40 Facts About Sor Juana

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

Sor Juana 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.

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

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

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

Sor Juana 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.

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

Since Sor Juana's works were rediscovered after her death, scholarly interpretations and translations are both abundant and contrasting.

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.

In conclusion, Paz makes the case that Sor Juana's works were the most important body of poetic work produced in the Americas until the arrival of 19th-century figures such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

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

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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.

Unlike other translations, Peden chose to translate the title of Sor Juana's best known work, First Dream, as "First I Dream" instead.

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

Sor Juana 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 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 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.

Sor Juana's decision to cut her hair as punishment for mistakes she made during learning signified her own autonomy, but was a way to engage in the masculinity expected of male-dominated spaces, like universities.

In 1995, Sor Juana's name was inscribed in gold on the wall of honor in the Mexican Congress in April 1995.

The town where Sor Juana grew up, San Miguel Nepantla in the municipality of Tepetlixpa, State of Mexico, was renamed in her honor as Nepantla de Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.