Military labour and martial honour in the Vida de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso

This article explores the characterization of military labour and martial honour in the Vida de la Monja Alférez attributed to Catalina de Erauso (?1592-1650). Reading Erauso's Vida against the backdrop of the military revolution and concurrent social upheavals, and alongside other military memoirs from the period, I argue that there is an underlying coherence between the Vida's criminal episodes and heroic scenes, which in turn reflects a conflicted notion of martial honour that comprises both exemplary conduct and transgression. At stake in this recontextualization of the Vida is a more nuanced grasp of the text itself and a more capacious understanding of the ways in which the professionalization of war was represented in early modern literature.