ABSTRACT
Introduction In a prose work frequently referred to simply as the "Respuesta" or Answer [to Sor Filotea de la Cruz], the seventeenth-century Mexican (or more properly, New Spanish) poet, playwright, and woman-of-letters Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (16517-1695) makes strangely amusing references to the Holy Office of the Inquisition.1 Boldly, she exploits contemporary cultural meanings of the
Inquisition in order to build a defense of her own doctrinal orthodoxy, while establishing the God-given nature of the pursuit of "humane” letters for which she has been criticized by Church authorities. Explicitly, the Inquisition figures in Sor Juana's Answer as a feared source of ruido ["trouble"] or disturbance that has kept her from pursuing sacred letters. A closer look, however, shows these references functioning to quite different effect: they underscore her implicit immunity from Inquisitional persecution. Establishing her orthodoxy, her citing of the Holy Office serves to justify the many areas of her activities subject to dispute and possible censure , theological disquisition and the writing of profane verses, as well as the study in both sacred and secular letters that allowed her to attain notable accomplishments in these areas. That Sor Juana is bold enough to use the much-feared Inquisition to her own ends underscores her courage and her resourceful uses of language; at the same time, it confirms other scholars' recent demonstrations that the Holy Office did not in fact pose the most immediate threat to Sor Juana's hard-won intellectual autonomy.A close reading of Sor Juana's remarks and a review of available historical data, in conjunction with the record given by other nuns' writings, suggest that we tend to assign greater importance to the Holy Office as a regulating, let alone threatening, force in the lives of New World women religious than it merits. On a daily basis and in most cases, other institutions exercised more direct control over the lives and writings of nuns in the period, including Sor Juana. This control was, especially, experienced from the authorities closest at hand: the confessor and his superiors, as historian Elias Trabulse's findings confirm and as other scholars have indicated.* 2The Inquisition functioned not only against but in some instances fo r religious women of the early modem period, and Sor Juana made careful, rhetorical use of its presence. The institution most fearful in our later view-with its torture and burnings-was the one she cited to defend herself against difficulties close at hand, from her immediate superiors. "Model nuns"—those brides of Christ dedicated to devotional rather than intellectual pursuits and thus "unlike Sor Juana" (as Asuncion Lavrin puts it)3-far from regarding the Holy Office as a threat or an opponent, were likely to see it as forwarding their projects of preservation of Catholic orthodoxy and several documents that illuminate mysteries that have generated debate among sorjuanistas for decades, especially regarding the poet's final years and her supposed "renunciation" of writing and intellectual activity.
