Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born around 1648 in San Miguel Nepantla in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (modern Mexico), the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a creole mother. By her own account she taught herself to read at three from her grandfather's library, mastered Latin in twenty lessons as a girl, and proposed to disguise herself as a boy to attend the university (which forbade women). At sixteen she was taken into the household of the Vicereine of New Spain as a lady-in-waiting, where forty senior university scholars examined her on theology, philosophy, mathematics, history and poetry — and she answered them all. Rather than marry, she entered the Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo at twenty, taking the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. From her cell she ran a salon, kept a 4,000-volume library (the largest in Mexico), and wrote: love poems, satirical sonnets, biblical mysteries, secular dramas, and a defence of women's right to education (the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, 1691) that pre-dates Mary Wollstonecraft by a century. Forced under ecclesiastical pressure to surrender her library and instruments, she died of plague in 1695 nursing her sisters in the convent infirmary.
All Figures
Hieronymite Nun · Poet · Playwright · Scholar
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
1,648 CE – 1,695 CE
The illegitimate New Spain village girl who memorised Latin in twenty lessons, became court favourite of the Vicereine, and entered a convent rather than marry — producing the first major literary corpus written in the Americas.
Lifetime
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