Reddit reviews Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World

A meaningful step in the construction of any identity is historical recovery—the finding of people in the past who can be considered similar. So, I'm sympathetic toward Feinberg's efforts, although I think there are significant problems that should preclude taking her claims at face value.

Feinberg's charge, that Joan of Arc was burned for dressing like a man, has the virtue of being sort of technically correct whilst misunderstanding the context in which that charge was issued. The records for Joan's trial are readily available online in English translation, although it should be noted that I believe the text comes only from a single manuscript originally in Latin. Like most inquisitorial transcripts, responses are truncated into often formulaic sentences that make it easy for the scribe to keep pace with the events. The essentials are as follows. After being brought to Rouen, Joan was tried as a heretic and, after a lengthy trial (spanning from February to May), was found guilty of both wearing men's dress and claiming to be responsible only to God. She signed a confession to this effect, but just a few days letter she returned to male dress, claiming that she did so on account of voices only she could hear. In terms of inquisitorial, legal procedure this was the equivalent of a knockout blow, for she had not only relapsed against the accordances of her signed confession—an act with significant legal consequences—, but the mention of the voices opened her up to the additional charge of idolatry. There was, to my knowledge, no charge of transvestitism, mostly because such phenomenon as we understand it would have been inconceivable to those present in Rouen, Joan included. The act of relapse was enough for the clerical adjudicators to hand her over to secular authorities for punishment.

This is not to suggest that there were not larger factors in play. The inquisitors hardly could claim to be ignorant of the larger stakes between the French and the English; it was, after all, Joan who had held the banner behind Charles VII as he was crowned at Rheims. It is also likely they would of at least been aware of her larger reputation, the deeds done at Orléans and in the course of Charles's subsequent march across northern France. Putting the political context aside, the later middle ages also saw a rise in tension between the papacy at Rome and populist religious figures and practices. A particular point of contention were female religious figures, who came under increasing scrutiny as their reputation for sanctity spread. All of this surely played a part in the outcome of Joan's fate.

As a historian reading this pamphlet for the first time, I must comment that I think Feinberg talks about history in some troubling ways. Her language reminds me of someone who has read a fair amount of marxist literature concerning the topic, but little else. You can see the fingerprints of this on her thinking with phrases such as "social soil", the arrogant French "feudal class," and "counter-revolutionary terror by the land-owning class." She invokes the Jacquerie, for example, as a contemporary revolution that was "shaking European feudalism root and branch," despite the fact that the Jacquerie was neither a revolution, nor contemporary to Joan, happening about eighty years before she showed up in Orléans. These inconsistencies would seem to push further than the point you made in asking your question: Feinburg willfully bends and distorts the past.

This is frustrating, because there is no reason to reimagine Joan in this way: we have remarkable records of people who lived lives much closer to our definition of trans than Joan. The sixteenth-century Catalina de Erauso is one such example. Catalina escaped a clositer and traveled to the Spanish new world, where she adventured through the blood-soaked streets swindling fellow Spainards at cards, brawling for honor, and romancing ladies as any Spaniard cavalier of the time would. She does this for several years before a series of events bring her back to Europe, where she confronts Church and Pope in a very different way than you would expect. You can pick up her autobiography on Amazon for rather cheap. I am sure a historian of gender could add more to this conversation. By comparison to Catalina, Joan is a person who makes poor fashion choices.

For anyone interested in the controversies surrounding religious women, I'd recommend Sean Field's The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trial of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (2012) or, although she can be quite dense, anything by Carolyn Walker-Bynum, starting with Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987). For Joan, there is too much literature, but I remember finding Wheeler and Wood's Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (1996) quite good, and I believe it also includes a chapter on the question of transvestism.

Catalina De Erauso. Born in the late sixteenth century in Spain, she spent most of her youth at a nunnery before escaping as a teenager. She then disguised herself as a boy and stowed away on a ship the Americas. She continued to live as a man for decades in South America: getting in frequent gambling fights, was sentenced to death several times, and made the rank of Lieutenant in the Spanish military. Much of De Erauso's story is tragic (killing her own brother in a duel, for example). But, upon returning to Europe, De Erauso had a brief audience with the Pope, who allowed De Erauso to continue living as a man.

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Catalina's memoir:

https://www.amazon.com/Lieutenant-Nun-Memoir-Basque-Transvestite/dp/0807070734/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=catalina+de+erauso&qid=1558678556&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Need: Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (1st Edition) by Catalina De Erauso

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Lieutenant-Nun-Memoir-Basque-Transvestite/dp/0807070734

for $5 or less