Luisa de Oliva Sabuco de Nantes y Barrera was born to Francisca de Cosar and Miguel Sabuco y Alvarez. We know not the date of her birth, but that she was baptized on December 2, 1562. Due to the disappearance from the Archivos Históricos Diocesanos in Albacete of Book 1 of the Baptismal records for the Church of Santísima Trinidad of Alcaraz, we rely on Marco-e-Hidalgo, the only person claiming to have seen the original, as he so states in his Biografía de Doña Oliva Sabuco,Madrid,1903. The record of Oliva's schooling is undocumented. She could have attended the precarious Alcaraz Council's Primeras Letras school (Simón-Abril was Maestro de Escuela twice there) or, more likely, she may have received her schooling with the nuns at the Dominican Convent close to home, on the town square, for it seems that a few young women students were accepted as seniors there (perhaps in-lieu-of attending the Council's ephemeral Cátedra de Gramática?). There is no evidence that Oliva Sabuco was a pupil there (no records kept!) but the English translators of Nueva Filosofía -having had the privilege of talking with the cloistered nuns during the visit to Alcaraz in 1997- believe in the plausibility of such hypothesis. The generous religiosas provided them with a comprehensive account of the Convent's tradition of spiritual and intellectual interests as well as with a rich historical and social tale about the region, going back to 15C. They asserted that the Convent had persistently maintained an important library where intellectual pursuit was encouraged. They showed their disappointment with the authorship debate for they not just admire Oliva but claim to easily identify with her problem. As a young woman, Sabuco might have been tutored by her father, an apothecary with seemingly professional knowledge of Botany (and possibly of Latin, as pointed out by Domingo Henares), by her brother, a pharmacist too, and by her godfather, the physician Heredia. Among others who may have tutored her we should cite one or both of the de Sotomayor, one a cleric, the other an attorney and a poet of prestige, both close to the family. Utmost prominent in her education might have been the mentorship by Pedro Simón-Abril, himself a native of Alcaraz . He is one of Spain's foremost philosopher-rhetoricians, a reputed grammarian, a larger-than-life figure in 16C academia, a scholar and a prolific translator of Greek and Latin Classics into Castilian (now Spanish), whose ideas are echoed in New Philosophy. Oliva's parents, Miguel Sabuco and Francisca Cozar, had seven children. Oliva was the fifth of the siblings.