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  • Reminiscences of Sor Juana in a festejo in the Convent of San Jerónimo (México City, 1756)
  • Frederick Luciani

It has long been recognized in scholarship devoted to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651?-1695) that the Mexican nun’s literary reputation, which had soared during the last years of her life and for some thirty years after her death, declined as the eighteenth century progressed, following the shift from baroque to neoclassic literary tastes. Appreciation for Sor Juana and her work was unsteady at best through the nineteenth century, revived in the early to mid-twentieth century with the “rehabilitation” of Gongorism and the Baroque, and burgeoned late in that century with, among other things, the attention of feminist literary critics and the increased scholarly activity that accompanied the three-hundredth anniversary of Sor Juana’s death. In the twenty-first century, the appeal of the nun’s life and work has remained very strong in the academy, among general readers, and among creative writers and artists in other media.1

Accompanying the intense scholarly interest in Sor Juana in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – and to some degree spurred on by it – has been the increased attention paid to other female religious in the early modern Hispanic world. Numerous aspects of the lives, writings, and other cultural contributions of nuns in Spain and the Spanish colonies have received scrutiny, in studies that in turn shed a clearer light on Sor Juana’s perceived uniqueness, her identity as rara avis that her contemporaries celebrated and which has remained entwined with her image to this day. Doubtlessly, Sor Juana’s literary and intellectual accomplishments and her publication success were matched by few Spanish-language writers of either gender during the early modern period, and the fact that she was a female religious made her achievements even more unusual. At the same time, scholarship has revealed that Sor Juana’s “exceptionality” was relative; many other nuns of her time demonstrated literary and intellectual proclivities, and a significant engagement [End Page 95] with secular spheres – economic, political, social – beyond the cloister.2 Such tendencies seem discrepant from the models of comportment that the Church prescribed for nuns, based on humility, obedience, reclusion, and “saintly ignorance.” Sor Juana was incongruous, but so were many of her sisters in religion, and convent life itself in early modern Spain and the colonies was characterized by certain fundamental tensions and paradoxes.

The present study hopes to make a contribution to these two related questions: 1) Sor Juana’s relative singularity (or not) among New Spain’s religious women; and 2) the trajectory of her reputation in the decades following her death. The study will deal primarily with a document that offers a privileged vantage point on these questions, having been produced within the very convent of San Jerónimo in which Sor Juana spent her adult life: the relación of a festejo celebrated by the nuns in honor of a visiting viceroy and his retinue in August of 1756, with theatrical and musical pieces composed by a chaplain of the convent and performed by its nuns and niñas.3 The festejo and its explicit references to Sor Juana will be examined within the context of other surviving representations of her in the 1750s, to attempt a kind of snapshot – necessarily incomplete – of the nun as remembered some sixty years after her death, and halfway through the century that saw her pass from eminence to relative obscurity. At the same time, the study will attempt to show the degree to which certain forms of theatrical artistry and engagement with civic ceremony, which contributed to Sor Juana’s fame in her lifetime, remained alive among her convent sisters of a later generation.

Sor Juana’s final years and early posthumous fame

The 1980s and 1990s saw the unearthing of some new documents, or the rescrutiny of half-forgotten ones, that significantly altered scholarly understanding of Sor Juana’s life, in particular her final years. They shed new light on Sor Juana’s troubles with powerful Church prelates at least since 1682, and on the especially intense difficulties...

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