Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

She was the Spanish empire’s most widely published poet of her time, and her work has survived until today, but not her own thoughts about much of her life. Consequently, her life, and her very complex poetry, has been really subject to interpretation.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. 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

(00:22):
are 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, Gayle, Lindsay, Meghan and Chavon. At
least three of those are folks who requested it when

(00:43):
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, and even some of
those four years has gone in oblivion thanks to a
number of email migrations. Those Unfortunately, they are always casualties. Yes, yes,

(01:08):
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 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.

(01:31):
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 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

(01:53):
been interpreted incredibly differently depending on who has been doing
the interpreting. So I mean there's a out of variety
you can you can get an almost totally different sense
of who she 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

(02:15):
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
she wrote in are totally unfamiliar to me. So if
you studied Spanish language poetry, specifically in particular the New
Spanish Baroque, that might have all be forms that you

(02:35):
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, when I studied poetry in college,
so it was not really any delving into the New
Spanish Baroque. No, well, then it's it has the added

(02:56):
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 primarily from Charles Baudelaire, not Spanish, but
similar translation issues not nearly as beautiful or melodic to

(03:18):
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 incredibly beautiful in a way that
it isn't necessarily in English. It really is like the

(03:40):
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,
any time you're translating and then interpreting and extrapolating someone's
essen from their written work in poetry that has been

(04:03):
shifted around, you're going to get different versions of who
that person was. Yep. Have 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 As de la Cruz was born
Juanna Ramirez as Bahi in San Miguel and the Pantla,
which is southeast of Mexico City. Her mother was Isabel

(04:25):
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 Basque. He had come to the
Americas from Europe, and Juana was the youngest of three
daughters who were born to Isabel and Pedro Wanas. Date
of birth isn't clear, as is the case with a

(04:46):
lot of people born this long ago. Some sources noted
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 second, sixteen forty eight. This record notes
the baptism of a girl named Inez, whose godparents were
Isabelle Ramirez, his brother and sister, so her maternal uncle

(05:09):
and aunt. This record also describes the young in As
as daughter of the Church, which meant that her parents
weren't married to one another. Sometime after Juana was born,
her father left the family, and we do not know
why that happened or where he went. We don't even
actually know exactly when it happened. It was by the
time Juanna was five or six years old, but it

(05:29):
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
outlawed in New Spain, although working conditions for indigenous people

(05:50):
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 why as older sister, Josepha Maria,
to a local school that was being run by a
woman in the community for the benefit of its less
wealthy children. When she was about three years old, Wanna

(06:10):
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 Juannah's account, this teacher
did not believe her, but she found the whole thing
so charming that she gave Wanna lessons anyway, and Juanna
learned so quickly that by the time her mother realized
what she was doing and put a stop to it,

(06:32):
she already knew how to read. Aside from that and
about twenty lessons in Latin, this was Wanta'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
hacienda's chapel to read them undisturbed. Juanna did not have

(06:53):
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 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 grew back,
and if she failed, she would cut more of her

(07:13):
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 allowed to attend, she begged
her mother to let her dress as a boy so
that she could go. Her mother did not go for
this plan. I think she was also still a small

(07:36):
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, Juana's grandfather died and in about the
same time, her mother started a relationship with a man
named Diego Ruiz Lozano, although they also never married. Isabel

(07:58):
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
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

(08:21):
the same time. But we do know that Juanna's half
siblings had better prospects for their futures than Juanna and
her sisters did. All six of them had been born
to unwed parents, although that was not as stigmatized as
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

(08:43):
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
find careers in the church or the military. I think
will imagine that if if you had children and you

(09:03):
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 Wanta was living. More important than
the children's birth was the fact that Diego Ruiz Losano
had some money and he was present in his children's
lives so one his half sisters all had dowries and

(09:26):
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
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

(09:49):
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,

(10:10):
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

(10:31):
actual assignment was more like seven or eight. A lot
of vice stroies 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 his

(10:52):
wife Donia Leonar Carretto. Juana'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. Wanta 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

(11:13):
Viceroy brought in a panel of forties 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 assailed it, did wanna and
as free herself of the questions, arguments and objections that
so many each in his own class propounded. It's likely

(11:34):
that this story was exaggerated at least somewhat, but the
Viceroy Shorted loved 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 we've talked about on

(11:55):
the show. That is probably a little embellished. Being at
court would have given Wana lots of resources to continue
educating herself. Although she studied literature and is best known
for her writing, Wana was also interested in science, astronomy, medicine,
and law. She also wrote extensively, although most of her

(12:15):
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 Vicerine, and in these poems
she refers to the Vicerine 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

(12:36):
like a troubadour writing a 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 Lana's time at court. A lot of
her writing suggests 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

(12:59):
or stormy love affair, 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

(13:22):
little because I certainly 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, cared for, and liked

(13:45):
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.

(14:05):
They did like to flirt. 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 Wada didn't
have anybody at court who could be negotiating on her behalf.

(14:26):
Number three, she still had no dowry. More important than
all of that, though, 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

(14:48):
quote total antipathy towards marriage, 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. Wanna 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

(15:09):
place that she was most likely to be able to
continue on with her course 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

(15:31):
orders and convents in New Spain were stratified and segregated
in the same way that the rest of the general
society was different. Convents had different levels of wealth. Some
of them were only open to people directly from Spain,
and others were open only to Creolya women. The first
one that Wanna joined was the convent of the Discounsed

(15:51):
Caramelites of St. Joseph, but she was only there for
a few months. Some sources say that she left because
of her health, but there's really no record 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

(16:12):
sore Juana and As de la Cruz at the convent
of Santa Paula of the Heernomite 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

(16:33):
Nuniez de Miranda, said that he rejoiced once she was
in a convent, 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

(16:56):
of Santa Paula had an average of between three thousand
and four thousand pesos for the dowries that it's nuns provided.
Sarwanda's dowry was provided by Pedro Velaska's de la Cadena.
Sorwana also had a few hundred pastos of her own,
which had been given to her while she was at court,
and she willed that to her mother. The nuns lived

(17:17):
in spacious cells that were more like apartments, with their
own small kitchens. Sor Juana bought one in sixteen ninety
one 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

(17:38):
of the nuns ate food prepared in the kitchens in
their own cells, 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 sixteen eighty four, Sorwana sold

(18:00):
wanted to San Jose and her baby to her sister,
Josepha Maria, for two d fifty pacos. On average, there
were three maids for each nun at this convent, so
it's very likely that Srijuana 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

(18:21):
were living in the convent. Daily life in the convent
was broken up 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

(18:42):
petty jealous ees and intrigues, and she often wrote about
settling into study. Only for one of her sisters to
come in and gossip, or 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

(19:04):
enforced vow of poverty for any of these nuns, so
Sarwana turned her cell into her personal library. She had
at least fift undred 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

(19:24):
really leave the convent, but they welcomed visitors and entertainers. Frequently,
sor 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

(19:45):
this particular convent, given how permissive it was, was an
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

(20:08):
we first pause for a little sponsor break. Overall, cer
Juana seems to have been pretty well respected within her convent.
The nuns elected women from among themselves to serve as
mother superior and in other important positions, and at various points,

(20:30):
Sir Juanna 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
drama at the convent 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

(20:53):
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. Viceroy Antonio
Sebastian de Toledo was recalled to Spain in sixteen seventy three,
and the following year, his wife, Leonar Caretto died. Sor

(21:13):
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 time on
religious matters rather than all of this secular study in writing. Then,
in sixteen eighty, Tomas de la Serta, the third Marquess

(21:35):
of La Laguna, became New Spain's new viceroy. His wife,
Maria Luisa, was almost exactly the same age as sor Juana,
and the two of them became very close. The Vice
Regin visited Sarwuana frequently at the convent and arranged for
the publication of her work. Over time, sor Juana became
something of an unofficial court poet. From within the walls

(21:57):
of the convent, sor Juanna wrote Maria Luisa numerous passionate
love poems addressing her as Lisi or Licida, and they
were generally more passionate and intimate than the ones that
she had written to Donia Leonard Corretto, and as with
those earlier poems, these didn't really attract a lot of
notice thanks to the huge gap in status between the

(22:17):
two women. It was really such a gulf that Sri
Juana often referred to herself as the Viceroy and vice
reigns servant, or even sometimes their slave. Like we said earlier,
a lot of Srijuana's work is undated, so it's not
always possible to tell exactly when she wrote a particular piece,
but we do know that she demonstrated immense skill in

(22:39):
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 viencicos. She wrote at least twenty
love sonnets and at least forty sonnets on other subjects,
as well as ballads that were known as romances. The

(23:00):
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 satirical poem called

(23:20):
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 during her lifetime.

(23:43):
In 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 space in sixteen
eighty six, and some biographers point to this as the

(24:04):
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, but it wasn't as though there was
suddenly a switch flipped and no one was reading her work. Anymore.

(24:27):
By sixteen ninety, 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 asked sor Juana to write a critique of
a sermon that had been delivered forty years before by

(24:49):
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 praise her
work and scolded her for spending too much of her
time on secular things rather than on religious matters. The
bishop didn't sign this under his own name, though he

(25:10):
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 Verea, who had written this sermon,
and it helped get that sermon published, so sorwana Is
criticism of the sermon had been arranged to kind of

(25:31):
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.
Who knows what the Bishop of Puebla thought was going
to happen when he pulled sor Juana into this dispute.

(25:53):
But what did happen is that a few months later,
sor Juana replied to sor Pilot defending both her actions
and the right of women to learn. Her response is
simultaneously really conciliatory and absolutely unyielding. Sorwana starts off by
praising sor Philotea and expressing that she herself wasn't at

(26:14):
all worthy to be writing this, and 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 from her life, like the time that a mother

(26:34):
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
through it. I'm just curious. I can't help it. She

(26:59):
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 Deborrah, Esther,
and the Queen of Sheba. It's a little reminiscent of
the Book of the City of Ladies, which we already

(27:20):
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 it.
She calls her poetry her quote twice unhappy ability, while

(27:40):
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, but total
derision in places where Antonio Vieira was especially revered. Her confessor,

(28:05):
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 secular studies before,
so this was not new, but things definitely did escalate.

(28:26):
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. That's all. The whole flooding
and we evil infestation then led to a famine and

(28:48):
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
two of that year, Tomas de Leserta died, so sar
Wuana no longer had a former viceroy on her side,
and his widow, who she had been so close to,

(29:08):
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. Sar Juanna wrote her last published
work during this time. That was a set of carols
to St. Catherine of Alexandria. In sixteen ninety three, she
sold off her library and her collections of scientific and

(29:30):
musical instruments, with the proceeds going to help the poor.
She renewed her relationship with her former confessor, and on
March five 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
was described as containing only three devotional books, along with

(29:52):
some hair shirts and scourges, although after her death it
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
Holy Mother. I entreat my beloved sisters, the nuns, who

(30:13):
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
these sorts of religious writings at the time, but it

(30:34):
is still very evocative, so we don't have any of
sor Juanna'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

(30:54):
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 sar Juana

(31:18):
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

(31:39):
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, sor Juana was nicknamed
the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of America, but her
work fell out of view for of time after her death,

(32:01):
An edition of her work was published in seventeen 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 Sri Juana. But interest in her work really
started to be renewed after the turn of the twentieth century,

(32:23):
especially after 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

(32:45):
about literary criticism as it is about her actual biography.
There's definitely more recent work about the biography itself, but
having a 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

(33:06):
series called Wanna Enz, which I haven't watched, but it's
on Netflix. There's so much on Netflix. Um. In the
nineteen 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 wore. The badge
was so warned that it was impossible to tell what

(33:28):
was on it. Sor Juana's had depicted the annunciation, but
it was more common for nuns to where 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

(33:50):
of Santa Gronemo on the three and twentieth anniversary of
sor Juana's death. Yeah, people, a lot of times these
remains aren't 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

(34:11):
different 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 Wanta was on the
two Paso note. Redesigned bills that don't feature her anymore
are entering circulation literally as we are recording this podcast.

(34:32):
Her birthplace was also renamed now it's Naputala Disorder Juanna
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

(34:53):
lot of times they're almost one dimensional as sort of
like this is sor Wanna who was such a rebel,
or this is Sorwana who was like such a child prodigy,
or this is Sorwana who was the first feminist. And
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.

(35:14):
We discover over and 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. Do you
have a little bit of listener mail? I do have
listener mail. It's from Alexia and we actually just got
this email last night. And Alexia says, dear Holly and Tracy,

(35:37):
I was so excited to hear the episode on the
Guatemalan coup as we are recording this, the second part
of that is not even out yet. The letter goes on,
I love Latin American history, which is so important but
so overlooked, in particular the complicated histories of twentieth century
Latin American countries. As an archivist, I had to reach
out following this episode because one of the most important

(36:00):
endangered human rights archives is in Guatemala, and the more
awareness the better. The archive is the Archivo Historica de
la Policia Nacional or the National Police Archives, which was
discovered in quotation marks in two thousand six and international
investment created the a h p N as an independent entity,

(36:21):
even though the records remained owned by the National Police.
This archive documents the National Police going back to the
early nineteen hundreds, but especially documents the human rights abuses
in the later part of the twentieth century and especially
during the most violent years of the Civil War in
the intervening gears. There has been a post custodial project

(36:41):
between the a h p N and the University of
Texas at Austin, where the original documents are maintained in Guatemala,
but the digitized surrogus are housed at u T Austin
for safekeeping. This archive is vital toward preserving the history
of Guatemala, pursuing justice, and forgiving friends and family members
answers about what happened to their loved ones. However, it

(37:03):
is currently under extreme threat by the government, which has
replaced its head with a politician, continues to threaten staff,
and has even threatened UT Austin with a lawsuit that
it is stealing its national heritage. More awareness is needed
about this archive to hopefully save it, hence this email.
For more information, please check out the links above or

(37:24):
Kristen Welds brilliant book Paper Cadavers about how the archive
was created out of US military training, maintained and later
rediscovered by activists. I've loved the podcast for years. I
find it super helpful when processing collections. Best regards, Alexeia.
Thank you so much for this email, Alexeia, I had
not heard about this at all, but basically, in two

(37:46):
thousand six, one of the oversight organizations that have been
created in in Guatemala found literally warehouses full of these
um full of these national police documents, literally millions of documents,
and the decision was made to the interest of human
rights and the interest of reconciliation to try to protect

(38:07):
them from being destroyed and to make it transparent to
people what had happened in the past. And so there's
this huge effort involving digitizing these millions and millions of documents.
And then over the last year or so, things have
shifted in terms of what I just read in the email,
and the archive went from a staff of about two
hundred two as of the last news article that I

(38:29):
read about it this morning, more like thirty. So it's
been a huge issue that are that people are trying
to to make sure that the archive continues to be
protected because it's an enormous wealth of information about all
of this basically last century in Guatemalan history and documentation
of all kinds of human rights issues that happened during

(38:50):
that time. So thank you again, Alexia for sending this email.
If you would like to write us, we're at history
Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're
all over social media at missed in History. You can
find us on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You can
also subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, the I
Heart radio app, and anywhere else to get your podcasts.

(39:16):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.