On July 29, 1689, the second volume of collected works by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was published in Seville — a collection of poetry, plays, and prose by a Hieronymite nun in New Spain who was, by any measure, the greatest writer in the Spanish-language world of her century.

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born in 1648 or 1651 in a small village near Mexico City. She was illegitimate, taught herself to read at three, had read all the books in her grandfather's library by eight, and asked her mother to send her to university in Mexico City disguised as a boy. Her mother refused. She taught herself instead.

She entered the viceregal court as a lady-in-waiting in her teens and was examined publicly by forty professors — the viceroy's test of whether her learning was genuine. She passed. She entered a convent in 1669 because it was the only institution in New Spain that provided women with libraries, intellectual community, and time to think.

She wrote love poems that have been interpreted as addressed to women. She wrote a theological essay arguing that a woman could legitimately interpret scripture. In 1690, the Bishop of Puebla published her essay with a preface condemning her intellectual ambition. The Archbishop of Mexico followed. Under sustained ecclesiastical pressure she signed a declaration renouncing secular learning and sold her library. She died of plague in 1695 while nursing sick sisters.