theorizing transatlantic women’s writing:

Early Modern Women:An Interdisciplinary Journal2013, vol. 8

53

Theorizing Transatlantic Women’s Writing: Imperial Crossings and the Production of Knowledge

Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk

The transatlantic paradigm, together with other recent methodologi-cal frameworks that privilege spatial considerations, has significantly

influenced recent scholarly work on colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies.1 This paradigm, which incorporates Europe and the Americas as a coherent area of study and is deemed by some histori-ans as constituting a field in its own right, has led to fruitful discussions about the possibilities and shortcomings of studying the communities surrounding the Atlantic Ocean without taking into account national or imperial histories.2 The move to decenter previous normative historical

1 The other frameworks discussed at length by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008) are hemispheric studies and early modern perspec-tives. Also relevant here would be the increasing interest in transpacific studies; see, for example, Ricardo Padrón, “Recordando las Indias del poniente: episodios en la historia de una metageografía olvidada,” in Estudios coloniales latinoamericanos en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios, ed. Stephanie Kirk (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2011). Recent research using the transatlantic model includes, but is not limited to, Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Nicolás Wey-Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

2 Philip Morgan and Jack Greene locate the emergence of the concept “Atlantic history” in the late 1960s, yet they clarify that its practice can be traced back to the 1870s.

54 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk

narratives has allowed for a more global understanding of the fluidity of cultural exchanges during the early modern period.3 In their enlightening collection of essays, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), Daniela Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf contribute to the scholarship that observes this paradigm, paying particular attention to the intersections of gender and religion. Although Kostroun and Vollendorf reference numer-ous scholars in the disciplines of Hispanic and women’s studies, history, and comparative literature who have mapped important connections that situate early modern women within a broader Atlantic geographic frame, they conclude that the transatlantic paradigm remains to be fully explored vis-à-vis the study of women and religion.4 More recently, Vollendorf, in collaboration with Grady Wray, has reiterated the need to acknowledge the centrality of women’s textual and cultural contributions to the Atlantic, urging scholars to adopt an approach to gender history that transcends traditional lines between Europeanists and Latin Americanists in order to map the role of women more successfully across the Atlantic.5

This article responds to that plea by means of a comparative study of the experiences of two religious women in the Atlantic world that explores their engagement with traditionally male concepts of language

See their introduction “The Present State of Atlantic History,” Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

3 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 215.

4 Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, eds., Introduction, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 6; see also 7–8, for an entire review of individual scholarly efforts that chart linkages among Atlantic communities. The authors also mention the works of Susan Dinan and Deborah Meyers, eds., Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Nora Jaffary, Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). The most recent contribution in the scholarship that explores this methodological framework is the edited volume by Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández, Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

5 Lisa Vollendorf and Grady Wray, “Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in Iberia and Latin America,” in Theorising the Ibero-Atlantic World, ed. Harald Braun, Kristy Hooper, and Lisa Vollendorf (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), 3.

55Transatlantic Women’s Writing

and authority. This analysis, we contend, allows us to delve further into the Atlantic paradigm in order to examine women’s implicit understand-ing of and active encounter with the spatial dimension of the transatlantic region. We will examine what role this dimension played in the acquisition of epistemological authority by two notable seventeenth-century nuns, the Mexican Hieronymite Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) and the Spanish Franciscan Sor María de Ágreda (1602–1655).

One of the meanings given to the Atlantic during the post-contact period, according to Joyce Chaplin, was that of a “space in which to make or imagine physical connections.” 6 Sor Juana and Sor María were not only able to imagine these connections across the Atlantic but they actually established their presence transatlantically without leaving their cloisters in Mexico and Spain, respectively. Through an exploration of the ways in which colonial spaces became rhetorical constructions and at the same time powerful devices to acquire authority, we will investigate the different connections that these women established through their “crossings” of the Atlantic. We will elucidate how both women writers engaged with lan-guage to create textual journeys across the Atlantic and to establish their presence in a localized site in which they self-identified as agents. Finally, we will explore how the Atlantic space functions not only as a topic in their writings but also provides a rhetoric with which they might demonstrate and legitimize their knowledge.

In 2000, Kathleen Ann Myers referred to female religious writing in colonial Latin America as a booming subfield within colonial studies; eight years later in a review essay, Myers asserted that the subfield of female conventual writing had gone beyond defining texts and contexts and had become more encompassing in its thematic analysis, sources employed, and methodologies.7 Myers noted the opening of the field for new disciplines

6 Joyce Chaplin, “The Atlantic Ocean and its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–1808” in Atlantic History, ed. Greene and Morgan, 36.

7 Kathleen Myers, “Crossing Boundaries: Defining the Field of Female Religious Writing in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review 9 (2000): 151–65; and Kathleen Myers, “Recent Trends in the Study of Women and Religion in Colonial Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 290–301.


and anticipated the “future directions” the field would take.8 One of the directions taken by studies of Hispanic religious women’s writings is that of comparative and collaborative works in which space considerations are central. The investigation of what we are calling the transatlantic para-digm is a fairly recent development within this subfield, one that, although implicit in our colleagues’ pioneering scholarship, had not been problema-tized to identify clearly transatlantic cultural activity on the part of women writers. There are important examples of scholarship that do take a more explicit approach to transatlantic questions. An example is Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989), by Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau and translated by Amanda Powell, which compiles writings by early modern women on both sides of the Atlantic.9 More recently, the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2007), edited by Emilie Bergmann and Schlau, includes several essays that place Sor Juana and her work within transatlantic, hemispheric, and Continental contexts.10

8 Myers, “Recent Trends,” 301.9 Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own

Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Other examples of scholars who have established links among women across the Atlantic are Electa Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst of Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century,” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 147–83; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta, ed. and trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (New York: Feminist Press, 1994); Georgina Sabat-Rivers, “Autobiografías: Santa Teresa y Sor Juana” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Studies, ed. Luis Cortesi (Asunción: Centro de Estudios de Economía & Soc., 1989); and Nina Scott, “‘La gran turba de las que merecieron nombres’: Sor Juana’s Foremothers in ‘La Respuesta a Sor Filotea,’” in Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

10 Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “Colonial No More: Reading Sor Juana from a Transatlantic Perspective” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2007), 86–94; Lisa Vollendorf, “Across the Atlantic: Sor Juana, La respuesta, and the Hispanic Women’s Canon,” idem, 95–102. See also: Stephanie Merrim, “Angels of History and Colonial Hemispheric Studies,” Letras femeninas 35, no.1 (2009): 63–84.


In Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1999), Stephanie Merrim took early modern women’s studies one step further as she endeavored to map connections between Sor Juana’s and other women’s writings in Spanish, English, and French, mainly to identify “certain common signal features and concerns.”11 Merrim established the relations between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the two Spanish nuns mentioned in her “Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz” [The Answer to Sor Filotea] (1691): Carmelite reformer and mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and Franciscan abbess Sor María de Ágreda (1602–65). Another impor-tant mention of Sor María de Ágreda can be found in Sor Juana’s “Ejercicios devotos para los nueve días” [Spiritual Exercises for a Novena] associating it with María de Ágreda’s Mística ciudad de Dios [Mystical City of God] (1670).12 Merrim hinted at a compelling link between the two women, writing that “the poetics of Sor Juana’s connection in this and other of her works to María de Ágreda, as well as their politics, are a fascinating subject, one that certainly merits further study.”13 While she did not pursue this avenue of inquiry in her book, she nonetheless laid the groundwork for our analysis of these two nuns’ transatlantic engagements, particularly with her broader reflections on certain aspects of early modern women’s writing

11 Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press, 1999), xiii.

12 Grady Wray, The Devotional Exercises/Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1648/51–1695): A Critical Study and Bilingual Annotated Edition (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). In the bilingual annotated edition, Wray establishes a textual relationship between the two nuns. Wray argues that Ágreda’s influence on Sor Juana goes beyond the defense of the Immaculate Conception; rather it supports “Sor Juana’s desire for self-expression and knowledge,” as well as the reestablishment of the imitatio Christi into a sort of imitatio Mariae (17).

13 Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, xiii. Merrim mentions two studies that have established the connection between the two nuns in a very limited manner: Clark Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Ágreda: Writing, Knowledge, and Power (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1994); and Marie-Cécile Bennasy-Berling, Humanisme et religion chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La femme et la culture au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982).


such as the “will to signature” and the desire to enter the “almost exclusively male world of learning.”14

In her essay “Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writing in Iberia and the Americas,” Vollendorf undertook the task of identifying transatlantic con-nections among women writers of what she calls the “Hispanic diaspora.”15 She contends that the identification of similar usages of themes and rhe-torical strategies in women’s writings allows for a transatlantic approach to women’s cultural production. Following Merrim’s insights into Sor Juana’s intellectual connections with other women, Vollendorf asserts that Sor Juana’s Respuesta [The Answer] “bridges women’s writings between early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America.”16 When we begin to chart relationships among women across the Atlantic and to identify affinities among women who might or might have not known of one another’s exis-tence, we begin to advance our notion of the manner in which women in the early modern period acquired authority through the written word, how they challenged patriarchal authority, and how, on occasion, they partici-pated along with men in projects of imperial expansion and epistemologi-cal inquiry.

This article builds on the pioneering works by Merrim and Vollendorf, among others, that have made it possible for us to think about early mod-ern women’s writings in a novel way. By placing Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and María de Ágreda in a transatlantic context, we will consider both their poetics and politics, yet we diverge from other critics primarily in our focus on these women’s usage of masculine language and rhetoric. Although both nuns were writing under the patriarchal power of the Church, and on occa-sion utilized the rhetorical strategies and thematic elements of female tex-tual production in the Iberian Atlantic, we are interested in exploring the ways in which they inscribed imperial and colonial epistemology into their

14 Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 194.15 Lisa Vollendorf, “Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writings in Iberia and the

Americas,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Kostroun and Vollendorf, 84.

16 Ibid., 100.


writing by distancing themselves from a “feminine language.”17 Our study also departs from other larger projects that seek to chart ties among several subjects, times, and places. Ours is a more specific, even “local” endeavor that questions constructions of gender, geography, and knowledge in a key moment in time, one that we hope will invite further collaborations and projects of this nature.18

We are principally interested in investigating how lettered women engaged with masculine intellectual culture and epistemological domains and placed their works in transatlantic circulation. By examining aspects of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sor María de Ágreda, we intend to shed light on how women negotiated a place in the top ranks of an intellectual discourse that was limited to all but a handful of elite men; in so doing, we will observe in what ways these same masculine net-works reacted to their participation. This study aims to both interrogate the mechanisms with which each woman acquired the epistemological authority that allowed her works and fame to circulate in a transatlantic context and to examine the specific circumstances that led each to choose this transatlantic framework. The engagements of these two seventeenth-century nuns not only illuminate women’s participation in the transatlantic intellectual networks of religion, culture, science, and power that were

17 Ibid., 79. Alison Weber’s analysis of Spanish Carmelite Teresa of Ávila’s writ-ings in Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) identifies a particular feminine language, and more importantly a “rhetoric of femininity” that allowed her to successfully address male ecclesiastical authorities and be canonized soon after her death. Many religious women in Iberia and across the Atlantic became familiar with the rhetorical strategies used by Teresa of Ávila and drew from these and common themes such as Christian piety and everyday feminine experiences of a spiritual and mystical nature.

18 Lisa Vollendorf and Grady Wray’s forthcoming chapter, “Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in Iberia and Latin America,” and previous efforts by Vollendorf on the subject problematize the initial lack of studies that place women in the Atlantic space. Ours is an attempt to note what these scholars have suggested and is a possible model for further studies of this nature. We chose the word “local” in opposition to a generalizing trend that aggregates similar experiences of women in the transatlantic paradigm. We are referring to the very locality where Sor Juana and Sor María began their Atlantic crossings.


considered exclusive to men but also expand our knowledge of Hispanic epistemological exchanges across the Atlantic.

The pairing of Sor Juana and María de Ágreda presents a productive point of comparison, since each inscribed her writings from opposite sides of the Atlantic. The major part of Sor Juana’s works was published in three volumes in Spain, whereas Sor María de Ágreda undertook missionary work in the New World through the phenomenon of bilocation. Their transatlantic crossings bring into play a complex set of issues regarding women’s mobility in the early modern Hispanic world. Although seem-ingly the most immobile of women, these two cloistered nuns succeeded in writing themselves into a masculine intellectual discourse both at home and on the other side of the Atlantic — theology in the case of Sor Juana and science in the case of Sor María de Ágreda.19 The renown each wom-an’s work garnered on opposite sides of the Atlantic thus offers a stunning contrast to the enclosed world that each inhabited in her own country and testifies to the skill with which they each negotiated the reception of their theological and scientific output by placing it in a transatlantic context. Moreover, through their actions, they brought their conventual space to the center of the imperial epistemological project. While convents were pivotal to Spain’s imperial identity in the New World, unlike male religious houses, they did not become an established locus for the production of official knowledge. Through these case studies, we demonstrate how both women not only overcame this restriction but succeeded in converting it into a strategy for advancement and transatlantic renown.

Their success notwithstanding, both women faced a difficult task in taking part in the masculine intellectual culture of the Atlantic. This dif-ficulty can be profitably examined through the suggestive pairing of books and bodies, since the transatlantic circulation of each entity was both fraught with danger and subject to strict controls. Indeed, the metaphori-cal connection between bodies and books is a powerful one in the early

19 As María Portuondo explains in Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2, the word “science” in the early modern period referred to “natural philosophy, experimentalism, natural history, natural magic and mixed mathematics.”


modern period and assumes a key point of departure for our collaborative and comparative study. Georgina Dopico Black has identified this con-nection as “fundamental” to early modern Spain and, by extension, to the colonies. She describes the symbolic and concrete manifestations of the two terms — body and book — as reversible, with each part of one stand-ing for the other’s.20 The explicit connection she makes between the book-body dyad and the “body of the nation” that calls the former into being as “subjects or objects even as it disciplines them” can be usefully applied to a gendered study of the circulation of books and bodies in the transatlantic domain.21 Imperial politics required that women cross the Atlantic in the service of empire to populate both secular and religious spaces. During these journeys, women’s bodies were subject to natural peril and stringent controls of behavior and movement, with no body more strictly supervised than that of the nun. Sarah Owens’s recent edition of the early eighteenth-century chronicle by the Capuchin Abbess Madre María Rosa of the jour-ney that she and four other nuns endured from their Madrid convent to found a similar space in Lima narrates a harrowing account of pirate attacks and disease while simultaneously highlighting the complex restrictions imposed by the Church on the movement of nuns who were ordinarily subjected to the vow of enclosure.22 Correspondingly, books were subject to

20 In “Canons Afire: Libraries, Books, and Bodies in Don Quixote’s Spain,” in Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook, ed. Roberto González Echevarría (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109, Georgina Dopico Black describes the connection in the fol-lowing terms: “Cuerpo [body] where books were concerned referred in the first place to the materiality of the book — a materiality that was given the contours of a body — with a face [carátula], spine [lomo], and even fingers [indices]. We need look no further than the Preliminares of any number of early modern texts to find, in the royal censor’s aprobación y licencia [approbation and license], permission for printing and selling a specified quantity of cuerpos de libros.”

21 Ibid., 116.22 Owens rightfully stresses that her edition of the writings of Madre María Rosa

helps shed light upon the “active role women played in the colonial enterprise.” See Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns, ed. and trans. Sarah E. Owens, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3. Regardless, the nun’s own writings also bear out the restrictions placed on the transportation of nuns’ bodies across the Atlantic.


control and vulnerable to danger as they made the Atlantic crossing. Irving Leonard’s and Dorothy Schons’s early studies related the rigor with which the Crown endeavored to control — often without success — the types of books that would enter its American domains.23 Colonial women’s access to books was further restricted, either through their lack of education or by the restrictions placed on what was deemed suitable for their consump-tion.24 Questions of gender thus come to the fore in these crossings as both books and bodies bear the distinctive marks of society’s desire to rigidly demarcate both entities along male and female lines.

Despite the difficulties attending the transit of both books and bod-ies, both Sor Juana and Sor María succeeded in writing themselves into the transatlantic production of imperial and colonial knowledge at its most elite levels. Their two cases reveal the complexity of male responses to female intellectual activity, which we intend to unravel in order to chal-lenge the idea of a monolithic male opposition to female intellectual pro-duction and to question what role space played in the inclusion of these women into these masculine intellectual milieus. In our reading of Sor Juana’s theology and Sor María’s cosmography, we have identified a subtle reworking of the concept of space as a rhetorical construction. Sor Juana and Sor María were avid users of the rhetorical devices at hand, as were other early modern women, since masculine authorities were the implicit

23 Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-century Persons, Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), and Dorothy Schons, Book Censorship in New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950).

24 Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sor Juana’s confessor, offered a circumscribed reading list for nuns in Distribución de las Obras Ordinarias y extraordinarias del día para Hacerlas perfectamente conforme al Estado de las Señoras Religiosas [Distribution of the Ordinary and Extraordinary Tasks as Befitting the State of Religious Ladies] (Mexico City: Viuda de Miguel de Ribera Calderón, 1712). The list included works by Saints Teresa, Thomas Aquinas, and Philip Neri. He stated, moreover, that these texts should be made accessible in the form of “apothegmas sueltos” [a series of apothegms] (38). In his Cartilla de la doctrina religiosa [Primer on Religious Doctrine] (Mexico City: A. Valdés, 1831) 39–40, he describes women’s lack of intellectual ability as “la debilidad del seso, la flaqueza del sujeto, la peregrinidad ignorada de la doctrina latina, la dificultad y embarazo de las lecciones” [the brain’s weakness, the individual’s frailty, the curious ignorance of Latin doctrine, the difficulty and discomfort with the readings and instructions].


readers and ultimate judges of their epistemological pursuits. Nevertheless, the construction of space as a rhetorical device in their writings becomes a more sophisticated notion than merely a simple feminine survival strategy in a tightly-controlled arena. It facilitated a direct engagement with the migration of bodies and books that otherwise would have been impossible for these two cloistered women, and, more suggestively still, it allowed them the means by which to participate in the exclusively male sphere of the imperial enterprise.

Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of the construction of social space provides insight into the verbal strategies utilized by Sor Juana and Sor María to concretize their conception of space in their written works, more specifically the space created through transatlantic crossings. We acknowl-edge that we are referring to the physical and real space created by the transit between the two continents that was known to these women not through empirical experience but through their processes of epistemologi-cal inquiry. We would like, however, to draw attention to another element at play in our invocation of transatlantic space here, which we have identi-fied as a rhetorical, imagined space constructed in words and legitimized by male authorities in the two women’s respective areas of intellectual interest, theology and cosmography. Lefebvre states that space is a social relationship that is inherent to property relationships and closely bound with the forces of production, including technology and knowledge.25 Following this definition, both Sor Juana and Sor María are agents in the production of colonial space, understood as a discursive practice and as a product of interrelations.26 The socio-historical context in which they lived implied that political power, knowledge, and space were closely related.27 The knowledge acquired in the convent through their relationships with their respective courts and their dealings across the Atlantic authorized

25 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nichols-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 85.

26 Santa Arias, “Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn,” GeoJournal 75 (2010): 32.

27 For a lengthier explanation, see: Arias “Rethinking Space,” 29–41.


the cloistered nuns to write about the seemingly unknown transatlantic space.

As research advances towards new conceptualizations of space, the dichotomy of women’s and men’s language becomes problematic and delimiting. Both cosmographical and scientific discourse and theological discourse differ from other expressions of women’s subjectivities from the medieval period to the eighteenth century primarily because women who participated in this discourse “borrowed” from what has traditionally been considered male language. Our contribution lies in part in focusing on these “other” language and thematic interests that extend beyond what traditionally has been considered feminine. Yet, the traditional method of identifying language depending on the gender of the writer makes futile the efforts of transatlantic, hemispheric, and transpacific approaches that seek to move beyond restrictive ways of thinking about and analyzing the cultural production of women in the early modern period. We contest that, despite their cloistered state, their incursion into male-dominated spheres made Sor Juana Inés and Sor María capable of transcending geographi-cal frontiers and allowed them to inscribe themselves as writing subjects within a wider transatlantic context.

In our two case studies, we further pose a series of key questions that probe the notions of gender, geography, and language we have out-lined above. To what degree were these women incorporated into male intellectual culture? Did the direction of their Atlantic crossing have any impact on their reception by masculine culture and the authorization of their writings? What did it mean to be a female colonial subject writing within a male genre and published in the metropolis? What did it mean to be a female imperial subject, connected to the highest realms of power and engaging in a work of scientific discovery that takes as its subject colonial territories? Hence, we will assess these encounters with masculine culture within a transatlantic paradigm, thus facilitating an examination of what role the locus of enunciation — that is, the point of departure of the respective transatlantic crossing — plays in the incorporation of both women into official discourses.


Sor María de Ágreda: Crossing the Atlantic through Cosmographical Knowledge

In July 1629 a delegation of fifty Jumano Indians arrived at the Franciscan convent of old Isleta in present-day New Mexico. The Jumanos requested missionaries to accompany them back to their territory, in what is now Texas, to instruct their people in the Catholic faith. According to the delegation, they had been advised to do so by the “Lady in Blue,” who had appeared to them on numerous occasions. This miraculous passage in the history of the Franciscan missionary endeavor on the Spanish frontier was recounted in Fray Alonso de Benavides’s report to the Spanish king Philip IV in 1630 and, in the extended version, to Pope Urban VIII in 1634.28 Benavides was first notified of the supernatural event while still custodian of the conversions in New Mexico; he was then sent to Spain to meet with the king and with the “Lady in Blue.”

From 1620 to 1631, Sor María de Ágreda allegedly experienced bilocations that transported her to the New World, where she preached to the native peoples of what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.29 María de Ágreda herself wrote about her experiences in her Relación [Account] addressed to the Commissary General of the Franciscan order, Fray Pedro Manero; however, in that document, Sor María states that her bilocations lasted only three years.30 In the Relación María de Ágreda informs Manero that the “exterioridades,” by which she means her bilocations, made her suffer greatly and that she constantly

28 Fray Alonso de Benavides, Revised Memorial of 1634, ed. George P. Hammond (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1945).

29 To bilocate means to be in two places at the same time. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia (online edition) Catholic philosophers “maintain that there is no absolute impossibility in the same body being at once circumscriptively in one place and defini-tively elsewhere (mixed mode of location)”: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02568a.htm, accessed October 15, 2012.

30 Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Relación que la V.M. Sor María de Jesús, religiosa del convento de Ágreda, escribió de su letra, del estado y progreso de su vida a nuestro Rmo. P. Fray Pedro Manero, Comisario general de la orden (n.d.), in the National Library, Madrid, 225.


asked God for them to stop occurring. Although her experiences attracted attention from the highest political and ecclesiastical ranks, making her a celebrated nun early in her life, it also drew the attention of the Holy Office, which led to two lengthy investigations that, in the end, absolved Sor María from any wrongdoing.31

María de Ágreda also penned a text that relates how she acquired knowledge of the composition of the world and the existence of “other” people in need of evangelization. Titled Tratado de la mapa y descripción de los orbes celestiales y elementales desde el cielo empíreo hasta el centro de la tierra [Treatise on the Map and Description of the Celestial and Elemental Spheres from the Empyrean Heaven to the Center of the Earth], the text contained a preamble that circulated independently as another treatise describing the four parts of the world and its inhabitants.32 For the most part, the text follows the thematic structure of a cosmographical treatise, a genre that was limited to male intellectuals; yet, Sor María’s text was produced due to “infused knowledge,” and it could therefore be read as the result of a mystical experience.33

María de Ágreda’s authorship of this piece has been contested in recent years. Manuel Serrano y Sanz’s Apuntes para una biblioteca de auto-ras españolas, one of the authoritative sources for women’s literary pro-duction in Spain, comments that, although the Treatise on the Map of the Spheres “seems authentic judging by what Ágreda and her confessor, Father Fuenmayor say about it, it is so foolish and full of absurdities that I cannot bring myself to accept it as genuine.”34 However, not a single document has

31 The first one in 1635, and the second one in 1650.32 Tratado del grado de luz y conocimiento de ciencia infusa que tuvo el alma de la

venerable Madre Sor María de Ágreda de toda la redondez de la tierra y los habitadores de ella, y unos secretos y misterios ocultos que en él contiene [Treatise on the gradation of light and knowledge through intuition that the soul of the Venerable Mother María of Ágreda had of the whole circumference of the Earth and of those who inhabit it, as well as some secrets and hidden mysteries that are contained within it]. The work is housed in the archive of the Convent of the Most Pure Conception, Ágreda, Spain.

33 Infused knowledge is the gift of secular and spiritual knowledge miraculously conferred by God.

34 Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas (Madrid: Atlas, 1975), 37.


been produced to verify such a claim.35 More recently, Sor María’s author-ship of this treatise has been acknowledged by Clark Colahan and a section even translated by him.36

In what follows we propose to read the Treatise as a textual justifica-tion of María de Ágreda’s alleged travels to the New World to evangelize the native population. In this light, the Treatise does not seem so “full of absurdities” but rather is a clear attempt to imprint her own bilocation experiences in the official knowledge of the period, which was implicitly male. With the backing of a cosmographical text, the bilocations would no longer be solely religious experiences of a cloistered nun but part of a larger experience of transatlantic crossing and knowledge. Even if the information included in the treatise was taken from other sources, her inserting it in a new genre, the “mystical cosmographical treatise,” demonstrates the exist-ing concern of women to share not only in the feminine knowledge allowed by the Church but in greater and more ambitious intellectual endeavors.

Several religious women during the early modern period included nar-rations of bilocations in their spiritual writings. Jane Tar has studied these phenomena, contextualizing María de Ágreda’s bilocations more broadly.37 The proscription to leave the cloister compelled religious women to find

35 As Clark Colahan explains in his book, until a century after Sor María’s death, no one suggested this text might not be written by her. Sor María even included it in the list of her works in the prologue of her autobiography (31). The copies of the Treatise housed in the archive of the convent in Ágreda include a handwritten note stating that the Holy Congregation of Rites in Rome had declared it apocryphal in 1762. This note was written by Eduardo Royo, chaplain of the convent and author of Autenticidad de la Mística ciudad de Dios y biografía de su autora (Barcelona: Juan Gili, 1914). Royo was a proponent of Sor María’s canonization cause in the early twentieth century, which might have led to this statement; however, we have not been able to locate any document that confirms the declaration from Rome.

36 Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Agreda. He follows the copy preserved in the Royal Library of El Escorial. It is also one of the legalized copies made by Fray Antonio de Jesús, who was in charge of Sor María’s canonization process in the last few years of the seventeenth century.

37 Some of the women who experienced bilocations are Chilean nun Úrsula Suárez, Mexican religious woman Sor María de Jesús Tomelín, and the Peruvian Sor María Manuela.


other means in which to travel across the empire and participate along with men in the missionary enterprise. Tar argues that religious women’s bilocations could indeed be read as gendered transgressions, yet they also appear in the historical moment as clear contributions to the expansionist agenda of the Hapsburgs.38 Katie MacLean, for instance, studies the mysti-cal phenomenon as part of the imperial expansion project, not only from the women writers’ point of view but taking into account the reception and appropriation of their experiences.39 It is important to note that bilocations were not limited to cloistered women. The Catholic Church endorsed the phenomenon as it was narrated in the life stories of several saints, such as Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua, for they represented an extraor-dinary mystical experience consistent with Catholic theology. Usually, the bilocations were reported when the saints were called to minister to others in different geographical places. The most noteworthy bilocations of saints and non-canonized religious subjects were reported during the early mod-ern period, as in the cases of Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Martin de Porres, Saint Catherine de’ Ricci, and Sor María de Ágreda. These cases support the argument by MacLean and Tar that the expansionism of the time apparently contributed to the increase of bilocation experiences. It could be contended that, although Sor María’s bilocations reveal her desire to promote the story presented by Benavides and to maintain the occurrence of her “exterioridades,” they are ultimately fabrications that worked for the benefit of the Franciscan missionaries. However, Sor María benefited from these experiences as well; her fame was such that Philip IV stopped by the convent in the village of Ágreda to meet Sor María in 1643 on his way to

38 Jane Tar, “Flying Through the Empire: The Visionary Journeys of Early Modern Nuns,” in Women’s Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire, ed. Jennifer L. Eich, Jeanne Gillespie, and Lucia G. Harrison (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2008), 273.

39 Katie MacLean, “María de Agreda, Spanish Mysticism, and the Work of Spiritual Conquest,” Colonial Latin American Review 17 (2008): 30.


Aragon. From this encounter there ensued a lengthy exchange of letters that would last through their lifetimes (both died in 1665).40

Sor María wrote down her “infused” knowledge of the world, choos-ing to bequeath not only her narrative of bilocation and her justification and correction of the Benavides story but a more scientific account: that of the cosmographical treatise.41 Sor María de Ágreda’s cosmographical writ-ing is problematic for several reasons. As a well-known religious woman, she tries to follow Church mandates by using rhetorical strategies common to other religious women writers, framing her knowledge as inspired from divine sources rather than from her own intellect. She uses the “tricks of the weak”42 to distance herself from intellectual accountability, yet instead of composing a spiritual autobiography or a mystical text, she enters a clearly masculine domain with cosmographical calculations about the dimension of the earth and the distances to the planets; as an example, among her other calculations, she writes: “Esta máquina tiene de redondez 9280 leguas y de canto, 2902 leguas” [This world has 9280 leagues of cir-cumference and 2902 leagues of radius].43 Sor María’s calculations are inac-curate and not produced from experimental observation but from archaic bibliographic sources. Moreover, the Aristotelian view of the universe, although privileged by the Catholic Church, had already been debunked with the new theories of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

At the beginning of the Treatise, Sor María narrates that after hav-ing taken communion, an angel appeared before her telling her that God

40 Sor María became the King’s counselor in political and spiritual matters. For an excellent study of their correspondence, see Consolación Baranda, Correspondencia con Felipe IV: Religión y razón de estado (Madrid: Castalia, 1991).

41 In her Relación, written many years after the bilocations, she “corrects” the official story of her trips, clarifying that “Es de advertir que algunas cosas están muy ponderadas, mal entendidas y otras añadidas” (220) [It needs to be considered that some things were exaggerated, misunderstood and others added].

42 Josefina Ludmer, “Tricks of the Weak,” in Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Stephanie Merrim (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 86–92.

43 Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Tratado, n.p.


wanted to carry out what he had promised her, to grant her infused knowl-edge of all things:

Fui llevada a la presencia del muy Alto y postrada delante de su acatamiento, oí que me decía su Alteza: Esposa, y paloma mía, Yo crié el cielo y la tierra y los elementos y el mar; y quiero que conozcas el fin para que fue criado todo lo que tiene ser.

[I was taken before the most High and kneeling down in front of Him I heard that his Highness told me: My bride and my dove, I created heavens and earth, and the elements and the oceans, and I want you to know the purpose of all of my creation.]44

The first section of the treatise, from which this quote is taken, refers to the infused knowledge that Sor María’s soul acquired of the earth and all if its inhabitants. The second section of the treatise takes into consideration the spheres and the elements, and the third one deals with the celestial region, that is of the heavens.

Modern readers find little merit in Sor María’s text for reproduc-ing scholastic information well into the seventeenth century. Sor María’s Treatise replicates the Ptolemaic model of the spheres and other informa-tion contained in various sixteenth-century cosmographical treatises, such as those by Gemma Frisius and Peter Apian.45 María Portuondo, who has studied Spanish cosmography in depth, states that the cosmographical production during the Renaissance integrated three classical traditions: Aristotelian natural philosophy, Ptolemaic geography, and Pliny’s human, animal, and plant kingdoms; and as Portuondo argues, the discovery of the New World presented an unprecedented opportunity to conflate this classical knowledge with the new realities they found.46 Sor María’s Treatise on the Map follows these traditions and imitates the structure of famous treatises in order to justify her knowledge and her travel to where the

44 Ibid., n.p.45 Pedro Apiano, La cosmographia, corregida y añadida por Gemma Frisio (Antwerp,

1575).46 Portuondo, Secret Science, 21.


peoples of the fourth world had been found and, in this way, legitimizes her journey to join the missionaries without leaving her cloister. It is clear that Sor María was not only influenced by Renaissance cosmographical discourse, which maintained many archaic concepts, but also by the mis-sionary discourse involving the exploration and conversion of souls in remote and dangerous lands. These two traditions are embedded in Sor María’s representation of the world in the Treatise.

Ágreda employs the same rhetoric of male explorers who exoticized the Americas and its inhabitants and tangentially touches on the debate that took place a century earlier about the nature of the Indians:

En esta Isla, digo, que está muy poblada, y no se si diga de gente, y de animales, por que mas parecen burros, que hombres, y que criaturas racionales; y puedo decir que lo son; por que maravil-lándome yo, como lo podían ser, me lo dijo un ángel: sí lo son, y tienen alma como tú.

[In this island, I say, which is quite populated, yet I would not know if I should say that it is populated by people or by animals, because they seem more like donkeys than men or rational crea-tures. And I can say that they are, because as I was astonished by their nature, an angel told me so: yes, they are humans and they have souls like you.]47

She catalogs people depending on their place of origin and uses the same categories of difference that had been debunked a century earlier. But her contribution is that rather than acknowledging any intellectual source for her understanding of the world and the heavens, she repeatedly states that God allowed her to be carried by angels and taken to these remote parts of the world to witness it firsthand.

T. D. Kendrick and Colahan support the idea that the treatise must be a text from Sor María’s youth.48 Regardless of the time of composition,

47 Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Tratado, n.p.48 T. D. Kendrick, Mary of Agreda: The Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (London:

Routledge, 1967).


it is difficult to deny altogether the possibility of her authorship, even though the autograph copy is lost. The number of extant copies of the treatise and the various testimonies stating her authorship, including her own comments about composing it, assert that this is an important instance in which a religious woman undertook this kind of composition.49 While its content might not be scientifically relevant, two key elements mark this text as ground-breaking. First, Sor María was able to merge the information brought back from Franciscan missionaries about evangeliza-tion in the northern frontier of New Spain with what she had learned from cosmographical texts in the convent. Second, she brought the mystical nature of the text into dialogue with traditional notions of geography and cosmography. Sor María de Ágreda was a prolific writer during the seven-teenth century; her most famous work, the controversial Mystical City of God, has caused heated debates among ecclesiastical officials through the centuries and has been the main point of contention in the debate about her canonization. Yet, Sor María acquired recognition for her mystical writing with both the king and the highest officials in the church during her lifetime and after her death. Since she was thought to have had direct

49 In the Vida de Sor María de Ágreda narrada por el padre José Ximénez Samaniego como “Prólogo Galeato” a la Mística ciudad de Dios, in the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Fray José Ximénez Samaniego includes sections of the Treatise when writing about Sor María’s bilocations (see especially page 132). Several of the manuscript copies include informal and brief commentaries at the begin-ning to clarify that the text is authentic, particularly because it had not been published. The copy at the Escorial begins:

Que trata de la redondez del mundo, y elementos, y algo de los cielos. El cual se halló en Madrid, cuyo original tenía el padre Salizanes, obispo de Córdoba, de quien el señor Samaniego, obispo de Placencia no pudo sacar sino un traslado que es como se sigue.

[Which relates the circumference of the earth and the elements and some things about the heavens. Which was found in Madrid, in the possession of Father Salizanes, bishop of Córdoba, from whom Father Samaniego, bishop of Placencia, could not obtain except for a copy which is as follows.]


communication from the Virgin Mary and God, her writings were valued for their symbolic meaning and not only for what they literally said.50

Read in the context of the bilocations, the Treatise on the Map is an intellectual justification of her geographical knowledge and a metaphor of the epistemological construction that supported imperial expansion across the Atlantic. It is possible to assert that the treatise is symbolic of Sor María de Ágreda’s textual travels through cosmographical knowledge. Sor María becomes a traveler without leaving her cloister; as a bilocating nun she had an important effect on missionary history, but she was never regarded as a cosmographer or even an intellectual nun like her coun-terpart in New Spain. Although her cosmographical treatise circulated widely in manuscript form during her lifetime and in the years following her death, this work was never published. Ultimately, her intellectual dis-course remains on the margins of the hegemonic paradigm of the official knowledge of the period, a fate that speaks precisely to the complex politics of reception. The treatise was copied by several different hands and trav-eled to different convents and monasteries throughout Spain and to the Americas, as we know from the preamble written by one of the copyists, Fray Antonio de Jesús, in the version of the Treatise found in the Library of the Escorial. The combination of infused knowledge and cosmographical discourse allowed Sor María to cross over, not only as a mystic nun but as an intellectual woman.

50 Some of the studies dedicated to Sor María’s life and writings have taken a more religious approach to this divine communication. See, for example, James Carrico, The Life of Venerable Mary of Agreda: Author of the Mystical City of God, the Autobiography of the Virgin Mary (Stockbridge: Culligan, 1960); Marilyn Fedewa, María of Ágreda: Mystical Lady in Blue (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009)


Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Theology and the Transatlantic City of Knowledge

While controversy surrounds the authorship of Sor Maria’s scientific treatise, it is a polemic of a different kind that attends Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagórica [Letter Worthy of Athena],51 This tract represents Sor Juana’s most explicit foray into theology wherein she disputes the famous Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira’s interpretation of the various patristic sources on the concept of the “finezas de Cristo,” that is, what was the greatest gift Christ gave to humankind upon his death. More than any other aspect of her life and work, the reception of the Letter Worthy of Athena, published in Puebla, Mexico in 1690, has consumed the attention of literary critics and historians of various generations.52 Most compelling to scholars has been a desire to discover the reasons behind its creation and its unauthorized publication by Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, including a letter admonishing Sor Juana for her literary activities which he signs with the pseudonym “Sor Filotea,” and Sor Juana’s subsequent renunciation of her studies beginning in 1693. Sor Juana’s most famous text, which she wrote as a response to Sor Filotea/Fernández de Santa Cruz’s criticisms — the Respuesta a Sor Filotea [Answer to Sor Filotea] of 1691 — has been analyzed in different ways by many scholars as they aim to shed light on these events.53 The text that set in motion the above-mentioned events and engendered a textual war in Mexico has itself not received as much critical attention, dealing as it does with what appears to be a seemingly minor theological debate over the “finezas de Cristo.”54

51 Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Vol. IV, Comedias, sainetes y prosa, ed. Alberto G. Salceda (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957), 412–39.

52 Important examples in this regard are works by Dorothy Schons, Emilo Abreu Gómez, Antonio Alatorre, Georgina Sabat, Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling, Octavio Paz, José Pascual Buxó, and Elías Trabulse.

53 See for example works by Elías Trabulse, José Pascual Buxó, Octavio Paz, Stephanie Merrim, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Frederick Luciani, Stacey Schlau, and Electa Arenal, among others.

54 The most notable exception to this is Pamela Kirk who addresses the theological content of the Carta Atenagórica in her book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art, and


In this case study we would like to focus on the transatlantic reception and circulation of the Carta Atenagórica itself in order to shed light on three key areas of inquiry: male acceptance of women within masculine discursive domains; women writers’ strategic use of “masculine” language; and the effect of these first two points on transatlantic epistemological crossings.

Although identical in content to the Carta Atenagórica, the tract on the “finezas de Cristo” that opens the Segundo volumen [Second Volume] of Sor Juana’s works, published in Seville in 1692 can in many ways be considered a distinct text.55 Finally bearing the title its author had origi-nally given it, the Crisis de un sermón [ Judgment on a Sermon] appears in print in Spain without the encumbrance of Sor Filotea’s preliminary text in which Fernández de Santa Cruz had leveled some crushing indictments at Sor Juana’s literary activities as well as evincing disapproval of the theo-logical content itself.56 Flanked instead by texts that attest specifically to the author’s erudition and rectitude, the reception of Sor Juana’s Crisis in

Feminism (New York: Continuum, 1998). Jean Franco also studies the text in some detail in her chapter on Sor Juana in Plotting Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989): 39–42. José Pascual Buxó has also looked at the content of this particular text in his article “Las lágrimas de Sor Juana,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La búsqueda sin fin,” ed. Stephanie Kirk, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 44, no. 2 ( June 2010): 363–96.

55 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995).

56 In the penultimate paragraph of his Carta de Sor Filotea in Salceda, ed., Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, vol. 4, 696, Fernández de Santa Cruz clearly rejects the theological arguments Sor Juana makes regarding God’s “finezas” as they pertain to free will in the last and boldest section of the Carta Atenagórica:

Estoy muy cierta y segura que si V. md., con los discursos vivos de su entendimien-to, formase y pintase una idea de las perfecciones divinas (cual se permite entre las tinieblas de la fe), al mismo tiempo se vería ilustrada de luces su alma y abrasada su voluntad y dulcemente herida de amor de su Dios, para que este Señor, que ha llovido tan abundantemente beneficios positivos en lo natural sobre V. md., no se vea obligado a concederla beneficios solamente negativos en lo sobrenatural; que por más que la discreción de V. md. les llame finezas, yo les tengo por castigos: porque sólo es beneficio el que Dios hace al corazón humano previniéndole con su gracia para que le corresponda agradecido, disponiéndose con un beneficio recono-cido, para que no represada, la liberalidad divina se los haga mayores.


Spain thus bore no resemblance to the hostility the Carta Atenagórica had encountered in Mexico. In crossing the Atlantic back to the Old World, the words and ideas Sor Juana had penned in the New World underwent a transformation and found acceptance in what Stephanie Merrim has dubbed the exclusively masculine precincts of the city of knowledge.57 The transatlantic voyage undertaken by Sor Juana’s theological musings facilitated a shift in the circumstances with which the text was to greet the public and which undoubtedly shaped the very different response that the same content had received in Mexico. As Margo Glantz has pointed out in her excellent analysis of the Segundo volumen’s preliminary materials, Sor Juana and her ally and patron, the Countess of Paredes, had marshaled a Spanish defense of the nun’s words to counter the negative reaction the text had caused in New Spain.58 The countess and her friends and asso-ciates brought together a group of twenty-two distinguished gentlemen

[I am very certain and confident that if you, with the lively arguments of your mind, would form and paint an idea of the divine Perfection (to the degree possible given the darkness of faith), at the same time you would see your soul illuminated and your will inflamed and sweetly wounded with the love of your God, in order that this Lord who has so abundantly showered positive natural benefits on you will not be obliged to grant you only negative supernatural benefits. Furthermore, that which your wit would call demonstrations of love, I consider punishments. The only thing that can be considered as a benefit is what God does to the human heart when he prepares it with his grace so that it can respond with gratitude, disposing it with a benefit that is acknowledged, so that it may respond unchecked to ever greater divine generosity.] See Pamela Kirk Rappaport, trans. and introduction, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings (New York and Mahwah, NJ: The Paulist Press, 2005), 252.

He makes many negative comments regarding her poetry writing including “Mucho tiem-po ha gastado V. md. en el estudio de filósofos y poetas; ya será razón que se perfeccionen los empleos y que se mejoren los libros” (695) [You have spent a great deal of time in the study of philosophers and poets; it is now high time for your pastimes to be perfected and your books improved”]. See Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, trans., The Answer/la Respuesta: Expanded Edition including the Letter to which it Replies and New Selected Poems (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009), 226.

57 Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 194.58 Margo Glantz, La comparación y la hipérbole (Mexico City: Conaculta, 1999),

212. Glantz also describes these laudatory texts as “ensalmos para protegerla de los


to write preliminary panegyrics in the forms of censuras [censures] and licencias [permissions] in both poetry and prose. A significant number of these authors were theologians and other scholars drawn from a selection of the most prominent male religious groups, among them three Jesuits. Inquisition officials were also found among their number.59 While it is not unusual that such a volume should include such laudatory paratextual material, it is the engagement of respected theologians with Sor Juana’s own theological discourse that serves to make this particular collection memorable.60 Why would the clerical and theological community in Spain approve of Sor Juana’s text while its counterpart in Mexico so heavily censured her? The countess was a powerful aristocrat whose political con-nections obviously reached far and wide. Yet, if the content and context of Sor Juana’s text had been so problematic — as the Mexican situation seems to indicate — surely even the influence of a noblewoman would not have been enough for men of this caliber to place their reputations in jeopardy

múltiples adversarios que . . . tuvo en la capital novohispana” [incantantions to protect her from the many adversaries she had in the capital of New Spain].

59 See Margo Glantz, La comparación y la hipérbole, for a detailed description of the organization of these materials (158–59).

60 In relation to the paratextual material accompanying the posthumous volume of Sor Juana’s work, Fama y obras póstumas, Margo Echenberg has called attention to the importance of these types of texts in “Alianza y censuras en las dedicatorias de las obras de Sor Juana,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La búsqueda sin fin,” ed. Kirk, 412:

No es solo que en su tiempo se valoraba más el paratexto sino que inmiscuido entre la hipérbole y las fórmulas de rigor se entretejen diálogos fascinantes llenos de pautas para mejor comprender tanto la concepción como la admisión de un texto. En el caso de la mujer que escribe, el conjunto de documentos que conforman el paratexto puede proveer, incluso, información biográfica de la cual no existe rastro en otras fuentes históricas.

[It is not only that in this period the paratext was more valued but also that, immersed in the hyperbole and the necessary formulaic language fascinating dialogues were woven, full of clues to further our understanding of not only the conceptualization of a text but also its reception. In the case of the woman who wrote, the group of documents that constitutes the paratext can go as far as to provide biographical information of which no trace can be found in other historical sources].


through praise of Sor Juana. Instead, we contend that the nun’s successful deployment of male intellectual language, together with the singularity of her colonial locus of enunciation and textual transatlantic crossing, opened up a new discursive space, allowing for the same ideas that had so shocked Mexican clerics to appeal to their Spanish counterparts.

The Spanish Jesuits seem to take Sor Juana at her word when she declares herself in the Carta Atenagórica “hija de la Sagrada Religión” of Vieira, with which she makes reference to the Society of Jesus. Jesuit Pedro Zapata, who also held the responsibilities of “calificador” [censor] of the Inquisition, “predicador del rey” [King’s preacher] as well as “Examinador Synodal” [Synodal Examiner] of the Archbishopric of Seville echoes Sor Filotea’s refusal to count himself among those men who shun the efforts of learned women, “apartándome del vulgo de aquellos hombres” [distancing myself from the vulgar opinions of those men]. 61 However, unlike Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, he is consistent in his support and goes on to echo Sor Juana’s belief that the soul had no sex. Thus, he concludes, God granted both men and women the capacity to uncover the “más delicadas sutilezas de las sciencias”62 [the most intricate subtleties of knowledge]. Sor Juana is one such woman, and while she demonstrates capacities in many branches of learning it is her theological work — the highest level of erudi-tion — that must garner the greatest praise: “Se introduce [Sor Juana] con tan superior inteligencia en los secretos de la Sagrada Escritura y desentraña las questiones de la Theologia Escolastica con vozes tan decentes. . .”63 [She (Sor Juana) inserts herself with such superior intelligence into the secrets

61 Pedro Zapata, “[elogio de] El P. M. Pedro Zapata, Religioso Professo de la Compañia de Jesus, Calificador del Santo Oficio, Predicador del Rey, Examinador Synodal de este Arçobispado” in Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995), n.p.. This could be seen as a sly critique of Fernández de Santa Cruz who, at the beginning of his letter, seemingly offers support of women writ-ers: “No apruebo la vulgaridad de los que reprueban en las mujeres el uso de las letras, pues tantas se aplicaron a este estudio, no sin alabanza de San Jerónimo” (695) [I do not approve of those who condemn women’s lettered pursuits, since so many who applied themselves thus garnered the praise of Saint Jerome].

62 Zapata, “[elogio de] El P. M. Pedro Zapata,” in Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, n.p.

63 Ibid., n.p.


of the Holy Scripture and unravels the questions of Scholastic Theology with the most decent of words”]. His fellow panegyrist Fray Pedro del Santíssimo Sacramento, Discalced Carmelite, praises many aspects of Sor Juana’s writing: “la profundidad de los Pensamientos, la sutileza de los Discursos, la ingenuidad de los Conceptos” [the profundity of her Thoughts, the artifice of her Discourse, the ingenuity of her Concepts]; he saves his most lavish praise for her “Magistral Inteligencia de la Sagrada Escritura y de los Santos Padres” [Masterful Understanding of the Holy Scripture and Church Fathers”]. 64 These comments represent just a few examples of the specific praise these Spanish clerics and theologians offer Sor Juana’s theological tract. There is no insinuation that Sor Juana has overstepped her position as a nun in debating the great Antonio Vieira. Indeed, several of the writers place Sor Juana’s talent on a par or surpass-ing the knowledge produced within the hallowed precincts of all-male intellectual establishments. For example, let us consider the exhortation of Pedro del Santíssimo Sacramento that “la aplaudan en las Escuelas, en las Universidades, en las Academias, en los Teatros, para que sea de Doctos la alabança y que elogien debidamente a la que en todas Facultades y Ciencias es Doctissima”65 [they applaud her in the Schools, the Universities, the Academies, the Lecture Halls, so that she might be praised by the erudite and rightly declared in all faculties and sciences as the most erudite of all]. Viewed within this framework, Sor Juana’s discussion of Vieira’s ideas suddenly fit neatly into the tradition of male intellectual debate of which theological disputatio was an integral part.66 Indeed, the first word of Sor

64 Fray Pedro del Santísimo Sacramento, “[elogio de] El Padre Maestro fr. Pedro del Santissimo Sacramento, Religioso Carmelito Descalço, y Predicador en su Colegio del Angel de la Guarda de Sevilla, de la misma orden” in Ibid, n.p.

65 Ibid, n.p.66 In the Jesuit plan for education, the Ratio of 1599, the issue of disputation

and the importance of students learning competitive argumentation is emphasized. In Educational Foundations of the Jesuits in Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1938), 28–29, Jerome V. Jacobsen details the procedures, explaining that this “intellectual joust in Latin, at times wearisome, was conducted at other times in so heated a manner that an outsider might readily suppose the good people, professors included, were on the verge of a very major schism. These jousts, or actas, while admirably suited to sharpen the mind to a keen point for perception of truth, falsity, and distinctions,


Juana’s own title for her tract, Crisis de un sermón, bore the connotation of judgment in its derivation from Greek. Sor Juana does indeed offer a judicious reading of Vieira’s text. In the first paragraph she explains how her disquisitions on his original involved various stages of intellectual judg-ment that range from praise [alabando] to dissent [disintiendo], but always incorporating admiration [admirándome].67

Perhaps the comprehension the Spanish clerics showed of her respectful and reasoned debate was the fate Sor Juana had originally antici-pated for her first explicitly theological efforts. We know from her opening comments in the Carta Atenagórica that her oral presentation of these ideas had been well-received by those who heard them in the “locutorio” or visiting room of the convent, among them presumably Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, who had apparently requested its transcription.68 Given that she published so few texts in Mexico, perhaps she had always intended for the original and sole audience to be across the Atlantic far from the conflicts of her own Mexican milieu.69 In the Respuesta she tells us she had

had a reflex in external attitudes and go a long way toward explaining the combative and controversial spirit of some religious.”

67 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta Atenagórica, in Segundo volumen, 412.68 In the opening lines of the Carta Atenagórica, 412, Sor Juana writes “Muy Señor

Mío: De las bachillerías de una conversación, que en la merced que V. md. me hace pasa-ron plaza de vivezas, nació en V. md. el deseo de ver por escrito algunos discursos que allí hice de repente sobre los sermones de un excelente orador” [My Dear Sir: When amid the pleasantries of a conversation, you were so kind as to recognize in me a certain acuity of mind, there was born in you the desire to see in writing some of the arguments that came to me spontaneously at that time, especially those concerning the sermons of an excellent preacher]. See Pamela Kirk, trans., Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 2005), 219.

69 Very few of Sor Juana’s texts were published in Mexico during her lifetime, with the exception of, most significantly, the Neptuno alegórico and the Auto sacramental del divino Narciso in 1690. Several of her sets of villancicos [carols] were also published, albeit some anonymously. In the earlier part of her life she also contributed poems to various published collections that were the fruit of poetry competitions and special celebrations. All of this information comes from Francisco de la Maza’s invaluable resource Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia (Mexico City: UNAM, 1980).


not anticipated the “favor” of the publication of her “borrones” [drafts].70 Perhaps the thinly-veiled anger she demonstrates here toward the cri-tiques she had received was inspired in part by the premature publication of something she had always intended for print in Spain in an anticipated second volume, given that the first volume, Inundación Castálida (1689), [The Overflowing of the Castalian Spring] had met with such success.

The panegyrists of the Segundo volumen make frequent references to Sor Juana’s singularity as a female intellectual.71 Nearly all of them draw attention, moreover, to the other singular feature of her persona: her iden-tity as a colonial subject. As with her gender, these clerics and other erudite men fall into the common trap of depicting America within a narrow set of images, making reference to its worth as exporter of raw materials and expressing surprise that the colonies should have produced such a learned woman. For example, Don Pedro del Campo writes “Qué millones trae la Flota?/pregunta el Vulgo, en llegando/ Qué obras de la Madre Juana?/el Discreto Cortesano?”72 [How many millions brings the fleet? / Asks the common man upon arrival / Which of Mother Juana’s works? / Asks the clever courtier]. In the same vein, Don Ambrosio de la Cuesta seems to upbraid “nuestra España,” which, he claims, “solo se reconocia agradecida a la America de los Tesoros, con que repetidamente la enriqueze”73 [only displays gratitude to America for the treasures, which constantly enrich her]. The depiction of America as provider of raw materials was a clear reflection of how the dynamics of imperialism influenced transatlantic

70 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in Obras completas ed. Salceda (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957), 440.

71 In La comparación y la hipérbole, 187, Glantz refers to the repertoire of images the panegyrists mobilize to praise her as “Numerosas frases convertidas casi en lugar común” [Numerous phrases which become almost clichés] and highlights what she sees as a misogynist gesture in this type of praise: “Mencionar a una mujer ilustre es siempre compararla con un hombre excepcional. Pareciera que solo así fuera legítima y pudiera autorizarse y aceptarse la valía, la existencia del talento femenino . . . [To mention an illus-trious woman is always to compare her to an exceptional man. It would seem that only then would she be legitimate and could she assume authority, and the value and existence of female talent be accepted].

72 Segundo volumen, n.p.73 Ibid., n.p.


scholarly exchange.74 While colonial subjects desired nothing more for their works than to be published in Europe, Europeans themselves did not hold the intellectual life of the colony in particularly high regard.75 Sor Juana, however, succeeds in converting the transatlantic crossing that served only to crush the hopes of many creole intellectuals into an episte-mological operating category for the reading and reception of her works. For Sor Juana’s works, the Atlantic crossing offered a bridge to a new read-ing of her works in which her brand of colonial knowledge was endowed with a particular epistemological value. It is precisely the prodigious con-

74 In “Colonial No More,” Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel analyzes how Sor Juana herself addresses these dynamics in her poem “¿Cúando, Númenes divinos?” detailing how “the poem resists its transatlantic reading by focusing on the meanings and referents that are lost in the cultural and literary reappropriations of the American context by the audience overseas.” She further notes that in the poem, the lyric voice shows how “European eulogists have created a false image of the colonial subject that is a reflection of their own (imperial) conceptions”; see Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Bergmann and Schlau, 93.

75 In Vida ejemplar, heroicas virtudes, y apostólico ministerio del venerable padre Antonio Núñez de Miranda, de la Compañía de Jesús (Mexico City: Viuda de Francisco Lupercio, 1702), his biography of Sor Juana’s erstwhile confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, fellow Jesuit Juan Antonio de Oviedo proclaims, somewhat spuriously, the great success Núñez’s intellectual labors enjoyed: “la fama del Padre Antonio no estrechaba los límites de la América — había ya grandes aplausos penetrados hasta la Europa” (45) [Father Antonio’s fame was not confined to America — great acclaim had reached as far as Europe]. At the same time, Sor Juana’s contemporary, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, desperately sought patrons, publishers, and renown in Europe, while complaining bitterly of the lack of respect American intellectual production inspired in these same Europeans in Libra astronómica y filosófica, 2nd. ed. (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984) 85: “piensan en algunas partes de Europa y con especialidad en las septentrionales por más remotas, que no sólo los indios, habitadores originarios de estos países, sino que los que de padres españoles casualmente nacimos en ellos, o andamos en dos pies por divina dispensación, o que aun valiéndose de microscopios ingleses apenas se descubre en nosotros lo racional” [ In some parts of Europe, and most especially in the North which is more remote, they think that not only the Indians, original inhabitants of these countries, but also those of us who happen to have been here of Spanish parents, either walk on two legs by divine dispensation or that even by making use of English microscopes one barely finds reason in us]. Irving Leonard, trans. Don Carlos De Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929), 62–63.


fluence of gender, space, and theological discourse that permits Sor Juana to enter the transatlantic city of knowledge where many colonial men had failed. Doctor Ambrosio de la Cuesta y Saavedra, canon of the cathedral in Seville summed up Sor Juana’s transatlantic value, declaring her erudition

este inestimable Tesoro, descubierto en el Mineral fertil del ingenio singular de la Madre Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, Religiosa professa en el Monasterio de San Geronimo de la Imperial Ciudad de Mexico, es, el que en varias y elegantes Obras enriqueze gloriosamente dos Mundos76

[this inestimable treasure, discovered in the fertile land of the singular genius of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, professed nun of the convent of Saint Jerome of the Imperial City of Mexico, is one which in various and elegant works gloriously enriches two worlds].

Conclusion: Women, Epistemology, and the Transatlantic Space

The findings we have outlined in this article lead us to the conclusion that women of the Hispanic early modern period did not always write in clearly contrasting terms that opposed male models of knowledge. Although Sor Juana’s theological and Sor María’s cosmographical contributions were not fully incorporated into male intellectual culture, they were acclaimed by certain masculine networks of support, and their ideas and writings drew the attention and engagement of ecclesiastical authorities. Thus, we believe that their intention was to participate along with men in the intellectual debates of their time and that ultimately they achieved what they intended to do in great part because of the transatlantic context in which both of them maneuvered. Sor Juana was able to publish her Carta Atenagórica on the other side of the Atlantic and garner praise from respected theologians;

76 Segundo volumen, n.p., emphasis ours.


Sor María undertook cosmographical writing as a way to justify and intel-lectualize her participation in the evangelization of the northern frontier in New Spain, and her text, although never published, circulated widely among ecclesiastical authorities.

It is important to bear in mind that women’s experiences as writers in the transatlantic setting were not monolithic but that there are certain sim-ilarities that allow us to draw a series of conclusions that will allow scholars to think more critically about the crossings of female bodies and books over the Atlantic. Although both Sor María and Sor Juana count among their writings texts that followed the “rhetoric of femininity” identified in a cohort of women religious writers in the Iberian Atlantic world, these two women also chose to engage in traditionally male genres using the elite masculine parlance of theology and cosmography.77 What we believe is that they chose to do this to more efficiently cross the Atlantic and map their presence through their written words. The transatlantic crossing operational in each woman’s case provided a liminal and transformative space from which they could capitalize on the politics of reception and launch new epistemological possibilities. While Sor María’s text is practi-cally unknown and Sor Juana’s is renowned — if not necessarily widely-read — we believe nonetheless that they offer productive and informative models of women’s experiences in the transatlantic milieu that allow us to think about the intersection of writing, religion, gender, and space in new ways and to consider in a wider context how these learned women helped shape transatlantic epistemology.

77 See note 17.

theorizing transatlantic women’s writing:

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