How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

Perhaps the most striking example of someone born female and then choosing to live as a man was the Spanish soldier Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650). Erauso left her life at a convent behind to live as a man for twenty years, having a successful (if violent) career both in Spain and in Mexico: I was educated there [in the convent], took the habit, became a novice and was about to be professed when, for such-and-such reasons, I ran away; that I went to such-and-such a place, stripped, dressed up, and cut my hair, went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled and roamed about.18 Erauso was not merely wearing masculine clothes, but sought to alter her body too. A contemporary who met her in Rome reported, ‘She told me she had used some sort of remedy to make [her breasts] disappear. I believe it was a poultice given her by an Italian – it hurt a great deal, but the effect was very much to her liking.’19 In the last couple of decades, these fragmented stories of transgender lives have started to be discovered, and together form a much queerer picture of the pre-modern past than was formerly appreciated.20