Lesbians in Early Modern Spain

3. Criminal Lesbians

35 3 Criminal Lesbians T he taxonomic variations that gave rise to disagreement among religious , courtly, and scientific treatises played out in secular and Inquisitional cases involving female sodomy in Spain. The surviving evidence depicts a criminal world that often connected sorcery, prostitution, and disciplinary institutions to female homoeroticism, with early modern legal cases revealing the range and variety of these intimate relationships. Some cases included same-sex marriages that had been achieved through cross-dressing, as well as long-term domestic partnerships between women who did not deem it necessary or desirable to dress in men’s clothing. Some women were successful in contesting the sentences that followed these suits, but not all of them. Francesc Eiximenis (d. 1409) cited the case of a woman who had dressed as a man, held a government job as a judicial officer, and married two women. Although she was convicted of sodomy (having used a penis substitute), her years of service to the government counted on her behalf, as she was not burned at the stake but given the more merciful punishment of being hanged: I was once in a city in Spain and was present when a woman was hanged who had for some years held a judicial office while clothed in masculine attire, and had taken two wives. And she had taken the two women as wives before the church; and the second of them was a widow who accused her of not being a man but a woman and indeed that was the case. The conclusion was reached on the spot that the one who had taken the women in this way had actually been a sodomite, having taken up with those women who must have been her wives for a number of years. Given the clemency of the authorities, and because she had loyally and piously served the republic as a judicial officer for a long time, she was not burnt but was hanged with that artifice around her neck with which she had 36 Lesbians in Early Modern Spain carnally lain with the two women. (translation quoted in Blackmore, “Poets,” 218)1 A case from Valencia from September 1502, mentioned in Llibre de memòries, shares certain similarities with the scenario that Eiximenis witnessed . Like the woman hanged with her dildo, the unnamed defendant had also passed as a man, and confessed her female anatomy only when she was arrested for theft. She too had married a woman, and she had worn an artificial penis made of lambskin,which she had also used during sexual ­ relations with other women. Despite the use of an instrument and the subsequent sentence of hanging, the queen intervened to stay the sentence, claiming that it had not been properly processed.2 These brief references to female sodomy raise questions about perceptions of same-sex relations between women in early modern Spain.Were the wives and other female lovers aware of the biological sex of their “husband” or lover? If so, do these cases suggest that when a same-sex couple was investigated , only the woman accused of playing the role of a man would be prose­ cuted while her partner (claiming ignorance) would be seen as the victim of a predatory and deceptive lesbian? The answers to such questions reveal many of the inconsistencies and contradictions persistent in both secular and Inquisitional cases against same-sex intimacy during this period. Catalina de Belunçe and Mariche de Oyarzún Almost a year after the timely acquittal of the “cross-dressed sodomite” in Valencia, another case of lesbian relations came to court, and again ended with an acquittal through royal edict. According to court documents housed in the Archive of the Royal Appeals Court of Valladolid, Miguel Ochoa (mayor of San Sebastián) was informed that Catalina de Belunçe and Mariche de Oyarzún were having sexual relations “like a man and a woman . . . doing carnal acts that only a man should do to a woman. . . . They had completed and perpetrated this crime on numerous and diverse occasions ” (Segura Graiño, 140).3 While the sexual acts are described in terms of a heterosexual coupling, the text does not mention the presence or use of a penis substitute. Consequently, Catalina was sentenced not to death but instead to perpetual banishment from San Sebastián, and told that her goods and possessions would be confiscated. Regardless of the lighter punishment, the court documents relating her sentence stipulate that if she were to...