Knowledge in Transition: Rethinking the Science of Sameness in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s New Spain

doi:10.1017/9781108976893.022

Chapter 21 - Knowledge in Transition: Rethinking the Science of Sameness in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s New Spain

from Part V - Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2022

Allison Margaret Bigelow

Edited by

Rocío Quispe-Agnoli and

Amber Brian

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Rocío Quispe-Agnoli: Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Amber Brian: Affiliation:
University of Iowa

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Summary

When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?-1695) famously described the natural secrets of cooking, she invoked some of the foundational terms of colonial science and society, from Aristotelian paradigms to Columbian acts of claiming. Scholars have long noted the importance of scientific knowledge to Sor Juana and underscore her engagement with Indigenous cultures, languages, and traditions. But few scholars have examined the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and scientific writing in Sor Juana’s ouvre. This chapter, grounded in a reading of classical natural philosophy, as it was expressed in Sor Juana’s Respuesta (1695), represents an effort to bring these research areas into dialogue. By juxtaposing Mayan-language documents from colonial Yucatán with Sor Juana’s masterful defense of knowledge in central New Spain, this chapter analyzes how Indigenous ways of knowing may have shaped one of the most important treatises on knowledge in colonial Mexico, thus suggesting. ways in which colonial letters both mark and help to promote critical transitions in the meaning of knowledge, epistemological categories, and the nature of knowledge production itself.

Keywords

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz natural philosophy mining industry colonial Mexico mercury science of sameness Indigenous knowledge Sor Juana’s Respuesta Yucatec Maya

Type: Chapter
Information: Latin American Literature in Transition Pre-1492–1800 , pp. 315 - 330

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976893.022 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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