Antonio de Erauso

de Erauso was originally an unwilling nun, but escaped the convent and travelled around Spain and Spanish America, mostly under male identities, in the first half of the 17th century.

[3] Erauso was born in the Basque town of San Sebastián, Gipuzkoa, Spain, in either 1585 (according to some sources including a supposed autobiography of 1626)[4][5] or February 10, 1592 (according to a baptismal certificate).

[8][10] Lacking religious vocation and as a result feeling imprisoned and refusing to take vows, Erauso was detained in a cell and constantly fought with a widowed novice named Catalina de Aliri.

[8][10] On March 18, 1600, the eve of San Jose, Erauso found the keys of the convent hanging in a corner, waited for the other nuns to be at morning prayer, and escaped.

In addition, a group of boys made fun of and attacked him, and when he got into a rock fight and injured one, he was arrested and spent a month in jail.

[17][18] Upon release from prison, Erauso went to Estella, and found work as a page there too,[17] under an important lord of the town called Alonso de Arellano.

Between 1602 and 1603, after years of service to Arellano, Erauso returned to San Sebastián, his hometown, and lived as a man there, taking care of relatives, whom he saw frequently.

[20] The first place in the Americas where Erauso landed was Punta de Araya, now part of Venezuela, where he had a confrontation with a Dutch pirate fleet which he defeated.

In Panama he started working with Juan de Urquiza, merchant of Trujillo with whom he went to the port of Paita (now Peru), where the trader had a large shipment.

He gave the letter of recommendation to Diego de Solarte, a very rich merchant and greater consul of Lima, and after a few days Erauso was given his shop.

[21] After marching with his company to Chile in 1619, his army swept through the lands and property of the Mapuches; he showed his aggressive side as conqueror, massacring many Indians.

There, Erauso fought in the service of the crown in the Arauco War against the Mapuches in today's Chile, earning a reputation for being brave and skillful with weapons and without revealing that he was biologically a woman.

However, due to the many complaints against him for his cruelty to the Indians, Erauso was not further promoted; frustrated, he entered a period devoted to vandalizing, killing people as he met on the road, causing extensive damage and burning crops.

At the brink of death he was saved by a villager and taken to Tucumán, where he promised marriage to two young women, the daughter of an Indian widow (who had hosted Erauso on her farm during his convalescence) and the niece of a canon.

In addition to seeking reward for time at war, Erauso also sought compensation for money lost while traveling to Rome.

Although there is no solid evidence to support it, some postulate that Bishop Juan de Palafox tried to move the remains to the city of Puebla, home of the bishopric, but failed.

Then his account was translated into several languages and versions of the theme, as idealized by Thomas De Quincey, entitled The Ensign Nun in English.

[30] Some have wanted to see a relationship between Erauso's extraordinary life, and the Baroque taste for portraying marginal and / or deformed or abnormal characters, as the main reason for the fame he gained throughout the Hispanic world on his return from America.

In the twentieth century, Velasco argues there was a "re-lesbianization" of Erauso, initially in heterosexual, femme-fatale narratives in the 1940s to appeal to younger women as glamorous[citation needed].

At the end of the century, states Sonia Pérez-Villanueva, one Domingo de Urbirú had in his possession a manuscript copy of Erauso's memoirs, which was duplicated by a friend, the poet and playwright Cándido Maria Trigueros.

One of the copies made by Trigueros ended up in the hands of the academic Juan Bautista Muñoz, who was writing the History of the New World and included a mention of Erauso in his work.

Eventually, the copy was used as a reference by Muñoz finished in the hands of the Royal Academy of History in 1784, and later was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by the politician Felipe Bauzá, who persuaded his friend, the astronomer and merchant Joaquín María Ferrer for publishing.

Finally, the manuscript was published in 1829 in Paris by Jules Didot with the title La historia de la Monja Alférez, escrita por ella misma ("story of The Nun Lieutenant, written by herself"), and a few decades later was republished by Heredia in 1894, making this version of the autobiography the revival of interest and research into Erauso's life.

[19][37] The character of The Nun Lieutenant was, and remains today, a source of inspiration for writers, playwrights, filmmakers and artists (most notably a 1630 portrait, attributed to Juan van der Hamen).

In the nineteenth century, the work of Thomas De Quincey stands out, who turns Erauso into a typically romantic character, victim of fate and immersed in a series of adventures.

At present, this character is attractive to the poststructuralist critique, as a clear example of instability and relativity of the notion of gender in the construction of the identity of an individual.

[citation needed] In 2019 textual analysis concluded that a 17th-century play called La Monja Alférez whose authorship had not been known had in fact been written by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.