Dr Maya Feile Tomes wins prestigious international award
New study challenges identity of Peru’s pioneering female poet
Maya with an original 1608 copy of the Parnaso Antártico held in the National Library of Scotland
A ground-breaking new study by a member of the 鶹Ƶ community has cast doubt on the long-assumed identity of ‘Clarinda’, the mysterious author behind the Discurso en loor de la poesía, a key text in Latin American colonial literature traditionally attributed to a prominent 17th-century Peruvian woman.
In an essay just named article of the year (Premio José María Arguedas al mejor artículo del año) by the Peruvian division of the Latin American Studies Association at its annual conference in San Francisco, former Murray Edwards Fellow Dr Maya Feile Tomes challenges more than a century of scholarly consensus that Clarinda was an anonymous, high-born female poet writing from Lima from the turn of the seventeenth century. Instead, she makes the bold case that the true author may have been Diego Mexía de Fernangil—a male, Spanish-born translator and bookseller who masterminded the volume in which the poem first appeared.
The Discurso en loor de la poesía (‘A Discourse in Praise of Poetry’) has long been revered as a landmark of colonial Latin American women’s writing. With nearly 1,000 lines of ornate verse celebrating the power and legacy of poetry, the work opens with an introduction identifying its unnamed creator as a ñǰ principal de este reino—a “noble lady of this realm,” widely interpreted as an elite Peruvian woman of letters. In modern times, scholars have dubbed this figure “Clarinda,” a pseudonym meant to signal her anonymity while honouring her supposed womanhood and literary stature.
Yet Feile Tomes, who published the article while in post as Lorna Close Lecturer in Spanish here at Murray Edwards, contends that the ñǰ may in reality have been an elaborate literary illusion—a kind of playful conceit rooted in classical models. “What if the so-called Clarinda was not a woman at all, but a figment of poetic invention?” she asks.
Her provocative thesis rests on a fundamental shift in approach: rather than viewing the Discurso as a stand-alone piece, Feile Tomes insists it must be understood within the broader context of its original publication. The poem was printed in the Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico de obras amatorias (1608), an ambitious anthology produced by Diego Mexía that showcases his Spanish verse translations of works by the Roman poet Ovid—especially the Heroides, a series of fictional letters from mythological heroines to their absent lovers.
Feile Tomes, who has moved from Cambridge to the University of Glasgow since completing the article, identifies deep thematic and structural connections between the Discurso and these Heroides. Both adopt a “ventriloquised” female voice; both explore themes of poetic identity and literary heritage; and both are steeped in a genre-defying classical tradition where fiction, irony, and authorial disguise are central. The Discurso, she argues, is not simply addressed to Mexía: close analysis of its style and form point to him as the writer.
“In a collection where Ovidian gender play, irony, and false authorship are the dominant modes,” Feile Tomes writes, “the idea that the Discurso was written by a ‘real’ Peruvian woman becomes harder to sustain.” She argues that the phrase “heroic lady” (heroica dama), often cited as a proof of female authorship, is more plausibly a generic label – referring not to a historical individual but to a literary persona modelled after Ovid’s heroines.
The implications of this reinterpretation are significant. The analysis challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of women’s writing in colonial Latin America. It also calls into question how feminist literary history is constructed, especially when texts written in the feminine voice are assumed to be authored by women without deeper scrutiny.
But rather than diminishing Clarinda’s legacy, Feile Tomes believes this reframing can enrich it. “To read the Discurso as a sophisticated piece of gendered literary performance is not to devalue it,” she explains. “On the contrary, it highlights the intellectual daring and complexity of early colonial literary culture, particularly in Peru, and prompts us to ask harder questions about authorship, identity, and the politics of interpretation.”
Far from a simple “hoax,” she sees the work as a metatextual tour de force – poetry about poetry, scripted with self-aware irony by a writer steeped in classical tradition. Indeed, in an era when Cervantes and others were gleefully blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, Mexía’s Clarinda may have been intended not to fool but to amuse – and challenge – readers.
While Feile Tomes’ conclusions may prove controversial among scholars invested in Clarinda’s status as a female literary forebear, her article has already generated interest and praise for its methodological clarity and archival depth of its argument. By reuniting the Discurso with the Parnaso Antártico as a whole, and restoring its ties to the Ovidian tradition, she opens new doors for both textual analysis and broader conversations about gender and literature in colonial contexts.
As Feile Tomes concludes, “The ñǰ may not be who we thought she was—but that doesn’t make her less interesting. Quite the opposite. She becomes a dazzling figure of literary possibility: a woman made of poetry, not flesh, whose eloquence endures even as her identity dissolves.”