Episode 5 - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz vs. The Catholic Church: Mexico's First Feminist

Primary Topic

This episode explores the life and challenges of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, focusing on her intellectual battles with the Catholic Church and her role as an early feminist figure in colonial Mexico.

Episode Summary

In this episode, host Bridget Todd delves into the extraordinary life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun, scholar, and poet who emerged as one of the first feminist voices in the Americas. Sor Juana's thirst for knowledge and her literary prowess put her at odds with the Catholic Church, leading to significant conflicts. Despite societal restrictions and church opposition, she pursued education and literary expression vigorously, advocating for women's rights to education and intellectual freedom. Her critique of misogyny and her defense of women's intellectual capabilities marked her as a pioneering figure in challenging the established gender norms of her time.

Main Takeaways

  1. Sor Juana was a self-taught intellectual who mastered multiple languages and literary forms despite being denied formal education.
  2. Her writings challenged the societal and religious norms of her era, particularly in relation to women's roles and intellectual capabilities.
  3. Sor Juana's conflicts with the church were marked by her bold critiques of its leaders and its doctrines, especially regarding women.
  4. Despite facing censorship and condemnation, Sor Juana remained committed to her intellectual pursuits and feminist ideals.
  5. Her legacy as a feminist icon and intellectual martyr continues to inspire discussions on gender, culture, and education in contemporary contexts.

Episode Chapters

1: Early Life and Education

Sor Juana's early passion for learning was evident as she taught herself multiple languages and began writing at a young age. She faced numerous obstacles due to her gender but utilized her intellect to gain recognition. Bridget Todd: "Sor Juana taught herself Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl, showing early signs of genius."

2: Literary Achievements and Feminist Writings

Exploration of Sor Juana's diverse literary contributions, which include poems, plays, and feminist essays that challenged conventional roles assigned to women. Bridget Todd: "Her writing tackled themes of love, education, and women's rights, often critiquing the patriarchal society."

3: Confrontations with the Catholic Church

This chapter discusses Sor Juana's most contentious interactions with church authorities, highlighting her strategic defiance and the repercussions she faced. Bridget Todd: "She bravely stood up to church leaders, defending her right to intellectual freedom and education for women."

Actionable Advice

  1. Pursue Learning: Embrace every opportunity for education, as Sor Juana did, regardless of the obstacles.
  2. Challenge Injustice: Speak out against injustices, especially those based on gender.
  3. Preserve Integrity: Stand firm in your beliefs and values, even when faced with opposition.
  4. Promote Equality: Advocate for equal rights and opportunities for all, drawing inspiration from Sor Juana's writings.
  5. Support Feminism: Engage with and support feminist ideals and movements that seek to empower women.

About This Episode

This week on Beef, the brilliant 17th century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz dares to defy the Catholic Church with her scholarship and searing wit.

Pick up Dr. Stephanie Kirk's fascinating book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico.

People

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bridget Todd, Stephanie Kirk

Companies

None

Books

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Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Transcript

Bridget Todd

Next chapter podcasts.

In a moment, you're gonna hear two voices speaking in Spanish. The dialogue is over 300 years old.

Puermi de johana sido penar de hele. Velar puejes estades velado por mi de. Genle dormir de helen velar que noi pena en que nama comono penar de. Jele dormir que quienduerme en el suenos. En saya morir silencio que duerme cuidado que vela no le pierteg no si.

Bridget Todd

Lespierten si de helle velar de genle dormir.

Let's break this down. You've heard two voices. If you didn't understand the words, the scene is still pretty clear. A man and a woman are arguing. At its core, it's a lover's core, which makes it relatable across eons and beyond cultures.

Because you haven't loved, if you haven't had a really good argument. What you've just heard is a short, lyrical poem telling a story in just ten lines. In the strictest interpretation, it's about one's duty to God. But it could also be about a young married couple not wanting to wake their baby. Its genius is in its allowance of wide interpretation.

By today's standards, one could call this poem a comedy sketch. It was likely written to entertain dinner guests at a party in Mexico in 1689. The author was a woman and a nun named Sor Juana. She was a scholar and a writer. In addition to poetry, Sor Juana wrote plays, Christmas carols, literary commentary, ballads, and even romantic sonnets with erotic imagery.

In Spanish, Sor is akin to the title sister, as in Sister Juana. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz both was a bona fide intellectual prodigy and a genius. She taught herself multiple musical instruments and languages, studying greek, logic and latin texts. She was the dominant intellectual voice for her generation. Her written word caused change, and naturally, the Catholic Church hated her guts.

Sor Juana wrote in the era right between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. This puts her at the tail end of the hispanic baroque. But in terms of historical context, she was the author of the first feminist text to come out of the Americas. Unfortunately, this was also around the tail end of the Spanish Inquisition, which previously condemned artists and intellectuals to having their fingernails ripped off and various hot metal objects inserted into their body. Cavities.

No, no, no.

The Catholic Church was still medieval at the time in its thinking and its actions, and the only thing the Catholic Church knew or cared about women was that they made bigger babies. But for her strategic political moves, we might never have heard of Sor Juana de la Cruz. Her enemies were her neighbors who spoke the same language and were of the same faith. Yet they did their best to squelch her voice from being heard. Turns out that some old priests could be real assholes.

She nearly succumbed to defeat. But Sor Juana shrewdly manipulated those in charge to serve the immortality of her writing. Its the unlikeliest of things that weve even heard of her. And yet today her face is on Mexico's money and its memes.

I'm Bridget Todd and this is beef.

Sor Juana valued the written word more than anything and navigated her life choices around the opportunity to study, read, and write. Denied a formal education, her battle to educate herself was the seedling from which her lifes work would grow. Often using her works to place men and women on equal footing, she seized her skill as a popular essayist and expressed a unique brand of thought, one which jabbed at the patriarchy of the Catholic Church. She went twelve rounds with the higher ups in Mexico and Spain, but was betrayed by a former patron of her work. She eventually was forced to accept a brutal, soul shattering censorship for which she literally bled.

The Catholic Church nearly silenced her forever, but her rising modern popularity has become the last nail in the coffin for this beef. Born Juana de Oswaje y Ramirez de Santayana, probably between 1648 and 1651, she's from that time in history when they didn't even bother to write down the date of girls births. Her maternal grandfather owned Hacienda de Pana Olla, a rural estate sandwiched between the nearby Puebla and Mexico City. Her father was Don Pedro, a spanish naval commander who fathered three daughters and basically just bounced. The hacienda became the family home of Juana, her two sisters, and her mother, Donya Isabel.

Because Isabel and Pedro never married, the three daughters were considered illegitimate. Ethnically, Donya Isabel's family was Criollo, one of the first identities of those born in what was then called New Spain, Juana enjoyed a largely middle class upbringing and showed early signs of being an intellectual prodigy. She learned to read at three years old by exploring her grandfather's vast library and quickly learned Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, the Aztec language spoken throughout her community. After talking the talk, she would later walk the walk by publishing in all three languages.

Women's access to university at the time was a non starter. As a teenager, she begged her mother to let her wear boys clothing so she could continue formal schooling, but was instead presented as a lady in waiting to the court of the local viceroy. At 16 years old, the marquis of Monseirra, Don Antonio Sebastian de Toledo, grew extremely fond of the newest and most intelligent addition to his court. Where gossip of her acumen spread quickly, it was Don Antonio's wife, Donna Eleonora, who called upon the intellectual elite to tutor young Juana. Seeing both to her social commencement and education, Juana would often engage with visiting mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists.

Their public discussions regarding engineering, scripture, and logic entertained the court. Impressed by her cerebral gymnastics, Don Antonio said of one such encounter in the manner that a royal galleon might fend off the attacks of small canoes, so did Juana extricate herself from the questions, arguments, and objections these many men, each in his specialty, directed at her. Despite lacking a proper dowry, she turned down several marriage proposals. At age 18, she instead decided to enter a convent. She found a home at the monastery of San Jeronimo, taking her vows as Sor Juana.

Ines de la Cruz. Despite her lack of options, all evidence points to Sor Juana's authentic personal devotion to Catholicism. She wrote of her decision, quote, it was the least unsuitable and the most honorable. From a gifted child to a favored intellectual and playwright, Sor Juana worked for many years amassing a body of work that's stretched across poetry, prose, plays, both profane and sacred, sonnets and songs just about anything that comes from pen and paper. Her stylish, often humorous voice was celebrated for its ability to convey truth.

Like later philosophers Joseph Campbell or Joni Mitchell, she gained recognition throughout the subcontinent and into South America and Spain. Her fame would also make her a target. Sor Juana sought the spotlight, but not a soapbox. Advocacy and politics were forced upon her when her writing was stolen and published under another name. After a public rebuke over the purpose of her education, she later became the unwilling figurehead of one of the first serious debates on female literacy.

Doctor Stephanie Kirk notes that the complexity of the time in which she lived is what both elevated and imperiled Juana's creative output. She's a professor of spanish and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Sor Juana, Ines de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of knowledge in colonial Mexico. The hispanic baroque is a very complex artistic, literary, political, social movement in the sense that there was incredible artistic production, exuberance. Anyone who's been lucky enough to have been to Mexico, for example, to see those incredible colonial architecture, which is a great example of the baroque.

Stephanie Kirk

But it was also a time of religious control and state control over thought, over culture expression. Not as much as some people would have you believe. There was resistance and there was agency on behalf of many different kinds of people. But I think it's definitely a time when access to knowledge, access to culture, was definitely controlled. And what you could say about love, sex, religion was definitely circumscribed and controlled by the church.

You know, the mexican inquisition was founded in the 16th century and very active, very interested in making sure orthodoxy of religious expression in particular was maintained. And there are fascinating indexes of prohibited books. And although there's always a great disjuncture between what is prohibited and what is, you know, allowed to circulate. So, for example, you weren't allowed to read novels of any kind. They were not allowed into Mexico, but of course they came in and there was all kinds of networks of things circulating that weren't appropriate.

You see people being punished by the Inquisition for writing obscene verses or things like that. But I think the more sinister piece of the Inquisition, although there's been a lot of revisionist history around the inquisition, and it's not quite the burn them, burn everybody to Cinder's organization, although they did do plenty of that, but it's not quite on the scale and intensity that maybe we had thought. But they did do a lot of things around, for example, sexual crimes. There were people who were executed for homosexuality. There were people who were suspected of, you know, adhering to the jewish faith, who were executed right at the beginning of the inquisition.

They executed indigenous people, but then the inquisition was then not allowed to prosecute indigenous peoples, although Africans and Afro descendant peoples were very much persecuted by the inquisition. So the inquisition is very much alive and well. So I think the lavishness of the culture and the cultural expression is very much taken place within the confines of what the church thought was acceptable. And Sor Juana, I think, was very good at navigating that. And scholars have read all kinds of things into her work that the inquisition would not have necessarily noticed or liked.

Bridget Todd

Had they noticed it all Sor Juana ever really wanted was to be allowed to learn. She was a student at heart with a love of discovery, the kind of writer whose words read as if they're excited to tell you something. It was a transitional period for the art of her time, when a relatively stable middle class demanded entertainment. Think the mid nineties, when you could watch the Simpsons, friends and Seinfeld all within the same block of programming. If the baroque period were a brick and the very idea of a Mexico were another, then Sor Juana would be the mortar holding them together.

Mexico wouldnt even achieve independence from Spain for over a century. Yet here was a nun of minor prominence, ideating an entire cultural voice. She literally has characters named America and religion. Theyre from a play, a prologue, really, to divine Narcissus. America and religion argue with their counterparts, occident and zeal, which sounds like it could be a decent comedy until you remember the history of every native american tribe, ever.

The short version lies somewhere between gentrification and genocide. Here's what's so special. No one was talking about that yet, at least not on paper. She often used a point of view from multiple enslaved black people. Native born Mesoamericans and the spanish colonials were all represented, the mix of which resulted in a uniquely mexican point of view.

However, that point of view was reverberating among cultures up and down Central America and even as far as Peru. Audiences anywhere in the spanish speaking Americas identified with her patchwork cultural voice. It was subversive. It was also rhythmic. Quereis compresuncion necia ayara la que vais para pretendidaes en la lucrecia.

That was a complicated balancing act. She used an archaic tense so her verb would rhyme with the name of an allegorical sex worker and also name dropped an ancient roman rape victim. You know, typical stuff for a nun to be rapping about. She was also a gifted satirist. She wrote poems with impish titles like which reveals the honorable ancestry of a high born drunkard or satiric reproach to a woman who boasts of her beauty.

Her most famous literary diss track is a poem entitled foolish men. The assumption was that irrationality and ignorance were female traits. Foolish men reverses it, accusing men of craving and desire in one moment and slut shaming the next. The poem that was just read a few moments ago is a stanza from foolish men. Why, she asks, does a man seek a woman for promiscuous sex, then shame the same woman for her indecency.

She describes it as breathing on a mirror, then getting angry when you cant see your reflection. Real heretical stuff, right?

Most curiously, Sorhuana was also a deeply sensual and romantic writer. It would be easy to think of her as a sedate intellectual buried in the library, inserting just one more clever reference to the well of Zohosadar. However, theres a section of her writings known as the burlesque sonnets, in which her imagery is expressive, detailed, and pretty risque. In one, she conjures imagery of a lover trying to escape, but hes become captured in her arms and held by her fantasy. In another, a suspicious lover touches her heart and it disintegrates in her hands.

And if coded references to female orgasms, penetration and lesbianism are what youre into, look no further. Sor Juana kept things spicy. Her intimacy was evocative. For a nun. She had a mysterious fluency in the emotions usually reserved between lovers.

300 years ago, this was how people would titillate themselves. So it had to be good.

Just ask Dh Lawrence or Pablo Neruda, equally responsible for many sexual awakenings. Have you ever read the words entangled, aquiver and hitherto without looking around to make sure your mom cant see you? Love opened a mortal wound is a particularly overt example. In it, she agonizes over a wound made by love, yet wishes for the pain to enrapture her further. She longs to experience a thousand deaths and surrender her heart to blow after blow to achieve an ultimate yearning sigh.

Finally asking if theres any greater pleasure, she summons thoughts of pain and eroticism, blending them in an enticingly progressive way. Imagine if Mother Teresa had released a line of massage oils, or if Cesar Chavez published a book of dirty limericks. It was subversive, but in a fun way, a way that appealed to people's most basic desires of wanting to tumble around in bed. They're incredibly bawdy, I suppose, would be the word. It's a very kind of off the time word, and very, I wouldn't say vulgar, because she was just such an exquisite stylist.

Stephanie Kirk

But the content, if you were to describe it, could be, you know, seen as vulgar and does touch on these very sort of like sexual themes. If you read, keep reading the way that, you know, I think she intended us to read, but they're coded, right? But this is what got her in trouble. So, you know, there are people that say that she wasn't in trouble, but she really was in trouble. She was definitive critiqued for writing about what they would call profane matters, matters that did not pertain to religion, matters that did not pertain to the church, and matters that really took her out of the realm, very far away from the realm of what was acceptable for a woman, a religious woman writing in the 17th century.

Bridget Todd

Her popularity was growing, and her enemies were starting to take notice. Nevertheless, she was about to drop her 9th symphony, her Sistine chapel. It was called la rez puesta, the first document of its kind. Espousing enlightenment era thinking about the rights of women to education, Father Antonio Vieira, a 17th century Jesuit of portuguese origin, published a sermon. In his sermon, Father Antonio made several arrogant claims regarding the gifts that Christ and his saints bestowed on man and himself, specifically raising his own prominence in a sort of self sanctification.

He also makes the world's wackiest 30 zero year old dick joke, an insistence of male virility that has endured for centuries. Imagine we get Pompeii this year and the only thing to survive a few centuries later is a blu ray disc of the bottom tier fast and furious movies. Father Antonio was just a real jerk.

This offended Sor Juana, so she wrote a critique of a sermon and that made its way to the authority in the region, the bishop of Puebla, Don Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz y Sagun. Because nothing screams emotional security like injecting three different locations into your name. The bishop was strategic. He'd been a fan of her work until then, but he knew that Sor Juana's views demanded rebuke. In response, he took a pair of seemingly contradictory actions.

First, he published the critique without her consent, releasing it across the entire spanish empire. The bishop renamed it Carta, Antenna Gorica, or letter worthy of Athena. Simultaneously, he catfished her. He penned and published a letter under the pseudonym sor Filotea, a supposed rival to Sor Juana. She too was an educated woman of God.

But conveniently her thrust was that a woman couldn't be entrusted with an education. And remember, shes not a real person. Its the bishop in a sore filotea disguise. Hence, such gems as human letters are slaves, making ladies of those intended to be servants. The letter was a slap in the face.

The really condescending kind. Sor filotea compliments Sor Juanas intellect, but reminds her that literacy is a gift from God and especially when shared with women, should be used primarily for studying the Bible. It accused her of arrogance and a lack of gratitude. The bishop capitalized on Sir Juana's popularity while suppressing female education. He had his cake and ate it too.

Misogynist didn't have to try so hard back then. Hence his flagrant hypocrisy in writing. I do not intend by this advice that you alter your natural inclinations by renouncing books, but rather better them by reading occasionally in the Book of Jesus Christ. There's even evidence that the bishop was using using the letter as a political tool against a rival candidate for archbishop of Mexico, a title he hunted. What's important to note is that all of this takes place well before any notions of the separation of church and state.

To be a member of the church, therefore, was to position oneself, to pivot between matters of faith and matters of state, commerce, and even military. Literate church members used their writing to outline, criticize, and even dictate the direction of culture, wielding their influence like a Taylor swift tweet. Whatever the case, Sor Filotea's suggestions for the proper use of Sor Juana's intellect had the force and effect of a command, with Juana later writing, though it comes in the guise of counsel, it will have for me the authority of a precept. An archbishop of the Catholic Church was rich, connected, and sought by the kind of power hungry personality that wants to speak for God. For the bishop, the greatest concern concern was in losing that power.

To him. Ser Juana's ideas were a threat in need of smothering. After his bait and switch betrayal, the bishop retreated to his sanctuary, satisfied with his supposed checkmate.

Sor Juana spent her whole life writing what she knew to be true and right. She was not about to swallow the criticism and condescension of the men who didn't even deem her fit to argue. The bishop stole her writing, published it without her permission, and even agreed with some of her points, then chided her for making them. In response, she crafted the reply to Sister Philotea, often referred to simply as the reply or la rez puesta, in which she told them off. She told them all off.

She told them where to get fucked if she couldnt continue to read and where else to get fucked if women were incapable of education.

Her response facetiously referred to Sofie Lottea throughout with reverence, lampshading the insipid premise that anyone would believe she was real in the first place. She painted Sophie Latias critique as envious. She also casually dismissed the accusation that she didnt know her Bible, pointing out her lifetime habit of reading every book in every room shed ever entered. And she mockingly refers to a debt to her fellow nun, thanking her for her attentions in a deluge of genteel irony. If it were in my power, lady, to repay you in some part what I owe you, she wrote, it might be done by having opened wide to you the doors of my heart, by having made patent to you its most deeply hidden secrets.

You will deem my confidence not unworthy of the debt I owe to your most august person and to your most uncommon favors. The dispute that she has with Vieira is the kind of theological dispute that men had all the time. Thats what the jesuit colleges were doing. They were always having these kind of kinds of disputes and discussions around the finer points of theology. So the only real problem here was who was disputing and the fact that she published it.

Stephanie Kirk

But she never intended to publish it. She wrote it down, and it was published. And I think she's a feminist hero to people like me, but she would never have conceived of herself as such. And she does talk a little bit in the resuerta about how, you know, women should be able to access knowledge, but I don't think she was taking up a cause. I don't think she was trying to get knowledge for all women.

She was very specific about what she had done and the difficulties that she had had and how she did think that women should learn if they were given the right circumstances. But she's not trying to advocate for education for everyone. I mean, she's quite specific about how some of the nuns that surround her are annoying because they just want to chatter and gossip and, you know, make all kinds of noise when she's trying to work at her books. She's very much thinking about her own part. And so I'm not saying she was a feminist.

I'm never saying that. I'm also not saying she wasn't an observant nun. She was a very observant nun. She just wanted to write and study. But not even the sort of scandalous, I mean, if you look at her library and the books that she used as reference books, they were all books that were allowed.

I mean, she was basically a Jesuit in a women's convent. I mean, in the sense that some of the Jesuits were probably more scandalous than she was in terms of the pushing at the boundaries of knowledge. The only boundaries she pushed at were the ones that said she couldn't be studious and she couldn't be a writer. Sor Juana's vehement defense of her right to learn, write, critique, and educate is largely seen as one of the first documents in the literature of the Americas to espouse the rights of women. The scope of those rights she insisted upon would be without peer for centuries.

Bridget Todd

Moreover, her tone had a strategic passive aggressiveness usually reserved for lifelong politicians and house cats. The church was not happy.

La rez puesta was the final straw in the mind of the mexican clergy, which still had close ties to the Spanish Inquisition. While not necessarily in danger of being tortured, her oeuvre's knack for inclusion of mesoamerican linguistics, religion, and cultural voices did little to engender support from the church in Spain either. Even her most loyal patrons amongst the wealthy and elite of Mexico's regal court began to abandon her, some because of their own staunch misogyny, others to escape punishment by association for her having fought ecumenical law. Her position was made all the more profound by knowing what was to come. She knew she would suffer for her choices, and she was right.

In the end, the church won, handing down a censure that banned her not only from expressing herself but even living her artificial artistic lifestyle. She watched as her possessions, her personal library of thousands of books, her musical instruments, and even her scientific and mathematical tools were sold off, and the proceeds donated to the poor. Her very identity and our ability to reconstruct key portions of her biography were hauled out to the curb. After the humiliation she endured as a result of la rez Puesta, Sor Juana spent the remainder of her life attending to non literary religious duties, rarely touching ink to paper in a meaningful way. Again, the most famous of her post censure work is a document prescribed by her censure.

In it, she was to reaffirm her faith, demonstrate her subjugation before God and the church, and to recant any previous opinions that were subversive or feminist. Her final word on the subject is her most famous in the form of her signature, cho la peor de tolas. I, the worst of all. It was signed in her own blood.

Since her death and literary resurrection, she's come to represent the idea of a female voice from before, a time when women's voices were heard, evidenced by the centuries long censure and subsequent neglect. Illiteracy was and is an attack on the history of feminism. If the generations of women after Sir Juana could not read that, they could not appreciate the battle she fought. Sor Juana went to her grave knowing she would never be free of the yoke of censure the Catholic Church forced upon her. No doubt her only reprieve was the knowledge that she fought for what she knew to be right.

That, and a hope that in some distant, emancipated world, her expressions in writing, even those outside of feminist thought, might be vindicated by a more enlightened society.

Stephanie Kirk

This is not unique to Mexico, but it's particularly relevant to Mexico because she was mexican. But a time of great gender violence against women of femicide that's going on in Mexico and elsewhere in the world. In many parts the United States England. I think she's an inspiration for people. I mean, she talks about men's cowardice around sex.

She talks about, you know, men's control over systems. I mean, you know, not in the feminist 2023 way, but in the way that's applicable to the 17th century. And I think if you look at the way she's memed online, and some of the memes are insane. So I think, you know, it's hard for us to understand in the US or in the UK, just, you know, how incredibly meaningful she is as a national poet. That's why she's a feminist icon.

Not because she said feminist things, but because her struggles as a woman in the 17th century against an incredibly powerful male establishment. And you can slice some of this any way you want, but you cannot get away from the fact of how much power the church had and how the church was only men. The power in the church was men. That's not up for any dispute. So I think to see a woman push against that in whatever way you think she did, whether it's just by writing poetry or the other things that she did, her, you know, petitions to study, I think that's incredibly meaningful for people.

Mexico has an incredibly active. They could teach us a lot in terms of feminist activism, and I think I can only imagine that they draw inspiration from her.

Bridget Todd

While literary figures of her time have undergone 300 years of criticism, her works were largely rediscovered in modern times by Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and published in 1982. Much of her baroque writing was ignored for its adherence to the archaic style of the time. All interpretations and translations are written well after her death, meaning there's a contrast in what her story even represents. Some scholars insist that fluctuation and argument suit an analysis of Sor Juana better than a fixed identity. To make the history books generally means having a body count.

The only blood Sor Juana spilt was her own. Nobody died to create this legacy. A war of words is civilized, even when the players arent. The idea of gendered intellectualism or that literacy required permission is ridiculous. She both recognized that sentiment and lived it.

She was subversive punk rock, and still her sacrifice could even be seen as a pious gesture. She believed in God with all of her heart ever grateful for placing in her a love of knowledge. God has granted me the mercy of loving truth above all else. From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination towards letters has been so vehement, so overpowering, that not even the admonition of others and I have suffered many, nor my own meditations, and they have not been. Few have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God has placed in me.

The Lord knows why and for what purpose. Beef is a production of next chapter podcasts. This episode was written by Adrian Dustin Munoz with support from our senior producers, James Levine and Ben Austin Docampo. The actors who voice Sor Juana's words are Luisa Sofia and Franco Macado Pesce. Our editor, sound designer and showrunner is Pete Musto.

Bridget Todd

Our executive producer is Jeremiah Tiddle. Don't forget to subscribe to, rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us get the word out. I'm Bridget Todd. Thanks for listening to beef and remember to stay petty.

Who knows how far it'll take you.

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