Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s Letter to Sor Filotea This is a famous letter from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz. The Bishop was her sometime friend and adviser, and he wrote to her under the pseudonym “Sor Filotea.” This letter is a spirited, autobiographical response to critics among her ecclesiastical superiors.Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651-1695) is perhaps the most celebrated literary figure of colonial Spanish America. De la Cruz was daughter of Creole Spanish parents from the pueblo of Chimalhuacan, near the valley of Mexico. In this letter to the Bishop she tells him about herself. She writes about her own life, her experiences, thoughts, and values. Her life and writings say much about the Baroque predicaments that were keenly felt, especially in the 17th century, and it reflects a life of struggle toward salvation in a world of troubling contradictions. De la Cruz was identified as a child prodigy, and she became an instant celebrity at court at an early age, but in 1668, at the age of 17, she entered the Jeronymite Order, and spent the remainder of her life as a nun. In this letter we learn about this remarkable woman who had a total disinclination to marriage, and who choose a conventional way to remain faithful to her religion and pursue her passion for study. We learn that she had interior struggles over religion and science, body and soul, passion and reason, and the situation of a woman entering the intellectual territory of men. This is an important document because we can compare de la Cruz to Santa Rosa of Lima. We can see that the secluded life of the spirit for this refined, troubled, and vibrant woman took a very different turn from that of Santa Rosa of Lima, and it met with a very different response from her superiors. De la Cruz found little of Santa Rosa’s reported serenity, and she finally gave up the struggle in 1694 at the age of for...
