Playwright and poet Sor Marcela de San Félix (b. Toledo, 1605, d. Madrid, 1687) wrote at a time of political decline, counterposed by a period of a tremendous flowering of literature and the arts in Spain. While, as the saying went, “the sun never set” on the far-flung Spanish empire, Spain had lost its dominion over the seas and, therefore, of commerce. Like all empires it was built on the exploitation of indigenous and imported, enslaved labor. Tightly controlled mercantilist economic policies strained the country's finances, as did a top-heavy class of semi-idle aristocrats. The Catholic Church continued to amass and manage enormous fortunes, and to expend money and energy in preventing further protest (i.e. Protestantism, Reformation) and in attempting to reform from within (i.e. Counter-Reformation, Catholic Reform). Many of the aristocrats and various branches of the Catholic Church were great patrons of the arts; large and small sums were lavished on decoration, public enactments of power, entertainment, and religious festivities.

Poets competed, often viciously, to earn patronage from the king and other nobles (Wright 13–23). For crafting public events and authoring literary, epistolary, and other kinds of texts, they were supported by members of the aristocracy and by the Church. At her Convento de San Ildefonso in Madrid, convent of the Discalced (Barefoot) Trinitarian order (devoted to worship of the Holy Trinity), Sor Marcela wrote her share of admirable poems, as did a significant number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women, among them the poets featured in these pages.

In this essay I use the topics of sex—of sensual love—and, to a lesser extent, of class, to broaden the context for reading poems by Marcela del Carpio, who as a nun took the name of Sor Marcela de San Félix. Sex and class—in her times as in ours—are vital to understanding both the individual and society. Although they are frequently spoken of as a binary opposition, implying that sex is related exclusively to inner, personal, bodily and psychic life, and class to external, social, economic, political and cultural existence, it is now generally accepted that there are no such clear-cut divides.