Booktalk

So dig into your old college books and pull out your copy of The Norton Anthology of World Literature; the one full of all those familiar names: Keats, Rousseau, Ibsen, Tolstoy.

Thumb down to the section on the Enlightenment stopping at "Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz" by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. For a moment you will be properly intimidated by 25 pages of nearly margin-to-margin page-long paragraphs. Read on.

What you have here is the incredible voice and intellect of a woman, a nun from 1690, humbly, but ultimately soaringly, responding to a superior for a kindness and a criticism. As she emerges from behind her apologies and self-reproach, the pages erupt with such a fountain of scholarship, rhetorical brilliance, and passion for learning that she utterly unhinges the notion that women keep silence in the church; or anywhere.

It is a blazing testament. Reading it, I was reminded of my first reading of poetry by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Chills.

These early works beg me to inhabit their moment; a nun in 1690, in Mexico City, in the moments between her duties, continually educates herself, organizes these thoughts and references, then dips her pen and writes pages and pages with such fever and eloquence in a letter to one other soul.

Good for NAOWL for including it.