Reminiscences of Sor Juana in a festejo in the Convent of San Jeronimo (Mexico City, 1756)
It has long been recognized in scholarship devoted to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651? 1695) that the Mexican nun's literary reputation, which had soared during the last years of her life and for some thirty years after her death, declined as the eighteenth century progressed, following the shift from baroque to neoclassic literary tastes. Appreciation for Sor Juana and her work was unsteady at best through the nineteenth century, revived in the early to mid twentieth century with the "rehabilitation" of Gongorism and the Baroque, and burgeoned late in that century with, among other things, the attention of feminist literary critics and the increased scholarly activity that accompanied the three hundredth anniversary of Sor Juana's death. In the twenty first century, the appeal of the nun's life and work has remained very strong in the academy, among general readers, and among creative writers and artists in other media.1 Accompanying the intense scholarly interest in Sor Juana in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries and to some degree spurred on by it has been the increased attention paid to other female religious in the early modern Hispanic world. Numerous aspects of the lives, writings, and other cultural contributions of nuns in Spain and the Spanish colonies have received scrutiny, in studies that in turn shed a clearer light on Sor Juana's perceived uniqueness, her identity as rara avis that her contemporaries celebrated and which has remained entwined with her image to this day. Doubtlessly, Sor Juana's literary and intellectual accomplishments and her publication success were matched by few Spanish language writers of either gender during the early modern period, and the fact that she was a female religious made her achievements even more unusual. At the same time, scholarship has revealed that Sor Juana's "exceptionality" was relative; many other nuns of her time demonstrated literary and intellectual proclivities, and a significant engagement Reminiscences of sor Juana in a festejo in the convent 95