Reading about Catalina de Erauso, the “Lieutenant Nun,” was an interesting task, mainly because I found it difficult to wrap my mind around any of the events that occurred. It was like a Hollywood account of some forgotten tale. Once I put that aside, it was a captivating read, especially in comparison to last week’s monotonous adventures of Christopher Columbus.
It seemed to me that Catalina led a life of coincidence. This is the only way I can think to word it. Most everything that lead her along the path she travelled was connected in some off chance way that pushed her to the next place and event. It seemed everywhere she went there was a long lost family member waiting to cluelessly greet her. Examples include her aunt on her mother’s side in Vitoria, her brother Captain Miguel de Erauso in Concepción who she later killed, and her father, who came looking for her in Valladolid. Everywhere she turned, she had family and she still kept running. She didn’t have much of a connection to any of her family. Perhaps this was the effect of being raised in a strict convent instead of in a family home. And the courage that she must have had to escape the convent is impressive on its own, let alone how much further she went after that.
However, it was not this that surprised me most in the reading, but the turn Catalina’s fate took when she was discovered. Apparently, it was quite predictable of me because at the beginning of the passage it says that, “contemporary readers might expect punishment to follow” her exposure. Everything that I know of this time period, which truthfully is not as much as I wish, had me assuming, due to the significant privilege men had in comparison to women and the religious influence at this time, that Catalina would have been reprimanded in some way. Masquerading as a man, living as a soldier, and even murdering people, her own brother and many others included, seems plenty to be admonished for. Instead she was given not only permission to continue on as she had by both the king, Phillip IV, and Pope Urban VIII but was also rewarded with pension from the king for serving the crown. Her bold adventures had earned her the chance to continue living the life that she wanted. Although Catalina did notably overcome adversity in her life, in the end the indifference when she writes of the lives she has taken left me uneasy as to where to stand in regards to her story.