Complete Works.
Complete Works of the First Feminist of the Americas
Cruz, Juana Inés de la, Sor. Poemas de la Unica Poetisa Americana, Musa Dezima... Valencia: Antonio Bordazar, 1709.
Together with:
Cruz, Juana Inés de la, Sor. Segundo Tomo de las Obras de Soror Juana Ines de la Cruz... Barcelona: Llopis y á su Costa, 1693.
Together with:
Cruz, Juana Inés de la, Sor. Fama, y Obras Posthumas, Tomo Tercero, del Fenix de Mexico... Barcelona: Rafael Figuero, 1701.
3 vols.; 4to and 8vo; later vellum wrappers made from antiphonal leaves; loss of a few letters in the imprint on the title page of volume one; title-page of volume two skillfully backed; minor tears to the margins of a few leaves; browning to some leaves; a few early ink spots; slight foxing.
Early editions of one of the most important feminist writers in the Americas.
Widely acknowledged to be the “first feminist of the New World,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51 – 1695) maintains her status as one of the most significant writers, woman or man, in the literature of the Americas. Known in her lifetime by the epithets “The Tenth Muse,” and the “Mexican Phoenix,” she earned reverence from her contemporaries and posterity alike for her advocacy of women’s education, her challenges to prescribed gender roles, and her uncommon poetic talent.
Born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel de Nepantla, New Spain (now Mexico), she had learned to read and write by the age of three, thus commencing a life-long campaign of self-education. As a young woman facing a lifetime of intellectual limitation as a wife and mother in patriarchal New Spain, Juana elected in 1667 to enter a convent, where she would be able to devote her life to the pursuit of knowledge.
The body of work that Sor Juana subsequently produced across all genres represents an explicit challenge to the norms of “women’s” literature up to her time, and to the gender stratification of colonial Spanish society at large. Whereas the writings of many women (and especially religious women) were mystical and hermetic, Sor Juana’s work was physiological and empirical.
In folk lyric forms and in persona poems in which she donned male masks, she attacked the exclusionary tendencies of the world of letters, and asserted the right of women to participate in the male-dominated intellectual order. Her sonnets dedicated to famous female suicides— Porcia, Lucreatia, Julia, and Tisbe— celebrated those women as heroic intellectuals exercising sovereignty over their lives, rather than pitying them as victims of male deception. And her considerations of literary androgyny radically re-imagined women’s roles as writers, anticipating Virginia Woolf’s explorations of the same subject more than two centuries later.
One of Sor Juana’s most well-known works, and perhaps the most significant from a feminist standpoint, is La respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691), her reply to the Bishop of Puebla who, writing under a female pseudonym, condemned Sor Juana for her public questioning of church doctrine and for her open devotion to intellectual pursuits. Considered the first feminist “manifesto” in the Western Hemisphere, La respuesta cites more than forty women from the Bible and from classical antiquity in its militant defense of a woman’s right to an education, and argues for the equal participation of women in the intellectual life of society.
The three volumes here presented comprise the complete published work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as issued during and slightly after her lifetime. Not commonly found together, this set further distinguishes itself by a provenance which testifies to the great esteem in which Sor Juana continued to be held in her native country centuries after her death. In 1934, Mexican General José Monge Sánchez presented this set to Mexican statesman Silvestre Guerrero, a close associate of then Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas.
Palau 65229, 65224, 65228.
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