Intellectual setting
Sor Juana worked within the viceregal court and convent culture of late seventeenth-century colonial Mexico, where women were formally barred from university study. She entered the Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City in 1669 in part to secure the freedom to read and write, assembling one of the largest private libraries in the Americas and corresponding with scholars, before ecclesiastical pressure from the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz (writing as "Sor Filotea"), and Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seijas eventually forced her to renounce secular study shortly before her death during an epidemic in 1695.
Key ideas
Defense of women's right to learning
In her 1691 "Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz," written after a bishop rebuked her for pursuing secular study, she marshaled scripture, patristic authority, and a genealogy of learned women through history to argue that women possess the same right and capacity as men to study both sacred and secular knowledge.
The soul's ascent in Primero sueño
Her philosophical poem "First Dream" depicts the soul rising by night in pursuit of comprehensive rational understanding of the universe, only to be defeated by the sheer totality of creation - a Baroque staging of the aspirations and limits of the human intellect.
Legacy
Celebrated in her lifetime across the Spanish-speaking world as "the Tenth Muse" and "Phoenix of Mexico," her reputation faded through the eighteenth century before being revived by twentieth-century scholarship - most influentially Octavio Paz's "Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith" (1982) - and reclaimed by Latin American and feminist philosophy as a foundational figure, often identified as the first Latin American thinker to raise the question of women's intellectual status and among the earliest feminist philosophers of the Americas.