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11 - Catalina de Erauso—‘the Lieutenant Nun’—at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter discusses recent scholarship on Catalina de Erauso—‘the Lieutenant Nun’—one of the more controversial figures of the early seventeenth century. Erauso fled from a convent at age fifteen; from then on, she dressed as a man and lived a life of travel, violence, and adventure. Her autobiography replicates the fluidity of her gender assignment, showing elements from different religious and secular writings. Both the person and the text are characterized by their defying of categorization. In Erauso, binary oppositions such as male/female, saint/sinner, Basque/ Spaniard seem to be subsumed. Erauso's Basque origin emerges as a key element for the understanding of her life, and her story becomes a privileged documentation of the Basque experience in America in the early modern era.
Keywords: early modern Spain; Basques in America; transvestism; gender identity; seventeenth-century autobiographies; literary genre classification
In the early modern period, political borders were often in flux, and people were ‘strongly aware of the potentially shifting, unstable nature of borders, which are arbitrary and political’. This fluctuation, however, was not confined merely to political boundaries. Humans have long understood that edges—whether they be of countries, between the spiritual and the secular, and indeed between categories of classification and study—are, in the words of Lisa Hopkins, ‘arbitrary and subject to radical change through time’. While this collection has shown that gender was an important and sometimes impermeable edge in early modern Europe, this edge has also been perpetuated by scholars in the proceeding centuries, with ‘arbitrary’ edges created to limit and contain women deemed contradictory and conflicted. One of the best examples of this is Catalina de Erauso, ‘the Lieutenant Nun’. The subsequent retellings of her story, and the way that edges were reinforced by successive generations of scholars, help to show what was at stake in the various and different ways in which early modern women might be on the edge.
Catalina de Erauso, the daughter of a Basque family of noble ancestry, was born in Donostia-San Sebastián in 1592. At the age of 4, she entered the convent of San Sebastián El Antiguo, like two of her sisters had done before her.
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- Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe , pp. 227 - 246Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019