Writing from a convent cell in seventeenth-century New Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz produced some of the most dazzling lyric, satirical, and philosophical verse in the Spanish Baroque — including the philosophical poem Primero Sueño and her famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea, a reply to a bishop's criticism that argued, with wit and scripture, for women's right to study. Under pressure from the church that remains debated, she surrendered her library and her pen in her last years and died in 1695 nursing epidemic victims. She is now recognized as a founding figure of Mexican and Latin American letters.
A bishop warned her to stop. He published a theological critique she had not meant for print, signed it with a woman's pen name, and told the most celebrated mind in colonial Mexico that a nun had no business with worldly learning. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz answered him in 1691 with one of the boldest essays ever written by a woman of her age. She defended her right to study with wit, scripture, and a long roll call of learned women before her, and she did it from inside a convent cell, three centuries before the world would catch up to the argument. A few years later she gave up her books and her pen, signed a renunciation in her own blood, and fell silent. Why she stopped is still argued. That she could out-think the men who silenced her is not.