Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - Nominee

"I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.”

 - Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Early feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a 17th century poet, Catholic nun and scholar. Sor Juana’s mother raised her and her two siblings (all of whom were born out of wedlock) in her childhood home where she was educated and given free reign of her grandfather’s immense library, something that was forbidden to girls. She was a child prodigy who had a remarkable aptitude for everything from mathematics to Latin as well as philosophy and Greek logic. Sor Juana was sent to Mexico City where she hoped to study disguised as a young man but she was unsuccessful in that endeavor. Due to her family’s influence, she was able to become a lady-in-waiting for the colonial viceroy’s court. While Sor Juana was working there, the Viceroy Marquis de Mancera of Spain brought in several theologians, jurists, philosophers, and poets to test her knowledge unprepared and she passed with flying colors. This brought her an increased positive reputation and fame as well as marriage proposals which she rejected. Sor Juana decided instead to begin her novitiate at the age of 19 and as a nun (who remained cloistered for the rest of her life) she was free to study the more than 4000 books she collected in her cell – one of the largest private libraries in the New World. Her poetry and plays were widely read and brought her renown in Europe and Spanish America for celebrating the “magicas infusions (magical infusions)” of Indigenous American cultures – all of which earned her a reputation as one of the greatest lyric poets of the Age. In her work as in her life, she acknowledged being “en dos partes dividida (divided in two parts),” torn between passion and reason, sensuality and religious devotion. Contemporaries gossiped about her liaisons with other nuns (and the wife of the viceroy of the Court of Mexico City), but it was her audaciously brilliant verse, and the threat to the traditional male authority it posed, that proved her undoing. In her most famous work Reply to Sor Filotea, she defended the intellectual rights of women and condemned the Church for helping keep women uneducated. As a result of challenging societal values and ecclesiastical dogma she was officially censured. In 1694, she signed documents that may have been conscious rejections of her past life and donated many of her books to help the suffering poor in the city. She died the following year at the age of 43, while nursing her sister nuns in the midst of an epidemic. Nobel Prize winning author and poet Octavio Paz said of her poetry that it was the most important produced in the Americas until the advent of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Sor Juana – who has been pictured on Mexico’s 200-peso note among other currency in that country – has been an inspiration and a focus of study for centuries. She has also been named one of the most influential contributors to the Spanish Golden Age. Her former convent is now the University of the Cloister for Sor Juana. Her childhood town was renamed in her honor, Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Sor Juana’s name was inscribed in gold on the wall of honor in the Mexican Congress in 1995. A statue gifted by Mexico to Madrid, Spain  in 1981 is located in that city’s Parque del Oeste (Western Park).