Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz — Storied No. 013

She was three years old, by her own account, when she followed her elder sister to the village school and talked the mistress into teaching her to read. By eight she was writing verse. At sixteen she begged her mother to dress her as a boy so she might enter the university in Mexico City — the one door to real learning in New Spain, and it was shut to women. Her mother refused. So Juana Inés de Asbaje taught herself: Latin, she said, in no more than twenty lessons, cutting off four fingers' width of her own hair whenever she failed to learn something by the time it grew back — because it seemed to her unreasonable that a head so empty should be dressed so well.

She took vows at twenty-one, not from fervour but from arithmetic. A convent cell was the only place in the viceroyalty where a woman could own books and be left alone with them. For twenty-six years she filled it — some four thousand volumes, maps, musical and mathematical instruments — and wrote the finest verse of her century in Spanish. Then the Church told her to stop. She answered with a letter still read as the founding feminist manifesto of the Americas, and it cost her every book she had.

A life between two worlds

The lifeline

1648

Born at San Miguel Nepantla, below the volcanoes — nepantla is Nahuatl for "in the middle"

1664

At about sixteen, taken into the viceregal court as lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine

c.1667

The Viceroy assembles some forty scholars to examine her; she answers them all

1669

Professes at the Convent of Santa Paula, Mexico City — her cell for twenty-six years

1691

Writes the Respuesta, defending every woman's right to study

1695

Dies at forty-six nursing her sisters through an epidemic, her library already sold

By the numbers

The measure of her

3

Her age when, as she told it, she got herself taught to read

~40

Scholars gathered by the Viceroy to test a teenager's learning

4,000

Volumes reported in her cell — among the largest libraries in the Americas

975

Lines of Primero sueño — the only poem, she said, she wrote to please herself

What she wrote, and what it cost

The work

1676–91

Villancicos for the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca — carol cycles sung in Spanish and Latin, and in Nahuatl and the Spanish of enslaved Africans.

1680

Neptuno alegórico. She designed and versed the triumphal arch raised for the new Viceroy's entry into Mexico City, casting him as Neptune — a public commission for a cloistered nun.

1689

Inundación castálida, her first collection, printed in Madrid — a nun of New Spain, read across the empire that ruled it.

1689

El Divino Narciso, her finest sacramental play, whose prologue opens with Indigenous characters dancing a tocotín before the Christian allegory begins.

1690

Carta atenagórica. Her private critique of a celebrated sermon by the Jesuit António Vieira is printed without her consent — and answered by a bishop writing under a woman's name, "Sor Filotea," who tells her to put down her books.

1691

Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1 March). Part autobiography, part argument: that a mind cannot be forbidden to think, and that women have always taught women. It is read today as the first feminist manifesto of the Americas.

1694

The renunciation. She gives up her library and instruments as alms, and signs a renewal of her vows in her own blood: Yo, la peor de todas — "I, the worst of all women."

Silenced, then sounded

Recognition

In her lifetime

Barred from university; every book she read, she found for herself
Her work printed without her permission, then publicly rebuked by a bishop in a woman's disguise
Pressed by her confessor and her Church to give up letters for penance
By 1694 her library, maps and instruments were gone, sold for alms
Dead at forty-six, and largely forgotten for the next two centuries

Today

Called the first feminist of the Americas; the Respuesta is its founding text
Octavio Paz devoted a landmark 1982 biography to her, Las trampas de la fe
Her convent in Mexico City is now the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana
Her portrait circulated on Mexico's 200-peso note from 1994 until the 2019 redesign
"Hombres necios" is recited by schoolchildren across the Spanish-speaking world

The place that made her

Nepantla

She was born in a farmhouse on her grandfather's hacienda, on the plain between Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, a long day's ride southeast of Mexico City. She read her way through his library there before she was ten. The village name is Nahuatl — nepantla, "in the middle" — the word Nahua speakers used for the condition of standing between two worlds. It was the truest address she ever had. The town is called Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz today.

5,426 m

Popocatépetl, the live volcano above her birthplace

~60 km

From Nepantla to Mexico City, where she spent the rest of her life

3

Languages she wrote in — Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl

"I do not study in order to write, still less in order to teach — but only to see whether by studying I may be less ignorant." "No estudio para escribir, ni menos para enseñar… sino sólo por ver si con estudiar ignoro menos." — Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, 1691