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The Colonial Schools and Sor Juana

The universities of Lima and Mexico were chartered in 1551, and philosophy came with them as the arts course of the scholastic curriculum: Alonso de la Vera Cruz wrote Mexico’s logic and physics in the 1550s. In that order the arts were the steps to theology.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun of Mexico City, described the ladder from inside it. In her Respuesta a sor Filotea (1691) she says she directed her study “a la cumbre de la Sagrada Teología”, to the summit of sacred theology, climbing “por los escalones de las ciencias y artes humanas; porque ¿cómo entenderá el estilo de la Reina de las Ciencias quien aun no sabe el de las ancilas?”, by the steps of the human sciences and arts; for how will one understand the style of the queen of the sciences who does not yet know that of her handmaids? Her own reason for study: “Yo no estudio para escribir, ni menos para enseñar … sino sólo por ver si con estudiar ignoro menos”, I do not study to write, still less to teach, but only to see whether by studying I am less ignorant.

She did it alone, “teniendo sólo por maestro un libro mudo, por condiscípulo un tintero insensible”, with a mute book for master and an unfeeling inkwell for fellow student, and wherever she was: “what can women know except philosophy of the kitchen? … it is possible to philosophize while preparing dinner. As I often say on observing these little things, if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more” (tr. Rappaport). Against “Mulieres in Ecclesia taceant”, let women keep silent in the churches, she asks why those women are reproved “que privadamente estudian”, who study privately.

In the eighteenth century Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787) wrote his history of ancient Mexico, as he says in its prologue, “para servir a mi patria en cuanto mis fuerzas lo alcanzasen, y para reponer en su esplendor a la verdad ofuscada por una turba increíble de escritores modernos sobre América”: to serve his country as far as his strength allowed, and to restore to its splendour the truth obscured by an incredible crowd of modern writers on America (in the Spanish of the 1917 edition).