That is, that the first-person singular narrative Vida y sucesos is a unique example of an early-modern autobiographical text which clearly displays the characteristics of the genre more evidently than other texts that traditionally have been used to define an autobiography. Across several chapters (seven in total), carefully and methodically the author builds a clear set of comparisons to support the central claim contained in her research. Vida y sucesos, then, is yet to be scrutinized as the autobiography that it is, and Sonia Pérez-Villanueva’s text embarks on such a task.īased on research conducted for her doctoral dissertation, Pérez-Villanueva presents a comparative study of Vida y sucesos and several early-modern Spanish narratives that are often claimed to be, or used as examples of, autobiographical works. Memoir, novel with autobiographical characteristics, and historical autobiography have been some of the more common perspectives from which Vida y sucesos has been studied, not including various attempts to use the text to support political agendas. Frequently overshadowing most attempts at a close analysis of her text are, clearly, the remarkable characteristics of her protagonist, Catalina de Erauso.

At the center of the debate lies whether Vida y sucesos can or should be classified as an autobiography.Įven taking into consideration the changing limits and definitions of what constitutes an autobiography, Vida y sucesos has more often than not been dismissed as one. Thus, this unique first-person autobiographical narrative has been variously classified, critiqued, and dismissed over the last several centuries.

The life, story, and history of the seventeenth-century Basque Ensign nun doña Catalina de Erauso, a young cross-dressing novice who defected her order to enlist and fight in Spain’s conquest and colonization wars in the Americas, as recorded in Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez, doña Catalina de Erauso, has incited various scholarly debates-among them, the historical existence of doña Catalina, the authorship of the text, and the year of publication.

Catalina de erauso autobiography