Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2013, vol. 8
Theorizing Transatlantic Women’s Writing:
Imperial Crossings and the Production of Knowledge
Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
T
he transatlantic paradigm, together with other recent methodological frameworks that privilege spatial considerations, has significantly
influenced recent scholarly work on colonial Latin American and early
modern Iberian studies.1 This paradigm, which incorporates Europe and
the Americas as a coherent area of study and is deemed by some historians as constituting a field in its own right, has led to fruitful discussions
about the possibilities and shortcomings of studying the communities
surrounding the Atlantic Ocean without taking into account national or
imperial histories.2 The move to decenter previous normative historical
The other frameworks discussed at length by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in
From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2008) are hemispheric studies and early modern perspectives. Also relevant here would be the increasing interest in transpacific studies; see, for
example, Ricardo Padrón, “Recordando las Indias del poniente: episodios en la historia
de una metageografía olvidada,” in Estudios coloniales latinoamericanos en el siglo XXI:
Nuevos itinerarios, ed. Stephanie Kirk (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana, 2011). Recent research using the transatlantic model includes, but is
not limited to, Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and
Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Lisa Voigt,
Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in
the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2009); Nicolás Wey-Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to
the Indies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
2
Philip Morgan and Jack Greene locate the emergence of the concept “Atlantic
history” in the late 1960s, yet they clarify that its practice can be traced back to the 1870s.
1
53
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Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
narratives has allowed for a more global understanding of the fluidity of
cultural exchanges during the early modern period.3 In their enlightening
collection of essays, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800),
Daniela Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf contribute to the scholarship that
observes this paradigm, paying particular attention to the intersections of
gender and religion. Although Kostroun and Vollendorf reference numerous scholars in the disciplines of Hispanic and women’s studies, history,
and comparative literature who have mapped important connections that
situate early modern women within a broader Atlantic geographic frame,
they conclude that the transatlantic paradigm remains to be fully explored
vis-à-vis the study of women and religion.4 More recently, Vollendorf, in
collaboration with Grady Wray, has reiterated the need to acknowledge
the centrality of women’s textual and cultural contributions to the Atlantic,
urging scholars to adopt an approach to gender history that transcends
traditional lines between Europeanists and Latin Americanists in order to
map the role of women more successfully across the Atlantic.5
This article responds to that plea by means of a comparative study
of the experiences of two religious women in the Atlantic world that
explores their engagement with traditionally male concepts of language
See their introduction “The Present State of Atlantic History,” Atlantic History: A Critical
Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 3.
3
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–
1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 215.
4
Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, eds., Introduction, Women, Religion, and
the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 6; see also
7–8, for an entire review of individual scholarly efforts that chart linkages among Atlantic
communities. The authors also mention the works of Susan Dinan and Deborah Meyers,
eds., Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Nora
Jaffary, Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (Burlington: Ashgate,
2007). The most recent contribution in the scholarship that explores this methodological
framework is the edited volume by Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández, Women’s Literacy
in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2011).
5
Lisa Vollendorf and Grady Wray, “Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s
Writing in Iberia and Latin America,” in Theorising the Ibero-Atlantic World, ed. Harald
Braun, Kristy Hooper, and Lisa Vollendorf (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), 3.
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
55
and authority. This analysis, we contend, allows us to delve further into
the Atlantic paradigm in order to examine women’s implicit understanding of and active encounter with the spatial dimension of the transatlantic
region. We will examine what role this dimension played in the acquisition
of epistemological authority by two notable seventeenth-century nuns, the
Mexican Hieronymite Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) and the
Spanish Franciscan Sor María de Ágreda (1602–1655).
One of the meanings given to the Atlantic during the post-contact
period, according to Joyce Chaplin, was that of a “space in which to make
or imagine physical connections.” 6 Sor Juana and Sor María were not only
able to imagine these connections across the Atlantic but they actually
established their presence transatlantically without leaving their cloisters
in Mexico and Spain, respectively. Through an exploration of the ways
in which colonial spaces became rhetorical constructions and at the same
time powerful devices to acquire authority, we will investigate the different
connections that these women established through their “crossings” of the
Atlantic. We will elucidate how both women writers engaged with language to create textual journeys across the Atlantic and to establish their
presence in a localized site in which they self-identified as agents. Finally,
we will explore how the Atlantic space functions not only as a topic in their
writings but also provides a rhetoric with which they might demonstrate
and legitimize their knowledge.
In 2000, Kathleen Ann Myers referred to female religious writing
in colonial Latin America as a booming subfield within colonial studies;
eight years later in a review essay, Myers asserted that the subfield of female
conventual writing had gone beyond defining texts and contexts and had
become more encompassing in its thematic analysis, sources employed, and
methodologies.7 Myers noted the opening of the field for new disciplines
Joyce Chaplin, “The Atlantic Ocean and its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–
1808” in Atlantic History, ed. Greene and Morgan, 36.
7
Kathleen Myers, “Crossing Boundaries: Defining the Field of Female Religious
Writing in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review 9 (2000): 151–65;
and Kathleen Myers, “Recent Trends in the Study of Women and Religion in Colonial
Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 290–301.
6
56 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8
Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
and anticipated the “future directions” the field would take.8 One of the
directions taken by studies of Hispanic religious women’s writings is that
of comparative and collaborative works in which space considerations are
central. The investigation of what we are calling the transatlantic paradigm is a fairly recent development within this subfield, one that, although
implicit in our colleagues’ pioneering scholarship, had not been problematized to identify clearly transatlantic cultural activity on the part of women
writers. There are important examples of scholarship that do take a more
explicit approach to transatlantic questions. An example is Untold Sisters:
Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989), by Electa Arenal and Stacey
Schlau and translated by Amanda Powell, which compiles writings by early
modern women on both sides of the Atlantic.9 More recently, the volume
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2007),
edited by Emilie Bergmann and Schlau, includes several essays that place
Sor Juana and her work within transatlantic, hemispheric, and Continental
contexts.10
Myers, “Recent Trends,” 301.
Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own
Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).
Other examples of scholars who have established links among women across the Atlantic
are Electa Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst of Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the
Seventeenth Century,” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth
Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 147–83; Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta, ed. and trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (New
York: Feminist Press, 1994); Georgina Sabat-Rivers, “Autobiografías: Santa Teresa y Sor
Juana” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Studies, ed. Luis Cortesi (Asunción: Centro
de Estudios de Economía & Soc., 1989); and Nina Scott, “‘La gran turba de las que
merecieron nombres’: Sor Juana’s Foremothers in ‘La Respuesta a Sor Filotea,’” in Coded
Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Francisco Javier
Cevallos-Candau, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
10
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “Colonial No More: Reading Sor Juana from
a Transatlantic Perspective” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz, ed. Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau (New York: The Modern Language
Association, 2007), 86–94; Lisa Vollendorf, “Across the Atlantic: Sor Juana, La respuesta,
and the Hispanic Women’s Canon,” idem, 95–102. See also: Stephanie Merrim, “Angels of
History and Colonial Hemispheric Studies,” Letras femeninas 35, no.1 (2009): 63–84.
8
9
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
57
In Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(1999), Stephanie Merrim took early modern women’s studies one step
further as she endeavored to map connections between Sor Juana’s and
other women’s writings in Spanish, English, and French, mainly to identify
“certain common signal features and concerns.”11 Merrim established the
relations between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the two Spanish nuns
mentioned in her “Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz” [The Answer to Sor
Filotea] (1691): Carmelite reformer and mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–82)
and Franciscan abbess Sor María de Ágreda (1602–65). Another important mention of Sor María de Ágreda can be found in Sor Juana’s “Ejercicios
devotos para los nueve días” [Spiritual Exercises for a Novena] associating
it with María de Ágreda’s Mística ciudad de Dios [Mystical City of God]
(1670).12 Merrim hinted at a compelling link between the two women,
writing that “the poetics of Sor Juana’s connection in this and other of her
works to María de Ágreda, as well as their politics, are a fascinating subject,
one that certainly merits further study.”13 While she did not pursue this
avenue of inquiry in her book, she nonetheless laid the groundwork for
our analysis of these two nuns’ transatlantic engagements, particularly with
her broader reflections on certain aspects of early modern women’s writing
Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press, 1999), xiii.
12
Grady Wray, The Devotional Exercises/Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/51–1695): A Critical Study and Bilingual
Annotated Edition (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). In the bilingual annotated
edition, Wray establishes a textual relationship between the two nuns. Wray argues that
Ágreda’s influence on Sor Juana goes beyond the defense of the Immaculate Conception;
rather it supports “Sor Juana’s desire for self-expression and knowledge,” as well as the
reestablishment of the imitatio Christi into a sort of imitatio Mariae (17).
13
Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, xiii. Merrim mentions two studies that
have established the connection between the two nuns in a very limited manner: Clark
Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Ágreda: Writing, Knowledge, and Power (Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1994); and Marie-Cécile Bennasy-Berling, Humanisme
et religion chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La femme et la culture au XVIIe siècle (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982).
11
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Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
such as the “will to signature” and the desire to enter the “almost exclusively
male world of learning.”14
In her essay “Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writing in Iberia and the
Americas,” Vollendorf undertook the task of identifying transatlantic connections among women writers of what she calls the “Hispanic diaspora.”15
She contends that the identification of similar usages of themes and rhetorical strategies in women’s writings allows for a transatlantic approach to
women’s cultural production. Following Merrim’s insights into Sor Juana’s
intellectual connections with other women, Vollendorf asserts that Sor
Juana’s Respuesta [The Answer] “bridges women’s writings between early
modern Spain and colonial Spanish America.”16 When we begin to chart
relationships among women across the Atlantic and to identify affinities
among women who might or might have not known of one another’s existence, we begin to advance our notion of the manner in which women in
the early modern period acquired authority through the written word, how
they challenged patriarchal authority, and how, on occasion, they participated along with men in projects of imperial expansion and epistemological inquiry.
This article builds on the pioneering works by Merrim and Vollendorf,
among others, that have made it possible for us to think about early modern women’s writings in a novel way. By placing Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
and María de Ágreda in a transatlantic context, we will consider both their
poetics and politics, yet we diverge from other critics primarily in our focus
on these women’s usage of masculine language and rhetoric. Although both
nuns were writing under the patriarchal power of the Church, and on occasion utilized the rhetorical strategies and thematic elements of female textual production in the Iberian Atlantic, we are interested in exploring the
ways in which they inscribed imperial and colonial epistemology into their
Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 194.
Lisa Vollendorf, “Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writings in Iberia and the
Americas,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Kostroun and
Vollendorf, 84.
16
Ibid., 100.
14
15
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
59
writing by distancing themselves from a “feminine language.”17 Our study
also departs from other larger projects that seek to chart ties among several
subjects, times, and places. Ours is a more specific, even “local” endeavor
that questions constructions of gender, geography, and knowledge in a key
moment in time, one that we hope will invite further collaborations and
projects of this nature.18
We are principally interested in investigating how lettered women
engaged with masculine intellectual culture and epistemological domains
and placed their works in transatlantic circulation. By examining aspects
of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sor María de Ágreda, we
intend to shed light on how women negotiated a place in the top ranks
of an intellectual discourse that was limited to all but a handful of elite
men; in so doing, we will observe in what ways these same masculine networks reacted to their participation. This study aims to both interrogate
the mechanisms with which each woman acquired the epistemological
authority that allowed her works and fame to circulate in a transatlantic
context and to examine the specific circumstances that led each to choose
this transatlantic framework. The engagements of these two seventeenthcentury nuns not only illuminate women’s participation in the transatlantic
intellectual networks of religion, culture, science, and power that were
Ibid., 79. Alison Weber’s analysis of Spanish Carmelite Teresa of Ávila’s writings in Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990) identifies a particular feminine language, and more importantly a “rhetoric of
femininity” that allowed her to successfully address male ecclesiastical authorities and be
canonized soon after her death. Many religious women in Iberia and across the Atlantic
became familiar with the rhetorical strategies used by Teresa of Ávila and drew from
these and common themes such as Christian piety and everyday feminine experiences of
a spiritual and mystical nature.
18
Lisa Vollendorf and Grady Wray’s forthcoming chapter, “Gender in the
Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in Iberia and Latin America,” and previous efforts by
Vollendorf on the subject problematize the initial lack of studies that place women in the
Atlantic space. Ours is an attempt to note what these scholars have suggested and is a
possible model for further studies of this nature. We chose the word “local” in opposition
to a generalizing trend that aggregates similar experiences of women in the transatlantic
paradigm. We are referring to the very locality where Sor Juana and Sor María began their
Atlantic crossings.
17
60 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8
Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
considered exclusive to men but also expand our knowledge of Hispanic
epistemological exchanges across the Atlantic.
The pairing of Sor Juana and María de Ágreda presents a productive
point of comparison, since each inscribed her writings from opposite sides
of the Atlantic. The major part of Sor Juana’s works was published in three
volumes in Spain, whereas Sor María de Ágreda undertook missionary
work in the New World through the phenomenon of bilocation. Their
transatlantic crossings bring into play a complex set of issues regarding
women’s mobility in the early modern Hispanic world. Although seemingly the most immobile of women, these two cloistered nuns succeeded
in writing themselves into a masculine intellectual discourse both at home
and on the other side of the Atlantic — theology in the case of Sor Juana
and science in the case of Sor María de Ágreda.19 The renown each woman’s work garnered on opposite sides of the Atlantic thus offers a stunning
contrast to the enclosed world that each inhabited in her own country and
testifies to the skill with which they each negotiated the reception of their
theological and scientific output by placing it in a transatlantic context.
Moreover, through their actions, they brought their conventual space to
the center of the imperial epistemological project. While convents were
pivotal to Spain’s imperial identity in the New World, unlike male religious
houses, they did not become an established locus for the production of
official knowledge. Through these case studies, we demonstrate how both
women not only overcame this restriction but succeeded in converting it
into a strategy for advancement and transatlantic renown.
Their success notwithstanding, both women faced a difficult task in
taking part in the masculine intellectual culture of the Atlantic. This difficulty can be profitably examined through the suggestive pairing of books
and bodies, since the transatlantic circulation of each entity was both
fraught with danger and subject to strict controls. Indeed, the metaphorical connection between bodies and books is a powerful one in the early
As María Portuondo explains in Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the
New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2, the word “science” in
the early modern period referred to “natural philosophy, experimentalism, natural history,
natural magic and mixed mathematics.”
19
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
61
modern period and assumes a key point of departure for our collaborative
and comparative study. Georgina Dopico Black has identified this connection as “fundamental” to early modern Spain and, by extension, to the
colonies. She describes the symbolic and concrete manifestations of the
two terms — body and book — as reversible, with each part of one standing for the other’s.20 The explicit connection she makes between the bookbody dyad and the “body of the nation” that calls the former into being as
“subjects or objects even as it disciplines them” can be usefully applied to a
gendered study of the circulation of books and bodies in the transatlantic
domain.21 Imperial politics required that women cross the Atlantic in the
service of empire to populate both secular and religious spaces. During
these journeys, women’s bodies were subject to natural peril and stringent
controls of behavior and movement, with no body more strictly supervised
than that of the nun. Sarah Owens’s recent edition of the early eighteenthcentury chronicle by the Capuchin Abbess Madre María Rosa of the journey that she and four other nuns endured from their Madrid convent to
found a similar space in Lima narrates a harrowing account of pirate attacks
and disease while simultaneously highlighting the complex restrictions
imposed by the Church on the movement of nuns who were ordinarily
subjected to the vow of enclosure.22 Correspondingly, books were subject to
In “Canons Afire: Libraries, Books, and Bodies in Don Quixote’s Spain,” in
Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook, ed. Roberto González Echevarría (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 109, Georgina Dopico Black describes the connection in the following terms: “Cuerpo [body] where books were concerned referred in the first place to
the materiality of the book — a materiality that was given the contours of a body — with
a face [carátula], spine [lomo], and even fingers [indices]. We need look no further than the
Preliminares of any number of early modern texts to find, in the royal censor’s aprobación y
licencia [approbation and license], permission for printing and selling a specified quantity
of cuerpos de libros.”
21
Ibid., 116.
22
Owens rightfully stresses that her edition of the writings of Madre María Rosa
helps shed light upon the “active role women played in the colonial enterprise.” See Journey
of Five Capuchin Nuns, ed. and trans. Sarah E. Owens, The Other Voice in Early Modern
Europe Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3. Regardless, the nun’s own
writings also bear out the restrictions placed on the transportation of nuns’ bodies across
the Atlantic.
20
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Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
control and vulnerable to danger as they made the Atlantic crossing. Irving
Leonard’s and Dorothy Schons’s early studies related the rigor with which
the Crown endeavored to control — often without success — the types of
books that would enter its American domains.23 Colonial women’s access
to books was further restricted, either through their lack of education or
by the restrictions placed on what was deemed suitable for their consumption.24 Questions of gender thus come to the fore in these crossings as both
books and bodies bear the distinctive marks of society’s desire to rigidly
demarcate both entities along male and female lines.
Despite the difficulties attending the transit of both books and bodies, both Sor Juana and Sor María succeeded in writing themselves into
the transatlantic production of imperial and colonial knowledge at its
most elite levels. Their two cases reveal the complexity of male responses
to female intellectual activity, which we intend to unravel in order to challenge the idea of a monolithic male opposition to female intellectual production and to question what role space played in the inclusion of these
women into these masculine intellectual milieus. In our reading of Sor
Juana’s theology and Sor María’s cosmography, we have identified a subtle
reworking of the concept of space as a rhetorical construction. Sor Juana
and Sor María were avid users of the rhetorical devices at hand, as were
other early modern women, since masculine authorities were the implicit
Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-century Persons,
Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), and Dorothy
Schons, Book Censorship in New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950).
24
Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sor Juana’s confessor, offered a circumscribed
reading list for nuns in Distribución de las Obras Ordinarias y extraordinarias del día para
Hacerlas perfectamente conforme al Estado de las Señoras Religiosas [Distribution of the
Ordinary and Extraordinary Tasks as Befitting the State of Religious Ladies] (Mexico
City: Viuda de Miguel de Ribera Calderón, 1712). The list included works by Saints
Teresa, Thomas Aquinas, and Philip Neri. He stated, moreover, that these texts should
be made accessible in the form of “apothegmas sueltos” [a series of apothegms] (38). In his
Cartilla de la doctrina religiosa [Primer on Religious Doctrine] (Mexico City: A. Valdés,
1831) 39–40, he describes women’s lack of intellectual ability as “la debilidad del seso, la
flaqueza del sujeto, la peregrinidad ignorada de la doctrina latina, la dificultad y embarazo
de las lecciones” [the brain’s weakness, the individual’s frailty, the curious ignorance of
Latin doctrine, the difficulty and discomfort with the readings and instructions].
23
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
63
readers and ultimate judges of their epistemological pursuits. Nevertheless,
the construction of space as a rhetorical device in their writings becomes a
more sophisticated notion than merely a simple feminine survival strategy
in a tightly-controlled arena. It facilitated a direct engagement with the
migration of bodies and books that otherwise would have been impossible
for these two cloistered women, and, more suggestively still, it allowed
them the means by which to participate in the exclusively male sphere of
the imperial enterprise.
Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of the construction of social space
provides insight into the verbal strategies utilized by Sor Juana and Sor
María to concretize their conception of space in their written works, more
specifically the space created through transatlantic crossings. We acknowledge that we are referring to the physical and real space created by the
transit between the two continents that was known to these women not
through empirical experience but through their processes of epistemological inquiry. We would like, however, to draw attention to another element
at play in our invocation of transatlantic space here, which we have identified as a rhetorical, imagined space constructed in words and legitimized
by male authorities in the two women’s respective areas of intellectual
interest, theology and cosmography. Lefebvre states that space is a social
relationship that is inherent to property relationships and closely bound
with the forces of production, including technology and knowledge.25
Following this definition, both Sor Juana and Sor María are agents in the
production of colonial space, understood as a discursive practice and as a
product of interrelations.26 The socio-historical context in which they lived
implied that political power, knowledge, and space were closely related.27
The knowledge acquired in the convent through their relationships with
their respective courts and their dealings across the Atlantic authorized
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nichols-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), 85.
26
Santa Arias, “Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn,”
GeoJournal 75 (2010): 32.
27
For a lengthier explanation, see: Arias “Rethinking Space,” 29–41.
25
64 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8
Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
the cloistered nuns to write about the seemingly unknown transatlantic
space.
As research advances towards new conceptualizations of space, the
dichotomy of women’s and men’s language becomes problematic and
delimiting. Both cosmographical and scientific discourse and theological
discourse differ from other expressions of women’s subjectivities from
the medieval period to the eighteenth century primarily because women
who participated in this discourse “borrowed” from what has traditionally
been considered male language. Our contribution lies in part in focusing
on these “other” language and thematic interests that extend beyond what
traditionally has been considered feminine. Yet, the traditional method of
identifying language depending on the gender of the writer makes futile
the efforts of transatlantic, hemispheric, and transpacific approaches that
seek to move beyond restrictive ways of thinking about and analyzing the
cultural production of women in the early modern period. We contest that,
despite their cloistered state, their incursion into male-dominated spheres
made Sor Juana Inés and Sor María capable of transcending geographical frontiers and allowed them to inscribe themselves as writing subjects
within a wider transatlantic context.
In our two case studies, we further pose a series of key questions
that probe the notions of gender, geography, and language we have outlined above. To what degree were these women incorporated into male
intellectual culture? Did the direction of their Atlantic crossing have any
impact on their reception by masculine culture and the authorization of
their writings? What did it mean to be a female colonial subject writing
within a male genre and published in the metropolis? What did it mean
to be a female imperial subject, connected to the highest realms of power
and engaging in a work of scientific discovery that takes as its subject
colonial territories? Hence, we will assess these encounters with masculine
culture within a transatlantic paradigm, thus facilitating an examination
of what role the locus of enunciation — that is, the point of departure of
the respective transatlantic crossing — plays in the incorporation of both
women into official discourses.
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
65
Sor María de Ágreda: Crossing the Atlantic through
Cosmographical Knowledge
In July 1629 a delegation of fifty Jumano Indians arrived at the Franciscan
convent of old Isleta in present-day New Mexico. The Jumanos requested
missionaries to accompany them back to their territory, in what is now
Texas, to instruct their people in the Catholic faith. According to the
delegation, they had been advised to do so by the “Lady in Blue,” who had
appeared to them on numerous occasions. This miraculous passage in the
history of the Franciscan missionary endeavor on the Spanish frontier was
recounted in Fray Alonso de Benavides’s report to the Spanish king Philip
IV in 1630 and, in the extended version, to Pope Urban VIII in 1634.28
Benavides was first notified of the supernatural event while still custodian
of the conversions in New Mexico; he was then sent to Spain to meet with
the king and with the “Lady in Blue.”
From 1620 to 1631, Sor María de Ágreda allegedly experienced
bilocations that transported her to the New World, where she preached
to the native peoples of what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico,
and Arizona.29 María de Ágreda herself wrote about her experiences in
her Relación [Account] addressed to the Commissary General of the
Franciscan order, Fray Pedro Manero; however, in that document, Sor
María states that her bilocations lasted only three years.30 In the Relación
María de Ágreda informs Manero that the “exterioridades,” by which she
means her bilocations, made her suffer greatly and that she constantly
Fray Alonso de Benavides, Revised Memorial of 1634, ed. George P. Hammond
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1945).
29
To bilocate means to be in two places at the same time. According to the Catholic
Encyclopedia (online edition) Catholic philosophers “maintain that there is no absolute
impossibility in the same body being at once circumscriptively in one place and definitively elsewhere (mixed mode of location)”: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02568a.
htm, accessed October 15, 2012.
30
Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Relación que la V.M. Sor María de Jesús, religiosa
del convento de Ágreda, escribió de su letra, del estado y progreso de su vida a nuestro Rmo. P.
Fray Pedro Manero, Comisario general de la orden (n.d.), in the National Library, Madrid,
225.
28
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asked God for them to stop occurring. Although her experiences attracted
attention from the highest political and ecclesiastical ranks, making her
a celebrated nun early in her life, it also drew the attention of the Holy
Office, which led to two lengthy investigations that, in the end, absolved
Sor María from any wrongdoing.31
María de Ágreda also penned a text that relates how she acquired
knowledge of the composition of the world and the existence of “other”
people in need of evangelization. Titled Tratado de la mapa y descripción
de los orbes celestiales y elementales desde el cielo empíreo hasta el centro de la
tierra [Treatise on the Map and Description of the Celestial and Elemental
Spheres from the Empyrean Heaven to the Center of the Earth], the text
contained a preamble that circulated independently as another treatise
describing the four parts of the world and its inhabitants.32 For the most
part, the text follows the thematic structure of a cosmographical treatise,
a genre that was limited to male intellectuals; yet, Sor María’s text was
produced due to “infused knowledge,” and it could therefore be read as the
result of a mystical experience.33
María de Ágreda’s authorship of this piece has been contested in
recent years. Manuel Serrano y Sanz’s Apuntes para una biblioteca de autoras españolas, one of the authoritative sources for women’s literary production in Spain, comments that, although the Treatise on the Map of the
Spheres “seems authentic judging by what Ágreda and her confessor, Father
Fuenmayor say about it, it is so foolish and full of absurdities that I cannot
bring myself to accept it as genuine.”34 However, not a single document has
The first one in 1635, and the second one in 1650.
Tratado del grado de luz y conocimiento de ciencia infusa que tuvo el alma de la
venerable Madre Sor María de Ágreda de toda la redondez de la tierra y los habitadores de
ella, y unos secretos y misterios ocultos que en él contiene [Treatise on the gradation of light
and knowledge through intuition that the soul of the Venerable Mother María of Ágreda
had of the whole circumference of the Earth and of those who inhabit it, as well as some
secrets and hidden mysteries that are contained within it]. The work is housed in the
archive of the Convent of the Most Pure Conception, Ágreda, Spain.
33
Infused knowledge is the gift of secular and spiritual knowledge miraculously
conferred by God.
34
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas
(Madrid: Atlas, 1975), 37.
31
32
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
67
been produced to verify such a claim.35 More recently, Sor María’s authorship of this treatise has been acknowledged by Clark Colahan and a section
even translated by him.36
In what follows we propose to read the Treatise as a textual justification of María de Ágreda’s alleged travels to the New World to evangelize
the native population. In this light, the Treatise does not seem so “full of
absurdities” but rather is a clear attempt to imprint her own bilocation
experiences in the official knowledge of the period, which was implicitly
male. With the backing of a cosmographical text, the bilocations would no
longer be solely religious experiences of a cloistered nun but part of a larger
experience of transatlantic crossing and knowledge. Even if the information
included in the treatise was taken from other sources, her inserting it in a
new genre, the “mystical cosmographical treatise,” demonstrates the existing concern of women to share not only in the feminine knowledge allowed
by the Church but in greater and more ambitious intellectual endeavors.
Several religious women during the early modern period included narrations of bilocations in their spiritual writings. Jane Tar has studied these
phenomena, contextualizing María de Ágreda’s bilocations more broadly.37
The proscription to leave the cloister compelled religious women to find
As Clark Colahan explains in his book, until a century after Sor María’s death,
no one suggested this text might not be written by her. Sor María even included it in the
list of her works in the prologue of her autobiography (31). The copies of the Treatise
housed in the archive of the convent in Ágreda include a handwritten note stating that
the Holy Congregation of Rites in Rome had declared it apocryphal in 1762. This note
was written by Eduardo Royo, chaplain of the convent and author of Autenticidad de la
Mística ciudad de Dios y biografía de su autora (Barcelona: Juan Gili, 1914). Royo was a
proponent of Sor María’s canonization cause in the early twentieth century, which might
have led to this statement; however, we have not been able to locate any document that
confirms the declaration from Rome.
36
Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Agreda. He follows the copy preserved
in the Royal Library of El Escorial. It is also one of the legalized copies made by Fray
Antonio de Jesús, who was in charge of Sor María’s canonization process in the last few
years of the seventeenth century.
37
Some of the women who experienced bilocations are Chilean nun Úrsula
Suárez, Mexican religious woman Sor María de Jesús Tomelín, and the Peruvian Sor
María Manuela.
35
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other means in which to travel across the empire and participate along
with men in the missionary enterprise. Tar argues that religious women’s
bilocations could indeed be read as gendered transgressions, yet they also
appear in the historical moment as clear contributions to the expansionist
agenda of the Hapsburgs.38 Katie MacLean, for instance, studies the mystical phenomenon as part of the imperial expansion project, not only from
the women writers’ point of view but taking into account the reception and
appropriation of their experiences.39 It is important to note that bilocations
were not limited to cloistered women. The Catholic Church endorsed the
phenomenon as it was narrated in the life stories of several saints, such as
Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua, for they represented an extraordinary mystical experience consistent with Catholic theology. Usually, the
bilocations were reported when the saints were called to minister to others
in different geographical places. The most noteworthy bilocations of saints
and non-canonized religious subjects were reported during the early modern period, as in the cases of Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Martin de Porres,
Saint Catherine de’ Ricci, and Sor María de Ágreda. These cases support
the argument by MacLean and Tar that the expansionism of the time
apparently contributed to the increase of bilocation experiences. It could
be contended that, although Sor María’s bilocations reveal her desire to
promote the story presented by Benavides and to maintain the occurrence
of her “exterioridades,” they are ultimately fabrications that worked for the
benefit of the Franciscan missionaries. However, Sor María benefited from
these experiences as well; her fame was such that Philip IV stopped by the
convent in the village of Ágreda to meet Sor María in 1643 on his way to
Jane Tar, “Flying Through the Empire: The Visionary Journeys of Early Modern
Nuns,” in Women’s Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire, ed. Jennifer L. Eich, Jeanne
Gillespie, and Lucia G. Harrison (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2008),
273.
39
Katie MacLean, “María de Agreda, Spanish Mysticism, and the Work of
Spiritual Conquest,” Colonial Latin American Review 17 (2008): 30.
38
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
69
Aragon. From this encounter there ensued a lengthy exchange of letters
that would last through their lifetimes (both died in 1665).40
Sor María wrote down her “infused” knowledge of the world, choosing to bequeath not only her narrative of bilocation and her justification
and correction of the Benavides story but a more scientific account: that of
the cosmographical treatise.41 Sor María de Ágreda’s cosmographical writing is problematic for several reasons. As a well-known religious woman,
she tries to follow Church mandates by using rhetorical strategies common
to other religious women writers, framing her knowledge as inspired from
divine sources rather than from her own intellect. She uses the “tricks of
the weak”42 to distance herself from intellectual accountability, yet instead
of composing a spiritual autobiography or a mystical text, she enters a
clearly masculine domain with cosmographical calculations about the
dimension of the earth and the distances to the planets; as an example,
among her other calculations, she writes: “Esta máquina tiene de redondez
9280 leguas y de canto, 2902 leguas” [This world has 9280 leagues of circumference and 2902 leagues of radius].43 Sor María’s calculations are inaccurate and not produced from experimental observation but from archaic
bibliographic sources. Moreover, the Aristotelian view of the universe,
although privileged by the Catholic Church, had already been debunked
with the new theories of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.
At the beginning of the Treatise, Sor María narrates that after having taken communion, an angel appeared before her telling her that God
Sor María became the King’s counselor in political and spiritual matters. For an
excellent study of their correspondence, see Consolación Baranda, Correspondencia con
Felipe IV: Religión y razón de estado (Madrid: Castalia, 1991).
41
In her Relación, written many years after the bilocations, she “corrects” the official
story of her trips, clarifying that “Es de advertir que algunas cosas están muy ponderadas,
mal entendidas y otras añadidas” (220) [It needs to be considered that some things were
exaggerated, misunderstood and others added].
42
Josefina Ludmer, “Tricks of the Weak,” in Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, ed. Stephanie Merrim (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990),
86–92.
43
Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Tratado, n.p.
40
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wanted to carry out what he had promised her, to grant her infused knowledge of all things:
Fui llevada a la presencia del muy Alto y postrada delante de su
acatamiento, oí que me decía su Alteza: Esposa, y paloma mía,
Yo crié el cielo y la tierra y los elementos y el mar; y quiero que
conozcas el fin para que fue criado todo lo que tiene ser.
[I was taken before the most High and kneeling down in front of
Him I heard that his Highness told me: My bride and my dove,
I created heavens and earth, and the elements and the oceans,
and I want you to know the purpose of all of my creation.]44
The first section of the treatise, from which this quote is taken, refers to
the infused knowledge that Sor María’s soul acquired of the earth and all if
its inhabitants. The second section of the treatise takes into consideration
the spheres and the elements, and the third one deals with the celestial
region, that is of the heavens.
Modern readers find little merit in Sor María’s text for reproducing scholastic information well into the seventeenth century. Sor María’s
Treatise replicates the Ptolemaic model of the spheres and other information contained in various sixteenth-century cosmographical treatises, such
as those by Gemma Frisius and Peter Apian.45 María Portuondo, who has
studied Spanish cosmography in depth, states that the cosmographical
production during the Renaissance integrated three classical traditions:
Aristotelian natural philosophy, Ptolemaic geography, and Pliny’s human,
animal, and plant kingdoms; and as Portuondo argues, the discovery of
the New World presented an unprecedented opportunity to conflate this
classical knowledge with the new realities they found.46 Sor María’s Treatise
on the Map follows these traditions and imitates the structure of famous
treatises in order to justify her knowledge and her travel to where the
Ibid., n.p.
Pedro Apiano, La cosmographia, corregida y añadida por Gemma Frisio (Antwerp,
44
45
1575).
Portuondo, Secret Science, 21.
46
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71
peoples of the fourth world had been found and, in this way, legitimizes
her journey to join the missionaries without leaving her cloister. It is clear
that Sor María was not only influenced by Renaissance cosmographical
discourse, which maintained many archaic concepts, but also by the missionary discourse involving the exploration and conversion of souls in
remote and dangerous lands. These two traditions are embedded in Sor
María’s representation of the world in the Treatise.
Ágreda employs the same rhetoric of male explorers who exoticized
the Americas and its inhabitants and tangentially touches on the debate
that took place a century earlier about the nature of the Indians:
En esta Isla, digo, que está muy poblada, y no se si diga de gente,
y de animales, por que mas parecen burros, que hombres, y que
criaturas racionales; y puedo decir que lo son; por que maravillándome yo, como lo podían ser, me lo dijo un ángel: sí lo son, y
tienen alma como tú.
[In this island, I say, which is quite populated, yet I would not
know if I should say that it is populated by people or by animals,
because they seem more like donkeys than men or rational creatures. And I can say that they are, because as I was astonished
by their nature, an angel told me so: yes, they are humans and
they have souls like you.]47
She catalogs people depending on their place of origin and uses the same
categories of difference that had been debunked a century earlier. But her
contribution is that rather than acknowledging any intellectual source for
her understanding of the world and the heavens, she repeatedly states that
God allowed her to be carried by angels and taken to these remote parts of
the world to witness it firsthand.
T. D. Kendrick and Colahan support the idea that the treatise must
be a text from Sor María’s youth.48 Regardless of the time of composition,
Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Tratado, n.p.
T. D. Kendrick, Mary of Agreda: The Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (London:
Routledge, 1967).
47
48
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it is difficult to deny altogether the possibility of her authorship, even
though the autograph copy is lost. The number of extant copies of the
treatise and the various testimonies stating her authorship, including
her own comments about composing it, assert that this is an important
instance in which a religious woman undertook this kind of composition.49
While its content might not be scientifically relevant, two key elements
mark this text as ground-breaking. First, Sor María was able to merge the
information brought back from Franciscan missionaries about evangelization in the northern frontier of New Spain with what she had learned from
cosmographical texts in the convent. Second, she brought the mystical
nature of the text into dialogue with traditional notions of geography and
cosmography. Sor María de Ágreda was a prolific writer during the seventeenth century; her most famous work, the controversial Mystical City of
God, has caused heated debates among ecclesiastical officials through the
centuries and has been the main point of contention in the debate about
her canonization. Yet, Sor María acquired recognition for her mystical
writing with both the king and the highest officials in the church during
her lifetime and after her death. Since she was thought to have had direct
In the Vida de Sor María de Ágreda narrada por el padre José Ximénez Samaniego
como “Prólogo Galeato” a la Mística ciudad de Dios, in the Royal Library of the Monastery
of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Fray José Ximénez Samaniego includes sections
of the Treatise when writing about Sor María’s bilocations (see especially page 132).
Several of the manuscript copies include informal and brief commentaries at the beginning to clarify that the text is authentic, particularly because it had not been published.
The copy at the Escorial begins:
49
Que trata de la redondez del mundo, y elementos, y algo de los cielos. El cual se
halló en Madrid, cuyo original tenía el padre Salizanes, obispo de Córdoba, de
quien el señor Samaniego, obispo de Placencia no pudo sacar sino un traslado que
es como se sigue.
[Which relates the circumference of the earth and the elements and some things
about the heavens. Which was found in Madrid, in the possession of Father
Salizanes, bishop of Córdoba, from whom Father Samaniego, bishop of Placencia,
could not obtain except for a copy which is as follows.]
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
73
communication from the Virgin Mary and God, her writings were valued
for their symbolic meaning and not only for what they literally said.50
Read in the context of the bilocations, the Treatise on the Map is an
intellectual justification of her geographical knowledge and a metaphor
of the epistemological construction that supported imperial expansion
across the Atlantic. It is possible to assert that the treatise is symbolic of
Sor María de Ágreda’s textual travels through cosmographical knowledge.
Sor María becomes a traveler without leaving her cloister; as a bilocating
nun she had an important effect on missionary history, but she was never
regarded as a cosmographer or even an intellectual nun like her counterpart in New Spain. Although her cosmographical treatise circulated
widely in manuscript form during her lifetime and in the years following
her death, this work was never published. Ultimately, her intellectual discourse remains on the margins of the hegemonic paradigm of the official
knowledge of the period, a fate that speaks precisely to the complex politics
of reception. The treatise was copied by several different hands and traveled to different convents and monasteries throughout Spain and to the
Americas, as we know from the preamble written by one of the copyists,
Fray Antonio de Jesús, in the version of the Treatise found in the Library of
the Escorial. The combination of infused knowledge and cosmographical
discourse allowed Sor María to cross over, not only as a mystic nun but as
an intellectual woman.
Some of the studies dedicated to Sor María’s life and writings have taken a more
religious approach to this divine communication. See, for example, James Carrico, The
Life of Venerable Mary of Agreda: Author of the Mystical City of God, the Autobiography
of the Virgin Mary (Stockbridge: Culligan, 1960); Marilyn Fedewa, María of Ágreda:
Mystical Lady in Blue (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009)
50
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Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Theology and the Transatlantic
City of Knowledge
While controversy surrounds the authorship of Sor Maria’s scientific
treatise, it is a polemic of a different kind that attends Sor Juana’s Carta
Atenagórica [Letter Worthy of Athena],51 This tract represents Sor
Juana’s most explicit foray into theology wherein she disputes the famous
Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira’s interpretation of the various patristic
sources on the concept of the “finezas de Cristo,” that is, what was the
greatest gift Christ gave to humankind upon his death. More than any
other aspect of her life and work, the reception of the Letter Worthy of
Athena, published in Puebla, Mexico in 1690, has consumed the attention
of literary critics and historians of various generations.52 Most compelling
to scholars has been a desire to discover the reasons behind its creation and
its unauthorized publication by Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz,
including a letter admonishing Sor Juana for her literary activities which
he signs with the pseudonym “Sor Filotea,” and Sor Juana’s subsequent
renunciation of her studies beginning in 1693. Sor Juana’s most famous
text, which she wrote as a response to Sor Filotea/Fernández de Santa
Cruz’s criticisms — the Respuesta a Sor Filotea [Answer to Sor Filotea]
of 1691 — has been analyzed in different ways by many scholars as they
aim to shed light on these events.53 The text that set in motion the abovementioned events and engendered a textual war in Mexico has itself not
received as much critical attention, dealing as it does with what appears
to be a seemingly minor theological debate over the “finezas de Cristo.”54
Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Vol. IV, Comedias, sainetes y prosa,
ed. Alberto G. Salceda (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957), 412–39.
52
Important examples in this regard are works by Dorothy Schons, Emilo Abreu
Gómez, Antonio Alatorre, Georgina Sabat, Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling, Octavio Paz,
José Pascual Buxó, and Elías Trabulse.
53
See for example works by Elías Trabulse, José Pascual Buxó, Octavio Paz,
Stephanie Merrim, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Frederick Luciani, Stacey Schlau, and
Electa Arenal, among others.
54
The most notable exception to this is Pamela Kirk who addresses the theological
content of the Carta Atenagórica in her book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art, and
51
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
75
In this case study we would like to focus on the transatlantic reception
and circulation of the Carta Atenagórica itself in order to shed light on
three key areas of inquiry: male acceptance of women within masculine
discursive domains; women writers’ strategic use of “masculine” language;
and the effect of these first two points on transatlantic epistemological
crossings.
Although identical in content to the Carta Atenagórica, the tract on
the “finezas de Cristo” that opens the Segundo volumen [Second Volume]
of Sor Juana’s works, published in Seville in 1692 can in many ways be
considered a distinct text.55 Finally bearing the title its author had originally given it, the Crisis de un sermón [ Judgment on a Sermon] appears in
print in Spain without the encumbrance of Sor Filotea’s preliminary text
in which Fernández de Santa Cruz had leveled some crushing indictments
at Sor Juana’s literary activities as well as evincing disapproval of the theological content itself.56 Flanked instead by texts that attest specifically to
the author’s erudition and rectitude, the reception of Sor Juana’s Crisis in
Feminism (New York: Continuum, 1998). Jean Franco also studies the text in some detail
in her chapter on Sor Juana in Plotting Women (New York: Columbia University Press,
1989): 39–42. José Pascual Buxó has also looked at the content of this particular text in
his article “Las lágrimas de Sor Juana,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La búsqueda sin fin,” ed.
Stephanie Kirk, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 44, no. 2 ( June 2010): 363–96.
55
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995).
56
In the penultimate paragraph of his Carta de Sor Filotea in Salceda, ed., Obras
completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, vol. 4, 696, Fernández de Santa Cruz clearly rejects
the theological arguments Sor Juana makes regarding God’s “finezas” as they pertain to
free will in the last and boldest section of the Carta Atenagórica:
Estoy muy cierta y segura que si V. md., con los discursos vivos de su entendimiento, formase y pintase una idea de las perfecciones divinas (cual se permite entre las
tinieblas de la fe), al mismo tiempo se vería ilustrada de luces su alma y abrasada
su voluntad y dulcemente herida de amor de su Dios, para que este Señor, que ha
llovido tan abundantemente beneficios positivos en lo natural sobre V. md., no se
vea obligado a concederla beneficios solamente negativos en lo sobrenatural; que
por más que la discreción de V. md. les llame finezas, yo les tengo por castigos:
porque sólo es beneficio el que Dios hace al corazón humano previniéndole con su
gracia para que le corresponda agradecido, disponiéndose con un beneficio reconocido, para que no represada, la liberalidad divina se los haga mayores.
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Spain thus bore no resemblance to the hostility the Carta Atenagórica had
encountered in Mexico. In crossing the Atlantic back to the Old World,
the words and ideas Sor Juana had penned in the New World underwent
a transformation and found acceptance in what Stephanie Merrim has
dubbed the exclusively masculine precincts of the city of knowledge.57
The transatlantic voyage undertaken by Sor Juana’s theological musings
facilitated a shift in the circumstances with which the text was to greet the
public and which undoubtedly shaped the very different response that the
same content had received in Mexico. As Margo Glantz has pointed out in
her excellent analysis of the Segundo volumen’s preliminary materials, Sor
Juana and her ally and patron, the Countess of Paredes, had marshaled a
Spanish defense of the nun’s words to counter the negative reaction the
text had caused in New Spain.58 The countess and her friends and associates brought together a group of twenty-two distinguished gentlemen
[I am very certain and confident that if you, with the lively arguments of your mind,
would form and paint an idea of the divine Perfection (to the degree possible given
the darkness of faith), at the same time you would see your soul illuminated and
your will inflamed and sweetly wounded with the love of your God, in order that
this Lord who has so abundantly showered positive natural benefits on you will
not be obliged to grant you only negative supernatural benefits. Furthermore, that
which your wit would call demonstrations of love, I consider punishments. The
only thing that can be considered as a benefit is what God does to the human heart
when he prepares it with his grace so that it can respond with gratitude, disposing
it with a benefit that is acknowledged, so that it may respond unchecked to ever
greater divine generosity.] See Pamela Kirk Rappaport, trans. and introduction, Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings (New York and Mahwah, NJ: The Paulist
Press, 2005), 252.
He makes many negative comments regarding her poetry writing including “Mucho tiempo ha gastado V. md. en el estudio de filósofos y poetas; ya será razón que se perfeccionen
los empleos y que se mejoren los libros” (695) [You have spent a great deal of time in the
study of philosophers and poets; it is now high time for your pastimes to be perfected
and your books improved”]. See Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, trans., The Answer/la
Respuesta: Expanded Edition including the Letter to which it Replies and New Selected Poems
(New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009), 226.
57
Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 194.
58
Margo Glantz, La comparación y la hipérbole (Mexico City: Conaculta, 1999),
212. Glantz also describes these laudatory texts as “ensalmos para protegerla de los
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77
to write preliminary panegyrics in the forms of censuras [censures] and
licencias [permissions] in both poetry and prose. A significant number of
these authors were theologians and other scholars drawn from a selection
of the most prominent male religious groups, among them three Jesuits.
Inquisition officials were also found among their number.59 While it is
not unusual that such a volume should include such laudatory paratextual
material, it is the engagement of respected theologians with Sor Juana’s
own theological discourse that serves to make this particular collection
memorable.60 Why would the clerical and theological community in Spain
approve of Sor Juana’s text while its counterpart in Mexico so heavily
censured her? The countess was a powerful aristocrat whose political connections obviously reached far and wide. Yet, if the content and context of
Sor Juana’s text had been so problematic — as the Mexican situation seems
to indicate — surely even the influence of a noblewoman would not have
been enough for men of this caliber to place their reputations in jeopardy
múltiples adversarios que . . . tuvo en la capital novohispana” [incantantions to protect her
from the many adversaries she had in the capital of New Spain].
59
See Margo Glantz, La comparación y la hipérbole, for a detailed description of the
organization of these materials (158–59).
60
In relation to the paratextual material accompanying the posthumous volume
of Sor Juana’s work, Fama y obras póstumas, Margo Echenberg has called attention to the
importance of these types of texts in “Alianza y censuras en las dedicatorias de las obras
de Sor Juana,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La búsqueda sin fin,” ed. Kirk, 412:
No es solo que en su tiempo se valoraba más el paratexto sino que inmiscuido entre
la hipérbole y las fórmulas de rigor se entretejen diálogos fascinantes llenos de
pautas para mejor comprender tanto la concepción como la admisión de un texto.
En el caso de la mujer que escribe, el conjunto de documentos que conforman el
paratexto puede proveer, incluso, información biográfica de la cual no existe rastro
en otras fuentes históricas.
[It is not only that in this period the paratext was more valued but also that,
immersed in the hyperbole and the necessary formulaic language fascinating
dialogues were woven, full of clues to further our understanding of not only the
conceptualization of a text but also its reception. In the case of the woman who
wrote, the group of documents that constitutes the paratext can go as far as to
provide biographical information of which no trace can be found in other historical
sources].
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through praise of Sor Juana. Instead, we contend that the nun’s successful
deployment of male intellectual language, together with the singularity of
her colonial locus of enunciation and textual transatlantic crossing, opened
up a new discursive space, allowing for the same ideas that had so shocked
Mexican clerics to appeal to their Spanish counterparts.
The Spanish Jesuits seem to take Sor Juana at her word when she
declares herself in the Carta Atenagórica “hija de la Sagrada Religión” of
Vieira, with which she makes reference to the Society of Jesus. Jesuit Pedro
Zapata, who also held the responsibilities of “calificador” [censor] of the
Inquisition, “predicador del rey” [King’s preacher] as well as “Examinador
Synodal” [Synodal Examiner] of the Archbishopric of Seville echoes Sor
Filotea’s refusal to count himself among those men who shun the efforts of
learned women, “apartándome del vulgo de aquellos hombres” [distancing
myself from the vulgar opinions of those men]. 61 However, unlike Manuel
Fernández de Santa Cruz, he is consistent in his support and goes on to
echo Sor Juana’s belief that the soul had no sex. Thus, he concludes, God
granted both men and women the capacity to uncover the “más delicadas
sutilezas de las sciencias”62 [the most intricate subtleties of knowledge]. Sor
Juana is one such woman, and while she demonstrates capacities in many
branches of learning it is her theological work — the highest level of erudition — that must garner the greatest praise: “Se introduce [Sor Juana] con
tan superior inteligencia en los secretos de la Sagrada Escritura y desentraña
las questiones de la Theologia Escolastica con vozes tan decentes. . .”63 [She
(Sor Juana) inserts herself with such superior intelligence into the secrets
Pedro Zapata, “[elogio de] El P. M. Pedro Zapata, Religioso Professo de la
Compañia de Jesus, Calificador del Santo Oficio, Predicador del Rey, Examinador
Synodal de este Arçobispado” in Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(Mexico City: UNAM, 1995), n.p.. This could be seen as a sly critique of Fernández de
Santa Cruz who, at the beginning of his letter, seemingly offers support of women writers: “No apruebo la vulgaridad de los que reprueban en las mujeres el uso de las letras,
pues tantas se aplicaron a este estudio, no sin alabanza de San Jerónimo” (695) [I do not
approve of those who condemn women’s lettered pursuits, since so many who applied
themselves thus garnered the praise of Saint Jerome].
62
Zapata, “[elogio de] El P. M. Pedro Zapata,” in Segundo volumen de las obras de
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, n.p.
63
Ibid., n.p.
61
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
79
of the Holy Scripture and unravels the questions of Scholastic Theology
with the most decent of words”]. His fellow panegyrist Fray Pedro del
Santíssimo Sacramento, Discalced Carmelite, praises many aspects of
Sor Juana’s writing: “la profundidad de los Pensamientos, la sutileza de
los Discursos, la ingenuidad de los Conceptos” [the profundity of her
Thoughts, the artifice of her Discourse, the ingenuity of her Concepts];
he saves his most lavish praise for her “Magistral Inteligencia de la Sagrada
Escritura y de los Santos Padres” [Masterful Understanding of the Holy
Scripture and Church Fathers”]. 64 These comments represent just a few
examples of the specific praise these Spanish clerics and theologians offer
Sor Juana’s theological tract. There is no insinuation that Sor Juana has
overstepped her position as a nun in debating the great Antonio Vieira.
Indeed, several of the writers place Sor Juana’s talent on a par or surpassing the knowledge produced within the hallowed precincts of all-male
intellectual establishments. For example, let us consider the exhortation of
Pedro del Santíssimo Sacramento that “la aplaudan en las Escuelas, en las
Universidades, en las Academias, en los Teatros, para que sea de Doctos la
alabança y que elogien debidamente a la que en todas Facultades y Ciencias
es Doctissima”65 [they applaud her in the Schools, the Universities, the
Academies, the Lecture Halls, so that she might be praised by the erudite
and rightly declared in all faculties and sciences as the most erudite of all].
Viewed within this framework, Sor Juana’s discussion of Vieira’s ideas
suddenly fit neatly into the tradition of male intellectual debate of which
theological disputatio was an integral part.66 Indeed, the first word of Sor
Fray Pedro del Santísimo Sacramento, “[elogio de] El Padre Maestro fr. Pedro
del Santissimo Sacramento, Religioso Carmelito Descalço, y Predicador en su Colegio del
Angel de la Guarda de Sevilla, de la misma orden” in Ibid, n.p.
65
Ibid, n.p.
66
In the Jesuit plan for education, the Ratio of 1599, the issue of disputation
and the importance of students learning competitive argumentation is emphasized. In
Educational Foundations of the Jesuits in Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1938), 28–29, Jerome V. Jacobsen details the procedures, explaining
that this “intellectual joust in Latin, at times wearisome, was conducted at other times in
so heated a manner that an outsider might readily suppose the good people, professors
included, were on the verge of a very major schism. These jousts, or actas, while admirably
suited to sharpen the mind to a keen point for perception of truth, falsity, and distinctions,
64
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Juana’s own title for her tract, Crisis de un sermón, bore the connotation
of judgment in its derivation from Greek. Sor Juana does indeed offer a
judicious reading of Vieira’s text. In the first paragraph she explains how
her disquisitions on his original involved various stages of intellectual judgment that range from praise [alabando] to dissent [disintiendo], but always
incorporating admiration [admirándome].67
Perhaps the comprehension the Spanish clerics showed of her
respectful and reasoned debate was the fate Sor Juana had originally anticipated for her first explicitly theological efforts. We know from her opening
comments in the Carta Atenagórica that her oral presentation of these
ideas had been well-received by those who heard them in the “locutorio” or
visiting room of the convent, among them presumably Manuel Fernández
de Santa Cruz, who had apparently requested its transcription.68 Given
that she published so few texts in Mexico, perhaps she had always intended
for the original and sole audience to be across the Atlantic far from the
conflicts of her own Mexican milieu.69 In the Respuesta she tells us she had
had a reflex in external attitudes and go a long way toward explaining the combative and
controversial spirit of some religious.”
67
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta Atenagórica, in Segundo volumen, 412.
68
In the opening lines of the Carta Atenagórica, 412, Sor Juana writes “Muy Señor
Mío: De las bachillerías de una conversación, que en la merced que V. md. me hace pasaron plaza de vivezas, nació en V. md. el deseo de ver por escrito algunos discursos que allí
hice de repente sobre los sermones de un excelente orador” [My Dear Sir: When amid the
pleasantries of a conversation, you were so kind as to recognize in me a certain acuity of
mind, there was born in you the desire to see in writing some of the arguments that came
to me spontaneously at that time, especially those concerning the sermons of an excellent
preacher]. See Pamela Kirk, trans., Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings (Mahwah,
NJ, Paulist Press, 2005), 219.
69
Very few of Sor Juana’s texts were published in Mexico during her lifetime, with
the exception of, most significantly, the Neptuno alegórico and the Auto sacramental del
divino Narciso in 1690. Several of her sets of villancicos [carols] were also published, albeit
some anonymously. In the earlier part of her life she also contributed poems to various
published collections that were the fruit of poetry competitions and special celebrations.
All of this information comes from Francisco de la Maza’s invaluable resource Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz ante la historia (Mexico City: UNAM, 1980).
Transatlantic Women’s Writing
81
not anticipated the “favor” of the publication of her “borrones” [drafts].70
Perhaps the thinly-veiled anger she demonstrates here toward the critiques she had received was inspired in part by the premature publication
of something she had always intended for print in Spain in an anticipated
second volume, given that the first volume, Inundación Castálida (1689),
[The Overflowing of the Castalian Spring] had met with such success.
The panegyrists of the Segundo volumen make frequent references to
Sor Juana’s singularity as a female intellectual.71 Nearly all of them draw
attention, moreover, to the other singular feature of her persona: her identity as a colonial subject. As with her gender, these clerics and other erudite
men fall into the common trap of depicting America within a narrow set
of images, making reference to its worth as exporter of raw materials and
expressing surprise that the colonies should have produced such a learned
woman. For example, Don Pedro del Campo writes “Qué millones trae la
Flota?/pregunta el Vulgo, en llegando/ Qué obras de la Madre Juana?/el
Discreto Cortesano?”72 [How many millions brings the fleet? / Asks the
common man upon arrival / Which of Mother Juana’s works? / Asks the
clever courtier]. In the same vein, Don Ambrosio de la Cuesta seems to
upbraid “nuestra España,” which, he claims, “solo se reconocia agradecida
a la America de los Tesoros, con que repetidamente la enriqueze”73 [only
displays gratitude to America for the treasures, which constantly enrich
her]. The depiction of America as provider of raw materials was a clear
reflection of how the dynamics of imperialism influenced transatlantic
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in Obras completas
ed. Salceda (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957), 440.
71
In La comparación y la hipérbole, 187, Glantz refers to the repertoire of images
the panegyrists mobilize to praise her as “Numerosas frases convertidas casi en lugar
común” [Numerous phrases which become almost clichés] and highlights what she sees
as a misogynist gesture in this type of praise: “Mencionar a una mujer ilustre es siempre
compararla con un hombre excepcional. Pareciera que solo así fuera legítima y pudiera
autorizarse y aceptarse la valía, la existencia del talento femenino . . . [To mention an illustrious woman is always to compare her to an exceptional man. It would seem that only
then would she be legitimate and could she assume authority, and the value and existence
of female talent be accepted].
72
Segundo volumen, n.p.
73
Ibid., n.p.
70
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scholarly exchange.74 While colonial subjects desired nothing more for
their works than to be published in Europe, Europeans themselves did
not hold the intellectual life of the colony in particularly high regard.75
Sor Juana, however, succeeds in converting the transatlantic crossing that
served only to crush the hopes of many creole intellectuals into an epistemological operating category for the reading and reception of her works.
For Sor Juana’s works, the Atlantic crossing offered a bridge to a new reading of her works in which her brand of colonial knowledge was endowed
with a particular epistemological value. It is precisely the prodigious con-
In “Colonial No More,” Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel analyzes how Sor Juana
herself addresses these dynamics in her poem “¿Cúando, Númenes divinos?” detailing
how “the poem resists its transatlantic reading by focusing on the meanings and referents
that are lost in the cultural and literary reappropriations of the American context by
the audience overseas.” She further notes that in the poem, the lyric voice shows how
“European eulogists have created a false image of the colonial subject that is a reflection
of their own (imperial) conceptions”; see Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, ed. Bergmann and Schlau, 93.
75
In Vida ejemplar, heroicas virtudes, y apostólico ministerio del venerable padre
Antonio Núñez de Miranda, de la Compañía de Jesús (Mexico City: Viuda de Francisco
Lupercio, 1702), his biography of Sor Juana’s erstwhile confessor, Antonio Núñez de
Miranda, fellow Jesuit Juan Antonio de Oviedo proclaims, somewhat spuriously, the great
success Núñez’s intellectual labors enjoyed: “la fama del Padre Antonio no estrechaba
los límites de la América — había ya grandes aplausos penetrados hasta la Europa” (45)
[Father Antonio’s fame was not confined to America — great acclaim had reached as far
as Europe]. At the same time, Sor Juana’s contemporary, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora,
desperately sought patrons, publishers, and renown in Europe, while complaining bitterly
of the lack of respect American intellectual production inspired in these same Europeans
in Libra astronómica y filosófica, 2nd. ed. (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984) 85: “piensan en
algunas partes de Europa y con especialidad en las septentrionales por más remotas, que
no sólo los indios, habitadores originarios de estos países, sino que los que de padres
españoles casualmente nacimos en ellos, o andamos en dos pies por divina dispensación,
o que aun valiéndose de microscopios ingleses apenas se descubre en nosotros lo racional”
[ In some parts of Europe, and most especially in the North which is more remote, they
think that not only the Indians, original inhabitants of these countries, but also those of
us who happen to have been here of Spanish parents, either walk on two legs by divine
dispensation or that even by making use of English microscopes one barely finds reason
in us]. Irving Leonard, trans. Don Carlos De Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the
Seventeenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929), 62–63.
74
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83
fluence of gender, space, and theological discourse that permits Sor Juana
to enter the transatlantic city of knowledge where many colonial men had
failed. Doctor Ambrosio de la Cuesta y Saavedra, canon of the cathedral in
Seville summed up Sor Juana’s transatlantic value, declaring her erudition
este inestimable Tesoro, descubierto en el Mineral fertil del
ingenio singular de la Madre Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz,
Religiosa professa en el Monasterio de San Geronimo de la
Imperial Ciudad de Mexico, es, el que en varias y elegantes
Obras enriqueze gloriosamente dos Mundos76
[this inestimable treasure, discovered in the fertile land of the
singular genius of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, professed nun
of the convent of Saint Jerome of the Imperial City of Mexico,
is one which in various and elegant works gloriously enriches two
worlds].
Conclusion: Women, Epistemology,
and the Transatlantic Space
The findings we have outlined in this article lead us to the conclusion that
women of the Hispanic early modern period did not always write in clearly
contrasting terms that opposed male models of knowledge. Although Sor
Juana’s theological and Sor María’s cosmographical contributions were not
fully incorporated into male intellectual culture, they were acclaimed by
certain masculine networks of support, and their ideas and writings drew
the attention and engagement of ecclesiastical authorities. Thus, we believe
that their intention was to participate along with men in the intellectual
debates of their time and that ultimately they achieved what they intended
to do in great part because of the transatlantic context in which both of
them maneuvered. Sor Juana was able to publish her Carta Atenagórica on
the other side of the Atlantic and garner praise from respected theologians;
Segundo volumen, n.p., emphasis ours.
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Sor María undertook cosmographical writing as a way to justify and intellectualize her participation in the evangelization of the northern frontier
in New Spain, and her text, although never published, circulated widely
among ecclesiastical authorities.
It is important to bear in mind that women’s experiences as writers in
the transatlantic setting were not monolithic but that there are certain similarities that allow us to draw a series of conclusions that will allow scholars
to think more critically about the crossings of female bodies and books
over the Atlantic. Although both Sor María and Sor Juana count among
their writings texts that followed the “rhetoric of femininity” identified in
a cohort of women religious writers in the Iberian Atlantic world, these
two women also chose to engage in traditionally male genres using the
elite masculine parlance of theology and cosmography.77 What we believe
is that they chose to do this to more efficiently cross the Atlantic and map
their presence through their written words. The transatlantic crossing
operational in each woman’s case provided a liminal and transformative
space from which they could capitalize on the politics of reception and
launch new epistemological possibilities. While Sor María’s text is practically unknown and Sor Juana’s is renowned — if not necessarily widelyread — we believe nonetheless that they offer productive and informative
models of women’s experiences in the transatlantic milieu that allow us to
think about the intersection of writing, religion, gender, and space in new
ways and to consider in a wider context how these learned women helped
shape transatlantic epistemology.
See note 17.
77