Somatmospheres: Atoms, Ambiance, and Nascent Sky Bodies in the Work of Athanasius Kircher, María de Jesús de Ágreda, and Sor Juana

Lecture by Katharina N. Piechocki, Associate Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, The University of British Columbia

This talk brings into a Transatlantic dialogue three seventeenth-century writers who engaged with sky bodies: the prolific Rome-based German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), the Spanish writer and mystic María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602-1665), and the Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). While Sor Juana’s interest in the polymath Kircher has long been explored, recent scholarly work has highlighted the impact María de Jesús’s Mística Ciudad de Dios (Mystical City of God) has had on Sor Juana’s scientific-cosmic poem Primer Sueño (First Dream). All three writers explore sky bodies through the joint lens of science, poetic thought, and religion, recurring to what was then a relatively new vocabulary, such as “atmosphere” (Kircher) or “ambiance” (Sor Juana). While María de Jesús offers a unique vision of her “bilocation,” her mystical flight from Spain to the Americas, in which her own body turns into a “sky body,” both nuns focus on the generation of sky and celestial bodies, inquiring into their own somatic presence within a larger cosmological framework. Piechocki calls this preoccupation, which extends to a range of seventeenth-century writers about the universe, “somatmospheres.”

Katharina N. Piechocki is an Associate Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her monograph, Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the European Studies Book Award in 2022. She is the co-editor of a special double issue of Romance Quarterly on the topic of “Early Modern Clouds” (2021) and of the forthcoming special issue of SubStance on “Atmospheres of Nuance” (both with Jeffrey N. Peters). Piechocki is currently completing a monograph, tentatively titled Procreative Poetics: Hercules and the Rise of the Opera Libretto. She is the founder of the Cartography Seminar in Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, which she co-chaired from 2014-2024.

The lecture will take place via Zoom.

To request the Zoom link, please email c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu .

Image: Clouds from A discourse concerning the origine and properties of vvind, with an historicall account of hurricanes, and other tempestuous winds. By R. Bohun. Oxford, 1671. QC859 .B67 *, UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.