SYMHC Classics: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

This 2019 episode covers a woman who was the Spanish empire's most widely published poet of her time. Her work has survived until today, but not her own thoughts about much of her life.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday Today. Maybe the three seventy one birthday of
Sorwana and Nez Dela Cruz. As we note in our
episode on her, her birthdate is not entirely clear, but
one of the possible dates that comes up a lot
is November twelve, sixty one. She was a poet who
lived in New Spain, and she was requested by a

(00:23):
lot of listeners. Our episode on Sorguana came out on
September eight, nineteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.

(00:47):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, we
have one of those episodes that a lot of people
have been asking us to do for years, indeed only
just now getting to it. We have had a lot
of listener requests to talk about sor Juanna Inez de
la Cruz, including from Bailey, Alyssa, Wendy Arturo, Tressa, Shannon Mario, Ella, Jessica, Gail, Lindsay,

(01:11):
Megan and Chavon. At least three of those are folks
who requested it when I asked for some topic suggestions
on our Facebook page recently, and I'm sure we have
had other requests as well. At this point, we can
only look back through like four years or so of email,
and the rest of it is gone into oblivion. Well,

(01:32):
and even some of those four years has gone into
oblivion thanks to a number of email migrations. Those unfortunately,
they are always casualties. Yes, yes, when uh when, When
you are not the personal controller of your own email
because you work for a company, then sometimes things happen
that are beyond your control anyway. Sorwana Inez de la

(01:54):
Cruz lived in New Spain in the seventeenth century, that's
in what's now Mexico, and she was the Spanish Empire's
most widely published poet of her time. Her work was
read in both Spanish and Portuguese speaking areas in Europe
and the America's and the Philippines, and her work has
survived until today. But in terms of like her own

(02:15):
personal thoughts and introspection, we don't have as much about
a lot of her life. Consequently, her life has been
just really subject to interpretation. It has been interpreted incredibly
differently depending on who has been doing the interpreting. So
I mean, there's a lot of variety you can you
can get an almost totally different sense of who she

(02:37):
was depending on exactly who is describing her. Also, her
poetry is very complex, and she wrote in poetic forms
that were common during the Spanish Golden Age that won't
necessarily be familiar even to people who have studied poetry
like I have studied poetry, but I have studied poetry
in English, and a lot of the poetic forms that

(02:58):
she wrote in are totally unfamiliar to me. So if
you studied Spanish language poetry, specifically in particular the New
Spanish Baroque, that might all be forms that you know about.
Um not as easy to explain to English speakers who
don't have the familiarity. So this episode is a lot
more about sor Juana's life than it is about her work. Yeah,

(03:22):
when I studied poetry in college, there was not really
any delving into the New Spanish Baroque. No, well, then
it's it has the added layer of complexity of if
if you are not a fluent speaker of Spanish, you're
reading a translation into English, and translating poetry is particularly
difficult because of how poetry works. Yes, I learned that

(03:45):
primarily from Charles Baudlair, not Spanish, but similar translation issues
not nearly as beautiful or melodic to my ear in English,
but well. And one of the things that one of
my one of my literature professors told us when I
was in college was that Baudelaire was the person who
translated Poe into French. So pose poetry in French is

(04:08):
incredibly beautiful in a way that it isn't necessarily in English.
It really is like the cadence of it is really beautiful.
It uh, it has its own rhythm that is not
the way it reads in English. I also love Poe
in English, but there is a whole it's like a
whole different writer essentially, um, which is kind of illustrative
of what you were saying, Like, anytime you're translating and

(04:29):
then interpreting and extrapolating someone's essence from their written work
and poetry that has been shifted around, you're going to
get different versions of who that person was. Yep, if
you only read Poe in French, I bet you would
think he was slightly different than he really was in
real life. So applying this to today's topic, Sarjuana and
Es de la Cruz was born Juanna Ramirez as Bahi

(04:53):
in San Miguel and the Pantla, which is southeast of
Mexico City. Her mother was Isabel Ramirez de Santiana, who
was a creolea woman, that is, she was of Spanish descent,
but she was born in New Spain, and her father
was Pedro Manuel de Esbahi, who Wanna described as Bosque.
He had come to the Americas from Europe, and Juana
was the youngest of three daughters who were born to

(05:15):
Isabel and Pedro. Wanna's date of birth isn't clear, as
is the case with a lot of people born this
long ago. Some sources note it as November twelfth, sixteen
fifty one, but there's also a baptismal record from her
parish that's probably hers and that was dated December two sixty.
This record notes the baptism of a girl named Inez,

(05:37):
whose godparents were Isabel Ramirez's brother and sister, so her
maternal uncle and aunt. This record also describes the young
Innes as daughter of the Church, which meant that her
parents weren't married to one another. Sometime after Juanna was born,
her father left the family, and we do not know
why that happened or where he went. We don't even

(05:57):
actually know exactly when it happened. It us by the
time Juanna was five or six years old, but it
was probably earlier than that, and As took her children
to live with her father at his hacienda known as Panoya,
and this was one of two haciendas that he was
leasing from the church, which had a workforce of enslaved
Africans and Indigenous people. Enslavement of indigenous people had been

(06:20):
outlawed in New Spain, although working conditions for indigenous people
still tended to be abusive and exploitive. This family wasn't
especially affluent, but they were relatively comfortable and stable, and
they were able to send Juana's older sister, Josepha Maria,
to a local school that was being run by a
woman in the community for the benefit of its less

(06:40):
wealthy children. When she was about three years old, Wanna
sneaked away from home and followed her sister to school
and then told the teacher that her mother had ordered
that she get lessons to In Juanna's account, this teacher
did not believe her, but she found the whole thing
so charming that she gave Wanna lessons anyway, and Juanna

(07:00):
learned so quickly that by the time her mother realized
what she was doing and put a stop to it,
she already knew how to read. Aside from that and
about twenty lessons in Latin, this was Wanna's only formal education.
But once she knew how to read, Wanna started educating herself.
She started with her grandfather's library. She would take the
books from the shelves and then go hide in the

(07:23):
hacienda's chapel to read them undisturbed. Juanna did not have
a lot of choice in what she studied. The books
that were available to her were the ones in her
grandfather's library, and that was that. But she dedicated herself
to whatever she had at hand, and to motivate herself,
she would cut a few inches off of her hair,
intending to master a particular subject by the time it

(07:43):
grew back, and if she failed, she would cut more
of her hair off. She said, quote, it did not
seem to me reasonable that I dressed the hair of
a head naked of knowledge, which was a more appreciable adornment.
When she learned that there was a university in Mexico City,
but that only men were wowed to attend. She begged
her mother to let her dress as a boy so

(08:04):
that she could go. Her mother did not go for
this plan. I think she was also still a small
she was too young in addition to being a girl,
too young to go to university, but yeah, there was
no way her family was going to allow her to
do that. In January of sixteen fifty six, when she
was about eight, Juanna's grandfather died, and at about the

(08:24):
same time, her mother started a relationship with a man
named Diego Ruiz Lozano, although they also never married. Isabelle
and Diego had two daughters and a son together, and
sometime as all of this was happening, Wana was sent
to Mexico City to live with her mother's sister. All
of these changes probably played a part in her going

(08:44):
to Mexico City, but the exact reasons for Juanna's departure
aren't documented anywhere, and we also don't know whether her
older sisters were also sent to live somewhere else at
the same time. But we do know that Juanna's half
siblings had better prospects for their futures than one and
her sisters did. All six of them had been born
to unwed parents, although that was not as stigmatized as

(09:06):
folks may imagine. In terms of religion, New Spain was
very strictly Catholic, but at the same time people seem
to recognize and accept that people who were not married
to each other might have babies together. The family doesn't
seem to have been looked down on or ostracized because
of any of this, and several people within the family
went on to marry prominent, respected men, attend university, or

(09:30):
find careers in the church or the military. I think
people imagine that if if you had children and you
were unmarried, that your whole family might be immediately shunned
from society and you had to hide forever, And that
just doesn't seem to be how things were actually working
when and where it wanted was living. More important than
the children's birth was the fact that Diego Ruiz Losano

(09:53):
had some money and he was present in his children's lives.
So one has half sisters, all had dowries, and they
had a father to negotiate for them in their marriages.
Wanna had none of that. She did have some relatives
who could offer some protection. Though her mother's sister, Maria
had married a wealthy man named Wanda Mata, and we

(10:13):
know very little of her life over the next few years,
except that she was extremely precocious and continued to be
very eager to learn. By age thirteen, she was teaching
Latin to others, and she also taught herself no waddle.
She also grew into an attractive young woman, which caught
the attention of New Spain's nobility. We will get to
that after a quick sponsor break. In the seventeenth century,

(10:46):
New Spain was ruled by a viceroy who acted as
the Crown's presence in the America's The viceroy was sent
to the America's from Spain and to try to ensure
that the viceroy would be loyal to the Crown but
also not become too powerful. Viceroys were given limited terms.
The standard term was technically three years, but often the

(11:06):
actual assignment was more like seven or eight. A lot
of vice stories were given an extension before they even
left from Europe. Relocating someone all the way across the
ocean every three years seems like a lot. Antonio Sebastian
did Toledo. Marquis de Mancera began serving as Viceroy of
New Spain in sixteen sixty four, and he arrived with

(11:27):
his wife Donia leonar Caretto. Buanna's aunt and uncle presented
her at court, and Juanna, at the age of sixteen,
was selected to be a lady in waiting to the Viceroy,
who was in her early thirties. Wanna lived at court
from the age of sixteen until she was about twenty,
and she became known as a court prodigy. One of
the most famous stories from these years is that the

(11:48):
Viceroy brought in a panel of forty scholars to try
to test her intellect and, in his words, quote in
the manner of a royal galleon defending itself against a
few small sloops that had a sale, that did Wanna
and as free herself of the questions, arguments and objections
that so many each in his own class propounded. It's

(12:09):
likely that this story was exaggerated at least somewhat, but
the Vice Roy shorted Love to tell it, so probably
some version of it really did happen. Probably also, the
collective memory of everyone involved shifted to match with the
Vice Royce. Yeah, yeah, it's not the only you know,
examination of a person by a team of scholars that

(12:30):
we've talked about on the show that is probably a
little embellished. Being at court would have given Wanna lots
of resources to continue educating herself. Although she studied literature
and is best known for her writing, Wanna was also
interested in science, astronomy, medicine, and law. She also wrote extensively,

(12:50):
although most of her poems are not dated, so we
don't always know when any particular poem was written. Her
poetry included love poems, including ones written to the Vice Drine,
and in these poems she refers to the vice Rine
as Laura, which is a reference to Petrarch's sonnets. These
were socially acceptable given the vast differences in the two
women's positions. It was more like a troubadour writing a

(13:13):
courtly love sonnet to a lady than a lover writing
a poem to someone who was considered their equal or
their partner. There's a lot of speculation about one as
time at court. A lot of her writings suggest to
people that she had some firsthand experience with love. Her
poetry especially is really evocative of all the feelings that
can come along with a passionate or stormy love affair,

(13:36):
including affection and jealousy and betrayal, and the joy of
requited feelings. A lot of these poems are also erotic,
but at the same time, there is a lot that
we just don't know, which has led people to wonder
whether Wanta had a tragic love affair at court, and
if so, who it was with, and what that person's
gender was. This tickles me a little because I certainly

(13:58):
know that I have read the writing of people who
have never had a romantic relationship who right as though
they did. So it's kind of funny to think, like,
she must have been involved with someone, look what she wrote.
I'm like, not necessarily, she may have just been perceptive. Yeah.
As we noted earlier, the vice Regency of New Spain
was a temporary position. Juana seemed to have been very comfortable,

(14:19):
cared for, and liked during her time at court, but
she also knew that once the Viceroy and Vice rene
went back to Spain, there was no guarantee that she
would find herself similarly favored by their replacements. It was
also incredibly unlikely that she would find a husband while
she was at court. Number one, most of the men
at court were already married. They did like to flirt.

(14:42):
There were for her dalliances and affairs, but they were
already married. No, I'm not saying there were necessarily affairs
with her, just they existed. Also. Number two, marriages were
negotiated between families, and Wana didn't have anybody at court
who could be negotiating eating on her behalf. Number three,
she still had no dowry. More important than all of that, though,

(15:06):
she just didn't want to get married. Even if she
did have a dowry, it was incredibly unlikely that a
husband would just allow her to continue on with her self,
educating and her writing, rather than expecting her to leave
all that behind and take up the duties of a wife.
She said she felt a quote total antipathy towards marriage,

(15:26):
so she decided to become a nun. As was true
for many other women at the time, this was more
of a practical decision than a religious calling. Juanna was
a devout Catholic, but she had never expressed a desire
to devote herself to a religious life. Instead, she recognized
that a convent was the place that she was most
likely to be able to continue on with her course

(15:48):
of study and writing. One flaw in this plan was
that women whose parents were not married were not generally
allowed to join. So Juanna said her birth was legitimate,
something she repeated it numerous points throughout her life, even
though it seems to have been common knowledge that her
parents were not married. Religious orders and convents in New
Spain were stratified and segregated in the same way that

(16:11):
the rest of the general society was different. Convents had
different levels of wealth. Some of them were only open
the people directly from Spain, and others were open only
to Creolea women. The first one that want to join
was the convent of the Discounsed Caramelites of St. Joseph,
but she was only there for a few months. Some

(16:31):
sources say that she left because of her health, but
there's really no record of that. It is more likely
that she just found this particular order way too restrictive
for her tastes. About eighteen months later, she tried again.
On February sixteen sixty nine, she became sore Juana and
As de la Cruz at the Convent of Santa Paula

(16:51):
of the Heeronomite order in Mexico City. In the minds
of many in Mexico City, this was the best possible outcome,
not just for Juanna, but for society as a whole.
Intelligent women were regarded as a threat, and so were
beautiful women. Her Jesuit confessor, and Tonio Nuniez de Miranda,
said that he rejoiced once she was in a convent

(17:13):
because her continuing to be in the public eye had
the potential to cause a lot of harm. Thanks to
how beautiful and learned she was, this convent was a
little different from the very spare, minimal existence that might
immediately come to mind. Each woman joining the convent was
required to provide a dowry. The Convent of Santa Paula

(17:33):
had an average of between three thousand and four thousand
pesos for the dowries that it's nuns provided. Sarwata's dowry
was provided by Pedro Velasquez de la Cadenna. Sarwana also
had a few hundred pasos of her own, which had
been given to her while she was at court, and
she willed that to her mother. The nuns lived in
spacious cells that were more like apartments with their own

(17:55):
small kitchens. Sar Juana bought one in sixte that had
two floors. A nun's servants lived with her, as did
any children or young women they were sheltering or teaching.
Although the nuns in theory lived communally, these rules were
not strictly observed in sor Juana's convent. Many of the
nuns ate food prepared in the kitchens in their own cells,

(18:17):
rather than eating with their religious sisters. The convent as
a whole was supported by a staff of servants, some
of whom were enslaved. Sor Juana's mother gave her an
enslaved servant the year that she joined the convent, and
this woman's name is listed as wanted to San Jose.
Then in six four, Sorjuana sold Wanted to San Jose
and her baby to her sister Josepha Maria, for two

(18:40):
hundred fifty pacos. On average, there were three maids for
each nun at this convent, so it's very likely that
sor Juanna had other servants who were either free or
enslaved while she was living there. They're just not specifically
documented anywhere. Altogether, about two hundred women were living in
the convent. Daily life in the convent was broken up

(19:00):
into a regular pattern of prayers, meals, and other religious duties.
It was a very predictable and regimented pattern. At the
same time, there was a lot of time for chatter
and gossip, which really annoyed sor Juana. To her, the
place seemed like a hotbed of ongoing petty jealousies and intrigues,
and she often wrote about settling into study only for

(19:23):
one of her sisters to come in and gossip, or
of being interrupted by someone playing an instrument or having
allowed conversation, or otherwise being disruptive. At the same time,
the convent was relatively permissive in terms of things like
personal wealth. There wasn't a strictly enforced vow of poverty
for any of these nuns, So so or Wanna turned

(19:44):
her cell into her personal library. She had at least
fift hundred volumes and possibly as many as four thousand.
She also collected scientific and musical instruments. The convent was
also pretty lax about visitors. The nuns didn't really eave
the convent, but they welcomed visitors and entertainers frequently. Sor

(20:04):
Juana turned the locutorio, or the sitting area where the
nuns were allowed to have visitors into a literary salon.
The nuns were technically supposed to keep their faces veiled
when they met with outsiders, but this really wasn't enforced either.
So the decision to join a convent, and to join
this particular convent, given how permissive it was, was an

(20:24):
incredibly savvy move in terms of what Sarwana wanted out
of life. She had various prayers and duties that she
had to tend to throughout the day, but she was
also able to keep studying and learning and writing and
making a name for herself both within and outside of
the convent. We'll talk about her most productive years after
we first paused for a little sponsor break. Overall, sar

(20:55):
Juana seems to have been pretty well respected within her convent.
The nuns acted women from among themselves to serve as
mother superior and in other important positions, and at various points,
sor Juana was elected to be an archivist and a bookkeeper.
As bookkeeper, she also did an excellent job at managing
the convents funds and interests. She also taught music and

(21:17):
drama at the Convents School, and it's possible that she
was a painter. One of the portraits that we have
of her as labeled as being copied from one that
was made by her own hand. She may have also
painted miniatures, including things like the medallion that she wore
as part of her religious dress, but no examples of
her painting survives if that was the case. Vice Roy

(21:41):
Antonio Sebastian de Toledo was recalled to Spain in sixteen
seventy three, and the following year his wife, Leonar Caretto died.
Sor Juana wrote three sonnets to commemorate her passing. Other
than that, sor Juana's first decade at the convent seems
to have been pretty quiet, although members of the church
hierarchy did sometimes admonish her to spend more of her

(22:02):
time on religious matters rather than all of this secular
study in writing. Then, in sixteen eighty, Tomas de la Cerda,
the third Marquess of La Laguna, became New Spain's new viceroy.
His wife, Maria Luisa, was almost exactly the same age
as or Juana, and the two of them became very close.
The Vice reign visited Sarwana frequently at the convent and

(22:25):
arranged for the publication of her work. Over time, sor
Juana became something of an unofficial court poet. From within
the walls of the convent, sor Juanna wrote Maria Luisa
numerous passionate love poems, addressing her as Lisi or Lisida,
and they were generally more passionate and intimate than the
ones that she had written to Donia Leonard Caretto. And

(22:47):
as with those earlier poems, these didn't really attract a
lot of notice thanks to the huge gap in status
between the two women. It was really such a gulf
that sor Juanna often referred to herself as the Viceroy
and vice reigns servant, or even sometimes their slave. Like
we said earlier, a lot of Sorjuana's work is undated,
so it's not always possible to tell exactly when she

(23:09):
wrote a particular piece, but we do know that she
demonstrated immense skill in the multiple poetic forms that were
valued during the Spanish Golden Age. She wrote plays in verse,
which were preceded by short theatrical works known as lous.
She wrote liturgical musical works known as vienskos. She wrote
at least twenty love sonnets and at least forty sonnets

(23:31):
on other subjects, as well as ballads that were known
as romances. The piece that's considered her masterpiece translates into
English's First Dream and it is a very long, complex
philosophical poem. And her range with all of this work
was huge. It spanned from the body and erotic to
cloak and dagger drama to religious work. She wrote a

(23:55):
satirical poem called Ambre Nacios or Foolish Men, in which
she pointed out the double standards in the behavioral expectations
of men and women. She also incorporated multiple languages and dialects,
including the Nawada language and Hispanic African dialects, and there
was a lot of this work collected today. It takes
up four volumes, and a lot of that was published

(24:17):
during her lifetime. In sixteen eighty nine, a collection titled
Castilian Flood was published in Madrid, and then other editions
of that work followed. Her work was collected into three
volumes during her lifetime, which were all published in the
years just before and after her death. Thomas de la
Cerda was recalled to Spain in sixteen eighty six, and

(24:37):
some biographers point to this as the moment that sor
Juana lost all of her protection and prestige, but that's
not exactly so. She had been writing and studying before
the marquess and his wife arrived, and she continued to
do so afterward. She didn't have as much help getting
her work published or performed or in front of the court,

(24:57):
but it wasn't as though there was suddenly a which
flipped and no one was reading her work anymore. Bye,
she was one of the wealthiest nuns in her convent.
That year, though, Sorwana got caught up in a dispute
between Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla,
and the Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar say Us. The bishop

(25:19):
asked sor Juanna to write a critique of a sermon
that had been delivered forty years before by Jesuit priest
Antonio Vieira. When she did this, he published it without
her permission, and when he published it, he added a
letter ahead of it that both praised her work and
scolded her for spending too much of her time on

(25:39):
secular things rather than on religious matters. The bishop didn't
sign this under his own name, though he signed it
sore Philotia, framing it as this being the opinion of
a fellow nun. The archbishop was a friend and a
colleague of Antonio Vieira, who had written this sermon and

(26:00):
had helped get that sermon published. So sorwana Is criticism
of the sermon had been arranged to kind of criticize
the archbishop by proxy because the Bishop of Puebla didn't
get along with him. It's very complicated and petty. Yeah,
she was essentially used as a tool by uh squabbling man.

(26:22):
Who knows what the Bishop of Puebla thought was going
to happen when he pulled sor Juana into this dispute.
But what did happen is that a few months later,
sor Juana replied to sor Philotia defending both her actions
and the right of women to learn. Her responses simultaneously
really conciliatory and absolutely unyielding. Sorwana starts off by praising

(26:46):
sor Philotea and expressing that she herself wasn't at all
worthy to be writing this. Then she went on to
say that her desire to learn wasn't something she had
chosen for herself. It had come from beyond herself and
was just part of her nature. She talked about her
upbringing and her time and the convent and how it
related to this desire to learn. She also gave examples

(27:08):
from her life, like the time that a mother superior
ordered her not to study from her books anymore, and
that was an order that she obeyed, but she wasn't
able to stop herself from studying whatever was around her,
like when she saw some children playing with a top,
she scattered some flower onto the ground to see whether
the tip made perfect circles when it made its way

(27:29):
through it. I'm just curious. I can't help it. She
also described how her desire to learn had mostly brought
her hardship because to be different was to be seen
as evil, and because a mind like hers was not
considered suitable for a woman. But she also writes about
some of the exceptional women in the Bible, including Deborah, Esther,

(27:51):
and the Queen of Sheba. It's a little reminiscent of
the Book of the City of Ladies, which we already
have an episode on if you would like to check
that out over and over in this piece, Sor Juana
combines the idea that her intelligence and aptitude and desire
to learn are a hardship because of her gender with
the idea that it's also just natural to her and

(28:12):
it She calls her poetry her quote twice unhappy ability,
while she also says that it is such a core
part of her that she has had to struggle not
to write the letter in verse. Sar Juana's response was
not formally published during her lifetime, but it was passed
around in religious circles, and the reaction varied from place
to place. She got some sympathy and support in Spain,

(28:35):
but total derision in places where Antonio Vieira was especially revered.
Her confessor, Antonio Nuniez de Miranda, refused to see her.
He was also reported as saying that if he had
realized she was going to do all this writing, he
would have seen her married instead. The archbishop demanded that
sor Juana give up her studies. He had criticized her

(28:57):
secular studies before, so this was not new, but things
definitely did escalate. This might have blown over, but in
sixte there were extensive floods in the region, and then
there was a solar eclipse, and then that was followed
by a plague of weevils, which people either blamed on
the eclipse or thought the eclipse had predicted this all.

(29:19):
The whole flooding and we evil infestation then led to
a famine and food riots in sixteen. The National Palace
was attacked and burned during the riots, along with a
lot of the market in the main square of Mexico City.
On April twenty two of that year, Tomas de Lesserda died,
so Sarwana no longer had a former viceroy on her side,

(29:42):
and his widow, who she had been so close to,
was naturally occupied with other matters. This was a time
of hardship and chaos for everybody, and everybody, including the church,
was totally on edge. Sarwana wrote her last published work
during this time. That was a set of carols to St.
Catherine of Alexander. In sixteen ninety three, she sold off

(30:03):
her library and her collections of scientific and musical instruments,
with the proceeds going to help the poor. She renewed
her relationship with her former confessor, and on March fifth,
sixteen ninety four, she wrote a repentance signed in her blood.
That sounds very dramatic, but it was a fairly common
practice at this time. After all of this, her cell

(30:24):
was described as containing only three devotional books, along with
some hair shirts and scourges, although after her death that
was found that she also still had some money and jewelry.
A few months before her death, sor Juanna wrote this
in the Convinced Book of Professions. Quote in this place
is to be noted the day, month, and year of
my death. For the love of God and His most

(30:46):
Holy Mother. I entreat my beloved sisters, the nuns, who
are here now and who shall be in the future,
to commend me to God. For I have been and
am the worst among them. Of them, I ask forgiveness
for the love of God and his Mother, I worst
of all in the world. Juana and as de la Cruz.
This was not an unusual amount of self judgment in

(31:07):
these sorts of religious writings at the time, but it
is still very evocative. So we don't have any of
sor Juana's own writing about all this. Catholic biographers, especially
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, framed this as coming
from devotion and from a sincere desire for sor Juana
to re dedicate herself to religious life. Other More recent

(31:30):
biographers have described it as a punishment that was inflicted
on her by an archbishop who was outraged over the
events of sixteen ninety. Still, others have suggested that it
might have been more pragmatic. The younger sar Juana had
recognized that a convent was the best place for her
to continue her studies, even though she didn't actually feel
a religious calling to be there. The older sor Juana

(31:53):
may have thought that the best way to secure her
future was to, at least for a time, put aside
her secular study in writing. If that was the case,
though she didn't get the chance to see if she
might return to her study and writing someday. In the
spring of sixteen and epidemics struck the convent. It is
sometimes described as plague and sometimes as a plague. I

(32:15):
do not know what type of plague it was, regardless
though Sarwana contracted it while caring for her religious sisters.
She died on September seventeen, sixte at the age of
about forty six. During her lifetime, sar Juana was nicknamed
the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of America, but her
work fell out of view for a time after her death.

(32:37):
An edition of her work was published in seventeen five,
and that was it for more than two hundred years. Also,
laws banning communal ownership of property led to church archives
being scattered and lost, including records and documents that were
related to sar Juana. But interest in her work really
started to be renewed after the turn of the twentieth century,

(32:59):
especially for the Mexican Revolution. The first modern edition of
sor Juana's work was published in nineteen forty. Multiple biographies
have been written since then, including one by Mexican poet
Octavio pass that was one of those sources for this episode.
I highly recommend it, especially if you want to know
more about her poetry, because this work is as much

(33:21):
about literary criticism as it is about her actual biography.
There's definitely more recent work about the biography itself, but
having work about her poetry being written by a Mexican
poet is like particularly insightful in terms of her writing.
Her life has also been the subject of numerous plays
and movies and TV shows, including a twenty sixteen mini

(33:42):
series called Wanna Z which I haven't watched, but it's
on Netflix. There's so much on Netflix. Um. In the
n nineties, sor Juana's convent was being refurbished and a
set of remains was found with a badge that was
typical of the medallion that she usually war The bang
was so warned that it was impossible to tell what

(34:04):
was on it. Sor Juana's had depicted the Annunciation, but
it was more common for nuns to wear one depicting
the Immaculate Conception. Mexican novelist Margharita Lopez Portillo, who was
a scholar of sor Juana, took the medallion home with her,
which became a huge issue. Ultimately, she returned it and
the remains and the medallion were reinterred in the church

(34:26):
of Santronimo on the three and twentieth anniversary of sor
Juana's death. Yeah, people, a lot of times these remains
are described as belonging to her, and it's not impossible
that they are hers. But the medallion that she wore
was very commonly warned among nuns in her order during
her time, with the exception that hers had a different

(34:47):
depiction on it than was more commonly worn, so it's
a lot. It's it's not a certain that these were
her remains, but they have been treated as there they are.
Until very recently, sir Wana was on the two PTO note.
Redesigned bills that don't feature her anymore are entering circulation
literally as we are recording this podcast. Her birthplace was

(35:09):
also renamed now it's the Pantala Disort Wanna and As
Dela Cruz, and her old convent is now a university
that is named after her. She is a fascinating figure
to me, and also a lot more complicated than like
a lot of the one page write ups that you
will find about her, like on online. A lot of

(35:30):
times they're almost one dimensional as sort of like this
is Sarwana who was such a rebel, or this is
Sarwana who was like such a child prodigy, or this
is Sarawana who was the first feminist. That one is
particularly troubling because none of those grapple with the fact
that she enslaved people while she was in the comment Yeah,
well that's always the case, right, We discover over and

(35:51):
over there's something that's come up or someone has asked
us to do it because they're like, so and so
it was a vampire. It's like wait, wait, wait, their
life is way more nuanced than yeah. So that is
why we do the work we do. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is

(36:13):
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to

(36:35):
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.