Ingenio y feminidad: Nuevos enfoques sobre la estética de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ed. by Bárbara Ventarola (review)

Ingenio y feminidad: Nuevos enfoques sobre la estética de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a rigorous and coherent collection of essays on the New Spanish writer. Taking into account Sor Juana’s mythification from Diego Calleja’s hagiographic biography and beyond, the volume examines the nun’s consciousness of her own genius before her twofold marginality as a woman writing from the Americas. Within this context, the unifying concept of ingenio refers to the intersection of poetic aptitude and self-conscious writing to which the collection seeks to attend. The anthology’s overall relevance for Sor Juana studies is indisputable, for it challenges the sorjua-nine canon with analyses of frequently overlooked pieces. Moreover, additional resonances with gender and women’s studies and broader topics in early modern cultural production reflect recent efforts to draw the poet into scholarly discussions beyond the Hispanic world.

The volume opens with Ventarola’s reflection upon Sor Juana’s genius: a re-reading of the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, which illustrates the poet’s self-conscious engagement with the concept. Ventarola details women’s marginalization within constructions of genius from antiquity to the early modern period and argues that Sor Juana’s epistle responds through textual hermaphroditism. Complementary to prior scholarship, the rich theoretical framework draws out the creative lyric self’s fluid gender characteristics. Moreover, it highlights links between sensuality and rationality that intersect with broader discourses on the body and the senses. In the next study, Beatriz Colombi’s remarks upon the transcultural productivity of Neptuno alegórico dovetail nicely with themes from Ventarola’s essay. Specifically, she retraces the triumphal arch’s mythological and emblematic roots and their sorjuanine transformations, lending a much-needed feminine and Creole perspective to prior readings of the topic by José Pascual Buxó and Octavio Paz.

The second section delves into the epistemological and ontological questions that a study of ingenio implies. In an exacting theoretical article, Callsen examines intersections of knowledge, subject and self-realization in Sor Juana’s oeuvre. She draws out a saber ser, or subjective self-consciousness, in which the construction of the lyric self responds to and grapples with epistemological limits (100). The essay highlights a tension with the Cartesian cogito ergo sum and is especially useful for understanding the autobiographic poetic subject. Next, Ingrid Simson reads Primero sueño in light of Sor Juana’s intellectual isolation. While prior scholarship generally seeks to draw out resonances with scholarly and aesthetic traditions, Simson’s purpose is to differentiate the piece from other works of “genius.” Her reasoning sparks a provoking question: is Primero sueño’s originality less a product of the nun’s poetic virtuosity than it is the result of her isolation?

In the third segment, Verónica Grossi and Sebastian Neumeister examine Sor Juana’s love poetry through a Petrarchan lens. Grossi’s intertextual reading of the poetic portraits juxtaposes personal lyric—above all, that dedicated to the Countess of Paredes—with staged pieces like Villancico VI (1685 cycle) or Neptuno alegórico. In this way, she illustrates how the Petrarchan poetics of Sor Juana’s minor works also stand out in the theatrical space of pieces written for a public audience. For his part, Neumeister examines how Sor Juana intervenes in the poetic discourses of the Baroque by appropriating both the Petrarchan portrait and the emblematic tradition in “Pinta en jocoso numen, igual con el tan célebre Jacinto Polo, una belleza.” He notes that Sor Juana’s ovillejo elaborates a poetic portrait that is not based upon an extant, painted version and thus beckons a metatextual interpretation. Within this context, distortions of the Petrarchan descriptio puellae and its limits in “Pinta en jocoso numen” reflect the nun’s engagement with the poetic tradition in general.

Finally, the last section of Ingenio y feminidad considers Sor Juana’s...