The Routledge Research Companion to The Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ed. by Emilie L. Bergman and Stacy Schlau (review)

Emilie Bergman and Stacy Schlau are essential reading for anyone who endeavors to study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This new editorial collaboration takes their 2007 anthology, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, into the next realm by addressing the needs of the researcher. This collection of essays will benefit scholars of multiple disciplines with any degree of interest in Sor Juana, be that to examine new directions for research or to find a point of entry to connect her works to those of her contemporaries and those who followed her.

The editors have identified key areas of interest in the field, bringing together specialists in each to summarize what is in some cases a massive bibliography. In conversation with scholarship in relevant disciplines, including musicology, theology, art history, and more, this resource may provide a broader context to even seasoned Sor Juana scholars for further study. It is a dense volume, packed with twenty-three concise, yet informative chapters divided into four parts: "Contexts," "Reception History," "Interpretation of and Debates about the Works," and "Future Directions." The last part is not the only place one may look to consider new projects, however. The author of each chapter also makes such suggestions for each particular genre, text, or topic.

Part I, "Contexts," provides an overview of the social, political, and intellectual milieu that surrounded Sor Juana as a woman and nun writing in the Spanish colony. These chapters—by Alejandro Cañeque, on the tension between Empire and local space, by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, on Creole baroque aesthetics and subjectivity, and by Stephanie Kirk, on the landscape of intellectual life for women—amply describe the three primary forces that constitute Sor Juana's worldview.

With the larger context established, Part II begins with Mónica Díaz's substantial chapter addressing Sor Juana's reception among her contemporaries. Subsequent chapters group first the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (Martha Lilia Tenorio), then focus on the surge in appreciation for and subsequent publications of her works during the twentieth century (Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling). These chapters on reception are not reduced to summaries, but rather yield an overall examination of the most noteworthy considerations of each time period. This keeps the reading rich while also facilitating further study with specific references to the significant secondary texts of each time period. Tenorio's chapter revisits Sor Juana's growing fame during her life and as the seventeenth century came to a close after her death. Part II also includes an essay by Amanda Powell that elucidates for the contemporary reader how Sor Juana's feminism and love poetry would have (and could have) been read. Isabel Gómez examines translations and the ideologies that sometimes inform them. The last chapters, by J. Vanessa Lyon on her portraits, and by Emily Hind on her presence in popular culture, provide intriguing perspectives that reveal as much to us about Sor Juana as they do about Transatlantic and Mexican cultures through their reinventions of her as a woman and as a national figure.

The most substantial portion of the book is Part III, containing twelve essays divided into "Prose Works," "Verse," and "Theater and Public Art." It begins with essays by Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling and Grady C. Wray detailing the history of Sor Juana's letters and controversies surrounding them. Emilie L. Bergmann addresses the "asymmetry of gender" (142) in her love poetry, complementing Powell's earlier chapter. While there is some unavoidable thematic overlap in the book, it never feels repetitive, and this is one such example. This edition allows the chapters to be in conversation with one another, deepening or broadening the reader's perspective. Rocío Quispe-Agnoli writes...