Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—a witty, intellectually formidable, and prolific author—stands as an icon of women's early writing and of colonial New Spain. Living in the capital city of seventeenth-century Mexico, she was located in the center of her world, but, as a self-taught, illegitimate, Creole woman and as a nun subject to the authority of male religious leaders, she was also socially marginal within that world. Like other early modern women she took up the pen to challenge gendered norms …