Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?-1695), Mexican poet and scholar, whose ingenious, eloquent, and expressive verse established her as the outstanding 17th-century poet of colonial Latin America. She was born Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramirez in San Miguel, Nepantla, Mexico, and was mostly self-educated. Her first biographer placed her birth in 1651, but subsequent researchers have upturned evidence that may prove that she was born in 1648. A prodigy in her childhood, she learned to read at the age of three. In her teens, she served as a lady-in-waiting at the court of the viceroy of New Spain and was renowned for her beauty, wit, intelligence, and learning. In 1667 she retired from court life to become a nun. Some biographers have attributed her retirement to an unhappy love affair, but she declared that only the monastic life permitted her sufficient opportunity to carry on her intellectual pursuits.

As a nun, Juana de la Cruz studied theology, literature, history, music, and science, and in the process acquired a vast library. She corresponded with many leading poets and scholars of her day and wrote poetry that earned her the sobriquet of the Tenth Muse. Some authorities of the Catholic Church in Mexico disapproved of her studies and sought to curtail them. In 1691, in response to a public critique from a superior, she wrote a letter defending her secular interests and pleading for equal educational opportunities for women. The letter, which came to be known as Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Response to Sister Filotea) is one of her best-known works and is considered a defining work in feminist literature. Two years after writing it, however, she gave up her studies and turned almost wholly to religious contemplation.

Her writings, comprising lyric and allegorical poems and religious and secular drama, were first published in Spain between 1689 and 1700, and have been published frequently since that time. Her works include Inundación castálida de la única poetisa, musa décima, sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Flood from the Muses’ Springs by the Poetess, Tenth Muse, Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1689); Segundo Volumen des las obras de Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz (Second Volume of the Works of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1692); and Fama y obras pósthumas de Fénix de México y Dézima Musa (Fame and Posthumous Works of the Mexican Phoenix and Tenth Muse, 1700). Her works have also been translated into English and collected in several volumes and anthologies, including Sor Juana’s Dream (1986), A Sor Juana Anthology (1988), and The Answer (1994).