Sor Juana became a nun so nothing could curtail her freedom to study
Barred from Mexico City's university, a teenage prodigy chose convent life because it left her free to read. From her cell Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz built a library of more than 4,000 volumes and wrote the poetry that earned her the nickname the Tenth Muse.
She was born in San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City, on 12 November 1648, the illegitimate daughter of a Canary Islands navy captain, Pedro Manuel de Asuaje, and a criolla mother, Isabel Ramírez de Santillana. Her father drifted out of her life early, so she grew up at her grandfather's leased hacienda at Panoayan, slipping into the chapel to read books from his library, which girls were forbidden to touch. Reportedly she could read and write Latin by three, keep accounts at five and compose a poem on the Eucharist at eight; at thirteen she was teaching Latin to small children.
Sent to Mexico City in 1664, she asked to dress as a boy and enrol at the university; her mother said no. She became a lady-in-waiting to the vicereine, Eleonora del Carretto, instead. The viceroy, the Marquis of Mancera, once gathered theologians, jurists, philosophers and poets to fire unprepared questions at the 17-year-old, and her answers stunned them. She turned down marriage proposals, spent a few months with the Discalced Carmelites in 1667, and in 1669 joined the more relaxed Hieronymite order at the Convent of Santa Paula.
Her quarters became a salon for vicereines and learned women, and her patrons had her writing printed in Spain. The long silva First Dream, in lines of 7 and 11 syllables, follows a sleeping soul up to the summit of its own intellect, where it tries to take in all creation at once, fails, and retreats to Aristotle's ten categories before the sun defeats night and the poet wakes.
Trouble came in November 1690, when the bishop of Puebla, writing as Sor Filotea, printed without her permission her critique of a sermon by the Jesuit António Vieira, adding advice that she keep to religious study. Her Reply to Sister Philotea defended women's right to formal education and to teach other women. She also joked that one can philosophize perfectly well while cooking supper. By 1693 she had fallen silent; a penance document from 1694 is signed I, the worst of all women, and her books and instruments were sold off. She died on 17 April 1695, aged 46, after nursing sisters sick with plague.
Source: Juana Inés de la Cruz
