Can literary critics possibly determine what made early modern Spanish women laugh and why? Is there such a thing as a specifically female sense of humor, and if there is, what did it consist of in early modern Spain and how was it expressed by women poets? These are the larger questions that motivate this essay on female burlesque, that is, burlesque poetry written by women in Golden Age Spain. In that regard, several of the poets anthologized in Julián Olivares's and Elizabeth Boyce's compilation Tras el espejo la musa escribe: Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro (2009) wrote metrically skillful and ingenious humorous poetry which is both varied yet complementary in nature. Although the burlesque poetry of Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Marcia Belisarda, and Sor Marcela de San Félix will enter into my subsequent discussion, this essay will focus primarily on the work of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán since she is particularly adept at a specific type of burlesque verse centered on the vicissitudes of female domesticity and everyday life. Seen as a group, however, these women's humorous verse offers peculiar insights into their mid-seventeenth-century worlds—provincial for some and conventual for others—as lived by women of their class.

Although it is unnecessary to pinpoint lyric poetry's usefulness as a research tool to literary scholars and social historians of early modern Spain, it should be acknowledged that its burlesque/satirical mode has often been relegated to the dustbin of literary history, especially when the poetry is written by women. On the other hand, to analyze humor and how it broadens our understanding of any given time and place, as well as the mentalities that inform it, is a procedure that theorists like Bakhtin and his rather numerous emulators have used to great advantage. This interpretive interconnectedness is particularly enriching when the authors of burlesque are women, since they often use humor as a defense mechanism in negotiating the limiting circumstances in which they live. Humor, as we know well, can also be a response to the negative images of women commonly found in male-authored satire and burlesque, and implicitly—if not explicitly—as an arm in the effort to extend the canon to include women authors in particular. Moreover, as Everett Rowson has pointed out with respect to a different context, jokes at the expense of another are “far more likely to depend for their effectiveness on implicit, or indeed explicit, hostility, and may reveal just where societal attitudes are most uncompromising” (53). For this reason it is illuminating to investigate against what and whom women write burlesque poetry, and to enter the lives that give their work a fuller context. As María del Mar Graña Cid posits for women's writing of this period, we need to consider signs that allow us to better appraise social practice, specifically “de qué manera se inserta en la experiencia de vida femenina en los distintos contextos históricos a lo largo de la centuria” (214).