41 Facts About Sor Juana Ines

Dona Ines de Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, and Hieronymite nun.

Sor Juana lived during Mexico's colonial period, making her a contributor both to early Spanish literature as well as to the broader literature of the Spanish Golden Age.

Sor Juana educated herself in her own library, which was mostly inherited from her grandfather.

Sor Juana Ines died the next year, having caught the plague while treating her sisters.

Dona Ines de Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana was born in San Miguel Nepantla near Mexico City.

Related searches

Sor Juana Ines was the illegitimate child of Don Pedro Manuel de Asuaje y V a Spanish officer, and Dona Isabel Ramirez de Santillana y Rendon, a wealthy criolla, who inhabited the Hacienda of Panoaya, close to Mexico City.

The name Sor Juana Ines was present through their cousin Dona Sor Juana Ines de Brenes y Mendoza, married to a grandson of Antonio de Saavedra Guzman, the first ever published American-born poet.

However, thanks to her maternal grandfather, who owned a very productive hacienda in Amecameca, Sor Juana Ines lived a comfortable life with her mother on his estate, Panoaya, accompanied by an illustrious group of relatives who constantly visited or were visited in their surrounding haciendas.

Sor Juana Ines learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl and wrote some short poems in that language.

Sor Juana Ines even asked her mother's permission to disguise herself as a male student so that she could enter the university there, without success.

Sor Juana Ines was much admired in the viceregal court, and she received several proposals of marriage, which she declined.

Later, in 1669, she entered the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns, which had more relaxed rules, where she changed her name to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, probably in reference to Sor Juana de la Cruz Vazquez Gutierrez who was a Spanish nun whose erudition earned her one of the few dispensations for women to preach the gospel.

Sor Juana Ines stayed cloistered in the Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite in Mexico City from 1669 until her death in 1695, and there she studied, wrote, and collected a large library of books.

Sor Juana Ines addressed some of her poems to paintings of her friend and patron Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, daughter of Vespasiano Gonzaga, Duca di Guastala, Luzara e Rechiolo and Ines Maria Manrique, 9th Countess de Paredes, which she addressed as Lisida.

Sor Juana Ines published his criticisms to use them to his advantage against the priest, and while he agreed with her criticisms, he believed that as a woman, she should devote herself to prayer and give up her writings.

Sor Juana Ines advocated for women's right to serve as intellectual authorities, not only through the act of writing, but through the publication of their writing.

Resultingly, Sor Juana argued, this practice could avoid potentially dangerous situations involving male teachers in intimate settings with young female students.

Sor Juana Ines's name is affixed to such a document in 1694, but given her deep natural lyricism, the tone of the supposed handwritten penitentials is in rhetorical and autocratic Church formulae; one is signed "Yo, la Peor de Todas".

Sor Juana Ines is said to have sold all her books, then an extensive library of over 4,000 volumes, and her musical and scientific instruments as well.

Sor Juana Ines proposed that those one thousand words were written by Sor Juana.

Julie Greer Johnson describes how Sor Juana Ines protested against the rigorously defined relationship between genders through her full-length comedies and humor.

Sor Juana Ines argues that Juana recognized the negative view of women in comedy which was designed to uphold male superiority at the expense of women.

Sor Juana conceived Theseus as the archetype of the baroque hero, a model used by her fellow countryman Juan Ruiz de Alarcon.

Besides poetry and philosophy, Sor Juana was interested in science, mathematics and music.

For instance, in the following poem, Sor Juana delves into the natural notes and the accidentals of musical notation:.

Related searches

One musical work attributed to Sor Juana survives from the archive of Guatemala Cathedral.

In Juana Ramirez, Octavio Paz and Diane Marting find that Sor Juana's decision to become a nun stemmed from her refusal to marry; joining the convent, according to Paz and Marting, was a way for Juana to obtain authority and freedom without marrying.

Scholars such as Scout Frewer argue that because Sor Juana Ines's advocacy for religious and intellectual authority would now be associated with feminism, she was a protofeminist.

Instance, scholars like Rachel O'Donnell argue that Sor Juana occupied a special place in between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable roles in seventeenth century Mexico.

Since Sor Juana was opposed to marriage, Paz argues, entering the convent was a socially acceptable way to be a single woman in seventeenth century Mexico.

O'Donnell argues that Sor Juana was called a rare bird because although theology was only an acceptable pursuit for men in the Catholic Church, she actively studied religion.

Sor Juana likely perceived wisdom and religion as inseparable, so she probably believed that to follow God was to pursue wisdom.

Sor Juana Ines suggests that rather than locating Sor Juana in a fixed identity, scholarship on Sor Juana should be a fluctuating and multilayered conversation.

Sor Juana Ines celebrates poet Octavio Paz for crossing national borders with his internationally acclaimed work on Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith.

Yugar argues that Sor Juana is the first female bibliophile in the New World.

Sor Juana Ines argues that Sor Juana's historic focus on gender and class equality in education and the household, in addition to her advocacy for language rights, and the connection between indigenous religious traditions and ecological protection were paramount in the seventeenth century.

Sor Juana Ines returned it to Congress on November 14,1995, with the event and description of the controversy reported in The New York Times a month later.

Sor Juana Ines cites modern movements such as the Roman Catholic Women Priest Movement, the Women's Ordination Conference, and the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, all of which speak out against the patriarchal limitations on women in religious institutions.

Yugar emphasizes that Sor Juana interpreted the Bible as expressing concern with people of all backgrounds as well as with the earth.

Gomez argues that Sor Juana emphasizes the violence with which Spanish religious traditions dominated indigenous ones.

Paz's accredited scholarship on Sor Juana elevated her to a national symbol as a Mexican woman, writer, and religious authority.