Sor Juana was as prolific as she was encyclopaedic. Notable in the popular vein are the villancicos (carols) that she composed to be sung in the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Sor Juana authored both allegorical religious dramas and entertaining cloak-and-dagger plays ( cloak and sword drama). Her breadth of range-from the serious to the comical and the scholarly to the popular-is equally unusual for a nun. Though it is impossible to date much of her poetry, it is clear that, even after she became a nun, Sor Juana wrote secular love lyrics. She wrote moral, satiric, and religious lyrics, along with many poems of praise to court figures. She drew on a vast stock of Classical, biblical, philosophical, and mythological sources. Sor Juana employed all of the poetic models then in fashion, including sonnets, romances (ballad form), and so on. Her writings display the boundless inventiveness of Lope de Vega ( Vega, Lope de), the wit and wordplay of Francisco de Quevedo ( Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de), the dense erudition and strained syntax of Luis de Góngora ( Góngora y Argote, Luis de), and the schematic abstraction of Pedro Calderón de la Barca ( Calderón de la Barca, Pedro). She was the last great writer of the Hispanic Baroque and the first great exemplar of colonial Mexican culture. ![]() Sor Juana's success in the colonial milieu and her enduring significance are due at least in part to her mastery of the full range of poetic forms and themes of the Spanish Golden Age. Sor Juana remained cloistered in the Convent of Santa Paula for the rest of her life. She moved in 1669 to the more lenient Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite order in Mexico City, and there she took her vows. In 1667, given what she called her “total disinclination to marriage” and her wish “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study,” Sor ( Spanish: “Sister”) Juana began her life as a nun with a brief stay in the order of the Discalced Carmelites ( Carmelite). He invited her to court as a lady-in-waiting in 1664 and later had her knowledge tested by some 40 noted scholars. There her prodigious intelligence attracted the attention of the viceroy, Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, marquis de Mancera. Juana's mother sent the gifted child to live with relatives in Mexico City. Her mother was a Creole and her father Spanish. Juana was born out of wedlock to a family of modest means in either 1651 or, according to a baptismal certificate, 1648 (there is no scholarly consensus on her birth date). As a female, she had little access to formal education and would be almost entirely self-taught. Juana Ramírez thirsted for knowledge from her earliest years and throughout her life.
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