Thinkers Timeline

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun of colonial New Spain, widely regarded as the finest writer of the Spanish Baroque in the Americas. She was born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman of Spanish descent. She taught herself to read at the age of three, devoured the books in her grandfather's library, and begged her mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend university — which was closed to women. At sixteen she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, where she astonished scholars with her learning. Rather than marry, she entered a convent in 1669, first the Carmelites and then the Hieronymites, where she could continue her studies and writing. Her cell became one of the great intellectual centres of the Americas, filled with books, musical and scientific instruments, and a stream of visitors. She wrote love poetry, religious verse, philosophical essays, plays, and comic dramas in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and the Afro-Mexican creole of her time. In the early 1690s, church authorities pressured her to abandon secular studies. She signed a statement of submission in her own blood, sold her library of some four thousand books, and died in 1695 while nursing her sisters through an epidemic.