Historia de la monja Alferez, Doña Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma, é illustrada con notas y documentos por D. Joaquin Maria de Ferrer

by Antonio de Erauso / Catalina de Erauso / Alonso Díaz | Juan Pérez de Montalván | edited by Joaquín María de Ferrer y Cafranga

Paris: Jules Didot, 1829

li, [1], 311, [1] p. + [1] plate (frontis portrait) | 12mo | a-b^12 c^2 1-13^12 | 170 x 101 mm

First edition of the vaunted memoir by the famous 17th-century lieutenant nun (1585 or 1592-1650). For a century, the manuscript remained in the hands of the descendants of Erauso’s original master in Peru. The present edition comes from a 1784 transcription, which the editor, Ferrer, encountered in the 1820s. The work would go on to be translated and edited repeatedly during the 19th and 20th centuries. Included at end, and occupying roughly a third of the book, is Juan Pérez de Montalván’s comedy, La Monja Alferez (1626). ¶ While obviously anachronistic, Erauso's name appears regularly among early documented cases of what today might be considered transgender expression. "Whether she was a lesbian, transgender, or simply a transvested heterosexual woman cannot be claimed definitively. We can, however, confirm her successful performance of New World masculinity" (Stinnett). All labels aside, their story was plainly extraordinary. Born female and not long after sent to a Dominican convent, Erauso escaped in 1600 and lived the remainder of their life as a man. Following their escape, and after fashioning their habit into boy’s clothing, Erauso “worked as a page in Spain, and then took passage as a cabin boy to the kingdom of Peru. In Panama, she worked as a merchant’s assistant and joined the Spanish forces, becoming a lieutenant and fighting the Indians during the conquest of Chile. As Lieutenant Diaz, he also displayed a hot temper, getting involved in brawls and duels, and killing several men, including his own brother. As a man, Catalina was attracted to women and romantic entanglements caused recurrent problems. He left one employer rather than marry, got sent to the worst front in the war after visiting the mistress of his captain, and fled two other marriage proposals. Despite the fact that he was wounded severely as a soldier, his sex remained undetected until he revealed it to Bishop Agustín de Carvajal in Guamanga to avoid execution” (Crawford). At this point, one might have expected some repercussion for his remarkably prolonged deception, to say nothing of his violent crimes. Yet upon returning to Spain, he was given special royal and papal dispensation to continue living his life as a man. He evidently returned to the New World, where he worked as a cart driver named Antonio. ¶ “Dressing as a man provided her with opportunities—and dangers—that were largely unavailable to women (and certainly to cloistered nuns). Many people used the great distances of the colonial world to remake their identities, and, as records of military forces and trading companies indicate, Erauso was not the only cross-dressing woman” (Wiesner-Hanks). To be sure, despite his crimes and transgressions—or perhaps because of them—he had been "‘successful’ as a man, respecting gender norms that required men to fight and love and have adventures” (Crawford). It’s this unusual success, however, that “reveals the contradictions inherent in female masculinity, as it provoked a response to the violation of traditional gender proscriptions while reaffirming the patriarchal assessment of male-centered identity as superior” (Velasco). ¶ A remarkable memoir of a life truly exceptional for its time.

PROVENANCE: A PRESENTATION COPY FROM THE EDITOR, the inscription on the half-title signed el autor, which we take to mean Ferrer.

CONDITION: Early quarter brown leather and marbled boards. With a frontispiece portrait of Erauso by Fauchery (Jean-Claude-Auguste?). ¶ Pages a little dusty at the edges, and the first and last few leaves a little foxed; small blue sticker on the front fly-leaf. Spine ends chipped; leather split at the bottom of the rear joint, just over an inch, and discreet splitting along the bottom half of the front joint (in both cases superficial, as all cords remain intact and the hinges strong); surface of the rear board partially skinned. A solid copy.

REFERENCES: Jason Stinnett, "New World Masculinity: The Lieutenant Nun—Hyperbole or Reality?" Confluencia 35.1 (Fall 2019), p. 13 (cited above); Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University, 2007), p. 143-144 (cited above); Sherry Velasco, “Hairy Women on Display in Textual and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain,” South Atlantic Review 72.1 (Winter 2007), p. 72-73 (cited above); Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University, 2019), p. 346 (cited above); Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, translators; Beacon Press, 1996), p. xlv; Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, & Catalina de Erauso (University of Texas, 2000), p. 3; Aaron Devor and Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Transgender: A Reference Handbook (2019), unpaginated ebook ("in 1626, de Erauso's story had become legendary, and Pope Urban VIII gave de Erauso a choice between continuing to be a woman in a convent or to be a man who would leave the convent and go back out into the world. De Erauso chose to embrace manhood...Accounts of him from the 1640s present him as a person of courage who everyone knew had been assigned female at birth, but who dressed as a man and wore a sword and dagger."); Tonia Poteat, et al., "History and Prevalence of Gender Dysphoria," Transgender Medicine: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2019), p. 4 (de Erauso "exhibited behavior that today might indicate a trans identity. Lacking any alternative for gender expression other than subterfuge, at the age of 15, de Erauso escaped from the convent where she had been deposited as a child and began to live as a young man."); Marcia Ochoa, "Becoming a Man in Yndias: The Mediations of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun," Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies (2007), p. 57-58 (for a thoughtful discussion of the different loaded labels that might be applied to de Erauso, suggesting that transvestite "is perhaps the most historically accurate word that could be used to describe her, given that there have been many other documented cases of transvestites contemporary with Erauso")

Item #784