July 18, 2026

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Took the Veil to Keep Studying, and Signed Her Own Epitaph in Blood

She entered the convent at twenty because marriage would have ended her studying, turned a bishop's published rebuke into the first great defense of a woman's right to learn in the Americas, gave up her four-thousand-book library, and died nursing her sisters through the plague at forty-six.

In 1664, the Viceroy of New Spain, Don Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, the Marquis of Mancera, summoned a panel to examine a sixteen-year-old girl who had lately arrived at his court. He gathered, by the account of his Jesuit biographer Diego Calleja, "forty of the most learned men in New Spain," theologians, philosophers, jurists, mathematicians, historians, and poets, and set them in a room with Juana Ramírez de Asbaje, an illegitimate criolla from the village of San Miguel de Nepantla, in the shadow of the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. They put questions to her, unprepared, across every subject a colonial university taught. The Viceroy later told Calleja that she had fielded them "in the manner that a royal galleon might fend off the attacks of small canoes," disposing of each man in his own specialty. The court took her for a prodigy. She was, by every contemporaneous description, also beautiful. She had several offers of marriage. She declined them all.

The puzzle of her life is already present in that room. She could out-argue the forty learned men of Mexico City, but she could not enroll in their university. She had taught herself to read at three, by following her older sister to a school for small children and tricking the schoolmistress into giving her lessons, she writes in the letter we now call the Respuesta. At six or seven, having heard "that in Mexico City there was a University, and schools where the sciences were taught," she begged her mother to "dress me in boy's clothing and send me to Mexico City" so she could attend. Her mother refused. She got to Mexico City anyway, sent to live with an aunt at eight, and learned Latin, by her own count, in "fewer than twenty lessons." To force herself to learn faster she would cut off four to six fingers' breadth of her hair, measuring it first, and rule that if it grew back before she had mastered whatever she had set out to learn, she would cut it again as punishment, "for it did not seem right for my head to be dressed in hair when it was so bare of knowledge, which was a more desirable adornment." She was, in other words, the kind of child who invents her own curriculum and her own penalties for failing it. The only thing the society around her would not give her was an institution to receive it.

The convent as a study-hack

The question her biographers keep returning to is the one Octavio Paz put at the center of his 1982 book Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith: why did she become a nun? She was, by 1667, the ornament of the viceregal court, a lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine Leonor del Carretto, with patrons and admirers. She answered it herself, in the same 1691 letter, and the answer is the one thing about her that resists every pious reading. She did not take the veil for a religious vocation. She took it because it was the only legal arrangement in seventeenth-century New Spain in which a woman could refuse marriage without becoming a dependent of her family, and could keep studying.

"I entered the convent," she wrote, "although I knew the situation had certain characteristics (I speak of secondary qualities, not formal ones) incompatible with my character, but considering the total antipathy I had toward matrimony, the convent was the least disproportionate and most honorable decision I could make." The "secondary characteristics" she meant were the very things a convent normally imposes: community, noise, obligation. She lists them as defects to be overcome. The "first (and in the end the most important) obstacle to overcome was to relinquish all the minor defects in my character, such as wanting to live alone, and not wanting any obligatory occupation that would limit the freedom of my studies, or the noise of a community that would interfere with the tranquil silence of my books." Read it carefully. She is describing the convent as a cost she is paying in order to study, not as a good she is seeking. Marriage was worse, because marriage meant the end of the books.

She tried the Discalced Carmelites first, in 1667, an austere reformed order whose discipline nearly killed her; she left after three months. On the twenty-fourth of April, 1669, she professed at the Convent of San Jerónimo, the Hieronymite house in Mexico City, whose rule was lax enough to permit what she wanted. She signed herself into the Libro de profesiones as "Yo, soror Juana Inés de la Cruz," and she would live in that convent for twenty-six years and twenty-one days, until her death.

What she built there was, by the standards of the colony, an impossibility. Her cell became a two-story apartment with a library that grew to roughly four thousand volumes, scientific and mathematical instruments, musical instruments, maps, and jewels given by admirers. The convent's locutory, the grated window through which nuns could receive visitors, became the most serious literary salon in New Spain. She wrote poems for state occasions, plays for the court, villancicos for cathedral feasts, and a long philosophical poem, Primero sueño (1692), on the soul's night-journey through the architecture of the cosmos. The Vicereine María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, the Countess of Paredes, became her intimate friend and patron, carried her manuscripts to Spain, and arranged the first Madrid edition of her poetry, Inundación castálida, in 1689. A second volume followed in Seville in 1692. She was, in her late thirties, among the most published poets of the Hispanic Baroque, and one of the only women in the Atlantic world running anything like an intellectual career at that scale.

The mechanism that held it together was patronage. As long as a sympathetic viceroy or vicereine sat in Mexico City, the convent-as-study-hack held. The Marquis and Marchioness of Mancera protected her; the Archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera, who served as viceroy from 1673 to 1680, tolerated her; the Marquis and Marchioness de la Laguna (1680-1686) actively championed her. When the Lagunas returned to Spain in 1688, the protection thinned. What remained was the convent, the library, and the habit of writing. And then a bishop decided to publish a private letter of hers.

The bishop's trap, and the letter she wrote back

In 1690, in conversation at her locutory, Sor Juana had offered a sharp critique of a famous 1640s Maundy Thursday sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Vieira, one of the most celebrated preachers of the age. The Bishop of Puebla, Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, admired her argument and asked her to put it in writing. She did, titling it Crisis sobre un sermón. What she did not know was that the Bishop, on the twenty-fifth of November, 1690, had it printed under the title Carta Atenagórica, "Letter Worthy of Athena," and prefaced it with a letter of his own, signed with the pseudonym "Sor Filotea de la Cruz," a supposed sister advising another sister. The prefatory letter called her "una mujer que es honra de su sexo," a woman who is the honor of her sex, and said he did not approve of those who rejected women's use of letters outright, but it urged her that it was time to "se perfeccionen los empleos y que se mejoren los libros," to perfect her employments and improve her books, and lamented that so great an understanding "se abate a las rateras noticias de la tierra," debases itself to the lowly knowledge of the earth, rather than penetrate what passes in Heaven. He had, in effect, published her private theological opinion without her consent and used the publication as the vehicle for an admonishment. The Carta Atenagórica also happened to attack a Jesuit admired by the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, a man known for censoring the theater, disliking poetry, and regarding women's intellectual life as a disorder. Whether the Bishop of Puebla intended it or not, he had set her in the path of an archbishop with the means to silence her.

She waited three months. Then, on the first of March, 1691, she dated and sent her reply, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, from the Convent of San Jerónimo. It is the document on which her modern reputation rests. It is at once an intellectual autobiography, a defense of women's right to study, and a catalogue of the learned women of antiquity and the Church, from Deborah and the Sibyls to Saint Jerome's pupils Eustochium, Fabiola, and Marcella, to the nuns whose writings the Church itself had published, Gertrude, Teresa, Brigid. She argues, with scriptural citation, that Saint Paul's "let women keep silence in the churches" meant only the material pulpit, not private study and writing, because the Church had permitted women to write for two thousand years. She recounts the hair-cutting, the boy's-clothing plea, the twenty Latin lessons. And then, in the passage every biographer quotes, she turns the kitchen into a laboratory:

And what shall I tell you, lady, of the natural secrets I have discovered while cooking? I see that an egg holds together and fries in butter or in oil, but, on the contrary, in syrup shrivels into shreds; observe that to keep sugar in a liquid state one need only add a drop or two of water in which a quince or other bitter fruit has been soaked; observe that the yolk and the white of one egg are so dissimilar that each with sugar produces a result not obtainable with both together. I do not wish to weary you with such inconsequential matters, and make mention of them only to give you full notice of my nature, for I believe they will be occasion for laughter. But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner. And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.

The passage is a piece of Baroque rhetoric that does several things at once. It performs the modesty the Bishop demanded of a nun, it concedes the domestic sphere the Church assigned to women, and it smuggles through the claim that observation of the kitchen is natural philosophy, that Aristotle himself would have written more had he cooked. The "trivial details" are a small empirical physics of emulsions and sugars. She is telling the Bishop, in his own language, that the mind he wants her to put away does not in fact go away when the books do. She had already said it more starkly a few paragraphs earlier, in the image that recurs through every biography of her: "I thought I would flee myself, but I, poor wretch, brought myself with me as well as this inclination, my greatest enemy (I can not determine whether Heaven gave it to me as a gift or a punishment), for when it was dimmed or interfered with by the many spiritual exercises present in the religious life, it exploded in me like gunpowder, proof in my own person that privation is the cause of appetite." Deprive the mind of books and it studies the egg in the pan. The Respuesta ends with a famous deflection of modesty: "In all the above, most honored lady, I do not wish to say (nor is such folly to be found in me) that I have been persecuted for my wisdom, but merely for my love of wisdom and letters, having achieved neither one nor the other."

The same years produced the poem that travels under the title "Hombres necios que acusáis," "You Foolish Men," a satirical redondilla on the sexual double standard that is the most anthologized poem in colonial Spanish-American literature. "You foolish men who lay the guilt on women," it opens in Margaret Sayers Peden's translation, "not seeing you're the cause of the very thing you blame." It runs through the hypocrisy of men who want a Thaïs in the woman they court and a Lucretia in the woman they have possessed, and ends: "Why be outraged at the guilt that is of your own doing? Have them as you make them or make them what you will." The poem was not published under her name in her lifetime in quite the form we read it, and its dating is uncertain, but it circulates with the Respuesta as the twin expression of her case. It is also, in a colony whose court and convents were the only rooms a woman could speak in, an extraordinarily direct thing to have written.

The renunciation in blood, and the nursing

The Respuesta is the document on which her fame rests and the document that began her undoing. Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas and his vicar general, according to the sorjuanista Grady Wray, opened "a secret episcopal process against Sor Juana accusing her of heresy, disrespect for authority and activities incompatible with her monastic state" in 1693. Whether or not there was a formal process, the pressure was real. The protection of the viceregal court was gone. The Lagunas were in Spain. The convent itself, after the floods and famine of 1691-92 and the indigenous riot that burned the viceregal palace on the eighth of June, 1692, had turned against her; a faction of nuns blamed her "worldly" life for the pestilence. By February 1693 she had ceased to write.

On the eighth of February, 1694, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her profession, she ratified her vows in the Libro de profesiones of the Convent of San Jerónimo. The entry is in her hand and, in its closing lines, in her blood. "Yo, Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa profesa de este convento," it begins, "no sólo ratifico mi profesión y vuelvo a reiterar mis votos, sino que de nuevo hago voto de creer y defender que mi santa virgen María fue concebida sin mancha de pecado original en el primer instante de su ser." Then, signed in blood: "En fe de lo cual lo firmo en 8 de febrero de 1694 con mi sangre. Juana Inés de la Cruz." On the same folio she added what amounts to her own epitaph, a request that the day of her death be recorded above, and the line that became the title of María Luisa Bemberg's 1990 film: "Aquí arriba se ha de anotar el día de mi muerte, mes y año... me encomienden a Dios, que he sido y soy la peor que ha habido... Yo, la peor del mundo: Juana Inés de la Cruz." I, the worst of all the world.

She sold or gave away her library. The Jesuit Diego Calleja, writing the biography that prefaced her 1700 posthumous works, said it was the renunciation that cost her most: "La amargura, que más, sin estremecer el semblante, pasó la madre Juana, fue deshacerse de sus amados libros, como el que en amaneciendo el día claro, apaga la luz artificial por inútil," the bitterness that, more than any other and without a tremor of her face, Mother Juana endured, was ridding herself of her beloved books, like one who, at the break of clear day, extinguishes the lamp as useless. Calleja said she left only three devotional books in her cell, "and many hair-shirts and disciplines." The proceeds went to the poor through Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas. A later-found clause in the testament of her friend Father José de Lombeyda says she had asked him to sell the books and give the money to the archbishop for distribution, which some scholars read as evidence the renunciation was voluntary and others as the formula a coerced person uses to make a forced act look free. The historical record does not resolve it. What is certain is that the woman who had built the largest private library in New Spain let it be dispersed, and stopped writing.

She had, by then, about fourteen months to live. In the spring of 1695 the plague that had followed the floods returned to Mexico City and entered the Convent of San Jerónimo. Sor Juana, who held the offices of accountant and archivist of the convent, nursed her sisters through it. She recorded the deaths of five of them in the convent's books, one after another, in January, February, March, and April. On the seventeenth of April, 1695, two Sundays after Easter, she was the sixth. She was forty-six. Her friend the polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora delivered the eulogy at her funeral. The inventory of her cell, made after her death, listed one shelf of a hundred and eighty selected volumes, the books she had kept back for the convent's use, and almost nothing else.

Paz, in The Traps of Faith, argued that her life and silencing together are the test case of what a closed theocratic society does to a free intellect. The convent that she had entered as a study-hack became, at the end, the place that took the books away. The Respuesta that she wrote to defend the right to study is the work that survives her, and it survives because it is the one document in which she set down, in her own voice and at full length, what she was doing and why. "I have not been persecuted for my wisdom," she wrote, "but merely for my love of wisdom and letters, having achieved neither one nor the other." She was wrong about the last clause. She had achieved one of them, and it is the reason there is still a biography to write.

Read the full life: Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith (Harvard University Press, 1988, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden).