Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Mexican nun, poet and scholar (New Spain, 1648–1695), born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, an illegitimate daughter and intellectual prodigy who, by her own autobiographical account, could already read at three and had learned Latin in just twenty lessons, and who, faced with the impossibility of a woman attending university in seventeenth-century New Spain, unsuccessfully begged her mother to let her disguise herself as a man in order to study. Becoming a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court, where her prodigious learning caused a sensation — to the point of being subjected to a public examination by a tribunal of forty scholars, which she passed brilliantly — she finally chose to take religious vows in 1669, not out of deep religious vocation but, as she herself frankly explained, as the only social option that allowed her to devote herself freely to study and avoid marriage. At the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City she produced an extraordinarily varied and sophisticated body of literary work, including lyric and love poetry of great emotional subtlety, the philosophical poem First Dream, regarded as her most ambitious poetic achievement for its allegorical exploration of the human desire for knowledge, and both secular and religious plays (autos sacramentales). Her most famous and daring work, the Reply to Sister Filotea de la Cruz (1691), is an apologetic letter addressed to the Bishop of Puebla — who, under the pseudonym 'Sor Filotea', had criticised her for pursuing secular studies rather than theology — in which she defends, with theological, historical and personal arguments of extraordinary boldness for the time, women's right to intellectual knowledge, making it one of the earliest feminist texts in Spanish-language literature. Later persecuted by ecclesiastical authorities, she was forced to sell her extensive personal library and scientific instruments, and died shortly afterward while tending to her fellow nuns during an epidemic.