The Wisdom of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

She was a self-taught nun in seventeenth-century Mexico who became one of the great poets and philosophers of the Spanish-speaking world.

The Wisdom of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Knowledge, Solitude, and the Soul's Ascent traces the life and thought of the Mexican baroque genius who assembled one of the largest libraries in the Americas inside a Hieronymite cell, wrote the great philosophical poem of the Spanish baroque, and produced the first systematic defense of women's intellectual rights in the Spanish-speaking world.

Born in 1648 between two volcanoes in central Mexico, Juana Inés de Asbaje taught herself to read at three, mastered Latin in twenty lessons, and at sixteen entered the viceregal court as a celebrated prodigy. She chose the convent over marriage because no other framework would let her continue her studies. Behind the double grille of San Jerónimo she gathered four thousand books, scientific instruments, maps, and globes, and produced sonnets, plays, theological letters, and her masterpiece, Primero Sueño, a 975-line poem about the soul's nocturnal ascent through the cosmos and its failure to grasp the totality of knowledge.

The Wisdom of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Knowledge, Solitude, and the Soul's Ascent offers:

• A clear introduction to the most important woman writer of colonial Latin America
• Vivid accounts of her years at the viceregal court and inside the convent of San Jerónimo
• A close reading of Primero Sueño, the masterpiece of the Spanish baroque
• An exploration of her famous defense of women's right to learn, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea
• Honest treatment of the institutional pressures that forced her late renunciations
• A portrait of seventeenth-century New Spain at the height of its baroque culture

Written for thoughtful readers who want to understand why Sor Juana's voice still matters three centuries after her death, this book is for anyone interested in literature, philosophy, religion, women's history, and the long story of how minds make their way against the conditions that constrain them.