In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 1 “I am a man and a woman” Eleno/a de Céspedes Faces the Inquisition I n 1605, doña Magdalena Muñoz entered a convent in the town of Ubeda, in southern Spain. Muñoz was put there by her father, who deemed her unfit for marriage because she was a manly woman (mujer varonil) who could handle weapons and perform heavy manual labor with ease. Twelve years later, Muñoz experienced a bodily transformation: While transporting a load of grain, she felt a great pain in her groin. After three days, a penis emerged from her body. Muñoz feared that if she told the nuns about her genital swelling, they would think she had lost her virginity. At the very least, they would summon a doctor. Instead of telling her sisters, she called in a priest, Fray Agustín de Torres, to counsel her. When Torres examined Muñoz, he found her to be“as much of a man as any other.”1 Even before the appearance of the phallus, Muñoz’s manliness had been the cause of much curiosity over the years. The prioress had examined Mu- ñoz once, and on several other occasions, the nuns had looked in vain for physical signs of masculinity on Muñoz’s body while she slept, because her “strength, energy, characteristics, and general condition were those of a man.”2 Muñoz described her situation to Torres with candor: She never had menstruated, but “when she disciplined herself, in order to keep the nuns from calling her a tomboy [marimochacho], she put blood on her nightshirts, saying that she had her period.”3 When the priest saw she had grown a penis and a beard and heard the change in the register of her voice, he immediately requested that Muñoz be locked in a cell and told her to maintain her silence. When Torres returned later with another priest, both clergymen “saw with their eyes and touched with their hands and found [Muñoz] to be a perfect man with the nature (naturaleza) of a man.”4 With a male member 12 The Lives of Women intact and secondary sex characteristics that bolstered a finding of masculinity , Magdalena Muñoz was proclaimed a man. As Fray Torres tells it in the letter that is our only source for these happenings , Muñoz’s father “thought he might die from shock” when the news arrived in his town, Sabiote.5 Soon thereafter, the priest escorted father and son away from the convent and then informed the nuns of the strange turn of events. While Torres offers no details on the nuns’ reaction, he describes the men’s feelings: [T]he father is very happy because he is a rich man and he didn’t have any heirs and now he finds himself with a very manly son and one who can marry, and she, too, is happy because after twelve years in jail [the convent], she knows liberty well, and she was a woman and now a man, which out of all things and timely events no better favor could have been paid her by nature itself.6 If Muñoz had become a man, why did the priest refer to the ex-nun as a man and a woman in the same sentence? The mix of nouns calls attention to the discomfort with gender instability that infuses his letter, and the triumph of manliness emerges as the moral of the story. The father had a“manly son” to inherit his wealth and carry on his line, and Muñoz was sprung from the convent after twelve years of confinement. At the end of the letter, this triumphant attitude prevails—a man was liberated from his womanly body and happily welcomed by men into their fold. We know nothing more about Muñoz’s life, and nothing else in Fray Torres’s letter indicates what Muñoz might have felt about becoming a man at the age of thirty-four. The simplicity and brevity of the letter impose order on the chaos. A nun who acts like a man but has no physical signs of being one suddenly grows a penis, and two priests vouch for the legitimacy of the change. The nun returns home as a man, ready to marry and step into his father’s shoes. A “strange case,” in Torres’s words, but not one that provoked him to detail Muñoz’s...

Share