THE LIEUTENANT NUN

A Historical True-Crime Case of Catalina de Erauso

A nun who fled enclosure. A soldier who crossed oceans. A case that forced power to decide.

Born in early seventeenth-century Spain and raised within convent walls, Catalina de Erauso escaped a life of enclosure and moved through the Spanish Empire under a male identity. She worked, travelled, fought, and survived in worlds governed by violence, honour, and rigid social control—until repeated conflict and custody brought her life under institutional scrutiny.

The Lieutenant Nun reconstructs Catalina’s life as a historical case, following the points where private survival collided with public order. Grounded in contemporary records and later accounts, this book traces the pressures of convent discipline, military life, colonial violence, and the competing authorities that sought to classify, punish, or contain a body that refused easy definition.

Neither myth nor modern projection, this is a factual narrative of a life lived at the limits of early modern power—and of the system that ultimately had to decide what to do with it.