Historians of Hispanic science have paid generous attention to the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–95), a New Spaniard. Her debts to Aristotelianism and hermeticism have been acknowledged in painstaking detail. Literary historians and others have argued that the subjects and metaphors of her philosophical poetry were aired in the writings and the covers of the Jesuit and hermeticist, Athanasius Kircher, and that she borrowed much from his Iter extaticum (1656). She ostensibly knew Kircher's works through the viceregal confessor in New Spain, François Guillot (Francisco Ximénez), who had been a student of Kircher's and a teacher of rhetoric in Lyon. Kircher corresponded with the Spanish Jesuit Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz, who was in turn a correspondent of Sor Juana's contemporary and fellow humanist, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Yet it is unlikely that Guillot could have ignored Gassendi's teachings and writings, since Gassendi visited Lyon several times and many of his works, including the Opera (1658), were published there. His appointment as professor of mathematics at the royal college in Paris was secured by the archbishop of Lyon, Alphonse de Richelieu. Although Gassendi disliked hermeticism as much as he disliked Aristotelianism, Gassendi corresponded with Kircher and Lobkowitz, and with the German hermeticist and Jesuit Christopher Scheiner, whom he had met in Aix-en-Provence in 1622 when the Jesuits took over the college where Gassendi was lecturing in philosophy.

In addition, the influence of Descartes’ Discours de la mé thode on Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora was suggested nearly forty years ago. But doubt was not exclusive to Descartes, and Sor Juana and Sigüenza were well read in Ciceronian scepticism as well as Christianized epicurean scepticism. My interpretation of Sor Juana's natural philosophy ties Sor Juana to Sigüenza y Góngora, an admirer of Epicurus and Gassendi. She was seeking to create in her most famous poem, Sueño, an imitation or fiction of the activity of the philosophers who inspired her practical ethics and her understanding of the cosmos and microcosmos, the Christian epicureans. Like later Hispanic humanists, she joined the new philosophy to an absolutist notion of natural hierarchy that concentrated rather than dispersed social force.

The Confluence of Logic, Discourse and Ethics

In a poem published in Inundación Castálida, Sor Juana reprimanded the emotions that took credit for the understanding's achievements.