From calligraphic exercises to literary competitions: female poetry at the college “Real Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola” (18th and 19th centuries)

Abstract

Teaching women to read was a common activity during the colonial period, they were taught mostly about religion and morality. However, the same cannot be said about writing, because it was considered as an activity less useful and was only learned after mastering reading. There were two educational institutions that cultivate this learning, formally, in Mexico City: “Colegio de la Enseñanza” and “San Ignacio de Loyola Vizcaínas”. In this last institution, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the development of the literature started with calligraphic exercises using poetic compositions, something we can consider as the first approach to that genre. Nevertheless, some schoolgirls decided to try and show their poetic's abilities.
In this article, I show a diachronic review that starts with the schoolgirls' calligraphic efforts –they are located in the historical archive of “Vizcainas”– until the creation of “circumstance poetry”, that were part of two literary competitions dedicated to the King Charles IV: the first one took place when he ascended to the throne in 1790 and the second one during the devealation of Manuel Tolsá’s equestrian sculpture in 1803.