The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

This article analyses the story of Catalina de Erauso, a Spanish nun, who escaped from a convent at the beginning of the seventeenth century to begin a new life as a military warrior serving under the King of Spain in colonial Latin America. Her story reveals that notions of sex and gender at the time were surprisingly elastic and flexible, and often more associated with acts and behaviour than with physical bodies. By examining how the personage of the Lieutenant Nun has been treated in Spain and in Britain in the nineteenth century, this article also evaluates the extent to which certain pre‐modern ideas about sex and gender continued to survive two centuries later.