"Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more." – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, *Answer to Sor Filotea* (1691)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The College of Letters, Quarter of Reason; the Pavilion of Borrowed Names SUBJECT: Instruction; the question of invented women Every newcomer to the Cité takes one course, and it is taught in a kitchen. The College of Letters is a convent cloister from New Spain – grey stone, red volcanic tezontle, orange trees – with three storeys of Cambridge brick on top of it, added the year the College ran out of room. Its library holds four thousand volumes and one empty shelf. Its tutor is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who in life was examined at seventeen by forty scholars at once and answered all of them, who wrote the great poem of her century in a convent cell, who defended the right of women to learn in a letter so brilliant that her bishop made her stop, and who, at the end, gave up her books and signed her vows in the words I, the worst of all. She teaches geometry with an egg in a pan. The course is called How to Read a Stone, and I took it. Th...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.