Hispanic Baroque Sor Juana

During the Enlightenment in Europe and The Americas the Hispanic Baroque that covers from the year 1600 to the year 1750 approximately. This time period, as opposed to the Renaissance, was an era where the feelings of distrust, disappointment, and pessimism was always present. A very important and recognized author of the Hispanic Baroque was Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz because of her defense of women’s intellectual rights against men (Puchner, 68). Sor Juana is mostly known for her Respuesta a Sor Filotea, which where she defends women to receive an education, and to be treated equally. During the Hispanic Baroque there were ethical, moral, and social aspects or issues. An ethical aspect was self representation, but because people wanted to make themselves a better representation there was a lack of modesty. A moral aspect of that time period was that men were to be

“better” than women because it was thought that women were not as intellectual as they were. A social aspect was that the royalty of Spain governed the Spanish Inquisition, which decided what people were allowed, and not allowed to do. Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz was important to World Literature because she is known as one of the most important Hispanic literary figures, and the first Latin American poet (EDSITEment). During the Baroque era art, literature, and religion is important due to the Spanish Inquisition.
Sor Juana Ines De La Garza was an example of the Hispanic Baroque because she was a feminist, and made an effort to let women know they should be able to participate in a literary world in which women could be measured intellectually with a man.

Sor Juana She was also the first woman to make fun of men in her poem of You men, or also known as Foolish Men. It is said that “She is best known for her spirited defense of women’s intellectual rights in The Poet’s Answer to the Most Illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” which gives us more of an insight of Sor Juana’s was feeling, and what she was committed to do for women. (Puchner, 68). Her most known work has been Respuesta a Sor Filotea where she was accredited as the first feminist of the world. “Sor Juana breaks the stereotype of the writer nun in other ways. Nearly all her religious writings are intended to reach beyond the convent walls,” meaning that just because she was a nun, and lived in a convent did not mean that Sor Juana would allow herself to be suppressed, and her writing were also sand during mass in the church of Mexico City (Kirk,

11).
Luis de Gongora was another author of the Hispanic Baroque period. Gongora during the baroque created his own genre known as Gongorismo. His most important and known culteranist creation is the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, of mythological subject, in which it narrates the passionate love of the giant Polifemo towards the nymph Galatea. Another work in this genre is Las soledades, a poem in which nature is exalted and which remained incomplete. He also wrote numerous sonnets in which satires predominate his enemies, including Lope and Quevedo. He wrote numerous letrillas and romances in the traditional way, beautiful and easy to understand. “In the Introduction Gongora is considered as a typically Spanish poet, a cultivator of traditional and Renaissance themes, and a Baroque poet in contrast and ornament,” explains how Luis de Gongora is seen (De Gongora, vii). Even though he wrote during the Hispanic Baroque, Gongora may use themes outside of the time period.
There were different cultures that interacted with one another during the Hispanic Baroque. The Mexican culture is one of them. Due to Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, who lived her whole life in Mexico City she was able to help the Mexican culture to Spain with her work. The Baroque was a period of history in Western culture that produced works in the field of literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, etc., and it is usually placed between the Renaissance and the Neoclassical, at a time when the European Catholic Church had to react against many cultural revolutionary movements that produced a new science and a dissident religion within the dominant Catholicism itself: the Protestant Reformation.“First, religion was the main public arena in which ordinary people and elites, women and men, debated and negotiated fundamental issues on a regular basis,” religion was an important part of the Hispanic Baroque culture because it was an area where people would have their voice heard (Kevorkian, 1). Baroque art emerged as a style promoted mainly by the Catholic Church, since the reformist and rationalist ideas tried to put aside religion not only in artistic spaces but also in the daily life of individuals. The works in Baroque art include religious themes that had been left aside by the Renaissance and seek to represent them in a highly expressive way. Baroque artists reflect reality as they see it, with its vague limits, its forms that come and go, the inconsequential objects of foreground, the fore shortenings and violent postures, and the diagonal compositions that give the work great dynamism . The most used themes were the religious, scenes of saints, mythological, the portrait, both the individual and the group, and the still life is a new theme.Baroque literature is a genre of prose of the seventeenth century that has several distinctive features compared to the literary styles of previous centuries. The baroque era is characterized by the use of dramatic elements in all forms of art and works of baroque literature are generally no exception.