March 4

Nina Scott
Spanish & Portuguese
University of Massachuesetts-Amherst

Crowns, Books and Dead Nuns: Female Religious Portraiture in Colonial Mexico and Colombia

Readings

Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989, Introduction.

Cruz, Sor Juana Ines de la. The Answer/La Respuesta. Critical ed. and trans. by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press, 1994.

Lavrin, Asuncion. "Unlike Sor Juana? The Model Nun in the Religious Literature of Colonial Mexico." In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Ed. Stephanie Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 61-85.

SUMMARY

I. Importance of religious portraiture in the Colonial Americas. Daughters of the elite went into convents in droves. Their portraiture, as their writings, are an important source of information about the lives of these women in this era.

II. Emblematic portraiture, both male and female. Meaning in the 17th century.

III. Portraits of important female saints: St. Theresa of Avila and St. Rose of Lima (the first woman saint in the Americas).

IV. Types of nuns' portraits:

A. Crowned nuns, both alive and dead

B. Pious nuns

C. Good administrators

D. Newly-discovered genre pieces

V. Portraits of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648/51-1695), Mexico's leading poet and intellectual. Dilemma of the painter in portraying her, and how this problem was solved in a very radical manner. We will look at two specific issues:

A. the library as background

B. text and image

We will also look at the seven extant major oil portraits of her, and how her image changes over time.