Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was the greatest intellectual of colonial Mexico — a self-taught polymath who wrote poetry, philosophy, and scientific treatises from inside a convent because it was the only institution that would allow a woman to pursue a life of the mind. When the Church hierarchy tried to silence her, she wrote the first feminist manifesto in the Americas. When the Inquisition finally cornered her, she surrendered her library of four thousand books in a gesture of submission that may have been the most calculated act of defiance in literary history.

This episode traces Sor Juana from her childhood prodigy years through the convent that became her intellectual fortress, the feminist manifesto that challenged patriarchal authority, and the forced silence that ended her public career.

• Sor Juana's self-education as a chi ...