In his study of Sor Juana's ‘occasional’ poetry, George Antony Thomas convincingly makes the case that this area of her work has been wrongly marginalised by literary critics and historians. All these poems were written to coincide with ‘occasions’, some of which were public, such as the arrival of a new viceroy in New Spain, and others private, such as the latest act of kindness shown by a patron. Thomas rejects the idea that these poems and other early modern texts written in the ‘occasional mode’ are of less interest to us because they are ‘the product of external circumstances or commissions and not “poetic inspiration”’ (p. 4). He argues that, instead of focusing on their aesthetic value, readers should examine how Sor Juana, who spent a lifetime defending her right to a literary voice, took advantage of the pretext that she was writing purely out of obligation to those who sanctioned her occasional works. In doing so, she was able not only to expound her views on some of the most pertinent issues in Spanish-American colonial society but redefine her own position and those of other women within it. One key component of Habsburg strategy in the New World was to imbue viceroys with a kingliness which would make Spanish monarchical authority more visible to colonial subjects. This sense of regality was pre-eminently symbolic; the American viceroys were of aristocratic rather than royal stock, and their personal authority in the colonies was limited. In his final chapter Thomas deftly shows how Sor Juana capitalised on this by equating Mexico's vicereines with queens, raising the prestige of the colony. He also persuasively asserts that Sor Juana's epistolary poems to the viceregal couples add weight to the notion that she sought to act as spokesperson for the expanding criollo (American-born) community of which she was a member, and how, in her ceremonial verse, she was less concerned with legitimising Spanish imperial authority than using these commissioned works to vocalise the concerns of the metropolitan populace, casting herself as a Horace of the New World. The book contains a number of fascinating insights, such as the interesting idea that Sor Juana's composition of the recently-discovered Enigmas ofrecidos a la casa del placer ‘disproves the pervasive myth of her renunciation of the world of letters’ during the final years of her life (p. 79). It has often been assumed that an exasperated Sor Juana effectively ceased writing following the return of her principal patroness, the marchioness of La Laguna, to Spain, and the controversy which followed her famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea, an apologia pro vita sua in which she vehemently defended the right of women to an education against the bishop of Puebla. Perhaps the most intriguing claim of all is Thomas's assertion that a reading of the Respuesta is ‘enriched by examining how the author employs recurring literary strategies from the occasional mode within this canonical text’ (p. 104), though such an important insight perhaps should have been introduced prior to the conclusion, since it supports the author's compelling insistence that her occasional works be accorded greater significance.