Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Portrait by Miguel Cabrera c. 1750, oil on canvas, National Museum of History.
Born	Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-11-12)November 12, 1648 San Miguel Nepantla (New Spain)
Died	April 17, 1695(1695-04-17) (aged 46) Mexico City (New Spain)
Cause of death	Possibly epidemic typhus
Resting place	Convent of San Jerónimo
Other name	Juana de Asbaje
Occupations	Writer and nun
Years active	17th century
Known for	Lyric poetry, playwriting and prose (literary languages: Spanish and Nahuatl; native language: Spanish)
Notable work	El divino Narciso Los empeños de una casa Primero sueño Neptuno alegórico Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz
Movement	Baroque
Signature
File:Signature of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.svg

Juana Inés de Asbaje Ramírez de Santillana (San Miguel Nepantla, Tepetlixpa; November 12, 1648 – Mexico City, April 17, 1695), better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or Juana de Asbaje, was a Hieronymite nun and writer of New Spain, an exponent of the Golden Age of literature in Spanish.

Considered by many to be the Tenth Muse, she cultivated lyric poetry, the auto sacramental and theatre, as well as prose. She learned to read and write at a very early age. She belonged to the court of Antonio Sebastián de Toledo Molina y Salazar, Marquis of Mancera and 25th Viceroy of New Spain. In 1669, out of a longing for knowledge, she entered monastic life. Her most important patrons were the Viceroys De Mancera, the Archbishop-Viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the Marquises of La Laguna de Camero Viejo, also Viceroys of New Spain, who published the first two volumes of her works in peninsular Spain. Thanks to Juan Ignacio María de Castorena Ursúa y Goyeneche, Bishop of Yucatán, the work that Sor Juana had left unpublished when she was condemned to destroy her writings is known. He published it in Spain. Sor Juana died as a result of an epidemic on April 17, 1695, in the Convent of San Jerónimo.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz held, together with Bernardo de Balbuena, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a prominent place in New Spanish literature. In the field of lyric poetry, her work belongs to the guidelines of the Spanish Baroque in its late stage. Sor Juana's lyric production, which accounts for half of her work, is a crucible in which the culture of a New Spain at its height, the culteranismo of Góngora and the conceptista work of Quevedo and Calderón converge.

Sor Juana's dramatic work ranges from the religious to the profane. Her most notable works in this genre are Amor es más laberinto, Los empeños de una casa and a series of autos sacramentales conceived to be performed at court. She also wrote poetry in Nahuatl.

Biography

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, by Juan de Miranda (Convent of Santa Paula, Seville).

Early years

Until almost the middle of the 20th century, Sor Juana scholarship accepted as valid the testimony of Diego Calleja, the nun's first biographer, regarding her date of birth. According to Calleja, Sor Juana would have been born on November 13, 1651, in San Miguel de Nepantla. In 1952, the discovery of a baptismal record that supposedly belonged to Sor Juana pushed the poet's date of birth back to 1648. According to that document, Juana Inés would have been baptized on December 5, 1648. Several critics, such as Octavio Paz, Antonio Alatorre, and Guillermo Schmidhuber, accept the validity of the baptismal record, as does Alberto G. Salceda, although the Cuban scholar Georgina Sabat de Rivers considers the evidence provided by this record insufficient. Thus, according to Sabat, the baptismal entry would correspond to a relative or to a French woman. According to Alejandro Soriano Vallés, the most acceptable date is 1651, because one of Sor Juana's sisters was supposedly born on March 19, 1649, making it impossible for Juana Inés to have been born in November 1648. (This supposition of 1651 is not based on supporting documents, but on assumptions that start from the date reported by Diego Calleja in 1700. However, Guillermo Schmidhuber's discovery of the baptismal certificate of "María, daughter of the Church" in Chimalhuacán, dated July 23, 1651, belonging to Sor Juana's younger sister, rules out the birth of the Tenth Muse in 1651, because the mother's womb was occupied by another girl, that is, her sister María.)

The research scholar Dr. Lourdes Aguilar Salas, in the biography she provides for the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, points to 1651 as the most correct. In fact, what Alejandro Soriano maintains had already been stated earlier by Georgina Sabat de Rivers, and he only later takes up the argument of the renowned Sor Juana scholar, who personally leans toward the year 1651 because, since the baptismal date of Sor Juana's sister named Josefa María is known to be March 29, 1649, the proximity of the dates made it impossible to imagine two births so close together (Note: the baptismal certificate of Josefa María has never been located; the date of birth of this girl is an assumption that has not been based on a document).

However, this argument is also inevitably relativized when we know that the interval between birth and baptism was frequently not just days, but months and even years, just as we know from the historian Robert McCaa, who bases his work on a direct study of the written sources of the period, that baptismal records in rural areas were entered in the registers when the infants were anywhere from several months to one or several years past the time they had been presented for baptism. The discovery of the Chimalhuacán record by the historian Guillermo Ramírez España was published by Alberto G. Salceda in 1952; in it, Sor Juana's uncle and aunt appear as godparents of a girl recorded as a "daughter of the Church," that is, illegitimate. Previously the only reference available was the biography of Sor Juana written by the Jesuit Diego Calleja and published in the third volume of Sor Juana's works: Fama y obras póstumas (Madrid, 1700). Nevertheless, the existing documents are not definitive on the matter. On the one hand, Calleja's biography suffers from inaccuracies typical of the hagiographic tendency of the period regarding prominent ecclesiastical figures; that is, the data were possibly altered with ulterior intentions. To give just one example, Calleja categorically sets the day of Sor Juana's supposed birth on a Friday, when November 12, 1651, the date he recorded, was not a Friday. On the other hand, the Chimalhuacán record found in the 20th century provides scant data about the baptized girl; if, as is currently accepted, the December 1648 date is only that of baptism, the date of birth could have been several months or a year earlier. Schmidhuber has discovered a second baptismal entry from the parish of Chimalhuacán that reads «María, daughter of the Church»; it is dated July 23, 1651, and the name matches that of Sor Juana's younger sister; it is impossible for another girl to have been born the same year.

To this day, the most rigorous position from a historiographical point of view is to keep to the alternative 1648/1651, as happens with countless historical figures whose dates of birth or death are not known with absolute certainty from the documents available at the time. Adopting such an alternative as a general rule does not affect studies of Sor Juana, either of her biography or of the assessment of her work.

Although little is known about her parents, Juana Inés was the second of the three daughters of Pedro de Asuaje y Vargas Machuca (Sor Juana wrote the names this way in the Book of Professions of the Convent of San Jerónimo). It has been claimed that her father was a native of Gipuzkoa in Spain, but this has not been documented; it is known that her parents were never joined in church marriage. However, Schmidhuber has documented that the father arrived in New Spain as a child, as proven by the Passage Permit of 1598, in the company of his widowed grandmother, María Ramírez de Vargas, his mother Antonia Laura Majuelo and a younger brother, Francisco de Asuaje, who became a Dominican friar. In San Miguel Nepantla, in the Region of Chalco, his daughter Juana Inés was born, in an obscure place then called «la celda» ("the cell"). Her mother soon separated from her partner and later had three more children with Diego Ruiz Lozano, whom she did not marry either.

Many critics have expressed their surprise at the civil situation of Sor Juana's parents. Paz notes that this was due to a «laxity of sexual morals in the colony». The effect on Sor Juana of knowing she was an illegitimate daughter is also unknown, although it is known that she tried to hide it. Her testament of 1669 reveals this: «legitimate daughter of Don Pedro de Asuaje y Vargas, deceased, and of Doña Isabel Ramírez». Father Calleja was unaware of it, since he makes no mention of it in his biographical study. Her mother, in her testament dated 1687, acknowledges that all her children, including Sor Juana, were conceived out of wedlock.

Frontispiece of the Panoaya hacienda, in Amecameca, State of Mexico, where Sor Juana lived between 1648 and 1656.

The girl spent her childhood between Amecameca, Yecapixtla, Panoayan—where her grandfather had a hacienda—and Nepantla. There she learned Nahuatl from the Indians of her grandfather's haciendas, where wheat and maize were grown. Sor Juana's grandfather died in 1656, so her mother took charge of the estates. Likewise, she learned to read and write at the age of three, by taking lessons with her older sister without her mother's knowledge.

Her love of reading began early, thanks to her discovery of her grandfather's library, and she became fond of books. She learned everything that was known in her time; that is, she read the Greek and Roman classics and the theology of the day. Her eagerness for knowledge was such that she tried to convince her mother to send her to the University disguised as a man, since women could not attend it. It is said that when studying a lesson, she would cut off a piece of her own hair if she had not learned it correctly, for she did not think it right for the head to be covered with beauty if it lacked ideas. At the age of eight, between 1657 and 1659, she won a book for a loa composed in honor of the Blessed Sacrament, according to her biographer and friend Diego Calleja. He states that Juana Inés lived in Mexico City from the age of eight, although there is more reliable information that she did not settle there until she was thirteen or fifteen.

Adolescence

Portrait of Sor Juana, by Fray Miguel de Herrera

Juana Inés lived with María Ramírez, her mother's sister, and with her husband Juan de Mata. She may have been sent away from her mother's haciendas because of the death of her maternal grandfather. She lived in the Mata household for approximately eight years, from 1656 to 1664. Then began her period at court, which would end with her entry into religious life.

Between 1664 and 1665, she entered the court of the Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, Marquis of Mancera. The Vicereine, Leonor de Carreto, became one of her most important patrons. The environment and the protection of the Viceroys would decisively shape Juana Inés's literary production. By then her intelligence and her sagacity were already known, for it is said that, on the Viceroy's instructions, a group of learned humanists examined her, and the young woman passed the examination with flying colors.

The viceregal court was one of the most cultured and enlightened places in the Viceroyalty. Sumptuous tertulias were customarily held there, attended by theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, historians and all kinds of humanists, most of them graduates or professors of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. There, as lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine, the adolescent Juana developed her intellect and her literary abilities. On repeated occasions she wrote sonnets, poems and funeral elegies that were well received at court. Chávez notes that Juana Inés was known as «the Vicereine's dearly beloved», and that the Viceroy also held her in special esteem. Leonor de Carreto was the first protector of the girl poet.

Little is known about this stage of Sor Juana's life, although one of the most valuable testimonies for studying that period has been the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz. This lack of data has contributed to several authors wanting to recreate, in an almost novelistic manner, Sor Juana's adolescent life, often supposing the existence of unrequited loves.

Period of maturity

Design of the Neptuno alegórico

She wanted to enter the University, but since women had no right to study she disguised herself as a man in order to be admitted. At the end of 1666 she drew the attention of Father Núñez de Miranda, confessor to the Viceroys, who, on learning that the young girl did not wish to marry, proposed that she enter a religious order. She learned Latin in twenty lessons given by Martín de Olivas and probably paid for by Núñez de Miranda. After a failed attempt with the Carmelites, whose rule was of an extreme rigidity that made her fall ill, she entered the Order of Saint Jerome, where discipline was somewhat more relaxed, and she had a two-story cell and servants. She remained there for the rest of her life, as the statutes of the order allowed her to study, write, hold tertulias and receive visitors, such as Leonor de Carreto, who never ended her friendship with the poet.

Façade of the Church of San Jerónimo in Mexico City. Sor Juana lived most of her life in this convent complex.

Many critics and biographers attributed her departure from court to a romantic disappointment, although she often expressed that she did not feel attracted to love and that only monastic life could allow her to devote herself to intellectual studies. It is known that Sor Juana received payment from the Church for her villancicos, just as she obtained it from the Court for preparing loas or other spectacles.

In 1674 she suffered another blow: the Viceroy of Mancera and his wife were relieved of their post and, in Tepeaca, on the journey to Veracruz, Leonor de Carreto died. Sor Juana dedicated several elegies to her, among which «De la beldad de Laura enamorados» stands out, Laura being the Vicereine's pseudonym. In this sonnet she demonstrates her knowledge and mastery of the prevailing Petrarchan conventions and topoi.

In 1680, Fray Payo Enríquez de Rivera was replaced by Tomás de la Cerda y Aragón at the head of the Viceroyalty. Sor Juana was commissioned to design the triumphal arch that would adorn the entry of the Viceroys into the capital, for which she wrote her famous Neptuno alegórico. She favorably impressed the Viceroys, who offered her their protection and friendship, especially the Vicereine María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess of Paredes, who was very close to her: the Vicereine owned a portrait of the nun and a ring the nun had given her, and on her departure she took Sor Juana's texts to Spain to have them printed.

Her confessor, the Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda, reproached her for concerning herself so much with worldly subjects, which, together with her frequent contact with the highest personalities of the period owing to her great intellectual fame, unleashed his wrath. Under the protection of the Marchioness of La Laguna, she decided to reject him as her confessor.

Sor Juana (ca. 1680), by Juan de Miranda (UNAM).

The government of the Marquis of La Laguna (1680–1686) coincides with the golden age of Sor Juana's production. She wrote sacred and profane verse, villancicos for religious festivities, autos sacramentales (El divino Narciso, El cetro de José and El mártir del sacramento) and two comedias (Los empeños de una casa and Amor es más laberinto). She also served as administrator of the convent, with good judgment, and carried out scientific experiments.

Between 1690 and 1691 she became involved in a theological dispute as a result of a private critique she made of a sermon by the very well-known Jesuit preacher António Vieira, which was published by the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, under the title Carta atenagórica. He wrote its prologue under the pseudonym Sor Filotea, recommending that Sor Juana stop devoting herself to «human letters» and devote herself instead to divine ones, from which, according to the Bishop of Puebla, she would derive greater benefit. This provoked the poet's reaction in the writing Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in which she makes an impassioned defense of her intellectual work and in which she claimed women's right to education.

Final stage

Statue of Sor Juana Inés in Madrid, Spain

Sculpture of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in front of the Convent of San Jerónimo, Mexico City.

By 1692 and 1693 the last period of Sor Juana's life began. Her friends and protectors had died: the Count of Paredes, Juan de Guevara and ten nuns of the Convent of San Jerónimo. These dates coincide with unrest in New Spain; rebellions broke out in the north of the Viceroyalty, the mob stormed the Royal Palace and epidemics ravaged the population of New Spain.

A strange change took place in the poet: around 1693 she stopped writing and seemed to devote herself more to religious tasks. To date the reason for this change is not precisely known; Catholic critics have seen in Sor Juana a greater dedication to supernatural matters and a mystical surrender to Jesus Christ, especially after the renewal of her religious vows in 1694. Others, by contrast, discern a misogynistic conspiracy plotted against her, after which she was condemned to stop writing and was forced to carry out what the ecclesiastical authorities considered the appropriate tasks of a nun. There have been no conclusive data, but progress has been made in research that has uncovered the controversy caused by the Carta atenagórica. Her own penance is expressed in the signature she set down in the convent's book: «I, the worst in the world», which has become one of her most famous phrases. Until recently, some claimed that before her death she was forced by her confessor (Núñez de Miranda, with whom she had reconciled) to get rid of her library and her collection of musical and scientific instruments. However, a clause was discovered in the testament of Father José de Lombeyda, an old friend of Sor Juana, which relates how she herself entrusted him with selling the books in order to help the poor by giving the money to the Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar.

At the beginning of 1695 an epidemic broke out that wreaked havoc throughout the capital, but especially in the Convent of San Jerónimo. Of every ten sick nuns, nine died. On February 17 Núñez de Miranda died. Sor Juana fell ill a short time later, as she was helping care for the sick nuns. At four in the morning on April 17, when she was forty-six years old, Juana Inés de Asbaje Ramírez died. According to one document, she left 180 volumes of select works, furniture, an image of the Holy Trinity and a Child Jesus. Everything was given to her family, except for the images, which she herself, before dying, had left to the Archbishop. She was buried on the day of her death, with the Cathedral Chapter in attendance. The funeral was presided over by the Canon Francisco de Aguilar and the funeral oration was delivered by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. The following inscription was placed on the tombstone:

In this precinct, which is the lower choir and burial place of the nuns of San Jerónimo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was buried on April 17, 1695.

In 1978, during routine excavations in the center of Mexico City, her supposed remains were found and given great publicity. Several events were held around the discovery, although their authenticity could never be corroborated. They are currently located in the Historic Center of Mexico City, between Isabel la Católica and Izazaga streets.

Characteristics of her work

Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz made in 1772 by Andrés de Islas (Museo de América, Madrid).

She composed a great variety of theatrical works. Her most famous comedia is Los empeños de una casa, which in some of its scenes recalls the work of Lope de Vega. Another of her well-known theatrical works is Amor es más laberinto, which was esteemed for its creation of characters, such as Theseus, the main hero. Her three autos sacramentales reveal the theological side of her work: El mártir del sacramento—in which she mythologizes Saint Hermenegild—, El cetro de José and El divino Narciso, written to be performed at the court of Madrid.

Her lyric poetry also stands out, amounting to approximately half of her production: love poems in which disappointment is a frequently used device, vestibule poems and occasional compositions in honor of figures of the period. Other notable works by Sor Juana are her villancicos and the tocotín, a kind of derivation of that genre that intersperses passages in indigenous languages. Sor Juana also wrote a treatise on music called El caracol, which has not been found; however, she considered it a poor work, and it may be that for this reason she did not allow it to be circulated.

According to her, almost everything she had written was done on commission, and the only thing she wrote for her own pleasure was Primero sueño. Sor Juana wrote—at the request of the Countess of Paredes—some poems that tested the wit of their readers—known as «enigmas»—for a group of Portuguese nuns who were fond of reading and great admirers of her work, who exchanged letters and formed a society to which they gave the name Casa del placer ("House of Pleasure"). The manuscript copies these nuns made of Sor Juana's work were discovered in 1968 by Enrique Martínez López in the Library of Lisbon.

Themes

Segundo tomo de las obras de sóror Juana Inés de la Cruz, monja profesa en el monasterio del señor San Jeronimo de la Ciudad de México, dedicado por la autora a D. Juan de Orúe y Orbieto, caballero de la Orden de Santiago. Seville, Tomás López de Haro, 1692.

In the field of comedy, she starts above all from the meticulous development of a complex intrigue, of an intelligent plot, based on misunderstandings, mix-ups and reversals of fortune that are nevertheless resolved as a reward for the virtue of the protagonists. She insists on presenting the private problems of families (Los empeños de una casa), whose antecedents in Spanish Baroque theater range from Guillén de Castro to Calderonian comedies such as La dama duende, Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar and other works that address the same subject matter as Los empeños.

One of her great themes is the analysis of true love and the integrity of courage and virtue, all of which is reflected in one of her masterpieces, Amor es más laberinto. Also notable (and exemplified by all her works) is her treatment of woman as a strong character who is capable of handling the wills of the surrounding characters and the threads of her own destiny.

One also observes, as she herself confessed, a permanent imitation of the poetry of Luis de Góngora and of his Soledades, although in an atmosphere different from that of the poet known as the Andalusian Apollo. The setting in Sor Juana is always seen as nocturnal, dreamlike, and at times even complex and difficult. In this sense, Primero sueño and all her lyric work address the vast majority of forms of expression, classical and ideal forms that can be observed throughout the lyric production of the nun of San Jerónimo.

In her Carta atenagórica, Sor Juana refutes point by point what she considered the erroneous theses of the Jesuit Vieira. This is in keeping with the spirit of the thinkers of the Golden Age, especially Francisco Suárez. Her use of syllogisms and of casuistry is striking, employed in an energetic and precise prose, but at the same time as eloquent as in the first classics of the Spanish Golden Age.

Faced with the reproach made by the Bishop of Puebla as a result of her critique of Vieira, Sor Juana does not refrain from answering the prelate. In the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz one perceives the freedom of the nun-poet's judgment, her acuity and her obsession with achieving a personal, dynamic style free of impositions.

Style

Monument to Sor Juana in Chapultepec Forest, Mexico City.

The predominant style of her works is the Baroque; Sor Juana was very given to making puns, to turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, to piling three adjectives onto the same noun and distributing them throughout the sentence, and to other grammatical liberties that were in fashion in her time. She is likewise a master of the art of the sonnet and of the Baroque conceit.

Sor Juana's lyric poetry, a witness to the end of the Hispanic Baroque, has at its disposal all the devices that the great poets of the Golden Age used in their compositions. In order to give her poetry an air of renewal, she introduces some technical innovations and stamps it with her very particular seal. Sor Juana's poetry rests on three great pillars: versification, mythological allusions and hyperbaton.

Several scholars, especially Tomás Navarro Tomás, have concluded that Sor Juana achieves an innovative mastery of verse reminiscent of Lope de Vega or Quevedo. The perfection of her meter, however, entails a problem of chronology: it is not possible to determine which poems were written first on the basis of stylistic questions. In the field of poetry, Sor Juana also turned to mythology as a source, as did many Renaissance and Baroque poets. The writer's deep knowledge of certain myths causes some of her poems to be flooded with references to these subjects. This aspect is most noticeable in some of her most culterano compositions, since mythology was one of the paths that every learned poet, in the style of Góngora, had to display.

On the other hand, hyperbaton, a frequently used device in the period, reaches its splendor in El sueño, a work full of forced syntax and combinatorial formulations. Rosa Perelmuter notes that in New Spain it was the nun of San Jerónimo who brought Baroque literature to its summit. Sor Juana's work is a characteristic expression of Baroque ideology: it raises existential problems with a manifest didactic intention; its topoi are well known and form part of Baroque «disillusionment» (desengaño). There are also elements such as carpe diem, the triumph of reason over physical beauty and the intellectual limitation of the human being.

Sor Juana's prose is made up of short independent sentences separated by punctuation marks—comma, period and semicolon—rather than by subordinating connectives. Juxtaposition and coordination therefore predominate. The scant presence of subordinate clauses in complex periods, far from making comprehension easier, makes it arduous; it becomes necessary to supply the logic of the relations between the sentences, deducing it from the meaning, from the idea being expressed, which is not always easy. Her depth, then, lies in the concept as well as in the syntax.

Sources

First part of Inundación castálida, complete works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Madrid, 1689).

Her skill in cultivating both the comedy of intrigue (Los empeños de una casa) and the autos sacramentales stands out. However, her works hardly touch on themes of the popular romancero, limiting themselves to comedy and to mythological or religious subjects. Her emulation of outstanding authors of the Golden Age is well known. One of her poems presents the Virgin as Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes, rescuing people in distress. Her admiration for Góngora is evident in most of her sonnets and, above all, in Primero sueño, while the enormous influence of Calderón de la Barca can be summed up in the titles of two of Sor Juana's works: Los empeños de una casa, an emulation of Los empeños de un ocaso, and El divino Narciso, a title similar to Calderón's El divino Orfeo.

Her training and inclinations are those of a theologian, like Calderón, or those of a friar, like Tirso, or of a specialist in sacred history, like Lope de Vega. Her sacred conception of drama led her to defend the indigenous world, to which she turned through her autos sacramentales. She takes her subjects from very diverse sources: from Greek mythology, from pre-Hispanic religious legends and from the Bible. The importance of the observation of contemporary customs, present in works such as Los empeños de una casa, has also been pointed out.

Characters

Most of her characters belong to mythology, and burghers or peasants are scarce. This departs from the moralizing intention in keeping with the didactic premises of religious tragedy. Her work is notable for the psychological characterization of its female characters, often protagonists, always intelligent and ultimately capable of steering their own destiny, despite the difficulties with which the condition of women within the structure of Baroque society burdens their possibilities of action and decision. Ezequiel A. Chávez, in his Ensayo de psicología, points out that in her dramatic production the male characters are characterized by their strength, even reaching extremes of brutality, whereas the women, who begin by personifying the qualities of beauty and the capacity to love and be loved, end up being examples of virtue, firmness and courage.

Sor Juana's autos sacramentales, especially El cetro de José, include a great number of real characters—Joseph and his brothers—and imaginary ones, such as the personification of various virtues. The Patriarch Joseph appears as the prefiguration of Christ in Egypt. The allegorized passage of the auto, in which the biblical story of Joseph is transposed, makes it possible to equate the dreams of the biblical hero with knowledge given by God.

Feminist reading

Main article: Feminist reading of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Modern interpretation of the famous portrait by the Mexican artist Mauricio García Vega.

Among scholars of Sor Juana there has been debate about the alleged feminism that a certain sector of criticism attributes to the nun. Feminists have recognized in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea and in the redondilla Hombres necios authentic documents of liberation for women. However, resistance on the part of Men, chiefly Antonio Alatorre, refutes this theory. For Alatorre, the satirical redondilla in question lacks feminist traces and offers, rather, a moral attack pointing out the hypocrisy of seductive men, whose precedents can be found in authors such as Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: there was nothing new about attacking men's moral hypocrisy toward women. The Respuesta merely demands women's right to education, but keeping within the customs of the period. It is a direct critique and a personal defense of her right to learning, to knowledge, to the natural inclination toward learning that God granted her.

One author who denies feminism in that work is Stephanie Marrim, who points out that one cannot speak of feminism in the nun's work, since she merely defended herself: the feminist allusions in her work are strictly personal, not collective. According to Alatorre, Sor Juana decided to symbolically neutralize her sexuality through the nun's habit. On marriage and her entry into the convent, the Respuesta states:

Although I knew that the state had things […] many of them repugnant to my temperament, nevertheless, given the total aversion I had to marriage, it was the least disproportionate and the most decent thing I could choose in the matter of the security I desired for my salvation.

According to most philologists, Sor Juana advocated for the equality of the sexes and for women's right to acquire knowledge. Alatorre acknowledges it: «Sor Juana, the undisputed pioneer (at least in the Spanish-speaking world) of the modern women's liberation movement». Along the same lines, the scholar Rosa Perelmuter analyzes various features of Sor Juana's poetry: the defense of women's rights, her personal experiences and a relative rejection of men. Perelmuter concludes that Sor Juana always favored the use of a neutral voice in her poetry, in order to achieve a better reception and critique.

According to Patricia Saldarriaga, Primero sueño, Sor Juana's most famous lyric work, includes allusions to female body fluids such as menstruation and lactation. In the medieval literary tradition it was believed that menstrual flow nourished the fetus and then turned into breast milk; the poet takes advantage of this notion to emphasize the all-important role of woman in the cycle of life, creating a symbiosis that allows the process to be identified with a divine gift.

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Octavio Paz consider that Sor Juana's work breaks with all the canons of women's literature. She challenges knowledge, immerses herself completely in epistemological questions foreign to the women of that period and often writes in scientific, not religious, terms. According to Electa Arenal, all of Sor Juana's production—especially El sueño and several sonnets—reflects the poet's intention to create a universe, at least a literary one, where woman would reign above all things. The philosophical character of these works gives the nun the invaluable opportunity to discourse on the role of women, while keeping to her social reality and her historical moment.

Works

Drama

In addition to the two comedies reviewed here (Los empeños de una casa and Amor es más laberinto, the latter written together with Juan de Guevara), Sor Juana has been credited with a possible ending to Agustín de Salazar's comedy La segunda Celestina. In the 1990s Guillermo Schmidhuber found a suelta (loose printing) containing an ending different from the one previously known, and proposed that those thousand lines were by Sor Juana. Some Sor Juana scholars have accepted Sor Juana's co-authorship, among them Octavio Paz, Georgina Sabat-Rivers and Luis Leal. Others, such as Antonio Alatorre and José Pascual Buxó, have rejected it.

La segunda Celestina

Main article: La segunda Celestina

This comedy was written to be performed on the birthday of Queen Mariana of Habsburg (December 22, 1675), but its author, Agustín de Salazar y Torres, died on November 29 of that same year, leaving the comedy unfinished. In 1989 Schmidhuber put forward the hypothesis that an ending to Salazar's comedy, until then considered anonymous, which had been published in a suelta under the title "La segunda Celestina", might be the work of Sor Juana. The comedy was edited in 1990 by Octavio Paz, with a prologue of his own attributing its authorship to Sor Juana. In New Spain there is record of a performance of this piece at the Coliseo de Comedias in 1679, as cited by Armando de María y Campos. In 2016 this comedy was performed at the National Palace by the Compañía de Teatro Clásico, directed by Francisco Hernández Ramos. The comedy has been published several times; the editions of the University of Guadalajara and of the Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura of the State of Mexico stand out.

Los empeños de una casa

Main article: Los empeños de una casa

It was first performed on October 4, 1683, during the festivities for the birth of the firstborn son of the Viceroy, the Count of Paredes. However, some critics maintain that it may have been staged for the entry into the capital of Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, although this theory is not considered entirely viable.

The story revolves around two couples who love each other but, by the twists of fate, cannot yet be together. This comedy of intrigue is one of the most outstanding works of late Baroque Hispanic American literature, and one of its most distinctive features is the woman as the driving axis of the story: a strong and determined character who expresses the yearnings—often frustrated—of the nun. Doña Leonor, the protagonist, fits this archetype perfectly.

It is often considered the summit of Sor Juana's work and even of all New Spanish literature. The handling of the intrigue, the depiction of the complicated system of conjugal relations and the vicissitudes of urban life make Los empeños de una casa an unusual work within the theater of colonial Hispanic America.

Amor es más laberinto

Main article: Amor es más laberinto

It premiered on February 11, 1689, during the celebrations for the assumption of the viceroyalty by Gaspar de la Cerda y Mendoza. It was written in collaboration with Fray Juan de Guevara, a friend of the poet, who wrote only the second act of the theatrical festivity. Ezequiel A. Chávez, in his Ensayo de psicología, nevertheless mentions Francisco Fernández del Castillo as co-author of this comedy.

The plot takes up a very well-known theme of Greek mythology: Theseus, hero of the Island of Crete, fights the Minotaur and awakens the love of Ariadne and Phaedra. Sor Juana conceives Theseus as the archetype of the Baroque hero, a model also used by her compatriot Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. On triumphing over the Minotaur, he does not grow proud, but rather acknowledges his humility.

Autos sacramentales

Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México (Madrid: Ruiz de Murga, 1700).

From the end of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century the genre of the auto sacramental remained almost forgotten. The prohibition of their performance in 1765 led critics to describe it as a deformation of taste and an affront to the principles of Catholicism. It is to German Romanticism that the reappraisal of the auto sacramental and the interest in studying the subject are owed, which led to the recognition of its importance in the history of Spanish literature.

In New Spain the auto sacramental began to be performed immediately after the Conquest, since it was a useful means of achieving the evangelization of the natives. Sor Juana wrote, on commission from the court in Madrid, three autos—El divino Narciso, El cetro de José and El mártir del sacramento—whose themes deal with the European colonization of America. Here Sor Juana takes up devices from the theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and uses them to create lyrical passages of great beauty.

El divino Narciso

Main article: El divino Narciso

It is the best known, most original and most perfect of Sor Juana's autos sacramentales. It was published in 1689. El divino Narciso represents the culmination of the tradition of the auto sacramental, brought to its highest point by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, from whom Sor Juana takes most of the elements of the auto, and carries them even further, creating a great auto sacramental. In El divino Narciso Sor Juana uses a lyrical-dramatic ensemble to bring the characters she created to life. The divine Narcissus, personification of Jesus Christ, lives in love with His image, and the whole story is narrated from that premise. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Julio Jiménez Rueda and Amado Nervo have agreed that El divino Narciso is the most accomplished of Sor Juana's autos.

It alludes to the theme of the conquest of America and to the traditions of the native peoples of the continent, although this theme was not popular in the literature of her time. Sor Juana makes use of an Aztec rite, represented by a tocotín, in honor of Huitzilopochtli to introduce the veneration of the Eucharist and to link pre-Columbian beliefs with Hispanic Catholicism. It is one of the pioneering works in depicting collective conversion to Christianity, since European theater was accustomed to depicting only individual conversion.

The work features allegorical characters based mainly on Greco-Roman mythology and, to a lesser extent, on the Bible. Human Nature, the protagonist, converses with Synagogue and Gentility, and confronts Echo and Pride. At the same time Narcissus, the divine shepherd, son of the nymph Liriope and of the River Cephissus, personifies Christ.

El divino Narciso is in many respects more than Calderonian theater, since its reflection encompasses the relationship between two worlds. Among the various possible sources of the conception of Narcissus as Christ, one may mention everything from Plotinus to Marsilio Ficino. The theological and metaphysical dimension of the work also points to the texts of Nicholas of Cusa, whose philosophy inspires many of Sor Juana's finest pages. In El divino Narciso, the meaning of the New Spanish author's theatrical exposition of the sacrament of the Eucharist can be traced back to apologetic literature. Considering that the loa governs a subtle line of argument on how the pagan gods are reverberations of Christian truth, whether in the Old or the New World, we can find in the auto various mythical parallels that express different facets of the Christian religion under the principles offered by the apologists who catechized the ancient world. The echo of the apologetic literature of the beginning of the Christian era thus resonates in this work of Sor Juana's insofar as it contains multiple glimpses of the ancient pagan gods as unfinished or imperfect versions of the story of Christ. The delicacy of the verses, the variety of stanzas and the dramatic and narrative resolution also make El divino Narciso one of the most perfect works of New Spanish literature. Its proposal—besides being pacifist through an accumulation of Orphic-Pythagorean references—also fulfills the auto's mission of syncretizing the ancient religion of the Mexica in favor of Christianity, and offers the reader a poetic and ecumenical thesis of the Christian religion.

El cetro de José

Main article: El cetro de José

The date of its composition is unknown, but it was published, together with El mártir del sacramento, in the second volume of Inundación castálida in 1692 in Madrid. Like El divino Narciso, El cetro de José uses Pre-Columbian America as a vehicle for telling a story with biblical and mythological overtones. The theme of human sacrifice appears again in Sor Juana's work, as a diabolical imitation of the Eucharist. Even so, Sor Juana feels affection and esteem for the natives and for the missionary friars who brought Christianity to America, as can be seen in several sections of the auto. Furthermore, the auto is a pioneer in depicting collective conversions to Christianity, something unprecedented until then in religious literature.

El cetro de José belongs to the Old Testament autos, and it is the only one of this kind composed by Sor Juana. Calderón de la Barca wrote several Old Testament autos, among which Sueños hay que verdad son stands out, also inspired by the figure of the Patriarch Joseph. It is commonly held that Sor Juana wrote her autos in the firm conviction, encouraged by the Countess of Paredes, that they would be performed in Madrid. For this reason, the themes and style of these works were directed toward the peninsular public, although there is no written record that they were staged outside New Spain.

El mártir del sacramento

Main article: El mártir del sacramento

It deals with the theme of the martyrdom of Saint Hermenegild, Visigothic prince and son of Liuvigild, who died for refusing to adore an Arian host. It could be classified as an allegorical-historical auto, like La gran Casa de Austria by Agustín Moreto, or El santo rey don Fernando by Calderón de la Barca. The language is very plain and simple, with the exception of some academic technical terms. It is a work of manners (costumbrista), in the style of the entremeses of the 16th century and of some Calderonian works. Sor Juana treats a subject that is at once hagiographic and historical. On the one hand, she tries to strengthen the figure of Saint Hermenegild as a model of Christian virtues; on the other, her source is the great Historia general de España by Juan de Mariana, the most highly regarded work of that time. The author plays with «El General», a kind of auditorium of the Colegio de San Ildefonso, and with the company of actors who will perform her auto. The work begins when the first cart opens, and there are two more in the rest of the staging.

Lyric poetry

Love poetry

Poemas de la única poetisa americana, musa décima, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

In some of her sonnets Sor Juana offers a Manichaean vision of love: she personifies the beloved as virtuous and grants all defects to the abhorred lover. Several of her critics have wished to see in this a frustrated love from her time at court, although this thesis is not supported by the community of scholars. Paz, for example, points out that had her work reflected some romantic trauma, it would have been discovered and would have caused a scandal.

Sor Juana's love poetry takes up the long tradition of medieval models fixed in the Spanish Renaissance, which evolved without rupture into the Baroque. Thus, in her output one can find the typical Petrarchan antitheses, the laments and complaints of courtly love, the Neoplatonic tradition of Leone Ebreo and Baldassare Castiglione, or the Baroque Neo-Stoicism of Quevedo.

It can be classified into three groups of poems: poems of friendship, poems of a personal nature, and poems of amorous casuistry. In Sor Juana's lyric work, for the first time, the woman ceases to be the passive element of the love relationship and recovers her right, which the poet considered usurped, to express the varied range of amorous situations.

The so-called poems of friendship, or courtly poems, are devoted, in the vast majority of cases, to extolling Sor Juana's great friend and patron: the Marchioness of la Laguna, whom she nicknamed "Lisi". They are poems of a Neoplatonic character, in which love is stripped of all sexual connection in order to affirm itself as a sisterhood of souls on a spiritual level. On the other hand, the idealization of woman that Neoplatonism takes from medieval courtly love is present in these poems in a continuous praise of the Marchioness's beauty.

In the other two groups of poems, a varied series of amorous situations is analyzed: some very personal, an inheritance of the Petrarchism prevailing at the time. In a good part of her poems Sor Juana confronts passion, an intimate impulse that must not be rejected, with reason, which for Sor Juana represents the pure and disinterested aspect of true love.

Primero sueño

Main article: Primero sueño

According to critics, it is her most important poem. According to the poet's own testimony, it was the only work she wrote for her own pleasure. It was published in 1692. It appeared in print with the title Primero sueño. Since the title is not Sor Juana's doing, a good part of the critics doubt that it is accurate. In the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz Sor Juana referred to it only as the Sueño. Be that as it may, and as the poet herself affirmed, the title of the work is a tribute to Góngora and his two Soledades.

It is the longest of Sor Juana's poems—975 lines—and its theme is simple, although presented with great complexity. It is a recurring theme in Sor Juana's work: the intellectual potential of the human being. To transform this theme into poetry she resorts to two literary devices: the soul leaves the body, to which she gives a dreamlike framework.

The literary sources of the Primero sueño are diverse: the Somnium Scipionis by Cicero; The Madness of Hercules by Seneca; the poem by Francisco de Trillo y Figueroa, Pintura de la noche desde un crepúsculo a otro; the Journey of the Mind to God by Saint Bonaventure and several Hermetic works by Athanasius Kircher, in addition to the works of Góngora, chiefly the Polifemo and the Soledades, from which she takes the language in which it is written.

The poem begins with the nightfall of the human being and the sleep of nature and of man. Then the physiological functions of the human being are described, along with the failure of the soul in attempting a universal intuition. In response, the soul resorts to the deductive method, and Sor Juana alludes at great length to the knowledge humanity possesses. The yearning for knowledge is maintained, although the scant human capacity to comprehend creation is acknowledged. The final part recounts the awakening of the senses and the triumph of Day over Night.

It is the work that best reflects Sor Juana's character: passionate about the sciences and the humanities, a heterodox trait that might foreshadow the Enlightenment. Paz's judgment on the Primero sueño is categorical: «one must underscore Sor Juana's absolute originality as regards the subject and substance of her poem: there is nothing in all of Spanish literature and poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries that resembles the Primero sueño».

The "Primero sueño", as Octavio Paz rightly points out, is a unique poem in the poetry of the Golden Age, since it unites poetry and thought in their most complex, subtle and philosophical expressions, something uncommon in its time. It draws on the finest mystical and contemplative tradition of its time to tell the reader that man, despite his many limitations, has within himself the spark (the "centella", according to Sor Juana) of the intellect, which partakes of the divinity. This tradition of Christian thought (the Patristics, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas of Cusa, etc.) regards night as the ideal space for the soul's approach to the divinity. The nocturnal birds, as attributes of the goddess Minerva, associated with the triform moon (because of its three visible faces) and a symbol of circumspect wisdom, symbolize wisdom as an attribute of night (In nocte consilium), one of the themes dearest to humanist thought, present in Erasmus of Rotterdam and in a whole range of exponents of this idea in the Renaissance and the Baroque. That is why the nocturnal birds are the symbols that preside over what will be the dream of the soul in search of knowledge of the world created by the divinity. This explains why night appears in Sor Juana's poem as a synonym of Harpocrates, the god of prudent silence, who, as an aspect of night, tacitly accompanies the trajectory of the soul's dream to the end. Night, therefore, is an ally and not an enemy, since it is the space that will give rise to the revelation of the soul's dream. The figures of the deer (Actaeon), the lion and the eagle appear, first, as the diurnal animals set against the nocturnal birds to represent the act of watchful sleep. That is, they represent the idea that Sor Juana is interested in highlighting: rest must not be entirely absent from intellectual consciousness, but must be a watchful sleep, attentive to the revelations of divine wisdom. These diurnal animals also symbolize the three most important external senses: sight, hearing and smell, which remain inactive during sleep. Thus there are harmoniously linked in the poem the nocturnal birds in their wise vigil, the diurnal animals in their watchful sleep, and the human being, whose body (bodily members and external senses) sleeps physically while the soul, conscious, is temporarily freed to launch itself into the adventure of knowledge, which takes place by two paths: the intuitive and the rational. In the first, the soul is fascinated by the instantaneous contemplation of the totality of creation, but is incapable of forming a concept of that fleetingly contemplated totality. On the rational path, the soul recovers the use of its reasoning faculty after having been dazzled by the sun, but finds the human method (which is the Aristotelian one of the ten categories) ineffective for comprehending the countless mysteries of creation. On both paths the soul fails in its attempt, which nonetheless is always renewed. Only awakening seems to grant a truce to this dream of the desire for knowledge, which always strives to reach the mystery of God, of the nature He created and of man himself as the "linking hinge" between God and the created world.

Intuition

The first way of trying to reach that "First Cause" of which Sor Juana speaks («And always aspires to the First Cause») is the one in which the totality of things presents itself «at a single glance». This communion of things must appear in the dream, once one is inside it, for, as we shall see in the section devoted to the dream as the place of fantasy, the dream is the place where the content kept in memory, which is the raw material with which the understanding will have to reason, can be freed from the demands of the body, as Sor Juana points out: «The soul, then, suspended / from outward governance—in which, occupied / in material employment, / whether well or ill—it counts the day as spent»..

By the path of intuition, particular things are still unknown to us, so we could not say that we know fully, since within that full knowledge would be the knowledge of the very essences of things: "She herself recognized the insufficiency of an intuition that sought to encompass all things without coming to know the intimate essence of each one. The path to be followed is precisely the opposite: to begin with particular things, in order then to rise to the total vision."

Sor Juana sought a full knowledge of things, so that once she noticed the insufficiency of the path of intuition for her purpose, she would have to lay out a new method—or rather, take up again the Aristotelian (later Scholastic) project of starting from ten categories in which the totality of things must be thought, ascending ever higher, from the lowest to the most elevated. She says:

"but it judged it fitting / to confine itself to a single subject, / or separately / to run through things one by one / which come to be contained / in those which, artful, / are twice five Categories: / a metaphysical reduction that teaches / (conceiving general entities / in mere mental fantasies / where abstracted discourse / disdains matter) / to form a science of Universals, / remedying, forewarned, / with art the defect / of not being able, with an intuitive / act of knowing, to know all that is created, / but rather, making a ladder, from one concept / to another goes ascending step by step, / and follows the relative order of comprehending, / in need / of the limited vigor / of the understanding, which to successive / discourse entrusts its profit: / whose feeble forces doctrine / goes strengthening with learned nourishment, / and the prolix, if gentle, / continuous course of discipline / goes infusing it with robust breath… it beholds the honorable summit, / sweet end of its heavy toil"

Sor Juana begins to follow the Aristotelian method of starting from things themselves in order to rise, through the understanding, toward the First Cause.

Fantasy based on the De Anima of Aristotle

The material with which the understanding operates is not things themselves; it is something else that allows images that are engraved in us to be kept in memory.

The Aristotelian operation starts from this raw material, which is what we have of objects, so that abstraction operates only within ourselves; nothing guarantees us that from this knowledge we can reach a higher one.

Ioan P. Couliano, an author known for his work "Eros and Magic in the Renaissance", tells us the following: "Aristotle does not question the existence of the Platonic dichotomy between body and soul. However, studying the secrets of nature, he feels the need to define empirically the relations between these two isolated entities, whose union, almost impossible from the metaphysical point of view, constitutes one of the deepest mysteries of the universe."

In book 3 of De Anima, Aristotle notes that between the soul and the body there must exist an intermediary that connects them. He says: "To imagine, then, amounts to opining about the sensible object perceived not accidentally. Now, certain sensible objects produce a false image to the senses and are nevertheless judged in accordance with the truth." And further on he says: "...when one contemplates intellectually, one necessarily contemplates at the same time some image: for images are like sensations, only without matter. Imagination is, moreover, something different from affirmation and negation, since truth and falsehood consist in a combination of concepts… Could it not be said that neither these nor the other concepts are images, although they never occur without images?"

It is from here that Culianu's interpretation of fantasy will arise, and of how those phantasms (or images, according to the translation) are stored within memory and operated upon in the understanding. He says:

"In short, the soul can transmit to the body all vital activities, as well as mobility, only by means of the proton organon, the pneumatic apparatus located in the heart. On the other hand, the body opens to the soul a window onto the world through the five· sense organs, whose messages reach the same cardiac device, which then takes charge of encoding them so that they are comprehensible. Under the name of phantasia, or inner sense, the sidereal spirit transforms the messages of the five senses into phantasms perceptible by the soul. This is so because the soul cannot grasp anything that has not been converted into a sequence of phantasms; in a few words, it cannot understand anything without phantasms (aneu plzantasmatos)."

Other

Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, a redondilla by Sor Juana.

A good part of Sor Juana's lyric work consists of occasional poems, created for social events at which the hosts were praised immoderately. They are festive poems, in which many trivial situations were magnified. To a certain extent, they are a faithful reflection of a society consolidated on two very strong pillars: the Church and the Court.

In them Sor Juana employs the most varied poetic resources she had learned throughout her life: the surprising image, the lexical learned borrowing, the omnipresent religious allusion, the play of concepts, syntactic devices reminiscent of Góngora, and personal references that serve as a counterweight to the immoderate praise contained in most of them.

She also wrote humorous and satirical poetry. Self-mockery was not new in Baroque rhetoric, a current in which Sor Juana participates by writing a wide range of burlesque poems. Her satire of «foolish men» is the best known of her poems. Paz points out:

The poem was a historic rupture and a beginning: for the first time in the history of our literature a woman speaks in her own name, defends her sex and, thanks to her intelligence, using the same weapons as her detractors, accuses men of the same vices they attribute to women. In this Sor Juana was ahead of her time: there is nothing similar, in the 17th century, in the women's literature of France, Italy and England.

— Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Mexico: FCE, 1982, pp. 399-400.

During her life Sor Juana composed sixteen religious poems, an extraordinarily small number, which is surprising given how little interest the nun had in religious matters. Most of them are occasional works, but there are three sonnets in which the poet presents the relationship of the soul with God in more human and loving terms.

Prose

Neptuno alegórico

Main article: Neptuno alegórico

Title page of the first edition of the Neptuno alegórico (Mexico, 1680).

It was written to commemorate the entry of the Viceroy, the Marquis of la Laguna, into the capital on November 30, 1680. At the same time, Sor Juana published a very long poem by way of explanation of the arch. It consists of three main parts: the «Dedicatoria», «Razón de la fábrica» and «Explicación del arco».

On the canvases and statues of this triumphal arch the virtues of the new Viceroy were represented, personified by the figure of Neptune. The work belongs to a very long classical tradition that links the virtues of heroes or rulers with triumphal arches and with a specific allegorical context. Although the Marquis is linked only with the god of the sea, his deification encompasses all the natural realms. It was very well received in New Spanish society, both by the incoming viceroys and by a good part of the clergy.

For Paz, the work, besides being influenced by Athanasius Kircher, establishes a connection between the religious veneration of ancient Egypt and the Christianity of the time. This work was, moreover, the cause of the displeasure of Antonio Núñez de Miranda, confessor and friend of the poet. Several authors conjecture that the prelate was jealous of the prestige his friend was acquiring at court, while his own was declining, which cracked their relationship. Shortly afterward, feeling she had the support of the viceroys, Sor Juana took the liberty of dismissing him as her confessor.

Carta atenagórica

Main article: Carta atenagórica

It was published in November 1690, in Puebla de Zaragoza, by Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. Atenagórica means «worthy of the wisdom of Athena». The letter is a critique of the Maundy sermon by the Portuguese António Vieira on the finezas (supreme proofs of love) of Christ.

It marks the beginning of the end of Sor Juana's literary output. Shortly afterward, in 1693, Sor Juana would undertake a series of small works called works of supererogation, in which she sought to thank God for the many favors received.

Through her main conclusions, Sor Juana maintains that dogmas and doctrines are the product of human interpretation, which is never infallible. As in the vast majority of her texts, both dramatic and philosophical, the interpretation of theological topics becomes a conceptist game full of wit.

Carta atenagórica.

In March 1691, as a continuation of this letter, Sor Juana would write the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in which she defends herself by arguing that the vast knowledge she possesses of various fields is sufficient for her to be allowed to reason on theological subjects, which should not be confined to men alone.

It is one of Sor Juana's most difficult texts. It was originally titled Crisis de un sermón, but when it was published in 1690 Fernández de Santa Cruz gave it the name Carta atenagórica. For Elías Trabulse, the true addressee of the Carta atenagórica is Núñez de Miranda, who celebrates in his sermons and writings the theme of the Eucharist, central to the Carta, although Antonio Alatorre and Martha Lilia Tenorio have refuted this hypothesis.

Following a hypothesis formulated by Darío Puccini and expanded by Octavio Paz, Schuller thinks that although it was directed at Núñez, it is not improbable that Aguiar felt attacked by the publication. According to the hypothesis of Paz and Puccini, Santa Cruz circulated the letter among the theological community of the viceroyalty in order to reduce the Archbishop's influence. The admiration the Bishop of Puebla felt for Sor Juana is well known, which led him to set aside the misogynistic attitude predominant in the 17th century.

One of the questions Paz asks is to whom the criticism in the Carta atenagórica is directed. Between 1680 and 1681 a dilemma arose in Madrid over the choice for the very important post of Archbishop of Mexico, upon the departure of Fray Payo Enríquez de Rivera. Fernández de Santa Cruz was one of the options considered, along with Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas. The latter was a faithful admirer of Vieira. By attacking Vieira in a sermon written 40 years earlier, Sor Juana became involved in a power struggle between the two clerics, defying Aguiar y Seijas—known as a misogynist and for censuring theater, poetry and comedy. The Carta Atenagórica was published by the prelate of Puebla under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, with a prologue in which he praises and criticizes the nun for her forays into sacred letters.

Against this hypothesis, Antonio Alatorre and Martha Lilia Tenorio believe that in one of the many gatherings Sor Juana held, Vieyra's Sermón del Mandato was discussed, and that Sor Juana's interlocutor, upon hearing her, asked her to put her opinions in writing. This interlocutor of Sor Juana's, whoever it may have been, decided to make copies of Sor Juana's text, and one of them reached the hands of the Bishop of Puebla, who published it under the name Carta Athenagórica. All this stands in contrast to the elaborate conspiratorial hypotheses very popular among Sor Juana scholars, as they point out.

By the foregoing we mean that, just as the romance on jealousy was the result of a conversation with the Countess of Paredes about poetry, the Crisis was the result of a conversation with a certain visitor to San Jerónimo, perhaps Fray Antonio Gutiérrez (and if not he, any other learned theologian). Sor Juana liked commissions so much that she disguised them as «precepts», so that fulfilling them would be «obedience». What she says in the Respuesta to Sor Filotea about the genesis of the Crisis could not be clearer. But in recent times, as the reader will see in several places in this book, it has become fashionable to doubt Sor Juana's sincerity as a matter of principle and, worse still, to discover behind her words all kinds of ulterior motives, astute calculations and complicated intrigues. We feel that such conjectures are idle and unnecessary. The genesis of the Crisis is like the genesis of almost everything Sor Juana wrote. We see no mystery in it at all.

— Antonio Alatorre and Martha Lilia Tenorio, Serafina y Sor Juana. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1998, p. 16

Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz

Main article: Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz

It was written in March 1691, as a reply to all the reproaches made to her by Fernández de Santa Cruz under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz. The Bishop warns that no woman should strive to learn about certain philosophical subjects. In her defense, Sor Juana points to several learned women, such as Hypatia, a Neoplatonic philosopher murdered by Christians in the year 415. She writes about her failed attempt and the constant pain that her passion for knowledge brought her, while expressing a resignation, since she makes clear that it is better to have a vice for letters than for something worse. She also justifies the vast knowledge she has of all the subjects of education—logic, rhetoric, physics and history—as a necessary complement for understanding and learning from the Sacred Scriptures.

The Carta de Sor Filotea expresses the admiration the Bishop of Puebla feels for Sor Juana, but at the same time reproaches her that she should not employ her enormous talent on profane matters, but on divine subjects. Although he does not declare himself against the education of women, he does express his disagreement with the lack of obedience that some already educated women might display. Finally, he recommends that the nun follow the example of other mystical writers who devoted themselves to theological literature, such as Saint Teresa of Jesus or Gregory of Nazianzus.

Sor Juana agrees with Sor Filotea that she must show obedience and that nothing justifies the prohibition of writing verse, while affirming that she has not written much about Scripture because she does not consider herself worthy of doing so. She also challenges Sor Filotea, and all her enemies, to present a single couplet of hers that sins by indecency. Her poetry cannot be described as lascivious or erotic, which is why many critics consider that the affection she showed for the vicereines was filial, not carnal.

Protesta de la fe

Protestation of faith and renewal of religious vows that Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz made and left written in her blood

Protesta de la fe y renovación de los votos religiosos que hizo, y dejó escrita con su sangre la madre Juana Inés de la Cruz monja profesa en San Gerónimo de México is a work of 1695 in which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz reaffirms her faith in Christ, urging that He be loved above all things and that one even shed one's blood for Him to the last drop. This work captures the importance of fervor for Jesus Christ in her life.

Loas

Sor Juana published twelve loas, nine of which appeared in the Inundación castálida and the rest in volume II of her works. Three of Sor Juana's loas preceded her autos sacramentales by way of prologue, although all of them have their own literary identity. Works of a learned tone, running to around 500 lines, they included praise of the personages of the time—she dedicates six loas to Charles II and his family, two to the viceregal family and one to Father Diego Velázquez de la Cadena. They were usually performed with great pomp and had an excessively flattering tone and artificial themes, as the learned poetics of the 17th century demanded. Most of Sor Juana's loas, mainly those of a religious kind, are compositions in a florid and conceptual style, with a great variety of metrical forms and a firm clarity of thought. In this respect the Loa de la Concepción stands out.

Five loas were composed «a los años del rey don Carlos II», that is, for his birthdays. In each of them Sor Juana celebrates the Spanish Empire in décimas of lively rhythmic and quadratic splendor. Even so, the second loa of this kind presents a plain style, a long romance and a certain stanzaic sobriety. Another of the loas, simpler, makes many mythological allusions of enormous wit to celebrate November 6, the date of the King's birth. The rest of these loas, with an enormous decorative display, celebrate Charles using fable-like allegories and lyrical passages of exceptional musicality and color. These loas are representative works of Sor Juana's highly Baroque style.

She also wrote a loa to the Queen consort, Marie Louise of Orléans, full of sharp puns and with a Calderonian stamp that stands out above all in the metaphors. Another of the loas was dedicated to the Queen Mother, Mariana of Austria. It is a composition very similar to those written in honor of Charles II, although with less majesty. Notable in it are the decasyllables with a proparoxytone opening and the mythological allegory used to extol the Queen.

To her friends and protectors, the Marquis and Marchioness of la Laguna and the Count and Countess of Gelve, she also dedicated several loas. Once again she employs mythological devices to sing the virtues of her rulers. What enhances her style is her agility in creating symbols and similes, through a very Calderonian game woven from the anagrams or initials of the personages whom Sor Juana seeks to extol.

Villancicos

Sor Juana's villancicos, unlike her loas, are simple and popular compositions that were sung at the matins of religious feasts. Each set of villancicos follows a fixed format of nine compositions—eight on occasion, since the last could easily be replaced by the Te Deum—which gave them considerable length.

Thematically, the villancicos celebrate some religious event in a varied range of poetic tones running from the learned to the popular. Although the villancicos usually included compositions in Latin, the truth is that the whole piece veered toward the popular, in order to attract the attention of the people and generate joy. Sor Juana, like other Baroque creators, had full command of popular poetry, and her villancicos are proof of this, for she succeeded in capturing and conveying the cheerful comicality and simple tastes of the people. Sung at matins, the villancicos have a clear dramatic configuration, thanks to the different characters that take part in them.

In Los villancicos al glorioso San Pedro Sor Juana presents the apostle as a champion of true justice, repentance and compassion. Another of them vindicates the Virgin Mary as patroness of peace and defender of the good, and Peter Nolasco as liberator of the Blacks, while offering a dissertation on the condition of that social group. Other notable villancicos by Sor Juana are the Villancicos del Nacimiento, sung in the Puebla Cathedral on Christmas Eve of 1689, and those composed in 1690 to honor Saint Joseph, also premiered in the cathedral of Puebla.

In 2008, Alberto Pérez-Amador Adam, taking into account the relevant musicological research carried out up to that time, demonstrated that eleven of the villancicos credited to Sor Juana are not hers, because they had been set to music by chapel masters in Spain and Hispanic America long before Sor Juana used them. Nevertheless, they should be considered part of her work by virtue of the fact that she reworked them to incorporate them into the cycles of villancicos commissioned from her by the various cathedrals of New Spain. The same researcher drew up a list of surviving villancicos by Sor Juana set to music by composers of various cathedrals, not only of New Spain but also of South America and the Peninsula.

Biographical documents

Various documents of a legal nature have been recovered. These are of particular importance for the reconstruction of different aspects of her biography.

1. Request by Juana Inés de la Cruz, novice of the convent of San Jerónimo, to execute her will and renunciation of property. February 15, 1669. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
2. Will and renunciation of property of Juana Inés de la Cruz, novice of the convent of San Jerónimo. February 23, 1669. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
3. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz sells a female slave to her sister, Doña Josefa María de Asbaje. June 6, 1684. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
4. Petition by Juana Inés de la Cruz, nun of the convent of San Jerónimo, to place at secured annuity (censo) on properties of said convent the sum of $1400.00 pesos of common gold, property of the petitioner. March 12, 1691. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
5. Annuity on $1400.00, secured on properties of the convent of San Jerónimo, established in favor of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. March 24, 1691. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
6. Placement of a further $600 on assets and revenues of the Convent of San Jerónimo, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. August 18, 1691. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
7. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz requests license from the Archbishop of Mexico to purchase the cell that belonged to Mother Catalina de San Jerónimo. January 20, 1692. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
8. Sale of the cell that belonged to Mother Catalina de San Jerónimo to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, February 9, 1692. (in Enrique A. Cervantes 1949)
9. Vow and oath of the Immaculate Conception in the Convent of San Jerónimo of Mexico City. 1686 (in Manuel Ramos Medina 2011)
10. Three Documents in the Book of Professions of the Convent of San Jerónimo (February 24, 1669 / February 8, 1694 / undated) (in the fourth volume of the Obras completas, Mexico 1957: 522-523. Guillermo Schmidhuber, with the collaboration of Olga Martha Peña Doria, published a facsimile of the Libro de la Profesiones del convento de San Jerónimo, currently kept in the Benson Library of the University of Texas at Austin.
11. Guillermo Schmidhuber and Olga Martha Peña Doria published the image and paleographic transcription of 64 documents in Familias paterna y materna de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Hallazgos documentales and 58 documents in Las redes sociales de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, most of them previously unknown or lacking a published image; a total of 122 documents, among them the baptismal certificate of Pedro de Asuaje, Sor Juana's father, and the 1598 permits of passage from the Canaries to New Spain of Sor Juana's paternal family (grandmother, mother and the boy Pedrito de Asuaje). Also the paternal and maternal family trees of Juana Inés covering five generations, and several documents from the Canaries that prove the immediate origin of the family from Genoa.

Lost works

From various sources we know of works that remain unpublished or that have been irretrievably lost. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (in the first volume of the Obras completas, Mexico 1951: XLIV) gives the following list in this regard:

1. A Loa to the Most Holy Sacrament written at the age of eight, of which Diego Calleja gives notice in his biography.
2. El Caracol, a treatise on music to which she refers in her romance Después de estimar mir amor.
3. El equilibrio moral. Direcciones prácticas morales en la segura probabilidad de las acciones humanas. The manuscript was kept by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora
4. Las súmulas, a minor logic, which was kept by Fr. M. Joseph de Porras of the Society of Jesus at the Colegio Máximo de S. Pedro y S. Pablo in Mexico.
5. Otros discursos a las finezas de Cristo Señor Nuestro
6. Otro papel sobre el siervo de Dios, Carlos de Santa María (a spiritual son of Fr. Núñez)
7. A «glosa en décimas a la inédita religiosa acción de nuestro Católico Monarca»
8. The ending of the Romance gratulatorio a los Cisnes de la España
9. A poem (dramatic?) left unfinished by Agustín de Salazar y Torres. La segunda Celestina, a comedy begun by Agustín de Salazar y Torres, who died in 1675 while writing it, and which Sor Juana finished (Octavio Paz and Guillermo Schmidhuber proposed a suelta located in 1989 as the work of Sor Juana, Editorial Vuelta, 1990).
10. «Many other discreet papers and letters», some in the possession of D. Juan de Orve y Arbieto
11. Correspondence with Diego Calleja
12. Correspondence with the Marchioness of la Laguna. Recently Beatriz Colombi and Hortensia Calvo published a collection of letters by María Luisa that are kept in the library of Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Criticism and legacy

Sor Juana appears today as an extremely important playwright in the Hispanic American milieu of the 17th century. In her own time, however, her theatrical activity may have occupied a secondary place. Although her works were published in Volume II (1692), the fact that performances were restricted to the palace milieu hindered their dissemination, unlike what happened with her poetry. The literature of the 18th century, above all, praised Sor Juana's work and instantly included it among the great classics of the Spanish language. Two editions of her works and numerous controversies attest to her fame.

In the 19th century, Sor Juana's popularity gradually faded, as several statements by 19th-century intellectuals prove. Joaquín García Icazbalceta speaks of an «absolute depravity of language»; Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, of the arrogant pedantry of her Baroque style, and José María Vigil of a «tangled and insufferable Gongorism».

Following the interest in Góngora aroused by the Generation of '27, men of letters in America and Spain began the reappraisal of the poet. From Amado Nervo to Octavio Paz—by way of Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Ermilo Abreu Gómez, Xavier Villaurrutia, José Gorostiza, Ezequiel A. Chávez, Karl Vossler, Ludwig Pfandl and Robert Ricard—, various intellectuals have written about Sor Juana's vast body of work. All these contributions have made it possible to reconstruct, more or less well, Sor Juana's life, and to formulate some hypotheses—not raised until then—about the characteristic features of her output.

At the end of the 20th century what is considered a contribution by Sor Juana to La segunda Celestina was discovered, proposed by Paz and Guillermo Schmidhuber, at the same time as Elías Trabulse made known the Carta de Serafina de Cristo, attributed to Sor Juana. Both documents have unleashed a bitter controversy, still unresolved, among experts on Sor Juana. Some time later the trial of the cleric Javier Palavicino became known; he praised Sor Juana in 1691 and defended Vieira's sermon. By 2004, the Peruvian José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido reported two fundamental documents for the study of Sor Juana: Defensa del Sermón del Mandato del padre Antonio Vieira, by Pedro Muñoz de Castro, and the anonymous Discurso apologético en respuesta a la Fe de erratas que sacó un soldado sobre la Carta atenagórica de la madre Juana Inés de la Cruz.

In 1992, in recognition of her figure, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize was created to distinguish the excellence of literary work by women in the Spanish language from Latin America and the Caribbean.

In film

The figure of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has inspired several cinematographic works in and outside Mexico. The best known is probably Yo, la peor de todas, an Argentine film of 1990, directed by María Luisa Bemberg, starring Assumpta Serna, and whose screenplay is based on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Other films that take up the figure of the nun of San Jerónimo are the documentary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz entre el cielo y la razón (1996) and Las pasiones de sor Juana (2004). She has also inspired the miniseries Juana Inés, produced by Canal Once and Bravo Films, with Arantza Ruiz and Arcelia Ramírez in the role of Sor Juana as a young woman and as an adult respectively.

Editions

Early editions

• Inundación castálida de la única poetisa, Musa Décima, sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa profesa en el Monasterio de San Jerónimo en la Imperial Ciudad de México, que en varios metros, idiomas y estilos fertiliza varios asuntos con elegantes, sutiles, claros, ingeniosos, útiles versos, para enseñanza, recreo y admiración. Madrid: Juan García Infanzón, 1689. Reprinted with the title Poemas.... Madrid, 1690; Barcelona, 1691; Zaragoza, 1692; Valencia, 1709 (two editions); Madrid, 1714; Madrid, 1725 (two editions). It contains 121 poems, five complete sets of villancicos and the Neptuno alegórico together with the Explicación del arco.
• Segundo tomo de las obras de sóror Juana Inés de la Cruz, monja profesa en el monasterio del señor San Jeronimo de la Ciudad de México, dedicado por la autora a D. Juan de Orúe y Orbieto, caballero de la Orden de Santiago. Seville, Tomás López de Haro, 1692. Reprinted in Barcelona, 1693 (three editions). With the title Obras poéticas, Madrid: 1715 and 1725. It includes the autos sacramentales, the Carta atenagórica, Amor es más laberinto, Los empeños de una casa and seventy more poems.
• Fama y obras póstumas del fénix de México, décima musa, poetisa americana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa profesa en el convento de San Jerónimo de la Imperial Ciudad de México, conságralas a la majestad católica de la reina Nuestra Señora doña Mariana de Neoburg Baviera Palatina del Rhin, por mano de la Excma. Señora doña Juana de Aragón y Cortés, duques de Montoleón y Terranova, marquesa del valle de Oaxaca, el doctor don Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, Capellán de Honor de su majestad, Protonotario, Juez Apostólico por su santidad, teólogo, Examinador de la Nunciatura de España, prebendado de la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana de México. Madrid: Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1700. Reprinted in Madrid in 1700, 1701 and 1714, and in Barcelona in 1725. It consists of the Respuesta a Sor Filotea and several poems.

Modern editions

Complete works

• Obras completas, four volumes, edited with notes by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951-1957. New edition of the first volume, Lírica Personal, by Antonio Alatorre, 2009.
• Obras completas, prologue and edition by Francisco Monterde. Mexico: Porrúa, 1985.

Individual editions

• Nocturna, mas no funesta. Poesía y cartas, edition, prologue and notes by Facundo Ruiz. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2014.
• Poesías escogidas, ed. Manuel Toussaint. Mexico: Imprenta Victoria, 1916.
• Obras escogidas, ed. Manuel Toussaint. Mexico: Cvltvra, 1928.
• Primero sueño, ed. Ermilo Abreu Gómez. Contemporáneos: vol. I, pp. 272-313 and II, pp. 46-54, 1928.
• Poesías completas, popular edition revised by Ermilo Abreu Gómez. Mexico: Botas, 1940.
• Poesías escogidas, ed. Francisca Chica Salas. Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1940.
• Poesías selectas, ed. Ermilo Abreu Gómez. Mexico: Botas, 1944 (2nd ed. revised and corrected, 1970).
• Poesía, teatro y prosa, ed. Antonio Castro Leal. Mexico: Porrúa, 1948.
• Primero sueño, ed. by the Section of Ibero-American Literature of the University of Buenos Aires, with the collaboration of Juan Carlos Merlo, preliminary note by Gerardo Moldenhauer. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1953.
• Obras escogidas, ed. Juan Carlos Merlo. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1968.
• Obras selectas, ed. Georgina Sabat de Rivers and Elias L. Rivers. Barcelona: Clásicos Noguer, 1976.
• Respuesta a Sor Filotea, ed. Grupo Feminista de Cultura. Barcelona: Laertes, 1979.
• Florilegio, ed. Elías Trabulse. Mexico: Promexa, 1979.
• Inundación castálida, ed. Georgina Sabat de Rivers. Madrid: Castalia, 1982.
• Carta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a su confesor: autodefensa espiritual, ed. Aureliano Tapia Méndez. Monterrey: Impresora Monterrey, 1986.
• El sueño, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. Mexico: UNAM, 1989.
• Los empeños de una casa / Amor es más laberinto, ed. Celsa Carmen García Valdés. Madrid: Cátedra, 2010.
• Neptuno alegórico, ed. Vincent Marín, intro. by Electa Arenal. Madrid: Cátedra, 2009.
• Poesía lírica, ed. José Carlos González Boixo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1992.

Bibliography

• ALATORRE, Antonio, Sor Juana a través de los siglos, Mexico, El Colegio de México, 2007.
• ALATORRE, Antonio and Martha Lilia TENORIO, Serafina y Sor Juana. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1998.
• ASPE ARMELLA, Virginia, Approaches to the Theory of Freedom in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico: Aliosventos, Universidad Panamericana, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2018.
• BEAUPIED, Aída, Narciso hermético, Liverpool, University Press, 1997.
• BENASSY-BERLING, Marié-Cécile, Humanismo y religión en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico: UNAM, 1983.
• BRAVO ARRIAGA, María Dolores, La excepción y la regla: Estudios sobre espiritualidad y cultura en la Nueva España, Mexico, UNAM, 1997.
• BUXÓ, José Pascual, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Lectura barroca de la poesía, Mexico, Renacimiento, 2006.
• CERVANTES, Enrique A., Testamento de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y otros documentos." Mexico 1949
• CHÁVEZ, Ezequiel, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ensayo de psicología, Mexico, Porrúa, 1970. ISBN 970-07-2654-1.
• GARCÍA VALDÉS, Celsa Carmen, Los empeños de una casa / Amor es más laberinto, Madrid, Cátedra, 2010. ISBN 84-376-2647-1.
• GAOS, José. "El sueño de un sueño", in Historia Mexicana, 10, Jul-Sep, 1960: 54-71.
• GONZÁLEZ BOIXO, José Carlos (ed.), Poesía lírica, Madrid, Cátedra, 1992.
• JAUREGUI, Carlos A.. "Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and Criollo Subjects." In 'Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities Ralph Bauer & Jose A. Mazzotti (eds.). Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Williamsburg, VA, U. of North Carolina Press, 2009. 61-100.Link to article
  • 'El plato más sabroso': eucaristía, plagio diabólico, y la traducción criolla del caníbal." 'Colonial Latin American Review' 12:2 (2003): 199-231.In Spanish. Link to article
• JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ, Sor, Primero sueño, in Obras completas, vol. 1, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (ed., intro. and notes), Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951: 335-359.
• MERRIM, Stephanie, Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991.
• MÉNDEZ PLANCARTE, Alfonso. Notes to the "Primero sueño", in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, vol. 1, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951: 575-603.
  • Autos y loas, volume III of the Obras completas, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955. ISBN 968-16-4511-1.
• NERVO, Amado, Juana de Asbaje, 1910.
• OLIVARES ZORRILLA, Rocío. "El sueño y la emblemática" (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), in Literatura Mexicana, VI, 2, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM, 1995, 367-398. // in Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes [2].
  • "Los tópicos del sueño y del microcosmos: la tradición de Sor Juana", in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las vicisitudes de la crítica, ed. by José Pascual Buxó, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, UNAM, 1998 (Serie Estudios de Cultura Literaria Novohispana): 179-211. // in Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes [3].
  • "Tradición de la poesía visionaria y emblemática mística y moral en el Primero sueño, de Sor Juana", in Florilegio de estudios de Emblemática. A Florilegium of Studies on Emblematics. Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de Emblemática de The Society for Emblem Studies. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, ed. by Sagrario López Poza, A Coruña, Sociedad de Cultura Valle Inclán, 2004: 553-558. // in Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes [4].
  • "Refracción e imagen emblemática en el Primero sueño, de Sor Juana", in Studi Latinoamericani / Estudios Latinoamericanos, 4, Università di Udine, 2008a: 251-282. In Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes,[5]. In the Repository of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of UNAM [6].
  • "Aspectos retóricos de la alusión emblemática en los textos literarios: ejemplos novohispanos", in Conceptos y objetos de la retórica ayer y hoy. Homenaje a Paola Vianello de Córdoba, ed. by Gerardo Ramírez Vidal, Mexico, UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2008b: 165-179.
  • "Avances en la anotación del Primero sueño, de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz", in Etiópicas. Revista de Letras Renacentistas, Universidad de Huelva, no. 7, 2011a: 64-86 [7].
  • "De la retórica a la isotopía y del ideosema a la argumentación: una decodificación contemporánea y circular del texto barroco", in Retórica y argumentación. Perspectivas de estudio, Luisa Puig and David García Pérez (eds.), Mexico, UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2011b (Centro de Estudios Clásicos, Centro de Poética): 195-209. // in the Repository of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of U.N.A.M. [8].
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• PERELMUTER, Rosa, Los límites de la femineidad en sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2004.
• PAZ, Octavio, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982.
• PÉREZ-AMADOR ADAM, Alberto, El precipicio de Faetón. Nueva edición, estudio filológico y comento de Primero Sueno de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz", Frankfurt, Vervuert, 1996.
  • La ascendente estrella. Bibliografía de los estudios dedicados a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en el siglo XX, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2007.
  • De los villancicos verdaderos y apócrifos de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, puestos en metro músico, Literatura Mexicana xix.2, 2008: 159-178.
  • De finezas y libertad. Acerca de la Carta Atenagórica de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las ideas de Domingo de Báñez, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011.
  • El precipicio de Faetón. Edición y comento de Primero sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz., Frankfurt / Madrid, Iberoamericana 2015. (corrected and greatly expanded version of the volume published in 1996)
• POOT, Sara, Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando, Mexico, El Colegio de México, 1993.
• PUCCINI, Darío, Una mujer en soledad: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Una excepción en la cultura y la literatura barroca, trans. by Esther Benítez. Mexico: FCE, 1996.
• Manuel Ramos Medina: Voto y juramento de la Inmaculada Concepción en el Convento de San Jerónimo de la Ciudad de México. siglo XVII al XIX". Mexico. Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso 2011.
• RODRÍGUEZ GARRIDO, José Antonio, La Carta Atenagórica de Sor Juana: Textos inéditos de una polémica, Mexico, UNAM, 2004.
• SABAT DE RIVERS, Georgina, El «Sueño» de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: tradiciones literarias y originalidad, London, Tamesis, 1977.
• SALAZAR MALLÉN, Rubén, Apuntes para una biografía de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico, UNAM, 1978.
• SALDARRIAGA, Patricia, Los espacios del «Primero Sueño»: Arquitectura y cuerpo femenino, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2006.
• SCHMIDHUBER, Guillermo, De Juana Inés Asuage a sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. El Libro de las Profesiones del Convento de San Jerónimo de México, Toluca, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 2013.
  • Amigos de Sor Juana, Sexteto biográfico, Mexico, Bonilla Artigas Editores/ Iberoamericana Libros, 2014.
  • Familias paterna y materna de Sor Juana: Hallazgos documentales. Mexico: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México 2016.
  • Teatro y Teología: Los tres autos sacramentales de Sor Juana. Mexico: Universidad Claustro de Sor Juana and Bonilla Artigas Editores/ Iberoamericana Libros, 2016.
• SORIANO, Alejandro, Aquella Fénix más rara. Vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico, Nueva Imagen, 2000.
  • La hora más bella de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico, CONACULTA/Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes, 2010.
• XIRAU, Ramón, Genio y figura de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico, El Colegio Nacional, 1997.

External links

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes

Biographies and critical studies

• Former Convent of San Jerónimo, today the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana
• Images of Sor Juana and some of her signatures
• Literary corner of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
• Chronology of Sor Juana in English
• Lyric work of Sor Juana
• Brief study of her works
• Studies carried out by the University of Cambridge
• Biography published by México Desconocido
• Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez. Pasión disruptiva, Mexico, 2018.

Digitized works

• Online works of Sor Juana digitized by the Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes
• Facsimile editions of Sor Juana
• Digitized works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain

Bibliography on Sor Juana

• PÉREZ-AMADOR ADAM, Alberto, La ascendente estrella. Bibliografía de los estudios dedicados a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en el siglo XX, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2007.
• Early and modern editions of the works of Sor Juana
• Bibliography and critical editions on Sor Juana
• Bibliographic compilation by Robert Lauer
• Bio-bibliographical note, by Margo Glantz