Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a poet, playwright and scholar of colonial New Spain, the Spanish viceroyalty centred on what is now Mexico, and is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the late Spanish Baroque. A largely self-taught prodigy who became a Hieronymite nun in Mexico City, she wrote love poetry, religious and secular plays, music and a celebrated defence of women's right to learn. Her contemporaries called her the "Tenth Muse", and today she is a national symbol of Mexico.

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born at San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish sea captain from the Canary Islands and a criolla mother, Isabel Ramírez. Her birth year is uncertain: two baptismal records have been linked to her, one for a "Juana" in 1648 and one for an "Inés" in 1651, and scholars still debate which is hers.

She grew up on the hacienda of Panoayan and taught herself from her grandfather's library, often hiding in the chapel to read books girls were not meant to touch. Later accounts say she could read by three and was teaching Latin to younger children at thirteen.

In 1664 she was sent to Mexico City. Barred from the university as a woman, she is said to have asked her mother's permission to attend dressed as a boy. Instead she became a lady-in-waiting to the vicereine, Eleonora del Carretto, wife of the Marquis of Mancera. When the viceroy had a panel of theologians, philosophers and poets question her, her answers made her famous across the colony. She refused several offers of marriage.

Seeking above all the freedom to study, she entered a strict Carmelite convent in 1667 but left within months, and in 1669 joined the more relaxed Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo, taking the name Juana Inés de la Cruz. She remained there until her death, assembling a large library and receiving visitors such as the scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Successive viceroys were her patrons, and the Countess of Paredes arranged for her poems to be printed in Spain.

Her best-known long poem, First Dream, follows the soul's flight during sleep as it tries and fails to grasp the whole of creation. Her verses known as Foolish Men attack the double standards men applied to women. For the stage she wrote the comedy Pawns of a House, first performed in 1683, and religious dramas such as The Divine Narcissus, whose prologue draws on Aztec religion. She also wrote a treatise on music, now lost, and carols for church feasts.

In November 1690, without her consent, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla, published her critique of a decades-old sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira, adding a letter under the pen name "Sor Filotea" that urged her to give up secular study. Her answer, the Reply to Sister Philothea, defended women's right to education and to teach and write. She also wrote that one could "philosophize while cooking supper". The Archbishop of Mexico was among her critics.

By 1693 she seems to have stopped writing. In 1694 she signed penitential documents, one with the words "I, the worst of all women", and she is said to have given up her library, reportedly of more than 4,000 volumes, along with her instruments, though some sources say they were confiscated. She died in the convent on 17 April 1695 after nursing sisters struck down by an epidemic.

In the 20th century the Mexican poet Octavio Paz's study of her helped make her a national symbol, while feminist scholars such as Amanda Powell have placed her in the long European debate about women begun by Christine de Pizan. Her old convent now houses the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, and she appears on Mexican banknotes.

Our 1650 and 1700 maps show New Spain at the height of Spanish rule, the colonial world in which she lived and wrote.