The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition)

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition)

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The Answer La Respuesta

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

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That same year, in 1692, Sor Juana sold her library and musical and scientific instruments, contributing the proceeds to charity. She wrote her last set of villancicos (carols), those to St. Catherine. Little more would come from her pen. Two years later, in 1694, she renewed her vows, signed a statement of self-condemnation, and reportedly turned to penance and self-sacrifice.

Was Sor Juana’s retreat from writing, study, and society a religious conversion? Was she under compulsion? How much the pressure came from without, how much from within is rigorously debated by scholars. It is notable that, at the end, Sor Juana took the ascetic path Núñez had earlier prescribed. In fact, in 1693 he became her confessor once again. Sor Juana’s life ended two months after his, in 1695, when she fell victim to an epidemic while caring for her sisters.21 The last of her three volumes of work was not published until five years later, in Madrid, in the first year of the new century.

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