The Nun Who Signed in Blood

By the age of three, Juana Inés de Asbaje could read Latin. By six, she was begging her mother to let her cut her hair short and disguise herself as a boy so she could attend university. By her teens, she had talked her way into the viceregal court, where the viceroy, half skeptical, half showing off, arranged for forty of New Spain's most distinguished scholars to examine her at once. She was self-taught. She passed.

Then she chose a convent over marriage. Not for God, but for the library.

Sor Juana essentially shopped for the most comfortable order in Mexico City, rejecting the Carmelites for their fondness for sleep deprivation, and settling on the Hieronymites, who gave her a private suite with a bedroom, a kitchen, and enough shelf space for what became the largest personal library in the Americas, more than four thousand volumes. She wrote over two hundred works — poetry, philosophy, comedy, theology — and her admirers called her the Tenth Muse.

When the Church finally pressured her to stop writing, she sold every book and gave the money to the poor. Then she renewed her vows in a document she signed in her own blood, beneath the words Yo, la peor del mundo — "Me, the worst in the world."

She died the following year, nursing plague victims in her convent. An unfinished poem was found in her cell.

She had signed away her pen in blood. She wrote anyway.