1616

by Christensen, Thomas

Moll had a reputation as a formidable street fighter, suggesting the aptness of lines written half a century before by Isabella Whitney, the first professional English woman writer: “When we women, too, are armed and trained / We’ll be able to stand up to any man.” Several women writers, like the later sixteenth-century French poet Catherine des Roches, imagined a world of Amazons who would subjugate men by force: “We hold men prisoner / In the places where we rule,” she wrote, “And force them to spin.” But few women would wish to emulate the macho qualities of pride, aggression, and violence exemplified by a Spanish soldier known as Alonzo Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán, who fought during this period against native peoples in Chile and Peru. Although Ramírez de Guzmán was in about the same Andean area as the native author Guaman Poma in 1616, there is no record of their paths having crossed — which was fortunate for Poma. The hot-blooded swordsman’s own memoirs boast of the “trampling and killing and slaughtering of more Indians than there are numbers,” as well as the slaying of some fifteen Spaniards in bar arguments, street brawls, and duels over twenty years in the region.

  In the early 1620s, one such confrontation would reveal this hell-raiser to be anything but a typical soldier. While it, like so many of the other of the swordfights, left Ramírez de Guzmán’s opponent dead, it also left the brawling soldier with an apparently fatal injury. When a priest was called for last rites, the injured warrior revealed her identity as Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman from Spain. (The rites proved unnecessary, and she fully recovered.)

  De Erauso’s military service, quick temper, propensity for violence, and prowess with the sword are documented in historical records. Her baptismal certificate and convent fees are a matter of record. High-ranking eyewitnesses formally testified to her service in the Americas. Petitions made by Erauso after she returned to Europe for compensation for her services and against a loss to robbery still exist. A portrait has survived. And at least five accounts of her life were published by different authors while she was still alive, though these already incorporate mythologizing elements that resulted from her brief (except in the Basque region, where she remains a local hero) celebrity status as a woman warrior; such mythologizing makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction in Erauso’s story.

  The fullest source of information is her memoirs, but their authorship must be considered an open question. They did not see print until 1829, and although a complicated provenance involving at least two copyings was claimed for them it cannot be confirmed. On stylistic grounds the text does appear to date from the period of Erauso’s lifetime. But, while she was literate, there is little in her life that would suggest serious literary interests. Certainly the memoir does not depict her in the favorable light that would have been required to win the concessions she sought from king and pope.

  The text falls more or less within the genre of the picaresque novel, which in the early seventeenth century was near the high point of its popularity. But it is more transgressive than most picaresque novels, since Erauso makes no attempt to conceal her sexual indifference to men and her attraction to women, not to mention her persistent thievery, violence, iconoclasm, and insolence, for which she shows little remorse. It is conceivable that the core of the story was dictated by her to some other person who added embellishments, and that it circulated privately as a titillating underground document before finally surfacing, but this is speculation. In any case, much of the content of the book has clearly been fictionalized.

  Modern discussion of de Erauso has been so focused on gender issues that there has been comparatively little effort to clarify the chronology of her life. A recent English translation of her memoirs, for example, and its accompanying critical essays and translators’ note, never address the question of the memoir’s authenticity. “When Catalina de Erauso fights duels, steals money, leads soldiers into battle, rescues a woman in distress, evades the marriage plans of hopeful widows and their daughters, and marches across league upon league of uncharted Peruvian terrain, it is tempting to see in her tale an allegory of early modern woman’s emergent subjectivity,” says the scholar Marjorie Garber, who emphasizes that most readings of de Erauso’s life have been allegorical — “as exempla, as indications of deeper or higher truths.”

  A case could be made for referring to Erauso with male pronouns, but no solution is entirely satisfactory, and I will follow precedent and refer to her in the feminine. There are many variant stories of Erauso’s life, but it is usually told something like this: She was born to a family of minor nobility in a town in the Basque region of Spain and was sent as a young child to a convent there. Her father and four brothers pursued military careers — like Catalina, the brothers would end their lives in Latin America, but she would outlive them all — while three sisters took their vows in the same convent to which she had been sent.

  Shortly before she was to take her own vows, when she was about fifteen, Catalina abruptly departed from the family script and ran away from the convent — in response, her memoirs claim, to having been beaten by one of the nuns. Historical records, however, show that the woman she identified as her abuser did not become a nun until some years later.

  According to her memoirs, after fleeing the convent she hid in the woods for about a week. She cut her hair short and fashioned herself a boy’s outfit from her convent garments, and set off on her extraordinary journeys. Being literate, she served first as an apprentice to a tutor but rebelled against the boredom of Latin lessons and became a muleteer’s assistant. One story says that she spent a month in jail during this period for throwing stones at a boy who had insulted her.

  After three years of wanderings in the Basque region, during which, like all pícaros, she served a variety of masters, Erauso booked as an apprentice sailor on a ship bound for Mexico. The story is told that an uncle on the same ship failed to recognize her, and that Erauso stole 500 dollars from him and jumped ship with the loot in Panama.

  From Panama she made her way to Peru, where she worked briefly as a storekeeper. This, it is said, is where she learned to use a sword. Following a dispute with a man who was blocking her view in a theater, Erauso armed herself with a sword and, a few days later, confronted him and a companion; she killed the companion and took refuge in a church. She moved on to another town, where the same man confronted her again with a new companion, whom she also slew, again taking refuge in a church.

  Moving down the coast, Erauso continued cutting a swath of terror, eventually reaching Chile, where she signed on as a soldier under the command of one of her own brothers (this service is apparently factual — it is confirmed by her petition to the king). For three years she worked as his right-hand man without being recognized. Needless to say, the two shared a similar background, and Basques tended to form tight-knit communities in the Americas. Eventually — following, it is said, an argument over a woman — the two came to blows, and Erauso was transferred to one of the most heated zones of conflict. Here she proved her valor by recapturing, together with two companions, the company flag during a battle. Both of her companions were killed and she was seriously injured. For this she was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, and this promotion is also documented in historical records. As a result, she would later enjoy celebrity in Europe as “the lieutenant nun.”

  The memoirs would next have us believe that Erauso was selected by a companion to serve as his second in a duel. When both the principals in the duel fell dead, Erauso, never overly troubled by niceties of protocol, began fighting with the other second. It was a pitch black night, so her opponent was hard to make out, but she succeeded in vanquishing him. On hearing his dying words she realized he was her brother.

  Only after the confrontation that left her with what appeared to be a fatal injury did the veteran soldier reveal her identity as a woman to a bishop in Guamanga, Peru. The bishop had her examined by two elderly women, who confirmed her to be not only a woman but also a virgin.

  Now perceived as female, she was force
d, after her recovery from her wounds, to dress in women’s clothing (an eyewitness reports seeing her dressed as a woman in Lima), which surely must have galled her. But it was necessary to wait for confirmation from Spain that she had never taken vows, because that would have condemned her to spend the rest of her life in a convent, an unimaginable prospect.

  In 1624 Erauso returned to Spain, where her combination of masculine valor and female purity (having maintained her virginity in a camp of soldiers) won her acclaim as a modern Amazon. She traveled to Rome for an audience with the pope, who granted her a special dispensation to wear men’s clothes. King Philip of Spain granted her request for an annual pension. She had her portrait rendered by two painters in Italy, where she met with the traveler Pietro della Valle. Della Valle described her as “tall and strong of frame, rather masculine in appearance.” He thought she resembled the eunuchs he had seen in Persia. “She wears men’s clothing in the Spanish style,” he noted, and “she bears her sword with as much bravado as her life.”

  In 1629 Erauso formally signed her portion of the family inheritance over to a fourth sister, who had escaped the convent fate of her other sisters by getting married. In exchange Erauso received a cash sum of one thousand reales, and with this seed money she returned to America. She spent the remainder of her days as a muleteer (and slave owner) in Veracruz. Around 1650, when she would probably have been sixty-five years old, she was found dead along the mule road that led from Veracruz to Mexico City.

  In her petition to Philip IV for a pension based on her military service — which has the flavor of having been drafted by a lawyer or some other person experienced in such matters — Erauso plays up her dual identities as a man and as a woman. On the one hand she requests recognition for her “inclination to take up arms in defense of the Catholic faith and in the service of Your Majesty” in which capacity “she distinguished herself with great courage and valor, suffering wounds, particularly in the battle of Peru.” Yet she also alludes to “the uniqueness and prodigiousness of her story, mindful that she is the daughter of noble and illustrious parents.”

  Erauso seems to have won general acceptance of her male identity as Antonio de Erauso, the identity in which she lived out the last decades of her life. Several witnesses testified, in connection with a claim related to the family estate, that they had seen her on a visit to her home town in 1629. All refer to her in her male identity, as “Lieutenant D. Antonio de Erauso.”

  In Florence on July 1616, another woman was also moving in a man’s world. She was a twenty-three-year-old painter named Artemisia Gentileschi, who was being admitted at this time to the Academie del Disegno, the professional artists’ association of Florence. She was the first woman so honored: among the obstacles women painters faced were that they were not allowed to paint male nudes or frescos and other works that had to be done in public. Gentileschi’s achievement was probably facilitated by her patron, a member of the prominent Medici family. Her talent was hard to dispute, but her virtue was, for some, a point of contention. She was, first of all, a woman working in a man’s profession. Additionally, she had been the center of attention in a scandalous trial (despite being the victim) that had gripped the attention of the city of Rome. A month after the trial concluded, in November 1612, she had hurriedly married and moved to Florence, but she would later separate from her husband and lose track of him. She would have another child after the separation.

  She was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a painter originally from Tuscany who was based in Rome, working in a studio not far from the Spanish Steps. He was a follower of the dramatic Baroque style of Caravaggio, an influence that would also appear in his daughter’s more naturalistic painting. Her mother died when she was twelve, and within a few years she joined her brothers in the painting studio, where she quickly outshone them. Her training was that of an artisan — she did not learn to read and write until she reached adulthood.

  Seeing her artistic promise, her father hired a fellow painter, Agostino Tassi of Florence, with whom he was collaborating at the time, to instruct her in the art of perspective. She was eighteen years old. Assisted by a hanger-on named Cosimo Quorlis, Tassi trapped Artemisia in her room and raped her; to complete the violation the men also stole one of her paintings. According to Artemisia, Tassi entered her bedroom on the pretext of looking at a painting, threw her on the bed, and put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. She scratched his face and cut his chest. Afterward, he promised to marry her. The Gentileschis hoped that he would do as he promised, and so she continued to have sexual relations with him. Only when it was apparent that a marriage was not in the offing did Orazio sue.

  Workplace rape was common during the Renaissance, and not necessarily considered an especially grave offense, though by the early seventeenth century it was increasingly frowned upon. Servants were especially vulnerable. One man in the early Renaissance sent a maid along to his nephew with the comment “Because you writ me word that you were in love with Dirty Sluts, I took great care to fit you with a Joan that may be as good as my Lady in the dark.” Women working in male-dominated trades were another often victimized group, in part because the men they came in contact with often lacked the wherewithal for marriage. Gang rape was not uncommon; it was usually justified by the imputation of a lack of chastity to the victim. In such cases the woman might be forced to take a small sum of money as proof of her harlotry. Despite its nonconsensual character, rape still resulted in a loss of honor to the woman. In this situation the father could seek compensation, as Orazio did; such compensation could increase the woman’s dowry. That was important, for the rape victim’s loss of honor could be corrected through marriage. In many cases the rapist would marry the victim himself rather than make a cash payment that would end up in the hands of another man.

  The trial that followed Artemisia’s rape lasted seven months. The transcript of the trial survives. Tassi’s main line of defense was that Artemisia was “an insatiable whore” and consequently could not be raped as she had no virtue to defend. The household, he claimed, was really a bordello — her late mother, aunts, and sisters were also whores, he said, and Orazio had sold Artemisia for a loaf of bread. He claimed that she had written erotic letters to various men, apparently not realizing that she was illiterate. She was subjected to a gynecological exam that was supposed to determine how long she had been sexually active. She was also tortured with thumbscrews, on the theory that if enough pain was applied the truth would come out. This must have been doubly painful for the young artist, whose work depended on the use of her hands. A painting of Artemisia’s hand exists — it was made by the artist Pierre Dumonstier le Neveu in 1625.

  Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1598–1599, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Oil on canvas, 144 × 192 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Barberini, Rome.

  Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1620, by Artemisia Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, 162 × 199 cm. Uffizi, Florence.

  In the Book of Judith Holofernes laid seige to the town of Bethulia. The town was saved by Judith, who seduced and then slew him while he was drunk. While Caravaggio’s Judith appears to recoil from the gory scene, Gentileschi’s Judith attacks her victim with vigor.

  Gentileschi depicts the blood from Holofernes’s neck spurting along parabolic paths. This may have been a contribution from her friend Galileo, who helped her obtain payment for the painting — by this time he had discovered the parabolic law of projectiles.

  Tassi brought forth several witnesses to support his position. His credibility suffered, however, when it came out that he had had sexual relations with his sister-in-law and had conspired to murder his wife, who was missing and presumed dead. That wife he had acquired by first raping her. Artemisia learned of the marriage in the course of the trial. A witness further testified that Tassi had boasted about his attack on Artemisia. He was convicted and exiled from Rome, but was back within months. Strangely, he was later invited by Orazio back into the Gentileschi ho
usehold. There are hints that Artemisia’s relationship with her father cooled for a time, perhaps in part as a result, but they appear later to have reconciled, working on projects together near the end of his life.

  Around the time of the trial — perhaps even while it was in progress — Artemisia painted Judith Slaying Holofernes. Now in the Museo di Capolodimonte in Naples, the painting is remarkable for, among other things, being a particularly graphic expression of female anger and violence. Among the few works to rival it was another version of the same scene that Artemisia painted in 1620; it is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Caravaggio painted the same bloody scene years before Artemisia’s trial, but his Judith shows nothing of the purpose and passion of Gentileschi’s version.

  Within a month of the trial Artemisia was married to a Florentine artist named Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi. He was presumably a relative of the main witness in Artemisia’s defense, a man named Giovanni Stiattesi, who testified that Tassi had been rejected by Artemisia, became obsessed with her, and stalked her. One can only speculate what sorts of dealings led to the marriage that restored Artemisia’s honor, but in any case payment to the husband was the essence of the dowry system. The two were not, however, to live long together as husband and wife.

  After the notoriety of the trial Rome was too hot for Artemisia, and the newlyweds made their way to Florence, where she gave birth to two sons who did not survive infancy and a daughter named Prudentia. There Artemisia won the patronage of Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici and of the Grand Duchess Cristina. She made the acquaintance of influential people like Galileo Galilei, with whom she kept up a correspondence; later she would meet and be celebrated by notable artists from many parts of Europe, such as the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck. Among her substantial works from this period is her Allegory of Inclination, probably painted in 1615 or 1616, in which a young woman embodies natural talent or affinity with art. The painting was commissioned by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a grandson of the great Florentine artist. It was said that the figure in the painting resembled Gentileschi. Even for late Renaissance Florence the large female nude was a bit in-your-face as a ceiling decoration, and a few decades later a descendant of Buonarroti had it covered with a mass of unfortunate drapery.