¿Volver a empezar? Viejos y nuevos documentos alrededor de Sor Juana

• Main Author: Sara Poot Herrera
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Prof. Dr. Vittoria Borsò, Prof. Dr. Frank Leinen, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yasmin Temelli, Prof. Dr. Guido Rings 2019-01-01
• Series: iMex. México Interdisciplinario/Interdisciplinary Mexico
• Subjects: Sor Juana
• Online Access: https://www.imex-revista.com/xv-documentos-sor-juana/

Recently discovered documents dating back to the time of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz call for a reappraisal of the Novo-Hispanic poet’s biography. While perusing documents related to her family, her court life, and her conventual destiny, we perceive the contours of a “novel” portrait of her person in her own lifetime. We already have what we could call “data”, pointing to an integral and multifaceted biography: Sor Juana the thinker, the intellectual, the artist, the theologian, the writer, and the economist, among numerous traits of a complex and fascinating personality. This investigation begins with the following questions: What was Sor Juana’s family like? How much time elapsed between her departure from the convent of the Carmelites and her entrance into San Jerónimo? Is Juana Inés her first name or only Juana? In which way does her image appear in her writings at the convent? What happened to her books at the end of her life? Was she really oppressed by the Church? How might one write the chronicle San Jerónimo marked by the “collective” death of 1695? From these and other questions, and from the answers offered by “novel” documents emerges a somewhat different image of Sor Juana and her time from that which was previously observed. Following the trail of documents and their relations, I suggest some notions of certainty regarding the identity of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (and her avatars). The question of “who she was” is also of a changing nature: Sor Juana one and the same (although, as she wrote, “and diverse from myself”), and also Sor Juana the changing historical figure. The additional contours of her portrait are supplied by documents dating from the 17th and early 18th centuries. They provide an image of a human being more related to her era and also to ours: a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for specialists and for non-specialists; the answer to a call for equality and plurality urgently needed in this half of the second decade of the 21st century.