“She was a woman of many parts. She was completely dedicated to the intellectual life.” Santiago Cortes Hernandez Mexican historian

MEXICO CITY—If ever there was a female martyr to men’s domination of the Roman Catholic Church, then her name is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a woman whose image reappears in Mexico daily — just about every time anyone pulls out a wallet or a purse.

It’s her likeness you see on the country’s 200-peso banknotes (worth about $16).

Sor Juana lived — and died — more than 300 years ago, but she remains a rarity in Mexico, a symbol of female achievement and even supremacy in a land that is still far more closely identified with masculine pursuits and accomplishments, a nation of matadors, mescal and machismo.

Born around 1651, Sor Juana was the pre-eminent figure of either sex to emerge during a period of Mexican history known as the viceroyalty, an era that stretched from the Spanish conquest in 1521 to Mexico’s independence from Madrid 300 years later.

“In three centuries of the viceroyalty,” says Mexican historian Santiago Cortes Hernandez, “the most important figure is Sor Juana.”

And, yet, she died a diseased and broken woman — silent, anonymous, unsung — defeated by the very church that she had served for much of her life.

That same church, represented by 115 cardinals from around the world, this week elected a new pope to replace Benedict XVI, who resigned the papacy last month.

The new pontiff is an Argentine, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, formerly Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who now goes by the name Pope Francis.

The new bishop of Rome will preside over a church in disarray, facing challenges and scandals on a daunting range of fronts, nowhere more so than in Latin America, where roughly 40 per cent of the world’s Catholics reside — more than 90 million of them in Mexico.

The subordinate role of women in the hierarchy of the planet’s largest Christian church, however, continues to cause controversy and despair, for it has not fundamentally changed from Sor Juana’s time.

Still excluded from the priesthood, women in the Catholic Church are relegated to positions of little power and much deference, a condition that seems certain to remain in force.

Which bring us back to Sor Juana.

She is not the only Mexican woman to enjoy enduring fame. She isn’t even the only woman to have her picture appear on a Mexican banknote. Twentieth-century painter Frida Kahlo enjoys a similar honour, with her likeness occupying the reverse side of the country’s 500-peso bill. (Her fellow painter and sometime husband, Diego Rivera, appears on the front.)

Another female figure, the Virgin of Guadalupe, has long played a vital role in Mexican culture. But let’s face it: based on an apparition of a dark-skinned Madonna early in the 16th century, la guadalupana is a mythical figure, not a real person.

It is Sor Juana, a bastard child, lifelong spinster and product of the baroque era, whose many accomplishments give her pride of place among women in Mexican history, far outshining any achievements even remotely approached by the immense majority of men.

The Mexican prodigy, born Juana Ines de Asbaje y Ramirez, was a feminist before the concept existed. Although a nun, she spent much of her life challenging the authority of the church. Despite being born out of wedlock, she moved in the most exalted social circles of her time, mingling with the greatest writers and intellectuals of the territory then known as New Spain.

“She was a woman of many parts,” says Cortes Hernandez. “She was completely dedicated to the intellectual life.”

Sor Juana wrote poems, plays and social manifestos. She composed music. She was fascinated by physical science and kept a laboratory of her own.

If it was her acute intelligence that brought her celebrity, it was the same attribute that ultimately led to her premature death, an event of genuinely tragic proportions.

She was born in a village called San Miguel Nepantla, although there is some uncertainty about the exact year. Later, she moved with her mother to the town of Amecameca on a property that belonged to her maternal grandfather, a learned man with an extensive library.

There, the child promptly immersed herself in a world of books.

By the age of 8, Juana was writing poetry. She began giving Latin lessons to neighbouring children when she was just 13. She taught herself nahuatl — the indigenous tongue of the central Mexican highlands — and began composing poems in that language, too.

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At 16, Juana was presented to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City, the marquis of Mancera, who was so impressed he promptly invited the girl to join the viceregal court. A year later, in an exhibition that became legendary and cemented her fame, the marquis assembled a panel of learned men who sought to test the young woman’s erudition and intelligence.

Her performance was a triumph.

But Juana abandoned that shimmering world. At age 21, she entered the Convent of San Jeronimo in what is now the old centre of Mexico City, there to remain for the rest of her life.

“The major part of the works of Sor Juana were produced here,” says Cortes Hernandez, whose casement window overlooks a centuries-old courtyard surrounded by the very same convent walls. “There’s a debate about why she entered the cloister.”

Closed in 1861, the antique monastery now is home to the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, where Cortes Hernandez, a slim man in steel-rimmed glasses with his long hair in a ponytail, oversees the advanced program in the history of viceregal Mexico. He believes Sor Juana’s choice of the monastic life was mainly practical.

She had few financial resources of her own, he says. Lacking a dowry, she could not easily have married, even had she wanted to. A liberal institution for its time, the Convent of San Jeronimo allowed her to keep a library, a collection of musical instruments and her scientific equipment. She could entertain visitors. Here, she was able to lead a life of greater independence and security than would have been possible even at the viceregal court.

But others view Sor Juana’s life through the prism of gender politics and sexual identity. Her refusal to wed, they maintain, reflected a feminist’s conviction. Some suggest she may have been lesbian.

Whatever her motives, Sor Juana was able at first to prosper both intellectually and socially while she lived within the convent walls, regularly receiving visits from the greatest writers and thinkers of her day, all of them men. Nowadays, she is generally regarded as the greatest writer of her time, not only in what is now Mexico, but in all of the Spanish-speaking world.

Gradually, however, her circumstances deteriorated. Her patrons at the viceregal court were recalled to Spain, removing her chief line of defence against conservative pressure from the church, which had long insisted she restrict her writing to rote declarations of religious piety. Her chief adversary was Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, the archbishop of Mexico City and a committed misogynist.

The nun fought back in a famous manifesto, called “Letter to Sor Filotea,” in which she stubbornly defended her conviction that intellectual freedom was a birthright to be shared by all.

But the clerics wore her down, and in the end she surrendered.

At the church’s insistence, she sold her library, her musical instruments, her scientific equipment. She ceased to write on any subject at all and passed the final years of her life under an imposed silence.

In 1695, an outbreak of the plague gripped Mexico City. Sor Juana initially devoted herself to the care of other nuns infected with the disease but, inevitably, she fell ill herself. She died on April 17 of that year. As nearly as can be reckoned, she was 44.

Now, three centuries later, the woman’s abiding influence resides chiefly in her defence of intellectual freedom as a right for all, for women no less than men.

“We all have the same right to know things,” says Cortes Hernandez. “This idea of intellectual liberty — that’s completely present in her works.”

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