Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1651-1695) was born on a small ranch southeast of Mexico, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Criolla woman. She was raised by her grandparents in the nearby town of Panoayan. She learned to read quite early both Spanish and Latin. At the age of five she could do accounts and by eight, she was composing poetry. She had learned Greek as an adolescent as well as the Aztec language.

She wanted a life of scholarship, not matrimony, so she decided to become a nun which might enable her to study as she wished After a brief time in a Carmelite convent, she was admitted to St. Paula’s convent of the order of St. Jerome. She took the name of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz when she made profession in 1669. She studied, wrote and collected a large library of books.

Sor Juana pursued science, music and literature, and along the way, collected her own library. She was soon in demand as a fine composer of poetry and plays and other literary works. The literary works of Sor Juana might be classified as “secular” rather than “sacred.” She was frequently admonished by clergy and hierarchy and was told to focus on religious rather than on secular subjects. Her confessor ordered her to stop writing, so she dismissed him as her confessor, certain that the guidance of the Holy Spirit would suffice. Eventually she stopped writing rather than incur the wrath of the Church. She died in 1695.