With Juana In s de la Cruz and the Theology of Beauty, George H. Tavard presents the first thorough investigation of the theology of the greatest Latin American poet before our own time. HIs program is all the more important because she was the first woman of this continent to assert the right of women to study to the full extent of their capacities. An intelligent and intellectual woman, Juana In s was eager to live a life of scholarship and felt a great aversion to matrimony, which directed her to enter the convent in 1667. Tavard provides a thought-provoking analysis both of the theological ideas that Juana In s expressed in poetry and prose and of the conclusions, provisional or definitive, she may have reached about herself and about humanity.