The Other Mexican Muse: Sor Maria Anna Agueda de San Ignacio (1695-1756) (review)

Sor María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio (1695–1756) is one of the most important unsung women writers of Mexico's colonial past. Born the year Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz died, the Dominican wrote prolifically and shared Sor Juana's uniqueness of being a colonial woman writer published during her lifetime. Her writings include constitutions for her convent, spiritual guidebooks for nuns, and four mystical theological treatises. Yet, despite her popularity in life and an early approval of the orthodoxy of her writings, Sor María Anna quickly disappeared from Latin American literary history. Jennifer Eich's carefully researched and well-written The Other Mexican Muse is the first book-length critical study of this important colonial writer.

Eich employs a sound gender-based analysis of Sor María Anna's life and writings. She begins with a brief biography, then dedicates one chapter each to four aspects of Sor María Anna's writing: her narrative self-authorization, the relationship she develops with her audience, her textualization of mystic experience, and her response to social laxity in her spiritual decalogue for nuns.

Eich's analysis reveals an admirable command of Spanish and colonial religious literature, which required painstaking work to locate and study a number of rare published and manuscript sources. She excels at persuasive close readings in which she considers the narrative and rhetorical strategies employed by Sor María Anna and her biographers to negotiate the complex social implications of creating a female religious subject in the eighteenth century. Eich also contextualizes her work on Sor María Anna, particularly her discussion of narrative authorization, with a wealth of knowledge from the past two decades of scholarship on female religious writings in the early modern Hispanic world.

Eich's most important contribution to this scholarship is her examination of the nun's particular construction of intertextuality, especially her creation of a sense of community and dialogue through her discourse. Sor María Anna builds this dialogue not only with her confessors, but also importantly, with a popular audience by using secular discourses from folk culture and the natural world, lexical Mexicanisms, and insinuating into the text a number of different addressees. She also establishes a special relationship with her nun audience by recreating the oral/aural quality of communal convent spirituality.

The book might benefit from a broader discussion of the eighteenth century's greater receptiveness to women's intellectual pursuits, to which Eich attributes at least in part Sor María Anna's early publication. Also helpful would be a more global analysis of what distinguishes Sor María Anna's writings from those of her female contemporaries. Finally, I would welcome conclusions on how Sor María Anna contributes to an understanding of the Other's impact on Spanish cultural discourses, as Eich postulates the importance of women's writings to such understanding.

Jennifer Eich's highly readable book represents an important and long-awaited contribution to the scholarship on colonial women's writings. It will be of significant interest to students of Latin American colonial literature and history, church history, and women's history and writing.