 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a 17th century nun from Mexico, known then as New Spain, and at a time when most women in New Spain could not even write their name, Sor Juana wrote poetry, mathematical treatises, social manifestos, musical compositions, passionate love poems, and stage plays. She was a prolific writer who earned the title of the 10th Muse. And in her writing, Sor Juana expressed her deep concerns as an intellectual Creole woman, and her writings are key to understand the history of New Spain. Now although Sor Juana's literary identity was forged in colonial Mexico, her works were published in Spain making her a prominent writer of the Spanish Golden Age. Now one of the major themes in Sor Juana's work is the right of women to have access to knowledge. And she defended her right to be an intellectual and asserted that women should not only be educated but also become educators. And in 17th century New Spain, knowledge was a dangerous commodity that was carefully controlled by the church and rigorously policed by the inquisition. And any interpretation of scripture that questioned the prevailing orthodoxy was dangerous. Access to knowledge of the divine order, whether scientific or theological, was strictly mediated through a patriarchal hierarchy of men. And this is why it's so extraordinary that the first great poet to emerge from New Spain was a woman and a nun. It wasn't easy for Sor Juana to defend her right to be an intellectual in a masculine culture where the writers, editors and readers were all men. In 1690 she criticized the theological ideas of a very famous and well connected Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio Vieira. And after that in 1693 she sold all her books as well as her musical and scientific instruments and renewed her religious oath by signing it in blood. Now doesn't it seem strange that a prolific writer would suddenly renounce her intellectual labours and sign a statement of self-humiliation with the words yo la peor del mundo meaning I the worst of them all. So what happened in New Spain between 1690 and 1693 that led to Sor Juana's abjuration? Now before we get to the life story of Sor Juana, let's briefly review the institutions and society of 17th century New Spain. This historical context is crucial to understand the life and work of Sor Juana. Now after a decade of conquest and exploration Spain created the wise royalty of New Spain in 1535. It was the first of four wise royalties that Spain created to govern the colonies in the Americas. The Aztec capital Tennischtitlan was raised and then Mexico City became the capital of the wise royalty of New Spain which included modern-day Mexico, much of Central America, parts of the Caribbean, Southwestern United States, Florida and the Philippines. During the first 100 years of Spanish rule the indigenous population of New Spain declined from an estimated 25 million to 1 million as a result of disease, war and systematic destruction of indigenous cultures. Now soon after the military and political conquest, Catholic missionaries began arriving in the Americas to begin the spiritual conquest of indigenous people. The missionaries founded monasteries and open schools because educating the indigenous population was a crucial justification of the colonizing enterprise. The church also evolved significantly over 300 years of colonial rule and Spanish colonization in the Americas took place through a partnership between church and state that aimed to further the power of both institutions. The church controlled all aspects of life from birth through marriage until death and the religious climate of the colonial state was much more orthodox than in Spain. The church was extremely wealthy and powerful. Now on the most basic level the clergy fell into two large camps, the secular and the regular clergy. The secular clergy included the common parish priests who served under the supervision of the local bishop or archbishop as well as high-ranking clerics who served in the cathedrals. The secular clergy and the bishops were under the administrative supervision of the king of Spain thanks to a series of papal grants and privileges and this control over the church in the new world was known as the Royal patronage. The Spanish kings exercised the royal patronage over the church by appointing major officials to administer the church including bishops, archbishops and members of cathedral chapters. That's why the viceroy and the archbishop who were appointed by the Spanish monarch held great power in the colonial state. Now throughout the colonial period education was almost exclusively in the hands of the Catholic church. The regular clergy had its own internal governance and hierarchy ultimately under the supervision of the pope. In New Spain the Franciscans landed first in 1523 followed by the Dominicans and the Augustinians and these mendicant orders focused on educating the indigenous population and their major goal was to force the indigenous population to convert to Christianity. All instruction was in Spanish and mostly of catechism. The spread of Christianity stimulated a massive religious building campaign in the Americas and one important type of religious structure was the convent. Convents were large complexes that typically included living quarters for the missionaries, a large open-air atrium where mass conversions took place and a single nave church. The missionaries used the large outdoor atriums as classrooms. They trained elite indigenous boys to be the helpers to the priests. Now the Jesuits arrived in New Spain in 1572 and they provided education for the colonial elite. Their teaching was designed to instill loyalty to the Spanish crown and the curriculum remained strictly within an officially approved theological framework. The Jesuits established some of the most impressive libraries in their urban colleges as well as their missions. Jesuit libraries also functioned as centers of cultural power and distinguished themselves in many ways by the norms and rules they set up for the ordering of their books. They promoted homogeneity of knowledge in all Jesuit centers of learning and the Jesuits dominated education until the Spanish king expelled them in 1767. Jesuits occupy an important place in Sorfana's own life and education. They believed in the interrelationship of piety and intellectual practice and Sorfana herself shared this conviction. For several years she confessed with one of the intellectual luminaries of New Spain, Núñez de Miranda, a Jesuit confessor. Later on after their relationship faltered Sorfana dismissed him as her confessor. But Sorfana's intellectual activities brought her into constant contact and eventually into conflict with the Jesuits. In 1551 the king of Spain Charles V established the royal and pontifical university of Mexico. Theology and law dominated the curriculum but after 1579 the university offered courses in medicine and indigenous languages. The royal and pontifical university was the only institution that could confer academic degrees that were equivalent to European degrees. And soon rivalry developed between the university and some of the Jesuit colleges as they jostled to position themselves as premier institutions of higher learning in Mexico. As the Catholic Church established itself in Mexico the desire to promote Latin soon followed and a Latinate class of clerics ensured the doctrinal purity of Christian instruction and it was the clearest manifestation of the flourishing of western cultural ideals in the Americas. Eventually in the mid-18th century students from a few Jesuit colleges succeeded in earning college credit for the courses they took there to graduate with a degree from the royal and pontifical university. Now women could not attend the university in Colonial Mexico. Most of the Mexican population was illiterate and unschooled. And the point that I want to emphasize is that higher education was provided for a small minority only. The education of girls was not a priority in New Spain. Private tutors educated girls from wealthy families but only enough so they could oversee a household. Now a few girls in Mexico City entered convent schools around age 8 to remain cloistered for the rest of their lives. So it was in such a world that Juana Ramirez grew up. She lived in a society where men occupied positions of authority and power. Men also defined acceptable female conduct and controlled the justice system which punished those who overstepped the established boundaries of acceptable behavior. And the parameters of acceptable female behavior and activities were closely tied to a woman's social class and racial category. It is really important to understand colonial society to appreciate So Juana's achievements. She manipulated social values of 17th century New Spain by becoming a nun and rejected marriage, the only other honorable choice for women. Entering the convent allowed her not only to remain respectable but also to attain a certain sense of freedom to pursue her educational goals. Juana Ramirez was born in San Miguel, Nipantla, a small town southeast of Mexico City. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish father, Pedro Manuel de Asuaje, probably of Basque origin and a Creole mother, Isabel Ramirez de Santiana. Now although it was not unusual in New Spain for a Creole woman to have children outside of wedlock, it certainly required a firm independence of character. And what we know is that her father was absent from So Juana's life. And there is no doubt that her mother Donia Isabel contributed greatly to Juana's independent attitude. Now Juana's mother had other daughters by Juana's father and three more children by another peninsular. Now because of Juana's illegitimacy, the date of her birth is contested. Many biographies list 1648 as the year of her birth, but a few studies suggest that she might have been born in 1651. The register in which the names of children born of peninsular parents were recorded in Ameca Meca, the city closest to where So Juana was born, but that is missing. And some scholars point to a baptismal certificate from 1648 in a parochial archive of Chimalwakan of Ija de la Iglesia meaning someone of illegitimate birth. Now Juana's maternal grandfather owned property in Ameca Meca and Juana spent her early years living with her mother on his estate. She learned to read when she was three years old and composed her first poem when she was eight. After her mother remarried, Juana was sent to live in Mexico City, with her maternal aunt Donia Maria Ramirez and her husband Juan de Mata. And when she learned that there was a university in Mexico City, Juana asked if she could be dressed in men's clothing to be enrolled in the university. Now Juana wanted to join the University of Mexico, but women were not permitted to pursue higher education. So she continued to study privately and by the time she was a teenager, she had studied Greek logic and Latin grammar, which enabled her to read philosophical and theological works. In 1664, when she was 16 years old, her aunt presented her to the court of the viceroy, where she became a lady-in-waiting for the viceroy. Her aunt and uncle had hoped that the court would be a perfect place to find a husband for Juana. And when Juana was 17 years old, the viceroy invited a panel of scholars to test her intelligence. Juana outwitted these scholars, and the range of skills and knowledge she demonstrated before the panel became publicly known throughout Mexico. As a young, intelligent and beautiful teenager, Juana had to constantly defend herself from the amorous advances of the married men of the court. Eventually, she rejected the idea of marriage and became Inam. In her own words, joining the convent was the most decent thing she could do for her intellectual growth. Initially, Juana entered the mendicant order of the discalced Carmelites, but she left the Carmelite order after three months. And some scholars have speculated that the snobbish attitudes of the peninsular women who dominated that particular convent might have led her to leave after only three months. 1667, at the age of 20, Juana joined the convent of San Jerome in Mexico City and lived there until her death. There, she took the name Sor Juana, which means sister Juana. The Order of Saint Jerome is a Catholic cloistered religious order and a common name for several Augustinian congregations modeled after the life of Saint Jerome. Sor Juana was a faithful Catholic, but she was not a mystic. And the life story of Sor Juana is the tale of a female intellectual who entered the convent to pursue higher education without the obligations of a conventional marriage. Now, in the convent, she lived very comfortably. Her cell was an apartment maintained by servants and slaves and she had a huge personal library containing various scientific, mathematical and musical instruments, works of art and about 4,000 books. Sor Juana's great book collection was unique for her nun, but she never enjoyed the same institutional protection as the Jesuits and confiscation of her books always loomed as a possibility. The possession of dangerous books often led to accusations of heresy. The inquisition held great power to punish publishers, booksellers and readers. Although Sor Juana never possessed any banned books in her collection, eventually her singular views seemed to pose a threat and she became the target of misogynistic attacks. Sor Juana's library was in her room, a private space, but the knowledge that she acquired there allowed her to participate in the public arena through her writing and her small room in the convent became a meeting place for Mexican intellectuals. In 1680, the Count of Paredes arrived in Mexico City as New Spain's viceroy from 1680 to 86. He was welcomed by two triumphal archers, one was erected by the municipal council and the other by the cathedral chapter. The cathedral commissioned Sor Juana to design one of the archers and write a poem in his honour. Very quickly, a friendship developed between Juana and the Countess of Paredes. And the viceroy and the vicerain were frequent visitors at the convent and supported her literary ambitions and ensured the publications of the first two volumes of Sor Juana's works in Spain and it was for them that she wrote some of her best poems. The first printing press in the Americas was established in Mexico in 1539 early on in the colonization phase. It was controlled by the Spanish monarch and the church and it was designed to produce texts for the conversion of indigenous people. Now most of the paper was imported from Europe. Given the limitations of the Mexican press the best option for new Spanish authors was to publish in Spain as did Sor Juana who published three volumes in Spain. She used her fate to support her intellectual talents. Sor Juana's works were printed and widely circulated in Spain which made her a writer of golden age Spain's literary culture just as much as she was part of Colonial Mexico's cultural production. The first volume of her work containing a large number of secular poems was published in Spain in 1689. Sor Juana wrote 12 Viancicos or Carol Sequences for festive performances in cathedrals in Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca. This literary genre was considered a humble one so she took advantage of the freedom and fluidity offered by its marginality and she used this popular genre to express the sentiments of marginalized social groups such as slaves, indigenous people and women. Traditionally Viancicos held a connection to Christmas but in the mid 17th century that changed and cathedrals in Mexico celebrated many festivals with the singing of Viancicos. Gongorismo is a literary style named after famous golden age Spanish poet Luis de Gongora and Sor Juana very much admired his work and in some ways her Primero sueño is a homage to Gongora's Soledad Primera. Sor Juana's Primero sueño or first dream occupies a unique place among her works. It was a baroque masterpiece and it is her most important single work. Together with the respuesta it constitutes the basis of an understanding of Sor Juana as a person and as a poet. Primero sueño is a long poem and in it we find the whole range of Sor Juana's learning mythology, theology, ancient modern science, physiology and philosophy. The poem begins with a description of the invasion of night. Then sleep enters the poets inner world. Only the soul is still awake ready in it's dream voyage to be the protagonist of Sor Juana's philosophical adventure and Sor Juana dramatizes the human soul as a thinking being. The soul rises above the stars even above itself in search of a complete living of the universe. Perhaps the journey represents the author's own crisis as a religious woman in the pursuit of knowledge. In the 1680s she wrote You Foolish Men, her most famous redondilla which is a popular Spanish verse style. Her poem expresses her disappointment in the hypocrisy of the relations between men and women in New Spain. She wrote With foolish arrogance you hope to find a Thais for courtship but want a Lucretia after you've possessed her. Now Thais was a sex worker who accompanied Alexander on many of his campaigns and Lucretia was a Roman noble woman who committed suicide after she was raped to preserve her family's honor. So essentially Sor Juana highlighted the double standard of sexual relationships in which women are criticized for being chased and also criticized for being sexually active. Sor Juana's criticism was incredibly radical for its time especially from Annan who was supposed to concern herself only with spiritual matters. Consequently she became the target of misogynistic attacks from the church for her candidness and commitment to women's advocacy. In 1688 her beloved patrons, the Count and Countess of Paredes returned to Spain and with their departure Juana lost her most powerful protectors in New Spain. The Bishop of Puebla Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz who was a friend of Sor Juana requested her to write a review of a sermon delivered by a very famous Portuguese Jesuit named Antonio de Vieira and the sermon about Christ's proof of love for man had been delivered in the Royal Chapel in Lisbon in which Vieira articulated the meaning of one of Jesus's finesses a divine act of love for humanity particularly about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and Vieira dismissed the theological ideas of Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John Chrysostom and reached his own conclusion that Christ had washed his disciples' feet for love's own sake. Christ's greatest favour was to make his love for us an obligation to love one another and not to love him in return. At the request of the Bishop of Puebla Sor Juana wrote a critique of that sermon and this was Sor Juana's only theological composition in which she criticised Antonio Vieira not just for the wrongness of his opinions but also for his arrogant dismissal of the ideas of the Church Fathers Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John Chrysostom and she argued in a very sophisticated way that if God does not command us to love him in return it is to free us of the sin of ingratitude. In other words, God would never make humans feel obligated to him since we can never repay him and this critique set off a chain of events that ended Sor Juana's literary career along with the dismantling of her library the symbol of her greatest disobedience. In 1690, the Bishop of Puebla published this critique now known as Carta Athenagorica or letter worthy of Athena along with his own letter but signed it with a feminine pseudonym Sor Filotea and the Bishop published Sor Juana's critique without her consent In his letter, the Bishop of Puebla advised Sor Juana to write about devotional matters rather than philosophical and scientific topics Sor Juana knew that the Sor Filotea pseudonym was the Bishop of Puebla and she took three months to respond to the Bishop's letter and she probably could have expected her critique to be circulated in manuscript form but she did not anticipate that her friend the Bishop of Puebla would print it without her permission for wider circulation I guess she was not aware that he was a foil to the misogynist archbishop of New Spain Francisco Aguirre E. Sejas Now here's the interesting part Sor Juana's Carta Athenagorica was republished later with her permission in Spain in 1692 as Crises Sobreón Cermón in the second volume of her works and it was received with great enthusiasm in Spain in fact the Spanish Inquisition declared that it contained nothing contrary to the faith so why did it arouse a storm of criticism in Mexico? Some Jesuits viewed Sor Juana's singular opinion of divine favors as an attack on the Jesuit order to which Vera as well as the archbishop of New Spain Francisco Aguirre E. Sejas belonged and Sor Juana's Carta Athenagorica was declared heretical it was strongly condemned in New Spain because the Jesuits were very powerful Now in 1691 Sor Juana responded to the bishop of Puebla's letter and in her response she defended herself vigorously claiming for herself the right to study and her respuesta was an eloquent biographical document with details from a personal life and intellectual contributions to defend the rights of women Now several scholars have described Sor Juana as a proto-feminist not only for her defense of women's intellectual capacities but also for her legitimization of traditional feminine qualities namely obedience, humility and silence and Sor Juana's respuesta is far more than a political self-defense from the Mexican Inquisition a layered and nuanced work that showcases the depth and richness of her thought Sor Juana asserted that with the exception of Primero Sueño all her work had always been commissioned and she wrote about her lifelong desire for learning and although she wanted to pursue higher education in the university she was not permitted she explained her choice to join the convent but graced me with a gift of immense love for the truth and since the first light of reason dawned on me my inclination toward letters was so intense and powerful that neither reprimands by others of which I have had many no self-reflection of which I have done not a little have been sufficient for me to stop pursuing this natural impulse that God put in me So Sor Juana argued that since her talent was a divine gift she should neither be praised nor blamed for it and she included a list of exemplary women from the Bible and from classical antiquity to champion the intellectual rights of women and she implied that women as scientists have empirical advantages by reframing cooking as a philosophical practice and poked fun at Aristotle and wrote if Aristotle had done some cooking he would have written even more and she claimed a superiority for women on the basis of the menial chores assigned to them Sor Juana distinguished herself from her male colleagues by suggesting that her brilliance was not in spite of her gender but in some ways because of it such a feminist argument was unique in 17th century New Spain in 17th century St. Paul's famous precept let women keep silent in church now while some have interpreted this to mean that public lecturing or preaching is inappropriate for women Sor Juana took that quite literally to frame her argument about women's education she wrote that not only women but men too should be silent and listen in church that does not mean that women should study or give private lessons in fact the Christian community needs educated women especially to instruct young girls who might be led into sin by men who tend to be heretics one sex has nothing to do with one's ability to understand the bible and while she championed the intellectual rights of women she also defended her own right to disagree with father Vera and highlighted the absurdity of framing Vera's view as immune from criticism and she asked is it bold of me to oppose Vera yet not so for that reverent father to oppose the three holy fathers of the church in 1693 the theological debates were put aside and Sor Juana became the subject of a secret episcopal trial started by the powerful bishop of new spain and the archbishop's attitude towards women was medieval he considered women to be the source of temptation to man he hated the theater and fiestas that Sor Juana wrote comedias and even published them must have been a crime in his eyes and the archbishop's goal was to silence Sor Juana so the charges levied against her included the suspicion of heresy and activities incompatible with her religious state after five months Sor Juana was found guilty and ordered to renounce her literary and intellectual activities she was forced to make a public declaration of guilt which the archbishop then circulated among the other nuns of Mexico city and her downfall was to serve as an example for all those women who might foolishly consider trespassing on the exclusive masculine territory of knowledge clerics dominated the intellectual scene in new spain and created a society in which higher education became synonymous with an ecclesiastical career powerful men within the colonial church built an intellectual emotional machine that not only promoted official knowledge but also excluded dissenting opinions and unwelcome participants such as Sor Juana Sor Juana's assertion of female access to knowledge and culture challenged the very foundation upon which it had been built she skated on very thin eyes for many years and Sor Juana's nuanced intellectual abilities clashed with patriarchal society's tendency to relegate women to a condition of ignorance surrounded by criticism and under great pressure from her confessor Sor Juana began the process of forced abjuration in 1693 a couple of years later in 1695 a plague hit Mexico city and while looking after her sisters in the convent she contracted the disease and died at the age of 46 Sor Juana was neither royal nor aristocratic but we remember her today for her intense love of learning during her lifetime two out of three volumes of her complete works were published and the last volume was published five years after her death and like the other volumes was reprinted several times within the posthumous volume we find her first biography by father Diego Caejo which was based largely on her own words Sor Juana is a national icon in Mexico she is the subject of many movies plays novels and Netflix series and her image appears on the 200 pesos bill her old convent is now a university bearing her name the university of the cloister of Sor Juana was founded in 1979 and the life and work of Sor Juana forms the intellectual basis and identity of the institution I hope you enjoyed watching this video please feel free to share your comments with me thank you