Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (12 November 1648 – 17 April 1695), was a Hieronymite nun and a Novohispanic writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse", "The Mexican Phoenix", and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. She was also a student of science. She was among the main contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "El Inca", and is considered one of the most important female writers in Spanish language literature and Mexican literature.
Learning and religious life
Juana was born in San Miguel Nepantla (presently Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) near Mexico City as the illegitimate daughter of Don Pedro Manuel de Asuaje y Vargas-Machuca (1602-1680), a Spanish navy captain from the Canary Islands involved in colonial transatlantic shipping and trade, and Doña Isabel Ramírez de Santillana y Rendón (1626-1690), a distinguished criolla, whose father leased the Hacienda de Panoayan, near Mexico City. There are two different baptism registrations that have been attributed to her, one under the name of "Juana" in 1648, and another one under the name of "Inés" in 1651, still a matter of academic research and debate. There is, nevertheless, agreement that she was one of the three children that Doña Isabel Ramírez de Santillana had out of wedlock with Don Pedro de Asuaje.
In 1667, Inés entered the Monastery of St. Joseph, a community of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, as a postulant, where she remained but a few months. Later, in 1669, she entered the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns, which had more relaxed rules, where she changed her name to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, probably in reference to Sor Juana de la Cruz Vázquez Gutiérrez, a Spanish nun whose intellectual accomplishments earned her one of the few dispensations for women to preach the gospel. Another potential namesake was Saint Juan de la Cruz, one of the most accomplished authors of the Spanish Baroque. She chose to become a nun so that she could study as she wished since she wanted "to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study."
Poetry, drama, and intellectual ambition
First Dream, a long philosophical and descriptive silva (a poetic form combining verses of 7 and 11 syllables), deals with the shadow of night beneath which a person falls asleep in the midst of quietness and silence. There night and day animals participate, either dozing or sleeping, all urged to silence and rest by Harpocrates. The person's body ceases its ordinary operations, which are described in physiological and symbolical terms, ending with the activity of the imagination as an image-reflecting apparatus: the Pharos. Sor Juana's first volume of poetry, Inundación castálida, was published in Spain by the Vicereine Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzága, Countess of Paredes, Marquise de la Laguna. Many of her poems dealt with the subject of love and sensuality.
Besides House of Desires and Love is but a Labyrinth, Sor Juana is cited as the author of a possible ending to the comedy by Agustin de Salazar: The Second Celestina (La Segunda Celestina). In the 1990s, Guillermo Schmidhuber found a release of the comedy that contained a different ending. He proposed that those one thousand words were written by Sor Juana. Some literary critics, such as Octavio Paz, Georgina Sabat-Rivers, and Luis Leal have accepted Sor Juana as the co-author, but others, such as Antonio Alatorre and José Pascual Buxó, have questioned the attribution.
Arguments about women's education
In November 1690, the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz published, under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea, and without her permission, Sor Juana's critique of a 40-year-old sermon by Father António Vieira, a Portuguese Jesuit preacher. Although Sor Juana's intentions for the work, called Carta Atenagórica are left to interpretation, many scholars have opted to interpret the work as a challenge to the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church.
Along with Carta Atenagórica, the bishop published a letter advising Sor Juana to concentrate on religious rather than secular study. In response to her critics, Sor Juana wrote a letter, La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Reply to Sister Philotea), in which she defended women's right to formal education. She also advocated for women's right to serve as intellectual authorities, not only through the act of writing, but also through the publication of their writing. By putting women, specifically older women, in positions of authority, Sor Juana argued, women could educate other women. Resultingly, Sor Juana argued, this practice could also avoid potentially dangerous situations involving male teachers in intimate settings with young female students. In 1691, she was reprimanded and ordered to stop writing after the exposure of a private letter in which she wrote of the right of women to education.