Notes
401 Notes Introduction 1. The genre “Life,” or “Vida” in Spanish , refers to the particular kind of spiritual (auto)biography commonly penned by religious writers, especially nuns. 2. In Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca, the vast majority of the sixteenthand seventeenth-century women authors presented are nuns. A bio-bibliographic survey by Barbeito Carneiro of women writers of Madrid during the same period, Escritoras madrileñas, includes a large number of women religious. Barbeito Carneiro has followed up that study with several more books that select certain figures, including Mujeres del Madrid barroco and Mujeres y literatura. See also Caro Baroja, Formas complejas; Domínguez Ortiz, Clases privilegiadas; and Muriel, Cultura femenina novohispana. Other, more recent collections include Lavrin and Loreto López, Monjas y beatas and Diálogos espirituales; Mujica, Women Writers; and Olivares and Boyce, Tras el espejo. 3. In the last fifteen years or so, others have gained more recognition. María de Zayas y Sotomayor (b. Madrid, 1590, d. 16?), for instance, has gained recognition as a significant prose writer. Among other merits , her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos have won praise as forceful responses to the truculent misogyny of the period. Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) is the term traditionally ascribed by historians and critics to a period that runs approximately from the middle of the sixteenth century until 1681 when, despite political decadence, the literary and fine arts flourished. In the twenty-first century , in addition to the canonical figures— Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Baltasar Gracián, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca— increasingly we find such names as Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Violante del Cielo, Leonor de la Cueva, Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, Marcia Belisarda, and Catalina Ramírez de Guzmán. For one such study, see Barbeito Carneiro, Mujeres del Madrid barroco. Two volumes of the Historia y crítica de la literatura española—López Estrada, Siglos de Oro: Renacimiento, and Wardropper , Siglos de Oro: Barroco—contain a good overview of critical issues and genres in the Golden Age. See also Rivers, Quixotic Scriptures , chs. 3 (“Renaissance Experiments”) and 4 (“Baroque Age of Gold”), for one view of the period in English. For a more recent good overview in Spanish, see Anceschi, Idea del barroco. With the exception of Luisa 402 Notes to pp. 2–3 Roldán, the sculptor, and the three writers already mentioned, the women in the arts of the period have, until quite recently, generally been unknown, ignored, or forgotten. 4. A number of studies of Sor Juana from a feminist perspective have been published in the past thirty years, beginning with “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” in 1983; “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, México 1651– 1695” in 1985; and Merrim, Y yo despierta, in 1989. In chapter 8 of her Límites de la feminidad , Perelmuter reviews earlier women’s contributions to Sor Juana scholarship. For up-to-date, comprehensive bibliographies, see Bergmann and Schlau, Approaches to Teaching, and Ortiz’s “Bibliography.” 5. In a public lecture by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar at Barnard College during the early 1980s we first heard the expression “mother tongue,” now commonly employed, used to characterize women’s writing. 6. Studies of the relationships between Catholic Church women and men include Ahlgren, Politics of Sanctity; Bilinkoff, Related Lives; Donahue, “Writing Lives”; Herpoel, Zaga de Santa Teresa; and Myers, “Addressee Determines the Discourse.” 7. Saint Teresa spent a good part of the first fifty years of her life in Ávila, the city of her birth. For further study of this tradition in Ávila, see also Bilinkoff, Avila of Saint Teresa. Two other women of Ávila famed for religiousexemplarityatthistimewereMaría Vela y Cuento (see her Autobiografía y Libro and, in English, Third Mystic of Avila) and María de Santo Domingo (see Giles, Book of Prayer). There is also an edition of Ana de San Agustín’s work in Howe, Visionary Life, and an in-depth study of Isabel de Jesús’s Life (a different one than the subject of our chapter 3) in Velasco, Demons, Nausea, and Resistance. 8. There is a large bibliography on Saint Teresa’s new stylistic norms. A classic study is Marichal, “Ensayismo hispánico.” 9. See Pagels, Gnostic Gospels; Ruether, “Mothers of the Church”; SchüsslerFiorenza , In Memory of Her and “Word, Spirit and...
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