^{Photo from the archives of the newspaper La Vanguardia}

Our mission is to collect, transcribe, edit, translate, and share literary texts by and information about women writers who lived on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.

Mentored Research

The More than Muses project aims to incorporate mentored research into undergraduate education. In doing so, students acquire proficiency in library research, document collection, editing, analytical writing as well as expanding their subject knowledge.

In doing this, More than Muses preserves a number of Iberian creative works which might otherwise be lost, making them easily available from a single source, at no cost to users.

• Bring undergraduates into active participation in significant research as they work with faculty mentors
• Maintain the More than Muses database as a cost-free source of texts and resources
• Assist students and scholars of women’s work
• Foster the establishment of similar projects in other fields

More than Muses

by Valerie Hegstrom

When I studied Spanish and Spanish American literature as an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1980s, my professors at two different universities taught me that the only woman who composed literary works in Spanish–before Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) toward the end of the nineteenth century–was a brilliant seventeenth-century nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). She fits one of the “She wrote it, but” categories identified by Joanna Russ in chapter eight of her 1983 book How To Suppress Women’s Writing. Sor Juana wrote a lot of it, BUT there was only one of her. I was thrilled as an undergraduate to learn that Sor Juana was called “la décima musa mexicana” (the Mexican tenth muse). What a cool honor, I thought. When I started teaching early modern Spanish theater in the 1990s and began searching in archives for other women writers to include in my classes, it did not take long to discover that María de Zayas was called “la décima musa de nuestro siglo” (the tenth muse of our century), Ana Caro was “la décima musa sevillana” (the tenth muse from Seville), Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda was “la décima musa portuguesa” (the Portuguese tenth muse), and so on. In the seventeenth century, Mount Parnassus suffered from overcrowding! Rather than a compliment, the title “muse” became a way to exclude women from the category “writer” or “author.” The muses’ job was to inspire the male artists.

We believe the women writers included on this website are more than muses. We seek to remember and honor them as writers by making their works of literature more easily available to students and researchers.