![]() Her beliefs and experiences also led her to defend the need for a female community in which knowledge could be produced, accessed and spread, added Rodríguez-Rodríguez. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. ![]() Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. She said the author’s decision to write about topics that were not considered appropriate for her as a nun and a woman – such as philosophy and theology – often “exposed her to the cruel scrutiny of a cultural universe that was not ready to embrace her as a new member”. Police are currently trying to recover the third book.Īs the Guardia Civil statement pointed out, Sister Juana was an important Golden Age author “both because of the depth and quality of her work and because a large part of the intellectual community considers her to be the first feminist author of the Spanish empire”.Īna M Rodríguez-Rodríguez, who teaches early modern Spanish literature at the University of Iowa, described Sister Juana as “the voice of an early but already determined feminism”. When he in turn died, they were acquired by a US citizen who put them up for auction in the sale where they were discovered by investigators.”Īt some point in the chain of sales, the statement added, the five volumes were rebound as three volumes. “From there, they were sold to a Mexican businessman with a passion for antique literature. “After that person’s death, part of the collection, including the objects under investigation, were acquired in June 2011 by a well-known bookshop in Madrid,” said the Guardia Civil statement. Investigators discovered that the books, printed in Barcelona in 1693, had originally consisted of five volumes that had recently belonged to a private collection in Catalonia. Inquiries by the Spanish force, US Homeland Security and the New York district attorney determined that the convent stamps were proof that the books belonged to Spain and should be returned to the country.Īlfonso Lopez Malo of Spain’s Guardia Civil speaks in New York alongside images from the books saved from auction. In a statement, the Guardia Civil said the auction value of the works comfortably exceeded the €50,000 limit above which transactions involving items of national historical heritage become a smuggling offence under Spanish law. Perhaps fittingly, the books recovered by Spanish police first aroused suspicions in September last year after it was noted that pictures in the auction catalogue showed their pages bore the stamps of a Carmelite convent in Seville.Īfter being alerted to the sale at Swann Auction galleries in New York – where a set of three volumes by Sister Juana had an estimate of €80,000 to €120,000 – Spain’s culture ministry got in touch with the auction house and asked it to suspend the sale while Guardia Civil officers investigated the books’ provenance. But her views and writing often brought her into conflict with the church authorities, and she gave up her literary endeavours and sold her library not long before her death during a plague in 1695. ![]() ![]() In 1667 she entered a convent to devote herself to study because, in her own words, “given my total disinclination towards marriage, it was the least disproportionate and most decent choice”. ![]()
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