Alice Brooke

Dr. Brooke is a Tutor in Spanish at Merton College at the University of Oxford. Her research focusses on the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world (1500-1700), with a particular interest in religious culture, women’s writing, and the relationship between religious thought and early modern scientific enquiry. Her first book explored the presence of empirical ideas in the religious plays by the Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was one of the most significant literary figures of colonial New Spain (The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Natural Philosophy and Sacramental Theology, OUP, 2018). Her second-book length work, a translation and critical edition of Sor Juana’s Crisis sobre un sermón (Critique of a Sermon, 1690) opens up one of her most groundbreaking, yet rarely read works. As the only known published theological critique by an early modern Hispanic woman, it puts into practice what she would later argue in her more famous Respuesta a sor Filotea (1691): that women could, and should, engage in theological study, and that a woman’s well-reasoned argument would defeat any man’s ill-founded and unorthodox thought. Dr. Brooke’s book was awarded an ‘honorable mention’ by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. She has also published on the role of curiosity in Sor Juana’s Respuesta, on Marian images in her villancicos, on the role of silence in the works of Sor Juana and Teresa of Ávila, and on Golden Age theatre.

Spanish literature, women’s writing, Carmelite spirituality.