The Routledge Research Companion to the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Emilie L. Bergmann, Stacey Schlau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317041641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse, " Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women's and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.

PART I

Contexts

1

The empire and Mexico City

Religious, political, and social institutions of a transatlantic enterprise

Alejandro Cañeque

Following a well-established tradition, when the count of Paredes arrived in Mexico City in 1680 as New Spain’s new viceroy, he was welcomed by two triumphal arches, one erected by the municipal council and the other by the cathedral chapter. The cathedral arch had been designed by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and depicted scenes from the life of the Roman god Neptune, whom Sor Juana had chosen as the incarnation of a good ruler. As part of the welcoming rituals, a few days before his solemn entry into Mexico City, the viceroy had had the opportunity to receive the representatives of the most important institutions of colonial and imperial rule. These corporate bodies were the Real Audiencia (high court), the Cabildo Secular (municipal council), the Cabildo Eclesiástico (cathedral chapter), and the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición (the Holy Office of the Inquisition). These were the most important institutions of colonial and imperial rule, and they dominated the political and religious life of seventeenth-century Mexico City.

Despite its significance, the historiography on the viceregal institution is, for the most part, rather antiquated. In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of historians published biographical studies of the viceregal post in the Habsburg period, focusing on the two or three more “important” viceroys – those who were thought to have decisively contributed to establishing royal authority in the American territories, especially in the sixteenth century – and ignoring the rest (Aiton; Levillier; Zimmerman). In the 1950s, José Ignacio Rubio Mañé published his Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de Nueva España, the most complete biographical and institutional study of New Spain’s viceroys, and, in the 1960s, Jesús Lalinde Abadía authored two of the most exhaustive studies of the viceregal figure from an institutional and juridical perspective. Approximately in the same years, John Leddy Phelan and Mario Góngora published their studies of the structure of Spanish colonial administration in which they saw the viceroy as an instrument of absolutism and of the expanding modern state in its struggle against corporate privileges and the network of patron-client relationships. In this administrative structure, the viceroys constituted the political layer of the imperial bureaucracy, while the oidores (justices of the high court) formed the professional level.

Regarding the role of the audiencia in the government of New Spain, institutional historians pointed out its importance in limiting viceregal power. This key political role of the high court led Clarence Haring and Rubio Mañé to argue that the audiencia was the most important and the most characteristic institution in the government of the Spanish possessions in America. But John Parry, in his study of the audiencia of Guadalajara, found it difficult to determine where real authority lay in the Indies. He contended that the whole system was deliberately devised to prevent the growth of a strong colonial government. These historians argued that the division of authority among different individuals or institutions exercising the same powers (executive, legislative, judicial) was the cause of the many conflicts over matters of jurisdiction that characterized colonial society. For Haring, “Spanish imperial government was one of checks and balances,” secured by a deliberate overlapping of jurisdictions to prevent any one institution or individual from becoming too powerful (110–13).¹ For his part, John Elliott has claimed that the absence of major open challenges to the Crown was the result of the development in Habsburg Spain of a strong bureaucratic structure and an administrative class of letrados (lawyers) to staff it. These letrados were the ones who really held the Spanish monarchy and empire together (Elliott, “Spain and America” 63). In the 1970s, Mark Burkholder and D.S. Chandler tried to bring the methods of quantitative history to the study of the audiencias by examining the backgrounds and careers of hundreds of judges appointed to the American high courts between 1687 and 1821. According to the authors, the systematic sale of appointments that started in 1687 and did not end until around 1750 heralded an age of royal weakness, as the sale of these offices allowed Creoles to dominate these fundamental institutions of imperial rule. Although often quoted, the study of Burkholder and Chandler was not followed by others of a similar nature, as historians of Latin America were quickly moving away from institutional and quantitative history towards social history and, above all, ethnohistory.

Another fundamental institution of the imperial system of government was the cabildo secular or municipal council. The traditional narrative maintains that the absolute monarchy and the imperial bureaucracy had reduced the cities of the Spanish Empire to the role of mere followers of the dictates of the Crown and its representatives. The appointment of corregidores (magistrates), the sale of town council positions, and closed elections (only members of the council were entitled to vote) made city government the preserve of a narrow circle of wealthy, influential families, an oligarchy in which the private interests of the regidores (aldermen) did not always coincide with the general interests of the community they represented (Merriman 1.183–94; 2.144–52; 3.637–39; Haring 147–55).² The cabildos gradually lost their autonomy through the increasing centralization of the Crown’s authority, with corregidores or, in the case of Mexico City and Lima, viceroys interfering in their affairs. This made Haring conclude that “as the cabildos were gradually deprived of whatever initiative and independence they may have possessed in the beginning, the office of regidor became politically of less and less consequence” (163). However, Jonathan Israel has argued that in New Spain, municipal councils, especially the cabildos of Mexico City and Puebla, provided positive political leadership for a broad combination of Creole groups. The cabildo, in fact, represented local interests and was the principal political institution of the Creole population. The cabildo of Mexico City claimed a special preeminence among the Mexican cabildos, considering itself the representative of all Mexican Creoles, a claim vehemently contested by Puebla (Israel 94–98).³

In the early 1980s, Woodrow Borah published his study of New Spain’s Indian Court, a court of law presided over by the viceroy and specifically geared to administering justice to the indigenous population. This book probably was the last significant study of an institution of colonial rule written by a North American historian, as since the 1970s historians of colonial Latin America have abandoned the study of political and imperial history, concentrating their research on the study of indigenous peoples and the population of African descent under Spanish rule. The consequence of this abandonment has been that many scholars still rely on outdated views of the political and institutional structure of the Spanish Empire.⁴ Around the same time that North American colonial historians were abandoning institutional history, historians working on the early modern history of Europe on both sides of the Atlantic started to develop a series of new approaches for studying political history, which have contributed to transforming in profound ways our understanding of the system of governance of early modern societies. These historians have, to a large extent, eschewed the study of the state and formal institutions, in order to focus on the analysis of informal institutions and the political culture of early modern polities. They have criticized the previous emphasis on the emergence of the “modern state” and contend that it is actually hard to find such a political entity anywhere in early modern Europe. These new political historians have concentrated their attention instead on the royal court, which had been practically ignored by institutional historians, arguing that the royal or princely court, not the state, was the site where politics and power in the early modern period were located.

Interest in the court was spurred by a rediscovery of Norbert Elias’s work in the 1980s.⁵ Elias saw the court as a “civilizing” tool which facilitated the conversion of medieval knights into refined courtiers. The early modern court was a crucial step in the development of the modern state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. An institution used by monarchs to centralize and increase their power (for Elias, Louis XIV’s court was the paradigmatic example), the court was also the center of a propaganda machine aimed at persuading or indoctrinating the king’s subjects. Although still highly influential, many historians have criticized Elias’s main arguments, contending that the court system was much more fluid and complex than the simplified and rather rigid scheme he presented. New court history calls into question the notion of “state building,” based on the contention that the modern concept of the unitary nation-state was practically non-existent in the seventeenth century. John Elliott, in a highly influential article published in the early 1990s, contributed to popularizing the notion of “composite monarchy” as a way to define the heterogeneous nature of early modern polities.⁶ As John Adamson has observed, “early modern sovereignties were often an untidy composite of disparate territories and subjects; they took their coherence not from territorial boundaries or ‘national’ identity but primarily from religious and dynastic allegiance” (40). Instead of the nation-state, what we find is the “realm” (the reino in the Spanish case), which is not a clearly defined territorial unit but a collectivity of subjects owing allegiance to a ruler. The monarch, not the state, constituted the prime focus of loyalty.⁷

In the course of the 1990s, Spanish and Portuguese historians proceeded to revise the history of the Iberian monarchies and the Spanish Empire along these lines. With their studies, they contributed to revitalizing the study of political history. Avoiding teleological approaches, these historians understand the past in terms of its alterity, as a time essentially different from ours, a period which was not simply a prologue to our own time but one which needs to be reconstructed according to its own categories and not to ours. They have questioned the still-common view that the early modern period was already dominated by the power of the state as a centralizing power. These historians have identified a political system dominated by a plurality of jurisdictions, a system which was very different from the unitary power of the modern state. They have also emphasized the study of the royal court and argued that informal relations were much more effective than institutional ones in the governance of the early modern Iberian monarchies, as these relations helped create and develop networks of patronage and clientelism through which power was effectively exercised (Hespanha, Vísperas and Gracia; Fernández Albaladejo; Martínez Millán).⁸

For these historians, the court was a system of political organization essentially different from the one constituted by the modern state. To begin with, its model was the household, something that contributed very much to the blurring of the distinction between the “household” (serving the ruler) and the “bureaucracy” (serving the government). One important effect of the household model was that a large part of the business of government was determined by the “politics of proximity.” Proximity to the monarch, or the ability to control access to his private apartments, was fundamental in determining the amount of power enjoyed by an individual (Adamson 13). As noted by the Portuguese historian Antonio Hespanha, who has made some excellent observations on the political nature of the court system, the court model drew its legitimacy from such concepts as love and friendship, which were very different from the ones used in modern forms of political organization. For the subjects of the Spanish empire, love and friendship were not, as we nowadays tend to assume, personal feelings devoid of political meaning, but rather very strict forms of codifying power exchanges and of conditioning social behaviors. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish political writers, it was clear that the political community was founded on reciprocal love between the vassals and their ruler. The language of love and friendship was rooted in the thought of Aristotle and Cicero, whose ideas were still profoundly influential in the seventeenth-century Hispanic world and for whom friendship gave rise to and sustained the most long-lasting of political bonds.⁹

The court model was also distinguished by informal systems of power deeply enmeshed in patron-client relationships. Although the workings of the patronage system in the Spanish Empire still await systematic study, some historians have started to explore these practices (Feros; Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, chapter 5; Rosenmüller). Tamar Herzog’s important study of the administration of justice in Quito between 1650 and 1750 is, in many ways, related to this new understanding of how power operated in the early modern era. Highlighting the extraordinary importance of the notion of justice in the system of governance created by the Spaniards in the New World, Herzog revises the traditional institutional interpretation that assumed that audiencia judges constituted a professional bureaucracy that helped develop the modern state. Her study suggests that seventeenth-century institutions were qualitatively different from modern ones. Herzog shows how colonial institutions functioned through networks of patronage and personal ties and loyalties, even in the act of administering justice, rather than through the use of coercive or legal means. Her work questions the common idea that sees colonial society made up of well-defined and separate entities like the “state,” the “bureaucracy,” or the “society.” Herzog’s work problematizes the nature of the colonial state as an autonomous entity with independent goals and programs and shows that there was no radical separation between “the institutions” and the “public.” The real division lay not in the formal political structures but in the networks of social relationships.

The insights of this new political history of the Habsburg monarchy also allow us to see the cabildo of Mexico City in a very different light, as an institution that fulfilled a role very similar to that of the Castilian cities represented in the Spanish Cortes (parliament). At its foundation, the Crown had awarded Mexico City the title of “metropolis” or “head” of the kingdom of New Spain, which, in fact, was a status similar to the one enjoyed by the cities represented in the Cortes. The Crown and the Mexican regidores were well aware of the position that the Mexican cabildo occupied in the monarchy’s “constitutional” order. When levying new taxes, the Mexican cabildo fulfilled the same role as the cities of Castile that voted in the Cortes: the Crown had to ask the city for its consent, without which it could not proceed. On the other hand, and similarly to the Castilian Cortes, the predominant political discourse of the Mexican aldermen was one of love, loyalty, and cooperation with the monarch. This, nevertheless, did not prevent the regidores from showing a high degree of independence and, occasionally, even obstructing the king’s wishes. Like their Castilian counterparts, the Mexican regidores would use obstructionist and dilatory practices when the time came to vote new subsidies, at the same time using the opportunity to strengthen their preeminent position or to obtain material benefits (Cañeque, The King’s Living Image 66–77).¹⁰

Recent historiography has also reassessed the meaning and significance of court magnificence, which included such ephemeral display...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: making and unmaking myth in Sor Juana studies Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau
• A note about conventions
• PART I Contexts
• PART II Reception history
• PART III Interpretations of and debates about the works
• PART IV Future directions for research
• Contributors
• Works cited
• Index