(b San Miguel de Nepantla, nr Mexico City, 12 Nov 1648/51; d Nepantala, nr Mexico City, 17 April 1695). Mexican poet, dramatist and writer on music. She was the daughter of a Basque captain, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje y Vargas, and Isabel Ramírez de Santillana. She demonstrated such intellect that at the age of eight she sought entrance to Mexico University, and after only 20 lessons mastered the Latin language. The 25th viceroy's wife, the Marchioness of Mancera, took her as a lady-in-waiting from 1664 to 1669. In 1667 she was for three months a novice in the austere Convent of the Discalced Carmelites, but found her true home in 1669 at the S Jerónimo Convent, Mexico City, where she spent the remaining 26 years of her life, gaining a transatlantic reputation as the ‘tenth muse’. Her protectors included the Mexican Archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera and the wives of the viceroys who ruled Mexico during the periods 1680–86 (the Countess of Paredes) and 1688–96 (the Countess of Galve). Her literary works, reprinted several times in Spain until 1715, include three volumes of poetry (1689, 1692, 1700), 12 sets of villancicos published in Mexico City or Puebla and another ten sets that can be attributed to her. Her composers were Joseph de Agurto y Loaysa, Antonio de Salazar, Miguel Matheo de Dallo y Lana and Matheo Vallados, maestros de capilla at the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca.
Calling herself a disciple of Cerone, Sor Juana annotated her copy of his El melopeo y maestro (now in the Congressional Library, Mexico City) and for the benefit of her musical sisters in religion she summarized portions of it in a treatise, El caracol (now lost), which she epitomized in a poem addressed to the Countess of Paredes. Her two plays, the second of which, Amor es más laberinto, was written in collaboration with another poet, and her three autos sacramentales abound in musical allusions and in sections that demand singing and/or instrumental music. In her last work, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, completed on 1 March 1691, she reminded the Bishop of Puebla that scripture cannot be properly interpreted without musical science, citing Genesis xviii.23–33 and suggesting that Abraham's numbers are to be understood as an inspired reference to musical intervals.
A. Méndez Plancarte, ed.: Obras completas de Sor Juana de la Cruz (Mexico City, 1951–2)
M. del C. Reyes: El convento de San Jerónimo: vida conventual y finanzas (Mexico City, 1990)
R. Stevenson: ‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Musical Rapports’, Inter-American Music Review, xv (1995), 1–21
R. Stevenson: ‘Sor Juana's Mexico City Musical Coadjutors’, ibid., 23–37
R. Miranda: ‘Aves, ecos, alientos y sonidos: Juana Inés de la Cruz y la música’, RdMc, xix (1996), 85–104
ROBERT STEVENSON