The Divine Narcissus/El Divino Narciso [antikvár]

IntroductionPatricia A. Peters The AuthorSor (Sister) Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648/517-1695), canonized by literary historians of Spain's Golden Age, but not by the church she served, is considered the last great practitioner in Spanish poetry of the baroque style, which dominated European literature, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture in the seventeenth century. Essentially theatrical, baroque art, like the geographic colonization of that age, ignores boundaries, and it escapes the borders of both genre and medium. Paintings like those of El Greco, for example, often refuse to limit their spatial domain to the dimensions of their frames while Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila is placed in a stagelike setting with theater boxes on either side of the sculpture. Baroque poetry ignores boundaries too. It stretches rhetoric beyond conventional limits and abounds in conceits that find correspondences between concepts that inhabit different intellectual worlds. Opera, written in many languages, with its sung conversations, monumental choruses, characters of many races and classes, and spectacular stage effects, was born in a baroque cross-cultural marriage between drama and music and nursed by the visual arts.Sor Juana was, paradoxically, equally at home in the international world of the baroque and in the cloistered convent of Santa Paula of the Order of San Jeronimo in Mexico City, where she lived most of her life. Like the frame of a baroque painting, the cloister walls could not contain the artistic and intellectual space of the beautiful, multitalented nun. Her letters, lyrics, drama, and liturgical writings went out from her cell-study, and they drew into the convent parlor representatives of both the viceregal court and the Roman Catholic clergy, the two powerful forces on which the Spanish Empire in America was built. For nearly twenty-five years, Sor Juana's deft diplomacy, talent, intelligence, and wit kept her in fruitful relationship with those formidable patriarchal institutions, the court and the church, benefiting her convent and assuring herself time and space to study and write while she faithfully carried out her duties in the community and the prayer life demanded by The;