The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World 9789048552894

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
A Note on the Text
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Fama
2. Soaring above the Rest
3. Light from the New World
4. With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper”
Afterword (Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?)
Appendix A
Appendix B
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/ or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including, but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world, as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions. Series editors James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and Merry WiesnerHanks

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Margo Echenberg

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Escuela de Humanidades y Educación del Tecnológico de Monterrey, México.

Cover illustration: Allegorical Figure of Fame, c. 1590 by Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari). The MET Museum, New York Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 704 4 e-isbn 978 90 4855 289 4 doi 10.5117/9789463727044 nur 685 © M. Echenberg / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

A Note on the Text

7

Abbreviations 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 13 Negotiating Rumor and Fame: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Posthumous Fama

Sor Juana, Agent of Her Own Celebrity Status 25 The Fama and Sor Juana’s Retreat from Public Life 28 Exempla, Edification, Posterity and the Written Word 34 More Than a Sourcebook 38 Chapter Outline 42 Appendix 44 1. The Fama 55 A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana

The Engraved Portrait: Gateway to the Volume 57 The Fama’s Prologue: A Guide to Unearthing the Volume’s Structure 72 A Private Dialogue Made Public: Sor Juana Engages the Editor of Her Fama 84 Conclusions 88 Appendix 91 2. Soaring above the Rest

Sor Juana as “Sacred Phoenix” and the Fama as Moral Exhortation

99

Tales of Virtues: Posthumous Fame for Holy Women of Seventeenth-Century Mexico 105 Father Calleja Tries His Hand at Hagiography 112 Paying Homage to Sor Juana’s Spiritual and Literary Desengaño 122 Conclusions 134 Appendix 138

3. Light from the New World

Posthumous Praise for an American Mind

147

Sor Juana, An American Treasure 154 American Tributes: Sor Juana and a New World Order 171 Not Woman at All?: Sor Juana and the Discourse of New World Abundance 182 Conclusions 198 Appendix 202 4. With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper” Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image

213

Sor Juana as Panegyrist: In Praise of Doña María de Guadalupe de Lencastre 219 Sor Juana Vilifies and Promotes Her Renown in the Respuesta 228 “I Have No Knowledge of These Things”: Sor Juana’s Careful Crafting of Her Literary Self-Portraits 236 Conclusions 254 Appendix 262 Afterword(Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?)

271

Appendix A

281

Appendix B

289

Bibliography of Works Cited

291

Index 309 Figure 1. Frontispiece of the Fama y obras pósthumas. Madrid, 1700. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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A Note on the Text

All citations from the Fama y obras pósthumas, unless otherwise indicated, are from the 1995 facsimile edition of the original 1700 publication. The same facsimile series is used for references to the preliminary matter from the two volumes published in Spain in Sor Juana’s lifetime, Inundación castálida (IC) and Segundo volume (SV). The Fama’s pagination begins only well over a hundred pages into the text. Page numbers cited within square brackets, therefore, refer to the unnumbered pages of the original. I have modernized the spelling (except for the volume’s full title) but have conserved the original punctuation and capitalization in most instances. References to individual poems by Sor Juana will employ Méndez Plancarte’s numeration as it appears in his edition of her Obras Completas (OC). In addition to identifying the number Méndez Plancarte assigns each of the writer’s poems, I also indicate the number of the volume, page, and verse as they appear in his definitive editions. When the English translation of Sor Juana’s works has appeared in print, I have used those sources and noted any discrepancies I have with these. When no print translation is noted, it is my own with the invaluable assistance of Jessica C. Locke. In those instances, English translations appear in prose.

Abbreviations CA Fama

Carta Atenagórica, SV, pp. 1–34; OC IV 412–39. Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Facsim. Edition. México: UNAM, 1995 [1700]. Inundación Castálida de la única poetisa, Musa IC Décima. Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Facsim. Edition. México: UNAM. 1995 [1689]. Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited OC by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (vols. I, II, III) and Alberto G. Salceda (vol. IV). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951–1957. Respuesta Respuesta a sor Filotea, in Fama, pp. 8–60; OC IV 440–75. Segundo Volumen de las Obras de Soror Juana Inés SV de la Cruz. Edited by Margo Glantz. Facsim Edition. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, 1995 [1692].

Acknowledgments Three decisive moments prepared the ground for the gestation of this book. Z. Nelly Martinez at McGill University laid out the worlds of Latin American women writers before me and urged me onto a path of keen exploration and marvelous discoveries. Later, Stephanie Merrim invited me to join her in exploring the immensities of Sor Juana’s incredible mind and pen and taught me to navigate both texts devoted to early modern women and the contemporary world of sorjuanistas. I am immensely grateful for her guidance, erudition and scholarly acumen which not only imbues many parts of this book, but also helped me to find my own voice. Finally, holding the Fama in my hands at the John Carter Brown Library sparked an enormous curiosity about who else had done so and what might they have made of Sor Juana? That inquisitiveness is the motor of this book. The many hours spent pouring over the Fama in my time as a James M. Stuart Fellow at the JCB in Providence, R.I., were a great privilege for which I am thankful. Geoffrey Ribbans† helped improve an early version of this book and shared with me his discerning sense of what fame meant in the Hispanic literary context. Another thank you goes to Elizabeth Rhodes for her many suggestions and knowledgeable insights into the world of Spanish contemporaries of Sor Juana. A very special word of gratitude goes to Stephanie Kirk who aided to the project over the years in innumerable ways; her belief in me and in this book never waned and spurred me on in the most decisive of times. My fortuitous meetings with Veronica Grossi (in Buenos Aires) and Josefina Ludmer† (in Mexico City) also proved decisive in the publication of this book. In Mexico City, my dear friend Jessica C. Locke spent hours disentangling Baroque verse with me. I am indebted to her for all that she taught me as well as her meticulous and thoughtful translations of obscure and hyperbolic Spanish and Latin poems into English. Osmar Sánchez Aguilera, compañero de trinchera, remains unmatched as a supportive friend and generous c­ olleague. At the Tec de Monterrey, Javier Camargo, Inés Sáenz, Ivón Cepeda, Connie Castillo and Mariana Gabarrot were the best of soundboards; many hours of earnest discussions with them in the Cátedra UNESCO/ UNITWIN-Tec de Monterrey de Ética, Cultura de Paz y Derechos Humanos aided in the completion of this book, albeit not in a conventional way. This project also benefitted immeasurably from the wise advice and generous support of Dora Elvira García González. Her mentorship and unfailing belief in me and my work helped me to navigate the rougher waters. I am

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also very grateful to the Escuela de Humanidades y Educación of the Tec de Monterrey, Mexico, that helped make this book a reality. Another thank you goes to Erika Gaffney and her team at Amsterdam University Press for their encouragement and guidance. I am also indebted to the anonymous reader for the Press whose suggestions vastly improved the original manuscript. I would like also to gratefully acknowledge the many helpful suggestions made by one of the editors of the Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World series. This book is better thanks to their close, careful reading as well as their insightful and timely recommendations. Finally, I would like to thank family and friends whose support and encouragement were paramount to a long book project. To my dear friends Nora Jaffary, Patricia Sobral, Maria Fernanda Lander, Monica Flores, Carolyn Goldman, Ingrid Hernández, Alem Sklar and Laila Smith for their companionship, warmth and never-flinching support over the course of many years of sustaining friendship. My parents, Myron Echenberg† and Eva Neisser Echenberg, engaged me in a world of ideas, reading and writing from my earliest childhood and continued unfailingly to love and support me and my journeys. Their communities of friends, family, and colleagues as well as their vast world of ideas helped shape me. To my Cordero, Hernández, Nájera, Benítez, Campirano clan in Mexico City, I owe many hours of companionship, support and wonderful meals. I would also like to recognize and make visible the work, dedication, love and support given to me by my childhood caregiver, Irene Gor, and that bestowed on my own children by Juventina Flores García. Mothering has proved vital in teaching me how to pay close attention to the pressing issue at hand without losing sight of the scope of a lengthy project. My amazing daughters, Katya, Siena, and Lía, have given me the energy, vitality and inspiration to see things through to the end. The love, patience, and quiet assurance about so many things given to me by Juan Hernández Cordero, my husband and companion, has allowed me to think and write this book in all of its stages. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

Introduction Negotiating Rumor and Fame: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Posthumous Fama Abstract: This chapter examines the conditions and qualities of Sor Juana that made her a celebrity in her time and warranted her posthumous fame in a transatlantic tribute published in Spain. Instead of the limits of existing models of renown transforming to accommodate a colonial woman author, she is reconciled into conventional notions of fame. The three fictions of Sor Juana that emerge most clearly in her posthumous tome are that of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse of New Spain, and the New World marvel. All three help bridge the gap from celebrity to being worthy of enduring fame and can be traded in the male literary marketplace. Within the framework of Celebrity Studies, I examine both Sor Juana’s role as agent of her own celebrity and the negotiations of her panegyrists. Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Fama y obras póstumas; posthumous fame; Celebrity Studies; Hispanic Baroque; seventeenth-century women writers

The third and final volume of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s works published in her time (if not her lifetime), appeared posthumously in Madrid in 1700. Organized and edited in New Spain and Old, the Fama y obras pósthumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] includes writing by Sor Juana (1648–1695), the cloistered Hieronymite nun known as New Spain’s “Tenth Muse,” dozens of elegies written upon her death by Spanish and Mexican peers and a voluminous paratext in the way of licenses, a frontispiece, a vita and two prologues.1 Alone in being the third volume of work published by a New 1 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama.

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_intro

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World criolla nun in Spain,2 the complex baroque volume is also her fama póstuma, a tribute to her posthumous fame, written and printed at a time in which fame was off limits to women and literary posthumous fame (a male affair) did not assure glory. As Ann Rosalind Jones has shown, although the winged figure of allegorical Renaissance iconography that personified Fame was a woman, seventeenth-century women were excluded from her realm (1986, 74). And posthumous literary fame could not be uncoupled from the author’s moral exemplarity until well into the eighteenth century (Goodman 549). No other writer in the Hispanic world of her time, male or female, published as prolifically as Sor Juana and no female contemporary that I know of was honored with a posthumous tribute.3 In fact, the only other posthumous tome published to honor literary genius and guard it for time immemorial in the early modern Hispanic world was that dedicated to Lope de Vega, the giant of Spain’s Golden Age theater, a year after his death in 1635. The very existence of Sor Juana’s little-studied posthumous volume that went on to be reprinted three times (1701, 1714, 1725) begs the cardinal questions of this book, the implications of which potentially span well beyond Spain and her colonies in the seventeenth century: Why does Sor Juana have a Fama? And why is she alone in this regard? Everything about Sor Juana made her exceptional in the seventeenth century, a time in which women were steadfastly kept outside the realms of knowledge, erudition and authorship. Born on American soil, Sor Juana had a prodigious intelligence, learned voraciously from sources of all kinds (from theological treatises to cooking ingredients) and engaged in what Margaret Ezell has called the “‘game’ of authorship” in Spain from within her Hieronymite convent in New Spain’s capital (1999, 1). For twenty-six years, the duration of two viceroys’ regimes between 1665 and 1691, she was what Stephanie Merrim deemed the viceregal capital’s “unofficial official court poet” (1999, 35), writing occasional verse and participating in tournaments.4 Much of this occasional verse written at the behest of the 2 I use the Spanish term to refer to American-born individuals of Spanish descent. See Bauer and Mazzotti on the origins and usage of the term in Spanish America (2009, 23–25). 3 While I have yet to f ind another account of posthumous fame complied for a woman of the Hispanic world, there are tributes in verse published for European women (although not always posthumously). The Swedish poet, Sophia Elizabeth Brenner (1659–1730), for example, was honored with a volume entitled Poetiske Dikter (Poems) (Stockholm, 1713), as were the Italian humanist, Olympia Morata (1526–1555) (Smarr, 1999), and the Dutch polyhistorian, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) (See Gilberto, 1642). 4 For more on the subject see Tenorio (1999). On the topic of Sor Juana’s occasional verse, see George Antony Thomas, The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Introduction

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viceroys went on to be printed in Spain, but her villancicos, or carols, were published and widely disseminated in New Spain. According to Stephanie Kirk, “[i]n the entirety of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Sor Juana was one of only three women—both religious and secular—whose works were to emerge under their own names from the Mexican printing press and, moreover, the only one whose works demonstrated training in rhetoric and classics” (2016, 150).5 It’s believed, moreover, from the details surrounding the unauthorized publication of her “Crisis de un sermón” [Appraisal of a Sermon], that Sor Juana held tertulia-like sessions from within the locutorio of the convent (Kirk 2016, 150), and her printed works make reference to her wide-reaching correspondence with intellectuals in Europe and other parts of the colonial world such as Peru and Nueva Granada (although all traces of any correspondence have been lost). Together with her ally, María Luisa Gonzaga Manrique de Lara, Countess de Paredes and Marquise de la Laguna, the woman responsible for the publication of the first two volumes of her work in Spain, Sor Juana tirelessly promoted her writing and her renown. Writing at the end of Spain’s Golden Age, Sor Juana alone was to see all three volumes of her works published in her time. Her many European publications appeared between the years 1689 and 1725 and the unprecedented number of editions and printings of her poetry and prose is staggering. Her first two volumes of works published in Spain were revised and reprinted in an unparalleled manner. The first volume, (originally entitled Inundación castálida (IC) and then modified to Poemas), dated 1689, had by the year 1725 seen two editions and had been printed nine times, while by that same year her Segundo volumen (SV), originally published in 1692, had seen six editions (Sabat-Rivers, 1982a, 72–75). For its part, volume three, the Fama, saw three separate editions and was printed a total of five times.6 It’s estimated that by 1715, twenty thousand copies of Sor Juana’s three volumes of poetry had been published 5 Kirk follows Josefina Muriel who registers the other women as a nun, Sor María San Agustina, of the order of St. Clare, and two poets, Catalina de Eslava and María de Estrada Medellina (Muriel 122–24). 6 There are five editions of the Fama: Madrid, 1700; Lisbon, 1701; Barcelona, 1701; Madrid, 1714; and Madrid, 1725. The last edition includes all three volumes of Sor Juana’s works (Sabat-Rivers, 1982a, 74; 1995a, 52). Enrique Rodríguez Cepeda estimates that the printer Ruiz de Murga printed more than two thousand copies of the Fama of 1700 over the course of two or three years. “[N]o [son] muchos si tenemos en cuenta que tenía que completar los miles de juegos que había en el mercado español y americano de los dos volúmenes primeros” (47). [It is not a large quantity if we consider the number of volumes needed to complete the thousands of collections of the first two volumes owned in Spain and America].

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in Spain (Rodríguez Cepeda, 1998, 64); and this in a time when most authors’ work only flourished after their deaths. Many of those volumes, like the manuscripts that preceded them, crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean on what the nun deemed in her romance #37 “wings of fragile paper” and could just as easily be called “the wings of fame.”7 If the “game” of authorship involved mediated negotiations, the Mexican Phoenix (another of her epithets) exceled at these. Her publications, her reputation as an American Tenth Muse and her negotiations with patrons and ecclesiastical hierarchs made Sor Juana a transatlantic celebrity in her own time. But so too did her oddity, her freakish exceptionality as a prodigy, a wonder of her sex and treasure of the feminized New World. Indeed, her peers marveled that someone as different and exotic as she could think, reason, and write as she did.8 As Georgina Sabat-Rivers put it, “We may wonder whether the glory accorded to this woman in her own day […] was due to her genius itself or to those Baroque ideas of being unusual, extraordinary, and amazing in a topsy-turvy world” (1992, 144). As will become clear, Sor Juana’s celebrity status stemmed from a fortuitous combination of what was perceived by others as her exceptionality and her own clever mediations. She also had help from her friends. Her best-known contemporary and fellow criollo intellectual, the savant Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, attests to her fame in no uncertain terms in his Theatro de virtudes políticas […] [Theater of Political Virtues]: “debemos aplaudir las excelentes obras del peregrino ingenio de la Madre Juana Inés de la Cruz, cuya fama, y cuyo nombre se acabará con el mundo” [We must applaud the excellent works stemming from the unmatched inventiveness of Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose fame and name will last as long as the world does] (1680, 20). Yet the leap from being renowned in her lifetime to deserving of a posthumous tribute, of posthumous glory itself, was an enormous one. The Fama y obras pósthumas of 1700 grants us a window onto how and why her peers wanted to add her name to the annals of fame. Exploring their motives and machinations, furthermore, sheds light on the wider implications of considering early modern women writers of the New World as famous. Less interested in uncovering historical inaccuracies or finding elusive biographical truths about Sor Juana in her posthumous 7 The romance roughly corresponds to the English ballad; it has an octosyllabic or eight syllable line and alternate lines rhyme assonantly. 8 Antonio Alatorre’s last substantial contribution to Sor Juana studies, Sor Juana a través de los siglos 1668–1910, allows scholars to consult what was written about the Mexican nun and writer over the course of almost two hundred and fifty years in one annotated source book. The entry from 1700 reprints the elegies of the Fama.

Introduction

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volume, I examine how the Mexican nun’s peers grappled to fit her into models of posthumous fame that hadn’t changed since Horace and Renaissance Humanism and were unlikely to budge to accommodate this unusual woman. Instead of the limits of existing models of renowned women being stretched to accommodate a colonial woman author, it is she who must be accommodated to the notions of fame, both posthumous and literary. To accomplish this, her elegists reduce her to emblems or images, fictions that allow her to be intelligible to her reading audience, either by responding to the Baroque aesthetic of the bizarre or upholding the hegemonic orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation. For Sor Juana’s peers of the Fama, the death of an individual signaled the removal of a physical presence and of an authorial voice. With her person expunged from the terrestrial world, not only could Sor Juana’s panegyrists temper the normative sanctions held against a woman’s public reputation in the seventeenth century, but they could also use her person and life to reaffirm the existing ideology. Ironically, then, her death allowed Sor Juana’s panegyrists to praise what for them were her “unwomanly” qualities without empowering her and to reconstruct her life along exemplary lines without being contested by her. As her laudators both recreate and laud Sor Juana in their elegies, they also reveal the moral codes of the societies of Spain and viceregal New Spain. The many negotiations played out by Sor Juana’s elegists regarding her singularity as a learned and New World woman writer provide vying images symptomatic of the late Baroque in Spain and her colony. Writing in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the nun’s admirers must contend with such conflicting ideas as extolling her fame despite believing in the fleeting rewards of worldly achievements and knowledge, and postulating her as deserving of the publicity of saints when she is far from saintly. If by rule panegyrics dedicated to women reinforced gender specific behavior and identified exemplary early modern women, then the Fama’s collaborators would need to devise a way to make Sor Juana, whose worldly knowledge and public celebrity fueled her fame during her lifetime, deserving of a posthumous tribute. The Fama thus provides insight into the underlying tensions of the epoch by exemplifying how contradictions such as the very notion of a New World woman-writer were understood in their own time. As Kathleen Ross suggests in her incisive re-reading of the “Barroco de Indias,” conventional readings have often led to static interpretations of the inherent contradictions of Baroque culture in which exceptional individuals are considered to be beyond their time and not as having a significant impact on the overwhelming trend of paralysis and stagnation

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(1994, 238). Indeed, creative individuals who are thought to have done more than simply uphold the neo-medieval, scholastic worldview tend to be studied as monstrous individuals both inside and especially outside their own time and place. Disassociating these individuals from their historical time undervalues the importance implied in being an exception in one’s own time. Sor Juana was exceptional during and after her lifetime. True to their baroque sensibility, her peers crafted her into what Stephanie Merrim has called an “anomaly cum cultural icon” (1999, 30). Their posthumous imaging of her, in its attempt to safeguard her as a nun, a colonial, or a woman writer and Tenth Muse, most often reduces her to a stylized, iconic, baroque and, at times, contradictory textual emblem.9 As will become clear, these machinations allowed for the nun to be commodified as a New World treasure wielded and exchanged by men. The three fictions of Sor Juana that emerge most clearly in her posthumous tome are that of the saintly exemplar and devout penitent, the Tenth Muse of New Spain and, finally, the exotic, monstrous, New World, marvel. Studying how the fictions around Sor Juana are construed, her image and life re-scripted according to those seventeenth-century female archetypes considered worthy of renown heeds historian Joan Scott’s behest to consider women as “sites [on which] political and cultural contests are enacted” (Scott 1998, 15–18, 31–33). As contemporary readers, we have to resist the urge to parse the configurations of a saintly Sor Juana from those that fashion her as anomalous. The two versions, the transgressive “monstruo de las mujeres,”10 [monster among women] and the sanctioned exemplar collide and coalesce throughout a posthumous volume that grapples to justify her fame in perpetuity. Inspired by the work of Stephanie Jed and Patricia Parker, I sustain that in all three of the “fictions” of Sor Juana offered up to readers in the Fama 9 In her study of the SV, Margo Glantz has suggested that there too Sor Juana is transformed into an emblem albeit for somewhat different reasons (1995, IX). 10 It was not uncommon to consider Sor Juana as a monster for being a woman with male characteristics. Here, I quote Fray Pedro del Santísimo Sacramento, author of a laudatory work written for Sor Juana during her lifetime and published in the SV. The epithet also echoes one attributed to Lope de Vega. An incomparably talented and prolific dramatist, Lope was known in his time as “un monstruo de la naturaleza” [“a monster of nature”]. Stories of female “monsters” such as that of Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650), the cross-dresser known as the Monja Alférez, were intended more to entertain than to instruct. For a suggestive comparison of Sor Juana and Erauso, see Merrim 1999, chapter 1; Myers (2003) also offers a suggestive reading of her alongside other women in Spanish America.

Introduction

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she is commodified by the Imperial male gaze, made legible, and “vendible” in the Spanish literary marketplace (Jed 195). For Jed: The epithet ‘Tenth Muse’ […] provided a f iction to make sense of or explain the emergence of signif icant women writers in the colonial literature market. Taking on this explanatory function, the category ‘Tenth Muse’ became a taxonomic ‘fact’ which could account for the otherwise unintelligible appearance of women writers. As a fictional or constructed ‘fact,’ it provided a solution to the taxonomic impossibility of classifying [Anne] Bradstreet and Sor Juana either as women or as writers. This ‘fact,’ moreover, had the function of commodifying these writers within a system of assumptions about authorship (men, inspired by Muses, did it) and gender (women did not write). As a ‘fact’ designed to account for and control any variance from the gender norm, the fictional classification ‘Tenth Muse’ made these writers more intelligible, and thus more ‘vendible,’ in a taxonomic system which separated women from writers. (1994, 196)

The Sor Juana “fictions,” which existed to a greater or lesser degree in her lifetime, are modified after the nun’s death to help bridge the gap from celebrity to an individual deserving of a posthumous tribute. As will become clear, gendering and control are vital in the commodifying of the fictions created about Sor Juana given that in her time, Fame, The New World and the Tenth Muse were all gendered as female. Another key notion in Sor Juana’s fashioning, perhaps the definitive one, was her relation to the publicprivate divide that placed enormous constraints on women’s behaviors in the seventeenth century, keeping them tethered to the domestic sphere and banished from the public one for reasons both social and moral. It also proves useful in sorting out what contemporary readers, especially, perceive as contradictions regarding renowned women, as well as what was understood as the distinction between a writer and an author in the early modern period. In what follows, I explore how central this divide was in terms of the notions of fame and authorship that buoy the Mexican nun’s posthumous fashioning. How, for example, are contemporary readers to understand that Fame wasn’t for women, yet undoubtedly there were famous women? Queens, saints, martyrs, crossdressers, such as the Monja Alférez in the Hispanic world, and some women writers were all widely known in their own times. The contradiction is in part an inconsistency between theory and praxis. In her discussion of the works of women who defied gender restrictions in

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seventeenth-century Seville, Mary Elizabeth Perry writes “[…] neither the eloquence of preachers nor the number of books published by writers could bridge the gap between the order they idealized and the disorder of their society. This gap produced a tension that invigorated much of the moral exhortation of the Counter-Reformation” (1990, 179). As Carlos Eire has noted, paradigms suggest how things should be and “offer the comforting reassurance of perfection and stability within an imperfect world of flux and decay” (1995, 364). Part of the idealized order was that all women—forever susceptible to sin and falling from grace—be virtuous and protect their reputations at all costs. The most effective way to do this was to avoid the public sphere and any behaviors that could be regarded as an “opening up” of the self publicly, including of course prostitution, but also speaking and writing. As it were, speaking up and out are acts tied to fame, which stems from Greek and Latin words meaning “to speak.” The implication is dual, as the famous both speak and are spoken about. For women, however, Fame’s morally contentious counterpart, Rumor, was always only a blink away. A powerful and fearsome goddess personified in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Rumor (Pheme or Fama) “has many eyes, ears, and tongues; she heedlessly mixes truth and lies. She is a creature of the present moment, a vehicle of contemporary opinion, notoriously fickle” (Jackson 2). And, while Rumor’s work is done in the present, her effect can be everlasting as attested to in the Latin proverb: Vel mala furta teges praeclaro nomine parto [La mala llaga sana, la mala fama mata; a bad wound heals but infamy is deadly] (Diccionario de Autoridades). So, while there were famous women, it remained imperative to not refer to them as famous, as references to fame and vox populi meant invoking the dreaded Rumor. The distinction between being considered a woman writer versus an author also responds to restrictions in terms of the public-private divide in the seventeenth century, as women were viewed as less problematic when they wrote and remained in the more private sphere of manuscript circulation, as opposed to the public marketplace of print (Ezell 1999, 1). Writing about New Spain, Stephanie Kirk explains that “[i]n the discursive web that operates to exclude women from literary and intellectual production, an important thread is connecting acts of publishing by women to unseemly inappropriate public visibility” (2016, 6). Arguably, Sor Juana’s celebrity among her peers, cultivated in part by her published and manuscript works that crisscrossed the Atlantic, enabled her renown in her lifetime, but also left her vulnerable to criticism for circulating as a published author, a role reserved for men. For Margaret Ezell, writing about seventeenth-century

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England, the “author is categorized as a person writing for material gain, whether cash or influence with more powerful readers” (1999, 11). We know that Sor Juana pursued and relied on her powerful readers, but the public nature of publishing was precisely what was questioned by her adversaries. As is well known, Sor Juana’s troubles with her religious superiors stem from her public writing and the circulation of her name alongside them, what Beatriz Colombi calls her “excessive public exhibition” (2015, 83). Her eventual renunciation of the pen, likewise, is thought to have been her eschewing of seeing her work in print, as opposed to the act of writing itself (Luciani 159). As such, the distinction between being a woman who writes and an author who circulates in the literary marketplace could potentially be critical in establishing posthumous fame on literary grounds. Moreover, if literary fame as posthumous fame was linked to character, morals and exemplarity, as was the case with Lope de Vega already mentioned, this prescription would be even more strict in the case of a woman writer and helps us explain the transformation of a colonial author—Mexico’s Tenth Muse—into an exemplary model of devout penitence. Colombi rightly speaks of how fame is intimately tied to power: “For although her contemporaries were able to acknowledge and even celebrate a mulier docta […], they were not capable of approving her public attention, renown, or worldliness, not to mention the effects these could potentially have on women’s power” (2015, 84). As I have begun to lay out, Sor Juana’s status as a transatlantic celebrity in her own time was spurred by her publications, her reputation as an American Tenth Muse and her negotiations with patrons and ecclesiastical hierarchs, as well as her oddity, her monstrous exceptionality as a prodigy, a wonder of her sex and treasure of the feminized New World. If celebrity indeed catapulted Sor Juana’s fame, then the burgeoning field of “early celebrity studies” (Wanko 351) provides the best framework for exploring Sor Juana’s posthumous fame immediately following her death. Ultimately, the conditions that enabled Mexico’s Tenth Muse’s transatlantic celebrity become as important as the images of her celebrity itself. For Cheryl Wanko, the field of celebrity studies “can be understood as unified by scholarly methodology that examines the social, media, and economic events that create local conditions of popularity and disseminate public images” (351–52). Reading the Fama according to this theoretical framework allows me to move away from the biographical impetus that has prevailed in Sor Juana studies and to situate the last of her works published in her own time within the trajectory of her career as a published author and in the larger context of her popularity, the dissemination of her public image and the “early modern paradigm of the Tenth Muse that allowed for an uneasy acceptance

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of the woman into the public sphere as well as for her containment, in a circumscribed and exclusive third space” (Merrim 1999, 30–31). Although the scholarly landscape has changed some since the tricentury conferences in 1995, the context just after which Linda Egan writes, she is right in claiming as a general rule that “the goal of most sorjuanine scholarship now as before her death is to understand not the poetic voice but the woman of flesh and blood who confounded her peers and whose multiple volumes of writing set a hook into the collective imagination that continues to reel scholars in toward the center of what her life might finally be said to signify” (2002, 206). In my approach, the structural framework that comes to the foreground in celebrity studies becomes paramount (Mayer and Novak 151) and preoccupations with a woman’s life are less urgent than issues of agency and self-fashioning. This focus, then, serves as a framework in which to more fully study how Sor Juana’s celebrity fed her posthumous fame; it also proves useful in guiding my inquiries into notions of authorship for women, the nun’s public and private writing on her own celebrity and fame, as well as the negotiations carried out by authors, editors, panegyrists and censors in the literary marketplace. It is worth clarifying my use of the terms celebrity and fame. In his influential The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, Leo Braudy wrote that “[f]ame is made up of four elements: a person and an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity has thought about them ever since” (1986, 15). Today, three elements encourage distinguishing celebrity from fame. First, the temporal distinction—celebrity happens in one’s lifetime, while fame is granted posthumously; secondly, it is one’s contemporaries who grant celebrity status, while (mostly) men of taste and cultural institutions decide who is worthy of glory for posterity. The third is a result of the previous two determinations: posthumous renown is recognized as a far worthier goal than celebrity status as, in the words of Braudy, “celebrity is fame’s ill-begotten and cannibalizing offspring” (2011, 1071). Braudy goes on: “Celebrity is in the moment, but fame sits on the cusp between the material—the myriad ways that it can be created and manipulated—and the immaterial: Why this person? Why now?” (2011, 1075). In her study of eighteenth-century France, nonetheless, Jessica Goodman suggests that while ephemeral celebrity and posthumous glory are traditionally set up as polar opposites, they are closer than what the standard reading suggests (545). Clearly, if being well-known causes one to be a celebrity, this held the potential reward of Fame and glory that are brought on by death. “[T]he similarities in theoretical discussions of posthumous literary reputation and lifetime celebrity suggest that they might be more

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closely linked than the accounts cited give them credit for, and furthermore, that exploring these connections in the context of literary fame might prove enlightening about celebrity and posterity, and the status of author and text in relation to both” (Goodman 457). Celebrity may be suspicious because it is potentially “false-valued” (Marshall 1997, 5–6), a response to the vagaries of fashion, partisanship or personal interest (Jackson 16), but it can become blurred with fame, especially of the literary sort. Indeed, literary fame has its particularities. As H. J. Jackson observes in Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, literary fame is not entirely of the past; unlike deeds, thoughts expressed in words can be experienced again. Writers “potentially have two ways of being famous, whereas most people have only one: they can be celebrated for something they have done that is over, or for something they have done that is still current. Or both” (Jackson 7–8). Interestingly, the Diccionario de Autoridades of the early eighteenth century considers celebridad as a synonym of alabanza, aplauso and elogio [praise and applause] and does not mark any temporal distinction.11 What is clear is the lack of consensus on the matter, especially since the rise of Celebrity Studies, which can be traced, as much as these things can, to the creation of the homonymous journal in 2010. In essence, critics tend to disagree as to whether celebrity is a term reserved for our current time, or the stress on agency, identity, authenticity and intimacy, public and private selves, myth-making and revelation, cultural memory and identity politics (Mayer & Novak 150) makes it useful for contemplating the social, media and economic conditions that enable a person to be transformed into a celebrity, regardless of the historical period. In my own study, I refer to Sor Juana’s lifetime renown as that of a celebrity and believe that it played a decisive role in the shaping of her posthumous fame. One way of potentially working out the fame–celebrity distinction in the case of Sor Juana is to think that the material nature of her literary production, her life’s achievement, allowed for her fame, while her celebrity status, enjoyed in life, was fueled by her being a prodigy, a Tenth Muse, a wonder of her sex and treasure of the feminized New World. When we consider her posthumous Fama, however, we see that these clear distinctions cannot hold as many different facets of the Mexican nun’s life and character are put forth as matters to be praised and remembered posthumously. The Fama upholds Goodman’s appraisal that ephemeral celebrity and posthumous glory are indeed closer than standard readings suggest. 11 According to Cheryl Wanko, this distinction is drawn as of the eighteenth century (351).

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That being so, the categories of celebrity studies that contemplate the events that create local conditions of popularity and disseminate public images suggested by Mayer and Novak work well to uncover more about Sor Juana’s Fama and its goals. Within the realm of the social, I examine the relationship between Sor Juana’s private and public forays into writing (and the images of public and private selves), her literary patronage as well as her relationship with Church authorities and her negotiations at the “game” of authorship in the literary marketplace. The “media” of the time entails exploring the material culture of printed books, epistolary exchanges and the reception of these. For Wendy Wall, print commodity can be informed by the reciprocity of social exchange through letters with family members (297). In Sor Juana’s case, social exchanges seem to happen in and out of print, as letters, poems, but also favors exchanged hands. In his study of the Mexican nun’s occasional verse, George Antony Thomas argues that while highly literary, these works also “document literary networks, reveal systems of patronage, provide evidence of intellectual exchanges, and substantiate the creation of literary communities” (2016, 6–7). Economic conditions, meanwhile, include the brokering of printed books, of the Fama and of Sor Juana herself, (a New World “treasure”), as commodities caught up in the dynamics of male exchange. Two other components of celebrity studies relevant to studying Sor Juana’s posthumous fame are myth making and cultural memory (Mayer & Novak 150). Both prove particularly useful in making sense of Sor Juana in today’s Mexico where she is no longer read much, but carries on as a celebrity: her face printed on bills and her life story recreated in television series and novels. Understanding to what degree she was a celebrity in her own time helps explain why her contemporaries, or some of them anyhow, were concerned with her everlasting fame; but it is also true that the fact that today she remains a celebrity surely affects the way we read her posthumous figuring in the Fama. As literary historian Gillian Beer reminds us, We need a reading which acknowledges that we start now, from here; but which re-awakens the dormant signification of past literature to its first readers. Such reading sees meaning embedded in semantics, plot, formal and generic properties, conditions of production. These have been overlaid by the sequent pasts and by our present concerns which cannot be obliterated, but we need to explore both likeness and difference. Such reading gives room to both scepticism and immersion. (Beer 234, emphasis in the original)

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The result, as Catherine Boyle astutely remarks, is our ongoing engagement with Sor Juana as a text open to apparently endless interpretations. The figure of Sor Juana is asked to act differently for us at the moment of our engagement with her. In this sense, Sor Juana is an eternally translated text, brought into new life from the position of her interlocutors’ everchanging time and place, interpreted as a text that will respond to and shed light on the historicity and specificity of its translator—as if she could only be what we are capable of understanding, or what we want her to say for us, at any given moment. In this way, Sor Juana lives on as an echo of the ways in which she made her world. Modern scholarship has given us entryways into her world making and has made her more material, more readable, more gendered. But this has also made her more complex, more “monstrous,” for she becomes uncontainable as one woman; it is this uncontainability that propels us into the tantalizing complexity of a person constructed by her own narrative and the endless narratives of others. (Boyle 2016, 76)

Sor Juana, Agent of Her Own Celebrity Status Reading Sor Juana’s ideas on how she was represented or “fictionalized” while alive, together with her own fashionings of self, her thoughts on fame and the possibility of another kind of exchange possible amongst women, serve as key points of comparison with how her peers portrayed her posthumously. Sor Juana struggled during her lifetime with her celebrity; she claimed to abhor it but also used it to her advantage in publishing her work despite her enclosure in New Spain’s Hieronymite convent. Always cognizant of the perils of falling victim to Rumor, Sor Juana walked the tense line between celebrity and infamy, using her writing preemptively to solidify her fame and mocking her monstrous fame that ultimately rendered her a pariah (Merrim 1999, 34; 36). In her response to a gentleman recently arrived in New Spain (romance #49), for example, she writes: “¡Que dieran los saltimbancos, / a poder, por agarrarme y llevarme, / como Monstruo, / por los andurriales de Italia y Francia, que son / amigas de novedades / y que pagaran por ver / la Cabeza del Gigante, / diciendo: Quien ver el Fénix / quisiere, dos cuatros pague” [What would the circus folk give if they could capture and parade me around out-of-the-way places in Italy and France, where they enjoy novelties and pay to see the giant’s head, crying: two quid

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to see the Phoenix!] (OC 4:147).12 Thomas argues that with her occasional epistolary texts, she “transformed vacuous praise into an ideal mode of self-promotion,” noting that “[w]hile the realm of personal and unofficial occasional verse has often been gendered feminine and regarded as ‘trivial,’ these compositions enabled Sor Juana to step outside of the private sphere and establish herself as a woman of letters” (80). Sor Juana fashioned her public identity through her writing, not as “documents of lived experience” but as “cultural constructions of the self” (Nussbaum 149), what Frederick Luciani, following Stephen Greenblatt, calls self-fashioning. In Luciani’s words, she “engaged in a complex, varied and strategic process of literary self-fashioning that proved both self-promotive and self-protective functions” (16). And, to the degree that she could, she relied on her celebrity to speak and publish: “[f]ame itself [was] Sor Juana’s courtly portfolio, which legitimize[d] her public and political speech” (Luciani 2004, 23). Many of these fashionings were decidedly public, and thus allow us to consider the idea of Sor Juana as a public author, worthy of publicity and, eventually, or potentially, of fame itself. “Playing” the “game” of authorship proves a helpful way of thinking about Sor Juana’s agency in her writing and publishing and the role her celebrity played in enabling both of these. Sor Juana chose what texts to print and which should remain in manuscript form; in so doing, she showed her orchestration of her publications and how tied what she wrote, for whom, and whether privately or publicly, was to her negotiations of her celebrity status.13 Sor Juana was aware of the fact that images that circulated around her gender and New World birth allowed her to venture beyond the convent in the world of ideas and publishing, but also could be distorted and used against her. Patricia Parker speaks of women being blamed for being talked about, for allowing such opening and publicity (138). Undoubtedly, as Wendy Wall has studied in women writers of the Renaissance, Sor Juana too needed constantly to negotiate her public exposure (309). Her public persona, who could risk the dangers of fame, may well be best understood as “a form of negotiation of the individual in their foray into a collective world of the social” (Marshall and Henderson 1). This remains true even when the social, collective world is the world of print. In her study of celebrity in the long eighteenth century, Cheryl Wanko notes that seeking fame meant the “relinquishment of some control of one’s public image” (359). Sor Juana’s deflecting attention from her person onto her publicly crafted and circulated 12 Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957) herein OC. 13 See Poot (1999) for more on the revealing play between Sor Juana’s private and public writing.

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image in romance #51, her last, unfinished, poem, seems a testament to how she struggled both to create a cultural construction of her self and to guard herself from notoriety. In romance #51, she accuses her admirers of celebrating an image of their own making: “La imagen de vuestra idea / es la que habéis alabado” (OC 1.161:113–14) [“Your praises have been lavished / on an image of your idea” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]. Knowingly, she attributes the fashioning of her distorted public image both to her admirers—“[v]osotros me concebisteis / a vuestro modo” [“The conception you hold of me / is proportionate to yourselves”] (OC 1.161:109–10; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)—and to her own works. By granting her work (as opposed to her self or her life) and the words of others the responsibility of formulating her image(s), Sor Juana protects herself; she ensures that she remain absent, carefully ensconced in the convent. Not only was Sor Juana adept at carving out a space for herself in which to read, write and publish, she also skillfully managed her own celebrity. As Stephanie Merrim puts it, “Sor Juana not only actively produced her fame but also managed it with the skill of an expert impresario” (1999, 35); I think Linda Egan agrees when she calls her “a savvy queenpin, a ‘player’, as we say, someone to be reckoned with” (2002, 216). But what did she need her celebrity for? Certainly, it was of little help to her with daily affairs in the convent, but it could help her accrue influence and allies that would allow her to devote part of her day to reading, thinking and writing; powerful allies could also keep critics at bay. That the writer and the Marquise de la Laguna, her most powerful patron and for Beatriz Colombi “the true agent of Sor Juana’s fame,” were able to penetrate the literary marketplace shows just how vital their respective negotiations must have been (Colombi 2015, 88). Yet Sor Juana also engaged in negotiations that potentially opened up a place for women outside a system of male exchange. Her epistolary exchange with the Portuguese nuns and noblewomen of the secret literary academy known as the Casa del Placer [the House of Pleasure], that brought about the text known as the Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del placer [Enigmas Offered to the House of Pleasure] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994b), suggests the possibility of another system of exchange that surely could also fuel a woman writer’s renown entirely removed from the literary marketplace of printed books.14 So, despite the fact that female authority and authorship were considered contradictions in terms in her time, Sor Juana’s agency, negotiations and literary self-fashionings stand in contrast to the imperial male gaze that 14

4 For a useful overview, see Munguía Ochoa (2020).

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f ictionalized her, making her legible, and “vendible” (in Jed’s words) for the readers of said marketplace.

The Fama and Sor Juana’s Retreat from Public Life 1700, the year of the Fama’s publication, marked the waning of the controversy surrounding Sor Juana. It was her writing that emerged from within the walls of Mexico City’s Hieronymite convent in the years spanning between 1689 and 1693 that not only brought her renown but also embroiled her in a dispute with her religious superiors who opposed her public life at a time when enclosure was the norm for women, most especially those who took the veil.15 It’s worth noting that Sor Juana was actively writing before and after this four-year period. 1689 marks not the beginning of Sor Juana’s career as a writer, but rather the onset of her impressive number of publications printed in Spain; 1693, meantime, signaled the end of her publicly heralded literary career, her decision to no longer participate in the “game” of authorship. In many ways, understanding Sor Juana’s fame and celebrity is the key to beginning to unearth and understand her many complexities and outright contradictions. She was the subject of praise and envy, criticism and acclaim. Her fame ultimately proved a double-edged sword: it is both what allowed her to thrive as a writer and an intellectual and what brought about the scorn, and most likely, the pressure to capitulate to the wishes of her ecclesiastical superiors. It allowed her reputation to soar abroad but brought her trouble locally. Indeed, the Fama forms part of the crisis surrounding the last years of Sor Juana’s life; it speaks directly to her contested fame in her lifetime only to try to rewrite her renown posthumously as one free of dispute. In this sense, the Fama serves as a kind of a response to her problematic public celebrity status. The fact that to answer in Spanish—contestar—shares the same Latin root as “contested,” underlines my reading of the posthumous volume as a response to what had been Sor Juana’s decidedly controversial renown in life in the hopes of recasting it for posterity. 15 The subject of Sor Juana’s controversial entanglement with her religious superiors has engaged scholars a great deal, especially following the publication of Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las trampas de la fe in 1982. While there is too much bibliography to cite here, Bénassy-Berling (2000) has summed up the circumstances well until the end of the twentieth century. More recently, Nina Scott (2007) offers an excellent introduction to the controversy as does the second edition of Arenal and Powell’s The Answer/La respuesta (2009, ix–xvi). Arguably, the fierce debating among critics continues as Alejandro Soriano Vallès (2008) has resuscitated the hagiographic interpretation of the end of the nun’s writing career to which Kirk (2016) has responded categorically.

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Today it is well-known that Sor Juana’s privileged status that came hand in hand with her fame brought about the envy of those close to her, most especially her religious superiors who formed the upper echelons of New Spain’s ecclesiastical hierarchy. For Arenal and Powell, she was “kept on a pedestal, provisionally protected yet isolated amid the ceremony and the turbulence of Mexico City” (1994, 2). After engaging in New Spain’s courtly life as a personality and a writer in the years between 1665 and 1690, Sor Juana became a thorn in the side of highly influential ecclesiasts in the viceregal capital, namely Mexico City’s archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seijas and the nun’s one-time confessor and well-known misogynist, Antonio Núñez de Miranda. In question was her close ties to the viceroys, especially the Marquise de la Laguna, as well as her participation in the public world of letters that culminated in the publication of the first two volumes of her collected works (Inundación castálida (IC) and Segundo volumen (SV)). The goals of these two volumes are distinct. The first launched Sor Juana’s career as a published author of surprising talent in a volume printed in Spain. The IC was also a political move as “discovering” Sor Juana is parlayed into a political victory for the viceroys after their calamitous reign in New Spain from 1680 to 1686. Lisa Rabin argues that the friendship between Sor Juana and her patron and friend, the Marquise de la Laguna, benefitted both women: the nun gained protection at court and the publication of her work was one of the lone triumphs upon the viceroys’ return to Spain (Rabin 1997, 158–59; Colombi 2018, 33–34).16 The second volume of her Works, edited by Don Juan de Orve y Arbieto, ostensibly under the direction of the Marquise de la Laguna, was meant as an apologia, as will become clear. It is thanks to her celebrity, her publications, and her calling that the Mexican nun found herself embroiled in controversy over the course of the last few years of her life. In what follows, I briefly outline the circumstances surrounding the debate that had at its center the relationship between the nun’s publicly speaking out by publishing her works, her ensuing celebrity and her decision to no longer play the “game” of authorship. I do so not because I am entirely convinced that the Fama is organized and prepared as an apologetic in direct response to this crisis—a hypothesis set forth by the Mexican historian Elías Trabulse—but rather because it is the only extant literary testimony in print following the crisis and, as such, there is undoubtedly a tacit dialogue between what supposedly occurred in those 16 Hortensia Calvo’s and Beatriz Colombi’s (2015) unearthing and publication of the correspondence of the Marquise de la Laguna has helped shed new light on the travails of this period.

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“final years” and the image of Sor Juana that her panegyrists formulate in the posthumously published tribute. Yet again, the public-private divide that held at its center the notion of enclosure and obedience for women that I have already referred to, and that plagued Sor Juana throughout her career, is paramount in her last years. Veronica Grossi has noted how the “officials came to view her literary activity as threatening and autonomous, as ‘different’ (and, moreover, as flaunting its strangeness, its otherness, its marginal nature), as impossible to integrate into the socio-literary structures of the hegemony and as unfitting to the symbolic values of the reigning political order” (38). For Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas and Núñez de Miranda, for example, Sor Juana’s fame was equivalent to rumor, precisely what all women of good repute, and especially nuns, must avoid (being talked about) or guard carefully (their reputations). How she negotiated her relations (or failed to do so) as she moved between the spheres of influence of the Court and the Church helps shed light on this conundrum. By 1690 there was little doubt that Sor Juana’s literary career was flourishing and yet her celebrity was dividing those around her. In fact, it was the publication of the Carta atenagórica (CA) [Letter Worthy of Athena] in 1690 that exacerbated the divide to a point beyond repair. Following the publication of what she called her “Crisis de un sermón,” which consists of Sor Juana’s refutation of a sermon given fifty years earlier by the distinguished Jesuit, Father Antonio Vieira, Mexico’s intellectual community was divided among those who defended the nun and those who worked to censor her. Unfortunately, most of the documents that attest to the debate have been lost.17 Juan Ignacio María de Castorena Ursúa Goyeneche y Villareal (1668–1733), the editor of the posthumously published Fama, was clearly in the first camp and is believed to have written a defense of the nun. While the text has been lost, we know of its existence thanks to a décima, (a stanza of ten octosyllabic lines), of Sor Juana’s in which she thanks him by writing “pues debéis a mi 17 The Carta de Serafina de Cristo (1691), unearthed in 1996, is believed to be one such document. The subject of much speculation and controversy, this letter has been attributed to both Sor Juana (a belief held by Trabulse (1998)) and Castorena (a theory put forth by Alatorre and Tenorio (1998a)). According to Rodríguez Garrido: “En el lapso de unos cuarenta días se predica un sermón y se escriben y se difunden por la Ciudad de México al menos ocho obras (incluido el mismo Discurso [Discurso apologético]) que expresan su crítica o su defensa a la obra de sor Juana” [In a period of forty days, a sermon was predicated and at least eight works (including the “Discurso apologético”) that expressed either a critique or a defense of Sor Juana’s Crisis were written and distributed] (2004, 40). See Kirk (2007, chapter 5) for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the Carta de Serafina.

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defensa / lucir vuestro entendimiento” [You owe to my defense the chance to display your learning] (OC I, 249: 9–10). The Peninsular equivalents of Castorena’s lost text can still be read today as they make up the better part of the very lengthy paratext of the SV published in Seville in 1692.18 Meant as an apologia, and strategically planned by the Marquise de la Laguna and Sor Juana herself, this volume defends the nun from accusations that she had gone too far in her theological critique of Vieira’s reasoning by publishing an interpretation of the “finezas de Cristo” (Christ’s expression of love) that differed from that of the celebrated Jesuit orator. Yet unlike her two volumes printed in Spain, Sor Juana did not consent to the publication of this manuscript, a fact that she makes clear in her largely autobiographical Respuesta a sor Filotea [Answer to Sister Filotea]. The publication in the Mexican printing press of Sor Juana’s appraisal of Vieira’s sermon was carried out by the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, as a very public means to chastise the nun for her trespassing. As Stephanie Kirk has noted, “[i]n ‘outing’ Sor Juana, Fernández made a woman’s theological observations public, taking her already daring private debate with Vieira to a far more dangerous degree” (2016, 158). Arguably, the trespass here was double as Sor Juana is accused of publicly making known her ability to engage with the most erudite of Jesuit scholars. Kirk notes that the Jesuits were firm in creating a “male-only proto-public sphere of institutional culture” (2016, 8), a community of scholars built on formal education and the concomitant production of knowledge and high culture erudition, that was decidedly off limits for women. The Spanish apologetic of 1692—that printed the Crisis in its pages, this time in Spain and flanked by approving praise—turned out to be a tactical mistake. Instead of clearing her name, it stirred up even more trouble for Sor Juana. Following the publication of the SV, and perhaps more importantly, the arrival of the contentious tome in Mexico, comes the period known as her “last years.” These final years, dating between 1693 and her death in 1695, are marked by her silence. This period has been read by Sor Juana scholars in two ways, entailing either her “silencing” or her “conversion.” According to the conversion myth, Sor Juana recognized the error of her ways and, of her own volition, abandoned her worldly pursuits in order to devote herself entirely to her duties as a nun. There are both actions and texts that seem to uphold this line of thinking. Her charity was exceptional: she donated her extensive library (thought to have been the largest individual collection in New Spain, comprising some 4,000 volumes) and tended to her 18 Margo Glantz (1995, IX) has analyzed a number of its commendatory paratextual materials.

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fellow sisters who had fallen ill with the epidemic disease that eventually claimed her life. As for the documentation, she signed with her own blood her formulaic and self-deprecating renunciation, the “Protesta de la Fe” [Solemn Declaration of Faith], dated March of 1694, and no further secular writing reached the presses. Trabulse considers Castorena responsible for setting the conversion myth into motion with the publication of the Fama, which he calls the “official, hagiographic and edifying version of the final years” (1999, 37). The Fama does publish the “Protesta,” along with two other penitential documents, but it is also true that Aguiar y Seijas publishes the “Protesta” in Mexico just after her death in order to circulate it among nuns in New Spain.19 According to Trabulse’s reading, the Archbishop is the mastermind behind the myth of sanctification; the fact that the Fama published the retraction of the Mexican nun speaks to Aguiar y Seijas’s plan to “cleanse” Sor Juana’s name by assuring that her posthumous image is guarded in an edifying hagiography. For his part, Castorena is little more than a “un instrumento dócil y fiel” [a docile and faithful pawn] of the archbishop’s looking to advance his ecclesiastical career (1998, 153–54). While Trabulse’s suggestive reading of the Fama as “gestado and promovido” [solicited and promoted] by Aguiar y Seijas (1998, 154) is tempting given that it helps explain the edifying portrait of Sor Juana fashioned within its pages, it overlooks some of the textual evidence that challenges the idea of presenting the nun in a homogenous manner. For one, the devotional and penitential writing in the Fama appears alongside Sor Juana’s Respuesta and secular poetry, including the above-mentioned décima #112 that thanks Castorena for what was most likely his defense of her display of erudition in the Crisis / CA. Regardless of their individual preferences for eulogizing Sor Juana, it would seem that all of her admirers in the Fama at the very least pay lip service to a sanctified image of her and at most cast her as a saintly figure. Yet alongside this fiction, the many-faceted Fama offers other representations of the nun, including those of sage writer and anomalous prodigy, all of which undermine the notion that she could be reduced to little more than a penitent. Trabulse’s interpretation of the Fama as hagiography bolsters his belief that there never was a conversion of which to speak. He adheres to a more recent interpretation of the so-called final years, more in tune with our 19 The two other texts are the: Docta explicación […] y voto que hizo de defender la Purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora [Learned Explanation […] and Vow that she took to Defend the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady] and the Petición […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas [Petition […] to Implore Forgiveness for her Sins].

Introduction

33

contemporary beliefs, which argues that Sor Juana’s silence was the result of the intense pressure exerted on her by Church authorities. According to this view, she was forced to capitulate, sign the penitential documents, and renounce all intellectual and public pursuits. It is believed that despite all of this, she most likely continued writing and reading, but this time containing her name, reputation, and her work within the walls of the convent. Both Luciani and Francisco Ramírez Santacruz’s recent biography of Sor Juana support this contention; the first from intuition, the second based on the inventory of her cell upon her death that documents 180 books and a “cartapacio con quince legajos de versos” [a folder with fifteen bundles of pages of poetry] (Ramírez 2019, 229). The above-mentioned Enigmas don’t offer categoric evidence since we can’t know exactly when Sor Juana’s corresponded with the European nuns, but given that this correspondence was meant to be private, entirely removed from the public eye (Kirk 2007, 143), it is possible that she penned these verses after 1693.20 Myers, too, supports the idea of “Sor Juana’s continued literary activity with her composition of the villancicos, romances, and Los enigmas” (2003, 110). For his part, Alejandro Soriano (2018) decries any potential conversion or renunciation; in his reading, the Mexican nun is unfailingly devout and contemporary critics are all off the mark.21 Scholarship by Stephanie Kirk regarding the nun’s trespassing on the domain of the masculine intellectual elite bolsters the idea that Sor Juana reconsidered her public celebrity and authorship under the pressure of Church authorities in New Spain (Kirk 2016, 157–59). Regardless of whether she chose silence and the renunciation of her celebrity, or felt obliged to do so, Sor Juana’s rift with the upper echelons of the Church had been laid to rest by late 1700 when the Fama reached New 20 Alatorre rightly suspects that the manuscript took a long time to take form as it moved from one convent to another. The tongue in cheek title page is dated 1695 and was most likely added last, along with two “licenses” by nuns at the Bernardine convent at Odivelas and the Franciscan convent in Vialonga, Spain (Alatorre 1994, 17). His speculation that Sor Juana sent her Enigmas to Spain after 1691, when she sent her manuscript works to be published in the SV (1692) and before her retreat from “mundane activities,” however, assumes that she would consider these works for the press, which seems highly unlikely given the secretive nature of the Casa del Placer. 21 Soriano Vallès’s scholarship seems guided by the denunciation of what he calls the “black legend” around Sor Juana, which he suggests was begun by Dorothy Schons in 1929 when she argued, unsubstantially in his view, that an inquisitorial process stripped the nun of her cherished library. Soriano believes that once prominent voices the likes of Octavio Paz and Antonio Alatorre picked up this view, the legend propagated uncontrollably. The twentieth clause of a recently unearthed will, belonging to the cleric José de Lombeyda Ayala and found in Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación, bolsters Soriano’s argument that Sor Juana did not capitulate against her will, but freely gave her books to be sold for alms (Soriano 2011, 62).

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The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Spain. And while it is necessary to consider the crisis years and to ponder Sor Juana’s motives for no longer participating in the public sphere, there is an important caveat that makes me inclined to believe that the Fama was planned as a forward-looking volume—aimed at preserving her for time immemorial—and not one that harked back to the contentious final years. Significantly, Sor Juana’s death makes a moot point of the controversy surrounding her. And by the time the Fama was published in 1700, regardless of their stance vis-à-vis the writer, whether friend or foe, no one spoke of the controversy that had plagued her in life. Notwithstanding whether or not her contemporaries believed her deserving of a posthumous fame, it was perhaps more prudent to not stir up the murky waters of the turbulent past. Instead, they worried about preserving her memory for time immemorial. It seems to me that in the years following her death, clearing her name was important not in order to prove Aguiar right and Sor Juana wrong, but to ensure that her fame endure—by whatever means possible. I would not argue, as Trabulse does, that “the erudite intellectual of the first two volumes becomes the ‘venerable’ Mother Juana, ‘Martyr of the Conception’ in the Fama” (1998, 153), but rather that the two fashionings coexist, along with others, in the third tome.22 The Fama construes not one prevailing image, reading, or interpretation of the nun, but rather several, and each of those has a say in her posthumous renown construed for the literary marketplace. Could it not be that editor Castorena was hedging his bets by trying to assure her posthumous fame through various means? What is certain is that Castorena was a key player in disseminating images of Sor Juana and his publishing of works like the biographical “Aprobación” [approbation] written by Father Calleja and Sor Juana’s Respuesta have fueled her contemporary celebrity enormously.

Exempla, Edification, Posterity and the Written Word As young, wealthy, Mexican Jesuit and intellectual, Juan de Castorena would have been well-versed in the importance of preserving his illustrious compatriot’s name in print in order for it not to be lost. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the works most prescribed in Spain’s colonies, in addition to Biblical texts and the lives of the saints, were elegiac texts published either in the form of vidas (vitae) following the saintly model, 22 “[P]asa de ser la mujer letrada y sabia de los dos primeros volúmenes a ser la ‘venerable’ Madre Juana, ‘Mártir de la Concepción’ de la Fama” (Trabulse 1998, 153).

Introduction

35

funeral accounts (including sermons) which recounted exemplary lives, and other occasional texts devoted to holy matters.23 This large and somewhat varied body of literature worked both to uphold Catholic dogma and to preserve the lives of those deemed worthy of posthumous fame. In turn, all of these texts played a role in the subject formation of the viceregal populace. In the words of Sor Juana’s confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, the appropriate reading materials for Catholics were those books which encouraged “nuestra instrucción y provecho espiritual” [our spiritual instruction and progress] (1712, 109). Significantly, these panegyric works most often turn on the death of socially relevant individuals whose virtue in life granted them the honor of being preserved for posterity through the written word. The motivating factors behind the publication of such texts were manifold. In some cases, the lives of the virtuous were recounted in the hopes of bringing posthumous fame to those who had lived in relative anonymity. In the case of those individuals who were already renowned, their religious biographies written in prose and poetry were able to elaborate on their fame without running the risk of damaging their reputations. In both cases, model individuals were to serve their community by existing as exemplars and by bringing recognition to their place of origin. In Spain and New Spain alike, priests, poets, and literary academicians celebrated the fame of their carefully chosen heroes, extraordinary poets, nobles, saints, and the saintly by means of brilliant images, extravagant comparisons and often tortuous hyperbole. Even in those cases in which the notable personages had been openly celebrated in their lifetime, it was upon their death that panegyrists by means of funeral elegies praised the deceased most ebulliently, generally accentuating their exemplarity above all other accomplishments. Their works could take the form of poetry, prose, sermon, or full-fledged biographies as, ultimately, each genre shared the goal of edification. By elegizing individuals in light of the Christian Renaissance ideal—a life dedicated to the cultivation of virtue and exemplary service to God—panegyrists assured them a means of survival on earth, as conceivably in heaven, through posthumous renown. Eulogies in prose and verse, furthermore, employed the exempla and allegories of patristic and Biblical authors as 23 Scholars have worked extensively on vidas of women in the Hispanic colonial period, and, in so doing, have helped reinstate the significance they held in their own times; see Myers (1990; 2003), Bilinkoff (1983), McKnight (1997), Ibsen (1999) and Eich (2004). The work of Lavrin (2008), Muriel (1982), Kirk (2007) and Arenal and Schlau (2010) on Hispanic colonial nuns helps inform our current understanding of the gendered experience of piety and female instruction.

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The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

yet another means by which to diffuse Christian doctrine (Buxó 1975, 18). In testimony to its preoccupation with perpetuity, the century saw entire volumes of laudatory poetry dedicated to poets such as Lope de Vega and the Gongorist, Francisco Soto de Rojas, upon their deaths. In addition, poetic tournaments (certámenes) celebrating religious occasions, including canonizations and holy feasts, and countless funeral sermons and vidas, which chronicled the lives of religious and secular figures of extreme piety, were printed and circulated throughout Mexico, Lima, and Madrid. Although each of these occasional texts can differ notably in style and composition, they all subscribe to the notion that those preserved in writing following their deaths must be exemplary individuals who serve to edify those left behind on earth. Posthumous renown was a means of positing the life (and death) of the deceased as one of the extraordinary examples upon which the populace could model their own lives. Undoubtedly, the goal of edification by means of what panegyrists envisioned as enduring testimonies to a life well lived was one of the principal reasons that the elegy prevailed in the literary milieu of the seventeenth century. Elegy, moreover, often worked hand in hand with the revived classical tradition of fame as the ultimate reward for only the most distinguished of notables. As Leo Braudy reveals in his wide-reaching study of fame, famous people throughout time had to be both exceptional and exemplary (1986, 5, emphasis added).24 With regard to the early modern period specifically, Neil Kenny has noted that “the relative increase in the […] amount of posthumous communicating that was delegated to writing was the greater interest in the biography and moral character of the author figure. This interest became evident especially from Petrarch onwards” (2015, n.p.). Nowhere is this truer than in the case of women. The machinations employed to fix Sor Juana’s individual characteristics to traditional forms of renown reflect the didactic role that fame was forced to play in the lives of women. As much as elegists might have wanted to praise Sor Juana only for being the Tenth Muse or a prodigious autodidact, these qualities alone were not enough in 1700 to justify a posthumous tribute. The Fama needed to inscribe itself, at least to some degree, into the tradition of hagiographic vidas, funeral 24 While Braudy’s book traces the continuity of the cult throughout medieval times and its emphatic revival in the Renaissance, it is inadequate in its treatment of the Hispanic world. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel (1952) has studied the notion of fame in her important La idea de la fama en la edad media castellana. As Geoffrey Ribbans has noted, it is in the medieval period that specifically Christian alternatives, namely martyrdom and renunciation and self-abnegation, rival worldly fame (1986, 8). Jorge Manrique’s “Coplas por la muerte de su padre” [Stanzas on the Death of his Father] exemplify how, in the medieval world, individuals sought both earthly renown and eternal glory.

Introduction

37

sermons, and biographies, that is, the most common forms of eulogizing and commemorating women in the century. For Josefina Muriel, Exemplarity, understood as abiding by the values inherent in the Christian virtues, was what impelled the writing of biographies at the time. It is for this reason that in the colonial period life stories and full-fledged biographies devoted to women depicted those women renowned for their virtue who could serve as examples for all of their sex as well as for men given that they had reached “the heights of Christian perfection,” a state which transcended that which was considered merely feminine or masculine. (1982, 27–28)

As will become evident, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Fama is its original way of engaging Sor Juana’s life, death, and fame vis-à-vis the normative means of writing about them and the implications they held in the literary context of the time. After all, despite the fact that the pursuit of glory may have been an individual effort, its achievement depended as much on the celebrated figures’ actions as on those around them who expounded their fame, and those who, it was hoped, would engage in their direct imitation. Fray Agustín de Vetancurt, for example, begins the preliminary matter to his Menologio seráfico [Seraphic Menology], the fourth volume of Teatro Mexicano and an account of the exemplary lives of men and women of Mexico from 1600 to 1695, by reminding his readers that were it not for efforts such as his, the memory of exemplars would be lost: “Del no saber de los hechos, y virtudes de varones memorables, no tiene la culpa el tiempo cuando descuidos caseros sus ilustres hazañas pasan en olvido, que contra los resabios del tiempo que las oculta, es memorial perpetuo el cuidado de los Archivos que lo escriben” (1961, 1) [It is not time that is to blame for our ignorance of the feats and virtues of men worth remembering, but rather carelessness that allows their illustrious deeds to be forgotten; only the care of the archives that record their achievements by writing of them will protect them from being buried by time]. Seen in this light, Castorena’s desire to aid in preserving the memory of Sor Juana seems quite natural. After all, the editor of the Fama had before him a most unusual woman who, he believed, in spite of her celebrity accrued in her lifetime, may well have been forgotten were it not for his compilation. If Álvaro de Luna had written in his Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres that “the fame of any mortal, regardless of how pure and magnificent, will fade with time if it is not assured by the written word” [“qualquier cosa mortal, commo quiera que sea muy clara y magnífica, por tienpo viene a paresçer de su fama, si non es ayudada con beneficios de escriptura” (28)], then Sor Juana,

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The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

who promoted her own celebrity and at times publicly defied convention, would surely need much help of this kind from her posthumous panegyrists.25

More Than a Sourcebook As an admirer and, possibly, a friend of Sor Juana’s, Castorena personally oversaw the publication of the last volume of her work to be printed in her own time. Two years after her death in 1695, the young priest traveled to Ávila to pursue a doctorate in theology. He took with him texts of Sor Juana’s and those of some other contemporaries with the decided purpose of honoring his late and esteemed compatriot. Castorena would spend the next three years toiling to arrange and finance the publication of the polyphonic volume comprised of materials that he himself had edited and compiled. Having brought along with him all of Sor Juana’s highly coveted unpublished works that he managed to amass, as well as a series of elegies written by fellow criollos (clergymen, military officers, university intellectuals), he set about collecting panegyrics from Spanish clerics, nobles (and their servants), and a handful of Spanish nuns. The result was the Fama’s swelling paratext of well over a hundred printed pages of elegies. Paying attention to these in terms of the potential of early modern paratexts imbues them with a wealth of interpretative potential. In their introduction to Renaissance Paratexts, Helen Smith and Louise Wilson argue that early modern paratexts “operate in multiple directions, structuring the reader’s approach not only to the text in question but to the experience of reading, and of interpreting the world beyond the book” (2011, 6). By bearing the title of Sor Juana’s Fama, the volume assumes the potential of drawing a direct parallel between itself—as a body that preserves the works of a famous individual—and the very concept of renown. In other words, the volume hopes to be her fame and to both trumpet and preserve her renown. Castorena’s compilation suggests that Mexico’s Phoenix, like the mythological bird whose epithet she shares, will be reborn and indeed improved upon in her posthumous fame on earth, and, accordingly, in the hands of her panegyrists within the pages of her Fama. This is a far cry from how the book is understood in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. When read at all it is usually easily dismissed, its contradictions smoothed out by the reader’s own biases. Indeed, with 25 De Luna’s work, along with others, such as Triunfo de las donas by Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, forms part of the fifteenth-century debate on women. As its title suggests, it sides with Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris.

Introduction

39

one notable exception, Antonio Alatorre’s important “Para leer la Fama y Obras pósthumas,” the Fama has always been considered little more than a sourcebook that originally housed some of Sor Juana’s most important work.26 For decades scholars have not questioned the fact that these works have been extracted from a volume without paying heed to the tome itself. It goes without saying that most readers happen across Sor Juana’s most well-known work of prose, her defense of her right to study and learn subjects both secular and sacred and a moving account of her life known as the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz [Answer to Sister Filotea de la Cruz] in an anthology and are not aware of the circumstances regarding its first printing. In reading Sor Juana’s writings on herself and her fame as engaging in a dialogue with works written about her shortly after her death, I play her many textual fashionings off one another. In so doing, her slippery self-portraits undermine her fixed iconic representation by others. For their part, the elegies of the posthumous volume have rarely been studied and never put into dialogue with one another or with the praise lavished on the nun while she was alive. Indeed, the remarkably little notice that has been paid to the Fama as an integral volume is due in part to readings which, until recently, have held firm ground in the study of the literary climate of Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. According to these interpretations, volumes such as the Fama are born of a place and time that supposedly bred only uninspired works—primarily civic, social and religious panegyrics—in order to uphold an inward-looking and self-serving literary milieu.27 For example, in a discussion of the literary prose of the Spanish American Baroque, David Brading refers to its triviality, to how “classical epithet was piled on classical epithet, with metaphors multiplied beyond control, meaning was sacrificed to literary effect, and critical acumen destroyed by the imperatives of eulogy” (1991, 376). Although it would be misleading to argue that the Fama is not rife with imitative poetic form, tired metaphors and fanciful flights of hyperbole, the conflict that arises from the attempt to integrate Sor Juana into traditional modes of writing about the famous—and famous women particularly—lends it special significance.28 26 Another significant exception is Georgina Sabat-Rivers’s bibliographic investigation, “Sor Juana: Bibliografía. Las ediciones de Fama y obras póstumas de Lisboa y Portugal, 1701.” (1995a). 27 Interpretations by seminal authors, such as Irving Leonard and Mariano Picón-Salas, assent to the notion that eulogistic texts did little more than uphold the allegedly static literary climate of the seventeenth century. See particularly Alfonso Reyes’s chapter entitled “Virreinato de filigrana (XVII–XVIII)” in his Letras de Nueva España (1948). 28 The fact that the Fama’s prefatory material and poetic tributes all converge around the single theme of Sor Juana’s death—either by retelling her life story or speculating about her

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The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

There is little doubt that the posthumous volume concedes to the imperatives of eulogy, given that the praising of its subject and co-author is its primary purpose. What makes Sor Juana’s tribute different, however, is how it employs strategies taken from the modes of writing about women renowned for their virtue—that is, poetic elegies, vidas (exemplary “lives” or religious auto- or bio-graphies, cultural products of the seventeenth century), and sermons—to construct a tribute to a woman who in her time was a controversial celebrity. The Fama’s collaborators also borrow from literary tributes dedicated to male poets, adapting them by making what they believed were the necessary emendations in light of their subject’s sex. As an amalgamation of different genres, and in its attempt to assign Sor Juana a posthumous fame, the Fama challenges the commonly held notion that like many other works produced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it is worthless. It is primarily that bias, coupled with the belief that the volume is merely a sanctification of Sor Juana, which has led to the Fama being disregarded or simply overlooked. In suggesting a new reading, one that turns on the nun’s celebrity and that considers the volume as a carefully structured and planned whole, my aim is to garner a better sense of how it was pieced together and might have been read in its own time. The importance of these critical questions can be surmised from the following example. Contemporary critics can easily ignore the fact that Sor Juana’s Respuesta or Answer is published in the Fama alongside her spiritual exercises for nuns, the Ejercicios de la Encarnación and Ofrecimientos de los Dolores. The effect of this decision carried out by the volume’s editor would not have been lost on his readers: the Mexican nun was capable of writing extraordinary texts for devotional purposes and for her admirers—that is, her readers—both in the Church and in the courts of Mexico and Madrid. Simply in its structure, then, the Fama presents a continuous struggle to fashion Sor Juana as a devout nun and as the rarest of birds: a colonial woman author. In fact, it can posit the two images of Sor Juana together. As a posthumously published tribute, the Fama can confidently argue that the nun’s forays into the world of profane letters did not mislead her from her chosen path to God and salvation. Castorena’s editorial decisions regarding the organization of the volume can easily be dismissed if we attribute them to baroque excesses or to the short-sightedness of a compiler who published the carefully collected texts according to whim. But to overlook the structure of the Fama is an oversight afterlife—makes it reminiscent of the poetic tournament, a popular tradition of the seventeenthcentury Hispanic world orchestrated most often to extol an important noble or saint (Peña 1995, 432).

Introduction

41

that diminishes the importance of the book. Castorena’s interventions, which number no fewer than eight, six in prose and two in verse, inform us as to his careful deliberations in ordering his volume. Moreover, it is within that order that we become privy to his objectives of singing Sor Juana’s praises and underscoring his decisive role as a criollo in preserving her for posterity. His writing, like all writing, also reveals much about the writers themselves. None of Sor Juana’s admirers achieved the likes of her fame (nor did they share her talent), but their tributes reveal much about the state of poetry in Old and New Spain at the turn of the eighteenth century and some of their own ambitions as men and women of letters in their own right. Far from being mere hyperbole then, the paratext of the Fama (its approbations, dedications, prologues and elegies) form an essential and even original part of the baroque volume.29 As will become clear, tracing a divisionary line between text and paratext is a complex task in a tome whose prologue only surfaces after 165 pages.30 For a reader in the early modern period, the preliminary pages of a book, this collection of underappreciated and little-studied texts, would never have been considered as independent segments that may be disregarded, but rather as an integral part of a whole. As Smith and Wilson note, “paratextual materials work both outwards, altering the contexts and possibilities of the book’s reception and inwards, transforming not only the appearance but the priorities and tone of the text” (2011, 6). By playing the many texts of the Fama y obra pósthumas against each another, I seek out textual negotiations and dialogues that reveal much about the strategies of granting posthumous fame to an anomalous woman by means of forcing her into strict notions of fame, about criollo desire to 29 Gérard Genette devotes a great deal of attention to the matter of paratext in his Sueils (Paratexts in the English translation) of 1987. According to the French thinker, paratexts include, among other structural elements of a literary text, epigraphs, prefaces and epilogues, titles, subtitles, prologues, margin and footnotes. The paratext is “the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers” (Genette 1991, 261). 30 Closer to what we call today an anthology (or miscellaneous volume), the Fama is not unlike other publications of its time that united texts of disparate natures in a single volume. Texts about women, in fact, are especially embedded within other publications of the seventeenth century. Sigüenza y Góngora’s Parayso occidental [Western Paradise] of 1684, in which several nuns’ biographies are published within the chronicle of the foundation of the convent of Jesús María de México is a case in point. And of Sigüenza’s three objectives for his volume, two are clearly politically motivated: to write a history of women for women, to inform the Royal Council of the Indies, the authorities of New Spain and the Spanish monarch of the history of the religious order, and of the convent particularly, in order to incur the favor of the king and, finally, to relay information regarding the founding of the third convent for Conceptionist nuns in Mexico City (Ramos Medina n.p.).

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seek out recognition through literary endeavors and about how carefully and meticulously crafted a textual project that strives for those means must be.

Chapter Outline Chapter 1 describes the Fama’s contents, structure and organization. It also traces the designs of the volume’s editor; specif ically, his actions in transforming manuscript into print in order to influence potentially powerful readers in his endeavor to recast Sor Juana’s lifetime celebrity into posthumous renown. In conjunction, the intricate frontispiece and lengthy prologue set up editor Juan Ignacio María de Castorena Ursúa Goyeneche y Villareal’s framing of the Fama for his contemporaries. I use the engraving that opens the volume to show how its many Baroque intricacies both underscore and undermine its endeavor to preserve Sor Juana’s lifetime celebrity for posterity. An examination of the editor’s prologue, meantime, allows me to detail the contents, structure and organization of the Fama as it conjoins the nun’s writings with the tributes of her admirers. While there is a decided emphasis on portraying the nun as a a pious exemplar, it is by no means the only posthumous representation of her. The final section of this chapter explores part of a private dialogue between Sor Juana and the editor of her Fama that, once published, renders public their ties to one another and underscores her role as author, a recognizable figure albeit an unlikely one for a woman. The second chapter reads Sor Juana’s Fama within the seventeenth century’s attempts to create holy subjects for the purpose of edification. Examining the Mexican nun’s posthumously published volume alongside female Mexican penitents of the Counter Reformation eulogized in littleknown, contemporary, funeral sermons situates her posthumous fame within a context in which women’s lives are recounted in order to praise their Christian virtues of charity, humility and obedience. Father Calleja’s approbation that opens the Fama echoes, in both tone and subject matter, biographies or vidas, and funeral sermons dedicated to women. Importantly, while Calleja’s text on Sor Juana’s life and death adheres to the sanctified model I lay out in this chapter, it also divests from it as he finds ways to vindicate her singular mind and literary production. The chapter then explores the work of other collaborators of the volume who follow Calleja’s lead, interpreting Sor Juana’s desengaño [her disabusing of the error of her secular, worldly, ways], death, and salvation, as means for both warranting her renown as a religious exemplar as well as championing her literary and

Introduction

43

intellectual fame. Concretely, I examine the effects that Sor Juana’s renewal of her vows, her charitable duties in the convent, her death, her devotional writings, her teachings, and her God-given grace had on their portrayal of her person and life. By considering Sor Juana’s life story and her work as a writer over and against that of female penitents, comparisons with male saints and even imitatio Christi, or the paradox of the inimitable female exemplar, I examine how and why the volume’s collaborators chose to align Mexico’s rara avis to staunchly entrenched formulae to make her legible for her contemporaries, thereby increasing the promise of posthumous fame. Chapter 3 contemplates how the Fama honors Sor Juana from a secular standpoint, be it as Tenth Muse or exotic New World marvel, thus fashioning her posthumously to mold her more closely to existing forms of enduring fame. In order to make her intelligible to European readers, the Mexican writer’s panegyrists write her into the language of American abundance and riches and debate whether her sexless soul, her manliness, or her otherworldliness was responsible for her surprising ingenio [inventiveness]. Sor Juana’s posthumous fame could be associated to her intellectual prowess and to her role as author if framed within the familiar discourse in which she is brokered as a New World “treasure,” a commodity caught up in the dynamics of male exchange. Another, transatlantic, line of inquiry examines the role that the writer’s birth in Mexico plays in her European posthumous imaging and how she embodies a problematic icon of New World culture in the minds of her Mexican peers seeking recognition from the Spanish literary marketplace that traded in intellectual goods. Two other contemporary and polemical debates make appearances in the more secularly minded elegies of the Fama: the question of whether women have infused or acquired knowledge and whether American minds are equal to those of their European counterparts or are adversely affected by the geographical and humeral conditions of their birthplace. The closing chapter examines Sor Juana’s textual responses to her public image and contrasts it with her posthumous imaging in the Fama. Throughout I examine how her carefully construed images of self reverberate within the volume, at once revealing her conflicting feelings about her fame and informing her posthumous depiction. The chapter opens with an examination of Sor Juana’s romance #37 in order to explore her ideas on representation, her role as a female and New World elegist, her familiarity with the traditions of the panegyric, and her original modifications to the genre. I also suggest that this response to the Duchess de Aveyro, that mentions her friend and patron, the Marquise de la Laguna, introduces a potential reciprocal exchange among women absent from her responses to

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her male peers. Next, I consider Sor Juana’s ideas on fame as expressed in her Respuesta, concretely in her daring comparison with the martyrdom of Christ. In the analysis of the literary self-portraits décima #102, sonnets #152 and #145, I continue to explore the Mexican poet’s musings on images and representation and delineate the means she uses to destroy her public image, commercialized and traded in the literary marketplace by her editors, patrons and elegists. Finally, the chapter closes with the suggestion of another means of exchange in the form of the Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer, a text and tribute to Sor Juana that emerged from an all-female literary academy. Insofar as it functioned as a distinct transatlantic discursive community made up of only women, it surely also held the potential of fueling a woman writer’s renown entirely removed from the literary marketplace of printed books. A brief Afterword asks whether we should think of the Fama in terms of a successful volume insofar as it promotes Sor Juana’s posthumous fame when in fact it fails to expand the notion to a New World woman writer; the volume also falls short in establishing the writing of “famas” as a practice that takes hold in its time. Surely, however, the volume does encourage our sense of how the Mexican nun and poet was understood in her own time, how, albeit for different reasons, her exceptionality was consolidated in elegiacal writing about her in her lifetime and shortly after and lasted two hundred years until the end of the twentieth century. That today critics have moved beyond understanding Sor Juana as an exception in her time, turning their attention to other women writers and subjects of writing, makes the study of her exceptionality all the more relevant.

Appendix Table 1.  Contributors and Texts Cited in the Chapter Contributor

Title

Form

Sor Juana

“Crisis de un sermón” [Appraisal of a Sermon]

prose

Sor Juana

romance #37 “Elogio de Doña María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess de Aveyro”

romance

Volume

More also known as the CA (1690)

IC

dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, who lived in Madrid and was married to the Duke de Arcos (several of his attendants also contribute to the volume)

45

Introduction

Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Pedro del Santísimo Sacramento

Elegy

prose

SV

he calls her “monstruo de las mujeres” Spanish Discalced Carmelite

Sor Juana

romance #49 “Respuesta romance de la poetisa [a un caballero recién venido a la Nueva España]”

SV

response to a gentleman recently arrived in New Spain (OC 1) (Eng  1994)

Sor Juana

romance #51 “Romance en reconocimiento a las inimitables plumas de la Europa, que hicieron mayores sus obras con sus elogios; que no se halló acabado”

romance

FAMA

to the inimitable pens of Europe who improved on her work with their praise; found unfinished (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Sor Juana

“Engimas ofrecidos a la discreta inteligencia / de la soberana asamblea de la Casa del Placer / por su más rendida y aficionada / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa” [Enigmas Offered to the Discrete Intelligence / of the Sovereign Assembly of the House of Pleasure / by their Most Humble Follower / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Tenth Muse]

20 riddles and 2 dedicatory poems (a romance and a sonnet), plus prefatory material in verse and prose by Portuguese and Spanish noblewomen, most of whom were nuns décima

Sor Juana

décima #112

Sor Juana

La respuesta / The Answer prose

Unknown

Carta de Serafina de Cristo prose

Sor Juana

Docta explicación del misterio y voto que hizo de defender la purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora […]

prose

eighteenth-century manuscripts were found in Lisbon in the 1960s

FAMA

dedicated to Castorena

FAMA

Written in 1691 in response to “Sor Filotea” and published posthumously; (OC 4; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a) Serafina’s identity remains unknown (it has been attributed both to Castorena and to Sor Juana); dated 1691

FAMA

[Erudite explanation of the mystery and vow that she took to defend the immaculate conception of Our Lady]

46 

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Sor Juana

Petición […] que […] presenta al Tribunal Divino […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas […]

prose

FAMA

[Petition that she presented to the divine tribunal to plead for her sins to be forgiven]

Diego de Calleja

Approbation

prose

FAMA

Spanish Jesuit, corresponded with Sor Juana

Sor Juana

Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días antes de la purísima encarnación del hijo de Dios Jesu Christo Señor Nuestro

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Sor Juana

Ofrecimientos para el santo rosario de quince misterios que se ha de rezar el día de los dolores de Nuestra Señora la Virgen María

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

“Prólogo al que leyere” [Prologue to the reader]

prose

FAMA

Followed by a second prose intervention later in the volume (see appendix B)

Sor Juana

décima #102, “Décimas que acompañaron un retrato enviado a una Persona,” [Décimas that accompanied a portrait sent to a person]

décima

SV

poem intended to accompany a pictorial self-portrait, which, as indicated by its appended title, is a gift for the Vicereine, the Marquise de la Laguna. (OC 1)

Sor Juana

sonnet #152 “Verde embeleso de la vida humana” [Green allurement of our human life]

sonnet

Sor Juana

sonnet #145 “Este que ves, engaño colorido” [This object which you see—a painted snare]

sonnet

appears on the Miranda portrait of 1713 (OC 1); (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988] IC

(OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a)

Sources: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995a; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995c; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995d; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988; Alatorre and Tenorio 1998a; Alatorre 1994

Works Cited Alatorre, Antonio. 1980. “Para leer la Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 29(2): 428–508. DOI 10.24201/ nrfh.v29i2.1755.

Introduction

47

Alatorre, Antonio. 1994. “Estudio introductorio.” In Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del Placer by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio. 1995. “Introducción.” In Fama y Obras póstumas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ix–lxvii. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Alatorre, Antonio. 2007. Sor Juana a través de los siglos (1668–1910). 2 vols. México: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio and Martha Lilia Tenorio. 1998a. Serafina y Sor Juana. México: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio, and Martha Lilia Tenorio. 1998a. “Una enfermedad contagiosa: los fantaseos sobre Sor Juana.” NRFH 46(1): 105–21. DOI 10.24201/nrfh.v46i1.2621. Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 1994. “Introduction.” In The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1–37. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 2009. The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Second Edition. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau. 2010. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Translated by Amanda Powell. Revised edition. University of New Mexico Press. Bauer, Ralph and José Antonio Mazzotti. 2009. “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 1–59. Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. Beer, Gillian. 2017. “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past.” Extract [1989]. In Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries. Edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, 229–236. Berlin, Boston and Beijing: DeGruyter. Bénassy-Berling. 2000. “Actualidad del sorjuanismo (1994–1999).” Colonial Latin American Review 9(2): 277–92. DOI 10.1080/713657424. Bilinkoff, Jodi. 1983. “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila.” In Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, 83–100. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Boyle Catherine. 2016. “Sor Juana Inés De la Cruz: The Tenth Muse and the Difficult Freedom to Be.” In A History of Mexican Literature. Edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra and Anna Nogar, 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brading, David A. 1991. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1492–1867). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford University Press. Braudy, Leo. 2011. “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies.” PMLA 126(4):1070–75. DOI 10.1632/pmla.2011.126.4.1070. Buxó, José Pascual. 1975. Muerte y desengaño en la poesía novohispana (siglos XVI y XVII). Letras del XVI al XVIII: Textos y Estudios 2 (Instituto de Investigaciones filológicas). México: UNAM. Calvo, Hortensia and Beatriz Colombi. 2015. Cartas de Lysi: La mecenas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en correspondencia inédita. Edited by Hortensia Calvo and Beatriz Colombi. Madrid and México: Iberoamericana/Vervuert; Bonilla Artigas Editores. Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. 1969. La Elegía funeral en la poesía española. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Colombi, Beatriz. 2015. “Mulier docta and Literary Fame: The Challenges of Authorship in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Translated by Wendy Gosselin. In The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature. Edited by Mónica Szurmuk and Ileana Rodríguez, 81–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colombi, Beatriz. 2018. “Diego Calleja y la Vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Vestigios y silencios en el archivo sorjuanino.” Revista Exlibris (7): 24–44. Diccionario de Autoridades. 1963. Real Academia Española. Ed. Facsim. Biblioteca románica hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Egan, Linda. 2002. “Sor Juana’s Life and Work: Open Texts.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 18(1): 205–16. DOI 10.1525/msem.2002.18.1.205. Eich, Jennifer. 2004. The Other Mexican Muse: Sor María Anna Agueda de San Ignacio, 1695–1756. New Orleans: University Press of the South. Ezell, Margaret. J. M. 1999. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1991. “Introduction to the Paratext.” Translated by Marie Maclean. New Literary History 22(2): 261–72. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol. 20 of Literature, Culture and Theory. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1996. “Colonial Lyric.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 191–230. Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, Jessica, 2016. “Between Celebrity and Glory? Textual After-Image in Late Eighteenth-Century France.” Celebrity Studies 7(4): 545–60. DOI 10.108 0/19392397.2016.1233705. Grossi, Verónica. 1991. “El triunfo del poder femenino desde el margen de un poema: Otra lectura del Primero Sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Mester 20: 27–40.

Introduction

49

Ibsen, Kristine. 1999. Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Jackson H. J. 2015. Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jed, Stephanie. 1994. “The Tenth Muse: Gender, Rationality, and the Marketing of Knowledge.” In Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 195–208. London: Routledge. Jones, Ann Rosalind. 1986. “Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric.” In The Poetics of Gender. Edited by Nancy K. Miller, 74–93. New York: Columbia University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1692. Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, monja profesa en el monasterio del Señor San Gerónimo de la Ciudad de México. Sevilla: T. López Haro. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1700. Fama y obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Poetisa Mexicana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa professa en el Convento de San Gerónimo de la Imperial Ciudad de México. Madrid: En la Imprenta de Manuel Ruiz de Murga. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1701a. Fama y obras pósthumas, tomo tercero del Fénix de México, y Décima Musa […]. Barcelona: En la Imprenta de R. Figuero. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1701b. Fama y obras pósthumas, tomo tercero del Fénix de México, y Décima Musa […]. Lisboa: Por Miguel Deslandes. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1714. Fama y obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Poetisa Americana […]. Madrid: En la Imprenta de A. Gonçález de Reyes. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1725. Fama y obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Poetisa Americana […]. Madrid: En la Imprenta de A.P. Rubio. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1988. A Sor Juana Anthology. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994a. The Answer/La Respuesta. Edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995a. Carta athenagórica de la madre Juana Ynés de la Cruz […]. Edited by Elías Trabulse. Ed. Facsim. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex. (1690). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995c. Inundación castálida. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1689). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995d. Segundo volumen de sus obras. Edited by Margo Glantz. Ed. Facsim. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. (1692).

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Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1996. Carta Serafina de Cristo. Toluca, México: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura. (1691). Kenny, Neil. 2015. Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirk, Stephanie. 2007. Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Kirk, Stephanie. 2016. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. New York: Routledge. Lavrin, Asunción. 2008. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. 1952. La idea de la fama en la edad media castellana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Luciani, Frederick. 2004. Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Luna, Álvaro de. 1917. Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres. Valencia: Editorial Prometeo. (1446). Marshall, P. David. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Marshall, P. David and Neil Henderson. 2016. “Political Persona – An Introduction.” Persona Studies 2(2): 1–18. Mayer Sandra and Julia Novak. 2019. “Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections.” Life Writing 16(2): 149–55. McKnight, Katherine Joy. 1997. The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671–1742. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Merrim, Stephanie. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Munguía Ochoa, Laura Yadira. 2020. “Sor Juana y sus Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer: un acercamiento a nuevas perspectivas.” Hipogrifo 8(1): 251–62. DOI 10.13035/H.2020.08.01.18. Muriel, Josefina. 1982. Cultura femenina novohispana. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM. Myers, Kathleen A. 1990. “Sor Juana’s respuesta: Rewriting the vitae.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14(3): 459–71. https://0-www-jstor-org. biblioteca-ils.tec.mx/stable/27762766. Myers, Kathleen A. 2003. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Núñez de Miranda, Antonio. 1712. Distribución de las obras ordinarias, y extraordinarias del día; para hazerlas perfectamente, conforme al estado de las señoras religiosas […]. México: Viuda de Miguel de Ribera Calderón.

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Nussbaum, Felicity. 1988. “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Shari Benstock, 147–76. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001–2019. Douglas Harper. https://www.etymonline. com. Parker, Patricia. 1987. “Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon.” In Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, 126–54. London and New York: Methuen. Peña, Margarita. 1995. “Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora y Diego Calleja, biógrafos de monjas.” In Cuadernos de Sor Juana. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el siglo XVII. Edited by Margarita Peña, 421–40. México: UNAM. Pérez-Amador Adam, Alberto. 2007. La ascendente estrella: bibliografía de los estudios dedicados a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en el siglo XX. Madrid: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. 1990. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poot Herrera, Sara. 1999. Los guardaditos de Sor Juana. México: Textos de Difusión Cultural, UNAM. Rabin, Lisa. 1997. “Speaking to Silent Ladies: Images of Beauty and Politics in Poetic Portraits of Women from Petrarch to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” MLN 112(2): 147–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3251456. Ramírez Santacruz, Francisco. 2019. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: la resistencia del deseo. Cátedra. Ramos Medina, Manuel. 1995. “Presentación.” Parayso occidental plantado y cultivado por la liberal benefica mano de los muy catholicos y poderosos Reyes de España Nuestros Señores en su magnifico Real Convento de Jesus Maria de Mexico. Facsímile de la primera edición (México, 1684) by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. http://www.cervantesvirtual. com/obra-visor/parayso-sic-occidental-plantado-y-cultivado-por-la-liberalbenefica-mano-de-los-muy-catholicos-y-p-0/html/df6aee15-5433-49d2-b80311325ae65235_444.html#I_3. Reyes, Alfonso. 1948. “Virreinato de filigrana (XVII–XVIII).” In Letras de la Nueva España, 87–118. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ribbans, Geoffrey W. 1986. “The Cult of Fame in Cervantes and Unamuno.” The Fordham Cervantes Lecture. New York. (1970). Rodríguez Cepeda, Enrique. 1998. “Las impresiones antiguas de las Obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (un fenómeno olvidado).” In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las vicisitudes de la crítica. Edited by José Pascual Buxó, 13–75. Mexico: UNAM.

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Rodríguez Garrido, Antonio. 2004. La Carta Atenagórica de sor Juana: textos inéditos de una polémica. México: UNAM-Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas. Ross, Kathleen. 1994. “Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora y la cultura del Barroco hispanoamericano.” In Relecturas del Barroco de Indias. Edited by Mabel Moraña, 223–39. Hanover, N. H.: Ediciones del Norte. Ross, Kathleen. 2002. “Rethinking Colonial Poetry in an Atlantic Studies Context.” Arachne @ Rutgers: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. 2(1). https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/projects/arachne/vol1_2ross. html. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1982a. “Introducción biográfica y crítica.” In Inundación castálida, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 9–71. Madrid: Castalia. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1992. Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y otros poetas barrocos de la colonia. Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1995a. “Sor Juana: Bibliografía. Las ediciones de Fama y obras póstumas de Lisboa y Barcelona, 1701.” In Bibliografía y otras cuestiúnculas sorjuaninas, 48–75. Salta, Argentina: Editorial Biblioteca de Textos Universitarios. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1995b. “Sor Juana: Mujer barroca, intelectual y criolla.” In Memoria del Coloquio Internacional: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el pensamiento novohispano, 1995, 375–96. México: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura; UAEM. Scott, Joan W. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, Nina M. 2007. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Three Hundred Years of Controversy and Counting.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 193–200. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1680. Theatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe […]. México: Por la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón. Simón Díaz, José. 1978. “Algunas peculiaridades del libro barroco mejicano.” In XVII Congreso del Instituto Internacional de literatura iberoamericana, 71–87. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación. Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson. 2011. “Introduction.” In Renaissance Paratexts, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soriano Vallès, Alejandro. 2008. La hora más bella de Sor Juana. México: Conaculta/ Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes. Soriano Vallès, Alejandro. 2011. “Sor Juana y sus libros: un polémico hallazgo documental.” Relatos e historias en México (40): 58–63. Tenorio, Martha Lilia. 1999. Los villancicos de Sor Juana. México: El Colegio de México.

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Thomas, George Antony. 2016. The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Trabulse, Elías. 1998. “El silencio final de Sor Juana.” In Sor Juana & Vieira, trescientos años después. Edited by K. Josu Bijuesca and Pablo A. J. Brescia, 143–56. Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara. Trabulse, Elías. 1999. La muerte de Sor Juana. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex. Vega, Lope de. 1779. Fama póstuma a la vida y muerte del doctor Fray Lope Félix de Vega Carpio y elogios panegyricos a la inmortalidad de su nombre, escritos por los más esclarecidos ingenios, solicitados por el doctor Juan Pérez de Montalván. Colección de las obras sueltas, assi en prosa como en verso. Madrid: En la Impr. de don Antonio de Sancha. Vetancurt, Fray Agustín de. 1961. Teatro mexicano descripción breve de los sucesos exemplares de la Nueva España en el Nuevo Mundo occidental de las Indias. Vol. 4. Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas. (1697). Wall, Wendy. 1993. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wanko, Cheryl. 2011. “Celebrity Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview.” Literature Compass 8(6): 351–62. DOI 10.1111/j.17414113.2011.00806.

1. The Fama A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana Abstract: This chapter describes the Fama’s contents, structure and organization. It also traces the designs of the volume’s editor; specif ically, his actions in transforming manuscript into print in order to influence potentially powerful readers in his endeavor to recast Sor Juana’s lifetime celebrity into posthumous renown. In conjunction, the intricate frontispiece and lengthy prologue set up editor Juan Ignacio María de Castorena’s framing of the Fama for his contemporaries, highlighting its Baroque intricacies that both underscore and undermine preserving Sor Juana for posterity. The chapter also explores a private dialogue between Sor Juana and the editor of her Fama that, once published, renders public their ties to one another and her role as author, a recognizable albeit unlikely f igure for a seventeenth-century woman. Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Juan Ignacio María de Castorena; Fama y obras póstumas; fame; Hispanic Baroque; frontispiece

In romance #51, “En reconocimiento a las inimitables Plumas de Europa” [To the matchless pens of Europe], her poem left unfinished yet published in the Fama, Sor Juana asks “¿Tanto pudo la distancia / añadir a mi retrato?” (OC 1.158:78) [Has distance really the power / to magnify my likeness? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 103)].1 Although the query regarding her ill-wrought renown was most likely intended for the panegyrists of the Segundo volumen (SV), the writer’s newly exaggerated “distance” in death nuances the meaning of the verses published within the Fama. As a posthumous volume, the Fama 1 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama; Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957) herein OC.

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_ch01

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imbues the literary (and visual) retrato or likeness that Sor Juana alludes to in romance #51 with a significance it could not have had while she was alive. By presenting its reader with a portrait of Sor Juana as they open its pages, the 1700 edition of the Fama offers its first indications of how and why the posthumous volume hopes to preserve the memory of the Mexican nun (see fig. 1).2 Befitting its role as a frontispiece, the emblematic engraving introduces the volume’s themes and concerns and constitutes the reader’s first encounter with its considerable task of figuratively recreating and recasting Sor Juana posthumously. By portraying a complex and multifaceted image of Sor Juana, the frontispiece echoes the greatest dilemma facing the writer’s elegists: how to grant posthumous fame to a woman who often and openly defies convention? Indeed, it seems most relevant that Sor Juana’s posthumous tribute begins with her likeness as the Fama imagines and images the nature of the Mexican nun-writer in the process of eulogizing her. While the nun-writer’s panegyrists assign her different guises, they also debate not only the appearance but ultimately the nature and order of things and her place in them. The shuffling and shuttling of her posthumous image is yet another way in which she is commodified in a male exchange in the material culture of printed books. Ultimately, if Sor Juana is not made legible and “vendible” to her readers, the volume would be a fiasco that most likely would not have been printed at all. Interpreting the engraving through the lens of the social, media and economic framework suggested by celebrity studies enables a thorough analysis of the paratextual image that engages with the rest of the book, the editor and his designs as well as the fashioning of Sor Juana for the literary marketplace. As Wendy Wall explains, “the physical features of the text—its prefatory apparatus, its title headings, its mode of distribution—[…] construct protocols of reading and provide the grounds on which the text is authorized” (5). This chapter elaborates on the engraving as an intricate introduction to the volume given that it opens up its complexities as might a gateway or portal. In fact, the frontispiece is so complete in its presentation of the contents of the volume that it practically usurps the role of the prologue. Perhaps as a result, Juan Ignacio de Castorena’s “Prólogo al que leyere” [Prologue to the Reader] does not follow the portrait, but rather begins 2 Given the fact that the Fama of 1700 is dedicated to Queen Mariana, wife of Charles II and fervent partisan of the Austrian claimant to the Spanish throne (Lynch 1981, 269 n. 273), both the dedication and the engraved frontispiece are omitted in later editions following the Hapsburg’s defeat in the question of succession.

THE FAMA

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over one hundred pages later.3 In analyzing the prologue, I explore the Fama’s unusual structure and polyphony and the editor’s role in ordering the (apparent) disorder of the volume. While there is a notable attempt on the part of editor Castorena to underscore the nun’s sacred writing, his machinations further her status as a published author. His admission in the prologue that it is her own works that “define her” challenges his readers to question whether this definition alludes to her pious writings or her public authorship, both of which potentially enable her posthumous glory, the ultimate ambition of the volume. This provocation of Castorena’s readers can be read as wielding Sor Juana as an object of exchange among her primarily male readers. Moreover, such machinations underline the relevance of the conditions and forces that spurred Sor Juana’s celebrity outlined in the introduction of this book. The social conditions surrounding her fame are borne out primarily in her textual ties with her editor; examining the tome and the shift from manuscript to print form engages the media component; and, finally, wielding the poet’s posthumous image as a means of exchange to influence potentially powerful readers plays out as a means of symbolic economic transaction. In the final section of the chapter, once the contents of the Fama and the events and deliberations surrounding its publication are apparent, I contemplate a ten-verse poem of Sor Juana’s, the décima #112, dedicated to none other than editor and posthumous patron, Castorena. Originally an epistolary exchange, the décima sets the stage of their posthumously formulated dialogue and serves as an example of how Castorena’s editorial project propelled Sor Juana’s private manuscript writing into the public realm.

The Engraved Portrait: Gateway to the Volume The Fama’s frontispiece serves as an example of how Sor Juana’s panegyrists met the challenge of reconciling her image as marvelous exception to her sex with that of the virtuous exemplar—the only sanctioned incarnation of fame available to women in her century. Whomever designed the engraved portrait struggles—as do all of the Fama’s contributors—to contend with Sor Juana’s already cultivated fame as Tenth Muse and rara avis in terris. In his approbation to the Inundación castálida (IC), written eleven years before 3 The Prologue begins on page [119]. For a listing of the sections of the Fama and the order of the texts within it, see appendices A and B.

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the publication of the posthumous volume, Spanish religious censor Fray Luis Tineo de Morales establishes the later commonplace analogy between the poet and the never-before-seen rare bird: yo no sé [… si] pueda haber alabanza más bien empleada, ni debida más justicia, que a un sujeto, cuya singularidad le saca tan fuera de lo común, que viene a ser una Ave rara, que sólo en un Mundo nuevo, pudiera hallarse, porque en el antiguo, por más que lo predica el proverbio tan repetido, rara avis in terris, hasta ahora dudo mucho, que se haya visto, y más con las circunstancias, que aquí concurren. [I am not aware of more apt praise for a subject whose singularity is such that she is truly a rare bird who could only come from the New World, for, despite the fact that in the Old World rara avis in terris is a common proverb, I very much doubt that that one has ever been seen, and certainly not with the characteristics observed in this case] ([6]).

The Fama’s panegyrists clearly had to select a means, from among the limited array of female models available to them, by which to represent this strange bird. Much like laudatory works in verse or prose that proceed it, this pictorial fashioning of Sor Juana lavishes praise on her by likening her to seemingly unparalleled predecessors. If at first glance her portrait impresses by its sheer number of emblems and flourishes, a closer look reveals, from within its apparent excesses, a perfectly symmetrical engraving that depicts Sor Juana through comparisons with literary and religious foremothers and allusions to well-known Renaissance emblems and icons. Like the literary portraits and elegies of the volume, the engraving holds important clues as to how Sor Juana’s contradictory person was aligned with traditional representations of fame and the famous. The portrait of the frontispiece, then, is an example of how the Fama conceives of Sor Juana, at once eulogizing her as one might a more traditionally famous individual, and making allowances for her differences. The engraving aims to represent the nun-writer as an idealized exception that confirms the rule as opposed to a woman remarkable solely for being “monstrous.” As Ryan Prendergast observes, “Hers is a category unto itself, but there exists no such identifiable category. As a result, she can only be inserted into a more conventional representational field that metaphorically elevates her status while still visually controlling and enclosing her” (42). As the reader opens the Fama, its portrait of Sor Juana instantly immerses us in the text’s florid, complex, suggestive and, on occasion, confounding material. Despite its overriding attempt to represent Sor Juana in a stylized,

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traditional, manner, the engraving’s message is not unequivocal. Its use of iconographic images and devices combine to reveal how Sor Juana was understood in her time to be both exceptional and exemplary. Obscure devices (also known as empresas or hieroglyphs), polyvalent symbols that were often accompanied by a motto and that could hold hidden meanings, and the conjunction of many different images within the area of the portrait, work ambiguously to cloud the line between the real and the symbolic. Not only does the use of emblems and empresas display the ingenio of the engraving’s creator and, ideally, stimulate that of the spectator, their double meanings also work effectively to introduce a nun and a volume who themselves were multi-faceted. With his customary hyperbolic style, Castorena suggests that the emblems surpass other attempts to express Sor Juana’s singularity, which for him rests in her mind’s agility: “El dibujo de su lámina te expresa más doctamente la fisonomía del alma, que es la viveza del pensamiento, en lo alusivo de sus emblemas” [The allusive emblems of the engraving learnedly express the physiognomy of the soul, which is the vividness of thought] ([126]). Instead of portraying a static Sor Juana, the Fama’s frontispiece provides clues as to how her contemporaries worked within the parameters of acceptable female models of fame while at the same time revealing the contradictions inherent in the Mexican nun and in the very idea of a posthumous tribute dedicated to her. While from a contemporary perspective these machinations seem excessive, in their time they worked precisely to transform what was illegible and incomprehensible—the rara avis—into an idea of her that was not only legible, but worthy of praise and the reward of posthumous glory. By purposely clouding the line between the real and the ideal, the portrait also blurs the matter of exactly which of Sor Juana’s qualities is responsible for her posthumous fame. The frontispiece clearly endeavors to illustrate all of Sor Juana’s characteristics and her many abilities within its design. For example, she appears as a poet laureate, as a religious exemplar, and as a cultural icon and ambassador between New and Old Worlds. In fact, not only is every one of Sor Juana’s attributes enumerated in the portrait, they are played off each other, in essence casting doubt on which among her many characteristics merited, or would allow for, a posthumous tribute in her honor. From the very outset, the reader of the Fama, like its contributing panegyrists, must debate whether Sor Juana’s remarkable erudition or ingenio, her knowledge of science, her inspired poetry, or her spiritual rebirth in death are responsible for her posthumous fame. As the first aggregation of images both of and about the writer, Sor Juana’s portrait, perhaps unintentionally, suggests the diff iculties involved in

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portraying her during her life and, particularly, beyond it. Sor Juana, after all, was the never-before-seen rare bird, an erudite woman of the wondrous New World, capable of reason and gifted in verse and virtue. But can this exceptional and celebrated woman also be conceived of as a female exemplar in order to justify her tribute? The rhetorical question, written on the cornices of the columns of empire which frame Sor Juana’s portrait, suggests a means of resolving the dilemma. The question, which reads “Mulierem fortem, quis inveniet? / Procul et de ultimis finibus” [Who will discover the strong woman / From the farthest extremes of the earth?], is transplanted from the book of Proverbs (31, 10). Not just an auxiliary part of the engraving, the phrase may well be (in conjunction with the volcanoes, to which I will refer shortly) the frontispiece’s thema, or overriding theme. The Biblical phrase sets up the Mexican writer as a paragon of virtue. It does so by encouraging us to conjoin in our minds Sor Juana and the woman whom Salomon seeks: the illusive mujer fuerte understood to be virtuous in all regards. 4 By implying that Sor Juana is comparable to the quintessential female exemplar, the epigraph aims to dictate the reading of Sor Juana in both the volume and its frontispiece. Many of the engraving’s images, nevertheless, reveal the writer’s unique attributes that led to her being identified as an erstwhile celebrity: the rara avis and Tenth Muse of her time. For example, Sor Juana’s image occupies the very center of the engraving and is surrounded by a series of sixteenth and seventeenth century iconographic commonplaces used to express erudition, excellence, fame, poetry, and virtue, of which only the last was considered within the reach of women. Perhaps most important to aligning the Mexican nun with the elusive bird of myth was her New World birth. Revealingly, the Biblical epigraph is able to accommodate this characteristic into its exemplary reading of the Mexican poet. Salomon’s illusive woman was believed to be from the confines of the earth and it is not inconceivable to imagine seventeenthcentury New Spain as denoting that distant most land. It is also worth noting that the two hemistiches of the Biblical phrase are divided among the two 4 The complete phrase as it appears in the Vulgate Bible reads: “ALEPH Mulierem fortem, quis inveniet / procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius.” The ensuing lines each begin with a letter from the Hebrew alphabet and describe the qualities of the mujer fuerte. Although the mulier fortis is commonly referred to in English as the good wife, the Latin term is mulier (woman), which distinguishes it from uxor, the word for wife. Also lost in this translation is the sense of fortitude. Castorena underlines the importance of strength when he writes in his prologue that the mujer fuerte is “fuerte en virtud, religión, y sabiduría” [exemplary in virtue, religion and wisdom] ([126]). I base my interpretation of the woman from Proverbs on that put forth by the Fama’s editor. To avoid any confusion, I employ only the Spanish translation (mujer fuerte).

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cornices of the pillars that frame the engraving. Each column is inscribed with explanatory titles that refer to the allegorical figures of Europe and America, respectively, that stand on them. This design allows for a felicitous coincidence as the second hemistich, that is, the reference to the confines of the earth, joins directly with the word “America” as it appears at the top of the pillar. Although in this instance the disparate readings of the writer fuse seamlessly together, on other occasions the nun’s complex persona and the multiple goals of the volume seem to undermine the Fama’s attempt to have Sor Juana remembered as an exemplary and self-sacrificing woman. Before examining these, however, I will consider another example of how the frontispiece attempts to transform the Mexican nun from exception into rule. One of the primary visual means of postulating Sor Juana as an exemplar is to draw a parallel with one of her most important predecessors, Spain’s most celebrated female saint, Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). This comparison takes place within the small circular portrait of Sor Juana in the very center of the engraving. Revealingly, the Mexican nun appears in the portrait holding a quill in her right hand, which at once defines her as a writer and establishes a significant tie to the Spanish holy woman, who herself was often represented in a like manner. The image of the Saint engaged in the act of writing, as, for example, in her portrait by Diego Velázquez entitled “Saint Teresa, writer,” was not unusual in her iconography.5 Indeed the portrayal of Teresa as a writer, despite infringing on a decidedly male domain, in no way undermined her sainthood. Rather, her writing, like her life, was interpreted as a singular expression of God’s grace, that is, as evidence of how she was singled out by Him (Ahlgren 1996, 159). In the Velázquez painting, the Spanish saint looks decidedly more enraptured than does Sor Juana in her portrait. With her quill poised in her right hand, her left resting on an open book, and her eyes gazing expectantly upwards towards the heavens, Teresa looks very much as if she were awaiting direction from above. Similarly, in her portrait of the Fama, Sor Juana holds an uplifted quill and an open book. Her expression, however, is flat and unemotional, appearing neither enraptured (there is no sign of the holy spirit) nor particularly interesting.6 5 “Saint Teresa, writer” (Colección Marquesa de Casa Riera, Madrid) is reproduced in Untold Sisters (Arenal and Schlau 1989, 18). The same volume also includes a reproduction of a sculpture of the Saint as writer by the Spanish sculptor, Gregorio Fernández (127). The iconography of Saint Catherine of Alexandria also usually shows her with a book in her hands to denote her learning. Sor Juana’s portrait may include echoes of this saint as well, in that Catherine shares other similarities with her, including an examination before her learned elders at a young age. 6 Although engraved considerably later (in 1757), the portrait of the Mexican prioress and author of theological tracts, María de Anna Águeda de San Ignacio, is strikingly similar to that

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If the demure Mexican nun in the engraving of 1700 bears some resemblance to the Spanish saint, she establishes a striking contrast with her most famous portrait, by Juan de Miranda, which was probably completed sometime after her death but no later than 1714.7 In Miranda’s rendition of her, Sor Juana appears standing before her writing table and looking outward, perhaps at the artist, but also at us and at the world outside her cloistered cell. From within her book-lined walls she exudes a remarkable dynamism and self-assurance. Miranda portrays Sor Juana as both a writer and a learned woman who receives her inspiration from the numerous volumes that line the wall behind her. While her shoulders and head are turned to look out at the viewer, the nun’s hands remain engaged in the act of writing. A close look reveals the very sonnet that she is in the midst of composing (#152 “Verde embeleso…”; or “Green allurement…” OC 1.280–281). One cannot avoid the distinct impression, seconded by Sor Juana’s intense gaze, that we, along with the artist, have interrupted her creative process.8 I will return to this portrait and sonnet #152 in chapter 4 when discussing Sor Juana’s beliefs regarding the deceptive qualities of visual and poetic imagery. For our purposes here, however, there is no doubt that in contrast to the Miranda painting, the engraved portrait of the Fama’s frontispiece portrays a writing woman stripped of the confidence and individuality, or perhaps, as it was understood at the time, the audacity, she shows in the Miranda painting. Yet another feature of the Fama’s portrait—surely patently evident to Sor Juana’s contemporaries—strengthens the implicit parallel drawn between the Mexican nun and the Spanish saint. Whereas in the Miranda of Sor Juana in the Fama (Imprentas 1995, 117). 7 1714 marks the year of Miranda’s death. Octavio Paz speculates that the portrait might date from the 1680s, but it is unlikely given that the portrait includes the date of Sor Juana’s death in 1695 (1982, 309). There is also some speculation regarding the possibility of the Fama’s portrait stemming from another portrait (or a self-portrait) of Sor Juana painted in her lifetime and described by Diego Calleja in his “Aprobación,” a preliminary approbatory text to the Fama. The flat and highly formulaic rendition of the nun-writer makes this a doubtful hypothesis, especially when compared to the more dynamic Miranda portrait. Housed in Mexico’s Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Miranda portrait can be viewed online at: http://museopalaciodebellasartes. gob.mx/micrositios/op/nucleo-08.php. 8 In another of Sor Juana’s well-known portraits, that by Miguel Cabrera dating from 1750, Sor Juana also looks out def iantly at the viewer. In this portrait, based on that of Miranda, Sor Juana sits at her table not as a writer but as a learned woman who receives her inspiration from the open book before her and from the multiple volumes, which here too, appear behind her. While in the earlier portrait Sor Juana engages in the act of writing, Cabrera’s work shows her turning the page of the book on her table. A reproduction is available online at: http:// museopalaciodebellasartes.gob.mx/micrositios/op/nucleo-08.php.

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portrait Sor Juana wears the rather elaborate habit of the Hieronymites and a large, eye-catching escudo (a small painting that serves as a “shield”) characteristic of the Mexican unreformed orders (Perry 1997), the engraving of 1700 portrays Sor Juana in a primarily black habit much like that worn by the nuns of St. Teresa’s order (De la Maza 1980, 138). The Sor Juana of 1700, furthermore, lacks the escudo portraying the Annunciation that appears in the very center of Miranda’s painting. In view of the likely association with Saint Teresa, the engraved portrait may well speak to the kind of writing in which Sor Juana engaged, in essence distinguishing between the writing of profane versus religious works. It seems to be implied that Sor Juana’s worldly works are to be aligned with her more religious writings in order to parallel more closely the work of the Spanish mystic. Mysticism, after all, was a far more acceptable form of female expression in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than Sor Juana’s philosophical or intellectual inquiries. The portrayal of Sor Juana in the frontispiece, therefore, echoes the Fama’s repeated praise of her devotional works—the most extensive of her writings included in the volume. Read in this way, the portrait within the frontispiece bolsters the Mexican nun’s association with the mujer fuerte, aiding in the transformation of Sor Juana’s difference into the rule. The correlation with the founder of the order of the Discalced Carmelites may well imply that if the Mexican nun’s writing echoes that of her Spanish foremother, then arguably she deserves posthumous recognition for publicizing not her status as an author, but rather her commitment to serving God. Much as the engraving borrows from the Bible and the tradition of the saints to construct a likeness for Sor Juana in the center of frontispiece, it also appropriates much from the classical tradition’s imagistic repertoire. After all, it is decidedly more concerned with displaying erudition and ingenio than with mimesis. Despite the fact that the engraving appears initially to be inundated with elements haphazardly distributed throughout, it is in fact organized in groupings of pairs, with almost every element appearing with its complementary opposite. The choice reflects not only the Baroque’s fondness for binary opposites, but also editor Castorena’s particular penchant for them. The pictorial elements that surround the image of Sor Juana describe her characteristics, represent her world, or stand in for the Fama and its objectives. For the most part, the emblems informed by Greek and Roman myths denote her qualities and environment. For example, framing Sor Juana’s likeness is a wreath that suggests that she ranks among the poets of Antiquity whose circular crowns signal their preservation in eternity. A closer look confirms the explanatory words of Castorena’s prologue, in which he describes the wreath as being formed of two distinct branches, those

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of the palm and olive trees. The Mexican editor chooses to call attention to the wreath as he believes it to symbolize Sor Juana’s aptitude in no less than all of the Arts and branches of knowledge (“su aplicación a todas Artes y Ciencias” [her assiduity in all the Arts and Sciences]) ([127]). This same sentiment is reaffirmed in the lower quadrant of the engraving, where a variety of elements, including musical and scientific instruments, a globe of the world, a compass, and caduceus, or winged staff encircled by serpents, together symbolize the many facets of Sor Juana’s intellectual capacities. The palm and olive branches, furthermore, evoke two classical figures that play significant roles in elegizing and defining Sor Juana, Apollo and Minerva. In her role as the extraordinary Tenth Muse, Sor Juana is likened to the companion of the nine Muses who, according to legend, was born under a palm tree. As we will see, the Mexican writer is also equated with Minerva, Athena’s Roman counterpart. Athena’s association to the olive tree is relevant to the Fama in that it, like the symbol of the phoenix—yet another of Sor Juana’s epithets—symbolizes renewed life. According to the legend, while competing for the possession of Athens, Athena planted an olive tree in the Acropolis, which, following the razing of the city was found to have a fresh shoot growing out of its decayed trunk. Noteworthy among the miscellany of elements that appear below Sor Juana in the engraving are an open book and the emblem of the terrestrial globe, both of which work in conjunction with the wreath to reaff irm the objectives of the Fama. The orb confirms the notion that Sor Juana’s celebrity should reach all parts of the world. For its part, the open book, in addition to signaling Sor Juana’s well-known aptitude for learning, mirrors the allegorical Book of Fame that records the names of heroes throughout history. Indeed, the open book in the lower quadrant of the portrait may well be a representation of the Fama itself as it strives to record Sor Juana’s name for posterity. By also appearing in one of the nun’s hands, however, the open book alludes to Sor Juana’s role as a writer, as explained earlier. In fact, it may well suggest how her act of writing and her learning may justify, if only in part, her posthumous fame. The Fama also appears in another capacity within the engraving. Continuing the play on corresponding pairs, the creator of the portrait arranged for two cherubs to occupy its uppermost section. Resting on the cornices of the pillars that frame the frontispiece, the cherubs hold up a wreath of perennial laurel and the trumpet of fame respectively, thereby announcing to the reader the volume’s primary objective of publicizing and preserving Sor Juana’s fame. In his Prologue, Castorena suggests that these cherubs are hieroglyphs meant to represent the contributors from Madrid and Mexico

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whom he calls “alados genios” [winged angels or geniuses] since “lo que uno publica, otro corona” [what one publicizes, the other crowns] ([126]). Like allegorical Fame, the cherubs, and by extension the nun-writer’s panegyrists, spread her renown throughout the world and ensure that her worthy name continues to ring out on earth. I believe the cherubs are used as a means to distinguish the nun from the allegorical figure of Fame. In Sor Juana’s portrait in the frontispiece to the SV, for example, it is not a cherub but the more traditional female figure who wields the trumpet. In the Fama it is imperative that the Mexican writer be recognized as worthy of fame, but not confused with Fame herself. Moreover, the distinction between the cherubs who publicize on the one hand, and “crown,” on the other, is reminiscent of the difference between public celebrity and posthumous fame I laid out in the introductory chapter. As Wendy Wall has noted, frontispieces participated in both the commemoration and monumentalizing of the author (274). The intricacies of the Fama’s busy frontispiece, some of which I have already examined, hinder the reader from precipitately drawing conclusions as to which among Sor Juana’s many talents or virtues was responsible for her meriting the volume and its weighty goal of achieving immortality through posthumous renown. In addition to Sor Juana’s portrait, its Latin epigraph, and the emblematic images that appear alongside it, two elements of the frontispiece are specifically American and hence suggest another layer in the Fama’s complex web: a burgeoning Mexican “conciencia criolla” [creole consciousness], to use Mabel Moraña’s term, which reveals an incipient cultural patriotism (1998, 31). The difference between the two New World images of the frontispiece is notable. To the right of Sor Juana, standing on a column which at its top reads “America,” is the commonplace emblematic representation of the American continent, a nubile Indian figure generally represented, as is the case here, with a headdress of feathers and a bow and arrow.9 Directly across from the scantily dressed figure, on the pillar called “Europe,” stands Minerva, the equally familiar incarnation of the European continent and of Sor Juana.10 Clearly these well-known emblems are legible for the readers of the Fama however surprising Sor Juana’s case proves to be. 9 For more on the allegorical representation of the American continent, see Hernández Araico (1994). 10 The title of Sor Juana’s Carta atenagórica refers to her letter being worthy of Athena, the Roman goddess of wisdom’s Greek counterpart (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 125). “Minerva indiana,” moreover, is another of the nun’s epithets. The fact that the goddess’s name derives from the ancient root for “mind” (Scott 1994, 208) makes the comparison a popular one among Sor Juana’s panegyrists.

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Just beneath Sor Juana’s circular portrait is another, more original, Mexican image. The two Mexican volcanoes, like the emblematic figures of a primarily European tradition, work to justify the Fama’s very existence by appealing to the Baroque imagination of its readers. Together with its saintly and cultural portrayals of the nun, then, the engraving offers up a uniquely Mexican portrait of her. Sor Juana’s New World identity, after all, was not remarkable simply because it allowed her to be the rara avis for her European admirers. In the Western Hemisphere, her place of origin permitted criollos to portray her as an icon of culture, that is, as a representative of all those who shared her American birthplace. As I will explore in chapter 3, Sor Juana’s identity was held up as evidence of the cultural and spiritual equivalence of New Spain and Old. The two mountains each bear its own Latin inscription; the one to the left is in flames and reads “Vnde Lix [sic] ardet” [where light glows], while the other, “inde Nix lucet” [where snow shines], is snow covered. In his prologue, Castorena explains that the epigraph was conceived “con todo el rigor de paranomasia lemática” [with all the rigor of a paronomasia on the subject] ([126]). Presumably for this reason then, he replaces the word lux with lix, a word he has invented for the occasion. Representative of the two Mexican volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, themselves not far from Sor Juana’s birthplace in San Miguel Nepantla, the emblems function within the engraving in a number of ways. Not only are the volcanoes an authentically Mexican phenomenon but owing to their size and presence they also invoke the popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of New World abundance and exoticism.11 In fact, by being born in the foothills of these impressive natural wonders, the exceptional writer is understood to be a natural result of a wondrous land. But the creator of the conceit of the volcanoes (most likely Castorena) also had a classical image in mind: the twin peaks that mark the place of origin of poets, Mount Parnassus. Innumerable are the references throughout the Fama to Sor Juana (insofar as she is the “Tenth Muse”) having abandoned the mount upon her death, 11 Antonio Alatorre has noted that perhaps more important than the presence of the volcanoes as a theme in the Fama is the variety of ideas and ingenious concepts that the subject inspired in the volume’s poets and panegyrists (“no ya la importancia que el tema de los Volcanes llega a tener en la Fama, sino la variedad de ideas y de ‘conceptos’ que hizo brotar en la mente de poetas y panegiristas”) (1980, 486). The topic is certainly not new to the Fama; in his romance that prefaces the IC, José Pérez de Montoro speaks of Sor Juana as the woman from the “bipartido monte” [bipartite mountain], (IC [3]). Sor Juana herself incorporates the volcanoes in her carol or villancico #282, in which she compares the purity of the eternally snow-capped mount to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (OC 2.109:78–80).

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leaving the other Muses alone and despairing. It seems quite natural, according to this line of thinking, that Mexico’s Tenth Muse should have her own New World Parnassus. In his prologue, Castorena declares his intent of conjoining the volcanoes and the classical mountain in the minds of his readers. He does so by deciphering for us the epigraph that stretches between the two volcanoes. Borrowing a phrase from Lucan, that Bénassy-Berling has traced to Pharsalia, L. V, v. 72 (1982, 2), the editor imbues the volcanoes with the notion of the twin peaks of the Parnassus reaching for the heights (“Gemino petit aethera colle”) ([126]). The vertical image of the volcanoes, moreover, conjures up the idea of (wo)man’s struggle to attain the heights, which in Sor Juana’s case was twofold. Indeed, the multiple interpretations incited by the volcanoes signal a potential ambiguity regarding the nature of the heights after which she strove during her lifetime: were they the pinnacle of scientific and artistic heights, or, God in the heavens? For Lisa Rabin, the epigraphs to the twin volcanoes are reminiscent of Petrarch’s “icy-fire,” the paradox of unrequited love (1995, 29). Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling, meantime, understands the dual nature of the volcanoes (flames and snow or fire and ice) to have the same origin and further explains their division into two parts: “The first part refers to the volcano Popocatépetl and to Juana, the Mexican Phoenix; the second to Ixtaccíhuatl [sic] and Juana, the illustrious nun” (1982, 2). According to this reading, the two volcanoes express more fully the dual nature of the nun and writer. The duality of the volcanoes can also symbolically represent not only two aspects of the same mountain (fire and ice) but also the idea of two worlds, which according to Cirlot represent “los dos aspectos rítmicos esenciales de la creación manifestada (luz y tinieblas, vida y muerte, inmortalidad y mortalidad)” [the two rhythmic aspects essential to creation (light and darkness, life and death, immortality and mortality]) (308). Such a duality only furthers the Fama’s ingenious play on a search carried out from two peaks, themselves possible echoes of Old World and New, not to mention terrestrial and celestial “worlds.” As the frontispiece’s culminating artifice, then, the volcanoes reaffirm the inherent debate of the volume regarding Sor Juana’s potentially multiple pathways to posthumous fame. The volcanoes, moreover, reaffirm the possibility of her being rewarded as Mexico’s phoenix, Tenth Muse and devout bride of Christ. Together with the pillars of empire and their respective allegorical figures, the volcanoes signal yet another of Sor Juana’s roles in the Fama, that of cultural intermediary between Old and New Worlds. In order to explain the volcanoes’ peculiar relevance to the nun-writer’s role in uniting Europe and America, I must return to the allegorical figures that represent the two

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continents. The engraved frontispiece undoubtedly draws a parallel between Sor Juana and the allegorical figure of Europe. Her keen intellect aligned the Mexican writer in the minds of her admirers with Minerva, the goddess of learning and the arts and the personification of European culture and knowledge. Renaissance emblem books such as Cesare Ripa’s Iconología explain that the allegory of Europe is traditionally represented by a woman wearing armor or regal robes at whose feet lie numerous emblems signaling her embodiment of Culture. Similar to Sor Juana’s portrait, in which Minerva wears robes and bears a helmet and shield, these traditional renderings often include elements such as books, a compass, an easel, measuring instruments and a globe (Ripa 1970, 332), that is, many of the same emblems found in the Fama’s frontispiece. But what of the figure of America who stands in sharp contrast to Europe? Does Sor Juana share characteristics with the Indian figure as well? Although the portrait does not intimate a direct link between the two, in the Fama’s poetry, America’s personification as female and the European conception of New World abundance do work to trace significant parallels between the poet and her continent. This union encourages the commodification of the writer as an American treasure, a topic I will return to in chapter 3. The frontispiece suggests not that Sor Juana is another Minerva (much less an Indian), but rather that her own image, poised between the two allegorical figures, belongs to both worlds. As the frontispiece’s frame (only the cherubs lie beyond them), these two allegorical figures and their pillars thus emblematically contain the writer’s world, while she symbolizes what links the two shores on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. As Ryan Prendergast notes, “[i]n this visual space [the frontispiece], while she may be enclosed, [by the two pillars], she is granted a place of status and privilege forged in between the two continents and cultures” (2007, 48). Significantly, it is her work, written in Mexico and published in Spain, and thus necessarily transatlantic, which bridges the two continents, endeavoring to bring the opposite sides of the world closer to each other, much as Castorena’s Fama hopes to place the colony on par with the motherland. Reaffirming this interpretation within the engraving are two significant coats of arms. While the figures of America and Europe stand on the columns of empire and frame the sides of the frontispiece, the two heraldic blazons, similarly opposed, are symmetrically placed above and below Sor Juana’s portrait. The two nobles elliptically represented are, not coincidentally, the Queen of Spain, Mariana of Neuburg (second wife of Charles II and the sister of the Emperor Leopold) and a Mexican noblewoman, Juana de Aragón y Cortés, Duchess de Monteleón y Terra-Nova and Marquise del

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Valle de Oaxaca, who is a descendent of none other than Hernán Cortés. It is to these two noblewomen that Castorena dedicates the posthumous volume, each in a separate dedicatoria (dedication). Importantly, since 1700 marks the end of the Hapsburg dynasty’s rule in Spain, the dedications, like the engraved frontispiece, appear exclusively in the Fama’s first edition. Castorena’s arrival in Spain in 1697 coincided with the last years of the life of Charles II, precisely the period in which the problem of succession to the crown gripped the political life of the country. The editor’s selection of the reigning Queen as the patron of his volume seems to indicate that the Mexican favored the losing side in the succession problem.12 Castorena’s reason for choosing the Mexican Marquise is, at least initially, less evident. It would seem that in his intent to intellectually join Spain and her colony within the pages of his volume, the editor purposely chose an American counterpart to Queen Mariana. Although there were Spanish noblewomen close to Sor Juana who were still alive in 1700, (as was, for example, her friend and patron the Marquise de la Laguna), the editor clearly wanted a Mexican figure. Surprisingly, Castorena ultimately does not liken Sor Juana to the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca but rather to the noblewoman’s famous forefather. In fact, his choice of a descendent of Cortés enables the compiler to begin his second dedication by describing the Conquistador’s entry into the Aztec capital, and in turn, to call attention once again to the volcanoes, this time with reference to Spain’s expanding Empire of the sixteenth century. The dedicatoria begins as follows: El ínclito don Fernando Cortés, gloriosísimo progenitor de V. Exc., heroico conquistador del Nuevo Mundo en la América Septentrional […]; en el progreso de sus victorias, a quince millas de la Imperial México, subió a un monte, que bañados cuajados hielos, llaman los naturales Volcán de nieve, y […] dijo: ‘Camaradas, Nueva Venecia hemos descubierto.’ Este, pues, elevado risco se une por sus orillas con otro collado que, respirando llamas, es, por su naturaleza, Volcán de Fuego; [The illustrious don Fernando Cortés, glorious progenitor of Your Excellency, heroic conquistador of the New World in northern America […]; over the course of his victories, some fifteen miles from imperial Mexico, climbed a mountain bathed in ice that 12 The Fama went to press just months before the King’s death; the “Fee de Erratas” and “Certif icación de la Tasa” (both approbatory documents) date from February, while Charles II died in November 1700. In the three editions of the Fama published during Bourbon rule, a dedication to the Virgin Mary replaces that of Queen Mariana. For a thorough, philological comparison of the two editions published in 1701 (Lisbon and Barcelona), see Sabat-Rivers 1995a, 48–75.

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the natives call the Snow Volcano, and […] proclaimed: ‘Comrades, we have discovered a New Venice.’ This lofty cliff is joined at its sides with another which breathes fire and is, by its very nature, the Fire Volcano]. ([9])

In accordance with his own particular bent of Mexican creole consciousness, a topic I explore thoroughly in chapter 3, Castorena posits Cortés as a second, American, incarnation of Hercules. This attribution, a variation on the equating of Hercules and Charles V (“un Nuevo Hércules” (whose deeds made him a “new Hercules”) (Sebastián 1992, 142)), endows the columns of the Fama’s engraving with a special significance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the columns of the Plus ultra (meaning “beyond here,” that is, beyond the straits of Gibraltar) were known as the personal emblems of Charles V and as such both symbolized the discovery of America and embodied Spain’s new territories. As Antonio Alatorre explains, the volume’s prologue suggests that the conquistador responds to the Non plus ultra [not beyond here] of the classical hero’s columns placed on the promontories of Europe and Africa with his own Plus ultra, inscribed in the twin peaks of the Mexican volcanoes (1980, 433). For the editor of the Fama, it is Cortés and not the King who, with his discovery of New Spain, unearths the “beyond here,” bringing glory to the Spanish Empire and uniting the two continents. Careful not to leave the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca out of his craftily structured analogy, Castorena adds that since she is a peaceful descendent of Cortés and an admirer of poetry, she may choose to interpret the volcanoes as the twin peaks of the Parnassus. His resounding purpose in this dedication, however, is to praise the Marquise in such a way that her lineage allows him to ally Sor Juana with the conquistador. In his prologue, the editor reiterates the parallel between the writer and the soldier as he reminds us that the volcanoes represent both Cortés’s Plus ultra and the nun’s birthplace. Although perhaps a surprising comparison, Castorena ultimately likens Sor Juana to Cortés in her contribution to the advancement of the Spanish Empire, albeit in an altogether different manner. In positing her as a second Minerva, the editor explains that Sor Juana extended both shores of New and Old Worlds—here represented by the allegorical figures, the columns of empire, and the blazons—in effect bringing them closer together not by conquest but by means of her genius: “difundió en márgenes los simulacros de Europa y América” [she extended the limits of the simulacra of Europe and America] ([126]). Superimposed on the image of the terrestrial globe, the caduceus also sustains the frontispiece’s Mexicanist suggestion that Sor Juana is a figure of such high standing that she places her hemisphere on the same cultural continuum with Spain. As the representative symbol of Mercury, god of

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eloquence and intellectual activity, the caduceus is associated with science, medicine, fame, and ever-present virtue. In Cesare Ripa’s Iconología, a winged Mercury representing pure fame holds the caduceus in one hand while leading Pegasus, who for Leo Braudy is “the horse that leads great men to the skies,” with the other (1986, n. pag.). For the Greeks, the curative snake of the caduceus was linked to Asclepius, the God venerated as the founder of medicine. As Asclepius was thought to be able to revive the dead, the snake, who each year renewed its skin, was his most opportune symbol. Furthermore, according to Diego López, a seventeenth-century interpreter of the emblems of Alciato, the force of Mercury’s eloquence implies that the caduceus “propiamente significa vara de embaxador” [strictly signifies staff of the emissary or ambassador] (1973, 433). Indeed, such were Mercury’s abilities that he made peace between two warring snakes, a feat immortalized by the entangled serpents of the emblem. For their part, the wings of the staff, taken together with the globe, may well refer not only to the fact that Sor Juana is a universally celebrated figure, known and heralded throughout the world, but also that she belongs to both worlds. By means of her publications—her metaphorical wings—the nun-writer has not only traveled to, but has also achieved renown on both sides of the Atlantic. The conclusion garnered from the portrait is a perplexing one. As a frontispiece, the allegorical engraving succeeds in presenting the reader with the first instance in which one (or perhaps several?) of Sor Juana’s panegyrists pictorially debate her role in her posthumous volume. While the engraving manipulates Sor Juana’s fame by recasting her as a second Minerva from a New World Parnassus, it carefully stipulates that she must be preserved in posterity as a saintly nun. It falls to the reader to decide if the various roles attributed to the Mexican poet can coexist in the space of the posthumous tribute. That is, with the text still unread before us, we must consider whether the mujer fuerte, the rara avis, the Phoenix, the Tenth Muse, and the cultural ambassador can share an image, a volume, and a place in the minds of her contemporaries. Ryan Prendergast recognizes “that much of what is shown in terms of heraldry is relatively common in early modern frontispieces” and proposes “that placing Sor Juana in the midst of them requires us to think how, by framing her, these conventions are subject to diverse interpretations and, perhaps, to her reframing of them” (2007, 39). What are we to make of the woman-writer whose role and agency is undoubtedly diminished in the engraving? Perhaps both Sor Juana’s protected status within Mexico’s viceregal court and her celebrity, which propelled her during her lifetime and facilitated the publication and circulation of her works in Europe and America, became irrelevant upon her

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death. So much so, in fact, that her image was easily manipulated according to normative views of posthumous fame that best suited the society she left behind upon her death. Undoubtedly, rendering Sor Juana legible through the multiple machinations of the frontispiece reaffirms the notion that as a woman she was caught up in arguments of male exchange, many of which are reiterated throughout the rest of the posthumous tribute. Before examining how the Fama portrays through texts the nun and writer presented in the frontispiece, however, I must describe the volume’s structure. Key in this task will be probing the role of editor Castorena. As has become increasingly evident, Castorena’s role in the design, organization and intentions of the Fama is not to be underestimated. Piecing together his distinct contributions to the volume expressed in prose and verse allows us to recreate, at least in part, the driving motives behind writing a posthumous tribute in general terms and to explore some of the forces that would move a criollo Jesuit to preserve the idea of Sor Juana for posterity. In other words, Castorena’s own writing offers up clues regarding how to read and understand his volume. His work offers a good example of how “paratextual elements are in operation all the way through the reader’s experience of the text, not merely at the start, and they continuously inform the process of reading, offering multiple points of entry, interpretation and contestation” (Smith and Wilson 2011, 6). For example, the editor’s explanation of the engraving included in his “Prólogo,” some details of which I have already brought to light and will discuss further in chapter 3, suggests that the frontispiece was rendered according to his design. Antonio Alatorre has in fact convincingly argued that the editor imagined and subsequently commissioned the frontispiece (1980, 488). But what Castorena chooses not to say—his silence and omissions—also deserves our attention for they speak not so much to his personal relationship with Sor Juana, of which we know almost nothing, but rather of a textual dialogue that says quite a bit about both.

The Fama’s Prologue: A Guide to Unearthing the Volume’s Structure Following its engraving and lengthy paratext, the Fama encloses Sor Juana’s writing between Spanish and Mexican elegies. The Spanish tributes appear at the start the volume, while those from New Spain close the tome.13 By 13 See appendices A and B for a description of the sections of the volume and an overview of the contributors.

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framing Sor Juana’s poetry, prose, and devotional writings with echoing laudatory notes—eulogistic panegyrics that open and close the volume—the Fama presents itself as a whole, a carefully planned entity in its own right. Castorena describes the relationship between the two framing sections in no uncertain terms: “unos, y otros aumentan lo que la luz al espejo; pues en reverberación repercusiva, se difunde en inmenso resplandor cada rayo” [both amplify one another just as light on a mirror given that as they reverberate in tandem, each ray of light disseminates their splendor] ([123]). That notwithstanding, the work has traditionally been studied as a disconnected array. The tendency to disregard the volume’s elegiac material and to study Sor Juana’s works within the larger context of her life, that is, within the periods that she is believed to have authored the respective texts, and not within the confines of the volume, dates back to the nineteenth century. The fact that the eulogistic texts appear as part of the prefatory material is another reason that they have suffered neglect. Contemporary readers have a decidedly different attitude towards preliminary matter than did early modern readers. When the encomiums are considered, they are either disregarded for their saintly reading of the writer or, as Antonio Alatorre points out, for being redundant. This last opinion is held by sorjuanistas such as Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Francisco de la Maza, who generally glorify all things related to the Mexican nun (De la Maza 1980, 430). For Castorena, and, most likely, for his readers, the elegies of the Fama did not detract attention from Sor Juana’s works but rather enhanced them. By contemplating the Fama as a sourcebook for important works of Sor Juana’s and not as an integral text, critics have overlooked the editor’s conception and actual devising of the volume. Furthermore, the editor’s deliberations regarding the printing of the nun’s manuscript work upholds the notion of posthumous fame being accessible to a woman author whose works are published in the imperial public marketplace, as opposed to works that circulate in manuscript form in the colonies. One of the keys to unlocking the complexities of the Fama is Castorena’s engaging “Prólogo al que leyere” to which I have already briefly referred. Many of the textual decisions regarding the ordering of the volume and the selection of both the subject matter and the identities of the contributors are his alone. Thus, although the sheer number of voices heard in the Fama is dizzying (there are sixty-six identified collaborators and an indefinite number of anonymous ones), close attention proves that among the panegyrists, Castorena’s voice rings out most clearly. The Mexican editor strives to resolve the fragmentation of the miscellaneous volume by expounding his goals regarding its publication. His prefatory text not only turns on

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the Horacian principle of utile dulci, since Sor Juana’s praiseworthy works dedicated to sacred themes allow him to posit her as an exemplar, but also on ensuring that his readers revel in admiration for this extraordinary woman and his remarkable tome. An examination of the Prólogo will serve both to trace the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Fama and to describe the multi-layered text, much in the way the editor intended his prologue to inform his own readers. Castorena’s prologue also attests to his enthusiastic impulse to beatify Sor Juana. As was the case with the publication of Sor Juana’s more celebrated volumes—the IC and the SV, originally published in Madrid in 1689 and Seville in 1692 respectively—the Fama remains with us today thanks to the efforts of an admirer of the poet. A personal acquaintance and ally of Sor Juana, Castorena, who, the title page informs us, was “Capellán de Honor de su Magestad, Pronotario, Juez Apostólico por su Santidad, Theólogo, Examinador de la Nunciatura de España y Prebendado de la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana de México,”[Chaplain of Honor to his Majesty, Notary, Apostolic Judge for his Holiness, Theologian, Examiner of the Nunciator of Spain and Canon of the Saintly Metropolitan Church of Mexico] apparently singlehandedly orchestrated the publication of the Fama.14 From his prologue, we garner that he was among those personages of New Spain’s capital who attended Sor Juana’s tertulias held from within her cloistered cell in the Hieronymite convent of Santa Paula ([119]). Castorena’s boundless esteem for the poet and his sense of an excellent literary opportunity made him into a seventeenth-century literary agent. First, he collected both original manuscripts and tributes written upon her death in Mexico. Then, in 1697, he set out for Spain with the intention of promoting and publishing the third, and he hoped, most important, volume of Sor Juana’s works. After a year of study in Ávila, he traveled to Madrid where, in 1699, he sought out Spanish collaborators, mostly nobles and their attendants, for his encomiastic volume (Alatorre 1980, 431). Castorena’s “Prólogo” is the glue that binds Sor Juana’s writings and the panegyrics devoted to her together, bestowing on them the sense of pertaining to a text envisioned as a coherent and cohesive volume. The 14 A native of Zacatecas, Castorena received a doctorate from Ávila in Theology and another in Jurisprudence from the University of Mexico; as such, he served as Professor of Sacred Writing and was Director of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1703 and Visitador of the University’s Chapel. His career was catapulted by his bringing with him, upon his return from Spain, the appointment of the Metropolitan prebendary (Sosa 1884, 224). The culmination of his ecclesiastical career was his being named Bishop of Yucatán in 1730, a position he held for three years until his death at the age of sixty-five (Ochoa Campos 1968, 43).

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editor begins by informing us that the prologue itself “es la piedra de toque en que se estrena diligente su aplicación, examinando en los crisoles del argumento los quilates de un libro” [is the touchstone in which our efforts are diligently employed to weigh the carats of a book, these being expressed in the cruset, or amalgamation, of its arguments] ([119]). Castorena’s analogy comes from the world of alchemy. With customary baroque flourishes, he argues that it is the prologue that tests or marks the “carats” of a book, based on the alchemical “mixture,” that is, the worth and relevance of its arguments. Antonio Alatorre has correctly pointed out that by the time the reader reaches the “Prólogo,” over a hundred pages into the text, s/he has had ample time to experience first-hand the magnitude and number of the “quilates” [carats] in the form of Spanish preliminaries and elegies (1980, 434). Not only will Castorena explain in his prologue what he deems most worthy about the Fama, he will also examine the various works—here represented by the precious metals melted together in the crisoles [cruset or melting pots]—which, by appearing together, render Sor Juana’s third volume of her Works her finest.15 Taking the metaphors of precious metals and stones (“piedra de toque,” “crisoles,” “quilates”) one step further, Castorena terms the Fama a ruby, that is, the most wondrous of all precious stones. The reasoning behind such a superlative appellation is only in part self-congratulatory. Castorena undoubtedly hoped that the Fama would ultimately bring Sor Juana more glory in the way described by the religious censor, Muñoz Castilblanque: “Nueva circunstancia de gloria de la Poetisa, hallar quien perpetúe los fragmentos de sus obras en la memoria” [having found whom might perpetuate the fragments of her works forever provides yet another occasion to celebrate the Poet’s glory] ([110]). The Fama’s editor also wanted his volume to be the “ruby” insofar as it transcends the volumes that precede it. Unlike Sor Juana’s first two volumes published in Spain during her lifetime, the Fama contains, in addition to her poetry, her highly conventional devotional writings and the renewal of her vows written in 1693; this “ruby” thus proves more precious than gold given its superior style and the perfection of its themes (“Lo que el rubí en el terno sube de estimación al oro, y sus esmaltes, con que los aventaje el estilo, y los mejora la perfección de los asuntos”([120])). Another metaphor for abundance not uncommon to prologues further describes the distinctive nature of the Fama. The Prólogo describes Sor 15 The Diccionario de Autoridades defines crisol as “Vaso […] en que los plateros funden el oro y la plata, y los acendran y acrisolan” [a glass in which silversmiths melt, treat and purify gold and silver] (1963, 661).

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Juana’s sacred works as her irreproachable “fruits.”16 In so doing, Castorena once again distinguishes the writer’s third volume from the other two. His prologue, in fact, tells of an even more ambitious plan than the publication of the Fama: the thematic reordering of the three volumes of the nun-writer’s works. Although never brought to fruition, the plan consisted of the following: “En la primera, las poesías de asuntos humanos. En la Segunda, los Divinos. En la tercera, sus escritos a sagrados asuntos en prosa, para que por los moldes brotase esta primavera en lo intelectual, según el orden vegetativo, hojas, flores, y frutos” [In the first volume, poetry on matters human. In the second, those divine. In the third, her prose works on sacred matters, so that the presses may bloom this spring, in matters of the mind, according to the vegetative order, leaves, flowers and fruits] ([120] italics in the original). Despite the fact that he was never able to complete his formidable project, Castorena clearly believes that the Fama was the first step towards its accomplishment, given that much of Sor Juana’s writings published within it are indeed devoted to sacred matters [sagrados asuntos]. In addition to clearly establishing the editor’s high regard for the writer’s dedication to matters deemed sacred, his argument about the fruits also proves him to be a careful reader of Sor Juana’s first two volumes. Indeed, it shows him engaging in a dialogue with the other preliminary matter of her books of poetry. For, in his approbation (aprobación) to the IC, Fray Luis Tineo asks of Sor Juana: “¿Qué árbol no produce primero la flor que el fruto?” [What tree sprouts fruits before having flowered?] i.e., it is understood that secular verses must precede sacred ones ([9]). The religious censor excuses Sor Juana’s writing of secular poetry, as do many of her laudators of the Fama, by interpreting her intelligence to be a God-given gift, and hence, not necessarily a misdirected enterprise. A central idea in the “sacred” construction of Sor Juana in the volume, I will return to this idea at length in chapter 2. Assuming that his attentive reader has already marveled at the Spanish laudatory poetry which opens the volume, Castorena—having paid Sor Juana a number of hyperbolic tributes—decides to use his prologue to explain in detail the decisions he was forced to make concerning the organization of the miscellaneous elements of the Fama and his resulting 16 According to Curtius, the reference to fruits commonly formed part of the exordium, specifically as part of the topos of dedication. The most common formulation was the comparison of literary works to an offering brought to the gods. Among Christian authors, the idea behind the consecration of a work to God goes back to Jerome (1990, 86). For the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, flowers were metaphors for the virtues that grew in her well-known “garden” (huerto), that is, her soul she entreated to God.

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plan for a meticulously ordered volume. The occasionally confusing order of the text suggests that the compilation and publication of a manuscript with a large number of contributors, not all of whom were of the same social rank and poetic caliber, was no small task. Consequently, although Castorena planned to divide the text into three parts, the actual ordering of the Fama is somewhat different from what he had initially envisioned. According to his preliminary design, the three sections were as follows: a) the Carta de sor Filotea [Sister Filotea’s Letter] and the vida of Sor Juana by Diego Calleja, i.e., the texts he most admires; b) the poetic elegies written in New and Old Worlds; and c) the posthumous works of Sor Juana, beginning with her well-known Respuesta a Sor Filotea [Answer to Sister Filotea]. The Fama is divided into three sections, these being the two elegiac “Fama” sections which surround Sor Juana’s central “Obras póstumas” [Posthumous Works]. Unlike the two volumes of Sor Juana’s poetry published in her lifetime, just under half of the three hundred-odd pages of the Fama are taken up with her own poetry and prose. Opening the “Fama” section are the two dedications to the important—and famous—noble women already mentioned. After the dedication of the Fama and in accordance with the norms of publishing of the time, follows the required prefatory material from religious and political censors—themselves regulators of cultural integrity who must state that nihil obstat (nothing goes against Church teachings). It is here that the reader finds the two favorable approbations written by Jesuits: the well-known vita-approbation by Diego Calleja and another by Diego de Heredia. Another interesting parecer (opinion or approbation) by Jacinto Muñoz Castilblanque appears much later in the volume ([106–10]), rounding out the number of commendatory censors to three. The preliminary matter also includes three licenses, all written shortly before the publication of the volume (the latest date recorded is February 25, 1700). Clearly there is a conscious attempt on the part of Castorena to organize the material in groups of threes. We already have seen, for example, that he planned on dividing this, the third volume of Sor Juana’s works, into three sections. Immediately following the preliminary matter in prose are forty-seven Spanish laudatory poems, the last of which is Calleja’s elegy, written in 1695 when news of the poet’s death arrived in Spain (Alatorre 1995b, 360; Colombi 2018, 27). Led by a sonnet by the Duke de Sessa, a highly respected nobleman if not a renowned man of letters, the poets celebrate both Sor Juana’s ingenuity and precocity, utilizing biographical information they had recently acquired in the previously unknown Respuesta and Calleja’s

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Aprobación (written in 1695).17 Both of these texts, which Castorena most likely circulated upon his arrival in Madrid, included many aspects of the nun-writer’s life which inspired her panegyrists to construct poetic conceits surrounding both her life and her death (Alatorre 1980, 474). The Mexican poetry that occupies the last forty-five pages of the volume differs somewhat from its Spanish counterpart in that Sor Juana’s life story was familiar to her compatriots, some of whom had known the nun-writer personally. Among those documented as having known Sor Juana is her Latin teacher, Martín de Olivas, who contributes a sonnet to the Fama and to whom she dedicated an acrostic sonnet #200 in the SV (OC 1.306–7). Due to the fact that Castorena most probably began collecting the elegies written in New Spain shortly after Sor Juana’s death, the poetry that closes the volume is exclusively funerary in nature. Yet, despite one group’s inspiration having stemmed at least partially from her life and the other’s primarily from her death, most of the “Ingenios Matritenses and Mexicanos” [wits of Madrid and Mexico] present the writer as virtuous, constantly attempting to align her knowledge with her piety and thereby fashioning her into a more conventional female exemplar. Although considerably fewer (the Mexican poems number only nineteen, as compared to the forty-seven poems penned in Spain), the New World contributions include, perhaps as another example of their cultural merit, six poems written in Latin (De la Maza 1980, 134). Among the most interesting American poems are those of Lorenzo González de la Sancha and that of the “Caballero de Perú” (the Peruvian Gentleman otherwise known as the Count de la Granja) who inspired Sor Juana’s famous response—romance #50—also published here for the first time.18 17 This nobleman, don Félix Fernández de Córdoba Cardona y Aragón, may well be the grandson of the fifth Duke de Sessa, Lope de Vega’s well-known patron, given that they share identical noble titles (Duke de Sessa, Baena, y Soma, Marquis de Poza, Count de Cabra, Olivito, y Palamos, Viscount de Iznajar, Baron de Velpuch, Linola, y Calonge). Perhaps not coincidentally, Lope’s benefactor was also the author of the first poetic elegy in the Spanish playwright’s Fama póstuma (1636). 18 According to Castorena, González de la Sancha wrote a tribute to Sor Juana shortly after her death that was to be published in Mexico together with an “Funerary oration” (Oración fúnebre) by her friend and the much-respected intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Although the bibliographer Beristain records the Exequias mythológicas, llanto de las musas, coronación apolínea de la insigne poetisa americana Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [The Mythological Funerary Rites, the Weeping of the Muses, the Apollonian Coronation of the Incomparable American Poetess Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] as having been published in Mexico in 1697, there is no evidence of its ever having been printed (Alatorre 1980, 344 n. 36). For its part, Sigüenza’s “Oración”—which was probably not written for the funeral since the chronicler Robles makes no mention of it—suffered the same fate as the majority of the erudite collector’s manuscripts, lost centuries ago. For a discussion of the possible animosity that existed between Castorena

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Castorena’s prologue is carefully situated between Calleja’s elegy and the five poems authored by distinguished admirers of Sor Juana, aptly placed just prior to the writer’s own works. Included among these poems is a décima by an anonymous female contributor, (“Una gran señora” [a distinguished noblewoman]), who may or may not be the Countess de Paredes and Marquise de la Laguna, patron and friend of the writer, and the Lysi of her poetry. Among the clues Castorena offers in his Advertencia [remark] to the acrostic décima, is that the woman in question is a ladyin-waiting to the Queen ([143]). Alatorre, following Méndez Plancarte (OC 1.379), is convinced that the editor thus reveals the identity of the Countess de Paredes (1980, 457). Georgina Sabat-Rivers discovered, however, that both Alatorre and Méndez Plancarte mistakenly believe that the Countess attended the second wife of Carlos II, Mariana de Neuburg, when in fact she served the Queen Mother, Mariana de Austria, thereby suggesting the possibility that the “gran señora” may well be another noblewoman (1995a, 54n6). The Queen Mother, moreover, had died in 1696 (Elliott 1963, 373). It is difficult to ascertain whether the Marquise de la Laguna played a role in the publication of the volume. By 1700 she was a widow and her influence appears to have diminished considerably (Sabat-Rivers 1997, 13). It hardly seems to be a coincidence that the Mexican editor’s prologue and the two anonymous poems that appear in its midst (and clearly have his imprint) are the only Mexican works to be included in the “Spanish” section of the Fama.19 Despite claiming that the Mexicans “ceden al favor la primacía,” that is, they courteously concede to the Spanish panegyrists by allowing their applause to begin the volume, Castorena’s incorporation of his own poetry in the volume’s Iberian preliminary matter is, I believe, no mere oversight but rather his way of allying himself with the court of Madrid and the subject of his compilation ([123]). Like Sor Juana, her Mexican patron and González de la Sancha and a hypothesis regarding why the Fama offers considerably fewer Mexican elegies than Iberian ones, see Alatorre 1980, 443–47. With regard to virtually all the other Mexican wits (ingenios), De la Maza describes them, not entirely fairly, as “ilustres desconocidos o mediocres conocidos” [illustrious unknowns or well-known but mediocre poets] (1980, 135). Of the seventeen Novohispanic poets published in the Fama, Méndez Plancarte mentions Diego Martínez, Francisco Ayerra Santa María, Juan de Avilés, Antonio de Deza y Ulloa, Lorenzo González de la Sancha, Alonso Ramírez de Vargas and Felipe de Santoyo García in his important Poetas novohispanos (1945), while in her collection of Poesía novohispana (2010), Tenorio only includes Alonso Ramírez de Vargas and Felipe de Santoyo García. 19 Castorena includes as a postscript to his prologue two of his own poems: the first composed of four décimas and a sonnet entitled “Epitaphio” [Epitaph]. Alatorre convincingly argues that four other compositions published anonymously may well also be the editor’s (1980, 440–41 n. 29, 447, 497–99).

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has a voice that resounds in both orbs and which, he hopes, will acquire still more fame by sounding hers. Only after the anonymous noblewoman’s décima (the only poem to receive its own Advertencia or remark) does the Fama then yield to the “Obras pósthumas” section. Interestingly, the section begins not with Sor Juana’s own texts, but with the Carta de Sor Filotea de la Cruz by the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. This letter is published as an appendage to Sor Juana’s Crisis or Carta atenagórica (1690), itself published in the SV. The editor must have realized after writing his prologue that Sister Filotea’s missive belonged alongside the Respuesta and not with the vida, as he had originally planned (Alatorre 1980, 439n25). Sor Juana’s famous response to this letter—and, among other things, to her own fame—the Respuesta, follows, completing the epistolary exchange. In many ways a defining text, the Respuesta is a fitting opening to her works in a volume so concerned with fashioning and self-fashioning. Indeed, we cannot but agree with the hyperbolic Castorena, who in his prologue writes that whereas in the Fama section the writer’s admirers “la anima[n] [y …] la lloran” [both encourage and mourn her], Sor Juana’s works “la definen” [define her] ([123]). A revealing statement, it constitutes both a literary commonplace and calls attention to how some of her texts contemplate the very concepts of self-definition and representation that her panegyrists weave into their tributes. Her renowned verses from romance #51 appear in print for the first time in the Fama, in effect defining the volume: y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando, no como soy, sino como quisisteis imaginarlo. (OC 1.159:17–20) [Borne on your feather-pens’ plumes, my flight is no longer mine; it’s not as you like to imagine, not what your fancy depicts]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 103)

Sor Juana’s verses ring out particularly clearly alongside the elegies of the Fama since, according to Castorena, her texts often “define” her because they are written in a style dictated by her sex (“estilo propísimo de su sexo”), a manner of writing understood to be “non alte, sed apte” [not elevated, yet appropriate] ([124]). Although this reading of the nun-writer’s works may hold some truth with regard to her devotional writings, the same cannot be said

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for her salient renderings on the self and the concept of representation, which often contested her assigned role as a cloistered religious. Included in the Fama, subsequently, are works of poetry and prose in which she responds to the multiple images of her self and fame that prevailed in her day. In addition to the Respuesta, the volume includes: romance #50 (Sor Juana’s response to praise by the Conde de la Granja), her last and unfinished poem, romance #51, and décima #112, dedicated to Castorena, to which I will return shortly. Further, occupying the largest segment of the Obras section are two works in prose written for nuns, Sor Juana’s devotional exercises, Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días antes de la purísima encarnación del hijo de Dios Jesu Christo Señor Nuestro and Ofrecimientos para el santo rosario de quince misterios que se ha de rezar el día de los dolores de Nuestra Señora la Virgen María.20 These two religious works are, with the exception of a glosa [gloss], the only works included in the Fama that were published in Mexico prior to the printing of the posthumous tribute. Although the exact date of their publication remains unknown, the anonymously published edition had to have been printed prior to 1691; this being the year in which Sor Juana writes her Respuesta and includes within it the following statement: “…solamente unos Ejercicios de la Encarnación y unos Ofrecimientos de los Dolores, se imprimieron con gusto mío por la pública devoción, pero sin mi nombre” (OC 4.474) [ …only some little Exercises for the Annunciation and certain Offerings for the Sorrows were printed at my pleasure for the prayers of the public, but my name did not appear (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 101)]. Still another group of texts appears in the second section of the Fama. These include the highly formulaic renewal of her religious vows: Protesta […] que hizo de su fe […] al tiempo de abandonar los estudios humanos […]; Docta explicación del misterio y voto que hizo de defender la purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora […]; Petición […] que […] presenta al Tribunal Divino […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas […] [Protest made of her faith at the time in which she abandoned worldly studies; Erudite explanation of the mystery and vow that she took to defend the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady; Petition that she presented to the divine tribunal to plead for her sins to be forgiven], and sacred love poetry, or a lo divino (romances #56, #57, #58; sonnets #210, #208), her most conventional religious works. Finally, two miscellaneous texts complete the selection of Sor Juana’s works published in the Fama: a translation of a public oration in Latin given by Pope Urban 20 Previously unavailable in English, Grady C. Wray (2005) has published a prize-winning critical study and bilingual annotated edition of these devotional exercises: The Devotional Exercises / Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/50–1695).

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VIII [Traducción que hace Sor Juana de una oración pública en Latín por la santidad del Papa Urbano VIII], and a gloss of a quartet by Luis de Góngora, “Glossa de una quarteta de Don Luis de Góngora,” which won her a prize in Mexico City’s certamen, or literary competition, of 1682.21 While it is true that the editor did indeed publish all of Sor Juana’s works that he could get his hands on, he does not merely present the texts casually one after another, nor does he follow what might be deemed a chronological order. Rather, Castorena’s careful placement of her texts within his volume speak to his conscientious attempt to underscore her dedication to secular and pious texts, while all the while privileging his role as the guardian and promoter of these works. For one, Sor Juana’s secular works are perfectly spaced among the religious ones. I have already mentioned that her Respuesta is the first of her works to appear in the Fama, but it is followed not by her romances devoted to self and self-representation that would allow for continuity in the same defensive vein, but rather by the spiritual exercises and the formulaic renewal of her vows. Her pious verses devoted to divine love follow closely behind, yet are divided in two sections, allowing Castorena to carefully squeezed her secular romances in their midst. This decision ostensibly could be justified as an attempt to keep all the romances, both secular and divine, together, but it seems to me not mere coincidence that the compiler decides to publish two pious sonnets after the secular verses one devoted to the Virgin and the other to Christ. By so doing, Castorena assures that Sor Juana’s secular texts are appropriately immersed in the midst of her religious works. But, surprisingly enough, he decides to end on a secular and not a religious tone. The reason for this becomes clear once we become aware of the fact that the décima #112, the last text to appear in the section of Sor Juana’s “Obras pósthumas,” is devoted to none other than Castorena. To this thank you note of sorts, I will return shortly; for now, suffice it to say that he decidedly privileges this text by inserting it after a pious sonnet and before the continuation of his Prologue, which he has picked up again over 150 pages after he left off. The original Prologue and its addendum or “continuation,” like the frontispiece before it, offer many clues as to Castorena’s textual intentions, among them his decisions to include—and suppress—works, all in the name 21 As with her devotional work, Sor Juana’s name is suppressed from this glosa [commentary or explanation] as she competed in the tournament of 1682 under the pseudonym of Br. Felipe de Salaizes Gutiérrez. The poem was included in Sigüenza y Góngora’s published compilation of the certamen organized by Mexico City’s University in honor of the Immaculate Conception, his Triunfo parténico [Parthenian Triumph] (1683) (OC 1.514).

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of preserving Sor Juana’s fame. Indeed, Castorena’s “Prólogo” to the Fama shares many of the prevailing characteristics of prologues of its time. Not only does it address the complicit reader directly, the prologue also aims to impress and display erudition. Its precise listing of what the volume fails to include, however, is original. Attempting to convince his readers not only of Sor Juana’s prolificacy but also of his familiarity with her work, Castorena lists seven texts in poetry and prose that he would have published had he been able to pry them from their possessive owners.22 In the hopes of preserving in print more of the dispersed fragments of the writer’s work, what he calls “borradores” or rough drafts, the compiler includes the following plea to his readers: Si acaso, Lector, (aquí te invoco piadoso) fueres heredero de estas preseas, reconvengo a tu plausible gusto, reserve tu estimación bizarra el original, y con el dócil trabajo de una nema al impresor de este libro, remitas una copia, para que a otra vez, que en este tercer Tomo (como lo ha merecido en siete ediciones sus dos primeros) suden los moldes, se impriman dichos manuscritos; así los privilegias de lo caduco del olvido, los indultas del peligro de un papel suelto, darás buenos ratos de diversión a los Tertulios, y renuevos inmarcesibles al perenne nombre de la Poetisa. [If per chance, Reader (and here I invoke you beseechingly), were you to have inherited one of these jewels [a manuscript copy of the nun’s work], I implore that you should keep the original and remit a copy to the printer of this book, so that in this, the third volume (as have deserved the seven editions of the first two volumes) the manuscripts may be printed; in so doing you will save them from oblivion, that is, the risk incurred by a loose leaf of paper, and you will grant moments of pleasure to the Poet’s readers and renew her name indefinitely]. ([125–26])

The notion of the “borrador,” or draft, here referred to as a “papel suelto” or loose leaf of paper, is assumed to be finite, whereas only the printing press 22 For a discussion of these texts still lost today, see Alatorre (1980, 438 n. 23). Among the collectors of Sor Juana’s works that Castorena names are Sigüenza y Góngora and the editor of the SV, Juan de Orve y Arbieto. While De la Maza suggests that the editor’s jealousy and competitiveness with fellow Mexicans Sigüenza y Góngora and González de la Sancha spurred his omitting them from the Fama, Alatorre believes that all three collectors of the nun’s works were probably involved in a selfish game of quid pro quo (De la Maza 1980, 137; Alatorre 1980, 445). De la Maza comments extensively on several Mexican poets—superior in talent to the actual collaborators—who might have contributed to the Fama had they been invited to do so. (See particularly, 1980, 135–36 and Alatorre 1980, 442 n. 35).

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can assure that Sor Juana’s name be “renewed indefinitely.” Castorena’s words encourage me to believe that by this juncture, the turn of the eighteenth century, authorship was beginning to be reason enough (granted it be accompanied by moral rectitude) to secure posthumous fame. Castorena’s words of the prologue, moreover, uphold the private-writer and public-author distinction I have already begun to lay out following Margaret Ezell. In turn, Sor Juana’s celebrity in her lifetime, earned through publicity (with an emphasis on its necessarily public nature), and garnered through the circulation of her printed works does indeed inform her posthumous fashioning—note that at this juncture of the volume Sor Juana is referred to as “the Poet.” Her public celebrity status thus proves not an impediment to her posthumous renown, but rather an advantage as long as it is properly curated in printed works, much as Castorena envisages his own efforts in the Fama. It’s also worth noting that in his plea, the editor and compiler does not privilege one type of writing over another, be it devotional or otherwise. In addition to signaling that Sor Juana’s manuscripts were prized possessions in her time—any one of his readers may have collected them—Castorena again reveals his hope that his participation in the publication of the nunwriter’s works will further publicize her life and fame. Today, the editor’s preoccupation with publishing all of Sor Juana’s known works, as well as those dedicated to her, reveals his unsettling foresight given that some of the texts mentioned yet not included in the Fama, such as Sigüenza y Góngora’s funeral sermon, have indeed been lost.

A Private Dialogue Made Public: Sor Juana Engages the Editor of Her Fama Another lost text is Castorena’s own letter of defense that sparked Sor Juana’s response in the form of a short poem, décima #112.23 Why, given his plea 23 In an explanatory note to décima #112, Méndez Plancarte writes: “[D]e ese Papel en pro de Sor Juana (quizá contra el anónimo censor de su Crisis, al que alude Calleja) no hay más noticia” (“We do not know the whereabouts of the ‘Paper’ written in defense of Sor Juana (and perhaps countering the anonymous censor of her Crisis [the Carta Atenagórica] to whom Calleja refers)” (OC 1: 502). The recently unearthed Carta de Serafina de Cristo, subject of much speculation and debate, is precisely one such document written in Sor Juana’s defense. In a contentious book, Alatorre and Tenorio suggest that “Serafina’s Letter” is in fact the defense penned by Castorena and the very same text Calleja alludes to (1998b). For his part, Elías Trabulse believes that it was penned by Sor Juana herself (1998, 18). For a succinct overview of this debate, see Bénassy-Berling, (2000). As Sara Poot Herrera has noted, regardless of the question of authorship, the discovery

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cited above, would the editor censor his own text? Why would he purposely truncate a textual dialogue with none other than the subject and object of his tribute? After all, I have already shown that he chooses to publish some of Sor Juana’s textually rendered dialogues, namely the Letter of Sor Filotea and the nun’s Answer, as well as romances #49bis and #50, her poetic exchange with the gentleman from Peru. The truncated dialogue between editor and poet of the Fama, while still a mystery of sorts, can serve not only to highlight the organization and context of the volume, but also Castorena’s very personal motivations in seeing his project to fruition. It also allows contemporary readers insights into how this early modern priest and intellectual understood notions of private and public writing for both himself, a Jesuit with ambitions in the Church, and his once-cloistered and now deceased compatriot. Written probably in the years after 1690, in response to the praise and blame that she received after the publication of her Crisis de un sermón (her commentary on a sermon by the Jesuit Vieira), the décima #112 thanks Castorena for having written in her defense. Published in the Fama with a title assigned by the poem’s interlocutor, the décima appears to be one side of a literary dialogue, a path whose markings have been all but disappeared. The title, also reproduced by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte in his exhaustive edition of Sor Juana’s Obras completas [Complete Works], reads as follows: “Con graciosa agudeza, recompensa con el mismo aplauso al Doctor D. Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, por un papel que discurrió en elogio y defensa de la Poetisa” [With able wit, the poet thanks and extols Doctor Don Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa for writing a document that both praises and defends her] (OC I, 249). Castorena’s decision to censor his own text seems to speak to his decision to keep Sor Juana’s name and works free from the scandal that constantly loomed over her and that intensified in the years before her death, a suggestion that I made earlier in the Introduction. Not publishing his defense of Sor Juana alongside the décima #112 thus informs us not of his stance in the debate surrounding the publicly known dispute with Father Vieira, but rather of his decision to remove his volume from that contentious past. The architecture of his volume shows us how he circumvents the issue since here the décima is highlighted not so much a “response” but rather as a tribute to the man who has brought Sor Juana’s posthumous work to light, he who not only speaks for Mexico’s Tenth Muse, but also for “los Ingenios of the letter has revealed more insight into the intrigue surrounding Sor Juana following the publication of her litigious text in 1690 (2005).

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que al tiempo que murió [Sor Juana], florecían en México” [the wits who at the time of her [Sor Juana’s] death thrived in Mexico] (165). Castorena’s privileged role as both an intermediary and as someone close to Sor Juana thus comes to the forefront in the architecture of his text as he introduces these Mexican talents precisely in his addendum to the Prologue, that is, the text that appears immediately after the décima. Easily overlooked by contemporary readers, the editor’s conscious shaping of his text would certainly have been clear to the readers of the Fama in its own time. Perhaps as important as what the décima says and how Castorena situates the short poem in his posthumous volume, is what motivates this literary exchange of sorts since it offers us clues as to how the editor felt about his own writing and of course, about his monumental tribute to Sor Juana. I am not referring to the events surrounding the publication of the Carta atenagórica (CA), which I believe is the backdrop for, but not what lies at the center of the poem. This seemingly formulaic and inconsequential poem of the Sor Juana’s is an example of both the literary “exchanges” with her laudators, motivated usually by the desire to see one’s work in print, and her tactical responses that veer attention away from herself and onto her panegyrists. These ideas form the core of chapter 4 of this book; however, it seems pertinent to begin to address the question of an exchange or dialogue—albeit truncated—between Sor Juana and her editor at this juncture as it sheds light on the importance of Castorena’s motives in bringing to fruition his project of publishing the Fama; in other words, what concerns us in this chapter. While potentially easily dismissed as formulaic, décima #112 alerts us to one of the essential characteristics of the elegy: it proves an opportunity (especially if the work is published) to widen the renown of both the poet and the addressee of the tribute. As a poem written in response to another text, this poem participates in a poetic exchange that could potentially benefit both parties. As such, it presents us with a Sor Juana who is not merely a passive observer of her imposed fame (as she would like us to believe) but rather an active promoter of her endeavors. As for Castorena, I have already shown how he uses the poem dedicated to him to boost his stature within his volume. The ten verses of the décima read as follows: Favores que son tan llenos, no sabré servir jamás, pues debo estimarlos más cuanto los merezco menos. De pagarse están ajenos al mismo agradecimiento;

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pero ellos mismos intento que sirvan de recompensa, pues debéis a mi defensa lucir vuestro entendimiento. (OC I. 249:1–10) [I will never know how to repay favors so abundant; I must cherish them all the more despite being so undeserving. Even my thanks will fall short in repaying such favors; instead I intend that they themselves may serve as due reward, since in my defense you have displayed your erudition].

Readers familiar with Sor Juana’s work can easily distinguish in the first four verses what are today known to be her personal commonplaces, namely the widely used rhetoric of humility—she claims to be unworthy of the praise bestowed on her, and, secondly, the conundrum of not being able to repay such favors due in part to her being a nun.24 The poem itself suggests a manner of overcoming her shortcomings as Castorena’s own text (his defense of her) will serve as a just reward (“recompensa”) given that with his words written in her defense he was able to demonstrate his erudition (“lucir vuestro entendimiento”). More than Castorena or the poet herself, the idea of the favors exchanged form the subject of the first eight verses. But as is her want, Sor Juana is less concerned with the object of her poem the “you” or “tú,” that is Castorena, than she is with her “I” or “yo.” It is the undeserved favors that unite subject and object in the poem as Sor Juana tries to veer attention away from herself and onto her admirer. While she appears to be sheltering herself from potential criticism for having written these verses without having been instructed to do so, she does not refrain altogether from writing. In other words, Sor Juana chooses to thank Castorena by means of the written word when she could have remained silent. These favors of which she writes are literary favors and we can surmise that not only will Castorena’s own writing propagate his acclaim, so too of course will the décima #112. These machinations reaffirm my claim that Sor Juana negotiated her authorship by seeking out literary favors and writing for material gain; in this case, not monetary benefits, but “influence with more powerful readers” (Ezell 1999, 11). What is more, the epistolary exchange, like reciprocal favors, speaks to the very negotiations that helped Sor Juana establish her celebrity in her lifetime. The editor’s decision to publish only one part of this exchange sheds light on the nature of her mediated negotiations and 24 Merrim (1999), Ludmer (1991) and Harvey (2008) have examined different facets of Sor Juana’s postures of humility.

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works to further the case for Sor Juana’s posthumous glory by eliding any need for her to be defended from wrongdoing. Being privy to Sor Juana’s literary exchanges makes it difficult to believe her famous words from the Respuesta [The Answer]—that only Primero sueño [First Dream] was written of her own accord. While we know that much of what she wrote was commissioned by the viceroys or her religious superiors [“in response to the pleadings and commands of others” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 97)], it is still difficult to image that she was compelled to answer all the letters she received from her many admirers throughout the Spanish Empire.25 Arguably, Sor Juana’s thank you note to Castorena was not meant to be a public document, but surely she knew there was a possibility that the text could circulate once it left her hands and that her many admirers would welcome anything and everything she wrote. By engaging in a textual exchange with her while she was alive, Castorena enters into her decidedly public literary world. And, undoubtedly, his decision to posthumously publish her poem dedicated to him thrust the décima into the public world of print. Sor Juana’s short poem proposes that writing in itself can potentially be a favor rendered, perhaps especially for someone such as Castorena who longed to be a part of his literary milieu. Could not his own reputation benefit from being associated with that of the Tenth Muse? He certainly hoped so. Despite suppressing his defense of Sor Juana’s jousting with Father Vieira, Castorena published a handful of his own works in the Fama, clearly hoping to be seen as a published author in his own right. This line of thinking helps explain why he would choose to transform a private relationship—carried out through their correspondence—into a public one with his decision to publish Sor Juana’s décima. Such a move, moreover, elevates a manuscript text into a printed one, thereby bolstering the nun’s position as a worthy published author.

Conclusions I have argued that without careful analysis, the Fama’s lessons garnered from its engraving, structure, and the truncated dialogue between its editor and 25 In his Approbation to the Fama, the Jesuit Calleja writes: “Sólo para responder a las cartas, que en versos, y en prosa, de las dos Españas recibía, aún dictados al oído los pensamientos, tuviere el amanuense más despejado bien en que trabajar” [Even the best scribe might have found himself overwhelmed simply with having to transcribe the responses to the many letters, penned in verse and in prose, that she received from the two Spains [Spain and New Spain]] ([26]).

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subject, can easily be lost to contemporary readers. In the early eighteenth century, however, insofar as they were the physical features of the text, these constructed protocols of reading authorized the text for potentially powerful readers (Wall 5). Within this dynamic, Sor Juana’s posthumous image—be it as author or virtuous nun—is wielded as a means of exchange, a symbolic economic and cultural transaction with the potential for political gain. Such a context informs my understanding of how to tackle the problem facing the Fama’s collaborators: not only what to write about the exceptional Mexican nun-writer, but also how to do so. As we shall see in the ensuing chapters of this book, the polyphony of voices and intertexts heard in the Fama interlace directly with the multiple purposes of the text and, in particular, with the potential vindication of Sor Juana both after her retreat from public view in 1693 and her death two years later. In other words, the nature of the texts that constitute the Fama, especially in the manner in which they memorialize Sor Juana posthumously, sustain—with varying degrees of success—the volume’s overriding and prevailing attempt to reinforce prescriptive ideals of women and steadfast notions of posthumous fame. As made clear in the multivalent baroque frontispiece, it is not the notions of women and fame that budge so much as the tempering or adapting of the unusual Mexican nun and her talents to fit normative prescriptions. In other words, Sor Juana’s posthumous panegyrists pick and choose from among her characteristics in life that made her a celebrity to fix her posthumous renown and their motives, as is becoming increasingly clear, were as much cultural and political as they were literary. In their attempt to mold Sor Juana’s life and work into a didactic model of virtuous purity sanctioned by the reigning ideology, each one of the texts (including the engraved frontispiece) must refashion and re-construct the nun-writer. To do so, the individual rescriptings of Sor Juana and her renown employ the language and images of normative works on the subject of famous women (and men) such as compilations of occasional verse, funeral sermons, and vidas, to name only a few. As will become clear in the ensuing chapter, the Fama most clearly imitates conventional accounts of the lives and deaths of seventeenth-century Mexico’s pious women by retelling the account of Sor Juana’s so-called conversion, the renewal of her religious vows, and her charitable death. Although not all of the volume’s literary contributions ascribe to this pious reading of the Mexican nun, those that do, describe Sor Juana as a religious exemplar according to the entrenched models of the saint or the biblical mujer fuerte. And yet, the nun-writer’s exceptional person and uncommon fame encourage her fashioning as author in the volume of 1700 alongside traditional

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Figure 1. Frontispiece of the Fama y obras pósthumas. Madrid, 1700. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

readings of her person. As the volume’s multi-layered frontispiece suggests, the works that laud the “secular” Sor Juana—that is, the extraordinary intellectual, the American cultural icon, and the poet—and which appear alongside the more normative representations of her, necessarily undermine them by breaking with sanctioned notions of women. Similarly, Castorena’s printing of the poet’s décima #112, a manuscript poem in his possession,

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furthers Sor Juana’s image as author and highlights his role as not only editor, but also a broker of texts. In its struggle to imagine and portray a Sor Juana worthy of posthumous renown, the volume’s textual contradictions and often irreconcilable images and personas of the nun-writer ultimately reveal the fragility of her condition as both an exemplary and an exceptional woman. If Fame’s wings allow the allegorical figure to travel the globe, Sor Juana’s own, as she herself says, may prove to be no more than “wings of fragile paper” (“alas de papel frágil” (romance #37; OC 1.105:78)). In what follows, I analyze how and why certain cogent examples of both Sor Juana’s writings and the Fama’s panegyrics represent—often unintentionally—the fragility, or precarious nature, of her self, her public image, and her fame in her own time.

Appendix Table 2.  Contributors and Texts Cited in the Chapter Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Sor Juana

romance #51 “Romance en reconocimiento a las inimitables plumas de la Europa, que hicieron mayores sus obras con sus elogios; que no se halló acabado”

romance

FAMA

to the inimitable pens of Europe who improved on her work with their praise; found unfinished (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

“Prólogo al que leyere” [Prologue to the reader]

prose

FAMA

Followed by a second prose intervention later in the volume (see appendix B)

José Pérez de Montoro

romance

romance

IC

well-respected Spanish poet; prefatory romance written for the publication of IC

Sor Juana

villancico #282

carol

IC (1691)

forms part of the carols devoted to the Conception dating from 1689, published in Mexico by the printer Diego Fernández de León (OC 2.109, 408)

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

dedicatoria

prose

FAMA

to Queen Mariana

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

dedicatoria

prose

FAMA

to the Mexican noblewoman, the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca

Luis Tineo de Morales

Approbation

prose

IC

Spanish religious censor to the IC; potentially a powerful protector of the nun’s and a friend of the Marquise de la Laguna

Diego de Calleja

Approbation

prose

FAMA

influential Spanish Jesuit, corresponded with Sor Juana and believed to be her first “biographer”

Diego de Heredia

Approbation

prose

FAMA

Spanish rector of the Imperial College of the Jesuits

Jacinto Muñoz de Castilblanque

Parecer

prose

FAMA

Spanish religious censor (the third); theologue of the Nunciature of Spain, Archbishop of Manila and Bishop of Cotrón (today Gelves, Spain)

Diego de Calleja

elegía

elegy in verse FAMA

Spanish Jesuit

Félix Fernández de Córdoba y Aragón

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Duke de Sessa, highly respected nobleman if not a renowned man of letters

Sor Juana

La respuesta / The Answer prose

FAMA

Written in 1691 in response to “Sor Filotea” and published posthumously (OC 4; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a)

Martín de Olivas

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

her Latin teacher; the sonnet is in Spanish

Sor Juana

sonnet #200

acrostic sonnet

SV

to her Latin teacher Martín de Olivas (OC 1)

romance heroico Lorenzo González de la Sancha

romance heroico

FAMA

rector and chronicler of the Jesuit College of San Pedro, New Spain

romance #49bis

romance

FAMA

Luis Antonio de Oviedo y Herrera (Madrid, 1636-Lima, 1717)

Un caba­llero de Perú [a Peruvian Gentleman], the Count de la Granja

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Title

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Sor Juana

romance #50 “Respuesta de la poetisa en la que descubre el nombre del peruano”

romance

FAMA

response to the Count de la Granja, who she reveals as the gentleman from Peru (OC 1)

an anonymous female contributor

décima acróstica

acrostic décima

FAMA

“Una gran señora” [a distinguished noblewoman], who may or may not be the Countess de Paredes and Marquise de la Laguna, patron and friend of the writer, and the Lysi of her poetry

Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz

Carta de Sor Filotea de la Cruz

prose

FAMA

Bishop of Puebla, thought to be one-time friend and ally to Sor Juana

Sor Juana

décima #112

décima

FAMA

dedicated to Castorena

Sor Juana

Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días antes de la purísima encarnación del hijo de Dios Jesu Christo Señor Nuestro

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Sor Juana

Ofrecimientos para el santo rosario de quince misterios que se ha de rezar el día de los dolores de Nuestra Señora la Virgen María

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Sor Juana

Protesta […] que hizo de su fe […] al tiempo de abandonar los estudios humanos […]

prose

FAMA

[protest made of her faith at the time in which she abandoned worldly studies] [Solemn Declaration of Faith], dated March of 1694

Sor Juana

Docta explicación del misterio y voto que hizo de defender la purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora […]

prose

FAMA

[erudite explanation of the mystery and vow that she took to defend the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady]

Sor Juana

Petición […] que […] presenta al Tribunal Divino […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas […]

prose

FAMA

[petition that she presented to the divine tribunal to plead for her sins to be forgiven]

Sor Juana

romance #56 “en que expresa los efectos del Amor divino”

romance

FAMA

in which she expresses the effects of Divine love

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Sor Juana

romance #57 “al mismo intento”

romance

FAMA

on the same subject

Sor Juana

romance #58 “en que califica de amorosas acciones todas las de Cristo […]”

romance

FAMA

in which she deems all of Christ’s acts loving

Sor Juana

sonnet #210 “al retardarse San Juan de Sahagún en consumir la Hostia Consagrada, por aparecer en ella Cristo visiblemente”

sonnet

FAMA

in which Saint John of Sahagún delays in consuming the Holy Host as Christ was visible in it

Sor Juana

sonnet #208 (a una pintura de Nuestra Señora de muy excelente pincel)

sonnet

FAMA

to a painting of Our Lady by an excellent painter

Sor Juana

Traducción que hace Sor prose Juana de una oración pública en Latín por la santidad del Papa Urbano VIII

FAMA

a translation of a public oration in Latin given by Pope Urban VIII

Sor Juana

“Glosa de una cuarteta quatrain de Don Luis de Góngora”

FAMA

gloss of a quartet by Góngora, which won her a prize in Mexico City’s literary competition of 1682

Sor Juana

Crisis de un sermón

her commentary on a sermon by the Jesuit Vieira, also known as the CA, published in Mexico in 1690

Unknown

Carta de Serafina de Cristo

a defense written after publication of the CA; Serafina’s identity remains unknown (it has been attributed both to Castorena and to Sor Juana)

Sor Juana

romance #37 “Elogio de Doña María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess de Aveyro”

romance

IC

dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, who lived in Madrid and was married to the Duke de Arcos (several of his attendants also contribute to the volume)

Source: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995a; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995c; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995d; Alatorre and Tenorio 1998a

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Works Cited Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. 1996. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Alatorre, Antonio. 1980. “Para leer la Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 29(2): 428–508. DOI 10.24201/ nrfh.v29i2.1755. Alatorre, Antonio. 1995. “El Zurriago de Salazar y Castro contra el padre Calleja, amigo y biógrafo de Sor Juana.” Literatura mexicana 6(2): 34366. DOI 10.19130/ iifl.litmex.6.2.1995.191. Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau. 1989. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bénassy-Berling, Marie Cécile. 1982. Humanisme et Réligion Chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Editions Hispaniques. Paris: Sorbonne. Bénassy-Berling, Marie Cécile. 2000. “Actualidad del sorjuanismo (1994–1999).” Colonial Latin American Review 9(2): 277–92. DOI 10.1080/713657424. Biblia Sacra. 1983. Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford University Press. Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. 1994. Diccionario de símbolos. Barcelona: Editorial Labor. Colombi, Beatriz. 2018. “Diego Calleja y la Vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Vestigios y silencios en el archivo sorjuanino.” Revista Exlibris (7): 24–44. Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1990. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1953). De la Maza, Francisco. 1980. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892. México: UNAM. Diccionario de Autoridades. 1963. Real Academia Española. Ed. Facsim. Biblioteca románica hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Elliott, John H. 1963. Imperial Spain 1469–1716. London: Penguin Books. Ezell, Margaret. J. M. 1999. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, Tamara. 2008. Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Burlington: Ashgate. Hernández Araico, Susana. 1994. “El código festivo renacentista barroco y las loas sacramentales de Sor Juana: Des/re/construcción del mundo europeo.” In El escritor y la escena II. Edited by Ysla Campbell, [75]–93. Actas del II Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (17–20 de marzo de 1993, Ciudad Juárez). Ciudad Juárez, México: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez.

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Imprentas, ediciones y grabados de México barroco. 1995. Puebla, México: Museo Amparo; Backal Editores. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1988. A Sor Juana Anthology. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994a. The Answer/La Respuesta. Edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995a. Carta athenagórica de la madre Juana Ynés de la Cruz […]. Edited by Elías Trabulse. Ed. Facsim. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex. (1690). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995c. Inundación castálida. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1689). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995d. Segundo volumen de sus obras. Edited by Margo Glantz. Ed. Facsim. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. (1692). López, Diego. 1973. Declaración magistral sobre los emblemas de Andrés Alciato. Continental Emblem Books. No. 13. Menston, England: Scolar Press. (1655). Ludmer, Josefina. 1991. “Tricks of the Weak.” Translated by Stephanie Merrim. In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Stephanie Merrim, 86–93. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Lynch, John. 1981. Spain Under the Hapsburgs. 2nd. ed. Vol. 2. New York: New York University Press. Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso. 1945. Poetas novohispanos. México: UNAM. Merrim, Stephanie. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Moraña, Mabel. 1998. Viaje al silencio: exploraciones del discurso barroco. México: UNAM. Ochoa Campos, Moisés. 1968. Juan Ignacio de Castorena, primer periodista mexicano. 3rd ed. México: UNAM. Perry, Elizabeth. 1997. “Monjas Coronadas: Mexican Portraits of Religious Professions.” Brown University, Providence, RI. 10 Mar. Poot Herrera, Sara. 2005. “Sor Juana: Nuevos hallazgos, viejas relaciones.” Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes and Anales de Literatura Española. Num. 13, 1999. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmccn7f2. Prendergast, Ryan. 2007. “Constructing an Icon: The Subjectivity and SelfReferentiality of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (7)2: 28–56. www.jstor.org/stable/40339579.

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Rabin, Lisa. 1995. “The blasón of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Politics and Petrarchism in Colonial Mexico.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 72(1): 28–39. https://doi. org/10.3828/bhs.72.1.29. Ripa, Cesare. 2000. Iconología. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1995a. “Sor Juana: Bibliografía. Las ediciones de Fama y obras póstumas de Lisboa y Barcelona, 1701.” In Bibliografía y otras cuestiúnculas sorjuaninas, 48–75. Salta, Argentina: Editorial Biblioteca de Textos Universitarios. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1997. “Mujeres nobles del entorno de Sor Juana.” Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando. Homenaje internacional a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Sara Poot Herrera, 1–19. México: El Colegio de México. Scott, Nina M. 1994. “‘La gran turba de las que merecieron nombres’: Sor Juana’s Foremothers in ‘La Respuesta a Sor Filotea.’” In Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America. Edited by Javier Cevallos-Candau, Jeffrey A. Cole et al., 206–23. Amherst: The University Massachusetts Press. Sebastián, Santiago. 1992. Iconografía e Iconología del arte novohispano. Italy: Grupo Azabache. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1684. Parayso Occidental. México: Juan de Ribera. Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson. 2011. “Introduction.” In Renaissance Paratexts, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tenorio, Martha Lilia. 2010. Poesía novohispana, antología. 2 vols. México: Colegio de México. Trabulse, Elías. 1980. “Prólogo.” In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892, by Francisco de la Maza. México: UNAM. Trabulse, Elías. 1998. “El silencio final de Sor Juana.” In Sor Juana & Vieira, trescientos años después. Edited by K. Josu Bijuesca and Pablo A. J. Brescia, 143–56. Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara. Vega, Lope de. 1779. Fama póstuma a la vida y muerte del doctor Fray Lope Félix de Vega Carpio y elogios panegyricos a la inmortalidad de su nombre, escritos por los más esclarecidos ingenios, solicitados por el doctor Juan Pérez de Montalván. Colección de las obras sueltas, assi en prosa como en verso. Madrid: En la Impr. de don Antonio de Sancha. Wall, Wendy. 1993. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wray, Grady C. 2005. The Devotional Exercises / Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/51–1695). A Critical Study and Bilingual Annotated Edition. Mexican Studies, Vol. 6. Lewinston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.

2.

Soaring above the Rest Sor Juana as “Sacred Phoenix” and the Fama as Moral Exhortation Abstract: This chapter reads the Fama y obras pósthumas within the seventeenth century’s attempts to create holy subjects for the purpose of edification, primarily through Father Calleja’s approbation, as well as posthumous elegies that rescript Sor Juana’s renewal of her vows, charity, devotional writings, teachings, and God-given grace as means for both warranting her renown as a saintly exemplar as well as championing her literary and intellectual fame. By considering Sor Juana’s life story and her writing over and against that of Mexican female penitents of the Counter-Reformation, comparisons with male saints and even imitatio Christi, or the paradox of the inimitable female exemplar, I examine how the volume’s collaborators chose to align Mexico’s rara avis to staunchly entrenched formulae to make her legible for her contemporaries, thereby increasing the promise of posthumous fame. Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Diego Calleja; funeral sermons; seventeenth-century female penitents; vitae; exemplars

-¿Qué quieres que infiera, Sancho, de todo lo que has dicho?—dijo don Quijote. – Quiero decir—dijo Sancho—que nos demos a ser santos, y alcanzaremos más brevemente la buena fama que pretendemos. [Don Quijote asked: what do you mean to imply by all that you have said, Sancho? – I mean—said Sancho—that we should devote ourselves to being saints in order to sooner achieve the fame that we desire]. — Don Quijote, II:8, 595. “En el poema [ funeral] se revela el mundo, creencias, costumbres, ideas de la época, condición social del poeta y del muerto, la concepción del mundo, de la vida y de la muerte; todos estos factores determinaran el signo que posee el morir de los otros”

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_ch02

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[revealed in a funerary poem are the world, beliefs, customs and ideas of the time, the social status of the poet and the deceased, their conception of the world, of life, and death; all of these factors determine the sign imbedded in the death of others] — Eduardo Camacho (1969, 22).

The richly Baroque portrait, the editor’s contradictory prologue, and his meticulous structuring of the volume all underscore the complexity of the Fama’s task of both commemorating and materializing Sor Juana’s fame.1 The posthumously published volume’s opening and closing “fama” sections, (as opposed to the middle section of “obras” [works]), engage the reader by being reminiscent of other texts devoted to exemplary and exceptional personages, while at the same time manifesting their own peculiarities. Among these is the way in which the nun was scripted into a genderless “sacred phoenix.” The epithet, a turn on the more commonly used “Mexican Phoenix” that referred to Sor Juana’s prodigious mind (and pen) and fueled her celebrity, appears in the Fama in a series of octavas published anonymously and devoted to the nun’s charitable gift of her voluminous library ([100]).2 The designation allowed for death to be staved-off as the mythological bird is reborn from its ashes, while at the same time attributing such an honor to Sor Juana’s exemplary moral stature alongside her literary production and exceptional mind, and conveniently circumventing the question of her sex. While this reading of Sor Juana is a constant in her posthumously published tome, one of its most fervent advocates, who most likely set the tone for the other panegyrists, was the notable Spanish Jesuit, Father Diego Calleja (1638–1725). As the Fama’s primary religious censor, Calleja writes not just an approbation, but an exemplary vita, or vida, as might a nun’s confessor, in which he recounts Sor Juana’s life story, intermingling the celebration of her virtues and his esteem for her intelligence.3 A common form of writing for religious women in the New World, self-scripted vitae were 1 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama. 2 The editor’s annotation to the octavas reads: “A la piadosa acción de vender sus libros la Poetisa para socorrer a los pobres con su producto. De un aficionado a sus obras” [To the Poet’s pious action of selling her books to give alms to the poor. By an enthusiast of her work]. Alatorre attributes the poem to Castorena (1980, 496 n. 148). 3 Of the many texts that make up the Fama, the only known manuscript is that of Calleja’s vita housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, and entitled Vida de la Madre Juana Inés de la Cruz Religiosa Profesa en el convento de San Jerónimo de la Ciudad Imperial de México [Life of Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz Professed Nun in the Convent of St. Hieronymite in the Imperial

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often recast by confessors according to their own motives (Peña 1995, Myers 1990, Bilinkoff 1983, McKnight 1997 and Eich 2004). Sor Juana and Father Calleja never met, but they did maintain an enthusiastic correspondence for many years, a fact revealed to readers of his “Elegía,” another text published in the Fama. It was from her letters then, as well as Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, which would have been forwarded to Calleja as part of the manuscript he was asked to review on behalf of the Church, that he culled the biographical details that make up the vita. If posthumous fame is granted by “men of taste,” then the influential and morally outstanding authority of Calleja most likely was a key element in the promotion of the nun’s candidacy for posthumous fame. As editor Castorena writes in his Prologue: “Si la pluma es nuevo aliento, que reanima las heladas cenizas de los escritores, en la segunda Aprobación encontrarás a la Poetisa resucitada, de su vida el Oriente y Ocaso” [If the pen breathes new life into the cold ashes of writers to revive them, in the second approbation [Calleja’s] you will find the poet resuscitated, her birth and death retold] ([122]). What is remarkable about Calleja’s approbation is how he employs the biographical information provided by Sor Juana herself to script a sacred phoenix—itself not marked by gender—and yet steeped in a paradigm of faith based on both male and female models of exemplarity. This pious reading of the nun’s life—bolstered by the publication of her devotional and repentant works within the Fama—conforms most closely to the reigning ideology’s conception of a woman’s renown as a paragon of faith. It also engages with and encourages imitatio Christi, insofar as it presents a moral guideline to attempt to live and act as Christ lived and acted, as was expected of both men and women at the time. Also true is the fact that in addition to being an influential Jesuit with many ties to the court of Madrid, Calleja was an author in his own right and a fervent admirer of the Mexican nun’s prodigious mind and literary talent. It thus follows that it is he who sets the tone—posthumously at least—for the nun’s desengaño [her disabusing of the error of her secular, worldly, ways] in which her literary genius becomes a manifestation of moral perfection. Sor Juana’s acts of repentance, including most notably her renunciation of writing in the years just prior to her death in 1695, discussed in the previous chapter, was understood precisely as a desengaño that changed not only her life but also the way it would be interpreted and remembered. Sor Juana’s religious transformation allowed for her rebirth in heaven and, importantly, in the City of Mexico] (Colombi 2018, 26). Colombi points out that it was written expressly for the Fama as it mentions the volume twice (27).

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Fama, as a woman whose intellect, ingenio and authorship were no longer a threat to the greater social order. After all, once Sor Juana’s learning is proved to have been sanctioned and infused by God and she herself is at a safe distance (in heaven), she ceases to be a controversial figure. For me, how Calleja and others deal with the disjunctions between her worldly celebrity and her paradigmatic posthumous portrayal are as important as the extra-textual reality (i.e., her renewal of her vows), irrevocably censored and muted by the orthodox impulses of the nun’s time. By suggesting, even by means of imperfect logic, that Sor Juana acted chastely, obediently, and charitably and yet produced literature, allows her to exist as an exception that confirmed the rule. For the contributors to the Fama who reinterpret Sor Juana’s life and achievements according to doctrinal precepts, her exceptional qualities, particularly those considered alien to her sex, are reined in by those attributes understood to be exemplary. The nun’s own belief, as expressed in her Answer, that her poetry and her love of knowledge were God-given gifts, have to be accommodated into the sanctioned understanding of women’s role as a potential medium for divine intervention. 4 Likewise, her transgressive acts of participating in the male realm of publication, scholastic argumentation, of proving her reasoned rather than infused knowledge, and of arguing her own substantiated authority all had to be circumscribed into an acceptable female model. Hard as it may be for us to believe today, for many of the Fama’s collaborators Sor Juana’s supposed exemplarity overwhelmed her contradictions, or at least, held them at bay. While pivotal to the posthumous volume’s attempt to warrant her enduring worldly fame, the conjoining of Sor Juana’s piety and writing was by no means novel. Indeed, the suggestion that Sor Juana is chaste, obedient, and wise and thus beyond reproach constitutes an intertextual dialogue that can be found in the preliminary matter to all of the Mexican nun’s works published in Spain. In their efforts to render Sor Juana legible for her mostly male readers, her panegyrists who promoted the volumes of her work published in her lifetime employed machinations similar to those found in Father’s Calleja approbation and peppered throughout the Fama, 4 Sor Juana’s already cultivated celebrity caused still more difficulties given that when God did choose a woman as a medium of His greatness it was usually in the form of a lowly, meek, and illiterate woman such as Catarina de San Juan (1608–1688), known also as the “china poblana” [the Chinese woman of Puebla]. Ultimately, however, the consensus agreed that God chose to bestow His gifts on whomever He saw f it. See Myers (2003) on the speculation regarding Catarina’s hotly debated orthodoxy.

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such as writing her out of her gender or allying her with saints, male and female alike. Both the anonymous prologue to the Inundación castálida (IC) and its approbation by Luis de Tineo aimed to quiet those shocked to discover that the author of such excellent verses was a woman. While Tineo employs a religious rationale to defend her actions—likening Sor Juana to writing saints—the anonymous contributor calls up the notion of her sexless soul and situates her in a taxonomy of writing women. For De la Maza, the prologue is a more prudent text than Tineo’s given that it suggests that Sor Juana composed (courtly) poetry not as an act of vanity but rather in moments of leisure (54). For his part, Tineo is the first of Sor Juana’s laudators to argue that “no es incompatible, ser muy siervos de Dios, y hacer muy buenas coplas,” [being a servant of God and writing good poetry are not in themselves incompatible] thereby including her among the ranks of writing saints the likes of St. Teresa and St. Gregory of Nazianzus (IC [10]). The censor takes his praise of the nun one step further by ebulliently claiming: “y añado […] que ha de ser muy santa, y muy perfecta, y que su mismo entendimiento ha de ser causa, de que la celebremos por el S. Agustín de las mujeres” [and I would add that she must be very saintly, indeed perfect, and that her intelligence is the reason why we should celebrate her as a female Saint Augustine] (IC [10–11]). Enamored as they were of Sor Juana’s victory over Father Vieira in her Crisis, the Spanish collaborators of her second volume of poetry hoped to defend the nun’s erudition and choice of subject matter against her Novohispanic critics. Like Tineo, the collaborators of the Segundo volumen (SV), as for example, Fray Ambrosio de la Cuesta, compare Sor Juana to St. Teresa, arguing that they are both mujeres fuertes, or “heroic” due to their saintliness and wisdom. Only this combination of traits usually reserved for men can aptly express Fray Ambrosio’s admiration while at the same time serving as a justification for her literary endeavors in general and the Crisis in particular. It makes sense that the Fama would carry on in the tradition of conjoining Sor Juana’s piety and writing, not because its authors needed to vindicate her writing deemed inappropriate (i.e., her courtly love poetry and contentious Crisis), but rather to ensure her posthumous renown and to justify their own tributes to her. After all, the panegyrists of the posthumous volume are no longer concerned with her reputation—they firmly believe in the salvation of her soul. Freed from the conflicts surrounding a woman’s repute, the Fama focuses its attention on providing textual proof of Sor Juana’s salvation and her dedication to matters holy. Published in the pages of the

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Fama is not a contentious text like the CA (Carta atenagórica) but rather the Carta de Sor Filotea, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, her devotional works, and her conventional vows. Golden Age poet Gabriel Bocángel’s unadorned yet poignant verse, “Ni muere al mundo el justo, sólo falta,” [The just are never dead to the world, only absent] in many ways epitomizes the Hispanic Baroque’s notion of posthumous fame (1946, 1.62:26–28). Indeed, from the time of the Christian Renaissance enduring worldly fame was conceived of as salvation’s earthly complement. Enraptured by the idea of death and the passing of time, the poets of the Baroque believed that posthumous fame was the means by which to prolong life on earth for the greatest among them. Most revealing is under what guise these privileged dead, whether heroes, saints, or poets, “lived” on. They exist indisputably in their renewed lives as paradigms which, as Carlos Eire writes, speak in the subjunctive mood—suggesting not how things are (or were) but rather how they should be (1995, 364). Not surprisingly, given the ardent orthodoxy of the Counter Reformation, paradigms were constructed almost exclusively from religious role models whose life stories had a direct impact on the world they left behind. They also evolved according to a given place or time. As Jorge Borja Gómez argues, texts that recounted exemplary lives in the American territories of the viceroyalties “pretendían presentar cómo Dios mostraba su bondad al bendecir estas tierras con sujetos ejemplares y virtuosos” [aimed to show how God displayed his goodness by blessing these lands with exemplary and virtuous subjects] (Borja Gómez 70). Hagiography, moreover, “es un mecanismo de conciencia criolla, sobre el cual se articulan la posibilidad y la responsabilidad de generar una representación del ideal de sujeto colonial” [is a mechanism of criolla conscience, upon which to articulate the possibility and the responsibility of creating a representation of the ideal colonial subject] (Borja Gómez 57). Inscribing Sor Juana into this tradition in her Fama becomes a means of expressing her death as a public tragedy and positing her metaphorical rebirth as edification. Opening the chapter is a discussion of posthumous fame and woman during the Counter-Reformation that proposes, by means of comparisons drawn with Mexican penitents of the seventeenth century elegized in funeral sermons, that Sor Juana’s Fama should be read within the period’s attempts to create holy subjects for the purpose of edification. I then analyze Father Calleja’s approbation insofar as its tone and subject matter echo biographies or vidas, as well as funeral sermons dedicated to women, which similarly recount their lives in order to praise their Christian virtues of charity, humility and obedience. Importantly, while Calleja’s approbation adheres

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to the sanctified model I lay out in this chapter, it also divests from it as he finds ways to vindicate her singular mind and literary production. The chapter then explores the work of other collaborators of the volume who follow Calleja’s lead, interpreting Sor Juana’s desengaño, death, and salvation, as means for both warranting her existence as a religious exemplar as well as celebrating her literary and intellectual fame and Fama. More specifically, I examine the effects that Sor Juana’s renewal of her vows, her charitable duties in the convent, her death, her devotional writings, her teachings, and her God-given grace had on their portrayal of her person and life. By considering Sor Juana’s life story and her work as a writer over and against that of female penitents, comparisons with male saints and even imitatio Christi, I examine how and why the collaborators in the Fama chose to align Mexico’s rara avis to staunchly entrenched formulae. Closing the chapter is a discussion of Mexico’s Tenth Muse insofar as she complies with the paradox of the inimitable female exemplar. This role is difficult for contemporary readers to parse out, but made her legible for her contemporaries, thereby increasing the promise of posthumous fame.

Tales of Virtues: Posthumous Fame for Holy Women of Seventeenth-Century Mexico During the early modern period, as before, women (barring royalty) were not only excluded from the realm of fame but were also instructed by moralists to refrain from entering the public domain under any pretense. The Renaissance notions of woman that placed such rigid restrictions on the members of what was understood as the weaker sex originated primarily in Aristotelian and Pauline conceptions which presumed woman’s moral, physical, and intellectual potential to be inferior to that of man (Maclean 1980, especially pp. 7–20; Tuana 1993). It was believed that if unseen and unheard in both social and political milieu, early modern women could protect themselves from Eve’s inescapable inheritance: the proclivity to sin and the weakness of the flesh. Moralists the likes of Luis Vives advocated enclosure for women inside and out of the convents. Vives’s influence is palpable in much of the work published for and about women in both Spain and Spanish America. For example, in his funeral sermon (1684) for the Mexican widow Agustina Picazo de Hinojosa, the preacher José de Herrera praises her as follows: “Lloraré la inocencia de una viuda religiosa, que ignoró las calles de la vanidad, casas de visitas supérfluas, y teatros de profanos entretenimientos […]” [I will mourn the innocence of a religious widow who

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knew not of the streets of vanity, superfluous meeting houses and theaters of profane entertainment] (f. 11v).5 Desiring to be known, be it for her piety or otherwise, held a distinct danger for woman given that she was understood to be apt to succumb to the sin of vainglory. The demise of the reputedly holy sixteenth-century prioress of the Convent of Santa Isabel de Córdoba, Sor Magdalena de la Cruz, serves as a telling example of how, according to the Church, women could easily fall prey to pride and self-love. Sor Magdalena’s reputation for holiness was called into question after her claims of having visions, knowledge of the unknown, and the ability to transport herself throughout the world with the aid of a staff came under the suspicion of Church officials. When the Inquisition eventually interceded, Sor Magdalena confessed that for forty years she had been a servant of the devil, who, in her words “had promised her more fame and celebrity than any other woman in Spain” (Perry 1997, 82–83). In theory then, women were taught to shun public recognition. Yet despite the strict codes of behavior, we know that in practice there were undoubtedly some truly famous women. Saint Teresa of Avila is, of course, a case in point. Furthermore, extant works testify to the fact that attempts were made, usually post-mortem, to further a woman’s fame by means of the publication of her spiritual biography or vida, her funeral sermon (sometimes accompanied by poetry and an account of her obsequies), and, in extremely rare cases, a literary tribute. Indeed, the act of writing or being written about, whether by means of an autobiographical vida or a hagiographic biography and funeral sermon, offered early modern women the opportunity to earn what Kathryn McKnight calls “posthumous fame and lives of power” (1997, 59) in spite of the daunting confines of gender. Who were the women of seventeenth-century Mexico granted posthumous fame? And why were these women singled out? As might be surmised from the aforementioned genres used to extend their renown (with the notable exception of the literary tribute), it was those seventeenth-century women who were either models of sanctioned behavior or exceptional women understood to be imbued with God’s grace who were granted this distinguished honor. In fact, these two feminine types formed the paradigms that governed women’s participation in the public world of printed texts, most especially following their deaths. Chosen from among two distinct 5 All citations from the sermon dedicated to Jacinta de Vidarte y Pardo refer to the pagination of the copy owned by the John Carter Brown Library. All other references to sermons stem from the copies conserved by the Medina Microfilm collection.

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but related spiritual groups, the women were members of religious orders known for their extreme spirituality, and married lay women, the most common type of female penitent (Bilinkoff 1983, 96n1). Although different sets of rules applied to women who took religious vows and to those who did not, in the case of female penitents the lines between the two were often blurred. It is quite common, for example, to find references to married or widowed women who are so devout that they were likened to nuns. Consider, for example, the following rhetorical question of Fray Gregorio Sedeño, author of the Mexican Jacinta de Vidarte’s funeral sermon (1681), “O Jacinta o señora, ¿eres religiosa observante o eres casada señora?” [Oh Jacinta, are you an observant nun or a married woman?] (f. 14r). Similarly, comparisons were sometimes made between nuns and widows, as was the case of Antonio Núñez de Miranda who, in his Distribución ordinaria (Mexico, 1712), a treatise for cloistered religious women, speaks of the nun’s black veil as reflecting their status as widows of Christ (qtd. in Myers 1993, 70n47). As a number of critics have noted, extremely pious women, some of whom were themselves authors of vidas, walked a precarious line between existing as dangerous heretics or as mediums through which the Church reaffirmed its ideology and glory (Ahlgren 1996, 24; Arenal and Schlau 1989, 10–22; Myers 1993, 19; Lavrin 1991, 71). For McKnight, “the tightrope, when deftly walked, promised both salvation and inscription into popular memory” (1997, 59). The moral and didactic impulses of the Counter-Reformation reigned unwaveringly in the realm of posthumous fame for women. In the case of both religious and lay female exemplars, their heroic virtue was championed in the texts devoted to them in the hopes that it would be imitated. Notably, renowned women were usually considered as such not for who they were per se but rather for a specific characteristic or, on occasion, numerous ones, related almost invariably to one or more of the seven virtues.6 Undoubtedly, it was in those cases in which religious and lay women alike took the cultivation of virtues—considered the principal activity for all women—to extremes that led to their being distinguished from the rest. After all, their exceptional virtues could assure their salvation, honor their families or religious communities, and repel what was believed to be their inherent weakness of the flesh. When seen in this light, the popular use of the analogy 6 The seven virtues consisted of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the four moral or cardinal virtues of fortitude, justice, prudence and temperance. For the religious, enthusiastic adherence to the vows of chastity, humility and obedience were also considered foremost in attaining a privileged place among the saintly.

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of the mujer fuerte from the Book of Proverbs, she who is virtuous in every regard, becomes all the more evident. Given the assumption that a woman’s virtue is what merits both eternal glory on the one hand, and posthumous fame in the minds of the listeners and readers on the other, the telling of her life’s story invariably consists of a recounting of her virtues.7 The images of purity, passivity and social withdrawal that biographers offer up in their portraits of virtuous women are patterned on similar depictions of the Virgin Mary and other female saints. By calling special attention to what were commonly understood to be the “female” virtues of chastity, humility and charity, moralists effectively prescribed women’s behavior.8 Other virtues played up in women’s vidas were longsuffering, patience, and compassion, all of which were more commonly associated with women than with men (Maclean 1980, 21–22). Female virtues naturally echoed steadfast notions regarding female behavior, that is, what Sidonie Smith has called “the fictions of femaleness,” including, among others, prescriptions regarding obedience, silence, enclosure and charitable Christian behavior (1987, 19). Such fictions undoubtedly labored, as did most works of moral exhortation of the Counter-Reformation, to close the notable gap that existed between things as they were and the idealized order envisioned by moralists. As Mary Elizabeth Perry has shown, representations based on entrenched formulae clearly reflect a need for social control, a concern for order that rests squarely on gender prescription (1990, 43). As part and parcel of the proscriptions imposed on women, the CounterReformation Church, following Tridentine reforms, condemned what had been women’s two most common paths for spiritual union with God, mysticism and recogimiento.9 In their place, it advocated the role of prayer and spiritual exercises, and reaffirmed the cult of the Virgin Mary and the saints as well as the role of the Church as the intermediary between mankind and God. For Asunción Lavrin, the change in emphasis dovetailed with the seventeenth century’s “return to more classical forms of spirituality, based on concepts such as the need to uproot vices and replace them with virtues through the attendance of religious ceremonies (mass, the Eucharist, etc.), prayer, and acts of penance and devotion” (1991, 64). In the newly affirmed 7 See Torremocha on the vida as Hispanic cultural product and literary form in the seventeenth century (2016, 252–54). 8 While Aristotle distinguished between male and female virtue, Plato believed that they were identical. For Juan Luis Vives, the sexes’ capacity for virtue in genere is different and therefore women should practice different virtues from those of men (Maclean 1980, 54–56). 9 Literally withdrawal or meditation, recogimiento implies abstraction from worldly concerns and the preparation for spiritual exercises, tasks always carried out in solitude.

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orthodox climate of the Counter-Reformation, women who achieved renown did so thanks to their steadfast attainment of the goals laid out for them by their religious authorities. And, while obsessed with edification through imitation, early modern Hispanic society did not insist that a woman be a saint, only that she act like one. Kathryn McKnight suggests, for example, that the burgeoning of both hagiographic and biographical practices that take as their objects non-canonized subjects is one of the principal factors upholding the notion that there existed a progressive construction of a holy subject (both male and female) from the end of the sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century (1997, 52).10 In those exceptional cases in which a woman did attain a state of moral perfection it was important that her story be told in order that she might serve as a model to be imitated, to edify the faithful, to preserve her and her biographer(s) for posterity, and to bring recognition to her community. Virtually all of the lay women known today for having been formidable penitents stem from Spain and Spanish America’s nobility (Borja Gómez 70). Although there may have been many more scattered throughout the society as a whole, these are the women whose families bore the expense of the publication of either their life stories, or, as was more often the case, the sermons read during their funerary ceremonies. Funeral sermons written for seventeenth-century Mexican noblewomen reassure mourners that the memory of an exemplary life is more powerful than death itself. The “Salutación” to the Sermón funeral y descripción de las funerales exequias en las honras de la muy noble señora Doña Jacinta de Vidarte y Pardo [Funerary Sermon and the Description of the Funeral Rites in Honor of the Very Noble Lady Jacinta de Vidarte y Pardo] (Puebla, 1681) states: “Y aun por eso los cuerdos no juzgaron en esta ocasión la muerte por fatal; porque saben con San Agustín, que no es la muerte para llorada cuando precede a ella una ejemplar vida […]” [The sound of mind did not on this occasion consider death to be fatal; they know, as did Saint Augustine, that death is not to be mourned when it is preceded by an exemplary life] (f. 120r). Yet 10 In his research on Spanish Baroque hagiographies, José Luis Sánchez Lora similarly argues that the fact that many more vidas were written between 1500 and 1679 about as of yet notcanonized individuals than the canonized underlines how hagiographic practices upheld and defended the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, offered models meant to be imitated, and reminded the faithful that there were chosen ones in their midst. Sánchez Lora approximates the number of vidas written to as yet not-canonized saints based on his analysis of the library of the Spaniard Nicolás Antonio. The collection contains seven hundred hagiographic works of which twice as many were written about contemporaries and near-contemporaries who had not been canonized at the time of the publication of their life stories (1988, 388–89).

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while it appears as though the author of the sermon, Fray Gregorio Sedeño, is planning to inform his audience of Jacinta’s life, he instead presents a portrait of her virtues “para que vea el mundo que con el ay doloroso de sus penitencias, con el ay lastimero de sus mortificaciones, y austeridades, grabó nuestra difunta la ley de Dios en su pecho” [so that the world can see that with her painful cries from her penitence and her sorrowful cries from her mortification and sacrifice, she engraved God’s law on her chest] (f. 130v). Upon reading her funeral sermon we learn more of its thema than of Doña Jacinta herself. Jacinta’s name metonymically reveals her “perfecciones ilustres” [illustrious perfections], represents her person in death, and functions as the organizing principle for the entire sermon (f. 11r). In the discussion of Castorena’s prologue to the Fama in chapter 1, I showed how flowers were commonly used to symbolize virtues. Here, Sedeño draws on the meanings of Jacinta’s name—the jacinto [hyacinth] is both a flower and a precious stone—to signal the beauty of her virtues and the preservation of these permanently inscribed in stone. “[D]ebe de ser especial providencia de la naturaleza que […] una flor tan peregrina como el jacinto viva aun después de muerta, y se quede aun después de marchita en el jacinto piedra retratada […]” [It must be special providence of nature that a flower as ephemeral as the hyacinth survive after death, its image captured in the stone of the same name] (f. 20r). Given that she died at the tender age of twenty-two, Jacinta is like the plant that upon being crowned with the flowers of virtue shrivels and dies and, equally, due to these same virtues, like the stone that endures forever. In his funeral sermon dedicated to the Mexican noblewoman and widow, Agustina Picazo (1684), the Dominican preacher José de Herrera explains that it is the perfection of a woman’s virtue that deserves public praise. “[L]a perfección, a que corresponde alabanza pública, no consiste sólo en una, u otra virtud, sino en el agregado de santos ejercicios […]” [Perfection, worthy of public acclaim, does not consist of one virtue or another, but rather of the conjunction of saintly exercises] (f. 11r). Herrera goes on to inform his public that Agustina deserves to be honored upon her death because like the mujer fuerte, “lucen en la muerte de una viuda todas las virtudes juntas” [all the virtues shine in the death of a widow] (f. 11r). The Dominican constructs his sermon not around Agustina’s life story, but rather around Saint Paul’s sententia regarding virtuous widows. For, not only did Agustina care and educate her children (“[mostró] un desvelo continuo, un infatigable cuidado en el prudente gobierno de su familia […]” [she took great pains in the prudent governing of her family] (f. 4r)), she gave freely to the poor (“fue aquella difunta caritativa viuda generosa y limosnera por camino

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extraordinario” [this charitable widow was extraordinarily generous in giving alms] (f. 5r)), and expressed such humility that she behaved in the company of her servants as though she were their slave (f. 8r). Herrera and Sedeño’s sermons dissolve the women and their individuality into universal examples of generic virtues. More interested in publicizing their virtues than in recounting their lives or achievements, the authors of Agustina and Jacinta’s funeral sermons carefully choose from among their attributes those that support their assumption that they deserve a renewed life in heaven. No mention is made, for example, of the fact that as a widow Agustina not only cared for her children, but also controlled the financial and administrative affairs of her entire household. As Asunción Lavrin has shown, A widow […] acquired direct control of her dowry and arras, as well as half of her deceased husband’s estate or the wealth that the couple had accumulated throughout the marriage (bienes gananciales). As a rule, a widow also gained the tutorship of her children and the right to administer their inheritance until they became of age. […] Whether they administered their wealth or simply enjoyed their incomes, widows wielded a great deal of power, especially if they belonged to the upper and richer segment of society. (1978, 41)

As evinced in the funerary sermons cited, not only was the intercession of male clergy instrumental in the publicizing of women’s stories, the language they used aided in reaff irming the moral impulse of the time. Indeed, while posthumous fame was much on their minds, moralists, preachers, poets, and biographers such as Sedeño and Herrera often refrained from mentioning it outright. When referring to renowned women, social and moral authorities often modified their wording to veer away from the negative association implicit in the conjunction of woman, Rumor, and the public realm. Significantly, by changing the wording from fama to publicidad (publicity), panegyrists and preachers implied that it was the action of another that made the virtuous woman known. Their strategy not only underscored the fact that these women’s virtues deserved recognition, but also circumvented the dilemma of the pious whose modesty rendered them incapable of publicizing their own moral rectitude and much less of cultivating their own celebrity. What is undoubtedly true is that the idea of seventeenth-century women earning power, posthumous fame, or even salvation, is a paradoxical one. For just as Sidonie Smith argues that female foremothers such as Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Teresa of Ávila

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are powerful because their life stories have been blessed and sanctified by male authorities, so do these women need the intervention of their moral superiors to publicize their seldom paralleled virtue (1987, 28). It is also through their intercession—in the form of preaching, writing and sometimes publishing about a woman’s virtue—that priests and husbands bring recognition to their localities, an important goal for furthering the Church’s authority in the New World and its imprint on criollo role models. The little-known seventeenth-century Mexican sermons by Sedeño and Herrera prove that posthumous representations of Sor Juana’s criolla, secular, peers are formulaic to such a degree that assuring their likeness and not potential differences is their objective. The highly conventional sermons also oblige us to rethink the way these widespread formulae necessarily informed the poet’s posthumous representation in the Fama.

Father Calleja Tries His Hand at Hagiography In the Fama the role of championing Sor Juana’s virtues falls to Diego Calleja. The Jesuit’s tribute to Sor Juana, particularly his account of the years leading up to her death, in which she renounces writing (at least for public consumption), renews her vows, and engages in acts of extreme mortification, ally it with more traditional post-mortem accounts of devout exemplars the likes of Jacinta de Vidarte and Agustina Picazo. As happens in the case of the funeral sermons, the moral impulse to publicize stories of holy women by championing their virtues and the intercession of the male clergy form the basis of the approbation cum biography. Sor Juana’s transgressive behavior as a learned, published, author is subsumed in the narrative of her pious conversion late in life, which in turn assured her salvation and transformed her into a model nun. Calleja’s admiration for his subject appears to converge on the final years of the nun’s life, during which her “female” virtues of charity, obedience, silence and humility are plainly visible and, arguably, exemplary. As a result, most contemporary critics see him as Sor Juana’s hagiographer and attribute him with the role of inceptor of the conversion myth discussed in the Introduction (Alatorre 1993, 111 n. 16). Upon close scrutiny, however, Father Calleja’s approbation aptly publicizes Sor Juana’s life as one steeped in virtue without suppressing his admiration for her skill as a writer. In his “Elegía,” which appears much later in the volume, the Jesuit reveals that his correspondence with the nun and writer was literary in nature when he confesses to having sent her a poem for her perusal.

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Much as happened with holy women, the worldly accomplishments of Mexico’s Tenth Muse are not effaced, but transformed and transfigured. For Jodi Bilinkoff, hagiographers and biographers, like Calleja, “exercise the prerogatives of authorship—including or excluding information, emphasizing and deemphasizing details of their subject’s lives as they saw fit” (1983, 93). Generally, tampering by biographers of the facts in a woman’s life served to fix them more closely to the model rather than to distinguish distinctly individual traits.11 Sor Juana’s authorship, her exceptionality, and even her existing as a New World treasure are not erased from Calleja’s vita, but emended in order to make her posthumous fame legible. At the outset of his approbation, for example, he rescripts the discourse of American treasure when he compares the nun’s enclosure in the Hieronymite convent to a pearl ensconced in its shell. “El convento de las religiosas de San Jerónima de la imperial ciudad de México fue el mar pacífico en que, para ser peregrina, se encerró a crecer esta perla” [The convent of the Hieronymite nuns in the imperial city of Mexico was the pacific sea which enclosed this rarely seen pearl] (24]). As Leon Edel and others have studied, the biographer inscribes his or her own subjectivity in the life and identity of the subject (1987, 67–69).12 Beatriz Colombi rightfully notes that “Calleja diseña un camino de perfección emprendido por sor Juana al sentirse deudora de dones divinos a los que retribuye con acciones superlativas” [Calleja designs Sor Juana’s path to perfection: she repays divine favors with superlative actions] (29). And yet, the Jesuit censor’s approbation proves he is also awed both by Sor Juana’s poetic talent and her seemingly unmatched ingenio. In other words, Calleja adheres to the sanctified model I have laid out in this chapter, but also divests from it. Similarly, Colombi f inds in Calleja’s biography: “rasgos estructurales y semánticos correspondientes a distintos modos de na­ rrar una vida femenina (hagiografía, vida de monja, vida ejemplar, fama literaria) que, como elementos flotantes, aparecen en distintos momentos 11 While in general this remains true, scholarship in the writings by and about religious women and beatas of the seventeenth century, such as the work of Arenal and Schlau (1989), Myers (1993), and Ross (1993), and more recently, Eich (2004), Gunnarsdöttir (2004) and Holler (2005), has shown that texts did deviate to some degree from the larger model and thus served to identify elements particular to the place and time in which the woman in question lived. 12 I use the term biography in its most general sense, that is, as the account of an individual’s life as narrated by another. Technically speaking, the majority of the works of the Fama are neither biographies nor vidas but rather elegies written in either prose or poetry. Nevertheless, the fact that they do rewrite Sor Juana’s life story (or at least parts of it) allows them to be considered as examples of “life-writing.”

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para quebrar esa matriz pretendidamente homogénea e instalar otros motivos” [structural and semantic traits that correspond to different modes of narrating a woman’s life (hagiography, vita, exemplary life, literary fame) that, as floating elements, appear at different times to upend a homogenous reading and suggest other motives] (2018, 25). Of interest to me is how the deliberations surrounding Sor Juana’s final actions emerge from within the larger issue of whether or not she should be allowed to participate in the male realm of authorship, publishing, learning, and thinking. In other words, how Calleja’s interpretation of Sor Juana’s spiritual rebirth works to justify her love of knowledge and others’ praise of it. And, moreover, how the story of her desengaño, or spiritual awakening, frees her from any potential criticism regarding what may be deemed vainglory or pride, the implicit danger that fame was believed to bring to all women. As a work composed by her contemporaries, the Fama never questions the authenticity of Sor Juana’s religious conversion as expressed in her renunciation of writing, her renewal of her vows, and her acts of extreme mortification. Rather, its panegyrists take for granted the fact that she would be preoccupied with her salvation. Indeed, in my study of Calleja’s text specifically and of the Fama as a whole, I, along with the critics gathered by Mayer and Woolf in The Rhetorics of Life Writing in Early Modern Europe, am “less concerned with the accuracy of any biographical or autobiographical representation than with the manner of its presentation—with some of the ways […] that ‘culture […] intervenes between the writer and the text’” (Cohen qtd in Mayer and Woolf 1995, 86). In his study of saints, the sociologist of religion Pierre Delooz has argued that the holy dead are all constructed through recollections after their deaths: “All saints are more or less constructed in that, being necessarily saints for other people, they are remodeled in the collective representation which is made of them. It often happens, even, that they are so remodeled that nothing of the real original is left” (1983, 195). Interestingly, as an approbation, the Jesuit’s text presents itself as a factual account. Indeed, Calleja’s personal and highly formulaic narrative of the nun’s life and death not only provided his contemporaries with useful biographical information from which many constructed their poetic tributes, it also continues to be one of the few extant texts that recounts the course of Sor Juana’s life. Yet despite its precarious nature as a wholly dependable factual source, Calleja’s approbation is valuable to the literary critic precisely because it does embody what Elías Trabulse calls the characteristic “piadosas inexactitudes” [pious inexactitudes] of the seventeenth

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century’s “óptica crepuscular” [suspect perspective] (Trabulse 1980, 20–22). Much like the authors of the aforementioned funerary sermons, the Spanish Jesuit clearly had encomium and not history in mind. As such, the means that he uses to describe her life and death reflect posthumous accounts of men and women thought to have abandoned the terrestrial world for the celestial one. Castorena’s prologue describes Calleja’s prefatory approbation as a “Preludio, vecino de los prólogos, con la breve narración de su Patria, Padres, Progresos, y estudiosas tareas” [Prelude, similar to a prologue, with a brief narration of her homeland, parents, progress, and studious works] ([122]). Not surprisingly, the Jesuit’s discussion of Sor Juana’s progresos, or steps taken towards religious perfection, reaches a climax in his recounting of her conversion begun perhaps in 1693, and her death two years later. In his retelling of the nun’s life, Calleja suggests that Sor Juana’s fervid devotion to God, expressed in part by means of an arduous religious calling, peaks not at her profession as a nun or even earlier, as might be expected, but rather when she is reconciled with her confessor Núñez in 1694. The censor’s examination of Sor Juana’s devotions, as expressed in her virtues, asceticism, and suffering, culminate in his account of her life following her retreat from the public literary world. It is here that one can observe Sor Juana as a mujer fuerte who excels in all virtues and whose charity and acts of penance are meant to instruct other women. Choosing a series of battle images to describe what he terms as Sor Juana’s inner war (replete with the necessary weapons, sins, and blood spilling), Calleja marks the calendar year of 1693 as the point when the nun, with the help of God’s grace, reformed her ways ([31]). This new Sor Juana, whom Calleja goes so far as to call “ya otra,” [now another] decides henceforth to perform her duties as a cloistered nun with the utmost of care, abiding by even the strictest rules in return for the gifts she has received from God ([33]). Calleja informs his readers of the nun’s decision to initiate her internal warfare by performing a general confession of all her past sins, “para declararse la guerra, y conquistar del todo a sí misma” [in order to declare war on herself and to vanquish herself] ([31]). Following this, she presents the Tribunal Divino [Divine court] with “una súplica en forma de Petición Causídica,” [an entreaty in the form of a holy petition], writes her Docta explicación del misterio [de la purísima concepción de María] [Learned Explanation of the Mystery of the Immaculate Conception] and a retraction, her Protesta, signed in her own blood, all three of which are published within the pages of the Fama. Sor Juana’s penitential writing, especially her substitution of blood for ink, in turn become important themes for her panegyrists of the

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Fama, who use it to extol her renewed religious fervor without losing sight of her role as a writer.13 Calleja sustains the war imagery in the vita by describing how Sor Juana carried out her spiritual quest by means of asceticism and physical mortification. “Armada de esta desnudez, entró en campo consigo, y fue la victoria más continua, que consiguió de sí, no querer entre sus hermanas religiosas parecer muy espiritual en nada, procurándolo ser en todo […]” [Armed with this nakedness, she began the battle with herself and her victory was such that she wished not to appear spiritual among her sisters, but rather to be so entirely] ([32]). In fact, according to Calleja, once the nun purged herself of her worldly belongings—donated so that alms could be given to the poor—her cell contains but “tres libritos de devoción, y muchos silicios, y disciplinas” [three devotional books and many “switches” and “disciplines” [instruments used for self-flagellation]] ([32]). Like their virtues, penance and mortification were qualities that distinguished exceptional women from the masses given that from the late medieval period on, mortification and self-flagellation were understood as a means of getting closer to God (Bynum 1987, 295) and of proving great humility (Weinstein and Bell 1982, 150). It follows then that the Jesuit includes his well-known statement regarding the severity of Sor Juana’s asceticism at this juncture of the narrative. When asked by other Jesuits how the nun is progressing in her quest for spiritual perfection, Calleja cites Núñez as responding: “‘Es menester mortificarla para que no se mortifique mucho, porque no pierda la salud y se inhabilite, porque Juana Inés no corre en la virtud, sino vuela” [It is necessary to mortify her so that she does not mortify herself too much, resulting in the loss of her health and well-being, because Juana Inés does not “run” in her virtue, instead she “flies”] ([33–34]). While perhaps shocking to contemporary readers, the description of a female penitent’s confessor intervening lest she cause herself harm is not unusual in the works of moral exhortation of the time. Compare, for example, the following statement from the funeral sermon of Jacinta de Vidarte: “Era tan invencible al golpe de la azotes, y tan tenaz en las disciplinas, que fue menester que su confesor la mandara que no prosiguiera en ellas, porque no enfermara […]” [So invincible was she with her blows and so tenacious in her mortification that her confessor had to order her to stop so that she not fall ill as a result] (f. 14r). 13 Calleja speaks of “dos Protestas que escribió con su sangre, sacada sin lástima, pero repasada, no sin ternura todos los días” [two retractions that she wrote with her blood, drawn without sorrow and sweetly relived every day] ([31]). One of these, as previously mentioned, is published in the Fama while the other can be consulted in OC 4.522.

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Unlike critics today, Calleja and his contemporaries did not conceive of Sor Juana’s affirmation of her faith as a “conversion.” What we see as an unmitigated rupture, or change of course, is more accurately described for them as being a desengaño, or a renewal and reawaking of faith never believed lost, inspired by God, and distinguished by acts of repentance. In other words, whereas contemporary critics mistrust the notion of a conversion in Sor Juana, searching for what they believe is the suppressed truth, the nun’s panegyrists never called into question the fact that she was a woman of profound faith, only that before 1693 she did not devote herself solely to spiritual matters. What is surprising in the case of Calleja’s narration is that women generally did not undergo spiritual desengaños. Rather, the process of conversion, insofar as it signified the dedication of one’s life to Christ, is understood to have begun at a very young age in women. Following Weinstein and Bell, Carolyn Walker Bynum has shown how the pattern of religious women’s lives reveals fewer ruptures than that of men. Instead of women’s conversions occurring as rifts, there is generally a “gradual dawning of vocation, voiced earlier and consolidated far more slowly” (1987, 293). Significantly, Calleja’s belief that Sor Juana’s desengaño was inspired by God ([31]),—its late arrival notwithstanding—permits him to interpret other events of her life as evidence of divine will. For example, he concedes that her decision to profess as a Hieronymite nun was in part inspired by her conviction to study and her aversion to marriage while at the same time describing the convent of Santa Paula as a sanctuary meant to harbor New Spain’s “pearl” ([24]).14 In fact, he traces God’s will as far back as her birth by endowing her birthplace with a sense of the embodied religiosity and moral perfection commonly found in the written lives of saints. The volcanoes, which as we saw in the previous chapter symbolize both a New World Mount Parnassus and the expansion of the Spanish empire, are for the Jesuit “benignos templos” [benign temples] which create a “celda” [cell] into which she is born. Her birth in the “celda” happily signals her destiny: “con el primer aliento la enamoró de la vida monástica, y la enseñó que eso era vivir, respirar aires de clausura” [she was enamored with a monastic life from the time she took her first breath and she learned that to breathe the air of enclosure was to live life fully] ([16]).15 14 Interestingly, the short period in the nun’s life in which she enters the convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Mexico City but leaves of her own volition due to the severity of the cult is elided from Calleja’s text. In fact, the only mention of Sor Juana’s brief stay in the Carmelite convent appears in the Latin Epitaphium of the Mexican Tiburcio Díaz Pimienta. 15 While Sor Juana’s own words in the Respuesta speak of her concern for her salvation, they do not reveal a spiritual calling articulated from the time of her birth. “Entréme religiosa, porque

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Calleja’s suggestion that grace played a more significant role in Sor Juana’s destiny, and particularly in her desengaño, than did her personal convictions is crucial to the Fama. Once Sor Juana’s “enlightenment” is understood as having been inspired by God’s grace, it can be traced through her dedication to acts of charity and obedience, her renewal of her vows signed in blood, and her asceticism. Not coincidentally, according to Catholic doctrine, the aid of grace and the cultivation of virtues are the necessary requirements for the attainment of salvation. Instead of interpreting Sor Juana’s piety as marking a rift with her former self, the nun’s contemporaries believed that her newly renewed faith denoted the measures she took in preparation for her salvation. It thus comes as little surprise that her self-sacrificing activities are retold in the Fama as one might tell an exemplary tale. After all, the retelling of deaths through exemplary narratives in the Catholic tradition reinforces the belief that individuals earn their salvation within a merit system. If one could in fact do something to aid one’s salvation prior to death, then it only made sense to publicize the way in which pious individuals confirmed the truth of Catholic teachings through their final deeds. In the words of the seventeenth-century Mexican preacher, José de Herrera, “[S]on los sepulcros de los difuntos, libros abiertos para nuestros aprovechamiento” [The sepulchers of the dead are open books for our using] (f. 1r). He is most likely referring to the Ars moriendi, a genre of practical devotional literature of the late medieval and early modern periods that aimed to comfort and instruct the laity in the art of dying. These books offered not only advice regarding good deaths but also prayers that were supposed to help in the attainment of salvation (Eire 1995, 24–25). In relaying the details of Sor Juana’s death to his readers, Calleja definitively conjoins her actions with her salvation. According to Calleja, instead of simply accepting her fate when she contracted a deadly plague from her sisters of Santa Paula, the Mexican nun shows a serene conformity faced with her impending death, actually welcoming it without fear. In fact, once the final prayers of her last rights were read, her soul joyfully returned to her aunque conocía que tenía el estado cosas (de las accesorias hablo, no de las formales), muchas repugnantes a mi genio, con todo, para la total negación que tenía al matrimonio, era lo menos desproporcionado y lo más decente que podía elegir en materia de la seguridad que deseaba mi salvación […]” (OC 4.446) [I took the veil because, although I knew I would find in religious life many things that would be quite opposed to my character (I speak of accessory rather than essential matters), it would, given my absolute unwillingness to enter into marriage, be the least unfitting and most decent state I could choose, with regard to the assurance I desired of my salvation (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 51)]. Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957) herein OC.

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Creator, “restituyó la suya, no sólo con serena conformidad, pero con vivas señales de deseo, en las manos de su Criador, a las cuatro de la mañana, en diez y siete de abril […]” [She returned her soul to the hands of her Creator not only with serene complacency, but with a vivid desire to do so, at four in the morning on April 17] ([35]). Like other model women, Sor Juana overcomes death and the fear of dying with the aid of God and in direct imitation of Christ. For example, the Mexican widow and Marquise de las Torres de Rada, Gertrudis de la Peña, who is called “la mujer fuerte” in the very title of her funeral sermon, is so “strong” that she overcomes death (“vence a la muerte”) in emulation of Christ “[quien] muere venciendo la muerte” [who dies overcoming death] (f. 15r).16 In addition to justifying posthumous tributes, the process of attaining salvation, insofar as it meant being excused from the worldly order of things, could shed new light on the (potentially sinful) life lived prior to acts of contrition and death. In essence, Calleja’s text follows the maxim stipulating that once a sinner has repented, there is no need to elaborate as to the degree of her perpetrations that took place prior to the moment of contrition. Thus, once the events of her life are seen through the filter of her conversion, Sor Juana’s morally reprehensible traits, such as her forays into the realm of male knowledge and authorship or the disobedience she showed her confessor, are either elided or transformed.17 In the case of the 16 The complete title of the sermon delivered by Juan Antonio de Oviedo reads: La muger fuerte, Sermón panegyrico, y funeral, Que en las solemnes Honras, que la Casa Professa de la Compañía de Jesús de México, celebró a su insigne bienhechora, y Patrona de su Iglesia, la muy ilustre señora Marquesa de las Torres de Rada, La Señora Doña Gertrudis de la Peña, el día 28 de Abril del año pasado de 1738 [The Strong Woman, a Panegyrical and Funerary Sermon given on behalf of the Jesuits of Mexico in solemn honor of the singular patron of their Church, the illustrious Marquise de las Torres de Rada, Lady Gertrudis de la Peña, on April 28, 1738]. Oviedo is perhaps best known for having written the vida of Sor Juana’s confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda (Mexico, 1702), and that of Saint Rosa of Lima (Madrid 1711; Mexico 1729). The Jesuit was also the nephew of the Peruvian, Luis Antonio de Oviedo, el Conde de la Granja, author of a romance written for Sor Juana and included, together with her response (romance #50), in the Fama (Alatorre 1980, 503 n. 163). I return to these texts in chapter 4. 17 Sor Juana’s dismissal of her confessor, Núñez de Miranda, documented in her recently unearthed Autodefensa espiritual, and noticeably absent from the vida, may well have been understood at the time as not simply a lack of obedience, but as an act of outright def iance. Moreover, her bold contention that she need not depend on him in order to secure her salvation challenged the importance that Tridential reforms placed on the intercessory role of the priest. “Dios […] proveerá con remedio para mi alma, que esperó en su bondad, no se perderá, aunque le falte la dirección de Vuesta Reverencia, que del cielo hacen muchas llaves, y no se estrechó a un solo dictamen, sino que hay en él infinidad de mansiones para diversos genios, y en el mundo, hay muchos teólogos, y cuando faltaran, en querer, más que en saber, consiste el salvarse, y esto más estará en mí, que en el confesor” (Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1986, 23) [For […] God […] will

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Jesuit censor, even his admiration of the nun’s intellect and poetic gift is tempered by his devout reading of her life. I alluded earlier to the fact that the Jesuit and the Mexican nun maintained a literary correspondence over the course of twenty years. Calleja’s lengthy discussion of Sor Juana’s life prior to the events of 1693, aside from the aforementioned examples, presents a prodigious, ingenious, self-taught poet and intellectual who inspired the admiration of an entire society. His vida includes epithets such as “ingeniosa,” “rara,” “prodigiosa,” “maravilla,” “nuestra poetisa única,” and “americana fénix” [“ingenious,” “unusual,” “prodigious,” “astonishing,” “our unique poetess” and “American phoenix”] to underscore the extent of her once secular fame. Moreover, Calleja calls attention to two of Sor Juana’s works, neither of which is a devotional composition: he comments on the Crisis, also known as the CA, and on her epistemological poem Primero sueño, works that speak to the nun’s erudition, skill at argumentation, and intimate sense of self. His esteem of the Crisis derives from her ability to defend an argumentative position by means of evidence, whereas the Primero sueño (for him, an imitation of Góngora’s Soledades), demonstrates her ability to make poetry of something so mundane as the digestion of food. In other instances, the vita-approbation seems to blur praise for the writer’s mind and models of faith and sanctity. For example, Calleja’s account of Sor Juana’s examination by the intellectual giants of Mexico, as told to him by the Marquis de Mancera, discloses his deference for her wit and brilliance; it also echoes Christ among the Doctors, an episode in the early life of Jesus, described in Luke 2:41–52. Among the better-known events of Sor Juana’s life is this tale of how at age seventeen she brilliantly outwitted the intellectual elite of New Spain upon being subjected to an exam organized to deduce if her intellect was “o infusa, o adquirida, o artificio, o no natural” [either infused or acquired, artificial or natural] (Calleja [21]). According to the Marquis, the young woman answered the questions put to her in the royal palace with such ease that she seemed a “galleon” who readily dismisses the challenge posed by mere “rowboats.” While not mentioned provide a means whereby my soul, which trusts in His goodness, will not go astray even if it be without Your Reverence’s guidance, for Heaven has many keys and is not restricted to one judgment only, but there are many mansions for diverse temperaments and in the world there are many theologians and even if these were lacking, salvation consists more in the desiring than in the knowing and the former depends more on me than on a confessor” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1999, 79)]. It should be noted, nonetheless, that while problematic, discords between confessors and their spiritual daughters were not uncommon. Both St. Teresa of Avila and St. Rosa of Lima, for example, had numerous confessors over the course of their lives.

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directly, it is likely the Jesuit’s readers would be familiar with the episode of twelve-year-old Christ that tells of how after Passover in Jerusalem, he remained in the temple when his parents and their traveling party left the city; when they found him days later, he was in discussion with the elders who were amazed at his learning at such a young age. One last aspect of Calleja’s approbation is worth mentioning. At the end of his discussion of her literary works, the Jesuit shifts his focus from their ebullient reception to the nun’s humility vis-à-vis her acclaim. According to the Fama’s censor, Sor Juana remained entirely oblivious to the effervescent praise she received from intellectuals throughout the Hispanic world. En estos empleos, que hacían a la Madre Juana Inés amada con veneración de personajes muy insignes, vivía ella tan ignorante de sus prendas, como si hubiera entrado entre tantas monjas, a ser no mas de una, sin querer para sí, ni prelacía, ni conveniencia, ni singularidad […]. [Mother Juana Inés lived entirely ignorant of her talent that caused her to be venerated by distinguished personages; it is as if she entered the convent as might any other nun without desiring to rise within the convent, to receive privileges, or to be singled out it any way]. ([131])

Cognizant as we are today of Sor Juana’s involvement in the propagation of her literary celebrity, the Jesuit’s argument is hard to believe. Seen within his attempt to justify her accomplishments as divinely inspired and hence as part of her exemplarity, however, his incredulous words take on new meaning. In his attempt to clear the nun’s name from the critique and controversy her works caused only a few years earlier, Calleja suggests that Sor Juana’s writings, whether challenging a Jesuit icon like Antonio de Vieira or testing the limits of the expression of self within Baroque verse, are simply expressions of God’s greatness as manifested in a lowly New World nun. Appearing at the outset of the Fama, the vida-approbation establishes a pattern for describing Sor Juana’s death and the events leading to it that resonates throughout the entire volume. Significantly, Calleja is the first among the collaborators to devise a means by which to admire and preserve in print both the exemplary and the exceptional Sor Juana. In fact, it seems likely that some of the collaborators of the posthumous volume read his text before composing their own. Not only do they cull biographical details about their tribute’s life from the vita, but they echo its strategies that prove her learned yet modest, thereby protecting her from vainglory, pride and Rumor. Consider, for example, Benetasua Gudeman/García Bustamante’s rescripting of the nun’s renown:

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Como creció tu nombre en tu retiro, Ansiosos todos verte pretendían; Pero la Religión, Madre prudente, Más te quiso observante, que aplaudida. [Your fame grew twice fold once you withdrew from the world and, despite all wanting desperately to see you, religion, a most prudent mother [i.e., guide], preferred you to be not acclaimed but observant]. ([135])18

García Bustamante assures his readers that Sor Juana’s ability to resist worldly applause was anchored to her faith, “Venciste así, y hollaste vencedora / Engañosas del Mundo las caricias […]” [Only in this way did you overcome the temptation of the deceitful praise of the world] ([134]). The anonymous author of the sonnet that appears at the end of the approbation expresses a similar sentiment. According to him (or her?), once Sor Juana recognizes the incomparable greatness of God (“lo inmenso”) she sees worldly fame for what it is: “nada” [nothing]. (“Y aun te habrás de tu fama arrepentido, / al cotejar lo inmenso con la nada” [Having compared the incomparable greatness of God to nothingness, you will have renounced your fame] ([36])).19

Paying Homage to Sor Juana’s Spiritual and Literary Desengaño The rejection of worldly fame for Mexico’s Tenth Muse after her spiritual desengaño seems to be a given for many of the authors of the Fama. In a similar vein, Sor Juana’s dedication to teaching and learning also undergoes a transformation. Her panegyrists modify the way these are understood, shifting from secular to religious appreciations. Namely, before 1693, Sor Juana might learn from everything within her reach and teach through her writing and publications (the contentious Crisis being a case in point). For many of her elegists in her Fama, however, learning implies knowledge of 18 In his introduction to the facsimile edition of the Fama, Alatorre reveals that “Marcial Benetasua Gudeman” is an anagram that foils the identity of Manuel García Bustamante (1995a, XLVIII n. 57). 19 Appearing immediately after Calleja’s approbatory text, the Jesuit introduces the sonnet by explaining that it was penned by “a friend with a talent for writing poetry” ([35]). It seems likely that the sonnet is Calleja’s own (Colombi 2018, 38). Alatorre believes Castorena to be the author. We know that Calleja wrote poetry, as evinced in the previously mentioned elegy, that was printed in Lisbon in 1701 as A la muerte del Fénix de México [Upon the Death of the Mexican Phoenix] (Alatorre 1980, 448–49 n. 48).

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God and teaching is carried out through the modeling of virtues, such as charity. As will become clear, in its posthumous variant Sor Juana’s ingenio becomes intertwined with faith and salvation through comparisons with male saints, the likes of St. John Chrysostom, and allusions to imitatio Christi. These rewrites appear alongside others that reaffirm her role as a female exemplar as a pure bride of Christ and virtuous mujer fuerte. The collaborators of the Fama knew full well that their posthumous tributes to Sor Juana depended on her soul’s salvation. At the core of a romance by the Spanish García Bustamante, for example, is the suggestion that whereas Sor Juana’s ingenio is central to her life, her virtues inform her death and, by extension, decide her salvation: Ya, Juana, que tu ingenio, y tus virtudes, Dichosas terminaron tus fatigas, Dando gozos aquellas a la muerte, Y aquel admiraciones a la vida. [Now, Juana, your cleverness and your virtues have ended your travails, the latter bringing joy to death and the former admiration to life]. ([131])

His verses echo those of Calleja’s “Elegía,” in which he sums up the significance of Sor Juana’s virtues as follows: “Esta, pues alma grande por su ciencia, / Aun fue por su virtud más elevada” [while her knowledge made her soul great, her virtue allowed it to soar] ([117]). Another revealing example comes from a Mexican panegyrist, Felipe de Santoyo García. Over the course of his lengthy romance, Santoyo lists how the worlds of knowledge, literature, music, and theology will suffer in the absence of Sor Juana only to conclude that Por piedad perdió la vida, Nuevo modo no se ignore, Que el camino que ésta vive, se cogió en las aflicciones. [Let it be known that she died from piety and that her life was assailed with afflictions]. (199)

The formulae employed by the authors of funeral sermons echo in Santoyo García as he entreats his contemporaries to rejoice in the fact that the nun has been reunited with God.

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Pero no llore ninguno, Todos al fin se alborocen De gusto, pues llevó el Cielo, Lo que toca a sus mansiones. Muestren placer, que más vive, No ha muerto Juana, señores, Sino que la trasladaron Donde en su Esposo se goce. [No one should mourn, all should rejoice as the Heavens have claimed her. Be joyful all for Juana has not died but rather has been taken to where she will be reunited with her Divine husband]. (199)

Another funeral elegy from the Fama, this one in the Spanish section, expresses a similar sentiment. In discussing the day of Sor Juana’s death, which Calleja informs us was “Dominica del Buen Pastor” [Good Shepherd Sunday] (the second Sunday after Easter), Gerónimo de Monforte y Vera argues that on this day the Divine Pastor called the intelligent but lost nun back to His flock: Conoció a su Maestro (Dios), Discípula en el diestro Prodigioso desvelo de la ciencia, Que en todas docta fue su inteligencia, Más siguiendo al Pastor, amante oveja: Vida, ciencia, esperanza, y siglo deja. [A disciple in her prodigious knowledge of science and her intelligence in all disciplines, she finally met her Teacher (God); a loving sheep, she followed the shepherd, leaving behind life, knowledge, hope and her century]. ([87])

Undoubtedly, Sor Juana’s desengaño was critical in this shift from erudition to piety. It allowed her to be more closely aligned with traditional female role models who, if they engaged in teaching, learning and publishing, certainly didn’t do so publicly. In fact, for panegyrists such as Catalina de Alfaro Fernández Córdova, a nun in the Convent of Sancti-Spiritus in Alcaraz, Spain, Sor Juana’s desengaño is directly tied to her posthumous fame. According to Catalina, her Mexican counterpart’s spiritual enlightenment lies in her realization that only the act of loving God warrants eternal fame. Catalina’s

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sonnet describes the four thousand books that once made up Sor Juana’s library as constituting her grave once she donates them for almsgiving. Instead of bringing her fame, Catalina argues, the books (and the knowledge they represent) are illusory. As the last stanza of the Spanish nun’s sonnet indicates, only those who know God are truly wise, “Y del perdido estudio en desagravio, / Practiquemos, que en esta escuela humana / Quien sabe amar a Dios solo es el sabio” [Let us study to be forgiven in this human school, for only he who learns how to love God is wise] ([95]). In a similar manner to Calleja, in deciding that her Mexican contemporary’s posthumous fame resides in her pious conversion, Catalina dramatically changes her stance vis-à-vis Sor Juana’s work. While there is no evidence of a correspondence between the two nuns, Catalina must have been among the first to read Sor Juana’s work in Spain, given that she penned a poem included in the prefatory matter of the IC.20 Unlike her sonnet in the Fama, the one included in the volume of 1689 speaks of Sor Juana as “[l]a mexicana musa, hija eminente / de Apolo […]” [the Mexican muse, eminent daughter of Apollo] in order to praise and defend her eloquence and reason from the attacks of censors who might doubt a nun who writes of courtly love (IC ([4]). Catalina is of course also protecting herself for she too is liable to be criticized as a nun who engages in writing verse. Like Calleja and Sor Catalina, editor Castorena had a literary and intellectual relationship with the nun. I have already brought this to light by examining the décima #112 in the previous chapter. While it would appear, then, that the Mexican editor dramatically changes his idea of Sor Juana— from erudite thinker to sacred phoenix—it seems more likely that it is his tactic of writing about the nun that undergoes a vital change upon her death. Castorena commends Sor Juana for being a most holy nun who repeated her vows “todos los días de su devoción, nueva idea, que podrá aplaudir el advertido, y loable ejemplo, que imitar el virtuoso” [every day, bringing about the admiration of others and serving as a worthy example for the virtuous to follow] ([124]). However, unlike Catalina, he does not wish to praise the Mexican nun only as an ascetic, virtuous, and redeemed nun. Instead, he seeks to preserve Sor Juana as an author, albeit different from the one who garnered acclaim during her lifetime. Her removal from the worldly order, as suggested by Calleja’s prefatory text, grants him the opportunity to align 20 Catalina is the only one of the Fama’s collaborators to have published a work in either the IC or the SV. According to Castorena, the décima by García de Ribadeneyra y Noguerol, given to the editor by his son Rodrigo (who also contributes a sonnet), was supposed to be included in the IC but was not. It seems that Sor Catalina was a popular candidate for writing poetic tributes given that, along with Sor Juana, she composed a poem for the Swedish poet, Sophia Elizabeth Brenner, published in Poetiske Dikter (see Kaminsky 1990, 31).

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her with traditional female paradigms while at the same time justifying and celebrating her talent as a writer and an intellectual. For Castorena, Sor Juana’s unparalleled gifts of intellect not ordinarily granted to women are due not to individual (and necessarily transgressive) impulses but rather to supernatural favors. In his interpretation of the nun’s conversion, which for him consists of a spiritual and a literary desengaño, Castorena strikes a balance between a Sor Juana who is at once an icon and an exception. An epitaph that appears in the midst of the Mexican editor’s prologue explains how for him Sor Juana’s mind (“su entendimiento”) is not only what fuels her learned and humanistic self, but also an integral part of her religious self. Her rebirth is dependent both on renewed faith and on a shift in her learning that leads her from the secular to the devout. The final stanzas of his epitaph read as follows: De su Pluma se engendra más lucido Fénix Occidental, Numen extraño, De Evangélicas luces advertido En la ciencia del bien, del mal, y daño: Que renace más bien un entendido, Cuanto engendra mejor un desengaño. [From her plume is born a more lucid occidental Phoenix, oddly inspired, aware of evangelical lights, of the science of good, evil and harm: the more one harbors an awakening, the more likely a wise person will be reborn from it]. ([129])

For Castorena, the Mexican Phoenix is not simply spiritually awakened and ultimately saved by the “evangélicas luces.” Evangelical lights also inspire her “pluma” [pen / wing], thus making her ascent both real (her actual flight towards heaven) and symbolic (the flight of her pen in writing spiritual works). In the editor’s numerous contributions to his volume, the change in the nature of the nun’s learning or “entendimiento” is expressed through a shift in the nature of her writings and in the manner she can instruct others. Upon her religious rebirth, Sor Juana does not stop writing; she redirects her attention from the writing of secular works to devotional and even theological ones. In his attempt to state his thesis regarding the redirection of her written endeavors and all the while to liken her to a model nun, Castorena employs a male paradigm. Just as women experience more gradual conversions, they do not usually experience epiphanies that inspire them to turn from the composition and study of the secular world to the holy one.

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On the other hand, male saints such as St. Jerome and St. John Chrysostom, two of Sor Juana’s spiritual fathers, were known to have abandoned the writing of secular texts in favor of theological ones. Spiritual Father of the Hieronymites, Jerome had a renowned library that included many works that he himself translated. Upon retiring to the desert, he was believed to have had a revelation in which he was accused of being a “Ciceronian not a Christian.” Jerome’s dream inspired him to renounce his pagan learning and to dedicate himself solely to scriptural studies. Sor Juana speaks of wanting to follow St. John Chrysostom’s example of persuading and instructing in her Respuesta (OC 4.472). Known for his eloquence, ascetic life, and charity, John did not go undergo a dramatic spiritual transformation like of that of Jerome. However, trained in philosophy and rhetoric from a young age it was not until he was eighteen that he was initiated in the study of literal and grammatical exegesis (New Catholic Encyclopedia 1967, 872 and 1041). Castorena is not alone in his use of this paradigmatic model. García Bustamante also recounts how Sor Juana experienced a flash that purified both her and her mind. According to this account, the nun spent her days lost in her studies, Cuando (o gran Dios) una mental centella, De las eternas lumbres desprendida, Unida a tu razón, llama suave, Tus pensamientos purificó activa. [When God released a mental spark from the eternal lights and it joined with your ability to reason, like a soft flame, it purified your thoughts]. ([133])

If for García Bustamante Sor Juana’s epiphany led to her abandonment of writing, for Castorena her desengaño prompted her sacred writings in the Fama, which he describes in the Prologue as being her “fruits,” or most extraordinary work. In the epigraph to Juan de Bolea y Alvarado’s madrigales (a brief poem that combines verses of seven and eleven syllables), the editor repeats the claim (echoed by Bolea) that this, the third volume of her works, is filled with “sazonados frutos y utilísimos desengaños” [expressive “fruits,” i.e., works, and most useful enlightenments] ([67]), in other words, that her pious works, her death and her desengaño constitute lessons for others. In the words of Bolea, Vive en la Fama heroica, que adquiriste, Lógrete el desengaño que animaste;

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Y pues tanto vivir sabia supiste, ¿Quién duda que a morir te doctrinaste? [You live in the heroic fame that you acquired and you were able to awake to the truth; given that you lived wisely, who would doubt that in dying you were indoctrinated in Christian doctrine?] ([68])21

In a series of four décimas that appear towards the end of the Fama’s prologue, Castorena employs Sor Juana’s redemptive act of signing her Protesta in blood as a means to attribute his praise of her as a writer to her religious rebirth inspired by grace. In his décimas, Castorena relies on Sor Juana’s writing of devotional works to extol her imitatio Christi, which, remarkably, is accomplished through the act of writing and not through dying as we saw it to be in Calleja’s approbation. With this, the editor takes the idea of the saintly male model one step further by comparing Sor Juana to the ultimate exemplar, Christ himself. Using a series of bird images, Castorena replaces the nun’s usual phoenix epithet with that of the pelican to underline her exemplary behavior expressed through her devotion to the Immaculate Conception. Despite its formulaic nature, the nun’s acknowledgment, in both the Docta explicación and her Protesta, of her willingness to shed her blood to uphold her vow to defend the truth of the Immaculate Conception and affirm her devotion to God and Church, are important indications of her own personal redemption. In her repentant Protesta, Sor Juana cites the significance of Christ’s deed of spilling his blood: “[Y] me duelo íntimamente de haber ofendido a Dios […] en cuya bondad espero que me ha de perdonar mis pecados sólo por su infinita misericordia y por la preciosísima sangre que derramó por redimirnos […]” [I am pained by the thought that I offended God […] whose kindness I hope will allow Him to forgive my sins given his infinite mercy and his precious blood that he spilled in order to redeem mankind] (OC 4.519). Consequently, Castorena’s first décima reads: Teñida de sangre se lee Desplumar tu devoción Las alas del corazón, Para escribir con más Fe: Al ave de Gracia fue, Quien dio vuelo a tanto ardor, 21 According to the Diccionario de Autoridades (1963), “doctrinar” can be synonymous with “enseñar” (to teach), especially in regard to the explication of Christian doctrine.

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Y en las plumas del fervor Te construyó su inocencia, Como a Fénix de la ciencia, Pelícano de su amor. [We read of how the wings of the heart were deplumed of devotion and tainted with blood; in order to write with more faith, it was the bird of grace who allowed such ardor; and your innocence was constructed in “plumesquills” of fervor; as the Phoenix is to science, so is the pelican to love]. ([127])

Like the pelican, one of the allegories of Christ (Cirlot 1994, 356), Sor Juana metaphorically wrenches the feathers from her breast (“se despluma”) in an act of sacrifice. While Jesus’ sacrifice was carried out to redeem mankind (like the pelican, he “feeds” his offspring [man] with his own blood), the author of the décimas believes that the nun performs this selfless act to “write with more faith.” Namely, that is, to write her renewal of her vows (the Protesta) and her reverence of Mary’s virgin birth (the Docta explicación). In another sonnet, Pedro Alfonso Moreno interprets this same act as proof that Sor Juana did not succumb to worldly applause: “Aun por el timbre de lauros que adquiriste, / El corazón virgineo te rasgaste, / Y la fe con tu sangre defendiste” [In spite of the multitude of accolades, you tore open your virginal heart and defended your faith with your blood] ([47]). Castorena also uses a bird image to speak of the nun’s religious renewal or desengaño. In the second décima he writes, “El rojo licor te pinta, / Y eres tú misma la tinta / Para renovar tu pluma” [the red liquid [blood] paints you and you yourself form the ink to renew your quill] ([128]). If Christ’s blood is spilled to redeem mankind, Sor Juana’s blood works as ink and moves her plume/writing. His verses refer in fact to a double renewal—that of her faith and that of her devotionally inspired writings—given that “pluma” is both the instrument used for writing and, according to Saint Gregory, a symbol of contemplation (Cirlot 1994, 368). The author further extends the feather-bird imagery to include divine Grace (the “ave de gracia” [bird of grace]), the force that propelled Sor Juana’s devout “flight” to God. Finally, the volume’s editor concludes that in her imitation of the pelican, the writer both extols Mary and allows (posthumous) Fame to preserve her own image as one of illumination and purity, as expressed in the white color of the page on which she writes her name in blood. A María se atribuya La gloria, y póstuma arguya

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La fama en bronce, y en cincel, Quedar más blanco el papel, Por tener la sangre tuya. [The Glory is thanks to Mary and posthumously does fame argue with bronze and chisel that the page is whiter still for being stained with your blood]. ([128])

Castorena’s words from his prologue elucidate his esteem of Sor Juana’s skill at composing not only formulaic declarations of faith such as her Protesta [oath], but also devotional works intended for her fellow religious. Unlike Calleja before him, the Mexican editor purposefully chooses to praise those compositions that he was able to include in his volume. While contemporary critics have until recently overlooked Sor Juana’s devotional exercises, Ejercicios de la Encarnación and Ofrecimientos de los Dolores, due to their seemingly formulaic nature and practical design, Castorena appreciates them for reasons that may surprise us.22 Without overlooking their religiosity, he applauds these works as if they were treatises, commenting on the author’s exegesis, her use of authorities, and the appropriateness of her Scholastic and theological terminology. Sobresaliendo a esta delicadez, que ninguna de las obras aquí impresas, es de las que se dicen frescuras, en que lo prudente solicita disimulos a lo profano; antes si la Novena de la Encarnación contiene entre la Sagrada Escritura, mucha y bien entendida, breve resumen del Tratado de Opere sex dierum, con autoridades varias de Santos Padres, y Doctores, unas Meditaciones verdaderamente afectuosas: los Ofrecimientos del Rosario de los Dolores de Nuestra Señora, unas Deprecaciones tiernamente fervorosas: En las Protestas de la Fe, y Voto de la Concepción Purísima, donde sirvió [de] tinta su sangre, se explica con rigurosa propriedad de términos Escolásticamente Teológicos […]. [Better than all the other works included here because discretion is superior to the profane; much as the novena of the Incarnation contains much intelligent writing on sacred themes, we find a brief treaty of the Opere sex dierum that cites 22 Despite suffering neglect in contemporary criticism (see Sabat-Rivers (1990), Montañez (1995), and Wray (2005) for the notable exceptions), the importance of Sor Juana’s religious exercises is reflected in the number of times that they were published during and shortly after her lifetime. In fact, only the Ofrecimientos were published both in Mexico and in Spain in the years that followed her death. While critics do not agree as to the number of imprints (if any) published before 1691, Abreu lists five editions printed in Mexico 1735, 1736, 1755, 1767 and 1804 (1935, 253).

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the Church Fathers and other authorities, most sincere Ofrecimientos, fervently sweet self-deprecation in the Protestas de la Fe, y Voto de la Concepción Purísima, in which she used ink made from her blood to explain Scholastic Theology]. ([124])

Castorena’s mujer fuerte is a virtuous writer of repentant and devotional works, but a learned writer nonetheless. In his discussion of Sor Juana’s charity, the editor’s focus shifts from the significance of her writing to her role as a teacher. While the nun’s blood-signed documents are impressive indications of spiritual rebirth—especially in a renowned writer—the action that provoked the most recognition from the Fama’s collaborators was the donation of her cherished library, already mentioned by Sor Catalina. Purported to include more than four thousand volumes, Sor Juana’s collection was justifiably well-known among her contemporaries. For them, the nun’s choice to sell her much-loved “amigos” in order to give alms to the poor entailed an act of unparalleled charity. According to Calleja, “[S]u quitapesares era su Librería, donde se entraba a consolar con cuatro mil amigos, que tantos eran los libros de que la compuso, casi sin costa, porque no había quien imprimiese, que no la contribuyese uno, como a la Fe de Erratas” [Her consolation was her library where she would go to console herself with four thousand friends, which was the number of books she owned, practically without having had to spend on them as everyone who published would give her a copy, much like one included an errata] ([30]). Indeed, although admired as the mujer fuerte who excels in all virtues, Sor Juana’s charity is described by Calleja as “su virtud reina,” her supreme virtue ([25]). So great was her charity, in fact, that according to the Jesuit, she finally fell ill thanks to it—“enfermó de caritativa”—having contracted a deadly plague while tending to her fellow Hieronymite sisters ([34]). In addition to proving that she excelled in charity, the act of tending to the ill also implied a disposition to compassion and nurturing, two qualities traditionally associated with female behavior. While charity is not necessarily a “feminine” virtue, women’s charity is usually distinguished from that of men in that they give not things but of themselves. Sor Juana does both: she donates her books and gives of herself when tending to her fellow nuns. Among the collaborators in the Fama who chose Sor Juana’s charity as the theme of their elegies, two anonymously published poems, a series of octavas23 by an author referred to only as “un aficionado a sus obras,” 23 A metric combination of eight lines of hendecasyllables, in which the f irst six rhyme alternately and the last two form a rhyming couplet.

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[an admirer of her work] and a romance by “un apasionado de sus obras,” [an enthusiast of her work] exemplify the relationship between charity, desengaño, salvation, and exemplarity. Given the fact that both compositions share Castorena’s interpretation of Sor Juana’s conversion, it is most likely that he is their author.24 Both poems argue that in rendering her books into alms the nun uses her knowledge and learning for good. The author of the octavas proposes that once Sor Juana studies only Christian doctrine, she no longer needs her courtly or secular knowledge (“estudios cortesanos”). Más ya de amor en la doctrina muda Rasgos admira de más alto anhelo, Pues pasan los estudios cortesanos Desde su gran razón hasta sus manos. [Yet again did she impress with her eloquence, for given her love for doctrine did her courtly knowledge move from her mind to her hands]. ([99–100])

Seconding the octavas, the author of the romance uses the same argument—that she teaches more with her hands (by giving) than with her mind (by learning)—to contend that Sor Juana’s charity makes her a didactic exemplar. Dejando el libro en las manos Del propio conocimiento, Enseñas más, pues descubres De la Caridad los senos. […] Te excediste en la enseñanza En el penúltimo esfuerzo, Pues sirvieron tus doctrinas De racional testamento. Con tus libros enseñaste; Humanas Artes; sin ellos, a los discretos avisas La teología del Cielo. 24 Alatorre is convinced that Castorena penned the romance and suggests that the similarities between that composition and the octavas point to the Fama’s editor as the author of both poems (Alatorre 1980, 440, 441 n. 29, 496 n. 148).

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[You teach more leaving your books in the hands of knowledge itself and finding yourself in charity’s bosom; Your next to last teachings were the finest as your doctrines (i.e., your books) served as a rational testament. With your books you taught the Human Arts, without them you taught the discreet Theology of the Heavens]. ([142])

For Castorena, Sor Juana is a natural teacher who needs only her mind and not her books to teach, be it humane letters and science or the “theology of the heavens.” The Mexican nun’s act of charity is thus more complex than suggested by Calleja and Sor Catalina, who claim that she “bought” her salvation by means of her generosity. According to the author of the approbation, the Tenth Muse emptied her cell of all her possessions “con que socorriendo a muchos pobres, compró paciencia para ellos, y Cielo para sí” [in aiding the poor, she bought them patience and salvation for herself] ([32]). Castorena coincides with the Spanish Jesuit who believe that Sor Juana’s charitable actions shortly before her death link them directly to her salvation, but he insists on adding that her mind, as expressed in her writings (i.e., her teachings), also play a vital role in her attainment of posthumous fame. Sor Juana’s role as a teacher appears in the work of another Spanish collaborator to the Fama. While Pedro Alfonso Moreno shares Castorena’s belief that the nun’s learning is integral to her religious persona, he ultimately reaches a more traditional conclusion than does the editor. The disparity between their interpretations points to how Sor Juana’s contemporaries continuously struggled to adapt her individuality to established views of feminine behavior. Moreno’s sonnet attempts to explain that Sor Juana can be “santa y docta” [saintly and learned] by comparing her to a male saint, John the Baptist. The sonnet hinges on the notion that Saint John’s three crowns, granted to him for being a virgin, a martyr, and a doctor, reflect the three vows of the religious—chastity, poverty, and obedience. The comparison lies in the fact that Sor Juana is “Virgen, a religión siempre anhelaste; / Mártir, si pobre, aun libros repartiste; / Doctor, con tus escritos enseñaste” [A Virgin who always sought out religion; a martyr who despite being poor gave away her books and a doctor who taught others with her works] ([47]). Thus, by normalizing the nun’s act of teaching through the comparison with the male saint, Moreno allows her to circumvent the violation of trespassing on an exclusively male domain. In this case, however, Sor Juana’s role as a teacher, or “doctor” in Moreno’s words, is robbed of its potentially empowering significance when the elegist writes that “[…] aun blasonas, / sabiendo obedecer, de mayor ciencia” [your learning was all

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the more impressive as you knew how to obey] ([47]). According to both Moreno and Castorena (the latter writes an explanatory epigraph to the sonnet), Sor Juana’s obedience is exemplary given that she donated her worldly belongings and wrote her Protesta at the behest of Father Núñez de Miranda. Despite being understood as divinely inspired, Sor Juana’s charity was also intimately tied to her obedience of her spiritual director. Núñez de Miranda, with whom the nun was reconciled in 1694 following her dismissal of him in 1682, was believed to have encouraged the donation of her worldly belongings.25 The nun’s retreat from the world was understood by her contemporaries to comply with the wishes of her confessor, who was convinced that the best way to scorn the world was to not step foot in it (“el modo mejor de despreciar el mundo, era no pisarle [sic]”) (Núñez 1712, [33]).

Conclusions By offering an image of Sor Juana unwavering in her virtues, the collaborators of the Fama cited throughout this chapter seem to equate her with a quintessential female role model. Yet the true mujer fuerte is also strong in reason and intellect—let us not forget Castorena’s definition of the woman from the Book of Proverbs: she who is “fuerte en virtud, religión, y sabiduría” [she who excels in virtue, religion and wisdom] ([126], emphasis added). As such, the “strong woman” necessarily disqualifies herself from being an exemplar who can be emulated. During the Counter-Reformation, a distinction had to be drawn between those women whose life stories molded seamlessly to those of ideal holy subjects and others whose exceptional ability allowed them to trespass on what were exclusively male domains. For Mary Elizabeth Perry, since all women deviated from the male norm, they existed “in an ambiguous area where social rules can be played with, questioned, or waived” (1990, 9). In the Fama, this waving of seemingly unwavering rules results in the paradox of the woman who exists as the inimitable exemplar. Sor Juana’s panegyrists relate her behavior deemed exemplary, such as her charity, obedience, asceticism, and pious death, in such a way that other women can translate it into domestic and private terms thereby helping to maintain the social status quo. It is thus in its attempt to regulate feminine behavior that the Fama imitates the goals of funeral sermons and vidas. Conversely, in those instances in which the nun and writer proved able to 25 The Carta de Monterrey (1682), discovered in 1980, reveals that Sor Juana fired her confessor for having publicly chastised her for her ever-increasing renown (Egan 207).

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teach, write, or reflect beyond what was understood to be feasible in woman, or to experience a traditionally male desengaño, her morally inspired elegists attributed these actions to God’s grace. Moralists believed intelligence to be so dependent on God that they sustained that just as He granted it, He could take it away. The censor Castilblanque, for example, writes: “No nació Salomón docto, ni murió sabio; porque por sus culpas le multó Dios con ignorancias. Adviértelo San Ambrosio” [Saint Ambrose tells us that Salomon was not born a wise man, nor did he die a sage because God punished his sins with ignorance] ([109]). By providing the behavior deemed dangerous in woman with a divine explanation, the likes of Calleja, Santoyo, and García Bustamante disallowed the chosen one to be exemplary of her sex. In speaking of women graced with the gift of prophecy, the Renaissance theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli sums up the paradox as follows: “[D]ivine gifts are not conferred in order to be hidden away, but so that they may promote the edification of the Church as a whole. But it should not be deduced from this that that which God does in some particular case of privilege should be made by us a model of behaviour” (qtd. in Maclean 1980, 21).26 Perhaps the ultimate example of the paradox in question is the Virgin Mary. While she embodies certain moral values that are consistent with the social role of women, the immaculately conceived mother of God is too perfect and hence too remote to ever serve as an imitable model. Notably, the mujer fuerte is also a feature of Marian writing. In fact, Maclean notes that some theologians see the depiction of the femme forte in the Book of Proverbs as a prefiguration of the Virgin herself (Mclean 1977, 74). Similarly, God’s grace transforms Sor Juana into a more traditional female figure—a medium for divine intervention, but her uncommon intelligence, that is, her gift, remains inimitable. Ironically enough, as they deal with the fissures between theory and praxis in women’s behavior to attempt to dissipate the contradictions, the Fama’s collaborators cited in this chapter are forced to turn to paradox. Upon considering Sor Juana’s often contradictory complexities—she is worldly yet cloistered, learned yet unschooled, employs reasoned knowledge yet is 26 The notion of the inimitable exemplar also appears in Torremocha’s analysis of a seventeenthcentury Spanish husband’s account of his perfect wife’s life: “El propio escritor no oculta que el modelo propuesto, y del que su mujer es una clara representación, es imposible de seguir (‘Maravilla rara. Exemplo de gobierno si puede ser exemplo lo que no es imitable’) y solo el auxilio divino permite alcanzar ese grado de perfección en lo material y en lo espiritual.” [The writer does not hide the fact that the proposed model, of which his wife is a clear example, is impossible to imitate (‘Strange marvel. Example of comportment if one can be an example of the inimitable’), and only divine intercession can allow for such a degree of perfection in both material and spiritual qualities] (Torremocha 2016, 251).

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a woman—it is not surprising that her elegists describe her by means of what in her time constituted oxymorons: the mujer fuerte and the sacred phoenix. By manipulating Sor Juana’s religious conversion for the purpose of ensuring her fame posthumously, these panegyrists hope to promote the nun as an exemplar while knowing full well that her genius is inimitable. A romance by the Spanish noblewoman, Doña Francisca de Echavarri, Señora de la Villa de Aramayona de Mújica assures that Sor Juana will forever endure in her writings, but cannot serve as an exemplar: Mujer naciste a ser pasmo Tú de todas las Deidades, Y no envidia, porque nunca Se envidia lo inimitable. [Born a woman you caused wonder and not envy in all the deities because the inimitable is never the cause of envy]. ([94])

Indeed, she concludes her romance by adopting humility topics—one of Sor Juana’s well-known literary strategies—to emphasize further still the gaping gulf between herself and the Tenth Muse: Perdona el que en tus primores Mi débil expresión hable; Pues sólo en el sexo pude Ser, Juana, tu semejante. [Forgive my unworthy words that praise your talent, for only in my sex do I resemble you, Juana]. ([94])

Almost all of the contributors to the Fama whom I have discussed in this chapter, including those who imitate the sentiments of the vida and the funeral sermon most closely or use the model of male religious or imitatio Christi in an attempt to normalize her endeavors, wish to elegize the nun for being an original thinker and talented writer. Constantly maneuvering between their two objectives, the panegyrists who depend on Sor Juana’s religious conversion as a means of justifying either her religious rebirth or her literary one, present an image of her grounded in the didactic religious beliefs of the seventeenth century but not free from contradiction. In spite of the fact that she allegedly spent her last years lost in prayer, her attention turned only to God, Sor Juana’s exceptional mind and talent remain a mystery to

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her contemporaries. Perhaps no one better expresses the difficulty that the laudators of the Fama grappled with in the face of Sor Juana’s incongruities than Francisca de Echavarri: Un Monstruo de perfecciones En ti admiren, y en ti alaben, Que definirte tú puedes Sola por contrariedades. [Others admire and praise you as a monster of perfection who can be defined by you alone and only by way of contradictions]. ([93])

The panegyrists of the Fama that I have studied in this chapter refuse to divorce Sor Juana’s soul from her work despite any contradictions that may exist therein. According to sociologists Weinstein and Bell, “a society’s heroes [including the saint] reflect, through antithesis and projection, its real condition and its longings” (1982, 8). True to their Baroque sensibility, Sor Juana’s contemporaries’ representation of her as an inimitable exemplar is less concerned with mimesis than with offering an image of how they wished her to be, inspired by God and free of conflicts. If the nun was self-sacrificing and virginal, it thus followed that her literary endeavors could not be but God-given gifts. Hence the Fama’s collaborators openly praise a woman deserving of a posthumous fame born of extraordinary faith who endures in her own literary works. For the purposes of the elegists discussed in this chapter, Sor Juana’s posthumous fame depends on her literary production constituting a natural extension of her moral perfection. In speaking in his prologue of how Sor Juana’s works define her, Castorena articulates their belief without his customary hyperbole: “la pluma es pauta del natural, se trasuntan insensiblemente al papel las facciones del alma” [The pen is the tool which copies the exterior while the qualities of the soul are imperceptibly copied onto the paper] ([123]). The apparent contradiction or paradox of the inimitable female exemplar—at once a paradigmatic model and yet not easily emulated—is perhaps confusing for contemporary readers, yet helped make Sor Juana more legible in her own time. Indeed, all of the models considered in this chapter allow for her life to be rewritten posthumously according to customary, conventional, scripts, whether it be along the lines of virtuous contemporaries the likes of Jacinta and Agustina, male and female saints, the mujer fuerte, or Christ himself. Positing the Mexican phoenix as a sacred one, or as a “monster of perfection,” takes some inventiveness, but clearly was a route her panegyrists wanted to take, especially after following the lead of the influential Jesuit

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censor, Father Calleja. The result is not only a New World Tenth Muse made legible, but also made credible as worthy of posthumous fame according to the moral impulse of her early modern world. As powerful as this impulse was, however, it was not alone. While in this chapter Sor Juana is aligned with paradigms, in the next she is championed precisely for her unusual, indeed peerless, stature as an American treasure, a manly-woman with a sexless soul or a wondrous New World monster.

Appendix Table 3.  Contributors and Texts Cited in the Chapter Contributor

Title

Anonymous (“De un aficionado a sus obras” [By an enthusiast of her work]

Volume

More

Octavas “A la piadosa acción [octaves] de vender sus libros la Poetisa para socorrer a los pobres con su producto” [To the Poet’s pious action of selling her books to give alms to the poor]

FAMA

Alatorre attributes the poem to Castorena (1980, 496 n. 148)

Diego de Calleja

Approbation

prose

FAMA

influential Spanish Jesuit, corresponded with Sor Juana and believed to be her first “biographer”

Diego de Calleja

Elegía

elegy in verse FAMA

Anonymous

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

romance

FAMA

romance

FAMA

Romance en arte mayor Marcial Benetasua Gudeman/ Manuel García Bustamante Felipe de Santoyo García

romance

Form

included at the end of the Approbation; attributed to both Castorena and Calleja Alatorre discovered the anagram of this Spanish elegist

among the best-known Mexican poets; was the speaker of Mexico City’s Audiencia and a popular contributor to occasional works devoted to holy themes and published in New Spain; anthologized in both Poetas novohispanos (1945) and Poesía novohispana (2010)

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Gerónimo de Monforte y Vera

elegía funeral

funeral elegy

FAMA

Spanish elegist

sonnet

FAMA

a nun in the Convent of Sancti-Spiritus in Alcaraz

sonnet Catalina de Alfaro Fernández Córdova Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

“Prólogo al que leyere” [Prologue to the reader]

prose

FAMA

followed by a second prose intervention later in the volume (see appendix B)

Juan Castorena Ursúa

epitafio

epitaph

FAMA

included within the Prologue

Juan de Bolea y Alvarado

madrigales

brief poem FAMA that combines verses of seven and eleven syllables

Juan Castorena Ursúa

décimas

a series of four décimas

FAMA

Anonymous

romance

romance

FAMA

sonnnet

FAMA

Pedro Alfonso sonnet Moreno Jacinto Muñoz de Castilblanque

Parecer

prose

FAMA

Francisca de Echavarri

romance

romance

FAMA

Tiburcio Díaz Pimienta

epitafio

epitaph in Latin

FAMA

gentleman servant of the Marquise de Belmonte y Menasalvas

by “un apasionado de sus obras,” [an enthusiast of her work]; appears just prior to the décima by the “distinguished noblewoman” Spanish elegist Spanish religious censor; theologue of the Nunciature of Spain, Archbishop of Manila and Bishop of Cotrón (today Gelves, Spain) Spanish noblewoman, Señora de la Villa de Aramayona de Mújica Mexican elegist; Abogado de la Real Audiencia de México y Colegial en el insigne Colegio de San Ramón Nonato [solicitor of the Royal Audience of Mexico and member of the noteworthy College of Saint Ramón Nonato]

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Sor Juana

Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días antes de la purísima encarnación del hijo de Dios Jesu Christo Señor Nuestro

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Sor Juana

Ofrecimientos para el santo rosario de quince misterios que se ha de rezar el día de los dolores de Nuestra Señora la Virgen María

prose

FAMA

spiritual exercises for nuns

Sor Juana

Protesta […] que hizo de su fe […] al tiempo de abandonar los estudios humanos […]

prose

FAMA

Sor Juana

Docta explicación del misterio y voto que hizo de defender la purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora […]

prose

FAMA

[Protest made of her faith at the time in which she abandoned worldly studies] [Solemn Declaration of Faith], dated March of 1694 [Erudite explanation of the mystery and vow that she took to defend the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady]

Sor Juana

Petición […] que […] presenta al Tribunal Divino […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas […]

prose

FAMA

[Petition that she presented to the divine tribunal to plead for her sins to be forgiven]

Sor Juana

romance #56 (en que expresa los efectos del Amor divino)

romance

FAMA

[in which she expresses the effects of Divine love]

Sor Juana

romance #57 (al mismo intento)

romance

FAMA

[On the same subject]

Sor Juana

romance #58 (en que califica de amorosas acciones todas las de Cristo […]”)

romance

FAMA

[in which she deems all of Christ’s acts loving]

Sor Juana

sonnet #210 (al retardarse San Juan de Sahagún en consumir la Hostia Consagrada, por aparecer en ella Cristo visiblemente)

sonnet

FAMA

[where Saint John of Sahagún delays in consuming the Holy Host as Christ was visible in it]

Sor Juana

sonnet #208 (a una pintura de Nuestra Señora de muy excelente pincel)

sonnet

FAMA

[to a painting of Our Lady by an excellent painter]

141

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Contributor

Title

Sor Juana

Form

Volume

More

Traducción que hace Sor prose Juana de una oración pública en Latín por la santidad del Papa Urbano VIII

FAMA

a translation of a public oration in Latin given by Pope Urban VIII

Sor Juana

Glosa de una cuarteta de quatrain Don Luis de Góngora

FAMA

Luis Tineo de Morales

Approbation

prose

IC

gloss of a quartet by Góngora, which won her a prize in Mexico City’s literary competition of 1682 Spanish religious censor to the IC; potentially a powerful protector of the nun’s and a friend of the Marquise de la Laguna

Anonymous

prologue

prose

IC

sonnet Catalina de Alfaro Fernández Córdova

sonnet

IC

this Spanish nun was the only panegyrist of the FAMA to also write in the IC

Ambrosio de la Cuesta

prose

SV

Spanish cleric of Seville and elegist of the SV

Elegy

Sources: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995c; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995d

Works Cited Abreu Gómez, Ermilo. 1934. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Bibliografía y Biblioteca. Monografías bibliográficas mexicanas 29. México: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. 1996. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Alatorre, Antonio. 1980. “Para leer la Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 29(2): 428–508. DOI 10.24201/ nrfh.v29i2.1755. Alatorre, Antonio. 1995. “Introducción.” In Fama y Obras póstumas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ix–lxvii. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau. 1989. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Biblia Sacra. 1983. Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Bilinkoff, Jodi. 1983. “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila.” In Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800).

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Edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, 83–100. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bocángel y Unzueta, Gabriel. 1946. Obras de Don Gabriel Bocángel y Unzueta. Edited by Rafael Benítez Claros. 2 vols. Biblioteca de antiguos libros hispánicos. Madrid: Imprenta de S. Aguirre. Borja Gómez, Jaime Humberto. 2007. “Historiografía y hagiografía: vidas ejemplares y escritura de la historia en el Nuevo Reino de Granada.” Fronteras de la Historia 12: 53–78. https://revistas.icanh.gov.co/index.php/fh/article/view/469/397. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. 1969. La Elegía funeral en la poesía española. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Cervantes, Miguel de. 1985. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by Martín de Riquer. 2 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud. Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. 1994. Diccionario de símbolos. Barcelona: Editorial Labor. Colombi, Beatriz. 2018. “Diego Calleja y la Vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Vestigios y silencios en el archivo sorjuanino.” Revista Exlibris (7): 24–44. Delooz, Pierre. 1983. “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church.” In Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History. Edited by Stephen Wilson, 189–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diccionario de Autoridades. 1963. Real Academia Española. Ed. Facsim. Biblioteca románica hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Edel, Leon. 1987. Writing Lives: Principia Biographica. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Egan, Linda. 2002. “Sor Juana’s Life and Work: Open Texts.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 18(1): 205–16. DOI 10.1525/msem.2002.18.1.205. Eich, Jennifer. 2004. The Other Mexican Muse: Sor María Anna Agueda de San Ignacio, 1695–1756. New Orleans: University Press of the South. Eire, Carlos, M. N. 1995. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Gilberto, Domenico. 1642. La Fama trionfante: Panegírico alla bellísima, castissima, e dottisima signora Anna María Schurman. Paris. Glantz, Margo. 1995. “Prólogo.” In Segundo volumen de sus obras, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ix–lxxvii. México: Facultad y Letras, UNAM. (1692). Gunnarsdöttir, Ellen. 2004. Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herrera, Joseph de. 1684. Sermón funeral en las honras de la muy noble señora Doña Agustina Picazo de Hinojosa, Viuda de el Capitán Luis Vázquez de Medina, Celebradas en el Convento Imperial de Predicadores de México de 1684. México: Juan de Ribera.

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Holler, Jacqueline. 2005. “Escogidas plantas”: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601. New York: Columbia University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (vol. 4 edited by Alberto G. Salceda). 4 vols. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1986. Autodefensa espiritual. Monterrey: Impresora Monterrey. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994a. The Answer/La Respuesta. Edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995a. Carta athenagórica de la madre Juana Ynés de la Cruz […]. Edited by Elías Trabulse. Ed. Facsim. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex. (1690). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995c. Inundación castálida. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1689). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995d. Segundo volumen de sus obras. Edited by Margo Glantz. Ed. Facsim. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. (1692). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1996. Carta Serafina de Cristo. Toluca, México: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura. (1691). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1999. “Carta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a su confesor: autodefensa espiritual.” In Madres del verbo / Mothers of the Word: Early Spanish American Women Writers: A Bilingual Anthology. Edited by Nina M. Scott, 61–70. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kaminsky, Amy Katz. 1990. “Nearly New Clarions: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Pays Homage to a Swedish Poet.” In In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Edited by Noël Valis and Carol Maier, 31–53. Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press. Lavrin, Asunción. 1978. “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives. Edited by Asunción Lavrin, 23–59. Contributions in Women’s Studies, 3. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Lavrin, Asunción. 1991. “Unlike Sor Juana? The Model Nun in the Religious Literature of Colonial Mexico.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Stephanie Merrim, 61–85. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Maclean, Ian. 1977. Women Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610–1652. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maclean, Ian. 1980. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mayer, Thomas F. and D. R. Woolf, eds. 1995. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. McKnight, Katherine Joy. 1997. The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671–1742. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Montañez, Carmen L. 1995. “La literatura mariana y los Ejercicios devotos de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Revista Iberoamericana 61 (172–73): 623–30. https://revista-iberoamericana.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/Iberoamericana/article/ download/6365/6541. Myers, Kathleen A. 1990. “Sor Juana’s respuesta: Rewriting the vitae.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14(3): 459–71. https://0-www-jstor-org. biblioteca-ils.tec.mx/stable/27762766. Myers, Kathleen A. 1993. Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre María de San José (1656–1719). Hispanic Studies Textual Research and Criticism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Myers, Kathleen A. 2003. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. New Catholic Encyclopedia. 1967. New York: McGraw-Hill. Núñez de Miranda, Antonio. 1712. Distribución de las obras ordinarias, y extraordinarias del día; para hazerlas perfectamente, conforme al estado de las señoras religiosas […]. México: Viuda de Miguel de Ribera Calderón. Oviedo, P. Juan Antonio de. 1739. La muger fuerte, Sermón panegyrico, y funeral, Que en las solemnes Honras, que la Casa Professa de la Compañía de Jesús de México, celebró a […] la muy ilustre señora Marquesa de las Torres de Rada, La Señora Doña Gertrudis de la Peña, el día 28 de Abril del año passado de 1738. Llanto de las piedras En la sentida muerte de la mas generosa Peña. Debidas honras, y solemnes Exequias […] de […] la Señora Doña Gertrudis de la Peña […]. Edited by Francisco X. Carranza. México: en la Imprenta de D. Francisco Xavier Sánchez. Paz, Octavio. 1982. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Peña, Margarita. 1995. “Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora y Diego Calleja, biógrafos de monjas.” In Cuadernos de Sor Juana: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el siglo XVII. Edited by Margarita Peña, 421–40. México: UNAM. Perry, Elizabeth. 1997. “Monjas Coronadas: Mexican Portraits of Religious Professions.” Brown University, Providence, RI. 10 Mar. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. 1990. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ross, Kathleen. 1993. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1990. “Ejercicios de la encarnación: sobre la imagen de María y la decisión final de Sor Juana.” Literatura Mexicana 1(2): 349–71. http://

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www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/ejercicios-de-la-encarnacion-sobre-la-imagende-maria-y-la-decision-final-de-sor-juana/. Sánchez Lora, José Luis. 1988. Mujeres, conventos, y formas de la religiosidad barroca. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española. Sedeño, Gregorio. 1681. Descripción de las funerales exequias, y sermón que en ellas se predicó en la muerte de la muy noble, y piadosa Señora Doña Jacinta de Vidarte y Pardo […]. Puebla, México: Imprenta de la viuda de Juan de Borja y Gandia. Smarr, Janet. 1999. “Women Writers of the Italian Renaissance.” Invited Talk. McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. 5 Mar. Smith, Sidonie. 1987. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Torremocha Hernández, Margarita. 2016. “La perfecta casada: del modelo a las representaciones. La biografía de Francisca Zorilla, escrita por su marido.” Studia histórica. Historia Moderna 38(1): 223–54. DOI 10.14201/shhmo2016381223253. Trabulse, Elías. 1980. “Prólogo.” In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892, by Francisco de la Maza. México: UNAM. Tuana, Nancy. 1993. The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Weinstein, Donald and Rudolph Bell. 1982. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wray, Grady C. 2005. The Devotional Exercises / Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/51–1695). A Critical Study and Bilingual Annotated Edition. Mexican Studies, Vol. 6. Lewinston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.

3.

Light from the New World Posthumous Praise for an American Mind Abstract: This chapter contemplates how the Fama y obras pósthumas honors Sor Juana’s enduring fame as Tenth Muse or exotic New World marvel. Sor Juana’s posthumous fame could be associated to her intellectual prowess if framed within the familiar discourse in which she is brokered as a New World “treasure,” a commodity caught up in the dynamics of male exchange. To make her intelligible to European readers, her Mexican panegyrists write her into the language of American abundance and debate whether her sexless soul, her manliness, or her otherworldliness was responsible for her surprising ingenio. Another transatlantic line of inquiry examines the role that the writer’s birth in Mexico plays in her European posthumous imaging as well as in her role as icon of New World culture. Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Juan Ignacio Castorena de Ursúa; Creole patriotism; Fama y obras póstumas; American abundance; New World treasures

“Toda ventaja en el entender lo es en el ser.” [Any advantage in wisdom is also advantageous to the self ]. — Baltasar Gracián, Realce I “Genio y ingenio [sic],” El discreto (1646) “México [cría] hermosura peregrina, / Y altísimos ingenios de gran vuelo, / Por fuerza de astros o virtud divina.” [Mexico is blessed with rare beauty and great minds, be it thanks to the stars or Providence]. — Bernardo de Balbuena, La grandeza mexicana (1604)

The depletion of the silver and gold mines of the New World in the early seventeenth century coincided with two other significant changes in New

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_ch03

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Spain: the shift in emphasis from the conversion of the indigenous communities to the dissemination of charismatic Catholicism, and the growing importance granted to a distinctively Mexican cultural identity. It was notably as the precious metals of the colony became increasingly scarce that the religiosity of the inhabitants of the New World was bequeathed to Spain as a new form of tribute, literally a new kind of “gold.” No longer working primarily to evangelize the indigenous peoples, the clergy redefined their role by “emphasizing their traditional vocation as exemplars of Christian perfection and effective agents for the salvation of others, tasks to which attention was called by publicized miracles of holy persons drawn from the ranks of the orders and the convents” (DeStefano 1977, xi). As I showed in chapter 2, the presence of holy people such as the Peruvian Saint Rosa of Lima (1586–1617) or the Mexicans María de Jesús Tomelín (1579–1637) and Marina de la Cruz (1536–1597) held significant importance for seventeenth-century Mexico as they render testimony to the belief that New World religiosity paralleled that of Spain and Rome.1 For the criollo population intent on proving to Spain that God had singled out the American continent, the presence of the extraordinarily pious in their midst denoted the true meaning of the spiritual conquest and a means of rivalling Iberian religiosity (Myers 1993, 53). Conceived of as the pride of their localities and indeed of their hemisphere, pious Mexican women such as Jacinta de Vidarte and María de Jesús Tomelín (the nun who had the greatest number of biographies written for her in the colonial period (Muriel 1982, 39)), thus symbolize the true wealth of America for both seventeenth-century Mexicans and Spaniards. In the words of the scholar and patriot Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Mexico was “‘a delicious paradise of prayer and virtue’” (qtd. in Brading 1991, 369). Diego de Lemus, the Spanish author of María de Jesús’s biography, would agree.2 In his “Prologue to the reader,” 1 In the section of his Parayso Occidental dedicated to Marina, a reputedly saintly Conceptionist nun, Sigüenza y Góngora stipulates that a life of sanctity brought fame to distinguished nuns—a fame that was upheld through a publicized martyrdom. Although unsuccessful, María de Jesús’s supporters brought a petition for canonization before the Holy See in the years following her death in 1637. On the importance of St. Rosa of Lima as a creole f igure for seventeenth-century Lima, see Hampe Martínez (1998); and Myers (2003) on how she was codified and controlled by biographers and the Church. See Borja Gómez on the importance of exalting local holy people in the Spanish viceroyalties (2007, 55) and Rubial (1999) on New Spain in particular. 2 Vida, Virtudes, Trabajos, Fabores y Milagros de la Ven. M. Sor María de Jesús Angelopolitana Religiosa en el Insigne Convento de la Limpia Concepción de la Ciudad de los Angeles, en la Nueva España; y natural de ella (León, 1683). Lemus’s work is one of four biographies written for María de Jesús. The vidas by Francisco García Pardo (1676) and Andrés Sáez de la Peña (1683) were

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De Lemus explains the nature of the relationship between Spain and New Spain as he understood it: Discurriendo en la materia hice juicio, que podía ser muy del servicio de nuestro Señor, que se estampasen las misericordias, que su Majestad había usado con esta Alma pura: pues de este modo, no solo tributaría la nueva España a la antigua lo precioso de sus materiales, sino que la enriquecería con el oro de tan celestiales ejemplos; debiéndole tanto más en esto, que en aquello, cuanto es mejor la edificación, que la opulencia. [I decided that writing about the mercies that His Majesty invested in this pure soul would be a sign of appreciation, given that in this way not only would New Spain pay tribute to Old with its precious metals, but it would also enrich it with the gold of its celestial exemplars, giving preference to the latter and not the former as edification is more desirable than opulence]. (1683, [4])

The notion of a shift from the exchange of material commodities to a spiritual commerce between New Spain and Old plays a key role in Sor Juana’s more pious posthumous f iguring explored in chapter 2; it also presented possibilities in terms of trading in the intellectual goods of deserving authors. Regardless of whether American bounty was on the downslide, the commonplace notion of New World plenty and fecundity held strong in the collective imagination and as a theme and topic fueled “regional patriotic imaginaries” (More 8). That being so, Sor Juana’s posthumous fame could be associated to her intellectual prowess and to her role as author if framed within this familiar discourse in which she is brokered as a New World “treasure,” a commodity caught up in the dynamics of male exchange. Trading in intellectual goods, such as the Tenth Muses’s poetry, sets the stage for a more secular adulation of her mind, ingenio and publications; moreover, it helps to bridge the span from celebrity to posthumous fame given that an authentic treasure is not a passing fancy, but a valuable “resource” that not only can be traded, but whose worth presupposes an enduring legacy. If transatlantic trading in gold, souls and poetry was customary in the literary marketplace and beyond, there were important caveats in the ways in which transactions operated with goods gendered as female. Whether in the realm of the marketplace, in which quantifiable commodities were published in Mexico and Puebla respectively, while that by Félix de Jesús María was printed in Rome (1756) (Muriel 1982, 39).

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traded, or that of patronage, in which favors were exchanged, Sor Juana’s posthumous fashioning was controlled and mastered in order to mold her more closely to existing forms of enduring fame. Furthermore, mastery and control allow for that which is deemed strange to be reined in. In her study of Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana, Stephanie Jed argues that the epithet of the “Tenth Muse” is a fiction that allows for the entry of the woman writer into the literary marketplace (1994, 196). It also functions as part of the rationalization and to promote the objectification and commodification of the New World (Harvey 2006, 17). As Jed explains, “[r]eports from the New World; promotional literature, ‘natural’ histories, editorial projects, and economic ventures provided the textual and relational ground for collecting, classifying, and knowing the ‘Tenth Muse’ as a commodity and resource for cultural exploitation” (1994, 198). For her part, Patricia Parker has studied how the language of New World abundance later becomes the language of commodity and, ultimately, that of control over “women and other strange things” (1987, 147–49; 154). The Fama operates following the dynamics suggested by Parker and Jed. Presenting the New World woman writer as a “treasure” makes her rarity intelligible and hence allows her image to be commodified and controlled in the negotiations carried out by authors, editors, panegyrists and censors in the literary marketplace.3 Ryan Prendergast’s ideas about Sor Juana being enclosed in her visual representations are equally relevant in the posthumous poetical fashioning and commodification I examine in this chapter: “[h]ers is a category unto itself, but there exists no such identifiable category. As a result, she can only be inserted into a more conventional representational field that metaphorically elevates her status while still visually controlling and enclosing her” (2007, 42). Two of Sor Juana’s best-known fictions, the American Tenth Muse and the exotic marvel,—both of which underline her excess, her overflowing of supposedly rigid boundaries—are best understood within this posthumous discourse of abundance and transatlantic trading in treasures. The correlation between the nun and treasure can be found in the Fama in the works of Spanish panegyrists Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara, Lorenzo de las Llamosas (originally a Peruvian), José de Cañizares, and Alonzo de Otazo, and, albeit with significant differences, and in different degrees, in most of the Mexican panegyrics. 3 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama.

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Significantly, the discourse of American plenty or treasure allows for Sor Juana’s laudators of the Fama to appeal to her gender or to dispense with it entirely. Such as with the personification of Fame, New World treasures and the Tenth Muse were understood as feminine or feminized. For example, in his romance of the Fama, the Spaniard Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara describes Sor Juana as “oro racional” [rational gold] and entreats the American continent to be proud of its “preñez fecunda” [pregnant fecundity] ([59]). According to this logic, if the feminized nature and strangeness of the New World were commonplaces, then fashioning Sor Juana along these lines made her more intelligible. At the same time, representing the writer as treasure or corresponding images, such as the sun and light, allowed for her to be written out of a gendered narrative entirely, whereby she is shown to be not a woman at all, or, is adapted to seventeenth-century conceptions, such as a woman with a sexless soul or a manly woman (mujer varonil), in order to secure her posthumous fame. By conceptualizing her as a treasure or gold, and through myriad corresponding images such as light, sun, and angel, not only could the nun and writer be immortal (given that like the celestial bodies, she possesses infinite light and knowledge), but she could also escape the restrictions imposed on her sex and, potentially serve as a kind of beacon for her admirers without threatening the status quo or contradicting the teachings of the post-Tridential Church and its powerful moralists. Stripping her of her gender allowed for many to unreservedly applaud her poetic genius as well as her “manly,” and distinctly American, intellect and authorship. While her virtue, repentance, and death allow Sor Juana to figure in the Fama as a truly otherworldly creature who resides in heaven, the praise granted her genius is described in equally colossal terms: it is a desmesura [an excess] of immeasurable breadth comparable only to other incomparable phenomenon such as solar light or American riches. And, just as in the discussion of her virtue and salvation, the writer’s death plays a significant role in substantiating her representation as an icon of poetry and intellect freed from her sex. For one, the Mexican nun’s rebirth in heaven signaled an irrevocable severance between the body and the soul. In the words of Saint John Chrysostom, the attainment of heaven implied “morir al cuerpo para vivir a lo del alma, negarse a tod[a]s [las] […] vanidades de la grandeza en vivir, muriendo retirada para labrarse la inmortalidad de un fénix a lo del cielo” [the death of the body in order to live as the soul, denying one’s self the vanities of life, dying inconspicuously in order to attain the immortality of a heavenly phoenix] (qtd. in Segura 1715, f. ¶2r). Taken in conjunction with the somewhat contentious Renaissance belief that stipulated that

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when women died they were reborn as men (Maclean 1980, 14), 4 or at least were equal to them in the terrain of the soul, this Catholic line of reasoning proves vital in the Fama’s attempt to preserve Sor Juana as a distinguished author graced with astounding ingenio. The posthumous nature of the Fama thus grants the nun’s encomiasts the opportunity to freely praise in death those characteristics that proved most controversial while she was alive. As for those elegists who don’t deny her her sex, these find in the fact that she is a woman a rare (monstrous?) novelty as worthy as her New World birth and criollo intellect. Castorena himself challenges his readers to marvel at a woman remarkably capable of style, verse and wit: “Pues, si todo esto junto, en un varón muy consumado fuera una maravilla, ¿que 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” [For, if all of this together would be, in a very accomplished man, a wonder, what would it be in a woman? Is this not worthy of immortal applause? Does it not deserve eternal acclaim? To deny it would be blundering ignorance or coarse vulgarity] ([7]). In this more daring posthumous reading of Sor Juana, difference, be it regarding gender or birthplace, can potentially be seen in a positive light, indeed even as valuable in the marketplace, provided, as we will see, that the description fit into one early modern category or another. Legible and “vendible” categories, it should be said, that assumed that neither women nor criollos could rival the intellect of a European male. Two other contemporary and polemical debates add to the mix and make appearances in these elegies of the Fama: the question of whether women have infused or acquired knowledge and whether American minds are equal to those of their European counterparts or are adversely affected by the geographical and humeral conditions of their birthplace. The similarities and differences between Spanish and Mexican conceptions of treasure used for the posthumous imaging and imagining of Sor Juana constitutes another line of inquiry of this chapter. For the elegists who hailed from New Spain, their Tenth Muse is necessarily unique; nonetheless, the idea of American treasure can be shown to be natural as opposed to singular and hence can extend to others who share her birthplace. In other words, while the Hieronymite nun is a single “pearl,” New World treasures 4 The Church fathers differed in their opinions on this point. Thomas Aquinas, for example, denied the view that all resurrected persons will be male. According to Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, he insisted, rather, “[that] equal perfection is granted to males and females in Paradise—a less androcentric position than that of Augustine, who envisaged a paradisical equality of asexual souls” (1974, 220).

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abound in a land in which other criollo authors and writers eagerly claim imperial recognition and validation. The implication is that the rara avis has to be a European construction. In America, the nun may well be a paradoxical exemplar who cannot easily be imitated, yet she is a far cry from a freak of nature. For example, the Spanish censor Luis de Tineo’s suggestion in the Inundación castálida (IC) that it “rained” gold in the western hemisphere is borne out in the American criollos’ use of astrological metaphors—composed primarily of sun and star imagery—that speak to their natural disposition to ingenio and poetry, formulated through what Jorge Cañizares Esguerra calls “patriotic astrology” (1999, 37). The Spanish panegyrists of the Fama, meanwhile, marvel at Sor Juana’s strange prodigiousness and use the discourse of American treasure as exotic, monstrous, abundance to make sense of it. So, while all of her posthumous elegists commodify Sor Juana, using and trading her for the sake of preserving her renown or a chance to see their poetry in print, there remains an important distinction among them. Criollo poets and intellectuals were perhaps less unintelligible than Sor Juana, but they remained outsiders in the imperial literary marketplace centered in Madrid. The outsiders’ response comes to the forefront in the Fama by means of a line of praise that reveals a nascent sense of patriotic pride and sense of cultural validation in writers such as Lorenzo González de la Sancha. Much as some of Sor Juana’s elegists portray her as an erudite author in the hopes of assuring her posthumous renown, others wish to preserve her as an extraordinary literary figure in order to justify their own poetic endeavors at a time when good poets were waning on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a time, moreover, as Margaret Ezell has shown, when virtually no one in the century saw their work in print and “to publish was the exception for both men and women” (1993, 34). I have already examined in previous chapters how the nun’s publications fueled her celebrity in her lifetime and, if fashioned properly, may well ensure her posthumous renown. Beatriz Colombi argues that while for Margo Glantz Sor Juana’s laudators highlight her singularity as a phoenix, monster, or American treasure in order to “normalize” her, she believes “that these discourses attempt to explain and produce female authorship as an emerging phenomenon in the seventeenth century” (Colombi 2015, 86). By electing to pay tribute to her intellect, then, Sor Juana’s panegyrists could ingeniously posit the nun’s anomalous talent as worthy of enduring fame, or, in the case of the criollos, relay a message to Europe regarding the merit of New World minds. In their attempt to rationalize Sor Juana’s seemingly unnatural or monstrous poetic talent and wit and her rational mind, the nun’s elegists on both sides of the

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Atlantic engage in clever tactics of brokering her as a treasure, ranging, as we will see, from would-be scientific hypotheses to the reconfiguration of the solar cycle, concocted to warrant the posthumous renown of a doubly marginalized figure: not only a woman writer, but a Mexican criolla as well.

Sor Juana, An American Treasure The correlation between Sor Juana and the riches of her birthplace are by no means original to the Fama; however, it is in the third volume of her works that the notion of the poet as treasure is brokered to assure her posthumous fame. Let me begin by highlighting some of examples that preceded the Fama and helped establish the correlation between the Mexican nun and New World riches. In her romance #37, dedicated to the Duquesa de Aveyro and published in the IC, the poet herself suggests the analogy that seems to have taken seed in the collective imagination of her encomiasts: “Que yo, señora nací / en la América abundante, / compatriota del oro, / paisana de los metales” [I, milady, was born in the abundant America, a compatriot of gold, a kinswoman of metals] (OC 1.102: 81–84).5 In his prefatory romance written for the publication of Sor Juana’s IC, the well-respected Spanish poet José Pérez de Montoro baptizes the Mexican nun as “[un] ignorado tesoro” [an unknown treasure]—a fitting epithet for what is arguably her introduction to the poets of Europe. An enthusiast of the New World’s intellectual promise (De la Maza 1980, 157), Montoro expresses his, and, by extension, Europe’s deference to America for its having produced “a new wonder” [“un nuevo asombro”]: Goza, oh felice América, este nuevo Ignorado tesoro, que difuso Ya en la noticia, vale el nuevo aplauso Con que el resto del Orbe se hace tuyo. [Celebrate, America, this new and unknown treasure worthy of the applause with which the rest of the orb renders tribute] (IC [4]).

Significantly, the Spanish poet claims that this heretofore unknown treasure, “la primera voz Americana” [America’s most outstanding voice], who inhabits the pinnacle of (a new) Mount Parnassus, hails from a land 5

Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957) herein OC.

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whose mineral-rich soil was believed to be more propitious to the activities of Mercury, God of commerce, than to those of Apollo, companion to the Muses. In his second elegy for Sor Juana published in the front matter to the Segundo volumen (SV), Montoro once again relies on the image of American treasure this time to conjoin it directly to Fame: “Mujer, déjame que dude / si en esa región naciste / para que de sus metales / labre la Fama clarines […]” [Woman, allow me to ponder whether you were born in that region [America] so that Fame might work her trumpets out of the metals found there] (SV [79]). His insistence on Mt. Parnassus, site of established authors, and the Muses, encourages us to believe that it is the nun’s authorship that is celebrated by Fame herself. Montoro’s suggestion of a correspondence between the nun and the mineral riches of the New World is seconded in the IC by another Spaniard, Luis Tineo de Morales, the same who first called the Mexican nun “rara avis in terra.” Upon contemplating Sor Juana’s birth in his appraisal, Tineo writes: “En el nacimiento de Platón […] llovió el cielo oro para simbolizar lo precioso de aquel ingenio. En el nacimiento de Sor Juana no se dice que genial el Cielo se desatase en esta lluvia supersticiosa, pero sabemos que nació en una tierra que ella misma produce el oro como llovido” [When Plato was born […] gold rained down from heaven to symbolize his extraordinary genius. Despite there being no word of the heavenly sight of superstitious rain at Sor Juana’s birth, we know that she was born in a land so bountiful that it seems to rain gold] (IC [7]).6 While the New World’s gold and silver had dictated the notion of America’s treasure in Spain’s popular imagination since the time of conquest, together Montoro and Tineo imbue new meaning into the commonplace metaphor. According to the authors of the front matter to the IC, the publication of Sor Juana’s poetry in Spain proved that the extraordinary nature of the Indies lay not its goldmines, nor in exemplary pious criollos, but in its having engendered the Tenth Muse. Tineo sums up their idea perfectly by recalling an ancient epigram that a clever friend at Court—“un ingenio cortesano”—translates as follows: Tú de las Indias serás noble Virgen, el decoro; 6 Unearthing a previously unknown poetic correspondence between Sor Juana and Tineo counts among Alatorre’s significant contributions to the field (Alatorre 1984, 4–13; Poot 2005). For the Mexican scholar, Tineo was Sor Juana’s most ardent protector and a friend of María Luisa Manrique, Marquise de la Laguna and Countess de Paredes (Alatorre 1994, 24–25).

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que no es lo raro su oro: engendrarte a ti es lo más. [You, noble Virgin, shall be the decorum of the Indies, as your birth is more surprising than its gold]. (IC [8])

Sor Juana’s identification with the veritable wealth of New Spain reaches beyond the front matter to her first volume of poetry. In the SV, published only three years after the IC, for example, the Jesuit Pedro Zapata writes: “Concluyo dando el parabién a la Nueva España, no de los mares de plata con que inunda a la Europa, sino de que es la preciosa concha en que nació esta perla, […] el mayor tesoro que ha contribuido aquel reino a nuestra España” [I conclude by expressing my admiration for New Spain, not for its oceans of silver with which it floods Europe, but rather for being the precious shell into which this pearl [i.e., Sor Juana] was born […]; she is the greatest treasure that that kingdom has contributed to our Spain] (SV [25]). Clearly this was an analogy that held firm; you may recall that Father Calleja in his Approbation to the Fama similarly deems Sor Juana a “pearl” enclosed in the “shell” of Mexico City’s Hieronymite convent. While Calleja frames his admiration for the writer’s intellectual prowess in pious discourse, the language of treasure works to bolster Sor Juana’s more secular fictions in which she is treasured for her extraordinary mind and literary achievements. The nun’s Mexican peers had reasons for using the analogy that went beyond the hyperbole of her Spanish elegists and promoters. While Puebla was preoccupied with its religious “treasures” in the late seventeenth century, the Mexican capital was in its earliest stages of formulating a singular cultural identity. Grounded firmly in the evangelization of the non-Christian peoples as the basis for colonial rule, it was an identity that was evolving slowly and that emerged from within a society that earlier esteemed military exploits and, later, mercantile principles; it remained loyal to Spanish imperialism, but as More has argued, felt the effects of the waning of the Spanish empire under the Hapsburgs (2013, 7). Indeed, the literary distinction that hoped to bring posthumous fame to Sor Juana, as well as much-needed attention to her Mexican panegyrists for their part in making her into an iconic figure, was crucial to the New World elite criollo intellectuals of the late seventeenth century who longed for renown given that the era of military conquest was no longer and the gold and silver mines were increasingly barren. In his seminal Baroque Times in Old Mexico, Irving Leonard attributes the attraction of the literary tournament in the

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New World to the criollos’ frustrations vis-à-vis the Renaissance ideal of a gentleman that required that distinction be won by sword or pen. “To the Creole these unpropitious circumstances seemed to close the door of martial renown, leaving open only that of literary distinction” (1959, 131). It seems to bear true then in our case, when we consider that practically all of the Fama’s panegyrists from New Spain were members of the elite diocesan clergy associated with the Royal and Pontificate University of Mexico. Moreover, literary distinction was not dispensed equally. As Kirk aptly notes, “[t]he dynamics of imperialism […] made an impression on the scholarly life of the colony as creoles looked toward Europe for validation of their worth, where better circulation, a more developed scholarly community, and rewards and preferment awaited” (2016, 144). It’s of note that admirers of Sor Juana on several occasions blur the lines between the two paths to renown by arguing that she distinguishes herself in literary campaigns like a nun of military rank. For example, in the following verses, the Peruvian poet and satirist, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, presents the Tenth Muse’s fame as being as worthy as that of the cross-dressing, warrior nun, known as the Monja Alférez: Como huvo la Monja Alférez para lustre de las armas, para las letras, en vos hay una monja capitana. [Just as the Alférez nun gave Glory to arms, in letters you are the captain nun] (qtd. in Alatorre 2007, 193)

Similarly, the Jesuit Pedro Zapata, author of one the prologues to the SV, uses the familiar image of the heroic woman to argue that Sor Juana earns her name not on the battlef ield (as did Judith) but by winning literary “campaigns” against learned men (i.e., Father Vieira) ([27]). Under these circumstances, it follows that Sor Juana’s compatriots and fellow dwellers of Mexico City mourn the loss of an icon of culture. Following the lead of the volume’s editor, they wanted to ensure that the writer’s Spanish public recognize her, and, by extension, her homeland’s piety, but also that her European audience continue to read the work of Mexico’s best-known cultural figure. Of the volume’s twelve collaborators from New Spain to contribute works in Spanish, only editor Castorena and Felipe de Santoyo García propose that she exists as a distinctly Mexican mujer fuerte whose unyielding virtues support the hypothesis that Mexico is Catholic

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Spain’s spiritual correlate.7 But even these two apparently fervent Catholic panegyrists choose not to accentuate only Sor Juana’s spiritual rebirth. Despite their irrefutable and unwavering faith, Santoyo and the Fama’s editor are also poets preoccupied with distinguishing themselves both at home and, importantly, in Europe, in order to bring another kind of prominence to the American continent: not that granted to its gold, nor to its golden or celestial examples, but that of creative and intellectual excellence—in other words, the vital basis of an estimable national culture. And yet, despite the importance granted individual poetic recognition at the local level, winning Europe’s esteem hinged on both cultural and religious achievements. In fact, the two were often closely and fatefully intertwined. One only need consider, for example, the crucial role played by the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the establishment of a Mexican religious and cultural identity. Moreover, the great majority of the authors of belles lettres were drawn from the clergy. Editor Castorena exemplifies the fact that it was not uncommon for criollos to uphold a firm belief in Mexico’s cultural and religious excellence.8 As such, it’s noteworthy that Castorena chooses the language of American riches to fulfill his endeavor of praising and preserving Sor Juana as a New World icon of culture.

7 Among the six Mexicans to contribute poems in Latin, only one, the Augustinian Fray Juan de Rueda, a popular candidate for the composition of appraisals (“censuras”) and approbations, addresses a spiritual phoenix who abandons worldly literature for that of the “heavens” (1995, 167). Alatorre says Castorena is wrong in his attributions of the two Latin elegies to different authors; for him they were both penned by the Jesuit Oviedo (2007, 330). A total of seventeen Mexican contributors author the nineteen works that appear in the final section of the Fama. See appendix A. 8 Well aware of the significant role that holy people, the texts dedicated to them, and the larger religious communities played in cities such as Puebla and Zacatecas in his time, Castorena’s varied works that venture beyond the scope of the Fama hint at his pride in Mexico’s distinguished Catholics. He is the author of Panegírico en la dedicación del templo de Capuchinas de Corpus Christi de México (Mexico, 1725) and Ejercicios devotos para acompañar a la Virgen María en su soledad (Mexico, 1720), and founder in 1722 of what is considered Mexico’s earliest newspaper, the Gaceta de México (Ochoa Campos 1968, 7–10). He also energetically promoted the beatification of the hermit and missionary Juan González, even persuading the renowned Jesuit Miguel de Venegas to write his vida (Beristain qtd. in Medina 1908, 147). Yet another elegiac work, this one dedicated, perhaps not coincidentally, to a fellow zacatecano and entitled El minero más feliz. Elogio del Ven. Fr. Juan Angulo, religioso lego de San Francisco, de Zacatecas (México, 1728), celebrates a lay clergyman revered for his holiness. He also supported the founding of a convent for indigenous women in Corpus Christi and was himself the founder of the Colegio de los Mil Ángeles de Zacatecas, a school for girls dating from the first decades of the eighteenth century. For a complete listing of works attributed to Castorena, see Ochoa Campos (1968, 47–49); Beristain (1980, 13); Eguiara y Eguren (1986, 47–49) and Echenberg (forthcoming).

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Juan de Castorena’s confabulations regarding the notion of treasure are best appreciated in his Prologue and the volume’s two dedications. In the first, the editor-cum-agent articulates a plural sense of American treasure that serves at once as a tribute to the Old World and allows for the discourse of trading in the Tenth Muse to justify posthumous fame for her and for her fellow criollo intellectuals. As a “knowledge broker” (Jed 1994, 201), Castorena trades in manuscripts and interprets New World experiences for a Spanish reading public. In essence, the commodification of the Tenth Muse allows, by extension, that her authored works—as well as his own—be similarly valued and traded. According to the Fama’s editor, New Spain’s “gold” lies in Sor Juana’s writings, in the Fama itself and, by association, in criollo ingenio. As will become clear, in suggesting a correlation between intellect and ingenio, gold, and the inhabitants of New Spain, Castorena’s ideas can be framed within the wider debate on whether American minds are naturally inclined to culture and intellect. The Prologue also presents, for Peninsular readers, a conflation regarding what needs to be made legible given that Sor Juana’s unpublished works and her elegists of New Spain are being presented for the first time in Spain. Undoubtedly, all of these machinations require manipulating and controlling Sor Juana’s image. While the volume’s Prologue displays the language of brokering as part of the economic and commercial relationship between Spanish imperial forces and colonial New Spain, the dedications underscore the reciprocal idea of tribute and patronage. We have already seen that it was patronage that allowed Sor Juana to become a published author. In the Fama, Castorena develops his understanding of patronage in two ways: the dedications prove that he too needs favors in order to publish the posthumous tome, and, secondly, he describes a form of posthumous literary benefaction carried out by the Mexican nun and writer as the “sun” and “light” that illuminates the path of authorship for her peers. In the first dedication, Castorena, as a colonial subordinate, presents the Queen with the “rara avis” as tribute in return for her patronage and protection; in the second, he draws an analogy between the laminas de Michoacán—whose worth is unquestionable in the Spanish marketplace—and the Fama, arguing that it should be similarly valued. His edited volume, in other words, is tribute for his New World patron: the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca. Let me begin by examining Castorena’s stance in the Prologue. Whereas the Spanish religious censor, Jacinto Muñoz de Castilblanque, is forthright in his identification of the Mexican nun and writer as the true wealth of her homeland, proposing that she comprises a precious mine filled with intellect and faith, Castorena’s concurrence with him is guarded and, ultimately,

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more highly charged. The theologian and censor’s “Parecer” to the Fama exalts Sor Juana for having employed her singular knowledge in her quest for the attainment of salvation. By suggesting that her intellect was properly exercised, Castilblanque underlines his belief that America’s “wealth” lies above all in the writer’s mind. In a wonderful display of baroque wit, the religious censor compares twenty-four-carat gold to the twenty-four letters of the (antiquated) Spanish alphabet in order to describe Sor Juana as the Indies’ most formidable treasure: No habían menester las Indias ser tan ricas, para ser tan opulentas, ence­ rrando en sí preciosa mina, como la de su peregrina ciencia. Llámanse ciencias las letras, y las de nuestro alfabeto son veinte y cuatro, como de veinte y cuatro quilates el oro más subido: y no hay vena de oro tan alto, como el que incluye mineral científico. [The Indies need not be so rich, to be so opulent, containing such a precious mine, as is her pilgrim science. Letters shall be considered a science, and our alphabet contains twenty-four, like the highest quality twenty-four carat gold: and there is no higher quality gold than that which includes scientific mineral]. ([109])

In Castorena’s prologue the allusions to the role of the New World’s mineral riches are more cleverly concealed. As I suggested in chapter 1, Castorena extols his compilation by arguing that the prologue is a crucial piece to a multifaceted composition. It is here, he tells us, that a work’s “carats” are studied: “[El] Prólogo es la Piedra de toque, en que se estrena diligente su aplicación, examinando en los crisoles del argumento los quilates de un libro.” [This prologue is the touchstone in which its [the text’s] application is diligently revealed and which examines in the crucibles of the arguments, the carats of a book] ([119]). His purpose, naturally, is to argue that the Fama—the “ruby” of all her works published in Spain—is superior to her two preceding volumes of poetry: “lo que el Rubí en el terno sube de estimación al oro, y sus esmaltes, con que los aventaje el estilo, y los mejora la perfección de los Asumptos.” [The ruby in a set of jewelry increases the value of the gold and enamel because it improves the style, and the perfection of the subject matter improves them even more] ([120]). While the editor of the Fama is clearly lauding Sor Juana and her works that he himself has published, the analogy seems strangely muted. His readers may grasp his allusion to the biblical mujer fuerte who is worth more than rubies or precious stones (Proverbs 31:10). Even so, it appears as though Castorena were reluctant to

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proclaim the nun as New Spain’s greatest treasure in the manner Muñoz de Castilblanque does, or as Tineo and Montoro did eleven years earlier in the front matter of the IC. A possible motive for Castorena’s reticence becomes clear when he suggests that while Sor Juana was perhaps the icon of American culture, she was not alone in her intellectual endeavors. Significantly, his argument can be constructed precisely because the Tenth Muse is already implicitly a commodity shuttling across the Atlantic Ocean. As such, “trading” in her works, as well as the collection of Mexican elegies that he has procured, can (hopefully) bring about esteem, further this cultural commerce and justify the nun’s posthumous fame. The Fama’s prologue reveals Castorena’s intention of proving to his Spanish public that Sor Juana deserved to be preserved for posterity as a cultural figure whose “peregrina ciencia” [pilgrim science] represented the intellectual potential of all Mexicans, and, even perhaps, that of all the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies. In relaying to his readers the perfection of the subject matter of the Fama vis-à-vis the first two volumes of the writer’s works, he uncovers his intentions: Sor Juana’s unpublished works are “[los] motivos que han empeñado mi diligencia, sobre mis leales ansias de que se conozcan en ambos Orbes los delicadísimos y agudos ingenios de nuestra América […].” [What has motivated and engaged my diligence, over and above my loyal desire for the most tasteful and sharpest wits of our America to be known in both Orbs] ([120]). The editor’s use of the plural when referring to “los delicadísimos y agudos ingenios” [the most tasteful and sharpest wits] is deliberate. Taken together with the attention he pays to both the Fama’s “cortesanos ingenios” [courtly wits] and to distinctly Mexican imagery in his dedications to Queen Mariana of Neuburg and the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca, his words from the prologue divulge that granting Sor Juana posthumous fame is important because it allows for continuity in the commodification and recognition of New Spain’s other poets. While Antonio Alatorre rightly calls Castorena’s dedications “excelentes muestras de la prosa que muchos escribían en las postrimerías del siglo XVII cuando se ponían a adular a los grandes personajes” [excellent examples of the prose written by many at the close of the seventeenth century when flattering important figures] (1980, 432), the tributes also comprise a distinctly American message concerning the ability of criollos and their literary and tributary relationship with Spain. Castorena’s prose teeters between seeking recognition and carefully keeping his subjugated place as a colonial criollo. In his Dedicatoria to Queen Mariana, Castorena appeals to the sovereign as the protector and patron of New and Old Worlds and their

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corresponding intellectuals, some of whom contribute to the Fama: “V. Mag. multiplica con identidad estos números y permitiendo influencias a los ingenios de uno, y otro Polo, en el Cenit de sus horizontes, ilumina dos poemas en ambos Mundos” [Your majesty illuminates two poems in both worlds, allowing the wits of one Pole and the other to reach the zenith of their horizons] ([6]). The editor once again relies on images of birds to construct his arguments. His hope is that not only will his presentation of a posthumous volume dedicated to the “pluma de perlas” [quill of pearls]—Sor Juana—be a fitting tribute, but that her Majesty may benef it from the Mexican nun’s devotional writing. In his consistently contradictory manner, the editor bestows on the Queen the spiritual works of a rational Mexican Phoenix. Ansioso el anhelo de la lealtad, solicita siempre los más peregrinos pájaros del Orbe, que tributar a la soberanía de los Monarcas. Cuidadoso mi estudio trajo de los fines del Universo esta racional Fénix Mexicana, para que entre las lecciones espirituales de libros devotos, […] logren la elección de atendidas, por discretas, las Medicaciones [the Ejercicios]; y por sagrados, los Ofrecimientos de esta Religiosa. [The eager desire for loyalty prompts the search for the world’s most peregrine birds to pay tribute to the Monarchs’ sovereignty. My study carefully brought from the ends of the universe this rational Mexican phoenix, so that among the spiritual lessons of devotional books, the Meditations [the Ejercicios espirituales] be heeded for their discretion, and the offerings of this nun for their sacredness]. ([7])

Castorena’s use of the image of the “peregrinos pájaros” [peregrine birds] is a clever way of fusing himself with Sor Juana and, as I will show, with the entire Fama. According to its strictest definition, the expression “peregrino pájaro” denotes a bird that flies from one place to another. The bird seemingly represents Castorena, who has traveled from “los fines del Universo” [the confines of the Universe] to Spain. But the editor does not speak of himself alone. He has clearly chosen to speak of “peregrinos pájaros” as he undertakes his voyage in order to bring with him none other than the “Fénix mexicana” [the Mexican Phoenix]. That another of peregrine’s significations is synonymous with “raro” [rare, exotic], grants Castorena the opportunity to present the rara avis and not precious metals (whether in the form of minerals or celestial souls) as a form of tribute that expresses his loyalty to the Queen. While it would seem that Castorena appeals to yet another

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commonplace (the never-before-seen bird) only to reinforce European tactics for writing about the New World, when considered alongside his subsequent use of bird images in his dedicatorias to Queen Mariana and the Marquise, the outcome is a veiled patriotic statement on the ability of American minds. Other works from the period reveal that the feather-quill-poet synecdoche was a commonplace, principally when used to describe literary works from the New World that travel to the Old in the form of tributes. In his defense of the giant of the Spanish Baroque, Luis de Góngora, entitled Apologético (Lima, 1662), the Peruvian writer Juan de Espinosa Medrano, better known as Lunarejo, writes as part of his dedication to Luis Méndez de Haro, Count Duke de Olivares, (successor and nephew of the famous Count-Duke Olivares): “A los Principes grandes suelen presentarse la Aues peregrinas, los paxaros que crio Region remota: vna pluma del Orbe Indiano se abate a los pies de V. Exc.” [It is to the great princes that peregrine birds are usually presented, birds raised in the remote region: to the feet of your excellency falls a plume from the Indian orb] (qtd. in González Echevarría 1993, 153). Here too the language of tribute veils the demand of literary recognition from a motherland that was quick to dismiss American-born writers as backward and peripheral. Castorena begins his dedication to Queen Mariana by recording four of her epithets that correspond to those granted Sor Juana. Among the descriptive appellations, by means of which he conjoins Queen Mariana to the Mexican writer, the editor includes those of “la águila de Alemania” [The German Eagle] and “el Fénix de la América” [the American Phoenix] ([5]). Despite later transforming Sor Juana’s epithet of the “pluma de perlas” [plume of pearls] into “tinta dorada” [golden ink], Castorena prefers not to dwell on this image. He does, on the other hand, return to the iconic symbol of the eagle, “reina de las aves” [queen of birds], on the following page in order first to praise the Queen and then to remark on the bird’s two throats depicted in the Roman version of the emblem (“Las cesáreas águilas se descuellan en dos gargantas” [the Caesarean eagles divided in two necks] ([6])). The editor explains that the bird’s twin necks symbolized the whole of the Roman Empire as it spread from east to west. The Hapsburgs similarly portrayed the eagle in their coat of arms as a sign of their own wide-reaching empire. Furthermore, explains Castorena, according to sacred writings, the weight of the imperial bird’s wings is a symbol of patronage. He thus concludes that “Europa es el Oriente si América el Ocaso, porque hasta donde se dilatan los dominios, hasta allá se extiendan las protecciones” [Europe is the Orient if America is the Occident, because as far as the dominions expand, shall

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the protection be extended ([6–7]). It is in return for her protection, then, that Castorena bestows the Mexican rara avis on the Queen. Another suggestive aspect of the image of the eagle, however, provides a clue to the fact that the editor is less obsequious than he initially appears to be. Like the Romans and the Hapsburgs, the Mexican emperors also used the imperial eagle as a heraldic symbol (“También las tuvieron [las águilas] por escudo los emperadores mexicanos” [The Mexican emperors also had them as a shield] ([6])). While he offers this remark only as a passing comment, left unexplained and buried within the exuberant laudatory praise of a queen and her Empire, by incorporating a reference to a Mexican civilization that parallels the greatest of the Europeans, Castorena draws on Mexico’s past to set the colony on more equal footing with Spain.9 As evinced in its central place in the national flag, the eagle still holds an important role in contemporary Mexican iconography. During the colonial period, the emblematic bird was frequently employed to portray the notion of an imperial and noble Mexico. It is possible that Castorena knew that his contemporary and compatriot, José Francisco de Isla, was working on a book in verse entitled Vuelos de la Imperial Águila Tezcucana [Flight of the Imperial Eagle of Texcoco] (Mexico, 1701). In the Fama, panegyrist José de Villena describes Sor Juana and the wings of the Mexican eagle as being one and the same: “Quitó tirana Cloto / […] al águila de México las plumas” [Tyrannical Clotho took the plume / quill from the Mexican eagle] (182). Sor Juana too suggests the grandeur of the Mexican eagle who celebrates the arrival of “el mexicano” in her romance #24, written on the occasion of the birth of the Countess de Paredes’s son: Levante América ufana la coronada cabeza, y el Águila Mejicana 9 In her illuminating Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (2013), Anna More argues that in the face of the political and social limits placed on criollos by the Spanish, the former used their particular “vantage point” in which the “cultural landscape of seventeenth-century New Spain became a cipher for a hidden and secret past” (7). The discourse of a unique, noble past fueled a republican patriotism and political discourse spurred by their desire for a more equal status with peninsular-born Spaniards, a burgeoning sense of community, and concern about the decline of the Spanish empire under the Hapsburgs. “[B]y the end of the seventeenth century, Novohispanic Creoles has begun to invent a deep history extending beyond the Spanish conquest. Through this body of knowledge stored in writings, collections and visual artifacts, they began to set the foundations of a local patrimonial order that could stand in for a distant monarch who appeared increasingly unable to secure his faltering empire” (2013, Introduction).

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el imperial vuelo tienda, pues ya en su Alcázar Real, donde yace la grandeza de gentiles Moctezumas nacen católicos Cerdas. [Proud America raises its crowned head, and the Mexican eagle sets off in imperial flight, for in its royal castle, where the greatness of gentile Moctezumas lies, catholic Cerdas are born] (OC 1.72:37–44)

Understood in this wider context, then, Castorena’s use of the eagle, which suggests that imperial beings have an American counterpart, shows how he toes the line of obsequiousness while at the same time demanding recognition. In his discussion of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s defense of what the savant referred to as “the criollo nation,” Anthony Pagden surmises that the Mexican scholar and royal cosmographer believed that Mexico “possessed its own classical antiquity, inferior in many respects but no less fanatic nor any less instructive in the examples it could provide than that of Greece and Rome” (1987, 72). Undoubtedly, the ability to appropriate a truly Mexican political tradition, whose sources lay in the civic achievements of the Mexicas, granted criollos a foundation on which both to ground and to articulate their nascent sense of identity vis-à-vis their colonizers.10 Castorena’s inclusion of the relevance of the eagle to the Aztec civilization cannot be gratuitous because his point—that Queen Mariana is a noble patron of New World and Old deserving of a tribute such as the rara avis— could easily stand on its own without the allusion to the Mexican blazon. His arguments concur with Ross’s assessment of seventeenth-century Creole discourse as a “literature [that] shows a constant wavering of language from dominant to subordinate positions, resulting in subversions of European models even when those models are consciously being imitated” (1993, 7). Clearly Castorena was not alone in these endeavors. Merrim has noted how in “promot[ing] herself as outstanding luminary” Sor Juana infuses her use of the eagle with both European and Mexican imagery and meaning, thereby writing “in the interstices of Western and Mexican literature [and] keeping open her mobility between them” (Merrim 2007, 79). Castorena’s dedicatoria to the Mexican noblewoman, the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca, introduces indisputably Mexican elements more forcefully than his first dedication. Here Castorena employs his favorite 10 See More (2013) on this topic.

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(and commonplace) synecdoche, feather-quill-poet, not only to praise Sor Juana’s “golden quill” but also the “plumajes” [plumage] of the volume’s many contributors. In this, his second dedication, the Fama’s editor completes the bird associations he began in his elegy of Queen Mariana. Castorena’s own self-given epithet of peregrine bird and that of the Mexican Phoenix intrinsically tie them to the “plumajes” of Sor Juana’s panegyrists, whereas the sum of all these feathers/quills make up the Fama. While he is sure to mention the “cortesanos” [members of the court] of Madrid, Lima, and Mexico, Castorena grants special attention to the contributors of New Spain by alluding to the feathered artwork of the indigenous people of Michoacán. Their artwork serves both to describe the Fama and to illustrate the nature of the relationship between New World ingenios and their Spanish (and, to a degree, Mexican) patrons. His tactics also reveal the volume’s editor to be a skilled broker of American goods worth trading. Editor Castorena’s detailed description of the artistry of the inhabitants of the province of Michoacán, a metaphor for the composite nature of the Fama, introduces the importance of the stars (“astros”) in the fate of American creativity (literary or otherwise)—that is, its inherent dependence on external factors. The description is worth citing in its entirety: En estas Provincias, de las más fértiles de aquellos Reinos, son los naturales muy industriosos, y con graciosa habilidad desairan los pinceles, y pintan con plumajes. Cazan unos pajarillos, aves propias de aquellos Países, los desnudan de sus plumas, y siendo la luz vida de los colores, como migajas de resplandor, las unen al metal, según la distante proporción, que ha de ocupar la imagen, saliendo con exquisito primor, sin pinceles la pintura, y sin colores el matiz; quedando unidas vistosamente en la lámina las plumas; pero siempre con tal subordinación a la influencia de los astros, que si no las ilumina el reflejo del sol, ni brilla su artificio, ni lucen sus primores. [In these Provinces, among the most fertile of this Kingdom, the natives are very industrious, and with graceful skill they shun paintbrushes in favor of plumes. They hunt little birds native to those lands, they feather them, and since light is the life of colors, like crumbs of brightness, they apply them to metal, proportionally, so that the image appears done with exquisite workmanship, paint without brushes, and shades without colors; the plumage put together beautifully on the metal; but always with such subordination to the influence of the stars, that if they are not illuminated by the sun, their art does not shine, and their beauty does not show]. ([10–11])

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In tempering the topic of the peregrine birds, Castorena suggests that “plumas” and not gold is what are natural to the people of Mexico. The inhabitants of Michoacán, moreover, have no interest in selling their feathers; they prefer to render them works of art. As in his proclamation of the prologue where he claimed that Europeans should learn of the “delicadísimos y agudos ingenios de nuestra América,” [sharpest wits of our America], the editor’s emphasis in his description of the act of “pintar con plumajes” rests clearly on the multitude of the plumas/ingenios. The nouns “[N]aturales,” “pinceles,” “pajarillos,” “aves,” and “plumas” [“natives,” “paintbrushes,” “birds,” and “plumes”] all suggest that the creation of the “láminas” is not the work of one alone. Castorena concludes by signaling the dependence of the laminas on the sun: if its reflections do not illuminate them, the works of art will not be able to shine. The relevance of this conclusion becomes all the more evident when in the subsequent section of the Dedicatoria the Fama is bestowed upon Doña Juana as a lamina made up of both “plumas de oro” [golden plumes] (Sor Juana’s literary and devotional works) and “los plumajes de los cisnes cortesanos de Madrid, Lima, y México” [the plumage of the courtly swans of Madrid, Lima, and Mexico]: Ofrece a V. Exc. mi rendimiento en este Libro una valiente lámina de plumas de oro, en los escritos de la Poetisa, Mexicana Fénix, y de los plumajes de los cisnes cortesanos de Madrid, Lima, y México que renuevan el vuelo a su Póstuma Fama; y aunque brillantes no lucieran, a no iluminarlos el sol por influjo de V. Exc. no es mérito el sacrificio, cuando es muy de justicia el tributo. [I offer Your Excellency in this book a valiant lamina of golden plumes/ quills, in the writings of the Poetess, the Mexican Phoenix, and in the plumage of the courtly swans of Madrid, Lima, and Mexico that renew the flight of her posthumous fame; and, although they will not shine if the influence of Your Excellency does not cause the sun to illuminate them, the sacrifice is nothing when the tribute is deemed worthy.] [(11)]

Just as the lamina needs the sun’s rays to bring it to life, Sor Juana’s Fama also requires the generous cultural patronage and influence of figures such as Doña Juana and Queen Mariana. What better way to gain it than by offering the noblewomen the exotic birds of Mexico? We see that the closing words of Castorena’s Dedicatoria to the Queen hold more than trite commonplaces when we consider the manner in which the Fama is bequeathed in the second dedication. Without the help (light) of their

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“superiors,” whether Spanish or American, the minds of the criollos remain isolated and forgotten. If the “sun” fails to shine on them, both the Mexican Phoenix and her verses, the “cenizas lucientes de tinta dorada” [shining ashes of golden ink], not to mention the laudatory tributes, will remain in literary oblivion. Nevertheless, just one ray of light from the Queen will render them immortal. [E]ntre las diversiones Reales […] este sino volumen, breve epitafio a las reliquias del entendimiento de la Poetisa, como Fama Póstuma, en cenizas lucientes de tinta dorada, se ennoblezca flamante pira, iluminándola un desperdicio de luz, un descuido en la atención serenísima de V. Mag. Así renacerá inmortal a la perpetuidad de los siglos […]. [Among the Royal diversions, may this mere volume, a brief epitaph to the relics of the Poetess’ understanding, like posthumous fame, in sparkling ashes of golden hue, ennoble the glowing pyre with but a remnant of your light, a lapse in your majestic, ever-so-serene attention. Thus [the poetess] will be reborn, immortal to the perpetuity of the centuries]. ([7–8])

In Castorena, a criollo patriot who demonstrates irreproachable subservience to his Queen, we find an excellent example of what David Brading has called the effect of the “subtle counterpoint between the patriotic and imperial traditions” (Brading 1991, 6). One final aspect of the Dedicatoria to the Mexican marquise renders testimony to the fact that Castorena hoped that his volume would not only grant the Mexican ingenios of the Fama exposure to a Spanish audience, but that it might also aid in furthering the cultural status of all criollos. By appealing to the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca’s own sense of identity, the Fama’s editor constructs an intricate puzzle that joins her to her forefather Hernán Cortés, indirectly to the Emperor Moctezuma, to Sor Juana, and last, but certainly not least, to himself. Like most seventeenth-century criollos who recalled the heroic epoch of the conquest with nostalgia, the Mexican priest and intellectual effusively praises the Conquistador and his legacy in New Spain. As I outlined in chapter 1, Castorena begins the Dedicatoria to Cortés’s descendant by invoking the Conquistador in order to show that the volcanoes, from whose heights Cortés viewed “a new Venice,” towered over an empire and at the same time proudly stood as a Mexican Parnassus. While this parallel links the Marquise to Mexico’s Tenth Muse, who was born at the foothills of these distinguished mounts, Castorena’s heroic rendering

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of Cortés permits him to construct a web of associations that ultimately lauds what he considers genuinely Mexican: the offspring of the Spanish and Mexica empires. In a poorly veiled attempt to paint himself into his game of associations, Castorena describes another descendant of Cortés born from his union with a daughter of the emperor Moctezuma: Leonor Cortés y Moctezuma (Alatorre 1980, 433). Doña Leonor had the distinct privilege of descending from the most distinguished of Mexico’s Spanish and Aztec born individuals. Ingratiating her further still in the eyes of Castorena, Cortés’s daughter married Joanes de Tolosa, who was no less than the founder of “la muy noble ciudad de nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas, mi patria” [The very noble city of Our Lady of Zacatecas, my homeland] ([10]). Leonor Cortés y Moctezuma is proudly held up as a worthy mestiza figure. A descendant of two cultures, Leonor played a role in the expansion of the cities of New Spain, notably those, like Zacatecas, known to contain mines rich with precious metals. In mentioning Leonor, the city of Zacatecas, and the traditionally Mexican art of painting with “plumajes,” Castorena underlines the fact that he, Sor Juana, and all of the Mexican contributors in the Fama are enriched by their cultural identity amalgamated from two worlds. As a result, he contends that they are the natural heirs of a creative tradition that may hold more than a simple reflection of Spain’s cultural legacy. By engaging both the historical experience and the contemporary reality of Mexico, Castorena proves a contention laid out by David Brading in The First America, his study of creole patriotism over four centuries. According to Brading, no matter how much criollos depended on Europe’s art forms, literature, and cultural patterns, New World patriots “succeeded in creating an intellectual tradition that […] was original, idiosyncratic, complex and quite distinct from the European model” (1991, 5). As we have seen, great pains had to be taken to parlay—or broker—this originality into a language and imaginary that was decipherable for European readers. The Fama’s two dedications depend overwhelmingly on the image of the exotic American bird and the “plumas de oro” of her fellow “plumajes” to express both Sor Juana’s intellectual and cultural worth and that of the volume as a whole. Closing his prologue, however, Castorena includes, almost as an afterthought, the direct correlation between the New World’s gold and the intellectual capabilities of its populace. The Fama’s editor establishes the correspondence by citing an Italian critic who employs the ever-popular image of the Mexican volcanoes to construct his play on words. Pongo término a las alabanzas de la Poetisa […] una paronomasia, que describía un crítico Italiano a favor de los ingenios de la América, alusivo

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al nacimiento de la Poetisa entre dos Volcanes. Pintó dos montes; uno, que se liquidaba en arroyos de oro; otro, que se vertía en Ríos de plata; en las cumbres dos Ingenios con este epígrafe: si hoc in montibus, quid in mentibus? [I end the praises of the poetess with […] a paronomasia, described by an Italian critic in favor of the wit and talents of America, allusive to the birth of the Poetess between two volcanoes. He pictured two mountains; one that melted into rivers of gold; the other that emptied itself into rivers of silver; on the summits two Wits with this epigraph: si hoc in montibus, quid in mentibus? [If this in their mountains, what then in their minds?]. ([130])

Alatorre is convinced that Castorena equipped the Italian critic with the images needed in the formulation of his emblem (1980, 488). Whatever the case, whereas the editor suggests in his prologue that the volcanoes are alight with fire and snow, respectively, the anonymous Italian equates fire with gold and snow with silver. Suggesting a correspondence between what lies in the American soil and the quality of the minds of its inhabitants, the Latin paronomasia (montibus-mentibus) echoes what Castorena has been hinting at in his bird/feather images: that given the proper conditions, i.e., patronage, the Mexican “ingenios” of the Fama can show off their natural inclination to culture and intellect. In other words, their intelligence is a natural extension of the fecundity of their geographical space. By positing Sor Juana as the daughter of the wondrous volcanoes, Castorena suggests that while the nun is perhaps a rare intellect and certainly unlike other women, like Leonor Cortés y Moctezuma and her “winged” encomiasts, her person and her intellect are unquestionably Mexican. All these machinations show Castorena to be a patriotic broker in knowledge, poetry and experiences. Ironically, while he argues that the indigenous people of Michoacán have no interest in selling their feathered laminas, he himself trades them, at least metaphorically, in his role as intermediary between New World phenomena and experiences and Spanish ignorance of the same. The language of American riches and its exotic fauna were so well-known that writing other kinds of Americanness (be it ingenio, intelligence, poetic talent or a woman who had all of the above) into the commonplace meant making legible that which was formerly unintelligible. The laminas, too, seem to have been treasured as valuable and hence had already been commodified. In a villancico attributed to Sor Juana and dedicated the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1686), peasants from Michoacán compare Her beauty and Her ascension to the plumed laminas: “—Dios te bendiga, ¡qué linda / hoy a ver a Dios te vas! / Cierto

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que me has parecido lámina de Mechoacán” [God bless you, how lovely you are as you go to see God today. It is true that you have seemed to me like a lamina of Michoacán] (OC 2.314:9–12). Moreover, Méndez Plancarte cites Francisco Javier Clavijero’s reference to the feathered artwork of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán (Breve descripción de la Provincia de Méjico en […] 1767), as an indication of how well-known these impressive works of art were: “‘había [en Pátzcuaro] muchos artífices de mosaicos de pluma, cuyo arte tanto celebran los europeos’” [there were in Pátzcuaro many crafts of feather mosaics, whose art is so celebrated in Europe] (OC 2.505). As a cultural broker, Castorena uses well-known discourses to pawn his wares in the imperial marketplace; he also seeks favors through his offering up of tributes. The multivalent potential of American treasure allows him to craft an imaging for Sor Juana deserving of posthumous fame and, as such, deserving of a tribute such as that which he has assembled in the Fama. If the fiction of the “Tenth Muse” was already intelligible for his reading audience, he made sure that the imaging of Sor Juana as the treasure of the Americas be just as noteworthy an invention.

American Tributes: Sor Juana and a New World Order In Castorena’s prose introduction to Mexico’s “ingenios,” a continuation of his prologue that appears after Sor Juana’s works of the Fama, that is, one hundred and fifty pages after he began his prologue, the editor finally describes how his compatriots mourn the loss of “the richest of America’s treasures”: En el prólogo te previne, lector amigo, que por último, para coronar esta Obra, ofrecía a tu diversión las poesías fúnebres latinas y castellanas […], y son de los ingenios que al tiempo florecían en México […], pues al ver morir a su amadísima Sor Juana Inés, el lustre de su Nación, el honor de su Patria, el más rico tesoro de su América, apenas quedó pluma que no trasladase a su tinta los colores de su corazón. [In the prologue I advised you, reader friend, that lastly, to coronate this work, I would offer for your enjoyment the Latin and Castilian funeral poems […] by the ingenios that at the time flourished in Mexico […] as upon the death of their beloved Sor Juana Inés, light of her nation, honor of her country, the richest treasure of her America, there was hardly a quill that did not transcribe into ink the colors of its heart]. (165–66)

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This is actually the second allusion to the Mexican contributors’ act of crowning the volume. In his prologue’s description of the two cherubs of the frontispiece, the “alados genios” [winged angels or geniuses], Castorena writes: “lo que uno publica, el otro corona” [what one publicizes, the other crowns] ([126]). Editor Castorena’s suggestion that the Mexicans “crown” the volume grants them a distinguished position in the Fama and upholds the idea that they, along with Sor Juana’s never before published works, are being presented to an unfamiliar reading public and therefore need to be made intelligible for them. The Mexican poets included in the volume (some of whom knew the nun personally) impart, through their individual and secularly construed accounts of mourning, both a sense of newly inherited cultural impoverishment and of local pride in Sor Juana’s achievements. Undoubtedly, their main purpose is to honor Sor Juana’s memory in the hopes that their tributes will help grant her immortality through posthumous fame. Yet akin to Belgian sociologist Pierre Delooz’s belief that the dead saint is constructed in accordance with the need of a given society or group, Sor Juana’s Mexican panegyrists portray her as an example of the cultural potential latent in all criollos in order to satisfy their desire for literary recognition on a transatlantic scale (Delooz 1983, 195). To prove their cultural worth vis-à-vis their Spanish contemporaries, the Mexican contributors to the Fama transform Sor Juana into a commodity that can be traded and valued transatlantically. The primary means they employ to fulfill their design is the appropriation of the commonplace perception of American bounty introduced by Sor Juana’s Spanish elegists of the IC, Pérez de Montoro and Luis de Tineo. Similarly to Castorena’s somewhat elliptical tactics in his prose works, the Mexican “wits” of Sor Juana’s Fama repudiate the European notion of a single American treasure—the Tenth Muse—implying instead that Mexico’s gold lies in their literary endeavors and, by extension, in those of all cultured criollos. Well aware of the traditional correlation between the sun and gold, Sor Juana’s Mexican panegyrists of the Fama are decidedly more interested in poetically construing her intellect by means of solar and astrological images than in describing the American volcanoes and birds that captivated Castorena’s imagination. No other symbol is used as consistently by her compatriots to express Sor Juana’s exceptional talent and its relevance for the cultural status of the New World than that of the sun. While not always present as a pivotal metaphor, ten of the thirteen poems written in Spanish by Mexicans incorporate solar and light images. In fact, the Mexican funerary poems written in Sor Juana’s honor are based on an aggregation

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of emblems and images that vary only slightly between each composition, leading me to believe that the poets either agreed on the topic beforehand or perhaps responded to a suggestion proposed by the volume’s compiler. While the copious solar imagery is often used in its most commonplace guise, that is, either to assert the elegists’ belief in Sor Juana’s immortality (and that of her works), or to mourn the injustice of having lost the “light” of their world, it also reveals decisive sentiments of local pride. Most often, the Mexican poets envision the nun and writer suffused with light and engaged in a collaborative relationship either with them or with their patria. For example, in his question asked of the Fates, Felipe de Santoyo hints at the enduring alliance between Sor Juana and her compatriots: ¿Es posible que atrevida Así a la América robes (Como a Jobe Prometheo) Luz, que a ninguno se esconde? [Is it possible that you dare to steal light from America, hidden from no one, (like Prometheus from Zeus/Jove)?] (194)

The solar image, moreover, in its voyage from east to west or, more appropriately in Sor Juana’s case, from west to east, suggests a potential inversion of a natural order that grants the New World a distinguished position therein. If, as the volume contends, Sor Juana’s death is in effect a rebirth like that of the Phoenix, then perhaps the west is also a new oriente, literally, a new east and a new Spain. The inverted cycle of the sun thus serves as an ideal metaphor to describe Sor Juana, and the Fama’s Mexican elegists, all of whom enlighten as they (or their works) travel eastward. While their choice of imagery differs from Castorena’s treasured birds, the Mexican panegyrists share his belief that their voices and ingenio deserve recognition. And implicit in their reasoning is the presumption that if a woman can outdo a man in the realm of poetry and reason, then a colonial should be able to do the same with his or her Peninsular counterpart. Sor Juana’s Mexican elegists’ distinctive vision of “America’s richest treasure” resembles—albeit with some notable differences—Father Calleja’s perspective. Indeed, the age-old correlation between the most precious of metals and the sun is most eloquently expressed in the conceit from the Jesuit’s Elegía that describes Sor Juana’s birth in a land where the sun “dies” (that is, the west), but where gold, itself another incarnation of the sun, is plentiful:

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Sabed, que donde muere el Sol, y el oro Dejar por testamento al clima ordena, Le nació en Juana Inés otro tesoro, Que ganaba al del Sol en la cuantía. [Know that where the Sun dies, and in its will leaves gold to order the climate, another treasure was born in Juana Inés, which exceeded that of the Sun in number]. ([112])

Calleja succinctly and poignantly suggests that Sor Juana’s New World birth granted her the distinct and unfathomable privilege of exceeding the sun’s ability to illuminate the world. The Jesuit’s elegy most likely inspired his compatriot José de Cañizares to express more fully the transformation of Sor Juana’s works from “gold entrails” in “conceptual mines” to “suns” that travel eastward to illuminate Spain. The penultimate stanzas of his romance en arte mayor read: Sólo a España consuela el ver, que goza En sus números doctos, y elocuentes La pura mina de conceptos suyos, Cuyas entrañas oro resplandecen. Por ellos le presume competencias El Indio Ocaso al Español Oriente; Pues si de España el Sol les va a las Indias, De las Indias a España Soles vienen. [Only Spain is consoled to see the pure mine of its concepts that delights in its learned and eloquent numbers, and whose entrails shine with gold. For these, the West Indian presumes rivalry to the Eastern Spaniard; for, if from Spain the sun goes to the Indies, suns come to Spain from the Indies]. ([76])

Similarly, another of the Fama’s Spanish panegyrists, García de Ribadeneyra y Noguerol, writes that Sor Juana outmatches the sun by dawning in the west and thereby illuminating the world while the sun “dies” or sets. The metaphor is popular among Spanish contributors. Pedro María Squarzafigo, Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara, and Lorenzo de las Llamosas echo Ribadeneyra y Noguerol in their respective sonnet, romance, and octavas. De Ribadeneyra y Noguerol’s décima underlines Sor Juana’s individual superiority over the sun in order to proclaim her immortality and, especially, her singularity:

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El sol, padre del saber, y principio del vivir, caducar puede, y morir al tiempo de anochecer: mas esta insigne mujer, que cátedra, y cuna adquiere en poniente, le prefiere, y dos ventajas le hace, pues ella discurre, y nace, donde el Sol caduca, y muere. [The sun, father of knowledge, and the beginning of life, can expire and die at the time of nightfall: but this notable woman, who acquires Chair and cradle in the West, exceeds it and does it [the sun] two favors, for she invents and is born where the sun expires and dies]. ([88])

In fact, in virtually all of the Spanish elegies of the Fama written in a secular vein, Sor Juana’s New World birth defines her as unusual, exotic and exceptional, in short, a rara avis; far from a representative of Creole minds, she figures as the continent’s sole merit. In what is perhaps the most shocking of the European poems of the posthumous volume, Pedro Verdugo, the Count de Torrepalma, describes how Europe surrenders to the weaker and “barbarous” America (represented by the Mexican writer): Murió, y una mujer, que tanta gloria A el medio Mundo de su clima inculto, Y a el débil de su sexo le concede; Que rendido a su mérito, y memoria, El medio Mundo racional, y el culto Al bárbaro respeta, al débil cede. [A woman, who grants so much glory to half of the world, with its uncultured climate, and to the weakness of her sex, has died; and, yielding to her merit and memory, the other half of the world, rational and cultured, respects the barbarous half and cedes to the weaker sex]. ([40])

While less provocative than Verdugo’s sonnet, the octavas by Lorenzo de las Llamosas, the Peruvian born member of Madrid’s literary scene, reaffirm the Spaniards’ conviction that Sor Juana’s death is synonymous with the loss of the New World’s “treasure of knowledge”:

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Cuantos debemos cuna al Nuevo Mundo, Duplicada su pérdida sentimos; Pues de sus ciencias en el Mar profundo Todo el tesoro del saber perdimos: Bien que felices, con favor segundo, Sus inmensos caudales recibimos, Que admitió los talentos en dos modos, Por todos ella, y ella para todos. [Those of us who owe our cradle to the New World feel her loss doubly, for we lose in the deep sea of treasure, the wisdom of her knowledge, while joyous given the second favor: we received her immense riches in two ways: all for her and she for all]. ([65])

In contrast to the Spanish examples cited above, the funereal works of the New World criollos prefer not to speak of Sor Juana’s death solely as an irrevocable loss. Instead, they insist that the nun is reborn in her own works and in the poets who conjure her up in writing. The image of the sun speaks to the wide-reaching effect of Sor Juana’s fame that spans the earth’s two hemispheres and thus constitutes a logical choice in the Spaniards’ portrayal of the renowned nun-poet. But Cañizares, Calleja, and even Montoro, who wrote well before them, also prepared the groundwork for the criollo collaborators to the Fama’s poetic inversion of a natural order. In Spanish, east and west can also be described by the terms oriente and ocaso. Conveniently for Sor Juana’s Mexican elegists, the two expressions both draw a distinction between the two hemispheres and signify birth and death respectively. Borrowing their meaning from the cyclical trajectory of the sun, the terms oriente and ocaso reaffirm one of the Fama’s central arguments: like the sun, Sor Juana will once again dawn in her posthumous volume. That is, by means of her works, the writer continues to travel in the form of a cultural emissary to and fro across the Atlantic, enlightening first the west and then the east with what is commonly described as the “light of her knowledge.” In spite of her death, the publication of the Fama has signaled a movement of Sor Juana’s works which traveled to Spain (in the hands of Castorena) and, sometime in the future, will return to Mexico in the form of a published volume. Unlike the distinctively Mexican image of the volcanoes, the solar image’s perpetual voyage between the two hemispheres endows Sor Juana and New Spain with a place as Spain’s equal. According to the Mexican captain and well-respected poet Alonso Ramírez de Vargas, Sor Juana’s contemporaries who live in the “edad

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luciente” [enlightened age] know that her life is as cyclical as the sun’s daily journey: ¿Agoniza del Sol la edad luciente? No, que a giros eternos se devana: Y en los dos hemisferios es mañana, Lo que parece en ambos Occidente [Does the brilliant age of the sun fade away? No, it spins in eternal revolutions, and in the two hemispheres it is morning though it appears in both to be Occident [dusk]] (175).11

True to their Baroque sensibilities, the collaborators to the posthumous volume describe differences between east and west or birth and death as matters of interpretation. In his “astrological” sonnet, the highly respected poet, Francisco Ayerra de Santa María, prefers to compare Sor Juana to a star given that for the wise, death is a star that leaves a trail of light in its wake.12 Ayerra’s allusion to the legacy of the nun’s death may well be a poorly veiled reference to the Fama: “¿Cuál pudo ser la de tu fin glorioso? / Que la muerte es estrella de los sabios” [What could have been the cause of your glorious end? For death is the star of the wise] (180). Paramount to Ayerra’s statement is the idea that the star (Sor Juana) is not described as vanishing entirely but as leaving behind a legacy for the other stars, that is, the poets who remain in Mexico after Sor Juana’s passing. Further elaborating on the sun-star relationship, two other Mexican authors make inferences to Sor Juana’s benefaction towards her fellow criollo poets. A student of the Real Colegio de Cristo in Mexico City, José de Villena 11 Captain Ramírez de Vargas was a well-respected noble born Mexican poet who gained the favor of both the viceroys and the archbishops and who regularly participated in Mexico City’s certámenes, or poetic tournaments (1665, 1672, 1673). In Sigüenza y Góngora’s Triunfo parténico, to which he contributed f ive poems, Ramírez is lauded as “honra de la Laguna de México” [the pride of the Lagoon of Mexico] (Méndez Plancarte 1945, xxxv). Sor Juana dedicates her décima #109, “A un capitán discreto y valiente,” [to a discreet and valiant captain] to him (OC 1.247). Ramírez de Vargas is one of the few contributors to the Fama that can be considered among New Spain’s more distinguished poets, a fact belied by his presence in two notable anthologies: Alfonso’s Méndez Plancarte’s seminal Poetas novohispanos (1945) and Poesía novohispana, edited by Martha Lilia Tenorio and published by the Colegio de México in 2010. 12 In addition to being a poet, Ayerra was an orator, a theologian, an erudite philosopher, and, not surprisingly, an intimate friend of Sigüenza y Góngora (Méndez Plancarte 1945, xv).

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records in his endechas13 how Mexico became a star (i.e., a poet)—filled sky because it produced an astral body in Sor Juana, “Oh México felice! / Gloriosa Patria, en cuya región el Firmamento, / Porque produce estrellas, se transmuta” [Oh joyous Mexico, glorious homeland, in whose region the firmament is transformed because it produces stars] (185). Entreating his compatriots not to mourn the writer’s death (“América, no llores / la muerte de su Musa / Juana Inés […]”) [America, do not mourn the death of your muse, Juana Inés], Villena suggests that Sor Juana’s fate as an especially bright star is inextricably linked to her fellow Mexican poets who reflect her light. Diego Martínez correlates most directly the effect of Sor Juana’s light to the aspirations of her imitators.14 For Martínez, the Tenth Muse’s compatriots depend on her light much as the moon reflects the sun’s rays: Sol viviste, y habrá muchos acaso, Que mendigando de tus luces bellas, A ser astros aspiren del Parnaso. Ocaso, pues padezcan tus centellas, Que si el sol no hace tumba del Ocaso, Lucimiento no gozan las estrellas [As the sun you lived, and there will perhaps be many who, begging for your beautiful light, aspire to be stars of Parnassus. At dusk, the flashes of light suffer, for if the sun does not set, the stars cannot shine [i.e, be illuminated]. (176)

Castorena’s epigraph to Martínez’s sonnet succinctly sums up his argument: “Transfiere a la utilidad que tendrán los ingenios con los escritos póstumos de la Poetisa, la claridad que toman las estrellas de la muerte del sol” [He compares the benefits the ingenios will have thanks to the posthumous writings of the poetess, to the lights that the stars take from the death of the sun] (176). In other words, Martínez proposes that in order for the “stars” (the Fama’s collaborators) to shine, the nun-writer/sun had to die. If, for editor Castorena, the “plumajes” of the artisans of Michoacán depended on the sun in the form of patronage in order to shine, for Sor Juana’s Mexican panegyrists of the Fama, it is she who both showers them with the light of 13 Four verses of six or seven syllables, generally assonant, often composed on funerary occasions. 14 According to Méndez Plancarte, Diego Martínez is an “ilustre desconocido” [an illustrious unknown] (1945, xxxiv).

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her mind and who, with her death, grants them the opportunity to compose funeral elegies that may bring them long hoped for literary esteem. Indeed, the solar inversion, that is, the movement of the Sor Juana’s works from west to east, endows the nun with the ability to enlighten and encourage her contemporaries through her posthumous literary patronage. While the examples culled from the works of the Mexican contributions to the Fama that I have cited thus far subtly draw attention to their cultural potential by means of their association with Mexico’s Tenth Muse, one collaborator in particular stands out from the rest. Undoubtedly the most outspoken of the Mexican criollos to contribute to the posthumous volume, Lorenzo González de la Sancha articulates a passionate appeal for the universal recognition of both Sor Juana and her compatriots’ talent. Of González de la Sancha’s three poems published in the Fama—two romances and a funeral elegy—the most revealing is his romance heroico, written in response to José Pérez de Montoro’s romance of the IC (to which I alluded previously). Composed of three distinct sections: a planctus, a meditation on the nature of Sor Juana’s knowledge, and a statement regarding the status of poetry in New Spain, González de la Sancha’s lengthy romance echoes many of Montoro’s sentiments. At the same time, however, the Mexican poet infuses the Spaniard’s imagery with a genuinely New World perspective. In the final section of his romance, González de la Sancha corroborates the suggestion shared by Castorena, Villena, Ayerra, and Martínez that poets abound in Mexico. More directly than Castorena, the Mexican poet and compiler of the Exequias mythológicas in honor of Sor Juana borrows images and metaphors from Montoro. By means of antithesis, the Mexican challenges the Spaniard’s choice of images and words in order to infuse them with a distinctly criollo interpretation.15 González de la Sancha appropriately begins the last six stanzas of his romance with the word acá [here] in response to the final three stanzas of Montoro’s romance, which denote New Spain from a European perspective and begin with the adverb allá [there]. While for the Spanish panegyrist writing in 1689 Sor Juana is a rare poetic voice found amidst devotees of the commercial activities of Mercury, González de la Sancha suggests that the nun and writer is the most talented 15 I have already discussed the relevance of the ill-fated Exequias mythológicas in chapter 1, 78 n. 18. Strangely enough, as Alatorre has also noted (1980, 462 n. 76), De la Maza questions why the epigraph to González de la Sancha’s romance even mentions Montoro, (“no tenía porque mencionar a Montoro” (1980, 157)), despite the fact that, in addition to their thematic similarities, the two romances feature identical assonance.

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amidst Minerva’s many vassals. González de la Sancha replaces Montoro’s reference to Apollo with his own to Minerva, presumably in her guise as the personification of thought. Not surprisingly, both poets rely on the concept of the New World’s mineral riches to prove their respective points. For example, the following stanza by Montoro sets up the circumstances from which Sor Juana emerges: Allá, donde en los senos de los montes, Que el codicioso afán deja infecundos, Solo se aspira a que propague Apolo las civiles tareas de Mercurio [There, in the wombs of the mountains, which are left barren by covetous zeal, the wish is that Apollo propagate the civil works of Mercury]. (IC [3])

González de la Sancha’s response, on the other hand, reads as follows: Acá dije, que acá, sí dan los montes, Preciosos poros, envidiados frutos, Más vasallos se rinden a Minerva, Que a civiles tareas de Mercurio [Here, I said, that here the mountains do have precious pores, envied fruits, more vassals surrender to Minerva than to the civil works of Mercury]. (190)

As Antonio Alatorre has noted, the Mexican panegyrist clearly wishes to impress upon his Spanish audience the fact that in New Spain Sor Juana is not as much of a rarity as she is “allá” (in Spain) (1980, 462 n. 76). Moreover, he proves himself to be perfectly versed in Peninsular poetic traditions and adds to these his “unique access to local knowledge” as a criollo (More 2013, 7). To substantiate his point, in the next stanza González de la Sancha illustrates how Mexico would produce many more works for public consumption in Europe if granted the opportunity in the form of more printing presses: Acá, donde, si a falta de las prensas, No zozobrara el más tirante estudio, Más hojas floreciera su distancia, Que dio Laureles a su Oriente Augusto

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[Here, where, if it weren’t for the lack of printing presses, the most diligent study would not be lost; more pages would emerge from this distance than the laurels that Augustus gave to the East]. (191)

By blaming European ignorance of Mexico’s “admirables ingenios” on the sorry state of the printing press in America rather than on the lack of talent, González de la Sancha affirms the intellectual ability of his compatriots. The Mexican panegyrist’s fourth stanza beginning with the word acá (there are a total of six) is perhaps the most defiant. Here, he addresses the enormity of the challenge faced by New World poets longing to impress their skills upon their European counterparts who, for the most part, presumed them to be devoid of any culture, learning, or talent. With the following verses, González’s romance heroico speaks directly to Spain’s disregard for cultural products born on American soil: Acá donde las ciencias enlazadas, Tan hermanadas llevan siempre el rumbo, Que es una sola Norte muy pequeño A juveniles despreciados lustros [Here, where the sciences, connected, always take the same path, which is the lone North Star to juvenile and disdained lustrums]. (191)

While the New World’s knowledge is like the north, or the polar star, argues González de la Sancha, it is dismissed by Europeans as small and juvenile; that is, from a new, and, therefore, lesser world. Written six years after Montoro’s elegy appeared in the IC, González de la Sancha’s romance seizes the opportunity granted to him by the Spanish poet to praise Sor Juana with similar imagery yet with a distinctly criollo viewpoint, displaying what Bauer and Mazzotti describe as “a creole consciousness [that] emerged largely in reaction to what colonials perceived as unfair metropolitan biases” (2009, 31). González de la Sancha’s allusion to the New World vassals of Minerva becomes more highly charged when considered alongside his disdain for the Spaniards who disregard the New World’s intellectual potential. For, the poet stipulates, despite the natural bounty of their land (“[…] acá, si dan los montes, / Preciosos poros, envidiados frutos”) [Here, I said, that here the mountains do have precious pores, envied fruits], Americans value poetry (“Más vasallos se rinden a Minerva, / Que a civiles tareas de Mercurio” [more vassals surrender to Minerva than to the civil works of Mercury] (190). Iberians, on the other hand, González de

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la Sancha intimates, eagerly welcome the flow of minerals from America to Europe but not its intellectual products. Perhaps, González de la Sancha seems to suggest, greed renders the Spanish even more “backward” than they deem the Mexicans to be.

Not Woman at All?: Sor Juana and the Discourse of New World Abundance Engaged in a transatlantic dialogue, the secularly motivated Mexican elegies and accolades of the Fama promote Sor Juana as an iconic symbol, a Mexican Tenth Muse and phoenix who travels on, and by means of, her golden plumequills, and the quintessence of the creative potential latent in all criollos. In negotiating this figuring of the nun by means of poetic images inspired by astrology or New World fauna or riches, her elegists transform her into an iridescent being who both enriches the Old World and lies beyond the grasp of death and oblivion. So doing also allowed Sor Juana’s admirers to strip her of her gender or to temper her being born a woman by ascribing her qualities to established categories, such as the mujer varonil [manly woman]. In what follows, I explore other ways in which Sor Juana’s panegyrists from Old World and New distance her from her sex and what was understood to be her nature. The elegies considered in the ensuing pages employ images such as the Mexican volcanoes, would-be scientific theories, and Patristic notions to mold the writer into an icon of ingenio varonil; they debate the notion of ingenio mixto, the one-sex model, and whether her knowledge was infused or acquired. Rendering her more intelligible meant that the arguments used on both sides of the Atlantic engage in lines of thinking that tie the nun to the land, the climate and fecundity of the New World and the minds of its inhabitants. In all cases, the concomitant discourse of American excess and abundance was that of the monstrous, yet another legible category for European readers. For the most part, the encomia by Sor Juana’s compatriots show so little concern for her sex that she rarely appears as a human being. In the rare occasions in which the woman does take on human form, it is usually to distinguish her from the divine or the miraculous. Such is the case, for example, of the sonnet by Alonso Ramírez de Vargas, which concludes that Sor Juana is both like the cherub and superior to it—surprisingly enough, due to her very human ability to die. ¿Muere el Cherub? No muere, que eminente, Del saber vive esencia soberana,

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Mar de iluminación, que siempre mana; Luz, que siempre es Aurora, y es Oriente. ¿Pues cómo, siendo espíritu de ciencia Julia, el Ocaso su esplendor domina? Fue acaso porque, humana inteligencia, Tan única murió, tan peregrina, Que en ella fue la muerte providencia, Porque no la tuvieran por Divina [Does the Cherub die? They do not die, for, eminent, as sovereign essence of knowledge they live on, a sea of light that forever flows, a light that is always the dawn (Aurora) and the east. For, how is it that dusk prevailed over Julia, who was the spirit of science? Perhaps it was because as human intelligence she died so unique, so peregrine, that for her, death was providence, so she would not be mistaken for a divine being]. (175)

By reducing Sor Juana to the static image of angel, sun, star, or treasure, her New World elegists need not enter into the debate surrounding whether her knowledge was infused or acquired. While the first would free her of any responsibilities, it also offers the opportunity of overlooking her sex, as God bestows favors on whomever he deems worthy. Some elegists take certain liberties in their negotiations. González de la Sancha, for example, taking his cue once again from Montoro, proposes that the nun acquired her knowledge, albeit in the celestial realm. In his romance of the IC, Montoro compares the writer’s daring to that of Prometheus who steals fire (light) from the sun only to be punished for his actions. Unlike the mythological figure, however, Sor Juana is spared punishment for her audacity: “Enmedando el error de Prometeo, / Repite el riesgo; pero logra el hurto” [Amending Prometheus’s error, she repeats the risk, but achieves the theft] (IC [3]). In his rewrite, González de la Sancha retorts that Sor Juana does not imitate Prometheus since her intelligence is rightly hers: Hurto dije, y no es, que lo usurpado Ajeno pone impedimento al triunfo, Y es el lucir de nuestra ilustre Juana Más, que por ser tan grande, por ser suyo [I said “theft” and it is not, for when something that is someone else’s is usurped, triumph is impeded, whereas the brilliance of our illustrious Juana is more impressive being hers alone]. (190)

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For González de la Sancha, the writer played an active role in obtaining her knowledge: “Adquiridas [sus luces], que no es razón que quiera / Minorar a sus méritos lo infuso” [Having acquired her knowledge (“illumination”) through study is no reason to diminish the merits of Divine inspiration] (190). Interestingly enough, Sor Juana’s compatriot believes that her knowledge has as its source both her own actions and God’s will, in other words, that it is both acquired and infused. González de la Sancha’s suggestion that the nun possessed a natural disposition to ingenio despite her sex constitutes a radical departure from the norm. Sor Juana’s ingenio, whether infused or acquired, proved problematic for her contemporaries in view of the Aristotelian notion of her sex that still held firm in the seventeenth century. Simply acknowledging the nun’s sex implied having then to justify her intellect, which was understood as being alien to her “nature.” Reluctant to break with the thinkers and moralists of their time, Sor Juana’s secular encomiasts devised strategies for extolling the nun’s ingenio. Among the most popular of these tactics was to deny Sor Juana a body, in order to focus on her soul. Already in the IC the anonymous censor of the second prologue chastises those who find woman and ingenio to be incompatible: “Espanto que se queda para la estolidez rústica de quien pensare, que por el sexo se han las almas de distinguir” [For the rustic ignorance of those that believe that souls are distinguished by their sex] (IC [14]). Following Aristotle, Church fathers such as Aquinas stipulated that while both men and women were marked by the imago Dei and the possession of a rational soul, men were understood to possess the image of God in a way different and superior to women. The difference in question resided in the fact that rational faculties appeared more strongly in the male and hence the female’s weaker and imperfect body had a detrimental effect on her soul (McLaughlin 1974, 218). Woman’s sexuality was believed to define her; her flawed body was assumed to affect her intelligence, and, ultimately, her moral stature. Nevertheless, the hierarchical relationships based on the imperfections of corporeality that governed life on earth were overcome in the resurrected state. As Eleanor Commo McLaughlin explains, “the logical equivalence on a religious level of the male and female equally endowed with a rational soul in the image of God is finally and unambiguously fulfilled in the Resurrection” (1974, 220). In her posthumously compiled tribute, Sor Juana can exist for her fellow poets of New Spain and Old in the quasi-human form of a resurrected being. As one of the faculties of the soul, the nun’s intelligence, or entendimiento, can be contemplated without regard to her sex. A number of the nun’s admirers

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employ these maxims to bridge what would otherwise be understood as the gap between her sex and her incomparable learning. Such is the case of Felipe de Santoyo García,16 who writes: No fue mujer aunque el sexo como a tal la reconoce que fue un ángel, si los hay de humanas composiciones [She was not a woman, although her sex recognizes her as such; she was an angel, if they exist in human form]. (197–98)

Santoyo’s remark is notable not only because he refutes the nun’s sex in no uncertain terms, (“no fue mujer” [she was not a woman]), but also because by describing her as an angel, the panegyrist alludes to the equivalence of the souls of men and women. The Spanish confessor to the Duke de Arcos, Juan de Cabrera, formulates a similar argument in his misconstrued account of Sor Juana’s life. Cabrera’s sonnet suggests that there was no need for the nun to beseech her parents to send her to the university dressed as a man given that her wisdom exceeded that of the scholars found there, and, secondly, because souls have no sex—“solamente las presta calidad / quien las llega a vestir de perfección” [They only earn their worth from those that clothe them in perfection]. After all, Cabrera writes, the singular favor of God nurtured Sor Juana as a “Virtud o Querubín” and, later, as a “Serafín” ([49]). Virtud, Querubín and Serafín [Virtues, Cherubim and Seraphim] being the three levels (from lesser to greater) in the hierarchy of angels. Castorena shares the opinion that intelligence pertains to the realm of the soul. In his works of prose, his most enthusiastic praise is reserved for Sor Juana’s decidedly secular wit and intellect. In fact, early in his prologue Castorena effusively adulates the nun’s learning with the following words: “Pues 16 Santoyo was the speaker of Mexico City’s Audiencia and a popular contributor to occasional works devoted to holy themes and published in the Mexican capital. He is the author, for example, of a dedicatoria to the Virgin Mary entitled “Dedicación del Templo de Santa Teresa de Jesús en la Ciudad de México” and included in Mística Diana (Mexico, 1684), a prose description of a temple built for the Discalced Carmelites in New Spain. Owned by the John Carter Brown Library, Mística Diana also includes poetry by Fama contributors Francisco de Ayerra y Santa María and Alonso Ramírez de Vargas. Santoyo’s Mexicanist position is expressed more clearly in his Panegírica dedicación del Templo para Sta. Isabel […] (Mexico, 1681), another volume published in honor of the construction of a church, in which he describes Mexico City as “esta segunda Roma Mexicana” [this second, Mexican, Rome] (qtd. in Méndez Plancarte 1945, 142).

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es sin duda, que si el entendimiento son los ojos del alma, esta rara mujer fue el Argos de los entendimientos” [For it is without a doubt that, if knowledge is the eyes of the soul, this rare woman was the Argus of knowledge] ([119]). According to Saint Augustine, of the three potencies of the rational soul, entendimiento is the virtue that understands those things that lie beyond the realm of the senses. “Es una potencia espiritual y cognoscitiva del alma racional, con la cual se entienden y conocen los objetos así sensibles como no sensibles, y que están fuera de la esfera de los sentidos” [It is a spiritual and cognitive power of the rational soul, with which both appreciable and unappreciable objects that lie beyond the realm of the senses are understood and recognized] (Diccionario de Autoridades 1963, 501). Argus Panoptes, the “Argos” to whom Castorena refers, was known as a giant of redoubtable strength who was believed to see all thanks to his one hundred eyes, fifty of which remained open while the other fifty closed in his sleep. The Mexican nun’s soul was thus blessed with entendimiento to the same degree that Argus had eyes. Moreover, by following his analogy of desmesura with praise for her writing, Castorena draws a direct correlation between the “eyes” of Sor Juana’s soul and her literary production. Indeed, if, as the compiler argues, the writer’s works are products of her soul, then it naturally follows that he should write in one of his romances: “No guardó el alma [de Sor Juana], en sus Obras / femenil temperamento” [The soul [of Sor Juana], as expressed in her works, did not have a feminine temperament] ([142]). A number of the Fama’s Spanish collaborators agree with the compiler’s belief that sex becomes irrelevant once Sor Juana’s genius is proved to pertain to the sphere of the soul. Articulating his conviction much more candidly than Castorena, the censor Diego de Heredia, for example, incites his readers not to revere the nun’s femininity, which, as we have seen, is irrelevant to the faculties of the soul, but rather the fact that Sor Juana acquired knowledge with no help from teachers. Like many other European laudators of the Fama, Heredia is concerned with the acquisition and nature of Sor Juana’s knowledge but less so with the subject of her erudition. Like Saint Basilio, whose words he quotes from Proverbs, the censor praises “aun más el modo de saber hacendosa de labrar sus panales, que en los panales mismos la sustancia […]”) [her industrious way of forming her honeycombs, more than the substance of the honeycombs themselves] ([14]). It is perhaps due to the Fama’s Spanish panegyrists’ amazement at the extent and universality of Sor Juana’s knowledge that so many of the Old World elegies fail to deal with the nun’s poetry or with her death, and instead focus on her prodigious learning accomplished without the aid of mentors. Sor Juana’s precocity, explicitly the fact that she could read by age three, fascinates

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her Spanish elegists. They devote a décima and no fewer than four sonnets to the subject. Other biographical “facts” relating to the nun’s learning, such as her exam at Mexico City’s court at age seventeen, and, based on her account from the Respuesta a sor Filotea [Answer to Sister Filotea], the cutting of her hair out of frustration at her intellectual progress, also serve as popular themes for the European elegists. In addition to the décima by Ribadeneyra’s to which I have already alluded, Iván Alonso de Mújica, Feliciano Gilberto de Pisa, Pedro María Squarzafigo, Francisco de León y Salvatierra, and Inés de Vargas devote sonnets to Sor Juana’s precocity. A mediocre sonnet by Marcos Suárez de Orozco describes the nun’s exam, and a series of liras by Francisco Bueno and a décima by María Jacinta de Abogader y Mendoza treat the cutting of her hair. Without a doubt, however, the topic of Sor Juana as autodidact held special importance for the Spanish collaborators to the Fama. The censor Muñoz de Castilblanque forthrightly discloses the motives fueling his praise: ¿A quién no admira que una mujer, […] que no tuvo más maestro que un libro mudo y un tintero insensible por condiscípulo, y […] muchos estorbos entre las precisas obligaciones religiosas, disputase con tan grave fundamento la verdad del asunto de aquel gran ingenio lusitano? Una mujer […] sin que para mí sea mucha admiración porque el todo Poderoso no vinculó los talentos que puede conceder a determinado sexo. Sea calificación de esta verdad la dilatada serie que hizo la poetisa de insignes mujeres dignas de eterna Fama; y sea calificación de sí misma la universalidad de noticias que fecundaron su pluma. [Who is not amazed that a woman who has no teacher but a mute book and an inanimate inkwell as a classmate, and many impediments in the rigorous religious obligations, could dispute with such grave principles the truth of the matter of that great Lusitaniana ingenio [Father Vieira]? It does not astonish me all that much that she is a woman because the Almighty did not bind the talents He can concede to a particular sex. Let the proof of this truth be the poetess’ extensive series on distinguished women worthy of eternal fame, and let her merit be the universality of the concepts that nurtured her plume]. ([108])17 17 The reference to the women worthy of fame is, in turn, a reference to Sor Juana’s naming of her female predecessors in her Respuesta (a topic I return to in chapter 4). The censor, moreover, proves that he has read the Carta atenagórica when he refers to Vieira as the “gran ingenio lusitano” [great Portuguese “ingenio”]; in so doing, he allows us to surmise that he may well have been one of Sor Juana’s defenders who chose to withhold his name in the Segundo volumen (SV).

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While Sor Juana complained in her Respuesta, in her dedicatoria to the Segundo volumen (SV), and in her Carta al P. Núñez of not being able to study under the tutelage of others, her Spanish elegists deem that she had no need for them (Alatorre 1980, 490). According to Calleja and more than a few of the Fama’s Spanish poets, the nun’s prodigious mind naturally allows her to be her own teacher. This would allow for the fact that she learned on her own, what it took them decades of study in Jesuit schools to learn (Kirk 2016, 63–65). In the words of Menalcas, one of two pastors from Eulogio Francisco de Córdoba’s Égloga [eclogue or pastoral poem]: Su numen prodigioso En la Cátedra docta de sí mismo Resumía ingenioso El propio, que formaba, silogismo; Siendo, en preciso instante, Científica doctora, y estudiante [Her prodigious inspiration was summarized in her own erudite teachings, thus forming a syllogism by being, at the same time, a doctor of science and a student]. ([82])

In his sonnet, Gilberto de Pisa understands the nun’s intelligence to be that much greater precisely due to the absence of teachers in her life: No fue de la fortuna contingencia, Ni de la vana presunción jactancia, Aprender sin maestros la substancia Fundamental de toda humana ciencia [It was not a contingency of fortune, nor the pretentions of vain conceit, to learn without teachers the fundamental substances of all human science]. ([45])

Yet again, it is Calleja who articulates most expressively what “naturally” belongs to the nun and writer: ¿Avéis visto jamás naturalmente con el de Juana igual entendimiento? Ni ejemplo podéis dar de lo siguiente: su maestro fue solo su talento.

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[Have you ever naturally seen intelligence equal to Juana’s? Nor could you give another example of this: her talent was her only teacher]. ([117] cursives in the original)

By conceiving of Sor Juana’s mental agility as natural to her person and not acquired, panegyrists such as Heredia, Córdoba, and Pisa perhaps unknowingly refrain from entering the feminist debate regarding women’s education prevalent throughout Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The debate centered on whether noblewomen and female religious should dedicate themselves to acquiring knowledge through study.18 When Sor Juana’s panegyrists argue that her knowledge was infused, they exclude her from being considered alongside her contemporaries, whether noblewomen or fellow nuns. Indeed, what fascinates Sor Juana’s Spanish laudators is not the fact that she is a woman but rather that she is a strange prodigy who is unlike those of her sex. In other words, what is believed to be natural in Sor Juana is precisely what is unnatural in all other women. Martín Dávila y Palomares sums up their position when he writes in his rimas: “O portento del sexo, que ilustraste!” [What a marvel of your sex you exemplify!] ([71]). Dávila y Palomares’s verse confirms that despite agreeing on the equality granted the souls of men and women, not all the contributors to the Fama are prepared to overlook the question of Sor Juana’s sex. How could the writer’s knowledge be acquired, or even infused, when it clearly surpassed expectations regarding women’s intellect? In the words of the Spaniard Rodrigo de Ribadeneyra, Sor Juana’s prodigious ingenio faced four impediments: “lo Niña, lo Femenil, lo Sin Maestros, [y] lo Humana” [the fact of being a girl, of being feminine, of being without teachers and of being human] ([73, cursives in the original]). Not surprisingly, none of the Fama’s collaborators defy Aristotle and contemporary thinkers such as Juan Huarte de San Juan, who steadfastly believed that understanding was beyond the inherent ability of women. The Mexican Antonio de Deza y Ulloa, a captain, a gentleman of the Order of Santiago, and later, governor of Nueva Vizcaya, in fact attributes the nun’s death to her flawed corporeality, which was literally unable to sustain her learning! No común se atrevió segur profana, Que como toda fue sabiduría, 18 For an overview of the debate as it pertains to Spain, see McKendrick (1974, 6–14) and Merrim (1999, chapter 5: “The New Prometheus: Women’s Education, Autodidacticism, and the Will to Signature”).

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Y en frágil sexo, y cuerpo no cabía, Más murió de entendida, que de humana [For, as she was all knowledge, which in the fragile sex and the body did not fit, she died more from being learned than from being human]. (187)

Whether Sor Juana’s panegyrists of the Fama display fascination, shock, or indifference to her sex, each of their strategies for normalizing the nun’s impressive learning reveals their struggle to fit her into their notion of the world. Instead of contradicting the teachings of the authorities, Sor Juana’s elegists searched for means to reconcile their beliefs with the incongruities of her person. If, for those who reduce the nun and writer to a disembodied image or an impressive wonder, she is not a woman, for others she remains a woman—albeit with a genderless soul. Yet another paradigm, perhaps the most revealing of all, surfaces repeatedly in the Fama to impart the disjuncture between what was believed to be Sor Juana’s nature and her ability: the monstrous and ambiguous person of mixed gender, the mujer varonil. Like the popular characters of the comedias of the Golden Age, the Tenth Muse is described as manly for acting out of character, that is, for breaking with the strict norms set for female behavior. In the case of Sor Juana, however, some of her posthumous elegists suggest not only that she possesses unwomanly characteristics but also that she is like a man. The strategy serves the nun’s elegists as a means of rationalizing her ingenio, which, for them, could be nothing if not “varonil.” It is worth noting that the Biblical image of the mujer fuerte, central to Sor Juana’s rendering as a virtuous exemplar, is often likened to the mujer varonil due to the etymological association between the Latin vir (man) and virtus (virtue). While perhaps likening a woman to a man is surprising to us, in her discussion of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, Constance Jordan examines how exceptional women often had to be spoken of as men. “In societies maintaining a strict hierarchy of persons, where the very concept of equality was rarely expressed and usually philosophically suspect, to praise a creature by identifying it as qualitatively higher on creation’s ladder than it in fact is may not be so back-handed a compliment as it might seem” (1987, 28n4). In yet another game of echoes with the poet Montoro, Lorenzo González de la Sancha (in his second romance of the Fama), reluctantly concedes that Sor Juana is in fact a woman. Whereas Montoro hesitantly begins his romance of the SV with the words, “Mujer […] mas ¿qué dije?” [Woman […] but what did I say?] ([79]), González de la Sancha rejoins: “Esa, (no sé cómo se

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diga) / Mujer (cómo lo pronuncie)” [She, (I don’t know how to say it); woman (how to pronounce it?)]. The Mexican panegyrist discloses the source of his difficulties when he admits in the following stanza: “Esa, que en femenil sexo / varonil afecto encubre” [She, who in the feminine sex conceals a masculine affectation] (205). To prove a similar point, Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara, one of the Fama’s Spanish poets, uses a surprising grammatical construction to describe Sor Juana: “aquella prodigio extraño” [that strange prodigy] ([58], emphasis added). In Spanish, the demonstrative must agree with the corresponding gender and number of the noun. The grammatically correct rendering of the phrase should read: “aquel prodigio extraño.” Sor Juana’s ingenio, her most unusual attribute as a woman, is most intriguingly construed by the Peruvian Count de la Granja, who suggests that the nun is composed of “ingenio mixto” [mixed “ingenio”]. Published in the pages of the Fama but written while the nun was still alive, the Peruvian Count’s romance offers the following definition of Sor Juana: “de ángel, hombre y mujer / organizado individuo.” [an individual composed of angel, man and woman]. As a hybrid creature, it thus follows that the nun should have “[…] ingenio mixto, / para usar en ambos sexos / de versos hermafroditos” [mixed ingenio to use hemaphrodite verses in both sexes] (143). While the Count de la Granja is certainly displaying his own wit in his interpretation of Sor Juana’s rare ability, he also puts forth an early modern scientific explanation for the nun’s rare display of learning, ingenio, and reason. In fact, the Fama engages in its own scientific account of the Mexican writer’s rarity, inspired in part, I think, by a prologue to the SV by Pedro Zapata. Like Tineo before him and, as I have shown, several of the elegists of 1700, Zapata insists that in the realm of the soul men and women are equals. His construal of why women are able to reason relies not only on spiritual grounds, but also on the following clinical explanation: No es el mayor motivo de admirarme, ver tan varonil y valiente ingenio en un cuerpo mujeril, […] debo saber que no hay diversidad en las almas y que los cuerpos en ambos sexos de tal suerte son desemejantes, que pueden y suelen admitir igual proporción de órganos para penetrar las más delicadas sutilezas de las ciencias. [It is not the greatest cause for admiration, to see such a masculine ingenio in a womanly body […] I should know that there is no difference in souls and that the bodies of both sexes are dissimilar, yet they tend to have the same proportion of organs to access the most delicate subtleties of the sciences]. (SV [23])

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With his statement, Zapata alludes to the findings of the much-esteemed authority on the relationship between female corporeality and ingenio, Juan Huarte de San Juan. Huarte believed that women simply did not have a humeral constitution that enabled them to reason like men. According to doctor Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1594), man’s humors were warm and dry and thus capable of intellectual reflection, whereas women, “por razón de frialdad y humedad en su sexo, no pueden alcanzar ingenio profundo” [because of the coldness and dampness of their sex, they cannot achieve profound ingenio] (1989, 627–28). Huarte’s humeral explanation suggests that the very cold and humidity that determines women’s sex is what renders them incapable of ingenio and literary talent. However, it seems likely that Zapata has in mind Huarte’s notion of sexual dimorphism, his “myth of mobility” between the sexes (Greenblatt 1998, 78), which can logically result in the occurrence of “ingenio mixto” [mixed ingenio]. According to the sexual theories of the time, “which place males and females on a single biological continuum” (Merrim 1999, 13), both sexes had the same sex organs (“igual proporción de órganos,” [equal proportion of organs] says Zapata) only women had them on the inside of their bodies, and men outside. As Stephanie Merrim has noted, Huarte’s thinking upholds the so-called one-sex model. “Huarte […] detail[s] on a continuum ranging from the ‘pure’ male to the ‘pure’ female, with all the gradations in between, the manner in which within the one-sex model male shades into female; he also describes the facility with which one sex can theoretically convert into the other […]” (Merrim 1999, 14). For laudators like Zapata who were familiar with the one-sex model, “Ver tan varonil y valiente ingenio en un cuerpo mujeril” [seeing such manly and valient ingenio in a womanly body] comes as little surprise. The Conde de la Granja’s puzzling reference to Sor Juana’s “ingenio mixto,” her “versos hermafroditos” of “metros de climas distintos” [hermaphrodite verses of disparate climates] take on yet another meaning when considered alongside the interpretations of Huarte offered by his compatriot Juan del Valle y Caviedes, and Sor Juana’s panegyrists of the Fama. Returning yet again to the topic of the nun’s birth at the foothills of the Mexican volcanoes, Sor Juana’s contemporaries offer their own would-be scientific clarification of the nun’s intelligence, prodigiousness, and rarity. Let us look at the sinuous manner in which the matter unfolds. Earlier in the chapter, I outlined how the mineral riches of the Mexican volcanoes mirror the intellectual ability of the criollos as expressed in the anonymous Italian’s paronomasia cited in the Fama’s prologue. Stemming from the allegorical images of the volcanoes portrayed in the volume’s engraved frontispiece are not only the gold and silver found inside the respective

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mountains but also their corresponding attributes of fire and ice. One of the most polymorphous and salient images of the Fama, the volcanoes serve once again to affirm Sor Juana’s status as an American icon; this time allowing her to overcome the limitations imposed on women of her time. In his poetic elegy to Sor Juana, Father Calleja refers to the vital role that the antithetical characteristics of the volcanoes played in her birth: Y entre dos Montes fue su primer lloro. Estos de nieve, y lumbre, Noche, y Día, Volcanes son, que al fin la Primavera vive de frío, y fuego cercanía. [And between two mountains she let out her first cry. These two volcanoes are formed of snow, and fire, night, and day; they are volcanoes and the spring, after all, lives in the proximity of cold and fire]. ([112])

Together, asserts the Jesuit, the complementary volcanoes create an idyllic spring in which everything, and especially Sor Juana, flourishes. But Calleja’s sonorous description of the nun’s birth may also suggest that she is marked by both qualities associated with the humeral effects of heat and cold that emanate from the volcanoes, which, according to Huarte, belong only to either men or women. In his anonymously published romance of the Fama, Castorena draws a direct correlation between Sor Juana’s unusual talents for her sex—her “habilidad para las letras” [literary abilities] and her ingenio—and the fire (warmth) and snow (cold) of the volcanoes: De la nieve el ampo diga Lo apacible de su metro, Y de tu ingenio lo ardiente Lenguas publiquen de fuego. [From the whiteness of the snow, comes the serenity of your verse, while from the fire comes your inflamed genius]. ([140])

To reinforce his hypothesis that Sor Juana’s ingenio mixto stems from the warmth granted her not by her biology but by the volcanoes that presided over her birth, Castorena writes: De aquí nacen los rayos de aquel poderoso incendio,

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Que en sutiles llamas arde mas allá del pensamiento [From here are born the rays of that powerful fire, which burns in subtle flame beyond thought even]. ([140])

As Antonio Alatorre has noted, Juan del Valle y Caviedes’s romance, written for Sor Juana well before the publication of the Fama, proves that the correspondence between the Mexican nun and her birthplace was already well known among her admirers. Un lugar que está entre dos volcanes, de fuego y agua, para ser notable en todo dicen que fue vuestra patria. [They say your homeland was a most notable place between two volcanoes of fire and water] (Alatorre 2007, 190–94).

By associating the snow and fire of the volcanoes with memory and intelligence respectively, Caviedes’s poem also offers a would-be scientific reasoning for the nun’s brilliance that is in line with the hypothesis proposed by Castorena, and, although more obliquely, by Calleja: porque la humedad y el frío a la memoria adelantan, y sequedad y calor al entendimiento inflaman. [Because humidity and cold advance memory, and dryness and heat inflame understanding]. (110)

Alatorre, I believe, is correct in assuming that [D]e la misma manera que es rarísimo que en lo físico se llegue al equilibrio absoluto entre lo húmedo y lo seco, entre lo frío y lo cálido, también es rarísimo que la memoria y el entendimiento, la erudición y la inteligencia, estén, como en Sor Juana, exactamente a la misma altura: y todo por haber nacido en Nepantla.

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[In the same way that it is extremely rare that in one physical condition an absolute equilibrium be achieved between dampness and dryness, between cold and hot, it is also extremely rare that memory and understanding, erudition and intelligence be, as in the case of Sor Juana, equally brilliant: and all due to her having been born in Nepantla] (1980, 488 n. 132).

Not only was such a combination of talents unheard of in women, it was rare even in men. Criollos, however, may well have a distinct advantage insofar as they may be conceived as a natural extension of their geographical landscape. Here then, was another means for Sor Juana’s American-born contemporaries to align themselves with her seemingly unmatched talent. Notably, in the early seventeenth century, two Spanish physicians articulated theories based on the system of humors and astrological determinism set forth by Hippocrates and Aristotle to defend criollos from Europeans who believed them to be culturally backward and intellectually challenged. Enrico Martínez and Diego Cisneros agreed that the criollos “differed from Spaniards in that their choleric disposition of their peninsular forebears was rendered more tractable by the benign climate in which they were reared. ‘A temperate region makes men who are temperate and docile, of acute wits, and perfectly equipped for the sciences’” (qtd. in Brading 1991, 298). The notion that the innate disposition of a human being is determined by the physical environment where he or she is born, has its origin in classical theories. According to the Classics, the stars, the earth, and the climate contribute to the formation of the character of an individual (Pagden 1987, 81). These theories influenced the European vision of Americans from very early on and, as Bauer and Mazzotti argue, were decidedly negative: “the fact that transplanted Europeans changed in the Americas was typically seen as profoundly disturbing, as evidence of a cultural degeneration” (2009, 1). In the 1570s, the Franciscan ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún was among the first to argue that the character of the Spaniard born in America was influenced by both the climate and the constellations: “los que en ella [la Nueva España] nacen, muy al propio de los indios, en el aspecto parecen españoles y en las condiciones no lo son […] y esto pienso que lo hace el clima o constelaciones de esta tierra” [those who are born there [in New Spain], as are the Indians, appear to be Spaniards and in conditions they are not […] and I think the climate or the constellations of those lands are responsible for that] (1985, 579). It is perhaps the Dominican Juan de la Puente who publicizes most widely the negative effect of the climate on the Creole when, in 1612, he declares that the American sky contributes to the inconstancy, lasciviousness and dishonesty of its inhabitants (qtd. in

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Brading, 1991, 298). As Gerbi (1982) has demonstrated, the debate on this topic between French philosophers and American intellectuals becomes scathing upon reaching its peak in the eighteenth century.19 According to the climatic theories, the negative effect of the constellations not only caused weakness of character in the inhabitants of the New World, but it also caused an early decline in their intellectual capacities. This line of thinking was countered by those who, like the Franciscan criollo Agustín de Vetancurt, believed that New Spain’s climate was responsible for what he called “vivísimos ingenios y floridos talentos” (Ciudad de México 1990, 105) [the vivacity of the intelligence] of its inhabitants. For Vetancurt, the sensitive powers of the brain are stimulated and awakened by heat and “given that the temperament of New Spain is more hot than cold, and in which extreme qualities are not seen, and as such vapors do not fill this part of intelligence, its inhabitants are able sooner to create works of discourse” (1961, 11). In Spain, on the other hand, comments Vetancurt, “the temperament is extremely cold” (1961, 11). The absence of what the Franciscan calls a “temperament [and climate] without extreme qualities” constitutes a central point in the arguments put forth by Castorena and his contemporaries in the Fama to prove their intelligence to a European audience. In order to formulate their patriotic humeral theories, the poets of the posthumous tribute use, as a point of departure, the attributes of the volcanoes that witnessed the birth of Sor Juana; the same ones that the Italian critic uses to trace his paronomasia (montibus-mentibus). Yet even if Sor Juana’s contemporaries believed that the nun’s birthplace could determine her disposition, there was still the question of her autodidacticism to contend with. According to Huarte, in the third and highest class of ingenio, “hace naturaleza unos ingenios tan perfectos, ‘que no han menester maestros que los enseñen’: es una especie de inteligencia creativa, inventiva, adjudicada ‘por Dios y Naturaleza’ a los que […] traza[n] caminos nuevos […] en las ‘artes’ y en las ‘ciencias.’” [Nature creates some ingenios that are so perfect ‘that they do not need teachers to teach them’: it is a sort of creative intelligence awarded ‘by God and Nature’ to those that forge new paths […] in the ‘Arts’ and ‘Sciences’] (qtd. in Serés 1989, 48). Such distinction in a woman, therefore, could be nothing less than a monstrous deviation from the norm, even for those aware of the one-sex model. Only the conjunction of a monstrous soil, 19 See Cañizares Esguerra for a comprehensive review of Europe’s negative climatological and astrological characterizations of the New World (1999, 38–47).

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enhanced by the particularities of the volcanoes of Mexico’s valley might bring about such a creature: Si cuando naces, te miro, toda mi razón suspendo, pues esperando un milagro, hallo también un misterio. De dos monstruos bien ceñida naces en otro Hemisferio Que hasta los montes ocultan De la gracia los secretos [If when you are born, I look at you, I suspend all my reason, for, awaiting a miracle, I find, also a mystery. From two monsters [volcanoes] you are born, in another hemisphere; even the mountains conceal secrets from grace]. ([139–40])

Castorena’s verses reveal that if the manly, or deviant, woman is monstrous, so too is New World exoticism and abundance. In another example, Bernardo de Balbuena, in the fourth chapter of his Grandeza mexicana, describes the Mexican soil as: “un acaso, un raro, una aventura, / un monstruo, un tornasol de mil maneras / donde la vista a penas se asegura.” [a marvel, a rarity, an adventure / a monster, a thousand faceted reflection / where vision is hardly guaranteed] (1930, 104). Castorena’s above-cited lines of poetry suggest that the antithetical volcanoes provoked a disjunction in those who marveled at them; as such, Sor Juana, whose very nature is contradictory, cannot be but the monstrous creation of a monstrous Mexican soil: “Y saliendo monstruo al Mundo, / Hija de aquel brazo excelso, / En lo racional se admire otro mejor Mongibelo.” [And coming to the world as a monster, daughter of that excellent power [New Spain], in rationality she is another, improved, Mongibelo] ([140]). The language of monstrosity is of course a familiar one that helps make Sor Juana more intelligible. All the more so when a potential analogy can be traced with Europe. In this case, the twin peaks of the fiery and icy Mexican volcanoes are compared to Mongibelo, an active volcano in Sicily with a snow-covered peak, that appears in both Dante and Petrarch. The humeral characteristics of the volcanoes may well have been responsible for her “ingenio mixto” and her “metros de climas distintos” [verses of disparate climates], that is, they brought about an American-born woman with a genderless soul and a man’s ability to reason, but that didn’t make her any

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less monstrous. Interestingly enough, in a love poem, romance #4, Sor Juana herself alludes to the notion of Mongibelo’s warm interior and frigid exterior not to define her as her peers insist on doing, but to describe her cold exterior with which she suppresses her amorous feelings and her “monstrous will”: ¿Podrá mi noble altivez consentir que mis acciones de nieve y fuego, sirvan de ser fábula del orbe? […] No me convence el ejemplo que en el Mongibelo ponen, que en él es natural gala y en mí voluntad disforme [Will my noble pride allow my actions of snow and fire to serve as a fable of the orb? I am not convinced by the example they cite, of the Mongibelo, for, in its case, it is [a matter of] natural elegance and in me it is monstrous will]. (OC 1.18–19;45–49; 69–72)

As was her wont, the Mexican poet and nun opts out of entering into the debate on how to describe or even fathom her. Begun well before her Fama was even imagined, the intent to reign Sor Juana in and regulate her becomes ever more important in order to grant her posthumous fame. Her elegists’ attempts to classify her, be it as a gendered monstrous prodigy or a sexless soul more akin to light and sun, fuel a transatlantic commerce that works to secure posthumous renown for Sor Juana and hopefully arouse curiosity in the minds of the European readers about the potential talent of the poets of New Spain who follow in her wake.

Conclusions The examples brought to light in this chapter prove that the Fama engages in writing secular fictions about Sor Juana that worked to warrant her posthumous fame—or so hoped her elegists. Sor Juana’s posthumous fame, be it as American Tenth Muse or exotic marvel, could indeed be motivated by her intellectual prowess and her role as author if framed within this familiar discourse in which she is brokered as a New World “treasure,” a commodity caught up in the dynamics of male exchange. As Sor Juana’s

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panegyrists of the Fama try to make sense of a nun self-schooled in scholastic argumentation and who possessed what appeared to be reasoned knowledge, their perception of the Tenth Muse continues to waver, not between the notions of woman and mujer fuerte, but between those of the manly woman and not woman at all. While Sor Juana may be among the most notable literary figures of the late seventeenth century, and certainly the most remarkable talent yet produced in the New World, her role as icon is necessarily problematic. In order to highlight her achievements over and above her nature, the Fama’s encomiasts who write in a secular vein must strip the nun of her sex or write her into the language of monstrous American excess. Unable to promote her as a model of intellect, or author, and at the same time as a woman, Sor Juana’s elegists consistently reduce her to an emblem, literally an iconic image that plays the role of an icon but that is entirely detached from the person behind the image. In so doing, the nun’s posthumous elegists avoid dealing with her supposedly inferior nature as a woman and find various means of elucidating her inexplicable contradictions, such as poetic images like the sun, the stars, and gold, or would-be scientif ic ideas that stem from the natural wonders of the New World. When her Mexican panegyrists attempt to render Sor Juana a natural result of her marvelous land, as someone who, instead of being inferior to the Europeans, has an advantage over them precisely for having been born, or dawning, in the New World, her person is lost in the array of images steeped in New Spain’s minerals, geography, and fauna. All the permutations of the textual images of Sor Juana as an intellectually gifted non-woman—whether a sun, a treasure, an angel, a man, a bodiless soul, or a monster—remove her from the social order. The inimitable exemplar remains distinct, or in a class apart, from other women, and, indeed, all other human beings. Mexicans, the nun’s compatriots argue, have a natural disposition to learning despite what Europeans might think of them. Yet none of Mexico’s intellectuals who collaborate in the Fama suggest that they are like Sor Juana. Who, after all, can possibly imitate a monster of ingenio mixto? There does remain, however, the possibility that positions of difference or subordination can be aligned among themselves. In this sense, criollos and women share the potential of challenging the long-standing order of things in the same way. When they are reworked in the Fama, the seemingly obsequious criollo with his own agenda is not unlike the penitent nun who also happens to be a brilliant woman. Both walk a tightrope between their religious duties and their sense of what is just (recognition won by merit),

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and what is not (being excluded or dismissed for the body or place they were born in(to)). Frequently frustrated in their attempts to define Sor Juana, the elegiac works of the nun’s panegyrists published in the Fama instead often reveal their own ambitions. Led by editor Castorena, all of the Tenth Muse’s admirers wanted her person and works to be preserved for posterity, yet they were not blind to the fact that their elegies written precisely for that purpose provided them with the opportunity to advance their own literary careers. By 1700, Sor Juana was no longer the “new wonder” that Montoro introduced in Spain in 1689, but rather what Castorena terms “[un] posible asombro, que producen tardos los siglos, (quizá por eso amanece al rayar el de setecientos)” [a possible wonder, which centuries tarry in producing, (perhaps for that reason she dawned with the new century)] ([119]). In other words, Sor Juana was a mystifying wonder whose widespread renown at the end of the seventeenth century allowed her elegists an opportunity to see their work in print, and, in some cases, to express their varying perspectives on the nature of Mexico’s literary and tributary relationship with Spain. The criollo authors of the Fama exploit the characteristics of the Americas—its climate, its volcanoes, its riches, its geography and its antipodal sun—to prove their parity or even, although only rhetorically, their cultural superiority with regard to Spain. These natural phenomena, unique to the New World, become ideal images to describe the complex relation that criollo intellectuals had with the metropolis. On one hand, their land, New Spain, has unique characteristics such as the volcanoes that witnessed the birth of the Tenth Muse and, on the other hand, both continents share the same sun. The image of the sun, which is the same for Old and New Worlds, except that it visits each at different moments of the day, sums up the relationship of criollo intellectuals with their Iberian counterparts: they sought to imitate the European example but also to emphasize their own noteworthy differences; they bowed down to their patrons, but offered up American artistic treasure as tribute. At the end of the seventeenth century, the intellect and the genius of the criollo is measured according to European norms—the time has not yet come in which cultural and intellectual originality is valued. Nevertheless, in texts such as the Fama, we can begin to distinguish literary voices that imitate European models and, at the same time, recognize not only the differences in the Spaniards born in the colony—product of another world and another landscape—but also the fact that these differences enrich them. Both Castorena and González de la Sancha prove to be brokers of the cultural and artistic products of the New World as opposed to the

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mercantile goods of Mercury. Accordingly, trading and brokering are not understood as exclusively commercial activities given that New World art—such as the laminas of Michoacán, González de la Sancha’s poetry printed in America and of course the Fama itself—needs to be valued in the cultural marketplace of the motherland. If in her lifetime Sor Juana played a role in the voyage, or flight, of her works across the Atlantic, only the Fama with its “peregrine bird” and its many “plumages” (the elegists) can allow Sor Juana to “dawn,” or be reborn, in 1700. None of the nun’s posthumous panegyrists overlooked the fact that Sor Juana’s published works of the Fama, carried on wings made of their own “plumas,” were the last of what Calleja termed her “consonantes finos / oro mental de vena manirrota” [fine consonants / mental gold of a prodigious vein] to make the cyclical voyage from New Spain to Old and back again. A voyage that hopefully would keep alive not only the name of Mexico’s Tenth Muse, but also a literary and cultural exchange amongst her admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. More than a simple tribute meant to honor her memory then, the posthumous volume, like Sor Juana herself, is a tribute offered both out of subordination and as an attempt to place the inhabitants of New and Old Worlds on the same intellectual and poetic continuum. We must consider in this light, then, Castorena’s motives in brokering in New World poetry and Tenth Muses. Without discrediting the possibility that the Fama was planned to spur his ecclesiastical career, the truth is that the third volume of Sor Juana’s works bears more resemblance to the first two volumes (IC and SV) than to an apologetic for a wayward nun. Alongside his sanctifying image of the writer, Castorena writes of her in a way that clearly reveals his admiration for her talent, and it seems most probable that he encouraged his American-born contemporaries to follow his lead. Surely this line of praise in the volume did not ingratiate the editor’s religious superiors and garner him the bishopric of Yucatán. It seems more likely, rather, that he put together the volume in a way that suited his interests—be these of the realm of the soul or of the mind—the most. According to this reading, the Fama forms yet another example of what Sor Juana resented: the manner in which her admirers (and detractors) devised her image in ways most suitable to them. In other words, when the elegists of the Fama write of her as a nun, a woman, a writer or a colonial, they always praise and imagine her on their own terms, never on hers. This becomes all the more clear when read against Sor Juana’s representation of the self on her own terms, the subject of the following chapter.

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Appendix Table 4.  Contributors and Texts Cited in the Chapter Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara

romance

romance

FAMA

Spanish servant of the duke de Arcos

octaves

FAMA

originally a Peruvian, relocated to Madrid; lieutenant of the commission of royal celebrations

Lorenzo de las octavas Llamosas

José de Cañizares

romance en arte mayor

FAMA multiform verse with more than eight syllables

Spanish elegist

Alonzo de Otazo

romance endecasílabo

romance with FAMA lines of eleven syllables

Gentleman of the Order of Santiago

Sor Juana

romance #37 “Elogio de Doña María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess de Aveyro”

romance

IC

dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, who lived in Madrid and was married to the Duke de Arcos (several of his attendants also contribute to the volume)

José Pérez de Montoro

romance

romance

IC

well-respected Spanish poet; prefatory romance written for the publication of IC

José Pérez de Montoro

romance

romance

SV

Secretary to the King

Luis Tineo de Morales

Approbation

prose

IC

Spanish religious censor to the IC; may have been a powerful protector of the nun’s and a friend of the Marquise de la Laguna

Pedro Zapata

Prologue

prose

SV

Spanish Jesuit

Diego de Calleja

Approbation

prose

FAMA

influential Spanish Jesuit, corresponded with Sor Juana and believed to be her first “biographer”

203

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Contributor

Title

Form

Juan del Valle y Caviedes

romance

romance

Juan de Rueda epigram

Volume

More Caviedes (1645–1698) was Lima’s best-known poet and satirist in Sor Juana’s time; his romance to her can be found in his published works, but not hers

epigram (in Latin)

FAMA

Augustinian clergyman of New Spain; taught Sacred Theology in the College of Saint Pablo and Philosophy in the National University

Jacinto Muñoz de Castilblanque

Parecer

prose

FAMA

Spanish religious censor (the third); theologue of the Nunciature of Spain, Archbishop of Manila and Bishop of Cotrón (today Gelves, Spain)

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

“Prólogo al que leyere” [Prologue to the reader]

prose

FAMA

followed by a second prose intervention later in the volume (see “introduction” below)

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

dedicatoria

prose

FAMA

to Queen Mariana

Sor Juana

romance #24 “Habiendo ya bautizado su hijo, da la enhorabuena de su nacimiento a la señora virreina”

romance

IC

written on the occasion of the birth of the Countess de Paredes and Marquise de la Laguna’s son (OC 1)

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

dedicatoria

prose

FAMA

to the Mexican noblewoman, the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca

¿Sor Juana?

Villancico a la Asunción #lviii

carol

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

introduction to Mexico’s ingenios

prose

attributed to Sor Juana and dedicated the Assumption of the Virgin Mary; published anonymously in Mexico in 1686 by the Herederos de la Viuda de Calderón (OC 2.314, 499) FAMA

continuation of his prologue that appears 150 pages after he began his prologue (after Sor Juana’s works)

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Felipe de Santoyo García

romance

romance

FAMA

among the best-known Mexican poets; was the speaker of Mexico City’s Audiencia and a popular contributor to occasional works devoted to holy themes and published in New Spain; anthologized in both Poetas novohispanos (1945) and Poesía novohispana (2010)

Diego de Calleja

elegía

elegy in verse FAMA

Spanish Jesuit

décima Rodrigo García de Ribadeneyra y Noguerol

décima

FAMA

Spanish elegist, Gentleman of the House of Aporreyra

Pedro Verdugo

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish nobleman, the Count de Torrepalma

Alonso Ramírez de Vargas

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Mexican captain and well-respected poet

Francisco Ayerra de Santa María

sonnet

“astrological” sonnet

FAMA

highly respected poet, orator, theologian and philosopher; he was also the chaplain of the Royal Convent of Jesús María of Mexico City

José de Villena

endechas endecasílabas

endechas stanzas of four verses with lines of eleven syllables

FAMA

a student of the Real Colegio de Cristo in Mexico City

Diego Martínez

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Mexican elegist

romance Lorenzo González de la Sancha

romance

FAMA

rector and chronicler of the College of San Pedro, New Spain

romance heroico Lorenzo González de la Sancha

romance heroico

FAMA

elegía Lorenzo González de la Sancha

funeral elegy

FAMA

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Anonymous censor

prologue

prose

IC

the second prologue of the IC

Juan de Cabrera

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

the Spanish confessor to the Duke de Arcos

Anonymous

romance

romance

FAMA

by “un apasionado de sus obras,” [an enthusiast of her work]; appears just prior to the décima by the “distinguished noblewoman” (thought to be Castorena)

Diego de Heredia

Approbation

prose

FAMA

Spanish rector of the Imperial College of the Jesuits

Iván Alonso de Mújica

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish royal attendant

Feliciano Gilberto de Pisa

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish elegist

Pedro María Squarzafigo

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish elegist

Francisco de León y Salvatierra

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

solicitor of the Royal Council

Inés de Vargas sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish elegist, perhaps a noblewoman as referred to as “Sra. Dña.” [refers to a woman of rank]

Marcos Suárez sonnet de Orozco

sonnet

FAMA

Butler to the Duke de Arcos

Francisco Bueno

liras

a series of liras (five-line stanzas)

FAMA

Spanish elegist

María Jacinta de Abogader y Mendoza

décima

décima

FAMA

Spanish noblewoman

Eulogio Francisco de Córdoba

égloga

eclogue or pastoral poem

FAMA

Spanish elegist

Feliciano Gilberto de Pisa

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Spanish elegist

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Martín Dávila y Palomares

rimas sextiles

a stanza of 6 verses of consonant rhyme, usually octosyllabic

FAMA

Spanish elegist

Antonio de Deza y Ulloa

sonnet

sonnet

FAMA

Mexican captain and gentleman of the Order of Santiago, and governor of Nueva Vizcaya

Un caba­llero de Perú [a Peruvian Gentleman], the Count de la Granja

romance #49bis

romance

FAMA

Luis Antonio de Oviedo y Herrera (Madrid, 1636–Lima, 1717)

Sor Juana

romance #4 “Que romance resuelve con ingenuidad sobre [el] problema entre las instancias de la obligación y el afecto”

SV

a love poem that considers the problem of obligation versus affection (OC 1; no Eng. trans.)

Sources: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995c; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995d; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1951; Alatorre 2007

Works Cited Alatorre, Antonio. 1980. “Para leer la Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 29(2): 428–508. DOI 10.24201/ nrfh.v29i2.1755. Alatorre, Antonio. 1984. “Un soneto desconocido de Sor Juana.” Vuelta, 94: 4–13. Alatorre, Antonio. 1994. “Estudio introductorio.” In Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del Placer by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio. 2007. Sor Juana a través de los siglos (1668–1910). 2 vols. México: El Colegio de México. Bauer, Ralph and José Antonio Mazzotti. 2009. “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 1–59. Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.

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Balbuena, Bernardo de. 1930. La grandeza mexicana de Bernardo de Balbuena. Edited by John Van Horne. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature Vol. XV.3. Urbana: The University of Illinois. (1604). Beristain de Souza, José Mariano. 1980. Biblioteca hispanoamericana septentrional. 2a ed. Biblioteca del Claustro. Serie facsimilar 1–3. México: UNAM: Instituto de Estudios y Documentos Históricos. (1816). Borja Gómez, Jaime Humberto. 2007. “Historiografía y hagiografía: vidas ejemplares y escritura de la historia en el Nuevo Reino de Granada.” Fronteras de la Historia 12: 53–78. https://revistas.icanh.gov.co/index.php/fh/article/view/469/397. Brading, David A. 1988. Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano. Translated by María Soledad Loaeza de Graue. 2nd ed. México: Era. Brading, David A. 1991. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1492–1867). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge. 1999. “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America 1600–1650.” The American Historical Review 104(1): 33–68. Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de. 1719. El minero más feliz, que halló el thesoro escondido de la virtud en el campo florido de la religión […] oración fúnebre a el siervo de Dios Fray Juan de Angulo […] en el convento de n.p.s. Francisco, de la ciudad de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas. México. Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de. 1720. Ejercicios devotos para acompañar a la Virgen María en su soledad. México. Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de. 1722. Gaceta de México y noticias de Nueva España. 6 vols. México: Los herederos de la Viuda de M. de Ribera Calderón. Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de. 1725. Panegírico en la dedicación del templo de Capuchinas de Corpus Christi de México […]. México. La ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII (1690–1780): Tres crónicas. 1990. Prólogo y bibliografía Antonio Rubial García; notas a Juan de Viera, Gonzalo Obregón. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Colombi, Beatriz. 2015. “Mulier docta and Literary Fame: The Challenges of Authorship in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Translated by Wendy Gosselin. In The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature. Edited by Mónica Szurmuk and Ileana Rodríguez, 81–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De la Maza, Francisco. 1946. Las piras funerarias en la historia y en el arte de México. México: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. De la Maza, Francisco. 1980. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892. México: UNAM. Delooz, Pierre. 1983. “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church.” In Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology,

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Folklore and History. Edited by Stephen Wilson, 189–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeStefano, Michael Thomas. 1977. “Miracles and Monasticism in Mid-Colonial Puebla, 1600–1750: Charismatic Religion in a Conservative Society.” Diss. U of Florida. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International. Diccionario de Autoridades. 1963. Real Academia Española. Ed. Facsim. Biblioteca románica hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México. 1986. Quinta edición corregida y aumentada con un suplemento. 3 vols. México: Editorial Porrúa. Echenberg, Margo. Forthcoming. “Juan Ignacio Ma. de Castorena Ursúa Goyeneche y Villareal: ¿Poco más que un defensor de Sor Juana? ¿O ejemplo representativo del criollo intelectual en el albor del siglo XVIII?” In Nueva Historia de las literaturas mexicanas. Edited by Ana Castaño Navarro, Jessica C. Locke and Jorge Reyna. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM. Eguiara y Eguren, Juan José de. 1986. Biblioteca mexicana. México: UNAM, Coordinación de Humanidades. Ezell, Margaret. 1993. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ferguson, George. 1954. Signs & Symbols in Christian Art. London: Oxford University Press. Gerbi, Antonello. 1982. La disputa del nuevo mundo: historia de una política 1750–1900. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1993. “Poetics and Modernity in Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Known as Lunarejo.” In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures, 151–68. Durham: Duke University Press. Gracián y Morales, Baltasar. 1997. El discreto. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. (1646). Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press. Hampe Martínez, Teodoro. 1998. Santidad e identidad criolla. Estudio del proceso de evangelización de Santa Rosa. Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina 20. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas. Huarte de San Juan, Juan. 1989. Examen de ingenios para las ciencias. Edited by Guillermo Serés. Madrid: Cátedra. (1594). Jed, Stephanie. 1994. “The Tenth Muse: Gender, Rationality, and the Marketing of Knowledge.” In Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 195–208. London: Routledge. Jesús María, Félix de. 1756. Vida, virtudes y dones sobrenaturales de la venerable sierva de Dios la Madre Sor María de Jesús. Religiosa profesa en el V. Monasterio de

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la Inmaculada Concepción de la Puebla de los Ángeles en las Indias Occidentales. Roma: Imp. Joseph y Phelipe de Rossi. Jordan, Constance. 1987. “Boccaccio’s In-Famous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De mulieribus claris.” In Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson, 25–47. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. (vol. 4 edited by Alberto G. Salceda). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994a. The Answer/La Respuesta. Edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995c. Inundación castálida. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1689). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995d. Segundo volumen de sus obras. Edited by Margo Glantz. Ed. Facsim. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. (1692). Lemus, Diego de. 1683. Vida, Virtudes, Trabajos, Fabores y Milagros de la Ven. M. Sor María de Jesús Angelopolitana Religiosa en el Insigne Convento de la Limpia Concepción de la Ciudad de los Angeles, en la Nueva España; y natural de ella. León: Anisson y Posuel. Leonard, Irving A. 1959. Baroque Times in Old Mexico. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Maclean, Ian. 1980. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKendrick, Melveena. 1974. Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the Mujer Varonil. London: Cambridge University Press. McLaughlin, Eleanor Commo. 1974. “Equality of the Souls, Inequality of the Sexes: Woman in Medieval Theology.” Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. Edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, 213–66. New York: Simon and Schuster. Medina, José Toribio. 1908. La imprenta en México (1539–1821). Vol. 3. Santiago de Chile: Impreso en casa del autor. Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso. 1945. Poetas novohispanos. México: UNAM. Merrim, Stephanie. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Merrim, Stephanie. 2007. “The ‘Mexican’ Sor Juana.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 77–85. New York: The Modern Language Association.

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More, Anna. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos Sigüenza de Góngoga and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Muriel, Josefina. 1982. Cultura femenina novohispana. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía. Departamento de Historia. 1940. Iconografía colonial; retratos de personajes notables en la historia colonial de México, existentes en el Museo Nacional, con notas colegidas de diversos autores y ordenadas por el Jefe del Departamento de Historia de la misma institución, Jesús Romero Flores. México: Museo Nacional. Myers, Kathleen A. 1993. Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre María de San José (1656–1719). Hispanic Studies Textual Research and Criticism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Myers, Kathleen A. 2003. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. 1959. New York: Hamlyn. Ochoa Campos, Moisés. 1968. Juan Ignacio de Castorena, primer periodista mexicano. 3rd ed. México: UNAM. Pagden, Anthony. 1987. “Identity Formation in Spanish America.” In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Edited by Ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, 51–94. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parker, Patricia. 1987. “Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon.” In Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, 126–54. London and New York: Methuen. Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1996. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Poot Herrera, Sara. 2005. “Sor Juana: Nuevos hallazgos, viejas relaciones.” Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes and Anales de Literatura Española. Num. 13, 1999. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmccn7f2. Prendergast, Ryan. 2007. “Constructing an Icon: The Subjectivity and SelfReferentiality of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7(2): 28–56. www.jstor.org/stable/40339579. Ross, Kathleen. 1993. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rubial, Antonio. 1999. La santidad controvertida. Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva España. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Fondo de Cultura Económica. Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1985. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, libro X. México: Porrúa. Sedeño, Gregorio. 1681. Descripción de las funerales exequias, y sermón que en ellas se predicó en la muerte de la muy noble, y piadosa Señora Doña Jacinta de Vidarte y Pardo […]. Puebla, México: Imprenta de la viuda de Juan de Borja y Gandia.

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Segura Troncoso, Juan Antonio de. 1715. “Aprobación.” In Sombra fúnebre, oración que dijo el R. P. Fray Pedro Dañon […] en las honras, que hizo el Rmo. Padre Fr. Rodrigo de la Cruz, […] a la excelentísima señora doña María de Guadalupe, Duquesa de Aveyro, de Arcos, y Maqueda. México: Los herederos de la viuda de Miguel de Ribera Calderón. Serés, Guillermo de. 1989. “Introducción.” In Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, by Juan Huarte de San Juan. Madrid: Cátedra. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1684. Parayso Occidental. México: Juan de Ribera. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 2016. El viaje inmóvil: Primavera Indiana de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Ciudad de México: Ediciones el Tucán de Virginia. (1680). Sosa, Francisco. 1884. Biografías de mexicanos distinguidos. México: Of icina tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento. Tenorio, Martha Lilia. 2010. Poesía novohispana, antología. 2 vols. México: Colegio de México. Vetancurt, Fray Agustín de. 1961. Teatro mexicano descripción breve de los sucesos exemplares de la Nueva España en el Nuevo Mundo occidental de las Indias. Vol. 4. Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas. (1697).

4. With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper” Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image

Abstract: This chapter examines Sor Juana’s textual responses to her public image, in which carefully construed formulations of self reveal her conflicting feelings about her fame and inform her posthumous depiction. The chapter opens with an examination of Sor Juana’s romance #37 to the Duchess de Aveyro, in order to explore her ideas on representation and the possibility of a reciprocal exchange among women. Next, I consider her daring comparison with the martyrdom of Christ in her Respuesta, followed by readings of décima #102 and sonnets #152 and #145, in which she works to destroy her public image. The chapter closes with the suggestion of another means of exchange—in the form of the Engimas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer—that held the potential of fueling a woman writer’s renown outside the literary marketplace. Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; self-fashioning; Fama y obras póstumas; Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz; Engimas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer; romance 37

¿Que las plumas con que escribo son las que al viento se baten, no menos para vivirme que para resucitarme? — Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, romance #49 (OC 1.146:153–56) [That the very quills with which I write / are those that beat the wind, / as much to sustain me in this life / as to revive me again? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 177)]1

1

Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957) herein OC.

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_ch04

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A laudatory romance written shortly before 1700 by the Spanish Count de Clavijo includes the following uncharacteristically trenchant and unaffected lines: No muere quien así vive, pues en respetos mentales se ve en sus escritos toda la realidad de su imagen. [Those who live in this way do not die, since in intellectual respects, the entire reality of their image can be seen in their writing]. ([102])

Like many of his counterparts of the Fama,2 the Count de Clavijo trusts that Sor Juana’s published works will grant her eternal renown. While the general sentiment expressed in the Count’s romance resonates throughout the posthumous volume, the passage cited reveals an original and suggestive interpretation of the role of Sor Juana’s writings in the cultivation of her posthumous fame. In addressing the potential of the written word vis-à-vis the respective notions of representation and renown, the noble panegyrist speaks both to the purpose of the Fama and to a pivotal subject in her involved posthumous imaging—the volume’s words purport to describe the writer and to spread her renown. As I will show over the course of this chapter, however, Sor Juana’s works of self-fashioning constantly challenge the potential of visual and verbal representations to reflect authentic images and thus continually problematize the very suggestion that it is possible to see in her writing “toda / la realidad de su imagen” [the entire reality of her image]. Indeed, in many of her works the nun engages in the characteristically seventeenth-century strategies that Michel Foucault describes as growing out of “new kinship between resemblance and illusion” in which “the chimeras of similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras” (1970, 51). Count Clavijo’s suggestive lines are reminiscent of what Castorena y Ursúa proposes in his prologue to the Fama: whereas Sor Juana’s admirers “la anima[n] [y] […] la lloran” [encourage and mourn her], the nun’s posthumously published work of his volume “la definen” [defines her] ([123]). Indeed, several collaborators to the Fama echo the volume’s 2 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama.

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editor by alluding to the Sisyphean task of defining (or even thoroughly comprehending) the Mexican nun and writer. For example, an anonymous noblewoman identified only as being “[a]ficionadísima al ingenio de la poetisa” [a fan of the ingenio of the poetess] concludes her sonnet by writing: “Venerémosla ya más eminente, / que a quien sola nació sin competencia, / sola su fama puede definirla” [Let us venerate her, now even more eminent, for only her fame can def ine she who was born without rival] ([98]). Sor Marcelina de San Martín, a Spanish nun in the convent of the Concepción de Manzanares, underlines in her epicedio—or funeral song—the shortcomings of the allegorical f igure of Fame who futilely pursues Sor Juana’s illusive essence: Suspéndanse los labios, pues se advierte que la Fama, que intenta el aplaudirte, en sus voces no puede definirte, aunque llegue, admirada, a comprenderte. [Hold your tongues as we can see that Fame, who tries to applaud you [Sor Juana], in her many voices cannot define you although she manages, with admiration, to understand you]. ([96])

The two female panegyrists ultimately concur that only Sor Juana’s “fama,” insofar as it comprises her literary reputation, defines her in a way that her laudators—and her Fama—cannot. Sor Marcelina corroborates the fruitlessness of her own elegiac endeavor when she adds: “con nuevas obras tus elogios haces, / Pues son coronistas de tu gloria” [You earn your praise with new works, which are the chroniclers of your glory] ([96]). A sonnet by Don Tomás de Pomar voices a similar frustration: “Sólo no eres de ti, Julia, excedida, / con que nunca serás bien alabada, / porque nunca serás bien comprendida” [Only you yourself can exceed you, Julia, and, as such, you will never be properly praised because you will never be properly understood] (77). De Pomar’s lines do more than simply comply with a popular elegiac trope. His verses reveal the fundamental difficulty that plagues the nun-writer’s panegyrists: Sor Juana’s works may fuel her celebrity or the image of her that circulated publicly but they do not def ine her; she always remains illusive, fundamentally without equal and misunderstood. All the images prove to be chimera along the lines suggested by Foucault. Whether Sor Juana’s laudators refrain from or prove incapable of presenting a def ining image of her, each of them depends on her works to

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formulate her posthumous fashioning—be it “real” or not. In fact, each of the representations of Sor Juana that I have shown to emerge in the Fama and that I have described in the preceding chapters—whether the saintly exemplar, the mujer fuerte, the American treasure, or the mujer varonil—is based in part on the nun’s writings. In the ensuing pages, I examine Sor Juana’s contradictory and at times confounding stance vis-àvis her public image and renown. By studying the conflicting contentions of Sor Juana’s texts regarding self-representation and fame published within the Fama, notably, her Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Respuesta) and her last unfinished poem published in the Fama, romance #51, together with earlier texts written in the same vein such as romance #37 (to the duchess de Aveyro), décima #102 (a literary self-portrait), and sonnets #152 and #145 (on the illusory nature of images and self-representation), I piece together a “response” from the nun-writer to her double-edged renown. I do not intend to consider—nor could I in the space here—all of Sor Juana’s self-representational works. I have chosen, rather, those works that I believe vividly focus the nun’s seemingly contradictory responses to the praise lavished on her and her ensuing fame. Each of the nun’s works examined in this chapter reveals that Sor Juana’s response to her panegyrists centers on her relentless attempt to construct her public image and her renown on her terms. Sor Juana could not, of course, respond to her posthumous refashioning. Her works considered in this chapter, however, arguably engage elegists past, present, and future since all worked to exalt and normalize her. In paying attention to those elements of the nun’s own writings which either enabled her to be catapulted into a celebrity or paradigmatic icon or worked against this process, I aim to reconstruct a textual dialogue between the nun’s works and her posthumous elegies. In other words, I hope to reveal how Sor Juana’s published works define her (or fail to do so) and to delve into what the Count de Clavijo calls the “reality of her image”—an image that always remained, perhaps inevitably, shrouded behind a veil of uncertainty and ambiguity. Fame played so crucial a role in Sor Juana’s own writing that it is diff icult to overestimate its importance. In fact, the very notion pervades every stage of the nun’s literary career, appearing in works spanning from Los empeños de una casa (performed in 1683) to her posthumously published texts of the Fama. In each of these potentially “defining” works, Sor Juana both consented to and decried her fame. For example, when responding in romance #48 to the “Gentleman from Peru,” she employs a commonly used humility topic to suggest that she is unworthy of praise

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and, all the while, trumpets the fact that she is the recipient of elegies: “Dejo ya vuestros elogios / a que ellos solos se expliquen: / pues los que en sí sólo caben, / consigo solo se miden” (OC 1.137:66–68) [“That they themselves elucidate, / I now leave your eulogies: / as none to their measure correspond, / none can match them in degree” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 139)]. Notably, in every instance in which the issue of renown appears in Sor Juana’s writing, it is accompanied by an invective against the manipulation of her public image and a self-image of her own design. Offered to counterbalance the image of self that the nun attacked in writing, Sor Juana’s self-representations render her as hard to define as her panegyrists of the Fama suggest: they are heterogeneous, slippery, and, often, mutually contradictory. Using her deft, poetic and argumentative skills, providing “skillful verse that outlines a multiplicity of meaning” (O’Donnell 2015, 1128), Sor Juana moves between fact and fiction always aware of the “intricacies of devising and projecting images” to her advantage (Johnson 1983, 168). Each of her many self-representational tactics adapts to both the context and genre of the larger work in which it appears. Stephanie Merrim has cogently described how we must look at Sor Juana’s self-representations as “not only […] a limited economy of statements and deepening restatements but as an ars combinatoria in which elements that have become ‘topics’ in the nun’s self-representations are combined and restyled according to the pragmatic context” (1999, 167). For example, she presents highly constructed and conflicting images of self that borrow greatly from the traditions of the vida in autobiographical and self-referential texts such as her Respuesta and her Carta al P. Núñez. Images of self reflected in fictional characters, on the other hand, as in the case of Leonor in her comedy Los empeños de una casa, are “melodramatized” (Merrim 1999, 156). Sor Juana’s lyric poetry written in the third person, moreover, often veils a projection of self. In removing the emphasis from her “I,” the nun-writer can make her most acute statements while protecting her self and her reputation (Merrim 1999, 190). Such intricacies in her self-representation disallow the reader—be s/he contemporary or early modern—to ascertain conclusively where Sor Juana stands behind her many masks. Significantly, self-referential poems, such as her decisive romance #51 and sonnet #145, which position her squarely in the thematic center, or very close to it, present a vision of self as intangible and ambiguous as those masked by the use of the third person pronoun. Sor Juana’s many occasional tributes written in response to petitions from the viceroys of Mexico or contemporary intellectuals, such as the previously

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mentioned Gentleman from Peru, also play a role in piecing together the nun’s ideas on representation, be they of self or other.3 Despite surfacing time and again in her writings, Sor Juana’s image of self is never impromptu. Especially in the works that form the core of this chapter, which, at least in theory, are not exclusively about her, the nun seizes the occasion to comment on the shortcomings of visual and verbal representations as well as on her reputation that was constantly on the brink of disgrace. Sor Juana’s writings reveal that the two are inextricably linked. Her image (and not she) is responsible for any suspicions of Rumor or mala fama that hovered over her. After all, those images of her created and circulated by others are decidedly public unlike her guarded and physically cloistered self. By averting attention from herself even in self-referential works, Sor Juana contradicts what Michel Beaujour terms the “operational formula” of the literary self-portrait: “‘I won’t tell you what I’ve done, but I shall tell you who I am’” (1991, 3). With no justification to speak out based on who she is—in her words, but a “pobre monja” [simple nun]—she can only imply who she is through her creative endeavors. Thus, Sor Juana’s self-fashionings invariably allude to what she accomplishes and to the fact that her society is aware, perhaps too much so, of all that she does—be it writing in private or publishing in public. The chapter begins with an examination of Sor Juana’s ideas on representation, her role as a female and New World elegist, her familiarity with the traditions of the panegyric, and her original alterations to the genre in romance #37. I also suggest that this response to the Duchess de Aveyro—that names her friend and patron, the Marquise de la Laguna—introduces a potential reciprocal exchange among women that is nowhere to be seen in her responses to her male peers. Next, I consider Sor Juana’s ideas on fame as expressed in her Respuesta, concretely in her daring comparison with the martyrdom of Christ. In the literary self-portraits décima #102, sonnets #152 and #145, I continue to explore the Mexican poet’s musings on images and representation and describe the means she uses to destroy her public image, commercialized and traded in the literary marketplace by her editors, patrons and elegists. Finally, the chapter closes with the suggestion that the “Engimas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer,” a tribute to Sor Juana that emerged from an all-female academy, can be read as another form of exchange within a distinct transatlantic discursive community

3 See Sandoval Caballero (2021) and Ballón Aguirre (1997) on Sor Juana’s correspondence with her Peruvian admirers.

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that surely also fueled a woman writer’s renown entirely removed from the literary marketplace of printed books.

Sor Juana as Panegyrist: In Praise of Doña María de Guadalupe de Lencastre Sor Juana’s romance #37, a laudatory work written in honor of a fellow author, Doña María de Guadalupe de Lencastre, Duchess de Aveyro (1630–1715), serves as an excellent introduction to a number of the Mexican writer’s poetically configured beliefs regarding representation and fame. Complex and engaging, Sor Juana’s romance initially lauds the pious noblewoman in a manner akin to the hyperbolic elegies of the Fama. Romance #37 does much more, however, than simply mimic the conventional strategies of the baroque elegy. As a literary tribute to a woman also known as “la única maravilla de nuestros siglos” [the only wonder of our times], Sor Juana’s poem in honor of the Iberian duchess grants the New World writer an opportunity to reflect on the role of fame in the life of a woman writing in her time and on her own contradictory role as both a conventional and unorthodox elegist. Sor Juana discloses in her poem that she learned of the Portuguese Duchess’s works from her patron, friend, and ally, the Marquise de la Laguna, herself a relation of María de Guadalupe de Lencastre. A letter written to the latter by the former has been recently unearthed at the Latin American Library of Tulane University and published in facsimile and transcribed versions (Calvo and Colombi 2015). It’s difficult to know when exactly Sor Juana wrote the poem. Méndez Plancarte groups romance #37 with three others that he estimates were written between 1680 and 1686. Published in the Inundación castálida (IC), poem #37 could also have been composed in 1687 or 1688, the latter being the year in which the Marquises de la Laguna ended their eight-year stay in Mexico. Over the course of her lengthy and at times digressive panegyric, Sor Juana comments on many of the topics that most preoccupied her own posthumous elegists: the relationship between sex and intelligence, the role of devotional writings in a woman’s renown, the motives behind the writing of elegies, and, finally, the nature of her own literary enterprise. Addressing each of these subjects as they pertain to the Duchess, Sor Juana also explicitly formulates an image of her self despite—and within—the rigid limitations of convention. In this romance, as she so frequently does in her self-referential poems, Sor Juana reviles herself and belittles her

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work while extolling the Duchess. Nonetheless, as we will see, alongside her self-portrayal crafted with humility, the nun-writer offers an equally powerful image of herself as María de Guadalupe’s equal. As in all of the Mexican nun’s encomiums, she enters into a subject-object, or perhaps more precisely, a subject-subject relationship with her addressee. In other words, the poet and her addressee share the subject position in the poem’s distinct sections. In romance #37 we witness the clever manipulation of the subject as the poet struggles to keep herself out of the tribute to the Duchess, but cannot: ¿Pero a dónde de mi Patria la dulce afición me hace remontarme del asunto y del intento alejarme? [But whence from my homeland does my sweet admiration make me wander from the subject at hand?] (OC 1.103–4:125–28, emphasis added)

Before analyzing Sor Juana’s role as subject in romance #37, however, a few words must be said about the nun-writer’s portrayal of the Duchess de Aveyro. All through the f irst twelve stanzas of the romance, the poet hyperbolically lauds María de Guadalupe de Lencastre with the following epithets: “alto honor de Portugal” [high honor of Portugal], “Venus de Mar Lusitano” [Venus of the Portuguese Sea], “Minerva de Lisboa” [Minerva of Lisbon], “cifra de las nueve Musas” [sum of the nine Muses], “honor de las mujeres” [honor of women], “primogénita de Apolo” [Apollo’s f irstborn], “presidenta del Parnaso” [president of the Parnassus], and “clara Sibila Española” [illustrious Spanish sibyl] (OC 1.100–101). With her impressive list, the nun-writer clearly accentuates the Duchess’s sex and her literary and intellectual endeavors. By concluding her series of appellations with “alto asunto de la Fama” [of much importance to Fame], Sor Juana resolves that the Duchess deserves this most distinguished honor since she is a Spanish sibyl, “más docta y más elegante / que las que en diversas tierras / veneraron las edades” [more learned and elegant than those who in diverse lands have been venerated through the ages] (OC 1.101:42–44). Indeed, the Mexican writer freely compares her contemporary’s erudition and literary excellence to the talent of Minerva, the Sibyls, the Muses, and Apollo, by means of a rationale that I have shown to exist in elegies dedicated to Sor Juana both during and after her lifetime:

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claro honor de las mujeres, de los hombres docto ultraje, que probáis que no es el sexo de la inteligencia parte [Illustrious honor of women, insult to learned men, you prove that sex plays no part in intelligence]. (OC 1.101:29–32)

In her elegy to the European duchess, Sor Juana lauds the qualities not just of any woman writer, but rather of a true mujer fuerte blessed with intelligence, physical beauty, and extraordinary virtue. […] los Padres Misioneros, […] pregonan vuestras Cristianas piedades, publicando cómo sois quien con celo infatigable solicita que los triunfos de nuestra Fe se dilaten [The Missionary Fathers preached your Christian pieties, announcing how it was you who requested, with indefatigable zeal, that the triumphs of our Faith be known]. (OC 1.104:150–56)

The piety of María de Guadalupe, a writer of exclusively religious works, was widely celebrated in her time. In addition to her religious writings, the Duchess maintained correspondence with several Jesuit missionaries. Sor Juana’s reference to the “Missionary Fathers” may therefore denote father Kino, whose works she had read (Sabat-Rivers 1997, 17; Paz 1982, 343). Sabat-Rivers contends that it is likely that Sor Juana knew of María de Guadalupe’s spiritual exercise: Los siete dias de la semana contra los siete pecados capitales […]. For, despite the fact that the nun’s Ejercicios de la Encarnación comprise a nine-day cycle of prayer, the first seven days follow the Duchess’s work almost exactly (1997, 18). 4 Sor Juana’s romance also displays its adherence to tradition by alluding to the noblewoman’s physical appearance. In fact, the nun-writer invokes María de Guadalupe’s physical presence by subscribing to a widespread 4 The common source for both works is most likely Sor María de Ágreda’s La mística ciudad de Dios (1670) (Merrim 1999, xii).

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commonplace included in tributes dedicated to women: the description of her beauty. Physical beauty was not seen as something absolute in the early modern period, but as reflecting a woman’s moral character and thus was a necessary part of all encomiums. Taking its cue from Neoplatonic and courtly love traditions, the subject or beloved—in this case, the Duchess—ennobles the poet spiritually in that her beauty is both a source of divine virtue and the embodiment of human perfection (Greer 1979, 61–62). At the juncture of romance #37 in which Sor Juana praises the beauty of her subject, she also introduces the Marquise de la Laguna into the poem, thus making the total number of subjects three. In order to extol both women fairly, Sor Juana has them complement (and compliment) each other: de un Ángel sólo puede ser coronista otro Ángel. A la vuestra, su hermosura alaba, porque envidiarse se concede en las bellezas y desdice en las Deidades [Only an Angel can be the chronicler of another Angel. She praises your beauty because envy is allowed in beauties and is denied in deities]. (OC 1.105:169–72)

Sor Juana doesn’t write herself into this trilogy. Instead, by reflecting on her actions as an elegist, the Mexican nun begins to undermine the traditions she proves to know so well by introducing textual strategies that both call attention to herself and divert it away from her. By revealing her own incentives—or lack thereof—for writing to the Duchess, Sor Juana comments on the purpose of the poetic tribute in her time (Luciani 2004, 150). This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting nuances of romance #37, for the poet’s intrusion in the encomium tears at its very nature. Amy Katz Kaminsky has aptly noted that the poem “mak[es] manifest what is usually suppressed: the egocentrism of the writer of the eulogistic form” (1990, 142). If we are to believe the nun-writer, both the elegist and the object of praise stand to benefit from a laudatory poem that doubles as a favor. However, in this particular case, neither of the two women will benefit. Desinteresada os busco: que el efecto que os aplaude,

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es aplauso a lo entendido y no lisonja a lo grande [I seek you disinterestedly: [know] that the effect that I praise you with is learned applause and not exaggerated flattery]. (OC 1.102:65–68, emphasis added)

With her customary humility, Sor Juana assures the Duchess that her verses can do little to extend the noblewoman’s renown: Porque ¿para qué, Señora, en distancia tan notable habrán vuestras altiveces menester de mis humildades? [Because for what purpose, over such large distances, my Lady, has your pride need of my humility?]. (OC 1.102:69–72)

While continuing to address María de Guadalupe, who has abruptly ceased to be her subject, the poet writes that she, in return, does not expect to receive any of the myriad favors that a literary tribute can grant its author: Yo no he menester de Vos que vuestro favor me alcance favores en el Consejo ni ampara en los Tribunales; ni que acomodéis mis deudos, ni que amparéis mi linaje, ni que mi alimento sean vuestras liberalidades [I have no need of you, no need for the favors you can earn me before the Council, nor protection in the Courts; nor that you pay off my debts, nor that you protect my lineage, nor that my sustenance be your generosity]. (OC 1.102:73–80)

With these verses, the poet doesn’t place herself on par with the Duchess, as she seems to suggest when she wrote that only an angel (the Marquise) can chronicle another angel (the Duchess). Instead, she writes from a position of recognizable otherness: the result of American fecundity: “Que yo,

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señora nací / en la América abundante, / compatriota del oro, / paisana de los metales” [I, milady, was born in the abundant America, a compatriot of gold, a kinswoman of metals] (OC 1.102: 81–84). Indeed, she was born in “la América abundante” [Abundant America], adonde el común sustento se da casi tan de balde, que en ninguna parte más se ostenta la Tierra Madre. [where common sustenance is taken for granted such that Mother Earth can boast [her wares] here more than anywhere else]. (OC 1.102–3:85–88)

In romance #37, Sor Juana repeats three times that her only intention is to prostrate herself at the Duchess’s feet (vv. 35; 187; 189). According to her romance, as an inhabitant of America, a world of plenty rich in minerals and sustenance, and as a nun whose vows of poverty govern her life, Sor Juana need not petition María de Guadalupe for influential nor material favors; she is truly “desinteresada”—or so she says.5 No matter how Sor Juana describes her designs in her tribute to the Duchess, the very act of writing the panegyric exalts and contributes to the noblewoman’s fame much in the way that Sor Juana’s own panegyrists of the Fama participate in her renown. In other words, while insisting that the object of her praise stands to gain nothing from her endeavor, the poet actively spreads the Duchess’s renown. Regardless of whether the nun knew that her poem would figure among those works published in the widely circulated and reprinted IC, she had to know that her works reached far and wide, abetted by intercessors like the Marquise de la Laguna. All too familiar with the prescriptions governing a sanctioned fame, Sor Juana makes certain to subscribe to tradition in her portrayal of María de Guadalupe. The nun-writer not only warrants the Duchess de Aveyro’s literary fame by relegating intellect to the sphere of the soul, she also underlines the fact that the Duchess’s literary endeavors are religiously motivated and extols her beauty. 5 Together with her praise of America’s bounty, Sor Juana includes a commentary on European greed. Given that this is a rare instance of criollo pride in the nun-writer, this aspect of romance #37 has received more attention. See, for example, Lafaye (1974, 71–72). For a reading of the poem in its political dimension in which Sor Juana presents the Atlantic as a space of leveling equilibrium that allows both sides of the ocean to be conceived of on the same grounds, see Morales (2010).

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When Sor Juana turns her attention to herself in the final section of romance #37, the telling gap between what she says and does is even more apparent. Significantly, the nun’s mastery of the genre together with her ability to exploit the variable nature of images allow her to transform conventional tropes into windows to her ever-mutable self. Appropriately beginning the last twenty verses of the romance with the word “yo,” her person—or, importantly, the image of her—becomes the object of Sor Juana’s attention. Her intention, she reminds us, is no more than to prostrate herself before María de Guadalupe, an act that she will perform vicariously through her romance. Showing unmatched humility, Sor Juana attests that as a New World woman writer she has no influence and is of little consequence. She is in fact no one: De nada puedo serviros, Señora porque soy nadie; Mas quizá por aplaudiros Podré aspirar a ser alguien [I can be of no use to you, my Lady, because I am no one. Only, perhaps, by praising you, can I aspire to be someone]. (OC 1.105:193–96)

Taken at face value, the nun-writer’s lines suggest that she can hope only, at best, to be a panegyrist of the Duchess de Aveyro; to be a learned servant, if you will. Hence despite claiming to be “desinterested,” Sor Juana admits, albeit rhetorically, to aspiring to be “someone” by means of her tribute. This potential someone (“alguien”), however, not only stands in contrast to, but is undermined by the nun’s utterance of self-negation (“soy nadie”) [I am no one] that appears in the very same stanza. Granted, Sor Juana here seeks recourse to a humility topic and thus necessarily adheres to tradition, either for its own sake or to reveal within convention a disquieting self-image. As Stephanie Merrim explains, “[p]sychologically, [humility topics] supply a conventionalized vehicle for emotions or interiority and can act as enabling disclaimers; rhetorically, they capture the reader’s sympathy and ally the writer with tradition” (1999, 174). With the aid of the humility topic and despite being joined to the equally conventional notion that her interlocutor can potentially ennoble her, Sor Juana offers only one possibility for self-representation in this stanza: self-effacement. The language and imagery by which Sor Juana’s utterance of self-negation makes itself manifest, however, contradicts the disparaging message. More

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specifically, Sor Juana employs language and metaphors that characterize a particular bent of her self-representation: her quest for knowledge and her personal sense of daring. For example, the Mexican nun describes her mission to laud María de Guadalupe as “un impulso dominante de resistir imposible” [A dominant impulse, impossible to resist] (OC 1.105:74–75). Her words call to mind another “natural impulso” [natural impulse]. I am referring to Sor Juana’s description of her irrepressible inclination towards secular knowledge and writing in her Respuesta and the Carta al P. Núñez. Furthermore, in speaking of her metaphorical voyage to “la dichosa región” [the fortunate region] (Europe), carried out “con pluma en tinta, no en cera, / en alas de papel frágil” [with quills of ink, not wax, on wings of fragile paper] (OC 1.105:77–78), Sor Juana refers to the figure of Icarus, a recurring image of daring in her work as Sabat-Rivers (1998, 90) and Merrim have convincingly argued (1999, 173; 204). Used here to describe the nun’s transatlantic voyage from New Spain to the Duchess’s feet via her poem, the reference to Icarus also anticipates the greater act of daring to come—the publication (in Spain) of the IC. I concede that there is no way of knowing definitively whether Sor Juana was aware of the immanent publication of the IC. However, it is most likely that the poet entrusted the Marquise with delivering her tribute to the Duchess, be it in print or manuscript form. If, on the one hand, what Sor Juana writes or says in her tribute to María de Guadalupe de Lencastre subscribes to the conventions of the elegy and employs humility topics that demand expressions of self-denigration, the language at the end of the poem undermines the nun’s attempt at selfobliteration. Her conflicting sentiments—I am no one, yet I am daring Icarus—signal ever-present opposing forces in Sor Juana’s self-representation. Complex and layered, her opinions of self, fame, and the act of writing are often contradictory. In romance #37, the nun-writer proves her complexity while arguing that she is no one at all. And, just as the romance’s intricate final section reveals that Sor Juana’s motives for writing the elegy are more complex than she willingly admits, another stanza affirms a parallel between the nun-writer and the Duchess by suggesting a potentially reciprocal literary exchange. Upon introducing herself in the poem, the Mexican nun insists that she writes from the peripheries of New Spain in response to the European woman’s renown: al eco de vuestro nombre, que llega a lo más distante, medias sílabas responde desde sus concavidades […]

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[The echo of your name reaches the farthest latitudes and from their concavities half syllables reply]. (OC 1.102:53–56)

Sor Juana’s suggestion implies that on intellectual grounds the two women are equals—hers is “aplauso a lo entendido” [learned applause]—a fact she later affirms in her Respuesta when she includes María de Guadalupe as her closest contemporary in her catalogue of learned women.6 Moreover, Sor Juana again reneges on her supposed inferiority vis-à-vis the Duchess by textually displaying her erudition. As evinced in the lines cited above, the Mexican nun borrows the images and adjectives she employs to laud the Duchess’s learning—“imanes” [magnets], “compases” [compasses], “concavidades” [concavities], “ecos” [echoes], “sílabas” [syllables]—from the worlds of science and music. Whether intentionally or not, by postulating the Duchess de Aveyro as a world-renowned woman writer worthy of a literary tribute whose intelligence is not problematic but rather responsible for her fame, Sor Juana necessarily draws a parallel with her own life. The Mexican poet’s encomium ratifies at every turn that María de Guadalupe de Lencastre’s qualities and achievements, those of a true mujer fuerte, render her worthy of her renown. However, in virtually all of her self-referential writings Sor Juana claims to abhor the very thing that she helped extend in the Duchess: her fame. Repeatedly insisting that she does not want to be portrayed as an icon, the nun adamantly dismisses her contemporaries’ claim that she too is a “única maravilla” [unique wonder] who deserves widespread renown. If in her romance #37 Sor Juana refers to 6 In her romance #38 (to Doctor Don José de Vega y Vique) Sor Juana again presents the Duchess as her closest contemporary in an extensive list of women writers and thinkers deemed worthy of praise: o de la excelsa Duquesa de Aveyro, de nuestro siglo honra y corona, y gloriosa afrenta a los antiguos: en cuya divina pluma, en cuyos altos escritos, España goza mejores Oráculos Sibilinos. [Oh, the excelsior Duchess de Aveyro, honor and crown of our century, and glorious requirement of the Ancients: in whose divine quill, in whose esteemed writing, Spain enjoys the best oracles of the sibyls]. (OC 1.110–11:189–96) For more on Sor Juana’s use of the catalog see Harvey (2006) and Peraita (2010).

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willingly building temples in honor of the Duchess de Aveyro in America “[…] en este apartado Polo / templo os erijo y altares” [in this far-off Pole, I build alters and temples for you] (102:63–64), in what is arguably her autobiographical speech as the character Leonor in Los empeños de una casa, she reproaches those individuals who wish to do the same for her: Era de mi patria toda el objeto venerado de aquellas adoraciones que forma el común aplauso; […] llegó la superstición popular a empeño tanto, que ya adoraban deidad el ídolo que formaron (OC 4.37–38:321–32) [I was, through all my native land, / recipient of praise and laud, / the quality of veneration / formed by communal acclaim; / […] too soon, a general superstition / was so insistent and widespread / that the idol they’d created / now the people deified]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 244–45)7

Leonor’s account tells of a life filled with virtue, talent, and beauty, until, that is, she became an “idol” to those who spread her acclaim. In their hands, reveals Leonor/Sor Juana at the end of her speech, her “dichas” [fortunes] have proven to be “desdichas” [misfortunes] (Merrim 1999, 156). How then to explain Sor Juana’s double standard? Why does she help extend the Duchess de Aveyro’s fame but despise her own? In order to answer these questions, we must first look at the nun’s (written) opinion of her acclaim.

Sor Juana Vilifies and Promotes Her Renown in the Respuesta At its outset and at various junctures of Sor Juana’s letter written in response to Sor Filotea, her Respuesta (1691), the writer avers that upon hearing of the publication of her controversial Carta atenagórica she was elated and devastated; she wanted to both correct and destroy her work. She not only writes: “Que si creyera se había de publicar, no fuera con tanto desaliño 7

See Juana Inés de la Cruz (2005) for a bilingual Spanish-English edition of the play.

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como fue” (OC 4.468–69) [“For had I thought the letter was to be published, it would not have appeared as unkempt as it was”] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 93); but also: “[C]reo […] que si yo tal pensara, la ahogara antes entre las mismas manos en que nacía […]” (OC 4.471). [“I believe […] that were I to have imagined such a thing [that the letter would be published], I should first have drowned it with these very hands to which it was born”] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 97). Similarly, by publishing the polemical letter, the Bishop of Puebla, Fernández de Santa Cruz, has both honored and punished the writer. An excellent example of her conflicting opinion of her renown, Sor Juana’s vacillating stance in the Respuesta also provides insight into her desire to construct her fame and image on her own terms. Luciani rightly notes that when she took to the task of writing her own story in 1691, “she necessarily fashioned a self in relation to the diverse textualized selves already in circulation—the ambiguous legacy of her literary success and personal fame” (2004, 83). Her will to emend and annihilate both her writings and her image of self resonates in the works studied in the pages of this chapter, including her unfinished romance #51.8 Nonetheless, when addressing the existence of her admirers and the fame they brought her directly (as opposed to alluding to the publication of her work), Sor Juana’s opinion appears unwaveringly negative. Repeatedly in the Respuesta, the nun-writer refers to the acclaim showered on her by her contemporaries with the noun “aplauso” [applause], a term that for her has decidedly and exclusively negative connotations. To borrow from Sor Juana’s vocabulary, no other “desdichas” [misfortunes] masqueraded as “dones” [gifts] as often and as forcibly in her self-referential works as acclaim and renown. While her celebrity granted her the opportunity to continue to study and publish despite opposition from her religious superiors, the nun’s renown also provoked envy and mistrust in others. And, despite believing that “expressions of opinion, praise or opprobrium, and the pursuit of art itself are immune from punishment” (Arenal and Powell 1994, 29), as the object of the opinions of others Sor Juana felt susceptible to their effects. As she writes on several occasions, she preferred that her work be received coldly, since acclaim brought with it the costly price of having to endure the reproofs of those around her, a price that ultimately proved intolerable. Conversely, she says that calamities and vituperations may 8 As part of his argument on Sor Juana’s silence as informing her literary self-fashioning, Luciani believes this poem to be indicative of the nun’s decision to abandon literary writing (2004, 25).

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mortify her but never cause her harm: “Yo de mí puedo asegurar que las calumnias algunas veces me han mortificado, pero nunca me han hecho daño […]” (OC 4.473) [“For my part, I can testify that these detractions have at times been a mortification to me, but they have never done me harm”] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 101). Sor Juana’s voiced preference in the Respuesta for criticism (“calumnias”) over applause forms an integral part of her defense against the admonitions of the Bishop and her other critics. Specifically, the nun-writer uses her textual strategy of vilifying her renown to refute, on the one hand, the Bishop’s allegation that her secular works are transgressions, and, on the other, accusations that she has surrendered to the sins of pride and vanity. I speak of a textual “strategy” because Sor Juana’s defensive position vis-àvis her acclaim—in reality an offensive to eradicate her public image—is by no means unique to the Respuesta. Two of her best-known sonnets published in the IC, #146 “En perseguirme mundo, ¿qué interesas?” [World, in hounding me, what do you gain?] and #150 “¿Tan grande, ¡ay Hado, mi delito ha sido[?]” [Fate, was my crime of such enormity[?]] echo the Respuesta as they reiterate the nun-writer’s publicized campaign of affliction orchestrated in part to disparage suspicion that her acclaim incited sentiments of pride or self-love. Pleading her innocence before unwarranted attacks in sonnet #150, the poet accuses Fate of having betrayed her by granting her so many “dones” [gifts]: Dísteme aplausos, para más baldones; subir me hiciste para penas tales; y aun pienso que me dieron tus traiciones penas a mi desdicha desiguales, porque, viéndome rica de tus dones, nadie tuviese lástima a mis males. (OC 1.280: 9–14) [Bringing me applause, you stirred up envy’s ire. / Raising me up, you knew how hard I’d fall. / No doubt it was your treachery saddled me / with troubles far beyond misfortune’s call, / that, seeing the store you gave me of your blessings, / no one would guess the cost of each and all]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 99)

Sor Juana’s unfettered yet equally reproachful verses of sonnet #146 lack the urgency of the example cited above. The well-known lines instead reveal a profound sense of betrayal and an accompanying refutation of vanity and pride similar to that we will see unfold in the nun’s letter to Bishop Fernández:

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En perseguirme mundo, ¿qué interesas? ¿En qué te ofendo, cuando sólo intento poner bellezas en mi entendimiento y no mi entendimiento en bellezas? (OC 1.277:1–4) [In persecuting me, World, what is your intention? / How do I offend you, when all I desire / is to place beauty in my mind / instead of focusing my mind on worldly beauty?]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1999, 105)

The sense of persecution that Sor Juana introduces in the first line of sonnet #146 proves central to the opinion of her fame she carefully constructs in the Respuesta. Whereas in her sonnets the nun fended off criticism from Fate and the world at large, in her contestatory letter she responds directly to Bishop Fernández and his poorly veiled accusations of her impropriety. Accordingly, Sor Juana refutes any wrongdoing on her part with a characteristically double-edged argument steeped in religious beliefs. As Kathleen Myers has convincingly argued, Sor Juana’s “alternative religious self-portrait,” proves her adept at “exploit[ing] the ideological structure of traditional confessor-nun communiques—and the vida genre in particular—in order to accomplish her own reworking of it” (2003, 99; 95). If we are to believe only what Sor Juana says—and not how she says it—then only her piety should be extolled. At a juncture of her autobiographical treatise in which she defends the free will of her learning against an accusation of heresy from an unnamed (and never identified) censor, she writes: “aprecio, como debo, más el nombre de católica y de obediente hija de mi Santa Madre Iglesia que todos los aplausos de docta” (OC 4.469) [I more greatly value, as I ought, the name of Catholic and obedient daughter of my Holy Mother Church than any praise that might befall me as a scholar] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 93). In what follows, I trace how Sor Juana describes a martyrdom triggered by applause and akin to Christ’s while adopting a self-image that, surprisingly enough, warranted her fame. Sor Juana portrays her fate as the object of adulation and envy in her Respuesta as a thorn in her side or, perhaps more accurately, as a crown of thorns. In an evocative analogy, she describes how given the height (and winged flight) of her fame she inevitably suffers attacks like all other figures held in the highest esteem: Suelen en la eminencia de los templos colocarse por adornos unas figuras de los Vientos y de la Fama, y por defenderse de las aves, las llenan todas de púas; defensa parece y no es sino propiedad forzosa: no puede estar

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sin púas que la puncen quien está en alto. […] ¡Oh infeliz altura, expuesta a tantos riesgos! ¡Oh signo que te ponen por blanco de la envidia y por objeto de la contradicción! (OC 4.454) [Figures of the Winds and of Fame are often placed on the topmost heights of temples as adornments; to defend them from the birds, these images are covered with barbs. This would seem to be a defense, yet it is not, but rather a requisite attribute; for a figure thus standing on high must need feel those barbs. […] O, unhappy eminence, exposed to so many risks! O sign and symbol, set on high as a target of envy and an object to be spoken against!]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 67)

Exceedingly different from the Fama’s identification of the nun with the allegorical figure of Fame, Sor Juana’s words call to mind those of her character Leonor. While Leonor unequivocally referred to herself as “el objeto venerado” [the venerated object], here the writer has her addressee (and the reader) infer that she is a target of envy and criticism like the objects of idolatry she describes. In other moments of the Respuesta, Sor Juana presses her tormented state of persecution upon Sor Filotea/Bishop Fernández by affirming her own distinctive martyrdom in which she is both martyr and executioner. For Arenal and Powell, Sor Juana’s intimation that she is (or will become) her own executioner announces a veiled and coming decision to silence herself (1994, 118): ¿Quién no creerá, viendo tan generales aplausos, que he navegado viento en popa y mar en leche, sobre las palmas de las aclamaciones comunes? Pues Dios sabe que no ha sido muy así, porque leche, sobre las palmas de las aclamaciones se han levantado y despertado tales áspides de emulaciones y persecuciones, cuantas no podré contar, y los que más nocivos y sensibles para mí han sido […] los que amándome y deseando mi bien […], me han mortificado y atormentado más que los otros […] ¿Qué me habrá costado resistir esto? ¡Rara especie de martirio donde yo era el mártir—y me era el verdugo! (OC 4.452) [Who would not think, upon hearing such widespread applause, that I had sailed before the wind with a sea smooth as glass, upon cheers of universal acclaim? Yet God Himself knows it has not quite been so, because among the many blossoms of that very acclaim there have roused themselves and reared up the asps of rivalry and persecution, more than I could possibly

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count. And the most venomous and hurtful to me have […] been those persons, [who] loving me and desiring my good […] have mortified and tormented me more than any others […] How was I to bear up against this? A strange martyrdom indeed, where I must be both martyr and my own executioner!]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 63)

Given Sor Juana’s proclivity to prove a point in several different ways, it comes as little surprise that she underlines her martyrdom with a Biblical example. In what is perhaps her most audacious analogy of the Respuesta, Sor Juana compares her martyrdom to that of Christ. The quintessential example of innocent superiority, Christ exemplifies Sor Juana’s conviction that individuals of superior intelligence cannot escape ill-treatment. Indeed, writes the nun, Christ’s punishment resulted from his having distinguished himself. And, among the distinctions Christ earned during his lifetime, his uncommon wisdom spurred the greatest affliction: “cabeza que es erario de sabiduría no espere otra corona que de espinas” (OC 4.455) [The head that is a treasury of wisdom can hope for no other crown than thorns] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 67). Myers explains that to “follow the path to God […] was to experience suffering, as Christ had suffered in his Passion in order to save humankind. Taking Christ’s life as an example, the precept of the imitatio Christi in Spanish America centered on the Teresian dictate “padecer o morir” [suffer or die]. Suffering—and the acceptance of it as God’s will—was the essence of the imitatio Christi and the one path to salvation (2003, 105). Sor Juana thus saliently configures her own imitatio Christi by disclosing that the vituperation against Christ stemmed chiefly from his astounding intelligence. The Respuesta is, after all, the story and defense of her own intellectual “inclination.” To conclude her discussion of Christ’s martyrdom, Sor Juana describes her own, which, like his, is similarly prompted by her learning. It’s worth noting that while in the Christian tradition a martyr is a person who dies for their savior (as opposed to Christ who dies to redeem humankind), Sor Juana dedicates a lengthy passage of her Respuesta to Christ’s persecution, which she describes as a kind of strange martyrdom (OC 4.453–57): Yo confieso que me hallo muy distante de los términos de la sabiduría y que la he deseado seguir, aunque a longe. Pero todo ha sido acercarme más al fuego de la persecución, al crisol del tormento; y ha sido con tal extremo que han llegado a solicitar que se me prohíba el estudio.” (OC 4.457–58) [I confess that I am far indeed from the terms of Knowledge and that I have wished to follow it, though ‘afar off.’ But all this has merely led me

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closer to the flames of persecution, the crucible of affliction; and to such extremes that some have even sought to prohibit me from study]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 73)

Elaborating further on her imitatio Christi, Sor Juana disparages her acclaim yet again by abdicating any agency in her intelligence. With a humility fitting her calling, the nun attests that her glories, should she have any, are gifts of God and thus praise of them truly extols Him: “[L]as puntas de las alabanzas […] son lanzas que, en no atribuyéndose a Dios, cuyas son, nos quitan la vida y nos hacen ser ladrones de la honra de Dios y usurpadores de los talentos que nos entregó y de los dones que nos prestó […]” (OC 4.473) [The prongs of praise […] are spears that, when not attributed to God to whom they belong, take our very lives and make us thieves of God’s honor and usurpers of the talents that He bestowed on us and of the gifts he lent us] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 101). Stephanie Merrim explains how Sor Juana’s conjecture speaks to the orthodox heart of the imitatio Christi and comprises a remarkable self-defense. It singles out Sor Juana as chosen by God and this divests her of agency, selfhood, or responsibility for her actions. It renders those who would thwart her sinners for their opposition to God’s will. And […] it exculpates her from any perceived arrogance or sins. (1999, 171)

I would add that Sor Juana inscribes her defense—at once an attack on her unfounded persecution—into the kind of humbling discourse that her epistolary interlocutor demands of her as a nun. Yet her imitatio Christi is far different from any of those found in the biographies of colonial nuns. Myers notes that Sor Juana, unlike most nuns, “does not employ a meditating, supernatural vision or voice to make her case, but chooses instead to argue it with her God-given capacity to present an elaborate, logical, and convincing case” (1990, 465). Furthermore, noticeably absent from Sor Juana’s Respuesta are the acts of penance and purification which both subjected the imperfections of the flesh (principally women’s flesh) to the spirit and imitated the sufferings of Christ (Lavrin 1991, 77). Myers points out that the nun imitates the language of self-mortification when she writes in the Respuesta of abstaining from eating cheese or cutting her hair when she stumbled in her learning (1990, 463). However, in addition to signaling her path to intellectual (and not spiritual) perfection, the nun’s statements remain a far cry from the customary descriptions of self-inflicted pain through discipline.

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While most of her Mexican contemporaries focused on mirroring the physical suffering of Christ—with bodily mortif ication, fasts, and prayers concentrated on his crucifixion—Sor Juana shifts the focus to two symbolic moments in the Passion: the condemnation of Christ by the Pharisees and his crown of thorns. Christ’s Passion becomes a vehicle to discuss the interconnected nature of knowledge, wisdom, and love, and humankind’s contradictory responses to them. […] At this point in the narrative, Sor Juana audaciously identifies her path with Christ’s suffering and the apostle Peter: she has been persecuted not because she is wise, but rather because she pursued wisdom in the name of God, who is knowledge. (Myers 2003, 105)

Well aware of the prescriptions targeted at her, such as Antonio de Núñez’s stipulation that “‘a painless virtue does not count’” (qtd. in Lavrin 1991, 78), Sor Juana transforms what ordinarily would be an account of penitence into a tale of martyred persecution driven by those who envy her pursuit of knowledge in the name of God. As such, her imitatio Christi not only distances her from the sins of pride and self-love, but shields her audacious defense of her distinctive intellect from further criticism.9 Paradoxically, Sor Juana’s martyred persona warrants a kind of fame in its own right; not the renown praised by her literary admirers, but the acclaim bestowed on saintly nuns whose fame was upheld by a publicized martyrdom. The nun-writer appropriates one of the few forms of self-assertion considered appropriate for women, what Mary Beth Rose calls “a feminine mode of negative self-assertion,” (1986, 267) to ironically revile the fame proscribed for women (literary fame) and to write herself into a sanctioned form of renown (martyrdom). To use Avrom Fleishman’s terms, the “idealized” and “ideologized” literary figure of the obedient and self-sacrificing female martyr paradoxically becomes the “instrument” with which Sor Juana makes herself unique, “by creative reenactment, revision and reversal” (1983, 49). The Mexican nun’s layered account of persecution allows her to lash out at her public image as she attempts at once to annihilate it and to 9 As an intimate invective with the issue of her public defamation at its center, Sor Juana’s Autodefensa espiritual or Carta al P. Núñez (1681?) shares the Respuesta’s message regarding the punishing effects of acclaim. The nun describes her laurels, for example, as “pungentes espinas de persecución” [painful barbs of persecution] and asks her soon-to-be ex-confessor: “¿qué más castigo me quiere V[uestra] R[everencia] que el que entre los mismos aplausos que tanto [l]e duelen, tengo? ¿De qué envidia no soy blanco?” (Madres 1999, 63) [What greater punishment could Your Reverence envision for me than the pain which this very applause occasions me? Of what envy am I not the target?] (Madres 1999, 73).

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emend it. The Respuesta thus provided Sor Juana with an opportunity to contest her image as a woman who overstepped her bounds by publishing secular works and at the same time to participate in her renown by craftily constructing and publicizing another image of herself: Sor Juana the martyr. Manipulating the language and imagery that confessors demanded of their penitents, the nun-writer formally obeys Fernández’s wishes while presenting him with an intricate self-fashioning that peeks out from within the interstices of convention—a self-representation that is entirely of her own making.

“I Have No Knowledge of These Things”: Sor Juana’s Careful Crafting of Her Literary Self-Portraits While Sor Juana’s self-image as martyr is perhaps most evident in the Respuesta, it also f inds its way into other works with decidedly different pragmatic contexts such as the philosophical sonnets #146 and #150 mentioned earlier. Another example is the jocular romance #48, her lyric response written to a gentleman from Peru who sends Sor Juana clay vessels in an effort to help her become a man. In addition to affirming the nun’s martyrdom, romance #48 reinforces the divide between Sor Juana, who understands the dark side of celebrity and acclaim, and others, who do not. After a lengthy opening section to her poem in which she claims to lack the ability to praise the gentleman adequately but indeed does so effusively, she explains that she cannot heed his advice to change her sex. With the aid of the Neoplatonic notion of androgyny to which I alluded in chapter 3, Sor Juana insists that as a virgin nun in possession of a rational and sexless soul she can hardly be described as a woman. Consequently, she has no need to change the way she is. I should add that she offers a humble and rhetorical disclaimer—“[y]o no entiendo de esas cosas” [I have no knowledge of these things]—just prior to her explanation of androgyny. Her allusion to the one-sex model divulges that she does indeed understand but chooses to remain silent. My suspicion is confirmed in the poem when the speaker cuts short the discussion of her undefined sex to return her attention to the gentleman. Referring to silence and ignorance, two prescriptions governing feminine behavior, Sor Juana writes that she will not proceed “porque en lo que es bien que se ignore, / no es razón que se sutilice” (OC 1.139:111–12) [some matters better left unknown / no reason can illuminate] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 143). Nevertheless, as she consoles the exiled gentleman of Peru, the nun-writer draws on the very

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vocabulary that formed the basis of her textual account of persecution: “delito,” “envidia,” “blanco,” “alabanzas,” [crime, envy, target, praise] etc. “Por bueno lo desterraron,” she tells her addressee, “porque el exceder a todos, / es delito irremisible” (OC 1.139:123–24) [He was expelled for being good, / […] because to tower over all / is truly unforgiveable] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 143). As Sor Juana delineates the alteration of his gifts or talent into a crime, the echo of her personal sense of persecution rings out loudly: Al paso que la alabanza a uno para blanco elige, a ese mismo paso trata la envidia de perseguirle. (OC 1.139:129–32) [To the degree that one is chosen / as the target for acclaim, / to that same measure, envy trails / in close pursuit, with perfect aim] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 144).

It is an echo ironized by the fact that only a few lines earlier she deliberately silenced her own rational voice. Sor Juana’s actions of deliberately silencing herself and then speaking “through” the gentleman may be another example of what Josefina Ludmer (1985) has called the “tricks of the weak” (“tretas del débil”). In her article of the same name, Ludmer explains both how the nun creates a gnostic space of her own design by and through silence, and how her discussions of silence are in themselves a means of speaking out. In distinguishing himself, the Peruvian gentleman joins ranks with those individuals whose fate lies in being the target of applause and envy. As Sor Juana argues in the Respuesta, it is other people who decide one’s fate when they choose a target (“a uno para blanco elige”). Similarly, Leonor, to whose speech I referred earlier, resents being transformed by the actions of others. In fact, Leonor implies that the impetus for her celebrated acclaim lies not in her but in the image of her created by others: [E]ra el admirado blanco de todas las atenciones de tal modo, que llegaron a venerar como infuso lo que fue adquirido lauro. (OC 4.37:316–20)

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[I was the target of all eyes, / admired, the center of attention, / so immoderately eulogized / that laurels won through industry / were glorified as gifts of God]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 243)

Leonor’s acquired laurels have multiplied in and of themselves, spinning out of control and leading her to be “venerated” by her admirers who mistake external and imposed qualities for natural or inherent ones. The propagated myth has taken on a life of its own and celebrates her not for who she is but as an “idol.” In fact, once Leonor belongs to the public realm, truth gives way to fiction: “Voló la Fama parlera […] y en la distancia segura / acreditó informes falsos” (OC 4.38:333–36) [Fame spread the tidings far and wide, / and the persuasion distance lends / gave credence to these false reports] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 245). Alluding to the deceptive realm of sensorial perception through the trope of eyeglasses, the heroine of Los empeños de una casa rebukes those individuals who are deceived into seeing her as they wish to: La pasión se puso anteojos de tan engañosos grados, que a mis moderadas prendas agrandaban los tamaños. (OC 4.38:337–40) [Then Fervor, wearing spectacles / whose lens reality distorts, / saw talents of most modest worth / disproportionately magnified]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 245)

In the context of cloak and dagger theater of Spain’s Golden Age, passion is the culprit for the deception. However, a parallel image in a sonnet that pits Sor Juana against the world suggests that the nun’s mistrust of the manipulation of her image in the hands of others was not merely a theatrical embellishment of Leonor’s state of distress. Instead, I believe that the “anteojos / de tan engañosos grados” [spectacles / whose lens reality distorts] speak directly to Sor Juana’s preoccupation with illusions and the public’s (mis)shaping of her image. The sonnet in question is #152, “Verde embeleso de la vida humana” [Green allurement of our human life] that appears on the Miranda portrait of 1713.10 Appearing not in Sor Juana’s published volumes but rather on a portrait, the sonnet appropriately addresses the illusory nature of images. Employing 10 See chapter 1, 62, 62 n. 7, for a discussion on this portrait.

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once again the paradoxically blinding glasses that tainted Leonor’s image, the poet describes how the senses can deceive a person into seeing the world not as it is but rather as s/he wishes to: “sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día / los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos, / todo lo ven pintado a su deseo” (OC 1.281:9–11) [let those pursue your shadow’s beckoning / who put green lenses in their spectacles / and see the world in colors that appeal (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 101)]. In the final lines of the sonnet, Sor Juana introduces her “yo” in order to differentiate between herself and others: “que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía, / tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos / y solamente lo que toco veo” (OC 1.281:12–14) [Myself, I’ll act more wisely toward the world: / I’ll place my eyes right at my fingertips / and only see what my two hands can feel (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 101)]. Gracián and Alciato are both potential sources for the seeing hands. Sabat-Rivers speculates that Sor Juana learned of this image from reading Baltasar Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1995b, 380). In his “discurso XXIII,” Gracián cites Lucan as saying “le faltaba al hombre […] un ojo en la mano para no creer sino lo que con ella tocase” [The man was missing an eye in his hand so as to believe only that which he can touch] (1996, 222–23). Jorge Checa suggests that the last lines of sonnet #152 were inspired by Alciato’s emblem #16 which shows a hand with an eye in it and is accompanied by the following commentary on the virtue of temperance: “‘… Mira la prudente / Mano con ojos, que jamás fue vana / Por creer lo que ve tan solamente’” [Behold the prudent hand with eyes that was never presumptuous enough to believe only what could be seen] (1993, 128). Unlike those who wear green lenses then, the more prudent nun is cognizant of the illusory nature of appearances. For Georgina Sabat-Rivers, the sonnet signals a new order: “[l]a realidad ha dejado de ser unidimensional para convertirse en un mundo engañoso que debemos desentrañar a través de nuestra interpretación individual” [Reality stops being unidimensional in order to transform into a deceitful world that we must decipher by means of our own individual interpretation] (1995b, 380). While I agree with Sabat-Rivers’s reading of a new polymorphous reality, I believe that Sor Juana employs the notion of the desengaño to dramatize the gap between her vision of the world (including her place in it) and the false (though not necessarily individualized) perspective of those around her. Significantly, in #152 the Mexican writer does not state what she sees, only that she prudently refrains from allowing passion or emotions to influence her untrustworthy sight. Words, after all, as Michel Foucault has observed, prove impossibly inadequate when confronted by the visible (1970, 9). Sor Juana’s sonnet proves that she was able in the seventeenth century to discern what today is well

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known: that no verbal or visual representation can be “real” or truthful. Alongside the portrait with which it appears, Sor Juana’s sonnet reveals that like the painted image, verbal representations are copies and images apt to deceive the senses. As will become clear, the differentiation intimated in sonnet #152 between Sor Juana, who recognizes the illusory nature of images and of acclaim and renown, and others, who do not, plays a vital role in the nun’s poetic self-portraits, representations that problematize precisely how she “sees” herself. Sor Juana’s carefully crafted literary self-portraits, décima #102 and sonnet #145, prove to be a locus in which the nun-poet reflects on the illusory qualities of representation by self and other in order to both respond to and undo her public image. Speaking to the close ties between verbal and visual representation and to the popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notion of the senses’ ability to deceive, the nun-writer’s self-portraits express her desengaño. That is, they reveal Sor Juana’s awareness of the fact that her fame—the image of her that circulates either in written texts or by word of mouth—is but an illusion. As representations of the self, Sor Juana’s self-portraits affirm that her attack on fame and applause consists of an assault on her public image—especially in so far as it is an image and therefore necessarily deceiving. The speaking portrait of Sor Juana’s décima #102, “Décimas que acompañaron un Retrato enviado a una Persona,” [Décimas that accompanied a portrait sent to a person] plays on the traditional relationship between the Sister Arts: if painting is mute poetry, then the latter must be painting that can speak. Poem #102 was intended to accompany a pictorial self-portrait, which, as indicated by its appended title, is a gift for the Vicereine, the Marquise de la Laguna. The literary portrait nascent in the ekphrastic principle, which allows a poet to attempt to imitate in words an object of the plastic arts, provides Sor Juana with a highly conventional yet effective form of encomiastic poetry. By its very nature, and as suggested by the nun in sonnet #152, the rhetorical portrait’s dependency on words introduces uncertainty as to whether verbal means can represent the “un-picturable”—that is, an object in motion—thereby surpassing its pictorial counterpart. While the verbal portrait can describe motion more readily than can the pictorial portrait, it cannot capture movement. I use the term “un-picturable” as does Krieger in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, following the initiative of G.E. Lessing, who believes that literary images of objects at rest are “picturable” (1992, 45n8). Instead of attempting to resolve the difficulties involved in representing a person through an image, Sor Juana employs the commonplace of portraiture to problematize such a concept which, for her, is closely related to the Platonic

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notion of art as deceptive to the senses.11 Platonic thought espoused the belief that art was capable of turning the material world into “the deceptive realm of appearances, leaving reality to the invisible ideas that transcend the senses” (Krieger 1992, 16). Plato entrusted the dialectician, not the artist, with revealing the world of Ideas (Panofsky 1968, 6). In a sense, the literary portrait is deceptive on two levels in that it can problematize both visual and verbal representations. Eventually, the visual image that the ekphrasis attempts to translate into words is lost and becomes an extratextual element as the verbal representation “takes on the power of a free-standing entity” (Krieger 1992, 16). Both forms of representation, nevertheless, prove inadequate for Sor Juana. For her, the verbal portrait can reveal and suggest qualities such as virtue, yet it fails adequately to represent a person. Delving into the issue of sensorial versus imaginative perception in her self-portraiture, Sor Juana diverts the primary focus from her person. The speaking portrait of poem #102 organizes a triangular relationship in which the unfeeling speaker, “de un pincel nacida” [born of a paintbrush] (OC 1.239:18), adheres to conventions of courtly love while the person it represents, “[quien] es infeliz sintiendo”], [whose senses leave her unhappy] (239:13), is noticeably absent and silent. Within the spatial organization of the poem, the portrait speaks directly to the receptor of the gift (the Marquise) as if in her hands: “A tus manos me traslada / la que mi original es” [into your hands I am placed by she who is my original] (239:1–2). As a result, the speaking self-portrait implies a spatial and referential difference between itself and its “original.”12 11 Sor Juana often seeks recourse to the topic of the ineffable in her portrait poems written for the vicereines. While it is true that a woman’s sublime and hence indescribable beauty was a commonplace, the nun’s insistent use of the topos leads me to suspect that she was toying with it. Consider, for example, the following lines from endechas #74: Porque es tu hermosura tan inaccesible, que quien más la alaba menos la define; [Because your beauty is so inaccessible, he who praises it most, def ines it the least] (OC 1.197:41–44) and, from the jocular ovillejo #214: “No sé quien es Lisarda, les prometo; / que mi atención sencilla, / pintarla prometió, no definilla” [I promise I do not know who Lisarda is; my simple gesture promised to paint her, not to define her] (OC 1.323:142–44). 12 For Sabat-Rivers, drawing on Aristotelian thought, which maintains nature becomes art through poetry and painting, décimas #102 and #103 apply the topos of Art and Nature coinciding as the copy is faithful to the Original (1982b, 709).

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This differentiation calls upon the reader to recognize another space: that between the absent original and her beloved. The Marquise can only see the original transfigured into a portrait: “no la verás retratada: / en mí toda transformada” [you will not see her portrayed, in me entirely transformed] (239:3–4). By relegating the self (the original) to a silent and unseen position outside the canvas, removed from the declaration of devotion between the painting and its addressee, the reader faces a self-portrait of which Sor Juana is the center but not the subject. In so doing, Sor Juana adopts a role similar to that of the sovereigns in Velázquez’s masterpiece, “Las Meninas.” Michel Foucault explains that in so far as the King and Queen are visible in their reflections in the mirror at the furthest most point of the painting “they are the frailest and the most distant form of all reality. Inversely, in so far as they stand outside the picture and are therefore withdrawn from it in an essential invisibility, they provide the center around which the entire representation is ordered” (1970, 14). Her looming presence is felt but cannot be qualified and hence it is impossible to elicit a definition of Sor Juana from the décima: the “painting” is not about her. More disturbing, however, is that the original—the lover and absent self—has no voice. As I pointed out in her romance #48, Sor Juana was all too familiar with the discourses of Renaissance gender ideology that held the proper woman as an absence. In the words of Ann Rosalind Jones, “she is silent and invisible: she does not speak, and she is not spoken about” (1986, 74). In décima #102, Sor Juana’s original is silenced by her own representation that speaks on her behalf. Ekphrastic descriptions of paintings rival the qualities of the painted image “that make the absent subject (the beloved) a present object” (Jacobs 1994, 91). An absent subject is made an object by denying her subjectivity and reducing her corporeal presence to that of a trope. Yet in this poem of Sor Juana’s, neither of the three elements—original, portrait, and beloved—are objectified. The loved one who is, after all, the raison d’être of the portrait, is mentioned, yet she remains conventionally distant. The original, referred to in the third person singular, is, as we have seen, only a looming presence. And the speaking portrait expresses not the original’s corporeality, but rather her love and admiration for the beloved. Neither the active, speaking “I” of the portrait, nor the self outside the picture plane, are portrayed as tradition dictates. Not only is there no mention of beauty, there are no allusions to physical attributes whatsoever. The poet refuses to limit herself to a trope. Disallowing the possibility of playing muse to herself, she is not represented physically. Conversely, many other of the poet’s rhetorical portraits conventionalize female beauty in order to accentuate the subject’s virtue. As I explained earlier while referring to the encomium dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, this

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was standard practice in works that extolled women. Such is also the case in décima #103, which serves as a useful comparison with Sor Juana’s problematic self-portrait found in her décima #102. Here, the poem’s speaker retains the “yo” [“I”] while addressing the “tú,” [“you”] this time referring to the portrait (and, by extension, the original) of her beloved. Once again, the portrait functions as a buffer between the speaker (the courtly lover) and her beloved, as the third element in a triangular relationship. So life-like is the representation of the beloved in poem #103 that it seems she might become animate as did Pygmalion (OC 1.241:39). The speaker is deceived into believing that the portrait, if not already animate, must at least have use of its sensorial faculties: ¿Posible es, que no has sentido esta mano que te toca, […] ¿Que no hay luz en esos ojos? ¿Que no hay voz en esa boca? [Is it possible that you have not felt this hand that touches you? […] That there is not light in those eyes? That there is not a voice in that mouth?]. (OC 1.241:46–50)

The very possibility of sensorial perception provides a sharp contrast with the portrait of Sor Juana, entirely devoid of physical form. Sor Juana’s portrait is not life-like alongside that of the Marquise, but instead life-less. It is in this expression of inanimateness that the deceptive qualities of the portrait become most evident. The speaking portrait speaks of silence, “y no te admire la calma / y silencio que hay en mí” [are you not taken by the calm and silence that lie within me?] (239:7–8); of being inanimate, “quiero estar inanimada” [I wish to be inanimate] (239:24); and of lacking a soul, “y si te es faltarte aquí el alma” [and if in this you are unable to find the soul] (239:31–32)—that is, of being everything the original is not. Unwilling either to reduce herself to a trope (or object) or to comment on her vision of self, the nun-writer prefers to suggest how, in deft hands such as hers, the self-portrait can deceive. Sor Juana succeeds in forcing the reader to struggle to differentiate between the original and her portrait. Indeed, very little is said of either; Sor Juana writes herself out of the tradition of self-portraiture. If the reader of poem #102 faces confusion in distinguishing between the portrait and her original, that is, in accepting the space between the two, the conclusion of the poem accentuates their indistinct, blurred outlines. The portrait moves in and out of identity with its “subject,” and Sor Juana

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skillfully sets off this intricate yet clearly delineated interplay in what Alan Trueblood calls “a […] sfumato ending which deprives subject and portrait alike of materiality” (1988, 14). Y si te es, faltarte aquí el alma, cosa importuna, me puedes tú infundir una de tantas, como hay en ti: que como el alma te di, y tuyo mi ser se nombra, aunque mirarme te asombra en tan insensible calma, de este cuerpo eres el alma y eres cuerpo de esta sombra. [Should you find that the portrait is missing a direly needed soul, you may infuse it with one of the many you have; since I gave you my soul, and yours my self proclaims itself, even if looking at me astonishes you in such insensitive calm, you are the soul of this body and you are the body of this shadow]. (OC 239–40:31–40, emphasis added)

Illustrating the advantage of ekphrastic representation, the sfumato provides the perfect ending to a poem that refrains, in a game of illusions and deceptions, from representing the self. Not only is the distinction between subject and object collapsed, the self presents itself as mutable and indefinite: the body portrayed is infused with the soul of her beloved while her soul—the “sombra” [shadow]—also belongs to the body of the Marquise. At the conclusion of the décima, the portrait remains without body or soul and the reader remains ignorant of the original, who, like her beloved, is absent throughout. An absence of this kind is ultimately of no consequence for convention, for as Sor Juana articulates in another portrait poem: Ser mujer, ni estar ausente, no es de amarte impedimento; pues sabes tú, que las almas distancia ignoran y sexo. [To be a woman, nor to be absent, neither impede my love for you, for you know, that souls know neither of distance nor sex]. (OC 1.57:109–12, emphasis added)

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Yet it remains a troubling self-portrayal due to the secondary role assigned to the self. Décima #102 exalts the beloved and refuses to portray the self as belonging to the deceptive realm of appearances. If the self is absent—as Sor Juana insists it must be—then the image must be a deceit. Sor Juana’s only other poem to deal directly with self-portraiture presents an equally ambiguous self-(re)presentation. More than a descriptive portrait, sonnet #145 is a commentary on pictorial representation. From its first verse, the philosophical sonnet, “Este que ves, engaño colorido,” [This object which you see—a painted snare] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 153) warns, as does Plato, of the deceptive quality of the portrait. The poet cautions that, far from a presenting a mirror image, the portrait deceives the visual sense of the observer: “es cauteloso engaño del sentido” (OC 1.277:4) [is but a cunning trap to snare your sense] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 153). Incapable of faithfully representing the material world, the portrait is instead an artifice unfit to communicate truths such as the passing of time: “es un vano artificio del cuidado, / es una flor al viento delicada, / es un resguardo inútil para el hado” (OC 1.277:9–11) [this is an empty artifice of care, / a flower, fragile, set out in the wind, / a letter of safe-conduct sent to Fate] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 153). The desengaño for the reader/observer lies in recognizing this deceptive mirror. Like Sor Juana, who writes in sonnet #152 “solamente lo que toco veo” [[I] only see what my hands can feel], we must wear our eyes in our hands. Despite being intended for another (the vicereine) and closely following conventions of courtly love, the self-portrait of décima #102 addresses, in an elliptical way, both self and self-representation. Sonnet #145 follows the same trajectory even more explicitly. Replacing conventions of courtly love with philosophical concerns, sonnet #145, like the décima, appears to treat other issues but ultimately reveals Sor Juana’s creative hand at work. Rather than reveal an image of her physical self, the poet chooses to comment on the possibilities of her own self-fashioning. The intent of sonnet #145 is to restore the importance of the transcendental mental conception over fleeting materiality. Intellectual abstractions rather than what is sensibly perceived lead to the representation of the Idea. Sor Juana’s creative hand thus paradoxically works to destroy her own image. Based on movement, sonnet #145’s internal dynamic depends entirely on the poem being a written text. Words allow Sor Juana both to create an ekphrasis and the power to undo it. As the sonnet unfolds, it reveals the relationship between the three fundamental components of the poem: the poem itself, the portrait, and the person. If from the beginning, the poem espouses the deceptive quality of the portrait, by the end it reduces

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Sor Juana—its subject—to “cadáver […], polvo […], sombra […], nada” (OC 1.277:14) [corpse, dust, shadow, nothingness]. Signifiers for the destruction of the poem, the portrait, and the person, the words of the last verse also have an intertextual significance that proves revealing. The verse consists of a play on the lines of Góngora’s sonnet, “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” [While competing with your hair]. In this sonnet, conventional images of flowers and light are used to describe the beloved before reducing her to nothing: “oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,” [gold, lily, carnation, brilliant crystal], that is, “cuello, cabello, labio y frente” [neck, hair, lips and forehead] are turned into “tierra, humo, polvo, sombra, nada” [earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothingness] (1932, 228).13 Is it merely coincidental that Góngora marks the arrival of death with the disintegration of the woman’s physical presence whereas Sor Juana destroys not only her self-portrait but also herself? Stephanie Merrim argues that sonnet #145 aims to destroy both the object and the subject of the poem. The object consists of the portrait, which purports to represent the subject: Sor Juana herself (1999, 176). The self represented in sonnet #145, (similarly to the absent figure of poem #102), has no physical presence and hence no need for traditional metaphors like those of Góngora. From outside the pictorial plane, the unseen self comments on the futility of representation. Unwilling to limit herself to the narrow field of meaning implied in objectification, the absent yet looming subject in sonnet #145 suddenly takes on a surprising presence—one which only reveals destruction. In the process of the representation, Sor Juana is effaced. The desengaño proves to be double, for not only does art deceive by attempting to negate the ephemeral nature of physical reality, but also language proves not to be a means of adequate communication. Thus, the image of woman described through an ekphrasis, that is, the attempt to comprehend the simultaneity in the verbal figure of movement and repose, results in language’s destruction of that very image. The reduction of self-presence to nothingness is a disturbing thought for self-fashioning—particularly when offered as the only possibility for 13 Among the scholars who have made the comparison between the two poems are Clamurro (1986) and Legnani (2017). Valencia looks at the different interpretations traditionally granted to the poem through the lens of “loving violence,” the “acts perpetrated by admiring readers who wished to give it the readership and notoriety that only print can afford” (2018, 301). For him, “Sor Juana’s lyric has come down to us irreparably adulterated, the victim of the ravages inflicted by time and the gap between voice and letter, manuscript and print, Mexico and Madrid or Seville; impacted by the distance between a cloistered nun and her printers and readers in Spanish cities; by the difference between a Mexican woman and those, mostly men, who brokered the reception of her works in the imperial metropolis” (Valencia 2018, 301).

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female self-representation. A more positive interpretation comes into view, nevertheless, when we examine Sor Juana’s attempt to vindicate her moral virtue and intellectual ability through destruction. In other words, the expression of self-destruction of sonnet #145, like the absence of self in décima #102, may take place within her greater struggle to eradicate her public image. All too familiar with persecution, Sor Juana knew that her public actions jeopardized her reputation. As a result, she may have refrained from portraying herself as an embodied human, choosing instead an unseen self that might more effectively reflect and safeguard such qualities as an intellectual and ideational self. Her self-annihilation can in this sense be considered a form of defense in which, while negating her self and her abilities, she retains the prescribed role for her sex. Sor Juana’s astute creativity, nevertheless, expresses said effacement of self and abilities in a brilliant sonnet that serves as its own vindication. In addition, as we have seen, the poem successfully problematizes the notion of representing the transcendent Idea in any material form. The nun-writer not only disassociates her intellectual potential from a deceptive representation, but she also establishes the image inscribed in the mind as the superior one that must prevail. Significantly, the nun always presents her images of self—including self-annihilation—on her own terms. The representation that Sor Juana addresses in sonnet #145 is conceivably an emblem of her battle to destroy her public image. Rosario Ferré suggests that the ambiguity of the addressee, to whom the poet directs the first verse, “Este, que ves, engaño colorido,” [“This object which you see—a painted snare”] is significant. The verbal challenge addresses either the speaker herself or an anonymous spectator: a “tú” [you] that denotes the world (1985, 30). By integrating ambiguity into this element of the poem, Sor Juana may be alluding to two important objectives of the sonnet. The first of the two objectives, that is, her ability to formulate her own representation of self outside of materiality, reacts directly to the second: her public image. Destroying the image the world has devised for her gives Sor Juana the active role (of both the mind behind the sonnet and destroyer of the image) while concurrently accusing the anonymous spectator (the world) of having being unjust. Furthermore, Sor Juana’s commentary on her self-portrait anticipates romance #51, her last and unfinished poem, in which she struggles against being defined by others than herself. “¿Tánto pudo la distancia / añadir a mi retrato?” (OC 1.158:7–8) [Has distance really the power / to magnify my likeness?] she asks in vain. If in sonnet #145 Sor Juana’s image is reflected in a false mirror that cannot portray its subject, in romance #51 it faces and defies the image of her

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created, manipulated, and propagated by her panegyrists. As I suggested in chapter 1, critics agree that Sor Juana wrote poem #51 after having read the extensive laudatory front matter to her Segundo volumen (SV). Octavio Paz dates the poem from late 1692 or early 1693 (1982, 397). It seems to me that the poem’s language and imagery suggest that Sor Juana addresses all of her laudators—past and present—in this final and culminating offensive on her public image. Like sonnet #145, a brilliant act of self-defense and a biting critique of portraiture, romance #51’s objective in self-presentation lies in informing the reader as to what Sor Juana is not. The nun-writer is “un-picturable” and yet her admirers and detractors insist on portraying her as they fancy. Echoing the misgivings regarding fame that permeate so many of Sor Juana’s works, the lines “el que piensa beneficio / suele resultar agravio” (OC 1.160:83–84) [though he wants to be beneficial, / he ends by showing up faults [doing harm] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107) with my emendation] hint at the hidden syllogism that runs through the poem: too much fama is indeed mala fama. In an effort to diffuse the attention lavished on her, Sor Juana continuously problematizes her “yo” [I], insisting throughout the poem that she is not who her admirers, Europe’s inimitable pens or quills, say she is: No soy 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 1.159: 13–20) [I am not at all what you think. / What you’ve done is attribute to me / a different nature with your pens, / a different talent with your lips. Borne on your feather-pens’ plumes, / my flight is no longer mine; / it’s not as you like to imagine, / not what your fancy depicts. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 103)

With these verses, Sor Juana attributes the distortion of her self and image to the imagination of her panegyrists.14 In fact, like Leonor, who resented 14 Luciani argues that with these verses Sor Juana represents “identity as divided between multiple textual selves and a ‘real’ self” (2004, 149).

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those who mistook her acquired laurels for her own, the nun-writer accuses her admirers of celebrating an image of their own making: “La imagen de vuestra idea / es la que habéis alabado” (OC 161:113–14) [Your praises have been lavished / on an image of your idea] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107). In her apparently one-dimensional poem, the poet attributes the fashioning of her distorted public image both to her laudators—“[v]osotros me concebisteis / a vuestro modo” (OC 161:109–10) [The conception you hold of me / is proportionate to yourselves (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]—and to her own works. Let me first look at the role of her panegyrists. Attuned as always to potential deceptions, Sor Juana considers a number of determinants that may have transfigured her and her works in the eyes of her laudators. Each of these, perhaps not surprisingly, involve sensorial perception. First, she suggests that a magical spell cast on her works by a Mexican “herbolario” [herbalist] produced hallucinatory effects in her readers. Abandoning bewitchment for causes more scientific in nature, she then asks whether “sound” and “distance” could be the culprits: “¿Qué proporción de distancia, / el sonido modulando / de mis hechos […] hizo / cónsono lo destemplado?” (OC 160:57–60) [What intervals caused by distance / could modulate the sound / of my works, and harmonize / something so wholly discordant? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 105)]. Finally, she ponders on the possibility that her works have been transformed by “perspective,” a term that when used figuratively denotes a deceptive or false representation. According to the Diccionario de Autoridades, “Metaphoricamente [perspectiva] se toma por la apariencia o representación engañosa y falaz de las cosas” [Metaphorically, perspective is gauged from appearances or the false and deceitful appearance of things] (1963, 236): ¿Qué siniestras perspectivas dieron aparente ornato al cuerpo compuesto sólo de unos mal distintos trazos? (OC 160:61–64) [What left-handed perspective / gave an apparent decorum / to a body consisting solely / of lines drawn helter-skelter? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 105)

Two verses in particular effectively illustrate Sor Juana’s denunciation of her public image: “Celebrad ese, de vuestra / propia aprehensión, simulacro” (OC 161:117–18) [Celebrate that likeness [simulacrum] / of what you have

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apprehended (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 109)].15 In the word “simulacro” the poet’s idea of the relationship between image and imagination are joined. The noun signif ies both the image of a venerated or venerable thing and, according to the Diccionario de Autoridades, “aquella especie que forma la phantasía de lo que en los sueños se le representa” (1963, 118) [that specimen that the imagination portrays once culled from dreams]. In this one word then, Sor Juana demonstrates how the venerated “idol” (“el ídolo que formaron,” [the idol they’d created] says Leonor) is reduced to a figment of the imagination or a dreamlike apparition. By relegating her image to the realm of chimeras, Sor Juana affirms her often-stated belief that truth easily gives way to fiction. In romance #51, she proposes that the deceptive senses and the stated traditions of courtly elegies have led her panegyrists astray: “¿Así puede a la verdad / arrastrar lo cortesano?” (OC 159:31–32) [Can courtesy play so loose / with simple truthfulness? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 105)]. Another potential reason for their misguided perception is their European perspective. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel argues that “the representation of Europe as a distant place […] distorts the original image of the colonial subject and produces instead a ‘retrato’ (‘portrait’) in which the lyric speaker is unable to recognize herself” (2007, 92). Ironically, Sor Juana renders her critique of courtly poetry into a veritable tribute to her elegists. In a clever inversion of their roles, the writer becomes the panegyrist, which, in turn, allows Sor Juana to remove the onus from herself by applauding her admirers’ imagination. Having established that her laudators extol an image of their own design, the poet thus concludes that “siendo vuestra es bien digna / de vuestros mismos aplausos” (OC 161:115–16) [being yours, it surely deserves / the tribute of your applause (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]. As she diverts attention away from herself, she encourages her panegyrists to celebrate the simulacrum of their making “para que en vosotros mismos / se vuelva a quedar el lauro” (OC 161:119–20) [and let the laurel wreath / be restored to your own brows (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 109)]. Moreover, while applauding the talent of the “inimitables plumas” [matchless pens], Sor Juana seizes the opportunity to disparage her own abilities. In short, their illustrious praise shames her by illustrating the inadequacies of her own talent.

15 I differ in this case from Trueblood’s otherwise excellent translation, as “likeness” fails to suggest the deceptive qualities of the simulacrum.

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Before disparaging her works in poem #51, however, the nun-writer contests what she views as the falsities of her portrait (“mi retrato”).16 To statements that abound in tributes to her such as “la San Agustín de las mujeres” [the Saint Augustine of women], she retorts that she is but “una ignorante mujer” [an ignorant woman] with little schooling [“una educación inculta”] (OC 159:33;41). Similarly, she describes her birth—according to her contemporaries, a miraculous event in a paradisiacal place—as “un casi rústico aborto” [a practically rustic creature] in the midst of “unos estériles campos” (OC 159:37–38) [barren fields (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 105)]. As might be expected, Sor Juana treats her works even more harshly. She deprecates her poetry by referring to it as “humildes rasgos,” “ocios descuidos” (OC 159:26), and “borrones” (OC 159:25; 161:95) [unpretentious drafts, idle pastimes and scrawls]. The belittling of her work and the dismissal of the applause of her contemporaries as “mal merecido” [undeserved] (OC 159:30) must be attributed to her customary affected modesty. Sor Juana’s twentieth-century editor, Méndez Plancarte, agrees with the editor of the Fama’s commentary published at the end of the unfinished poem: “Este Romance […] muestra en la Poetisa lo humilde de su genial desconfianza” [This romance […] shows the humility of the Poetess’s sincere distrust] (Fama 126). In romance #51, nonetheless, Sor Juana’s self-vilification reaches new heights as she not only disparages her work, she destroys it. Borrowing from sonnet #145 the language of disintegration with which she decimated the portrait, Sor Juana sets out to destroy her works and her self in an attempt to eradicate her public image once and for all. As I outlined earlier, by the end of the sonnet, the portrait, and the self, its object, have been reduced to “cadáver,” “polvo,” “sombra,” “nada” [corpse, dust, shadow, nothingness] (OC 277:14). For Catherine Boyle, the “‘devouring’ of her life by her early hagiographers left a ‘simulacro’ of her being (OC, I 161), a danger against which Sor Juana had warned often in her poetry” (2016, 75). The devouring metaphor is Glantz’s in response to Paz’s devouring of Sor Juana with his biography, while also referring to the dangers of erasing the nun (Glantz 1995b, 137). Notably, each of these signifiers of destruction, save “nada,” are used in romance #51 to describe Sor Juana’s literary endeavors. Not coincidentally, her “cadaverous” works are literally buried and entombed by the works of her panegyrists: 16 Sor Juana repeatedly introduces the language of painting when she reflects on the world of images. In addition to the example cited here, in sonnet #152 she speaks of those who see the world “pintado a su deseo” [painted/colored according to their liking, i.e., as they wish it to be] (OC 1.280–81:11).

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Honoríficos sepulcros de cadáveres helados, a mis conceptos sin alma son vuestros encomios altos. (OC 161:97–100) [Tombs of stately grandeur / for stone-cold corpses— / such are your high-sounding praises / to my spiritless conceits. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]

Similarly, she opposes her “conceptos sin alma” [soulless concepts] of “polvo inanimado” [inanimate dust] to the encomiums, which, in comparison, constitute a “regal Pantheon” fashioned out of “marble and jade” (OC 161:99–105). Reduced to cadavers and inanimate dust, Sor Juana’s works can admit no light. They are “cuerpos opacos” [opaque bodies] that when touched by her laudators’ praise, “sólo de ocasionar sombras / les sirve lo iluminado” (160:91–92) [Any light shining upon them / will merely give rise to shadows (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]. Indeed, the nun underlines this point in the next lines of the poem: Bien así, a la luz de vuestros panegíricos gallardos, de mis obscuros borrones quedan los disformes rasgos. (161:93–96) [Just so, under the glare / of your courtly panegyrics, / the smudges and heavy strokes / of my pen all stand exposed. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]

Sor Juana’s poem #51 decimates and buries her “obscuros borrones” [unintelligible scrawls/drafts] which have not only been distorted by the applause granted them, but have also tainted her reputation and brought her shame. Her writing thus literally attempts to erase itself. For, in addition to being a hyperbolically modest signifier for her works, “borrón” (derived from “borrar,” to erase) is also the drop of ink that splatters and eclipses the written words on a page. Figuratively, the staining ink tarnishes and sullies the nun’s reputation, rendering fama mala fama. Sor Juana’s writings have betrayed her attempt to remain “un-picturable,” or free from deceptive appearances. Instead, they have impelled her panegyrists’ vision of her. Going one step further than sonnet #145, décima #102, and romance #37, in which she effaces her self, in her f inal poem, Sor Juana chooses

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to destroy and bury her works to annihilate her public image. While she never uses the noun “nada” [nothing] (the last word in sonnet #145), the poet strives to reduce her image, her writing, and her self to nothingness. Stephanie Merrim proposes that unlike sonnet #145, romance #51 fails in its attempt to destroy the poem’s object and its subject. “[H]owever forceful or extensive the arguments [Sor Juana] marshals to give the lie to praise, however strong the invective she exercises on herself and her writings, they would not appear to be sufficient or sufficiently copious for the beleaguered poet to reduce either the words—be they her own or others—or the self to the necessary ‘nothing’” (1999, 176). And she may well have succeeded were it not for a single sign that alludes to an ideational self beyond the representation and hence free from destruction. Only in knowing myself, writes the nun, have I abetted pride and vanity in the face of applause. Had she not, like Phaeton and Narcissus she surely would have fallen prey to sin, a no tener en mí misma remedio tan a la mano, como conocerme, siendo lo que los pies para el pavo. (OC 160:73–76) [had I not possessed within me / a remedy unfailing; / knowing myself was my cure, / as his ugly feet are the peacock’s (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 107)]

In other words, while the ugliness of the peacock’s feet, in stark contrast to his brilliant plumage, curtails his vanity, the nun’s knowledge of self keeps her “grounded” and free of sinful pride. Moreover, her self-knowledge, which Stephanie Merrim rightly calls “saving” (1999, 176), also frees her from being engulfed and consumed by her public image. Within a poem of destruction then, Sor Juana hints at a self—the untenable person beyond representation. Yet that self remains shrouded in mystery as the nun hides behind the allegorical peacock who is humbled by his ugly feet despite his beautiful plumage. Sor Juana recedes from “la imagen de vuestra idea” [an image of your idea] electing not to offer another potential self-representation in this romance. Instead, she only says that she cannot be who her admirers want her to be and suggests that her self-knowledge has led to her desengaño: her works are but “borrones,” representations that have deceived the senses and have inspired the transformation of her self into a simulacrum.

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Conclusions Constantly manipulating what is real, and what is only an image or a copy of the real, Sor Juana allows for a self-fashioning that can equally reside in that place between the original and the copy, never allowing the reader/ observer to define the subject. As such, the Count de Clavijo’s proposition with which I opened the chapter cannot be more than a rhetorical flourish. How indeed can it be possible to see “en sus escritos toda / la realidad de su imagen” [the entire reality of her image in her writing] when the nun-writer refuses to offer a single defining image or conception of herself? Unwilling to inform the reader as to who she is, she attempts only to give hints of her unseen self, and as a result, not to be limited to confining frameworks. Sor Juana’s self-presentations offer creative variations on conventional roles for women in an attempt to oppose the immutable representation of self assigned to her by others. That is, she employs, for her own intentions, those conventional elements that allow her the voice of authority (Jones 1986, 55). A voice that is non-threatening yet assertive enough to introduce the creative act as intellectual abstraction, and the denial of a rigid definition of self, into her self-fashioning. As the audacious Christ-like martyr, the prudent yet proud American-born elegist, or the bodiless model of a portrait, the nun destabilizes and problematizes her “yo” [“I”] and thus both shields her response to her public image and deters her critics. By diffracting herself into a myriad of selves—including the absent and effaced self—Sor Juana resists her admirers’ attempt to circumscribe her into one preeminent image. Staring down the image of the iconic Tenth Muse, an image that she reluctantly admits to have helped create, the nun refuses to be reduced to a trope. And yet it would be misleading to conclude that Sor Juana’s self-fashioning only works against the configuration of her person in the Fama as icon, trope, muse, and exemplar. As I have shown in the examples culled from her writings on self and fame, by including her complex self-representations within conventional modes of expression, the nun also enabled the catapulting of her image into an icon. At once adhering to and revising traditions such as the imitatio Christi (a requisite part of the vida), the encomium, the American treasure, and the literary self-portrait, Sor Juana grants her panegyrists the opportunity to ignore her deviations from the norm and to concentrate on those aspects of her writing readily idealized and ideologized. Sor Juana’s unmatched knowledge of the conventions of her time surely granted her the ability to see how and why her image was manipulated by others. No doubt among these conventions were the objectifying rhetoric of commerce and empire building that she employs in romance #37. I think

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Tamara Harvey is right in arguing that “positive representations of the commodification of the New World prove useful in legitimizing the role of each [Sor Juana and Anne Bradstreet] as a writer for a European audience” (Harvey 2006, 16). As Harvey writes, “[i]t is useful to see these women as engaging and even participating in the cultural dynamics that were commodifying them as published women writers and not as merely limited by those dynamics” (2006, 25).17 When expressed by Sor Juana, being a natural result of a mineral-rich land works to authorize her poetic voice vis-à-vis her Portuguese interlocutor, without making her a rarity nor losing sight of her place as a royal subject. Ultimately, there could be no dialogue between the nun-writer’s works and her posthumous elegies. When Sor Juana stops writing (or publishing what she writes) in 1693, she relinquished any control she may have had in the design of her public image. The nun’s silence and subsequent death, together with the disappearance of her commentators, seem to mark the fulfillment of her textual project of self-effacement—at least between the years of 1693 and 1699. The Fama of 1700, which includes within its pages her last offensive on her public image, pays no heed to the desperation of her controversial and conflictive “yo.” Rather, following her death, Sor Juana’s image as Mexico’s Tenth Muse and as a religious model becomes crystallized: the image of the person has all but evanesced. Her person has given way to her persona; her myth has eclipsed her life. In her epistolary romance #49, written in response to another gentleman from Peru recently arrived in New Spain and published in the SV, Sor Juana jocularly alludes to the chasm between her vision of self and her identity as a trope, in this case by reflecting on the everlasting phoenix: ¿Qué fuera, que fuera yo y no lo supiera antes? ¿Pues quién duda, que es el Fénix el que menos de sí sabe? (OC 1.145:101–4) [Could I-could I myself be she, / and not have known it sooner? / But who could doubt the Phoenix has / the very least self-knowledge? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 175) 17 Harvey studies the loa, a brief one-act drama that precedes Sor Juana’s The Divine Narcissus, an auto sacramental or play honoring the holy Eucharist, in which she presents her literary production as an intellectual American commodity. The play self-consciously packages Aztec/ American culture for Spanish consumption by objectifying America, who is being figuratively sent to Spain through the loa (Harvey 2006, 21). Merrim has studied the loa in relation to a properly Mexican archive to flush out Sor Juana’s mediation between Old and New Spain (2009).

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By the time the Fama is published, there remains little doubt that the nun has become a trope of herself: the volume’s very title publicizes and crowns her as Mexico’s phoenix. Returning once again to the Count de Clavijo’s lines from the Fama, what defines Sor Juana for her posthumous elegists is not what she says, or even what she does, but rather her literary reputation, the self-propagating myth of the “venerated idol,” commercialized and traded among themselves. Perhaps there is yet another reason why Sor Juana’s projection of self and conflictive responses to her fame are nowhere to be found in the panegyrics of the Fama. Unlike the layered complexities of her person, which rendered the very existence of a posthumous tribute problematic, the nun’s myth suited her laudators’ purposes. In her romance dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, the nun-writer insists that she, unlike other elegists, is “desinteresada” [disinterested]—she has no ulterior motive for extolling the noblewoman. Clearly, Sor Juana’s panegyrists had reasons for celebrating her that had more to do with them than with her. In the chapters dedicated to the contributors to the Fama, I have argued that they are eager to see their own reputations flourish with the publication of their elegies. As such, they could little afford to have Sor Juana be anything other than an ideal subject and inspiring muse. Seen in this light, words from the nun’s romance #50 for the Count de la Granja, another epistolary poem published in the Fama, resonate sharply as they appear alongside her eulogies: […] cuando en mí empleáis vuestro ingenio peregrino, es manifestar el vuestro mas que celebrar el mío. […] y así, yo no os lo agradezco, pues sólo quedo, al oíros, deudora de lo enseñado, pero no de lo aplaudido. (OC 1.157:161–72) [When you use your peregrine ingenio on me, it serves more to show yours off than to celebrate my own. And thus, I am not grateful, since upon hearing you I remain in your debt not thanks to your praise, but rather for what you have taught me.]

Sor Juana seems cognizant of the fact that her elegists trade in her works, commercializing them—and her—for the marketplace where they package

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and parade their “peregrine ingenio.” This commerce in literary wares is all the more problematic when seen in the light of the public-private divide of print and manuscript works. The Respuesta is a case in point. While she enjoyed the protection of her patrons, Sor Juana could choose which texts to print and which were better off remaining in manuscript form. So doing proved her hand in exercising some control over the fate of her work as well as negotiating her celebrity status. The Respuesta wasn’t intended for publication, but Sor Juana must have known that it ran the risk of being published like the rest of her works once they gained value in the marketplace. As it happened, it was printed posthumously. By publishing the now famous response in the Fama, Castorena preserved the text that has fueled our curiosity and imagination about Sor Juana for centuries. He also traded in the nun’s manuscript correspondence without her permission and exemplified how in print books “the ‘private’ became resituated within the public world” (Wall 1993, 339). And if her panegyrists dealt in her public image (the same that she worked to destroy) and published her works whenever possible, what of the nun’s own machinations when dealing in poetry? I have already examined how Sor Juana and the Marquise de la Laguna were strategic about what and when to publish, proving Harvey’s point that “these poets were not simply the pawns of patriarchy or of New World financial and cultural economies; they were also participants in these economies” (Harvey 2006, 24). Together, they also exchanged, plotted, promoted and negotiated in literary spaces beyond the male literary marketplace. The recently published correspondence of the Marquise de la Laguna (Calvo and Colombi 2015) allows us to be privy to some of these negotiations that potentially opened up a place for “women writers outside a system of male exchange” (Jed 1994, 208). Moreover, Sor Juana’s epistolary exchange with the Portuguese nuns and noblewomen that produced the text known as the Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer [­Enigmas Offered to the House of Pleasure], suggests the possibility of a system of exchange, in a distinct transatlantic discursive community, that surely could also fuel a woman writer’s renown entirely removed from the literary marketplace of printed books. Neil Kenny’s suggestion that humanists found new ways of pursuing secular posthumous renown, including constructing “what one might call, after Brian Stock, ‘textual communities’—based on rituals of exchange of letters and books as well as of favors—which served to promote that renown, including transgenerationally” (2015, n.p.), fits the Casa del Placer well. The Casa del Placer was a female literary academy founded by a group of aristocratic Portuguese nuns from Lisbon. Little is known about the

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academy beyond the text in Spanish and Portuguese entitled “Engimas ofrecidos a la discreta inteligencia / de la soberana asamblea de la Casa del Placer / por su más rendida y aficionada / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa” [Enigmas Offered to the Discrete Intelligence / of the Sovereign Assembly of the House of Pleasure / by their Most Humble Follower / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Tenth Muse].18 The Mexican nun’s invitation to participate with verses of her own in this Portuguese tribute to her, that doubles as a book of riddles, appears to come from her association with the Marquise de la Laguna and María Luisa Manrique’s Portuguese relative: the Duchess de Aveyro (the object of her praise in romance #37). The decision to invite Sor Juana into the society may have been prompted by her influential connections, by the fact that she was already famous in the Iberian Peninsula, or both.19 Whatever the case, insofar as the Enigmas is a tribute, like all others of it sort, it worked to promote the Mexican nun’s fame, albeit outside of the marketplace. If the nuns also trade in and objectify Sor Juana, their motives are very different from that of her male elegists when we consider that it is both the solidarity among the women, as well as their penchant for writing verse that moved them to create “a virtual and utopian all-female writing community that challenged the Church’s disapproval of female intellectual activity via the establishment of a learned community of scholarly women” (Kirk 2007, 130). When reading Sor Simona de Castillo’s words from the Enigmas, “Y pues a entrambos mundos, / si no a España dos / ilustras […]” [You [Sor Juana] enlighten not the two Spains, but rather both worlds] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994b, 93), it may be more productive not to think of a mimicking of the elegists of the IC as Alatorre does (1994, 83), but rather following Morales who when writing of romance #37, suggests a multidirectional flow across the Atlantic that implied not a hierarchical relationship between European noblewomen and a criolla nun, but a relationship of peers within a transatlantic community. “La ecuación del viejo y el nuevo mundo representa una restitución de la igualdad que se logra mediante la conexión de ambas mujeres [Sor Juana and the Duchess de Aveyro] en la comunidad imaginada de la virtud y la razón. Esto convierte al Atlántico en un espacio plural que enmarca y moviliza ‘multidireccionalmente’ las proezas virtuosas de las protagonistas 18 The two known copies of the text were located by Enrique Martínez López in Lisbon in the 1960s. As far as I know, there is no evidence that the manuscript ever traveled beyond Portugal. See Martínez López (2005) and Kirk (2007, 216 n. 32). 19 See Munguía Ochoa (2020) for a discussion of the conjectures regarding the Casa del Placer and what prompted Sor Juana’s collaboration in the “Engimas.” It is worth noting that the Enigmas do not include any texts penned by the Duchess de Aveyro, nor any direct references to her.

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históricas femeninas de sus costas” [The equation of new and old worlds represents a restitution of the equality that is struck by the connection between the two women within an imagined community of virtue and reason. This transforms the Atlantic into a plural space that frames and ‘multidirectionally’ mobilizes the virtuous achievements of the historical female protagonists on both shores] (Morales 2010, 29). Kirk points out that the power of the cloistered Portuguese noblewomen allowed them to circumvent the usual channels of transatlantic communication controlled by men (2007, 144). “The Casa del Placer was also a secret society whose text was not to be disseminated. Its content was meant only for the eyes of its members” (Kirk 2007, 143). The female space of a virtual academy—all communication had to take place via letters—permitted a separate space for women; freed from the male gaze and control, they acted in concert.20 The possibilities offered by the virtual academy admitted the existence of an “autonomous female textual space,” a utopian, ideal community different from the one they lived in and ordered by the Church (Kirk 2007, 144). It also allows us to think of Sor Juana as an author albeit in the private realm. The “author is categorized as a person writing for material gain, whether cash or influence with more powerful readers,” writes Margaret Ezell in the context of seventeenth-century England (1999, 11). The noblewomen of the Casa del Placer surely were more powerful readers given their social status. Whether their influence spanned beyond the secret society is unclear, but then again, maybe the point was to steer clear of the literary marketplace entirely. And yet, despite being freed from the restrictions that generally ordered their lives within the convent, the nuns of the Casa del Placer decided in their manuscript tribute to Sor Juana to mimic what a book published and traded in the male marketplace would look like, with an ample paratext of prefatory materials, including a title page, a dedication in the form of a romance and a prologue-sonnet, both penned by Sor Juana, a romance by the Marquise de la Laguna, Condesa de Paredes, and eight texts in prose and verse in Spanish and Portuguese by the nuns of the Casa del Placer. The core of the book ostensibly are the Enigmas, twenty redondillas (quatrains) by Sor Juana that offer riddles on the nature of love.21 Yet overlooking the 20 When early modern women deploy a catalogue of learned women as proof of sex and intellect not being at odds, such as Sor Juana does in her Respuesta, they are also creating “a virtual community for themselves where real communities of female intellectuals may not exist or at least are not commonly recognized” (Harvey 2006, 13). 21 Glenna Luschei first translated the twenty riddles to English (Juana Inés de la Cruz and Luschei 2006) and a bilingual English-Spanish edition was published in 2015 (Juana Inés de la

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paratext means eliding the use of parody entirely. If the title page warns us “Lisboa. En la Of icina del más Reverente Respeto, Impressor de la Magestuosa Veneración: a costa de un Lícito Entretenimiento” [Lisbon. In the Office of the Most Reverent Respect, Printer of the Majestic Veneration: at the behest of a Licit Entertaiment] (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994b, 71), how are we to read the prefatory materials at face value? For Kirk, parody—in this case of both the (all-male) literary academy and of the print book—is a means of expressing “communal subversions of patriarchal control” (2007, 142). “In their imitative gesture of a published book, the nuns of the Casa del Placer play with the paradox of their position as women who must write with the patriarchy’s tools. It can be viewed in terms of a ludic maneuver that seeks to highlight the absurdity of the exclusion of women writers from the arena of writing and publishing” (Kirk 2007, 146). And while not a print book, it does follow Wall’s suggestion that “women writers redef ined the rhetorical codes and literary forms used to present authorship in print, and in doing so, women proved that they could dance in the textual and cultural nets that threatened to confine them” (1993, 340). Given their place of enunciation and the nature of the text they produced, the nuns of the Casa del Placer “document literary networks, reveal systems of patronage, provide evidence of intellectual exchanges, and substantiate the creation of literary communities” (Thomas 2016, 6–7), yet seemingly for their own amusement rather than to justify a print commodity to be traded in the literary marketplace. Their reciprocal dialogue on benefaction encourages us to think more carefully about how patronage worked in the private realm in which manuscript texts were shared and nuns did not have to temper their words for their male religious superiors. In her sonnet-prologue to her Enigmas, Sor Juana makes no bones of her literary dependence; her book: “a tanto Sol eleva el pensamiento, / de reverente afecto apadrinado, / que, a soberanas aras destinado, / passa a ser sacrificio el rendimiento” [[This book] dispatches its thoughts to the suns, patrons of [my] reverential affection] (77, vv. 5–8). The response from the Portuguese noblewomen corroborates her idea, furthering the notion of an exchange among them. Sor Francisca Xavier writes: Los ocultos misterios de tu pluma reservaste a divinas atenciones, Cruz 2015).

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por que en tu auxilio logre felizmente tan noble ofrenda, protección tan noble [You save the hidden mysteries of your pen for divine deliberations, so that you may achieve noble protection in return for your noble offering [the Enigmas]]. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994b, 88–89)

Since the noblewomen are referred to throughout the paratext as divinities (“deidedas superiores”), and the “suns” (to which Sor Juana has already referred), these “divine” receptors of the “mystery of her pen,” i.e., the Enigmas, refer to the Portuguese nuns and noblewomen, who, in response for such a noble offering (“tan noble ofrenda”), grant her “noble protection” (“protección tan noble”). When the patronage is supplied by a women-only secret society in the “licit entertainment” of deciphering riddles about love, clearly the rules are other, and their patronage enables the existence of this literary exchange and community for and among themselves without responding to either the literary marketplace nor the Church. Perhaps Sor Juana’s participation in the Casa del Placer together with the resulting text, which was never meant for other eyes beyond the members of the secret society, is her most apt response to her public image. Her dealings in words that she trades with the Marquise de la Laguna and the other Portuguese and Spanish nuns takes place in an alternative form of commerce, in which she steps away from the dynamics of dialoguing with her admirers, detractors and the static images of self that circulated in the literary marketplace. The eighteenth-century manuscripts located by Martínez López date the “Engimas” in 1695 (2005, 141); while it is true that the manuscript likely took a long while to reach all of the nuns in Spain and Portugal who participated, it does raise the possibility that this alternative transatlantic engagement took place after Sor Juana’s decision (be it out of her own volition or her capitulation to others) to no longer publish her works in 1693. It also places her in a context, albeit an epistolary one, in which she is not the exceptional rare bird, but rather part of an intellectual community. “Instead of using the example of Sor Juana’s fame to obfuscate other women’s contributions to scholarship and literature, […] we [can] use her as a point of departure for exploring the cultural contributions of other women writers of the period, especially those writing from within the convent walls” (Kirk 2007, 129).22 As contemporary critics distance themselves from the 22 Drawing on work by Arenal and Schlau, Kirk rightly attests to the fact that many women, nuns especially, were intellectually active within their communities and examines evidence of

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traditional reading of Sor Juana’s exceptionality, popular in her own time and throughout the twentieth century, a rich body of scholarship about other women writers, principally within convents, has emerged. Learning about communities, such as that of the Portuguese academy, both broadens our knowledge of women writers of the time and illuminates more about Sor Juana’s promotion and participation in her literary worlds.

Appendix Table 5.  Contributors and Texts Cited in the Chapter Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Count de Clavijo

romance

romance

FAMA

Marcos Baltasar de Lanuza Mendoza y Arellano (1650–?) was named the 1st Count de Clavijo in 1690 by Charles II; gentleman of the circle of the King and of the Council of the Royal treasury

Juan de Castorena y Ursúa

“Prólogo al que leyere” Prologue

prose

FAMA

Sonnet

FAMA

identified as being “[a]ficionadísima al Ingenio de la Poetisa,” [a fan of the ingenio of the poetess]

funeral dirge

FAMA

a Spanish nun in the convent of the Concepción de Manzanares

sonnet

FAMA

Gentleman of the Order of Santiago

drama

FAMA

performed in Mexico in 1683 (OC 4); (Juana Inés de la Cruz 2005)

FAMA

(OC 4) (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a)

An anonymous noblewoman Sor Marcelina de San Martín

epicedio

Don Tomás de sonnet Pomar Sor Juana

Los empeños de una casa

Sor Juana

La respuesta / The Answer prose

intellectual solidarity such as the “Engimas” (2007, 128–29). Tamara Harvey has also explored the advantages of putting seventeenth-century women writers in discussion with one another in their given contexts over and above treating them as exceptions (Harvey 2007). See also Arenal and Schlau (2009) and Merrim (1999).

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Sor Juana

Carta al P. Núñez

prose

Sor Juana

romance #37 “Elogio de Doña María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess de Aveyro”

romance

IC

dedicated to the Duchess de Aveyro, who lived in Madrid and was married to the Duke de Arcos (several of his attendants also contribute to the volume)

Sor Juana

romance #38 “A don Josef de Vega y Vique, que elogió a la poetisa”

romance

IC

to don José de Vega y Vique who praised the poet (OC 1)

Sor Juana

romance #48 “Respuesta romance a un caballero peruano que le envió unos barros diciéndole que se volviese hombre”

SV

in response to a gentleman from Peru who sends her clay vessels in an effort to help her become a man (OC 1) (Eng: SJ 1997)

Sor Juana

romance #49 “Respuesta romance de la poetisa [a un caballero recién venido a la Nueva España]”

SV

response to a gentleman recently arrived in New Spain (OC 1) (Eng  1994)

Un Caballero del Perú (el Conde de la Granja)

romance #49bis “Romance de un caballero peruano, en que suplica la dignación de su respuesta”

romance

FAMA

romance by a Peruvian gentleman, who presses her for a reply (OC 1)

Sor Juana

romance #50 “Respuesta de la poetisa en la que descubre el nombre del peruano”

romance

FAMA

response to the Count de la Granja, who she reveals as the gentleman from Peru (OC 1)

Sor Juana

romance #51 “Romance en reconocimiento a las inimitables plumas de la Europa, que hicieron mayores sus obras con sus elogios; que no se halló acabado”

romance

FAMA

to the inimitable pens of Europe who improved on her work with their praise; found unfinished (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Sor Juana

décima #102, “Décimas que acompañaron un retrato enviado a una Persona,” [Décimas that accompanied a portrait sent to a person]

décima

SV

poem intended to accompany a pictorial self-portrait, which, as indicated by its appended title, is a gift for the Vicereine, the Marquise de la Laguna. (OC 1)

also known as the Autodefensa espiritual (1681?); with this letter she dismisses her confessor (Spa. and Eng.: (Madres 1999)

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Contributor

Title

Form

Volume

More

Sor Juana

décima #103 “Esmera su respetuoso amor, hablando con el retrato”

décima

IC

in speaking with the portrait, she demonstrates her respectful love (OC 1)

Sor Juana

sonnet #145 “Este que ves, engaño colorido”

sonnet

IC

[This object which you see—a painted snare] (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a)

Sor Juana

sonnet #146 “En perseguirme mundo, ¿qué interesas?”

sonnet

IC

[World, in hounding me, what do you gain?] (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Sor Juana

sonnet #150 “¿Tan grande, ¡ay Hado!, mi delito ha sido[?]”

sonnet

IC

[Fate, was my crime of such enormity[?]] (OC 1; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Sor Juana

sonnet #152 “Verde embeleso de la vida humana”

sonnet

[Green allurement of our human life]; appears on the Miranda portrait of 1713 (OC 1); (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988)

Sor Juana

“Engimas ofrecidos a la discreta inteligencia / de la soberana asamblea de la Casa del Placer / por su más rendida y aficionada / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa”

twenty riddles and two dedicatory poems (a romance and a sonnet), plus prefatory material in verse and prose by Portuguese and Spanish noblewomen, most of whom were nuns

[Enigmas Offered to the Discrete Intelligence / of the Sovereign Assembly of the House of Pleasure / by their Most Humble Follower / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Tenth Muse]; eighteenthcentury manuscripts were found in Lisbon in the 1960s. (Spanish: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994b); bilingual Spa. and Eng. edition: Juana Inés de la Cruz 2015).

Sor Juana

endechas #74 “Prosigue en respeto amoroso dando norabuenas de cumplir años la señora virreina”

endechas stanzas of four verses with lines of eleven syllables

IC

on the occasion of the vicereine’s birthday (OC 1)

Sor Juana

ovillejo #214 “Pinta en jocoso numen, igual con el tan célebre de Jacinto Polo, una belleza”

a stanza that consists of ten verses grouped in two sections (of six and four verses)

IC

[She paints a jocular portrait of a beauty, such as that of the famous Jacinto Polo] (OC 1)

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Contributor

Title

Form

Sor Juana

romance #19 “Lo atrevido romance de un pincel”

Sor Juana

drama the loa, a brief one-act drama that precedes El divino Narciso [The Divine Narcissus]

Volume

More

IC

another portrait poem that begins “the daring of a paintbrush” (OC 1) an auto sacramental or play honoring the holy Eucharist (OC 3)

Sources: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995c; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995d; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988; Juana Inés de la Cruz 1951, Alatorre 1994; Madres del verbo 1999

Works Cited Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 1994. “Introduction.” In The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1–37. New York: The Feminist Press. Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau. 2009. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Revised edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ballón Aguirre, Enrique. 1997. “Los corresponsales peruanos de Sor Juana.” Lexis 21(2): 273–325. Beaujour, Michel. 1991. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Translated by Yara Milos. New York: New York University Press. Boyle, Catherine. 2016. “Sor Juana Inés De la Cruz: The Tenth Muse and the Difficult Freedom to Be.” In A History of Mexican Literature. Edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra and Anna Nogar, 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvo, Hortensia and Beatriz Colombi, eds. 2015. Cartas de Lysi. La mecenas de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en correspondencia inédita. Preliminary Study, Edition and Notes by Hortensia Calvo and Beatriz Colombi. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Checa, Jorge. 1993. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La mirada y el discurso.” In Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando: Homenaje a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Sara Poot Herrera, 127–36. México: El Colegio de México. Clamurro, William H. 1986. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Reads Her Portrait.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 20(1): 27–45. Diccionario de Autoridades. 1963. Real Academia Española. Ed. Facsim. Biblioteca románica hispánica. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. De la Maza, Francisco. 1980. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892. México: UNAM. Ezell, Margaret. J. M. 1999. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Ferré, Rosario. 1985. “El misterio de los retratos de Sor Juana.” Escritura 10 (19–20): 13–32. Fleishman, Avrom. 1983. Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. “Las Meninas.” In The Order of Things, 3–16. New York: Vintage Books. Glantz, Margo. 1995b. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ¿hagiografía o autobiografía? Mexico: Grijalbo/ UNAM. Góngora y Argote, Luis de. 1932. Obras Completas. Edited by Juan Millé y Giménez and Isabel Millé y Giménez. Madrid: Aguilar. Gracián y Morales, Baltasar. 1996. Agudeza y arte de ingenio. Nuestros clásicos. México: UNAM. (1648). Greer, Germaine. 1979. The Obstacle Race. London: Secker & Warburg. Harvey, Tamara. 2006. “‘My Goods Are True’: Tenth Muses in the New World Market.” In Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Edited by Mary Carruth, 13–26. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Harvey, Tamara. 2007. “Seventeenth-Century Pansapphism: Comparing ‘Exceptional Women’ of the Americas and Europe.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 112–18. New York: The Modern Language Association. Jacobs, Fredrika H. 1994. “Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola.” Renaissance Quarterly 47(1): 74–101. DOI 10.2307/2863112. Johnson, Julie Greer. 1983. Women in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Literary Images. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind. 1986. “Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric.” In The Poetics of Gender. Edited by Nancy K. Miller, 74–93. New York: Columbia University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. (vol. 4 edited by Alberto G. Salceda). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1986. Autodefensa espiritual. Monterrey: Impresora Monterrey. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1988. A Sor Juana Anthology. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994a. The Answer/La Respuesta. Edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1994b. Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del Placer. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700).

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Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995c. Inundación castálida. Edited by Sergio Fernández. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1689). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995d. Segundo volumen de sus obras. Edited by Margo Glantz. Ed. Facsim. México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. (1692). Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1997. Poems, Protest and a Dream: Selected Writing. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Penguin Books. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1999. “Carta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a su confesor: autodefensa espiritual.” In Madres del verbo / Mothers of the Word: Early Spanish American Women Writers: A Bilingual Anthology. Edited by Nina M. Scott, 61–70. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 2005. Pawns of a House. Los empeños de una casa. Translated by Michael McGaha. Edited by Susana Hernández Araico. Arizona: Bilingual Review Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 2015. Enigmas. Translated by Stalina Emmanuelle Villareal. Brooklyn, NY: Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor and Glenna Luschei. 2006. “The Enigmas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Translated by Glenna Luschei. Prairie Schooner 80(4): 18–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40638582. Kaminsky, Amy Katz. 1990. “Nearly New Clarions: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Pays Homage to a Swedish Poet.” In In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Edited by Noël Valis and Carol Maier, 31–53. Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press. Kenny, Neil. 2015. Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirk, Stephanie L. 2007. Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lafaye, Jacques. 1974. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531–1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lavrin, Asunción. 1991. “Unlike Sor Juana? The Model Nun in the Religious Literature of Colonial Mexico.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Stephanie Merrim, 61–85. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Legnani, Nicole D. 2017. “Finger-Pointing (Painting) in Neuter: The Deixis of Portraiture in the Third-Person Lyric of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94(9): 951–70. DOI 10.3828/bhs.2017.58. Luciani, Frederick. 2004. Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

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Ludmer, Josefina. 1985. “Tretas del débil.” La sartén por el mango: Encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas. Edited by Patricia Elena González and Eliana Ortega, 47–54. San Juan: Ediciones Huracán. Madres del verbo / Mothers of the Word: Early Spanish American Women Writers: A Bilingual Anthology. 1999. Edited by Nina M. Scott. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Martínez López, Enrique. 2005. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en Portugal: un desconocido homenaje y versos inéditos.” Prolija memoria: Estudios de cultura virreinal 1(2): 139–75. http://www.journals.unam.mx/index.php/prolija/article/view/31253. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2007. “Colonial No More: Reading Sor Juana from a Transatlantic Perspective.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 86–94. New York: The Modern Language Association. Merrim, Stephanie. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Merrim, Stephanie. 2009. “Sor Juana Criolla and the Mexican Archive: Public Performances.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 193–217. Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. Morales, Mónica. 2010. “La distancia y la modestia: las dos ‘caras’ del Atlántico en los versos de Sor Juana a la duquesa de Aveyro.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 63(1): 19–33. Munguía Ochoa, Laura Yadira. 2020. “Sor Juana y sus Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer: un acercamiento a nuevas perspectivas.” Hipogrifo 8(1): 251–62. DOI 10.13035/H.2020.08.01.18. Myers, Kathleen A. 1990. “Sor Juana’s respuesta: Rewriting the vitae.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14(3): 459–71. https://0-www-jstor-org. biblioteca-ils.tec.mx/stable/27762766. Myers, Kathleen A. 2003. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell, Rachel. 2015. “Gender, Culture and Knowledge in New Spain: Sor Juana’s ‘To the Gentleman in Peru.’” Women’s Studies 44(8):1114–29. Panofsky, Erwin. 1968. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Translated by Joseph J.S. Peake. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Paz, Octavio. 1982. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Peraita, Carmen. 2010. “Elocuencia y fama: El catálogo de mujeres sabias en la Respuesta de Sor Juana Inés.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 77(2): 73–92. DOI 10.1080/00074900050081600.

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Rose, Mary Beth. 1986. “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography.” In Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives. Edited by Mary Beth Rose, 245–78. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1982b. “Sor Juana: Diálogo de retratos.” Revista Iberoamericana 48(120–21): 703–13. https://revista-iberoamericana.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ Iberoamericana/article/download/3737/3906. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1995b. “Sor Juana: Mujer barroca, intelectual y criolla.” In Memoria del Coloquio Internacional: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el pensamiento novohispano, 1995, 375–96. México: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura; UAEM. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1997. “Mujeres nobles del entorno de Sor Juana.” Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando. Homenaje internacional a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Sara Poot Herrera, 1–19. México: El Colegio de México. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. 1998. In En busca de Sor Juana. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Sandoval Caballero, Rosalía. 2021. “Reminiscencias de El sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en la Vida de Santa Rosa de Luis Antonio de Oviedo de Herrera y algunas conexiones con Luis de Góngora.” CESXVIII (31): 71–97. DOI 10.17811/ cesxviii.31.2021.71–97. Trueblood, Alan S. 1988. “Introduction.” In A Sor Juana Anthology, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Valencia, Felipe. 2018. “‘Amorosa violencia’: Sor Juana’s Theory of the Lyric.” Romance Notes 58(2): 299–310. DOI 10.1353/rmc.2018.0029. Wall, Wendy. 1993. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.



Afterword(Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?)

It seems only fitting to conclude by citing the final lines of the poem that closes the Fama y obras pósthumas.1 Written in Latin by the Mexican intellectual Felipe Santiago de Barrales, the highly affected and pedantic funeral elegy subscribes to the well-tried topic of the ubi sunt? by appearing not on Sor Juana’s tombstone but on her cenotaph. Accordingly, the poet describes how the nun retains her voice in the afterworld: Yo soy aquella, dijo, que excitada por el amor de Sofía, Concebí doctos libros en el virgíneo pecho. Por tanto, a f in de no despojarme, sepultada, de tan gran amor, me transformo aun en volumen más útil para los vivos [She said: I am she who, roused by the love of Sophia, imagined scholarly books in my virginal breast. As such and so as to not be stripped of such great love in the grave, I transform into a volume more useful still to the living].2

Ejemplar signifies exemplary when used as an adjective, while as a noun it stands for “copy,” as in a copy of a publication. Can Sor Juana thus be the true exemplar, or ejemplar—at once a model of imitation and a book 1 Fama y Obras pósthumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz [Fame and Posthumous Works of the Phoenix of Mexico, Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz] herein abbreviated as Fama. 2 The translation cited is that of Ignacio Osorio and Bernabé Navarro published in De la Maza 1980, 278. The original Latin reads as follows: Illa ego sum, inquit, virgineo quae pectore doctos Concepi Sophiae concita amore libros. Quare ne tanto fraudarer amore sepulta, Utilius vivis fio volumen adhuc. ([212])

Echenberg, M., The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727044_after

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or volume? By concluding the Fama with Santiago de Barrales’s poem, editor Castorena brings his volume full circle. His cherubs of the engraved frontispiece—the Mexican and Spanish contributors to the volume—have imitated the allegorical Book of Fame by trumpeting and crowning Sor Juana’s fame and, at the same time, the nun-writer has literally become his Fama. Or so he would have us believe. The nun’s posthumous panegyrists attempt upon her death to redirect and refashion the singularity that fueled her celebrity during her lifetime into either the heroic stature of an iconic poet and muse or the moralizing ­publicity granted to the saintly. Both the pious portrayal of Sor Juana, inspired by her “conversion” and propagated originally, albeit problematically, by Diego Calleja, and her identity as an American treasure and cultural icon ideally would have rendered her an exemplar or model and facilitated her elegists’ goal of persevering her for posterity. As an exemplar, Sor Juana could enjoy what Jorge Manrique conceived of as the second level of fame. Unlike her earthly renown (the first level), and eternal glory in heaven (the third), Manrique’s second tier describes a worldly fame that endures after life on earth ends.3 But despite the best intentions of her panegyrists, the polyvalent and polysemous Fama, when taken as a whole, does not leave the reader certain of her exemplarity, be it for female religious or poets and thinkers of the New Word or beyond. The nun’s admirers from Europe and America eulogize a woman fashioned out of vying images—the mujer fuerte, the rara avis, the Phoenix, the American Tenth Muse and treasure, and the cultural ambassador—all of which surely made her famous, yet, when considered together, did not, and could 3 No se os faga tan amarga la batalla temerosa que esperáis, pues otra vida más larga de fama tan gloriosa acá dejáis. Aunque esta vida de honor tampoco no es eternal, ni verdadera, mas con todo es muy mejor que la otra temporal perescedera. (Manrique 1968, 70) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translates as follows: “Think not the struggle that draws near / Too terrible for man, no fear / To meet the foe; / Nor let thy noble spirit grieve, / Its life of glorious fame to leave / On earth below. / A life of honor and of worth / Has no eternity on earth, / ‘Tis but a name; / And yet its glory far exceeds / That base and sensual life, which leads / To want and shame” (2011).

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not, render her an exemplar. Ultimately, the outcome in terms of assuring the Mexican nun the privileged status of the second tier of fame seems precarious if dependent on exemplarity. Was fame in itself enough to do so? The poets and noblemen and women enlisted by Castorena fail at devising a textual space that hinges on a new kind of fame created to accommodate the nun within the rigid parameters of the early modern world. Instead of stretching the limits of existing models of renowned women to accommodate a colonial woman author, it is she who must be accommodated to the notions of fame, both posthumous and literary. To carry out their ambition, her elegists reduce her to emblems or images, fictions that allow her to be intelligible to her reading audience, and keep her tethered to the private sphere. Much as they wished to mold her to the prescribed paradigms of fame and the famous, her singularity always betrayed their endeavors. The fault may well lie with the idea of fame itself; as Braudy astutely remarks: “fame gives and fame takes away. In part it celebrates uniqueness, and in part it requires that uniqueness be exemplary and reproducible” (1986, 5). Sor Juana remained the inimitable exemplar or the monster of ingenio mixto—always the rara avis—even in death. As Merrim explains, the “early modern paradigm of the Tenth Muse […] allowed for an uneasy acceptance of the woman into the public sphere as well as for her containment, in a circumscribed and exclusive third space” (Merrim 1999, 30–31). In many ways then, Sor Juana’s posthumous fame perpetuates the characteristic that defined her renown in her lifetime: her singularity. Despite failing to prove what Barrales calls Sor Juana’s “utility” as an exemplar, the Fama propagates the myth of the Mexican Phoenix whose fame, according to her friend Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, “se acabará con el mundo” [will end with the end of the world] (1680, 20). Unable or unwilling to see the person whom Sor Juana writes out of her works, the elegists of the Fama appropriate her unseizable persona, the evolving projection of her self to which she herself contributed, to solidify her reputation (or fame). As happens with later generations as well, they “choose to reduce the multiple and dissonant Sor Juanas to a coherent and unified self who fulfills [their] own expectations and needs, who can serve as a paradigm” (Luciani 2004, 156). Gillian Ahlgren’s observation regarding Saint Teresa can equally apply to the Mexican nun in spite of their decidedly different reputations: “[t]he persona can and does take on an independent life as the reputation of the saint, both during and after the saint’s lifetime” (1996, 147–48, emphasis added). Much as her elegists shy away from Sor Juana the person, they also deny her status as an author and with it the possibility of earning posthumous

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literary fame. Reducing her to an emblem or icon or privileging her persona are two strategies for carrying out this design. Another is displacing her authorship onto her role as muse. The “title ‘Tenth Muse’, which honors the unusual achievement of [early modern] women whose poetic forms and themes were traditionally male (Merrim 1999, 141), […] also displaces their poetic activity onto a figure of inspiration” (Harvey 2006, 14). Given authorship’s necessarily public status that invokes Rumor, none of Sor Juana’s elegists encourage this means of representing her, despite, as we have seen, the fact that printed elegies do of course spread the renown of their subjects. While Sor Juana’s panegyrists undoubtedly represented her as they wished she had been in her lifetime—free from contradictions and scandal—their own colliding and contending portraits of her reveal the chasm between who she was and who they wanted her to be. Indeed, the volume of 1700 is exemplary of its time (a true “ejemplar”) in that it teaches us both about the strict enforcement and adhesion to the rules and mores (especially concerning women) of the nun’s world and the ways in which they were occasionally waived. As such, the Fama’s elegies in prose and poetry cannot be relegated and confined the to the realm of the paratextual and dismissed as the bookends that encircle and heighten Sor Juana’s last works to be published in her century. Alongside the works of Sor Juana that question the notions of reality and illusion, worldly fame and eternal glory, divine intervention and individual capacity, the confrontation between ideal and real, and woman’s exclusion from the realm of fame, the Fama’s elegies must challenge the very modes of thinking that form the pillars of their world. Despite itself, Castorena’s Fama adheres to the hypothesis put forth by Dominick LaCapra: “certain works themselves both try to confirm or establish something—a value, a pattern of coherence, a system, a genre—and call it into question” (1983, 29). By not fitting into the molds and models that her laudators gathered from tradition, Sor Juana forced her contemporaries to question the order of things and her place in it. The Fama cannot be read solely as a stagnant and servile product of the late Baroque and the hegemonically inflected “Barroco de Indias.” However much a text like the Fama may have wanted to uphold dogma, it simply could not stretch conventional parameters enough to accommodate a woman like Sor Juana. Instead, the nun’s panegyrists are content to convert the nun— “[un] posible asombro que producen tardos los siglos” [a potential wonder that centuries produce late on] ([119]), says Castorena—into a rich Baroque trope that could be deployed as a showcase for ingenio. The refashionings of Sor Juana, which proclaim her unusual fame, be they religiously inclined or not, depend so heavily on topics and conventional modes of describing the

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famous that they ultimately reduce her to an iconic image. An image that was perhaps, as Sor Juana suggests in her romance #49, a self-perpetuating falsehood: ¿No echas de ver, Peregrino, que el Fénix sin semejante es de Plinio la mentira que de sí misma renace? [Can’t you see, Pilgrim, that the Phoenix without equal is Plinius’s tale that is itself reborn again?] (OC 1.145:41–44)4

Ironically enough, it is because the Fama represents its time so exuberantly that it was destined to fail as a textual endeavor. The volume of 1700’s ultra-Baroque engraved frontispiece and hyperbolic elegies published on the brink of a new century and a new world order condemn it and its subject to oblivion for two centuries. Appearing in 1725, the fourth and final edition of the Fama marks the last time Sor Juana’s complete works were published until the twentieth century.5 If the Fama exists because in her time (and shortly thereafter) the nun was the rara avis or “nuevo asombro” of her literary world, the next two centuries conceive of her as if she were little more than a Baroque trope: admirable perhaps, but certainly devoid of literary merit. Benito Jerónimo Feijóo provides a cogent example of the anti-Baroque tendency of the neo-classics when he writes in his Teatro Crítico Universal (Discurso XVI, “Defensa de las mujeres”): “La célebre Monja de México, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, es conocida de todos por sus eruditas y agudas poesías y así, es excusado hacer su elogio. Sólo diré que lo menos que tuvo fue el talento para la poesía, aunque es lo que más se celebra” (qtd. in Alatorre 2007, 483–84) [Mexico’s celebrated nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is known to all for her clever and erudite poetry and, as such, one need not sing her praise. Suffice it to say that she had no talent for poetry at all despite being remembered as a poet]. In addition to failing in its attempt to prove that the Mexican nun was an exemplar, then, the Fama also fails at being an exemplary book: there are 4 Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1951–1957). 5 Rosa Perelmuter points out that only Sor Juana’s redondillas were read in the two centuries following the publication of the Fama (1995, 336). Until the early twentieth century, what little was recorded in the annals of literary history underscores the nun’s rarity and not her accomplishments. For an overview of the literary reception of Sor Juana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see De la Maza (1980) and Alatorre (2007).

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no other works like it that follow its lead. While Sor Juana’s panegyrists are forced to question and weigh social rules to accommodate her, ultimately the precepts stand firm and Sor Juana remains beyond the scope of prescription. Their musings bring about no dramatic changes and the nun’s fame leaves no immediate repercussions in the world she left behind. The Fama does not open a floodgate in the years following her death; no other New World woman assumes her place as a truly famous woman and intellectual deserving of a Fama of her own. And even Sor Juana’s own works, in the words of Juan Nicasio Gallego writing in 1841, “‘yacen entre el polvo de las bibliotecas’” [lie among the dust of the libraries] (qtd. in Alatorre 2007, 648). Santiago de Barrales’s suggestion that the nun-writer is metamorphosed into a volume is so hyperbolic that it seems almost silly today. His words, however, may well hold an important underlying truth. For, Sor Juana’s contemporaries of the late seventeenth century still held fast to Alvaro de Luna’s words from his Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres: “qualquier cosa mortal, commo quiera que sea muy clara y magníf ica, por tienpo viene a paresçer de su fama, si non es ayudada con beneficios de escriptura” [any mortal thing, no matter how magnificent or pure, over times loses its fame, should it not be aided by being written down] (1917, 28). By writing elegies that proved (or attempted to prove) that the nun warranted an illustrious posthumous fame, the contributors to the Fama followed de Luna’s prescription exactly. The irony of their endeavor lies in the fact that as a writer, Sor Juana had little need for the “beneficios de escriptura,” or the “help,” of her posthumous elegists. Ultimately, her intricate, inventive, and penetrating works continue to spread her fame well beyond her time. If in her own time Sor Juana’s “wings”—her writings that allowed her to travel the globe—were unlike those of allegorical Fame, that is, no more than “alas de papel frágil” [wings of fragile paper] that revealed the fragility or precarious nature of her self, her public image, and her fame, today they have proven to be remarkably resolute. Only because her daring took the form of ink and paper can we still read and study her works. We have of course editor Castorena to thank in part for that. And here the intercessors, editors and patrons alike, do play a role because as Roger Chartier reminds us “there is no comprehension of writing, whatever it may be, which does not depend in part upon the forms in which it comes to its reader” (1992, 53). Moreover, Kenny has shown that it was precisely in the early modern period that “the notion that print gave ‘life’ to works and their authors, recent and ancient, became commonplace” (2015, n.p.). I can only speculate as to whether or not Castorena’s formulaic poetry was commissioned or encouraged by his religious superiors to further his

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ecclesiastical career and whether his more original works in prose reveal his true feelings about his compatriot and his volume. What remains without a doubt is that he did not let sleeping dogs lie after Sor Juana’s death, despite her contentious final years of life and her withdrawal from the world of printed books. Castorena entrusted that he employed his fortune for good in publishing the Fama and we are indebted to him for that regardless of his dubious talent as a poet. If his fellow criollo panegyrists hoped, as I have argued, to earn literary recognition by participating in their esteemed compatriot’s fame, this ambition too has to be seen as a failure. When thought of as a broker and an agent, as opposed to a poet, however, Castorena’s success has to be weighed differently. Changing our focus from appraising and judging poetry to thinking about trading in Sor Juana and her works teaches us to look for alternate forms of dealings that occurred within and outside the literary marketplace, among women and men alike. Trading in Mexico’s Tenth Muse, brokering her texts and her persona on both sides of the Atlantic in the late seventeenth century can open up explorations into the works of other criollo elites of New Spain as “bid[s] to establish an authority based on knowledge available only to those who understood both traditions” (More 13). In addition, exploring Sor Juana’s transatlantic and interamerican networks, comparing her to other so-called exceptional women, as well as contemporary writers of different kinds, and exploring texts written about women, like the sermons I recover in chapter 2, are all ways in which to continue to contribute to the field of early modern women’s writing.6 Similarly, reading the Fama in the frameworks of biography and celebrity studies encourages a move away from searching from any kind of “truth” about the Mexican nun and writer and instead urges us to explore the ways in which “celebrities as much as biographees are ‘reprocessed and reinvented’ through mediation” (Saunders 2017, 274).7 The Fama does not just describe Sor Juana’s “survival” through her works, but also works to promote her survival among her readers. It does so by understanding and engaging her “discursive remains as conduits for posthumous presence” (Kenny 2015, n.p.). Undoubtedly, the Fama played an enormous role in strengthening the idea of Sor Juana’s singularity. Whether this should be registered as a success 6 Much headway has of course been made in these directions. See especially Merrim (1999), Harvey (2006; 2007) and Vollendorf (2007) for comparisons between Sor Juana and other exceptional women writers. See Kirk (2016) for situating her in a Jesuit intellectual milieu and Arenal and Schlau (2010), Eich (2004) and Myers (2003), among others, for a better understanding of how Sor Juana fits into a colonial Spanish American landscape of religious women writers. 7 Saunders cites Turner (2010, 13).

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or not, depends on if we think it a good thing that still today her reputation—fossilized in an iconic image—takes on an independent life. Arguably, we continue to trade in Sor Juana, less so in the literary marketplace than in the commercial one, her image plastered on market bags and circulating on the internet in memes, her life scripted for a miniseries available on Netflix. When stripped in this way of her literary legacy, Sor Juana’s fame still today rests more on her celebrity-like status than on her intellectual endeavors. And regardless of what we think of these contemporary fictions, she would probably hold her ground in believing them to be self-perpetuating falsehoods, much as she felt about being deemed the Mexican Phoenix in her own time.

Works Cited Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. 1996. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Alatorre, Antonio. 2007. Sor Juana a través de los siglos (1668–1910). 2 vols. México: El Colegio de México. Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau. 1989. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1992. “Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader.” Diacritics 22(2): 49–61. De la Maza, Francisco. 1980. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia. Biografías antiguas: la Fama de 1700; Noticias de 1667 a 1892. México: UNAM. Eich, Jennifer. 2004. The Other Mexican Muse: Sor María Anna Agueda de San Ignacio, 1695–1756. New Orleans: University Press of the South. Harvey, Tamara. 2006. “‘My Goods Are True’: Tenth Muses in the New World Market.” In Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Edited by Mary Carruth, 13–26. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Harvey, Tamara. 2007. “Seventeenth-Century Pansapphism: Comparing ‘Exceptional Women’ of the Americas and Europe.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 112–18. New York: The Modern Language Association. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1951. Obras completas. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. (vol. 4 edited by Alberto G. Salceda). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. 1995b. Fama y obras póstumas. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700).

Afterword

279

Kenny, Neil. 2015. Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirk, Stephanie. 2016. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. New York: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 1983. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 2011. “Translations from the Spanish: Coplas de Manrique.” In The Complete Poetical Works. Edited by Horace E. Scudder. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1893; Bartleby.com, https:// www.bartleby.com/356/478.html. Luciani, Frederick. 2004. Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Luna, Álvaro de. 1917. Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres. Valencia: Editorial Prometeo. (1446). Manrique, Jorge. 1968. “Coplas por la muerte de su padre.” In Floresta de lírica española. Edited by José Manuel Blecua, 60–72. 2nd Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Madrid: Gredos. Merrim, Stephanie. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. More, Anna. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos Sigüenza de Góngoga and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Myers, Kathleen A. 2003. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perelmuter, Rosa. 1995. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: de la excepcionalidad a la impostura.” In Memoria del Coloquio Internacional: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el pensamiento novohispano, 1995, 331–40. México: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura; UAEM. Saunders, Edward. 2017. “Biography and Celebrity Studies.” In Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries. Edited by Wilhem Hemecker and Edward Saunders, 269–75. Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1680. Theatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe […]. México: Por la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón. Turner, Graeme. 2010. “Approaching Celebrity Studies.” Celebrity Studies 1(1):11–20. DOI 10.1080/19392390903519024. Vollendorf, Lisa. 2007. “Across the Atlantic: Sor Juana, La respuesta and the Hispanic Women’s Canon.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, 95–102. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.



Appendix A

Contents of the Fama y obras pósthumas (1700) Name

Text(s)

Title or Profession

Page

Juan Ignacio de Castorena

Dedicatoria a la reina Mariana [Dedication to Queen Mariana]

Capellán de honor de su Majestad, teólogo, etc. [Chaplain of Honor to his Majesty, Notary, Apostolic Judge for his Holiness, Theologian, Examiner of the Nunciator of Spain and Canon of the Saintly Metropolitan Church of Mexico]

[5]

Juan Ignacio de Castorena

Dedicatoria a la marquesa del Valle de Oaxaca [Dedication to the Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca] Aprobación [Approbation]

Diego de Heredia Diego Calleja

Aprobación [Approbation] Soneto [sonnet] Soneto [sonnet]

Félix Fernández de Córdoba Cardona y Aragón Pedro Verdugo Soneto [sonnet] Mateo Ybáñez

Soneto [sonnet]

Luis Muñoz Venegas y Guzmán Iván Alonso de Mújica

Soneto [sonnet]

Soneto [sonnet]

[9]

[13] Rector del Colegio Imperial de la Compañía de Jesús [Spanish rector of the Imperial College of the Jesuits] Padre de la Compañía de Jesús [15] [Spanish Jesuit] Duque de Sessa [Duke de Sessa] [39]

Conde de Torrepalma [Count de Torrepalma] Marqués de Corpa [Marquis de Corpa] Caballero del Orden de Santiago [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Santiago] Gentilhombre de la Boca de su Majestad [Royal attendant of the King] Caballero del Orden de Calatrava [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Calatrava]

[40] [41] [42]

[43]

[44]

Diego Rejón de Silva

Soneto [sonnet]

Feliciano Gilberto de Pisa Pedro María Squarzafigo Pedro Alfonso Moreno Marcos Suárez de Orozco

Soneto [sonnet]

[45]

Soneto [sonnet]

[46]

Soneto [sonnet]

[47]

Soneto [sonnet]

Mayordomo del Duque de Arcos [Butler to the Duke de Arcos]

[48]

282  Name

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Text(s)

Juan De Cabrera Soneto [sonnet]

Alonso de Otazo Romance Endecasílabo [romance with lines of eleven syllables] Francisco Bueno Liras [a series of liras (five-line stanzas)] Romance Luis Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara Miguel de Soneto [sonnet] Villanueva

Lorenzo de las Llamosas

Octavas [octaves]

Francisco de León y Salvatierra Juan de Bolea y Alvarado

Soneto [sonnet]

Martín Dávila y Palomares Rodrigo Ribadeneyra y Noguerol

Madrigales [Brief poem that combines verses of seven and eleven syllables] Rimas Sextiles [stanza of six verses of consonant rhyme, usually octosyllabic] Décimas

Title or Profession

Page

Capellán del Duque de Arcos [Spanish confessor to the Duke de Arcos] Caballero del Orden de Santiago [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Santiago]

[49]

[53] Criado del Duque de Arcos [Spanish servant of the duke de Arcos]

[55]

Secretario del Cardenal [Guiseppe] Archinto, Nuncio pontificio en España [Secretary to Cardinal Archinto, Papal Nuncio in Spain] Teniente de la comisión de los festejos reales [lieutenant of the commission of royal celebrations] Abogado de los Reales Consejos [solicitor of the Royal Council]

[62]

Gentilhombre del Marqués de Belmonte y Menasalvas [Gentleman servant of the Marquis de Belmonte y Menasalvas

Anónimo Eulogio Francisco de Córdova Gerónimo Monforte y Vera García de Ribadeneyra y Noguerol

[63]

[66]

[67]

[70]

Alcalde perpetuo de la Fortaleza de Perales, Señor de la Casa de Aporreyra, etc. [Gentleman of the House of Aporreyra]

José de Cañizares

Romance de Arte mayor [multiform verse with more than eight syllables] Tomás de Pomar Soneto [sonnet]

[50]

[73]

[75]

Caballero del Orden de Santiago [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Santiago]

[77]

Soneto [sonnet] Égloga [eclogue or pastoral poem]

[78] [79]

Elegía funeral [funeral elegy]

[84]

Décima

Caballero del hábito de Santiago [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Santiago]

[88]

283

Appendix A

Name

Text(s)

Title or Profession

Page

Rodrigo de Ribadeneyra y Noguerol María Jacinta de Abogader y Mendoza Francisca de Echavarri

Soneto [sonnet]

[García’s son]

[89]

Francisca de Echavarri Catalina de Alfaro Fernández de Córdova Marcelina de San Martín

Inés de Vargas Sra. Anónima Anónimo Conde de Clavijo [Marcos Baltasar de Lanuza Mendoza y Arellano] Manuel José de Toledo Cerda Sandoval Silva y Mendoza Castorena Jacinto Muñoz de Castilblanque

Anónimo [Calleja] Castorena

Décimas

Soneto [sonnet]

Romance Soneto [sonnet]

Soneto [sonnet]

Soneto [sonnet] Soneto [sonnet] Octavas Romance

Romance

Carta a Muñoz Castilblanque [Letter to Muñoz Castilblanque] Parecer [opinion]

Elegía [elegy] Prólogo A Quien Leyere (Décimas, Soneto) [Prologue to the Reader, includes décimas and a sonnet]

[90]

Señora de la Villa de Aramayona de Mújica [Lady of the Villa de Aramayona de Mújica]

[92]

[93] [95] Religiosa en el Convento de Santi-Spiritus de Alcaraz [nun in the Convent of Santi-Spiritus de Alcaraz] Religiosa en la Concepción Francisca [96] de la Villa de Manzanares [nun in the Convent Concepción Francisca de la Villa de Manzanares] [97] [98] [99] Gentilhombre de la Cámara del Rey [101] nuestro Señor, y de su Consejo en el real hacienda [gentleman of the circle of the King and of the Council of the Royal treasury] [103] Conde de Galve [Count de Galve, a relative of Gaspar de Cerda Sandoval Silva y Mendoza, New Spain’s viceroy from 1688–1696)] [105] Teólogo de la Nunciatura de España, [106] Arzobispo de Manila, y Obispo electo de Cotrón, Predicador, y Capellán de Honor de su Majestad etc. [theologue of the Nunciature of Spain, Archbishop of Manila and Bishop of Cotrón (today Gelves, Spain)] [111] [119]

284 

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Name

Text(s)

Marcial Beneta­ sua Gudeman (Manuel García Bustamante) Anónimo Gabriel Ordóñez

Romance de Arte mayor [multiform verse with more than eight syllables]

Anónimo Castorena

Sra. Anónima Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz Sor Juana

Sor Juana

Sor Juana

Sor Juana

Sor Juana

Soneto [sonnet] Poema acróstico [acrostic poem]

Romance Advertencia (a la décima acróstica) [Note of caution regarding the poem to follow] Décima acróstica [acrostic décima] Carta de la muy ilustre señora sor Filotea de la Cruz […] [Letter by the most illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz] Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre sor Filotea de la Cruz [The Poet’s Answer to the most illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz] Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días antes de la purísima encarnación del hijo de Dios […] [Devotional Exercises for the Nine Days Before the Purest Incarnation of the Son of God…] Ofrecimientos para el santo rosario de quince misterios […] [Offerings for the Saintly Rosary of Fifteen Mysteries…] Protesta, que rubricada con su sangre, hizo de su fe y amor a Dios […] [Solemn declaration of her faith at the time in which she abandoned worldly studies…] Docta explicación del misterio y voto que hizo de defender la Purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora […] [Erudite explanation of the mystery and vow that she took to defend the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady…]

Title or Profession

Page [131]

Caballero del Orden de Calatrava, Canónigo Doctoral de la Santa Iglesia de Cuenca [Gentleman and Knight of the Order of Calatrava, clergyman of the Santa Iglesia de Cuenca]

[137] [138]

[139] [143]

[144] 1

8

61

109

124

127

285

Appendix A

Name Sor Juana

Text(s)

Petición que en forma causídica presenta al Tribunal Divino […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas [Petition that she presented to the divine tribunal to plead for her sins to be forgiven] Sor Juana Traducción de una oración pública en Latín por la santidad del Papa Urbano VIII [translation of a public oration in Latin given by Pope Urban VIII] Sor Juana Romance #56 (en que expresa los efectos del Amor divino) [in which she expresses the effects of Divine love] Sor Juana Romance #57 (al mismo intento) [on the same subject] Sor Juana Romance #58 (en que califica de amorosas acciones todas las de Cristo […]) [in which she deems all of Christ’s acts loving] Sor Juana Glosa (#139) de una quarteta (sic) de Don Luis de Góngora [gloss of a quartet by Luis de Góngora] Un Caballero del Romance #49bis [from a gentleman from Peru] Perú (el Conde de la Granja) Sor Juana Romance #50 (en que responde) [in which she responds to the Count de la Granja] Sor Juana Romance #51 (en reconocimiento a las inimitables Plumas de Europa […]) [to the inimitable pens of Europe who improved on her work with their praise] Sor Juana Soneto #208 (a una pintura de Nuestra Señora de muy excelente pincel) [sonnet; to a painting of Our Lady by an excellent painter] Sor Juana Soneto #210 (al retardarse San Juan de Sahagún en consumir la Hostia Consagrada, por aparecer en ella Cristo visiblemente) [sonnet; in which Saint John of Sahagún delays in consuming the Holy Host as Christ was visible in it] Sor Juana Décima #112 (a Castorena) [to Castorena]

Title or Profession

Page 129

132

134

137 138

140

142

150

157

163

164

165

286  Name Castorena

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Text(s)

Title or Profession

(Intervención en prosa) [prose text; a continuation of the prologue] Juan de Rueda Epigrama (Latín) [epigram in Latin] Fraile agustino, Catedrático de Sagrada Teología en el Colegio de San Pablo y de Víspera de Filosofía en la Real Univ. de México [Augustinian clergyman of New Spain; taught Sacred Theology in the College of Saint Pablo and Philosophy in the National University] Juan Julián de Elegía (Latín) [Elegy in Latin] Colegial Real en el Colegio Real de Villalobos San Ildelfonso (México) [student of the Colegio Real de San Ildelfonso] José de Guevara Epitafio (Latín) [Epitaph in Latin] Colegial seminarista en el Real de San Ildelfonso, Retórico en el Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo [Jesuit seminarian in Mexico City] Epitafio (Latín) [Epitaph in Latin] Abogado de la Real Audiencia de Tiburcio Díaz México y Colegial en el Insigne Col. Pimienta de San Ramón Nonato [solicitor of the Royal Audience of Mexico and member of the noteworthy College of Saint Ramón Nonato] Martín de Olivas Soneto [sonnet] Bachiller y maestro de Latín de Sor Juana [university graduate and Sor Juana’s Latin teacher] Alonso Ramírez Soneto [sonnet] Capitán [captain] de Vargas Diego Martínez Soneto [sonnet] Juan Zapata Soneto [sonnet] José Miguel Romance Síndico y Secretario de la Real Universidad de México [secretary of Torres Mexico’s Royal University] Soneto [sonnet] Capellán en el Convento Real de Francisco de las religiosas de Jesús María, de la Ayerra Santa ciudad de México [chaplain of the María Royal Convent of Jesús María in Mexico City] Bachiller, Presbítero, en el Real José de Villena Endechas Endecasílabas [stanzas Colegio de Cristo (México) of four verses with lines of eleven [university graduate and priest of syllables] the [Jesuit] Real Colegio de Cristo of Mexico City] Juan de Avilés Soneto [sonnet] Catedrático de anatomía en la Real Universidad de México [professor of anatomy at Mexico’s Royal University]

Page 165 167

169

171

172

174

175 176 177 178

180

181

186

287

Appendix A

Name

Text(s)

Antonio de Deza Soneto [sonnet] y Ulloa

Lorenzo González de la Sancha

Romance Heroico

Felipe de Santoyo García

Romance

Lorenzo González de la Sancha Lorenzo González de la Sancha Felipe Iriarte y Lugo Felipe Santiago de Barrales

Elegía fúnebre (en varios metros) [funeral elegy in various poetic forms] Romance

Title or Profession

Page

Capitán, Caballero del Orden de Santiago, del Tribunal de Cuentas de la ciudad de México [captain and gentleman of the Order of Santiago, and governor of Nueva Vizcaya] Rector y cronista del Colegio de S. Pedro [Rector and chronicler of the Jesuit College of San Pedro, New Spain] Portero de la Audiencia de México [speaker of Mexico City’s Audiencia (the highest tribunal of the Spanish Crown)]

187

188

192

201

204

Epigrama (Latín)

Presbítero [clergyman]

[211]

Soneto (Latín) [sonnet]

Licenciado en Teología; Catedrático de Vísperas de Leyes en la Universidad; Colegial Mayor en el Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Sra. de Todos Santos [university graduate in theology, professor at the Royal University, senior member of the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Sra. de Todos Santos in Mexico City]

[212]

Source: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b



Appendix B

Sections of the Fama y obras pósthumas (1700) Fronspiece

Paratext I

Dedicaons (2) Licenses (3)

Calleja

Prologue Spanish elegies (44)

Paratext II

Sor Juana's Works

Carta de Sor Filotea La respuesta

Spiritual exercises (2)

Devoonal works

Penitenal texts (3) Religious poems (7)

Occasional "response" poems (4)

Castorena's Prologue connued Elegies from New Spain (19)

Source: Juana Inés de la Cruz 1995b

romance #51



Bibliography of Works Cited

Abreu Gómez, Ermilo. 1934. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Bibliografía y Biblioteca. Monografías bibliográficas mexicanas 29. México: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. 1996. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Alatorre, Antonio. 1980. “Para leer la Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 29(2): 428–508. DOI 10.24201/ nrfh.v29i2.1755. Alatorre, Antonio. 1984. “Un soneto desconocido de Sor Juana.” Vuelta, 94: 4–13. Alatorre, Antonio. 1994. “Estudio introductorio.” In Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del Placer by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by Antonio Alatorre. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio. 1995a. “Introducción.” In Fama y Obras póstumas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ix–lxvii. Ed. Facsim. México: UNAM. (1700). Alatorre, Antonio. 1995b. “El Zurriago de Salazar y Castro contra el padre Calleja, amigo y biógrafo de Sor Juana.” Literatura mexicana 6(2): 343–66. DOI 10.19130/ iifl.litmex.6.2.1995.191. Alatorre, Antonio. 2007. Sor Juana a través de los siglos (1668–1910). 2 vols. México: El Colegio de México. Alatorre, Antonio and Martha Lilia Tenorio. 1998a. “Una enfermedad contagiosa: los fantaseos sobre Sor Juana.” NRFH. 46(1): 105–21. DOI 10.24201/nrfh.v46i1.2621. Alatorre, Antonio and Martha Lilia Tenorio. 1998b. Serafina y Sor Juana. México: El Colegio de México. Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 1994. “Introduction.” In The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1–37. New York: The Feminist Press. Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 2009. The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Second Edition. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau. 1989. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Balbuena, Bernardo de. 1930. La grandeza mexicana de Bernardo de Balbuena. Edited by John Van Horne. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature Vol. XV.3. Urbana: The University of Illinois. (1604). Ballón Aguirre, Enrique. 1997. “Los corresponsales peruanos de Sor Juana.” Lexis 21(2): 273–325. Bauer, Ralph and José Antonio Mazzotti. 2009. “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires,

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Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 1–59. Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. Beaujour, Michel. 1991. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Translated by Yara Milos. New York: New York University Press. Beer, Gillian. 2017. “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past.” Extract [1989]. In Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries. Edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, 229–236. Berlin, Boston and Beijing: DeGruyter. Bénassy-Berling, Marie Cécile. 1982. Humanisme et Religion Chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Editions Hispaniques. Paris: Sorbonne. Bénassy-Berling, Marie Cécile. 2000. “Actualidad del sorjuanismo (1994–1999).” Colonial Latin American Review 9(2): 277–92. DOI 10.1080/713657424. Beristain de Souza, José Mariano. 1980. Biblioteca hispanoamericana septentrional. 2a ed. Biblioteca del Claustro. Serie facsimilar 1–3. México: UNAM: Instituto de Estudios y Documentos Históricos. (1816). Biblia Sacra. 1983. Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Bilinkoff, Jodi. 1983. “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila.” In Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, 83–100. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bocángel y Unzueta, Gabriel. 1946. Obras de Don Gabriel Bocángel y Unzueta. Edited by Rafael Benítez Claros. 2 vols. Biblioteca de antiguos libros hispánicos. Madrid: Imprenta de S. Aguirre. Borja Gómez, Jaime Humberto. 2007. “Historiografía y hagiografía: vidas ejemplares y escritura de la historia en el Nuevo Reino de Granada.” Fronteras de la Historia 12: 53–78. https://revistas.icanh.gov.co/index.php/fh/article/view/469/397. Boyle Catherine. 2016. “Sor Juana Inés De la Cruz: The Tenth Muse and the Difficult Freedom to Be.” In A History of Mexican Literature. Edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra and Anna Nogar, 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brading, David A. 1988. Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano. Translated by María Soledad Loaeza de Graue. 2nd ed. México: Era. Brading, David A. 1991. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1492–1867). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford University Press. Braudy, Leo. 2011. “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies.” PMLA 126(4):1070–75. DOI:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.4.1070.

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Index abundance, American 43, 66, 68, 75, 150, 153, 182, 197 academy, literary 27, 260 all-female literary 44, 218, 257–62 acclaim 28, 87, 110, 121, 125, 152, 228–38, 235 n.9, 240 agency 22–23, 26–27, 71, 234 Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco 30, 32 as confessor 29 Alatorre, Antonio 30 n.17, 33, 33 n.21, 66 n.11, 70, 72, 73, 75, 79, 79 nn.18–19, 83 n.22, 84, 100 n.2, 122 nn.18–19, 132 n.24, 155 n.6, 158 n.7, 161, 170, 179 n.15, 180, 194, 258, 275 n.5 “Para leer la Fama y Obras pósthumas” 39 Sor Juana a través de los siglos 1668–1910 16 n.8 Alciato, Andrés 71, 239 alchemy 75 Alférez, monja see Erauso, Catalina de Ambrosio de la Cuesta, Fray 103, 135, 141 archives 37, 255 n.17 androgyny 236 angels 65, 151, 172, 183, 185, 191, 199, 222, 223 apologia 29, 31 Apollo 64, 125, 155, 180, 220 approbations 34, 41, 42, 57, 76–77, 88 n.25, 100–04, 112–15, 120–22, 128, 133, 156 Aragón y Cortés, Juana de (Duchess de Monteleón y Terra-Nova and Marquise del Valle de Oaxaca) 68, 165, 168–70, 159 Arenal, Electa 28 n.15, 29, 35 n.23, 113 n.11, 232, 261 n.22, 277 n.6 Argus Panoptes 186 Aristotle 108 n.8, 184, 189, 195 Ars moriendi 118 asceticism 115, 116, 118, 134 Asclepius 71 Athena 30, 64, 65 n.9; see also Minerva Augustine, St 103, 109, 152 n.4, 186, 251 authorship 14, 19, 22, 27, 33, 57, 84, 84 n.23, 87, 102, 113, 114, 119, 151, 153, 155, 159, 260, 274 “game” of 14, 16, 24, 26, 28, 29 autobiography see vitae; Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz Aveyro, María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess of 43, 154, 216, 218, 219–28, 242, 256, 258, 258 n.19 Ayerra de Santa María, Francisco 79 n.18, 177, 177 n.12, 179, 185 n.16, 204 Baroque 17, 274, 275 Hispanic 39, 66, 104, 163 Barrales, Felipe Santiago de 271–73, 276 Barroco de Indias 17, 274 Bauer, Ralph 14 n.2, 181, 195

Bénassy-Berling, Marie-Cécile 28 n.15, 67, 84 n.23 Benetasua Gudeman, Marcial see García Bustamante, Manuel Bilinkoff, Jodi 35 n.23, 101, 113 biographers 108, 109, 111, 113, 148 n.1 biography 33, 35, 36, 37, 112, 113 n.12, 148, 251 Biography Studies 277 spiritual 35, 41 n.30, 42, 104, 106, 113, 234; see also hagiographies; saints, lives of; vitae Bolea y Alvarado, Juan de 127, 139 Borja Gómez, Jorge 104, 148 n.1 Boyle, Catherine 25, 251 Brading, David 39, 168, 169 The First America 169 Bradstreet, Anne 19, 150, 255 Braudy, Leo 22, 36, 71, 273 The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History 22 Brenner, Sophia Elizabeth 14 n.3, 125 n.20 Bueno, Francisco 187, 205 Calleja, Father Diego 84 n .23, 100–02, 125, 130, 133, 135, 138, 176, 188, 272 Aprobación 34, 62 n.7, 77, 88 n.25, 100, 112–22, 124, 131, 156 “Elegía” 101, 173–74, 188–89, 193–94, 201 Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge 153, 196 n.19 Cañizares, José de 150, 174, 202 Carta de Serafina de Cristo 30 n.17, 84 n.23 Casa del Placer 14, 33 n.20, 44, 257, 258, 258 n.19, 259–61 Castorena Ursúa Goyeneche y Villareal, Juan Ignacio María de 30, 32, 74 as Bishop of Yucatán 74 n.14, 202 as broker 34, 91, 159, 166, 169–71, 277 as criollo 185–86, 193–98 ecclesiastical career 32, 74 n.14, 201, 277 as editor 38–42, 57–88, 91, 157–72, 272, 276 as literary agent 74 Caviedes see Valle y Caviedes, Juan del celebrity 16, 17, 19–24, 33, 34, 65, 106, 111, 149, 236; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as celebrity transatlantic 16, 21 Celebrity Studies 21–24, 56, 277 censors of Sor Juana’s works, religious 58, 75, 76, 101, 103, 120, 121, 135, 153, 159, 160, 184, 186, 187, 187 n.17; see also Calleja, Father Diego charity 42, 104, 106 n.6, 108, 112, 123, 127, 131; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, charity of Charles II 56 n.2, 68, 69, 69 n.12 Charles V 70 chastity 107 n.6, 108, 133

310  Christ 82, 101, 117, 119, 128, 129, 137; see also imitatio Christi fame of 23–36 martyrdom of 44, 218, 233, 234, 254 among the Doctors 120–21 Church 30, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109 n.10, 128, 135, 148 n.1, 151, 231, 259, 261 authorities 24, 33, 131 Fathers 152 n.4, 184 Clavijo, Count de (Marcos Baltasar de Lanuza Mendoza y Arellano) 214, 216 Colombi, Beatriz 21, 22, 27, 101 n.3, 113, 153 commodities 24, 43, 149, 150, 161, 172, 198, 255 n.17 print 24, 260 communities, transatlantic 44, 218, 257–62, 277 Convent of Santa Paula see Hieronymite, convent of Santa Paula Córdoba, Eulogio Francisco de 188, 205 Cortés, Hernán (Fernando) 69, 70, 168, 169 Cortés y Moctezuma, Leonor 169, 170 Council of the Indies, Royal 41 n.30, 223 Counter-Reformation 17, 20, 104, 107, 108, 109, 134 Court of Madrid 79, 101, 155, 166 of Mexico City 14, 29, 30, 71, 166, 187 criollos/as 16, 38, 41, 66, 72, 112, 148, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164 n.9, 165, 168, 169, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 192, 195, 196, 199, 200, 224 n.5, 258, 277 Dávila y Palomares, Martín 189, 206 De la Maza, Francisco 73, 79 n.18, 82 n.22, 103, 179 n.15 death see Ars moriendi; elegies, funerary; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, and death Diccionario de Autoridades 23, 75 n.15, 128 n.21, 249, 250 Discalced Carmelites, order of 63, 117 n.14, 185 n.16 divide, public-private 19, 20, 30, 257 Duchess de Aveyro, see Aveyro, María de Guadalupe de Alencastre, Duchess de Echavarri, Francisca de (Señora de la Villa de Aramayona de Mújica) 136, 137, 139 edification 34–38, 104, 109, 135, 149 Egan, Linda 22, 27 Eich, Jennifer 35 n.23, 113 n.11, 277 n.6 Eire, Carlos 20, 104 ekphrasis 241, 245–6 elegies, funerary 35, 78, 124, 172, 179, 271; see also Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, elegies in emblems 18, 18 n.9, 64, 68, 71, 163, 170, 199, 239, 247, 274 envy 28, 29, 136, 222, 229, 231–37

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Erauso, Catalina de (the Monja Alférez) 18 n.10, 19, 157 exchanges 24, 25, 44, 57, 89, 149, 218, 226, 257, 260 epistolary 24, 27, 57, 80, 87, 257 literary 85–88, 201, 260–61 male 27, 43, 56, 72, 149, 198 exemplar, inimitable female 43, 105, 134, 135 n.26, 137, 199, 216, 254, 272–75; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as saintly exemplar exercises, spiritual see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, Works, Ejercicios de la Encarnación; Ofrecimientos de los Dolores exoticism 66, 167, 169, 170, 175, 197; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as exotic New World marvel Ezell, Margaret 14, 20, 84, 153, 259 fame: see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor as celebrity; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, fame of allegorical 65, 276 Book of 64, 272 literary 23, 114, 224, 235 mala fama 20, 218, 248, 252 posthumous literary 14, 21, 273–74 wings of 16, 91, 276 and women 19–20, 39, 89, 105–12, 276 worldly 36 n.24, 102, 104, 122, 272, 274 Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Fama): dedications 68–70, 77, 159–71 editions 15–16, 56 n.2, 69 n.12 elegies in Mexican 78–80, 161, 172–73, 177–86 Spanish 77–78, 174–77, 186–90, 191–93 frontispiece 56–72, 89, 90, 172, 192, 272, 275 paratexts 13, 38, 41–42, 72; see also Fama, dedications; Fama, frontispiece; Fama, prologue prologue 72–84 audience, reading 17, 171, 273 as sourcebook 38–39, 73 structure of 40–42, 72–84 fashioning of Sor Juana 19, 27, 43, 56, 58, 78, 84, 89, 150, 151, 216; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, self-fashioning Fernández Córdova, Catalina de Alfaro 124, 139, 141 Fernández de Córdoba Cardona y Aragón, Félix see Sessa, Duke de Fernández de Santa Cruz, Manuel (Bishop of Puebla) 31, 80, 229 Foucault, Michel 214, 215, 239, 242 García Bustamante, Manuel alias Marcial Benetasua Gudeman 121, 122, 122 n.18, 123, 127, 135 gaze, male 19, 27, 259

Index

Gilberto de Pisa, Feliciano 187, 188, 189, 205 Glantz, Margo 18 n.9, 31 n.18, 153 Golden Age, Spanish 14, 15, 104, 190, 238 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 82, 163, 246 González de la Sancha, Lorenzo 78, 78 n.18, 83 n.22, 153, 179–84, 190, 200 Goodman, Jessica 22 Gregory of Nazianzus, St 103, 129 hagiographies 32, 36, 104, 106, 109, 109 n.10, 114; see also biography, spiritual; saints, lives of; vitae Harvey, Tamara 87 n.24, 227 n.6, 255, 255 n.17, 262 n.22, 276 n.6 Hercules 70 Heredia, Diego de 77, 92, 186, 189, 205 Herrera, José de 105, 110, 118 Hieronymite, convent of Santa Paula (convento de San Jerónimo) 14, 25, 28, 74, 100 n.3, 113, 156 Huarte de San Juan, Juan 189, 192–3, 196 Examen de ingenios para las ciencias 192 humility 42, 104, 107 n.6, 108, 111, 112, 116, 251; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, and rhetoric of humility humoral theory 192, 193, 195–96 Icarus 226 imagery, solar 151, 153, 159, 167–68, 172–79, 260–61, 183, 198, 199–200 imitatio Christi 43, 101, 105, 123, 128, 136, 233–35, 254 immortality 65, 67, 151, 172–74 ingenio 43, 59, 63, 102, 113, 123, 149, 152, 153, 155, 159, 170, 173, 184, 189, 190–93, 196, 215, 265–67, 274 mixto 182, 191–93, 197, 199, 274 Iztaccíhuatl see volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl Jackson, H. J. 23 Jed, Stephanie 18–19, 28, 150 Jerome, St 76 n.16, 127 Jesuits 31, 77, 116, 119 n.16 John Chrysostom, St 123, 127, 151 Jones, Ann Rosalind 14, 242 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor (Sor Juana) and allies 14, 15, 27, 74, 219; see also Paredes, Countess de and Marquise de la Laguna and autodidacticism 36, 186–89, 196; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as prodigy birthplace of 66, 70, 117, 152, 154, 194, 196 geographical and humeral conditions of 43, 152 as celebrity 25–28, 37–38, 40, 60, 64, 71, 84, 87, 89, 100, 102, 102 n.4, 121, 153, 215, 216, 229, 257, 272, 278 charity of 31, 115, 118, 131–34

311 and conversion, myth of 31, 32, 33, 89, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 125, 126, 132, 136, 272 as cultural icon 18, 43, 59, 66, 90, 126, 151, 157, 158, 161, 193, 199, 216, 227, 254, 272, 274 death of 34, 38, 39 n.28, 62 n.7, 78, 118, 121, 124, 171, 173, 175–76, 178, 277 and desengaño 42, 101, 105, 114, 117–18, 122, 124, 126–27, 129, 132, 135, 239, 240, 246, 253 as exotic New World marvel 16, 18, 43, 150, 153, 162, 198 fame of 21, 25–28, 228–36, 64, 71, 83, 100, 176, 261, 272, 278 final years of 28–34, 85, 101, 112, 115, 136, 277 and God-given grace/gifts 43, 76, 102, 105, 137, 234 and knowledge 14, 17, 31, 59, 64, 68, 78, 114, 119, 122, 123–25, 132, 135, 151, 160, 175–76, 179, 199, 226, 235 acquired 43, 102, 152, 182–90 infused 43, 152, 182–90 and self-knowledge 253–55 library of 31, 33 n.21, 100, 125, 131 literary career of 28, 30, 216 and María Luisa Manrique see Paredes, Countess de and Marquise de la Laguna as monstruo de las mujeres; 18, 18 n.10, 25, 137, 197 and obedience 30, 112, 118, 119 n.17, 134 and occasional verse 14, 14 n.4, 24, 26, 217 as panegyrist 219–28 and patrons 16, 21, 44, 218, 257, 260, 276; see also Paredes, Countess de and Marquise de la Laguna as penitent 99–105, 112–38 as Phoenix of Mexico 16, 67, 100, 126, 137, 162, 166–67, 273, 278 and public image 21, 27, 43, 44, 91, 216–19, 230, 235, 240, 247–59, 261, 276 as prodigy 16, 21, 23, 32, 189, 191, 198 as rara avis in terra 43, 57, 58–60, 66, 71, 105, 153, 155, 159, 162, 164, 165, 175, 272–73, 275 and rhetoric of humility 87, 87 n.24, 121, 136, 216, 220, 223, 225–26, 234; see also martyrdom, of Sor Juana and renunciation 21, 32–33, 101, 114 self-fashioning of 22, 26, 80, 214, 229 n.8, 236, 245–49, 254 as sacred phoenix 100–01, 125, 136 as saintly exemplar 18, 42, 57, 59–61, 74, 78, 89, 105, 123, 132, 136, 190, 271 spiritual rebirth of 59, 114, 131, 158 as Tenth Muse 16, 18–23, 36, 57, 60, 64, 66, 67, 85, 136, 138, 150–52, 155, 159, 161, 168, 171–72, 179, 182, 198–201, 254, 255–56, 273–74, 277

312  as treasure 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 43, 68, 113, 138, 154–75, 183, 198–200, 216, 272 virtues of 65, 100, 112, 115–17, 123, 134 visual portrayals of 62–63, 65; see also Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, frontispiece; portraits Works “Autodefensa espiritual” 119 n.17, 235 n.9 Carta atenagórica 30, 32, 65 n.10, 80, 84 n.23, 86, 104, 120, 187 n.17, 228 Carta de Monterrey 134 n.25 Crisis de un sermón see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, Carta atenagórica décima #102 44, 216, 219, 240–47 décima #112 30, 32, 81–82, 84–88, 90, 125 Docta explicación […] y voto que hizo de defender la Purísima concepción de Nuestra Señora 32 n.19, 81, 115, 128–29 Ejercicios de la Encarnación 40, 81, 130, 162, 221 Los empeños de una casa 216–17, 228, 238 Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del placer 27, 33, 33 n.20, 44, 257–262 Inundación castálida 15, 29, 57, 66 n.11, 74, 76, 103, 125, 125 n.20, 153–56, 161, 172, 179, 181, 183, 184, 201, 219, 224, 226, 230, 258 Ofrecimientos de los Dolores 40, 81, 130–31, 162 Petición […] por impetrar perdón de sus culpas 32 n.19, 81, 115 Primero sueño 88, 120 Protesta de la Fe 32, 81, 115, 128, 129, 130, 134 Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz 28 n.15, 31, 32, 24, 39, 40, 44, 77, 81–82, 88, 101, 104, 117 n.15, 127, 187, 187 n.17, 188, 216, 217, 218, 226, 228–36, 237, 257, 259 n.20 romance #37 16, 43, 154, 216, 218, 219–28, 252, 254, 258 romance #49 25, 255, 275 romance #51 27, 55–56, 80, 81, 216, 217, 247, 248–53 Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 15, 18 n.9, 29, 31, 33 n.20, 55, 65, 74, 78, 80, 83 n.22, 103, 125 n.20, 155–57, 187 n.17, 188, 190, 191, 201, 248, 255 sonnet#152 44, 62, 216, 218, 238–41, 245, 251 n.16 sonnet #145 44, 216, 217, 218, 240, 245–49, 251–53 villancico #282 66 n.11

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Kenny, Neil 36, 276 Kirk, Stephanie 15, 15 n.5, 20, 28 n.15, 31, 33, 35 n.23, 157, 258 n.18, 259, 260, 261 n.22, 277 n.6 Laguna, Marquise de la see Paredes, Countess de and Marquise de la Laguna Lavrin, Asunción 35 n.23, 108, 111 Lemus, Diego de 148–49 Leonard, Irving 39 n.26, 156 Lima 36, 148 n.1, 166, 167 Llamosas, Lorenzo de las 150, 174, 175 Lope de Vega see Vega y Carpio, Lope Félix de love 31, 67, 242 courtly love 103, 125, 222, 241, 245 of knowledge 102, 114 love poetry 81, 82, 103, 198, 259, 261 self-love 106, 230, 235 Lucan 67, 239 Luciani, Frederick 26, 33, 229, 229 n.8, 248 n.14 Ludmer, Josefina 87 n.24, 237 Madrid 13, 36, 40, 64, 74, 78, 79, 101, 153, 166, 167, 246 n.13 Manrique, Jorge 272, 272 n.3 María, Virgen see Virgin Mary Mariana of Neuburg (Queen Mariana) 56 n.2, 68, 69, 69 n.12, 79, 161–67 marketplace 20, 73, 159, 171, 201 literary 19, 21, 22, 24, 27–28, 34, 43–44, 56, 149–50, 153, 218–19, 256–61, 278 martyrdom 36 n.24, 148 n.1 of Christ 44, 218, 233 of Sor Juana 231–36 Mazzotti, José Antonio 14 n.2, 181, 195 McKnight, Kathryn Joy 35 n.23, 106, 107, 109 Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso 73, 79, 79 n.18, 84 n.23, 85, 171, 178 n.14, 219, 251 Poetas novohispanos 79 n.18, 177 n.11 Mercury 70–71, 155, 179–81, 201 Merrim, Stephanie 14, 18, 18 n.10, 27, 87 n.24, 165, 189 n.18, 192, 217, 225, 226, 234, 246, 253, 255 n.17, 262 n.22, 273, 277 n.6 Mexico City 29, 41 n.30, 117 n.14, 156, 157, 177, 185 n.16 Michoacán 166, 170 laminas of 159, 166, 171, 178, 201 Minerva 64, 65, 65 n.10, 68, 70, 71, 180–82, 220 Miranda, Juan de 62, 62 nn.7–8, 238 Mongibelo 197–98 More, Anna 156, 164 n.9, 165 n.10 Moreno, Pedro Alfonso 129, 133–34 mortification, bodily see asceticism; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as penitent mujer fuerte 60, 60 n.4, 63, 71, 89, 108, 110, 115, 119, 123, 131, 134–37, 157, 160, 190, 199, 216, 221, 227, 272 Muñoz Castilblanque, Jacinto 75, 77

Index

Muriel, Josefina 15 n.5, 35 n.23, 37 Muses 19, 64, 67, 78 n.1 8, 155, 220; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as Tenth Muse Myers, Kathleen 18 n.10, 33, 35 n.23, 102 n.4, 113 n.11, 148 n.1, 231, 233, 234, 277 n.6 New Spain 14, 15, 17, 20, 29, 31, 32–33, 35, 41, 60, 66, 70, 74, 120, 149, 159, 161, 164 n.9, 168–69, 176, 179–80, 195–200, 226, 255, 255 n.17; see also treasures, American; criollos/ as New World, feminized 16, 21, 23 Núñez de Miranda, Antonio 29, 30, 35, 107, 199 nn.16–17, 134 obedience 30, 42, 104, 107 n.6, 108, 112, 118, 119 n.17, 133–34 one-sex model 182, 192, 196, 236 panegyrists see Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, elegies in paratexts 41, 31, 41 n.29, 259–61; see also Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, paratexts Paredes, Countess de and Marquise de la Laguna (María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga) 15, 27, 29, 29 n.16, 31, 43, 69, 79, 155 n.6, 218, 219, 222–24, 226, 240–44, 258, 259, 261; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, and allies; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, and patrons Parker, Patricia 18, 26, 150 Parnassus, Mount 66–67, 70, 71, 117, 154–55, 168, 178, 220 patronage 24, 150, 159, 163, 170, 178, 260–61 literary 24, 167, 179 Paz, Octavio 33 n.21, 62 n.7, 248 penitents, female 42, 43, 104–05, 107, 109, 236; see also Picazo, Agustina; Vidarte, Jacinta de Pérez de Montoro, José 66n.11, 154–55, 161, 172, 176, 179–80, 183, 190, 200 Perry, Mary Elizabeth 20, 108, 134 Petrarch 36, 197 phoenix 64, 151, 255; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as Phoenix of Mexico; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as sacred phoenix Picazo, Agustina 105, 110–12 piety see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as saintly exemplar; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as penitent Plato 108 n.8, 155, 240–41, 245 Popocatépetl see volcanoes, Popocatépetl portraits 61 nn.5–6, 108, 242; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, visual portrayals of; Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, frontispiece literary 58, 240–41, 241 n.11

313 self-portrait, literary 39, 44, 216, 218, 231, 240, 238–47, 251, 254 posterity 22–23, 28, 35, 41, 42, 64, 71, 72, 109, 161, 200, 272 Powell, Amanda 28 n.15, 29, 232 Prendergast, Ryan 58, 68, 71 pride (as sin) 106, 114, 121, 230, 235, 253 prologues 75, 83; see also Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, prologue Proverbs (Book of) 60, 60 n.4, 108, 134, 135, 186; see also mujer fuerte Puebla 102, 149 n.2, 156, 158 n.8 Rabin, Lisa 29, 67 Ramírez de Vargas, Alonso 79 n.18, 176, 177 n.11, 182, 185 n.16 readers: contemporary 18, 19, 85, 86, 89, 105, 116, 137 powerful 21, 42, 57, 87, 89, 259; see also Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reading audience Renaissance 17, 26, 35, 36 n.24, 104, 151, 157, 242 iconography 14, 58, 68 renown see fame; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as celebrity representation, allegorical 14, 35, 61, 64, 65, 65 n.9, 67–68, 70–71, 91, 129, 192, 215, 232, 253, 272, 276 riches see abundance; treasures Rodríguez Cepeda, Enrique 15 n.6, 16 Rome 148, 149 n.2, 165, 185 n.16 Rosa of Lima, St 119 n.16, 120 n.17, 148, 148 n.1 Ross, Kathleen 17, 113 n.11, 165 Rumor (Pheme or Fama) 20, 25, 111, 121, 218, 274; see also fame, mala fama Sabat-Rivers, Georgina 16, 39 n.26, 69 n.12, 79, 221, 226, 239, 241 n.12 saints, fame of 17, 19, 35, 43, 103, 104, 105, 114 lives of 34, 63, 108, 109 n.10, 117, 123, 127, 137; see also biography, spiritual; hagiographies; vitae salvation 40, 42, 103, 105, 107, 111, 112, 114, 117 n.15, 118–19, 119 n.17, 123, 132–33, 148, 151, 160, 233 sanctity see saints, lives of San Miguel Nepantla 66; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, birthplace Santoyo García, Felipe de 79 n.18, 123, 135, 157–58, 173, 185, 185 n.16 Schlau, Stacey 35 n.23, 113 n.11, 261 n.22, 277 n.6 scholasticism 18, 102, 199 Sedeño, Gregorio, Fray 107, 110–12 self-fashioning: see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, self-fashioning

314  self-portraiture see portraits, self-portrait, literary self-representation see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, self-fashioning; portraits, self-portrait, literary sermons 40; see also Picazo, Agustina; Vidarte, Jacinta de; Vieira, Father Antonio funeral 35–37, 42, 84, 89, 104–12, 115, 116, 119, 123, 134, 136, 277 Sessa, Duke de (Félix Fernández de Córdoba Cardona y Aragón) 77, 78 n.17 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de 16, 78 n.18, 83 n.22, 84, 148, 165, 177 n.12, 273 Parayso occidental 41 n.30, 148 n.1 Theatro de virtudes políticas 16 Triunfo parténico 82 n.21, 177 n.11 sins 20, 81, 105, 106, 115, 128, 135, 230, 234, 235, 253 Smith, Sidonie 108, 111 Soriano Vallès, Alejandro 28 n.15, 33, 33 n.21 souls 59, 76 n.16, 118–19, 123, 137, 149, 162, 184, 186, 199, 201, 224, 243–44 and gender 43, 103, 138, 151–52, 153 n.4, 184–85, 189, 190–92, 197, 198, 236 Tenth Muse 19, 21, 23, 36, 43, 66, 136, 150–51, 159, 161, 171, 198, 254, 272–74; see also Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as Tenth Muse Tenorio, Martha Lilia 14 n.4, 30 n.17, 79 n.18, 84 n.23, 177 n.11 Poesía novohispana 79 n.18, 177 n.11 Teresa of Avila, St 61, 76 n.16, 103, 106, 111, 120 n.17, 273 visual portrayals of 61, 61 n.5, 63 Thomas Aquinas, St 152 n.4, 184 Thomas, George Antony 14 n.4, 24, 26 Tineo de Morales, Fray Luis 58, 76, 103, 155, 155 n.6, 161, 172, 191 tournaments, poetic (certámenes) 14, 36, 40 n.28, 82 n.21, 156, 177 n.11 Trabulse, Elías 29, 30 n.17, 32, 34, 84, 114–15 trading, transatlantic 149–50, 172, 182, 198 treasures, New World 113, 149–56, 159, 171, 200; see also abundance, American; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, as treasure tributes see elegies, funerary; Fama y obras pósthumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, elegies in Valle y Caviedes, Juan del 157, 192, 194 vanity 103, 106, 230, 253 Vega y Carpio, Lope Félix de 14, 18 n.9, 21, 36, 78 n.17

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de l a Cruz

Verdejo Ladrón de Guevara, Luis 150, 151, 174, 191 Vetancurt, Fray Agustín de 37, 196 vida see vitae Vidarte, Jacinta de 106 n.5, 107, 109–10, 112, 116, 137, 148 Vieira, Father Antonio 30, 31, 85, 88, 103, 121, 157, 187, 187 n.17 Villena, José de 164, 177, 178, 179 Virgin Mary 108, 135 Marian writing 66 n.11, 69 n.12, 82, 108, 170, 185 n.16 Virgin of Guadalupe 158 virtues 13, 42, 76n.16, 118; see also charity; chastity; humility; mujer fuerte; obedience; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, charity of; obedience of; virtues of of early modern women 105–12; see also Picazo, Agustina; Vidarte, Jacinta de vitae 34, 35 n.23, 36, 37, 40, 42, 89, 100–01, 104, 106–08, 109 n.10, 113–14, 119 n.16, 134, 148 n.2, 158 n.8, 217, 231, 254; see also biography, spiritual; Calleja, Father Diego, Aprobación; saints, lives of; hagiographies volcanoes 60, 66 n.11, 66–70, 117, 168–70, 172, 176, 182, 192–97, 200 Popocatépetl 66, 67 Iztaccíhuatl 66 Wall, Wendy 24, 26, 56, 65, 260 Wanko, Cheryl 21, 23 n.11, 26 woman (women): early modern 17, 105–06 as early modern writers 16, 19, 26, 44, 255, 257–62, 259 n.20, 274, 277, 277 n.6 education of 189 enclosure of 28, 30, 105, 108; see divide, public-private and knowledge: see Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, and knowledge as “manly woman” (mujer varonil) 138, 151, 182, 190, 199, 216 as public woman: see fame, and women; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, mala fama as widows 105, 107, 110–11, 119 Wray, Grady C. 81 n.20, 130 n.22 Yucatán, bishopric see Castorena Ursúa Goyeneche y Villareal, Juan Ignacio María de, as Bishop of Yucatán Zapata, Pedro 156, 157, 191–92 Zacatecas 74 n.14, 158 n.8, 169