Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
A Hieronymite nun of Mexico City whose verse was printed in Madrid in 1689, enlarged by her own hand in Barcelona in 1693, and completed in Lisbon in 1701 with the letter in which she defends a woman's right to study. Her reply to a bishop argues from a life without masters, from a prelate who forbade her books, and from what she learned watching eggs fry and sugar thicken in a convent kitchen.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Sor Juana runs on two rails: a biographical sketch built from modern secondary literature, and one or two lines of the Respuesta quoted at second hand, usually the one about Aristotle and the frying pan, detached from the paragraph of observations that earns it. This object is built from the printings themselves, read as page scans: the Madrid 1689 title page and its privilege in another person's name, the Barcelona 1693 volume that says on its face it was enlarged by the author, and the Lisbon 1701 volume that keeps the bishop's rebuke and her answer bound together in sequence. That lets it show things a summary cannot — the exact bound of her obedience to the prelate who forbade her books, three months and only as to picking up a book; the sugar-and-quince observation that stands next to the Aristotle line; the viceroy's galleon simile for a seventeen-year-old under examination by forty men because no university would enrol her. It also refuses the triumphalist ending: the same volume that carries her defence of study prints commendatory octaves celebrating the sale of her library, and the object says so as a claim rather than leaving it out.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The copy read here is a Sammelband of three separate printings bound together, and the three imprints are the first fact about her. The first title page reads "INVNDACION CASTALIDA DE LA VNICA POETISA, MVSA DEZIMA, SOROR JVANA INES DE LA CRVZ, RELIGIOSA PROFESSA EN el Monasterio de San Geronimo de la Imperial Ciudad de Mexico", and its imprint is "EN MADRID: Por Jvan Garcia Infanzon, Año de 1689". The second is "SEGVNDO TOMO DE LAS OBRAS DE SOROR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ", dated 1693 and "Impresso en Barcelona, por Joseph Llopis". The third is "FAMA, Y OBRAS POSTHVMAS, TOMO TERCERO", printed "EN LISBOA: Por Miguel Deslandes. Año de M.DCCI." A cloistered nun in Mexico had her works set in type in three Iberian cities within twelve years.
The 1689 Madrid title page sells her as a marvel and as a colonial export at the same time: she is "LA VNICA POETISA, MVSA DEZIMA", her verses are offered "PARA ENSENANZA, RECREO, Y ADMIRACION", and the volume is dedicated to "LA EXCEL.MA SENORA. SEÑORA D. MARIA Luisa Gonçaga Manrique de Lara, Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna" — the departed vicereine of New Spain — and brought to press by "D. JVAN CAMACHO GAYNA, CAVALLERO DEL ORDEN de Santiago", governor of the city of Puerto de Santa Maria. The book reaches print through a viceregal patroness and a male courtier, and says so on its face.
The legal instruments confirm that arrangement and are worth reading literally. The Suma del privilegio grants the licence not to the author but to Camacho Gayna: he "Tiene Privilegio ... para poder imprimir vn libro, intitulado: Varios Poemas Castellanos de Soror Iuana Ines de la Cruz, por tiempo de diez años", dispatched at Madrid on 19 September 1689. The errata are signed by the crown's corrector Don Martin de Ascarza at Madrid on 17 November 1689, and the tasa of 19 November 1689 prices the book at six maravedis the sheet. The author of the verses holds none of these rights.
The preliminaries of the Madrid printing show how a woman writing in Mexico was made presentable to a Spanish readership. A romance by Don Joseph Perez de Montoro opens by asking the "Cytharas Europeas" to tune their gilded strings and see whether they can accompany a new wonder, "que es numerica voz del Nuevo mundo", and goes on: "Vna Muger baldona afeminados los fatidicos partos mas robustos, que à luz dieron Omeros, y Virgilios, Persios, Lucanos, Senecas, y Tulios." The praise is real and it is also a frame: she is admitted as a prodigy of the New World rather than as a colleague, and the compliment is that she shames the mothers of Homer and Virgil.
The 1693 Barcelona title page carries five words that settle a question often left vague in short accounts: the second volume is "AÑADIDO EN ESTA SEGVNDA IMPRESSION POR SV AVTORA". She was not a posthumous discovery being edited by others while she lived; she was revising and enlarging a book that was being reprinted on the far side of the Atlantic.
The Lisbon 1701 volume preserves the whole of the quarrel that made her famous, in order. It prints first the letter signed "Philotèa de la Cruz" — the pen name of the bishop of Puebla — dated "Deste Convento de la Santissima Trinidad de la Puebla de los Angeles, y Noviembre 25. de 1690"; then a printer's note that "La Crisis al Sermon, ò Carta Athenagorica no se reimprime aqui, por andar impressa al principio del Segundo Tomo"; and then, at page 8, "RESPVESTA DE LA POETISA A LA MVY ILVSTRE SOR PHILOTEA DE LA CRVZ". A woman's theological criticism of a celebrated Jesuit preacher, a bishop's rebuke, and her answer to the rebuke were all published, and kept in print together.
The Respuesta states the vocation as something she could neither choose nor shed. From the moment "me rayò la primera luz de la razon", she writes, the inclination to letters was so vehement and powerful that neither the reprimands of others — "que he tenido muchas" — nor her own reflections, of which she had made not a few, sufficed to make her abandon "este natural impulso, que Dios puso en mi". She adds that she has asked God to put out the light of her understanding and leave only what is needed to keep his law, the remainder being superfluous, in the judgement of some, in a woman — and there are even those, she writes, who say that it does harm.
The prohibition is narrated as fact, not as grievance. Her critics, she writes, "han llegado à solicitar, que se me prohiba el estudio", and once they succeeded, with "vna Prelada muy santa, y muy candida, que creyò, que el estudio era cosa de Inquisicion, y me mandò, que no estudiasse". Her compliance is precisely bounded and slightly comic: "yo la obedecì (vnos tres meses, que durò el poder ella mandar) en quanto à no tomar Libro", but as to not studying absolutely, that did not fall under her own power, and she could not do it — for though she did not study in books, she studied in everything God created, these serving her for letters and the whole universal machine for a book.
The most quoted passage of the Respuesta is a piece of kitchen empiricism, and the observations in it are specific enough to be repeatable. She asks what she could tell of the natural secrets she has discovered while cooking: that an egg holds together and fries in fat or oil and by contrast breaks apart in syrup; that to keep sugar fluid it is enough to add a very small quantity of water in which quince or another sour fruit has stood; that the yolk and the white of a single egg are so contrary that in the ones that serve for sugar each serves alone and not together. Then the turn: what can women know, she asks, but philosophies of the kitchen. She quotes Lupercio Leonardo, that one may well philosophise and get the supper ready, and adds her own line — "Si Aristoteles huviera guisado, mucho mas huviera escrito."
The letter is dated and placed: "Deste Convento de N. Padre San Geronimo de Mexico, à primero dia del mes de Março de mil seiscientos y noventa y vn años", and subscribed "B. V. M. vuestra mas favorecida, Juana Inès de la Cruz". It closes in the register of obedience it has spent fifty pages complicating, asking her correspondent to emend any term that seems incongruous and saying she has not dared to exceed the limits of her style.
Her editor's preliminaries supply the schooling she never had, and they should be read as an interested source. Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursua writes that at the age of eight her parents took her to Mexico to live with a grandfather, where she fed her craving to know on a few books found in the house that had no purpose there but to clutter a writing table; that the Bachiller Martin de Olivas attested to having given her twenty lessons in Latin and no more; and that, left to her own reasoning, she appointed herself a monitor by cutting off some of her hair and ruling that if it grew back to a certain point on her shoulder before she had learned what she had set herself, it should be cut again. The detail is vivid, posthumous, and printed in a volume built to celebrate her.
The same preliminaries preserve the examination that no university register could record, because she could not enrol in one. Castorena reports it from the viceroy, the Marques de Mancera, who told him twice that wishing to know whether such learning was infused, acquired, artificial or not natural, he gathered in his palace as many men as professed letters in the university and city of Mexico, some forty in all — theologians, scripturists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, poets, humanists. Juana Ines was then seventeen. The viceroy's own image, quoted in the text, is naval: in the manner in which a royal galleon would defend itself against a few launches that attacked it, so she disengaged herself from the questions, arguments and replies that so many put to her, each in his own field.
Castorena also states plainly the structural fact behind the anecdotes: "dentro de sola su capacidad cupieron Cathedra, y Auditorio", and she was by herself at one and the same time argument, answer, objection and resolution. Masters were never lacking to the city, he writes, but she was never lacking to herself. His own comparison is with the university: within her single capacity there fitted both the chair and the hall. The education of the most learned person in seventeenth-century New Spain is described by her own editor as conducted alone, and the men who examined her at seventeen were fetched to a palace rather than met in a faculty.
The cost is printed in the same volume as the defence, and this corpus does not separate them. Among the commendatory poems of the Lisbon volume is one headed "A LA PIADOSA ACCION DE VENDER SUS LIBROS la Poetisa, para socorrer à los pobres con su producto", and another that praises her for parting with books and other possessions she held by licence, and for writing a profession of faith in her own blood. The book that transmits the strongest early-modern Spanish argument for a woman's right to study also celebrates, in verse, her giving up her library — and it is the celebration, not the argument, that its apparatus treats as her crowning act.
What these three printings cannot do is speak for her outside a structure of male permission, and the limit should be stated rather than smoothed over. The privilege belongs to a knight of Santiago; the dedications run to a vicereine and to grandees; the third volume is assembled by a prebendary of the cathedral of Mexico and prefaced by dozens of laudatory poems from titled men; even her defence of study survives because a bishop attacked her first and the exchange sold well. No page opened here gives her date of birth or of death, and none is asserted in this object.