In 1617, a cheap printed pamphlet began to circulate through the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. It told the story of María Muñoz, a nun in the Castilian city of Úbeda whose body had, after twelve years in a convent, undergone a dramatic transformation. Stories like that of María were not unheard of in early modern Spain, where the general anxiety and fascination these events brought about were apparent in the rise of cabinets of curiosities, fictional literature about wonders and marvels, and in the high number of pamphlets that recounted similar stories.

Many of those publications were relaciones de sucesos (“accounts of events”), a Spanish form of cheap print that reported news or wonders from near and far. Its frequent sensationalism and low production costs made the relaciones proliferate across the peninsula, reaching their peak success during the seventeenth century.[1] In them, tales of anomalous and mutating bodies were often presented alongside the medical knowledge that permeated multiple layers of seventeenth-century Spanish society.

In early modern Spain, as across much of Western Europe, knowledge about the body drew on interpretative frameworks inherited and adapted from the classical, Hellenistic, and Islamic worlds.[2] Broadly speaking, however, the dominant framework viewed sexual transformation as a natural process, rooted in Galenic ideas that positioned both sexes not as opposites but as different stages along a single continuum. In the womb, the development of the foetus depended on heat and humidity.[3] Warm, dry conditions would cause the genitalia to thrust outward, producing a male; while cold, humid ones would leave them inside, producing its undercooked, defective version: a woman.^[4]

Sex was therefore inherently unstable. This meant that, later in life, thermodynamic shifts caused by strenuous labour, illness, or other changes could resume what the womb had left unfinished, tipping a body across the sexual threshold. Naturally, not all physicians agreed: those following Aristotle argued that male and female possessed entirely distinct organs, making sexual inversion a monstrosity rather than a natural variation.[5] But the Hippocratic-Galenic view predominated and travelled through all social ranks, disseminating the assumption that some bodies occupied non-dichotomous positions and that, under the right conditions, their sex could change.[6]

Written in epistolary form, the pamphlet was intended to describe a letter allegedly sent by the prior of the Dominican Order in Úbeda to the abbot of San Salvador in Granada. A perfect example of the marvel literature that so often featured instances of ambiguous sex, the account opens with a brief prelude that precedes the alleged transcription of the letter. In it, the anonymous author reminds the reader that they are about to know about a “miracle of nature”, even if miracles are merely events that people of “limited capacity” cannot comprehend.[7]

The document proceeds to transcribe what the prior reports about María, who in 1605 had taken her vows as a nun at the convent of La Coronada in Úbeda. According to the letter, however, María had been causing a stir in the convent since her arrival, “for being a masculine woman, who wielded a sword, fired a musket, and performed other manly deeds”. Perfectly in line with the well-known mujer varonil trope — the virile woman who defied gender norms through dress and deed — María’s behaviour had led to the nuns being accused of allowing men into the convent. To remedy such scandal, the abbess had ordered a genital examination of María, who “was found to be a woman”.[8]

According to the letter, this had not been the only occasion in which María had endured scrutiny beneath her habit. During the twelve years she had spent in the convent, her fellow nuns had sometimes allegedly uncovered her while she was sleeping “in a jesting manner to satisfy themselves, as her strength, demeanour, attributes and conditions were those of a male”. At this point in the letter, the plot takes a dramatic turn. The priest who pens it reveals that he had come to know of the case from María herself, after she had written to him concerned about salvation. In her letter, María had recounted that one day, while transporting heavy loads of wheat in the convent, she had experienced “great pain in her groin”. The “strength” and “physical labour” had left her swollen and in pain for six days, after which “the nature of a man” had come out. [9]

Upon hearing this news, the priest had instructed María to claim that she had taken her vows against her will (which was strictly forbidden since the Council of Trent) and had ordered the abbess to confine María to a cell while he sought a papal bull to annul her monastic vows. Afterwards, both he and the prior of Baeza had personally visited the convent to examine her.

With doctors, surgeons, or midwives conspicuously absent, the two clergymen had seen “with their eyes and touched with their hands, and found her to be a perfect man in the male nature, who possessed nothing of a woman except a small orifice like a pine nut above the place where women are said to have their sex, under the male genitalia that had come out”.[10]

María had then explained that she had initially taken her vows precisely because she had been an unmarried, “closed” (i.e., sterile) woman, who possessed only “that small hole”. The examiners had thus concluded that her orifice must have been “the same root of the male natural passage intended to expel urine in the absence of the primary member, which was missing due to a lack of expulsive virtue within”.[11] Demonstrating familiarity with Galenic principles, as well as with the medico-legal framework that linked impotence with sexual ambiguity, the “experts” seemed to conclude that María was an incomplete man whose genitalia had not had the time to develop fully. Heat and physical exertion had thus completed the natural process she had started in the womb. This was confirmed when the men noticed her modest breasts, and María herself admitted that she had never menstruated. As a final ratification, the letter recounts that a week after the appearance of male genitalia, María had suffered further bodily changes: facial hair had grown and her voice had changed.

To formalize the transformation, the men had informed María’s father, who had been “very pleased” to finally have a son to whom he could pass on his wealth. Although this was an “extraordinary” case that “had even been reported to the king”, the account concluded by referring to María as female still. The last lines depict them finally content, “for after twelve years of imprisonment, she [sic] now knows freedom well, having gone from woman to male […] as there is no greater mercy that nature could have granted her”.[12]

True or not, accounts like María’s evidence that the Galenic understandings of the body transcended university classrooms and permeated even the most remote corners of Spanish society. They also show that this model was conceived within an ontological continuum that saw the transformation of a woman into a man as a both natural, social, and material improvement. While the graphic descriptions of María’s corporeal configuration once again present individuals with ambiguous sex as fragmented and blazoned bodies, the medical knowledge conveyed in the text could have inadvertently done much more: the almost didactic tone also taught readers how to recognize a hermaphrodite.

And, while existing literature has emphasized the disciplinary function of such accounts — which taught the broader public to scrutinize and categorize — it is important to remember that people with ambiguous sex would also have heard or read these texts.[13] Especially for those to whom anatomical knowledge was not readily available, cheap prints like this could have served as a roadmap for their own strategies of identification and self-fashioning.

María’s account, therefore, not only illustrates broader ways in which knowledge was transported and reused. Blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined, the story also invites historians to take hermaphroditism tropes seriously, accepting that they may not only have served to describe distant or mythical societies.[14] Accounts like this also had an effect on the image and understanding early modern Spaniards had of themselves, and of the people around them. Tropes stretched the boundaries of the real, feeding collective imaginaries that regular people harnessed in order to make sense of what they encountered in their daily lives.