SOURCE: "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz," in The Siren & the Seashell, and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry, translated by Lysander Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, 1976, pp. 3-15.

In the following essay, Paz explores the autobiographical aspects of Juana Inés de la Cruz's work and places her within the context of historical and political events of seventeenth-century Mexico.

In 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, published Sor Juana Inés's criticism of the Jesuit Antonio de Vieyra's famous sermon, "Christ's Proofs of Love for Man." This Carta atenagórica [Letter worthy of Athena] is Sor Juana's only theological composition, or at least the only one that has survived.

Taken up at a friend's behest and written "with more repugnance than any other feeling, as much because it treats sacred things, for which I have reverent terror, as because...