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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
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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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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)
ISBN: 978-1 - 3 15-61356-7 (ebk)
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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-f eminist, 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-p oet’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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