Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz – A self-taught scholar and nun in colonial Mexico who defied the Church with poetry and philosophy

How Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote her way into history — and trouble — in colonial Mexico

In the high desert light of 17th-century New Spain, before feminism had a name and when books were chained to walls like sinners, a girl began to read.

Not merely read. Devour.

Her name was Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana — but history would come to know her, scandalously and sanctified, as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: poet, philosopher, nun, feminist icon centuries before the term existed. Born illegitimate. Raised in a land ruled by vice-regal Spain. And still, she dared — no, insisted — on knowing everything.

A woman with a library in her cell? Unforgivable. A woman who wrote back to bishops? Excommunicable. A woman who thought — dangerously.

And yet, she didn’t burn. She wrote.

The story begins, as many stories of brilliant women do, with silence. Or rather, with too much noise — the noise of men deciding who gets to speak.

Juana was born in 1648 (or maybe 1651 — recordkeeping was shaky and girls didn’t matter) near Mexico City. A creole, a bastard, a bookworm. She taught herself Latin by the age of seven. She begged to dress as a boy to attend university. Her family laughed.

So she read. She read by candlelight. She read hidden in haciendas. She read until her head ached and her soul swelled. At 16, she was tested by a panel of scholars — a sort of academic duel. The result? She dazzled them. Then vanished into a convent, because that was the only way to keep her books, her time, and her mind.

The convent. That paradox of liberation and enclosure. A place where women were watched — but also left alone. A place of prayer, yes, but also of letters, ink, silence, and song.

Sor Juana chose the Hieronymite order not for its piety but for its leniency. She needed space — and paper. She needed, as Virginia Woolf would say centuries later, a room of her own. She got it.

Her cell became a fortress of intellect: thousands of books, scientific instruments, musical scores. From this cloistered chamber, she composed baroque poems that shimmered with double meaning, wrote plays that mocked court hypocrisy, and crafted treatises on the nature of love, gender, and power.

She was the most celebrated writer in the Americas. The “Tenth Muse.” A living contradiction: a nun who spoke like a siren, cloistered yet cosmopolitan, celibate yet seductive on the page.

Her poetry? Velvet and dagger. Consider this:

“Who sins more, he who sins for pay,
or she who pays for sin?”

That wasn’t just verse. That was war. Sor Juana didn’t merely write poems. She wrote against — against the Church's control of female intellect, against misogyny masked as theology, against silence.

She had patrons — notably the viceroy’s wife, the Countess de Paredes, to whom she dedicated swooning, subversively erotic verses. It’s still debated whether their bond was romantic, but what’s clear is that Sor Juana loved her with fervor. Her language dripped with admiration, adoration — and rebellion.

And rebellion, like ink, stains.

By 1690, Sor Juana was powerful. Too powerful.

A Jesuit bishop, hiding behind a pseudonym, attacked her in print, accusing her of arrogance and impiety. Her crime? Writing theology — a field reserved for men. He called her mind “manly” (which he didn’t mean as a compliment).

Most women would have wept. Sor Juana sharpened her quill.

Her Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz was a literary thunderclap: part autobiography, part philosophical manifesto. She defended her right to study, to write, to think. She quoted Church fathers, poets, saints, and logic itself. She wrote with the calm fire of someone who knows she's right and also knows she’s cornered.

It would be her last major work.

The Church closed in. Her patron left New Spain. The climate chilled. The Inquisition sniffed around. And Sor Juana — proud, brilliant, exhausted — capitulated.

She signed confessions. Sold her books. Stopped writing.

History blurred here, as if even biographers can’t bear the ending. Some say she was broken. Others believe she was strategizing. Playing dead. Disappearing in plain sight.

In 1695, the plague entered the convent. Sor Juana, ever the rationalist, cared for the sick. She died in the process.

She was 46.

But ink is stubborn. And Sor Juana — the philosopher-nun, the self-taught scholar, the cloistered comet — would not fade.

In 20th-century Mexico, she was resurrected as a proto-feminist hero. Her face graces the 200-peso bill. Scholars rediscovered her brilliance — not just her baroque sonnets, but her scientific curiosity, her proto-queer voice, her radical courage. Her legacy flickers through college courses, Netflix shows, protest signs.

She is now a patron saint of nerd girls and iconoclasts. A reminder that intellectual hunger, once awakened, cannot be tamed — not by gender, not by dogma, not even by death.

When we speak today of the silencing of women, of the fight for education, of the Catholic Church’s troubled past, Sor Juana hovers ghost-like in the margins — a spectral scribe with ink-stained fingers, whispering truths centuries ahead of her time.

She asked questions that still sting.

Why are women denied knowledge?

Why must intellect be a man’s right?

Why, when a woman speaks with brilliance, must she also be punished?

Sor Juana never needed a pulpit. She had paper. She had fire. She had the nerve to say what the world wasn’t ready to hear — and the rhythm to make it unforgettable.

And that is why she survives.

Not just as a nun, or a scholar. But as a woman who looked at the whole glittering machinery of patriarchy and whispered — no, wrote — back: I know more than you think. And I will not be quiet.

Not then. Not now.