Ungendering Empire: Catalina De Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity

Abstract

Catalina de Erauso was no demure wallflower. This seventeenth-century Basque noblewoman, who was born in San Sebastian, Spain, in 1592,¹ escaped, at the age of fifteen, from the convent where she had lived almost her entire life, right before taking her final vows to become a nun.² Stepping out into a street and city she was entirely unfamiliar with, she hid on the outskirts of town for three days, cutting up her bodice and petticoat and altering them, shearing her long hair, and tossing aside her nun’s habit. When she emerged, she had refashioned herself as young man who would go on to travel thousands of miles over two continents, participate meritoriously as a soldier in the Spanish-Indian conflicts in South America (The Arauco War), and survive shipwrecks, barren highland landscapes, duels, marriage proposals, and not one, but two attempts by Spanish authorities to execute her for various crimes she had committed. For nearly twenty years Erauso lived successfully as a man until, while seeking sanctuary in a church in Guamanga, Peru, to avoid arrest for murder, she confessed the truth of her situation to a bishop there: she was not only a woman but also an intact virgin. At this revelation, she became an instant celebrity. Throngs gathered wherever she went, and she was feted by royalty. She visited the crowned heads of Europe, and she was even granted a yearly military pension by the Spanish monarch Philip IV and a special dispensation by Pope Urban VIII (both in 1626) to live the remainder of her life dressed as a man.