975 and 2004 but in 2009, a new edition of
the first volume of the Obras Completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was published, with signifi-
cantly less extensive annotation by the editor, Antonio Alatorre (1922–​2010). While Alatorre
rejected Méndez Plancarte’s text and punctuation modifications, preferring the orthography
and punctuation of the silva in its first publication in 1692, his constant dialogue with Méndez
Plancarte’s annotations proves that the 1951 edition remains the indispensable reference for the
study of Primero Sueño. The most recent edition of the Sueño is Alberto Pérez-​Amador Adam’s
extensively annotated El precipicio de Faetón (Phaeton’s Precipice), first published in 1996 and
significantly revised and updated in 2015.
A final consideration involves Américo Larralde Rangel’s speculative study, El eclipse del sueño
de sor Juana (2011), in which he passionately argued that Sor Juana wrote her cosmic poem the
night of December 22, 1684, while the inhabitants of Mexico City witnessed a unique astro-
nomical event: a winter solstice coinciding with a lunar eclipse. Larralde’s argument regarding
the impact of the event on Sor Juana’s poem appeared in a luxury edition with colorful illustra-
tions and reproductions of celestial maps; the prologue was written by the renowned Mexican
sorjuanista Sergio Fernández. Larralde hypothesizes that Sor Juana was able to observe the lunar
eclipse with the aid of astronomical maps and optical instruments, but his argument is disor-
ganized, unconvincing, and lacks connection with the attractive illustrations. The fact that the
Sueño was not included in the Inundación Castálida, the first volume of Sor Juana’s work (1689),
casts doubt on Larralde’s hypothesis that Sor Juana wrote the Sueño during the winter solstice
of 1684.

Sor Juana’s imitation of Góngora

The most canonical approach to the study of the First Dream has been the comparison
between Sor Juana and her most recognized model: Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–​1627),
beginning with the inclusion of the poem in the 1692 volume entitled Segundo Volumen de
las Obras de Soror Juana Ines de la Cruz, monja profesa en el monasterio del señor San Gerónimo de
la ciudad de México (Second Volume). The title in this first edition of the poem is almost as

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lengthy and explanatory as that of the volume itself: Primero sueño, que así intituló y compuso
la madre Juana, imitando a Góngora (First Dream, for Thus It Was Entitled and Composed by
Sister Juana in Imitation of Góngora). It is not surprising that numerous scholars, not only
guided but compelled by the inscription, have actively sought a parallel between the two
poets. What does constitute a surprise is that not until 2010 were Góngora and Sor Juana
reunited in one single edition that included both Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes) and Primero
Sueño. The volume, in spite of the importance of its contents, appears to be the poorest and
most distant relative of Larralde’s book in terms of editorial care –​another irony of Mexico’s
political culture.
Since 1692, Sor Juana’s imitation of Góngora has been the most accepted critical premise
about Primero sueño. In fact, it is probably one of the very few assumptions (if not the only one)
routinely accepted without question by all sorjuanistas. As early as 1700, when Father Calleja
edited the third volume of Sor Juana’s Fama y Obras Posthumas (Fame and Posthumous Works),
he stated in his prefatory Aprobación (Approval) that the Mexican nun-​writer had clearly imi-
tated Góngora in her poem, explaining that although Sor Juana’s silva was “no tan sublime” (not
as sublime) as those written by the “prince of poetry,” “vuelan ambos por una Esfera misma”
(OC 1.xiv–​xv) [both soar in the same sphere] (qtd. Pascual Buxó, “Sor Juana” 376).
In the twentieth century, scholarly contrasts between these writers’ aesthetics began with
a landmark article written in 1939 by Eunice Joiner Gates (1898–​1991), “Reminiscences of
Góngora in the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in which she quoted the judgment of
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856–​1912) that Sor Juana was even “more inaccessible than
her model” (1043). Gates’s main contribution was her comparison and contrast of Sor Juana’s
poem with Soledades. Her comparative study of fifty passages supported the conclusion that the
Mexican nun professed “a constant admiration for the Andalusian writer” (1058). While Gates’
article was the first modern commentary on the imitation of Góngora by Sor Juana, many oth-
ers would follow.
Sor Juana’s imitation of Góngora was accepted even by critics as difficult to persuade as
Octavio Paz, who, although acknowledging Sor Juana’s debt to Góngora, argued that the differ-
ences between Góngora and Sor Juana were greater and more profound than their similarities:

Góngora, poeta sensual, sobresale en la descripción  –​casi siempre verdaderas recrea-

ciones  –​de cosas, figuras, seres y paisajes, mientras que las metáforas de sor Juana son
más para ser pensadas que vistas. El lenguaje de Góngora es estético, el de sor Juana es
intelectual. El mundo de Góngora es un espacio henchido de colores, formas, individuos
y objetos particulares … En Góngora triunfa la luz: todo, hasta la tiniebla, resplandece …
Góngora: transfiguración verbal de la realidad que perciben los sentidos; sor Juana: dis-
curso sobre una realidad vista no por los sentidos sino por el alma. (Trampas 470)
(Góngora, a poet of the senses, excels in the description  –​the visual re-​creation  –​of
things, figures, beings and landscapes, while Sor Juana’s images are more intended to be
grasped intellectually than to be seen. The language of Góngora is aesthetic; that of Sor
Juana, intellectual. The world of Góngora is a space crowded with colors, forms, peo-
ple, and specific objects (…). In Góngora, light triumphs, everything, even shadows, is
resplendent (…). Góngora: a verbal transfiguration of the reality perceived by the senses.
Sor Juana: a discourse on a reality not seen by the senses but by the soul.) (Traps 358)

Since Paz’s formulation of Sor Juana’s differential imitation of Góngora, almost all critics and
scholars (including myself) have focused not on the obvious similarities between the First Dream

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and the Solitudes but on the significance of their most salient differences. A few recent discus-
sions on the subject of imitatio serve as examples of this widespread view. In 1996 Elias Rivers
published a short but incisive article, “Soledad de Góngora y Sueño de Sor Juana,” in which
he contrasted the passive nature of Góngora’s peregrino (wandering pilgrim) with the daring
activity of the soul in Sor Juana’s poem (73). Rivers also contrasted the Mexican nun’s use of
punctuation to that of the aristocratic Andalusian: Sor Juana favored long fragments separated
not by punctuation marks but by internal rhymes, a practice that differentiated her poem from
Góngora’s (73). This observation was important in light of the struggle all editors of Primero
Sueño have had with Sor Juana’s use of punctuation. Méndez Plancarte, for instance, was so
overwhelmed with the long periods of uninterrupted discourse found in Primero sueño that
he designed his own punctuation mark, the double colon (::), in order to follow the internal
rhythm of Sor Juana’s silva.
In 1995 Jean-​Michel Wissmer published Las sombras de lo fingido. Sacrificio y simulacro en Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz (The Shadows of the Feigned:  Sacrifice and Simulacrum in Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz), a study of imitatio in Primero sueño. The Swiss scholar argued that Sor Juana’s
awareness of the high value of artistic imitation in the Renaissance and the seventeenth cen-
tury informed her work (54). Her subversive imitation of models, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses
to Góngora’s Solitudes, reinterprets them and infuses them with her views, among them femi-
nist discourse (Wissmer 55, 123). As Wissmer further points out, in the Respuesta a sor Filotea
(Answer to Sor Philothea) Sor Juana transformed St. Paul into an ardent feminist and in her
villancicos (liturgical poems), the Virgin Mary became a Sovereign Doctor: “Sor Juana was the
greatest translator of her own desires” (55).3
Differences in the role of visual perception distinguish Góngora’s masculine agenda in his
major poems from the female gaze in Primero Sueño, as Emilie L. Bergmann demonstrates in
“Optics and Vocabularies of the Visual” (2004). The image of the bride as a rose in Soledad
primera resonates with strong implications of virginity and sexual violence, while the flower
for Sor Juana symbolizes the scientific mystery of fertility (155). By removing the groom
and his accompanying male voyeurs from the visual scene depicted in her silva, the nun also
removed implications of sexual violence against women (156). In a 2013 essay, Bergmann
linked Enrique García Santo-​Tomás’s ideological contextualization of the figurative uses of
visual technologies such as mirrors, lenses, and telescopes to Sor Juana’s differential imita-
tion of Góngora in “Sor Juana, Góngora and the Ideologies of Perception.” Among tech-
nologies of perception, one visual tool that is charged with a particular significance in Sor
Juana’s poem is the camera obscura, a reference implied in Góngora’s description of the cave of
Polyphemus. Sor Juana imitated the Soledad primera in the passage related to Nictimene, but
she inverted Góngora’s male agenda: “In her appropriation and reconfiguration of Góngora’s
rustic camera obscura, Sor Juana engages in gendered questions of knowledge and power in
terms of light and enclosed space” (121). Bergmann concluded that “many of the striking
phonetic resonances and reminiscences of visual imagery in the initial descriptive passage [of
Primero Sueño] are with the Polifemo” (122).
The visual images contrasted in Verónica Grossi’s 2009 “Apuntes para una lectura intertextual
del Primero Sueño de Sor Juana y las Soledades de Góngora” (Notes For an Intertextual Reading
of Sor Juana’s First Dream and Góngora’s Solitudes) are the poets’ respective conceptualizations
of the sea: for Góngora it was a dramatic scenario of unjust wars and greedy explorations.
Therefore, the ocean in Soledades emblematizes the lies and dangers of history, and its political
and moral failures. In contrast, the sea in Sor Juana’s poem alludes to an individual, intellectual
process in which even Phaeton’s abysmal fall into the sea could be metaphorically reconfig-
ured as a personal victory (142). Grossi also posits Primero Sueño as a symbolic response to the

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religious discourse that aimed to silence the female body (133), a theoretical approach that will
be explored later in this chapter.
José Pascual Buxó has also discussed Sor Juana’s complex imitation of the Soledades. In “Sor
Juana and Luis de Góngora: The Poetics of Imitatio” (2010), he posited that Góngora’s allusions
to Ovid’s Metamorphoses were just literary nods that the poet offered to his erudite readers. For
the Mexican nun-​poet, on the contrary, the same allusions played a highly symbolic role that
readers needed to recognize and decode in order to grasp the true meaning of the poem (363).

Scientific, philosophical, and emblematic models

That Primero sueño is a philosophical poem is indisputable, but scholars differ in locating it in the
shift from concepts of mind and cosmic design framed by orthodox Christian theology to those
based in secular epistemological models of modernity. This author’s El sueño manierista de sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz (The Mannerist Dream of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) provides an overview
of approaches to Primero sueño in the process of explaining the distinction between the intellec-
tual, unresolved dualisms of Mannerism (characterized by serpentine lines and the artistic trans-
formation of reality) and the spontaneous, impulsive, dramatic character of the Baroque, whose
typical figure is the circle. The study foregrounds Sor Juana’s transformation of myth through
the complex symbolism of Renaissance literature and hermetic philosophy as a crucial strategy
of dissimulated rebellion for a nun aspiring to forbidden knowledge in the colonial context.
The importance of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601–​1680) and the influence of his
scientific writings on Primero sueño is probably the second most canonical critical approach
to Primero Sueño. In 1941, Karl Vossler (1871–​1949), who translated the Sueño into German,
pointed out references to Kircher’s scientific treatises, in particular his Oedipus Aegyptiacus
(1652) and the dream journey in Itinerarium exstaticum coelesti (1656) (Ecstatic celestial journey).
Méndez Plancarte incorporated Vossler’s observations into his edition. Paz developed those
notes and connected Kircher’s knowledge to the hermetic tradition and the Renaissance Neo-​
Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, Pico de la Mirandola, and Leo Hebraeus (Trampas 489; Traps 167).
A vivid interest in the hermetic tradition is clearly evident throughout Paz’s chapter on Primero
Sueño. Attention to Kircher and Neoplatonic Hermeticism triggered important contributions
about this Renaissance school of thought, a movement that combined Egyptian and Greek
theology, philosophy, and spiritual practice. José Pascual Buxó‘s “Sor Juana egipciana (Aspectos
neoplatónicos de El Sueño)” [The Egyptian Sor Juana:  Neo-​Platonic Aspects of the Sueño]
critiqued Méndez Plancarte’s orthodox dismissal of Sor Juana’s Neoplatonism, quoting Robert
Ricard and Paz to support his theory of the Mexican nun as a hermetic author. Buxó also
discussed the influence of the Corpus Hermeticum in the passage in which Sor Juana described
the obscurity of night climbing towards the stars. And he quoted a passage of Plotinus’s fifth
Ennead as a proof of “the Neoplatonic agenda that undoubtedly underlays Sor Juana’s poem”
(12), to the dismay of ultra-​Catholic critics.
The assertion of Sor Juana’s debt to Kircher and affinities with hermeticism can, how-
ever, create the effect of isolating Hispanic thought from modernity in the sciences and phi-
losophy. Ruth Hill offers an alternative in her study of natural philosophy and ideology in the
Hispanic Late Baroque, arguing that Sor Juana’s “middle ground” between scholasticism and
modernity in Primero sueño had its roots in empiricism and seventeenth-​century epicureanism
(49–​65). Hill asserts that “For Sor Juana, motion or force did not indicate a hidden, internal
cause, as the hermeticists believed”; instead, “she understood movement through the senses,”
reasoning through the body and appearances (50). Hill proposes that Sor Juana’s ethics and
cosmology share features with the scientific method of Francis Bacon and Pierre Gassendi’s

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epicureanism, without the skepticism of these European thinkers. Her approach clearly differs
from the Catholic orthodoxy of Méndez Plancarte; instead, she opens the possibility of other
contexts for Sor Juana’s view of the mind’s relationship to phenomena and to her use of myth
and image in Primero sueño.
Paz traced Sor Juana’s knowledge of emblematic images to at least four popular Italian
Renaissance volumes: Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata, Piero Valeriano’s Hieroglyfica, Natale Conti’s
Mythologiae, and Vincenzo Cartari’s Le Imagini de gli Dei delgli Antichi (Trampas 235; Traps 174).
The speculative and certainly unorthodox visual images in these books prompted Paz to con-
clude that through the references to deities in the Neptuno alegórico (Allegorical Neptune) “nos deja
vislumbrar una sor Juana Inés de la Cruz muy distinta a la que tradicionalmente nos muestran
sus biógrafos y críticos” (Trampas 236) [we glimpse a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz very different
from the one traditionally presented by her biographers and critics (Traps 175)]. Paz’s representa-
tion of Sor Juana’s employment of emblems would be developed by numerous scholars in later
decades. Pérez-​Amador Adam’s 2015 edition of the Sueño, for instance, brings together emblems
with detailed discussion of their significance.
Buxó framed the difference between Góngora and Sor Juana in terms of their use of the
visual resources of emblem books, especially Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata and Diego Saavedra
Fajardo’s Empresas. Góngora engaged Alciato’s emblems “to provide visible figures for the con-
cepts of adulation, ignorance, self-​love,” whereas the author of the First Dream engaged them
as “metaphorical ideas” of incestuous love, impiety, and denunciation (“Sor Juana and Luis
de Góngora” 379). Buxó continued Paz’s important discussion of the strong visual influence
of emblems in the works of Sor Juana in his 1984 book Las figuraciones del sentido (Figures of
Meaning). There, he remarked that Sor Juana dared to use emblems illustrating concepts not
entirely approved by the religious authorities of her time (261).
Buxó‘s “El arte de la memoria en Primero Sueño” (The Art of Memory in the Sueño), linking
the silva with Italian Renaissance emblems and seventeenth-​century Spanish “empresas,” high-
lighting the multiple levels of meaning derived from each image, posits that Saavedra Fajardo’s
empresa 13, showing a pyramidal shadow whose point is the moon and its base is the earth,
was the model for the invasion by the personification of night in Sor Juana’s dream (349).4 He
justifiably advocates paying greater attention to the study of emblem literature in interpreting
Primero Sueño, but becomes restrictive in arguing that this should be the point of departure for
all similar analyses (350).
Aida Beaupied’s important study of the connections between Sor Juana’s poem and the
hermetic tradition, in particular, the ideas of the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–​
1600), burned at the stake for heresy in Rome, poses a critical question:  is Bruno her-
metically implicated in the Sor Juana’s allusions to Phaeton (“El silencio” 755)? Basing her
analysis on Elías Trabulse’s descriptions in El círculo roto (The Broken Circle) about Mexico
in the seventeenth century, a period when scholars such as Fray Diego Rodríguez, Carlos
de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana herself edited and commented on the life and works
of other notorious heretics, Beaupied argues in the affirmative. To prove her point, she com-
pares lines from a sonnet included in Bruno’s Di gli eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585),
“Non temer, respond’io, l’alta ruina! /​Fendi sieu le nubi, e muor’ contento /​S’il ciel si
ilustre morte ne destina” (757) [Fear not, I respond, high ruins! /​Descend boldly through
the clouds and die content /​If heavens destined you for illustrious death], comparing its
lines to the well-​known fragment of Primero Sueño in which Sor Juana glorified the ruin
of Phaeton (lines 781–​826). Beaupied also expands on the brief although revelatory note
in which Méndez Plancarte discussed the importance of Phaeton and Bruno’s poem (755,
citing OC 1.601).5

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In Narciso Hermético. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y José Lezama Lima (Hermetic Narcissus),
Beaupied continued her study of the hermetic tradition in Sor Juana’s works. Her substantial
chapter on Primero Sueño focuses on Silence and its hermetic revelations; she provocatively reaf-
firms Neoplatonism as the philosophical framework supporting Primero Sueño, noting that, to
avert the danger of Inquisitorial attention, Sor Juana made veiled allusions to some Neoplatonic
tenets: “Si tenemos todo esto en cuenta y descodificamos los múltiples mensajes que aparecen
en Primero Sueño su revelación se nos comunica y en lugar de un fracaso podemos asumir que
hay una victoria” (70) [If we take all this into account and decode the multiple messages of
Primero Sueño its hidden revelation is communicated to us and instead of a failure we can assume
that there is a victory].
Héctor Garza has published two articles on the parallels between Kircher’s Itinerarium exstati-
cum (1656) and Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño (1692).6 His point of departure is a speculative quote
by Paz: “Para sor Juana, la obra de Kircher fue una ventana por la que pudo asomarse a las espec-
ulaciones más osadas y a los descubrimientos de la nueva ciencia sin peligro de ser acusada de
herejía” (Trampas 238) (For Sor Juana, Kircher’s work was a window through which she could
view the most daring speculations and the discoveries of the new sciences without the danger
of being accused of heresy [Traps 177]). In “Iter extaticum coeleste” (2004), Garza discerned a cru-
cial difference between the Jesuit polymath and the Mexican Hieronymite: Kircher carefully
expressed his rejection of Copernicus in favor of astronomical beliefs accepted by the Catholic
Church, declaring unambiguously his rejection of Copernicus’s theories. Sor Juana, on the
other hand, refrained from making any explicit declaration about her astronomical beliefs (65).
José Eduardo Serrato Córdova’s “La imaginación emblemática en Primero Sueño” (The
Emblematic Imagination in First Dream) asserted the possible influence of Filippo Picinelli and
his 1687 Mundus Symbolicus, in which the pyramid is an emblem of strength and faith, while
in Sor Juana’s poem the connotations ascribed to the same symbol are pride and arrogance.
The reversal of attributes was a constant game played by a learned and mischievous Sor Juana
(127–​28). Most significantly, he argued that emblems (and not Kircher) were obligatory sources
for analyzing Primero Sueño.
Rocío Olivares Zorrilla has made numerous scholarly contributions to understanding the
sources of specific images in Primero sueño. While she acknowledged the influence of Kircher’s
De magnete and Oedipus Aegyptiacus (“Los tópicos” 182), she questioned the Kircherian deriva-
tion of the image of the inverted pyramids, positing instead the influence of fifteenth-​century
theologian and astronomer Nicholas of Cusa’s description of pyramids, with an accompanying
illustration, in his Ars Coniecturales (Olivares Zorrilla, “Los tópicos” 197). In her 1983 study
(Humanise et Religion), Marie-​Cécile Bénassy had also mentioned Cusa, in the context of Sor
Juana’s romance “Finjamos que soy feliz…” The line “¡Qué feliz es la ignorancia /​del que
indoctamente sabio, /​halla de lo que padece /​en lo que ignora, sagrado” (OC 1.7) [How happy
in his unknowing /​is the man unlettered yet wise, /​who finds relief from suffering /​in what
no knowledge supplies. (Trueblood 93)] has been interpreted by Méndez Plancarte and Bénassy
as a possible allusion to Nicholas of Cusa’s concept “of learned ignorance” (de docta ignorancia),
although the reference lacks the precise philosophical perspective that would link it definitively
with the medieval philosopher (Benassy, Humanismo 142 n194). When Paz discussed Nicholas
de Cusa and Giordano Bruno in The Traps of Faith, he stated that both writers resurface not only
in Primero Sueño but in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea as well (Trampas 427; Traps 382).
In an article on sonnets 152 and 165, “Emblems, Optics, and Sor Juana’s Verse: ‘Eye’ and
Thou,” Frederick Luciani pointed out emblematic references to mirrors, lenses, and optical illu-
sions that expose the fallibility of the senses. Sor Juana’s literary deployment of “self-​subversive
emblems,” as Luciani calls emblems depicting optical devices (159), is evident in many of her

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works, including Primero Sueño. Luciani includes an illustration of the instrumentum mesopticum
found in Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), and comments on Sor Juana’s use of this
mechanism in her silva and in poems such as the sonnet “Détente sombra de mi bien esquivo”
(OC 1.287–​88) [Semblance of my elusive love, hold still (Trueblood 81)] as well (169).
When Alejandro Soriano Vallés attempted, in El primero sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:
Bases tomistas (Sor Juana’s First Dream: Thomist Foundations, 2000), to refute earlier claims of
the German Jesuit’s influence on Primero Sueño, a lively debate ensued. Soriano had to acknowl-
edge that Sor Juana knew Kircher’s work, but he insisted on the ideological agenda of mini-
mizing its importance in order to emphasize the Aristotelian and Thomistic influences (159).
Soriano’s quest to transform Sor Juana into an irreproachable Catholic nun obviated his acerbic
dispute with Octavio Paz. Soriano even found it necessary to explain in a lengthy footnote that
his intention was not to “expurgate” the works of Sor Juana, but to refute any connection with
Hermeticism (174). More recently Soriano has denounced with increasing vehemence any
suggestion, however obvious, that Sor Juana was anything other than an obedient adherent of
Roman Catholic orthodoxy (cf. Doncella).
In 2001 Mauricio Beuchot published a study of the hermetic elements of Sor Juana’s phi-
losophy, devoting a chapter to the subject of Kircher and Renaissance Neoplatonism, based on
his 1995 article on hermeticism in Primero Sueño. Beuchot traces the influence of Kircher in
Mexico to Father Alexander Fabian, a Jesuit priest from Puebla, where Manuel Fernández de
Santa Cruz was Bishop (Sor Juana 73), and highlights quotations from Kircher’s De Magnete in
Sor Juana’s Respuesta a sor Filotea (Sor Juana 74).
In the annotations to the passage about the Pyramids (verses 400–​07) in his edition, Alatorre
dismissed as exaggerations Paz’s assertions regarding Kircher’s influence on Sor Juana (509).
Likewise, in “Lectura del Primero sueño,” he faults Paz for relying too heavily on references to
Kircher. In addition to Méndez Plancarte’s citations from the Jesuit polymath in his edition
of Primero sueño (594), relevant images detected in Sor Juana’s poem are also closely related to
illustrations found in Kircher’s books: the Tower of Babel and the Magic Lantern are among
the most notorious examples, along with the inverted Pyramids, although Nicholas of Cusa’s
illustration of the same figures preceded Kircher’s.
Further, Sor Juana playfully confessed her fondness for “kirkerizing” in line 182 of Romance
50,“Allá va, aunque no debiera…” (OC 1.158) [There it goes, although I shouldn’t]).This poem
portrays an intelligent and mischievous nun determined to reveal the hidden name she was able
to decipher, aided by Kircher’s Ars combinatoria. Marie-​Cécile Bénassy has stated that the “Ars
Combinatoria” associated by Méndez Plancarte with the romance was the fourth chapter of
Kircher’s volume Ars Magna Sciendi, Sive Combinatoria (The Great Art of Knowledge, Amsterdam,
1669). Bénassy brings to light further evidence of hermeticism and Kircher’s influence on Sor
Juana (Humanisme 149–​56).
Today, thanks to massive digitalization of printed texts, Kircher’s wonderfully illustrated vol-
umes, as well as those written by classical and Neoplatonic writers, are easily accessible to the
public throughout multiple websites. Undoubtedly, scholars will continue to explore new con-
nections between Sor Juana and her multiple mentors (among them, the unavoidable Athanasius
Kircher), as well as Sor Juana’s explicit employment of and subtle allusion to emblems.

Feminism
Throughout the twentieth century, scholars have insisted on Sor Juana’s feminism. As early as
1922, Miguel de Unamuno (1864–​1936) passionately applauded Amado Nervo’s celebrated
biography, Juana de Asbaje, published in 1910 and reprinted in 1920, in an article titled “Sor Juana

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Inés, hija de Eva” (Sor Juana Inés, Eva’s Daughter), and claimed that the seventeenth-​century
writer was the “precursora y profetisa del más refinado feminismo de hoy en día” (71) [precursor
and prophet of today’s finest feminism]. Unamuno’s use of “feminism” in relation to Sor Juana
illustrates how she was perceived throughout the first half of the twentieth century: as a defi-
ant woman who raised her voice to criticize men’s foolish slandering of women. In 1926, the
American scholar Dorothy Schons (1898–​1961) called Sor Juana “the first feminist of America,”
in an article destined to become a landmark study about the Hieronymite nun (see Bénassy,
“Schons,” this volume). The two essays constituted only the beginning of a flood of studies on
the Hieronymite as a feminist precursor. In the 1980s, Octavio Paz, for instance, insisted that
Sor Juana’s feminist stance is “a moral, even visceral reaction to lived experiences” (Traps 68).
And in the same decade, Marié-​Cécile Bénassy’s chapter on Sor Juana’s “Christian feminism”
addressed the spiritual aspect of the seventeenth-​century intellectual’s women-​centered stance,
concluding that the Hieronymite nun envisioned a Christianity in which the study of the sacred
sciences would become not only a right but a duty for women (Humanismo 281). In “A Feminist
Rereading of Sor Juana’s Dream,” Georgina Sabat de Rivers posited the thought-​provoking idea
of a linguistic feminism in Primero Sueño. She studied the preponderance of feminine nouns
absolutely essential to the topic explored in Sor Juana’s poem:  night, stars, moon, soul, light
(all gendered feminine in Spanish). Departing from this linguistic premise, Sabat analyzed the
feminine myths mentioned in the silva, concluding by highlighting that the lyric speaker whose
gender remained unspecified throughout the entire 975 lines of the composition reveals a femi-
nine voice with the very last word, which declares herself to be awake (“y yo despierta,” 157).
Sabat-​Rivers and Jacqueline Cruz both discussed the female mythological figures, whose role
has remained a central issue of debate in interpretations of the Sueño. Cruz posits the figure of
Icarus as a model for Sor Juana’s failure: she elaborates the similarities Sor Juana shared with her
mythological characters; for example, like Icarus, the Hieronymite’s ascent ended with melted
wings; like Phaeton, her audacity prompted her ruin, although it immortalized her name; and
like the builders of the tower of Babel, she tried to ascend to incommensurable highs but her
boldness was punished with verbal isolation (539). Paz takes the opposite view, affirming that in
her poetry, Sor Juana’s self-​identification with the Delphic Oracle connects her with inspiration;
the Egyptian female deity Isis with wisdom; and Phaeton with “el ansia libre de saber” (Trampas
505) (the unfettered desire for learning”[Traps 385]). Primero sueño, he argues, is not a dream of
failure but a modern perception of the nature of human knowledge (Trampas 482; Traps 367).
In contrast, as an oblique refutation to all possible claims of Sor Juana’s feminism, Antonio
Alatorre ended “Sor Juana y los hombres” (Sor Juana and Men) with the claim that Primero sueño
portrays Sor Juana’s lifelong dream: “el sueño de saberlo todo, de abarcarlo todo, de ser hombre
en el pleno sentido de la palabra” (n. p.) [Primero sueño …: the dream to know everything, to
embrace everything, to be a man in the full sense of the word]. Sor Juana would have debated
this conclusion; in Romance 19, she states:  “pues sabes tú que las almas /​distancia ignoran
y sexo” (OC vv. 11–​112).(“for the soul, as you well know, /​distance and sex don’t count”
[Trueblood 39]).
Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel’s Saberes Americanos (American Epistemologies) included a
thought-​provoking discussion of feminine subjectivity that turns out to be more absent than
present in the works of the Mexican Hieronymite. Martínez-​San Miguel asserts that:

Sor Juana no parece postular una epistemología feminista puesto que en su escritura no
se concibe diferencia esencial en la capacidad intelectual humana debido al género sexual
(…). Podría hablarse más bien del saber femenino que de un feminismo clásico en su
obra. (51)

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(Sor Juana does not seem to postulate a feminist epistemology since in her writing no
essential difference in terms of human intellectual capacity can be inferred based on
sexual gender … One could speak of a female knowledge rather than a classic feminism
in her oeuvre.)

These statements disputing the existence of a “classical feminism” in the works of Sor
Juana concur with other assertions by Martínez San-​Miguel: “… el sujeto que conoce es
mujer durante el día y asexual (o simplemente abstracta, como el Alma) durante la noche”
(70) [… the subject that achieves knowledge [in Primero Sueño] is female during the day and
asexual (or just abstract, as the Soul) at night]. The crucial gendered neutrality of Sor Juana
leads Martínez-​San Miguel to the sleeping body that dreams in the silva: “el sujeto femenino
se ve obligado a abandonar su cuerpo para acceder a un conocimiento, pero a la vez se ve
imposibilitado para obtener este conocimiento si no puede regresar a la instancia original”
(81) [the female subject is forced to abandon her body in order to access knowledge, yet
at the same time the subject is unable to obtain this knowledge without returning to the
original condition]. The paradox generated by a non-​gendered subject in search of knowl-
edge being forced to assume a female identity in order to benefit from what was obtained
as a neutral subject turns out to be an “unstable and confusing issue” (83). Martínez-​San
Miguel employs Judith Butler’s theory regarding the “permeable constructions” of identity
and subjectivity, which leads her to affirm that Primero Sueño, as well as the Answer, construct
a subject whose intellectual activity is intimately connected to the body. Both envision a
feminine subjectivity that aspires to cultural intelligibility once it can establish that gender
is incidental and not essential to the capacity to acquire and create knowledge (102). From
these premises, Martínez-​San Miguel concludes that Sor Juana did not locate herself in a
specifically feminist articulation because she never contemplated a feminine knowledge
superior to the theological and epistemological knowledge she was seeking to access (103).
Jacqueline C. Nanfito’s El Sueño: Cartographies of Knowledge and the Self affirms that “by means
of the spatializing of form, content and time in the poem the reader, like the protagonistic soul,
is suspended temporarily in a moment of time that Kristeva has designated as monumental”; in
this lastingness, “linear or historical time is abandoned in favor of a more fluid, feminine time”
(145). Nanfito’s observation about the spatiotemporal dimension found in Primero Sueño was
based on Kristeva’s essay, “Women’s Time.” According to Nanfito, The Dream is an autobio-
graphical text (the final verse confirms this classification) in which the poet validated her place
within the context of a “patriarchal cartography corresponding to the reality of seventeenth
century Mexico” (146). The female subjectivity that triumphs at the end of Primero Sueño both
challenges and reconfigures the cartographies of knowledge. Similarly to Verónica Grossi in “El
triunfo del poder femenino desde el margen de un poema” (The Triumph of Female Power
from the Margins of a Poem), Nanfito unambiguously asserts the triumph of a feminine power.
Grossi further argues that the silva, like The Answer, was polysemic, with descriptions of the
masculine socio-​political order aimed at inhibiting the literary activity of a woman (37). Grossi
wrote a later, more extensive essay on the triumph of female power in Primero Sueño in light of
a comparison with Góngora’s Soledades, “Apuntes para una lectura intertextual” (Notes Toward
An Intertextual Reading).Tamara Harvey both negates and transcends the Neoplatonic dualism
that separates body from soul in Primero Sueño when she argues that the dreamer of Sor Juana’s
silva “is fundamentally both body and soul” (“ ‘Cuerpo luminoso’ ”79, my emphasis). Harvey sug-
gests that the most interesting feminism of the monarchical Catholic period in which the nun
lived was not “starkly oppositional” (59), judging that the satire against men (the title given to
Sor Juana’s oppositional redondillas) does not belong to the “most interesting feminism” category.

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Harvey’s unintended disqualification comes to light when she discusses the gendered individu-
ality of the lyrical speaker of Primero Sueño, which in her view resembles the strong female sub-
jectivity that also emerges in Sor Juana’s other poems “critiquing the logic of misogyny” (79).
The parallel traced by Harvey between the silva and the redondillas deserves to be explored
by future scholars. She concludes that her intention was to argue that “the body is the site of
functions that are crucial to worldly and spiritual activities but that embodied sexual differences
have no transcendent symbolic value” (79), which links her essay to Martínez-​San Miguel’s and
other arguments regarding embodied knowledge.
In sum, Stephanie Merrim’s 1991 inquiry regarding the “exquisite and unresolvable multi-
valence” of the last two hendecasyllabic verses of Primero Sueño remains a valid question about
the alleged feminism in the Dream: “The last lines explode the poem. Do they set the feminine
quest for knowledge […] on an equal continuum with the masculine? Or do they privilege
the female, feminizing and/​or personalizing the quest?” (Feminist Perspectives 21). Susan M.
MacKenna, to name one scholar seeking to respond to Merrim’s question and arguing in favor
of the second option, wrote: “The complexity of subversive strategies employed in the Primero
Sueño exemplifies Sor Juana’s mastery of her male models: she appropriates male discourse to
communicate female desire” (50). Merrim’s powerful question will undoubtedly continue to
trigger responses.

Theology
The discussion about Sor Juana’s theology started with Marie-​Cécile Bénassy’s Humanisme et
Religion chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1982), whose fourth section (Humanismo 221–​84) especially
focuses on Sor Juana’s religious ideas. In the discussion related to Primero Sueño, Bénassy maintains
that although the poem employed secular language, symbols, and references, its Weltanschauung
nevertheless was so perfectly Christian that it did not require the use of theological vocabulary
(255). Her assessment of the religious tenets supported by Sor Juana highlighted the nun-​poet’s
rejection of the biased model of the Virgin Mary, which Sor Juana considered a trap aimed at the
oppression of women (260–​61). Bénassy concludes that Sor Juana was able to create a personal
theology free of the ideological clichés of her time (216). These observations implicitly depict
Sor Juana as a refined and extremely critical theologian.
In Juana Ines de la Cruz and the Theology of Beauty, George H.  Tavard applauds Méndez
Plancarte’s endorsement of John Duns Scotus in the passage of Primero Sueño related to the
Hypostatical Union or Incarnation of Jesus Christ: “This reading has the merit of paying due
attention to the theological dimension of the poem” (25). Regarding the issue of what kind of
theology Sor Juana endorsed, Tavard indicated that she outlined her “theology of beauty” (30)
when in the Respuesta she described the beauty of Christ, asking: “what jewel is more lovable
than his divine beauty”? Tavard concluded that the Mexican nun was decisively more inclined
to Plato than to Aristotle:

As she shows in Primero Sueño, she is well acquainted with both traditions, and she is eager
to treat them as epistemological markers and to try them as ways of cognition. When it
comes, however, to a basic understanding of the self, she squarely choses Platonism. Juana
defines herself by reference to her soul, not her body. Female in her body, she is simply
and totally human in her soul. (185–​86)

Linda Egan’s, “Donde Dios es todavía mujer: Sor Juana y la teología feminista” (Where God
is Still a Woman: Sor Juana and Feminist Theology), opens with a strong statement: “La teología

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católica asegura que Dios es Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz no afirma
tal cosa” (328) [Catholic theology claims that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz says no such thing]. Sor Juana’s seemingly deliberate avoidance in her works of the
orthodox male Trinity leads Egan to ask: was Sor Juana aware that her writings would be her
ruin? (329), signaling a feminist approach to theology. Egan acknowledged Electa Arenal’s 1983
groundbreaking article “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Speaking the Mother Tongue,” highlighting
the importance ascribed by Sor Juana to the Virgin Mary (330); Arenal’s article, “Where Woman
is Creator of the Wor(l)d,” Egan further asserts, offers an essential approach to the poet’s “femi-
nist epistemology” (328).When Egan discusses Primero Sueño, she indicates that in this poem Sor
Juana pronounces her last and most hermetic (unorthodox) word about the Trinitarian heresy
she had dangerously skirted in her other works: God is the feminine “First Cause” (line 404).
The article ends with a fictional depiction of Sor Juana praying at an imaginary stake: “It’s all
right, Let the fire devour me. Let me go to that place of light and compassion where God is
still a woman” (340).
In Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas, Michelle A. González addresses the distinction
between Primero sueño as a philosophical or a religious poem (133). She notes that, “like Seneca,
Russell, and Sartre, Sor Juana uses drama and poetry as a form of philosophical reflection” (61).
Finally, Lisa Powell’s Inconclusive Theologies: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Kierkegaard, and Theological
Discourse advocates for an inclusive theological discourse that would admit the analysis of liter-
ary genres (poems, dramas, and epistles) that communicate Christian knowledge. Departing
from this point, she discusses in her 300-​page volume the convergences between Sor Juana and
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–​1855), considered the father of Christian existentialism. The parallel
traced by Powell is not farfetched since the Danish philosopher has been studied in relation with
Thomas Aquinas, hence the link to Sor Juana. According to Powell, Sor Juana demonstrates that
discourse and knowledge claims “are not innocent” (266).

Primero Sueño in the twentieth and twenty-​first century

Contemporary Mexican and Latino/​a American poets and critics recognize the influence of
Sor Juana’s use of language, myth, and symbol, beginning with Méndez Plancarte, in his 1951
separate edition of Primero Sueño (ix). Cuban writer José Lezama Lima (97–​98) traced the
presence of Sor Juana in José Gorostiza’s long poem, Muerte sin fin (1939). Sergio Fernández,
Gilberto Prado Galán, and Sheldon Penn have found specified images and aspects of Sor
Juana’s work in Gorostiza’s and other twentieth-​century Mexican poetry. Ramón Xirau
attributed the “hermetic tendency” in Mexican poetry to Sor Juana (“Tres calas”), while
Fernando Castaños and Antonio Alatorre (“Nada ocurre”) point out the use of varying line
lengths and metrical patterns in both poems. Alberto Pérez-​Amador Adam demonstrated
the importance of recognizing the influence of Primero Sueño on Canto a un dios mineral
(Song to a Mineral God), in order to understand the complex philosophical poem by the
Mexican writer Jorge Cuesta (1903–​1942), cofounder of the prestigious literary journal
Contemporáneos. In addition to Octavio Paz’s decades-​long research on Sor Juana, her influ-
ence is evident in his long poem, Piedra del sol, as this writer demonstrates in her 2006 article.
Sor Juana’s influence is apparent beyond Mexico: Belén Castro Morales remarks upon the
shared “Faustian” project of Primero sueño and Altazor by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro
(1893–​1948) and the avant-​garde literary movement Creacionismo, while Vicente Cervera
Salinas argues that Huidobro’s cosmic imaginary echoes Sor Juana’s visual metaphors (20).
These studies suggest that the presence of the Sueño in contemporary Latin American poetry
has yet to be fully examined (97–​98).

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Conclusion
There has been such extensive research on the classical, medieval, and renaissance sources of
Primero sueño that this line of inquiry might seem exhausted, but there is still room for further
exploration of the intellectual resources that the poem engages, and the integration of this
uniquely personal composition into her other writings. While Sor Juana is undeniably unique,
comparative studies of heresy and knowledge, tradition and rebellion, imitatio and original-
ity opened a field that merits further exploration. Studying Primero sueño together with the
speculative philosophical writings of other seventeenth-​century European women intellectuals,
Margaret Cavendish in particular, places Sor Juana’s work in a wider transatlantic context, and
illuminates the work of marginalized European women writers. As with much of early modern
literature and philosophy, scholars continue to debate the configuration of Aristotelianism and
Thomistic epistemology in Primero sueño, as evidence of Sor Juana’s theological conformity, in
contrast to the references to the unorthodox aspects of Neoplatonism in emblem books and the
works of Athanasius Kircher. In light of scholarship on the diverse texts in both traditions, it may
be possible to bring these aspects of Sor Juana’s work into sharper focus.

Notes
1 In loving memory of Gustavo Sainz (1940–​2015), who gave me my first First Dream and whose soul
“libre tendió por todo lo criado” (free, his soul flew over all that was created) the night of June 26, 2015.
2 A silva is a poem of indeterminate length and stanzas, which combines in a non-​regulated alternation
heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic verses, with the latter dominating.
3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations to English are mine.
4 The moral inscribed on this emblem, Censura patent (The certainty that one’s defects will be obvious to
detractors) can be related to Sor Juana’s work in general.
5 In contrast, Alatorre omitted all references to the heretic friar in his edition of Primero Sueño.
6 Beginning with the 1671 edition, the title of Kircher’s volume is Iter exstaticum.

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C: Theater and public art

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17
WRITING FOR THE PUBLIC EYE
Theatrical production, church spectacle, and
state-​sponsored art (the Neptuno Alegórico)

Verónica Grossi

The Allegorical Neptune has recently received more critical attention, yet it is still one of
Sor Juana’s least-​studied works, considered a circumstantial piece, festive in nature rather
than literary. The scarcity of references, studies, and printed editions of arches in New Spain
makes the proper reassessment of this inaugural piece by the Mexican nun-​poet even more
challenging.

Early reception of Sor Juana’s arch

In his Diario de Sucesos Notables (1665–​1703), an eclectic register of notices and occurrences
in New Spain, Antonio Robles records the future arrival of the fleet of Spain with the new
viceroy Marquis de la Laguna, Tomás Antonio de la Cerda on July 3, 1680; the entry of the
fleet with the Marquis de la Laguna and the vicereine at the Port of Veracruz on September
15, 1680; his arrival at Chapultepec on October 30; and his official possession of power on
Thursday, November 7 of the same year, before a large audience (285–​90). The public entrance,
delayed due to illness, is recorded on Saturday, November 30, when an Indian fell from the arch
commissioned by the city and designed by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Robles makes no
mention of Sor Juana’s Neptune, a striking omission since it was one of the two most important
public commissions to welcome the new viceroy, signifying Sor Juana’s entrance into the arena
of international fame (Grossi, Sigilosos 91).
Two years after these events, in an informal letter written to Antonio Núñez de Miranda,
her confessor and a prominent figure within the ruling class of New Spain (Alatorre, “Carta”
601), Sor Juana responds to the Jesuit’s criticisms of her growing fame resulting from her works,
including the Allegorical Neptune. She dares to challenge the negative judgments and prohibi-
tions of her confessor against her literary and intellectual activities and public reputation, which
in her view are in harmony with a religious life in search for salvation (cf. Paz, Traps 495–​502).
Thus she defends the composition of the “Arch for the Church” and her two previous carols to
the Virgin Mary, “the published writings that have so scandalized the world, and so edified the
good,” as an act of obedience to requests, in this case by an archbishop-​viceroy and the cathedral
council, who honored her “by believing that an ignorant woman knew how to do what such
brilliant minds solicited” (Paz, Traps 497).

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Writing for the public eye: The Neptuno

The Allegorical Neptune was a well-​ paid commission by the cathedral council and the
Archbishop-​Viceroy Fray Payo Enríquez de Ribera, marking “the beginning of her great epoch
(1680–​1693)” (Alatorre, “En torno” 271). In a décima (a ten-​line stanza), the nun expresses her
gratitude for the remuneration she received (OC 1.350–​51). A “cathedral council decree,” dated
November 8, 1680, documents “the payment of 200 pesos to the Mother Juana Ynés de la Cruz,
nun of Saint Jerome, for having conceived the idea of the triumphal arch for the reception of
the Viceroy Marquis de la Laguna” (Alatorre, Sor Juana 1.21).1
Praise of Sor Juana and her Neptune was published during her lifetime and after her death.
The poet and clergyman José López de Avilés called her a “white and flourishing heron,” whose
lofty plume no daring falcon could reach (Alatorre, Sor Juana 1.31). He continued the enco-
mium: “This Castilian metaphor [Sor Juana as a white heron] hints at the uniqueness of the
erudite and ingenious woman of the Americas who wrote the abovementioned triumphal arch”
(33). And, he named her a rara avis in terra similar to the whitest of swans (33).
The Sardinian poet José Zatrilla y Vico continues the same metaphor in his long encomiastic
poem of the nun Poema heroyco al merecido aplauso […] (Barcelona, 1696) (Alatorre 1.209–​30).
She is not only a “happy Heron that crosses the spheres” but a “Sacred Phoenix,” “eminent
Eagle” and “mystical Gyrfalcon,” whose spirit, intelligence, knowledge, and discourse soar to
unparalleled heights (209). In three stanzas (53, 82, and 95) (229–​30 n. 1), Zatrilla expresses his
strong admiration for, among all of her works, her “very triumphant Arch” (stanza 53).
Another indication of Sor Juana’s fame, which her Neptune magnified, is the often-​quoted
citation in Latin by Dutch savant Joannis Michaelis von der Ketten in his Apelles symbolicus
(1699), in which his praise of Sor Juana is qualified by her gender: “But one has to note that
some of these symbols demonstrate more ingenuity than what one expects from a nun” (233).
Since von der Ketten’s praise of the Neptune is unique among European authors from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mexican scholars have noted its significance from the
eighteenth until well into the twentieth century (233).2 Mention of the Neptune appeared in the
Americas in a “romance” (ballad) included in a collection of works in recognition of Sor Juana
(Burgos, 1703) by Francisco Álvarez de Velasco y Zorrilla, from Santa Fe de Bogotá (Alatorre
2.409). In his Bibliotheca Mexicana […] (1755), a vast archive of bio-​bibliographical news writ-
ten in Latin, the Mexican scholar and bishop Juan José de Eguiara y Egurén presents Sor Juana
as an emblem of Mexican erudition (578 n. 1). Calling the Neptune a “splendid” work, “replete
with erudite quotes in Latin,” the eminent Mexican explains von der Ketten’s incredulity at the
authorship of the Neptuno, since “he did not know who this nun was” (593).
Early nineteenth century critics such as José Mariano Beristáin y Souza (1816) praised Sor
Juana’s Allegorical Neptune for its erudition, while denying her talent as a poet (630), an approach
that continues to this day. In his detailed physical description of the arch, Juan María Gutiérrez
(1865) sees that “[t]‌his time our nun associated geometry to erudition to give new proof of
her high capacity,” “above all nourished by secular reading matter” (Alatorre, Sor Juana 2.120).
Francisco Pimentel (1869) decried in Sor Juana’s arch its “unnecessary erudition” and its “arbi-
trary analogies” (162–​63). Similarly, José María Vigil in 1872 found the Neptuno’s erudition
“almost unbelievable […] and truly overwhelming”; furthermore, he expressed surprise that a
woman had the strength and persistence to write it, and decried its subject as “futile,” conclud-
ing that “she was not the author, but the victim of the aberrations of her century” (222). An
other late nineteenth-​century author, Juan León Mera (Quito, 1873), considered the Neptuno as
the least valuable of all her works (268); Antonio Sánchez Moguel (1892) similarly disparaged
it for its subject matter and as a commissioned work. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1893)
dismissed “its symbols and allegories” (586) and “ludicrous emblems” (590), along with other
commissioned poetry by Sor Juana, as “a curious document for the history of colonial customs

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and a clear testimony of how the tyranny of the environment can come to pervert the most
privileged natures” (590). Harold Dijon (1890) is one of the few critics of the late nineteenth
century who valued the Neptune, considering it among “the greatest of her works” (549).

The recovery of Sor Juana’s works and figure in the

early twentieth century
In 1945, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte published Poetas novohispanos (1621–​1721) as part of his
lifelong project to restore the worth and legacy of baroque aesthetics and gongorine style in the
arts and literatures of New Spain, in the face of ingrained neoclassical, romantic, and positivist
prejudices. In this way he joined other critics and writers –​Amado Nervo, and later Alfonso
Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Dorothy Schons, Eunice Joyner Gates, Manuel Toussaint,
Ermilo Abreu Gómez, and members of the group of Mexican writers Los Contemporáneos –​who
had begun in the first decades of the twentieth century to undertake a systematic reappraisal
of Góngora’s influence on colonial baroque culture, with particular attention to the figure and
writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Stanton, “Muerte”).3
The result of painstaking research in colonial archives and accompanied by erudite critical
commentary, Méndez Plancarte’s anthology offered for the first time a representative panorama
of colonial Mexican poetry, inextricably associated with other artistic and cultural manifesta-
tions. Thus, the anthology mainly includes excerpts of occasional poetry written for civic and
religious festivities, previously unpublished.4 Surprisingly, Méndez Plancarte excludes the expli-
cation in verse for Sor Juana’s arch in his selection of pieces by the Mexican nun. Although the
erudite Jesuit called the Neptune a paradigm of its genre, he did not include it, preferring a poem
by the Jesuit padre Castilla for the arch constructed in Puebla, also in 1680 (Poetas I, xlix-​l).
Manuel Toussaint, a pioneer in the study of colonial Mexican arts and architecture, cel-
ebrated the tricentenary of Sor Juana’s birth by publishing in 1952 a facsimile of her Explicación
sucinta del arco triunfal […] (Succinct explication of the triumphal arch). In his preface, he justi-
fies his choice of this “bibliographical jewel,” “the second printed work by our distinguished
nun” (November 30, 1680?) (8), and not the complete Allegorical Neptune (beginning of 1681?)
(12): its extensive passages in Latin would be “illegible or half legible” for the “learned uni-
versity student, of average culture” (7).5 Only humanists specializing in Latin writers would
be able to appreciate its baroque prose, which “no one understands since it is not necessary to
understand it but to feel it and to enjoy it as an altarpiece or a façade of a church of her epoch”
(7). For Toussaint, on the other hand, the Succinct Explication, without quotes in Latin, originally
recited in the presence of the viceregal couple and entourage, engages the reader (8).6
Setting aside Toussaint’s derogatory comments about the Neptune’s baroque difficulty, his
edition is an inestimable resource providing not only the facsimile of the Explication, but also a
bibliographical note, brief historical overview of the triumphal arch in New Spain and a verbal
reconstruction of the structure of Sor Juana’s arch, as well as an analysis and a modern transcrip-
tion of the poem with exegetical notes.
In the introduction to the fourth volume of Sor Juana’s Obras completas, Alberto G. Salceda
recounts the historical tradition of the triumphal arch in New Spain beginning with an arch
built to receive the first Audiencia (Royal Tribunal) in 1528. Salceda was the first to address the
role that Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora may have played in the design and construction of
their respective arches (xxxvi–​xxxvii). Although he leaves the judgment of the Neptune to the
reader, he suggests that its value, which is not easily discernible, resides in its sincerity or truth-
fulness, an emotional or personal quality unrelated to artistic or rhetorical skill, which critics
commonly ascribe to works by women (xxxviii). Salceda views the Neptune as a metonymy of

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Sor Juana’s erudition and is perhaps the first to bring attention to the large number of renais-
sance manuals of mythology and symbolism she consults, in particular “those of Cartario, Pierio
Valeriano and Natal Conti” (xxxviii). His attention to these sources is important to the develop-
ment of scholarship on emblem books in Sor Juana’s works. Because he expands on the sources
and provides translations of Sor Juana’s classical and biblical references and quotes in Latin as well
as one in Italian, Salceda inaugurates the debate on the errors in some quotes in Sor Juana’s arch.
For him, “certain infidelities,” which “seem not attributable to typographical errors,” suggest
failures of memory, and this in turn “demonstrates that the quotes are transcribed from memory,
deliberately without consulting the texts” (y no extraídas adrede de una biblioteca) (xxxviii).
Salceda acknowledges the quality of Sor Juana’s allegory, recognizing that the symbols with
which Sor Juana represents the “glories, virtues and attributes of the new viceroy” seek to
establish similarities that are “certainly daring and difficult but not far-​fetched” (xxxviii). After
citing von der Ketten, Salceda underlines, in vague terms, two of among the “many beauties of
thought and symbolism” in this work: “the defense of reason and of the word” (xxxix). Despite
his lack of enthusiasm for the Neptune, Salceda’s edition, with its erudite explanations, location
of sources, and translations from Latin, remains unsurpassed to this day.

Semiotic, rhetorical, and sociological

approaches to the Neptune
The renewed interest and historical appreciation of the baroque arts of colonial Mexico begin-
ning in the early twentieth century, with particular attention to the works and figure of Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, did not counterbalance the privileging of an aesthetic approach to
cultural texts of the colonial period, hybrid in nature and integral to social performances and
political rituals. Sor Juana’s poetry, in particular the First Dream, received most critical appraisal.
The Allegorical Neptune, on the other hand, continues to be seen as part of the genre of works
commissioned for festivities without much aesthetic or cultural interest. Moving away from an
aesthetic approach, José Pascual Buxó considers the semiotic mechanisms and rhetorical con-
ventions in Mexican colonial literature, in particular its allegorical and emblematic components.
Buxó published for the first time two complete triumphal arches of the period, defining them
as “perfunctory” and “superfluous” instruments of orthodoxy designed to “flatter” the authori-
ties, in a society “whose greatest ambition is to be a faithful copy” of the Spanish Peninsular
metropolis. Despite the negative judgement, Buxó’s edition contributes to the documentary
recovery of primary texts, a project which he expands in a later book, Impresos novohispanos
(1994), a compilation of the titles and sources of primary documents of colonial New Spain,
including triumphal arches, from 1543 to 1800, in libraries and archives in the United States.
In other studies focused on Sor Juana’s Neptune, Buxó disentangles the semiotic mechanisms at
play in the “iconic-​verbal” genre of the arch (“Función” 247, 250; “Cervantes”; El resplandor),
concluding that Sor Juana’s arch is “primarily a manifestation of hope for a better government
for Mexicans,” “without abandoning the ceremonial orthodoxy” (“Función” 254–​55).
Undertaking a combined sociological and semiotic approach, Dolores Bravo Arriaga inves-
tigates the triumphal arch in New Spain within the context of public festivity. She traces the
origin and physical transformations of the triumphal arch, defining, based on Maravall, its gen-
eralized function as a symbolic homage to the established authorities, before all the strata of
society in the theatrical stage of the city (181). For her, as for Buxó, the entire arch is “a grand
emblem” made up of “allegorical and metaphoric associations” (179).
Dalmacio Rodríguez Hernández highlights the chronicles of festivities (relaciones de
fiestas) in prose and verse as a historic context for the study of Sor Juana’s arch, providing

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a critical as historical context edition of a public feast conceived and described by Alonso
Ramírez de Vargas (1677), as well as an essential bibliography of chronicles of festivities and
other primary and secondary sources for understanding colonial texts within Mexican society.
Linda A. Curcio-​Nagy studies the great festivals of colonial Mexico, based on primary
sources, in particular festival descriptions of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, consulted
in a wide array of archives from Mexico and Spain. In spite of the omission of key references
such as Bravo Arriaga, de la Maza (Las piras), Morales Folguera, Rodríguez Hernández, Rubial
García, and Tovar de Teresa, the book provides a general context of the meaning and function
of the public ritual in an ethnically and culturally diverse Mexican society. In a later chapter,
Curcio-​Nagy focuses specifically on Sor Juana’s Neptune (“Sor Juana”).

Octavio Paz and the traps of biographical interpretation

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or the Traps of Faith (1982, 1988) seeks to recreate the complex universe
of New Spain in which Sor Juana’s genius flourished. Octavio Paz posits a parallel between
Sor Juana’s struggle to pursue a life of learning against the censorship imposed by ecclesiastical
authorities in seventeenth-​century New Spain and that of twentieth-​century writers and artists
in totalitarian bureaucratic states (Santí, “Poetics”). In spite of this anachronistic projection and a
number of gender-​based judgments, Paz’s book is the most comprehensive study of the Neptune.
Traps offers an overview of the ritual of reception of the new viceroy, beginning with his
public entrance in Veracruz, then Tlaxcala and Puebla, culminating in the welcoming ceremony
at the capital, in which “a system of symbolic relationships” incarnated during the magical
moment of the fiesta conjoined political and religious meanings and confirmed a sense of unity
between king and subjects, configuring “a system of symbolic relationships” (141). Paz then
describes the historical evolution and confluence of the triumph and the ceremonial entrance,
from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the baroque ritual of possession, a spectacular allegory,
pointing to the dramatization of politics that characterized baroque urban culture in Europe,
within the emerging absolutist states. He suggests that such ceremonies in New Spain brought
together European and Indigenous traditions. Based on Ignacio Rubio Mañe and other sources,
Paz explains the designation of a new viceroy in New Spain as well as the lineage of the Count
de Paredes, Marquis de la Laguna, and María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess de
Paredes, within the highest Spanish nobility (148–​49), bringing attention to the important role
that the Countess had in Sor Juana’s career: inspiring many of her poems, encouraging her to
publish one of her best works, The Divine Narcissus, and publishing in Spain the first volume of
her works Inundación castálida (Castalian Inundation) (1689).7
Paz restates the history of triumphal arches already found in Toussaint and Salceda, and
highlights the prestige associated with its commission. Nevertheless, he situates both Sor Juana
and Sigüenza within a social position of dependency and even fragility (150). In his Teatro,
Sigüenza y Góngora praised the author of the Neptune (153), justifying Sor Juana’s as well as
his own euhemeristic approach to pagan myths, a justification that Sor Juana also includes in
her description in prose.8 Paz sees in Sigüenza y Góngora’s attitude, not a proto-​nationalism as
others critics have, but a more nuanced combination of Jesuit syncretism and “the sentiments,
from the confused aspirations of criollo society” (154), pointing at another possible approach to
Sor Juana’s position as a Creole.9
Paz summarizes the analogies that Sor Juana presents in her Razón de la fábrica (“Rationale
of the Allegorical Invention”) to justify the allegories of her arch (Traps 155–​56). In addition to
Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi by Vincenzo Cartari as the source for the images of Neptune and
Anfitrite in the arch, already suggested by Karl-​Ludwig Selig (“aspectos” 836), Paz mentions the

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Teatro de los dioses de la gentilidad (Theater of the Pagan Gods) by Baltasar de Vitoria, which writ-
ers of the period often consulted. He argues that the Teatro by Vitoria, although not cited in Sor
Juana’s arch, is the main source of her versions and interpretations of myth, such as her transforma-
tion of Neptune, the “stormy god,” into a “civilizing deity whose attributes were sapience, culture,
and art” (161).The only quote in Italian that appears in Sor Juana’s oeuvre is in the Neptune: a verse
by Boccaccio that Vitoria also quotes in his chapter dedicated to Venus (173–​74).10
Paz agrees with other critics, such as Salceda, that it is unlikely Sor Juana personally super-
vised the construction of the arch, restating Toussaint’s dates of publication. He summarizes the
different episodes of the life of Neptune represented in the arch, noting coincidences and vari-
ations with Vitoria’s treatise. For instance, he finds a reference to Vitoria in the eighth canvas, in
the second petition to the viceroy to finish the construction of the cathedral in that both Sor
Juana and Vitoria contrast the opinions of Ovid and Virgil on who built the wall of Troy; indeed,
both quote the same verses.
Paz reiterates long-​held prejudices against commissioned work. Thus, the Neptune is “more
general than profound” (175), displaying her political talents “in the art of ingenious flattery”
(158), a topic taken up again by Merrim and Thomas. Thus, Paz recasts a commonplace in
the reception of Sor Juana’s works, contrasting her literary works closely associated with the
public realm of politics (her circumstantial pieces) with her truly poetic ones, emblematized by
the First Dream, “one of the most complex, rigorous, and intellectually rich texts of Spanish-​
language poetry” (178). For Paz, the Neptune’s brilliance resides in its capacity to symbolize
ideas. It is a compendium of the knowledges of the epoch, including the hermetic tradition
developed by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (178). As clearly, Paz links the allegorical or emblem-
atic view of the universe, at the core of the baroque, to the hermetic tradition (162–​63). The
Allegorical Neptune is a work of Kircherian inspiration, although Sor Juana does not quote him
in it.11 Her syncretist vision of Isis comes from the German Jesuit, as does her mania for Egypt
(162, 175).12 Paz also sees the influence of hermeticism in the nun’s conception of “original”
wisdom as female as well as in her insinuation that “what we call mind or idea is also female,”
both heretical ideas (170–​71). Sor Juana identifies Isis with Io, quoting the same verses from
Ovid “that Vitoria uses to illustrate his account” (170–​71).
The Neptune is a hieroglyph, a complex allegory, a multifaceted enigma, reflecting Sor Juana’s
situation and predicaments as a woman (179). For Paz, Sor Juana deliberately exalts the “female
condition” expressing “a no less deliberate will to transcend [it] […] (Is this not also the paradox
of the modern feminist movement?)” (171). Ciphering ideology through poetic analogy, he
relates Isis to Sor Juana and her literary/​intellectual activities to claim that the nun’s contradic-
tory stance reflects her deviation from her essence, resulting ultimately in a trans/​figurative
restoration of her natural femininity and motherhood. Thus, the double male in Isis, mean-
ing doubly Man, reflects the double perversion in Sor Juana, as a writer and as an intellectual,
culminating in a symbolic affirmation of motherhood. Through Isis, Sor Juana sublimates her
masculinization or anomalous superior intellect, emblematized in the Neptune, reconceiving her
manly activities associated with “learning (signs and letters)” (173) as an act of mothering. In
the spirit of critics such as Pfandl, Paz further develops a psychoanalytical analysis of Sor Juana’s
arch, which points at the absence of the father, whom she killed “in her imagination or, at least,
experienced that absence as the equivalent of death” (172), and whose ghost becomes the image
of a dead husband, making of Sor Juana a widow attracted to Isis, with whom she identifies.
The highly codified genre of the arch encodes a confession. The basis of such analysis is the
conception of Sor Juana’s works as a biographical mirror of her conflicts and contradictions as
a woman. Sor Juana’s writings, metonymically identified with the author, are the locus of the
negative, the lack –​the anomaly traditionally identified with woman (173).

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Feminist approaches to Sor Juana’s arch

Georgina Sabat-​Rivers addresses the Neptune from the perspective of material culture, specifi-
cally, the significance of its publishing history. She agrees with Toussaint that the Explication was
published before the Neptune, printed in leaflets and distributed during the event (Inundación
69). Like Paz and other critics, she conceives of the Neptune as a figure of the author’s personal
library and erudition (70). Sabat-​Rivers’s introduction opened the ground for feminist as well
as intertextual approaches to this complex circumstantial piece, which “considered in its totality,
has many aspects that reappear in other works by Sor Juana” (70).
Sabat-​Rivers ventures a visual reconstruction, from the studies of the baroque urban festivity
as an ideological instrument of control by the absolutist power of the monarchy, highlighting,
in the case of New Spain, the confluence of the native and Spanish imperial traditions (En
busca 260, 245).13 The arch, as conceived by the humanist writer with the role of “advisor to the
king,” is related to the tradition of the “mirror of princes” (246).14 Sabat-​Rivers diverges from
Paz’s qualification of Sor Juana’s choice of Isis as allegorical figure for the vicereine as bordering
on the heretic. Instead, she highlights the orthodoxy in her choice of Neptune for the viceroy
(248). Nevertheless, Sor Juana’s authorship must have created a tone of dissonance in the society
of her times (251). She also disagrees with the Mexican essayist that Neptune and Amphitrite
appeared unclothed, making reference to a seventeenth-​century engraving in which Neptune
appears with the bare torso, but the rest of his body, like that of Amphitrite, appears covered or
veiled (254). On the other hand, she concurs with Paz in seeing the Neptune as a cipher of the
dilemmas of the author (260).
In the spirit of Sabat-​River’s intertextual approach, Pamela Kirk considers that Sor Juana’s
arch “contains much that is typical of her later writing” (“Political Simulation” 31). Kirk con-
trasts the “simplicity and directness” of Sor Juana’s private Letter to her confessor (1682) to the
“intricacy” of the Allegorical Neptune, the least researched of her works (33). While in the letter
there is an expression of persecution, and a justification of intellectual pursuits, in the arch she
uses complex “stylistic devices” to conceal subtexts, such as her oppressive situation as a woman
“speaking in a restrictive society”; a critique of the censorship of rulers; and an exaltation of the
Viceroy, while at the same time suggesting that he, as god of silence, is a ruler of silent/​silenced
subjects (32–​36). Sor Juana also uses subtle humor as a “technique of reducing the powerful”
(39). Furthermore, her use of Euhemerism, based on Natal Conti, limits the divinity of the new
ruler (38). Thus, as in Paz’s and Sabat de River’s biographical interpretations, the central pres-
ence in the monument is not the viceroy himself, but the author, “a woman acutely aware of
her vulnerability, yet willing to make critical political and religious statements,” veiled under the
rhetoric of her arch (40).
Kirk points to another feminist subtext: Neptune is represented as a god dependent “on a
woman.” The goddess Isis is Neptune’s mother, and according to Conti, the “Egyptian goddess
of fertility,” a “celebrated queen” who “invented the Egyptian hieroglyph” and “discovered that
wheat can be used as food, and flax for linen” (38). More evidence of Sor Juana’s “feminist accent”
is the discussion about “the origins and interrelationships of Isis and other goddesses associated
with wisdom” (“Political Stimulation” 39). Sor Juana’s presentation of “wisdom in female guise”
reappears in other works, such as her hymns to Mary, carols in honor of St. Catherine, and the
Answer (39). Concurring with Rafael Catalá’s interpretation, Kirk acknowledges the presence of
Indigenous cultures and mythologies, primarily Aztec, as a subtext of the arch (37). In this way,
Sor Juana gives “a voice –​even if ‘muted’ –​to the suppressed indigenous cultures” (37).
Verónica Grossi finds inspiration in Sabat de River’s suggestion that Sor Juana conceived
the pyramids of her first Dream thinking about the “triumphal arches built in New Spain to

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receive the new viceroys, in imitation of those from Rome” (Inundación 63). Thus, Grossi relates
the arch, a commissioned, spectacular, public piece, to her other works, including those consid-
ered her most private or personal ones, associated with nocturnal study and the interior space
of imagination, such as her long philosophical poem. Allegory, a key creative and interpretive
technique in her arch, offers a diversity of meanings, some of which counter established rhetoric
and social norms. Such multiplicity of meanings, encompassing the realm of politics as well as
more abstract knowledge, should not be reduced to a biographical or cultural identity. A recur-
rent meaning in Sor Juana’s works is the exemplum of feminine writing as a quest for learning,
a disobedient, creative act resulting in defeat and punishment by authorities, which neverthe-
less, or rather, as a consequence, emboldens new flights of feminine fantasy or imagination. In
Sigilosos vuelos, Grossi also includes a prosification of the description of the eight canvases in
verse and final sonnet, of the Succinct Explication.15
For Virginia Bouvier, in the arch Sor Juana uses the masculine language of power, erudition,
and abstract thought to impress authorities, but her representations, such as in her seventh can-
vas, resignify established gender associations (49). At the same time, her arch served as a mirror
of herself as a wise woman, teacher, writer, and political advisor.The female figures from Greek,
Roman, and Egyptian mythology challenge women’s exclusion from the public sphere. She
creates a feminine genealogy for Neptune, with her mother as Opis or Cibeles, who is the same
as Isis. The gods of antiquity are represented with their consorts; the vicereine María Luisa, in a
role of power, is associated with the women of antiquity.
Whereas Sabat-​Rivers underlines the orthodoxy of the arch, in “Sor Juana’s Arch: Public
Spectacle, Private Battle,” Electa Arenal characterizes it as “novel and radical” as Sigüenza’s (176).
Both “were the two most prominent intellectuals” “looked upon with suspicion” by some of
the highest authorities (176). Both reject the heroism of the bloody prince in favor of “the
Neptunian defender of abiding peace” (177). While Sigüenza reformed historiography to relate
a monarchical lineage with the indigenous Aztecs, Sor Juana gave room to woman and the
representation of gender relations from a critical perspective, unconventional in the baroque era
(“Enigmas” 87). Sor Juana’s arch can be seen as a “feminist political treatise” (“Spectacle” 173).
Sigüenza y Góngora’s iconographic program is traditional and patriarchal in that the Aztec
past is appropriated into “the Hispanic Catholic providentialism,” and woman appears only in
the “decorative female Indian” as well as in the “symbolic and silent figures of the virtues that the
imperial heroes incarnate” (Arenal, “Enigmas” 88). Sor Juana, on the other hand, “summons up
concepts of creation and culture in which the feminine principle emanates from wisdom” and
“both sexes appear […] as dynamic and reasonable subjects” (88). Jupiter is the original figure for
Sigüenza; Isis or Sapientia, the inventor of writing, for Sor Juana (88, 92). The author identifies
with and speaks through this figure (88).The “metaphor of generation and of maternity,” such as
the childbearing of Neptune by Isis, is a thematic thread that runs through her arch (92).
Another subtext is Sor Juana’s battle with her confessor, documented in her letter, in which
“with startling sarcasm, [she] parades before him the arch’s successes” (Arenal, “Spectacle” 175).
Since Núñez represented the Council of Trent’s insistence on monastic women’s saintly igno-
rance, the Neptune can be seen in opposition to the tridentine prohibition of women’s access to
knowledge (Arenal, “Enigmas” 91), as well as Sor Juana’s lifelong celebration of wisdom (Arenal,
“Emblema” 19).

A new edition of the Allegorical Neptune

In her introduction to the Allegorical Neptune, prepared in collaboration with Vincent Martin,
Electa Arenal offers an overview of Sor Juana’s life and literary production within the spectacular,

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multicultural society of her times. Arenal underscores Sor Juana as the only woman in the his-
tory of the West ever commissioned to design a triumphal arch, a “baroque compendium of
humanistic culture that praised and entertained the aristocratic, lettered circles” of New Spain
(11). Rather than the education of the Christian prince, for Arenal the arch “procures an educa-
tion based in the Egyptian goddess Isis, the maternal goddess herself a compendium of feminine
divinities: Minerva, Athenas, Cybeles, Diana, and other goddesses” (25). The virtue of wisdom
divinized in many figures and the aquatic maternal symbology, present in other of her works,
are the centerpieces of the arch (21–​23). In a display of wit and erudition, Sor Juana makes
references in “221 quotes” in Latin to a wide array of biblical and classical mythological figures
and authors, including some who would be traditionally inadmissible in a text authored by a
religious woman, such as Seneca and Erasmus (20).16
In his introductory notes to the Neptune,Vincent Martin presents a synopsis of the history of
editions, beginning with the Explicacion succinta … (n.d.) [Succinct Explication] in verse, which cir-
culated during the event, as Toussaint had indicated, and the complete edition in prose and verse,
printed in Mexico by Juan de Ribera in 1680 (sic) (47).17 Martin follows what he considers
the best edition of the Neptune in Inundación castálida (1689), housed in the Biblioteca Nacional
of Madrid (R/​3053) and the facsimile which includes all the variants of other editions (1690,
1691, 1692, 1709, 1714, 1725), prepared by Gabriela Eguía-​Lis Ponce (1995), as well as other
modern editions by Herrera Zapién, Sabat-​Rivers, Sáinz de Medrano, Salceda, and Toussaint.
For this edition, Martin modernized the orthography, “correcting at the same time errors and
typographical errors” (49), but keeping as much as possible the original punctuation. He has also
“corrected Sor Juana’s Latin,” placing these and other changes between square brackets, resulting
in what he considers a “faithful translation” (49). Martin’s extreme efforts at presenting a flawless
text unfortunately result in new errors (cf. Alatorre, “En torno”). In addition, the sources for a
number of his corrections and attributions are not explicitly acknowledged. Of particular note
is his disregard for poetic form, highlighted by Alatorre, a disregard that characterizes past and
current approaches to the Neptune.18
Martin’s concept of error in translation, analysis and interpretation, going back to the debate
introduced by Salceda, is not only polemical from a historicist perspective, since in the early
modern period citation and creative imitation of classical, renaissance and contemporary texts was
based on “borrowed erudition” (Hinojo,“Fuentes” 187–​88), but also when we consider Sor Juana’s
intellectual project in its entirety, ciphered in her Dream. For Icarus and Phaeton, in particular, to
err signifies an audacious adventure of ascent and fall, of disobedience and (maternal) aquatic res-
toration, a resolute epistemological erring or wandering within interior poetic imagination, away
from patriarchal vigilance (looking for errors), punishment, and persecution (Grossi, Sigilosos).19
For the translations of the Latin quotes Martin has mostly used Cecilia Criado, Salceda, and
Herrera Zapién, and the modern Spanish editions of the classical works, included in the bibli-
ography. He has also included translations from modern Spanish editions of the original Greek
sources of some Latin quotes. Octavio Paz’s pioneering observation as well as Amy McNichols’s
extensive comparative analysis and Hinojo’s essay have been foundational for Martin’s edi-
tion, confirming Vitoria’s Teatro as the primary mythographic source of the Neptune, present in
“80 percent of [its] citations in Latin” (Hinojo 185).
Martin’s 420 footnotes, rich with information and clarifications, seek to indicate Sor Juana’s
sources. On the other hand, their excessive length and number impede the flow and cadence of
the reading, reiterating the traditional emphasis on the work’s erudition and thus distracting the
reader from an appreciation of its frequently neglected literary or poetic dimension.
In a previous article, Vincent Martin had examined Sor Juana’s “art of prestidigitation” and
“cover up” in her reconfiguration of  “citations and interpretations of classical myths” and biblical

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and patristic passages in the Neptune to authorize ingenuity and wisdom above the eulogized
figure of the viceroy (“El Neptuno” 171–​73). He argues that she fused the praise of Neptune
with the exaltation of feminine invention and study of letters (166). This analysis contextualizes
Sor Juana’s poetics of errors as a practice of creative imitatio or inventio.

A philological approach
Sagrario López Poza recapitulates key points about the ceremony of entrance, and summarizes
the content of the Neptune, providing a visual illustration of the arch (266). Restating a topic
of reception, she claims that in the Neptune, Sor Juana uses erudition to “demonstrate that she
dominated to perfection oratory and rhetorical techniques as well as classical and modern
sources” (259).20 Its “210 quotes” [sic] (260), appear at times “suffocating,” but reflect standard
practices of the period: citation, which Gracián called “noticiosa erudición” (well-​informed
erudition) (258), was “frequently abused.”21 López Poza does not recognize the use of creative
invention in Sor Juana’s arch; its rich poetic texture is reduced to a detailed description, with
the names of poetic forms, excluding the final sonnet (256–​58). Reiterating that recognition
came with the design of the iconographic program of an arch, “commissioned to prestigious
humanists, often professors of Rhetoric, and with more frequency to Jesuits” (245), but not to
women (246), López Poza concludes that “in spite of her condition as a woman,” Sor Juana
fulfilled “the expectations that Fray Payo Enríquez de Rivera and the cathedral council had
placed on her” (262). Differing from Paz’s thesis, the critic also asserts, without textual refer-
ences, that the citations in the Neptune are from mythographic manuals the nun-​scholar must
have had in her library, including “an anthology of classical poetry perhaps inherited from her
grandfather, Illustrium poetarum flores” (260), and that two of the primary sources of the arch are
the Francisco Sánchez de Brozas’s edition in Latin of the Emblemata by Alciato (Lyon 1573) and
the Hieroglyphica by Pierio Valeriano (Basilea, 1556).22

Classical and baroque sources of the Neptune

Tarsicio Herrera Zapién, who provides a “rhythmic version” of the “elegiac distichs that Sor
Juana composed for her Neptune” (“Los dísticos” 373), discusses poetic form in the Latin poems
included in the arch –​an aspect, as we have seen, mostly dismissed by critics.23 To fully appre-
ciate the arch, including the poetry in quotes of classical poets such as Ovid, Horace, Juvenal
and Virgil, as well as in the author’s own poems in Latin, the reader must have a command of
the classical language, in particular imperial Latin (374), and read it “with calmness and serious
attention” (373). Herrera also brings attention to the presence in the Neptune, which he calls
a “Hispano-​Latino mosaic,” of humor, variety, and playfulness (376–​78). In the arch, Sor Juana
took on the challenge of writing two epigrammas, each consisting of five distichs, inspired by the
numerous hexameters and elegiac distichs of the classical Latin poets she quoted in her descrip-
tion (374). The bard she finds of most interest is Virgil: “she quotes five hexameters from the
Georgics (III 108–​12) and […] transcribes seven hexameters from the Aeneid (V 820–​26).”24 She
also finds inspiration in Ovid’s Fasti (379), in her sixth canvas.
Taking as a point of departure the studies by Gabriel Méndez Plancarte and Tarsicio Herrera
Zapién, George Anthony Thomas interprets the influence of Horace in Sor Juana’s Neptune as
an ideological appropriation of his “poetics of empire” (44), from an Americanist, anti-​imperial-
ist perspective (46). The Mexican nun uses the arch to articulate the local, political concerns of
“colonial subjects,” per the request of the cathedral council, as Arenal and others have contended
(44–​45).Yet, the expression of these types of local concerns was part of the established rhetoric

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of the triumphal arch in New Spain. Accepting payment for her commissions, the Mexican
nun used “ceremonial poetry to maintain intimate relationships with authorities” to “assert her
own literary agenda,” that is, to cultivate “the patronage that would make the publication and
dissemination of her work possible” (47, 52, 55). Furthermore, with her “strategic imitation of
Horace’s poetics,” in her Neptune and other commissioned pieces, Sor Juana inscribed “herself
within imperial power hierarchies,” in order to privilege “her position as premier poet of the
viceroyalty,” while sanctioning “her role as a woman writer” (52, 54).Yet for Alejandro Cañeque
the arch designers “were playing not the role of flatterers and sycophants but one that was most
dignified” (Kings 34). Their public commission was not “simply an opportunity to further [a]‌
personal career,” but “the realization of one of the most important functions” in the seventeenth
century, that of giving advice to his or her prince, contributing in this way “to the preservation
of the monarchy” (34). Yet for Stephanie Merrim, concurring with Thomas, Sor Juana wrote
“herself into the esthetic and structures of the ruling order,” and “insistently positioned herself
as the star of an imaginary literary academy.” As Merrim avers, “[b]y undertaking all the genres
of the ruling discourse,” (“[m]ore than two-​thirds of her work is occasional or commissioned”)
“she rendered herself indispensable to […] the ruling class. […] The Neptuno Alegórico [and her
numerous occasional pieces] […] all fulfilled crucial societal functions while serving her per-
sonal needs” (Early 35).
In her landmark article, Eunice Joiner Gates demonstrates not only the “most noticeable”
imitation of style and poetic diction of Góngora in Sor Juana’s Dream but also the consider-
able influence of his poetry in her Allegorical Neptune, in the form of citations, parallelisms, and
reminiscences (“Reminiscences” 1043, 1053–​55). Martha Lilia Tenorio expands Joiner Gates’s
analysis, adding more “mentions-​tribute,” “echoes and knowing winks” from the poetry by or
attributed to Góngora (El gongorismo 151–​59). Sor Juana’s arch gave its author the opportunity
to demonstrate her ample knowledge and skill as a poet, and thus to make an impression (151).
To stand up for the occasion, she resorted to the most poetic language available, which was
Góngora’s (152).

Other semiotic, ideological, and performative approaches

Agustin Boyer develops a structural analysis of the Neptune, bringing attention to its rich
plurality of discourses. Verbal, pictorial, architectonic, theatrical, and imaginary components
constitute a self-​referential unity, encompassing society (38, 42). Thus, there is no reason to
consider the Succinct Explication in verse as detached from or of higher esthetic value than
the Rationale of the Allegorical Invention (Razón de la fábrica); or the hierarchically structured
baroque spectacle of the arch as separate from its 104 verses, a “truly polymetric program,”
as critics have traditionally done (40). The Explication, “far from being an appendix, is the
culmination” of the “strophic program” sustaining the arch (41). A series of “specular cor-
relations” confirm the interdependence of all elements (41). For Boyer, Sor Juana’s icono-
graphic program is a clear manifestation of baroque esthetics: the overcoming of renaissance
mimesis or representation by baroque semiosis, based on signification, both intertextual and
meta-​discursive (42).
José M. González García also situates the Neptune within baroque hermeneutics, comparing
its signifying mechanisms, centered on the communicative efficacy of painting, to the emblem
book by Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político cristiano (Idea of a Christian
Political Prince). Within the culture of absolutism, as Maravall has noted (234), baroque society
“develops a technology of the image at the service of the theatrical representation of power”
(236). New early modern culture “presupposes a solitary, silent reader who reads the image and

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looks at writing” (235). It also presupposes a visual perspective relative to the beholder (241–​43).
Thus painting becomes the model for the writer, with color acquiring supremacy over line in
its capacity to sway the spirit or emotions of the audience (235). Sor Juana’s arch, composed of
emblems, is “double writing on painting” (230). In addition, Gónzalez agrees with Boyer, that
there is an interdependence between prose and verse (246).
Drawing on Ángel Rama’s concept of the “lettered city,” Cristina Beatriz Fernández under-
stands the triumphal arch as part of the conservative baroque feast and as a paradigm of the
relation between the lettered Creole and governing classes (“Ecos” 197–​98). The written
description of the feast is ancillary to the architecture of the monument (200), yet as part of
Western writing, it also exerts a “tyranny” over its visual/​plastic language (Mignolo). The writ-
ten description, by means of ekphrasis, among other techniques, seeks to perpetuate the temporal
staging of the performance. Allegorical invention (fábrica alegórica) results in a “specular vertigo,”
a circular unfolding of self-​explications both in prose and in verse, reproducing the original
formal structure of the monument (200). Each modality of representation, verbal and visual,
has a different function depending on its audience, with writing occupying the highest level of
the hierarchy. The privileged receptors of written and visual texts are lettered Creoles, as well as
the viceroy and other members of the governing class, whereas the illiterate majority can only
apprehend the visual signs. Grossi, on the other hand, defines the reduced (secret) audience of
Sor Juana’s arch as the circle of “letrados y entendidos de la urbe” (Sigilosos 92) [educated and
influential urban elite], the author’s intellectual friends  –​not necessarily all members of the
ruling class.
Judith Farré further expands on the feast as a ritual that seeks to legitimize the power of the
metropolis, in which all groups of society participate following a series of protocols, mirroring
ranks and hierarchies. Farré analyzes the “paratheatrical” elements in a description contempo-
raneous to Sor Juana’s Neptune, Pierica narración de la plausible pompa… (1680) by Juan Antonio
Ramírez Santibáñez, focusing on the role of Indians and mestizos.
Benjamín Torrico Sánchez highlights the “performative” elements of the early modern
Hispanic baroque feast, both civil and religious, in which actors become spectators, to develop
a comparative analysis of three entries (entradas) during the 1680s, including that of the Viceroy
de la Laguna in Mexico. In contrast to Fernández, Torrico Sánchez maintains that within the
baroque feast, textuality is secondary to the performative (167). Through the performance,
established power and society recognize themselves mutually (166).

Comparative studies of Sor Juana’s Allegorical Neptune and

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Teatro de virtudes políticas
For Fernando Checa the architectonic and plastic conception of the arches designed by Sor
Juana and Carlos de Sigüenza, respectively, originate in the European humanistic culture of the
metropolis and the specificity of New Spain (304–​05). Based on an ample bibliography, Checa
focuses on hieroglyphs and emblems as central elements of ephemeral architectures, a combina-
tion of visual and literary elements comprising a ceremonial rhetoric with established topoi.25
In his analysis of the arches by Sor Juana and Sigüenza, Checa traces their origin and function,
symbolism, celebration of the arts, urban spaces, philosophical conceptions, and social practices,
reflective of the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. His exploration encompasses
rhetorical treatises, emblem books and mythological manuals, literature, painting, sculpture, and
architecture. Sigüenza’s Teatro is a “diachronic exposition” of “a political idea,” that, unlike Sor
Juana’s arch, does not make reference to its real location, “showing in this way its ultimate pur-
pose as a historical treatise” (293). In contrast to interpretations of the Neptune as subversive

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appropriation, Checa traces Sor Juana’s figure of Neptune to the “programs of imperial exalta-
tion of the Habsburg’s dynasty in Spain” (289); thus it is a “continuation of political allegory at
the service of the Spanish empire” (294).
For Claudia Parodi, the public festivity of the triumphal arch combines European and
pre-​Hispanic traditions. The arches designed by Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora, directed
to the new viceroy as well as to the lettered minority, which included educated Indians, were
also a manifestation of diglossia in that they used the variants of Spanish and Latin inspired
in Greco-​Latin texts, which formed “a homogenous linguistic unity” (31, 34, 37, 40–​41). The
plastic and theatrical elements of the arch, on the other hand, were for the wider public who
could not decipher the emblems or texts in Latin, but could interact with and understand
the arch at other levels (35). Cristina Beatriz Fernández considers the Teatro by Sigüenza an
exposition on the value of history over fable, in polemical relation with Sor Juana’s Neptune
(“México” 124, 126). Linear history, as opposed to the simultaneity of the image, is at the core
of the hermeneutics of Sigüenza’s arch, which breaks away from emblematic tradition. In Sor
Juana’s arch, on the other hand, myth seeks to annul temporality by fusing Neptune with the
new viceroy in the eternal present of archetypes (129). In his third prelude, Sigüenza adapts
Sor Juana’s classical mythological figure of Neptune into his own poetics, transforming him
into a historical figure, an ancestor of the American Indians. In this way, the viceroy is the heir
and culmination of this biblical genealogy of power (129). Yet, Sigüenza hints at the violent
historical break of the conquest that ruptured the biological genealogy, now restored by the
cultural symbology of his arch (130).
For Heinrich Merkl, Sor Juana does not aspire to originality but to the ideal of classic per-
fection in imitatio (35–​36). Sigüenza, on the other hand, assumes that a writer must depart from
venerable tradition for the sake of truth and usefulness. His attitude with regard to the Spanish
empire and the conquest of America is clearly Americanist, embracing all ethnic groups or castes
as part of the new Mexican nation, and so his arch manifests a critical approach to the Spanish
empire and a Creole consciousness (26, 33). In contrast, Sor Juana’s arch, as evinced in the fifth
canvas, acclaims the Spanish imperial project of conquest and discovery and expresses conde-
scension towards the Aztec founders of the city of Mexico, as expressed in the verses 131–​32 of
the third canvas (32–​33).
Whereas the final poem of Teatro is clearly encomiastic, there are critical passages in the cen-
tral treatise in which Sigüenza is more critical, such as when he admonishes the viceroy not to
become a tyrant and to follow universal law based on Christian ethics (26–​27). Sor Juana, who
speaks with the authority of an expert in classical culture and myth, uses hyperbole and a highly
figurative language to extoll the new viceroy, seeking in this way his protection (34–​36). For
Sigüenza, among the highest virtues of the ideal prince are religiosity and piety; for Sor Juana
wisdom, not associated with the theological virtues, prevails (27, 34).
Helga von Kügelgen argues that Sigüenza y Góngora’s revolutionary program, inspired
mostly on the pictorial-​literary genre of the emblem (“La línea” 216–​17), is the expression of
a truly patriotic, “ ‘criollo-​Mexican’ consciousness” (“The Way” 709–​10, 714). Sor Juana’s arch,
on the other hand, rather than emblematic or iconic, is more narrative in nature, most likely as
a result of the “structure of the pictorial arguments” (“ ‘Así repercute’ ” 718). Nevertheless, both
arches are representative of the tendency of written commentary to eclipse the image (“ ‘Así
repercute’ ” 712).
Finally, Sigmund Jádmar Méndez Bañuelos avers that in her Allegorical Neptune, Sor Juana
molds creatively conventional iconic materials and mythological sources to develop her own
artistic and ideological program (47–​51). Whereas Sor Juana’s prose in her Neptune is of artis-
tic quality, Sigüenza’s writing in his Theatre displays “a more vast erudition and a greater

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interest in doctrinal content” (53). Sor Juana’s careful adulatory hyperbole contrasts with
Sigüenza’s moderate expression (53). Both use ingenious analogy in their arguments (58).
Sigüenza justifies his break from norm by electing Mexica tlatoani to compose his allegory,
arguing for the primacy of history over mythology, which is also a direct criticism of Sor Juana’s
arch (55, 58).

Future directions
Past and recent studies have prepared the ground for an understanding of the triumphal arch
as a manifestation of public urban culture, inextricably connected to the other arts as well as
to wider social and cultural discourses. Because of the work of several scholars mentioned
above, primary sources are now better documented and more available. In the future it would
be fruitful to relate the Allegorical Neptune to other arches of the period, in particular those
of New Spain, in order to deepen our understanding of its rhetoric and originality. Finally, it
would be important to account for the centrality of poetry in Sor Juana’s arch, based on her
lifelong literary and intellectual project, as well as on a historical notion of baroque artistry
or artisanship in which poetry and prose, image and text, ephemeral spectacle and written or
imaginary record, inseparably associated, illuminate each other.

Notes
1 All translations to English, unless otherwise stated, are mine.
2 Sor Juana contributed four of the six symbols referring to Neptune in von der Ketten’s catalog
(Alatorre, Sor Juana 1.233).
3 This reappraisal of Góngora’s legacy coincided with that undertaken in Spain by writers like Dámaso
Alonso, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guillén, and others.
4 Martha Lilia Tenorio recently published an extended edition titled Poesía novohispana.
5 The complete Allegorical Neptune would reappear in the first volume of Sor Juana’s works, Inundación
castálida (Madrid, 1689), and its subsequent editions, and in her Obras completas, vol. 4, 1957, edited by
Alberto G. Salceda.
6 For Alatorre, the entire “Description” was recited by an actress, perhaps aided by a stick to point at the
canvases on which she was commenting (“En torno” 278).
7 Sabat-​Rivers agrees with Paz on the important role the Countess de Paredes had in Sor Juana’s life dur-
ing her most productive years (En busca 120). For Arenal, with the creation of this arch, Sor Juana initi-
ates the most significant relation of patronage in her life. The Countess helped to publish in Madrid,
Spain, the first volume of Sor Juana’s works, Inundación castálida (1689), placing her arch in a position
of honor as the last piece of the volume (Neptuno 30). Alatorre asserts that, from 1680 on, as a result of
the “admiration produced by the Allegorical Neptune,” Sor Juana’s life radically changes. Assisted “with-
out doubt by the vicereine,” who conversed with her frequently in the visiting room of the convent,
“the Mexican Hieronymite could fly at her ease through all the areas of the poetic firmament” (“En
torno” 271). Hortensia Calvo and Beatriz Colombí recently discovered two letters written by María
Luisa Manrique that provide documental proof of the two women’s mutually admiring and supportive
friendship.
8 For Salceda, Sigüenza’s euhemeristic justification of Sor Juana’s allegory did not imply a devaluation of
his friend’s mythological conception (xxxv). Other critics, such as Francisco de la Maza, have read it as
an indirect attack, born from a sense of superiority or hostile competition. Sor Juana was not satisfied
with Sigüenza’s justification. Thus, in her famous sonnet “Dulce canoro cisne mexicano,” she praises
him, with much irony, using figures from the classical fables (“Sor Juana” 197). Joseph R. Jones, taking
the opportunity to belittle Sor Juana’s arch as “the polished but commonplace performance of a clever
woman,” also interprets in Sigüenza’s words a sense of hostility and rivalry (47). For Merkl, although
in competition with Sor Juana, Sigüenza’s includes a “sincere” praise of her arch (31). In contrast, Sor
Juana does not mention the Teatro in her Neptune, although in some way she responds to it by justifying
her “traditional” use of classic mythology (32). Kügelgen suggests that Sor Juana and Sigüenza sent and

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read each other’s manuscripts: “She answered with a dedication of a sonnet, and he commented on her
subject matter in the ‘Prelude III’ of his own program for the arch” (“The Way” 713; “Sor Juana” 193).
9 Sabat-​Rivers calls it “criollo pride,” a result of Sigüenza’s Jesuit education and the baroque taste for the
exotic (En busca 248).
10 For Marie Cécile Bénassy-​Berling, this quote in Italian is a translation of  Virgil (117).
11 See Osorio Romero on the influence of Kircher in New Spain.
12 For Checa and Pascual Buxó, the writings and engravings by Kircher had an influence in Sor Juana’s
works (“Arquitectura” 265; “Función” 246). Alatorre strongly disagrees:  “No one has found in the
Allegorical Neptune any proof, not even a vague one, that Sor Juana found inspiration in the Oedipus
Aegyptiacus by Kircher.These are Octavio Paz’s fantasies which mysteriously have had a very warm and
lasting reception among the usual Sor Juana scholars” (“En torno” 269).
13 Margo Glantz offers another visual recreation from the collection of Arnaldo Aguiar (100).
14 Selig had observed that in a triumphal arch, “the author combines the emblematic tradition […] with
the genre ‘de regimine principum’ ” (837).
15 For a translation into English of Sor Juana’s Neptune, see Coroleu and Davidson, Allegorical.
16 Hinojo agrees with Arenal in the rarity of the citation: “The minimum presence of Erasmus, in one
passage, can be explained as the result of censorship; after the death of the humanist from Rotterdam,
the Church began a ferocious persecution against his works which were expurgated, deleted in part,
and condemned” (“Fuentes” 199). Martin, in turn, indicates that Sor Juana quotes Erasmus only once
in the entirety of her literary work, since she did not “want noise with the Inquisition” (“prestidigi-
tación” 167 n. 10). For Bénassy-​Berling, there is great uncertainty about how much real knowledge Sor
Juana could have had of Erasmus.The sentence Sor Juana attributes to him in the Neptune (“Necesse est,
ut princeps consultorem habeat in pectore”) is not sufficient proof that she read him (Humanisme 113–​14).
17 These two editions do not appear in the bibliography nor is the source of the information clarified.
18 “[T]‌he “romance” [ballad] of pp. 189–​91 stretches like a long spicy sausage, while in IC (Inundación
castálida) the separation between quatrain and quatrain is marked; there is also no separation between
the quatrains and tercets in the final sonnet (pp. 201–​02). Additionally, in the IC the even verses [versos
pares] of the Latin poems in distichs are indented (as is obligatory); but in the ten cases or more of
distichs (including the epigrams composed by Sor Juana herself, p. 162), VM systematically dismisses
this rule” (Alatorre, “En torno” 278).
19 For Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling, Sor Juana’s knowledge of several authors was most likely indirect,
in editions or adulterated adaptations, as it was common in the period (113). For López Poza, even if
“a great number of Sor Juana’s quotes may originate in secondary sources, this was as an established
practice of the ‘ingenios del siglo XVII’” (“erudición” 248, 260). Parodi adds an important clarifica-
tion: citations from memory with wrong attributions were common at the time (40). For instance, Sor
Juana’s attributes erroneously “Nimia familiaritas contemptum parit” to Cicero, a very popular proverb in
Europe, found in various classical authors such as Plutarch or Saint Augustine, but not in Cicero (40).
Reinterpretations and paraphrases were also common in the texts of the period (40). As an example
of this, Sor Juana does not quote literally Pliny but rather paraphrases him “demonstrating her great
knowledge of the language of Latium and of the classical authors” (41).
20 López Poza uses the rhetorical term “hipothiposi” (253), proposed by Bravo Arriaga (“El arco” 179). She
relates the arch’s rhetorical structure to a sermon (246), like Jones, who likewise highlighted its erudite
content and conventional form, relegating the work to a level of mediocrity as “a tasteful and moderate
piece of occasional art,” “in spite of the low place which [it] holds in the order of Sor Juana’s work”
(“La erudición” 44).
21 Like López Poza, José Pascual Buxó brings up Gracián’s concepts to explicate Sor Juana’s use of erudi-
tion from multiple sources (“Función” 250); Méndez Bañuelos likewise alludes to the Spanish Jesuit in
his analysis of Sor Juana’s arch (“Ingenio” 48–​9).
22 In his correction of  “minor omissions” in Salceda’s notes to the Neptune, Joseph R. Jones had already
included references to particular emblems in the Broncese edition of Alciato’s Book of Emblems.
23 For Hinojo, the Latin verses of Sor Juana do not have the quality of the “elegant versification” of the
Succinct Explication (190).
24 For the creative imitation of Virgil and other Latin authors in Sor Juana’s Neptune, see also Buena fe by
Herrera Zapién. In “Arquitectura,” Checa analyzes the influence of Virgil’s Aeneid in Sor Juana’s arch
(295–​56).
25 On the emblematic culture in New Spain, see Cuadriello.

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18
SOR JUANA AS LYRICIST AND
MUSICAL THEORIST
Mario A. Ortiz

Within the large corpus of Sor Juana scholarship, the subject of music has received relatively
­little attention. It is true that music is often mentioned, albeit in general terms, as it relates to
Sor Juana’s villancicos (carols), the use of musical imagery in her poetry, the numerous musical
elements she employed in her dramatic works, and most significantly her knowledge of musical
theory.1 However, studies that have exclusively focused on Sor Juana’s roles as lyricist and musi-
cal theorist remain the exception rather than the rule.
Likewise, in relationship to the growing scholarship of the last decades on early modern and
colonial conventual culture, the study of music as a major cultural activity within convents has
made some significant, although slow, progress in recent years. It is widely acknowledged that
music had a very important role as both recreation and religious expression in convents on both
sides of the Atlantic.2 Therefore, any examination of Sor Juana as lyricist and theorist requires an
understanding of her musical cultural milieu. In her foundational work, Cultura femenina novo-
hispana, Josefina Muriel wrote about the need for a thorough study of music among women in
New Spain (Cultura 483). Muriel’s posthumous publication in collaboration with musicologist
Luis Lledías, La música en las instituciones femeninas novohispanas (Music in Female Institutions of
New Spain), was a major step toward filling this gap. This voluminous work is by far the most
comprehensive study on the subject; in addition to a thorough overview of a wide variety of
musical institutions for women, this book also includes a rich collection of musical scores from
several colegios (schools) and convents. Other studies have given us new perspectives on the sub-
ject, by focusing on general musical practices (Ledías, “Actividad”) and the distinction between
public and private practices of conventual music in New Spain (Ortiz, “Euterpe,” La musa y la
melopea), as well as musical practices in individual institutions. Among the latter, it is worth men-
tioning Lledías’s studies on the Colegio de San Miguel de Bethlen (“Colegio,” “Didáctica”) and
Aurelio Tello’s work on the music of the Convento de la Santísima Trinidad de Puebla (“Capilla,”
“Prácticas”), which give us a better appreciation of the musical life in colonial convents, thereby
allowing us to understand Sor Juana’s musical practices within the conventual context.

Sor Juana, musician and composer

There are still many questions about Sor Juana’s musical activities for which we have no definite
answers, including whether she played instruments or composed music. Regarding the former,

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for example, in his “Aprobación” (Approval) of Sor Juana’s Fama y obras póstumas (Fame and
Posthumous Works), Calleja tells us about Sor Juana’s rich collection of musical instruments
(38). Baltasar Saldoni writes in 1864 that Sor Juana was as a youth already renowned for her
ability to play several instruments (qtd. Miranda 87). Despite the lack of solid documentation,
the question continues to appear. On one hand, Octavio Paz takes a cautious approach, reduc-
ing the issue to the following couple of phrases: ¿Tocaba sor Juana algún instrumento músico?
Ni ella ni sus contemporáneos dicen una palabra sobre esto” (Trampas 319) [Did Sor Juana play
a musical instrument? Neither she nor any of her contemporaries says a word on this subject
(Traps 246)]. Pamela Long, on the other hand, suggests that “[i]‌n all likelihood, Sor Juana, in
continuation to the tradition of Castiglione, probably played several instruments, since this was
a typical pastime for a lady of her social standing during the seventeenth century” (Sor Juana
13–​14). Similarly, Susana Hernández Araico believes it is “inconceivable” that Sor Juana did not
play any instruments, given her previous years in the Court, knowledge of musical theory, daily
practice of singing at all liturgical functions of the convent, and that she wrote texts to be sung
and danced (“Música” 208).
As to whether Sor Juana composed music, it is important to note that neither Sor Juana nor
Calleja make any mention about this in their writings. Even so, several critics seem inclined
to conclude that she composed music. Amado Nervo writes that “corrieron impresos algu-
nos villancicos, á los cuales muy probablemente ella puso música” (110) [several carols were
circulated in print, for which she very probably composed the music].3 Four decades later,
Esperanza Pulido challenges Nervo’s position and proposes that, at most, Sor Juana may have
written some musical exercises on harmony, but immediately reminds us that not even that can
be known with certainty because of the lack of proof (52). When approaching the same ques-
tion, Ricardo Miranda concludes that she must have composed music, arguing that given her
thorough knowledge of musical theory, composition was the next “natural” step for Sor Juana
to take (103). Likewise, Alberto Pérez-​Amador Adam writes about Sor Juana’s musicalizations
of her villancicos as well as of nineteen cantatas (18, 121). Finally, as the subtitle of Long’s book
suggests, How the Décima Musa Composed … Music, she concludes that “[t]‌here is no hard evi-
dence to support the thesis that Sor Juana composed music.Yet, it seems unlikely than Sor Juana
would have undertaken the immense chore of simplifying Cerone’s treatise on music for purely
pedagogical reasons” (12). In short, we cannot reach any definitive conclusions and we must,
therefore, continue our search for solid documentation.
Although there is no consensus on whether Sor Juana composed music, there is general
agreement about her role as lyricist, given the rich legacy of musico-​poetic genres in which the
Mexican poet excelled: her numerous comedias (plays), loas (brief, dramatic allegorical poems),
and auto sacramentales (passion or mystery plays), as well as her vast collection of villancicos and
other sacred texts to be sung (letras sagradas para ser cantadas). While the villancicos have received
much attention, one cannot ignore the important role that music, specifically song, has in
her dramatic output. In addition to the sung parts in her theatrical pieces, dance and musical
accompaniment were integral elements of drama in both Spain and the Americas. The overall
function of dance and music in Sor Juana’s plays is one area of study that has received minimal
attention. One fortunate exception is Hernández Araico’s relatively recent work on music in
Sor Juana’s theater, which stresses the prevailing dramatic effect of music and its “concomitant
visual impact,” which she calls “malabarismo escénico” (theatrical acrobatics) (“Música” 205).
Dramatic genres gave Sor Juana ample opportunity to explore a wide variety of musical
tools. In the absence of the musical scores that accompanied these works, all of which are
now lost, we must turn to stage directions to understand and appreciate the musical idioms
that Sor Juana employed. There is no exhaustive study to date of these musical instructions,

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unfortunately. A few studies refer to some of the stage directions that describe particular dances
in general terms (Hernández Araico, “Código,” “Coros,” “Música”; Ortiz, Musa). In the auto
sacramental El divino Narciso (Divine Narcissus), for example, we also find numerous references
that illustrate the use of particular musical styles from the period, such as “cantando en tono
recitativo” (singing in recitative style) (cuadro 2, scene 5); “canta el último verso de las Coplas, y
lo demás representa” (sings the last verses of the stanzas, and represents the rest) (cuadro 3, scene
8); “Dentro, repite la Música, con tono triste, los ecos” (Music, inside, repeats the echos with a
sad tone) and “Dice Eco, con intercadencias furiosas” (Says Echo, with furious cadences) (cuadro 3,
scene 11); and the use of musico-​poetic echoes (cuadro 3, scene 11).These examples are closely
related not only to the overall baroque aesthetics, but also, and most importantly, to the develop-
ment of a Spanish operatic tradition led at the time by Calderón de la Barca and the composer
Juan Hidalgo (Ortiz, Musa 62).
The relationship between Sor Juana and opera in New Spain is yet another topic that awaits
a thorough examination. Musicologist Louise Stein, for example, has indicated that the tonada
(song)4 “Bellisimo Narciso” (Most Beautiful Narcissus), which appears in both El divino Narciso
(Divine Narcissus) and between acts in Los empeños de una casa (House of Trials), was originally
composed for La púrpura de la rosa (The Purple Rose) (1659), a collaboration between Calderón
and Hidalgo (Stein xii–​xiii).5 This tonada will then reappear in Calderón’s play Eco y Narciso
(Echo and Narcissus) (1661), and yet again in the Peruvian version of Calderón’s La púrpura de la
rosa in 1701, this time with music by Juan Hidalgo and Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco. Hernández
Araico supports the idea of this musical-​poetic borrowing and goes further by proposing that
La púrpura de la rosa may have been performed in New Spain with Sor Juana’s Loa 381 as a prel-
ude (“Venus”). Although there is no historical record of such performance, Hernández Araico
provides a convincing analysis of the intertextuality between Sor Juana’s and Calderón’s texts.
If her hypothesis turns out to be correct, this would put Sor Juana in direct contact with the
development of an operatic tradition in New Spain.
Convents in both Spain and the Americas cultivated the development and performance of
villancicos. St. Teresa of Avila’s letters reveal her enthusiasm for the genre and demonstrate how
these compositions were frequently exchanged among convents (Ortiz, Musa 26). The singing
of villancicos written by nuns became a common practice in colonial convents; unfortunately,
most of these texts (both musical and poetic) are now lost, and of those surviving examples, the
great majority came to us as anonymous texts. In this regard, Sor Juana is an exception to the
rule. In the second volume of her Obras completas, Méndez Plancarte includes twelve cycles of
Sor Juana’s villancicos, five groups of letras sagradas, and ten additional villancico cycles which
he attributes to her, for a total of 232 poetic texts written between 1676 and 1691.
Sor Juana’s villancicos were written for the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca,
for the celebration of the Office of Matins, in cycles of eight or nine pieces, following the
liturgical division of this canonical hour into three nocturnes.6 Like most villancicos from the
period, Sor Juana’s are characterized by the use of a distinctive dynamic rhythm, the inclusion
of dance elements, and a rich theatrical quality (Hernández Araico, “Poesía” and “Coros”). In
fact, Hernández Araico reminds us that for Dario Puccini, Sor Juana’s villancicos are “libretos de
ópera devota” (librettos for religious opera) and for Robert Stevenson, “un embrión de drama
lírico” (a germ of a lyrical drama) (“Coros”).
The musicalization of these texts during the colonial period occurred in two different
phases:  first, during Sor Juana’s lifetime, when the original compositions were performed at
the cathedrals listed above; and a second period following her death, primarily throughout the
eighteenth century. Of the first group, we know the names of the cathedral chapelmasters who
composed the music for her twelve cycles: José de Agurto y Loaysa (Mexico City, 1647–​1688),

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Mario A. Ortiz

Antonio de Salazar (Puebla, 1679–​1688; Mexico City, 1688–​1715), Miguel Matheo de Dallo y
Lana (Puebla, 1688–​1705), and Matheo Vallados (Oaxaca, 1668–​1707) (Stevenson, “Rapports”;
“Coadjutors”). Unfortunately, with the exception of an incomplete vocal part, which Aurelio
Tello discovered in the Cathedral of Oaxaca, no music has survived (“Sor Juana”). In addition,
the level of interaction that Sor Juana may have had with Cathedral composers is unknown. An
extant document from the Hieronymite convent (“Autos hechos”) shows that for the musi-
cal examination of an aspirant to the position of Cantora (Song Mistress), the chapelmasters
Antonio de Salazar and Joseph de Loaysa came to the convent to conduct the examination; Sor
Juana herself is one of the nuns who signs the document. Could this have been an opportunity
for Sor Juana to talk to the composers about the musicalization of her villancicos (cf. Ortiz, “Sor
Juana en Guatemala”)?
Fortunately, we have a relatively good number of surviving musical settings from the
eighteenth century, all from cathedrals outside of Mexico. Several musicologists devoted
to the rescue of colonial music in general have prepared important musical catalogues and
anthologies. These have included several musicalizations of Sor Juana’s villancicos, although
in most instances the editors did not identify Sor Juana as the author of the poetic texts
(Claro Valdés; García Muñoz; García Muñoz and Roldán; Lehnhoff, “Villancicos”; Lemmon;
Perdomo Escobar; and Stevenson, Renaissance). A significant step in recovery of these surviv-
ing musical scores took place in 1995, the musicologist Aurelio Tello identified and cata-
logued fourteen of Sor Juana’s villancicos. Among the composers whom Tello recognized
were Matías Durango, Antonio Durán de la Mota, Matheo Tollis de la Roca, Juan de Araujo,
Roque Cerutti, Theodoro de Ayala, Ignacio Ortiz de Zárate, y Rafael Antonio Castellanos.
Two years later, researchers Carlos Senoae and Andrés Eichmann added an appendix to
Tello’s publication, which included seven additional compositions that they had discovered
in the National Archive of Bolivia, Sucre, as well as important archival references missing
in Tello’s study.7 Bernardo Illari added four more compositions from Bolivia, and prepared
a valuable study on Sor Juana’s presence in the Bolivian archive in general, and on the
five musical settings by Manuel de Mesa (d. 1773), highlighting the significance of these
works in the development of a criollo (Creole) identity. An important result of the work by
Tello, Senoae, Eichmann, and Illari was the production in 1999 of the first CD devoted to
Sor Juana’s villancicos, Le Phénix du Mexique: Villancicos de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (The
Phoenix of Mexico: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Carols).8
Building upon the discoveries of most of the musicologists above, Pérez-​Amador published
a general list of musical settings of Sor Juana’s villancicos (“De los villancicos”).9 Pérez-​Amador
also relied on the work by Paul Laird and David Martínez, who several years earlier had already
demonstrated that several of Sor Juana’s villancicos were in fact not her works, since they also
appear in other archives (from the Americas or Spain) set to music years before Sor Juana’s pub-
lications (Laird, Laird and Martínez). Thus, Pérez-​Amador catalogues a total of eleven works of
dubious authorship and twenty-​two musical settings of authentic Sor Juana’s poems, including
villancicos, letras para ser cantadas, and the opening chorus for one of her loas.10
The Guatemala Cathedral Archives (Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala
“Francisco de Paula García Peláez”) became another major colonial center where Sor Juana
attracted the attention of several composers in the eighteen century. Here we find a total col-
lection of fifteen of her villancicos, twelve of which had not been previously identified and,
therefore, had not appeared in Pérez-​Amador’s list of twenty-​two settings (Ortiz, “Sor Juana en
Guatemala.”).11 Interestingly, Sor Juana’s name appears on the covers of several compositions,
although the villancicos in question are not hers. Most importantly, Rafael Antonio Castellanos
(d. 1791) is the composer of eleven of the fifteen Guatemalan villancicos, dated 1765–​1790,

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making him the colonial composer with the largest number of extant musical settings of Sor
Juana’s villancicos to date.12
Despite this relatively large number of settings by a single composer, the dates of the com-
positions, as they appear in the manuscripts, indicate that no two of them were performed for
the same feast on the same year. Moreover, there are cases in which the composer slightly modi-
fied the poetic text to use it for a holiday different than that for which Sor Juana had written
it. Also, the villancico “Silencio, atención” (Silence, Attention) (Assumption, 1676, OC 2.220)
appears with two different poetic versions, one which follows the original Sor Juana text rather
faithfully and another in which the original is greatly modified and adapted to the feast of the
Immaculate Conception (Ortiz, “Sor Juana en Guatemala”). There is yet another version of
this same villancico, with the title “Oíd el concierto” (Listen to the Concert), by Manuel de
Mesa, among the villancicos preserved in Bolivia.The poetic variants of Mesa’s version illustrate
another case of poetic adaptation in order to suit the needs of another holiday, in this case that
of the Feast of Guadalupe (Illari 294–​95).13
The liberty with which composers approached the poetic texts, as well as the common prac-
tice of mixing villancicos by different poets, clearly tell us that they did not conceive the origi-
nal poetic cycles as a single poetic unity, but rather as separate texts they could use according to
their immediate needs. For literary scholars, who are often concerned with the preparation of
critical editions, this concept of a poetic text that was subject to continuous change represents
a challenge. When confronted by it, during the preparation of the critical edition of Sor Juana’s
complete works, Méndez Plancarte, for example, decided to use the Mexican booklets of the
cycles that were made at the time of their original performances, rather than the texts that were
published in Sor Juana’s volumes in Spain. He believed that they were more faithful to what Sor
Juana originally wrote. However, as recent research has shown, several of these “authentic” texts
were not written by the Mexican poet. Sor Juana left us a copy of one of these Mexican pub-
lications, for the Feast of San Pedro Nolasco (1677), in which she writes, “Estos [villancicos] de
la misa no son míos; Juana Inés de la Cruz” (OC 2; plate between 48–​49) (These [carols] for the
Mass are not mine; Juana Inés de la Cruz). It is likely then, that these booklets did reflect what
was sung at the cathedrals, but not necessarily that the composers were faithful to Sor Juana’s
texts because they did not see the cycles as an indissoluble poetic unit.

Sor Juana, musical theorist

The other major area of musical activity in Sor Juana’s life, that of musical theorist, forces us to
look into the question of her musical education. Regrettably, we do not have any documenta-
tion regarding whether Sor Juana received any type of musical instruction while at court or
in the convent. Given the common practice for nuns to receive musical instruction in the
convents, Robert Stevenson suggests that she may have taken lessons from the Mexico City
Cathedral chapelmasters Francisco López y Capillas (1654–​1673), Joseph de Loaysa y Agurto
(c. 1676–​1688), and Antonio de Salazar (1688–​1715) (Stevenson, “Rapports” 9 n. 24). Even if
we knew that she received lessons from these teachers, we would still need to ask whether the
instruction was purely practical –​i.e., the performance of musical instruments –​or theoretical –​
i.e., theory and composition.
While society encouraged educated women to study and practice musical performance, it
restricted women from delving into musical theory, a subject exclusive to the world of men. Sor
Juana found in her reading of Cerone’s musical treatise, El melopeo y maestro. Tractado de musica
theorica y pratica (The Perfect Musician and the Teacher: Treatise on the Theory and Practice
of Music) (Naples, 1613), an even stronger disapproval of women learning music.14 The Italian

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Mario A. Ortiz

theorist considered the practice of music for women more “pernicious” that learning reading
and writing. Ironically, in one of the few notes that she jotted in her surviving personal copy of
the treatise, she signs ironically: “Su discípula, Juana Inés de la Cruz” (Your disciple, Juana Inés
de la Cruz).15
There is, nonetheless, no doubt whatsoever of the vast knowledge of musical theory that she
acquired, from books, if not from other sources. Four treatises have been linked in relationship
to Sor Juana’s access to musical theory: the already-​cited El melopeo by Cerone (1566–​1625);
Arte de canto llano (Art of Plainchant) (Madrid, 1648), by Francisco de Montanos (c. 1528–​after
1592); Musurgia Universalis sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni (Universal Art of Music or the Great
Art of Consonance and Dissonance) (Rome, 1650), by Athanasius Kircher (c.1601–​1680); and
El porqué de la música (The Reason for Music) (Alcalá de Henares, 1672), by Andrés Lorente
(1624–​1703). Irving Leonard confirms that the treatises by Montanos and Lorente, for example,
were available in Mexico (“On the Mexican Book Trade” 419). While Stevenson supports the
thesis that Cerone was Sor Juana’s primary source of learning, Long adds that Lorente was an
equally important treatise for the Mexican nun (Sor Juana 24; Stevenson, Music). A thorough
examination of Sor Juana’s references to musical theory in her works, however, supports the
conclusion that Cerone was her primary source (Ortiz, “Musa” and Musa).
Sor Juana’s profound knowledge of musical theory gave her a strong foundation to develop a
sophisticated musical theory of her own. Mario Lavista, for example, praises Sor Juana by calling
her musicus, in the medieval sense of musician-​philosophers, to distinguish them from musician-​
performers (201).16 Similarly, Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling points out that Sor Juana’s interests
in music are above all from a philosophical perspective (Humanisme 150). These philosophical
foundations in Sor Juana’s musical thought are evident in two passages of her Respuesta a Sor
Filotea (The Answer), in which she demonstrates how the study of music is one of the steps of
“the ladder of the humane arts and sciences” used in her pursuit of reaching the “summit of
Holy Theology” (Answer 53) These musical examples are not original; rather, Sor Juana found
them in Cerone’s El melopeo (Ortiz, “Musa” 249–​51). The second of these passages, whose
sources Raimundo Lida traces to the late eleventh century (456), is based on the biblical pas-
sage (Genesis 18.23–​33) in which Abraham intercedes with God for the salvation of the cities
of Sodom and Gomorrah, providing that a certain number of just individuals can be found in
them. The numbers in the biblical text decrease (from 50 to 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally to 10),
which Cerone interprets as mathematical proportions (50:45, 45:40, and so on) that correlate
to musical intervals (from a minor second to the octave). Thus, Sor Juana’s selection of this text
is consistent with her interest in musical harmony, intervals, and mathematics, all of which fall
within the domain of the philosophical foundations of musical theory prevalent in her time, and
with Pythagorean theory in particular (Ortiz, “Musa” 249–​51).
The use of musical imagery pervades Sor Juana’s poetic and dramatic output.This has been
the subject of several studies that have provided insightful commentaries that have enriched
our understanding of Sor Juana as a musical theorist (Corripio Rivero; Lavista; Miranda;
Ortiz, “Musical Settings”; Long, Sor Juana; López de Mariscal). Most of the attention has been
focused on her Romance 21, “Después de estimar mi amor” (After Expressing my Love), in
which Sor Juana addresses the Countess of Paredes and excuses herself for not sending to
her the musical treatise that Sor Juana wrote, Caracol (Snail Shell). Calleja also brought our
attention to this work in his “Aprobación” (Approval) of the Fama y obras póstumas, praising
it in such terms as to affirm that that work alone would have sufficed to make her famous
(27–​28). Unfortunately, Sor Juana’s treatise is lost and no one has been able to verify its exist-
ence, beyond the references by the poet and her biographer (Méndez Plancarte 2. xliv; Orta
Velázquez 197–​98; Flores 50–​54).17

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While Calleja claims that Sor Juana wrote the treatise for pedagogical reasons, particularly for
her religious sisters, Pamela Long argues that the Mexican nun did not have any interest in mat-
ters of teaching. Instead, she suggests, Sor Juana wrote it “to simplify for herself the complexities
of composition” (12). Although we do not know for certain what the purpose or contents of
Caracol were, we can still turn to Sor Juana’s Romance 21, if not to reconstruct, to at least try
to infer the nature of the treatise. In addition to extensive praise to the Countess and her hus-
band, the poem employs paralipsis (the rhetorical device by which speakers emphasize an idea
by pretending that they will not speak about it) as a strategy to display her deep knowledge of
musical theory (López de Mariscal). Through a long series of rhetorical questions, Sor Juana
highlights a number of important issues regarding musical theory. At first sight, the long list of
musical terms in the poem seems not to follow any logical organization. However, one can still
discern an internal structure that corresponds to the two main areas into which musical treatises
from the period were divided: rhythm and harmony (Ortiz, Musa 76–​77).
Harmony is undoubtedly the main focus of Romance 21, and this must have been a central
topic in Caracol. Sor Juana concludes her musical lesson by giving us a significant clue about
her treatise: Harmony, she says, is a spiral, rather than a circle; hence the title of “caracol” (snail
shell) she chose for her work (lines 121–​28). Given the centrality of the concept of the spiral
in Sor Juana’s harmonic conception, several critics have suggested the influence of the already
cited Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (Universal Art of Music), specifically because of Kircher’s
interest in acoustics and the use of snail shaped objects (Maza 21; Paz, Traps 316–​17; Luciani,
Literary 116; Long, Sor Juana 119). Long adds that Sor Juana’s daily life experience, such as her
observations of spiral shaped objects, may have been what inspired her use of the visual image
of the spiral: the staircase leading to the high choir in the convent, the tuning pegs of string
instruments, or the human ear (Sor Juana 119).
Rather than a visual image based on acoustics or other objects, the understanding of the
concept of spiral as it relates to harmony must come from musical theory itself. Corripio Rivero,
on the one hand, suggests that Sor Juana may have borrowed this idea from Cerone’s lengthy
discussions of Guido D’Arezzo’s hand –​a medieval pedagogical system for teaching solfeggio
(195). On the other hand, Esperanza Pulido links the spiral to Johan Sebastian Bach’s musical
compositions using equal temperament, albeit five decades later, and on the theory of musical
harmonics (56–​57). Long, partly following Pulido, adds that Sor Juana was able to perceive “the
spiral nature of the circle of fifths” as the new major-​minor tonal system was evolving in her
time (Sor Juana 34–​36). In a similar vein, Ricardo Miranda concludes: “¿Podemos imaginar que
el círculo de quintas, estructura que actúa como base del sistema armónico-​tonal de nuestra
música, es en realidad una espiral?” (91) [Could we imagine that the circle of fifths, structure
that acts as the basis of the tonal system of our music, is in reality a spiral?].
Musicologist Carlos Flores proposes a more convincing thesis when he suggests that Sor
Juana may have known a Mexican musical treatise by Juan Matías (c. 1617–​1667), chapelmaster
in Oaxaca’s Cathedral. According to Matías, whose harmonic theory was based on the use of
equal temperament, harmony could be reduced to a circle of fifths, while Sor Juana defended
the spiral, which was more consistent from a Pythagorean perspective (53–​54). Regardless of
whether Sor Juana knew Matías’s work or not, the analysis of her own theoretical questions
posed in Romance 21, vis-​à-​vis Cerone’s theories on harmony, reveal that Sor Juana was indeed
an ardent defender of Pythagorean musical thought. As such, she decries in the poem the loss
of mathematical purity in musical intervals that was found in temperament systems of her time
(Ortiz, Musa 87).
Sor Juana’s musical theory reflects an aesthetics that is firmly grounded in Pythagorean
mathematics as well as in Neo-​Platonic definitions on beauty. It is in her “Encomiástico poema

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a los años de la Excelentísima Señora Condesa de Galve” (Laudatory Poem on the Birthday of
the Most Excellent Countess of Galve), also known as Loa 384, where Sor Juana once again
turns her attention to musical matters and reiterates her defense of the mathematical purity
of musical intervals. The theoretical premise that Sor Juana proposes in this work is the well-​
known Neo-​Platonic correspondence between Harmony and Beauty. Within this framework,
the intellect, rather than the senses, is the only means to perceive the intrinsic perfection of both
harmony and beauty (Ortiz, Musa 97).

Future directions
There is still much work that needs to be done with regard to Sor Juana and music. As I have
pointed out, more archival research will hopefully lead to the discovery of documents that can
provide more definite answers about Sor Juana’s musical practices and the content of Caracol,
among other questions. Also, the study of music in her dramatic output and Sor Juana’s pos-
sible connection to operatic developments in New Spain are two more areas that merit further
exploration. Moreover, we must continue our search for more musical settings of Sor Juana’s
villancicos, during and after her lifetime. It is regrettable that to date there are no critical edi-
tions of the musicalizations that have so far been identified. Results of recent research con-
ducted primarily by musicologists on these musicalizations suggest an urgent need to prepare
a new critical edition of the poetic texts as well. From a truly interdisciplinary perspective, this
edition would take into account the intrinsic musico-​poetic nature of this genre. It is necessary,
as well, to analyze the villancicos as part of the rich and spectacular liturgical context for which
they were written. Finally, the study of musical theory in Sor Juana’s work should be expanded
to include Sor Juana’s poetics as a whole. I strongly believe that her intellectual pursuit of music
theory is simply a part of a bigger picture related to her interest in aesthetics, which is apparent
throughout her works.

Notes
1 The bibliography of critical studies on Sor Juana’s villancicos, for example, has grown extensively, particu-
larly in the last two decades. Margo Glantz, Mabel Moraña, Dario Puccini, Georgina Sabat de Rivers,
Octavio Paz, and Martha Lilia Tenorio, among others, have devoted considerable attention to the literary
study of this genre. The most comprehensive work to date is, undoubtedly, Tenorio’s Los villancicos de Sor
Juana (Sor Juana’s Carols), which provides a thorough philological reading of Sor Juana’s works and an
in-​depth examination of the socio-​cultural context in which they flourished.
2 See, for instance, Muriel, Cultura; Ortiz, “Euterpe “; Lledías, “Actividad”; and Lavrin.
3 In all fairness, Nervo’s study precedes by several decades important research on the musicalizations of
Sor Juana’s texts for the Mexican cathedrals, to which I will refer.
4 Definition of “tonada”: “In the 17th century tonada, tono and sonada were frequently used to refer to
a variety of short secular or sacred songs for solo voice, as distinct from the villancico, although tonos
and tonadas for two or even more voices became fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries”
(“Tonada”).
5 I adopt the translation by David Pasto.
6 Some cycles include a few extra villancicos that were sung during the celebration of the Mass following
the Office of Matins.
7 Tello’s work was originally published in 1995 and reprinted in 1996 and 1997. I cite from the last ver-
sion, which includes the appendix by Senoae and Eichmann.
8 In addition to the works by Manuel de Mesa, the CD includes musical settings by Andrés Flores, Blas
Tardío Guzmán, Antonio Durán de la Mota, Juan de Araujo, and Roque Ceruti.
9 Unfortunately, Pérez-​Amador did not consult the last reimpression of Tello’s study, which included the
aforementioned appendix by Seoane and Eichmann.

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10 Pérez-​Amador does not claim the discovery of any of these works, but builds upon the studies previ-
ously cited. The chorus mentioned above belongs to the Loa de la Concepción (Loa to the Conception),
which was identified by Illari (291).
11 All the information on this paragraph comes from this study, which also includes a detailed catalogue
of the works.
12 Dieter Lehnhoff ’s doctoral dissertation, “The Villancicos of the Guatemalan Composer Raphael
Antonio Castellanos,” and monograph, Rafael Antonio Castellanos: Vida y obra de un músico guatemalteco
(Rafael Antonio Castellanos: Life and Works of a Guatemalan Musician), are to date the most thorough
studies on Castellanos. Although his dissertation includes a detailed catalogue of his compositions (31–​
107), Lehnhoff does not deal with the authorship of the poetic texts; therefore, he does not mention
Sor Juana in his works. Only one of the eleven villancicos by Castellanos had been previously identified
by Tello (“Sor Juana” 16).
13 The complete poetic text of this version appears in Eichmann 258–​60.
14 According to Cerone, “Melopeo” means “músico perfecto” (perfect musician) (219, 287).
15 Sor Juana’s copy is preserved at the Biblioteca del Congreso de la Unión in Mexico City; a facsimile
of Cerone’s page (285) where we find Sor Juana’s handwritten note, the only one in the entire book
(284–​85), appears in Abreu Gómez.
16 The most important medieval source for this definition of musicus is Boethius, who writes: “That per-
son is a musician who exhibits the faculty of forming judgments according to speculation or reason rel-
ative and appropriate to music concerning modes and rhythms, the genera of songs, consonances, and
all things which are to be explained subsequently, as well as concerning the songs of the poets” (51).
17 In Doña Catalina Xuárez Marcayda, primera esposa de Hernán Cortés y su familia,” Francisco Fernández
del Castillo writes that during one of the lootings of the Convent of San Jerónimo in the nineteenth
century, some of Sor Juana’s belongings, including the music treatise she wrote, were hidden in the
basements of the Hotel Imperial or the Hotel Lascuráin, but after that no one else saw it again (92).

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19
LOA TO EL DIVINO NARCISO
The costs of critiquing the conquest

Ivonne del Valle

As experts on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz know, it is increasingly difficult to keep up with the
numerous studies on the works of one of the few women who in the seventeenth century
wrote plays and poetry displaying formal skills and an intellectual brilliance that equal or surpass
those of her male contemporaries.This chapter provides a review of the literature on the Loa to
the auto sacramental (mystery play) El divino Narciso (The Divine Narcissus, 1691) which, along
with the Respuesta (Answer) and Primero sueño (Dream), is considered one of Sor Juana’s most
significant works, not only intellectually but politically (Sabat de Rivers, “Divino” 852). This
is not, however, an exhaustive appraisal; it provides a summary of two of the main interpreta-
tive frameworks around the loa and the reasons for their differing positions. These contrasting
approaches debate, on the one hand, the politics behind Sor Juana’s use of religious myths and
ancient cultures, and on the other, the relationship between the loa and the auto. With the
support of existing scholarship, I offer a reading of the loa and the auto that pushes one of the
available interpretations to its limits.
The loa and auto El divino Narciso were written  –​under orders and to be performed in
Madrid, explains Sor Juana through the voice of Religión (Religion), one of the characters
in the loa (172)  –​to celebrate Corpus Christi, an important day in the Christian calendar
commemorating the Last Supper and the transubstantiation of the bread and wine Christ
offered to his disciples into his own body and blood. In the Spanish American colonies Corpus
Christi became a vehicle to demonstrate and enact the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
The loa is a synthesis and allegory of the different stages of conquest from the reading of the
Requerimiento, to the military battles and posterior evangelization (Glantz, Borrones 178–​84).1
In it, América and Occidente (America and Occident) stand for the indigenous pre-​Hispanic
world interrupted in the midst of the celebration of the “dios de las semillas” (god of seeds) that,
in its consumption of an Aztec god in the form of seeds mixed with blood, offers a parallel to
the Eucharist. The arrival of Celo (Zeal), who represents military conquest, and Religión, who
takes over after the indigenous people have been defeated in order to evangelize them, suppos-
edly puts an end to paganism.
The loa was a brief dramatic performance that served as an introduction to the auto, a pas-
sion play, but the connection between the two runs deeper than this apparently weak sequen-
tial bond because the latter is the allegory through which Religión explains to the newly
conquered indigenous people, América and Occidente, the mystery of the Eucharist in order

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to convince them to leave behind the falsity of their practice of consumption of their god (the
“dios de las semillas”) and to embrace the true religion. That is, the relationship between what
initially serves as a mere introduction (loa) and the play proper (auto) is reversed, because the
characters in the loa are responsible for judging the success of the auto.
The loa could have been a straightforward, triumphant representation of military and reli-
gious conquest, but Sor Juana complicates this reading by (a) creating a parallel between the
Eucharist and teocualo (“god is eaten”), the ceremony in which one of the Aztec gods was con-
sumed, and (b) giving the indigenous characters voice and free will, which allows the audience
a glimpse into a fictitious, yet challenging and plausible response to the conquest.2 At the end
of the loa, the indigenous characters are eager to know the “true” god of seeds, but by then
the audience has already heard América and Occidente refusing to give up their gods in spite
of their military defeat (“y así, aunque cautivo gima, /​¡no me podrás impedir, /​que acá en mi
corazón diga, que adoro al gran Dios de las semillas!” (157) [Although in grief, I now lament,
/​a prisoner, your cruel might /​has limits. You cannot prevent /​my saying here within my
heart /​I worship the great God of Seeds]).3 Since the response of the characters of the loa is
not included at the end of the auto that explained to them the mystery of this new, true god, a
conclusion is never reached.
To complicate things further, and in what is a typical baroque gesture, instead of tackling
the Eucharist as a story on its own, in the auto Sor Juana creates a tension between form and
content when, from what she calls the “humanas letras” [human letters], she elects the myth of
Narcissus as the structure to which divine scripture would give another meaning by turning
Narcissus into a Christ figure. This Narcissus falls in love with his image (Human Nature, per-
sonified as Naturaleza Humana in the play) and “sacrifices” himself to this love –​turning first
into his namesake flower and later into the host.
Together the loa and the auto constitute allegories of Christianity’s displacement of old
mythologies –​“al nuevo misterio cedan los antiguos” (292) [let the old mysteries give way to
the new one] chant the characters of the auto at the end of the representation, an injunction
that seems to apply to the preceding loa as well.4 Around this alleged triumph of Christianity
and of Sor Juana’s alliances –​to herself? to ideas? to the indigenous peoples? –​two principal
trends in the criticism of the loa and the auto emerge.
The auto sacramental provides a Christianized version of Greek mythology, while the setting
of the introductory loa is the violent domination of Aztec religion by Spanish Christianity. To
treat the three distinct cultural domains articulated in the play (Aztec, Christian, Greek) with
equality, as if they had the same value, Sor Juana ends up renouncing their specificity, thereby
“sacrificing” them all. This allows for the creation of a possible common ground for these cul-
tures in which none of them is the model or universal.
In his analysis of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals,” Michel de Certeau creates
the concept of “triumphal loss” with reference to Montaigne’s depiction of the war customs
of the savage nations of the New World, who fight not to conquer, but for the glory of prov-
ing their worth and valor. Montaigne tells of the warriors captured, put to the test by their
enemies in order to extract from them a confession –​that of having been defeated (295–​97).
Even though the confession would save their life, no one would do this, preferring instead
to be killed and eaten. Montaigne finds the ultimate, poetic challenge of the warrior to his
enemies in the song he sings to them, refusing to submit and reminding them that they are in
fact about to eat, in him, the flesh of their own ancestors (299). By dooming himself and not
admitting his enemies’ victory, the “savage” remains true to his honor and group. That is why,
for de Certeau, when seen from the perspective of the warrior who lost the battle, cannibalism
is a triumph (75–​76).

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In the logic of these “triumphal losses,” through the poetics of her “song,” Sor Juana chooses
to win by losing when allowing teocualo to be confused with the Eucharist. With this move,
she seems to be saying that equality was only possible through ruining one’s own body, broadly
understood here as the specificity of the Aztec practices she recaptured and placed in relation to
the Eucharist. However to say that what properly belongs to Sor Juana is the Aztec content of
the loa, and not Christianity, or the Greek myth of the auto, is a stretch. In a way, what Sor Juana
is demonstrating is how the three cultures are her own, or how none of them is. The estrange-
ment of all cultural practices transformed by wild analogies and comparisons (the Eucharist and
the myth of Narcissus are as affected by Sor Juana’s rhetorical force as Aztec beliefs) reduced
them to the bare structure that made them all possible. This core that joins the three cases is
disorienting in its absence of cultural particularities. As we will see, it is only through taking
all mythologies (Greek, Christian, Aztec) to a basic and neutral area –​sacrifice –​that parity is
achieved, but in doing so, what was specific to each of these cultures is inevitably lost or ren-
dered accessory.

Western archive/​Mexican archive? Pro-​Christian/​pro-​Aztec?

One line of critical debate centers around whether or not Sor Juana consciously pursued a criol-
lista agenda. To respond to readings of Sor Juana’s oeuvre that deny her participation in Creole
imaginings of a possible Mexican patria (nation), Stephanie Merrim counters David Brading’s
and other similar interpretations of Sor Juana by emphasizing her contributions to what she calls
a “Mexican archive” (The Spectacular 193 and 220–​24).5 In his monumental The First America,
tracing the intellectual history in the Spanish colonies that led to independence and autonomy,
and in the midst of his discussion of El divino Narciso, Brading compares Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora’s triumphal arch, Theatro de virtudes políticas (Theater of Political Virtues) to Sor Juana’s
Neptuno alegórico (Allegorical Neptune) –​both written to celebrate the arrival of the new vice-
roy Marquis de la Laguna in Mexico City in 1680 –​and concludes that she “did not contribute
to the growth of creole patriotism other than to figure in her own right as a cultural icon, since
both her ambition and talent found expression and fulfilment within the universal tradition of
Spanish literature” (373). While there is no question as to the significant differences between
the two works from which Brading seems to derive his conclusion, critics such as Merrim,
Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel, and Georgina Sabat de Rivers have attempted to demonstrate
the opposite –​that Sor Juana rightly belongs to the group that put forward a historical critique
of the conquest and that, in order to do so she engaged the indigenous past in daring ways.
More recently, Carlos Jáuregui has rejected what he terms the somewhat “hyperbolic” readings
of Sabat de Rivers and others who would like to transform Sor Juana into something she was
not: an Americanist or nationalist. These critics, he says, “confuse the translation of difference
with the celebration or vindication of alterity” (“Cannibalism” 86).
Creole consciousness or patriotism for Sor Juana could hardly be considered a positive claim.
This early and continuous form of nationalism has been recognized since at least the 1970s
as constitutive of the problem of colonialism and not its solution; however, critical appraisal
of Sor Juana’s participation in these matters might still be important. Beyond the question of
Creole patriotism, such an assessment has important implications for what Sor Juana considered
worthy of her attention. Brading’s and Jáuregui’s conclusions imply that Sor Juana contented
herself with her participation in the “universal tradition of Spanish literature,” not a small feat,
but one that in her case implied leaving more political concerns to others (Sigüenza y Góngora,
for example), as if she were ignorant of or indifferent to the conditions of colonial life both
for criollas/​os like herself and the indigenous population. At stake is Sor Juana’s awareness of

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and concern for the condition of the indigenous populations in relation to the Hispanic city
in which she lived. Of course, any argument on this topic must derive from Sor Juana’s works.
Along with this scholarly debate, there is another related polemic, between literary critics
who read the loa and auto as representations of the success of Christianity for which the indig-
enous religious practices might have served as prefigurations (Ellis; Marini Palmieri; Patterson,
“Jesuit”; Jáuregui, “Cannibalism”; Grossi, “La loa”) and those who insist on these works as an
apology for the New World (Benoist; Glantz, Borrones; Sabat de Rivers, En busca; Zanelli). This
latter group does not propose that Sor Juana challenged Christianity, but more specifically, that
she was not as invested in this aspect (the religious battle) as in showcasing the free will, ration-
ality, and absolute parity of the indigenous population in relation to Spaniards. A third position
would be that of critics who emphasize Sor Juana’s ambiguity, her ability to assert apparently
contradictory arguments in order to activate the audience’s reason and judgment (Balsa; Díaz
Balsera, “Mal de amor”; Benoist). Whether this ambiguity favors one resolution or the other
(pro-​Christian, pro-​Aztec) depends on the critic in question. Benoist, for example, reads the
ambiguity as a tactic, but her reading implies that all interpretations that emphasize uncertainty
believe that Sor Juana was suppressing something potentially problematic. In this view, all critics
who insist on the opacity of Sor Juana’s work are advocating for interpretations that, had she
been more direct about them, would have been controversial for her time.
Important for these critics is just how controversial these hypothetical positions might have
been. In Jáuregui’s and Brading’s assessment, Sor Juana is mostly interested in securing for herself
a place in the Hispanic intellectual world. As Jaúregui puts it, the auto “is a good example of this
participatory yet differential practice of the letrado colonial elite … a symbolic balancing act of
cultural and political submission and a claim of peripheral authority” (“Cannibalism” 96). Sor
Juana herself left important traces that corroborate this claim. In fact, one of the most direct
gestures of Creole displacement and substitution for the indigenous comes precisely in one of
the last scenes of the loa to El divino Narciso, when Sor Juana takes the place of América –​that
is, the “india bizarra” (indigenous woman of poised self-​possession) who from the beginning
stands for the indigenous population (139). Here Sor Juana, as the writer of the play, has sup-
planted the indigenous population to address her Spanish audience using this disguise: “a sus
ingenios, /​a quien humilde suplica /​el mío, que le perdonen /​el querer con toscas líneas /​
describir tanto misterio” (173–​74) [and from /​their poets, I most humbly beg forgiveness for
my crude attempt, /​desiring with these awkward lines /​to represent the Mystery]. These lines
seem to confirm Jáuregui’s claim, threatening to transform all of América’s utterances into ficti-
tious play, a masquerade used by the writer to demonstrate her wit and craft across the Atlantic.
As Jáuregui says, it would be wrong to see in Sor Juana “an indigenist” or “an intellectual
from the tradition of the oppressed” (“Cannibalism” 94). He points out that the Baroque incor-
porates difference, but does so in the name of empire and excludes “the material conditions
that make the self-​celebratory imperial culture possible. Non-​allegorical Indians do not offer
themselves up like the rest of the Baroque cornucopia” (“Cannibalism” 86, 99). Nevertheless,
since there are many ways to translate and incorporate indigenous materials, the particular
means through which Sor Juana tackles these two tasks remain significant. As Margo Glantz and
Sabat de Rivers remind us, one has to ask why Sor Juana, with the extensive culture she had at
her disposal, would venture precisely into the controversial topic of indigenous cannibalism to
create a parallel with the Eucharist, and why would she do it in the highly ambiguous way she
did (Glantz, Borrones 181; Sabat de Rivers, En busca 269, 283).
Sor Juana probably wrote El divino Narciso in the same year that she penned the Respuesta, her
fierce response to the admonitions of her religious superiors following the publication of the
Carta Atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena). If Sor Juana appears to have been deeply conscious

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Ivonne del Valle

of her circumstances all along, since 1690 she had to be aware of her increasing vulnerability
due to realignments among members of the local elite who patronized her and her writing,
and of the fact that her status depended heavily on decisions made in the Spanish metropolis.
Her understanding of the complex power relations between Mexico City and Madrid, and the
written and unwritten rules between the two, is betrayed by the defense of her work in the loa.
As if responding to those who might consider it “improper” (“¿Pues no ves la impropiedad /​
de que en Méjico [sic] se escriba /​y en Madrid se represente?” (171) [That you should write
in Mexico /​for royal patrons don’t you see /​to be an impropriety]) says the character Celo of
the auto, she declares that her writing for Madrid is not a daring move on her part (not “osadía”
[daring]), because there is nothing new in the anticipation that a work written in one place
would be useful in another, and that, in any case, she is only fulfilling a commission (172).

Conquest
The loa opens with a festive scene:  América and Occidente in regal attire share with the
audience their fervor as they anticipate the celebration of the “dios de las semillas.” While
Occidente refers to the sacrifices offered to their gods as “cruentos” (bloody), there is no other
hint that their ceremonies, their gods, or their way of life might be mistaken for, or exemplary
of, depraved, dubious morality (143).6 On the contrary, as both characters make perfectly clear,
they live in a royal, wealthy, and complex city; and among the many other gods they worship,
on that particular day they praise the most esteemed one –​the god of seeds who has sustained
them both in material and immaterial ways. Gold, says América, would be useless if they lacked
the food granted by the generosity of their god, who by making “manjar de sus carnes mismas”
(144–​45) [food out of his very flesh] purified their souls at the same time.7 Oddly enough,
although the play was written to be presented on Corpus Christi, since it never represents the
Eucharist directly, it would seem that the Eucharist to which it refers as Corpus Christi was
actually “teocualo,” that is, the body of the god of seeds, consumed by the Aztecs. If as has been
generally accepted by critics, Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana (Indian Monarchy) is the
source for Sor Juana’s “dios de las semillas” (Glantz, Borrones 178), she astutely omits the fact
that the blood used to make the edible statue of Huitzilopochtli was from children sacrificed
for the occasion. According to Torquemada, this was done to “denotar en la simplicidad y ino-
cencia de la criatura la del dios que representaba dicha estatua” (113) [signify in the simplicity
and innocence of the child that of the god the statue represented]. Sor Juana’s omission of this
information evinces the careful construction of her works.
From these lines the play moves on to present the conquest, which will soon interrupt the
festivities, from the perspective of this first moment in which a world exists in peace and in
order. América’s and Occidente’s dialogue presupposes a city, a complex religious system, a
civic and religious calendar, a proper government, and an adequate supply of food and wealth.
Nothing appears to be missing. The utterances, attitude, even the clothing Sor Juana bestows
on her characters (“indio galán, con corona,” “india bizarra con mantas y huipiles” (139)
[gallant-​looking Indian, wearing a crown, indigenous woman of poised self-​possesion, wear-
ing mantas and huipiles]) all denote a complete and coherent space, one might say an orderly
civilization.
As Miguel Balsa has remarked, there is symmetry between these characters and those who
represent Spain: Celo and Religión (57–​58). Along these lines Verónica Grossi reminds us that
the dialogue among these four characters is a “combate discursivo inter pares” (“La loa” 64) [dis-
cursive battle among equals]. There is no sign of the superiority of one group over the other,
or of some obvious corruption in any one group; the four characters are rational, free, and

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intelligent. In fact, if anyone appears a little obtuse it is perhaps Celo, who wages war against
the American characters when they refuse to pay heed to the first lines spoken by Religión
(presumably, reading to them the Requerimiento), commanding them to leave behind “el culto
profano” (the profane cult) that the devil had inflicted on them (147–​48). The excess in Sor
Juana’s translation of Aztec history for Spain (to follow Jáuregui’s assessment) comes in the form
of the indigenous points of view evidenced in their reactions before and after Celo’s military
response to their initial refusal. For América and Occidente, Religión’s goal is as “crazy” as it is
“impossible” (149).
On one hand, Celo’s and Religión’s response adds nothing new to the historical record
of things said and “known” about the New World’s inhabitants:  they claim idolatry is blind,
Occidente is barbarous, and that their cults were instigated by the devil (150 and 148); on the
other, there is an innovative interpretation of the Spanish military and religious conquest in the
words used by the American characters: “bárbaro,” “loco,” “ciego,” “abortos del cielo, “advenedi-
zas naciones” (152–​53) [barbarous, madman, blind, miscarriages of justice, arriviste nations]. As
Sabat de Rivers reminds us, by the time Sor Juana writes, for European minds America was the
land of gold and uncivilized indigenous groups (En busca 282–​83). Sor Juana explicitly rejects
these two stereotypes in which America was seen as a land of opportunity and wealth inhabited
by people who neither deserved nor understood this wealth, by creating discerning and articu-
late characters who reject gold in favor of sustenance from agriculture, perhaps a more direct
critique of the unstable agricultural situation and the inadequate food supply to the city that
would cause the important food riots of 1692.
Jáuregui and Brading are right about the Hispanic cultural milieu in which Sor Juana aspired
to participate. There is no question that she saw herself as what we might now refer to as an
intellectual, but perhaps she considered it equally important to show her Spanish peers an
image of themselves from across the Atlantic. Moreover, América and Occidente refuse to be
humbled after their military defeat, when América appears especially determined to follow her
gods: “pues aunque lloro cautiva /​mi libertad, mi albedrío /​con libertad más crecida /​adorará
mis deidades” (156–​57) [A weeping captive, I may mourn /​for liberty, yet my will grows /​
beyond these bonds; my heart is free, /​and I will worship my own gods]. She remains uncon-
vinced by the novelties Religión offers, determined to follow what for her is the coherent and
sensible order of the world –​her world.
We might say that there is nothing subversive in this translation of the indigenous world
created for a Hispanic audience since it can be viewed as faithful to history. We know from the
works of Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún that at the end of the sixteenth century,
evangelization was considered to have failed by those attempting to carry it out. Although Sor
Juana could not have been familiar with the then-​unpublished manuscripts of these religious
chroniclers, she certainly knew the indigenous world to which they referred, and she probably
saw some of the consequences of such failures.Yet, by 1691, when she was writing this play, the
negative assessment of Durán and many others had receded because, true conversion or not, the
colonial order, religion included, had already had more than a century to take hold, to become
a habit of sorts that could be taken for granted. At the end of the loa, inspired by the intellectual
challenge the new god represents and convinced by the similarities between their god and the
new one, Occidente and América willingly submit themselves to the dramatic representation
(the auto) through which Religión would introduce the new god to them. This, however, does
not negate what was said before, the echoing of Occidente’s and América’s threat to continue to
do as their will pleases in spite of or because of their captivity (156). The question is then, why
would Sor Juana need to court the Hispanic literary circles with such a strange representation
of the indigenous response to the Conquest?

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Toward the end of the loa, Religión states that the play is the result “de la obediencia … no
parto de la osadía” (172) [from my obedience, /​and not from any arrogance]. Jáuregui reads
this statement as referring to the questionable propriety, alluded to in the previous verses, of
writing a play in the Americas to represent it in Spain (97), and this is of course the obvious
reading: the distance between the place of production and the place of representation makes
it a daring dramatic project. There are different ways to interpret this “distance”: just as the
Requerimiento’s supposed message of inclusion arrives as violence and barbarity in the loa,
the message of indigenous evangelization and conversion might be distorted by the time it
arrives at its destination.
In Sor Juana’s last poem, the poet confirmed her recognition of this distortion through trans-
atlantic circulation. Her misrecognition of herself is evident in verses addressed to her readers in
Spain: “No soy yo la que pensáis, /​… /​y diversa de mí misma /​entre vuestras plumas ando”
(qtd. 91) [I am not at all what you think /​… /​and different from myself /​among your pens,
I go].8 On the basis of these lines, Martínez San-​Miguel puts forward a theory of writing and
reading in which, without disavowing what others say about her work, Sor Juana maintains
autonomy (“Colonial”). She evades self-​definition, since the meaning of “diversa de mí misma”
is never given any positive description that clarifies where this “diversity” originates (91–​93). In
a similar way, Enrique Marini Palmieri reads the auto as an entry into the universal by which the
inhabitants of the New World say yes to becoming others, that is to becoming universal, but by
being themselves (230). Whether this universal could be defined by Christianity or Hispanism
is the topic of the following pages.

Sor Juana’s violence

Georgina Sabat de Rivers (En busca 265–​66) and Charles Patterson (“Jesuit” 460–​61) insist that
the three autos sacramentales and their loas –​El mártir del sacramento, San Hermenegildo; El cetro de
San José, and El divino Narciso –​should be read in conjunction. From this exercise (and what we
know from the Respuesta, I might add) emerges the image of an all-​too-​aware Sor Juana who
was not only cognizant of her own circumstances as an intellectual in the particular context of
New Spain and Spain, but also of what the relationship between the New World and the Old
World might have entailed for both from its earliest moments.
Sor Juana famously possessed one of the best libraries in the New World, and her own
increasingly fragile situation probably made her think time and again about how knowledge
was guarded and protected from perceived outsiders by institutions and powerful people
within those institutions. But as she makes patently clear in the Respuesta, her library and
her own ideas could also lead her to think about the advancement of knowledge due to the
contributions of sometimes unlikely people. For example, either through what she read or
through what she grasped by observing and thinking about the connections between Spain
and its colonies, Sor Juana seems to have had an acute sense of what the “discovery” of the
New World meant for changes in knowledge. In this respect, the three autos sacramentales
put forward an image in which the New World stands for the opening up of unimagined
possibilities.
As Patterson indicates, in El mártir del sacramento Sor Juana reminds Spain that it had once
been a pagan nation like the ones it conquered in the sixteenth century. She represents the strug-
gles of Hermenegildo, a Visigoth who had to fight his father, his tradition, and his old religious
beliefs in order to embrace Christianity, the new religion (“Jesuit” 464). Furthermore, through
this theme the auto suggests that blind obedience to tradition is absurd, and that accepting what
is new and different might be difficult, but is sometimes worthwhile (Patterson, “Jesuit” 465).

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Along similar lines, in the loa to the same auto, Sor Juana introduces the figure of the pillars
of Hercules in Gibraltar –​precisely the image on the cover of Anthony Grafton’s influential
book about how the discovery of the New World changed European knowledge –​to suggest
that there is always something else on the horizon and that no culture and no tradition have the
last word. As Columbus’s travels had demonstrated, against all odds and vis-​à-​vis ancient knowl-
edge, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar there was a plus ultra, a fuller history and a whole new world
to be known. In this sense, America represented the very real possibility of rectifying mistakes in
what was known about the world. At the same time, in this context America is not only a fact,
but a theoretical proposal suggesting future openings and unforeseen events (Sabat de Rivers, En
busca 285). As if all truths were provisional, new truths appeared to modify or cancel old ones.
Sabat de Rivers’s and Patterson’s readings nonetheless exhibit a tension between a possible
end to knowledge, a telos –​Christianity and Hispanic civilization as the universals encompass-
ing everything that was before, exemplified by the Aztec god of seeds and Narcissus –​and a
more open position. In the latter, these two important elements would be either provisional
(since something else might still happen in the world that would show they were not yet the
ultimate truth), or part of a larger cluster in which none of the units was the universal, but
simply an instantiation of it.
Although the literature on Sor Juana does not address this question, most critics seem to
think that El divino Narciso fits the first scenario, in which Christianity and Hispanic culture
stand for Sor Juana as the universal. This is certainly what Jáuregui indicates (“Cannibalism”
99), but also what can be indirectly or directly grasped in the authors who see the auto as a
critique of Spain and a defense of sorts of the indigenous historical past. Sabat de Rivers, for
example, says that teocualo prefigures the Eucharist, and that in the play the authority of Church
and Crown are maintained (En busca 291, 283). For his part, and taking his cue from Octavio
Paz’s work on Sor Juana, Patterson indicates that the influence of Neo-​Scholasticism and the
Jesuit view of the world as a “gradual unfolding” of the truth provide the correct framework
for understanding the play (“Jesuit” 461). From this perspective, more than a mistaken religious
practice, the Aztecs’ teocualo should be understood as an earlier, improvable form upon which
the correct content (Christ’s sacrifice) would be imprinted.
Nevertheless, as readers of Sor Juana know, she always seemed more interested in “letras
mundanas” (secular matters) than religious themes. In the Respuesta she gives several reasons for
this: it was partly her fear of the Inquisition (Obras selectas 773), but perhaps more importantly,
her true interests stood between her and theology.These she develops in her defense of the right
to read and write; they are connected to her god-​given and unstoppable “inclination” to knowl-
edge. As she states, in order to arrive at theology, she first had to understand all sciences and
arts –​among them, logic, rhetoric, physics, music, arithmetic, geometry, architecture, and history.
The study of god required a foundation in all of these disciplines and realms of knowledge. As
she put it, achieving this “no es fácil, ni aun posible” (Obras selectas 788–​89) [is not easy, or even
possible]. Even so, she would not feel prepared or inclined to discuss theology before achieving
the impossible. According to Sor Juana then, theology would never be the focus of her studies,
since she had to devote all her time and efforts to the arts and sciences. This does not mean that
she had an aversion to Christianity, but I would suggest that she seems rather aloof about these
matters. In El divino Narciso she treats the Eucharist as if it were a literary topic, a theme that
elicits her knowledge of Aztec and Greek myths, as well as her ability to transform all three, as
if the Eucharist were a pretext for the display of erudition and wit.
If Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican priest, was able to arrive at a radical relativism in
which indigenous sacrifice and cannibalism could be seen as indicators of the utmost religious
fervor, and therefore not as diabolical practices, but as demonstrations of an “innate religious

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sense” (Jáuregui, “Cannibalism” 79), why should Sor Juana not be able to arrive at a similar con-
clusion when thinking about teocualo? Taking one of the available criticisms on Sor Juana to
its limits, we can think that she was able to understand sacrifice as universal, a manifestation of
an innate religious sense (the neutral, abstract, and real universal) that was or could be fulfilled
in multiple instances: the Eucharist of Christianity was merely one among others, as was the
Aztecs’ teocualo.
While Jáuregui is right in thinking it a stretch to consider Sor Juana “an indigenist”
(“Cannibalism” 94), her addressing indigenous practices as an intellectual problem, a chal-
lenge to reason, does not negate the way in which this abstract endeavor affects any evalua-
tion of real indigenous people. That is, even if not directly interested in vindicating the real
indigenous people living in seventeenth-​century Mexico City, her discussion of sacrifice as
a structure present in many religions –​Judaism, Christianity, Aztec, and even Greek pagan-
ism –​makes indigenous groups part of a universe in which they are equals to Christians, Jews,
and Greeks.
In the case of El divino Narciso, for example, it would be helpful to know what to make of the
absence of “militaristic and religious paranoia” Jáuregui rightly finds in the Creoles’ treatment
of cannibalism and other colonial topics (“Cannibalism” 82). As many critics have remarked,
the similarity between cannibalism and the Eucharist was a difficult topic for Christian writ-
ers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Jáuregui, “Cannibalism” 72–​74). Was this
resemblance the work of the devil or a prefiguration of the Christian god to come? Or was it
something altogether different? To answer these questions we need to analyze the violence Sor
Juana employs in the treatment of her characters –​that is, the way she submits her materials to
the utmost tension via comparisons and displacements that burst open the core of what they
previously were. Nothing remains as it was under Sor Juana’s pen.
Perhaps in sacrifice, as in many other things, Sor Juana would have preferred abstraction (the
reduction of her biography to intellectual matters in the Respuesta comes to mind). She seems
to cherish the fact that Abraham’s gesture of offering his son in sacrifice was both accepted and
rejected by his god: “Ved a Abraham, aquel monstruo /​de la fe y de la obediencia, /​que ni
dilata matar /​al hijo, aunque más lo quiera, /​por el mandato de Dios; /​… /​Y ved cómo Dios
benigno, /​en justa correspondencia, /​la víctima le perdona /​y el sacrificio le acepta” (209)
[See Abraham, that prodigy /​of faith and of obedience /​who did not hesitate to kill /​his son,
despite his love for him /​because of the command of God /​… /​Now see how God so mer-
cifully, /​in equal and exact exchange, /​gives back his victim-​son to him /​and yet accepts his
sacrifice]. She was, however, well aware that Christ had not died in this way, and that his sacrifice
had been a bloody and violent affair. In contrast, her Christ-​like figure, Narcissus, does not spill
any blood, but dies consumed by his love for Naturaleza humana; he is later transformed into a
flower, and finally into the host.
Indigenous sacrifice did not always share this immateriality; in fact, it was usually a violent
endeavor that had to be repeated time and again. Christ, on the other hand, had died once
and for all; one might even say that he had sacrificed himself in order to end the need for this
recurrent religious habit. Ideally, after his, no more sacrifices would be necessary. Yet, in spite
of Christ’s sacrifice, as Sor Juana makes explicit, given the weakness of human nature, its folly
and erratic behavior, sacrifice was still constantly needed. Eco, comforted by knowing that the
sacrifice of Narcissus-​Christ would soon fail, warns him that he had had to die for the mistakes
of Naturaleza humana, but that given her nature, she would fall once again: “ … y claro está
que no es congruo /​que todas las veces que ella /​vuelva a pecar, a morir /​tú también por
ella vuelvas” (276) [and it is very clear /​that every time she sins, /​it isn’t likely that /​You’ll die
again for her]. The inexorable need for sacrifice is what the Eucharist was meant to address, it

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was the final bequest of Narcissus-​Christ’s “sin igual fineza” [unequalled gift] to assist humanity
in the difficult task of achieving grace (278).
But if most indigenous sacrifices did not follow this economical solution, a non-​violent
alternative to take the place of an actual sacrifice, as a reader of Torquemada Sor Juana knew
that the celebration of Huitzilopochtli followed the same paradigm. According to Torquemada,
during the festivities a statue of Paynal (one of Huitzilopochtli’s invocations) was “killed” by
a priest embodying the god Quetzalcoatl. As Torquemada indicates, the whole ceremony “se
hacía diciendo que era matar al dios Huitzilopuchtli para comer su cuerpo” (115) [was carried
out saying it was to kill the god Huizilopuchtli in order to eat his body]. Sor Juana does not
address any of this in the play, but the resemblance could have not escaped her.
Indeed, as Glantz has remarked, analogy is the system upon which Sor Juana builds her argu-
mentation in the auto (Borrones 186); and it is the attraction exerted by “semejanza” (resemblance),
for example, that allows Narcissus to love Naturaleza humana (his “trasunto,” 265[image]). In
addition, Sor Juana’s recurrent strategy of creating mirroring images amplifies similitude, whose
power of attraction threatens to collapse the boundaries separating what is human from the
divine as in Narcissus’s case above (Balsa, Grossi, “La loa”; Jáuregui,”Cannibalism”; Díaz Balsera,
“Mal de amor”). Especially in the loa to El divino Narciso, everything occurs in pairs. As Balsa has
remarked, “no image appears, no word is uttered, and no action takes place, without generating
its own counterpart” (49). Even Jáuregui, who denies the possibility of any subversive content in
the auto, comments that Sor Juana presents us with a “hall of textual mirrors in which cannibal-
ism and Communion dance arm-​in-​arm” (“Cannibalism” 95). The questions that emerge from
this double strategy of constantly formulating analogies and creating mirror images and from
the fast pace of the images’ dancing arm-​in-​arm, are about contamination and difference: the
ability to distinguish one from the other, and above all, the original that the mirrors reflect.
About contamination: in Sor Juana’s auto, everything is analogous to other elements brought
into play; their contiguity transforms both members of the equation to the extent that noth-
ing is what we thought it was, nothing is itself. “El dios de las semillas,” for example, is not
Huitzilopochtli, the god of war whose ceremony (teocualo) Torquemada writes about, nor is it
Tláloc, the deity associated with rain and agriculture, which the god of seeds would logically
represent. Since Tláloc did not have a similar ceremony dedicated to him, and Huitzilopochtli
was not directly associated with agriculture, “el dios de las semillas” is neither or is both, and
thus remains a construct that serves to counter and modify the Christian god of the Eucharist.
As for the Christian god, “el verdadero dios de las semillas” (the true god of the seeds), it has
also been radically transformed, since Christ was never an agricultural god, but quite the oppo-
site. Agricultural gods and their cults, such as that of Tláloc, are deeply embedded in particular
locations and are therefore in a sense always pagan in their observance of nature and geography.
Christianity, on the other hand, is precisely the negation of this deep sense of location –​it offers
a god that serves in all geographical conditions and to everyone regardless of his or her location.
In Sor Juana’s “verdadero dios de las semillas,” these crucial distinctions are elided.
For his part, Narcissus is not the vain and proud figure of Greek mythology, since he serves
as the placeholder for Christ’s sacrifice.9 In spite of his mighty role, he is the least interesting
character in a play in which Naturaleza humana and Eco –​both female characters –​think and
speak far more and more eloquently than him. In a reversal of the myth, this new and much
revisited Narcissus falls in love not with himself, but with humanity, and dies because of his self-
less appreciation of others.
In turn, the allegorical use of the myth, its Christianization, does not occur without affect-
ing the figure of Christ it had to represent: “… su beldad hermosa, soberana y prodigiosa, /​
es de todas la mayor, /​cuyo sin igual primor /​aplauden los horizontes” (188) [his beauty is

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sublime, /​so sovereign and marvelous /​that it excels in space and time, /​let horizons sing
and praise]. This somewhat feeble and beautiful figure is described with incongruous adjec-
tives.10 In the Respuesta, Sor Juana had transformed the Christian god into a god of intelligence
(“entendimiento”) who, envied because of this one trait, was forced to bear, precisely on his
brilliant head, a crown of thorns (Obras selectas 785–​86). But in the auto the “primor,” “bel-
dad,” and “aplausos” of Narcissus touch upon the image of Christ. The terms of the debate
about what was the most important gift Christ granted humanity (his death, or his body and
blood transubstantiated in the host), framed as “finezas,” immediately bring the divine to a
debased realm in which god, as an elegant lord, dispenses his graces among his courtiers. Baltasar
Gracián, the master of wit and implausible concepts, would have been proud of this notion of
connecting apparently disparate elements such as the divine nature of the Christian god to the
sophisticated yet overly mundane world of the court.
Sor Juana explicitly says in the auto that the form would be provided by “humanas letras”
(the Narcissus myth), but the content would come from divine script. Nonetheless by making
Christ the receptacle of other, non-​Christian meanings (beauty and a certain languor in the
case of Narcissus; agriculture and rain in the case of the “verdadero dios de las semillas”), the
form seems to modify the content so far as to displace its specificity (the love of humanity for
an abstract religion).
This is the violence of Sor Juana, a violence that does not allow self-​identity to settle in, and
by which everything is transformed and changed into something else. This is also what makes
the folding of everything that was before (teocualo, Narcissus) into the Christian matrix very
difficult. Did the gradual unfolding of the world come to finally rest in Christ, the ultimate
truth in whose blood and body teocualo would find its real sense? Or is this Christ also awaiting
another, higher resolution? In Sor Juana’s plays, by the time Christianity becomes the central
axis of meaning, it is already too late to pretend to have a pure Christian god. Either Narcissus,
Christ, and the god of seeds are each examples of an idea that remains pure in its abstraction
(sacrifice, in this case), or they are all the same in different disguises.
The mirroring in play –​teocualo as a mirror for the Eucharist, Narcissus as a mirror for
both Christ and “el dios de las semillas,” and Christ as a mirror for “el dios de las semillas” and
Narcissus –​makes it impossible to talk about an original and a copy. In an analysis that opens
the door to this interpretation,Viviana Díaz Balsera remarks: “[e]‌n esta nebulosidad en que no se
puede ni diferenciar ni identificar por completo … los contornos de la identidad y alteridad se
reflejan, se borran, se desdoblan” (29) [in this vagueness in which it isn’t possible to fully differ-
entiate or identify … the outlines of identity and alterity are reflected, erased, blurred]. Perhaps
more than the “unfolding of the world,” in Sor Juana we witness a constant folding and refold-
ing of it. If the world were indeed going to be subjected to a gradual unfolding, as some critics
have suggested, this process seems not to have yet begun by the time Sor Juana was writing, at
least not in her works, which means, of course, that the true god, or the falsity of all of them,
could still be waiting to be revealed.

On the Baroque and baroque sacrifices

It may be impossible to know with certainty what Sor Juana made of the indigenous people
whom she saw and with whom she spoke daily before entering the convent. It may be equally
impossible to know if she cared about them and their well-​being. What we do know is that
América and Occidente, her indigenous characters, are intelligent and articulate, perhaps even a
little disdainful. Nonetheless it is possible that she chose to present them in this way, not because
of her respect for Aztec history or the indigenous present, but because this was the best way to

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represent herself –​by using their redeemed past. Critics continue to debate whether Sor Juana
is the mask to make Madrid aware of this past or this past is the mask of Sor Juana’s cleverness.
There is no question of her interest in Greco-​Latin materials, but also in any form of intel-
lectual challenge, such as the one provided by the similitude between the Eucharist and teoc-
ualo. It was precisely the diabolical nature of indigenous religions and civilization that justified
the Spanish conquest. That she presented the indigenous perspective on teocualo signals a will-
ingness to observe and understand the practices from a non-​Christian perspective. And since
she had many options to choose from and write about Corpus Christi, her rendition of the
conquest as a violent interruption of coherent civilizations by arriviste nations (“advenedizas
naciones”) is all the more evident. If the conquest was predicated on the need to evangelize the
indigenous populations, in Sor Juana’s play it is not clear that this ever took place, or if it did,
whether it accomplished what was expected. Among all the possibilities her critics offer, I prefer
to think of Sor Juana as interested in the challenge teocualo presented for the Eucharist: a Sor
Juana who was for this reason willing to sacrifice everything (the specificity of the teocualo she
wanted to portray as a parallel to the Eucharist) in the name of achieving equality.Teocualo was
to the Eucharist what Narcissus was to Christ, and Christ was to the god of seeds what this god
was to Christ and Narcissus: any one of them could easily stand for the other.
And yet, if her complex literary operations achieve parity among all cultural domains and
all religions involved, this exercise might still be insufficient. We have no way of knowing if the
indigenous population would have preferred a more faithful rendition of the Aztecs’ past, for
example, or if they cared at all about any of this. Be this as it may, if all things had been equal,
this egalitarianism would have been welcome, but since in the name of Christianity, indigenous
religions and their practitioners were being oppressed, Sor Juana’s gestures could still be con-
sidered unconvincing. A strong and direct condemnation of the violence of Christianity would
have served this purpose much better. One wonders, though, if this were at all possible during
the Baroque understood as a historical period, and within baroque style.
Jáuregui reminds us that the Baroque always excludes its conditions of possibility –​that is,
the exploitation of indigenous labor and indigenous life. This is certainly the case in Sor Juana,
who was, no doubt, a baroque writer. Merrim also warns us about the limited possibilities of
the Baroque, of its “fraudulent” promises. As she says in a discussion of Sor Juana’s last poem
(the same one Martínez-​San Miguel refers to above) and her work in general: “No matter how
much the colonialist Baroque surface engaged or incarnated plurality, no matter how universal-
izing Baroque syncretism purported to be, the colonial New World remained at heart absolutist”
(The Spectacular 193). Opening and inclusion are, in this interpretation, lies, not only in the New
World, as Merrim states, but in the totality of the Hispanic world. Perhaps this is what explains
Sor Juana’s silence: the impossibility of saying any more under such conditions, as Merrim’s
analysis suggests.
We are thus left with the echo of the strong epithets (“loca,” “bárbara,” “advenediza” [crazy,
barbarous, arriviste]) directed at Spain and Christianity that do not amount to much since they
don’t openly name their game, their intention. We are left as well with a literature that treats all
subjects (Christian, Aztec, Greek) with care and respect. In Sor Juana, literature might be the
testing ground for bringing all of these materials into another, more democratic, but unreal, area
of contact. Her rendition of Eco’s banning from language in the passages in which, deprived of
her own speaking abilities, she is forced to repeat Narcissus’ words, is telling. Coming from her
mouth, they mean something very different from what Narcissus states, making this as intrigu-
ing intellectually as literarily. Eco’s highly poetic vengeance consists of her ability to inscribe
variation in her words even when forced to repeat what others say. Indeed, this might be the
grandiose extent and the dire limit of the “triumphal losses” possible within the Baroque.

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Notes
1 The Requerimiento was a document summoning the indigenous population to accept Christianity
and become vassals of the King of Spain or face a war that would annihilate them or force them into
submission. Reading it before each battle legalized campaigns of conquest.
2 Since teocualo involved the consumption of seeds mixed with the blood of sacrificed children, it is a
case of cannibalism, even if indirectly.The Aztecs, whose complex society was organized around a war-
rior culture, practiced cannibalism in state-​directed religious rituals, a more intricate rendition of the
warrior societies’ tradition of ingesting their enemies, about which Michel de Montaigne wrote in “On
Cannibals.” Consumption was central to the religious cosmovision of the Aztecs, who represented the
earth as a devouring monster and who saw life as a continuum in which ingestion was linked to death
and renewal (Arnold 42–​44).
3 In deciding how to approach translating Sor Juana’s highly complex poetry –​whether to provide a lit-
eral translation faithful to meaning or to use one of the available English editions of her work –​I opted
for the latter. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of the loa and the auto are from Patricia A. Peters
and Renée Domeier’s edition, which tries to retain both the form and meaning of Sor Juana’s poetry.
As the reader will see, meaning is not always preserved with exactitude, but perhaps the differences will
serve to highlight the difficulty of being completely faithful to Sor Juana.
4 Editors’ translation.
5 See Merrim, “The ‘Mexican’ ” as well.
6 See Sabat de Rivers for a comparison with Pedro Calderón de la Barca, an author whom Sor Juana
knew well and admired, and who treats his indigenous characters very differently in his play, La aurora
de Copacabana (En busca 298–​300). See Díaz Balsera, “Mal de amor” as well (16–​17).
7 My translation.
8 My translation.
9 There is some disagreement among critics as to the appropriateness of Narcissus to serve as a Christ
figure. Luciani (“Spanish American Theater” 283)  and Glantz (Borrones 194)  think there is nothing
that would explain such a choice. For Ellis and Dean, the choice of mythological figures for Christian
allegories is well-​represented in baroque festivals and plays. In fact, Dean’s book presents an interest-
ing counterpoint to my reading since it analyzes the strategies the Church used not to eradicate, but
replace pagan deities for Christian ones.
10 For a different reading of Narcissus, see Linda Egan’s chapter in this volume. She also provides an excel-
lent discussion of criticism of Sor Juana’s sources and influences for this and her other autos, as well as
criticism of the Eucharist and its place in Sor Juana’s writing.

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20
THE AUTOS
Theology on stage

Linda Egan

Of the monumental critical bibliography dedicated to understanding and celebrating the works
of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, analyses of her drama, both secular and sacred, are relatively scarce,
and those devoted to study of her theological dramas –​her three autos sacramentales (mystery
plays) and their introductory one-​act loas –​are, comparatively speaking, a virtual trace element.1
Still, interest in this segment of the nun’s overall literary output has grown perceptibly in the last
twenty-​five years. Between 1900 and 1990, for example, the Modern Language Association’s
electronic database cites eighteen critical works on Sor Juana’s sacred dramas, one commenting
on all three, fifteen dedicated to the Divine Narcissus (El Divino Narciso, c. 1688–​1689), two to
Joseph’s Scepter (El cetro de José, c. 1680–​1690) and none to her historical auto on The Martyr of
the Sacrament, Saint Hermenegildo (El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, 1692, published).
In the next quarter century, however, from 1990 to the present, nearly twice as many critical
works were produced on these sorjuanine texts; once again the great majority concerns the
Divine Narcissus (hereinafter Narcissus or DN), but now Joseph’s Scepter (Joseph or JS) and Saint
Hermenegildo (Hermenegildo or SH) each command a noticeable number of studies. A consider-
able additional quantity of criticism can be found outside the MLA database; in one source,
Octavio Paz’s acclaimed Traps of Faith (1982), all three plays and their playlets are analyzed, while
Mauricio Beuchot comments on the trio of loas in a recent article. In many cases, each of the
autos’ preliminary playlets receives individual attention, as well. Altogether, this new research
constitutes a movement toward the center of sorjuanine scholarship by a heretofore marginal-
ized portion of the erudite nun’s writing.
The research I  have carried out for this project constitutes an informal corroboration of
the findings above. More than half the articles and books I consulted are about Narcissus and/​
or its loa. Still, Joseph and Hermenegildo each claim a dozen critical analyses. What had been
largely untilled territory is now becoming well cultivated. These two texts have been awaiting
a deserved critical assessment.
A question that to my knowledge has not been asked, and which most likely cannot be
answered, is why the Narcissus auto attracts so much more attention than the other two. All three
were written at approximately the same time in Sor Juana’s career (some time between 1680
and 1690); the DN was published alone in 1690 in Madrid while the other two were published
for the first time in the second edition of her expanded complete works in 1692. It is gener-
ally believed that none was ever staged, either in Spain or in Mexico (Grossi, “Subversión” 557,

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n. 11), although Paz is among a handful who believe the DN was produced for the Spanish
court in 1689 (451).2 What is it, given the plays’ shared circumstances, that so rivets critics’ eyes
upon the story of a self-​absorbed pagan youth’s allegorical transformation into the Christ who
loves all of Humanity?
At least three factors seem to account for Narcissus’s popularity. First, its subject matter. Both
Joseph and Hermenegildo explore Catholic dogma and eucharistic teaching in historical settings –​
the Old and (prophesized) New Testaments of the Bible in the case of the story of Joseph
and the Visigoth history of Spain in that of the Arrian convert to Christianity, Hermenegildo.
But Narcissus’s lessons are taught in particularly dramatic fashion by transforming the Ovidian
mythical figure of the narcissistic man enamored of his own image into a divine human who
can love someone other than himself. Further, while the pair of historical autos do put strong
female figures on stage, in Narcissus their ubiquitous importance feminizes the play; Human
Nature and her companions; the Grace who facilitates reunion of Human Nature with God,
and the scene-​stealing female Satan (Eco/​Echo) who narrates the story of Jesus’s and human-
kind’s search for each other and stirs our sympathy; there is, as well, a Virgin Mary in the form
of a crystalline fountain, whose baptismal purity fuses the renewed bond between Christ and
humans prone to error but capable of redemption. Finally, textual exegesis is almost exclusively
focused on Narcissus; critics evidently admire the maturity, ingenuity, and sheer beauty of Sor
Juana’s language in this auto. The story of wayward humanity finding forgiveness in the purity
of Mary and the loving sacrifice of her Son, told with incomparable skill and seduction, cease-
lessly calls to the scholarly mind.
Even so, as I have noted, the other two autos offer increasingly compelling strengths. Critics
are prone to find in both the plays and their loas the kind of feminist, proto-​Creole, and
transcultural messages the DN and its loa communicate.3
Not only has scholarship on Sor Juana’s autos expanded to occupy a greater part of the
critical field. It has also grown more sophisticated, as earlier traditional themes have acquired
postmodern, poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonial, and other contemporary theoretical foci,
including semiotic and performance analysis. Topics such as the tracing of Sor Juana’s sources,
the authenticity of her Catholic beliefs, historiographies associated with convents and the plots
of her mystery plays, as well as philological and biographical investigations –​all subjects that
founded research on the nun’s sacred dramas –​have not disappeared; but others have joined
them to produce a more complex community of inquiry, one that more closely resembles main-
stream branches of literary, cultural, and cross-​disciplinarian study.
While keeping in mind that we are speaking of a minor field of criticism with respect to the
totality of Sor Juana studies, within it critics have flocked in numbers to explore the literary tra-
ditions that inform her sacred dramas. And on that topic, virtually all have focused on the Divine
Narcissus.4 Alexander Parker’s 1968 article on “The Calderonian Sources of El Divino Narciso by
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” sets the critical standard for this sub-​field, although forgotten –​or at
least set aside –​is that Parker’s starting point was a dispute with Ludwig Pfandl; he predicated
his classic findings on the possible symbiosis between Sor Juana’s famed play and her Spanish
predecessor’s prolific production in sacred theater upon a refutation of the German’s psycho-
analytical conclusion that a neurotic Sor Juana identified with the self-​centered Narcissus of her
auto. From that premise, Parker lays the groundwork for the following decades of scholarship on
sources that Sor Juana surely or possibly had in mind as she wrote the Narcissus drama.
Parker’s work inspires some scholars, for example, to carefully examine his findings, Calderón’s
texts, and Sor Juana’s to conclude that hers were not, in fact, a contrafacta of Calderonian drama
(a more or less exact “translation” of his to hers) (Cortés Koloffon).The importance to critics of
Sor Juana’s filiation with tradition can be appreciated in the growing variety of source studies.

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These explore her debts to pagan myths of Ovid, especially Narcissus and Orpheus;5 Jesuit syn-
cretism (Olivares Zorrilla, Apologética; Mariscal; Patterson, “Jesuit”), including the very impor-
tant influence of Atanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-​century German polymath and expert
in Egyptology and emblems (J. Checa, “El Divino Narciso” 199); Saint Bernard and Cistercian
theology (Ellis; Vermeylen); biblical authorities (Patterson, “Fruitful Bough”); Peña Fernández;
Donadoni and Houvenaghel, “Hibridez”); other Golden Age playwrights, such as Lope de Vega
(Peña Fernández); and Egyptian and Jewish mysticism (Rojas Bez).
The Jesuit influence noted above may be detected, for example, in Sor Juana’s two pro-​
Indian loas. Jesuits in baroque Mexico prominently emphasized the ideology of syncretism, in
particular their “attempts to discover prefigurations of Christianity in indigenous practices and
beliefs” (González, Sor Juana 42); one might see in Sor Juana’s exuberant staging of this ideol-
ogy in the loas to Narcissus and Cetro a permissive Jesuit community’s tacit approval. The Jesuits
were also proudly and energetically intellectual, as was Sor Juana. However, Jesuit men such as
her confessor Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda were vindictively opposed to the nun’s artistic
independence. They were men before they were Jesuit intellectuals.
Sor Juana was a famously well-​informed user of hermetic neoplatonism (Olivares Zorrilla,
Apologética; Egan, “Donde Dios”; Paz, Traps; A.  Parker; Azueta; Krynen; Bénassy-​Berling,
Humanismo), as well as of the perhaps not so much acknowledged philosophies of gnosticism
and Kabbalah (Artigas; Egan, “Donde Dios” and “Relativismo” 64). The story of creation in the
Pimander (also Poimandres), first book of the Corpus Hermeticum, central texts of non-​Christian
gnosticism dating from two centuries BCE, bears striking resemblances to the creation myth
of Genesis and elements of Sor Juana’s Narcissus (Paz, Traps 462–​64). Deeply versed in the sci-
ences of her day, the erudite Mexican nun evinced a “precocious ethnographic and linguistic
interest in Mexico’s indigenes” (Puccini, Una mujer 283, 293), as vividly depicted in the loa to
her Divine Narcissus and, as well, in the loa to Cetro. Pamela Kirk expands the argument, saying
that although the “preface play” was fictionally meant to instruct native Mexicans in Catholic
dogma, in reality it was “intended to convince the audience at the Spanish court of the dignity
and piety of the Indians and of the complexity of their history, customs, and religion” (Sor Juana
50). Another aspect of the nun’s philosophy and theology that lures critics:  she was an avid
reader of Kircher and other Renaissance Neoplatonists of the hermetic line, which complex
of knowledges is reflected in an intriguingly exotic representation of the Post-​Reformation
importance of the Eucharist as well as the then-​popular theme of the Virgin’s Immaculate
Conception.
The scientific, magical, metaphysical, and theological strands of Sor Juana’s vast knowl-
edges make her, more than anything, a philosopher. Her identity as such is seldom discussed
by scholars, who more specifically speak of her Neoplatonic tendencies, a strong allegiance to
hermetism, and especially to what Paz has called “one of the intellectual sicknesses of her cen-
tury: Egyptomania” (Trampas 236, my translation); critics speak of all the filaments of thought
I listed just above, but seldom do scholars think of Sor Juana as a philosopher. Theology is the
science of religion, but so is philosophy, a more all-​inclusive term. Perhaps her students still
today have difficulty imagining a female philosopher: “In order to find women philosophers,
we must challenge historical stereotypes that until recently have surreptitiously determined that
women do not do philosophy, regardless of the quality of their writings” (Femenías 145).
Cultural history allows scholars to view the nun’s sacred theater from diverse disciplinary
angles. The convent world in which Sor Juana lived most of her life, cooking, grinding choco-
late, keeping the monastery books, and producing the most extraordinary artistic achievement
of the New World, is the subject of fascinating studies. Those in which analysis of the reli-
gious poet’s works also figure include Paz’s Traps of Faith (Part 5, Chapter 5); Kirk, Sor Juana;

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Lavrín,”Vida conventual”; and Muriel, “La vida.” Sor Juana’s disobedience from the religious
rule is well documented; although she obfuscates this historical aspect of her life and work out
of fear of the Inquisition and powerful church prelates, manuals produced by priests on required
behavior of nuns demonstrate that, as a religious, Sor Juana was a terrible example: she was not
poor, not silent, not dead to the world, and decidedly not obedient. Her own confessor –​until
she dismissed him –​wrote with particular keenness on the subject of disciplining nuns in the
submissive mold. Perhaps he had Sor Juana in mind. He had reason to get used to disappoint-
ment (Bravo Arriaga, Agueda Méndez). Rigorous ecclesiastic supervision of cloistered nuns
reflected the overall spirit of Counter Reformation diligence in matters of dogma and disci-
pline. Carlos Jáuregui demonstrates how post-​Tridentine insistence on the performative real
in theology drives dialogue and plot in Sor Juana’s loa to Joseph (“ ‘Plato’ ” 212–​13); baroque
culture required that the metaphoric sacrifice embodied in the bread and wine of the Eucharist
be presented as staged action (212). Verónica Grossi points out, in a study of subversion of the
Spanish conquest in the loa to Narcissus, the central importance of the Eucharist in counter-
reformation efforts to eradicate heresy (“Subversión” 542). Seventeenth-​century rhetoric called
for the allegory of humankind to be identified “con la alegoría bíblica o divina para autorizar
el valor absoluto, atemporal, del dogma político y religioso que transmite” (541) [with Biblical
or divine allegory to authorize the absolute, atemporal value of political and religious dogma
that it transmits]. In Sor Juana’s three sacred dramas, critics point out the theological bond with
humanity in Hermenegildo, between the eponymous hero and anti-​Arrian Christianity; in Cetro,
between the prophetic Joseph and the Christological foresight of the devil and his cohorts, and
in Narcissus, between the Narcissus-​Christ and Human Nature, who reunite through the pow-
ers of pure Mary’s crystalline fountain, next to which the flower of the Eucharist blooms upon
Narcissus’s Christ-​like death (Kirk; González, “Seeing Beauty” 14–​15).
Sor Juana’s local cultural heritage is defined politically, theologically, and socially by the syn-
cretic, most powerfully by the indigene presence in all facets of daily life in Mexico City and
throughout New Spain. The nun signals her inclusionary mindset elsewhere in her oeuvre (her
depictions of the Nahua people and language in her church carols have inspired many criti-
cal essays, dissertations and books), but she does so with a unique sense of drama in the loas to
The Divine Narcissus and Joseph’s Scepter: “For Sor Juana, the multiple perspectives of Aztec and
Christian beliefs offered exciting intellectual possibilities. She decided to use the complicated
and troubling Aztec metaphors as part of her Christian allegory…” (Bergland 154). If her deci-
sion to allegorize the pagan Narcissus as Christ has caused considerable critical impact, the
back-​talking Aztec characters in her loas stir up drama; these colorful characters tell allegorical
representatives of Western Christianity that human sacrifice has worked just fine for them and
they are not inclined to trade it in for a metaphorical immolation. As often as critics direct their
attention to the autos, they are inclined to concentrate solely on the loas as exemplary illustra-
tions of the “transitivity” (J. Checa, “El Divino Narciso 205) that marks the positive outcome
of cultural hybridity (Alker) and a state of permanent openness that makes a text available for
expanded interpretation, which undecidedness stimulates ever more scholarly interest in the
nun’s religious works. Sor Juana is not the only but perhaps the most daring writer to position
pagan and Christian religions side by side as equals and, although the Aztec creed eventually
agrees to give Christianity a try, the Catholic nun allows the forbidden ideology to represent
itself with flair, honor, and credibility. She is seen to be subverting canonical Christian beliefs
(Grossi, “Loa” 127–​33), while dramatizing a “precise metaphor of the spiritual conquest of
ancient Mexicans” (Leal 195); this defeat becomes the foundation of the mestizo Mexico Sor
Juana historicizes audaciously in these two brief theatrical pieces. Like Las Casas before her, Sor
Juana shows in her incarnation of Aztec religion a prefiguration of Christian faith (Jáuregui,

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“Saturno caníbal”; Zanelli). Her treatment of the fusion of the “barbarous” Indian and Christian
ideologies is even likened, in a lengthy essay of the 1930s by Karl Vossler, to the clash of main-
stream Western beliefs and Nazism (qtd. in Merkl).
For Renée Bergland, among many perspectives discernible in Divino Narciso is the one that
mirrors Aztec and Christian beliefs. She sees Narcissus as an allegory of the Mexican god of
wind, Quetzalcóatl (155), a god that freshly converted amerindians equated with Christ, the
Sweeper God (Burkhart 122). Conversely, Bergland sees the Aztec America of Narcissus’s loa as
a conjuration of the mestizo Virgen de Guadalupe (155). The permutations are many; the syn-
cretism is evident. Sor Juana’s communal ties to the Jesuit philosophy of inclusiveness may argue
that her blending of religious beliefs in the autos is not an entirely original theological concept,
but her stylistic and philosophical rendering of the unsurprising is unique and compelling. One
of the most unusual facets of the theology she expounds in autos and villancicos is the conviction
that all of humanity is equal under the laws of God (Kirk, Sor Juana 52).
Despite numerous and repeated questions about the sincerity of Sor Juana’s Christian faith, a
preponderance of critics does not suppose that she holds heretical thoughts, although that might
depend on one’s definition of heresy. Certainly the men of the church closest to Sor Juana tried
very hard for decades to work around the powerful friends she had at the viceregal court to
keep her on a shorter leash and, indeed, to muzzle her altogether. They succeeded at the end of
her career when socioeconomic and political circumstances deprived her of the political and
personal protections she had previously always enjoyed. Meanwhile, a minor vein of sorjuanine
criticism devoted to her theological theater –​the Catholic branch –​views her more daring
departures from dogma with quasi-​ecclesiastical eyes. In one instance, for example, the investi-
gator borrows a leaf from Méndez Plancarte, who often despaired of his beloved nun, and who
frequently rewrote her poetry to correct what he saw as its heretical leanings and bring it into
canonical line. Citing the Bible, Marini Palmieri (unconvincingly) suggests there might be a
Christian aspect to the God of Seeds worshiped by the Aztecs in Sor Juana’s loa to the Narcissus
(225–​26). From the opposite angle, Krynen asserts that the loa as well as the auto separately
build upon a syncretic assimilation that is “scandalous insofar as devotion is concerned to the
devout Christian, and ridiculous with respect to the unvarnished theological truth” (505).
Although critics such as these do not remark explicitly on the nun’s most subversive reli-
gious expression (her hidden theology), they may be reacting in part to a suspicion of it, buried
in the baroque folds of her discourse. More recent scholarship overtly declares that Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz is the first woman theologian of the Americas (González, “Seeing Beauty” 18).
González adds:

Sor Juana is a forgotten theological voice whose work is increasingly the object of study.
Perhaps her greatest contribution to contemporary theology is found in the aesthetic
form of her theology. Beauty is not merely a theme in her corpus. Through the privileg-
ing of myth, metaphor, and symbol as the most authentic and valued forms of theological
expression, Sor Juana transforms the very nature of theological writing. (Sor Juana 57)

This analysis of the theology of beauty is much in the minority among comments on the
nun’s religious philosophy. It would be hard to miss the overwhelming role of the beauty meta-
phor in Narcissus. Narcissus himself is consistently and with great frequency throughout the
work described as being beautiful, possessing beauty. Human Nature is beautiful. Even Eco/​
Echo the feminist satanic figure, shares in the allegorical Christ’s beauty, perhaps because as an
angel, though fallen, she retains her divinity. A  solid textual foundation underlies González’s
treatise on Sor Juana’s theology (in her autos, villancicos, and lyric poetry), a critical stance

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following George Tavard’s Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Theology of Beauty: The First Mexican
Theology.
Women, of course, were ordered from Saint Paul onward to keep quiet in church; they were
certainly never to invade the sacred male domain of preaching or biblical exegesis or theology.
Sor Juana practiced all three everywhere throughout her work, which occupies four hefty vol-
umes in the Fondo de Cultura Económica edition of 1955–​57: lyric poetry, villancicos, sacred
and secular plays, the triumphal arch commissioned by the city, attacked by her confessor and
which led her to dismiss his services (Neptuno alegórico), and various essays, including the Carta
atenagórica (in which she most openly theologizes and which led directly to the crisis that per-
mitted the churchmen to silence her permanently), and the Respuesta (Answer), the famed the
intellectual autobiography with which she gamely fought to defend her right to speak, even in
church. In all of these, Sor Juana practiced a verbal sleight-​of-​hand, under cover of hyperbatonic
verse, cheerful church songs (especially), and supposedly traditional mystery plays, by which she
asserted opinions on theological matters. Judging by Méndez Plancarte’s frequent admonitions
and denials, these opinions often flirted with heresy, which he calls error due to the rapid flight
of her pen or a misreading on her part. And then he painstakingly corrects her.
Her contemporary critics, however, do not err. Scholars know she knew exactly what she
was saying and meant to get it out there in public from the pulpit available to her, sung with
harmonious voices in the middle of Catholic mass, offered in black and white print (two edi-
tions during her lifetime) in Spain and elsewhere in the New World, and if possible acted out
on stage (although none of her autos ever were). Much of her theology is centered on the Virgin
Mary, whom she incarnates in a litany of marvelously inventive guises (mathematician, Doña
Quijota, Professor, Head Angel), most of them traditional male roles, all of them leadership
positions. Scholarship on the topic of her hidden theology overlaps, then, with that of feminism,
which fills a more capacious critical territory.6
Before turning to that arena, however, I  will address a domain that grew out of scholar-
ship on the relationship between Mexico’s autochthonous and Western cultures, what Spanish
speakers call criollismo (indigenousness). The term applies less to the aborigine than to the mes-
tizo and Creole (Spaniard born in America) who, in the political sense here posited, is beginning
to argue for independence from Spain, to decolonize Mexico’s condition and assert the rights
of Mexicans to be Mexicans. Sorjuanine scholars see in various parts of her works, and very
strongly in her sacred dramas, a proto-​criollista voice arguing for Mexican sovereignty, a hundred
years before the colony will in fact gain its freedom from Spain (Marini Palmieri; Partida;
Patterson, “Jesuit”; Sabat de Rivers, “Apología”). It was the indigenous past of their land which,
in fact, constituted “what distinguished the new Spanish resident from the European; his cohab-
itation and permeability with a present that was nonexistent in Europe was the only thing that
could give him an autonomous consciousness” (Rubial García 249). Juan Luis Suárez gives a
glimpse into the ontological reality that defined Sor Juana’s literary laboratory: she was writing
just as the paradigm of space and time was changing in Europe from premodern to modern and,
in the New World, from Amerindian to Christian time-​keeping. Her syncretic, criollista loas
dramatize the baroque dislocations of time in space that her characters –​and she –​were living.
The feminist wing of research is densely populated. Sor Juana’s persona, ever mysterious, and
her work and its impact on generations of readers command a point of view that positions the
Hieronymite religious before and against the men who ran her world; these distinguish her
among others of her sex and most of the male figures who surrounded her, and characterize her
as an exemplary defender of women’s rights avant la lettre. The link between her theology and
the feminist convictions she intertwined with it are clear in a work such as The Divine Narcissus,
in which Mary and the sacred fountain create an image depicting the Virgin as equal to God

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in divine power (Granger-​Carrasco 240).7 Similarly, Joseph features a gnostic trinity of feminine
deities: Thought, Intelligence, and Foresight/​Imagination/​Conjecture (Pensamiento, Inteligencia,
and Previsión/​Imaginación/​Conjetura). These brainy women accompany Lucero the devil, who is
most of the time more confused than malevolent, as he tracks the biblical Joseph on the pro-
phetic road leading from the Old Testament toward New Testament Christianity. As she does
with Echo/​Eco in Narcissus, Sor Juana impishly, sagely, assigns the devil the task of expounding
theological dogma and biblical revelation. With key contributions from the gnostic females
who freely “preach in church” throughout Joseph, the play’s central message aligns itself with “a
spiritual consciousness consistently oriented against the antifeminist dogma exemplified by the
orthodox masculine Trinity.” Of course, Sor Juana cannot, in an auto sacramental published in
the Catholic empire, allow her heterodox Trinity to triumph openly over the orthodoxy that
Joseph prophesizes. Still, she savors the opportunity to encode a symbolic declaration that the
Snake/​Eve related to female goddesses is innocent of the charges against her and survives in the
free will of each individual (Egan, “Donde” 333).8 The sorjuanine Mary’s name is Book (vil-
lancico ii, v. 4), is Wisdom, the Divine Minerva (villancico v, v. 9), the Word of God…” (333).
Even in the historical auto about San Hermenegildo’s (at that time) heretical conversion from
Arrianism to Christianity, a pivotal role in the action belongs to Ingunda, Hermenegildo’s wife.
She exercises a force of character that he lacks; when the going gets tough and he is about to
fold, Ingunda has strength that shores up resolve for both of them and persuades him to persist
in his decision to defy father and religion to embrace the new faith –​and face martyrdom as a
consequence (Worley).
Sor Juana insistently alludes to herself as without gender, as a sexless soul, an intelligence
and consciousness belonging to neither woman nor man.The androgynous nature of her poetic
persona is a persuasive arm of her quietly militant stance on the freedom of women to think,
study, and write. Hers is what Mary Baldridge calls a Spiritual Androgyny; in her works, she
along with other medieval and early modern women “androgynize Christianity by emphasiz-
ing the feminine characteristics of the Divine… [Also,] these women androgynize themselves
by taking on masculine characteristics and roles” (15). In a study of the “mask of androgyny”
donned by Sor Juana and by the protagonist of Elena Poniatowska’s testimonial novel, Hasta no
verte, Jesús mío, Linda Egan demonstrates how, “in the context of the predatory patriarchies that
victimize both of them, each develops the masculine aspects of her being as a strategy to cope
with stress and the concrete problems caused by her situation, that of Sor Juana being that she
is a disobedient nun” (“Let No One” 27). Similar to the assertive, sometimes aggressive Eco/​
Echo of Narciso, Sor Juana plays in earnest fright with the masculine role in which her readers
often cast her.
Much has been said about whether Sor Juana’s concerns for feminine issues can rightly be
termed “feminist,” since the words feminism and feminist in the oppositional and inclusion-
ary sense they are now used did not gain wide currency until the 1970s (although Katherine
Hepburn mentions the “feminist movement” in her 1942 film, “Woman of the Year”). Many
scholars choose to label Sor Juana’s aesthetic, philosophical, and theological activism “proto-​
feminism.” Others do not quibble but simply pronounce what was real but unnamed with
today’s language. María Luisa Femenías, in a lengthy article on Sor Juana as a feminist philoso-
pher, defines women’s self-​aware assertion as “the perception of women’s subordination and the
commitment to correct this situation of subordination. We will see that we can attribute this
attitude to Sor Juana” (132).
Although I pretend to segregate “literary criticism” here, as though it were a category apart
from feminist, psychoanalytical, historical, and other fields I have discussed above, it is in fact
implicated in all of them. However, by literary I  mean concerned primarily with discourse,

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with the way Sor Juana manages language (structure, voice, narration, tone and other discursive
elements) to achieve her artistic goals in these religious works. Personally, as I examine analyses
of the nun’s theological dramas, I am heartened to note in this age of cultural studies the hefty
proportion of criticism still devoted to textual interpretation. Scholars fix their gaze on alle-
gory, especially of course in Narcissus but also in Joseph (e.g., Cortés Koloffon; Ellis; McGaha,
Story; Urbán) and analogy, or transformation (Granger-​Carrasco; Houvenaghel); metaphor and
other figurative language (Egan, “Donde Dios” and “Relativismo”; Muneroni; Urbán); hiero-
glyphic and emblematic representation in Narcissus (Nelson); baroque art (Cabranes-​Grant;
Peters and Domeier, Divine); character study (Daniel, “Satan”; Fuller; Merrim, “Narciso”); genre
study (Bergland); and representation and structure (Cevallos), among others, all falling into the
category of traditional literary exegesis.
In recent years, critics have emphasized aspects of the baroque nun’s work that mark her as
unique among her contemporaries and even among generations of writers to follow. The spot-
light she shines on women consistently throughout her career, and the courage, intensity and,
even fierceness with which she defends a woman’s right to think, learn, write, and speak her
mind have, of course, always characterized her as a feminist before the concept existed. Many
scholars remark on this aspect of her work, as I note above. Most women religious of her era
spoke and wrote about saints’ lives or their own spiritual experiences; Sor Juana rarely alludes
to her inner life as a Catholic who has married Christ. She writes about strong, independent
women, and includes the Virgin Mary among them. One cannot be sure, but she may be mock-
ing Church Fathers who cast the Eve of Genesis as evil incarnate/​the devil’s helpmate when
she makes curious use of female devils in both Narcissus and Joseph (Egan, “Donde Dios”; Rice).
Peña Fernández is one of several scholars who refute others who see Calderón de la Barca as
Sor Juana’s closely followed source in a play such as Joseph. She casts her allegorical characters
in original ways, and draws for inspiration outside the expected sources; she relies, for exam-
ple, on the twelfth-​century French priest, St. Bernard of the Cistercian order (Ellis). He held a
special devotion for the Virgin Mary, which endeared him to Sor Juana. The nun assigned roles
to the Virgin that could prompt strong resistance from some critics, often equating her divine
importance to Christ.
We have seen how Jean Krynen condemns Sor Juana’s identification of Mary with the foun-
tain in the Narcissus and the pagan youth himself with Christ. Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling is
no less offended by Sor Juana’s choice of analogy for dramatizing the Eucharistic lesson to view-
ers of her sacred theater. For Bénassy-​Berling, Narcissus as Christ represents a “contrasentido
de primera magnitud” (Humanismo 359) [misinterpretation of the highest magnitude]; the auto
really is not sacramental, she concludes. For others, the critic’s statement only defines a dimen-
sion of the Mexican’s originality. For, as Grossi remarks (“Loa” 127–​33), both the Narcissus and
its prehispanic loa theatricalize Sor Juana’s talent for working against the grain. Notably more
open-​minded, less racist, less sexist and less xenophobic than the intellectual elite of Mexico in
the seventeenth century, Sor Juana was the first democrat of the country that was soon to be, its
first defender of what today we consider postcolonial causes and postmodern ideologies (Egan,
“Relativismo”).We can almost feel sorry for the churchmen who despaired of disciplining such
a free-​thinking nun.
Almost.
A lingering pity is that her readers are almost exclusively confined to Spanish speakers, or
at least to those who can read Spanish. Few translations of her work exist. Of those that do,
most are in English. I shall qualify that statement, however, and add that I have conducted but
a cursory survey of sorjuanine works in translation. There will surely be many more available
than I  can report here. I  will be brief, therefore:  Her 975-​verse poem, Primero sueño, exists

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translated into English, German, and Italian, at least. Her famous retort to the men of the
church, the Respuesta (Answer) I have found in English and Italian, but it most likely exists also
in German. Indeed, there is an abridged edition of her “complete works” edited by Méndez
Plancarte, which provides side-​by-​side Spanish and German versions of selected lyric, theatri-
cal, and prose texts. I do not know if the translated theater includes one of her autos or loas.
Speaking of these, I will mention some of the English translations of these I have found: Alan
Trueblood’s Divine Narcissus; Margaret Sayers Peden’s Divine Narcissus and its loa; Patricia Peters’s
and René Domeier’s Divine Narcissus and its loa; Edith Grossman’s (partial) loa to the Narcissus;
Pamela Kirk Rappaport’s selections of Divine Narcissus and its loa; Michael McGaha’s Scepter of
Joseph. As this (surely) partial list suggests, virtually all efforts to translate Sor Juana’s sacred plays
in English have focused exclusively on The Divine Narcissus and its loa. I know of only the one
translation of El cetro de José (McGaha) and have seen no translations at all for even a fragment
of San Hermenegildo.
I mention translation –​and implicitly, the need for much more of it, across a language and
among the community of scholarly nations –​for two reasons. One, scholarship itself will benefit
from a broader, more diverse readership; the synergism will amplify scholarly efforts by much
more than numerical increase. Second, Sor Juana is and has been since she began writing a
world-​class artist. She was an unconventional thinker who projected her voice beyond the con-
vent walls. It is time she vaulted herself and her works far outside the Hispanic and anglophone
box in which she has been largely confined. Let her be heard in Danish, in Chinese, in Hindi.
At the same time, it would be helpful to readers –​elementary students, high school youths
and university folk, as well as “lay” readers everywhere –​to have side-​by-​side bilingual editions
of any and all of Sor Juana’s works: “Bilingual texts have been left outside the mainstream of
both translation theory and literary history.Yet the tradition of the bilingual writer … is a rich
and venerable one” (Hokenson and Munson, n.p.).
In whatever language the scholar may choose, understanding Sor Juana’s work is an open-​
ended proposition. As attractive to scholars as the feminist aspects of her work have been,
attending to women in general and to her writings in particular:

may help us better to deal with the trouble with maps that drives so much contemporary
scholarship. Important work is being done on women in Atlantic, transatlantic, and hemi-
spheric studies, often framed by caveats much like my own: A great deal remains to be
done, both because the enterprise is necessarily labor intensive and because the neglect
of women within current discussions of global studies during the colonial period persists.
(Harvey, “Women” 160)

Matthew Stroud’s unusual Lacanian study of Sor Juana’s Narcissus reminds us how few
explicitly psychological studies have expanded our knowledge of the nun’s world and writings.
We have heard of the “poetics of failure”: what does that mean? And what of the psychology
of the Gifted Girl? If ever there was a gifted child, specifically, a gifted girl, it is the Creole Juana
Inés, raised in an Indian village and transported suddenly at a tender age to the big metropolis
and whisked into the traps of social and political life in the viceregal court. What part of her
giftedness drives and shapes her work?
Some scholars have noticed the theologian in Juana, but that small community of critics
has scarcely touched the surface of the belief systems that interweave their suggestive concepts
of the divine in the nun’s deeply and widely informed consciousness. She is said to adhere
to dogmatic Catholicism. At times she is said to hold some heterodox notions. But what of
the gnosticism she accessed through the Church Fathers’ writings? How does Neoplatonic

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hermetism coincide with orthodox Christianity? And what of those many hints of a Protestant
free-​thinking spirit, which gave ecclesiastics an inkling of her heresy, and finally moved them to
act against her? Theology is key to understanding Sor Juana.
Little has been written about Sor Juana’s political leanings, or her political actions. Scholars
have mentioned the theology hidden in her villancicos and autos. What might also be written
about her role as a teacher? And about the ramifications both of her politics and her teaching in
the emerging field of transnational study, of comparative studies of the Puritan Anne Bradstreet,
for example? Has anyone analyzed John Donne’s metaphysical poetry and hers?
Few studies have focused on the ubiquitous use of emblems in Sor Juana’s works. We have
seen Nelson’s approach to the hieroglyphical Narcissus. It is perhaps not widely acknowledged
that the Jesuits “idearon y desarrollaron” (Mariscal 54) [conceived and developed] an emblem-
atic system reflecting their program of transculturation. Did Sor Juana’s constant exposure to
the Jesuit emblematic aesthetic guide her, wittingly or unconsciously, to perfect the art of
masked language? What we know is that Sor Juana “installed before our eyes literary images of
extraordinary complexity –​and rich transparency” (Egan, “Plumas emblemáticas” 281). Further
inquiry would be welcome into what lies behind the verbal shields Sor Juana devised. Related
to emblematics is ekphrasis. Typically the nun’s ekphrastic writing inspires commentary on the
many verbal portraits Sor Juana painted: of her vicereine friends, baby Jesus, Narcissus, Eco and
Human Nature in the auto, and even, tongue in cheek, of herself, busy painting those portraits.
What else does she paint in coded words besides the physical and psychological demeanor of
humans?
The popularity, in particular, of Sor Juana’s best-​loved mystery play reveals what the scholars
“interviewed” for this study have collectively shown: the cheeky nun who lived surrounded
by thousands of books was not only New Spain’s most priceless intellectual treasure, she was,
despite the way she skirted the convent’s strict rules, well-​versed in liturgy and church doc-
trine. And she was so gifted that she could translate these into fascinating dramas that hold our
attention for centuries of scrutiny and delight, even when the only stage on which her pastoral
scenes and native dances are performed is a well-​lit page. She makes us think about the way
Aztecs had to live after the Spaniards took over their land, homes, culture, and religion. She
makes us think about the long series of religio-​cultural transformations that brought Christians
from pagan worship to the “only true religion” they practiced in seventeenth-​century Mexico.
Electa Arenal speaks for me, and perhaps for many of us, when she affirms that “in Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz’s poetry and prose we find prefigurations of the theoretical modes of twentieth-​
century feminist scholars, especially literary critics” (“Where” 125). She was a scholar, a thinker,
a writer ahead of her time.

Notes
1 Méndez Plancarte, editor of Sor Juana’s complete works in the contemporary era, defines the loa as [my
translation and paraphrase] a small scenic piece at times staged by itself, or, more frequently, preceding
an auto or play and perhaps even alluding to the subject matter of the play it introduces (OC 4.503).
2 Two kinds of performances were outlawed by the Inquisition in Sor Juana’s time: “masked dances and
festivities by the native populations outside the Church.”This implies that “the native dances performed
in Sor Juana’s Loa [to Narcissus] would not have been permitted” to be staged (Taylor and Townsend 83).
3 See, for instance, Patterson, “Jesuit Neo-​Scholasticism”; Worley; Egan, “Donde Dios.”
4 Among the few studies dedicated to Hermenegildo and Joseph, still fewer comment on the cultural and
literary sources that Sor Juana drew on to plot her stories. See Ellis and Vermeylen on San Bernardo as
an inspiration for the Hermenegildo and the Narcissus and Sabat de Rivers, “Apología” on the historian
Mariana, also for Hermenegildo; Rice and Peña Fernández discuss biblical sources for Joseph while Daniel
(“Satan”) refutes claims that Sor Juana followed Calderón.

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5 These and the Calderonian sources are covered in solid detail by Bénassy-​Berling in Humanismo. See also
Houvenaghel, “Camino”; Bauer-​Funke; Urbán, and Vinge.
6 With respect to commentary on Sor Juana’s adventures in theology, see Arenal, “Where”; Beuchot,
“Autos”; Egan, “Donde Dios”; Merrim, “Narciso”; Wray, “Sermones.”
7 See also Egan, “Donde Dios,” which appears in the same volume, for analyses of villancicos and the
Narcissus positing a Virgin Mary as part of Sor Juana’s personal Trinity: God, Christ and Mary. Other
works examining the autos and their loas from a feminist perspective: Glantz; Gallo; McGaha, Story;
Patterson, “Jesuit”; Houvenaghel; Worley; Merrim, “Narciso”; Bergland; and Peters.
8 Or, as Verónica Grossi phrases it: “Sor Juana strives to put in practice her Baroque ingenuity in order to
create surreptitious ciphers, by means of a play of elaborate (but well realized) analogies, whose meanings
retreat in diverse measures from Christian dogma” (“Fiesta” 678).

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21
LOS EMPEÑOS DE UNA CASA
Staging gender

Susana Hernández Araico

The latter half of the twentieth-​century ushered in a critical appraisal of Sor Juana’s Los empeños
de una casa (Pawns of a House) after centuries of practical oblivion, beginning in the mid-​1700s.1
This fate was tied to evaluations of the Baroque in general. Neoclassical critics such as Benito
Feijoo had censured the highly metaphorical and syntactically inventive poetic style created by
Luis de Góngora (1561–​1627), whose influence had prevailed through most of the seventeenth
century, notably in theater. Indeed, in New Spain, Góngora’s style was all-​pervasive (Buxó,
Góngora). Although admiration for Sor Juana’s intellectual accomplishments never waned, rejec-
tion of gongorismo through the end of the nineteenth century meant that the Spanish poet’s
influence on Sor Juana’s poetic language was deemed if not nefarious, certainly regrettable
(Alatorre, Introducción 12–​22). The re-​evaluation of Góngora in Fitzmaurice-​Kelly’s History
of Spanish Literature (1898), translated into Spanish in 1901, signaled a renewed appreciation of
the Baroque among critics and poets. The modernist Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío (1867–​
1916) –​highly acclaimed throughout the Spanish-​speaking world –​paid tribute to and revived
Góngora’s poetic style in his 1905 Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope). In 1910,
for the first centenary of Mexican independence and on the eve of the Mexican Revolution,
Amado Nervo, one of Darío’s best-​known followers, published Juana de Asbaje in Madrid, dedi-
cated to “all the women” of Mexico (29).2 After initially exalting Góngora, the Mexican poet set
out to rescue Sor Juana’s work from two centuries of neglect (Alatorre, Introducción 11). This
included her dramatic texts, such as Los empeños de una casa. Nervo’s brief chapter on Sor Juana’s
theatre praised her autos sacramentales (one-​act Eucharistic allegories) and her mythological play,
thus counteracting neoclassical censure of these genres, as well as opposition by nineteenth-​
century realism’s major advocate, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856–​1912). For Los empeños,
Nervo cited this critic’s favorable comments on Sor Juana’s “interesting and exceptional imita-
tion of Calderón’s comedias” as well as Mesonero Romanos’s (1803–​1882) earlier praise of her
talent for the capa y espada (cloak and dagger) genre, tempered by his distaste for her Gongoristic
style: “si no fuera por aquella fascinación propria de la época en que escribía” (114) [were it
not for that fascination [with Góngora], characteristic of the time when she wrote].3 Against
more severe critics of Sor Juana’s theatre, the Mexican poet reacted with derisive sarcasm, while
reaffirming the autobiographical dimension of Los empeños in Leonor’s lengthy exposition (114,
116–​20). Los empeños thus entered the twentieth century with two specific critical observa-
tions –​Calderón’s influence and Sor Juana’s supposedly autobiographical portrayal –​that have

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persisted to the present, often impeding a theatrical and dramatic analysis of the play in its
own right.
In the twentieth century, Sor Juana’s secular theater attracted more attention as her autos
sacramentales gained recognition in Mexico. The reappraisal of baroque poetics by the Spanish
“Generation of ‘27” poets –​so-​called due to their enthusiastic commemoration of the third cen-
tenary of Góngora’s death –​propelled a renewed interest in Hispanic classical theater, including
the autos sacramentales of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Federico García Lorca’s theater troupe
La Barraca, for example, performed Spanish classical theater throughout Andalusian towns
and villages, and the poet-​critic of the group, Gerardo Diego, praised Sor Juana as “the most
accomplished of all poets during the time of Charles II,” asserting that she “proceeds directly
from Calderón even more so than from Góngora” (84). Sor Juana’s autos sacramentales influ-
enced some of contemporary Mexico’s most notable playwrights –​namely Emilio Carballido
(1925–​2008) and Luisa Josefina Hernández (1928–​) (cf. Hernández Araico, “Calderón entre
mexicanos”).
A more comprehensive appreciation of Sor Juana’s works, including her theater, began to
take root in the mid-​twentieth-​century, with the celebration of the tercentenary of her birth-
day in 1951.4 The first of three volumes of her complete works edited by Alfonso Mendez
Plancarte appeared in the same year.5 Alberto Salceda’s 1957 fourth volume of the Obras comple-
tas included Los empeños de una casa in its first publication since 1725, together with the songs
and playlets featured originally in Sor Juana’s 1692 Segundo volumen (Second Volume). Salceda,
however, titled this dramatic composite “festejo” (fête), unlike the original edition.6
Subsequently, in 1982, two highly significant publications that greatly stimulated interest in
Sor Juana also contributed to criticism on her theater: 1) Georgina Sabat de Rivers’s partial
edition of her 1689 first volume, Inundación castálida (Castalia’s Overflow) featured an introduc-
tory section on dramatic prologues as a genre exemplified by one of the nine loas originally
published in that volume; and 2) Octavio Paz’s monumental Sor Juana, o las trampas de la fe (Traps
of Faith) included sections on both Sor Juana’s secular and religious theatre.
In the English-​speaking world, Dorothy Schons’s pioneering research in the latter half of
the 1920s, Eunice Gates’s in the 1930s, and Irving Leonard’s in the 50s and 60s eventually led
to studies of Sor Juana’s theater. Critical interest in Los empeños in the United States may be
traced to Castañeda’s 1967 comparison of Sor Juana’s comedia and Calderón’s Los empeños de un
acaso (The Trials of Chance), despite its critical shortcomings. In 1971, Gerard Flynn’s Twayne
Series volume included sections on Sor Juana’s secular and religious drama. Lee Daniel wrote
what was very likely the first U.S. doctoral dissertation on her theatre, in 1979. In 1982, Vern
Williamsen’s The Minor Dramatists of the 17th Century presented Los empeños de una casa among
salient works by post-​Calderonian playwrights. From 1983 through 1989, the publication of
five articles by Daniel on Sor Juana’s loas and her two plays were certainly the most substantive
critical contribution on her theater.
Sor Juana’s impact as a dramatist on interdisciplinary English studies, however, may be
attributed principally to two translations, both published by Harvard in 1988: (1) Paz’s Traps
of Faith, by Margaret Sayers Peden; and (2)  a stylistically refined translation of various of
Sor Juana’s poems as well as some villancicos, and part of the auto, El divino Narciso (The
Divine Narcissus) by the renowned scholar of early modern Spanish literature and experi-
enced translator of Spanish poetry, Alan Trueblood.7 A year later, the English-​speaking world
saw the publication of Jean Franco’s Plotting Women:  Gender and Representation in Mexico,
which highlighted the significance of Sor Juana’s texts within Mexican culture, seemingly
for the first time with an avowed feminist perspective. This approach was continued, with
a specific focus on Los empeños in 1991 by Merrim (Feminist Perspectives) and Wilkins, and

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further developed, beginning in the late 90s by Weimer, Greer-​Johnson (“Sor Juana,” Sor
Juana’s,” “Creation”), and Dopico. In her passing references to Sor Juana’s two comedies,
Franco sees Sor Juana’s plays as giving voice to her experience in viceregal circles (26–​27).
She thus follows Paz, who titles the section in Traps dealing with her secular theater “Stage
and Court” (326–​37).8 Actually, only the Sainete primero de palacio (First Interlude for Palace
Performance), published between the play’s first and second acts, explicitly reflects and
mocks allegorically the duplicity of suitors and lovers at court (Monterde, “Teatro profano”
28).9 Nevertheless, although Sor Juana’s secular theater may reflect some of her experiences
and emotions, autobiographical interpretations limit potential readings of her secular theater.
In the first and subsequent performances before a court audience and in the first editions of
Los empeños, the nun-​playwright presents critical spectators and readers with her theatrical
artistry, creatively surpassing the strictures of a genre generally fallen out of fashion among
dramatists but still enjoyed through revivals, especially at private court performances.
In 1989, Carmen Celsa García Valdés published the first scholarly and amply annotated edition
of Los empeños de una casa, only the second edition since the last printing of Sor Juana’s Segundo
volumen in 1725 (Rodríguez Cepeda 15) that included all the ancillary pieces originally published
with the comedia –​i.e., the Loa, songs, sainetes (interludes) and final sarao (choral-​choreographed
finale); following Salceda, García Valdés referred to them as a “festejo” (51). Besides providing
continuously numbered lines for the three acts, in contrast with Salceda who numbered them
separately, García Valdés’s edition contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of Los
empeños de una casa within its Spanish literary context, but also served to perpetuate Salceda’s
questionable assertions about the chronology and location of the premiere in New Spain.
Modern performances in the U.S., Mexico, and Spain coincided with late twentieth-​century
critical attention to the play. An adaptation directed by the Spaniard Manuel Canseco toured
throughout Spain and reached the United States at the 1988 XII Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama
Festival in El Paso, Texas, as well as in Ciudad Juárez. This production by the Centro Dramático
de Extremadura brought out the artifices of the genre through lighting effects and electronic
music that made the characters in the dark scenes appear as marionettes (Hernández Araico,
“Duodécimo”).Two watershed critical studies, by Catherine Larson and José Ruano de la Haza
(“Puesta”), initiated a theatrically-​focused analysis of the play. Previous critics had concentrated
almost exclusively on Doña Leonor’s supposed biographical reflection of Sor Juana’s life in her
introductory speech, in which she refers to her fame as an intellectual (vv. 283–​358); and the
break of dramatic illusion by the gracioso (fool) Castaño and the characters in the Sainete segundo
(Second Interlude) as a purportedly innovative anticipation of Pirandello (Monterde, “Nota
preliminar” XII; Salceda (Introducción, XXIX); Paz (Trampas 435; Traps 329), and García Valdés
(55).10 But the break in dramatic illusion, with classical roots and a long popular evolution, was
a technique inherent in Spanish Golden Age comedy, frequently deployed in entremeses (inter-
ludes) and teatro breve (brief theatre), and particularly through the gracioso in three-​act come-
dias (Hernández Araico, Ironía 8–​74, “Introduction,” “Gracioso,” “El teatro breve”).11 Regardless,
after Canseco’s 1988 production and following Larson’s and Ruano’s studies, more early mod-
ern Spanish drama specialists began to focus on the play’s theatrical features, first taken up in
two essays by González (“Espacio,” “Fiesta”) as well as in various studies by Hernández Araico.
Subsequent productions have generated further interest in Sor Juana as a playwright. At the
1996 Chamizal Festival, David Pasto directed his own translation, with “the musical underscor-
ing of key moments” (Hegstrom and Williamsen 85). In 1997, the Bilingual Foundation for the
Arts in East Los Angeles staged Los empeños de una casa, alternating performances in Spanish
and English. The latter, advertised as The Misfortunes of a House, was based on McGaha’s Pawns
of a House. This production, with actors whose training was in television or film, may not have

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entirely pleased Classical Theater specialists but it brought quite successfully Sor Juana’s dra-
matic artistry for the first time to the Hispanic community of Los Angeles. In February 2005,
the BFA revised its production, again with popular acclaim.Though “far from perfect,” it “surely
satisfied the ravenous audience” (Gasior 227).
In contrast, the year before, at Stratford-​upon-​Avon’s Swan Theater, a highly polished
production of the play, in Catherine Boyle’s translation, House of Desires, was staged by the
Royal Shakespeare Company, whose training is similar to that of professional performances
of Spanish Golden-​Age drama. Sor Juana was thus set, as it were, on the world stage as
a playwright.12 Coincidentally, though worlds apart, both the RSC and BFA productions
begin with the playwright evidently writing the play about to be performed. That actress is
soon transformed into one of the female protagonists, probably because critics have tradi-
tionally equated Sor Juana with Doña Leonor.13 In Mexico, the National Institute of Fine
Arts (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) production of Los empeños, directed by José Solé,
was invited to participate in the 2008 Almagro Spanish Classical Theatre Festival and also
played through the fall season in Mexico City. So significant has Sor Juana’s comedia become
on the stage in the Spanish-​speaking world that, in 2013, it returned to Almagro with a
Chilean company (cf. Hegstrom and Williamsen). As Hegstrom and Williamsen have shown,
approaches to Sor Juana’s Los empeños from the point of view of feminist and gender studies,
both in Spanish and English, have certainly contributed to its increased presence on the stage.
The 1992 commemoration of the quincentenary of the encounter of the New and Old
Worlds brought increased awareness of American themes in Spanish drama of the colonial
period, and, consequently, an upsurge of interest in Sor Juana’s theater among directors and critics
(Hernández Araico, “La poesía”).The critical impetus given by this historical commemoration in
the Spanish-​speaking world drew on Anglophone post-​colonial criticism and the development
of cultural studies with its corollary of hybridity, developed by Homi Bhabha and Néstor García
Canclini, resulted in new approaches to Sor Juana’s theatre, mostly in English. These approaches
sometimes emphasize the theoretical without the necessary historical contextualization.
Additionally, from1991 to 1995, the tercentenary of Sor Juana’s death was celebrated in
Mexico with conferences mainly at the Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México’s Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, and the Universidad del Claustro de San
Jerónimo. The year 1992 also marked the tercentenary of the publication Sor Juana’s Segundo
volumen (Second Volume), which contains most of her theatre, including Los empeños de una casa.
The facsimile edition of this volume published for the 300th anniversary of the playwright’s
birth in 1995, with prologue by the renowned scholar and writer Margo Glantz, provided
a wider perspective of the seventeenth-​century reception of her “poesías cómicas” (dramatic
poetry) by making more accessible various admiring clerics’ preliminary remarks, including
favorable comments on her theatre, which sharply contrasted with her opponents’ censure in
New Spain. In the Segundo volumen de las obras de Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Inquisition’s
censor  –​immediately following her own introduction and preceding all the other prelates’
laudatory remarks –​states:

De las comedias, solo diré que me parecen dignas de hacer [sic] entre las más aplaudidas
de los autores más primorosos en este género de poesía, y que en los teatros merecerán los
aplausos que se granjean en el papel. (8)
(About the plays, I will only say that to me they seem worthy of becoming among the
most applauded by the most accomplished directors of this type of dramatic poetry and
that they will earn the applause in theaters that they merit on paper.)14

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Los empeños de una casa evidently did not face any censorship.Yet there are no extant records
of any specific production in Spain in public theaters, palatial homes, or royal private quarters –​
though a production in the latter two would be probable, considering the Condesa de Paredes’s
ardent support of Sor Juana’s publications (Alatorre, “Para leer la Fama,” 466; Paz, Trampas 558–​
59; Salceda, “Cronología” 356), and her influential position upon her return to Spain, as she was
named grandee in 1692 and the queen’s camarera mayor (Royal Chambermaid-​in-​Chief) in1694
(Sabat de Rivers, “Mujeres nobles”; Alatorre, “Para leer la Fama,” 457–​58; Sicard).15
Sor Juana’s religious and secular theater might also have been produced at the estates of
the former viceroy’s powerful Medinaceli family, perhaps even in a Hieronymite convent or
a Jesuit college in Seville.16 Although new compositions for court theatrical celebrations were
the mythological-​musical-​semi-​operatic type or the pastoral-​choral (zarzuela), particulares were
comedias playing in public theaters transferred to the court. In the late 1600s, however, these
were more than likely private revivals in various royal apartments on a temporary stage.17 Just
as the Manila performance of Los empeños was scheduled for a 1708 court celebration of Philip
V’s son’s birth (Cabrero Fernández 89; Retana 139, 227), the extant Loa and manuscript must
have also resulted from a court performance, given the high improbability of a commercial
production.18
Comedias were usually published some years after they had been playing in public theaters,
often touted as nuevas (“new”) and once they were published, they lost their novelty and the
commercial incentive to stage them diminished substantially. The first edition of Los empeños
in Seville in 1692 would thus have been a major economic deterrent for this play to be staged
in public theaters. A more significant reason, however, would have been the directors’ unwill-
ingness to risk a financial fiasco with Sor Juana’s experimental, structurally hybrid comedia
(Hernández Araico, “Introduction” XXVII–​XXX; “Sor Juana y sus graciosos II,” 277) which,
like Cervantes’s, was not staged for several centuries because it boldly deconstructed the sword
and dagger paradigm established by Lope de Vega to public acclaim, and subsequently perfected
by Calderón de la Barca with even greater popular success. Since Los empeños would likely not
have been a commercial production transferred to the Court, it was probably initiated at a pal-
ace as an innovative comedia, with a central semi-​operatic scene within a capa y espada intrigue
that rivaled and deconstructed Calderon’s.
In his Theatro de los teatros (1692), Bances Candamo mentioned being highly impressed by
two of Sor Juana’s books: “Sobre todo nos han impresso, pocos días a, dos libros de Soror Juana
de la Cruz, religiosa en México” (94).19 It is highly probable that, as a playwright himself, Bances
would have glanced through her comedias in the Segundo volumen, and likely that his reference
to her audacity (“temeridad”) pertained to the final comedia in that volume, Los empeños, where
Bances would have noticed Sor Juana’s bold break with the very decorum he was defending
in the comedia against moralistic accusations.20 Sor Juana’s audacious departure from the sub-
tle social criticism ingeniously imbedded within the acclaimed Calderonian paradigm, as well
as her bold interruption of the fast-​moving intrigue with an anomalous central lyrical pause,
were incompatible with the commercial interests of autores de compañía (director-​managers) of
the corrales (commercial playhouses), even without the outer trappings of the allegorical semi-​
operatic Loa and the choreographic-​choral finale as well as the inner fillings of the songs and
the allegorical Sainete primero which dressed up the comedia de capa y espada as a courtly fête.21
But in a court production, those divergences from the Calderonian model would have held
particular appeal.
Sor Juana, who had evidently read Lope, Tirso, Rojas Zorrilla, Salazar y Torres, Moreto
and, of course, Calderón undoubtedly had also seen some of their plays performed and had
learned the mechanics of theatrical composition from these acclaimed playwrights.22 She also

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understood how their theater embraced and necessarily disguised social criticism through very
effective irony (Hernández Araico, Ironía). Since the 1980s, various scholars have debunked José
Antonio Maravall’s theory that Spain’s baroque theatre served as propaganda for a repressive
monarchical system; however, recent Sor Juana critics propose that Los empeños is among the few
that break through the supposedly conservative mold of the Spanish comedia (Burmingham,
Donnell 179). As a creative artist on the edge of the empire –​“lo más remoto del occidente”
(Bances 94) [the remotest West], unhampered by any censorship or commercial deterrents for
her private production for the powerful who supported her, Sor Juana indeed could boldly
go beyond the comedia paradigm in satirizing social mores, in some instances approximating
what her Spanish models did only in the farcical or extemporaneous theatre commissioned
exclusively for private court entertainment (GRISO, “Introducción”). Castañeda and Valbuena
Briones, among the first in the latter part of the twentieth century to note Sor Juana’s debt to
Calderón, did not consider that, in addition to taking up a genre fallen out of fashion, she imagi-
natively deconstructed the comedia paradigm with unorthodox characters and a bold combina-
tion of dramatic modes in order to produce a stylistically hybrid comedia that “exponentially
intensifies the cloak and sword intrigue for which Calderón remained the acknowledged mas-
ter” (Hernández Araico, “Baroque Fest” 34).23
Sor Juana was commissioned to compose Los empeños for the court, very likely to be per-
formed either by servants –​that is, semi-​professional actors who had traveled from Spain with
the viceregal retinue24 and were superior to those performing in the public theater in the
Hospital de Indios (Hernández Araico, “Teatro palaciego” 142–​44), or by nuns or “niñas edu-
candas” (young female students) at the Monasterio de San Jerónimo who could “act admirably”
(representan tan admirablemente).25 Especially for good actors, Sor Juana could risk producing
a hybrid comedia, constructing very demanding roles for atypical characters and assigning them
innovative spatial movement in her experimental text (cf. Hernández Araico, “Editing”).
Wherever the play may have premiered in New Spain –​viceregal palace, noble home, the San
Jerónimo monastery –​it was intended principally for the court, that is, for the viceregal couple
and nobility as well as their attendants and some clerics (Hernández Araico, “Teatro palaciego”).
Sor Juana critics have persisted in blindly accepting the specific location and date proposed
over sixty years ago by Salceda: October 4, 1683 at the Tributes Accountant Deza’s home, reaf-
firmed unquestioningly by García Valdés (53) and Paz (Trampas 434; Traps 328). This, although
the Nobel laureate and most critics acknowledge the inopportune occasion of the archbishop’s
entry, mentioned at the close of the Loa, given his aversion to secular theatre. Salceda’s chrono-
logical hypothesis, often cited mistakenly as factual, becomes doubtful in light of several verified
facts: the absence of a reference in Robles’s Diario to any comedia at the Tributes Accountant
Deza’s home the day of the Archbishop’s entry, the existence of several other officials whose last
name is Deza, as well as the entries of two other bishops into Mexico City, especially that of Sor
Juana’s friend, Sariñana, the bishop of Oaxaca (Hernández Araico, “Problemas” 118–​22). Given
the lack of any proof and the doubtfulness of the specific date proposed but never ascertained
by Salceda, critical objectivity calls for more chronological flexibility in reference to the date for
the first performance of Los empeños de una casa (Good 46, n. 11).26
As the venue for its premiere likewise remains unascertained, this lack of documentation
casts doubt on the performance of the comedia actually accompanied by the two sainetes and
sarao published together with it in the Segundo volumen. No explanatory heading preceding the
title Loa (450) nor any phrase in the Index (552) listing it along with the songs and playlets
indicate that they were all performed with the comedia as a fiesta or fête for a special occasion,
as the publication after the performance of such theatrical composites usually indicated (Vega
García-​Luengos 72–​73). The only definitely documented performance of Los empeños in the

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seventeenth century appears certified in the Segundo volumen first under the title Loa (450),
explicitly identified as “que precedió a la comedia que se sigue” [that preceded the play that
follows] and in the index (552), for each letra (lyrics) or song listed before and in between the
three acts with the label “que se cantó” [that was sung]. The verbs in the past tense pertaining
to the Loa and the songs certify that they were actually performed in a specific sequence with
the three-​act comedia. On the other hand, the Sarao is only loosely linked with Los empeños by
the phrase in the index “al fin de la Comedia” (552) [at the end of the play], which does not
specify that this playlet was actually performed at the end of the three-​act play, but rather that it
concludes its printed edition.27 For the Primero Sainete de Palacio and the Sainete segundo no link-
age to the three-​act comedia is listed at all. It was actually unheard of for the same playwright
to compose both sainetes in between the three acts as well as the fin de fiesta along with the Loa
and three-​act pastoral or mythological musical comedia.
Two possibilities thus exist for the edition of Los empeños in the Segundo volumen to have
included the two sainetes and final Sarao with no specific linkage to the comedia like the one
clearly indicated for the Loa and songs. Obviously, the first edition was intended to appear as a
composite of these, plus sainetes and Sarao accompanying the three-​act comedia either because
it was actually performed that way –​which is highly questionable –​or because the editor(s)
proposed that the sainetes and Sarao could be coherently staged together with the comedia as
well as the Loa and songs that display a specific label of joint performance.28
For such a theatrical fiesta (fête), however, a comedia at the Spanish royal court would have
been a mythological semiopera (Stein, Songs 126–​86) or a partially sung pastoral zarzuela (Stein,
“Este”) with playlets, other than the loa, not composed by the playwright and staged with
impressive scenery changes.29 But such staging technology was not available at the viceregal
court of New Spain. In fact, all of the stage directions for all of Sor Juana’s theatre indicate
that her loas, autos, sainetes, comedias and sarao were composed for a stage based on the corral
design which was evidently set up at some court venue for particulares or private productions
(Hernández Araico, “Máscaras”).30 The question arises as to why a cloak and dagger comedy
would be presented with the external trappings that in Madrid would characterize a spectacular
lyrical drama. Those embellishing playlets and songs by the same dramatist are possibly meant
to gloss over the bold discordance of her three-​act text with the Spanish comedia paradigm,
thus outwardly legitimizing Sor Juana’s deconstruction with sophisticated baroque theatrics of
representation for courtly spectacles.
Perhaps those outer embellishments were intended to aggrandize –​in actuality or just in
the printed edition –​a private performance as a spectacular celebration. Though only corral-​
type staging was available at the Mexico City court, it remains puzzling that the Diario de
Robles does not allude to any occasion for a theatrical celebration on such a grand scale as the
Segundo volumen edition would warrant (Hernández Araico, “Problemas” 117). If, despite the
lack of historical references, Los empeños was actually a theatrical fête commissioned for a very
special viceregal occasion, the Segundo volumen did not cite it with an explanatory heading for
the comedia with ancillary playlets and songs  –​as various playwrights’ and Calderón’s edi-
tions of court celebrations were in fact labeled, identifying the occasion for which they were
staged (Vega García-​Luengos, “Sobre” 75–​97).The possibility thus remains that the two sainetes
and the sarao were editorial additions to a theatrical celebration that was nevertheless impres-
sive with the introductory allegorical semioperatic Loa and the letras adapted to well-​known
tunes as accompaniment for a highly unparadigmatic, experimental and hybrid comedia de
capa y espada.31
All these textual issues have been disregarded by readers of Los empeños who unquestion-
ingly accept the comedia with its ancillary playlets and songs as the composite festejo (fête)

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promulgated by Salceda. These editorial matters, however, become highly significant as more
recent interest in Sor Juana’s sociocultural preoccupations is based on Los empeños as a composite
unit. Horswell, for example, develops a very engaging transatlantic linkage among various refer-
ences to America or the New World vis-​à-​vis Spain or Europe in connection with the gracioso
Castaño, the Sainete segundo and the Sarao de cuatro naciones with a tantalizing yet quite loosely
proposed theoretical criterion of hybridity.32
The Sainete segundo, in contrast to the other ancillary mini-​dramas long regarded as practi-
cally superfluous, had continually attracted critical attention due to its purportedly original
anticipation of a Pirandello-​like theater-​within-​theater, and its reference (vv. 27–​28) to the
presumed sponsor of the performance of the comedia, according to Salceda (“Cronología”
335–​36). Two characters playing the role of actors take a break from the performance of two
supposedly very long acts, purportedly of Los empeños or whatever comedia the sainete was
adjusted to be interwoven with, since such playlets (entremeses) were characteristically modi-
fied as exchangeable pieces (comodines) from one play to another.33 The two actors Arias and
Muñiz criticize the work of the young student poet who composed the play as well as one Deza
who should have instead selected a better play by Calderón, Rojas [Zorrilla] or Moreto –​or
even the one in which Muñiz had played the role of Celestina. Arias’s comment that Muñiz
played that female role so convincingly that he now appears to be the sorceress disguised as a
man is ripe with suggestions about an actor’s gender role.
Since actors doing the secondary roles of comedic servants in the main comedia performed
its entremeses /​sainetes, Hernández Araico (“Sor Juana y sus graciosos I” 259–​60) posits that if
the Sainete actually accompanied the premiere of Los empeños, then Muñiz could very well have
been played by the actor doing the role of the criada (maid) Celia in the main play or vice versa
by an actress doing that of the male servant gracioso, Castaño.34 In fact, if premiered by nuns
or their young female students, the play would have been performed exclusively by females.
Regardless, Arias’s comment on Muñiz’s role as Celestina pokes fun at the practice of actors
of either gender cross-​dressing for dramatic needs, and not simply for humorous effects in the
comic role of the gracioso.35
Critics of Los empeños who focus on Castaño’s cross-​dressing from the standpoint of femi-
nist or gender studies (cf. Donnell, Greer Johnson, “Sor Juana’s Castaño,” and Weimer) or from
various critical perspectives on the Sainete segundo, particularly from the actorial standpoint (cf.
Cortijo; Greer Johnson, “Sor Juana”; or Burmingham), neglect to consider the seventeenth-​
century theatrical practice of role assignment to the actors (including the director or “autor,”
who often played the “gracioso”) in a comedia together with its accompanying entremeses/​
sainetes. The playwright was hardly ever the same for both play and playlets, but the troupe or
acting company was certainly the same for the performance of their entire combination. Actors
in the humorous roles of servants or country bumpkins (graciosos/​as or villanos ridículos) in the
main play portrayed the farcical characters in the interwoven playlets. If in the premiere, Celia
was played by an actor or if Castaño was played by an actress, either of whom subsequently
performed the role of Muñiz, both the Sainete and the cross-​dressing scene in the third act of
the play would have produced an even more metatheatrically ironic effect on the palace or
conventual audience. Critics who regard the Sainete segundo as originally inseparable from the
performance would do well to take these actorial nuances into consideration.
Pretending to be the notoriously raucous and highly demanding spectators of Spanish
theater, Arias and Muñiz taunt with their hissing a third character who, as the director (autor) of
the two acts already performed, becomes frantic with worry about the play’s failure. Monterde
(“Notas” 39–​40), Salceda (XXVI–​XXVII), Paz (Trampas 434; Traps 328), and even García Valdés
(56) disregard the seventeenth-​century meaning of the term “autor” to refer to an acting

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company manager or troupe director who was responsible for the production after obtaining
from the dramatist or “el poeta” the comedia (written in verse), often revising it to suit his actors
(Sanz Ayan 23).36 Acevedo is the director who threw together the play and sainetes (“de su mal
capricho/​la comedia y sainetes han salido” [vv. 72–​73]) [his mischievous whim produced the
comedia and the sainetes], and thus appears seemingly from back stage, upset over the hissing
in disapproval of his show, as opposed to the absent young student with whom Sor Juana –​as
a technique of captatio benevolentia –​humbly yet astutely identifies as inexperienced in writing
comedias –​therefore initially criticized by Arias “as ignorant of verses in his youth /​as his face
is scant in whiskers” (vv. 32–​35) and also included in the final collective taunt “And let all bad
poets … /​… not forget” (“Y los malos poetas /​tengan sabido,” vv. 144–​45). Greer-​Johnson
(“Sor Juana” 10) and Burmingham (140–​44) mistakenly identify Arias and Muñiz solely as spec-
tators and –​like Monterde, Salceda, Paz and García Valdés –​Acevedo as the playwright of Los
empeños and sainetes. At times some critics have strongly implied that these characters are real,
perhaps because their names apparently point to individuals in Sor Juana’s own literary milieu
(Salceda XXVI–​XXVIII). One must never lose sight, however, of their metafiction, which itself
highlights Sor Juana’s satirical sophistication. Though all three characters end up in ridiculous
chaos typical of interludes, there is nothing simplistic about all the humor in this brief piece
but rather “compleja simplicidad” (“complex foolishness”) (Hernández Araico, “Sor Juana y sus
graciosos I”) that has given way to various critical issues and inquiries.
The hissing brings up the pronunciation of the sibilant “s” by unassimilated or newly arrived
Spaniards derided by the still popular condescending appellation gachupines (v. 136) as opposed
to the pronunciation by criollos (those born of Spanish parents and raised in New Spain), who
evidently by then had a different accent and likewise used some slightly different vocabulary
or grammatical forms. This passage, along with the reference apparently to the superiority of
Spanish comedias since they are “pasadas por agua” (filtered through water) –​a clever play on
words to indicate they cross the Atlantic with a phrase that ordinarily means parboiling food for
easier digestion –​humorously reveal cultural differences among members of the audience and
possibly the actors’ troupe. Horswell’s transatlantic approach to such passages, though novel and
stimulating, at times seems to simplify Sor Juana’s position as confrontational, disregarding the
complexity of her cultural identity as a woman intent, above all on earning admiration, respect,
and support within the Spanish establishment, while simultaneously asserting her subjectivity as
rooted in the multiform mosaic that constituted New Spain (cf. Díaz Balsera).
“Half-​breed” and “stitched together” (“Mestiza /​y acabada a retazos,” vv. 62–​63), the recent
Celestina play in which Arias recalls Muñiz’s as the cross-​dressed sorceress seems preferable to
the former –​after any comedia by acclaimed Spanish playwrights –​than the one these two
say they are tired of performing. In this passage in the Sainete segundo, Salceda had brought
out the implication of Sor Juana’s possible authorship of the anonymous last act of La segunda
Celestina (“Introduction” XXX–​XXXII). The play left unfinished by Agustín Salazar y Torres
(1642–​1675) was widely known as El encanto es la hermosura y El hechizo sin hechizo, with a
third act by the editor of his complete works,Vera Tassis. Schmidhuber’s publication of an edi-
tion of the anonymously completed La segunda Celestina, touting the third act as definitively
Sor Juana’s, with Octavio Paz’s prologue and a previous imprimatur (Trampas, 435–​36; Traps,
329), instigated in the 1990s one of the most heated controversies in the history of Hispanic
letters (Alatorre, “La segunda,” “Tercer repaso”; Buxó, “Las vueltas,” “Sor Juana”; Poot-​Herrera,
“Prendas menores,” “Segundo sainete”; Sabat de Rivers, “Los problemas”). The disagreement
among some of the most prestigious Sor Juana scholars and the final commentary by a single
Vera Tassis specialist (O’Connor, “Los enredos”) served to promote the poet as a playwright
of secular theater.

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Consequently, in recent decades overlapping the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, Los
empeños de una casa and the playlets with which it was first published have increasingly gained
the attention of readers and directors, especially as new editions and English translations of
Sor Juana’s comedia have been making this seventeenth-​century Spanish text more accessi-
ble (Boyle, Castañeda, Hernández Araico, “Introduction”). Not surprisingly, in this age of glo-
balization, when a theoretical vogue impels the examination of literature as an intercultural
flow and exchange instead of a national tradition, Sor Juana’s play –​composed in New Spain,
both following and deconstructing the Spanish paradigm established by Lope and perfected
by Calderón –​has special appeal for critics, since it is metaphorically just as “mestiza” as the
Celestina play brought up in the Sainete segundo. While theoretical approaches in feminist, gen-
der, and transatlantic studies may provide enriching insights into Los empeños and accompany-
ing playlets, open-​minded readers must remain aware of limitations in comprehending the
cultural complexities of the Spanish Baroque and likewise wary of the danger of presentism.
Superimposing contemporary values on Los empeños de una casa while disregarding the poet-​
playwright’s cultural matrix, may produce a valid reading but certainly not the most enlight-
ened. Regardless, Sor Juana’s comedia has unquestionably now proven to be a classic because it
has become a text of contemporary relevance to a variety of receptors, readers, and directors.37

Notes
1 All references to the play and accompanying playlets will be to my edition, translated by Michael D.
McGaha; “elusive to direct translation” (Donnell 190 n.1), the title for Sor Juana’s comedy has found
other English equivalents: “The Desires of One House” (Amy Williamsen 114), “The House of Trials”
(Pasto), “Misfortunes of a House” (Los Angeles Bilingual Foundation for the Arts’ production), “House
of Desires” (Boyle) and “One House, Many Complications” (Matthews).
2 All translations of Nervo’s work are my own.
3 For the Neoclassical approval of Calderón’s cloak and dagger plays, see Luzán (454–​55).
4 The commemorative issues of Revista Iberoamericana 17.33 (1951) and Sur 206 (December 1951) do not
include articles on Sor Juana’s theater, but María y Campos’ “El teatro de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en
Manila en 1709” appeared that year.
5 For the theatrical aspects of Sor Juana’s villancicos, see Hernández Araico, “Coros y coreografía”
(605–​07).
6 Monterde (“Teatro profano,” 25, 34 and 36; “Nota,” IX) is actually the first to refer to Los empeños and
accompanying playlets as a “festejo.”
7 Sayers Peden had previously translated some of Sor Juana’s poetry and had written an essay on Amor es
más laberinto (Love Is the Greater Labyrinth) focusing on Sor Juana’s adaptation of classical myths.
8 In Trampas, “El tablado y la corte” 431–​46.
9 Except for Pailler’s study, critical attention to this playlet remains practically nil.
10 Page citations for García Valdés refer to the “Introduction” in her 2010 edition.
11 Nancy Meckler, the director of the 2004 Royal Shakespeare production of House of Desires, com-
mented, regarding Castaño’s telling the audience that cross-​dressing is not his idea but a humorous part
of the play itself (vv. 2471–​75): “Perhaps moments like these led the way to Pirandello” (n.p.).
12 See Fischer for more on how the RSC’s 2004 production of House of Desire, directed by Nancy Meckler
served as a prequel to the play based on Sor Juana’s life, The Heresy of Love by Helen Edmundson, pre-
miered early 2012, also by the RSC and with the same director; it was later produced at the Globe
September–​November 2015.
13 Eugenia Revueltas (204) exceptionally challenged the prevalent Leonor-​Sor Juana equation. Merrim
considers both Ana and Leonor dual autobiographical mirrors of Sor Juana. See Good for a parallel
between Ana’s rebelliousness against her brother Pedro and Sor Juana’s vis-​à-​vis (Pedro) Calderón. See
also Glantz (“De Narciso”) for Sor Juana’s emulation of Tirso de Molina in her apparent autobio-
graphical projection onto Leonor.
14 I have updated spelling and punctuation in the Spanish original; translation mine.
15 For the Condesa’s only surviving expressions of admiration for Sor Juana, see the fragment in her letter,
dated December 30, 1682 to her cousin, the Duchess of Aveiro (Calvo and Colombi 37–​40, 177–​8),

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her romance in the Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer (Alatorre, Sor Juana, 1.199–​200), and her décima
belatedly submitted for the 1700 Fama y obras pósthumas (Alatorre, “Para leer” 459).
16 For a connection between Sor Juana’s theater and the Jesuits in Seville, see Hernández Araico,“El mon-
taje.” In Manila, the book on the 1706 festivities that included productions of Los empeños and Amor es
más laberinto was published by the Jesuits (Retana 227).
17 Records indicate numerous “particulares” from 1684 to 1698 (Shergold and Varey 42–​226). Shergold
(History 359) concludes the chapter “Court Plays of the Reign of Charles II, 1665–​1700,” affirming
that “Private performances before the monarch and the court continued to be given in the royal apart-
ments, or rooms of different palaces…”
18 The Loa (Ms. 2.100, Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid) and the manuscript for the play (Ms. 16.019,
also at BNM) are considered to be in eighteenth-​century handwriting. Paz cites Armando de María y
Campos’s “curious” information on a 1709 production in Manila of Sor Juana’s Los empeños and Amor
es más laberinto (Trampas 441; Traps 333); neither he nor Cabrero Fernández provide the documentation
for this Manila staging, which Retana does cite (227, 231).
19 Evidently unaware of Sor Juana’s lifetime dedication to letters, Bances cites her as an example of the
power of inspiration or infused knowledge as seen in the ancient sybils, with great amazement at how
“una mujer, encerrada desde niña en un monasterio en lo más remoto del occidente, toca cosas que
nunca pudo ver, demuestra facultades que no pudo estudiar, y se arroja con el espíritu a cosas que
parece temeridad emprender” (94) [a woman [supposedly] cloistered since early childhood, in the fur-
thest end of the West could deal with things never seen, demonstrate skills she could not have studied
and confront with her spirit things that would seem intrepid to undertake].
20 Bances was writing in defense of theaters and plays as decent public entertainment (Moir L, LIII–​LIV,
XCVIII–​XCIX), rebutting the attacks leveled by Ignacio de Camargo in his Discurso theologico sobre los
theatros (Theological Discourse on Theaters, Salamanca, 1689).
21 The Sainete segundo with its popular tone, break in dramatic illusion and chaotic conclusion, all typi-
cal characteristics of an entremés would have been the only piece suitable for a corral production (See
Hernández Araico, “Sor Juana y sus graciosos I”).
22 It is clear that Calderón’s musical theatre (secular and religious) inspired Sor Juana to apply her own
musical talents to theatrical composition (see Hernández Araico, “Música y mitología”).
23 Donnell believes that by citing Calderón as the main model Sor Juana emulates, Hernández Araico
presents “an argument that follows traditional readings of the play and the genre” (179, 190). For addi-
tional links between Sor Juana and Calderón as well as other playwrights, see also Hernández Araico,
“Sor Juana y sus graciosos” II and III.
24 The performance of a sumptuous comedia by “soldados, pasajeros y frailes jóvenes” (soldiers, passengers
and young friars) aboard the ship transporting the new viceroy to New Spain in 1624, as reported by
Thomas Gage, could have included (semi)professional actors (Hernández Araico, “Teatro palaciego”
152). Luciani cites a mid-​eighteenth century example of dramatic entertainment for the Marquesa de
las Amarillas by pages and ladies during the transatlantic trip aboard the ship América (“Estudio” 9).
25 Explaining that a 1756 “Festejo” at the Monastery of San Jerónimo was performed by the resident
nuns, Luciani cites Thomas Gage’s observations (171) during his visit to New Spain in 1625 about
nuns teaching noble young ladies to stage brief comedies with luxurious male and female costumes
in order to attract more people to church, and vying with such admirable stagings for recognition as
best in music and the education of young ladies (“Estudio” 21). Schmidhuber quotes from Nuñez
de Miranda’s Primer of Religious Doctrine … for Young Girls Planning to Become Nuns to prove that nuns
donned costumes to perform plays inside the convent (Three 18).
26 The premiere could have taken place anywhere from the viceregal baby’s birth in July, 1683 to Bishop
Sariñana’s entry in August, 1684 and even  –​as Monterde had proposed  –​as late as following the
Inquisition’s censorship of Francisco de Acevedo’s El pregonero de Dios, October 4, 1684 (Maldonado
118)  which the Sainete segundo seems to satirize. de María y Campos (Representaciones 99)  cites an
“extraordinary” performance in 1684 of Los empeños in the palace theater in honor of the viceroy and
vicereine, but does not provide any documentation.
27 See Hernández Araico’s “Coros y coreografías” for more on the Sarao de cuatro naciones.
28 Claire Pailler has found a strong link between the Loa and Sainete primero with the play’s central
choral portion of Act II and the final Sarao through a peculiarly Sorjuanesque question d’amour.
29 For the queen mother’s birthday, December 22, 1679, Calderón composed a new loa for the revival of
his mythological play Faetón whereas the dance, entremés, and “fin de fiesta” Las naciones were com-
posed by the actors (Shergold y Varey, 33, 93, 238–​39; Rodríguez Cuadros and Tordera 158).

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30 For references to the hall where comedias were staged at the viceregal palace in Mexico City, see
Hernández Araico (“Teatro palaciego” 153–​55); for the private production of Los empeños in Mexico
City, Ruano de la Haza (“La puesta” 202–​03) points to the probable imitation of the stage at the
Mexican playhouse, the Hospital de Indios.
31 Stein (Introducción XXV) traces the musical origin of the tune for the “Letra for Bellísimo Narciso”
preceding the Sainete Primero de Palacio, as a tonada composed by Juan Hidalgo, used in Calderón’s Eco y
Narciso, also in Salazar y Torres’s Loa to Santa Rosolea and as well-​known in the New World, since Sor
Juana also used it in her auto El divino Narciso for the demonic Eco’s song (vv. 708–​803).
32 For a detailed discussion of the “Sarao de cuatro naciones,” see Hernández Araico,“Coros y coreografías.”
33 For the exchangeability of such playlets and their typically humorous metatheatricality, see Hernández
Araico, “El teatro breve de Quevedo.”
34 In the first production of La púrpura de la rosa (1660), Cruickshank (47–​48, 65–​66) points out that while
Mars was played by a woman, one of the “villanos rústicos” was played by a cross-​dressed actor in the
role of “la graciosa Celfa.” Stein (Songs 133–​34) explains that “all the principal singing roles in the semi-​
operas and zarzuelas were performed by women (actress-​singers from the same troupes that performed
in the corrales), such that the solo songs of mythological gods […] were heard as the expression of high
female voices.” For Sor Juana’s connection with “La púrpura de la rosa,” see Hernández Araico, “Venus
y Adonis.”
35 See Canavaggio for plays earlier (than Los empeños) where the gracioso cross-​dresses.
36 Salceda (XXVI) and Maldonado (117) use the term “comediógrafo” –​a term coined towards the end
of the nineteenth century –​to refer to Acevedo as the playwright of El pregonero de dios, at whom Sor
Juana seems to be poking fun; but in the Sainete segundo, he is referred to as autor and never as the poet.
37 Indeed, Dakin Matthews –​award-​winning director, stage actor (RSC, Los Angeles and New York),
Hollywood film actor (Spotlight 2015), and translator of several Spanish comedias –​has a new rhyming
verse translation of Los empeños, soon to be published.

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22
LA SEGUNDA CELESTINA, A
RECENTLY DISCOVERED PLAY,
AND AMOR ES MÁS LABERINTO
Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora

Today, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is widely known and appreciated, but primarily as a woman
and a nun, and secondarily as a baroque author. Few have included her plays in their under-
standing of her work, despite the fact that she wrote thirty-​one dramatic pieces, including three
secular plays, three passion plays, thirteen loas, and twelve carols.1 Lee A. Daniel has been patient
enough to count her theatrical verses; according to his estimate, there are 20,350 lines of theater,
as opposed to 22,250 lines of poetry (A Terra 43).2 We may therefore conclude that, at least in
terms of quantity (including the carols; he did not include Segunda Celestina), Sor Juana was
more a playwright than a poet.
So Juana wrote three secular plays: La segunda Celestina (The Second Celestina), Los empeños
de una casa (House of Desires), and Amor es más laberinto (Love is the Greater Labyrinth).The last
two were published in 1692 in the second volume of her works; the first was not published and
was forgotten, although it was mentioned by her contemporaries. Today’s concept of “author”
originated with Romanticism, which atttributed genius to those artists that gave proof of origi-
nality. In the baroque period, this was not the case; instead, praise was accorded to inventiveness
building upon the cumulative achievement of generations of writers. It was not unusual to find
works whose authorship was shared; nor was it considered plagarism when a text by another
writer was glossed. The search for Sor Juana’s lost play, La segunda Celestina, was undertaken to
clarify one of the mysteries surrounding her work.

The search for La segunda Celestina

The play was written to be performed at a birthday celebration of Queen Mariana of Hapsburg
(December 22, 1675), but its author, Agustín de Salazar y Torres (1636–​1675), died on November
29 of that year, leaving the play unfinished. Queen Mariana, mother of Charles II, loved the
theater.3 It is known that in New Spain, the play was produced in the Coliseum Theater, in 1679
(María y Campos 98). The first staged Spanish production of La segunda Celestina that we know
of was in Madrid, on March 6, 1696, Shrove Tuesday, in the Hall of Realms in the Retiro Palace,
produced by Carlos Vallejo’s acting company (Varey and Shergold 216); there is no information
as to whether or not Queen Mariana attended (she died on May 16, 1696).
In 1989, Schmidhuber offered the hypothesis that an alternate ending of Salazar’s play –​pub-
lished as a suelta (individually published playscript) which had until that time been considered

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Recently discovered plays

anonymous –​could be Sor Juana’s work. The play was published listing Sor Juana as co-​author,
with a prologue by Octavio Paz and a critical study by the discoverer.The attribution of author-
ship of this play to Sor Juana was the culmination of a great deal of research spanning several
years, ending with the discovery of the document. In what follows, I offer a chronicle of that
research, carried out over six decades by a distinguished group of scholars, based in Spain and
in Mexico.

The Spanish critics

In Spain, several critics had noted the existence of an ending by an anonymous writer to a play
that the Spanish playwright Agustín de Salazar y Torres had left unfinished upon his death in
1675, which had been completed by the editor Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel. The play was
titled El encanto es la hermosura y el hechizo sin hechizo (Charm is Beauty and Charm without
Witchcraft). On the other hand, Schmidhuber found a text titled, La gran Comedia de La segunda
Celestina (The Great Play of the Second Celestina), with a different ending than Vera Tassis’s.
Several critics had read and enjoyed this “anonymous” version. Two almost identical plays until
the second scene of the third act, but with different titles and endings.
The first mention of the ending by the “anonymous” writer was by Agustín Durán (1793–​
1862), in his unpublished Índice general de piezas dramáticas del Teatro antiguo español desde sus
orígenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII (General Index of Dramatic Works from the Early Spanish
Theater, From Its Origins to the Mid-​Eighteenth Century). His comments on the play were
published in 1860 by Barrera y Leirado in his well-​known Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico del
teatro antiguo español (Bibliographic and Biographical Catalogue of Early Spanish Theater). After
Durán’s remarks, two texts were identified: (1) one titled El encanto es la hermosura y El hechizo
sin hechizo, with Tassis’s ending, beginning with line 2,509 –​according to the note in his edition
of the play. And, a second text, similar but not identical in the first two acts and the beginning
of the third, which from line 2,509 on was different, offering another ending for a little over a
thousand lines, until line 3,512. The second text had been called “anonymous” by several later
critics.
When Mesonero Romanos edited Salazar’s play in 1858–​1859, he included an annotation
declaring that he had read a “conclusion by an anonymous author” (241). Menéndez y Pelayo
also saw this ending; in a note in Orígenes de la novela (The Origins of the Novel), he attributed
this conclusion to an “anonymous poet” (457–​58). In the modern period, two critics mentioned
the existence of a second ending, still calling it “anonymous”: Thomas Austin O’Connor (31–​
34) and Donald G. Castenien (561). Neither one of them offered an educated guess about who
might be the author of this ending of the La segunda Celestina.

The Mexican critics

In the “Prologue to the Reader” in the third volume of works by Sor Juana, published in 1700,
the editor Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa enumerated the works that had not appeared in the
first three volumes and that, consequently, had remained unpublished until that time. After
listing other works, he noted, “Un poema que dejó sin acabar don Agustín de Salazar, y [que]
perfeccionó con graciosa propiedad la poetisa” (s.n.) [A poem that don Agustín de Salazar left
unfinished, and {that} Sor Juana perfected with amusing propriety], and he went on to list other
texts that are considered lost, since there has been no other evidence of them since Castorena y
Ursúa’s listing. Few realized that Sor Juana herself had mentioned having written a first play that
had not been included in her first editions. In the Segundo Sainete of the House of Desire there

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are two speeches apparently written in a code whose signifier belongs to the play, but whose
meaning goes beyond the plot. The character Arias says: “¿No era mejor hacer a Celestina /​en
que vos estuvisteis tan gracioso, /​que aun estoy temeroso /​ –​y es justo que me asombre –​/​de
que sois hechicera en traje de hombre?” (Wasn’t it better to create a Celestina /​in which you
would appear so amusing, /​though still I am afraid /​ –​and I am justifiably shocked –​/​that you
are a witch in a man’s clothing?). And the character Muñoz responds:

Amigo, mejor era Celestina,

en cuanto a ser comedia ultramarina:
que siempre las de España son mejores,
y para digerirles los humores,
son ligeras; que nunca son pesadas
las cosas que por agua están pasadas.
Pero la Celestina que esta risa
os causó, era mestiza
y acabada a retazos,
y si le faltó traza, tuvo trazos,
y con diverso genio
se formó de un trapiche y de un ingenio (Salceda 52, 55, 57)
(Friend, Celestina was better
as a foreign play:
the ones from Spain are always better,
and in order for their humor to be understood,
they are light; because
things that pass over water are never heavy.
but the Celestina which caused you
so much laughter, was mestiza
and finished in fragments,
and if it lacked a plan, it had plot lines
and with a diverse spirit
it was formed from a machine and a genius) (Three Secular Plays 73–​74)

It seemed odd to find three mentions of a Celestina in seventeen lines of text.

The first Mexican who, upon reading Castorena’s text, put forth the idea of a lost work
by Sor Juana and who wrote down his suspicion, was Ermilo Abreu Gómez, in his brief
treatise Sor Juana, bibliografía y biblioteca (293) [Sor Juana, Bibliography and Library]. In addi-
tion, when Alberto G. Salceda, in modern times, edited the fourth volume of Sor Juana’s
Complete Works, he included in his erudite introduction a long commentary on an unknown
work by the Mexican nun (xxx–​xxxii). Finally, the Cuban-​American critic Georgina Sabat-​
Rivers, in her Introduction to Inundación castálida, noted the influence of Salazar’s poetry on
Sor Juana and suggested a possible literary collaboration between the two in the genre of
theater (51, n. 46).
Examining the writings of those visionary critics who suspected the existence of a literary
collaboration between Sor Juana and Salazar suggests that Schmidhuber’s discovery was not for-
tuitous, but rather the result of efforts within sorjuanine scholarship. Both Spanish and Spanish
American criticism contributed to a critical chain that, from both sides of the Atlantic, signaled
the loss of a play in literature, but not in historical memory.

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A critical bridge between Spanish and

Spanish American critics
After having researched the Spanish critical tradition, which affirmed the existence of an anony-
mous ending, and the Mexican one, which hinted at the existence of a collaborative play by
Sor Juana, in the fall of 1989 Guillermo Schmidhuber took upon himself the search for a play
that fulfilled the requirements mentioned in both critical traditions. Aided by a research grant
from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Louisville, where he taught in the
United States, Schmidhuber undertook the research. After searching in libraries in Mexico, the
United States, and Europe, he found in the University of Pennsylvania library a suelta titled,
La gran Comedia de la Segunda Celestina. Fiesta para los años de la Reina nuestra señora, año de 1676
(The Great Play of the Second Celestina, Festivity for the Birthday of Our Queen, in the
Year 1676) whose title page contained only Agustín de Salazar’s name. This suelta was part of
a collection of twenty-​four volumes of Comedias varias (Several Plays), which contains sueltas
for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They had belonged to the Counts of Harrach
(Vienna), and previously, to the Bibliotheca Viennensi, and had been acquired by the library of the
University of Pennsylvania in 1954 (Regueiro 11; Reichenberger 97–​100).
Next, Schmidhuber presented the research to Octavio Paz, who agreed to read the play;
this began their collaboration. Paz read a typed transcription created by Olga Martha Peña
Doria and Guillermo Schmidhuber, and concluded that it was a lost work by Sor Juana, as
he affirmed in a letter. Enrique Krauze, at the time director of Vuelta Press, and Schmidhuber
signed a contract for an edition of 3,000 copies. The book was published on June 15, 1990.
Paz wrote the prologue, poetically titled, “¿Azar o justicia?” (Chance or Justice?), dated
May 2, 1990 (7–​10). For this first modern edition, Schmidhuber wrote an introduction in
which he presented for the first time his research hypothesis, which assumed Sor Juana’s
co-​authorship of La segunda Celestina, because she had written the anonymous ending and
because she “perfected [the play] with amusing propriety,” in Castorena’s words.Vuelta Press
wrapped the book in a promotional strip that read, “Sor Juana’s lost play.” How could Sor
Juana have managed to write the ending? Paz asserted that the connection may have been
the ex-​viceroy, the Marquis of Mancera, who knew Sor Juana well and who, in the period
in which the play was finished, was part of the ruling junta of Queen Mariana’s regency. Sor
Juana had already dedicated a loa to the then-​child and future king, Charles II, her son (Paz,
“Prólogo” 9; Schmidhuber, Hallazgo 100–​10). Salazar had spent his childhood in Mexico,
when his uncle was Archbishop and Viceroy (from May 13, 1648 until the uncle’s death on
April 22, 1649). The young Salazar studied in the Jesuit college of San Ildefonso and in the
Royal College, and subsequently in the Papal University of Mexico. He also published verses
and won poetry contests. When he was twenty-​four years old, he returned to Spain in the
entourage of the former viceroy, the Duke of Albuquerque, in 1660, a date fairly close to
when the child Juana Inés went to live with her aunt and uncle in Mexico City. They never
met, but they were involved with the same people and places. Besides, in the Baroque, plays
written by several authors were common, even among the great playwrights. We would do
well to remember that painters often did not sign their paintings; it was Romanticism that
instituted the concept of “genius” and when shared authorship began to disappear, just as
painters strove to sign their paintings.
Sor Juana’s and Agustín de Salazar’s lives coincided significantly. Agustín was a boy of twelve
when Juana Inés was born in 1648, in the New World. They never met, but the precociously
wise young girl would have been aware of the fame of the boy-​genius because they both lived
in Mexico City, perhaps in the same viceregal palace. In 1660, Agustín returned to Spain as part

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of the entourage of the Conde de Albuquerque, who, after seven years, was leaving the viceroy-
alty in the hands of the Marqués de Mancera, in whose court the child Juana Inés would appear
a few months later. The twenty-​four year old Agustín who traveled to Spain, was no longer the
child who had arrived in New Spain, accompanying his uncle, the bishop and viceroy. Rather,
he had become a young man as clever as he was wise, having studied in the Royal and Pontifical
University of Mexico City. The two poets were both friends of the Viceroy of New Spain, the
Marqués de Mancera, Juana Inés in Mexico and Agustín in Spain.Testimony to the latter friend-
ship was the fact that the posthumous edition of Cythara de Apolo (1681) in Salazar’s complete
works included a dedication in the frontispiece, “Ofreciéndolas a la Catholica Magestad de
Doña Mariana de Austria Na Sa augusta madre por mano del excelentíssimo señor D. Antonio
Sebastián de Toledo Marqués de Mancera, Señor de las Cinco Villas” (Dedicated to the Catholic
Majesty Doña Mariana de Austria, Our Lady, August Mother, by Don Antonio Sebastián de
Toledo Marqués de Mancera, Lord of the Five Towns). When Salazar died in 1675, Sor Juana
was beginning her golden period, her greatest years of freedom to study and create.
Paz and Schmidhuber had to defend their position repeatedly against critics who challenged
them, especially Antonio Alatorre, who sent an open letter to the cultural journal Vuelta, con-
firming Sor Juana’s authorship, but of another ending not yet discovered. Paz decided to publish
the letter and also included an emphatically brief note, preceded by the headline, “La segunda
Celestina ante sus jueces” (La segunda Celestina Before the Bench). Paz’s note was written in ital-
ics, as though it were a prologue to a book:

Las opiniones de los dos eruditos, en lugar de esclarecer el problema, lo complican: postulan la existen-
cia no de dos sino de tres autores de La segunda Celestina: Agustín de Salazar y Torres, sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz y un tercero incógnito. Una solución, dirían los matemáticos, poco elegante. (44)
(The two scholars’ opinions, instead of clarifying the problem, complicate it: they pos-
tulate the existence of not two but rather three authors of La segunda Celestina: Agustín
de Salazar y Torres, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and a third, unknown one. An inelegant
solution, mathematicians might say.)

Paz invited Luis Leal, the eminent Mexicanist, to offer his opinion.4 His response, erudite
and affirmative, titled, “Una obra recuperada de sor Juana” (A Recovered Work by Sor Juana),
appeared in the same issue of Vuelta (December 1990)  (44–​45). In the same issue of Vuelta,
Antonio Alatorre’s “Ejercicio de crítica” (Critical Exercise), as he himself subtitled his article,
appeared, as well as a study by Guillermo Schmidhuber titled, “Búsqueda y hallazgo de una
comedia perdida” (Search For and Discovery of a Lost Play). The polemic today has been
resolved through the wisdom and reason of subsequent critical texts.
After a critical silence, perhaps due to the time necessary for spreading and maturation of
ideas, Georgina Sabat-​Rivers published a book review in Hispania whose clarifying words con-
tinue to invite the further discussion of La segunda Celestina and Sor Juana’s possible co-​author-
ship: “Mi conclusion es, pues, que todavía hay que tener muy en cuenta la posibilidad de que
sor Juana terminara La segunda Celestina” (512) [My conclusion is, then, that one must still keep
very much in mind the possibility that Sor Juana finished La segunda Celestina].
During the celebration of the third centenary of Sor Juana’s death in 1995, Fredo Arias de
la Canal and the publishing house Frente de Afirmación Hispanista of Mexico City published a
facsimile edition of La gran comedia de La segunda Celestina. For the first time, after three centu-
ries, Sor Juana’s three secular plays were united in one volume. As a footnote to this chronicle,

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it is worth mentioning that when Octavio Paz published his Obras completes (Complete Works),
in the volume dedicated to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or The Traps of Faith he included a notice
that mentions La segunda Celestina. The edition (Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 1991; Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), included in a new appendix his prologue, “Azar y
justicia” (Fate and Justice); this text was also included in his Miscelánea, part two of his Obras
completas.
One commentary should be made about the future of this research. There is the possibility
that historical information may be found, for instance, in a letter, in which Sor Juana’s author-
ship may be confirmed. Recently, several important documents about Sor Juana’s life have been
found, such as the Letter from Puebla and other texts found by Alejandro Soriano Vallès, which
constitute the possibility that there is still much to be discovered, perhaps new documents,
especially the private correspondence of Sor Juana’s contemporaries (Sor Filotea, “Sor Filotea”).

The play, Amor es más laberinto

The title page of the first edition of Amor es más laberinto (1692) informs us that “las jornadas
primera y tercera son de la madre Juana; y la segunda del licenciado don Juan de Guevara,
ingenio conocido de la ciudad de México” (OC 4.207) [the first and third acts are by Mother
Juana; and the second, by don Juan de Guevara, a well-​known wit of Mexico City]. Daniel has
concluded that the necessity of co-​authorship and the simplicity of the comedy (a loa and three
acts) was due to the hurried nature of the celebration, a supposition that may be plausible, espe-
cially if we compare this play to the ten theatrical elements of Los empeños de una casa (Daniel,
A Terra 107).
Salceda succeeded in dating the staging of this play, January 11, 1689, by analyzing the infor-
mation included in its loa: the name of the Count de Galve.The Diario de sucesos notables (Diary
of Notable Events) by Antonio de Robles notes events that occurred in January 1689: “Martes
11, fueron los años del virreyconde de Galve:  tuvo comedia en Palacio” (3.6) [Tuesday the
11th, for the birthday of the Viceroy, the Count de Galve: a play was produced in the palace].
The loa may be dated with certainty because the year of its creation is written into one of its
speeches, which mentions, in baroque style, a game of hands to communicate numbers: the left
hand signals prime numbers and decades, and the right hand indicates hundreds and thousands,
following a system from antiquity, as the speech by Edad (Age) tells us: “Y así, en su mano sini-
estra” (Salceda 192–​93) [And thus, in his left hand]. That is to say, the hands indicate the date
of 366. About this puzzle, Salceda confesses: “No sabemos de dónde haya tomado sor Juana
la representación del 366 (envez de 365); ni nos explicamos porqué la haya preferido aquí, ya
que el año de que se trataba (1689) no era bisiesto” (574) [We do not know the source of Sor
Juana’s figure of 366 (instead of 365); nor can we explain why she preferred it here, since the
year referred to (1689) was not a leap year]. The enigma can be solved with the conjecture that
Sor Juana wrote the loa in 1688, which was a leap year; this was the year in which the Count
de Galve was named Viceroy.
The loa of Amor es más laberinto is the longest that Sor Juana wrote; it has 624 lines (Daniel, A
Terra 157). Thematically, it is one of her most complex. Salceda divides it into five scenes with
changes on the entrance of characters or in poetic form. Nevertheless, the dramatic structure
comprises only one scene. Strangely, the first edition contains the following information: “Loa
a los años del excelentísimo señor conde de Galve, que parece que precedió a la comedia que
sigue” (my italics) [Loa for the birthday of the Most Excellent Count de Galve, which seems
to have preceded the play that follows]. Nevertheless, later editions change the verb to the past

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tense: “Loa que precedió” (Loa that preceded). In spite of Salceda’s opinion that the editors in
1693 changed the tense for some reason, we do not know for certain that this play accompanied
the loa in the staging at the viceregal palace on January 11 (Salceda xxi). The Diario de sucesos
notables mentions a play in the palace on January 11, and later, a loa: “Domingo 23 … echaron
una loa en palacio del virrey, conde de Galve, y otra al conde de la Monclova” (Robles 1.6–​7)
[On Sunday the 23rd … a loa was presented in the palace of the Viceroy, the Count de Galve,
and another to the Count de la Monclova]. Therefore, the play and the loa could have been
performed on different occasions.
In the loa of Amor es más laberinto, Sor Juana experiments with the musical theories of the
German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher.The characters Age,Winter, Spring, Fall, Summer, and Music
use a combinatorial game from the entrance of the characters representing the four seasons
(Schmidhuber, Three 133–​35). This internal structure, which Sor Juana learned in her study of
music, divides the speeches into seven homogeneous groups, for which the characters Music
and Age serve as a central axis. In this structure, we can confirm Sor Juana’s use of Kircher’s
combinatorial mathematical theories, as they are expounded in Musurgia universalis (Rome,
1650), a book of musical theory that defines music as an art of mathematical combinations
(Musurga combinatoria).
Similarly to all of Sor Juana’s secular and sacred plays, the first editions do not have divisions
into scenes, but Salceda’s edition divides the play into fourteen scenes. Nevertheless, for a better
understanding of the climax and dramatic tension, Schmidhuber has suggested another struc-
ture: four scenes in Act I, four in Act II, and five in Act III (Three 135–​40).5
Despite the double authorship, the play has a perfect structural balance. The climax of the
first act comes with the technique of the expected scene, when Phaedra meets Theseus, while
Ariadne looks on from a distance. In the second act the climax is in Scene Three, in which the
sarao (performance of music and dance) is more lyrical and visual than dramatic, and which
constitutes an advance toward the resolution of the play, with the couples Phaedra-​Theseus and
Ariadne-​Bacchus. In Act III, the climax occurs in the scene in which Phaedra agrees to flee
Athens with Theseus, and the resolution occurs in the fifth scene, with the multiple weddings.
The dramatic factor that allows this resolution is the opportune appearance of the Athenian
army, preventing the protagonists’ deaths, which would have turned the plot into tragedy
(Schmidhuber, Three 140).
Schmidhuber has proposed that Sor Juana also collaborated on segments of Act II, previ-
ously thought to have been written entirely by Guevara. The beginning of Act II is surprising
for its perfect unity of plot and drama, with respect to the previous act, although subtle stylistic
differences may be observed. This is a situation contrary to that of innumerable Golden Age
plays written by two or more authors; in those, the change of authorship is more noticeable.
Schmidhuber asserts that the following lines are by Sor Juana: Scene 1, lines 47–​52 and 67–​
78; Scene 2, lines 157–​328; and Scene 3, lines 631–​68 –​a total of 224 new verses written by
Sor Juana.
With regard to the second act of Amor es más laberinto, Paz has stated that “no es inferior a
las dos escritas por sor Juana; aparte de la dignidad verbal del conjunto, tiene momentos tea-
trales que Moreto habría aplaudido” (Trampas 438) [equal to the two acts written by Sor Juana;
aside from the overall dignity of the language, it has moments of drama that Moreto would
have applauded (Traps 331)]. Méndez Plancarte and Daniel have a similar perception (1: xxxiii;
Daniel, A Terra 108). For his part, Gerard Flynn sees the play as having considerable thematic
inconsistency, since it is not able to unite the theme of labyrinthic love with the style of the
cloak and dagger play (Sor Juana 51).

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Daniel pioneered a change in critical assessment of the play when he wrote that “The play
has sufficient intrinsic value just as it was written” (Daniel, A Terra 108). Margaret Sayers Peden
offered another opinion, in an excellent, incisive study in which she analyzed the play from four
angles: meta-​theatricality, the author’s commentary on her period, alterations in prototypes of
myth, and the focus on the curious, ambiguous character, Ariadna. Sayers Peden averred that
Ariadna gives voice to Sor Juana’s feelings, with autobiographical connotations:

I propose that there was an identification on the part of Sor Juana with the character
of Ariadna. Was this identification conscious? […] Ariadna plays a role that is import-
ant to Sor Juana. And what is that role? That of a woman who gives love that is not
returned, that of a woman rejected, a woman resigned to self-​abnegation. (“The Fourth
Labyrinth” 46)

Irony is omnipresent in the play. It springs from the correspondence of action in the world
of nobles with the counterpoint of the same actions in the microcosmos of the servants. The
title itself offers an irony, because love is a greater labyrinth than Crete’s: in love, one does not
have Ariadna’s ball of yarn to save oneself, but rather confusion of identity, which is a dramatic
metaphor for the fears and unease in any human relationship, until it achieves its height. This is
a comedia de amor (play about love), in the nomenclature suggested by Francisco Ruiz Ramón
about this type of play by Lope de Vega (Historia 173–​74); its characteristics may be applied
freely to this play by Sor Juana.
José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido and Beatriz Carolina Peña have both studied the dynamic
of power, while Paladino studies the social element of the labyrinth of love. The play pre-
sents the rivalry between Athens and Crete, and the Greeks’ efforts to liberate themselves from
Cretan domination, which ends with the taking of Minos’s palace and the wedding of Phaedra
and Theseus. The theme of freedom appears in Act I with a few mentions of democracy, in
spite of this concept not yet having been formed in history. Frederick Luciani has asserted
the necessity of re-​reading this play in the political context of its staging during the festivities
to celebrate the birthday of the newly arrived Viceroy of New Spain, the Count de Galve, in
January 1689, as well as the need to treat the loa and the play as parts of a whole (“Sor Juana’s”
175). Paz has described the speeches in this play as unbelievable, “porque no es fácil explicarse
cómo semejantes principios pudieron externarse en el palacio virreinal sin escándalo” (Trampas
439) [because it is difficult to imagine how such principles could have beenexpounded in a
viceregal palace without creating a scandal (Traps 332)]. Today, it seems ironic to compare a
thematic solution in the loa (infinite time vs. measurable time) with the intent to desire that the
viceroy’s life be extended, in the same play in which this desire for egalitarian freedom appears.
The polarity of intelligence and foolishness is also ironic, because the servants, not the masters,
understand the true nature of the events, and so, while the masters lose themselves in the laby-
rinth of love, the servants find love without so much confusion or affectation. The dispersal of
intelligence does not appear to be homogeneous; the servants, Laura and Tuna, are favored in
the play (Schmidhuber, Three 147).
Thomas Austin O’Connor (“Elegir”) has demonstrated the parallels of Amor es más laber-
into with Elegir al enemigo (Choose Your Enemy), by Salazar y Torres. This last play was staged
before the court in Madrid during the celebration of the future Charles II’s third birthday, on
November 6, 1664. He explains the reason why Sor Juana and Guevara were interested in writ-
ing a play about this Greek myth: they must have known Salazar y Torres’s work, which had
been published by then in a suelta and in four anthologies, as well as in Cythara de Apolo (1681).

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Salazar presents the perspective of the male character, while Sor Juana’s version offers that of
the female protagonists.
In future research, a critical re-​evaluation of Amor es más laberinto should be undertaken,
because the play has sufficient dramatic elements to be considered a text that unites two the-
atrical subgenres: (1) the mythological plays of Calderón de la Barca’s last period, after 1650 –​
according to Ruiz Ramón’s periodization of his work; and (2)  the subgenre of plays about
love. This search is but one of many undertaken by critics of Sor Juana’s work, at times without
success, but at others, successfully, such as the one presented in this chapter. The information
we have about Sor Juana can still not be considered definitive; we can expect new discoveries.

Notes
1 Alfonso Méndez Plancarte attributes ten more carols to Sor Juana, published without her name, but that
might have been hers, because of their high quality (2.xlviii–​l).
2 He accomplished this count before the discovery of the Segunda Celestina, a play in which 1,002 lines
were written by Sor Juana. Nor does he include in his total the carols, each of which contains 200–​400
verses.
3 Queen Mariana was honored with two productions of Salazar plays in 1686, one in 1695, and another
in 1696: on September 21 and December 12, 1686, También se amaen el abismo (There Is Also Love in
the Abyss); on December 2, 1695 and January 1, 1696, También se ama en el abismo (There Is Also Love
in the Abyss).
4 Leal (1907–​2010), who pioneered the study of Mexican and Latino writers in U.S. universities, was a
distinguished North American Hispanist.
5 See Vern G. Williamsen, Agustín de Salazar and “Simetría,” for another analysis of the play’s dramatic
structure.

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PART IV

Future directions for research

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23
UNDERSTUDIED ASPECTS
OF CANONICAL WORKS AND
POTENTIAL APPROACHES TO
LITTLE-​STUDIED WORKS
George Antony Thomas

The complex and exceedingly diverse collection of texts written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
have inspired an impressive range of scholarship.1 Nevertheless, in approaching the vast baroque
archive of her literary production, many sorjuanistas have unjustly favored a few select canonical
texts that are repeatedly included in literary anthologies, translated into other languages, read
in university courses, and analyzed in scholarship. These frequently studied works, which tend
to be the focus of most discussions of Sor Juana, are largely those that demonstrate her abil-
ity to rival the comedias and Italianate poetry of Spain’s Siglo de Oro or those that showcase her
feminism: the Repuesta (Answer), Los empeños de una casa (House of Desires), and poetry dealing
with philosophical, amorous, and feminist themes. Prioritizing particular texts because of their
literary value or aesthetic refinement has sometimes contributed to the marginalization or frank
condemnation of others. As recently as 1971 Gerard Flynn, a distinguished figure in Sor Juana
studies, comments in the preface to his introductory volume on the author’s life and work:

…Sor Juana was a woman with a strong philosophical bent, who frequently wrote some
of the best lyrical and dramatic poetry of colonial Latin America. It must be added, how-
ever, that many of her verses are uninspired lines that were written for important occa-
sions of Church and State. (Sor Juana 4)

Flynn goes on to explain why particular works were excluded from his study, remarking that
Sor Juana’s romances are “wooden,” the Neptuno alegórico is “bizarre,” and the majority of her vil-
lancicos and loas are not worthy of comment (Sor Juana 4–​5).2 Some of the preceding chapters
in the present volume have showcased how many of these once-​neglected works have become
the object of intense scholarly interest. As critics have focused less on Sor Juana’s place in liter-
ary history and adopted a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, they have brought to light
political, historical, theological, musicological, and linguistic aspects of previously ignored texts.
Nevertheless, there are still a number of texts that have not received much critical attention:
a somewhat artificial divide between the canonical works and the little-​studied works persists.
One means for future scholars to productively engage this tension is through readings of the

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classic texts in conjunction with those that have traditionally been marginalized, particularly in
relation to broader thematic, intellectual, or historical concerns.
The vast majority of Sor Juana’s little-​studied works are occasional in nature.3 Flynn’s rather
broad categorization of these compositions as “… uninspired lines that were written for important
occasions of Church and State” (Sor Juana 4) fails to acknowledge a number of innovative and
highly original examples of occasional verse as well as the existence of numerous poems of a more
personal nature that were composed for more mundane occasions. It is also somewhat unproduc-
tive to dismiss works that are not considered the product of “poetic inspiration” when an essential
pretext for literary production in the Spanish American colonies was to celebrate, to commemo-
rate, or to document both private and public events. Such texts call into question the notion of Sor
Juana’s isolation by foregrounding her participation in a variety of communities outside the walls
of her convent and demonstrating her connection to an extensive network of important figures
to whom she dedicated her writing: doting patrons, flattering admirers, celebrated writers, learned
women, Church authorities, viceregal bureaucrats, and metropolitan monarchs. Furthermore, Sor
Juana’s occasional texts and the contexts in which they were produced help bring to light under-
studied aspects of canonical works. For this reason, a central premise of this chapter is that new
research questions can arise by examining the marginalized works of Sor Juana’s oeuvre more
closely. In doing so, scholars will discover new avenues for Sor Juana studies by considering these
works both in relation to one another and in conjunction with more canonical ones.
Perhaps part of the problem is that Sor Juana’s verse, following the model established by
Méndez Plancarte and Salceda’s standard four-​volume collection of her works, is almost always
organized by genre. Dividing her work in this manner prevents readings across genres because
certain verse forms –​such as the sonnet –​are usually given precedence whereas others –​like
the epigram –​are typically ignored. For the sake of convenience, the section focusing on her
literary production in the present collection of essays has been divided into chapters according
to particular genres. Nevertheless, scholars should note that there are many points of connec-
tion made between the essays that suggest the ways in which readings of particular genres can
inform or contribute to scholarly interpretations of others. As new theoretical approaches and
thematic foci are applied in the next century of Sor Juana studies, it would be fruitful to apply
these new paradigms to the marginalized genres as well as the more central ones. Just as Sor
Juana herself should no longer be studied in isolation, her “major” and “minor” works should
be placed into dialogue with one another and with other relevant texts.4 In broad terms, such
a mode of inquiry can be illustrated by surveying recent scholarship that engages both canoni-
cal and little-​studied texts in order to examine Sor Juana’s literary production in relation to a
variety of topics, such as intellectual history, gender, and genre.
Sor Juana’s interactions with seventeenth-​century intellectual currents and the relationship
between her works and those of later eighteenth-​century writers are topics that deserve further
development. As a key figure bridging the period between the Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment –​a period in which the Hispanic world seldom makes an appearance in intel-
lectual histories –​her writings can help to remedy the frequent omission of women intellectuals
and writers from the Spanish Empire in broader discussions of these historical periods. While
studies of the intellectual history of the Hispanic world have often emphasized the repressive
nature of Catholic orthodoxy and the power wielded by the Inquisition, the wide range of
oblique references and direct quotations found in Sor Juana’s collected works reveal the active
circulation of books and ideas in New Spain. In this vein, future studies of Sor Juana have
much to contribute in relation to intellectual history and the circulation of ideas in the Spanish
American colonies.5 Since eighteenth-​century Hispanic literature is a woefully neglected and
largely unexplored field of study, particularly within the context of the Spanish American

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colonies, it would be productive to view Sor Juana as part of a long eighteenth century and to
bring her into dialogue with her successors in the Age of Enlightenment.6
Ruth Hill’s Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680–​
1740) is a model for this type of inquiry. Hill’s transatlantic study compares Sor Juana with three
other humanists that lived into the eighteenth century: the Spaniard Gabriel Patricio Álvarez
de Toledo, the Peruvian Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo, and the Portuguese Francisco Botello de
Moraes. This approach counterbalances previous scholarship that focused almost exclusively on
the relationship between her writing and the works of the German Jesuit intellectual Athanasius
Kircher since other important humanists of the period are brought into dialogue with Sor
Juana.7 Hill traces the influence of a variety of key figures outside of the Iberian tradition
such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi. At the start of her chapter on Sor
Juana, the author demonstrates how one particular romance can be used to advance an inter-
pretation of the relationship between the Mexican nun and prevailing intellectual currents. For
Hill, Romance 2 “Acusa la hidropesía de mucha ciencia, que teme inútil para saber y nociva
para vivir” (She condemns the bloatedness of much learning, which she considers useless even
as knowledge and harmful for living; OC 1.5; Trueblood 91)  is a literary composition that
expresses a critical stance towards scholastic discourse while embracing reason and the new
philosophy (44).8 This observation leads to the suggestion that Sor Juana aligns herself with
the Christian epicureanism of Bacon and Gassendi (45). These meditations on what is usually
considered a “minor” poem culminate in an analysis of Sor Juana’s major verse work Primero
sueño. While many of the philosophical preoccupations of Descartes manifest themselves in Sor
Juana’s ambitious silva, Hill stresses the influence of Gassendi and correlates this observation
with some of her broader conclusions about Hispanic humanists and the philosophical roots of
a Catholic Enlightenment:

…[H]‌is emphasis on ethics and his privileging of the senses within the process of cogni-
tion made Gassendi the perfect bridge between the Baroque and the Enlightenment in
the Spains, where there persisted an epistemology with ties to late medieval nominalism
… Gassendi’s via media would function for late baroque humanists as the tercera vía or
nominalist philosophy had functioned for renaissance and baroque humanists: to mediate
the rationalist and the imaginative poles or schools. (2)

In addition to Hill’s commentary on the importance of Gassendi to late seventeenth and

eighteenth-​century intellectuals in the Spanish Empire, her study contains a wealth of ref-
erences to a variety of competing intellectual currents and bibliographic sources that were
circulating during the period: classical philosophy, publications from Spain’s Golden Age, and
foundational works by key figures of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. Many of
the strands of this rich intellectual milieu that Hill identifies could be further developed and
applied in relation to unexplored works written by Sor Juana, particularly in order to further
expand and define the notion of a “Catholic Enlightenment” in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the
New World (24–​25).9 Scholars have explored the relationship between the science of optics
and baroque literary production and this mode of inquiry could be expanded to include other
topics in intellectual history.10
In addition to focusing on Sor Juana’s interactions with scientific and philosophic ideas, this
paradigm could also be applied to her engagement with political thought.While this subject has
frequently been discussed in scholarship on Sor Juana’s courtly drama Amor es más laberinto and
her triumphal arch Neptuno alegórico, it can also be the basis for interpreting some of her shorter
and more enigmatic poems, like the curious sonnet dedicated to a dead horse (OC 1.305) or the

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birthday romance that ends with a petition to spare the life of a convicted criminal (OC 1.74–​
79).11 Future studies in this vein should attempt to trace how Sor Juana engages with the ideas
of some of the central figures of early modern political science, such as Niccolò Machiavelli,
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others. For example, in analyzing one of Theseus’s soliloquies
in Amor es más laberinto, Luciani proposes that Sor Juana makes the unprecedented assertion that
violence is the origin of forms of government since “only force would induce men to submit
to the will of another” (Literary 62).This begs the question as to whether the idea articulated by
Theseus in Sor Juana’s play is based on observations from published works on political theory –​
such as Machiavelli’s The Prince or Hobbes’s Leviathan –​or, conversely, whether it is an entirely
original proposition on the origins of government. It would be fruitful to bring to light and
compare the disparate pieces of political philosophy contained in the Tenth Muse’s canonical
and little-​studied works and more fully contextualize them within the Western tradition. While
Sor Juana’s importance to world literature has been recognized, her achievements in other fields
of thought could be highlighted so as to increase her stature in these areas within a global con-
text. This is particularly important because of the paucity of notable women in studies of the
history of science, philosophy, and political thought.
The ways in which gender informs Sor Juana’s writing has been a recurring theme in stud-
ies of her work and should continue to be of central importance in future scholarship. Both
her canonical and little-​studied works are ideal texts to be examined through the lens of early
modern feminist thought, constructions of gender, and women’s studies.12 While comparisons
between Sor Juana’s works and those of other early modern women writers as well as her
engagement with feminist thought are topics that have received considerable attention, these
areas still merit further exploration. Tamara Harvey’s recent hemispheric study of Sor Juana and
three other seventeenth-​century women in the Americas demonstrates how important insights
can be drawn from such comparisons. Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas,
1633–​1700 considers New Spain’s Sor Juana along with New France’s Marie de l’Incarnation
and two important figures from New England: Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson. Her
study focuses on the ways in which the four women engage with discourse about the body
and it highlights the common deployment of the trope of functionality as an important femi-
nist strategy. While Harvey’s chapter on Sor Juana primarily focuses on Primero sueño, she first
signals the importance of discourse about the body by citing one of Sor Juana’s epistolary
romances in which she declares to a Peruvian admirer that her body is neuter or abstract
(Figuring 51–​52). Since feminist concerns and the topic of gender permeate Sor Juana’s oeuvre,
these areas of research are a central means of bridging the divide between her canonical and
understudied works.
As in Harvey’s study, future scholarship should continue to expand our understanding of Sor
Juana’s writing in relation to the feminist strategies employed by other early modern women
and their engagement with and contestation of dominant discourses. Since many of her often
overlooked works engage with topics that were not generally thought of as sanctioned areas
of study for women –​theology, politics, philosophy, and science –​it would be useful to com-
paratively analyze the genres and strategies that Sor Juana and other early modern women
employed to engage these disciplines.13 Stephanie Merrim’s landmark comparative study Early
Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, which influenced a number of subsequent
publications, including Harvey’s Figuring Modesty, serves as a model for approaching such com-
parisons. Many of the women writers that appear in the pages of Merrim’s book have been
the subject of intense scholarly interest in the last few decades.14 More generally, there has also
been an upsurge in the production of both research and scholarly editions of texts within the
field of early modern women writers.15 This new body of scholarship provides a wealth of ideas

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for comparative studies and should collectively inform future directions in Sor Juana studies.
The ways in which Sor Juana served as a literary model or rival for other mujeres doctas (learned
women) is one subject that merits consideration. In particular, her influence on Portuguese
women writers and her reception by learned women of the eighteenth century are topics for
future scholarship.16 It is important to clarify that the former area of study merits further explo-
ration because most early modern Portuguese women writers could read and write in Spanish,
were familiar with Hispanic literature, and have not received much critical attention.There have
been a few studies comparing Sor Juana and Sor Violante do Céu, who is the most studied early
modern Portuguese woman writer (Allen, Dugaw and Powell, Thomas, Politics 24–​27).
While transatlantic and hemispheric perspectives continue to shed light on various facets of
the Tenth Muse’s creativity in comparison to her contemporaries in Europe and the Americas,
there is still much to be gained from a more traditional approach that focuses on the influence
of classical and religious texts. This is particularly true in relation to particular genres or verse
forms. Many literary compositions in Sor Juana’s oeuvre –​such as the epinicion and the epi-
gram –​derive from the classical tradition, while others –​such as the auto sacramental and the
villancico –​are associated with religious feasts. These genres could be more fully explored in
relation to specific classical and early Christian authors in addition to being contextualized and
compared with other colonial-​era neo-​Latin and religious texts. While this chapter has primar-
ily advocated for reading across genres, perhaps there are some understudied ones that merit
exclusive focus in future studies. Additionally, however, there are certain features or themes that
are common to multiple genres and suggest the viability of studies that expand upon the rela-
tionship between two seemingly disparate genres.
Epistolarity is one feature of Sor Juana’s work that manifests itself in a variety of prose and
verse genres.17 In addition to formal letters, such as the Respuesta a Sor Filotea and the Carta de
Monterrey (or Autodefensa espiritual), Sor Juana composed verse epistles in a number of poetic
forms (e.g., décima, endecha, glosa, redondilla, romance). In many of these poems she adopts a
comical yo poético (“I” poetic voice) that echoes the voice of the classical poet Horace (Thomas,
Politics 50–​55, 62). Notably, the literary strategy of imitatio Horatii that permeates many of her
non-​canonical poems clearly informs the composition of particular passages of what is arguably
her most studied work, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Thomas 105–​06). Given the ubiquity of the
epistle in classical and early Christian literature, it would be useful to trace other patterns and
influences within Sor Juana’s epistolary works.The influence of classical authorities on rhetoric,
such as Quintilian and Cicero, as well as their reformulation in early modern manuals on letter
writing have been cited as an influence on both the Respuesta and her poetry (Perelmuter Pérez,
“La estructura,” Thomas, Politics 61–​62). Nevertheless, future comparisons with other colonial
and Golden Age epistolary texts (particularly those written in verse) could yield other impor-
tant insights. The epistles written by early Christian and classical authors –​like those composed
by the namesake of Sor Juana’s religious order, Saint Jerome, or those of Pliny the Younger –​
could also be the basis for future research.18
Comparative approaches that consider Sor Juana’s little-​studied and canonical works col-
lectively will hopefully not only produce new readings of canonical texts but also consecrate
new texts for the canon. This essential and perhaps inevitably cyclical mode of reevaluation
can be seen in relation to the recent upsurge of criticism devoted to the Neptuno alegórico, a
text that was somewhat ignored for many years but now even appears in Vincent Martin and
Electa Arenal’s critical edition as part of Editorial Cátedra’s distinguished Letras Hispánicas series
of the most celebrated works of Hispanic literature. The importance of drawing attention to
texts that are seldom read can also be applied on a more literal level to another potential area of
research: the discovery of new texts written by Sor Juana. Given that a rather significant number

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of works attributed to Sor Juana have been located since Méndez Plancarte’s compilation of
her “complete works,” it is still possible that more texts remain to be discovered in archives and
libraries.19 While it may not be feasible to find particular texts that are thought to have existed,
such as her elusive transatlantic correspondence or her treatise on music theory, it seems prob-
able that future research could uncover previously unknown selections of published verse.20
Since Sor Juana often received commissions or independently took up her pen to com-
memorate important people and events, it seems inevitable that scholars will discover more
examples of laudatory or occasional verse: encomiastic poems celebrating famous authors, epi-
taphs honoring the deceased, or ceremonial works composed for a variety of secular or reli-
gious occasions. The rapid increase of digitization and the creation of new databases and ways
of searching for early modern texts in libraries and archival collections will certainly aid in this
process of discovery. One means of searching for such texts is in relation to the myriad of names
that already appear within her collected works since these distinguished figures were all mem-
bers of Sor Juana’s personal or literary circles. Funereal exequies, book dedicatorias, or birthday
loas connected to these contemporaries could potentially be linked to Sor Juana. Even if such
searches fail to yield new texts, it would be useful to find out more biographical information
about these individuals and their relationship to Sor Juana and to one another. Octavio Paz’s
comprehensive study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe frequently provides some
background details about figures named in Sor Juana’s poems, but more comprehensive studies
would be welcomed. While the likelihood of finding more texts may be slim, expanding our
knowledge of the particular networks and people for whom she composed poetry would help
to establish links with particular religious orders, institutions, and patrons, thus furthering our
understanding of her literary vocation and particular understudied texts.
Another mode of searching for new texts written by Sor Juana would be to speculate in
relation to particular occasional genres that she is known to have practiced. For example, there
is only one known profession song (or convent epithalamium) in Sor Juana’s Obras completas
even though this was a frequent ceremonial occasion in female religious orders (2.228–​32).21
It is possible that this lone example was composed for a nun professing outside of her convent
and that Sor Juana –​not unlike her contemporary Sor Violante do Céu –​was commissioned
to compose similar works for profession ceremonies in other convents. Perhaps some of these
works still remain in Mexico or they are preserved in convent archives in other parts of the
Hispanic world. Although research of this sort does not promise to deliver a text authored
by Sor Juana, it may lead to the discovery of convent epithalamia or other forms of literature
written by previously unknown religious women, which would also be a welcome addition to
a growing corpus of writing by early modern Hispanic women. In short, the search for these
“minor” texts can be more broadly associated with an inquiry into particular understudied
genres. While the key to finding new texts in digital contexts may primarily relate to the selec-
tion of search parameters, the more daunting question of the discovery of new archival sources
that have not been digitized largely relies on establishing where such texts would most likely
be preserved. Given that one recently discovered romance that has been attributed to Sor Juana
was dedicated to the Swedish poet Sophia Brenner, it is important to understand that such a
quest should not be limited to databases and archives that originate within the geographical
boundaries of the Spanish Empire.22 In the next century of Sor Juana studies, the most exciting
unknown is that future investigations hold the possibility of unearthing previously undiscov-
ered texts composed by the celebrated writer. Until such searches are rewarded, examining Sor
Juana’s little-​studied and canonical works within a comparative framework  –​particularly in
relation to intellectual history, gender, and genre –​will help to provide innovative and original
interpretations of her extant texts.

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Notes
1 In addition to the chapters in this volume, the essays and bibliographies summarizing Sor Juana schol-
arship by Bénassy-​Berling, “Actualidad”; Kirk, “Genealogical”; Montes de Oca Naves; Ortiz, “Sor
Juana”; Perelmuter Pérez (Los límites), and Pérez-​Amador, La ascendente are useful points of departure
for future studies.
2 Despite these statements, Flynn frequently incorporated many of these works into his research. See, for
example, his study of Sor Juana’s philosophical thought (“A Revision”).
3 See my introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for a more expansive discus-
sion and definition of occasional literature (1–​9). I have incorporated many observations from the book
into this chapter.
4 This call for comparative and interdisciplinary studies is informed by Weber’s essay on literature by
women religious (“The Literature”), which outlines a variety of areas for future research. See also
Grossi’s study, Sigilosos, which productively analyzes the intertextuality between three key works of
poetry, drama, and prose: Primero sueño, El Divino Narciso, and Neptuno alegórico.
5 A related topic is the history of the book, which is an emerging field in colonial Latin American
Studies. An early attempt to catalogue the books in Sor Juana’s library is the study by Abreu Gómez.
While most of Sor Juana’s works were published in Spain, during her lifetime some of them were
published in Mexico (many villancicos, the Carta atenagórica, and others). Future studies could consider
Sor Juana’s works within the context of early printing, libraries, and book circulation in New Spain.
6 See Stolley’s Domesticating Empire:  Enlightenment in Spanish America for a discussion of the reasons
for this omission and new directions for future scholarship on eighteenth-​century Spanish American
literature.
7 Some of the scholars who have highlighted the influence of Kircher include Bénassy-​ Berling,
Humanismo and “Sobre”; Findlen; Luciani, Literary; and Paz, Trampas.
8 T. León also views Sor Juana’s Romance 2 as a critique of Scholasticism (249).
9 For a brief introduction to research on the Catholic Enlightenment, see Lehner.
10 In relation to optics, see Bergmann, “Amor” and “Sor Juana”; García Santo Tomás; and Luciani, Literary.
Another possible avenue of study is natural history, which Slater has examined in relation to the iden-
tification of plants in Baroque literature.
11 Both of these poems are briefly analyzed in my study of Sor Juana’s occasional works (Politics 97–​101).
12 Although it may seem somewhat inaccurate to mention these topics in an essay that purports to high-
light “understudied” aspects of Sor Juana’s works, further investigation in this area is still warranted.
Since there are some topics of inquiry that have already been extensively researched, scholars should
also consult the essays in this volume that deal specifically with gender and feminism.
13 For example, while male writers were able to publish short essays and more extensive prose texts on
governance, early modern women writers were more likely to make political observations within the
context of private, informal genres such as letters or personal poems (Thomas, Politics 81–​82).
14 While it would be impossible to summarize all of these works, some of the more suggestive book-​
length studies are those authored by Sarasohn; Thysell; Velasco, Lieutenent; Vollendorf, Reclaiming, and
Walters.
15 In particular, the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” (first published by the University
of Chicago Press and now published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies of
Victoria University at the University of Toronto) offers an exciting corpus of texts by early modern
women that could be the basis for future comparative studies. Additionally, the value of transatlantic
and interdisciplinary scholarship has been showcased in a number of essay collections (Jaffe and Lewis,
Kostroun and Vollendorf, and Owens and Mangan).
16 This idea is further developed in my article comparing Sor Juana to the eighteenth-​century Portuguese
writer Leonarda Gil da Gama (“Transatlantic”). An excellent point of departure for such comparisons
would be to consult the recently published anthology of Portuguese women writers edited by Vanda
Anastácio. The influence of Sor Juana on Maria do Céu has been suggested by both Marín Pina and
Hegstrom (“Journeys”), who is preparing an edition and translation of the Portuguese nun’s works
(From a Convent).
17 Poot Herrera’s book, Los guardaditos, examines many of Sor Juana’s letters and epistolary romances.
18 Riva, for example, analyzes the Carta atenagórica and other texts in relation to St. Jerome.
19 In addition to some of the essays in this volume, see Alatorre, Enigmas; Buxó, Oraculo; Juana, Libro;
Kaminsky; Schmidhuber de la Mora, “Hallazgo” and La segunda, Soriano Vallés, Protesta; Tapia Méndez,

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and Trabulse, Carta, for more information on recently discovered texts that were written by (or attrib-
uted to) Sor Juana. There remains some controversy in regards to the significance of some of these
documents. Bénassy-​Berling (“Actualidad”), Poot-​Herrera, Guardaditos, and Scott, “Three Hundred,”
discuss some of these texts and the controversies surrounding them. Schmidhuber de la Mora and
Peña Doria have also recently produced a modern edition of the book of professions from Sor Juana’s
convent, which contains entries that were written by her.
20 While many new texts were discovered in Mexico, perhaps printed and archival sources outside of
Mexico could be the most likely avenues for future discoveries. To some degree it is surprising that
texts written by Sor Juana have been discovered in Mexico since many convent manuscripts and
records were destroyed in the late nineteenth century (Lavrin 5).
21 For more on the genre of the convent epithalamium, see Baranda Leturio and Thomas (Politics
11–​35).
22 As detailed in Kaminsky’s book chapter, since this romance was published after Sor Juana’s death
and is very similar to her poem dedicated to the Duchess of Aveiro, it is not certain if she herself
composed it.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Luis F. Avilés received his Ph.D. from Brown University. He is Associate Professor and Chair
of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. He has
published Lenguaje y crisis: las alegorías del Criticón, and has also written a number of essays on
early modern Spanish authors such as Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega, Antonio de Guevara, and
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others. His book, Avatares de lo invisible: espacio y subjetividad
en los Siglos de Oro will be published by Iberoamericana Vervuert in 2017. He has also published
several essays for another book project that focuses on topics such as liberality, hospitality, friend-
ship, and magnanimity. He is co-​editor of Representaciones de la violencia en América Latina (2015).

Marie-​Cécile Bénassy-​Berling, retired professor of Colonial Spanish America at the New

Sorbonne in Paris, continues her writing, research, and publication agenda about the California
missions, Fray Servando de Mier, and above all, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She published Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Une femme de lettres exceptionnelle. Mexique XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2010). She has also just finished participating in a critical edition of the first volume of Historia
general de las Indias, by Francisco López de Gómara, forthcoming from the Casa de Velázquez in
Madrid. During her tenure as professor (1983–​1996), she directed an inter-​university research
group that published several studies of viceregal life, the Enlightenment in Latin America, and
especially, the first critical edition of Fray Servando’s Historia de la revolución de Nueva España
(Paris: Sorbonne, 1990). Her now-​classic Humanismo y religión en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
based on her doctoral dissertation, was published in French in 1982 and in Spanish, by the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in 1983. She also participated in numerous impor-
tant conferences dedicated to Sor Juana celebrating the tercentenary of her death, in Mexico,
the United States, and Europe.

Emilie L. Bergmann is Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, with

fields of specialization in early modern Spain and Spanish America, focusing on gender, the
maternal, and queer sexualities; and on relationships among poetics, visual perception, and
sound studies. Her forthcoming book, The Maternal Imaginary in Early Modern Hispanic Culture,
addresses the nurturing body and women’s voice in literature and the visual arts. She is co-​
editor, with Paul Julian Smith, of ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (Duke UP, 1995);
with Stacey Schlau, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2007); and, with
Richard Herr, Mirrors and Echoes: Women’s Writing in Twentieth-​Century Spain (2007). Topics of
recent publications include optics and sonorities in Sor Juana; Cervantes and the poetics of
madness; and cross-​dressing, gender transgression and violence in early modern Spanish theater.

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Contributors

She has also published on twentieth-​century women writers in Castilian and Catalan, including
Carmen Martin-​Gaite, Mercè Rodoreda, and Montserrat Roig.

Alejandro Cañeque is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is a

specialist in the history of colonial Latin America, early modern Spain, and the Spanish Empire.
He has researched and taught in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Peru, Spain and the United
States. His main area of research is the political and religious cultures of the early modern
Spanish world, with an emphasis on colonial Spanish America and the Spanish Empire. He is
the author of The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico
(2004), a study of the transatlantic political culture that developed in New Spain in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. He has also participated in a bilingual edition of Juan de Palafox’s
The Virtues of the Indian and published essays in U.S., Latin American, and Spanish journals. He is
currently completing a book-​length study on the culture of martyrdom that developed around
the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ivonne del Valle, Associate Professor at U.C. Berkeley, received her Ph.D. from the same
institution in 2004. Before returning to the Bay Area in 2009, she taught at the University
of Michigan. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present
in order to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary
times. She was co-​director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.”
She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (Ignacio de Loyola and José de
Acosta, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential
politico-​religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire.
She is currently working on two projects: one on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City,
and the other on the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the fifteenth century
onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories. In the latter she is
exploring the ways in which both the unprecedented violence of conquest and colonization,
and the need for effective administration of the colonies, brought about important theoreti-
cal, technological, and epistemological changes which may have been conceived to be put
in place in the colonies, but which in the long run transformed the way Europe understood
and fashioned itself.

Mónica Díaz is Associate Professor in the Departments of Hispanic Studies and History, and
Director of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at the University of Kentucky. She
is the author of Indigenous Writings from the Convent:  Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial
Mexico (2010). Her research has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, Ministry for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the United States,
Newberry Library, Lilly Library, and Fulbright-​García Robles.

Linda Egan was a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Davis from 1993
to December 2015, when she retired. She was also a founding member of UC Mexicanistas,
an international research group that attracts qualified members from Mexico and all of Latin
America, the United States and Europe. Throughout her teaching and publishing career, she
specialized in Mexican literature, culture and history, with particular emphasis on contempo-
rary narrative, Mexican poetry and colonial studies. Her books, including an edition, are studies
principally of the Mexican intellectual and cultural theorist, Carlos Monsiváis (1939–​2010), and
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s pride of the colonial era, whose poetry and prose remain

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among the most acclaimed works in the Spanish-​speaking world. Diosas, demonios y debate: Sor
Juana y las armas metafísicas (1997); Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico
(2001); Carlos Monsiváis: cultura y crónica en el México contemporáneo (translated by the Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 2004); Monsivaisiana: aforismos de un pueblo que quisiera ser ciudadano (2010),
and Leyendo a Monsiváis (2013). The edition she produced with Mary Long of the University
of Colorado, Boulder, is Mexico Reading the United States (2009). Her many articles, in addition
to those devoted to Monsiváis and Sor Juana, include studies of colonial authors and numerous
nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century writers, such as Guillermo Prieto, Salvador Novo, Carlos
Fuentes, Rosa Beltrán and Ana García Bergua.

Isabel Gómez is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in the

Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies, where she teaches in the Translation Studies
section. She received her doctorate in 2016 from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book project in process uses concepts from
gift theory to highlight a reciprocal ethics of translation in Latin American literary spheres
and is based on her dissertation titled “Reciprocity in Literary Translation:  Gift Exchange
and Translation Praxis in Brazil and Mexico (1968–​2015).” She translates from Spanish and
Portuguese into English and has translated pieces for the online poetry and poetics journal
Jacket2 and the new Norton Critical Edition of Selected Works by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Verónica Grossi is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literatures in the Department

of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
She is the author of Sigilosos v(u)elos epistemológicos en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Madrid/​
Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-​Vervuert Verlag, 2007), which received Honorary Mention for the
Alfred B. Thomas Award of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies in 2009. She
is also the editor of Escrito en México (1974–​1984) by Enrique Fierro (Mexico City:  Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1999). She has published articles on early modern and modern Latin
American literature as well as creative writing pieces in Spanish and English in refereed journals
from the United States, Latin America and Europe.

Susana Hernández ​Araico received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Mount St. Mary’s
College in Los Angeles (Brentwood Campus 1968), from UCLA, her M.A. in Spanish-​American
literature (1970) and her Ph.D. in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Literature (1976).
She is Professor Emerita in Spanish and Latin American Literatures at Cal Poly State University,
Pomona where she taught for thirty-​nine years courses in Literature of Mexico, Latin American
Women Writers, and Spanish Golden Age Literature. A Visiting Professor at various universi-
ties in the United States, Canada, and Spain, she has published numerous articles and reviews
especially on Spanish classical theater, with emphasis on the court theater of Calderón and Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz. She has presented research papers in over 180 conferences in Canada,
Europe, Latin America and the United States and has organized numerous research conferences
and panels. Susana served as President of the Pacific Modern Language Association, Director of
the Spanish Summer Institue at UCSB, and Vice President in North America for the Asociación
Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro. She remains affiliated to
UCLA’s Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies and Center for 17th & 18th-​Century
Studies and currently serves on the editorial board for important journals in her main research
field of Spanish Renaissance and Baroque theater. She serves on the board of directors of the
Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles and Hispanics for L A Opera. She has served as

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Commodore for the Women’s Sailing Association of Santa Monica Bay as well as President and
Director for the Marina del Rey district of the International Order of the Blue Gavel (for past
commodores).

Emily Hind is an Associate Professor with the University of Florida and has published two
books of interviews with Mexican writers, as well as a book of criticism on the Mexican Woman
Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska. She was a Fulbright scholar in Mexico in 2015, and her
essay on Rosario Castellanos won the Feministas Unidas essay prize. Hind has published more
than twenty articles on Mexican literature and film in academic journals, and nearly as many
chapters in books of collected criticism.

Stephanie Kirk is Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. She is
the author of two books: Convent Life in Colonial Mexico (Florida UP, 2007) and the recently
published Sor Juana and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Routledge, 2016).
She has written a number of articles and essays on Sor Juana and on convent culture in colo-
nial Mexico. She is currently working on a translation and annotated edition of Sigüenza y
Góngora’s convent chronicle, Paraíso Occidental (1684).

Alessandra Luiselli studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); she
completed her doctoral studies at The University of New Mexico. She has taught at Barnard
College, Tulane University, and at the Graduate Summer Program of Middlebury College.
Currently Dr. Luiselli is an awarded Full Professor at Texas A&M University. Her publica-
tions on the subject of Sor Juana include four books: Melusina Transfigurada. Siete calas a Sor
Juana (Mexico City: Instituto Cultural Mexiquense, 2013); Dolores Castro. El corazón transfigu-
rado (Harlingen TX: Editorial Medio Siglo, 2013); Letras Mexicanas (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006); and El Sueño Manierista de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México-​Instituto Cultural Mexiquense,
1993). Dr. Luiselli has also published numerous articles on contemporary women writers from
Mexico; the most recent one, “El secuestro en México sube a escena: Trabajo sucio de Leonor
Azcárate,” appeared in La representación de la violencia en el teatro latinoamericano, edited by José
Ramón Alcántara Mejía (Universidad Iberoamericana, 2016).

J. Vanessa Lyon, Assistant Professor of Art History at Bennington College, received her Ph.D.
from the University of California at Berkeley. Her articles examining conceptions of gender in
works by Peter Paul Rubens and cross-​cultural exchanges between Spanish, Flemish, and British
art have appeared in Word & Image, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Art History. She is cur-
rently at work on a study of Old Master painting and the visual rhetorics of color and/​as race
in early/​post/​modern art.

Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel is Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean

Studies and the Program of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She received
her B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University
of California, Berkeley. She is the author of four books:  Saberes americanos:  subalternidad
y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two-​Ways?:  cultura
de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Callejón, 2003), awarded the Second Prize,
Category: Research and Literary Criticism, by the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña of
the University of Puerto Rico in 2004; From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American
Colonial Discourse (Bucknell, 2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas:  Rethinking Intra-​Colonial

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Migrations in a Pan-​Caribbean Context (Palgave, 2014). She recently finished two co-​edited
anthologies:  Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (with Ben. Sifuentes
Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Palgrave, 2016)  and Trans Studies:  The Challenge to
Hetero/​Homo Normativities (with Sarah Tobias, Rutgers University Press, 2016). She is co-​
editing an anthology with Michelle Stephens titled “Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New
Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations” and she is working on her fifth
book project, Archipiélagos de ultramar: Rethinking Colonial and Caribbean Studies, which uses
comparative archipelagic studies as a historical and theoretical framework to propose a dif-
ferent research agenda for the study of cultural productions in the Caribbean between 1498
and 2010.

Mario A. Ortiz is Associate Professor of Spanish & Associate Provost for International Affairs
at the Catholic University of America. He received his Ph.D.  in Hispanic Literature from
Indiana University, where he also completed all the doctoral coursework in musicology. He
has a Master’s degree in music history from the University of Houston, and a B.A. in music
and sociology from Grinnell College. He also completed undergraduate studies in music at the
University of Costa Rica. Dr. Ortiz’s research focuses primarily on Latin American colonial and
transatlantic studies, and the relationship between literature and music. Other major areas of
research and teaching interest are postcolonial studies; Mexican, Central American and Latino
literatures and cultures; and popular music of the Hispanic world. He has published La musa y
la melopea: La música en el mundo conventual, la vida y el pensamiento de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(2015), La autobiografía espiritual de la Madre María de San José (2011), and Representaciones mod-
ernas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2008–​2009). He is a Member Correspondent of the North
American Academy of Spanish Language (ANLE).

Amanda Powell is Senior Lecturer II of Spanish at the University of Oregon. Her work
focuses on spiritual and secular writings of early modern Spanish and Spanish-​American
women, including the seventeenth-​century pan-​European fashion for women’s love poetry
to women. She co-​authored and co-​translated Sor Juana’s The Answer /​La Respuesta,
Including a Selection of Poems with Electa Arenal (The Feminist Press at City University of
New York, 2nd edition 2009) and A Wild Country Out in the Garden: Spiritual Journals of a
Colonial Mexican Nun with Kathleen A. Myers (Indiana University, 1999), and her trans-
lations appear in Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their
Own Works and Alison Weber, ed., Book for the Hour of Recreation by María de San José
Salazar. Her poems appear in journals, anthologies, and the collection Prowler. Her awards
for poetry and literary translation include Massachusetts Poetry Foundation, Oregon Arts
Commission, Oregon Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities,
National Endowment for the Arts, and Center for the Study of Women in Society at
University of Oregon.

Rocío Quispe-​Agnoli is Professor of Colonial Latin American Studies in the Department of

Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. Her books include La fe andina en
la escritura: identidad y resistencia en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala (2006), Durmiendo en el agua
(short fiction, 2008), and Nobles de papel: Identidades oscilantes y genealogías borrosas de los descen-
dientes de la realeza inca (2016). She has edited three special issues on literature, visual, gender
and women’s studies in CIEHL (Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2005, 2015) and Letras Femeninas
(2014). She is the recipient of recognitions from her university and the Peruvian government
and community at large; the latest ones are the 2013 Successful Peruvian Woman in the United

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States granted by Peru’s Embassy in the United States, 2013 TUMI-​USA Award, and 2016
MSU Faculty Leadership Award.

Stacey Schlau is Professor of Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies at West Chester
University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books related to early modern and
colonial Hispanic women writers, including Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/​in
the Hispanic Inquisitions (2013); Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, co-​authored
with Electa Arenal (1989, 2010); and Spanish American Women’s Use of the Word: Colonial Through
Contemporary Narratives (2001). She published a critical edition, Viva al siglo, muerta al mundo:
Obras escogidas de sor María de san Alberto (1568–​1640) (1998). Among her edited collections is
a volume in the Modern Languages Association series, Approaches to Teaching Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, with Emilie Bergmann (2007).

Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora is full professor at the University of Guadalajara.

Titles are: Chemical Engineer at the University of Guadalajara, M.B.A. at Wharton School of
Business University of Pennsylvania, M.A. and Ph.D. in Humanities at University of Cincinnati.
As an author, he has published more than 120 books in Argentina, France, Germany, Spain,
Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, the United States, and Mexico. As playwright he has been cited
as one of the most important Mexican playwrights in Felicia Hardson Londrés’ The History
of World Theatre, and in Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Theatre. He is a specialist in Mexican
theatre of the 1920s and 30s. As an author he has won innumerable prizes at home and abroad,
including the 1987 Letras de Oro for best work in Spanish in the United States (1987), and the
National Award of Theatre by the Mexican government (1980). He has taught at the University
of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and at several Mexican universities. As a researcher his
achievements include the discovery of two previously lost texts of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; one
of them, The Second Celestina, was published with a prologue by Octavio Paz.

Martha Lilia Tenorio is Professor at El Colegio de México. She was Visiting Professor
at the University of Chicago (2012–​2015). A specialist in Spanish Golden Age poetry and
the poetry of New Spain, she has published several books, among them: Serafina y sor Juana,
co-​authored with Antonio Alatorre (1998), Los villancicos de sor Juana (1999), Poesía novohis-
pana. Antología (2010) and El gongorismo en Nueva España. Ensayo de restitución (2013). She
has edited manuscripts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; the latest are Suma
del arte de Poesía (1592) by Eugenio de Salazar (2011) and El arte poética de Mr. Boileau tra-
ducida por Francisco Javier Alegre (circa 1776) (2016). She is a member of the Consejo Asesor
de la Cátedra Luis de Góngora (Córdoba, Spain) and of the recently-​founded Editorial
Committee of the Journal of Colonial Latin American Studies, sponsored by the Colonial
section of the Latin American Studies Association, based at the University of Minnesota.

George Antony Thomas received his Ph.D.  in Spanish from Emory University (2006).
His research focuses on colonial Latin American literature as well as Hispanic women writ-
ers. He currently holds the appointment of Associate Professor of Spanish at the University
of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches courses in Hispanic literature. He is the author of the
monograph The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2012). His research on Sor
Juana has also appeared in the journals Hispania, Letras Femeninas, and South Atlantic Review.
At the present time he is working on a book manuscript that examines Felipe Guaman Poma
de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno through the lens of early modern print culture.

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Grady C. Wray is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Oklahoma where he

teaches Latin-​American literature. His book, The Devotional Exercises/​Los Ejercicios Devotos
of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/​50–​1695), is the first critical study and
bilingual annotated edition of Sor Juana’s devotional work, and it closely examines devotional
writing in New Spain in the late seventeenth century.

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WORKS CITED

Abreu Gómez, Ermilo. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bibliografía y biblioteca. Mexico City:  Secretaria de
Relaciones Exteriores, 1934.
Acosta, Leonardo. “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista.” Barroco de Indias y otros ensayos. La
Habana: Cuadernos Casa 28, 1985. 9–​52.
Adamson, John. “Introduction: The Making of the Ancien-​Régime Court, 1500–​1700.” The Princely Courts
of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture Under the Ancien Régime 1500–​1750. Ed. John Adamson. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. 7–​41.
Agueda Méndez, María. “Antonio Núñez de Miranda, confesor de Sor Juana, y las mujeres.” Caravelle.
Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso bresilien 76/​77 (2001): 411–​20.
Aguilar Sosa, Yanet. “Por qué ‘Yo, la peor’ es el libro más vendido en México.” El Universal July 24, 2009.
Web. January 19, 2015.
Aiton, Arthur Scott. Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1927.
Alatorre, Antonio. “Avances en el conocimiento de Sor Juana.” Conquista y contraconquista. Ed. Julio Ortega.
Mexico City: Colegio de México/​Brown UP, 1994. 659–​67.
—​. “Avatares barrocos del romance (De Góngora a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz).” Nueva Revista de Filología
Hispánica 26.1 (1977): 341–​459.
—​. “La Carta de sor Juana al P. Núñez.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 35.2 (1987): 591–​673.
—​, ed. Enemigas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico City: Colegio de México,
1994.
—​. “En torno al Neptuno alegórico de Sor Juana.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 58.1 (2010): 269–​78.
—​. “Introducción.” Juana de Asbaje. Amado Nervo. 1910. Ed. Antonio Alatorre. Mexico City:  Consejo
Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994. 9–​27.
—​. “Introducción.” Obras completas. Vol. I. Lírica personal. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 2007. IX–​XLII.
—​. “Lectura de Primero Sueño.” Poot Herrera and Urrutia 101–​28.
—​. “Menéndez Pelayo y los poetas mexicanos: Una escaramuza crítica.” Ensayos de crítica literaria. Mexico
City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993.
—​, ed. Obras completas 1. Lírica personal. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. 1951. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2009.
—​. “Para leer la Fama y Obras Posthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica
29.2 (1980): 428–​508.
—​. “La segunda Celestina de Agustín de Salazar y Torres: Ejercicio de crítica.” Vuelta 169 (1990): 46–​52.
—​. Sor Juana a través de los siglos (1668–​1998). Vol. II (1853–​1910). Mexico City: Colegio Nacional, U
Nacional Autónoma Nacional de México, 2007.
—​. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas. I.  Lírica personal. Mexico City:  Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2009.
—​. “Sor Juana y los hombres.” Estudios 7 (1986): 7–27. http://​biblioteca.itam.mx/​estudios/​estudio/​estu-
dio07/​sec_​3.html.
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Works cited

—​. “Tercer repaso a La segunda Celestina.” Proceso 710 (1991): 56–​58.

—​. “Un devoto de sor Juana.” Filología 20.2 (1985): 157–​76.
—​. “Un soneto desconocido de sor Juana.” Vuelta 94 (1984): 12–​13.
—​. “Una Defensa del padre Vieira y un Discurso en defensa de Sor Juana.” Nueva revista de filología hispánica
53.1 (2005): 67–​96.
—​and Martha Lilia Tenorio. Serafina y Sor Juana (with three appendixes). Mexico City:  El Colegio de
México, 1998.
Alazraki, Jaime. “Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” World Literature Today 58.2 (1984): 225–​27.
Alberro, Solange. Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–​ 1700. Mexico City:  Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1988.
Alcalá, Ángel. “El control inquisitorial de intelectuales en el Siglo de Oro. De Nebrija al Índice de
Sotomayor de 1640.” Historia de la Inquisición en España y América.Vol. 3. Eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva
and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos; Centro de Estudios
Inquisitoriales, 2000. 829–​956.
Aldridge, A. Owen. “The Tenth Muse of America: Anne Bradstreet or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Inter-​
American Literary Relations:  Proceedings of the X Conference of the International Comparative Literature
Association. Vol. 3. Ed. Mario J.Valdés. New York: Garland, 1985. 177–​88.
Alker, Gwendolyn. “Sor Juana’s Loas: Hybridity in a Historical Context.” Bergmann and Schlau 153–​60.
Allen, Guinevere W. “Ovidian Lyric Voice in the Iberian Baroque.” Hispanic Review 82.4 (2014):
445–​63.
Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel. “Carta a una poetisa.” El Federalista, June 19 and 26, 1871.
Alvarado, Alejandro. “Yo, la peor, de Mónica Lavín: Sor Juana entre el conocimiento.” Siempre! 82–​83. 8 May
2011. Web. January 19, 2015.
Alvarado Morales, Manuel. La ciudad de México ante la fundación de la Armada de Barlovento: Historia de una
encrucijada (1635–​1643). Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1983.
Álvarez, Julia. Introduction. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:  Selected Works. Trans. Edith Grossman.
New York: Norton, 2014. ix–​xvi.
Álvarez de Velasco, Francisco. 1703 Rhythmica sacra, moral, y laudatoria. Eds. Ernesto Porras Collantes, Rafael
Torres Quintero, and Jaime Tello. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1989.
Anastácio, Vanda. Uma antologia improvável:  a escrita das mulheres (séculos XVI a XVIII). Lisbon:  Relógio
D’Água, 2013.
Anderson, Elizabeth, trans. Ten Sonnets from Sor Juana, 1651–​1695: Mexico’s Tenth Muse. Taxco, Guerrero,
Mexico City: n.p., 1943.
Anderson, Paul. Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004.
Anónimo. “Cosas del mundo.” El Mundo. Mexico City, January 30, 1891.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Now let us shift … the path of conocimiento… Inner work, public acts.” This Bridge
We Call Home:  Radical Visions for Transformation. Eds. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating.
New York: Routledge, 2002. 540–​78.
Aragón Domínguez, Julieta. “10 cosas que no sabías de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Design and Digital Art
by Óscar Aragón and Juan Hernández. Notimex, 2014. Web. January 19, 2015.
Arce, Pedro Ignacio de. Aprobación. Segundo volumen. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Madrid, 1692. Mexico
City: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. 92–​94.
Arenal, Electa. “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century.”
Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Ed. Beth Miller. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
147–​83.
—​. “Del emblema al poema: Leyendo como una mujer la imagen de la mujer.” Lorenzano19–​27.
—​. “Enigmas emblemáticos: El Neptuno alegórico de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” López-​Portillo 85–​94.
—​. “Introducción.” Neptuno alegórico. Eds. Electa Arenal and Vincent Martin. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra,
2009. 11–45.
—​. “Introduction.” Arenal and Powell 1–​37.
—​. “Sor Juana.” Rev. of Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith by Octavio Paz, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden; A
Sor Juana Anthology, trans. Alan S. Trueblood; Sor Juana’s Dream by Luis Harss. Criticism 31.4 (1989):
463–​70.
—​. “Sor Juana’s Arch:  Public Spectacle, Private Battle.” Crossing Boundaries:  Attending to Early Modern
Women. Eds. Jane Donawerth and Adele Seeff. Cranbury NJ: Associated UP, 2001. 173–​94.
—​. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Reclaiming the Mother Tongue.” Letras femeninas 11.1–​2 (1985): 63–​75.
—​. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:  Speaking the Mother Tongue.” University of Dayton Review 16.2
(1983): 93–​105.

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Works cited

—​. “ ‘This life within me won’t keep still.’ A  Dramatic Re-​creation of the Life and Thought of Anne
Bradstreet (1612–​72) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Reinventing the Americas:  Comparative Studies
of Literature of the United States and Spanish America. Eds. Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 158–​202.
—​. “Where Woman Is Creator of the Wor(l)d.” Merrim, Feminist Perspectives 124–​41.
—​and Vincent Martin, eds. Neptuno Alegórico de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Madrid: Cátedra, 2009.
—​and Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel. “Refocusing New Spain and Spanish Colonization:  Malinche,
Guadalupe and Sor Juana.” Castillo and Schweitzer 174–​94.
—​and Amanda Powell, eds. and trans. The Answer/​La Respuesta. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. 1994. 2 ed.
New York: Feminist P, City U of NY, 2009.
—​and Stacey Schlau. “ ‘Leyendo yo y escribiendo ella’: The Convent as Intellectual Community.” Letras
Femeninas 32.1 (2006): 129–​47.
—​and —​. “Stratagems of the Strong, Stratagems of the Weak: Autobiographical Prose of the Seventeenth-​
Century Hispanic Convent.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9.1 (1990): 25–​42.
—​ and  —​. Untold Sisters:  Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Trans. Amanda Powell. 1989. 2 ed. Trans.
Amanda Powell, Electa Arenal, and Stacey Schlau. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010.
Arias de la Canal, Fredo. “Introducción.” Segundo tomo 1995. I–​XIII.
Armella de Aspe, Virginia and Guillermo Tovar de Teresa. Escudos de Monjas Novohispanas. Mexico
City: Grupo Gusta, 1993.
“ ‘Arrebatos Carnales II’: Una charla con Francisco Martín Moreno.” Part One of Two. Efekto TV Opinión.
YouTube. November 11, 2010. Web. January 20, 2015.
Arnold, Philip. Eating Landscape. Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 1999.
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312
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INDEX
Abadía, Jesús Lalinde 3
Abreu Gómez, Ermilo 252
Adamson, John 5
Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco de xiv, xv, 49, 58, 126,
127, 129
Alatorre, Antonio: Allegorical Neptune 204n12;
authorship issues 148, 254; baroquisation of
ballads 154, 162n7; editions 147, 151n5, 177,
183; Primero Sueño 59, 184; translations 90n11
Alberro, Solange 10
Alcaraz, Carlos Elizondo 109, 112
Allegorical Neptune 105; Baroque esthetics 200–​1;
classical sources 199–​200; as criollista agenda
216; editions 197–​9, 204nn17–​19; feminist
approaches 27, 196–​8; inspiration 195, 204n12;
reception 191–​2; as serving personal needs 200;
summary of allegories 194–​5; translation 90n15
allegory, use of 27
Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel 47–​8
Álvarez, Julia 66
Álvarez de Velasco, Francisco 40, 43
Amor es más laberinto 255–​8, 263–​4
Anderson, Paul xiii
Answer see Respuesta
Arce, Pedro Ignacio de 42
Arenal, Electa xiii, 63; Allegorical Neptune 197–​8;
criollo discourse 17, 37; defiance of gender
categorization 75–​6; education of nuns 24–​5;
feminist conventual life 71; feminist translations
68–​9, 81, 83–​4; Primero Sueño 186–​7; production
of knowledge by women 28–​9, 33; triumphal
arch 20–​1
Aristotle 6, 69, 99, 102, 167, 186
Arrojo, Rosemary 90n13
arts as hegemonic propaganda xvi
Asquerino, Eduardo 51
audencia 3–​4, 6
313
Autodefensa espiritual (Carta de Monterrey) xii, 23
autodidacticism 25–​6, 42
autos sacramentales: conquest and evangelization
16; criollo voice 13, 14–​15, 20, 232; feminist
232–​4; popularity 227–​8; productions
227–​8; relationship of God with humanity
xviii; theological bond with humanity 230;
transatlantic dialogue 214 see also Divino
Narciso, El
Aveiro, Duchess of 37, 38
Avilés, Luis F. xix, 164–​75, 269
ballads 154, 155, 162n7 see also specific Romances
Balsa, Miguel 218
Bances Candamo, Francisco 242, 248nn19–​20
Baroque: Allegorical Neptune as manifestation
200–​1; in Americas 19–​21, 22n9; ballads
154, 162n7; Christianization of mythology
226n9; deciphering x; difference in name
of empire 217; elements of Latin American
67; Enlightenment condemnation 46, 49;
limitations 225; Mannerism dualisms 180;
Neoclassicist abandonment 45; poetic
portraiture 166–​7; reappraisal of 238–​9; sapphic
poetry 75; secularization during 19; translations
79, 81–​2, 90nn7–​9
Bastin, Georges L. 79–​80
Baudot, George 13–​14, 70
Bauer, Ralph 12
Beaupied, Aida 181–​2
Beckett, Samuel 80–​1, 83–​4, 85, 90nn10–​11
Beggs, Donald 70–​1
Bemberg, María Luisa xiii, 117
Bénassy-​Berling, Marie-​Cécile 15, 53–​62,
122–​32, 269; Christian feminist elements 71,
184; critiques Paz’s reading xii; distribution
of works xi–​xii; Kircher 183; knowledge of
314

Index

Erasmus 204n16; music 210; Narcisso as not Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de 43–​5,
sacramental 234; Primero Sueño xvii, 182, 186; 52nn5–​6, 251–​2
refutation of criticism of intellectual pursuits Catholic Enlightenment 263
xiv; villancios 70 Catholicism: celebration of triumph over
Bennett, Herman 13 paganism 214; Christianization of mythology
Bennett, John M. 89 46, 223–​4, 226n9; colonial church 8–​9, 11n26;
Bennett, Judith 74 community of women writers 35; defense
Benoist,Valérie 217 of works as in harmony 190; feminism 64,
Berger, Harry, Jr. 92 72; indigenous population encounter 11n26,
Bergland, Renée 231 14–​15, 226n1, 230–​1; intellectuality in face of
Bergmann, Emilie L. 34, 63, 142–​51, 269–​70; orthodoxy 262; music 207–​9, 212n6;
poetry 68, 75; verbal portrait versus literary nun-​confessor relationship 72; patristic
self-​portrait 168; visual technologies in Primero theology 28; Primero Sueño 186–​7; reception
Sueño 179 of works 48–​9; sacrifice of Christ 222–​3;
Beristáin y Souza, José Mariano 191 universality 14–​15, 16–​17
Beuchot, Mauricio 183 Chandler, D.S. 4
Beverley, John 12–​13, 19 Checa, Fernando 201–​2
Bijuesca, Koldobika Josu 136 Checa, Jorge 171–​2, 175n10, 204n12
Bilingual Foundation for the Arts (East Los children’s literature, Juana in 107
Angeles) 240–​1 Christ’s favors of love (finezas) 122–​3, 130n1,
Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos 144 130n3, 135, 139n11
Böhl de Faber, Juan Nicolás 46–​7 Clamurro, William 170, 175n7
Bokser, Julie A. 16, 136, 137 Cobb, Carl W. 85
Borah, Woodrow 4 Collado, Casimiro del 50
Bouterwek, Friedrich 46, 49 communion, cannibalism metaphor xviii, 15, 20,
Bouvier,Virginia 197 216, 222
Boyer, Augustin 200 Contreras, Jaime 10
Boyle, Catherine 88 Convent of St. Jerome xiv, 112–​13
Brading, David 216, 217, 219 conventual life: composition of love poetry
Bravo Arriaga, Dolores 193 147; contacts with outside 33–​5, 45, 262;
Brescia, Pablo A.J. 137, 172 disobedience 230; feminist elements 29–​30, 71–​
Brouillette, Sarah 111–​12 2; intellectual pursuits xiv, 24, 25; music xx, 207,
Buchholz, Friedrich 46 208; play performances 243, 248n25; vida común
Burke, Marcus 99 reforms 30, 30n5; writings 29
Burkholder, Mark 4 Corpus Christi 214
Buxó, José Pascual see Pascual Buxó, José Corripio Rivero, Manuel 211
criollos and criollismo: Allegorical Neptune
cabildo secular (municipal council) 4, 6–​7 194; autos 13, 14–​15, 232; ballads 160;
Cabrera, Miguel 100, 101, 102 baroque writings 20; as cultural equals 219;
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: influence xviii, defining 12–​13, 14; Divino Narciso 15, 20,
20, 57, 207, 226n6, 228, 234, 236n4, 239, 216–​18; Empeños 16; female subjectivity
242–​3, 248n23 159; importance of cabildos 4; intellectual
Calleja, Diego xi, xiv, 35, 43–​4, 206, 210–​11 movement 28; marginality 15; mediator
Campion, John 82, 90n11 function 15; pronunciation 246; transatlantic
Campos, Harold de 89 intellectual relationships 15–​19; in works 13–​21,
Cañeque, Alejandro xv, 3–​11, 200, 270 37, 159–​60
cannibalism: Azteca 226n2; metaphor for Crozier, Daniel xiii
commmunion xviii, 15, 20, 216, 222 Cruz, Anne 26
Carreño, Juan 102, 103, 103 Cruz, Jacqueline 184
Carta Atenagórica xii; current debates 125–​30, Cuevas, José de Jesús 48–​9
134, 139n9; name 123, 130nn5–​6; origin xiv, Curcio-Nagy, Linda A, 194
27–​8, 122–​4, 130n1; original debates 122–​5,
130n1, 130nn5–​6; publication 133, 137, 138n3; Daniel, Lee A. 239, 250, 255, 256–​7, 258n2
reception 35–​6; translations, 134, 138n1 Dean, Carolyn 226n9
Carta de Monterrey (Autodefensa espiritual) xii, 23 Décima 102 78
Castellanos, Rosario x, 65, 66–​7 de la Maza, Francisco xii, 55–​6, 61n15, 203n8
Castillo, Madre 29 de las Heras, Francisco 40–​1

314
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Index
del Valle, Ivonne xviii, 214–​26, 270
Díaz, Mónica xv–​xvi, xvii, xx, 29–​30, 33–​9,
35–​6, 270
Díaz Balsera,Viviana 224
Díaz Cíntora, Salvador 14
Dijon, Harold 49, 192
Discurso apologético (Anon.) 124, 131n12
Divino Narciso, El: beauty metaphor 231–​2;
Christianization of Aztec beliefs 230–​1;
Christianization of mythology 223–​4, 226n9;
as criollista agenda 15, 20, 216–​18; explanation
of mystery of Eucharist 214–​15; feminism 228,
232–​3; form modifying content 224; indigenous
representations 14–​15, 229; mirroring images
and boundaries 223; as not sacramental 234;
Pfandl interpretation 56; popularity 227–​8;
purpose of auto and loa 214; tension between
form and content 215; universalism 15, 220;
universality of knowledge 221 see also loa to
El Divino Narciso
Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio 9
Dopico Black, Georgina 75
Dugaw, Diane 75, 83, 150
Durán, Agustín 251
Durán, Manuel 60
Dürer, Albrecht 99, 100
education: gender 23–​7, 56; musical 209–​12,
213n15, 213n17; transatlantic texts 34, versus
knowledge 26
Egan, Linda xvii, xviii, 186–​7, 227–​37, 233,
 270–​1
Eguiara y Egurén, Juan José de 45, 191
Elias, Norbert 5, 7
Elliott, John 4, 5, 11n6
Ellis, Jonathan 226n9
emblems: arch as 193, 201, 202, 204n14; books
xviii, 145, 181–​3, 188n4, 199, 200; Jesuit system
236; sonnets 171–​2; verbal objects as 166
Empeños de una casa, Los: autobigraphical 241,
247n13; criollismo 16; García Valdés edition
240; gender staging xviii; productions 240–​1,
242–​3, 247n11, 248n17, 248nn25–​6; racialized
other 15; translations 88, 247, 249n37
empowerment xix, 15, 38
Enigmas xii, xx, 34–​5, 86, 114–​15, 126, 147,
153, 161
Enrigue, Álvaro 110–​11
epistolarity, as feature of works 265
Eramus 198, 204n16
Escamilla, Iván 110
escudos 94
Farré, Judith 201
Feijoo, Benito Jerónimo xi, 46
feminism: Allegorical Neptune 27, 196–​8; autos
228, 232–​4; of baroque themes 21; Carta
315
Atenagórica 27–​8; Catholicism 64, 72; classical
67, 183–​5; classical mythology 27, 73,
197–​8; conventual life 29–​30, 71–​2; courtly
73, 77n20; empowerment 68–​9; first feminist
of the Americas 67; first woman theologian of
the Americas 231, 232; genre use 69–​71; hero
and martyr xiii; historical approach 168, 174;
humor 70; Latina xvi; modern definitions 65;
portraiture 91–​2, 168–​9; pre-​Enlightenment 64;
Primero Sueño 179; purpose of sapphic poetry 75;
querelle des femmes issue 25, 64–​5, 69,
76n8; Schons xvi, 66; spiritual-​matriarchal
71–​3; textual studies 63–​4, 76n4; translations
xiii, xvi, 68–​9, 79, 81, 83–​8, 90nn12–​13;
villancicos 70, 127, 179
Fernández, Cristina Beatriz 201, 202
Fernández de Santa Cruz, Miguel 61n7, 123,
128–​9, 130n4, 132nn34–​5, 134, 139n10
festejos xviii, 88
festivals 193–​4
Fiorellino, Barbara 79
Flor, Fernando de la 156
Flores, Carlos 211
Flynn, Gerald 256, 261, 262
Franco, Jean 29
free will 19, 130, 136–​7, 215, 217, 233
Garber, Linda 74
García Naranjo, Nemesio 50
García Valdés, Carmen Celsa 240
Garza, Héctor 182
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia xiii, xvi
Gates, Eunice Joiner 178, 200
gender: binary nature 63; choice of genre 264,
267n13; community of women writers 25–​6;
cross-​dressing in theater 245, 249n34; defying
categorization 75–​6; education 23–​5, 23–​7;
empowerment strategies xix, 15; influence on
other learned women 265; intellect xii, xiv,
36, 41–​3, 51n2, 52n3, 66, 68, 136; love poetry
142–​6, 148; musc 209–​10; mythmaking xi;
patronage xiv, xvi, 35, 60n4, 203n7; in portraits
xix, 99; production of Allegorical Neptune 192;
production of Empeños xviii; reception 45, 46;
relationships xvii, 37, 38; souls as, -​neutral 75,
83–​5, 90n12, 233 see also feminism
genres, need to read across 262
Gillespie, Jeanne 38, 39
Gimbernat-​González, Ester 142
Glantz, Margo 17, 60, 165, 223, 226n9
Gomar, Rogelio Ruiz 93, 102
Gómez, Ermilo Abreu 55, 61n11, 267n5
Gómez, Isabel xix, 78–​90, 271
Góngora, Mario 3
Góngora y Argote, Luis de 163n17, 185;
emblem books 181; influence 20, 21, 58, 154,
162n7, 170, 171, 172, 177–​80, 200; during
316

Index

Neoclassicism 45; reevaluations 49–​50, 238; and Inquisition 262; gender xii, xiv, 36, 41–​3,
rewriting xix, 165 51n2, 52n3, 66, 68, 136; mythmaking xii; New
Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Pilar 24 Spain 36; production xiv; professing xiv, 66,
González, Michelle A. xvi, 73, 187, 231 72; transatlantic relationships 15–​19, 33–​9; of
González Boixo, Juan Carlos 76n4, 164, 165 women 28–​9
González García, José M. 200–​1 Inundación Castálida 36
Graubart, Karen 13 Islas, Andrés de 104
Graves, Robert 80 Israel, Jonathan 4
Greenblatt, Stephen 157
Grossi,Verónica 185, 190–​204, 234, 237n8, 271; Jáuregui, Carlos 14–​15, 20, 216, 217, 219–​20,
Allegorical Neptune xvii, 21; Divino Narciso 223, 225
218, 230; female knowledge 27; female power Johnson, Julie Greer 70
185; Primero Sueño 179; subversion of Spanish Jones, Ann Rosalind 142
conquest 230 Jones, Joseph R. 203n8
Grossman, Edith 81–​2, 90n7, 90n10 Joseph’s Scepter 227–​8
Guevara, Juan de 255, 256, 257
Gutiérrez, Juan María 49, 191 Kamen, Henry 9, 10
Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 8 Karttunen, Frances 13–​14
gynesis 64, 76n6 Kelly, Joan 64–​5
Kennet, Frances 14
Haring, Clarence 3–​4 Kircher, Athanasisus 28, 180, 182, 183, 195,
Harss, Luis 83 204n12, 256
Harvey, Tamara: feminism 185–​6, 264; gynesis 64, Kirk, Pamela xix, 72; Carta Atenagórica 135, 136;
76n6; Primero Sueño 185–​6; Tenth Muse xiii, 34; defense of Vieira 28; Divino Narciso indigenous
transatlantic responses to misogny 34, 39n4, 264 representations 229; feminism in Allegorical
Hensey, Fritz 79 Neptune 196; gender in translation 86; Paz’s
hermeticism 180, 181–​2, 183, 187, 195, 229 analysis of portraits 93; portraiture 92, 97, 99
Hernández, Rosilie 26 Kirk, Stephanie xiv, xv, xvii, 23–​30, 34–​5,
Hernández Araico, Susana xviii, 69–​70, 206, 207, 34–​6, 272
238–​49, 240, 245, 271–​2 knowledge: absolute 41–​2; discovery of New
Herrera Zapién, Tarsicio 199 World 220; versus education and literacy 26;
Herzog, Tamar 6 female 27; produced by women 28–​9; before
Hespanha, Antonio 6, 8 theology 221; universal 221
Higgins, Antony 12–​13 Kostroun, Daniella 33
Hill, Ruth 180–​1, 263 Kothe, Ana 136
Hind, Emily xiii, 107–​17, 272 Krask, Peter xiii
Hinojo Andrés, Gregorio 204n16, 204n23 Krauze, Enrique 253
Howe, Teresa Elizabeth 26 Krynen, Jean 231, 234
Hunt, Daniel 79 Kügelgen, Helga von 202, 203n8

Ibsen, Kristine 29 Lamas, Marta 116

indeterminacy in translation principle 89n1 language of love and friendship 6
indigenous population/​culture: as abstraction Larralde Rangel, Américo 177
18; Allegorical Neptune 196, 202; cannibalism Larson, Catherine 240
226n2; conquest 225; convents for women Lavín, Mónica 108
29–​30; encounter with Catholicism 11n26, Lavrin, Asunción 72, 137
14–​15, 226n1, 230–​1; as equals 218–​19; goddess Lea, Henry Charles 9
Tonantsi/​Tonantzin 73, 77n19; language Leal, Antonio Castro 56, 61n18
13–​14; loas 217, 229, 230; meaning in works Leal, Luis 14, 254, 258n4
37; religious equality with West 222; sacrifice Lee, Muna 80
222–​3; villancicos 13, 16–​17, 87–​8 see also Leonard, Irving 7, 210
transatlantic dialogue lesbianism 57; contemporary popular literature
Inquisition 9–​10; indigenous population 11n26; treatment 116; contemporary textbook
intellectuality despite 262; praise of work xv; treatment 109, 111; love poetry 74–​6, 147–​8,
stage performances 236n2 149–​50; myth of Juana’s xiii; in textual studies
intellectuality: conventual life 24; criollo 63–​4, 76n4
movement 28; in face of Catholic orthodoxy Lezama Lima, José 187

316
317
Index
Lipski, John 17
Lledías, Luis xx, 205
loas: Amor es más laberinto 255–​6; criolloismo
14–​15; dating 255; defined 236n1; indigenous
representations 229, 230; Jesuit influence 229;
and music xx; universality of knowledge 221
loa to El Divino Narciso xviii, 230; indigenous
population supplanted by writer 217; pairing
223; production 236n2; purpose for writing
214; rejection of stereotypes 219; relationship to
auto 214–​15
Long, Pamela 206, 210, 211
López de Avilés, José 191
López Portillo, Carmen 107, 113, 114–​15
López Portillo, Margarita 113–​14
López Poza, Sagrario 199, 204n20
love poetry: biography xix, 148–​9; categorization
xix, 147, 151, 152; celebratory nature 155–​6;
creation of literary persona 157; dialogic
nature 155, 159, 160; gender 142–​6, 148;
impersonality 166; lesbianism 74–​6, 147–​8,
149–​50; publication history 146–​8, 153; public
performance 155–​6; translations 85, 90n14;
verse forms 146
Lucero, Carla xiii
Luciani, Frederick 150, 155; Amor es más laberinto
257; Christianization of mythology 226n9;
image making xi; justification of literary
vocation 35; philosophical sonnets 170–​1,
175n9; Primero Sueño 182–​3; querelle des
femmes issue 69; Respuesta 136; Romance 51
158–​9; self-​fashioning xi, 35, 152, 157; Sonnet
165 145
Ludmer, Josefina 15, 70, 77n17
Luiselli, Alessandra xvii, 169, 172, 175n8,
176–​88, 272
Luschei, Glenna 86
Lyon, J.Vanessa xiii, xix, 91–​106, 272
manly woman concept 42–​3, 51n2, 52n3, 99
Manrique de Lara, María Luisa xiv, 74, 194, 203n7
Maravall, José Antonio xvi, 8, 19, 157
Marini Palmieri, Enrique 220, 231
Martin,Vincent 198–​9, 204n18
Martínez López, Enrique 86, 153, 159
Martínez-​San Miguel,Yolanda 12–​22, 27, 169,
272–​3; criollo discourse xvi, xviii, 17, 37;
defiance of gender categorization 75–​6; feminist
elements 184–​5; loa to El Divino Narciso xviii;
Romance 51 xviii ; staging of equality and
subordination xviii; transatlantic perspective
36–​7, 39
“mártir del Sacramento, El” 14–​15
Mazín, Oscar 8–​9
Mazzotti, José Antonio 12
McGaha, Michael 88
McKendrick, Malveena 42
317
McKnight, Kathryn 29
Méndez Bañuelos, Sigmund Jádmar 202–​3
Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso 55, 61n11, 61n14,
126, 145, 152, 256; authorship attributions
251, 258n1; definition of loa 236n1; heretical
flirtations 231, 232; importance 150–​1, 177,
192; love poetry chronology 146–​7; music 207,
209; Pfandl interpretation 56; philosophical
sonnets 164; Primero Sueño 179, 180, 187;
westernizing of works 13
Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino 50
Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 89n4, 109, 191–​2,
238, 251
Mera, Juan León 49, 191
Merkl, Heinrich 202, 203n8
Merrim, Stephanie 69, 142; acceptable female
biography 65; autobiography in Empeños
247n13; Baroque in Americas 19, 159; City
of Knowledge 26–​7; contacts outside convent
33–​4; criollo discourse 13, 14, 18; limitations
of Baroque 225; love poetry 143–​4, 146;
philosophical sonnets 166, 168, 174; portraiture
92; querelle tradition 67–​8; relationships with
powerful through commissions 200; on Schons
77n12; women writers 25–​6
Miranda, Juan de 93–​4, 99–​100, 102
Miranda, Ricardo 206, 211
misogyny: of ecclesiastics xv; of Pfandl 56;
satirized 65; transatlantic strategies fighting
34–​5, 39n4
monarchy: cabildos 6–​7; clergy 8; as focus of
loyalty 5, 11n6; Inquisition 9; politics of
proximity 6; viceroys 7
Monforte y Vera, Jerónimo 44
Montaigne, Michel de 215, 226n2
Montross, Constance M. 136
Morales, Mónica 37–​8, 39, 159–​60
Moraña, Mabel 14, 17
More, Anna 13, 19
Moreno, Martín 116
Muñoz de Castro, Pedro 124, 131n13
Muriel, Josefina xv, 24, 205
music xix–​xx, 205–​13, 244, 249n31, 256 see also
villancicos
Myers, Kathleen Ann 29, 72, 83
mythmaking: beginning xi; intellectuality versus
piety xii; lesbian nun xiii; popular-​culture
images xii–​xiv; portraits xix, 92; silence xii
mythology, classical: in arches 16, 197; celebratory
works 105, 156; Christianization 46, 223–​4,
226n9; Divino Narciso 215; and feminine
discourse 27, 73, 197–​8; portraits 97
Nahuatl ix, 13–​14, 37
Nanfito, Jacqueline C. 185
Navarro Vélez, Juan 41–​2
Neoclassicism 45
318
Index
neoplatonism xvii, 58, 71, 129, 150, 180, 182,
183, 188
Neptuno see Allegorical Neptune
Nervo, Amado xi, 49–​50, 148, 206, 212n3, 238
Nesvig, Martin 10
New Spain: Baroque 20–​1; ceremonies as
combining European and Indigenous
traditions 194; governance 3–​11, 201–​2, 218;
historiography xv; intellectuality 36; popular
image in xiii; recognition of writers from x,
xi; unique American identity 14; works as
propaganda 157; works published in 262, 267n5
Nicholas of Cusa 182
Nieto, Kristy 159
Novoa, Juan Bruce 60
Núñez de la Miranda, Antonio 23, 49, 54,
123, 131n28
O’Connor, Thomas Augustin 257
Olivares Zorrilla, Rocío 182
opera 207
Ortiz, Mario A. xviii, xx, 205–​13, 273
Oviedo, Antonio de 123, 129–​30, 132n39
Pacheco, Jao 45–​6
Palavicino Villarasa, Francisco Javier 123, 131n8
Pane , Remigio Ugo 80
Paredes, Condesa de (Manrique de Lara, María
Luisa) xiv, 74, 194, 203n7
Parker, Alexander 228
Parry, John 4
Pascual Buxó, José 59–​60, 137, 149, 181, 189, 193,
204n12, 204n21
Pasto, David 88
patronage: of aristocratic women xiv, xvi, 35, 60n4,
203n7; contacts with life outside of convent
262; poetry 74, 149–​50
Patronato Real 8
Patterson, Charles 28, 220, 221
Payo, Fray 51, 52n13
Paz, Octavio 57–​60, 83, 134; Allegorical Neptune
194–​5, 196; Amor es más laberinto 257; assertions
of feminity xii; authorship issues 253, 254,
255, 256; background 61n21; court culture
of viceroyalty 7; criollo discourse 19, 20; first
article 55; influence of Calderón 20, 57; Juana as
victim 127; lesbianism 75; love poetry 143, 144,
145–​6, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151n6, 166; Mexican
nationalism xii, 77n15; music 206; Pfandl
interpretation 56, 61n18; philosophical sonnets
164, 165–​6, 172–​3; portraiture xix, 93, 102;
Primero Sueño 178–​9, 181, 183, 184, 187; silences
in writing xii, 78–​9, 89n2; westernizing works 13
Peña, Beatriz Carolina 257
Peña Espinosa, Jesús Jöel 128, 129
Peña Fernández , Francisco 234
Perea, Héctor 102
318
Perelmuter, Rosa 67, 136
Pérez,Vivancos 117
Pérez-​Amador Adam, Alberto 187, 206, 208,
212n9, 213n10
Perry, Elizabeth 94, 114
Pfandl, Ludwig xii, 55–​6, 61nn15–​16, 228
Phelan, John Leddy 3
philosophical sonnets xix; categorization 164–​5;
confessional nature 172–​3; dialogic nature 169,
170, 171–​2; portraiture 167–​9, 175n7; struggle
between personal and impersonal 166
Phoenix of America 104, 160
Pimentel, Francisco 191
Pina y Guasquet, Santos 49
political theory sources 264
Poot Herrera, Sara 154, 155, 157, 159, 160
popular culture images xii–​xiv
Porrás, Jorge E. 17
portraits/​portraiture xix; Baroque poetic
tradition 166–​7; classical mythology 97;
contemporary commercialization 108, 109,
110, 111, 114–​16; contemporary drama and
film 116–​17; contemporary literature 107, 109,
115; contemporary treatment of lesbianism 109,
111, 116; exhibitions 107–​8; feminist 91–​2, 99,
168–​9; fiction and allegory 92; fictive likeness
of Juana de Asbaje 105; Jerome-​like treatment
99–​100, 102; during lifetime 93–​4, 95, 96, 97,
99; Mexican banknotes 104–​5, 110; as myths
xix; Paz 93; royal 102–​3, 103; self-​constructed
identity 92, 160, 168; smaller-​scale 104; sonnet
145 170–​2; in textbooks 109; written 91
Potter, Anthony 79
Powell, Amanda 63–​77, 273; feminist translation
xiii, xvi, 81, 83; gendered history of reception
xvii; homoerotic relationships xvii; love poetry
150; non-​gendered souls 75
Powell, Lisa A. 27–​8, 137
Prendergast, Ryan 97, 99, 114
Prieto, Guillermo 47
Primero Sueño xvii, 20; female knowledge 27;
feminism 68, 184–​6; Paz 58; poetics of
autodidact 26; as product of unconscious 56;
punctuation 179; scientific concepts 182; theme
41–​2; theological dimensions 186–​7; translation
89; visual technologies 179, 181 see also
Góngora y Argote, Luis de
propaganda, arts as xvi
pseudonym xiv
Puccini, Dario 66, 144
Puche, Clemente 97, 98, 99
Puebla, Bishop of see Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco de
Pulido, Esperanza 206, 211
Queen of the Sciences 71
querelle des femmes 25, 64–​5, 69, 76n8 see also
feminism
319
Index
Quine, W.O.V. 89n1
Quispe-​Agnoli, Rocío xvi, xvii, 152–​63, 273–​4
Rabin, Lisa 91, 150, 157
race 13, 15
Ramírez, Ignacio 48
Rebelo Gomes, Florbela 135, 136
reception x–​xi, 51, 162n14; Allegorical Neptune
191–​2; Catholic critics 48–​9; disdainful 45,
46–​7; gendered history of xvii; geographic
expansion 45; hagiographic 40–​5, 48–​9,
52nn5–​6, 147; marginalization 45; in Mexico
47–​8, 50; in Spain 35–​6, 50
“Redondilla” 109
Respuesta a Sor Filotea xiv, 23, 59, 224; Arenal and
Powell bilingual edition xiii; as autobiography
135; beginning of mythmaking xi; Carta
Atenagórica xii; catalog of foremothers 34, 73;
feminist biography 69; feminist manifesto 67;
feminist philosophy 70–​1; gender relationships
38; intellectual life in cloister 24, 25; knowledge
before theology 221; motives for becoming nun
xiv; publication 126, 133, 138n3; theme 134;
translations xix, 68–​9, 81, 134
Revueltas, Eugenia 247n13
Riva, Fernando 28, 137
Rivers, Elias 147, 151, 179
Roa Bárcena, José María 50
Rodríguez, Jesusa xiii, 116
Rodríguez, Manuel Rivero 7
Rodríguez Garrido, José Antonio 123, 257
Rodríguez Hernández, Dalmacio 193–​4
Romack, Katherine 65
Romance 2 263
Romance 21 xx, 15, 210, 211
Romance 37 37–​8, 159–​60
Romance 38 160
Romance 50 160, 161
Romance 51 xviii, 17–​18, 36–​7, 158, 159
“Romance a la Duquesa de Aveyro” 15
Rosas Moreno, José 51
Ross, Kathleen 12, 13, 19
Rothenberg, Jerome 87
Royal Shakespeare Company 241
Ruano de la Haza, José 240
Rubens, Peter Paul 97
Rubio Mañé, José Ignacio 3–​4, 194
Sabat de Rivers, Georgina (Sabat-​Rivers,
Georgina) 14, 15, 68, 70, 143, 175n7;
Allegorical Neptune 196; authorship issues 252,
254; categorization of love poetry 147, 151;
categorization of poetry 164–​5; criollista
agenda 216; importance of Condesa de Paredes
203n7; nun-​aristocrat relationships 73; reading
autos 220; rejection of stereotypes 219; sonnet
145 167
319
Sainete primero de palacio 240, 247n9
Saint Hermenegildo 227–​8
St. Paula 23–​4, 28, 100
Salazar, Sergio 107
Salazar y Torres, Agustín de 250–​1, 253–​4, 257–​8
Salceda, Alberto G. 148, 151n7, 192–​3, 240, 243,
246, 252; Amor es más laberinto 255, 256
Sánchez, J. xiii–​xiv
Sánchez Moguel, Antonio 191
San José, María de 29
Santísima Trinidad, Sebastiana de la 29
Santoyo, Julio César 88
Sartor, Mario 99, 104
Sasaki, Betty 169
Sayers Peden, Margaret 81, 82, 90nn9–​10, 239,
247n7; Amor es más laberinto 257; gender in
translations 84–​5; Sonnet 145 79
Schlau, Stacey 34, 274; education of nuns 24–​5;
production of knowledge by women 28–​9;
writings by nuns 33
Schmidhuber de la Mora, Guillermo xviii, 117,
250–​8, 274
Schons, Dorothy xi, 61n8; biography 53–​5,
60n4, 61n7; importance 77n12, 126, 184, 239;
profession as nun 54, 66, 148
Scott, Nina 74
secularization during Baroque 19
Segunda Celestina, La xviii, 250–​5
Serrato Córdova, José Eduardo 182
sexualization xiii
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de 16, 19, 194, 197,
203nn8–​9
silence, use of 21
silvas see sonnets
Sokol, Anna 105
Solodkow, David 13
Sonnet 145 79, 91, 169–​73
Sonnet 151 83
Sonnet 165 145
Sonnet 184 143–​4
sonnets 85, 109, 158, 171–​2 see also love poetry;
philosophical sonnets
Soriano Vallés, Alejandro 183
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Allegorical Neptune 196;
biography xiv; birth 53; as cautionary tale 66;
creation of literary persona 157; Empeños 241,
247n13; feminist 69; fictionalization 50–​1;
first 43–​4; as first woman theologian of the
Americas 231, 232; hagiographic 49, 65; love
poetry as xix, 148–​9; motives for becoming nun
xiv; musicial theorist 209–​12, 213n15, 213n17;
musician 205; Pfandl 61n15; philosopher 229;
profession 66; psychological deconstruction
56, 192; Respuesta 69, 135; sale of library
54, 55, 126, 129; Schons 53–​5, 60n4, 61n7;
tercentenary of birth 239, 247n4; tercentenary
of death 241, 254
320

Index

Sosa, Francisco 48 triumphal arches xvii, 3, 52n13; American

state, monarchy versus 5 references 20–​1; classical mythology 16, 197–​8;
Stein, Louise 207 as emblems 193, 201, 202, 204n14; purposes 7,
Stevenson, Robert 210 8–​9, 193 see also Allegorical Neptune
Stroud, Matthew 235 Trueblood, Alan S. 81, 82, 83–​4, 143, 144
Suárez, Juan Luis 232 Tymoczko, Maria 89

Tavard, George H. 186 Unamuno, Miguel 183–​4

Tello, Auerlio 208, 212n7, 212n9
Tenorio, Martha Lilia x–​xi, xv, Valdés, Lucas de 95, 96, 97, 99
40–​52, 274 Vallès, Soriano 135
“Tenth Muse” xiii, 34 Vargas, Nicolás Enríquez de 104
teocualo 218, 221, 225, 226n2 Velázquez, Diego 94–​5
Teresa de Ávila (Teresa de Jesús) 26, Vélez, Juan Navarro xv
94–​5, 95 Vernon, Richard 135
Terry, Arthur 143, 144, 149, 151n1 Vicens, Joseph 45
theater: authorship issues 252–​5, 256; cross-​ viceregal institutions 3, 4, 7, 8, 16, 22n6, 194, 202
dressing 245, 249n34; music 206–​7; number of Vicinus, Martha 74
works 250, 258nn1–​2; reappraisals 238–​9; terms Vicuña, Cecilia 87
used 245–​6, 249n36; translations 88–​9, 247, Vieira, Antonio de xii, 28, 35, 122, 125, 135 see also
249n37 see also specific works Carta atenagórica
Thomas, George Antony xvii, 161, 162n3, Vigil, José María 49, 191
261–​8, 274; Allegorical Neptune sources 199–​200; villancicos xix–​xx, 86–​8, 212n6, 213n12; feminist
ballads 155, 160; imperial discourses 162n14; 70, 127, 179; indigenous and New World topics
romances 157 13, 16–​17, 73; musicalization 206, 207–​9;
Thurman, Judith 67 Nahuatl used ix, 37; publication 59,
Ticknor, George 47, 49 132n33
Tineo de Morales, Luis 35, 41, 51n2 Villarreal, Stalina Emmanuelle 86
Tomás y Valiente, Francisco 9 Virgin of Guadalupe in poetry 14
Torrico Sánchez, Benjamín 201 Vitoria, Baltasar de 195
Toussaint, Manuel 192 Vitulli, Juan 13
Trabulse, Elías 66, 128, 131n30 Vollendorf, Lisa 33, 34
transatlantic dialogue: comparisons with humanists von der Ketten, Joannis Michaelis (Miguel) 45,
263; criollismo 15–​19; distortions 220; Divino 191, 193, 203n2
Narciso 214; educational texts 34; Empeños 245, Vossler, Karl 180
246; feminist 34, 39n4, 90n13, 264; intellectual
relationships 33–​9; romances 17–​18, 36–​7, Walsh, Thomas 80
158, 159–​60; sonnets 169; strategies fighting Weber, Alison 64, 153
misogyny 34–​5, 39n4; success of Spain as Weimer, Christopher 70
civilizing agent 162n14 see also indigenous Wissmer, Jean-​Michel 179
population/​culture women: patronage of aristocratic xiv, xvi, 35, 60n4,
translations xix, 78–​9, 90n11; Allegorical Neptune 203n7; platonic relationships 57; value of 135
90n15; audiences 80, 89n3; Carta Atenagórica see also feminism; gender
134, 138n1; contemporary recreations of Wray, Grady xii, 72–​3, 85–​6, 133–​9, 275
Baroque 81–​2, 90nn7–​9; early 79–​81, 89n4;
Empeños 88, 247, 249n37; Enigmas 86; feminist Xirau, Ramón 66, 187
xiii, xvi, 68–​9, 79, 81, 83–​8, 90nn12–​13;
impact of dramatic works 239–​40, 247n7; Zamora, Margarita 17–​18
indeterminacy principle 89n1; love poetry 85, Zanelli, Carmel 14
90n14; overview of 234–​5; Primero Sueño 89; Zarco, Francisco 47
Respuesta xix, 68–​9, 81, 134; sonnets 85; theater Zatrilla y Vico, Joseph 191
88–​9, 247, 249n37; villancicos 86–​8 Zavala, Iris 64, 76n5

320