Born: 1544, Dominican Republic
Died: 1611
Country most active: Dominican Republic
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Sor (Sister) Leonor de Ovando is the first poetess of whom we have notice in Latin America. We know of her through Eugenio de Salazar, Judge of the Royal “Audiencia” or Supreme Court in Santo Domingo during 1575 to 1580. He also mentions Elvira de Mendoza, but in his volume of poems “Silva de Poesias” he reproduced five sonnets of Sor Leonor that she dedicated to him corresponding herself in this way, to some that he wrote for her.
The poems of Sor Leonor de Ovando are all on religious subjects, and although somewhat fanciful in style, they reveal a high-finished cultivation of the Spanish language. Leonor de Ovando, in the convent of “Regina Angelorum” in Santo Domingo City, wore the white and black garment of the Dominican order founded by Saint Catharine of Siena. Perhaps she was a relative of the famous Comendador de Lares Frey Nicolas de Ovando, and thus of noble birth. We can imagine her fair and beautiful, of pronounced Spanish type, as she lived from the last of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century date still purely colonial. It is supposed that the learned Sor Leonor died sometime between 1610-1616, as her name appears in the book of that time in the convent of “Regina Angelorum,” in the capital of Santo Domingo. There she was a nun.