It seems only fitting to conclude by citing the final lines of the poem that closes the Fama y obras pósthumas. Written in Latin by the Mexican intellectual Felipe Santiago de Barrales, the highly affected and pedantic funeral elegy subscribes to the well-tried topic of the ubi sunt? by appearing not on Sor Juana’s tombstone but on her cenotaph. Accordingly, the poet describes how the nun retains her voice in the afterworld:

Ejemplar signifies exemplary when used as an adjective, while as a noun it stands for “copy,” as in a copy of a publication. Can Sor Juana thus be the true exemplar, or ejemplar—at once a model of imitation and a book or volume? By concluding the Fama with Santiago de Barrales’s poem, editor Castorena brings his volume full circle. His cherubs of the engraved frontispiece—the Mexican and Spanish contributors to the volume—have imitated the allegorical Book of Fame by trumpeting and crowning Sor Juana’s fame and, at the same time, the nun-writer has literally become his Fama. Or so he would have us believe.

The nun’s posthumous panegyrists attempt upon her death to redirect and refashion the singularity that fueled her celebrity during her lifetime into either the heroic stature of an iconic poet and muse or the moralizing publicity granted to the saintly. Both the pious portrayal of Sor Juana, inspired by her “conversion” and propagated originally, albeit problematically, by Diego Calleja, and her identity as an American treasure and cultural icon ideally would have rendered her an exemplar or model and facilitated her elegists’ goal of persevering her for posterity.

In romance #51, “En reconocimiento a las inimitables Plumas de Europa” [To the matchless pens of Europe], her poem left unfinished yet published in the Fama, Sor Juana asks “¿Tanto pudo la distancia / añadir a mi retrato?” (OC 1.158:78) [Has distance really the power / to magnify my likeness? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 103)]. Although the query regarding her ill-wrought renown was most likely intended for the panegyrists of the Segundo volumen (SV), the writer’s newly exaggerated “distance” in death nuances the meaning of the verses published within the Fama. As a posthumous volume, the Fama imbues the literary (and visual) retrato or likeness that Sor Juana alludes to in romance #51 with a significance it could not have had while she was alive. By presenting its reader with a portrait of Sor Juana as they open its pages, the 1700 edition of the Fama offers its first indications of how and why the posthumous volume hopes to preserve the memory of the Mexican nun (see fig. 1). Befitting its role as a frontispiece, the emblematic engraving introduces the volume’s themes and concerns and constitutes the reader’s first encounter with its considerable task of figuratively recreating and recasting Sor Juana posthumously.

The third and final volume of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s works published in her time (if not her lifetime), appeared posthumously in Madrid in 1700. Organized and edited in New Spain and Old, the Fama y obras pósthumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] includes writing by Sor Juana (1648–1695), the cloistered Hieronymite nun known as New Spain’s “Tenth Muse,” dozens of elegies written upon her death by Spanish and Mexican peers and a voluminous paratext in the way of licenses, a frontispiece, a vita and two prologues. Alone in being the third volume of work published by a New World criolla nun in Spain, the complex baroque volume is also her fama póstuma, a tribute to her posthumous fame, written and printed at a time in which fame was off limits to women and literary posthumous fame (a male affair) did not assure glory. As Ann Rosalind Jones has shown, although the winged figure of allegorical Renaissance iconography that personified Fame was a woman, seventeenth-century women were excluded from her realm (1986, 74). And posthumous literary fame could not be uncoupled from the author’s moral exemplarity until well into the eighteenth century (Goodman 549).

The depletion of the silver and gold mines of the New World in the early seventeenth century coincided with two other significant changes in New Spain: the shift in emphasis from the conversion of the indigenous communities to the dissemination of charismatic Catholicism, and the growing importance granted to a distinctively Mexican cultural identity. It was notably as the precious metals of the colony became increasingly scarce that the religiosity of the inhabitants of the New World was bequeathed to Spain as a new form of tribute, literally a new kind of “gold.” No longer working primarily to evangelize the indigenous peoples, the clergy redefined their role by “emphasizing their traditional vocation as exemplars of Christian perfection and effective agents for the salvation of others, tasks to which attention was called by publicized miracles of holy persons drawn from the ranks of the orders and the convents” (DeStefano 1977, xi).

The richly Baroque portrait, the editor’s contradictory prologue, and his meticulous structuring of the volume all underscore the complexity of the Fama’s task of both commemorating and materializing Sor Juana’s fame.

A laudatory romance written shortly before 1700 by the Spanish Count de Clavijo includes the following uncharacteristically trenchant and unaffected lines:

Like many of his counterparts of the Fama, the Count de Clavijo trusts that Sor Juana’s published works will grant her eternal renown. While the general sentiment expressed in the Count’s romance resonates throughout the posthumous volume, the passage cited reveals an original and suggestive interpretation of the role of Sor Juana’s writings in the cultivation of her posthumous fame.

Sections of the Fama y obras pósthumas (1700)

Contents of the Fama y obras pósthumas (1700)

In 1998 Valdemiro Santiago de Oliveira founded the Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus or Worldwide Church of God's Power (hereafter wcgp) and has been its leader ever since. The goal of this study is to foreground the “medieval” elements found in his religious discourse. I aim to show how his book O grande livramento (hereafter referred to as The Great Deliverance) uses discursive features commonly found in medieval hagiographies to promote the sacralization of his image and, consequently, develops his own hagiography. The issue goes beyond the use of the Middle Ages as a pretext to discuss topics from the present. The production and circulation of a religious discourse that harks back to early Christianity can have a symbolic effect in a country with deep Catholic influences like Brazil.

The WCGP is a Neopentecostal church that uses hagiographical discourse drawn from the Middle Ages as a way to sacralize its leader. Here, our focus is not on intentionality but rather on the hypothesis that in a culture such as Brazil's that is marked by Christianity the use of a rhetorical strategy based on a medieval-inspired narrative confers legitimacy on those who construct such narratives. Therefore, our theoretical approach employs neomedievalism, defined as the appropriation and reception of the Middle Ages. According to Francis Gentry and Ulrich Müller, one of the four distinct models of medieval reception is precisely the “political-ideological reception of the Middle Ages” which means that “medieval works, themes, ‘ideas’ or persons are used and ‘reworked’ for political purposes in the broadest sense, i.e., for legitimization or for debunking.”

In this study, our primary focus will be the medievalizing political and ideological appropriation used by Santiago de Oliveira to legitimate his image in The Great Deliverance. Valdemiro presents himself as a man who was persecuted and became a “martyr”— like the early Christians—thriving both religiously and financially due to his privileged relationship with the sacred. Valdemiro, after all, succeeded in becoming an “Apostle” of his church and according to Forbes Magazine in 2013 was considered the second wealthiest religious leader in Brazil with an estimated net worth at US$220 million.

A Brief Overview of Valdemiro and the WCGP

Although some facts about Valdemiro can be found on the official website of his church, and he has published several books, not much information can be found about his life.

Kennings fascinated Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), both attracting and repelling him. Often described as a figurative circumlocution or a double metaphor in Germanic poetry (most commonly in Old Norse but also in Old English), the kenning is a highly stylized and artificial compound noun. Borges found kennings sufficiently intriguing in his early days as a creative thinker that he wrote and published a significant analysis of them. In that study, he placed them in the context of Old Norse and Old English poetry, but also brought to bear the Spanish poetic movements known as gongorismo or culteranismo (the rococo and aureate stylings of the Baroque period) and the modernism called ultraísmo, which had greatly appealed to the young Borges when he briefly lived in Madrid with his family. He reused the material from this piece repeatedly throughout his life, and developed it further in several projects. Borges cared deeply about kennings, and gave examples of them frequently in talks and conversations, demonstrating his knowledge and his liking for this stylistic quirk of early Germanic literatures. He put them in his poetry, as best he could. At the same time, Borges's attitude to the kenning was remarkably contradictory. He describes the usage in one interview as “rather a weariness of the flesh to the poets themselves–at least to the Old English poets.” Old Norse poets, he implies, seemed to enjoy them more and certainly used them more. However, he also cites their “poignant quality,” and states they are “the first deliberate verbal delight of a literature governed by instinct.” His choice of goce here, which I have translated as “delight,” may be an example of deliberate borgesian double meaning; goce can also be “choice, preference, taste.” Kennings might be a delight, but they might also simply be a preference of the poet. Borges might just as easily be suggesting here that kennings were the first step away from a literature of instinct and towards a literature of artifice, or stylistic excess, rather than that they were a new elegance in the literature. Since he places kennings in the context of Spanish literary periods of excess and great artifice, his implication might be that kennings are a sign of excess in an otherwise fascinating poetic oeuvre. Or not.

In 1965, the Argentinian writer Manuel Mujica Lainez (1910–1984) published El unicornio (The Unicorn; though translated as The Wandering Unicorn), a historical novel presenting a romanticized and idealized vision of the Middle Ages. The Unicorn is structured in nine chapters that include several narrative episodes. The first chapter begins with a short prologue presenting the medieval legend of the fairy Melusine, who falls in love with a mortal, Raymond, and abandons the faerie world to live with him. Even though she asks him to avoid looking at her while she takes her Saturday baths, he spies on her and discovers her transformation into a partially ophidian body. The discovery ends in the escape of Melusine, who will return only sporadically to their castle and their children. The remaining chapters of the novel are dedicated to Melusine's love and travels with the knight Aiol in search for the Holy Lance, a narrative that was entirely created by Mujica Lainez utilizing medieval elements and research.

In the novel, the fairy Melusine is a first-person narrator who tells the story of an event in her life that took place towards the end of the twelfth century. This story that Melusine recalls occurs between 1174 and 1187; therefore the context is the prelude to the third Crusade, and the action takes place in two main sites, France and the Holy Land. Her speech is like a memory or an autobiography: “In the year I’m talking about, 1174,” she says in the first chapter; “at the board of the Leper-King, on that October evening of 1177,” she specifies in the sixth one. Several details interspersed through the novel also place us in a context close to the publication of the book, during the 1960s. Here are just two illustrative examples: “It was the dawn of literature, and a glance will confirm that most heroes and heroines were of royal birth…See Proust— he makes this very plain”; and “[w]e were in the Middle Ages, and prodigies seemed blessedly natural then, as natural as going to the moon does now.” The fairy's quality of immortality and her role as narrator allow Mujica Lainez to advance a series of critical reflections about the society of his time, the sixties of the twentieth century (or, more generally, modernity), as well as some metanarrative comments.