Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

A self-taught prodigy who entered a convent to keep her library, Sor Juana became the greatest poet of the Spanish Golden Age's American branch. Her Reply to Sister Filotea (1691) is the first sustained defence of women's intellectual rights written in the Americas; the Church forced her to sell her 4,000 books and instruments.

• Wrote Primero Sueño, a 975-line philosophical poem on the soul's pursuit of knowledge
• Composed the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, a foundational feminist manifesto
• Wrote plays, carols and satirical verse including 'Hombres necios', still memorised across Latin America
• Assembled one of the largest private libraries in the New World

She is on the Mexican 200-peso note and is the emblem of Latin American feminism; her Respuesta is standard reading in gender-studies and postcolonial curricula worldwide. Contemporary debates about women in science and the cost of institutional silencing routinely invoke her. Octavio Paz's biography made her a central figure in Mexico's understanding of its own colonial intellectual life.

As a nun she had no children. She was herself illegitimate, a 'daughter of the church', and died nursing sisters during an epidemic.