HISTORIA DE LA MONJA ALFEREZ, DOÑA CATALINA DE ERAUSO
Scarce first edition of the autobiography of the convent runaway, Spanish soldier, and womanizing duelist who was assigned female at birth but successfully petitioned the Pope to live publicly as a man.
Very good plus.
Price: $6,000.00
HISTORIA DE LA MONJA ALFEREZ, DOÑA CATALINA DE ERAUSO
From nobility to the convent, from a nun to a fugitive, from a fugitive to a pirate killer, conquistador, and a rake – the eventful life of Catalina de Erauso is well backed by documentary evidence. Born into nobility but forced into a convent at a young age, Erauso fled life as a nun at 16 and assumed the garb and comportment of a boy, wandering Spain working odd jobs before boarding a ship to Venezuela. After a run-in with Dutch pirates, Erauso voyaged across Spanish-held territories in South and Central America, and eventually joined the military, where Erauso — who used both feminine and masculine descriptors in the memoir — is presented as "the perfect colonizer [and] the perfect specimen of imperial masculinity – ruthlessly violent, highly nationalistic, and undeterred by hardship or injury" (Rex, 39).
Erauso engaged in relationships and dalliances with multiple women, even becoming engaged to two women at once. It was such romances that eventually led to catastrophe: after killing a jealous male paramour in a duel, Erauso was tried and sentenced to death. Upon this event, however, Erauso revealed that the duelist they had just sentenced was in fact assigned female at birth. After a physical examination revealed the accuracy of the claim (and seemingly rendered the death sentence moot), Erauso worked to assemble attestations from witnesses and collect military service records in order to lobby Pope Urban VIII for allowance to continue to live as a man — which was granted. Papal dispensation in hand, Erauso return to Europe a celebrity, making public appearances, visiting royalty, and securing a military pension.
Erauso allegedly composed this autobiography before retiring to Mexico (where the former conquistador worked as a mule driver until dying in 1650). Scholars are divided as to whether the work (which is based on a sole surviving copy at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid) is entirely the work of Erauso, an oral history recorded by someone else, or a later interpolation based on an earlier more authentic version. In any case, HISTORIA is remarkably scarce, with only five holdings located in OCLC — none of which are in the US. An important and remarkable story of genderqueer living in early modern Spain.
Read more: Cathy Rex, "Ungendering Empire: Catalina de Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity," in Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato, Women's Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire.
The Object
Paris: Julio Didot, 1829. 6.5'' x 4''. Contemporary tree calf with gilt edge roll, gilt tooling to spine. Marbled edges and endpapers. lii, 312 pages, lacking frontispiece, else collated complete. Binding with light edgewear and rubbing. Leaves with scattered foxing and one or two small spots of soil, largely contained to margins; tiny bits of loss to lower corners of a couple of leaves. A sound copy.
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