The Fame of Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz : Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muse's renown and studies how her worldly celebrity was altered posthumously by elegists in her Fama y obras póstumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] of 1700. In this study of a polyphonic, transatlantic volume, the didactic framework of early modern fame is pushed to its limits as panegyrists inscribe the nun into an evolving world-view that could trade in the fictions of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse or a New World treasure, but could not preserve a woman's renown on the grounds of authorship. Only by making her legible could she vie for the promise of posthumous fame. In flushing out the machinations of Sor Juana's role as agent of her own celebrity as well as the negotiations of her contemporaries, this book opens new lines of inquiry in the study of early modern fame and print culture and the role of writers, panegyrists and editors as cultural agents in the transatlantic literary relationship between Mexico and Spain Cover 1 Table of Contents 6 A Note on the Text 8 Abbreviations 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 14 Negotiating Rumor and Fame: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Posthumous Fama 14 Sor Juana, Agent of Her Own Celebrity Status 26 The Fama and Sor Juana’s Retreat from Public Life 29 Exempla, Edification, Posterity and the Written Word 35 More Than a Sourcebook 39 Chapter Outline 43 Appendix 45 1. The Fama 56 A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana 56 The Engraved Portrait: Gateway to the Volume 58 The Fama’s Prologue: A Guide to Unearthing the Volume’s Structure 73 A Private Dialogue Made Public: Sor Juana Engages the Editor of Her Fama 85 Conclusions 89 Appendix 92 2. Soaring above the Rest 100 Sor Juana as “Sacred Phoenix” and the Fama as Moral Exhortation 100 Tales of Virtues: Posthumous Fame for Holy Women of Seventeenth-Century Mexico 106 Father Calleja Tries His Hand at Hagiography 113 Paying Homage to Sor Juana’s Spiritual and Literary Desengaño 123 Conclusions 135 Appendix 139 3. Light from the New World 148 Posthumous Praise for an American Mind 148 Sor Juana, An American Treasure 155 American Tributes: Sor Juana and a New World Order 172 Not Woman at All?: Sor Juana and the Discourse of New World Abundance 183 Conclusions 199 Appendix 203 4. With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper” 214 Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image 214 Sor Juana as Panegyrist: In Praise of Doña María de Guadalupe de Lencastre 220 Sor Juana Vilifies and Promotes Her Renown in the Respuesta 229 “I Have No Knowledge of These Things”: Sor Juana’s Careful Crafting of Her Literary Self-Portraits 237 Conclusions 255 Appendix 263 Afterword (Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?) 272 Appendix A 282 Appendix B 290 Bibliography of Works Cited 292 Index 310 Figure 1. Frontispiece of the Fama y obras pósthumas. Madrid, 1700. Courtesy of theJohn Carter Brown Library at Brown University 91 "The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz' traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muse's renown and studies how her worldly celebrity was altered posthumously by elegists in her 'Fama y obras póstumas' (Fame and Posthumous Works) of 1700. In this study of a polyphonic, transatlantic volume, the didactic framework of early modern fame is pushed to its limits as panegyrists inscribe the nun into an evolving world-view that could trade in the fictions of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse or a New World treasure, but could not preserve a woman's renown on the grounds of authorship. Only by making her legible could she vie for the promise of posthumous fame. In flushing out the machinations of Sor Juana's role as agent of her own celebrity as well as the negotiations of her contemporaries, this book opens new lines of inquiry in the study of early modern fame and print culture and the role of writers, panegyrists and editors as cultural agents in the transatlantic literary relationship between Mexico and Spain".--Del editor