Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

In November 1690 the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, printed without her permission Sor Juana’s critique of a sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira (Vieyra in the letter), under the title Carta atenagórica and with a letter signed by “Sor Filotea de la Cruz” that urged her to leave secular learning for sacred studies. This is her reply, written some three months later.

She begins humbly and accepts the advice to study sacred books; if she has written little on religion, it is out of reverence and fear, “for I want no trouble with the Holy Office”. Then she tells of her inclination to letters “ever since the first light of reason dawned on me”.

The most famous scenes follow: she learned to read before she was three, tagging along with her older sister to school; she gave up cheese because she heard it made people dull; at six or seven she begged her mother to dress her as a boy and send her to the University in Mexico City; she cut her hair whenever she failed to learn in time, since a head “so bare of knowledge” did not deserve to be “dressed in hair”. She entered the convent because of her “total refusal” of marriage, and there kept studying on her own.

The second half is a plea. A prioress forbade her to study for three months, but she kept learning from “all the things God created”, and she tells what she discovered with a spinning top or in the kitchen: “Si Aristóteles hubiera guisado, mucho más hubiera escrito” (“Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written much more”). She lists learned women, discusses Saint Paul’s “let women keep silent in the churches”, proposes that learned older women teach girls, and defends her poetry and her right to disagree with Vieira.

Sor Juana writes in Baroque New Spain, where a girl could only dream of attending the University in men’s clothes and speaking of theology could end before the Holy Office. Her prose is Baroque, full of Latin quotations and biblical and classical examples, yet the tone is often familiar and full of humor, and beneath the required humility lies a firm argument: “Mi entendimiento tal cual ¿no es tan libre como el suyo, pues viene de un solar?” (“Is my mind, such as it is, not as free as his, since both spring from the same source?”).

The letter is an essential autobiographical document for understanding Sor Juana’s life and work, and it is often cited as one of the first defenses of women’s right to education written in the Americas: the story of a girl who never stopped asking questions, told with intelligence, irony and courage.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in San Miguel Nepantla, now Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on 12 November 1651 (some scholars argue for 1648), and died in Mexico City on 17 April 1695, during an epidemic. Before taking her vows as a Hieronymite nun she lived at the viceregal court, and in her time she was called the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of Mexico.

She wrote poetry, drama and prose: the poem Primero sueño (First Dream), the redondillas “Hombres necios que acusáis”, the comedy Los empeños de una casa and the sacramental play El divino Narciso. She is the towering figure of the literature of New Spain and one of the great writers in the Spanish language.