In the early modern period, political borders were often in flux, and people were ‘strongly aware of the potentially shifting, unstable nature of borders, which are arbitrary and political’. This fluctuation, however, was not confined merely to political boundaries. Humans have long understood that edges—whether they be of countries, between the spiritual and the secular, and indeed between categories of classification and study—are, in the words of Lisa Hopkins, ‘arbitrary and subject to radical change through time’. While this collection has shown that gender was an important and sometimes impermeable edge in early modern Europe, this edge has also been perpetuated by scholars in the proceeding centuries, with ‘arbitrary’ edges created to limit and contain women deemed contradictory and conflicted. One of the best examples of this is Catalina de Erauso, ‘the Lieutenant Nun’. The subsequent retellings of her story, and the way that edges were reinforced by successive generations of scholars, help to show what was at stake in the various and different ways in which early modern women might be on the edge.

Catalina de Erauso, the daughter of a Basque family of noble ancestry, was born in Donostia-San Sebastián in 1592. At the age of 4, she entered the convent of San Sebastián El Antiguo, like two of her sisters had done before her.