Post for the Week of October 21

 This week I found our reading on Catalina de Erauso to be very interesting. It really demonstrated to me how willing people were in that time to defend the honor of their name. On page 49, Erauso gets called a lier. In response, they immediately draw their dagger and a fight breaks out. This is only one of many occasions when Erauso's dagger or sword is drawn in response to an insult. Obviously, insulting one's name was intolerable, because it resulted in so many fights. Fighting to defend one's name, though must have been common practice, because on page 25, Erauso accepts and invitation to help Juan de Silva in a duel. This duel was most likely because insults had been thrown, and they had decided to duel to try to preserve their honor. In this instance, Erauso's brother is killed by Erauso, which is a sad turn of events. I can't say I would enjoy living in a society where any argument could break out into a full-blown sword fight just over the honor attached to one's name, but clearly this was the violent reality of the times in the Spanish New World.

Comments

  1. Olivia SchienkeOctober 21, 2021 at 12:11 PM

    Hey Joe! I thought it was very interesting to learn about the importance of protecting ones name. The extent that Erauso went to, killing her own brother as you said, shows just how important honor was to them. Violence erupted at the smallest of debates, thank goodness we don't settle all of our fights today to the extent of how Erauso handled them.

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  2. Médar SerrataOctober 25, 2021 at 4:47 PM

    Thank you for your post, Joe. You are absolutely right. People's lives in colonial Latin America, as well as in Spain, were governed by the honor system. Honor (or la honra, in Spanish) informed people's interactions in all aspects of society, so to insult a person's name, as you point out, was considered a serious offense.

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