The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature

Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 214

THE PROBLEM OF WOMAN IN LATE-MEDIEVAL HISPANIC LITERATURE What is a woman? This book questions the persistent assumption that the large corpus of medieval Hispanic texts that discuss the nature of women can be defined in terms of the clichéd discourses of misogyny and defence of women, arguing instead that the problem of gender identity is vital to them all. The texts, both well-known ones like Arcipreste de Talavera, Jaume Roig’s Spill, or Luis de Lucena’s Repetición de amores, and those which have received hardly any critical attention (such as Álvaro de Luna’s Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres), are each discussed in their specific contexts and in relation to the ostensible reasons for their composition, such as a political, literary, religious, or didactic agenda. They are also related to the literary traditions in which they are written (misogynistic denunciation, satire, humour, defence, narrative debate, among others), and the particular theoretical problems arising from them are discussed (for instance, that of humour and laughter in misogynistic writing). But it is also argued that the full meaning of the texts lies at the less immediately accessible level at which they address this very problem of definition, one which arises directly from the self-perpetuating contradictions of authoritative wisdom on the nature of women. ROBERT ARCHER is Professor of Spanish in the University of Durham, and from September 2005 will be Cervantes Chair of Spanish at King’s College London.

THE PROBLEM OF WOMAN IN LATE-MEDIEVAL HISPANIC LITERATURE

Robert Archer

TAMESIS

© Robert Archer 2005 The right of Robert Archer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2005 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 1 85566 113 6

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Archer, Robert. The problem of woman in late-medieval Hispanic literature / Robert Archer. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías ; 214) Summary: “This books argues that the problem of gender identity is vital to the large corpus of medieval Hispanic texts that discuss the nature of women” – Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–85566–113–6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Spanish literature – To 1500 – History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. I. Title. PQ6048.W6A73 2005 860.9’3522–dc22 2005005763

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

1 Notions of Women in Hispanic Didactic Literature . . . . . . . . . .

21

2 Unstable Sex, Unstable Voices: Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s . . . . Arcipreste de Talavera

64

3 Present Laughter: Bernat Metge’s Lo somni and Jaume Roig’s . . . . Spill

90

4 The Defences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 5 Torroella’s Maldezir de mugeres and its Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been written with the help of research grants awarded by the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, a Senior Research Fellowship of the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, and a term of research leave granted by the University of Durham. I wish to record my gratitude to all these institutions for their support. I should also like to thank all the colleagues and friends who have helped me with it in one way or another. In particular, I should like to acknowledge my debt to Professor Alan Deyermond for his invaluable editorial role in the production of the book. Part of Chapter 5 is based on my article ‘Las coplas de las calidades de las donas de Pere Torroella y la tradición poética catalana’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 46 (1999–2000), 405–423. My greatest single debt is to my wife, Dr. Jiřina Šmejkalová, for her moral support and intellectual encouragement during the eventful period in which this book has been written. Durham–Dobřichovice, 2004.

To Jiřina

INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

‘What is a woman?’ When two early Hispanic texts describe the traditional scene in which this stark question is put to an oracular sage, substantially different, if equally peremptory, answers are given. The question circulated widely as the last of three included in a didactic catechism to which Secundus the Philosopher gives the responses. The following version is copied into the Primera Crónica General of Alfonso X: ‘¿Qué es mugier?’ ‘Confondimiento del homne, bestia que nunca se harta, cuidado que no a fin, guerra que nunca queda, periglo del homne que no ha en sí mesura.’1

Secundus caps the bleak moral denunciation of men and beauty he has made in his replies to two previous questions with an uncompromising rejection of woman as the undoing of men, hominis confusio.2 In the Historia de la doncella Teodor the same question produces this second answer: El sabio le preguntó: ‘¿Qué cosa es el hombre?’ La donzella le respondió: ‘Imagen de Nuestro Señor Dios’. El sabio le preguntó: ‘Donzella, ¿qué cosa es la mujer?’ La donzella le respondió: ‘Arca de mucho bien y de mucho mal, imagen del hombre, bestia que nunca se harta’.3

While in this response woman is still labelled as an insatiable beast, she is first defined as a source of good as well as bad for the man of whom she is the divinely made image, rather than simply the means of confounding him. The response of the female sage Teodor, while it defines men in unambiguous Biblical terms that place his natural superiority to women beyond doubt, avoids the facile negativism of Secundus about the nature of women and replaces it with ambivalence. Woman – but only woman – is problematized, and Teodor’s response acknowledges the inherent complexity of the problem. The corpus of texts from medieval Spain that is the subject of this book 1 2 3

Menéndez Pidal 1955: I, 145–146. For the history of this idea see Brown 1920. Baranda & Infantes 1995: 76.

2

ROBERT ARCHER

contains a discussion of the nature of women. They include examples of wisdom literature; works which offer advice to women as wives or future wives or as a member of the other estates; enxemplos or illustrated tales derived from oriental as well as Latin sources; literary ‘debates’ about women; sentimental romances; works which declare a specific interest in praising virtuous women or in defending them generally from the accusations of slanderers; works which are generically more difficult to place like Martínez de Toledo’s Arcipreste de Talavera (one of the few canonical texts in the corpus), Jaume Roig’s Spill or Luis de Lucena’s Repetiçión de amores; and the notorious Maldezir de mugeres of Pere Torroella (Pedro Torrellas) and the various texts in verse and prose arising from it. In terms of their location in time, the earliest texts are from the late fourteenth century (although some of the exemplary tales discussed in this Introduction are from the mid-thirteenth), while the latest, Juan Justiniano’s translation of Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae, is dated 1528.4 Such generic writings about women complement two other kinds of medieval Hispanic text which also concern women, but which do not normally address the question of gender identity in a discursive form. These are, firstly, the large volume of texts that concern women in a particular sense, both as the subject of a vast body of love-poetry in Galician-Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish on the one hand and, on the other, the object of vilification in the cantigas d’escarnho e mal dizer, the Catalan maldits or (far less significantly) in the poems of vilification to be found occasionally in the Castilian cancioneros. The other type of text is that which contains the representation of female characters in narrative such as the Castilian epic or the Libro de buen amor or Celestina, or in hagiographic texts. Here only passing reference to such texts is made; to consider them adequately would require more than one further volume. To argue, as this book does, that all the texts it studies address the same question of how to define gender identity to which Secundus and Teodor produce such different answers would seem simply to be stating the obvious. And yet in practice it is only very recently that the texts have begun to be linked to this question. In previous work a range of other approaches to the texts can be found, all of them enmeshed with a number of often conflicting

4 The Spanish translations of Vives’s work are taken as the cut-off point for this study largely because, as I discuss below, Juan Justiniano’s Prologue is the place at which, in a manner of speaking, the preceding medieval Hispanic tradition of writing about women is first taken stock of as a corpus. During the whole of the sixteenth century, of course, there are important works on women that deserve a study of their own, such as Cristóbal de Acosta’s Tratado en loor de las mugeres, Juan de la Cerda’s massive Vida política de todos los estados de las mugeres, Cristóbal de Castillejo’s Diálogo de las mujeres, and Juan de Espinosa’s Diálogo en laude de las mugeres. See Acosta 1592, Castillejo 1986, Cerda 1599, Espinosa 1990.

INTRODUCTION

3

suppositions about the nature of medieval misogyny, the practice of writing ‘defences’ of women, and the European and Hispanic ‘debate’ on women.5 One of these approaches is that the question of what woman was could have little or no importance per se since medieval ideas about women, not least medieval Hispanic ideas, were well defined and largely unnegotiable in their misogynistic basis, so that any formal analysis of the question – most typically in the ‘defences’ – that the authors of such texts might have carried out was essentially redundant. The point is deftly summarized by María Cruz Muriel Tapia in her book on the representation of women in medieval Castilian literature: la defensa que hacen de la mujer los denominados profeministas, a tono con el espíritu cortés y caballeresco del siglo XV, deja bien al descubierto que los maldicientes habían ido demasiado lejos en sus ataques e insultos, y que su actitud merecía una reparación o desagravio. Mas la mujer, sustancialmente considerada, es la misma para unos y para otros’.6

The same supposition of a general misogynistic norm also lies behind some of the approaches to declaredly misogynous texts, bringing its own implications: if the medieval viewpoint is a priori misogynistic, then it can easily be inferred that openly antifeminine texts are not actually dealing with a viewpoint that required serious substantiation through argument, and can therefore be assumed to have another, perhaps less openly declared, main agenda (this might be personal, religious, political or literary, for instance). This is precisely the underlying concept behind an important book on Jaume Roig’s Spill: the subject of women is taken explicitly to be a readily available unproblematic rhetorical quaestio through which to introduce satirical humour into a work whose serious concerns are held to be largely theological ones that are unrelated to considerations about the nature of women.7 And yet there are compelling reasons for resisting the temptation to take 5 ‘Misogyny’ is not, of course, a concept that had any currency in the Middle Ages, but it is essential for our purposes here. By ‘misogyny’ I mean that form of discourse about women which is declaredly contra femina. This position is based usually on a number of commonly held attitudes to women that we would term ‘misogynous’ today, attitudes that are equally manifest in works that do not adopt a declaredly contra femina position or which may occur in works that are written in praise of women or in defence of them against the allegations of ‘slanderers’ (maldizientes). I avoid using the terms ‘antifeminism’ or ‘profeminism’ that sometimes appear as alternatives to ‘misogyny’ and ‘defence’ given the modern connotations that they inevitably carry, but I do employ the less obtrusive term ‘profeminine’ in the sense deftly defined by Blamires as referring to ‘pre-modern texts which develop constructions of “woman” which are positive according to the cultural ideology of their period’ (Blamires 1997: 11–12). 6 Muriel Tapia 1991: 345. 7 For Rosanna Cantavella: ‘el debat pro i antifeminista fou, en si, una polèmica superficial’ (1992a: 18), while the topic of women is ‘un tema-comodí poc compromès’ (162).

4

ROBERT ARCHER

the clichéd discourses of either defence or misogyny as less than earnest, even when they appear within rhetorical structures that may seem very contrived. In the first place, Sister Prudence Allen’s monumental work on the history of the European concept of woman from its origins through to 1500 can leave us in no doubt about the importance of gender definition in philosophical, religious and satirical writings, mostly by men but also by women (not only Christine de Pizan but also Cassandra Fedele, Isotta Nogarola and Laura Cereta). She shows how a large number of authors right through the European tradition sought to work through the gender implications of Aristotelian thought in a way that evidences important theoretical developments across the four categories of presocratic ideas relative to women which she identifies: the questions of whether men and women are opposites, how far their contribution to generation has relevance to sex identity, how far the faculty of reason operates in women and determines the nature of masculine and feminine wisdom, and lastly how men and women perform acts that may be deemed virtuous.8 The importance of gender identity as a philosophical question has its everyday analogy in what work on women in medieval European society has shown: that is, their vital role not only as administrators and supervisors in the home, but also as health workers and healers whose services were generally used in preference to the more painful and costly Galenic cures of the physicians.9 Then, too, studies on late medieval Spain have begun to suggest that there is a gap between the subordinate and subsidiary place of women as defined by the law, largely drawn up in the thirteenth century, and their real place, often one of influence and responsibility, in the everyday society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.10 All this ought to confirm, in the face of not infrequent suppositions to the contrary, that the discussion of female nature carried out in texts like those studied here has an underlying seriousness to it. The ostensible failure of European defence literature – of which the Hispanic corpus contains important examples – to bring about noticeable

8 9

Allen 2002: 7. For the role of women as domestic administrators, see the advice-for-brides texts studied in chapter 1 and Vecchio 1991. The importance of women as the principal ‘health-workers’ in medieval society is discussed by Carole Rawcliffe (1999: 170–215): ‘Women inspired confusion and fear in the medieval male, but so too did the prospect of illness and suffering, against which a wife, mother, herbalist or empiric might possibly offer relief. And, more to the point, a woman was, in many cases, quite capable of providing the same, or even better, care than a practitioner of physic with his degrees or a surgeon with his diplomas. The unreliability, discomfort and cost of professional treatment, as well as an obvious preference on the part of ordinary people for traditional remedies, ensured that women of all types, from hosewives to witches, would continue for generations to provide basic medical care in the community’ (190). 10 Rawcliffe 1999; Vigil 1994; García Herrero 1990.

INTRODUCTION

5

change in women’s position in society does not preclude the possibility that such texts produced a reexamination of attitudes. It certainly provides no grounds for supposing that the subject itself was not of genuine concern even when it was treated through modes of discourse which might seem replete with clichés whose currency was sustained by persistently unreflexive attitudes. This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from Alcuin Blamires’s work on European defence literature. He answers the common objection to such literature, namely that, as Jill Mann puts it, ‘writing against women and then apologizing for it’ was frequently ‘just a convenient way of manufacturing a literary subject’, by making a distinction between the seriousness of the views held by the medieval writers and what he calls ‘the seriousness which the reader is able to find in the views constructed’.11 That is, defence texts – or at least most of those written by men – can be deemed to offer objectively valid arguments, albeit often only incidentally produced and not necessarily intended by the authors, that expose the weakness of misogynistic discourse. Blamires’s approach raises the status of profeminine literary texts by showing that they can be the vehicle for substantive arguments that are at least capable of having some impact on practical life without necessarily challenging the misogyny embedded in the common medieval notion of women.12 Other approaches, however, suggest that the reaffirmation of precisely this embedded misogyny was seen by some of the Hispanic authors as an urgently vital task. Michael Gerli has argued persuasively that Martínez de Toledo’s Arcipreste is in part an earnest moralizing response to the courtly ‘religion of love’ in which, according to churchmen closely associated with the court like Martínez, women were dangerously exalted as earthly idols to the detriment of true religion.13 That is, Martínez is seen to take a necessary stance in the fight against a real threat to the social and religious status quo: in this way, the misogyny of his text is a tool with which to undermine a form of potential heresy. More recently, Michael Solomon has stressed the importance of the collective fear of women even among distinguished medical practitioners like Jaume Roig, as sites of disease as well as of moral danger to men. He has suggested that both Martínez’s and Roig’s works were written with very specific medical purposes in mind, aimed at curing men of an unhealthy obsession.14 The implication of this sense of urgency in such examples of

11 Mann 1991: 25; Blamires 1997: 31. Mann exempts Chaucer from the normal run of male writers of ‘apologies to women’, speaking of his ‘seriousness [. . .] of commitment to women’ (28). 12 The term ‘notion of woman’ refers to Ian Maclean’s influential study of Renaissance Europe (Maclean 1980). 13 Gerli 1981. 14 Solomon 1997.

6

ROBERT ARCHER

misogynistic discourse is, of course, that at least some of the formal replies to it – the ‘defences’ – took it for granted that vital matters were at stake. A widely used conceptual framework for discussing the Hispanic corpus and a large number of other European works is that of the ‘debate’. As far as the Hispanic texts are concerned, the notion of the ‘debate’ first appears in a still influential article by Jacob Ornstein of 1941 in which he groups in a rule-of-thumb fashion male writers on women in medieval Spain under the banners of Misogyny on the one hand and Defence on the other.15 Ornstein’s concept of the ‘debate’, useful as a general construct that links a wide variety of texts, has obvious disadvantages at a closer textual level: it tends to imply that the attitude to the problem of women to be found in each work can be defined by its positioning in this ‘debate’ and thereby to allow for little variation of attitude other than those to be found at these polarities.16 Another problem with the concept of the ‘debate’ is that it is modelled on the earlier literary exchanges in France about the Roman de la Rose, and on the querelle des femmes which flourished well into the sixteenth century, in which there was a public exchange of views. As we shall see, there is little or no evidence in the Hispanic corpus for the existence of such an exchange. It is significant that in her exhaustive study of the concept of women from 1250 to 1500, Prudence Allen uses the term ‘debate’ only in the strict sense of a public disputation, for example that which took place in the universities along scholastic lines or that of the Querelle de la Rose itself with its intergender written exchange of views. ‘Debate’ in the strict sense in which Allen uses it is only one of the ways in which developments in the European notion of women takes place. For these reasons, there seems little to be gained by adhering to the conceptual model implicit in Ornstein’s use of the term ‘debate’. At least one of these objections could be raised about the more recent use of the term ‘debate’ in the collective volume Gender in Debate since here again the point of reference seems to be the French disputational querelles.17 But here the editors and contributors, building on the work of Blamires, have developed the notion of the medieval European ‘debate’ as one which is not only part of the way in which historically the nature of women has been the object of discussion, but, more meaningfully, is also one which is directly relevant to contemporary concerns with the concept of gender. The authors suggest that an exploration of the temporal and geographical particularities of medieval views of women (including those of Spain) such as they conduct is one means of counteracting the contemporary influence of the ‘universalized and unified concept’ for which feminist theories of gender are sometimes criticized, for instance in the remarks by Toril Moi which they quote in their 15 16

Ornstein 1941. Ornstein’s article is still often given as the major point of reference on the Hispanic texts, in spite of its direct debt (unacknowledged) to Farinelli (1929) and Matulka (1931). 17 Fenster & Lees 2002: 1–18.

INTRODUCTION

7

Introduction.18 ‘Debate’ in this sense implies an engagement with the question of gender definition through the discourses of misogyny and defence and explicitly allows for the existence of a range of positions within each. In the latter part of the period studied here some of these positions can be explained in terms of political contexts in both general and particular senses. Weiss reconceptualizes the ‘debate’ using the theories of Gramsci and Bourdieu to argue that, when seen from the viewpoint of historical materialism, it was inherently linked, as an oppositional discourse, with what Gramsci called the ‘hegemonic process’: it was one way that the dominant structure of society rationalized or naturalized its heirarchies, and as such was closely related to other ideologies such as caste or class or practices like courtliness itself or its literature.19 The debate was a serious game in which the stakes were those of social position. A further political context is that of the shifting situation in Castile during the later part of the fifteenth century, an era of two weak kings (Juan II, Enrique IV) and a strong female one (Isabel la Católica) which, as Weissberger argues, forced a revaluation of the concept of male royal power and brought prominent confusion to common assumptions about gender roles.20 In both these contextualisations of the debate the texts can be seen as revealing anxieties of both social position and gender identity. This book attempts to explore even more widely the range and complexity of attitudes towards women in the Hispanic corpus. In effect what is argued here is that such anxieties as those identified by Weiss and Weissberger are local manifestations of the underlying concern with the question of how to define gender identity that pervades the texts as a whole. But why was this question a problem at all, let alone a pervasive one as I contend? After all, as many have argued, there are undeniable common suppositions about the nature of women in the discourses of both misogyny and defence. To answer this, we need to start exploring the texts themselves for what they have to say about it. In the following pages we will look at three of the shorter ones. The first of them is, in origin at least, one of the earliest texts, Flor de virtudes, a fifteenth-century Spanish translation of a thirteenthcentury Italian original; the next text to be examined is from the Spanish exempla collections with their origins in distant non-Western traditions; and the last of them is also the latest under consideration in this study, the Prólogo of Juan Justiniano to his translation of Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (Valencia, 1528).

18 19 20

Fenster & Lees 2002: 1–2 and Moi 1999: 3–120. Weiss 2002: 242. See Weissberger 1997, 1998 and 2002.

8

ROBERT ARCHER

Flor de virtudes The early fourteenth century Italian Fiore di virtù was translated into Spanish and Catalan in the second half of the fifteenth century. It was an immensely popular book: there are at least ninety-five Italian manuscripts and more than fifty editions before 1500, while in Spain the work circulated in two Castilian manuscripts and in a small number of editions (five Catalan, four Castilian).21 The fifth chapter of the Spanish version, Flor de virtudes, contains a theory of human love which is part of a larger section on different forms of love (‘amor e buena voluntad’, ‘amor de Dios’, ‘amor de parientes’, ‘amor de amistad’, ‘amor de namoramiento’).22 Human love is discussed last. It is argued that, contrary to the belief that men love women only out of carnal lust, there is in men – as in birds and beasts – a natural inclination to love their own likeness. This is a love which ‘non es en poder del hombre’ (692). The author alludes to the opinion held by some that women should not be loved in any way that involves the spirit (through the operations of the ‘deleite interlectual’ [sic]), but rather ‘ninguno non devía amar a mugeres, synon tan solamante por dormir con ellas carnalmente’ (p. 693). In this context, there is a concise account of what the ‘actoridades’ – Biblical, Classical and Christian together with Avicenna – have said about women both in their praise and in order to defame them: Primeramente escrivir[é] algunas actoridades e dichos de poetas, fablando en favor de las mugeres, e después declararé aquellos que dizen bien, acordando la una escriptura con la otra, dando verdadera absoluçión, queriendo tajar las lenguas a los maldizentes, que han tractado contra las venerables donas, o que començaron a fablar o tractar de aquellas que dezían bien primeramente. Dize Salamón asý: quien falla buena dona, falla buena cosa, conplida alegría; e en otro logar dize: quien dize mal de la buena fenbra, dize mal de todo su bien; e aun dize: la dona que ama su onor es corona de su amigo marido, e hordena la casa e la riqueza; e la buena fenbra hedefica e faze la casa, e la loca la desfaze. Asý como el honbre non puede bevir en aqueste mundo syn el quarto elemento, asý non puede vevir sin la fenbra. Asý que la muger se puede poner por el quinto elemento, e sy mugeres non fuesen, los hombres envejeçerían prestamente en el mundo, e prestamente el mundo sería despoblado de gentes. E más vos digo: que si las mugeres aprendían las çiençias del mundo, asý como fazen los onbres, todas las çiençias y artes alunbrarían por la su gran sotileza. 21 22

Cornagliotti 1975: 5–13. See also Renier 1894. References to the Spanish version, that copied in the Cancionero de Ixar, are to Azáceta 1956: II, 686–752. In the Catalan version of 1489, the sections on love are divided into six chapters instead of five: ‘de l’amor en general’, ‘de la amor de Déu’, ‘de la amicícia’, ‘de l’amor carnal’, ‘de l’amor natural’, ‘de les dones’ (Cornagliotti 1975, Acebrón Ruiz 2000).

INTRODUCTION

9

Agora veamos quién son aquellos que dizen contra las mugeres. Primeramente dize Salamón: asý como no es aspereza sobre aquella del tosygo del esturçón, todo asý non es maliçia sobre aquella de la fenbra. Dize más: por mala muger fue nasçido el primero pecado, por el qual todos morimos. E aún dize más en otro lugar: asý entre mill honbres yo bien he fallado uno puro e bueno, mas de las mugeres jamás no he fallado una buena. Dize más: no estés con las mugeres, ca de sus vestiduras salle estiércol, e de la muger salle la yniquitad. Dize más: mejor es la iniquitad del honbre, que non la bondat de la muger. Dize más: si la muger osase tomar señoría sobre su marido, mucho sería grande la su soberbia. Dize un sabio: tres cosas son que lançan al honbre de la casa: el gran fumo, e la casa mal cubierta cuando llueve, mas sobre todo lo lança la maliçia de la muger. Ypocrás dixo a una muger que portaba fuego: más ardiente es la cosa que lo porta, que no es la cosa que es portada. Omero dixo a una muger que estaba enferma: el mal está con el mal. San Justrio dixo a otra que aprendía a leer: el venino de la sierpe se ajunta con aquel del escurpión. Platón dixo a tres mugeres que lloravan por otra que era muerta: el mal se atrista porqu’el mal es perdido. Aviçena dize de otra que aprendía a leer e a escrivir: quiérese ayuntar el mal con el mal. (693)

This passage is a brief anthology of gnomic statments about women from the Bible and the sapiential tradition that includes works like the Libro de los buenos proverbios, Bocados de oro, Proverbios de Salamón, and the Llibre de paraules e dits de savis e filòsofs.23 When the author goes on to offer his explanation of why some of these authorities had made misogynistic remarks, he points to the crucial problem that is thrown up by authoritative texts concerning what a woman is: La verdadera absoluçión de los dichos e abtoridades, las cuales son las unas contrarias de las otras: bien es verdat que Eva dañó, e la Virgen Marí[a] salvó. Asymesmo dize San Agustín: ninguna cosa non fue peor ni mejor al mundo que la muger. (694)

The abtoridades collectively contradict one another where women are concerned and see her in terms of an irreconcilable polarity, represented by Eve on the one hand, responsible for the Fall of Man, and Mary on the other, bearer of the world’s saviour. The author goes on to enlarge on the contradictory nature of what the authorities have said and why some of them have spoken in such negative terms. In this context he introduces three arguments that are to appear many times in European literature concerning women: firstly the modification of the referential status of misogynistic statements (the authorities, it is argued, allude only to ‘malas mugeres’), and then the

23 See Sturm 1970, Crombach 1971, Kany 1925, Llabrés i Quintanar 1889, Archer 2000: 178–188.

10

ROBERT ARCHER

imputation of personal malice in the authors of the statements, followed lastly by the allegation of the moral inferiority of men: [. . .] Las actoridades que dizen mal de las mugeres, se deve entender de aquellas que son malas, esto por ver cada uno claramente que quiere notar los dichos de los actores aun non contrasta. E en esto quiso decir Salamón cuando dixo que él no falló jamás una buena: ya por eso non es que de antes e después los otros non hayan fallado de buenas, las quales no es neçessario de nonbrarlas, esto por esquivar prolexidat, e aunque es cosa muy manifiesta, salvando la su graçia e reverençia, que él mesmo dize en otro lugar, que eran estadas e aun eran de las buenas. Esto por ver cada uno que quiere considerar la su escriptura. Mas yo en verdat creo que cuando él escrivió esto que fue en aquellos tiempos, que se lee en el Viejo Testamento, como Salamón fuese una vegada delante del tenplo, él enbió por una muger pagana, la qual él amava muncho, e aquella fizo tanto que lo fizo renegar de Dios e adorar los ýdolos; atanto que ésta lo fizo vestirse e ligarse la cabeça como una muger, e tomar una rueca e filar, e tráxolo acá e allá donde ella quería, así como sy fuera un niño. Por que Salamón reconosçiéndose de la su falta, como yrado, escrivió esto de las mugeres diziendo que jamás no fallará ninguna buena. Asymesmo, sy queremos tener esmiente a los males que oy se fazen las mugeres, considerando los que los omes fazen, aun en la carnal conversaçión o deleyte, muy mayor abstinençia fazen las mugeres que non fazen los onbres. E dime tú, que te plaze oýr mal de las mugeres, ¿quál frayle, nin quál hermitaño, o ninguno qualquier otro, veyéndose todo solo con una fermosa fenbra podría contradezir la su voluntad, asý como fazen la mayor parte de las mugeres, que veyéndose munchas e diversas vegadas con munchos bellos onbres e jóvenes, a una parte a el hombre y la muger todos solos, con seso e virtud se sabe defender su honor? Por çierto aquellos que dixeron mal de las mugeres se perdieron muncho bien callar del bien de amor y de la su gran virtud. (694–695)24

In terms of the ‘debate’ polarities, we could simply assume this to be an early example in Spanish of the literature of defence. But we also find here part of the explanation of why the question of how to define woman was able to linger as persistently as I contend it did beneath the surface of the ‘debate’. Flor signals the difficulty that confronted any medieval writer who approached the subject of women, namely the way in which the auctoritates, the source of medieval knowledge on every other aspect of existence in a 24 esto por ver cada uno claramente que quiere notar los dichos de los actores aun non contrasta: Azáceta’s transcription is correct, but the text itself, as elsewhere in the manuscript, may be corrupt. As it stands, however, we might understand: ‘esto por ver cada uno que [lo] quiere notar [que] [speaking ill only of bad women] los dichos de los actores aun non contrasta’; the fact that such authorities implicitly refer only to aquellas que son malas removes any contradiction there may seem to be with the praises that other authors had sung of women.

INTRODUCTION

11

pre-empirical age, were especially contradictory and confusing about women. At the same time it stresses the special difficulty that the motives for misogynous statements attributed to some of these authorities were not beyond suspicion, precisely because the subject of women affected personally every male authoritative figure in a way that other subjects did not. True, the huge influence of Aristotelian notions of women through works like Egidius Romanus’s De regimine principum and the cumulative weight of misogynous discourse tipped the scales towards the negative side.25 But the contradiction of the authoritative voices from both sides could be addressed only through further discursive writing, much as the author of Flor de virtudes attempts to do in the last passage quoted, by adopting one of the two oppositional positions, in this case that of defence. And it is precisely because of the development of such discourse in works that are declaredly profeminine that the question acquired increasing complexity and indeterminacy.

Male Knowledge of Women in the ‘Exemplum’ Collections This sense of indeterminacy on the discursive level is often reflected, even in some of the earliest Hispanic narrative, in its representation of women and in the way it deals with the problem of male knowledge of the other sex. The exemplary tale or exemplum is a constant feature of medieval Hispanic literature from the mid-twelfth century (when material of Eastern origin begins to circulate in the Peninsula) right through the period studied here. Not only is it the basis of Castilian and Catalan exemplum collections (some of which have a narrative framework), but it also often forms part of the structure of literary works.26 Women appear frequently as the subject of exempla in all of them. María Jesús Lacarra identifies a typology of female characters, common to European collections, who are endowed with negative characteristics: the unfaithful spouse, the wife frustrated in her attempt at adultery, the woman full of deceit, the old go-between. Such female types illustrate lust, avarice and stubbornness in women.27 The major Catalan collection of exempla, the Recull d’exemples, contains many of the same tales, usually from a common origin such as Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, but also from other sources such as Jacques de Vitry.28 The Recull, composed no doubt for a monastic audience, has no favourable tales about women, who are presented as the major means by which the tonsured soul is brought into peril.

25 For the impact of Aristotle’s ideas about women in the Western tradition see the two volumes of Prudence Allen (Allen 1985, 2001). 26 The corpus of Hispanic exempla, while small when compared with that of other languages such as French or German, is larger than previouly thought, as recent work shows. For this see María Jesús Lacarra 1997. 27 María Jesús Lacarra 1986. 28 Ysern Lagarda 1992.

12

ROBERT ARCHER

But Lacarra also points out that the Castilian exempla include many cases of the positive representation of women.29 This aspect is developed by Marta Haro who stresses the representation of virtue in women characters in the exempla under the three aspects of her behaviour as wife, her role as counsellor, and her function as an example of piety and chastity.30 Harriet Goldberg has argued further that in many tales humour, at the expense of a gullible male character, rather than outright misogyny, is the main theme.31 There is a clear need to generalize in this way about the representation of female characters in the corpus of Hispanic exempla, and this is especially useful when such generalizations are conducted, as has been the case with a number of studies, in relation to a range of other texts from outside the exempla collections. But clearly the negative or positive aspects of women in the exempla are to a large extent determined by the specific context in which they are summoned up from the oriental or Latin corpus of exemplary tales, and then adapted and modified to fit a narrative or a didactic context. For instance, one of the collections, of Oriental origin, the Libro de los engaños, with a large proportion of misogynistic tales, sets the exempla in a narrative framework in which it is important for those telling the twenty-three stories (some of the narrators are women) to stress the negative aspects of female nature, since in effect their narrations are designed to dissuade the king from believing the lies of his new wife against his son.32 Within this narrative misogyny acts as a rhetorical device. Considerations of audience reaction are another important factor: it has been shown, for instance, that in Conde Lucanor Don Juan Manuel explicitly rejected many of the negative tales that he certainly knew from the collections he used.33 As it is, he includes only three such tales, and these are counterbalanced by two which represent women in a more positive way.34 Don Juan Manuel no doubt here was conscious of the female members of his audience, much as he indicates himself.35 And if the Recull d’eximplis has nothing good 29 30 31 32 33 34

María Jesús Lacarra 1986: 344–345. Haro 1995. See also Cándano 1997 and Favata 1991. Goldberg 1983. For the important broader context of the collection see Deyermond 1985. María Jesús Lacarra 1986: 351. Enxemplo XXXV tells the story of the taming of the shrew; XXX, while about ingratitude generally, uses the example of a woman; XLVII, although not specifically about women, contains the idea that they are both easily frightened and capable of great cruelty. Enxemplo XXVII contrasts on the one hand the exemplary wife of Álvar Háñez, who blindly supports her husband’s viewpoint even when he says that cows are horses, horses are cows and that the river flows upstream, in spite of the evidence of her own eyes, with, on the other, that of the woman whose contrariness causes her death. Enxemplo L concerns a model vassal who saves Saladin from himself (Juan Manuel 1982–83: II, 285–298, 257–262, 389–395, 219–246). For a feminist interpretation of XXXV, see Sandoval 1989. 35 María Jesús Lacarra 1986: 351.

INTRODUCTION

13

to say about women, then this is consonant with concern in the monastic orders to make civil life as unattractive as possible.36 Without such contextualisation, a synthesized view of the representation of women in the exempla as a corpus can in itself tell us very little of a general kind about medieval attitudes. However, specific enxemplos can usefully illustrate ideas about women that are formulated elsewhere in discursive texts. Thus, for instance, many tales could be understood to exemplify the belief, essentially Aristotelian in origin, that female intelligence took the form of astutia, an instinctive form of intelligence that for some authorities replaced the higher rational form available to men.37 Many more tales, of course, attest to the belief that women, once they ceased to be maidens, became more subject to sudden surges of the lust that naturally characterized them and that, since they were extreme in their behaviour, they were more likely to perform complete changes of attitude and intention. Such notions lie behind the grisly tale of the widow in the Siete sabios de Roma.38 This tells how a man dies from shock on seeing a minor cut on his wife’s hand. In her extreme grief, the wife refuses to leave his graveside, and her relatives build her a small shelter so that she can remain by her husband’s body. In the course of the night she meets an alguacil who offers to marry her if she will let him use her husband’s corpse to replace the stolen body of a hanged man on whom he was keeping watch on pain of his own life. She not only complies, but herself mutilates her husband’s body, verbally insults it and finally cuts off the testicles. The alguacil, seeing what she is capable of, reneges on his promise. Here what makes the change in the wife believable in the eyes of the medieval reader is the extremity of the grief itself: beyond the help of reason, the woman is easily capable of swinging across to another, quite opposed, passion. This ability to shock the reasonable male (in this tale, significantly, the alguacil is not, unlike many other male characters, blinded by love and made into a fool by his own attachment to a woman) is one aspect of the particular dimension to the representation of women in the exempla that concerns us here. Such tales as a whole, whether they serve to underline positive or negative aspects, attest to the traditional belief in the male inability truly to know women. They confirm again and again her status as an indefinable category whose only sure and foreseeable characteristics are precisely those which ensure her collective undefinability. Firstly, inherent contradiction: hence the faithful wife alongside the lustful adulteress, the duper of a besotted husband alongside the prudent counsellor. Secondly, mutability. That is, the exempla 36 37

Wilson & Makowski 1990; Ysern Lagarda 1992 and 2004: I, 64–79. The quality of astutia is praised, for instance, by Pere Torroella in his Razonamiento [. . .] en deffensión de las donas as a loable astuçia (Aubrun 1951: 34); see also Blamires 1997: 237. 38 Torre 1993: 101–107.

14

ROBERT ARCHER

are not so much cautionary tales about the evils of which women are capable (or the good that they can also perform) but rather they are the cumulative narrative of the renunciation by men of their attempts to define, by the exercise of the human reason deposited in them, a being who is herself normally devoid of reason and therefore liable to act in a way that the reasonable male cannot anticipate. This underlying dimension to the exempla is explicitly enacted in one of the tales of the Libro de los engaños.39 The tale of the mancebo contains no final statement about its exemplary meaning, unlike others in the collection such as that which concludes the Exe[n]plo del marido, e del segador e de la muger e de los ladrones que la tomaron a traición where it is plainly stated that the story has as its moral ‘el engaño e las artes de mugeres, que no an cabo ni fin’.40 The tale of the mancebo contains much more than a simple instance of women’s trickery. The young man assumes that there are certain ‘maldades’ and ‘engaños’ performed by women, knowledge of which can be learnt by rational means; such knowledge will equip him for life, since life must normally be lived with a woman. He seeks this knowledge from living sources of male wisdom, the sabios. But the tale mocks such wisdom when the young man is advised to submit to a programme of penitence and abstinence for three days, during which he also copies out ‘muchos libros de las artes de las mugeres’. It is not clear whether he is advised to do this by others or simply decides to intensify his efforts by acquainting himself with the teachings of the men of the past; but the books, as depositaries of the same male knowledge as that offered by the village sabios, become central to the meaning of the story. That the exemplo can be read as a tale centred exclusively on the problem of male knowledge of women is supported by the fact that the narrative involves no female maldad, since the wife of the omne bueno is properly obedient to her husband, and it is on his instructions that she helps the young man back to health after the ordeals he suffers while away from home on his quest. Even as she plans the trick that will bring him to his senses, pretending that she invites him to have sex with her, she intends only a salutary fright. Other characters in the Hispanic exempla who similarly equip themselves in vain with the counsel of sabios about the ways of women are less fortunate, since they learn the worst about them only after they have become victims of their treachery.41 The tale of the mancebo does not illustrate female malice in this way, but focuses, rather, on the fallibility of male knowledge in which the young man has such confidence. 39 40 41

María Jesús Lacarra 1995: 132–134 and Archer 2000: 192–194. María Jesús Lacarra 1995: 126–128; Archer 2000: 191–192. For instance, the exemplum number 303 in Libro de los enxemplos por A.B.C. (Sánchez de Vercial 1961: 237–238). Here the the advice of the ‘mayor sabidor de toda la comarca’ proves to be of no use in the face of female lust and perversity.

INTRODUCTION

15

What does the young man learn? In the first place, he discovers that female astutia can as easily be used for good as for bad. This time he was lucky, but before he realized what was happening he had found himself at the mercy of the wife. He also learns that male intelligence, deposited in books and wise men, is no match for this astutia, because in an instant lust can blind a man to the effects of the reason he is privileged to possess. Reason, on which male knowledge is founded, would tell him that he is under a moral obligation not to cuckold a good man who had shown him only kindness, and this same obligation would force him to question the wife’s motives. Most of all, he realizes the truth of what the wife proudly tells him at the end of the tale: that no man can ever comprehend her sex: ‘esto que tú demandas nunca lo acabarás tú ni homne de cuantos son nacidos’. The tale ends with a symbolic burning of the site of male wisdom, the books of the sabios, and the renunciation of any pretence to the understanding of women. Here too, as the passage in Flor de virtudes suggests, traditional knowledge fails the seeker of truth as a source of guidance to the problem of what a woman is. In its response, Flor opts for a fixed position based in generic praise. That is, it suggests that a man can cope with the contradictory nature of authoritative wisdom only by taking sides in the misogyny/defence polemic. The tale of the mancebo, on the other hand, claims that all such authoritative wisdom, whether tending to praise or to blame, is ultimately of no worth since no man can rely on it to anticipate confidently what female cunning is capable of. But this ironic tale of the abandonment of the pursuit of gender knowledge also implies, with equal irony, the self-sufficiency of the female: woman is beyond man’s ken, but also beyond his help. An important tradition of writings in the Hispanic corpus to which the last of the three texts refers attests to a quite different set of suppositions that add even greater complexity to the question of what a woman is.

Juan Justiniano In his remarkable Prologue, Justiniano traces a tradition of writing that refers to women from Plato, through Aristotle and Xenophon, the Pauline epistles, Patristic and Scholastic works, the late fourteenth century Eiximenis, Boccaccio, Poggio Bracciolini, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Pere Torroella. The Patristic and Scholastic authorities are seen as defective on the question of women since, believing that they could be subsumed as the object of moral discourse under the category of men, they failed to say anything specifically on their behalf: ‘pero yo veo que todos estos doctores tratan muy poco de la vida o instrucción de las mugeres. Todos ellos se pusieron a enseñar a los hombres’.42 42 [Juan LuisVives], Libro llamado Instrucción de las muger christiana (Vives 1528: fol. 2). Justiniano’s Prologue is partially reproduced in Archer 2000: 333–336.

16

ROBERT ARCHER

Moreover, they assumed that, since women should follow the instruction of men, it was sufficient merely to teach the instructors: es cierto que los hombres han de regir y adestrar a las mugeres, y ellas han de seguyr y obedescer. Y ésta creo yo haver sido la causa por donde los doctores se dexaron de escrevir particularmente instrución para ellas: pensando que con enseñar solamente a los hombres era hazer de una vía dos mandados, y (como dizen) matar dos páxaros de un tiro. (fol. 2)

The Greeks for their part contributed only a few words about how to be a good housewife. And as for St Paul: a las vírgines no hizo más de aprovarles la virginidad, y dezirles que aquél es de todos los estados el más perfecto. A las casadas tuvo harto en dezirles que guarden su honestidad con toda obediencia a sus maridos. A las biudas mandó que estuviesen en oraciones y ayunos, apartadas de todo deleyte. Y quasi en esto poco se encierra todo lo que tiene escrito el apóstol de las mugeres. (fol. 2v)

All that the Church Fathers did for women could be described as una manera de amonestar a las mugeres a que escojan un modo de vida honesta, loando sobremanera la virginidad y viudez y limpieza del matrimonio, que no fue darles forma de cómo han de vivir, o regirle en estos estados de vida. Todos ellos se ocuparon en loar y sublimar la limpieza y virtud; ítem en hollar la suziedad del pecado. Cosa en virtud muy digna y conforme a tantos y tales escritores, puesto que también – digámoslo todo – dieron muchos y muy buenos avisos a las mugeres a vuelta de todo lo otro que escrivieron, pero no porque se pusiesen de propósito a instruyrlas. (fol. 2v)

His words of greatest praise are reserved for Francesc Eiximenis, the only author before Vives whom he considers to have written specifically for women:43 Siguió a cabo de muchos centenares de años otro alumbrado doctor, que fue fray Francisco Jiménez de la orden de los mendicantes, obispo de Barcelona, el cual con paternal caridad emprendió de hecho el cargo de instruir y doctrinar las mujeres cristianas. Y así cogiendo muchas autoridades y ejemplos, tanto de gentiles como de cristianos, hizo un gran libro intitulado Libro de las donas. (fol. 2v) 43 Justiniano’s only criticism of Eiximenis is that he wrote in medieval Catalan, often taken in the sixteenth century to be a separate language (lemosín): ‘Según enseñó muchas cosas útiles a saberse de todos, assí bien las escribió en lengua para saberse de pocos, porque escrivió en lemosí, qu’es una lengua allá por si entre catalán y gascón que entonces se usava por estos reynos de Valencia y Cataluña’ (fol. 2).

INTRODUCTION

17

He then goes on to mention a quite different kind of writing on women in Spain and in Italy which has its origins in Classical literature: Otros escriptores hobo antes y después d’éste, extraordinarios, o no, sino desordenados, los quales, en lugar de dar la mano a las mugeres, dieron del pie, no instruyéndolas ni enseñándolas sino reprehendiéndolas y vituperándolas, según fueron entre los griegos Eurípides, entre los latinos Juvenal, y otros poetas satýricos y cómicos. Entre los italianos modernos Juan Bocacio y el Pogio y el Manganelo; en España Torrellas y un Alonso Martínez, archipreste de Talavera; y en otras partes otros, los cuales todos, según dicho tengo, antes se pusieron apassionadamente en dezir que las mugeres eran malas, que no trabajaron sabiamente en hazer que fuessen buenas’. (fol. 2v)

For Justiniano all these texts are united by the way in which they address, or fail to address, a common task that falls necessarily to all men who write on women from whatever perspective they ostensibly declare. In this way Justiniano sees the works about women he mentions as having been written for women in so far as no man could write about them while relinquishing his natural duty to instruct and improve them. Juvenal’s sixth satire or Torroella’s notorious Maldezir are seen as adding little or nothing to man’s ongoing task of educating women, who need his guidance, la mano, not el pie, as he says; but even these texts should nevertheless be seen as part of the same common project of men in their divinely allotted role of guides and masters of women. Justiniano, of course, also sought by this to underline the importance of the book he had translated – albeit selectively – into Spanish and which, as he tells us, he is also putting into Italian, in fact his native language.44 His description of the educational poverty of the tradition of writings about women leads into his encomium of Vives, now mentioned for the first time (his name is deliberately omitted by the publisher from the title page): [. . .] teniendo la christiandad tanta necessidad como tiene de alguna manera de reformación y regimiento en la vida de las mugeres, donde pende gran parte de la nuestra, [Dios] nos ha dado entre otros señalados doctores de nuestros tiempos uno natural de España y aún nascido en medio deste insigne ciudad de Valencia [. . .], llamado el doctor Juan Luys Vives. (fol. 3)

But this skewing of the history of literature about women in favour of Vives does not detract from the importance of Justiniano’s notion that all the texts he mentions are united by their common object of contemplation and by an underlying moral obligation towards women, both the virtuous and the less 44 For the background to Justiniano’s translation and the anonymous revision of Justiniano in the edition of 1529, see Fuster 1989.

18

ROBERT ARCHER

virtuous (‘no instituye solamente a las buenas y virtuosas mas aun a las no tales’, fol. 3). As far as the Hispanic corpus is concerned, Justiniano’s Prologue has further importance on two counts. Firstly because it considers a generically varied body of texts, some of them written in Spain, as forming a single tradition and thus, in effect, substantiates the claim made in this study that there exists a Hispanic corpus of texts about women and for women – Eiximenis and Vives alongside Torroella and Martínez de Toledo – that can meaningfully be treated as a unified whole without the assumption that there was a debate. Secondly, it offers a model of interpretation of this corpus that shifts the focus of discussion away from the abstract dimension of the disputational quaestio through which women had been conceptually displaced from their actual role in society.45 Instead, as Justiniano sets down his interpretation of the history of writings on women and lays the groundwork for his praise of Vives, he emphasizes their importance as an integral part of the social structure, while also stressing their need for men’s support and guidance. This approach, with its sense of social urgency, puts the subject of woman as dealt with by the Hispanic texts on a plane of total seriousness that belies the very ordinariness with which many of them seem to cite standard arguments pro and contra. Even this brief discussion of these three short texts suggests something of the potential complexity of responses to the question of how to define woman: they underscore the difficulty of relying on authoritative wisdom to explain the nature of her problematic otherness (Flor), the essential unknowableness of women (tale of the mancebo), while also stressing the male moral and educative responsibility towards them (Justiniano). The problem of definition was compounded not only by the contradictory nature of the auctoritates identified by Flor but also by the need to reconcile the statements of the Church Fathers with medical opinion. Together they made women both weaker than this universal male norm and yet stronger (as seductress, for instance, or the persuader of Adam, at least for some interpreters); both less intelligent and yet more astute; less responsible (hence men had a guiding role, as Juan Justiniano points out) and yet more guilty. The nature of the problem is enmeshed with the further one of defining the male, a problem which has been given particular importance by contemporary feminist theory. It is now a commonplace that the position and identity of men in society, at least during the last few centuries, has depended on marking out a non-masculine space in which women are meant to assume particular roles that are deemed to be non-masculine.46 In the texts to be 45 Such conceptual displacement is traced by Wilson & Makowski (1990: 3) to Quintilian who produced the indefinite propositum ‘an vir ducat uxorem’ and the limited topos ‘(causa) an vir sapiens ducat uxorem’. 46 As Judith Butler puts it, modifying Lacan, ‘In order to “be” the Phallus, the

INTRODUCTION

19

studied here there are signs that already a need existed to confirm men’s position in the face of the obvious ability of women to operate effectively in areas authoritatively defined as male. Hence the need to address the cases of physically brave or strong women (and sometimes to discredit them) or, as in the enxenplos, to account for the quick-wittedness of a being who was nevertheless deemed to be naturally less intelligent than men. Moreover, some of the texts, as we shall see, problematize male identity even as they struggle to define the female one. In effect, any medieval Spaniard who wrote on the subject of women came to it as the bearer of a particular symbolic order which constantly failed him in his attempt to come to terms with the subject. What I will attempt to show in this study is that this failure haunts much of the discursive writing about women in the late fourteenth to early sixteenth century in Spain. It is proposed that the authors of the Hispanic texts can be understood to have had recourse to whatever available traditions (misogynistic denunciation, satire, humour, defence, narrative debate, among others) could offer in their search for a way to deal with the question of defining what a woman is, and that this question had necessarily to be addressed even when there were other specific motives for writing (a political, literary, religious, or didactic agenda, as well as the collective enterprise of patriarchal control). They were not ultimately concerned with the facile question that, in one form or another, many of them ostensibly address (‘Is woman a good thing or a bad thing?’), but with the broader problem of gender definition (‘What thing is she?’). As such they all reveal the unresolved perplexity of the male gaze as it contemplates woman through the mists of contradictions and ambiguities that had sprung up since the earliest authoritative texts in the Western tradition. The main problem that unites them all is that of constructing the female with the tools available, given that these were designed to apprehend the male world, one in which, as feminist criticism would put it, the masculine is conflated with the universal. The problem lies embedded even in those kinds of text where perhaps we might least expect to find it, that is in those didactic writings that address the male obligation to guide and educate on which Justiniano insists, and where it could be asssumed that the writer relied on stable and authoritative universal notions of the nature of women as a prerequisite for his own didacticism. Such texts are the subject of the first chapter.

reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if they were”) precisely what men are not, and in their very lack, establish the position of men’ (Butler 1990: 45).

1 NOTIONS OF WOMEN IN HISPANIC DIDACTIC LITERATURE NOTIONS OF WOMEN

Some of the texts written in Hispanic languages in the medieval period about women are specifically intended for female readers. Their didactic concerns are not directed primarily at males as is the case with texts like Arcipreste de Talavera or Jaume Roig’s Spill, but largely at women themselves. Such texts declare themselves to have the practical function of preparing real women for real life in a range of social contexts such as marriage or queenship or, more generally, for moral life. They are especially important since they describe or indirectly reveal a ‘notion of woman’ based in what their authors variously assume to be the commonplace ideas held by contemporary readers and which women readers themselves are urged to accept as general truths about themselves. Such texts will allow us to gauge the extent to which the attempt to define women for women succeeds in the face of the conceptual difficulties previously described. One of these texts, whose declared aims are didactic and educational, was finished in 1392 and is mentioned by Juan Justiniano: Eiximenis’s Libre de les dones. Another, written with intentions which are as political as they are educational, is from the mid-fifteenth century (1468 or soon after), namely Martín de Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas, in relation to which we will need to take account of the Castilian translation of the influential De regimine principum of Egidius Romanus. Another Castilian text from the fifteenth century, Castigos y doctrina que un sabio daba a sus hijas, belongs to the tradition of advice to maidens and brides, like two other texts in Catalan to be considered, from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Conseyll de bones dotrines and the Letra [. . .] per dona Joana). The latest text to be discussed, Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (written 1522–1523), is the most famous book written by a Spaniard on the education of women. These texts written specifically for women are complemented by the voluminous body of transcriptions, from the second decade of the fifteenth century, of the Catalan and Spanish sermons of St Vicent Ferrer in which women are addressed, not only inclusively, but also directly and specifically.

22

ROBERT ARCHER

Libre de les dones The Libre de les dones does not contain all of Eiximenis’s thought on women, nor, in spite of its title, is all the book specifically about women, since much of the Christian doctrine discussed in the Segona Part, which makes up most of the book, is of relevance to female and male Christians alike.1 Eiximenis, while he wrote within the Franciscan tradition which gave primary attention to the Biblical text and secondarily to speculative theology, is not without individuality in his thinking. But his book on women is of particular interest for our purposes here since its Primera Part consists of thirteen chapters in which he attempts to summarize the general characteristics of women as he understood them to be and as he believed others to consider them: ‘tracta generalment d’açò que a dones pertany’.2 Eiximenis’s first words are to affirm the real possibility of virtuous perfection for women in this life, given the testimony of those in the past who came to faith and achieved ‘evangelical perfecció e vida’ just as certain men did. He places to the forefront of his discussion the special quality of vergonya, a concept that includes both shame and modesty, with which God has endowed women: ‘Déu donà a la dona vergonya en la cara molt més que a l’hom en esta part; e açò per preservar si mateixa de tota viltat e legea’ (I, 10). God helped her further by giving to men the Mosaic law, meant to keep all from sin but especially women; even the pagan Law of the Romans similarly prized chaste behaviour in them. The ideal of castedat, of chastity in the broadest sense of virtuous behaviour, informs all Christian thought and is the condition to which women should aspire, whatever their estate; Eiximenis’s book is designed to show women ‘con se puxen mills acostar a Déu e mills servir-lo, e con mills sàpien si matexes governar’ (I, 12). The guiding principle of chapters V–XI, preliminaries (preàmbols) to the main part of the book, is to help women to lead chaste lives. These contain general truths about women which will be of use to those who wish to instruct them in moral doctrine, but above all to women themselves. Selfknowledge is the key to moral action: avem a premetre alscuns preàmbols qui són generals a totes dones e necessaris a saber elles matexes, si volen conèxer lur natural condició, principi e fonament de lurs bonees, passions e misèries. (I, 12)

1 For a broad study of women in Eiximenis, see Viera & Piqué 1987. Another important discussion of women is to be found in Terç del Crestià, chapters 93–97 (Eiximenis 1929) and in Dotzè llibre del Crestià (Eiximenis 1986). 2 Eiximenis 1981: I, 8. The chapters to be discussed are in Eiximenis 1981: I, 9–27. Selections from the Spanish translation of these chapters (late fourteenth to fifteenth centuries) can be found in Archer 2000: 136–145.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

23

This ‘natural condition’ of women according to Eiximenis as set out in these chapters can be summarized as follows: (a) The natural place of women. Women are naturally in a subordinate position to men, as intended by God even before the Fall. As mas occasionatus, the Aristotelian ‘imperfect male’ interpreted here through false etymology as referring to a being whom God made ‘per diverses occasions qui guarden a l’om’, she is to be considered human only by virtue of this subordinate relationship to men: ‘la dona és hom occasionat, e no principalment entès en la espècia humana’ (I, 13). (b) Reasons for the creation of the female form: (1) as helper and companion to man, (2) to fulfill God’s intention that the human race should multiply and, after the Fall and the coming of death into the world, to replace those who die, (3) for the nourishment of children, (4) to prefigure, by being a partner in marriage, the union of Jesus with the Church. The female form, while inferior to the male, is neither deformed nor ugly, but is naturally defective: ‘no és diformitat ne legea, mas és deffalliment natural’, and it is to the greater glory of God that women will keep their female forms in heaven (I, 27). (c) Woman before the Fall. Eve was endowed by God with the blessings of Nature, fortune and grace. She was also wise and intelligent (‘era sàvia’), although less than Adam, as was shown by the fact that Adam did not believe the serpent and was not deceived by him; rather, he believed his wife and wanted to please her more than God (I, 24). (d) Woman after the Fall. Satan saw that Eve was weaker than Adam and tempted her. Using the wisdom with which God had endowed her and given her love for Him, she should have been able to reject the Devil, but failed because of her lack of forcefulness (‘tebeegava’, I, 17). Thus it was ‘wretched woman’ (‘la fembra mesquina’, I, 19) who caused the Fall of Man, using her feminine wiles (‘ab ses maneres’, I, 19) to bring Adam to sin. Together with Adam, she lost all the privileges of Paradise and the blessings of nature, fortune and grace, and lost most of the intelligence she had possessed: ‘fo ferida en natura, ço és que del seny que havia perdé gran part’ (I, 16) so that hardly any is left to woman now (‘és tan poch aquell qui y romàs que no és quays res’, I, 21). Thenceforth she had to bear the woes described in Genesis, such as the pangs of childbirth, but also the pain of knowing how much suffering she had bequeathed to her descendants, especially to women, whose share of them is greater than that of men (‘especialment a les dones, qui moltes més plagues e affanys han reebudes que los hòmens’). God also sought to punish the pride that had led her to seek to be like Him by subjugating her to her husband and by inflicting on her the shame of menstruation and its foul odours. (e) Eve’s relationship with Adam after the Fall. As a punishment to Adam, God decreed that he should have to shoulder the burden of his wife’s

24

ROBERT ARCHER

suffering: ‘gran càrrech és de l’hom haver a supportar sa muller en les sues passions e misèries’ (I, 19). Eiximenis cites the pseudo-etymological figure of the Woe-Man.3 If a man fails to exercise his authority over his wife, it is God’s will that he suffer for it, since she then is contrary to him in everything.4 Still now when men give in to women, lured by the hope of carnal delight, they pay for it by the sweat of their brow.5 (f) Characteristics of female behaviour resulting from the Fall. Citing Cyprian, Eiximenis adds to women’s subjugation to husbands, birth pangs, and menstruation a list of general traits of female character which are also deemed to be particular punishments that God has visited upon women in accordance with the sins committed by Eve (pride, belief in the Devil, lack of shame, breaking God’s command, acting without her husband’s consent, or further sins following from these): (1) They have the voice of a boy and a child’s face (‘veu de minyó e cara d’infant’). (2) They resemble certain animals: when riled, they haw like an ass (‘cridadora en sa turbació’); they defend themselves like a cat by leaping at their opponent’s face with their nails; when they are discontent, they will bark like a dog (‘que renyàs com a ca’). (3) They are unstable and inconstant, qual fium’al vento (‘instable e moble com la fulla de l’arbre’), constantly changing their minds. (4) They are unable to keep a secret (‘plach a Déu que [. . .] ne tingua secret a negú’).6 (5) Like the serpent which seduced Eve, they are full of poison (‘tota serpentina e verinosa, en tant que del cap fins al peus no.y aja loch qui tot no sia verí e mort d’òmens’). (6) They are always full of fear (‘paorugues’); one cockroach can send a thousand women fleeing in panic.7 (7) Owing to their very limited intelligence, they are scarcely able to control their passions, carnal delights, and other sinful actions (‘en la dona regnen les passions e malícies e malvestats de la carn, puys no y ha fre qui los tempra’, I, 21). (8) It is for the same reason that they are contrary by nature, following the 3 ‘Aquel que trobà lo lengage englès posà nom a la fembra uman, qui vol dir dolor del marit’ (I, 19). 4 ‘Ha volgut nostre senyor Déu que si l’om dóna senyoria a la fembra sobre si matex, que ella li sia tostemps contrària’ (I, 19). 5 ‘Per tal, encara, cant l’om delitosament e com a enamorat, e tirat per amor e delit carnal, consentí a la fembra, volent per amor d’ella haver exeperiència de la dolçor del fruyt a ell vedat, per tal li donà Déu, e pena d’aquests foylls delits, que tostemps mengàs son pa en suor de sa carn e visqués en dolor e en trebayll’ (I, 19) 6 In Dotzè del Crestià Eiximenis insists further on this, warning husbands that there are few exceptions to this rule (Eiximenis 1986: 165) 7 In relation to this notion of the fearfulness of women Eiximenis also cites Lactantius as his source for the idea that ‘són totes pesugues e volen seure e tostemps en terra, car pesen com a plom, ne neguna seïlla no les pot longuament sofferir’ (I, 20).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

25

passions rather than natural reason. (9) A woman never stops talking (‘és gran parlera, ne perdona a just ni a peccador’, I, 21). (10) After rejecting what God gave her, Eve became empty of all blessings, and from this emptiness comes the vanity of women, who need to fill this emptiness with praise and flattery. (11) It is because of the desire to be praised that a woman is avaricious (‘avara’), since she fears being too poor to win praise from others. (12) They use cosmetics and have recourse to other means to make themselves appear beautiful, claiming falsely that they are doing so for their husbands’ sakes. But it is true that their travails, especially in childbearing, make them often old before their time. (13) Vanity has led women into the practice of falsehood and deception (‘art de falsegar e d’enguanar’), and this is why the Devil has often used them for his ends, as the cases of Adam, Samson, David, and Solomon attest. (14) All these defects are magnified by the malice to be found in women. The Bible (Ecclesiastes 25) is quoted in support of this: ‘No és malícia sobre la malícia de fembre’.8

As presented by Eiximenis, who bases himself at every step on a cited auctoritas in accordance with the normal expository method followed throughout the Libre de les dones, these characteristics are a direct result of God’s will: they are punishments handed down from generation to generation for the sins of Eve. The description of each of these characteristics is accompanied by a moral argument which matches a characteristic with a particular aspect of Eve’s transgression. Instability, for instance, is the price that women must pay for Eve’s squandering of the precious gift of dominion over everything that surrounded her: Ítem, so diu aquest [Cyprian], per tal cant per sa colpa perdé justícia original, qui la tenia fort, axí que res no li podia en res rebel.lar, ne deffora no li podia res noure, plach a Déu que fos feta instable e moble axí com la fulla de l’arbre al vent, en tant que no agués en si neguna fermetat per natura, ne tingua secret a negú, e mut cent propòsits en un punt, e que ara plor, ara ria, ara vulla açò, ara lo contrari, axí que no tingua en res ni fus ni filosa [. . .]

In this way, the definition of women which Eiximenis elaborates in these chapters is one that has its own moral logic deriving from the theological reality of the Fall of Man. That Eiximenis was aware that notions such as those he lists here were 8 The Biblical quotation in support of female malice appears as the heading of chapter XIII of Terç del Crestià (Eiximenis 1929: I, 267): ‘Com malícia de fembra és major que tota altra malícia, e per quinyes rahons’. In the Segona Part, chapter 88 of Libre de les dones (Eiximenis 1981: I, 136–137), he describes at some length three tactics for dealing at a practical level with wives who are particularly afflicted with female malice.

26

ROBERT ARCHER

levelled against women in openly misogynist discourse, without recourse to justificatory arguments and on the basis of their status as self-evident truths, becomes immediately evident in the next chapter in which he scotches the use of this material for such ends: Emperò, ja per res que dit sia, negú no pens que meysprear ne malparlar de dones en general sia bona cosa ne plaent a Déu. Rahó és car, no contrastant lurs deffalliments damont dits, nostre Senyor les ha volgudes en algunes axí exalçar que tot lo món deu haver temor de parlar mal d’elles. (I, 23)

There is a fundamental distinction made here between the holding of a notion of women like the one Eiximenis has just described and the use of its relentless negativity for the purposes of propagating contemptuous ideas about their worth. For Eiximenis the attitude which today we would label ‘misogynist’ would apply only to the latter – the position of the slanderers of women – since it implies a conscious attempt to exclude from the notion of women everything but the abundantly available negative aspects. The arguments against the ‘mal dients’ in chapter XII constitute the earliest example of a ‘defence’ of women in a Hispanic language.9 While, as elsewhere in his work, Eiximenis sets out side by side two opposing views of women, it is inaccurate to say, as Viera and Piqué do, that in this chapter he reverses what he had said in the previous one.10 This would imply some kind of rhetorical intention which is clearly at odds with his aims in this book. In fact, he does not address more than two of the points he had made in the previous chapter. First, he counters the accusation that since Adam women have been the means of destruction of men, by making the objection that a handful of exempla do not prove a general rule. Secondly, he seeks to attenuate the guilt of Eve, pointing out that she was not aware of the full import of her actions, and he shifts some of the blame onto Adam: ‘hac-ne gran colpa son marit, qui la devia corregir e fer-la tornar a Déu quant en si fos’ (I, 24). The rest of the profeminine material bears no direct relation to the contents of the previous chapter. These fresh considerations about women, most of which are specifically about Eve, and will reappear many times in fifteenthcentury texts, are as follows:

9 As Viera & Piqué point out (1987: 86), in Terç del Crestià, chapter 950, Eiximenis denounces those who have vilified women – he mentions Solomon, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Cerverí de Girona, and the fourteenth-century poet known as the Capellà de Folquera – as those men who have also most sinned with them: ‘és certa cosa que tots aquels qui mal parlen de dones, són estats los majors peccadors en dones, e han més folegat per dones que homes del món.’ 10 ‘l’autor contradiu el contingut de l’anterior’ (Viera & Piqué 1987: 82; see also pp. 84–87 for an important analysis of the passages discussed here).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

27

(a) Mal parlar. The act of general vilification (‘inpugnant generalment a dones’) is an offence against God who created them, honoured them by being born to one, and placed His mother above all the angels in Heaven. (b) Female martyrs. He has rewarded the moral strength of many virtuous and saintly women with a place in Heaven, while many men have shown themselves morally weak where they were strong. (c) Sin. Women sin less than men, and there are many saintly women for the sake of whom God’s grace works in the world. (d) Privileges of women. God honoured the first woman with the place and manner of her birth. These are the standard arguments of materia and locus that appear countless times in Hispanic and European defence literature. Adam was made from the earth in the Damascene field, Eve from created matter – Adam’s rib – in Paradise. (e) Men’s companions. God made Eve from the rib at Adam’s side not from his head or his feet, because He meant her to be a respected companion, and that she should neither have sovereignty over the man nor be his slave. (f) Eve’s sin led to the coming of the Redeemer. Because of Eve, God was made man and came to the world to win man’s redemption with his sacrifice. (g) Eve as intercessor. Since her trangression, Eve, through bitter repentance, has earned reconciliation with God, dwells in Heaven in the company of the Virgin Mary and the angels, and intercedes for us. In this way, Eiximenis does not contradict what he has said about women in the previous chapter; indeed, he explains that he says all this in her favour ‘no contrastant lurs deffalliments damont dits’ (‘without contradicting the defects described above’). Instead he censures those who choose to speak only ill of women without mentioning their positive aspects, modifies two of the points raised in the previous chapter, and then introduces new arguments in favour of honouring women, almost entirely through the figure of the redeemed Eve. In practice, in later parts of the Libre de les dones Eiximenis modifies further the apparent universality of the negative characteristics he attributes to women. For instance, in an important chapter (I, 137–138) on whether women deserve to be loved by their husbands, Eiximenis answers some of the arguments against it (which he attributes to the Manicheans). However, these accusations – that they are thieves, stupid, malicious, and contrary by nature – are answered with phrases of limitation rather than denial: ‘Mas açò no.u fan totes’, ‘no parla generalment de tot[e]s’, ‘dich-te que no és ver de totes’ (I, 134). In the same chapter, he addresses the accusation of mutability by comparing this defect with its masculine form: while in women it is a ‘deffalliment de mutabilitat natural’, in men it is a more deliberate act of the will. The comparison serves to give greater validity to the notion that such

28

ROBERT ARCHER

mutability was a part of women’s nature. The naturalness of her mutability and also the inferiority of her intelligence is driven home further when he adduces a general rule regarding the respective levels of responsibility for sin in men and women in view of the superior reason of one sex and the greater subjection to the passions of the other: Sàpies que peccat de fembra ve comunament per ignorància e mutabilitat e poch seny, e per tal no fan los peccats tan greus con fan aquells qui péccan scientment contra lur consciència e contra la magestat de Déu, de la qual han gran conexensa. (I, 138)

These later observations only confirm that the chapter of ‘defence’ is complementary to the earlier one and in no sense contradicts it. The emphasis on a redeemed Eve in chapter XII does not deny the legacy of her guilt to all generations of women, but holds out the hope that they may overcome their nature. For both of the chapters there were many more arguments that Eiximenis could have used had he deemed it appropriate. But his book is neither a condemnation of women’s nature nor a defence of them against the slander he mentions at the beginning of chapter XII. He does not discuss in any detail at this point in the book the negative traits on which the slanderers insist. He tries, rather, to define those aspects of female nature which his women readers need to recognize in themselves and, through careful behaviour and by God’s grace, to overcome, if they are to act virtuously.

Martín de Córdoba, Egidius Romanus, and García de Castrojeriz Conquest of the female self is also at the forefront of the declared concerns of the next text to be discussed. Shortly after 1468, and at a critical moment politically, fray Martín de Córdoba composed for the young princess Isabel of Castile (born 1451), his Jardín de nobles doncellas, a work which lies somewhere between the genre of De regimine principum and the defence tradition, and includes elements of the further tradition of Advice to Brides. Córdoba writes with the immediate political aim of justifying in general terms the suitability of a female monarch, concretely Isabel rather than Juana of Castille (la Beltraneja), the other pretender to the throne, as the dedication to Isabel makes unequivocally clear.11 In this way, while Córdoba writes ostensibly for the benefit of Isabel, he also does so for the eyes of men. His treatise not only has to serve as a guide to the princess about how she should rule as a woman but has also to try to justify in terms acceptable to men the claim that, in spite of being a woman, 11 There is no solid evidence that Isabel read the work, and a copy of it does not appear in her library (Ballesteros Gaibrois 1970). Quotations are from the edition of Harriet Goldberg (Córdoba 1974); see also for the political context Soriano 1997.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

29

Isabel would be able to act effectively as a monarch. To meet these two aims, Córdoba has to address the general assumptions about women held by his contemporaries, since such assumptions were the basis for objections on principle to the acceptability of a female sovereign. At the same time, he had to produce a convincing programme for the reform of natural female defects in much the same way as Eiximenis. Córdoba, like Eiximenis, does not address the specific accusations attributable to the slanderers – the mal dients or maldicientes to whom all Hispanic works of defence claim to be responding – but rather the commonly accepted negative aspects of the notion of women on which the slanderers drew. Hence, his rhetorical tactics do not include that of identifying a particular discourse on women associated with maldezir: his concerns are not with the intentional denigration of women but with the general underlying notion of what they are. Córdoba structures his treatise in three Partes. The first deals with aspects of the creation of woman, the second with ‘las condiciones de la muger’, and the third with ‘cómo se han de promouer las dueñas a bien’. In the Primera Parte Córdoba offers an explanation, using various Patristic and Scholastic sources, of why women were created.12 In these chapters, while Córdoba does not try to confront the slanderers in the way that Eiximenis does, several of the defence arguments commonly used to counter the accusations of the maldicientes are brought into play in order to question commonly held assumptions. In the first place, he stresses the traditional ‘privileges’ of women in Eve’s creation in Paradise from already created matter (the arguments from locus and materia) but improves on the basic argument by introducing three further reasons for the need for God to make these distinctions. First, woman was created in substance at the same time as man and was given her form in Paradise, an argument by which Córdoba discards one of the other, though less cited, privileges of women, namely ordo.13 Secondly, through the distintion of locus, Adam and Eve represent the dual nature of man, caught between the earth (flesh) and Paradise (the spirit); it is significant that Córdoba’s argument challenges the received Aristotelian 12 Córdoba frequently cites auctoritates but does not always give his sources, including the glaring oversight of Egidius Romanus’s De Regimine Principum, as is discussed below. Other unacknowledged sources include Jerome’s treatise Adversus Jovinianum, fundamental to European defence and misogynistic literature alike, which underlies the early chapters of the Primera Parte, and Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 92.a.3), who is probably the source of chapter 7. 13 ‘[At the time of Adam’s creation] por quanto auía de ser fecha del costado de Adán, enél [Eve] ya se contaua por sustancia del que auía de proceder según la forma’ (160). The sentences which follow this seem to be corrupted as the distinction between substance and form there becomes mangled: ‘E quanto a la sustancia & ala forma, la muger fue criada fuera de paraýso; quanto ala substancia fue criada en paraýso; quanto a su propia forma: enesto lleua prerogatiua sobre el varón’ (160). The privilege of ordo which Córdoba discards heads the fifty razones for the superiority of women in Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’s Triunfo de las donas (see chapter 4).

30

ROBERT ARCHER

wisdom that woman was matter. The third additional argument is that Eve’s coming into being in Paradise honours the sacramental nature of marriage (158–161). Córdoba goes on to gloss allegorically the meaning of the choice of the rib, and discusses the function of women in the propagation of the species vis-à-vis the superiority, taken for granted since Jerome, of the ‘natural’ human state of virginity over motherhood (a topic he returns to in Part III, Chapter 7). On the latter point, he argues, with Augustine, that had it not been for the Fall, women could be said to have conceived without losing their true virginity, in so far as no sinful delight would have been involved in the act of procreation. The emphasis at this point is on mothers, not virgins – understandably so, since a potential Queen, whether a ruling monarch or a consort, was expected above all to provide an heir. The last chapter (187–190), on the natural conditions for the production of the female in nature, discusses with reference to the Latin version of Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, the effects of cold and heat in the season and place of conception, the effect of cold and warm winds and the humoral complexions of the parents. That is, it addresses the received notion that woman is the product of a lack of natural heat, but avoids stating the accompanying Aristotelian idea that she was, by virtue of this condition of her conception, an imperfect animal. On the contrary, in this chapter Córdoba emphasizes above all the naturalness of the phenomenon of the female and studiously avoids the notion of inferiority. Nevertheless, in this first Parte Córdoba specifically grants validity to at least three of the common physiological assumptions about women, no doubt mindful that two of them will reappear later. He acknowledges that her humoral complexion as a general rule is phlegmatic and moist (153), and that, just as she is weak and soft in her body, so in her soul she is easily swayed in her desires and intentions.14 The Biblical role of Eve makes it inevitable that he repeats the notion, citing Ambrose, that woman is Satan’s snare, ‘armadura para tomar las ánimas’ (155). But at this point, continuing his allegorical gloss of the rib, he cites the Virgin as the counter-example: she is a ‘costilla para encepar al diablo’ (155). The rib serves to raise another commonplace that circulated in the form of a joke: she is like one rib-bone struck against another, ‘e significa que la muger habunda enla lengua & en palabras más quel varón’ (156).15 Córdoba cites, apparently in earnest, the further common misogynist joke which held that the resurrected Jesus first revealed himself to women because he wanted the news to travel quickly, and he enjoins women to learn from the fact that even God assumed women were garrulous (156). 14 ‘Su conplesión [. . .] es flemática & aquosa & por quanto el ánima sigue las conplesiones del cuerpo, así como la muger enel cuerpo es flaca & muelle, así enel ánima es vertible en deseos & voluntades’ (152–154). 15 For a comparison of Córdoba’s use of two common misogynous jokes here with Christine de Pizan’s reaction to one of them, see chapter 3, below.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

31

In the next Parte, he argues for three ‘condiciones buenas’ (193) in women: their natural sense of shame and modesty (vergüenza), their compassion and kindness, and their solicitous concern for others (the term he uses is obsequiosas), especially as manifested in their sense of religious devotion. He then goes on to describe ‘tres menos buenas condiciones’ (209). The first of these is that they are intemperate, more subject than men to bodily desires because of their inferior reason: Quiere dezir que siguen los apetitos carnales como es comer & dormir & folgar & otros & que son peores. Y estos les viene porque enellas no es tan fuerte la razón como enlos varones, que con la razón que en ellos es mayor, refrenan las passiones de la carne. (210)

Córdoba’s second ‘less favourable characteristic’ comprises two defects: the first is that women talk too much, which is the way they make up for their physical weakness.16 Allied to this is the common trait of stubbornness (they are ‘porfiosas’), a form of the contrariness mentioned by Eiximenis.17 The third is inconstancy and mutability: La tercera no buena condición es que son mouibles & inconstantes, lo cual, por ventura, les viene dela feble complexión, ca por cuanto el ánima sigue la conplexión del cuerpo, así como las mujeres tienen el cuerpo muelle & tierno, assí sus voluntades & deseos son variables & no constantes. (211)

Córdoba adds a fourth characteristic, ‘neither good nor bad’ but instrumental in the exercise of good or evil: their tendency to extremes, which makes them capable of extreme modesty as well as brazen shamelessness, boundless compassion or cruelty greater even than that of the worst of men.18 In this second Parte in particular Córdoba follows closely the chapters on women in Egidius Romanus’s De regimine principum. In chapter 18 of Book 2, Part 1 (with the title ‘Quod mulieribis quaedam sunt laudabilia, quaedam vero vituperabilia’), Egidius distinguishes between three positive and three 16 Córdoba later qualifies the notion of physical weakness in Part III, Chapter 2 when considering the cases of Semiramis, Judith, and the Amazons: ‘es claro como las mugeres an en sí grand fortaleza, quitado el miedo’ (249) 17 ‘son parleras & porfiosas. Ser parleras les viene de flaqueza, ca veyéndose flacas para poner el negocio a manos, pónenlo a palabras; porque lo que no puede el espada, que lo haga la lengua. Y aun en los varones hay esta diversidad, que los covardes son grandes palabreros. Los osados hablan poco & luego lo ponen a los puños. Ser porfiosas les viene de falta de razón, ca no sabiendo probar su intención con que quieren salir, porfíanlo’ (210). 18 ‘la otra condición, que ni es buena ni mala, sino por el adjutorio, es asaber que mucho ex[c]eden, donde cuando son piadosas mucho lo son & cuando son crueles mucho lo son & cuando son desvergonçadas son por cabo’ (211). The point is taken up again in Part II, Chapter 2 (245).

32

ROBERT ARCHER

negative characteristics in women which clearly provide the framework for Córdoba’s discussion of the three ‘condiciones buenas’ (193) and ‘tres menos buenas condiciones & otra [. . .] indiferente’ (209).19 Egidius, citing Aristotle, first defines women as ‘quasi masculus occasionatus et quasi vir incompletus’, clearly an influential phrase, as the reference to it in Triste deleytaçión bears witness, and then compares them to children (‘quodammodo pueriles’, 160v) in their incompleteness.20 Córdoba chooses to ignore this important passage and picks up Egidius a few lines later when he lists the laudabilia and vituperabilia to be found in women. He follows his source for the first two laudable characteristics. These are, firstly, that ‘plurimum contingit foeminas verecundas esse’, which is explained by two causes, ex appetitu laudis and ex timiditate cordis (160v); here Córdoba translates verecundas as ‘vergonçosas’ and attributes this quality to ‘el apetito del loor & [. . .] porque son flacas & temerosas de coraçón’ (193). The second characteristic Córdoba adopts is that ‘sunt piae et misericordes’ (161v). Here Egidius explains that women are like children and old men: ‘Pueri enim & senes & foeminae ut plurimum sunt misericordes’ (161v). Córdoba follows him closely in the development of this idea (198), and then takes up another notion from him shortly afterwards when he discusses how ‘las mugeres son piadosas por otra razón, que dizen que han los coraçones tiernos y blandos’ (‘Mulieres quidem miserativae sunt ex mollitie cordis’, 161v). For his third ‘condición buena’, however, Córdoba intercalates a quality not mentioned in Egidius: that of being ‘obsequiosas’ (203). What is in Egidius the third point in the list of laudabilia becomes in Córdoba the ‘[condición] indiferente’, namely quia communiter nimis excedunt. Unde cum sunt piae, sunt valde piae & cum sunt crudeles, sunt valde crudeles & cum sunt inverecunde, sunt nimis inverecunde. Postquam enim mulieres audaciam capiunt, tanta turpia perpetrant, quam vix invenirentur viri adeo inverecundi ut possint turpia operari. Hoc autem tertium & si in bonis potest esse laudabile, in malis vero est vituperabile. (161v)

Córdoba translates almost literally: la otra condición [. . .] es asaber que mucho ex[c]eden, donde quando son piadosas mucho lo son & quando son crueles mucho lo son & quando son desuergonçadas son por cabo; ca desque toman osadía, tantas fealdades cometen que no se fallaría[n] varones que tales cosas aceptasen. Esta condición, avn que enlo bueno sea loable, pero enlo malo siempre es vituperable. (211) 19 20

Egidius Romanus 1968: fols 160–162. For the references in Triste deleytaçión see Gerli 1982: 54; the passage is discussed in Chapter 5, below.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

33

For the three negative characteristics that he discusses prior to this one in the same chapter (II, 4), Córdoba follows Egidius’s brief definition of the vituperabilia: Primo, quia ut plurimum sunt intemperate & passionum insecutrices. Secundo, quia sunt garrulae & litigiosae. Tertio, quia sunt mobiles & instabiles. (162)

These become in Córdoba ‘son intemperadas’, ‘son parleras & porfiosas’, ‘son mouibles & inconstantes’ (210–211). In following Egidius this closely, Córdoba was drawing on a solid authority, one of the most widely circulated Aristotelian works in the Middle Ages.21 The male readers whom Córdoba had to convince about the desirability of a female monarch would have found nothing to surprise them in the notion of women he describes with such deference, albeit undeclared, to Egidius. The authority of Egidius’s view of women is supported in the Hispanic context by the existence of two versions of the work. One of these is a translation into Catalan with glosses that are appended at the end of many of the chapters.22 The other is the expanded version of the book in Castilian, carried out by Juan García de Castrojeriz, considerably enlarged with insertions from various sources, and consisting, in effect, of a paraphrase.23 Clearly this work, completed in the mid-fourteenth century, will have enjoyed a stronger manuscript tradition than that suggested by the small number of existing manuscripts, since the version published in 1494 includes the third book, which is missing from these.24 There is thus every possibility that Córdoba knew the Spanish version in manuscript, but this cannot be assumed; certainly for the section of Jardín I have just discussed, there are no verbatim borrowings.25

21 For the place of Egidius in the De regimine principum tradition and the influence of the work in early Castilian literature, see Rubio 1960. 22 Epistola de frare egidi Roma al Rey de frança sobre lo libre del regiment dels princeps (Egidius Romanus 1480). The explicit (fol. 319) describes the book as ‘en vulgar catala ab algunes gloses molt specials posades en la fi dels capitols prenent lo vocable textual.’ The incunabulum is exquisitely printed in a single column with wide margins. There is a second edition (Barcelona: Luschner, 1498) with initial capitals to each chapter, printed in two columns (exemplar: Biblioteca de Catalunya 10–VI–20). 23 References are to Beneyto Pérez 1947. For a discussion of the educational programme put forward in Castrojeriz’s work see Shaw 1961. 24 Beneyto Pérez 1947: I, xxv. The edition of 1494 on which Beneyto Pérez’s edition is based (Seville: Meynardo Ungut Alemano & Stanislao Polono) has no reference to Castrojeriz and has the title in the first rubric (fol. 2) of Regimiento de príncipes fecho y ordenado por don Gil de Roma de la orden de sant Agustin. The work is thus passed off as a translation, with no mention of Castrojeriz’s intercalations. Apart from the exemplars mentioned by Beneyto Pérez (1947: xxv, n. 58), there is one in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Esp. 2 fol. 10.

34

ROBERT ARCHER

But what is more important for present purposes is the fact that both works describe in Spanish a common notion of woman (shared across the period of two hundred years that separates the two works), and it is this common ground which makes a brief discussion of García de Castrojeriz directly relevant to Jardín. The Primera Parte of Book II of Glosa castellana dedicates a lot of space to Egidius’s discussion of good government of the house, with particular reference to women’s role in it. As part of this advice, intermingled with the citation of many of the stock exempla of virtuous heroines, there is to be found a fragmentary definition of the nature of women. While the qualities that are desirable in queens are named as fermosura, grandeza, templanza, acucia, it is the case that even the wives of monarchs ‘naturalmente son inclinadas a seguir las pasiones e las desordenanzas’, a defect which only temperance (‘la templanza’) is able to control (II, 64). Castrojeriz cites the three praiseworthy ways of women (‘son vergonzosas’, ‘son piadosas e misericordiosas’, ‘son muy afincadas en las cosas’, II, 86), but he immediately qualifies the last of these as less praiseworthy than it might seem, since it involves extremes of behaviour. Only in very few women does this characteristic lead to good: ‘ca si en algunas e en pocas pueden ser acabadas porque son buenas, empero de sí es mala condición ésta, e la razón es porque tiene tal extremo que toda tal costumbre es de denostar’ (II, 86). In this he interprets Egidius’s ‘communiter nimis excedunt’ (161v) in a much more negative way than Córdoba. This is followed by Egidius’s three negative aspects: ‘son destempladas e seguidoras de sus talantes’, ‘son parleras e peleadoras’, ‘son movibles e nunca están en un propósito’ (II, 86). The author claims that his source holds these characteristics to be universal: ‘E estas condiciones todas tan bien de las buenas como de las malas están muy bien declaradas en el texto’ (II, 86).26 Castrojeriz continues to take advantage of this lack of distinction between good and bad women in his rewriting of other parts of Egidius. It is the role of men to instruct women appropriately (man is el guiador of women, II, 29), and with their help she should strive to be chaste, virtuous, temperate in food and drink, and to overcome her natural tendency to chatter (92). Also, again against nature, women should conquer their own changeability and become ‘firmes e estables en el bien que proponen’ (II, 92–93) as well as overcoming the instabilitas loci that afflicts them (‘deben guardar sus casas e estar pagadas de estar en ellas e no salir fuera’, II, 96). Citing Jerome (Adversus Jovinianum) as a source, the author censures the habit among wives of 25 Goldberg (Córdoba 1974: 88, note 54 and 100, note 8) notes the general similarities between Córdoba and Egidius. 26 This section of Glosa castellana (Book II, chapter 18) which follows Egidius II, i, 18, has obvious parallels with Jardín, Part II, chapter I (193–197) just discussed and also with Eiximenis, Dotzè del Crestià, chapter DXXXVIII (Eiximenis 1986: 164–165).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

35

nagging their husbands on the subjects of their wardrobe or their position in the household (II, 100), and provides a checklist of six essential instructions that husbands should give to their wives, while denouncing, in line with the Church Fathers, the use of cosmetics and sinful female pride in a fine head of hair (II, 102–104). A general assumption about female malice arises in connection with jealousy (following Egidius, I, vii, 22): the author warns that women are naturally disposed to behave badly when the husband is jealous since ‘las mugeres son más encendidas a facer mal’ (II, 109). The author goes on to transmit without palliatives Egidius’s solidly negative view on the question of the value of female advice, advancing two arguments in this respect. The first is in support of the assumption of a defective or incomplete intelligence: ‘no han consejo acabado, porque son menguadas de los entendimientos’ (II, 113). The second is based in humoral theory: ‘las mugeres han la complexión mala e flemática, ca son muelles e la molleza les viene de gran abundancia de flema’. As Blamires points out (1997: 237), the softness of women’s skin produced a problem in Aristotelian argument since such softness was deemed to be linked, in men, to intellectual subtlety. Glosa castellana works round this, as other Aristotelian commentaries did, by deeming the softness to be due to an excess of phlegmatic humour, which is why women ‘más muestran mala complexión que buena’ (II, 113). Because of the feebleness of their reason, aggravated by this condition, they tend to make hurried decisions. Nevertheless, the usefulness of female advice is not rejected outright: ‘los omnes [que] no han tiempo para haver deliberación sobre los consejos, en tal caso más es de tomar del consejo de la muger que el de los omnes, ca toda la natura se mueve por Dios en quien es toda sabiduría’ (II, 114). Having conceded this, the author is quick to explain such good female counsel as the work of God rather than of woman herself: ‘si la muger da consejo sano, esto es porque viene de Dios e de los ángeles, mas no por sabiduría dellas’ (II, 114). At this point, in order to drive the negative point home, the list of female defects previously discussed is repeated and the story is told of the French Queen whose good advice could not be followed simply because it originated in a woman and thus, logically, could not be relied on (II, 114–115). Some of these negative characteristics are summoned up again in the following chapter (II, 117–120), this time in order to insist on the need for a man to keep his secrets from his wife. Women ‘naturalmente son inclinadas a facer lo que les es vedado’, they lack the wisdom that would equip them to ‘refrenar su apetito natural’, they are soft (‘muelles’) and changeable (‘trastornables’), as well as covetous. This short list of reasons why a husband should keep his wife out of his business is followed by the only instance in Glosa castellana of limitation in the referential scope of the term ‘las mugeres’. When Aristotle recommends against accepting female counsel,

36

ROBERT ARCHER

no entiende decir que esto haya verdad en todas las mugeres ni que por fuerza haya así de ser, ca cuando fabla de las costumbres de los mozos e de las mugeres no quiere decir sino que han natural inclinación a aquellas costumbres. Mas aquella inclinación pueden las mugeres vencer con uso de la razón, ca magüera que sea fuerte de refrenar la cobdicia natural en las mugeres más que en los omnes, empero puédenla refrenar, si quisieren, con la sabiduría e con buenas costumbres. (II, 118)

Having conceded this, however, the author then steps back to end the chapter by adding two practical reasons, unrelated to the nature of women, why it is better to avoid telling anyone important secrets (II, 118–120). Even from this brief discussion, it is clear that Córdoba feels able comfortably to rely on Egidius or on a version of it like the Castilian one of Castrojeriz, as a guide to the basic notions about the nature of women and their failings, notions that would have been shared by the men for whom he was largely writing. There are close parallels between those passages in Jardín and Glosa castellana where aspects of women’s nature are selected for praise and for blame. In effect, as we have seen, here Córdoba differs from Egidius and Castrojeriz only in that he adds the quality of ‘obsequiosas’, but follows Egidius in everything else, including the treatment of their tendency to extremes as something which is potentially both good and bad.27 He also adheres closely to the list of six less desirable traits of behaviour against which women should be on their guard, even to the extent of including the recommendation, which could easily be deemed irrelevant to a princess, that she should not indulge a vain pleasure in dressing beneath her station.28 27 The concept of ‘obsequiosas’ may itself derive from another chapter of Egidius (II, I, 13) where he defines the exterior and interior ornatae desirable in a wife: ‘pulchritudo, & magnitudo, [. . .] temperantia & amor operositatis sive servilitatis’ (152v). The idea of women as obsequiosas may be based in the last of these qualities. The passage is also used by Castrojeriz in identifying the four qualities, discussed above, that are deemed to be desirable in queens (II, 63–64): fermosura, grandeza, templanza, acucia (II, 63–64). 28 Glosa castellana, following Egidius (II, I, 21), summarizes the recommendations made to husbands about how to instruct their wives in appropriate behaviour as follows: ‘lo primero, que no sean sofísticas en querer aposturas que no son suyas; lo segundo, que sean omildosas en no se vestir a vanagloria; lo tercero, que sean mesuradas en no querer mayores vestiduras que demandan sus estados; lo cuarto, que sean simples en no facer mucho por sus vestires ni por sus adobos; lo quinto, que no sean negligentes ni perezosas, así que por su negligencia anden desonrradamente; lo sexto, que no quieran loor por vileza en sus vestiduras’ (II, 105). Córdoba takes up the same points in chapter IX of the Segunda Parte, adding only his recommendations about the woman’s gesto which should speak only of her modesty, and merging the repetitive second and fourth points raised in Glosa castellana. The sixth point is addressed specifically in the context of the princess: ‘que no se vista ypocriticalmente, como si la princesa se vistiese de buriel, de pardo; tan bien sería desonesto, ca parescería que de tal hábito querría auer loor’ (Córdoba 233). The term sofístico that appears in Glosa castellana in the context of dress and appearance (‘cosas sofísticas e engannosas’, II, 103) is used by Córdoba also (‘no ayan en sí ningund afeyte sofístico’, 232)

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

37

In this, Córdoba was undoubtedly careful to preserve the universality of the notion of women expounded in Egidius and in versions of his work, and to avoid making a special case of princesses. As the quotation from Glosa castellana given above makes clear, while there is a distinction to be made between what particular women do in practice, they are all deemed to be predisposed to act in the ways described by Egidius. The main point of Córdoba’s Tercera Parte is precisely this. Isabel can be the monarch that Castile needs only if she accepts that, as a woman, she will find these defects in herself, and will remedy them. Córdoba drives the point home for the benefit of male detractors as much as of the Princess: Pues la muger que quiere ser virtuosa ha de consentir consigo & decir: Yo soy muger, enesto no he culpa ninguna, que ser muger me dio naturaleza así como a otro ser varón, pero pues que soy muger, tengo de mirar las tachas que común mente siguen las mujeres & arredrarme dellas. Las mugeres común mente son parleras, yo quiero poner puerta a mi boca; las mugeres común mente son de poca constancia, yo quiero ser firme en mi buen propósito, [. . .] yo quiero ser firme en virtud. Y si esta conjugación an de hacer todas las mugeres, mucho más la princesa que es más que muger & en cuerpo mugeril, deue traer ánimo varonil. (251)

Córdoba’s list of major natural failings in women is represented here by only two of them, but the main point made is that, in order to perform her duties as a monarch, the Princess must first come to terms with the defects inherent in her sex. The final chapter of the book is uncompromising in its insistence on the importance of exemplary behaviour in women and its condemnation, echoing Tertullian, Jerome, Cyprian and others, of ‘la muger que se pinta’ (284), its warnings of the dangers of ‘amor nescio’, and its advice about safe behaviour with regard to men (285). It is at this point that Córdoba in effect returns to the role of women in the world that he had mentioned earlier (154), that of the snare with which Satan catches men, for which he had adduced the counter-example of the Virgin as a trap for the Devil. All women, Córdoba now insists, can be used by Satan for that end, if they do not exercise their God-given modesty (vergüença): Un doctor dize que Dios puso enla muger natural vergüenza porque la frene de pecar & fue hecha para que siruiese al varón & no para acecharlo; pero ella, no curando dela costumbre de su estado, procura la muerte alos varones. Agora por infengidos halagos, agora por lisonjas, agora por hartibles ojadas, estudian delos traer a escándalo de vituperio. Eneste dicho ha de notar la muger moza & según la corruptión desta carne hermosa, que de quantas ánimas de hombres es ocasión de se perder, de tantas dará razón el día del juyzio; & esto es a ella importable, ca harto terná aquel día de dar razón de sí misma. (283)

A list of the defects of women that Córdoba apud Egidius takes as given and unchallengeable – is shorter than that of Eiximenis. It includes: (1) intem-

38

ROBERT ARCHER

perance and subjection to bodily desires, (2) garrulousness, (3) stubbornness (and thereby disobedience to men), (4) inconstancy and mutability, so that they are easily swayed to a change of attitude or action, (5) possession of an inferior reason to man, (6) a tendency to extremes of behaviour (and hence they are potentially cruel and potentially shameless), (7) use by the Devil as a snare for men. But it is still an impressive list for a work which sets out to show that a princess can be as effective a monarch as a prince. The point is that to make the list shorter would be to ignore the broad assumptions about gender differences that obtained among his contemporaries and fellow readers of Egidius and no doubt were shared by himself.

Vives and the Christian Woman The need to reaffirm such underlying assumptions is evident also in Vives’s book, De institutione feminae christianae, written some fifty years later, and soon to enjoy a vastly greater impact among the reading public than can be assumed for Jardín. Its success is evident even in Spain, where a only a small percentage of editions of Vives’s works were published in the course of the sixteenth century in comparison with other countries, and where, while not suppresssed, they were largely neglected. The eight editions of the two Spanish versions, Instrucción de la muger christiana, constitute one third of the total editions of Vives published in the sixteenth century in Spain.29 Significantly, the treatise circulated in these versions, as Enrique González points out, ‘casi como anónimo’ since the author’s name did not appear on the title-page.30 Its European success was partly due to the fact that it was composed in Latin by a man who wrote as a European humanist rather than as a vernacular writer from the Iberian Peninsula but also, conversely, that the work was widely disseminated in translations in five languages as well as Spanish.31 The work, which was composed in Belgium between 1522 and 1523 for Isabel’s daughter, Catherine of Aragon, later to be first wife of Henry VIII of England, represents an important change in the way the question of how to bring up women could be addressed, in so far as it stresses education and tries to be practical in its advice.32 What marks it out from the work of Eiximenis of over a hundred years before, which had been praised as a precursor of Vives by Juan Justiniano, is precisely the emphasis placed from the beginning on the education of women

29 Spanish sixteenth-century editions of Vives’s works make up barely 5 per cent of the European editions (González y González 1987: 44). 30 González y González 1987: 55. For the relationship between the two Spanish versions see Fuster 1989. 31 These languages are English, French, Flemish, Italian, and German (González y González 1987: 43, note, and Palau y Dulcet 1976: XXVII, 410–414). 32 Vives 1996, pp. x–xi.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

39

through the various stages of their early lives.33 The starting-point is no longer the stark theological fact of women’s burden of sin. Rather, on the very first page of its first chapter, there is a discussion of appropriate nourishment for the baby girl: Vives enjoins mothers to breast-feed and not to have recourse to wet-nurses, thus ensuring the bond of love and devotion between mother and daughter (12–13).34 The opening emphasis is on nurture, rather than reform.35 It is difficult to imagine a beginning that contrasts more strikingly with the relentless rehearsal of female defects that constitutes the preliminaries of Eiximenis’s Llibre de les dones or even, with its more complex aims, Córdoba’s Jardín. But the need, and the difficulty, of definition has not disappeared with the change of approach. Although Vives chooses not to identify a set of female characteristics as a preliminary to his demanding programme of education – one which Erasmus himself criticized as excessively harsh in some of its aspects – this proves to be little more than a structural difference from the approach of Eiximenis, since commonplace assumptions about the nature of women surface in several places, side by side with the morally instructive exempla of virtuous women cited as models of behaviour.36 While Vives avoids confronting his female readers with a list of their natural shortcomings, he bases his programme on the same notion of natural female inadequacy that Eiximenis and Córdoba use for their programmes of moral reform.37 Thus, while stressing the importance of keeping young women always occupied so as to avoid exposure to the influence of Venus in 33 The programme for education includes learning to read, something already advocated by Eiximenis in Llibre de les dones and Dotzè del Crestià (1981: I, 90–91; 1986: 196) and by Vincent de Beauvais (Allen 2002: 667). Catherine herself had been taught to read languages which included Latin. That Vives’s book was seen in the sixteenth century as a complement to Libre de les dones is demonstrated by the use of both texts as the basis for the anonymous Carro de les dones (see Viera 1975). 34 References in parentheses are to the Latin edition of C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeusen, with the translation of C. Fantazzi (Vives 1996), which is that cited in the main text. I have avoided reproducing the Latin text itself except where necessary, but have indicated in the notes the page and line numbers of the passages quoted. Given the intrinsic interest of the anonymous Spanish translation of 1529 – declaredly a revision of Juan Justiniano’s of 1528, but in practice often an appropriation of it – this Spanish version is cited in the notes. For the 1528 version I have used the exemplar in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R1289, and for the 1529 version that of Biblioteca de Catalunya 13–II–8. 35 León Esteban Mateo, who writes an extensive, though descriptive, analysis of the book, points to the similar concerns of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More (Mateo 1994: 125–165, especially p. 127). 36 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (1903: 157) translates part of a letter from Erasmus to Vives: ‘En lo del matrimonio te has mostrado más duro con las mujeres; espero que serás más cortés con la tuya.’ 37 Unsurprisingly, because of such elements, Vives has sometimes been labelled a misogynist (e.g. Sims 1974).

40

ROBERT ARCHER

moments of idleness, the notion of female moral weakness and natural mutability suddenly arises: ‘The devil’s cunning never finds such easy access as in idleness, nor does Venus ply her skills more readily at any other time, not only in women, but in the stronger and more stable male’ (73).38 Mutability is a characteristic named in several other places; for instance: ‘A woman’s thoughts are inconstant, and they do not remain easily fixed in one place’ (107).39 Elsewhere, while condemning the woman who indulges in games of chance, he asks: ‘What will a woman be able to learn or think about who gives herself to gambling? It must needs be that her mind will be weakened and she will become the victim of avarice, to which she was already inclined by nature’ (75): greed is still a firmly established female characteristic.40 When fulminating against the use of cosmetics and fineries, Vives inevitably brings into play the accusation of vanity in women: ‘There is an old proverb that has survived because of its truth: ‘ “There is no living creature more haughty than a richly adorned woman” ’ (87).41 He returns to this in a later chapter on appropiate behaviour in public, censuring feminine vanity, both individually and in group behaviour: Sometimes one can see twenty damsels sitting together, and if anyone looks at them, they all break into laughter, pretending that they are laughing at some witticism or action that is not at all funny, since each of them is convinced that she is the object of looks of admiration for her extraordinary and miraculous beauty, and in so doing gives clear proof of her shallowness and folly (133).42

Elsewhere the traditional attributes of envy, anger and a tendency to slander and cruelty raise their heads: She must do battle frequently with envy, which, shameful as it is for women to the point of absurdity, in some strange way afflicts that sex relentlessly.

38 8–10; ‘Por que nunca jamás entra tan fácilmente el engaño del demonio en el pensamiento de la muger como quando la halla ociosa, y esto no sólo se dize de las mugeres, mas aun de los hombres, que son de más firmeza que no ellas’ (Vives 1529: fol. 23v). 39 14–15: ‘Lubricus est feminae cogitatus nec uno loco facile consistit’; ‘porque el ánimo de la muger es ligero y en pocas partes halla puerto seguro’ (Vives 1529: fol. 37v) 40 11–12; the Spanish versions, while not corresponding exactly to the Latin text, make something more of the attribution of avarice: ‘¿Qué otro puede ella hazer (si lo queremos dezir todo) sino soltar la rienda a su natural cobdicia?’ (Vives 1529: fol. 24). 41 21–22; ‘Antiguo dicho es, y harto verdadero, creo, que no ay animal en el mundo más sobervio que la muger arreada y compuesta’ (Vives 1529: fol. 28v). 42 17–22; ‘Cosa es de ver alguna vez en estas visitas que agora se usan, ver veynte o treynta mugeres assentadas juntas; y si alguno pone los ojos en ellas [. . .] todas se estremecen de plazer, pensando cada una que lo ha[ze]n por su gentil rostro amoroso’ (Vives 1529: fols 47–47v).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

41

But one who is possessed of moderation and who is amply satisfied with simple necessities will have no desire to be envious of another or curious about someone else’s home. A woman who is chaste and moderate and sober-minded will never be carried away by anger or give vent to abusiveness or be swept away by violence and inhumanity (115).43

Unless they are on their guard, all women will find themselves exposed in particular to three of these tendencies in themselves: The incautious woman has to face a struggle with savage beasts – pride, anger and envy – because to their inconstant and weak minds every offence seems grave and intolerable and deserving of fierce revenge (116).44

On the allegation that no woman can keep a secret, Vives takes to task those who claim this is as a general truth, and cites Classical examples to refute it, insisting that this failing (unlike the others mentioned above) occurs only in individual women.45 But there is another defect, the habit of some women of picking the worst possible mate, which, while Vives seems at first to imply that it is found only in some women, acquires generality even as he describes it: I used to think that the mating of Pasiphae with a bull a fairy tale. Now it has become more plausible, since I have seen women who do not recoil from men whose nature is worse than that of brute beasts – dirty, drunk, wrathful, stupid, imprudent, fatuous, cruel and bloodthirsty, who have less in common with men than with wild beasts, who flee and avoid the company of wise and temperate men. This conduct inspired one of our own writers, in a poem written in the vernacular, to attack them, saying that they have the instinct of the she-wolf in choosing a mate, since she is said to

43 21–31; ‘La muger naturalmente tiene muy rezios vandos con la embidia, la qual, por muy mal que encaxe con algunas mugeres, nunca las dexa de la halda. Por tanto, la que fuere templada, moderada, sobria, vergonçosa o se contentare con lo que basta satisfazer a naturaleza, no terná por qué tener enojo ni dañada voluntad con nadie, ni le dará pena el cuydado de lo que se haze en casa de aquel o del otro, ni nunca se dexará vencer de la yra, ni se atreverá a maldecir ni a hazer mal a su próximo’ (Vives 1529: fol. 40). The Spanish translation then goes on to develop the topic of female envy in a direction that incorporates the kinds of ideas found in Egidius Romanus on the potential for cruelty in women due to their tendency to extremes: ‘Nunca vi cosa tan desaforada como es ver una demasiada ira y crueldad en una mujer; que hallaréis algunas tan sobresalidas, que con aquel su aceleramiento y encendida rabia pegarían fuego a todo el mundo y lo abrasarían juntamente, con tal que saliesen con la suya y se viesen satisfechas y vengadas.’ (Vives 1529: fol. 40). 44 4–6; ‘cúan peligrosa guerra le hazen a la muger, si no está sobre aviso, tres cruelíssimas fieras, soberbia, yra y embidia’ (Vives 1529: fol. 40). 45 ‘por ventura se puede dezir de algunas en particular [. . .], pero affirmarlo en general de todas es muy gran inconveniente’ (Vives 1529: fol. 51).

42

ROBERT ARCHER

choose the vilest and most foul-smelling of the males that follow her. From this characteristic the name of she-wolf has been transferred to women. (189).46

There are two aspects of this passage that are of particular interest. The first is the way in which it exemplifies the huge methodological gap between Vives’s fragmentary account of the nature of women, which we have to piece together from incidental remarks, and the more systematized approaches of Eiximenis or Córdoba. The same difference in method accounts for the fact that where Eiximenis cites auctoritates at every step and Córdoba keeps loosely to Egidius as a guide for his main points, Vives is not averse to citing personal observation, in a way reminiscent of sections of Arcipreste de Talavera or the sermons of St Vincent Ferrer, as we shall see. The second notable aspect is the way in which Vives, on the basis of his own empirical observations, endows with authenticity as statements about the nature of women two notorious misogynistic passages from one of the vernacular literatures of the country of his birth. First, the allusion to Pasiphae almost certainly originates in Celestina, a work which Vives may also have had in mind when he condemns the devilry of go-betweens and refers to their use of the black arts.47 Certainly both of the Spanish translations naturalize the allusion in this way, intercalating in an earlier chapter a reference to ‘las tales Celestinas’.48 The reference to Pasiphae recalls the 46 ‘Equidem fabulam esse rebar Pasiphaen concubuisse cum tauro. Nunc factum est mihi verisimilius postquam eas vidi quae ab illis non abhorrerent quorum ingenium peius beluino, spurcis videlicet, ebriis, iracundis, stupidis, imprudentissimis, fatuis, immanibus, sanguinariis, qui minus habent hominis quam quaevis ferae. A sapientibus, a moderatis viris fugiunt et abhorrent; ut huiusmodi feminas quidam nostrati carmine iure incessierit, dicens luparum eas esse naturae in deligendo quae ex multis lupis masculis qui eam sectantur vilissimum dicitur ac putidissimum sumere, a quo ingenio translatum est ad mulieres luparum nomen’ (186: 14–188: 3). ‘De verdad, yo pensé un tiempo que era conseja lo que se dize de Pasiphae con el toro, y de otras que hizieron muchos excessos abominables; mas agora lo creo de cierto, después que he visto algunas mugeres no poder desapegarse de unos vellacos suzios, borrachos, atronados, bestiales y crueles. Dime, te ruego, ¿qué desventura, o locura, o perdimiento de seso es tan grande agradarse de tal manera de hombres, y (según dice Plutarco) huyr de los sabios, templados y cuerdos, como huyrían de las bívoras o sierpes? No sin propósito dixo aquél que en escoger son de natura de lobas, y tienen esto: cuando muchos las siguen y demandan, se ciegan en tanta manera que siempre escogen y toman al que peor es, suzio e nescio; e de allí vino el refrán muy común que a las mugeres llama[n] lobas’ (Vives 1529: fol. 66v). 47 ‘The woman in the pay of a lover, who encourages with words and instigates to evil-doing, is not worthy to be called human, for she is something diabolical; the young girl will avoid her as if she were an asp or a viper, and she should be driven out of the city like a public scourge. There are no words to describe the evils that are caused by women such as these. [Some of them] make use of spells and incantations.’ (105). 48 ‘¿Agora qué diremos de aquellas que vienen con cartas de amores y embaxadas, sino que son una cosa diabólica? Yo me espanto de ver cómo el mundo sufre a las tales celestinas, que son muy peores sin comparación que basiliscos, que sólo con la vista

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

43

beginning of the famous passage in which Sempronio tries to talk Calisto out of his obsessive desire for Melibea, alleging that women are both easily procured and not worth having once they have been attained.49 Sempronio points out to his master that women are capable of giving themselves even to the most low and brutal men in fulfillment of their lust, and it is to this that Vives alludes when he cites Sempronio’s classical exemplum: Dixe que tú [. . .] desesperas de alcançar una mujer, muchas de las quales en grandes estados constituýdas se sometieron a los pechos y resollos de viles azemileros, y otras a brutos animales. ¿No has leýdo de Pasife con el toro, de Minerva con el can?50

The other Hispanic literary allusion in the passage is more specific. The vernacular poem by ‘one of our own writers’ that Vives refers to is Pere Torroella’s Maldezir de las mugeres (for which see chapter 5). Where Torroella’s lines 19–20 read: ‘De natura de lobas son/ ciertamente en escoger’, Vives has ‘dicens luparum eas esse naturae in deligendo’. Even though he has clearly been at pains in De institutione to circumvent the negative starting-point from which medieval treatises on women like that of Eiximenis or Córdoba were written, he has no compuction in quoting from Torroella’s notoriously misogynistic fifteenth-century poem in support of his personal observations on the behaviour of women. Even though Torroella in his lifetime was attacked in the courtly context in which he wrote because of the anti-courtly misogyny of his poem, and indeed wrote three different retractions of it, Vives assumes that at least one of the allegations it contains is a statement of universal validity, that is, part of a notion of women shared by those who strove to help and reform women, like himself, and by those who denigrated them in general terms. For the purposes of the moral education of women, he seems to suggest, what others call the maldicientes or mal dients have their part to play, much as Juan Justiniano suggests in his Prologue.

Women, Marriage, and Men In a way very similar to Vives’s treatise, the Hispanic texts to be considered next all contain a submerged notion of woman that is only sporadically brought to the surface. All three texts, which belong to the European tradition

matan’ (Vives 1529: fol. 33v). The reference also appears in Justiniano’s version, which is largely copied here by the second translator (Vives 1528: fol. 21). 49 The reference also appears in Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I, 48: ‘Why should I refer to Pasiphaë [. . .], the wife of a king and swimming in pleasure, [who] is said to have lusted for a bull?’ (Jerome 1892: 386). 50 Rojas 1989: 96.

44

ROBERT ARCHER

of advice to daughters, are concerned with describing specific notions of how a woman should behave in marriage. The longest of them, Castigos que un sabio daba a sus hijas, includes a programme of moral education, like other texts in this tradition such as the late-fourteenth-century Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry with its strong emphasis on piety and its systematic treatment of the deadly sins.51 But what is of particular interest for present purposes is the fact that Castigos shares with the other two texts, which are no more than short letters, an emphasis on the stark realities of daily life with a husband, so that in effect all of them deal necessarily not only with what a woman should be but also with what a man is deemed to be. It is in the tension between these two concerns that underlying notions about women come into play.52 Probably the oldest of the texts is the Conseyll de bones doctrines, written before the fifteenth century.53 This purports to be a letter written by a French queen for a daughter about to marry an English prince but, as the editor of the text points out, a narrative context has been imposed on an earlier text, creating in the process incongruities such as the advice that the young princess, having put her husband to bed each night, should personally wash the clothes he has dirtied that day (42). Further, even though the queen transmits her sixteen rules verbally – the daughter has a lot to remember – she prefaces it with the information that they are meant for ‘tota dona, de qual stament vulla que sia’. There is another incongruity in the advice, one which obviously caused the scribe of the Catalan manuscript some consternation, since there are blanks at the point in which, in her very last piece of advice, the queen seems to encourage the young wife to abandon all modesty in the bedroom: ‘quant seràs en la cambra ab ton marit e senyor, no.t vulles mostrar com a companiona sua, mas axí com si eres sua amigua e [. . .] [*druda?], e en aquell acte tota honestat [. . .] [*bandejada?] sia per tu.’54 The less problematic instructions fall into four categories. First there is the injunction, given priority in all three texts, to worship God (and the Virgin) and to love her husband. Another category concerns her behaviour in public in her new position. She must never divulge any secret of her husband, no matter how small. She must love all those people – relatives, friends, servants – whom her husband loves, not only to secure his affection but also so as to give no opening to those who would like to cause trouble between them. She should never question what her husband does or says or put her opinion

51 For this tradition, see Hentsch 1975; Hentsch includes one of the texts, the Letra, in her study. For Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry see Montaiglon 1854. 52 For a very recent study of these texts in the context of the sentimental romance, see Cortijo Ocaña 2001: 54–59. 53 Conseyll de bones doctrines que una reyna de França donà a una filla sua que fonch muller del rey d’Anglaterra in Cantavella 1991: 51–54. 54 The missing words are suggested by Cantavella 1991: 42–43.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

45

before his. She should be clean in person and dress and avoid using cosmetics. She should try not to behave too gaily, and not to do or say things that could inspire jealousy in her husband. In public she should always be modest and honourable, ‘honesta e devota’ in church, and when she has guests in her own house or palace she should not behave like the great lady, but make them feel relaxed and among friends.55 The third category is that containing instructions about her domestic duties. She should be the last to go to bed and should make sure everything is in order in the household for the next day. She must study her husband’s likes and dislikes at table and make sure he is given what he enjoys. She should make sure that no one wakes him when he is sleeping. She must look after his money and possessions, and never give any of it to anyone without his permission. The fourth category is made up of specific advice about how she should comport herself in the presence of the husband. It is recommended that she learn to recognize when he is in a bad mood, since this is the wrong moment to behave happily or gaily. Instead she should try to bring him out of the bad mood ‘ab les tues bones semblances e paraules, e maneres honestes e gracioses’. She should never say that she is feeling unwell, unless necessity requires it, since he might think that she is faking an indisposition in order to avoid doing something he wants of her. If he ever is drunk, she should not take him to task for it, but should even accept a drink too if he insists, and should try to wean him from this vice. Husbands must always be welcomed with a smile and a happy face, and should never be given cause for displeasure. But if there should be angry words between them, then she should not refuse to eat with him or sleep with him, should not complain about the matter to anyone and should ‘fer apparès que no y ha hagut res’. This way he will come to his senses in the end: ‘ell ladonchs haurà conexença de son defalliment, e tindrà tu per bona e per sàvia, e altra volta guardar-se.n ha’. The second text is also in the form of a short letter – like Conseyll it is a mere few pages long – and it is also in Catalan. But this time there is every reason to believe that it is genuine since the manuscript rubric refers to historically documented persons. The author is Alfons of Gandia and Foix (1332?–1412), the Marquess of Villena, also count of Ribagorça, who also became Duke of Gandia. It is addressed to his daughter Joana on the occasion of her marriage in 1387 or shortly aterwards to Joan Ramon Folch de Cardona, an apparently deformed sixteen-year-old. Alfons and his family had close connections with Francesc Eiximenis, and there seems no doubt that some of Eiximenis’s more unusual ideas, such as that women should be

55 The corresponding part of the text is erased, but an injunction to dignified behaviour seems to be implied: ‘quant hiràs per les carreras, que en tots tos actes e comports sies [. . .] [erased]’.

46

ROBERT ARCHER

taught to read, find their way into the letter.56 Alfons clearly intends his letter to be a document for frequent consultation, a brief manual of practical advice: ‘E prech-vos, ma filla, que gardetz bé aquesta letra, la qual ab gran amor vos é feyta, e la vullats sovín legir e decorar, e pendre.n lo bé que y és.’ Nevertheless, the beginning of the Letra makes it clear that it concerns more than fatherly advice, since Alfons’s first statements formally mark the change in the relationship between him and his daughter and set the advice in the framework of mutual obligation. He has brought her up honourably and lovingly in his house, he has married her to a man of appropriate rank (he adds encouragingly, perhaps against the evidence of Joana’s eyes, that the bridegroom is ‘bon jove e bell’), has provided a good dowry, and has held her marriage celebrations in his house with much honour. This is followed by a summary of the three main differences she can expect to find when she moves to her husband’s house. First, she will have to run a household rather than live in one in which everything is done for her. Also, she will have to learn to put up with the ways of others, particularly her husband: ‘à.l a comportar de tots deffalimentz, e a vegades ha-y marits qui n’an prou; e tots los vicis cahen sobre la muller, e ella és tenguda de celar-los sàviament e ab simpleza.’ Thirdly, in her husband’s house, the young wife will realize that there is no one to help her cover up any shortcomings she may have, and this can be especially hard if the husband is not very sensible or does not love her (‘e majorment si lo marit no és ben savi e no ama bé’). While some of the rest of the Letra alludes to the specific context of Joana’s transference to the Folch de Cardona household, the bulk of the advice is essentially the same as we find in the Conseyll, with special emphasis placed on the two injunctions to love God and after God her husband. She is also advised not to sleep too late and to read good books. One piece of advice – which is given some importance in the Castilian text we shall see shortly – contrasts with the Conseyll. The French Queen advises that her daughter should not do anything that could make her husband jealous. In the Letra Alfons assumes that it is her husband who will give her cause for jealousy, and he counsels tersely that she should not give way to these feelings.57 Both these texts are little more than lists of concise instructions, and there is no space for discursive considerations of female nature. Nevertheless, the substance of the advice itself points to underlying assumptions about general female defects of character: the tendency to be unable to keep a secret, the 56 The rubric reads: La letra deval scrita féu lo marqués de Villena e compte de Ribagorça, qui aprés fo intitulat duch de Gandia, per dona Johana, filla sua, quant la maridà ab don Johan, fill del compte de Cardona, per la qual li scriví càstich e bons nodrimentz [. . .] (Cantavella 1991: 55, 43–45). 57 The Letra contains no suggestion of the kind found in Castigos, discussed below, that the wife should encourage her husband to overcome his weakness for other women.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

47

difficulty in controlling a wagging tongue, an excessive love of lying in bed, a predisposition to destructive jealousy. The third text, Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas, much longer than the other two, inevitably reveals much more about the notion of women that underlies it. This text lacks the fictional or real context of a recent marriage that is foregrounded in the two Catalan letters and that lends a narrative urgency to the advice they contain. Rather, the Castigos purports to be the unhurried counsel of a wise father to his daughters in preparation for their future estate of casadas.58 The change of context is significant because the text purports to be the means by which doncellas may become the kind of women that good men will want to marry. It is in this sense as much a guide to marriageability as to marriage: Porque comúnmente todas las mugeres se desean casar, y creo que así lo fazedes vosotras, muy amadas hijas mías, no sabiendo por eso ni pensando quál es el cargo del casamiento ni lo que deuen guardar las buenas mugeres casadas, por ende quiérovoslo aquí declarar, porque entiendo que no puedo dar con vosotras dote de tanto precio como es éste. Y ante de todo es bien que sepáis que casamiento tanto quiere dizir commo sennal de cosa santa, ca sinifica el ayuntamiento de Jhesu Christo con la Yglesia. Y entre los filósofos y sabios antiguos ouo grant questión quál sería llamada nobleza, porque vnos dixeron que la rriqueza, otros que la hermosura, otros que la fortaleza, otros que el linaje, otros que las virtudes, y en esto fueron los más concordes, porque ésta era la cosa más digna y más excelente que en qualquier persona puede aver. Y por eso todos los onbres discretos comúnmente desean antes las buenas y virtuosas mugeres más que las ricas ni fermosas. (255)

While Conseyll and Letra contain, each in its different way, a virtual survival kit of advice for the new bride about to occupy her place in a different social estate, Castigos elaborates an ideal of virtue to which women should aspire either in their comportment in married life or in their preparation for candidacy to a good marriage.59 As in the other texts, the first injunction is to love God above all else, but this is followed immediately by the second commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, with a reminder about the overriding importance attached to them by Christ, so that in effect all the advice that follows is founded on a solidly religious context which goes beyond either of the Catalan texts. The next precept is one of the two most important, as the amount of space dedicated to it suggests (258–266). This concerns the obedience due to husbands in all things ‘saluo en aquellas cosas que fuesen contra nuestro sennor Dios’. While the sabio declares at the beginning that he has tried not 58 59

Castigos y dotrinas que vn sabio dava a sus hijas in Knust 1878: 251–293. For the importance of the ideal of virtue in the Castigos, see Haro 1993.

48

ROBERT ARCHER

to insert ‘muchas abtoridades y enxenplos que pudiera, por no alargar’ (256), nevertheless this part of the text is constructed around two brief Biblical exempla and a beautifully recounted version of the story of patient Griselda. The two exempla are those of the Virgin Mary and Abraham. Mary is cited specifically for the humility with which she accepts the role to which God, pleased by this, has appointed her: ‘su humilldad fue de que más nuestro sennor se contentó della’ (258). In Abraham’s case God was pleased by his qualities of ‘humillde y obediente a sus mandamientos’ (259). If He commands him to sacrifice Isaac this is in order that his obedience may be made even more manifest: ‘por que más paresciese su obediencia’; it is only when Abraham is about to sacrifice his son ‘de muy buena voluntad’ that the Angel of the Lord stays his hand. The two exempla and their explicit moral meanings set the widely-diffused tale of patient Griselda in an analogical framework within which the lowly-born wife’s humility and her obedience to her noble husband are equated from the first with the humble acceptance of divine will and unquestioning obedience to God.60 Indeed, the parallel is driven home by the Marquess when he brings Griselda’s ordeals to an end: ‘conocida es a mí tu fe y obediencia’ (264). Like Mary and Abraham, she has proved herself to be worthy of the joy that awaits her because of her faith and obedience. The wife not only has voiced no protest when her two children, each in turn, is taken away from her or when the Marquess gives her to believe that he is casting her aside for a younger wife, but she has also shown no sign of sadness or of having any other desire than to please her husband. Thus when she learns that her daughter is to be taken from her, avnque pensó que la auían de matar, pero por ser obediente no mostró tristeza ninguna, y miróla vn poco y santiguóla y besóla y diola al mensajero del marqués, al cual rrogó que tal manera touiese, commo no la comiesen bestias fieras, saluo si el sennor otra cosa le mandase.

Similarly, with the second child: Ni nunca por esto esta noble muger mostró tristeza alguna ni de ál curaba sino de plazer hazer a su marido.

Her only acknowledgment that she has suffered as a consequence of of her 60 Knust (1878: 260, note) assumes that the source is Boccaccio. But while there is frequent correspondence of detail between the much shorter Spanish version and the last tale of the Decameron, there is a stronger prima facie case for assuming that it follows Petrarch’s Latin version, De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria (Petrarca 1975: 1311–1339), which accounts for interesting parallels of detail between the Spanish text and Chaucer’s version in The Clerk’s Tale (Chaucer 1957: 101–114) and Bernat Metge’s Valter e Griselda (Riquer 1959: 117–155).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

49

husband’s decisions about their children comes in the form of a request that the Marquess’s new bride, in consideration of her tender age, should not be put to such trials as she has had to endure. Any danger of confusing her humble resignation to her husband’s will with indifference to the fate of her children is explicitly dispelled at the end of the tale when the Marquess reveals the truth, upon which Griselda ‘con el grand gozo pareció sallir de seso’ (265). But the author has to recognize the limits of the Biblical paradigm of humility and obedience, not because of any shortcomings in his heroine, but rather because an analogy between God and the husband is unsustainable. Indeed the rider to wifely obedience found in didactic texts, including Castigos itself (258), that the wife must not consent to anything contrary to God’s command, in some sense overhangs the story of Griselda in all its versions; in Castigos in particular this injunction rules out any possible analogy between the Marquess and God and between Isaac and Griselda’s children, since no man can expect of a woman what God can expect of a man. As the tale develops, the Marquess is given a different didactic function from the analogical one.61 Initially he is characterized as ‘muy virtuoso y muy discreto’, and he proves himself to be so in the choice of a wife, but it later emerges that he is not as virtuous and prudent as first described.62 The narrator makes a rare criticism of the husband’s obsessive behaviour at the point at which, even though he has already given his wife to believe that he has had their children killed, he decides to put his wife further to the test, ‘commoquier que harto bastaua esta espiriencia para prouar el marqués la bondat de su muger’ (262). The Marquess, in spite of being moved to tears by his wife’s exemplary obedience, carries through the pretence of the wedding even up to the moment of the supposed bride’s arrival, giving Griselda the opportunity to prove herself even further; only then does he acknowledge to himself (the narrator specifies that the confession is private and not public) the wrong he has done, ‘considerando a la grande ofensa que auía hecho a su muger’ (264). Blamires has suggested that Chaucer’s version of the story of patient Griselda can be read as one which ‘both prioritizes unchangeability in a woman and polemically claims that quality as feminine’ when it contrasts the

61 This rider to wifely obedience appears also, for instance, in the sermons of St Vincent Ferrer (Cátedra 1994: 439, Schib 1984: 11). 62 This is a fundamental difference from Boccaccio’s version, where Gualtieri is said to be reputed a very prudent man precisely because he resists the idea of marriage: ‘in niuna altra cosa il suo tempo spendeva che in uccellare e in cacciare, né di prender moglie né d’aver figluoli alcun pensiero avea; di che era da reputar molto savio’ (Boccaccio 1985: 893). In Castigos the connection between bachelorhood and wisdom is absent: ‘un marqués sennor de aquella tierra, el qual era muy virtuoso y muy discreto, pero no curava de se casar’ (260).

50

ROBERT ARCHER

husband’s inconstancy with the steadfastness of Griselda.63 The Spanish version of the tale arguably would lend itsef to a similar interpretation. At the very least, we are left in no doubt about the moral superiority of the wife over the husband, even without the sustained moral censure of Walter that appears in Chaucer’s version, and this is important for what the narrator says in the rest of this section of Castigos. Here it is clear that the Marquess has become the implicit point of reference for advice about the nature of husbands. In the first place, the sabio’s daughters are warned that some women believe that, far from marrying above their station like Griselda, they have been given in matrimony to a man who is their social inferior. This attitude is denounced as ‘vanidad’ and as a further instance of disobedience, this time to the parents who chose the husband; if this circumstance ever does arise, it doubtless happens ‘en pena de sus pecados’. Griselda’s behaviour is invoked for a further moral: even if a woman believes she has married beneath her, ‘por cosa que a él plega no le deue mostrar la cara triste’ (that is, she must show the same solicitous attention that the Marquess expected of his socially inferior bride). Finally, the narrator allows that there are many cruel and evil acts perpetrated by husbands against their wives. In these circumstances the same cheerful acceptance as Griselda’s is the only solution: Y avnque él sea malo y peruerso, si la muger le quiere tratar bien y no dar mal por mal, de nescessario le fará ser bueno y quererla bien avnque no quiera. Y por el contrario, si la mujer jamás muestra buena cara y plazentera a su marido, ni muestra alegría con lo que hace, avnque sea el más bueno del mundo, le tornará al rreués y le fará biuir vida triste y amarga.

In this way the sabio hints at the existence of other tales of obedience, in which the wife will find herself living like a Griselda, but without being able to count on the happy ending. In real life with real husbands the truth the tale holds lies in the cheerful acceptance of whatever fate wives will have to confront, and in the practical need, emphasized also in the Catalan texts, to work at improving life with men by outwardly joyful behaviour even in the face of severe adversity. Such virtues are not to be expected of men. The other major section of Castigos considers honestidad. It begins with a brief discussion of the major manifestation of honestidad in married life, namely the wife’s fidelity (castidad), and a reminder not only of the penalties of the law but also of the tendency of a wife’s adultery to lead to further crimes. But the two major points of concern in this section are the woman’s public image and her behaviour in the presence of men other than her husband. An important part of her proper behaviour in public is related to modesty in dress and adornment. Much of what the author says has the 63

Blamires 1997: 170.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

51

weight of several Patristic texts behind it, particularly Tertullian, Cyprian, and Jerome (whose name is cited, 274) as well as Egidius and the epistles and other sources that are specifically cited.64 Like Conseyll, this section insists on the undesirability of too much attention to dress and to looks, especially since the husband, who is the only man the wife should wish to please, will see her without make-up in any case. The only circumstances that may require more than simple tidiness and soap and water are (here the author cites St Bernard) when wives ‘no se conponen ni afeytan a vanagloria, mas por parecer bien a sus maridos y los tirar de mal’ (274) so that, presumably, the man is more inclined to fulfill the debitum coniugale than to take his need elsewhere. There is advice, also in the Catalan texts, on keeping proper company and ensuring that only chaste language is used in the wife’s presence, avoiding the charge of instabilitas loci, and staying indoors and away from windows.65 Male company is to be avoided or severely restricted when the husband is not present. This is mostly because of the fear of evil tongues, male and female, but it is also due to the dangers inherent in male company, especially away from public spaces. The narrator cites the case of Tamar and Amnon. ‘Donde la causa no fue sino apartarse con él’ and refers to the existence of many more such cases of rape by a family member: ‘Otras muchas se leen ser desonrradas de sus hermanos y parientes y aun de sus padres por apartarse con ellos’ (279). The danger of dishonour lies in any physical proximity to men and in any form of physical playfulness: porque muy mal está la estopa cerca del fuego. Y tanbién vos deuéys de guardar mucho de burlas de manos con ellos, porque, avnque por el pensamiento no vos pase ningunt mal, todos los hombres son ynclinados a pensar antes el mal que el bien y luego sospechan y lo dizen vnos a otros. Y de aquí se leuanta la disfamación, ca los gestos y mannas, segunt dize el filósofo, son fruto del pensamiento, y el rrostro demuestra lo que está en el coraçón. (279).66

The passage quoted contains a telling ambiguity about where the moral responsibility in these situations lies. On the one hand, the woman is always the ‘fuego’ which must be careful not to come too close to the ‘estopa’ of male desire and her gestures and looks are held to point to intentionality; on the other hand, it is allowed that she is always in danger when with men even if she is innocent of any immoral thought, precisely because men by nature tend to be more inclined to assume bad intentions in others. 64 65

See Blamires 1992: 50–77 and Archer 2000: 73–86. ‘No curéys de salir a menudo fuera de vuestras casas, [. . .] car la mujer que mucho quiere andar por las plaças muestra de sí poca cordura y no pone buen recabdo en su casa’ (276). 66 mannas is Knust’s emendation, clearly justified, of the reading of the manuscript, manos.

52

ROBERT ARCHER

Some of the matters discussed in the rest of the text cover familiar ground. The good wife is advised, as in Conseyll, not to drink wine unless she finds herself in situations in which she is required to do so, and the dangers of alcohol are set before her at some length. She is advised to keep her household staff content and to discourage excessive intimacy with them. But the context of this advice in Castigos is quite different, since in all the latter sections of the text, the sabio makes clear to his daughters that her husband’s household and her influence over him are also a power-base to be used by her when required. Castigos describes a woman’s role in marriage as one of huge adminstrative as well as social and moral responsibility.67 This idea is not based solely in the contemporary realities of the middle-class household to which Castigos seems to allude; behind it lies also the Biblical model of the perfect wife described in Proverbs 31, a passage which is quoted at length at the end of the text. It is the wife’s responsibility to ensure that domestic running costs and staff wages are kept to a minimum in order to keep want from the door, not merely for economic reasons, but also because a badly administered income can lead to immoral behaviour in the husband: ‘muchos, desde que se veen menguados, luego piensan dónde lo ganen avnque sea de mala parte, y lo ponen por obra y cometen cosas que no deuen y así condenan sus almas y a las vezes mueren por ello’ (284–285). Even an avaricious husband can be encouraged to exercise a modicum of largesse once he sees that his estate is well administered by his wife. The well-being of the entire household depends on her ability to perform this function. One situation in which bad administration is likely to occur, bringing with it a host of other troubles, is when the wife allows herself to be consumed with jealousy when her husband goes with another woman. When women are jealous ‘siempre están tristes y llenas de cuidado, [. . .] dan mala vida a sus maridos y házenles ser rrenzillosos, [. . .] no pueden así guardar ni administrar sus haziendas commo deuen’ (289).68 By allowing her emotions to get the better of her administrative capacities, the efficient wife forfeits the most important direct influence she has over her husband: si supierdes que ellos andan con alguna muger, deuésgelo dezir aparte y darle[s] a entender que, si de aquello no se quita[n], que dexarés de administrar su hazienda, ca ésta es la cosa más justa con que por esto la muger puede amenazar a su marido. (289)

67 ‘Y pues veis, hijas, que vuestros maridos buscan y procuran de ganar y traer la fazienda para mantener a vosotras y a vuestros hijos y casa, mucho seríades de culpar si no trabaiásedes por lo guardar y administrar’ (285). 68 Similar advice is given in Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, where it is assumed that husands will have relations with other women (Montaiglon 1854: 36), as also in Letra.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

53

This is not the only way in which she must learn to save the husband from himself. She must also keep him from quarrels with his enemies (enemistades), since such conflicts easily consume a family’s wealth and endanger the souls of those caught up in them (287–288).69 It is here that the inherent ideological complications of the model behaviour being prescribed start to surface: the more a specifically female virtue is required for the good functioning of family life, the more the notion of male reasonableness is threatened. Even though a love of peace and skill in pacification are frequently attributed to women by fifteenth-century writers of defences, the narrator of Castigos is quick to quash any inadvertent implications of female superiority in this moral area, insisting that if there is a gender-based difference it is one that favours the male.70 We can see this in operation in the way in which the section on enemistades is structured: while the first half makes the assumption that quarrels and feuds are situations in which men engage frequently for all kinds of reasons that may have nothing to do with women, in the second half the emphasis shifts to the need for women in particular to ensure that their behaviour does not give rise to quarrels. It is at this point that the narrator insists that, in spite of the picture of domestic normality he has described, women are even more quarrelsome by nature than men: ‘las mugeres que son sin loçanía y presunción y sofridas y tenpladas mucho son de loar y tener por buenas, porque naturalmente se ensannan más aýna que los onbres’ (288). There is thus a shift away from the implied defects of male character under the heading of enemistades and squarely onto the deficiencies of female nature. This is only the second time that the narrator explicitly invokes a tenet of the negative view of women (the first had been in reference to jealousy). The shift checks the development of a discourse of marriage which has the obviously unintentional effect of elevating women at the expense of men by placing a greater moral onus on wives and by seeking to deal with the difficulties of male behaviour without developing a male ideal for it. But there is an irony in the way in which the elaboration of a feminine ideal can be rhetorically functional only if a largely negative context of male behaviour is developed concurrently with it. The more the narrating sabio insists on extremes of virtue and practical capability in would-be wives, the greater must he make the need for such qualities in them by foregrounding negative aspects of the husband-dominated world they will enter. The woman is as she should be, the

69 The persuasive capacity of wives and its use for good had long before been recognized in sermons: for early-thirteenth-century examples see Farmer 1986. 70 This characteristic of women, linked to the quality of mollitie, is labelled most effectively by Blamires (1997: 83) as quietatio; Blamires notes how the capacity for peace-making ‘could easily throw into relief a contrasting masculine indulgence in irascibility’ (241). He also suggests (84) that quietatio may include implicitly the role of sexually satisfying the husband.

54

ROBERT ARCHER

man is as he is. The result is that the woman described has to be normalized in accordance with those underlying assumptions whose validity is threatened by the female ideal that the text develops. This is a rhetorical construct that all three texts share. The very weight of responsibility that the discourse of marriage in all of them loads onto the wife, recent or future, imposes the need for an image of men which is as negative in its lack of idealization as the image of women is positive in its condensation of a necessary ideal. In the last group of texts to be considered, all of them sermons, the moral perspective that underlies them shifts the position of women yet again in line with quite different rhetorical aims.

Women from the Pulpit The preserved sermons of St Vincent Ferrer in Catalan and Spanish constitute the largest surviving vernacular collection in fifteenth-century Spain: even without the volume of fifty-four sermons that disappeared during the Civil War, there are two hundred and sixty in Catalan, as well as thirty-four transcribed sermons in Castilian and one hundred and eighty brief summaries in Latin (reportationes) of sermons that must have been given in Castilian.71 The period covered by all this material is probably 1411–1418.72 The vernacular sermons are clearly meant for audiences from a wide social range, and the impact of their uncompromising apocalyptic message – there are constant references to ‘los pocos de días que quedan fasta la fin del mundo’ – is well documented.73 The moral concern of Ferrer covers all the estates, as he makes clear in the sermon to which the copyist has given the rubric ‘En quiny punt està lo món’: Si vos ne anau als capellans, son jugadors de daus, taffurs, bagassors, juradors, bevedors per tavernes, ajustadors de diners [. . .] Si parlam de cavallers, ¿què deuen fer? Sostenir la cosa pública, vídues, etc. E ara, ¿què fan? Cremen esglésies e roben e defan les comunitats, matar hòmens. Si és 71 The Catalan sermons are preserved in the three extant manuscripts of the four described by Sanchis Sivera (1927: xxxvi–xxxix) and published by Sanchis Sivera (1932 and 1934) and Schib (1975, 1977a, 1984, and 1988), as well as another containing the sermons preached during the Lent of 1413, published by Sanchis Sivera (1927). The sermons in Castilian, most of them in a single manuscript, and the reportationes are published by Cátedra (1994). There are several known manuscripts of the Latin sermons, and there are editions from 1475 (Sanchis Sivera 1927: xxxv–l); many of them are collected in Ferrer 1693–1695. For the exemplum in Ferrer see Almazán 1967 and Cátedra 1986 and 1993. 72 The best documented campaign of Ferrer in Castile is that of 1411–1412 (Cátedra 1994: 11); the extant Catalan sermons seem to date from 1412 to 1418 (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 12). 73 Cátedra 1994: 632–633; for the impact of the Castilian sermons see Cátedra 1994: 223–273.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

55

una vídua jove o fadrina pobre, trameten-hi alcavotes a les serventes de casa, hoc a les dides, may cessen fins que les han haüdes, etc. [. . .] Avant, si anau a ciutadans, totes les vendes són logres ab les quals viuen com a porchs: ben mengar, beure, dormir e dar-se plaers carnals. Si anau a mercaders, e venent o comprant, tot és frau e logre, e pigor sobre logre. [. . .] Més, si anau als llauradors, los uns se enganen als altres. Si n’i ha hu simple, tots los destroexen e ja no paguen bé los delmes, etc. Les dones, axí com a cans fan lo matrimoni; a les primeres paraules, no han cura de la ordenació de la Església e comença ja la heretgie dels gatzaros, uns heretges que yo he trobats. Item, ‘lo marit és vell e yo joveneta’: lexe’l e pren-ne altre.74

At the end of this passage Ferrer makes a generalization about women’s attitude to marriage, accusing them of being grasping and mercenary, but it is typical of his procedure in the sermons that he does so only after condemning in the same inclusive way the other estates he singles out: the clergy, the nobility, the burghers, the merchants and the peasants. The generalization about women has the same rhetorical function as the sweeping denunciations of other social groups: to jolt the audience into an awareness of their sins and to prepare their souls for the end that is nigh for all mankind. Ferrer’s practice throughout the extant sermons is largely to address an audience of sinners in this way, rather than identify a particular social group, no doubt with the aim of ensuring that all his listeners felt themselves alluded to. He is careful to include women specifically in nearly all his references to moral behaviour, rarely referring only to hom or dona, but rather always hom o dona or omnes e mugieres, and usually counterbalancing any particular examples of vice in females with other examples of the same or similar vices in men. This didactically motivated even-handedness can be seen in what he has to say, for instance, about sexual attraction. While, unsurprisingly, he sees woman as characterized by ‘la sensualitat’ in contradistinction to man who represents ‘l’enteniment’ (Schib 1988: 55), Ferrer does not assume, as the Patristic and Scholastic authorities largely did, that sexual attraction was a one-way process in which female corporeal beauty is the gateway to sin: La segunda razón por que alguna cosa es amada en este mundo digo que es por ser bella. E esto por esperiençia lo vedes; que un omne se enamora de una mugier por ser bella e fermosa, e por ventura non será buena. E una mugier esso mismo se enamora de un omne bello e fermoso, e por ventura non será bueno. (Cátedra 1994: 442)

74 Schib 1988: 155–156. I have emended ‘sou jugadors’ in l. 1 of the quotation to ‘són jugadors’ since the context seems to demand it and scribal confusion between u and v is common. The reference to the heretgie dels gatzaros is not explained in Schib 1998 or 1977b, but seems to allude to the Cathars, despite the date of the reference.

56

ROBERT ARCHER

Sexual desire of this kind serves only to bring out the worst in both sexes: E esso mismo digo del amorío que ha el omne a la mugier, que es muy falso. Ca dize el ome a la mugier: ‘Señora, tanto vos amo que por vos ando penado e vivo con cuydado, ca el mi coraçón non pienssa sinon en vos, ca nin duermo de noche nin de día fuelgo por amor de vos’. ¡O qué falso amor! Atal es como el amor que ha el lobo a la cabra, que tanto la ama que nin de noche duerme nin de día fuelga andando a una parte e a otra, e todavía pienssa en ella, diziendo: ‘¡Ay, mesquino! ¿E dó la fallaré?’ E si por malos de peccados la falla, échala al cuello e cómesela luego. E tal es el amor que ha el omne con la mugier, que anda de noche tañiendo instrumentos e baylando e dançando por amor della por alcançarla. E si la cuytada lo creye, es comida e desonrrada. [. . .] E así, por el contrario, el amor que ha la mugier al omne es tal como la rraposa que, quando ha fanbre, échasse en el suelo e fázesse muerta, e las aves vienen por comerla e ella préndelas e cómelas. E así fazen las malas mugieres, ca fázese la mugier rraposa pobre e vasse para un clérigo que entiende que tiene dineros e toma dineros prestados dél. E vesla bendida, ca assí como ha tomado el dynero, es tomada e vendida. Ca assí como el pez, después que ha comida la vianda del amzuelo non se puede partir dél, bien assí la mugier, después que ha tomado joyas o dineros de alguno, es fecha putana delante Dios. (Cátedra 1994: 462–463)

Men and women deceive and lie when driven by desire or when they are the object of it in order to achieve their particular goals: sexual pleasure in the case of men, and material profit where women are concerned.75 Ferrer seems deliberately to depict the two sexes from different social strata so as to emphasize the universality of human deception in love. Hence male falsehood is represented by the courtly lover, feigning his unrequited suffering by means of the conventions of cancionero verse (Ferrer might almost be quoting from a particular canción) and by means of other courtly endeavours, while female guile is typified by the woman who seeks to snare a priest for his money. But the reference to women comes with a qualifier: las malas mugieres, not all women, and Ferrer takes the opportunity to refer to one of his greatest bugbears: the concubinate priest.76 Even clerical concubines are seen as victims of their own behaviour, since they soon find themselves trapped in a relationship in which they are forced to perform what he calls elsewhere puteries particulars (Schib 1979: 306).77 75 There is a further damning reference to the obsessive interest of knights in beautiful women in the context of a discussion of accidia (Cátedra 1994: 363). 76 Other uses of the term malas mugieres occur in Sanchis Sivera 1932: 54 and Cátedra 1994: 463, 612. 77 Other references to concubinage occur in Sanchis Sivera 1927: 140, 1932: 190; Schib 1975: 32, 1975: 182, 1977: 30, 1984: 67, 86, 1988: 111, 203–204; Cátedra 1984: 556–557.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

57

There is only one allusion in these sermons to specifically female lust. This appears in a sermon in which Ferrer stresses that luxuria is committed in thought as well as deed: E como que sy una mugier se va confessar, dirá: ‘Padre, yo nunca fize pecado de luxuria con otro omne synon con mi marido’. E non se confiessa si ha avido algún mal pensamiento en el su coraçón, pensando de echarsse con otro alguno, o si lo dexó por miedo o por vergüença. E la mugier que esto non confiessa es putana delante Dios, porque non sopo guardar el coraçón. (Cátedra 1994: 416)

The gender specificity is significant since Ferrer is here glossing the text of Mattthew 5: 28 in which Jesus denounces the lustful thoughts of men. The decision to exemplify the Biblical text with an example of female lust is perhaps a means of amplifying the gender context of the passage, which he then goes on to quote and translate, while also confirming his belief in the traditional role of miedo and vergüença as controlling factors in female behaviour. But at the end of the sermon he draws a conclusion on the matter in general terms: ‘E por esto, buena gente, non pensedes mucho en los malos penssamientos; sy non, quemarvos han’ (Cátedra 1994: 417). There is no sense in which Ferrer assumes that sexual desire in women is greater than in men. Significantly, in the references to the story of David and Bathsheba there is not even the hint of blame for the wife of Urias, denounced as a meretrix by some authors, including Martínez de Toledo, and indeed she is not even named.78 The responsibility for sin is laid squarely on the shoulders of David, who is denounced for abusing his power in order to satisfy his lust: Item, de luxúria: lo dimoni portarà hun cas que s’esdevendràn hom e dona en loch sols; allí lo dimoni tempte e diu ‘Ací no us veurà degú’; vet ací la empenta. Axí pres a David, que estave a la finestra, vehie la muller de Ories en altre loch, molt bella, e dix lo dimoni: ‘Guarda’t, que bella fembra’; e féu-la’s venir, e pecquà ab ella. (Schib 1975: 16)79

Nevertheless, elsewhere Ferrer identifies a type of woman whose sole ambition is to attract men other than her husband: E entre semana están encogidas e atapadas los pechos a sus maridos, e el domingo aféytansse e van por la calle, e descubren los pechos a los omnes estraños e a sus maridos cúbrenlos. ¿Non has vergüença? Cubre la carnaza de los milanos; que quando vas por la calle e lievas las tripas de fuera, los omnes que te miran han grand tenptaçión. Ca non tan solamente dapñas tu 78 79

Martínez de Toledo 1992: 101–102. A more expanded account is found in a Castilian sermon (Cátedra 1994: 491); another reference is in Schib 1988: 119–120, where again David’s guilt is stressed.

58

ROBERT ARCHER

ánima, mas fazes dapñar las ánimas de aquellos que te miran quando vas así. E, por aventura, quando sales de casa fasta que tornas, averás fecho dapñar más de çient personas. (Cátedra 1994: 554)

In this passage at least, a certain type of woman is endowed by Ferrer with the status of ianua diaboli, and there is a further example in a Catalan sermon where he tells the story of the conversion, death, and salvation of a beautiful prostitute who had caused countless souls to be damned (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 211).80 But these are isolated instances and, in spite of these examples of woman’s traditional capacity to behave as temptress, when he comes to discuss marital problems he assumes no special burden of responsibility. Adultery is not seen as more likely to occur in women than in men: ‘adulteris, açò és hom o dona que lexe sa companyia per altra persona’ (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 65).81 Women should, of course, pay their husbands appropriate reverència (Schib 1984: 42) and not want to take other than a secondary role in the home (Schib 1975: 31) and should be obedient to them, at least in what God permits.82 Their role as comforters of their husbands is exemplified by the Virgin Mary’s reassurance of Joseph when he learnt that he must take his pregnant wife to Bethlehem: E catad, buena gente, cómo la bendycha consolava a su esposo. E catad aquí enxienpro para vos, mis fijas, ca ya sabedes en cómo el marido siente todo el trabajo de casa, ca la mugier non cura de nada. E por esto quando vuestros maridos vienen tristes e desconsolados, que les consoledes. (Cátedra 1994: 511)

But there is always the assumption that much hinges on the husband’s acceptance of his responsibility as head of the household: ‘Dur serà per aquells que no regexen bé sa casa, e si lo marit diu “bif ”, la muller diu “baf ” ’ (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 192). A man’s vices will always disrupt his home life: ‘E por el juego de los dados se matan los omnes unos a otros e han mala vida 80 81

Tertullian, De cultu feminarum, I, i; see Blamires 1992: 51. Similarly: ‘e no rompen la fe del matrimoni, que.l marit no.s mescle ab altra dona, ni la dona ab altre hom’ (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 18). 82 ‘E esso mismo digo. . .que le non conplegas en tal cosa’ (Cátedra 1994: 439). The intimate apostrophe suggests that sexual practice is alluded to, although elsewhere Ferrer specifies a broader range of sins: ‘que.l marit li manàs que matàs algú o que fés furt o adulteri per guanyar’ (Schib 1984: 11). Ferrer is specific about other aspects of sexual life in marriage, denouncing a wife’s non-fulfillment of the debitum coniugale as a mortal sin, even if she would sooner spend the time praying (Sanchis Sivera 1934: 17). Marriage is the only context in which sex is not a sin, even when the the wife is pregnant (although she is forbidden other activities, such as riding or dancing, for which see Cátedra 1994: 604). This is despite Ferrer’s denunciation elsewhere of carnal union for reasons other than procreation, comparing couples who practise it to mules, who were believed to be the only animals who mated for the pleasure of copulation (Schib 1988: 233–234).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

59

las mugieres con sus maridos’ (Cátedra 1994: 446). Wife-beating too is part of a familiar pattern in those marriages where love is not pure and lasting: ‘marit e muller, quan se ajustaran, portar-se an bon voler, e a mig any ja.y ha punyades’ (Sanchis Sivera 1977: 82). Ferrer recognises the vulnerability of women, singling out the case of pregnant women, who are frequently subject to beatings, and alerts his audience to the imperilled souls of the unborn children who may become victims of the wife’s maltreatment (Schib 1984: 249). But women must learn to cope with violent husbands: Ferrer tells the exemplary story of the beaten wife who saves her husband through prayer and, thanks to a miracle, converts him to a Christian life (Cátedra 1994: 608). There is not, at least in the extant sermons, any advocacy of physical reproof of wayward wives, although the practice may simply be taken for granted.83 Similarly, in his handling of the question of original sin, Ferrer does not attribute the Fall solely to Eve. In three of the sermons he lays the blame squarely onto Adam as the first father and first sinner: Tota conclusió ha de venir a conseqüència; e és aquest lo antecedent: que Adam morí per son peccat. Mas dirie algú: dos són: Adam e Eva. Yo dich que no és sinó hu; car doctrina és que si Adam no hagués peccat, per bé que Eva hagués peccat, no fórem obligats a mort. (Schib 1975: 200)84

Elsewhere Ferrer stresses Adam’s weakness in acceding to his wife’s wishes: ‘Adam peccó por su mugier, poniendo amor terrenal’ (Cátedra 1994: 580). In other contexts he focuses on the soberbia of both of them (Sanchis Sivera 1934: 96, Cátedra 1994: 527), or on the Devil’s power to deceive Eve who ‘no sabia la lògica de nostre Senyor Déus’ (Sanchis Sivera 1934: 228). But there is one important passage in a sermon on the thema ‘Ave Maria’, in which, following Augustine, he does set the blame squarely on Eve: En la quarta cláusola [of the liturgical prayer to the Vigin Mary, ‘Benedicta tu in mulieribus’], le presentamos dulçe piedat, ca ovo dolor e piedat de las mugieres, e por esto dize ‘in mullieribus’. Agora, buena gente, ¿cierta cosa es que la Virgen santa María es bendicha sobre todas las mugieres? Por declaraçión, buena gente, desta palabra, bien sabedes en cómo todo el mal que nosotros avemos en este mundo vino por mugier; esto es a saber, pena e dolor, ca Adam non oviera comido del fructo vedado sinon por la mugier Eva, que tanto le fizo fasta que le fizo comer dél. E por esto dize sant Agustín que Adam comió del fructo vedado por non dar tristeza a los placeres de su mugier. E por esto dize la actoridat: ‘A muliere ynicium factum est peccati, etc.’ [Ecclesiasticus 25: 33]. Diz que ‘de la mugier fue fecho el principio del peccado’. ¿E por qué la mugier fue el comienço del 83 The physical admonishment of women was not universally condoned, however, and was condemned by Bernardino da Siena among others (Lucas 1983: 127–128). 84 The other two passages are in Sanchis Sivera 1927: 1 and Schib 1975: 298.

60

ROBERT ARCHER

peccado? Ca por ella pasamos pena e ývamos al infierno. Por esto antiguament los omnes las maldezían mucho. E catad que la Virgen santa María, aviendo piedat de las mugieres, ganó mucho más que non perdió Eva, ca por Eva perdimos vida tenporal e por la Virgen santa María ganamos vida eternal para siempre jamás. E assí lo dize la actoridat: ‘Hoc per beatitudine mea beatem quippe me dicent mullieres [Genesis 30: 13]. Diz: ‘Esto fue por la mi bienaventurança e çiertamente dezir me han bienaventurada [entre] las mugieres.’ E por aquesta exçelencia tan maravillosa que en la Virgen santa María ovo, le dezimos en la Ave María: ‘Benedita tu in mullieribus’. Dezimos ‘la bendicha en las mugieres’. Ca como de primero eran maldichas por Eva, así agora por la Virgen santa María son bendichas. (Cátedra 1994: 373–374)

Even as Ferrer allows here that Eve is the originator of sin among men and women, he dismisses this as a justification for the practice of maldezir: on theological grounds there is no good reason for slandering women, and there has been none since the virgin birth took place, since with it men and women recovered all that had been lost through Eve. It is because the Virgin had not yet given birth to the Redeemer that women were so frequently the object of vituperation in the Old Testament.85 The implication, of course, is that the more recent occurrence of maldezir, underpinned by quotations from Old Testament such as the one from Ecclesiasticus to which he refers in this passage, cannot be sanctioned. Ferrer’s position on the generalized misogynistic denunciation of women could not be clearer. Significantly this interpretation of the Fall and its consequences occurs precisely when Ferrer wishes to denounce the female vanity that manifests itself in dress and the use of cosmetics. The Virgin is a model of behaviour in this matter: E por tanto, mis fijas, pues que tanto avedes alcançado por la Virgen santa María, rúegovos que la querades semejar en la humildat e que dexedes las vanidades, ca la Virgen santa María sienpre andava synplemente e non traýa consigo algunas vanidades. Mas vosotras non curades synon de afeytarvos e apostarvos vanamente. Mas algunas ay que se escusan, diziendo que o fazen por sus maridos. E esto es muy grand mentira. E proévolo por muchas razones: la primera, que nunca la mugier pone el blanquete nin el bermellete synon quando ha de salyr fuera de su casa: pues

85 There is an interesting autobiographical comment in relation to the Virgin Mary’s role as mother of the Redeemer. Ferrer refers to his instrumental part in the Agreeement of Casp in June 1412 which settled the succession of the Crown of Aragon in favour of Ferrán de Antequera after the death without an heir of Martí I. Ferrán’s claim was through his mother, Elionor of Aragon. In one of the sermons Ferrer rails against those who had criticized the decision in favour of a claimant through the female line, reminding the audience that: ‘Semblant era Jesucrist, que la successió li venia de David per la mare’ (Schib 1988: 205).

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

61

paresçe que non lo faze por el marido. Mas en sus casas tienen atapados los pechos con una aterradilla gorda; e quando han de salyr fuera ponen una aterradilla más delgada que tela de çedaço. Así que paresçe que non lo fazen por el marido. E más, que el marido bien sabe si su mugier es blanca o negra o si es tinnosa o lagañosa o non. ¿Pues por qué quando ha de salyr de casa pone el blanquete o el vermellete e los cabellos agenos e el alcohol en los ojos? Pues paresçe que non lo faze por su marido. (Cátedra 1994: 374)

Female vanity in dress and appearance is the general defect which is given most attention by Ferrer, in consonance with homiletic practice in such countries as England, as described by G. R. Owst, and the strong tradition of writing on the subject since Jerome, Tertullian, and Cyprian.86 The claim made by women that they make themselves up for the sake of their husbands is elsewhere dismissed more than once. The practice is seen as a venial sin if indeed husbands are the intended beneficiaries, but a mortal one if all the attention to clothes and appearance is meant for anyone other than the husband (Cátedra 1994: 628, Sanchis Sivera 1934: 68). This is the danger to which the dones pomposes that Ferrer refers to at several points expose themselves (Sanchis Sivera 1927: 198–199, 1932: 166, 1934: 73), and only the repentant ones can expect to avoid Hell and be consigned instead to Purgatory, which is the most they can hope for (Sanchis Sivera 1932: 72–73). There is little singling out of women in relation to other sins; here too Ferrer is evenhanded, treating sin as universal. Women may be subject to envy on account of such vain matters as believing that another man’s wife is better dressed (Schib 1975: 57), but envy and all the other sins occur in omne o mugier alike (Cátedra 1994: 417–418). A type of irate woman, algunes rabioses (Schib 1975: 253), is mentioned by Ferrer by way of contrast to St Anne, but not because anger is deemed to be more frequent in women than in men: Oo, beneyt és lo matrimoni de marit e muller que són devots. Que quan lo marit és devot e la muller rabiosa, axí com n’i ha moltes malastrugues de vosaltres, farà-li perdre aquella devoció. E per contrari, lo mal marit, jugador, etc. (Schib 1975: 249)

Here the amanuensis clearly feels no need to enlarge on the ‘etc.’, since the male counterexample of sin is so frequently adduced by Ferrer. Perhaps most strikingly, there are relatively few references, at least in the extant sermons, to female garrulity, which all writers on women at least as late as Vives take for granted. While women are reproved for gossipping in Church (Cátedra 1994: 289), men also are represented as inveterate talkers during mass (Cátedra

86

Owst 1933: 376–404.

62

ROBERT ARCHER

1994: 333). Unsurprisingly, in his references to the appearance of the resurrected Christ to women, there is no hint of the notion that this is to be explained by Christ’s belief in a natural female talkativeness.87 But there is concern for one particular type of woman: the buenas mugieres who, through their devotion, draw too close to their priest and place themselves in grave moral danger: Esso mismo, ¡quántas buenas mugieres caen en esta manera! Ca una mugier verá un rreligioso que es buen predicador e a buena entención llegar sse ha a él e fablará con él en cosas devotas e santas. E de poco en poco o va ella a la çella dél o él a la casa della a departir e, finalmente, como comiençan en Credo in Deum acaban en carnis rresurrectionem. E cata la buena mugier fecha putana. (Cátedra 1994: 493)

The same concern is expressed in almost identical terms in a Catalan sermon (Schib 1975: 17–18) where the point is exemplified by the story of the noble maiden who runs away from home to avoid marriage and devote herself to God, but who draws too close to her confessor, becomes pregnant, and hangs herself. There is also a special warning for those careless mothers who unwittingly suffocate their babies and, worse still, have delayed having them baptised; they will both go straight to Hell (Schib 1984: 250). Of specific types of women other than wives Ferrer has little to say. Widows are enjoined to overcome their carnal longing by mortifying the flesh (Schib 1984: 92), and not to give up going to mass on the pretext that they have no husband to accompany them (Cátedra 1994: 554). Nuns are mentioned in the context of some ironic advice on how women could avoid becoming pregnant: ‘Guardau-vos de home’ (Schib 1984: 250). The group he has most to say about is that of prostitutes. While he recognizes the relationship between prostitution and poverty (Schib 1988: 125), his main concern is with the fate of the souls of the prostitutes’ clients: such women should be kept off the street (Schib 1984: 164) and out of public inns (Cátedra 1994: 335, Schib 1975: 14, 112); he allows only that they should operate, if necessary, in a ‘bordell general per als malastruchs’ (Schib 1988: 249), and makes no distinction between prostitutes and the concubines of the clergy, except in so far as he sees the first as perhaps a necessary evil and the second as not to be tolerated under any circumstances. In this way, the didactic thrust of the vernacular sermons of St Vincent Ferrer levels out gender distinctions at the moral level, and virtually erases female specificity from the account he gives of human vices; in the grand moral scheme of things within which the sermons operate, the notion of women only occasionally needs to be brought to the surface. In this the sermons lie at the opposite extreme from the first texts discussed in this 87

Sanchis Sivera 1927: 309, 1932: 142, 1934; Schib 1988: 7, 9, 15.

NOTIONS OF WOMEN

63

chapter. When a moral educationalist like Eiximenis starts to lay the notion bare, or a politically motivated writer like Córdoba spells out what the notion is in order to address the misgivings of his male readers, its underlying contradictions and anomalies start to make themselves felt. Vives opts largely for the tactic of avoiding its direct formulation – even though it frequently slips through – and manages thereby to reduce the sense that there was a moral and intellectual handicap with which women were expected to strive so as to attain the goals set for them by all these writers. The texts on advice for brides, especially Castigos, summon up aspects of the received idea of woman only when the assumptions of their superior ability in vital domestic matters expose other notions about male inadequacy. All the texts discussed here reveal a notion of woman which thrives on its non-exposure. They place on the surface the underlying suppositions with which they are written only in so far as the particular objectives of their composition demand it. They all tend towards a pragmatic delineation of female nature, selecting, limiting, and expanding the defining elements according to their particular rhetorical aims. While several perceived characteristics of the female overlap across these texts, the importance accorded them or the interpretation to which they are subjected rarely coincide. There is no ‘notion of women’ in a stable sense, but rather a range of possible features that are selected as need requires. The same instability manifests itself even when the author opts for a declaredly misogynous standpoint, so that his implied view of women is placed on the surface. This is best illustrated by the major Hispanic text to be discussed in the next chapter.

2 UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES: ALFONSO MARTÍNEZ DE TOLEDO’S ARCIPRESTE DE TALAVERA UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

One of the major casualties of the entrenched critical assumption that there was a Hispanic medieval debate on women is Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s Arcipreste de Talavera or Corbacho. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that in those works concerning women produced during the fifteenth century which are deemed to fall on the negative side of the divide in this debate, the subject is treated from a consistent ideological basis, so that it is taken to be unproblematic to discuss the concept of misogyny with reference to Arcipreste de Talavera, Pere Torroella’s notorious poem ‘Quien bien amando persigue’, Juan de Tapia’s gloss on Torroella’s ‘Yerra con poco saber’, or Luis de Lucena’s Repetiçión de amores, all of which were written in different decades, in different socio-political contexts, and with what an attentive reading would suggest are clearly different aims. According to this model of interpretation, the Arcipreste de Talavera becomes, as the title of a recent important article puts it, a ‘maldezir de mugeres’ written, so the label implies, within the same ideological framework as the poem of Torroella known by that title.1 Here it is proposed that Martínez’s book deserves to be read on its own terms, that is as one finished in 1438, well before any of the texts with which it has been bracketed as a misogynous work of the supposed debate. To do this, we need to read Arcipreste de Talavera in the light of earlier texts, not later ones, and to be aware of that same persistent problem of instability in the notion of women that has surfaced in the texts we have seen so far.

Martínez and Eiximenis One of those earlier texts is Eiximenis’s Libre de les dones, a work which, as we saw in the last chapter, sets out to show how women could become better Christians specifically as women by first identifying the defects that were deemed to be inherent to their sex, and then to remedy them through a 1 Catherine Brown 1999. Similarly, in the Introduction to his edition of Arcipreste de Talavera, E. Michael Gerli refers to an ‘ideología antifeminista’ in Martínez’s work, Torroella and Juan de Tapia. Torroella’s Maldezir de mugeres is discussed in Chapter 5, below.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

65

programme of self-awareness and moral reform. It was also a work which Martínez definitely knew, and it is documented that he paid for a copy of it to be made.2 There is, as we saw, no apparent intention in Eiximenis’s book to emphasize the role of women as a major factor in human sin or to denounce them as protagonists in evil. And yet, what becomes immediately clear from a comparison of the same early chapters of the Llibre de les dones that we examined earlier and Martínez’s text is that, in broad terms, the conceptual basis for Martínez’s denunciation of women is the same as that on which Eiximenis constructs for them a programme of moral reform.3 These include: greed (Martínez 106–108, 145–153, and 157–160, Eiximenis I, 22), vanity and use of cosmetics (Martínez 157–160 and 183–186, Eiximenis I, 22), instability (Martínez 167–170, Eiximenis I, 20), falsehood and deception (Martínez 171–174, Eiximenis I, 22), disobedience and contrariness (Martínez 175–179, Eiximenis I, 19), pride (Martínez 189–183, Eiximenis I, 19), wagging tongues (Martínez 194–196, Eiximenis I, 21), malice (Martínez passim, Eiximenis, I, 21–22), and a tendency to shouting when upset (Martínez passim, Eiximenis I, 19–20). The gap between the two texts lies, then, not in the material used, but rather in what their authors do with it. Eiximenis saw his description of the defects of women, backed by constant reference to auctoritates and set within the framework of the Fall of Man and its theological consequences, as something quite different from the generic denunciation of women, a practice which he sees as a form of slander (malparlar) and which he denounces as something which is not pleasing to God since it ignores the ways in which He has chosen to privilege certain women: Emperò, ja per res que dit sia, negú no pens que meysprear ne malparlar de dones en general sia bona cosa ne plaent a Déu. Rahó és car, no contrastant lurs deffalliments damont dits, nostre Senyor les ha volgudes en algunes axí exalçar que tot lo món deu haver temor de parlar mal d’elles. (Eiximenis, I, 23)

For his part, Martínez openly acknowledges that his discourse is one of malparlar – he specifically refers to maldezir in his own book– and he addresses the subject several times, always insisting on the necessity of speaking out about evil-doing, an argument adduced not infrequently by fifteenth-century authors who wrote against women in general or in particular.4 Significantly, however, Martínez at no point tries to justify his act of 2 For the influence of Eiximenis on Martínez see Viera 1975 and 1978. For Martínez’s copy of the Llibre de les dones see González Muela 1970: 28. 3 In the following section, ‘Martínez’ refers to Gerli’s edition of Martínez (Martínez 1992), and ‘Eiximenis’ to Eiximenis 1981. Text in italics indicates addditions that first appear in the editions of Seville 1498 and Toledo 1500, as given by Gerli. 4 Examples of this are Ausiàs March, poem XLII passim (significantly this precedes

66

ROBERT ARCHER

maldezir solely with reference to women. Rather, the general rule is invoked, ostensibly oblivious to gender, and a long tradition of morally driven maldezir is cited as justification for his own use of it: El mundo es hoy tan malo que bien decir es muerte, maldecir es gloria delectable. Esto sea quanto a mi escusaçión, por quanto sé bien que si dixe, que de mi ha de ser dicho; pero de otros muchos dixeron a los quales no sería yo digno de descalçar su çapato. (190)5

The practice of maldezir is really the only aspect of his book that Martínez admits to feeling obliged to justify by argument. Much of the work needs no such discursive justification since the ideas he develops have a sound basis in the received view of women as human beings who are especially fallible, and therefore by extension especially sinful. But there are significant elements lacking in his account of women that in Eiximenis are foregrounded as factors in mitigation of her guilt: her physical and moral weakness and lower intelligence mean that she is less responsible for her actions, her natural subjection to the passions makes the exercise of reason extremely difficult, and the greater level of natural physical suffering to which she is subject in this world undermines her powers of resistance to sin.6 He also assigns no role to the concept of vergonya/ vergüenza which is for him (I, 10) as later for Córdoba and Vives a special quality in women that equips them to withstand the moral trials of life. On the other hand, there are other elements in Eiximenis’s account of the natural condition of women of which Martínez makes little or no use. One of these is the Biblical idea that the physical sufferings of women are the means by which God punishes them indirectly (Eiximenis, I, 29). A more important one is the notion that women are essentially poisonous like the serpent which seduced her into sin (Eiximenis, I, 20): ‘li és dat en pena que sia tota serpentina e verinosa, en tant que del cap fins als peus no y aja loch que no sia verí e mort d’òmens’ (I, 20). The idea finds its way into the folklore that surrounded menstruation, and surrounds it still in parts of southern Europe: a in most manuscripts his famous maldit against Na Monboí, poem XLI) and Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, ‘Voler m’enpeny, he rahó m’o consent’, ll. 1–8 (Archer & Riquer 1998: 266). 5 Other references to maldezir are either non-specific about gender or are carefully inclusive of both sexes: ‘Maldezir del malo, loança es del bueno’ (65), ‘que non digan que fue manera de mal dezir e mal fablar dellas, non fablando de los malos ombres que se fallan en este mundo [. . .]’ (202), ‘Non digan que non fue muger el que lo compuso, este compendio, si non çesara mal favlar por honestidad; pero los viçios de las criminosas bueno es redarguir porque oyéndolo se abstengan de mal usar, que non menos es en los perversos ombres, como ya suso dixe [. . .]’ (295–296). 6 Eiximenis offers theological explanations for their inferior intelligence (I, 16 and I, 20), the fearfulness that causes them to take fright if they see a cockroach (I, 20), and their greater burden of suffering (I, 17).

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

67

menstruating woman will make a wood wither and die if she walks through it, will make any mirror she looks into cloud over, and so on, and it is closely related to the widespread belief studied by Michael Solomon that woman was a site of sickness and disease.7 Martínez does not mention the concept of the poisonous woman explicitly, but there seems little doubt that it underlies other things he says about women, particularly in relation to their malicious speech.8 In this way, Martínez’s text reflects a core of general attitudes to women like those which Eiximenis sets forth in the early chapters of Libre de les dones. These general attitudes offer no specific difficulties of application to the question of amor desordenado with which Martínez is largely concerned. But in his selection of female characteristics he was following much more closely another text, one which is generically at several removes from Eiximenis’s manual of educational and moral reform. This is Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, a late-twelfth-century Latin text whose author seems to have been associated with the French royal court and with Marie de Champagne. The first two books into which his work is divided seem to be a largely tongue-in-cheek manual of proper behaviour in courtly love, while the third book consists largely of a denunciation of the evils of women.

Martínez and Andreas Capellanus It is in his didactic use of Andreas that problems of definition start to arise. Book 3 of De amore provides the basic structure and much of the detail to the Primera Parte, chapters 1–19, and the Segunda Parte.9 Martínez also uses the final injunction that Andreas makes to Walter as a basis for his closing prayer (303), an important detail since it indicates the extent to which the Tercera and Quarta Partes, in which Martínez does not use Andreas as a basis for his text, are integrated intercalations in a work which does not cease to address the same subject, namely ‘[el] amor de Dios e de reprobación del amor mundano de las mugeres’ (Martínez 62). Martínez’s decision to keep open

7 Solomon 1997. Solomon’s broader thesis that Arcipreste has a specific clinical function as a self-help manual is more difficult to sustain, given the lack of indices in the extant versions. 8 The reference to poisonous speech in Arcipreste (149) is pointed out by Solomon (1997: 83–84). For Eiximenis in relation to woman see Solomon 1999. 9 Andreas is almost certainly the ‘dotor de París, por nombre Juan de Ausim’ whom Martínez gives as his main source in the manuscript copy; the early editions try to rationalize the odd name, possibly a corrupt reading produced in the course of manuscript transmission, an allusion to a relatively minor source (Nicolau de Ausimo), or perhaps a deliberate blurring of references. See Martínez 1992: 62, note, also Penna 1955: xvii–xix and Del Piero 1960. For the relationship between Martínez’s text and Andreas see Richthofen 1941: 451–458 and 465 and Appendix; also Martínez 1992: 47–55. References to De amore are to Andreas Capellanus 1985.

68

ROBERT ARCHER

before him an uncompromisingly misogynistic twelfth-century text while working within late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century strictures on maldezir as it applied to women, means that his book will necessarily have to negotiate between two conflicting codes of discourse.10 Although Martínez uses Andreas from the point in the Prologue in which he denounces the folly of risking salvation for the sake of a brief sensual pleasure (Martínez 63, Andreas 368–369), he claims to begin following his source only from the point a little further on at which he says that the author ‘començó amonestándole e dándole primeramente a entender que amar sólo Dios es amor verdadero’ (Martínez 64). In fact, this is not what Andreas says at the beginning of Book 3 (Andreas 369–371). Rather, he denounces illicit love as an offence against God and a path to Hell; but the injunction to love only God since this is the only true form of love certainly concludes the same opening passage, and Martínez chooses to insist on it. He insists on it further when he summarizes the didactic substance of the first half of Andreas’s text (Andreas 370–393), which he will follow in the Primera Parte, as ‘lo ál amar [i.e. all that is not God] todo es burla e viento e escarnio’ (Martínez 64). But Andreas is not only a source and an auctoritas suitably endowed with the status of ‘dotor de París’. Martínez also cites him in justification of the rhetorical procedures he uses in his book. He alleges that the author of the source text instructs his friend about the evils of love, mostrándole por cierta esperiençia e razones naturales, consoledoras a quien leer y entenderlas quisiere, las quales por prática puede cada uno ver oy de cada día: esto es, de las malas mugeres sus menguas, viçios, tachas qué son, en algund tanto quáles son, e en parte quántas son. (Martínez 64)

So he too will use a combination of argument and empirical evidence drawn from his own experience. A reader who did not have De amore before him could easily overlook the fact that Andreas does not draw on ‘cierta esperiençia’ at all, but relies solely on general allegations backed up by Biblical exempla. The ‘cierta esperiençia’ is an element that is of Martínez’s 10 The extent to which the third Book of De amore may have been treated separately from the other two or completely ignored is perhaps reflected in the fact that the only known translation into a Hispanic language, the Catalan one made in the late fourteenth century, contains only the first two books (see Andreas Capellanus 1931). The third book of De amore can, of course be interpreted in a number of ways, including that which sees it as a deliberately over-the-top hoax (see Blamires 1992: 115–116) or as the logical consequence of the way in which Andreas represents in Books I and II what Toril Moi has called the ‘deceit of language’ that makes it impossible for the lover to distinguish between the good woman and the bad (Moi 1999: 420–421). That the Catalan translator chose not to include it or that it was detached at some stage from Books I and II, must at least suggest that it was read in the late fourteenth century in the Crown of Aragon as a part of Andreas’s work which was irrelevant to, or contradictory of, the use for which the translation was intended.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

69

own devising, and his use of it as a source of exemplification derives not from Andreas but from the sermon tradition. Martínez also attributes to his source a declaration of the ineffability of the subject of women: ‘Aquí cesa el autor, pues non han número ni cuento, nin escrivir se podrían, como de cada día el que con las mugeres platicare, verá cosas en ellas incogitadas, nuevas e nunca escriptas, vistas nin sabidas’ (Martínez 64). But in fact Andreas ends his list of reasons why women are not worthy of love simply by enjoining Walter to consider his arguments carefully, without any hint that there is more to say than he has already said (Andreas 408–409). After this, as he develops Andreas’s allegations in detail, the relationship between the two texts develops in a way which is far from that of a simple unmediated transposition of the Latin text into Spanish. But where Martínez adapts and modifies Andreas, he nevertheless keeps very closely to the main structure and arguments. Andreas is present at practically every point in the first and second Partes, so that inevitably these sections of Arcipreste develop into a dialogue with its source text that marks out their proximities and distances and forces Martínez to confront the uncertainties and contradictions of the discourse he has chosen to elaborate. The following pages attempt to trace this dialogue. In his description of the fear in which the lover lives, Andreas points to the folly of the man who abandons his friends for the sake of a woman (Andreas 374–375). Martínez (74–75) instead insists on the ‘muy corto juizio’ of the woman for the sake of whom the man gives up his free will, and concludes with the quite different moral that no man can count on female constancy (firmeza). Martínez amplifies this further in the next chapter, which actually concerns female inconstancy rather than what its heading states, that is ‘cómo el que ama aborresçe padre e madre, parientes, amigos’. The enamoured man thinks only of how to please his beloved, abandoning the security of his friends and family in exchange for total insecurity: ‘la seguridad que della tiene es que, quando otro vea que bien le paresca, dexe a él en el aire’ (Martínez 76). In the next chapter (Martínez 77–79), as in Andreas (374–377), the cause of a man’s ruin is attributed to his love of a woman after he becomes prodigal in his spending on her. But there is an important modification of the source material since for Martínez it is the man’s lawful wife who becomes the principal victim of his recklessness. She is beaten and abandoned and forced by circumstances to sin: ‘e allí conviene ser perdida la muger, e ser mala por se mantener a sí e a sus fijos’. This is not the last time that Martínez, while glossing Andreas’s uncompromisingly misogynistic text, will throw up images of unjustly beaten women, of mothers who protect their children at all costs, and of women who become malas not because of inherent perversity but because of the folly or evil of the men who should have their welfare in mind.

70

ROBERT ARCHER

Something of the same language of pastoral concern appears in I, viii (Martínez 80–82). Here, while the attention given to the woman’s loss of reputation, as well as the man’s, derives from Andreas (376–379), Martínez adds that there is a readier social tolerance of immoral behaviour in men than applies to women (Andreas assumes in his readers a greater level of condemnation of the man’s behaviour than Martínez does), and emphasizes how easy it is for a woman to acquire the label of mala muger. Then in I, ix (Martínez 82–83) he adds again a reference to how a man under the influence of amor desordenado will steal from his wife in order to shower his mistress with gifts. The concern for the plight of certain women disappears in I, xi (Martínez 85–86, Andreas 380–381), where Martínez fiercly denounces those who profess to love clergymen. He follows his source in denouncing love among the clergy on the grounds that, apart from the effects on the soul, it is an obstruction to an ecclesiastical career. But then Martínez has more to say: [All clergymen who pursue the love of women] perdieron, pierden e perderán con grand difamación queriendo amar a quien nunca los amó nin ama; que non es mujer, de qualquier condición que sea, que ame al eclesiástico, salvo por aver dél e por la desordenada cobdicia que la muger tiene por alcançar, aver e andar locamente arreada con vanagloria. E por esta razón muestran amarlos, que non los aman. Enxiemplo de esto: non es muger al mundo que non quiera a los eclesiásticos peor que a enemigos, que nunca facen sinón denostarlos, maltractarlos e dezir mal dellos, así las que han dellos como las que non han. E desta regla non saco a los seglares [i.e. secular clergy] aun que fijo sea del propio clérigo; pero nunca los dexan de inquietar, demandando dado, o emprestando pidiendo. E más te digo: ¿qué sacrifiçio entiende fazer a Dios el que por cautela o engaño, o por otra vía alguna, saca alguna cosa, mucha o poca, de eclesiástico?

In this way Andreas’s warning to fellow clergymen – of which the fictional addressee Walter is perhaps meant to be one – and to women, that love can bring them only frustration and dishonour, becomes in Martínez’s hands a denunciation of the greed of women who enter into relationships with clergymen, together with the accusation that they collectively hate all men of the cloth and constantly vilify them. A more general denunciation of women appears in I, xv (Martínez 91–96, Andreas 385–387), prompted by a phrase in Andreas’s text (‘Mulieris enim qualitatem sive statum districtius agitare nil foedius vel magis taedosium reperitur in orbem’). This comes in a long passage in which Martínez changes and greatly amplifies Andreas’s advice about how to overcome lust, adding a list of moral tactics and reminding the reader that, while a man may licitly love his ‘buena muger’ (91), all wives are Eve. As he makes this point, he slips into a defensively worded justification of the male discourse of denunciation in his book:

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

71

E por quanto a qualquier sabio l’es manifiesto poco más o menos la muger quién es, e cómo por ellas en el mundo vino destruiçión, e oy dura, non es honesto dellas mal favlar. Non digan que non fue muger el que lo compuso, este compendio; si non, çesara mal favlar por honestidad; pero los viçios de las criminosas bueno es redarguir porque oyéndolo se abstengan de mal usar, que non menos es en los perversos ombres, como ya suso dixe – que la entinçión del componedor non es otra más, salvo amonestar que amar desonesto no quieran.11

There is much twisting and turning here. It is not ‘honesto’ to dwell on the defects of women since these are shameful to speak of. Besides which, it is common knowledge what these defects are; so the least said, the better. Given that this is so, the objection could be raised that the author’s compendio should not have been written at all. The objection might be made, for instance, by women, who would also point out the sexual bias to be expected in a book written by a man. But if one worried too much about honestidad, wrong-doing would never be denounced, and the perpetrators would go unchastised and therefore unreformed. If the author had been a woman, his book would contain no mal favlar since a woman would play the objection of honestidad for all it was worth. The perpetrators of wrong-doing in the present context are, of course, women, but Martínez is careful to add that the general principle of the necessity of denunciation also applies to men who do evil, ‘los perversos ombres’. He then goes a step further in diluting the impact of his initial statement which had contained a particular identification of women with Eve and the destruction of Paradise, when he changes this specific focus for his denunciation to an overriding general didactic intention: the book is a warning for all, regardless of sex, of the dangers of amar desonesto. In another chapter, however (I, xvii), Martínez finds a suitable context to develop the concept of woman as Eve and to undo the previous suggestion that evil-doing is not a matter of gender (Martínez 99–104, Andreas 390–393). To Andreas’s main point that even the wisest men are fools where love is concerned, Martínez adds that the famous cases of men whose ‘voluntad desordenada’ has been their undoing (David, Solomon, the medieval figures of Virgil and Aristotle) are a source of empowering delight to

11 The sentence ‘Non digan que non fue muger el que lo compuso, este compendio; si non, çesara mal favlar por honestidad’ contains some differences of punctuation from Gerli’s edition. I interpret this as ‘Let it not be argued that this compendium was not composed by a woman, because, if it had been, speaking ill would cease for the sake of “modesty” ’. That is, if it were left to women to denounce those who perpetrate evil in the world (particularly themselves), nothing would be said since they would allege that their own modesty prevents them. The subject of çesara is mal favlar, while si non means ‘if he who writes this compendium was not a man, but a woman’. This differs considerably from the interpretation of Catherine Brown (Brown 1999: 92–93).

72

ROBERT ARCHER

women. These brief exempla are followed by a lengthy re-telling of Andreas’s account of the story of David and Bathsheba. The differences in the two interpretations of the Biblical passage are revealing. Andreas’s interest in the story is as an example of how the power of love can reduce a great man to baseness: Sed et quis maior aut sapientia clarior est David propheta repertus, qui tamen innumerabiles habuit concubinas, uxorem male concupivit Uriae et eam adulterando stupravit virumque ipsius tanquam perfidius homicida necavit?

Andreas, like Jerome, is true to the version of Samuel 2: 11; he censures David and squarely lays the blame for the adultery of Bathsheba and the death of Urias on David.12 He also specifically depicts Bathsheba as a victim of David’s lust and power: ‘eam adulterando stupravit’. Martínez, however, follows Andreas only for part of his narrative: El rey David, sabio de los sabios e profeta de Dios sobre todos los profetizantes, tovo muchas mugeres e aun cuncubinas e – aún non farto su voluntarioso apetito de quantas a su mandado tenía, e fermosas e tales como un rey por poderío tener podía – con mal propósito e desfrenada voluntad amó a Bersabé desonestamente, muger una sola que Urías, caballero suyo, tenía, enamorado della. (Martínez 101)

Up to this point, Martínez stresses, with Andreas, David’s guilt. But from here on he shifts the apportionment of blame to Bathsheba: Por quanto en un huerto la veía de cada día peinarse e arrearse a su ojo, e ella, como sentía quel rey la venía cada día a mirar de allí, aunque lo ella disimulaba – como que ella non conoscía ni sentía quel rey la miraba nin la venía a mirar – pero, por ser del rey cobdiçiada e deseada, venía allí cada día a se arrear e peinar mostrando sus cabellos e pechos, dando a entender que non lo entendía, como otras muchas de cada día acostumbraban a fazer. En tanto que el rey, no contento de muchas que tenía, quería e quiso una que Urías sola e señora tenía e amava, e con ella acometió carnal deseo e adulterio en derecho canónico llamado; lo qual non cometiera si ella quisiera, quando vido e sintió la voluntad e comienço de amor del rey, que ella se dexara de seguir la venida a peinar e arrearse allí donde venía. Donde fue causa de la su desonra e de la muerte de su marido e de tantas e tales personas que después murieron por el pecado que David cometió; lo qual plogo a nuestro Señor que así fuese que su fijo Absalón contra él se alçase e de Jerusalém fuir lo fiziese, e con sus mançebas, a vista del pueblo, forniçio cometiese. Pues verás de quánto mal fue causa la mujer de Urías, no quedando inoçente David deste pecado. Si leyeres la estoria adelante 12

For Jerome’s interpretation, see 1992: 75.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

73

verás, pues, quanto mal faze una mala muger, e esta práctica non la han perdido oy día. (Martínez 101–102)

The degree of guilt of Bathsheba and the consequences of her actions are discussed in several medieval texts, and Martínez is far from being the first to make the extreme case against her (the eleventh-century Marbod of Rennes is one of them).13 But there is a wealth of sensuous detail in his description of Bathsheba’s seductive wiles (perhaps drawn from another source) that speaks eloquently of David’s crazed longing and the deliberate provocation by Urias’s wife: she is in control of David’s desire, plotting by means of it her social elevation and cruelly willing her licit husband’s death. While David acts ‘no quedando inoçente’, he is a helpless puppet in the hands of a meretrix. In Arcipreste the meaning of the episode cited by Andreas shifts from the demonstration of how no amount of wisdom is sufficient to control male lust to the depiction of the defencelessness of men before the onslaught of female seduction. Martínez’s final words on Bathsheba, quoted above, drive the general lesson home. A question of female motive is implicit in this depiction of Bathsheba. She is sensual – and therefore subject to the passions – and yet calculating, a characteristic which implies self-control. How do these two forces coexist in women? Martínez addresses this question when in I, xviii he takes up the first of Andreas’s arguments for rejecting the love of women (Martínez 104–109, Andreas 392–395). Andreas insists that men are wasting their time when they pursue women in the hope of sexual pleasure, because women are motivated only by greed. The heading of the chapter in Arcipreste, ‘Cómo es muy engañoso el amor de la muger’, initially indicates that Martínez is about to make the same point, but he then splits his argument into two ‘partes de amor’. The first of these derives directly from Andreas: women are driven by greed, not love, in their relationships with men, a point which Ferrer had made in at least one of his sermons, but specifying that he means malas mugieres only.14 As we saw when discussing Eiximenis, Córdoba, and Vives in the last chapter, greed is a characteristic commonly used to define female nature even by writers whose didactic aims are the moral and educational reform of women and whose work has nothing to do with the denunciation of their role in false earthly love. This general belief is what Martínez alludes to when he says that ‘el motivo del amor de la muger es alcançar e aver por quanto naturalmente les proviene, que todas las más de las mugeres son avariçiosas’ (Martínez 106).15 But he does not generalize consistently about the role of women’s greed in love. Initially, there is a sweeping dismissal of 13 14 15

See Blamires 1992: 101 and 1997: 35. Cátedra 1994: 462–463. The same common belief is restated in II, i (Martínez 145–146).

74

ROBERT ARCHER

the love of women, as he translates Andreas almost verbatim.16 But later in the same chapter, Martínez, departing from Andreas on three occasions, qualifies with adjectives the general reference: ‘¡Quántas malas usan desta prática!’, ‘E más te digo: que si tienes e con mano abierta a la mala muger vinieres’, ‘E dígote verdad, que por esta mala e desordenada cobdiçia e immoderada avariçia, las mugeres malas todas son ladronas’. Shortly afterwards Andreas’s text again imposes itself, reintroducing a generalization: ‘E dígote que los dones, plata e joyas e oro e otras cosas preçiosas fazen a las más altas a lo baxo venir. [. . .] Por ende te digo que de mill una fembra fallarás rica’.17 When Martínez uses Andreas’s argument that avaritia is the overriding passion of all women in I, xviii, he thereby plays down the role of sexual desire in women, the ‘segunda parte de amor’. Andreas’s suppression at this point of his text of female lust fulfills an authorial need: in giving pride of place to avaritia he seeks to dissuade Walter from holding out hopes of sexual gratification through the love of women. When he restores lust to female nature by including it among his list of epithets, he insists not on woman’s accessibility but on the insatiable nature of her desire (Andreas 394–395 and 406–407). Similarly, Eiximenis in Libre de les dones chooses, for his own reasons, not to include lust as one of the main defining characteristics of women since the accusation has no place in the discourse of education and reform with which he is engaged. Elsewhere in Eiximenis, of course, where he has other needs to attend to, female luxúria appears in its normal form, that is, as a form of desire that is more difficult to control than the male one.18 Martínez, for his part, with his own moral intentions to think of, also chooses to make little of the idea of specifically female lust, and insists instead on the universality of sexual desire, a passion which in both sexes is stronger even than that of greed in women: ‘[en] amor carnal con complimento de voluntad [. . .] la muger al ombre, nin el ombre a la muger, non cura de sus dones salvo de su voluntad complir’ (Martínez 104). It is this universal lust which drives some women to take as lovers men beneath their station (the idea also appears in Andreas 406–407), since such liaisons raise 16 ‘Los amadores [. . .] amar e ser amado [. . .] en la fembra fallar nunca lo podrán; por quanto nunca fue ombre que exçesivamente muger o amiga amase que la tal muger le bien quisiese’ (Martínez 104). ‘Amorem namque mutuum, quem in femina quaeris, invenire non poteris. Non enim aliqua unquam dilexit femina virum nec amanti mutio se novit amoris vinculo colligare’ (Andreas 392). 17 Martínez 108; ‘Nec invenitur femina tanta generis altitudine decorari vel dignitatis et rerum fertilitate beari, cuius pudorem oblatio non frangat argenti, et quam degeneris et abiecta quoque personae subvertere non possit larga et abundans copia rerum; et hoc ideo quia nulla reperitur femina dives’ (Andreas 392–393). 18 For instance, Eiximenis, Terç del Crestià (Eiximenis 1929: I, 267): ‘comunament en fembra regna fredor e fleuma, e cant les coses fredes se encenen, sens comparació són pus ardentes que les altres.’

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

75

no suspicion among relatives, and women can indulge their lust more freely with such a man than would be the case with lovers of higher social rank who could be relied upon to boast of their exploits and thus bring them into danger. This is offered partly as an explanation of the traditional allegation, later made famous by Torroella’s Maldezir de mugeres, that women are lobas in their choice of mates, chosing always the worst specimens.19 But even on this point, Martínez dissolves the gender specificity of the traditional accusation: ‘son en esto como loba fechos o fechas, así el ombre como la muger’ (Martínez 104–105). By the end of the chapter, when he adapts to his own discourse the general dismissal of all feminae as an object that can be defined and limited by a list of pejorative epithets (Andreas 394–395), Martínez has stepped from under the long shadow of Andreas. Insisting on the need for women to be properly subject to men, he reconfigures Andreas’s list by qualifying the references to ‘women’: Dos cosas son de notar: ni nunca hembra harta de bienes se vido, ni beudo harto de vino, que cuanto más bebe, más ha sed. Por tanto, la mujer que mal usa e mala es, no solamente avariciosa es hallada, más aún envidiosa, maldiciente, ladrona, golosa, en sus dichos no constante, cuchillo de dos tajos, inobediente, contraria de lo que le mandan e viedan, superbiosa, vanagloriosa, mentirosa, amadora de vino la que lo una vez gusta, parlera, de secretos descobridera, lujuriosa, raíz de todo mal e a todos males hacer mucho aparejada, contra el varón firme amor no teniente. Esto es de la mala o malas; que es dicho que las buenas no han par ni que decir mal dellas; antes como espejo son puestas a los que miran. (Martínez 109)

The restriction of the referent of muger/mugeres that we see here reappears after the sections on the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, neither of which derives from Andreas. The introductory chapter to the Segunda Parte (I, xxxviii) reminds the reader that the list of pejorative epithets in the Primera Parte was intended to apply only to ‘mugeres malas’ and that as the list is amplified in the next Parte it will continue to concern ‘mugeres, esto se entienda de aquellas que viçios e mal usar de sí partir sería imposible’. Again virtuous women are praised: ‘las virtuosas, honestas e buenas como de oro de escoria apartando’ (Martínez 144). What is particuarly striking is that Martínez seems at pains to avoid saying what others do, namely that the virtuous woman is the exception that proves the rule. On the contrary, he immediately modifies the referent of his praise to exclude considerations of gender and extend the idea of the rarity of virtue to include both sexes: ‘el buen varón o la buena muger honestos e discretos son entre los viçiosos e de mal vivir usados rubí preçioso’ (Martínez 144). 19 Pere Torroella, ‘Quien bien amando persigue’, ll. 19–20: ‘De natura de lobas son/ ciertamente en escoger’ (for text, see Chapter 5, below).

76

ROBERT ARCHER

As he takes up Andreas again in the Segunda Parte, Martínez loads the heading and first lines of his text with qualifiers: ‘las malas e viçiosas mugeres’, ‘las perversas mugeres’, ‘las mugeres que malas son’ (Martínez 145). But as the chapter develops, this limitation of meaning becomes increasingly difficult to sustain since the defect of avariçia of which women are accused here was one which was too commonly accepted to be described as a defect of only bad women. His first example (Martínez 146–147) makes the point that even the wealthiest women harbour greed within them (the point had been made before: Martínez 108, Andreas 392–393). The gendered impact of this is diffused by the observation that even the Pope could be bought off for the right sum. However, this leads to a condemnation of general corruption among men and thence to the question that if greed takes such hold in men, how much more must this be so in women (Martínez 148). It is in this first section of the Segunda Parte that Martínez introduces an important stylistic innovation in his reworking of Andreas; the didactic voice which reports observed incidents and cites exempla gives way to projections of the female voice (Martínez 148–153). Martínez takes up Andreas’s passing reference to ‘simplex quidem mulier in unius venditione gallinae’ (393–395) and turns it into a lengthy theatrical monologue, firstly about a stolen egg and then about a lost hen, in which the representation of greed soon gives way to that of envy. Such monologues are a technique of misogynistic discourse already found in a brief section of Il Corbaccio which was expanded with great effect by Bernat Metge in Lo somni.20 Spawned from Andreas’s one simplex mulier there emerges a whole gang of garrulous women since Martínez develops the technique in several passages. It is these voices gabbling of eggs and hens and of the way other women dress which Martínez allows temporarily to silence the voice of the male didactic narrator. It has been argued persuasively by Catherine Brown that in passages like these (other notable examples are in II, ii, iii, iv, and vi), the narrator ‘slips into the mode he characterizes (and rejects) as feminine, even as he describes it’.21 But there is something equally important happening in these comic monologues and in the snatches of speech recited by wives and mistresses, a mode so greatly removed from Andreas’s relentless tally of female defects: the object of denunciation no longer has to exist only in the tortuous allusive discourse that operates with terms like ‘las mugeres’, ‘la muger’, ‘las malas mugeres’, ‘las viçiosas mugeres’, ‘las perversas mugeres’, ‘la muger que mal usa e mala es’, ‘las buenas non han par ni qué decir mal dellas’, and so on. Instead, the object becomes self-referring and self-defining. Yet what is referred and defined through them presents a female reality which is quite different from that which the didactic narrator in the greater part of the book struggles to depict: the reality, that is, of the dangers of 20 21

Boccaccio 1992: 56–57 (and 1975: 26–27) and Metge 1999: 134–135. Catherine Brown 1999: 92.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

77

earthly love incarnate in the women who are its object, especially, but far from exclusively, in the context of the cult of the religio amoris.22 This main discourse of the work is not developed at all through passages such as these, since in them the quality of garrulousness, which is the least of the accusations specifically levelled against women elsewhere by Martínez, swamps every other failing singled out for attention (greed, envy, spite, etc.) in a torrent of exclamations, expletives, and demonstratives. While these are perhaps the most famous passages in Arcipreste, they are nevertheless interludes in a moral narrative where the main controlling voice remains unerringly male. This is true also of some later passages where male speech is represented, such as the parody of the bold lover developed in the interior monologue of the phlegmatic man (222–224). But it is significant that in a later passage, in which a vengeful woman incites her choleric husband to violence (219–220), the narrator shows himself to be perfectly capable, when he chooses, of producing an image of evil through represented spech. The clear implication is that, for the most part, his intention was not to use this rhetorical strategy to stress the notion that all women are evil, but rather merely to depict by means of it their vacuous garrulity. But if the immediate effect of interludes like that of the lost egg is comic, they operate as something more than an opportunity for Martínez to display his skill in humorous dramatic writing.23 There is another reason for them, one that is implicit in what Martínez says on the first occasion in which he defines women as daughters of Eve: ‘Non digan que non fue muger el que lo compuso, este compendio; si non, çesara mal favlar por honestidad’ (95–96). That is, as we saw earlier, under the false pretence of modesty, a female narrator would not speak ill of the wicked for fear of having to include her own sex. But in these passages of dialogue and interior monologue, women are indeed allowed to have their own voice in the construction of the compendio. And it is a voice of gibbering inconsequentiality and spiteful recrimination that is intended to contrast completely with the reasoned and rhetorically substantiated denunciation made by the male narrator.24 This dismissal of the female through a borrowed female voice has to be set against the continuing discourse of the male-voice narrator in the rest of the Segunda Parte. In this part of the book Martínez seems largely to be testing the extent to which the negativity of Andreas’s definition of women can be 22

For the aspect of the religion of love in Arcipreste, see the important article of Gerli

1981. 23 Martínez, as is documented, was something of a man of the stage himself. See Torroja Menéndez & Rivas Palá 1977: 24–34. For the use of dialogue, see Gerli 1969. 24 Michael Solomon describes emphatically what is happening here as a form of silencing of the female voice: ‘For Martínez and Roig the words of women were nothing more than the chirping of birds, the cackle of hens, or the incessant wiggle of a goat’s tail. Detached from the body and displayed as beastly excess, the female voice becomes impotent, abject, and ultimately silent’ (Solomon 1997: 146).

78

ROBERT ARCHER

sustained in his own writing, by setting it in the context of common beliefs about them, some of which make Andreas’s pointed insistence seem needless. Speaking of greed, he concludes that it is a general truth (‘general regla es’) that women will stop at nothing to get whatever they covet; the chapter (II, ii) ends with an uncompromising address to women readers which challenges them to corroborate by their actions what he had said of them in the previous chapter on women as slanderers: ‘Entiéndame la que quisiere, e si mal de mí dixere, perdónala Dios’(Martínez 154). In II, iv, he again has initial recourse to a qualifier: ‘Envidiosa ser la muger mala dubdar en ello sería pecar en el Espíritu Santo’, but this is only because he speaks with the knowledge that the accusation is backed by a generally held belief that a tendency to envy others is common to all women. This makes the option of general denunciation more viable: ‘E desta regla non saco madre contra fija, nin hermana, prima nin parienta’ (Martínez 160). The chapter soon develops into a general denunciation of slander which is seen as an evil that has its roots in the inability of both men and women to accept their lot, and of the vanity of women in particular that leaves them vulnerable to the flattery of ‘los falsos de los ombres’. In the next chapter too (II, v) the initial referent is ‘la muger mala’, but again the standard belief in women’s changeability (‘una ora non durará en su propósito’, 168) makes the point almost redundant, so that Martínez, initially specifying that he speaks again of ‘la muger mala’, partly describes, partly represents through dramatic monologue the indecisiveness of all women (‘non creas que mujer al mundo seguridad te pueda dar’, 168), but soon prefers to denounce the superstitious practices which women use to help them make up their minds (and here he alludes to wayward nuns, ‘las malas, si las hay’, 170). Biblical authority (Proverbs 5: 4 and the exemplum cited by Andreas of Samson and Delilah) supports the accusation of female duplicity in the next chapter (II, vi); and the generic term of reference, ‘la muger’, is unqualified by any adjective (Martínez 171–174, Andreas 400–401). This is the case too of II, vii (Martínez 175–179, Andreas 400–401), a chapter constructed on the basis of four exempla to illustrate the contrariness of women, and of II, viii (Martínez, 180–183, Andreas 402–403) where the defect is stated as a general rule: ‘La muger ser sobervia, común regla es dello’. Martínez then shifts Andreas’s categorization of Eve’s sin from that of disobedience (a subject which he deals with in I, vii without any reference to Eve) to vanagloria (I, ix) in order to insist on the importance of this particular vice in women: ‘non es muger en el mundo por la mayor parte que escusar pueda de vanagloria’ (183). In II, x (Martínez 187–190, Andreas 404–405), again a characteristic of the ‘muger mala’ is constructed on a universal failing in women: ‘non es muger que mentiras non tenga prestas e non disimule la verdad en un punto’ Martínez 187), and this is the case also in II, xii (Martínez 194–196, Andreas 404–405): ‘la muger ser mucho parlera, regla general es’ (Martínez 194). But Andreas’s jocose denunciation of all women

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

79

as drunkards is modified in II, xi (Martínez, 191–194, Andreas 404–405) to refer to certain women who drink (‘Si la muger se mete en el vino [. . .]’, 191), while Martínez’s general denunciation of drunkenness includes men (‘e desta regla non salvo al ombre’, 192). Chapter xiii (Martínez 196–201) is partly based on two passages of Andreas in which he describes women as incapable of truly loving a man, since they are subject to wanton lust and are slaves to greed (Andreas 405–407 and 408–409). But Martínez opts for a more general moral: ‘el poco amor que la muger al ombre tiene’ makes them totally untrustworthy. It is significant that in this chapter the women represented are wives, not mistresses: there is no safe refuge even in marriage for the man who loves a woman, since the wives depicted here use alcahuetas and indulge in practices which drive their husbands away, are solicitous in their presence but mock them behind their back, and are tiresome hypocrites in bed, feigning resistance to their husbands’ more than welcome attentions. The moral ground has shifted considerably since the beginning of the Primera Parte where amor desordenado meant illicit love and where Martínez exempted from his condemnation that sexual activity which takes place within the hordenado matrimonio ordained by God for procreation (67). By the end of the Segunda Parte (II, xiv), Martínez’s discourse has become totally misogamous, a denunciation of marriage.25 A wife is condemned explicitly here as one of three wordly goods – ‘riquezas, mugeres e estados’ – which it is folly to desire (201). The way to Martínez’s rejection of even the licit spouse has been made easier by the previous chapter in which he has recontextualized what ‘woman’ refers to so as to include the greedy and hypocritical wife. Moreover, the distinction that previously obtained between muger and mala muger and the occasional references to the existence of virtuous women have long since ceased to appear in Martínez’s discussion of female vices, so that by the time we reach the final chapter the phrase mugeres mal usantes that he uses to describe the women referred to in the previous two Partes has acquired a sense that is virtually indistinguishable from the globally encompassing mugeres.

The problem of ‘maldezir’ and Partes III and IV Martínez has now set Andreas aside. But his glossing of De amore has thrown up a major anomaly that undermines the authority of his moral voice. In several places, he has denounced women as slanderers, as practitioners of maldezir. Woman is ‘murmurante e detractadora’ as the rubric of II, ii states (154), owing to her inherent characteristic of envy: 25 Naturally this does not mean that there is any questioning of marriage as a sacrament; there is a reference in the Tercera Parte to the ‘honestad de matrimonio’ (216) which is deemed to be attainable even for the most morally depraved man.

80

ROBERT ARCHER

Pocas mugeres fallarás que sus lenguas callar pudiesen en maldezir con pura enbidia. E piensan las cuitadas que maldiziendo de otras fazen a sí fermosas, e desonrando a otras acrescientan en su honra. Pero si considerase el detractador embidioso e murmurador, el maldezidor – cuchillo de dos tajos, que alaba en presençia e denuesta en absençia – cómo el sabio lo tiene en la posesión que él meresçe e por aquél que es, quiçá, si lo bien sintiese, rebentaría. (164–165)

He characterizes women as belonging generically to this category of maldiziente and yet he has already recognized that he is a maldiziente himself, and writes, as we saw earlier, a justification of maldezir as a means to moral reform. But even the demarcation he makes implicitly in the above passage between those who slander behind backs and those who do so openly is not enough to invalidate the accusation against himself, and he knows it. Hence the need for a Tercera Parte, the function of which, as he explains in II, xiv, is that it will redress any perceived imbalance in his treatment of the sexes and answer the objection that his book is a pretext for writing a maldezir of women: ‘que non digan que fue manera de mal dezir e mal fablar dellas’ (202). His claim seems to be borne out by what he actually does in the Tercera Parte, where the nature of men is discussed in the context of a broad humoral taxonomy with a wealth of selective physical detail.26 But there is not only a change of focus from women to men, but also a shift in perspective. While the first two Partes follow the format of Book 3 of De amore in using the material concerning earthly love and women as a series of admonitions presented primarily to a fictional male reader (with frequent addresses to a more general male audience and occasionally to women), some sections of the Tercera Parte adopt the perspective of women to describe the humoral complexions of men.27 We see this first in the chapter concerning the ‘ombre sanguino’ (III, vii) where the focus is on how women are duped by the attractive but irresponsible personalities of this humoral type, and are led into sinful actions. They leave their husbands for such men and covet those of other women, subsequently suffering terrible hardships ‘e todo esto por amor de aquel que en verdad non pierde sueño ni comer por ella’ (215). As well as condemnation of such behaviour for the sake of men of this kind, there is pastoral concern for the natural disposition of women to be fooled by them: !Quién pudiera pensar a quántos males, perigros e dapnos se pone la muger 26 The same approach to male character through humoral theory is to be found in Martín de Córdoba, Jardín de nobles doncellas (Córdoba 1974: 250), and in the Spanish versions of Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (where the passage, absent from the Latin text, probably derives from Martínez). 27 For Martínez’s use of physical detail, see Ciceri 1983.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

81

después de errada, o en el tiempo que comete los tales yerros a quántos denuedos – e la muerte al ojo – e non cura sinón çerrar e pasar, e biva la locura! (215)

His final words in this chapter are also for women: E non curen de creer locos amadores por mucho que sean bailadores, loçanos nin cantadores: que todos son burladores, honestad de matrimonio salva’. (216)

The chapter on the colórico (III, viii) offers concrete advice on how las buenas mugeres honestas should behave when married to a man of this complexion. But it also includes a vivid dialogic representation of how women – referred to as las mugeres (217) and la muger (218) without the qualifying adjectives that would remove the generic value of these terms of reference – can work evil through such a man by knowing how to manipulate him. Martínez describes briefly a kind of spiritual exercise which the choleric man might use to control his anger when provoked, but the assumption made here is that it is in the power of women to use that irascibility for their own purposes, given that this type of man is often blind to the reason with which he has been endowed and will usually react with the rage of a wild animal. The chapter contains harsh words for women who use this male defect for their own evil ends: Meresçía la tal casada o amigada, o otra qualquier [. . .] que como [el hombre] entrase ferido, le diese a ella una tal por la cara en señal de vitoria e enxiemplo a las otras que nunca dieren causa a los ombres de mal aver nin mal fazer por vengar sus lágrimas raviosas, e injurias voluntarias e dañadas. (220)

More significantly still, this passage, with its recommendation that the choleric man should take out his rage on women for the offence (injuria) that they commit against men with their goading tears, is also the enactment by the male narrator of precisely that malicia he denounces in women. But by the end of the chapter, the spite has gone, and the voice of pastoral concern returns with words of counsel for women: they should avoid such men and turn to God. Martínez then describes the ombre flemático (III, ix), choosing to do so in the form of a deliberate parody of the ideal of the courtly lover, depicting such men as the opposite of what the gallant suitor should be (221–225). He is more of a woman than the woman he is with, suffering from feminine temor – a characteristic that Martínez has not previously attributed to women, for the simple reason that it is not usually seen as a defect but rather as a positive quality, closely linked to vergüenza, which, as we saw in the texts of Eiximenis, Córdoba, and Vives discussed in chapter 1, ensures that women

82

ROBERT ARCHER

do not behave in a shamelessly sinful way. Again Martínez channels toward his women readers his analysis of the nature of men, asserting that men are incapable of behaving in a way that would make them deserving of the love that women give them. In the same chapter he loosely connects the unsuitability of such men as the object of women’s love to the willingness of some women – and also certain men – to dispense with considerations of compatibility for the sake of an advantageous marriage with someone much older. His condemnation of this practice leads into a classification of marriages into four types according to the relative ages of the couple (225–229). His treatment of the enforced marriage for money between an old man and a young woman depicts, by means of a long interior monologue, the disgust of the young woman, her despair, and the longing for a man of her own age that, while natural in itself, in the context of her married condition places her in grave moral danger. Here there is no sense that the woman bears responsibility for the situation she finds herself in or that this is the fruit of her greed, even though the sin of greed was attributed to women generally in the earlier Partes of the book. Quite the contrary: ‘¡Ya mi marido moço o çapatero fuese, pobre e sin dinero, e non fuese este diablo que tengo! ¿Qué me aprovecha su riqueza, cuitada? ¿Su fidalguía qué me vale?’ Rather, she is depicted as a victim of her parents’ decision, forcibly denied by them the only type of marriage approved by God, that is, ‘el moço con la moça’. This victimization of women also occupies Martínez in his concluding remarks about the ombre malencólico (III, x). Men of this type ‘non ha maldad que por dineros non cometan, nin muger que por ellos non vendan por aver o más valer. La que tal marido o amigo tiene, posesión tiene de muerte o de poca vida’ (229). Again, there is a discourse of dissuasion, aimed at women. Martínez deals with the melancholic only in the first half of the chapter (229–230). In the other half (230–231) he makes his concluding remarks about the combined operations of the complexions he has described. In doing so, he refers not only to men, the ostensible object of study in the Tercera Parte, but also to women, taking up again the troublesome question of the degree to which considerations of humoral theory are important to the understanding of the other sex. When he had first addressed this issue in II, xiv he had said that on the one hand ‘los ombres non son comprehendidos como las mugeres so reglas generales – esto por el seso mayor que alcançan’, and on the other he had allowed that whatever he says in his book about men ‘tal es mesmo de las mugeres’ (204). The difference, he had stated there, is that the ‘otras condiçiones’ of women which they could overcome if they chose but which they perversely (‘voluntariosamente’) refuse to attempt to change, dominate their general nature to such an extent that the effects of the complexions and the major differences between them that obtain among men are elided. However, when he again takes up this question here in III, x, he seems to allow that, in spite of the power of the ‘otras condiçiones’ of women,

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

83

the complexions also operate in them. Their influence can be overcome in the same way by men and women alike, that is, by the exercise of common sense and reason: el sentimiento e natural seso e juyzio mucho ayuda al ombre e muger para se encobrir de algund açidente si le predumina de rezio e le es malo. (230)

Both sexes have as enemies ‘estas calidades malas, los acçidentes perversos dellas, el usar mal continuando fasta la fin’ as well as ‘la voluntad desordenada, la cobdiçia defrenada, la ira non temprada, la vengança aparejada’. But men have an additional three-headed foe: ‘el mundo, el diablo e la muger’ (230). This is almost the last direct comment that Martínez has to make about women in his book. The only other place he does so is at the beginning of the Quarta Parte in a passage in which he summarizes what he claims to have done so far: ya de suso avemos visto los fundamentos de amar e los provechos e bienes que dél se siguen, demás avemos visto quál es mejor e más provechoso – amar a Dios o a las cosas terrenales – e de cómo el amor desordenado de hombre a muger o de muger a hombre es muy perigroso, que mata los cuerpos e condena las ánimas a penas infernales; demás vimos los viçios en algund tanto de los omes e mugeres (233).

This is a significant statement since it purports to prioritize the constituent elements of the book, among them that of women. The first phrase takes the reader down an alley of self-doubt where he is left to wonder if he has read the first three Partes for what their author now says they are. Here at the top of the list of contents are the ‘fundamentos de amar e los provechos que dél siguen’, a matter which in reality is not dealt with anywhere in Arcipreste, not, at least, in a literal sense. But the statement would be perfectly valid for De amore, as Martínez and his readers knew; in essence this is what Andreas says about his work on its final page, referring to his first two books on the nature and art of love, while enjoining Walter not to follow any of its recommendations if he wants to draw closer to God.28 The intention in echoing Andreas in such a strikingly inappropriate way is assuredly ironic, although only readers of the full version of Andreas would have picked up the irony. But Martínez then claims for his book, again with Andreas, its indispensable moral objective: to lead men to the love of God through the rejection of amor desordenado, the aim which he had stated in the Prologue and at several points in the text. Only then does he mention the question of sin, but he does 28 ‘Nam in prima partem praesentis libelli [. . .] artem amatoriam [. . .] serie tibi plena dirigimus et competenti ordinatione dispositam delegamus’ (Andreas 410).

84

ROBERT ARCHER

so without making a distinction between men and women as sinners, and indeed he places women after men in the order of the accused, underlining their subjection to male reason and their dependence on its proper use. Missing here is the explicit link that had been made in the Prologue between the amor desordenado that led men away from God and malas mugeres. This statement, with its irony and its re-ordering of priorities, can be taken to define the book as it is supposed to look after the shift in perspective that had been introduced in the Tercera Parte. In a sense, it is the shift in perspective signalled here that makes the Quarta Parte a necessary adjunct rather than a conveniently topical appendage. This is because when, in the Tercera Parte, Martínez tries to balance the distribution of the attention paid to women and men that he had made in the first two Partes by talking now in terms of humoral complexions about men and – more ambiguously – about women, he leaves himself open to the charge that he was promoting the theologically problematic notion that human beings were constrained by these in the exercise of free will. It is this serious matter that he explicitly addresses early in this part of the book, launching into a denunciation of the belief of ‘muchas personas, así omes como mugeres, que tienen que si mal han, que no les viene sinón porque de nesçesario les avía de venir, llamando a esto tal ventura, fado e fortuna, o dicha buena o mala’ (233–234). Shortly after the beginning of this Parte, ostensibly making a digression, Martínez turns to the subject of predestination (238–241). Conceptually this is not a true digression since predestination was part of the tangle of theological questions which, together with free will, grace, divine omniscience, and the notion of fate that Martínez has been discussing, concerned writers, religious and secular, in medieval Spain from the late fourteenth century until at least the time that Martínez was writing.29 Several points in the subsequent discussion of the question of fate coincide as a matter of course with the concerns that are central to the matter of predestination, such as the nature of the praescitii (preçitos, 258) and the operations of divine omniscience and prescience (267). As this first chapter of the final Parte evolves, Martínez’s discourse drifts further and further away from the questions of amor desordenado and women. Indeed, there is only one further gender-specific reference to women, although it is a telling one. Discussing the inscrutable nature of God’s will, Martínez draws an analogy (246) between God and Man and a man and his wife: just as a man cannot reveal his secrets to his wife, so God cannot reveal 29 Predestination is the subject of early-fifteenth-century vernacular treatises and is discussed by Pero López de Ayala and a number of the poets in the Cancionero de Baena; it is also the starting-point of Ausiàs March’s great poem ‘Puis que sens tu, algú a tu no basta’ (number CV). See Archer 1993 and March 1997: 477–490, Vázquez Janeiro 1984 and Rubio 1964. For Martínez’s probable source, a treatise included in Francesc de Eiximenis’s Vita Christi, see Hauf 1983.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

85

His mysteries to Man. The repeated injunction in many texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries not to tell a woman any more than necessary, because of her natural inability to keep a secret, is assumed here to be advice that is so commonly followed that it can serve as a useful basis of comparison.30 In this Quarta Parte, the original impetus of the book has fallen from view, as Martínez insists on the moral responsibility of every man and woman for his or her actions, drawing on his repertoire of narrative skills to work into his text an allegorical tale from Boccaccio, personal testimony, and the many apostrophes which he directs to the reader in conversational style. But almost immediately after the section on fate, he launches into another and even more significant false digression (259–270). This one, which takes as its point of departure the moral warning that God always sees through the hypocrite, is a ferocious denunciation of the Beghards. Martínez is specific about the nature of their hypocrisy, which he depicts as involving an outward show of devotion that cloaks a range of sexual practices so perverse that they are, as Catherine Brown has pointed out, ‘chaotically incoherent’.31 Their alleged sexual behaviour is not classified according to traditional categories – heterosexual, passive or active sodomite – but instead are a jumble of all these at once. Perversities like those of these hypocrites, Martínez seems to suggest, defy categorization. But what is most striking about the passage is that it contains Martínez’s only protracted denunciation of the sin of lust. The passage on luxuria is the shortest in the list of capital sins connected with amor desordenado (I, 129), while lust is not one of the characteristics attributed to women in later parts of the book, for the reasons previously discussed: Martínez writes to dissuade ardent males from the belief that, if pressed, the morally feeble object of their desires might finally respond eagerly to their importunement. His denunciation of the lust of the Beghards for boys and women and other men – and all of them at once – is more ferocious than anything he has said in relation to women.

The ‘Demanda’ and its Anachronism Passages like these point up the crudity of those readings of Arcipreste de Talavera which bracket it alongside later, supposedly misogynistic or antifeminist works in the so-called debate about women in Spain. Such readings, one suspects, have their starting-point in the passage that has come to be known as the Demanda which appears for the first time in the earliest edition of 1498, appended to the Quarta Parte, but which is absent from the only 30 In Martínez’s only other reference to women, when he briefly mentions again mal fablar in IV. ii (292–293 and 297), this vice is assumed to be practised by men and women alike. 31 Brown 1999: 84–89.

86

ROBERT ARCHER

extant manuscript. It is headed by a rubric in which it is claimed that this new section is the proper ending of the book, since in it the author ‘demanda perdón si en algo de lo que ha dicho ha enojado o no bien dicho’. It soon becomes clear that this is much more than the lengthy elaboration of the standard topos of authorial modesty, and is in fact meant to operate as a palinode in which the author pleads with his women readers that they will pardon him for presenting them in a light which is bound to earn their displeasure. The complex yo of Martínez, whose personal opinion and testimony is one of the structuring elements of his book, is transformed in the Demanda into the figure of the repentant maldiziente whose vituperation of women is now seen to be caused by his sufferings as a frustrated lover at the hands of ‘aquellas que siempre matan sin cuchillo ni espada e tormentan a quien quieren sin que bevan la toca’ and ‘aquellas so qual manto beví en esta vida’ (304–306).32 He recounts a dream in which the nature of the women he has offended is defined further: ‘señoras más de mil [. . .] fermosas, ya sin par graciosas, a par que gentiles’, but also ‘crueles señoras’ who, while berating him for what he has written against them, drag him by the hair, stamp on his throat and try to yank out his tongue. Waking from his nightmare, the narrator bewails the lonely life he has brought upon himself by writing such a book: ‘¡Guay del que duerme solo!’ While it is true that the Arcipreste de Talavera includes many chapters in which women are given a prominent and largely negative place, the Demanda enforces a reading according to which the book is conceived by its author primarily as a piece of misogynist writing. It redefines the status of its author, leaning on an argument which had frequently been used in defence writings (so far we have seen it in Flor de virtudes and Eiximenis) in order to discredit such archetypal maldizientes as Solomon or Boccaccio, namely that the authors of misogynist works wrote in order to avenge their sufferings in love at the hands of women. But it also assumes that readers, especially women readers, are already disposed not to take its misogyny in too much earnest. The argument will be made in the next few pages that the Demanda is not the work of Martínez at all, and could only have been written at a considerably later date. Between the 1498 edition in which the Demanda first appears and the composition of Arcipreste de Talavera in 1438, a lot of the material about women discussed in later chapters of this book had appeared in Spain: the argumentational defences of Diego de Valera and Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Álvaro de Luna’s largely exemplum-based Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres, but also Torroella’s Maldezir de mugeres and all the literature that 32 The phrase ‘sin que bevan la toca’ refers to the tormento de toca mentioned by Covarrubias and defined by the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española (1992) as ‘[tormento] que consistía en hacer tragar agua a través de una gasa delgada’. For other references to the toca see Macpherson and MacKay 1998: 124–125.

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

87

in one way or another is related to that poem. By the time the 1498 edition came out, the subject of women had been dealt with in many different ways, few of which have any bearing on the meaning or context of Martínez’s text. One work of particular interest from the latter end of this period is Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella, published circa 1495 and written a decade or two earlier.33 This contains the figure of Torrellas, a personage based on the author of the infamous coplas but here transformed by literary metamorphosis into a misogynist archetype. In his debate with Braçayda on the question of which of the sexes initiates love, Flores’s Torrellas argues that women are the guiltier party; his success leads to the death of the two lovers named in the title of the work. But Torrellas himself then falls a victim to love and, tricked into an ambush, meets a grisly death at the hands of the enraged Queen of Scots, mother to Mirabella, and her ladies in waiting, now transformed into bloodthirsty Bacchantes. This turn of events, of course, leaves the existence of female cruelty in no doubt: yo stimo que ellas davan al cuitado de Torrellas mayor pena que la muerte misma, y ansí vino a soffrir tanta pena de las palabras como de las obras, y después que fueron alçadas todas las mesas fueron juntas a dar amarga cena a Torrellas, y tanto fue de todas servido con potages y aves y maestre sala que non sé cómo scrivir las differencias de las injurias y offienças que le hazían. Y esto duró hasta que’l día esclareció. Y después que non dexaron ninguna carne en los huessos, fueron quemados, y de su seniza guardando cadaqual una buxeta por reliquias de su enemigo. Y algunas hovo que por cultre en el cuello la trahían, porque trayendo más a memoria su vengança, mayor plazer hoviessen. Ansí que la grande malicia de Torrellas dio a las damas victoria, y a éll pago de su merecido.34

The parallel is not coincidental: the Demanda presents Martínez as an author who has nightmares about meeting an end similar to that of Flores’s Torrellas.35 The author of the Demanda imitates Flores’s ironic description of

33 34

See Gwara 1986–87. Matulka 1931: 369–370. The orthography and punctuation of Matulka’s edition have been slightly modified. An important precedent for the description of Torrellas’s death is the passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Orpheus, having lost Eurydice for the second time, directs his desires towards boys, spurning the solicitudes of the other sex, and is murdered by a group of Bacchantes. The influence of Flores is pointed out by Martín de Riquer (Riquer 1949: 332); Matulka had earlier assumed (1931: 165–166) that the Demanda is authentic and that the traffic of influences was the reverse of what is argued here. 35 There is evidence for a legend of Torroella’s death, no doubt originating in Flores’s romance, in Juan del Encina’s ‘Quien dize mal de mugeres’, ll. 176–177 (ID 6962, in Pérez Priego 1990: 202–208), a poem found in his Cancionero of 1496: ‘Muera quien mal les dessea/ peor muerte que Torrellas’ (ID references are to the índice of Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991).

88

ROBERT ARCHER

Torrellas’s gruesome death, painting a comic martyrdom in which the very symbols of female propriety and virtuous retirement from the world – ‘las ruecas e las aspas’– are used to beat him about the head. If in his dream the ladies do not finish him off, it is only because he suddenly awakes. The Demanda is a blatant anachronism that belongs to a later age than that of Martínez de Toledo. It is assumed that the author of Arcipreste de Talavera has deliberately adopted a misogynistic posture, one which, precisely because it is a posture and has been deliberately assumed, can now just as deliberately be turned into the subject of pretended regret at the end of the book. Such ostensibly feigned misogyny appears in poems by Tapia and Hernán Mexía, where the poet is careful to explain in a rubric or in the poem itself that he has written against women in the manner of Torroella only because a lady or ladies has asked him to do so.36 Yet Martínez’s reworking of Book 3 of De amore and his shift of focus in the two final Partes reveals an instability in his discourse about women that is at several removes from the kind of misogynistic positioning that the author of the Demanda thinks he finds. As Martínez’s text wanders from one standpoint to another, its own internal anomalies are exposed: the pastoral concern for the mistreatment of women by unprincipled men alternating with the evidence of traditional exempla and empirical argument that attest to women as the incitement and cause of sin; the apportioning of blame to Bathsheba even as the Biblical text denies it; the holding up for scorn of woman as an object of love, with recourse to most of the standard arguments against her, and yet the almost complete silence about her traditional lasciviousness; her endowment with a voice in dramatic dialogue that, even as it tries to silence her, limits her performed defects to garrulity in the face of all the other failings enumerated in the male-voice narrative; the denunciation of female spite which enacts a male counterpart of the very malicia it condemns; the defence of virtuous women in the face of the implacable universality of the misogynous rule that is ostensibly supported; and at every point the shifting referent of the word that at once is meant to signify all that is women even as it limits itself with qualifiers: muger, mala muger, las virtuosas, todas, casi todas, las más, algunas. Martínez’s struggle to cope with the contradictions that confront him as he tries to lay much of the responsibility for amor desordenado on women is completely lost on the author of the Demanda. He, like readers from our own period, saw in the Arcipreste de Talavera only a predecessor to the literature that took as its point of reference from Pere Torroella’s Maldezir de mugeres. What he missed was the way in which Martínez had honestly and unselfconsciously problematized his consideration of women on his own terms, and had engaged with the inherent complexities of the subject. But it is probable too 36 Tapia, ‘Con fe de presta tornada’ (ID 6619); Hernán Mexía, ‘defectos de las condiciones de las mujeres’ (ID 3125).

UNSTABLE SEX, UNSTABLE VOICES

89

that, since several parts of Martínez’s book, particularly those in which female speech is represented, are undeniably funny, the author of the Demanda was misled into a false reading by the deceptive power of laughter. It is this problematic capacity of humour that is the subject of the next chapter.

3 PRESENT LAUGHTER: BERNAT METGE’S LO SOMNI AND JAUME ROIG’S SPILL PRESENT LAUGHTER

In her discussion with Lady Reason in Le Livre de la cité des dames about the misogynistic commonplaces that constantly undermine the position of women, Christine de Pizan refers to the allegation made by some that when Christ chose to appear after the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene rather than to one of the disciples, he did so because he knew that a woman’s tongue was the best guarantee that the news would spread quickly: ‘I smile at the folly which some men have expressed and I even remember that I heard some foolish preachers teach that God first appeared to a woman because He knew well that she did not know how to keep quiet so that this way the news of His Resurrection would be spread more rapidly.’ She [Lady Reason] answered: ‘My daughter, you have spoken well when you call them fools who have said this. It is not enough for them to attack women. They impute even to Jesus Christ such blasphemy, as if to say that He wished to reveal this great perfection and dignity through a vice. I do not know how a man could dare to say this, even in jest, as God should not be brought in on such joking matters.’1

Christine recognizes that behind this gloss on Christ’s apparition a joke is intended, but deplores both the joke and those who perpetuate it; Lady Reason takes the condemnation further, alleging blasphemy. Confronted with jokes in misogynistic discourse, an earnest writer of defence like Pizan has necessarily to quash the humour that others intend. To fall in with the joke, even supposing that she or other women were disposed to do so, would be an act of complicity, a recognition that women are endowed not with persuasive eloquence, as Christine argues, but with the garrulousness that the medieval working notion of women takes for granted. For the serious defence writer, all misogynistic argument must be treated with a gravity that recognizes the consequences in women’s lives of the attitudes behind it.2 1 2

Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la cité des dames, 1.10.5 (Pizan 1982: 28–29). For a slightly different interpretation of this passage see the brief discussion in Blamires 1997: 225–226: ‘To concede humour in misogyny would have been to pretend that nothing was really at stake, that misogyny had no connection with women’s exclusion from education, or with wife-beating’.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

91

Humour, deliberate or unintentional, latent or actual, occurs in the satire and ridicule of practically every period of negative writing about women since Juvenal, and its importance in the construction of a misogynous discourse would thus seem to be self-evident. And yet, as far as I am aware, it is an element which has been largely overlooked in the extensive discussion of misogynous texts over the past decades. This may be due in part to the notorious difficulty of discussing humour and laughter. Humour is an unstable element, and what may make a successful joke in one context may flop in another or may even be presented quite seriously without a hint of humour. A passage in Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas illustrates this point well. In it Córdoba uses the same Resurrection story whose function as a misogynist joke had been so roundly condemned by Christine: La otra propiedad es en la costilla que suena; & significa que la muger habunda en la lengua & en palabras más quel varón; donde como uno demandase a otro ¿por qué las mugeres fablan más que los varones? Respondió el otro burlando: – porquel varón fue formado & fecho de tierra, que es materia sorda & no suena nada; la muger fue fecha de huesso, donde si pones dos o tres huessos en una calabaça y la mueves, más ruýdo y son hazen que nuezes puestas en costal. En esto dezir dellas, no se tengan por desonrradas, ca Dios por esto sabiendo que heran parleras, primero que a los varones les reveló su resurrección porque por sus lenguas fuese publicada. (Córdoba 1974: 156)

Córdoba takes the idea behind the Resurrection joke and uses it to reassure women readers that Christ’s decision to reveal himself first to a woman is one of the privileges of womanhood which God granted them ‘sabiendo que eran parleras’. He offers this as a reason why women should not be offended when men allege in jest that Eve was made from the rib because bones clattering in a skull sound just like a woman’s jabbering. Córdoba refers to the same male reading of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene that Christine has deplored, but uses it as a straight-faced counterargument to another tale of female garrulity, one which he specifically identifies as a well-intentioned joke. The decisive factor in these two opposed uses of the Resurrection story is, of course, the different rhetorical aims of their interpreters. We know how they reacted and why they reacted the way they did. Both authors limit and control, each in a different way, the humorous elements they deal with (or, rather, the elements that are for others humorous), and both the passages cited give us an unequivocal account of the nature of their reactions to potentially humorous material. In each case we could say that their declared ideological position – the defence of women’s dignity in the case of Christine, the complex justification of the idea of a female monarch on the Castilian throne in the case of Córdoba – determines how they view the joke or jokes. But most reactions to humour, including laughter, of course do not occur

92

ROBERT ARCHER

in this meditated way. Most readers, both the medieval ones and those contemporary with ourselves, react instinctively on the basis of what some theories of humour appreciation call ‘affective disposition’, a factor in the production of humour which is best seen as a continuum of possible reactions from extreme negativity, through neutral response, to extreme positiveness.3 The reader’s position on this continuum is, of course, normally unknowable in relation to most of the material that we might objectively consider to be capable of eliciting a humorous response. With regard to the reactions of medieval readers to such material, there are other factors that contribute to the level of ‘affective disposition’ of the recipient such as the four ‘domains’ identified by Jacques Le Goff, namely, ‘value, mentalities, practices and aesthetics’, in particular the control of laughter by the Church and monastic orders at certain periods, the ‘domestication’ of laughter in the courts, and what he calls the scholastic casuistry of laughter concerned with determining who may laugh, when, how, etc. – a whole culture of laughter-control.4 And the concept of disposition in this historical sense would have to consider at least some of the insights of Bakhtin on the periodization of what he terms ‘laughter’, such as the contention that for the early medieval parodist ‘laughter [by which he means mirthful humour] was as universal as seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology’, that is, a kind of culturally embedded ‘affective disposition’ of a positive kind.5 But laughter is not always an indicator of the presence of humour, since it can be caused by non-humorous situations, such as anxiety, a sense of relief after perceived danger, or derision.6 Derision in particular, which Hobbes, in a brief but influential statement on the subject, saw as the main cause of laughter (the so-called ‘superiority’ theories of laughter derive from it), has obvious relevance to the way in which misogynous texts are read as humorous or provoke laughter.7 Humour and laughter – let us keep the terms separate – are unstable elements, capable of influencing in the most profound way how a text is read, precisely because they rely on such complexities of affective disposition. Humorous reponse is sometimes set in motion in literary texts by ‘cueing’ – that is, deliberately pointing out that something is meant to be funny, or (in 3 4

Chapman & Foot 1976: 99–100. Le Goff 1997. For the origins of the medieval discussion of jest and earnest and the Church’s attitude to laughter, see Curtius 1953: 417–435. 5 Bakhtin 1984: 84. 6 Chapman & Foot 1976: 3–4. 7 For Hobbes’s statement about laughter and the ‘superiority’ theories to which it has given rise, see Chapman & Foot 1976: 63–91. As Le Goff notes (1997: 48), Old Testament Hebrew distinguishes between two types of laughter: a mocking denigratory laughter, which must be related to Hobbes’s concept, and happy unbridled laughter (something closer to the Bakhtinian concept).

PRESENT LAUGHTER

93

narrative) depicting a character actually laughing because he finds it funny. More often, however, it is uncued in this direct way and lies embedded in the satirical detail which the writer uses to insist on the particular defects of female nature he has chosen.8 In these sorts of condition, we might explain the perception of humour by the incongruity that is a widely accepted condition for comic reaction – and incongruity itself, where humour is intentional rather than accidental, might be seen as a rhetorically subtle form of cueing.9 But it is no less useful to take account of the concept developed by Henri Bergson some eighty years ago: the stimulus of comic reaction, he argued, was often the result of the perception of what he calls ‘rigidity’ (‘une raideur quelconque appliquée sur la mobilité de la vie’), as when a misogynous diatribe turns a woman into a thing by combining what he calls ‘the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement’.10 It is scarcely possible to write a tirade against women without recourse to grotesque exaggeration, the ‘mechanical’ element that Bergson thinks essential. Latent humour embedded in such discourse, even when written in earnest – we can hardly ever tell – can at any time be activated by the suitably disposed reader or audience (and in the context of an appropriate audience, it is generally true that laughter is infectious). Some of the most influential works of European misogynistic writing are examples of this – Marbod of Rennes’s De muliere mala, Matheolus, or Il Corbaccio – where the authors clearly revel in grotesque satirical detail.11 In the following passage of Il Corbaccio, for instance, the Spirit (the erstwhile husband of the object of the protagonist’s desire) uses grotesque Juvenalian satire in his attempt to persuade the protagonist to forget his obsessive love for his widow: Be assured that there is no tow or any other padding in that swelling which you see above her belt, but only the flesh of two puffed and blighted plums, which were once perhaps two unripe apples, delightful to both the touch and sight – although I do believe she brought them thus misshapen from her mother’s body; but let us pass over this. They – whatever the cause may be, either because they were pulled too much by others, or because their own excess weight stretched them – are so beyond measure lengthened and dislocated from their natural position that perhaps (or rather, without doubt) if she let them droop, they would reach her navel, empty and wrinkled like a deflated bladder. [. . .] Her belly more or less corresponds to her cheeks, pulled taught by her tight wimple; lined with thick, wide furrows like a young she-goat, it looks like an empty bag, sagging just like the empty skin that hangs from the chin to the chest of an ox; and perhaps no 8 9 10 11

The concept of cueing is cited by Balzaretti 2002: 117. Chapman & Foot 1976: 12–13. Bergson 1935: 38–66 and 69 (Bergson 1927: 39–66 and 69). Liber decem capitolorum, III, in Puig Rodríguez-Escalona 1995; Van Hamel 1892–1905; Boccaccio 1975.

94

ROBERT ARCHER

less than the other pieces of cloth, she must raise it aloft whenever she wishes to empty her bladder obeying natural necessity, or, following pleasure, when she wants to put the devil in the oven.12

It it difficult to envisage that this passage could have been read without a reaction of laughter of some kind: out of derision perhaps, or because the ‘mobility of life’ in the young widow is denied by the counter-naturalness that turns her into a ‘thing’, or else perhaps because of Bakhtinian culturallyembedded mirth. But it is important that in this passage the Spirit is not making a general misogynist statement about the ‘pigsty of modern womanhood’ (33) that had concerned him previously in his declarations to the protagonist, but rather describes the particular secret ugliness of his lady.13 While the general vituperation of the female sex that precedes this passage in Il Corbaccio is, as always, latently comic, the relentless enumeration of women’s universal moral defects leaves little room for the grotesque detail of the kind we find in the passage quoted above. This tends to make the general misogyny seem less intentionally humorous and thereby to entail a higher level of ostensible earnestness; indeed a reaction of laughter from derision (rather than mirth) probably depends on the supposition that the intention is earnest. The passage quoted, however, with its studied stylistic effects (especially the use of fruit and animal analogies) draws directly on the humorous possibilities of grotesque detail. In it, a discourse designed to maximize the conditions for the production of humour and laughter is privileged, while the earnest misogyny of the book seems temporarily to lose its security of status as the dominant mode of discourse. The contrast between these two types of misogynist writing – unsmiling general invective on the one hand and humorous particular detail on the other – gives rise to a broad problem in the relationship between misogyny and laughter. Is the presence of declared or self-evident comic elements to be taken as an indication that the author has been using misogynistic material for the sake of a final effect that is preponderantly comic? Does an increase in the level of humour mean a diminution of the underlying misogyny?14 As we have seen, this kind of reading of misogynistic material is already visible in early readings of Arcipreste de Talavera. Even in the space of sixty years or 12 13 14

Boccaccio 1975: 55; Italian text in Boccaccio 1992: 111–113. Boccaccio 1992: 69: ‘[il] porcile delle femmine moderne’. Allen (2001: 210–216), without addressing the problem of humour as such, neatly categorizes interpretations of Il Corbaccio into three types: an experiment in satire, the expression of Boccaccio’s personal views on women, or ‘an ingenious meta-satire that satirizes the male character who offers the usual satirical views about women’. In the fifteenth-century Hispanic texts there are at least two interpretations of the text: (1) it represents the personal view of the author about women in his embittered old age, (2) it is a comic satire which nevertheless contains universal truths (this seems to be Bernat Metge’s reading, as we shall see).

PRESENT LAUGHTER

95

less after its composition, the author of the Demanda that first appears in the edition of 1498 misreads Martínez, prioritizing the humour that characterizes some of the satirical detail in a way that, while not challenging any of the assumptions about women, blurs the didactic focus of the work. Moreover, some modern readings of misogynistic Hispanic texts similarly assume that potential humour in the use of grotesque exaggeration can be taken as a sign of authorial levity, given that such discourse is in itself trivial in so far as it merely repeats already widely accepted beliefs.15 The presence of humorous elements or of laughter in misogynous discourse, then, is not to be taken lightly, since it can easily undermine, at least for some readers, the primacy of status of the misogyny itself. But how can we take account of an element that essentially operates at the level of response of the individual reader? The problem of affective disposition patently lies beyond what can normally be deduced from any particular text. However, there are misogynous writings which acknowledge their own deliberate humour or which contain, through narrative representation of the act of laughter, a cued response for the reader. Such texts make it possible to study the operations of misogyny alongside the humour and laughter in the certainty that the combination of the two elements is the result of authorial intention. In the Hispanic corpus there are two major works where this happens: Bernat Metge’s Lo somni and Jaume Roig’s Spill.

Bernat’s laughter Lo somni, written in the last few years of the fourteenth century, is a work of extraordinary innovation, spanning several genres, and drawing on a considerable knowledge of Latin and Italian literature as well as theology (with some reference also to the Koran).16 Its narrative framework is that of the dream-visitation to a wrongfully imprisoned protagonist, the most important examples of which for any discussion of Metge’s work are Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae – the model for the prison context – and Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, an important source for that part of the work that concerns us here. In Lo somni the visitation is by figures of mythology or from the historical past who come to voice their concerns about the author’s beliefs and behaviour. One of these is Joan I of Aragon, in whose court Metge had been one of the highest-ranking court officals until the king’s death in mysterious circumstances in 1396. Accusations of corruption and treason had followed, and Metge was one of several men imprisoned until released by the new king Martí and subsequently cleared of the accusations; practically irreplaceable in his administrative knowledge and ability, he soon regained his position. According to the hypothesis of Riquer, Metge wrote Lo somni after 15 16

Cantavella 1992a, discussed in a later section of this chapter. For the background to Lo somni: Riquer 1959: 87–167 and 1964: II, 357–432.

96

ROBERT ARCHER

his release. Martí himself asked for a copy of this and other works of Metge in April 1399.17 In this book, Joan reproves Bernat for what in modern terms would be materialism and rationalism (the belief in only a natural reality that man shares with animals, denial of the immortality of the soul, divine providence or Hell) and argues with him point by point in the first of the four books of the work until, abruptly, Bernat concedes that he has been in error.18 In the second book, Joan answers, though not to Bernat’s complete satisfaction, some of the questions he puts to him about his condition in the after-life. In both these books the protagonist Bernat presents himself as innocent, sometimes ignorant (in ironic contrast, of course, with Metge’s status as author), as a true and loving subject of the deceased king and as a man who is open to persuasion on matters of faith. Both books can be seen, at least in the Riquer interpretation, as a tour-de-force of political spin.19 The other two figures who appear with Joan in Bernat’s vision are Orfeu and Tirèsies, the Orpheus and Tiresias of Greek myth. Orfeu tells his story which loosely follows the account in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and answers Bernat’s questions about Hell. He describes a Classical Avernus framed in a Christian vision of heaven defined as the sight of God, the supreme good. The ‘political’ function of Orfeu’s account would seem to be to allow Bernat to present himself, in the form of his fictional alter ego, as a known former sceptic who has abandoned his incredulity about the after-life. But Orfeu’s story is twice interrupted by the domineering Tirèsies, impatient to turn to the questions of extramatrimonial love and the nature of women. In the context of the misogynist discourse that is developed here, Orfeu and Tirèsies complement each other in an important way. Orfeu explains that when he lost Eurydice for the second time, he withdrew from the world, blaming not only the fates but also women for his misery, and thereafter sang only in praise of his new life free of womankind: [. . .] pugé-me’n en lo mont de Ròdope; e d’aquí avant no volguí prendre muller ne amar dona del món, jatsia per moltes ne sia estat request. E aquí, 17 18

Riquer 1964: II, 430. See the excellent summary of Metge’s supposed beliefs and Joan’s objections to them in Badia 1999: 39–40 and 183–200. I use the name ‘Bernat’ to refer to the narrator and protagonist, ‘Metge’ to designate the author. 19 The recent work of Stefano Cingolani (2002), if it does not quite undo the compelling logic of Riquer’s hypothesis, offers a salutary challenge to the importance that Riquer gives to the political motives behind Lo somni, and the tendency to stress the slipperiness of the way in which Metge presents his views on the topics he discusses (the metaphor of the ‘anguila’ used by Metge is often applied to the author himself). Cingolani emphasizes instead the importance of the work as an innovative cultural project in which Metge sought to address essentially moral and philosophical matters rather than political ones: ‘Allò que investiga són les formes de coneixement, els camins que s’han seguit o que es poden emprendre per fer compatibles, allà on sigui poossible, la llibertat personal i els valors establerts’ (271).

PRESENT LAUGHTER

97

com pus melodiosament poguí, sonant la rota, canté alguns virolais, balades e cançons, lloant vida llunyada de companyia de dones. (111–112)

Orfeu’s narrative shows him as moving in a purely unreflecting way to an attitude of general misogyny because of his personal suffering in grief at the loss of one woman. When he describes how he put his feelings into song, he defines himself as an archetype of the misogynist troubadours with whose work Metge would have been well familiar.20 Tirèsies does not lose the opportunity to tell Orfeu (here echoing the dictum attributed to Socrates in some medieval texts) that the loss of his wife was really a gain, if only he realized it.21 He represents a more general moralist stance than Orfeu, who tellingly explains that he is now reunited with Eurydice in the afterlife: his misogyny lasts only as long as his separation from the beloved woman. Tirèsies, on the other hand, speaks from a considered position. His long tirade against women in general takes up the rest of Book 3, adapted freely from Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, Metge’s principal source for this speech. By means of it, Tirèsies (like Boccaccio’s Spirit) attempts to dissuade Bernat from notions of loving and being loved by his lady (Bernat confesses that she is not his wife). The propositio of his speech is that man’s dealings with women should be strictly limited to the needs of procreation. The proposition hinges, as will so many such passages in later Hispanic texts, on the Aristotelian concept of the imperfect animal and on the essential link between woman and matter: Fembra és animal imperfet, de passions diverses, desplasents e abominables passionat, no amant altra cosa sinó son propi cos e delits; e si los hòmens la miraven així com deurien, pus haguessen fet ço que a generació humana pertany, així li fugirien com a la mort. (126–127)

Tirèsies then marshalls some twenty arguments concerning ‘la propietat e manera de fembres’ (126) to support the proposition, all of them taken from Boccaccio (who in turn took them from other sources such as Juvenal): (1) (2) (3)

The hidden squalor of women’s physical functions, the falsity of their external beauty, attributable entirely to the use of cosmetics and dyes, their vain preoccupation with dress,

20 Matfre Ermengaud’s Lo Breviari d’Amor, a text well known in the Crown of Aragon, which was also translated into Catalan, contains a section (ll. 29486–30219) in which Matfre quotes a number of misogynistic passages from the classical troubadours and denounces them for it (Matfre Ermengaud 1976: 125–155). 21 The idea that the loss of a wife is really a gain for the man is developed by Petrarch, De remediis utriusque Fortunae, II, xvi; Spanish translation (see Petrarca 1510) reproduced in Archer 2000: 116–119.

98

(4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

(16)

(17) (18) (19) (20)

ROBERT ARCHER

their vain need to be praised by all for this false beauty, their profligate squandering on such vanity, their insatiable lust, to satisfy which they lose all the fearfulness they otherwise make so much of, their frequent abortions (131–132; the accusation is taken from Juvenal), their desire above all else to ‘robar e enganar los hòmens’ (133, partly overlapping with 5), their constant nagging, their greed, which leads them even to marry physically repulsive old men in the hope of inheriting quickly (partly overlaps with 7), their inconstancy, their presumption, their loquacity (especially about matters of learning, of which they know nothing), their readiness to tell lies and to deny even the obvious truth about themselves, their need to be in control of their husbands’ money, which is the cause of their hatred of step-children and other members of the husband’s family (this overlaps with 5 and 7), their vanity in their knowledge of languages and profane literary works, in knowing how to respond to suitors, and in having rosy cheeks and generous hips and bosom (this partly overlaps with 12 and 13), their gluttony in food and drink, their sloth, their love of vain things such as dances and songs (partly overlaps with 16), their vain and ridiculous fussiness over their appearance before they leave the house in the morning (this partly overlaps with 3).

Several of the main accusations, as indicated above, occur more than once and in different forms, and there is much insistence on cosmetics and dress, aspects which will allow Metge to exploit the comic possibilities of the detailed response which Bernat makes in Book 4. The style that Metge uses for this passage can be illustrated by Tirèsies’s description of the sloth that follows women’s gluttony: Aprés que elles són bé farcides e plenes, entre-se’n en llurs cambres, e fenyent-se no ésser ben temprades o que la nit passada, per moscards qui les han enujades o per corcons qui roseguen les bigues, no han pogut dormir, meten-se nues al llit entre frescs llençols e dormen entrò que deuen sopar, si doncs no han anar a mirar juntes o jocs o esposalles o parteres o a deports o a altres coses semblants. Puis dormiran entrò al sendemà a migjorn. (140)

PRESENT LAUGHTER

99

The hyperbolic development of the detail here is not taken from Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, but appears to be Metge’s own, with, as always, some debt to Juvenal. Together with the selection of misogynistic elements in Tirèsies’s list, it leaves no room for doubt that the author was revelling in the opportunity to improve on the latently comic descriptions of female defects he found in the largely unsmiling Boccaccio. But in Metge’s reading of Il Corbaccio the latent humour in the solemn invective of most of that book is assumed to be activated, at least as far as the narrator is concerned, since he recounts that, after listening to the arguments of the humourless Tirèsies, he had burst out laughing and had been unable to contain himself for a long while afterwards: ‘Lladoncs no em poguí abstenir de riure una gran estona’ (141). This moment in the narrative cues a response of laughter in the reader, and enacts the laughter through Bernat who in effect turns the latent comicity of Boccaccio’s text into a matter for open laughter. Is this then something akin to the laughter of Bakhtinian mirth, a reaction that wells up from an underlying culture of laughter that is also implicit in Boccaccio’s text, in spite of Tirèsies (who, we have to assume, misses or ignores all the subtle cueing in his own speech)? Or is it some other kind of laughter? This is not the first time there has been laughter in the text. Tirèsies has twice laughed at Bernat, on both occasions with derision, firstly at the irony of his modest confession that he is ignorant, since this is indeed what Tirèsies takes him to be (121) and again, this time more loudly, when Bernat declares that he is happy with his lot (123). On both occasions Tirèsies’s laughter is derisory, mocking his delusions about his beloved lady and his naive belief that happiness can be achieved through a woman; on a later occasion, after hearing Bernart’s defence of women, Tirèsies emits a further scornful chuckle (158).22 Bernat’s long bout of helpless laughter, however, is of a quite different order. Certainly not the laughter of derision in relation to what Tirèsies has said, since in the passage just quoted Bernat is also depicted as one who is disposed, in theory at least, to believe it all, given that he shares with Tirèsies some of the working assumptions about women that were commonly and unthinkingly held in medieval culture. Indeed, Bernat has already shown, during his discussion with Joan I, that he carries with him at least one important general assumption about women’s nature when he describes the Muslim religion as favourable to women ‘per tal com és feta en favor de les fembres, lo costum de les quals és tirar los hòmens, e especialment efeminats, a aquell angle que desigen’ (81). Couched in hyperbole and ordered into a long list of defects, Tirèsies’s invective produces its comic effect: Bernat laughs just as many readers, men and women, would have laughed. But what he says in this passage after he overcomes his 22 Cingolani points out that Tirèsies’s laughter has its origins in Classical tradition: his is the laughter of the sage described by Horace and Seneca, a figure capable of laughing at the human folly he decries (Cingolani 2002: 242–266).

100

ROBERT ARCHER

laughter makes it clear that his recognition of the comic does not mean that he assumes that Tirèsies is being anything but deadly earnest, nor that he denies the essential truth of his view of women: Puis diguí: Tot quant dessús has dit, bé que no passarà sens resposta tant com en mi serà, haguera pacientment sofert e creegut per ventura, si no haguesses dit que no serien preades res si hom les veïa en l’estament que ixen del llit. Açò verament no és de soferir, car jo he vist lo contrari d’algunes, qui eren sens comparació pus belles nues que vestides, e deslligades que ben parades. (141–142)

Thus, in his immediate reaction to Tirèsies’s diatribe he uses a quibble – contrary to what Tirèsies claims, he has seen women who are more beautiful naked than with their clothes on – as a pretext for rejecting all of Tirèsies’s arguments even as he concedes that he might easily have accepted and believed them all, were it not for this one point. That is, Bernat both affirms on the one hand his predisposition as a man with the same general conception of women as anybody else to believe these commonly attributed defects (even though, or especially because, they have been presented in such a comic form), and on the other finds a pretext to challenge them all. His reasons for the objection are already apparent to Tirèsies: Bernat is unable to accept that the woman with whom he is infatuated can be included in the general rule, and he assumes that the lady, whom he clearly has yet to see naked (like the protagonist of Il Corbaccio), can be counted among those few who look better with their clothes off. It is a bitter irony for Bernat that the account that Tirèsies, backed by Orfeu, promptly supplies of what his lady is like in stark reality turns his quibble into a point of devastating personal relevance: L’hora que ella ix del llit sembla que ella haja contínuament habitat en estanys d’aigua o en lloc de pantà: ab la vista verda e ab la carn crostuda e rascosa, semblant a cuixa d’esturç. ¿Has-la vista moltes vegades blanca e llisa? Sàpies que ella és negra e tan aspra, que un llaurador hauria prou fet tot l’any que li preservàs lo camp de romagueres e de canyota [. . .] ¿Les sues mamelles, quines penses que sien? Cert, blans com a cotó, grans entrò al llombrígol e buides com bossa de pastor. E aprés que s’ha vestida e ben cordada la camisa, fa-les inflar e estar tan plenes, rodones e plantades en lo pits, que sembla que així sien nades o que ella sia joveneta de quinze anys. (143)

As this passage attests, Tirèsies’s account of what Bernat’s particular lady looks like in the raw is, of course, just as full of latently comic detail as his general diatribe. Indeed, it is based on the passage of Il Corbaccio quoted earlier whose comicity is subtly cued even in the original.23 But this time 23 For an interpretation of Book IV of Lo somni as a humanist opposition to Boccaccian misogyny, see Butiñá 1993.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

101

Bernat finds nothing to laugh at. Rather, his reaction is to launch into a two-part response, ostensibly in reply to the general denunciation, but clearly with the intention also of undermining the validity of the particular claims about his lady. The otherwise largely docile Bernat (he has accepted Joan’s arguments and most of Orfeu’s account of the after-life), while shaken, clearly does not accept what Tirèsies says about her, and even by the end of the narrative he will not concede that he does. Set against this, his previous long bout of laughter is seen even more clearly for what it is, an act of assent. Presented now with all the potential cues for further laughter – still not intended, of course, by the dour Tirèsies – there is not even the hint of a snigger from Bernat, whose level of affective disposition suddenly falls to zero. Bernat had previously accepted unthinkingly the misogynous basis of what Tirèsies had said and had laughed in agreement. But now Tirèsies’s more particular invective starts to challenge his own equally unthinking assumption that there are exceptions to the antifeminine rule he embraces. Bernat’s desire for his lady causes him to look for ways of legitimizing denial. Hence, at the beginning of Book 4, when he launches into the first part of his response to Tirèsies’s revelations about his lady, presenting a defence of women, his rhetorical intention is not really to demonstrate that the sage’s general definition of women is false, since he has already conceded that he agrees with most of it. Rather, by attempting to overturn all the arguments against women generally, Bernat seeks to establish the possibility that there are exceptions, such as his own lady. This is clear from the dialogue prior to his defence of women: ‘[. . .] tant com poré m’esforçaré a sostenir e defendre la mia elecció ésser raonable e bona, e per consegüent, no haver errat. Si he bé concebut tot ço que m’has dit, tu has malparlat primerament de dones en general, puis en particular. Ço que m’has dit en general, ¿entens-ho haver dit de totes?’ ‘No jo’, dix ell, ‘mas de tan gran part d’aquelles que entén fort poques en nombre ne sien exemptes’.24 (146)

The first part of the defence of women that Bernat then goes on to make follows traditionally essentialist and historical lines: ‘lo bé que és en elles, e en temps passat, n’és esdevengut en lo món’ (147). He avoids any reference to Eve’s guilt, and inversely genders his account of the cause of the Fall, which he defines as ‘lo pecat de nostre primer pare Adam’ (147). He immediately makes the link, traditionally used by misogynist and defence writers, to the role of the Virgin Mary as vehicle for the Redemption brought by her son, a role which makes her more worthy of reverence than any other human 24 Similarly at the end of the first part of Bernat’s defence, he reprehends Tirèsies not for the accusations he has made but rather for the inclusiveness of their terms of reference: ‘has parlat massa generalment d’elles’ (158).

102

ROBERT ARCHER

being. He also addresses the possible objection that it was the son who redeemed man, not the mother, arguing that the son was not only human like his mother but was also God (147–148). At this point he invites Tirèsies to make any objection he may have to what he has said. He is prompt to do so: he replies that the Blessed Virgin is unique, and that in any case ‘una flor no fa primavera’ (148). Bernat then proceeds to describe examples of famous women, following the traditional division into Classical, Biblical, and modern examples. What he attempts to show, in much the same way as later writers of defence works in the fifteenth century, is that these women were able to outdo men in areas of activity that were considered a male preserve, in spite of the fact that they were not equipped by Nature to do so: ‘Mereixen gran honor, atès que majorment elles ab llur indústria hagen aconseguit ço que natura no els ha donat’ (148). No explicit link is made between the examples chosen and Tirèsies’s arguments, precisely because Bernat is not trying to rebut them, but merely to establish that there are exceptions among women who are not covered by the general rule. By taking this line of defence, of course, Bernat merely confirms what he had previously conceded: that he would normally be willing to allow what Tirèsies had said against women. The first part of Metge’s list of women is selected from that which appears in one of the Familiares of Petrarch, a consolatory letter to the Empress Anna on the occasion of the birth of a daughter instead of the desired male heir; this includes brief descriptions of women from Antiquity who had excelled in a man’s world.25 But Metge’s list follows a different order and contains various exclusions (e.g. Cleopatra) as well as additions, some of them from Valerius Maximus’s Factorum et dictorum memorabilium. All the women mentioned appear in Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, a work which does not exclude censorious comments on female behaviour, and it is the extensive accounts in this work rather than the concise references in Petrarch that Metge seems to have in mind when he says, for instance, of Zenobia that ‘llonga és la història’ (149) since this is a particularly lengthy chapter in Boccaccio.26 It is also the background presence of Boccaccio that most significantly affects the overall meaning of Tirèsies’s list. Like Petrarch, Metge cites cases of those virtues such as conjugal love, filial compassion, chastity or patience (here Metge refers to his own translation of Petrarch’s Latin version of Boccaccio’s story of the patient Griselda) that some writers of defence works deem to be especially prevalent in women and defining of them, as well as examples of women who matched or excelled men in warfare, or in letters and learning. But his list also includes cases of women whose behaviour, as he knew from Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, included aspects that made

25 26

Petrarca 1942. Riquer 1959: 153.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

103

them less than exemplary.27 This is the case of Semiramis who, as Boccaccio notes, ‘like others of her sex [. . .] was constantly burning with carnal desire, and it is believed she gave herself to many men. Among her own lovers – and this is something more beastly than human – was her own son Ninyas’.28 Another example is the bloodily vengeful Tamyris who calls for the severed head of the vanquished Cyrus, king of Persia. Here too Metge follows Boccaccio almost verbatim, stressing with him the Queen’s wrath: Puis, tolt lo cap del dit rei, més-lo en un odre ple de sang dels seus, dient: ‘Aital sepultura mereis: sang has desijada e de ta sang te sadollaràs’. (149)29

These two particular examples, moved from their position in Petrarch to be placed at the beginning of the list after the war-mongering Amazon Orithya, only serve to enlarge, at least for the informed reader, Tirèsies’s own list of bad women. Metge had excluded from his diatribe the less humorous misogynistic topics such as the vengefulness of women. He makes up for it here, albeit by implication, and by so doing ensures that at least part of Bernat’s arguments are self-undermining. After this part of the list, Metge refers to Biblical and hagiographical exempla (154) but spends only one sentence on them, before moving on to the real point of interest for him, that is, the modern examples of five Catalan Queens, each of whom is compared with a Classical figure. Here we can see at once that Bernat’s defence is as closely determined by the political priorities of the author as the earlier parts of the book. While some of the references in this section still puzzle commentators, they all lead up to the praise of Maria de Luna, wife of the new king Martí and thus, of course, of Martí himself since Tirèsies has already reminded Bernat that to praise a man’s wife is to praise him.30 Hers is the longest eulogy as well as the culminating 27 In spite of the use of Boccaccio by defence writers like Christine de Pizan, it would have been obvious to Metge as to other readers that De claris mulieribus was not simply a work of defence. For a fuller account of the negativity of Boccaccio’s text, from a feminist perspective, see Jordan 1997. 28 Boccaccio 2001: 16–24 (pp. 22–23). The accusation against Semiramis also appears in Roig’s Spill, ll. 9266–9505, and in Matheolus and Curial e Güelfa, as Rosanna Cantavella points outs (1992a: 111), but is challenged by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, who attributes the story to the machinations of her son and the perversity of the authors who, in their ‘estilo poético bestial’ (247), have written calumnies about her and other notable women (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 249). 29 Boccaccio 2001: 202: ‘Thamiris autem efferato animo iussit inter cadavera Cyri corpus equiri; cui comperto auferri caput et in utrem, sanguine suorum plenum, immicti mandavit; et quasi superbo regi dignum exhibuisset tumulum, dixit: “Satire sanguine quem sitisti”.’ It is instructive to compare Metge’s use of the detail from Boccaccio with the reference to Thamyris in Rodríguez del Padrón who simply reports that she had Cyrus beheaded ‘por vengança de su fijo muerto’ (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 246). 30 ‘Si és ta muller [. . .] has lloat tu mateix, per tal com ella és carn de la tua carn e os

104

ROBERT ARCHER

one, and in it Bernat attributes to her several of the virtues he has already mentioned: conjugal love, patience, political wisdom, and tact. His very last point of praise is for her sense of justice as exemplified by her treatment of Metge during the time of persecution by his enemies. In the brief exchange with Tirèsies that takes place at this juncture, Bernat begins to preface the second part of his defence with three further general arguments, one referring to the divinely appointed role of women to serve as the means by which man might go forth and multiply, and the other two to the caring and conciliatory aspects of their nature: human beings would have disappeared from the face of the Earth if it had not been for women, since they tend to the needs of others when they are sick, and they put restraints on men’s readiness to fight and on their disposition towards bad habits. These arguments are meant by Bernat to lead into a defence of his lady, but he is cut short by Tirèsies as soon as he mentions her and has to hear the devastating confirmation by Orfeu that everything Tirèsies says about her is true. Once more he tries in vain to prompt Tirèsies to admit that his previous denunciation did not include all women, but then he returns to the second part of his defence. This consists of an inversion of Tirèsies’s general accusations, which he systematically applies to men. His main intention in doing this, as he states at the beginning (161) is to shift onto men the blame for any perceived defects in woman on the basis that men had set them an appalling example: no era meravella si elles, qui no havien tanta perfecció com los hòmens, erraven, pus los homens feïen semblant o pijor (161).

Pointedly, he limits the referent of his accusations against men, as if to emphasize the need to concede that there are always exceptions to general statements: [. . .] no ho entèn a dir de tots, sinó tan solament dels hòmens dolents e viciosos; e per semblant forma has tu usat, si no m’engan, en lo maldit de dones. (161–162)

By saying this, of course, he invites Tirèsies to concede that there is implicit in his denunciation of women a similar limitation of referent, but Tirèsies staunchly denies any such thing. Thus, Bernat’s attempted tactic of channelling Tirèsies’s denunciation of women generally and particularly into an open debate is scotched from the start (162). Undaunted, Bernat then reviews the accusations of Tirèsies to show either how these defects are greater in men than in women or how the characteristics denounced in women dels teus ossos’ (124). For the perplexing nature of the refences to Elionor de Xipre and Sibil.la de Fortià, see Metge 1999: 226–228.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

105

are necessary for the good of men (162–174). Men, to an even greater extent than in women, love themselves above anything else, are dirty (women are cleaner and this is because they have all those baths they are criticized for), use make-up, are obsessed with fashion and finery, are full of lust, suspicion, and anger, are deceptive, steal from their wives, are subject to greed, inconstancy, and presumption, are garrulous, spend their time in petty matters, are inveterate liars, mistreat their step-daughters, are full of vanity, love to wallow in luxury, are gluttons and drunkards, are slothful and lovers of their beds, and take an inordinate amount of time over dressing and attending to the niceties of their toilette.31 If women seem to want to be in charge, this is because the bad habits of men make it desirable that they should be; as for the female love of songs and dancing, this is only natural and to be approved. With this final part of the book, humour, especially in the use of comic exaggeration, again comes to the fore, as Metge appropriates supposedly feminine elements and transfers them to male subjects: Grans cerimònies has dit que serven les dones en llevar-se del llit, e que no eixirien de la cambra tro que són bé reparades. Oh, bé t’adelites en dir mal! Crec que tu volries que n’eixissen nues e deslligades. Elles fan ço que deuen, e si en altra manera usaven, perjudicarien a vergonya, qui és virtut fort lloable, e especialment en dones. ¿Saps de qui pot hom bé dir això? Certament dels hòmens, qui en la vintena part de mija hora deurien ésser vestits e arreats per eixir de casa, e en botonar lo jupó, tirar les calces a vuit o deu parts, dreçar les polaines, espolsar les cotes, vestir-se aquelles, pentinar llurs cabells, qui la nit passada hauran estat en prensa, llavar llurs cares ab aigües ben olentes, mirar si són aquells qui eren lo jorn passat, posar-se al coll cadenes, cascavells e esquelles e garroteres a les cames, trigaran per espai de tres hores. Puis faran mostra de llur cos, sutze dins per vicis, e bell defora per vestedures solemnes. (173–174)

But while Metge’s inversion of Tirèsies’s tirade subtly cues comic elements for the reader, in the narrative itself this time there is no laughter. While Tirèsies indulgently praises Bernat for his wit and admits that he enjoyed listening, he insists that none of this undoes the essential truth of what he has said about women. Nevertheless, he in effect admits that misogynistic arguments such as those he has put forward can be stood on their heads: ‘a mon juí, has respost a tot ço que jo havia dit de fembres’ (174). As far as the topic of women in the overall scheme of Lo somni is concerned, this concession by Tirèsies is surely significant. In comparison with Metge’s reasons for writing this very clever work, the subject of misogyny and 31 The modern habit of men of paying what was seen as effeminate over-attention to dress and appearance is attacked by Eiximenis in Lo crestià, chapters DCLXX and DCCXIV, as well as in women (chapter DCCXV) (Eiximenis 1983: 156–160 and 160–162).

106

ROBERT ARCHER

defence of women which he chooses to make the subject of Books 3 and 4 is in itself hardly a serious one at all. Metge’s approach to the topic is political: it enables Bernat/Metge to present himself not only as ingenious, as Terèsies admits, but also imperturbably enamoured of his lady, unlike his forebear, the protagonist of Il Corbaccio, who in the end admits he has been in error after listening to the Spirit’s account of his lady and of women in general. In an important sense his staunch defence of his right to believe about his lady whatever suits him best confirms the virtue of fidelity he wishes to attach to himself, even while he hints at his failure in matters of marital constancy. On the issues relating to women which the exchange of Bernat and Tirèsies raises there is no ultimate positioning. As we have seen, Bernat’s views of women do not, in any case, differ functionally from those of Tirèsies. This is why Metge depicts Tirèsies concluding their exchange with an appeal to the protagonist’s conscience as he reminds him of some of the stock exempla of those women who had been the undoing of men: ‘E si volies confessar ço que en dicta la tua consciència, atorgaries ésser ver to ço que t’he dit dessús’. ‘No faria jamai’, diguí jo; ‘ab aquesta opinió vull morir’. ‘Consell-te’, dix ell, ‘que no faces, car major apariència ha que existència de veritat. Lleixa d’aquí avant amor de fembres. Fuig a tot lloc e avinentesa de parlar e perseverar ab aquelles, e esquiva-les com a llamp. Sobirana oradura és encalçar la cosa que, aconseguida, dóna la mort. Per fembra morí Nabot; Samsó ne fou pres e lligat; Josep encarcerat; Isboset, mort; Salomó, apòstata; David, homicida; Sisarà, traït e mort ab un gran clau; Hipòlit, Agamèmnon e quaranta-e-nou gendres de Dànau ne perderen la vida. Mas, ¿a què perd temps en açò? La major part dels inconvenients e mals qui són estats en lo món són venguts per fembres; açò no és algú, qui res de bé sàpia, que ho pogués sens vergonya negar’. (174–175)32

Tirèsies, crucially, then enjoins Bernat to turn to God. As Cingolani shows, his satire fundamentally echoes the principle concern of Roman Philosophy: how to attain contentment.33 Tirèsies’s injunction in this sense is more than a departing formulaic moralism. He is able to assume that with time, beyond the confines of his visitation (and of the narrative), Bernat will come round to facing what his consciència already knows to be the truth. The comicity of 32 Cingolani (1992: 262–264) argues convincingly for the influence of Petrarch’s Secretum on this passage: in Petrarch’s text Franciscus is rebuked by Agustinus for his misuse of a quotation from Cicero on his opinions on the immortality of the soul in defence of his stubborn persistence in loving a woman he deems to be a model of virtue: ‘Si in hoc erro, libenter erro, neque hunc errorem auferri michi volo, dum vivo.’ Bernat with similar words tries to justify his freedom to believe what he says in support of women and of his love for his lady in particular. On Metge’s sources see also Butiñá 2002: 314–391. 33 Cingolani 2002: 250–251.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

107

much of Tirèsies’s denunciation and of a good part of Bernat’s counterarguments and his inversion of the allegations is in this sense more important than the subject it springs from. The double denunciation, couched in terms we are encouraged by Bernat’s laughter to find comic, leaves the reader positioned ideologically with Bernat at his moment of laughter. Since the notion of women that underlies Tirèsies’s tirade rests on widely accepted commonplaces, the reader realizes with Bernat that there is little or nothing in general terms to disagree with. Certainly Bernat is not disagreeing, as Metge’s careful choice of words for his protagonist’s final defiance of Tirèsies indicates. When he declares that ‘ab aquesta opinió vull morir’ he uses the very same words with which he had accepted King Joan’s arguments for the immortality of the soul in Book I (80), only to be admonished by him for his inappropriate choice of terminology: ‘Així ho crec fermament, e ab aquesta opinió vull morir’ ‘¿Com opinió?’, dix ell; ‘ans és ciència certa, car opinío no és àls sinó rumor o fama o vent popular, e tostemps pressuposa cosa dubtosa’. ‘Haja nom, doncs, senyor, ciència certa. No em recordava bé la virtut del vocable’.34

Bernat’s protestations of belief in woman’s superiority are made in the same non-committal way. His debate with Tirèsies needs no conclusion, because all parties have brought to it shared a priori assumptions. Tirèsies’s rhetorical deployment of exaggeration, provoking the laughter that is represented in the narrative itself, invites the male reader to respond in much the same way as Bernat, that is, to accept all that Tirèsies says about ‘aquest maleit llinatge femení’ (144). But it also makes him more aware of the stark fact that he accepts it all only in so far as it does not affect him personally. By the end of the book, Bernat/Metge has enacted a major revision of his religious and philosophical position and has been left ‘fort trist e desconsolat’ at the realization that his adulation of a lady is founded in delusion. But while Bernat now has all the knowledge necessary to make a reformed man of himself on all the points raised by his ghostly visitors, the narrative ends while he is still outwardly defiant before Tirèsies’s view of women, so that the process of learning in his case is in this sense incomplete. In the text to be discussed next, Jaume Roig’s Spill, the protagonist, again aided by the visitation of a figure of wisdom, is shown taking the whole process to completion. Again, comic elements abound. Although, in contrast with Lo somni, there is no narrative representation of a comic response, there is, as we shall see, acknowledgement that the comic elements are a deliberate stylistic feature. Here too laughter and the learning process coexist in the 34 The ironic repetition is pointed out by Badia (1988: 94–95) and further contextualised in Metge 1999: 197.

108

ROBERT ARCHER

same text, raising yet again, but within different parameters, the problem of humour acknowleged with Bernat’s laughter.

Aphoristic ‘Facetiae’ Jaume Roig’s Spill, written some sixty years after Lo somni, trips and bounds through some 16,000 four-syllable lines in rhyming couplets that are crammed with denigratory anecdotes and exempla. Here there is no debate or pretence at a debate, but instead the relentless denunciation of women through the medium of two male voices: the narrator (also the protagonist of the narrative) and the sapiential figure of Salamó. There are only grudging hints of concession that any, save the Blessed Virgin and the author’s deceased wife, can be excused from the general rule. But much of the work is as relentless in its comicity as it is in its misogyny, and it is perhaps because of this duality of discourse that in the last decade it has attracted widely divergent interpretations such as those summarized by the following two statements, both taken from important books on Spill: La crítica al sexe femení és tan exagerada, arriba a tal límit, que no podem considerar que Roig militàs cabalment en el que anava escrivint. Sens dubte aqueixes exageracions, aquelles anècdotes esgarrifoses, no pretenien més que entretenir d’una manera plaent, i no podien llegir-se més que amb el somriure – escèptic o no – als llavis.35 The poignant anecdotes and derogatory descriptions of women in the Spill are [. . .] bound up in the effort to protect and cure men from what Roig deemed to be a [. . .] form of pestilence, the epidemic of disordered and excessive sexual desire.36

The first quotation is taken from Rosanna Cantavella’s study of 1992 in which she sets Roig’s work in the context of medieval traditions of misogyny and defence, doing so from a standpoint which seeks to minimize the impact on medieval European culture of the debate on women as something which took place in a less than earnest context, and was a relatively innocuous topic of discussion since it did not address real issues and thus was bound to lead nowhere in a social sense. She also stresses the humour of Roig’s work as an inevitable manifestation of this lack of earnestness, in contrast with the real importance accorded the topical question of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, which occupies part of the work.37 35 36 37

Cantavella 1992a: 161. Solomon 1997: 7. ‘el debat pro i antifeminista fou, en si, una polèmica superficial. No s’hi jugava l’autèntica consideració de la dona com a ésser social, i no presenta traces d’haver influït sobre l’status real de l’individu de sexe femení’ (Cantavella 1992a: 18); ‘La seua funció [la de l’obra] és d’entretenir el lector proporcionant-li estones de diversió a expenses d’un

PRESENT LAUGHTER

109

The second passage is from the early pages of Michael Solomon’s book on Roig and Martínez de Talavera. The quotation does not summarize the whole import of his subsequent arguments but it is sufficient to bring out the dramatic difference between his starting-point and that of Cantavella. Solomon’s interpretation is one which sees Spill as a clinical manual of self-help for men afflicted with the ills of love, a compendium of remedies made available through the power of the healing word, and a denunciation by Roig, a distinguished Valencian surgeon, of women as medical practitioners. The hypothesis of the medical manual is difficult to defend in the face of the obvious lack of an index in Spill or a structure in which particular aspects of the sickness of sexual love could easily be consulted, as also the characterization of the protagonist as a man who is seeking a wife who will give him an heir rather than as a victim of unrequited sexual desire. Nevertheless, the basic premise that Spill relentlessly depicts women as a site of disease is one that is solidly based in medieval medicine, as both Solomon’s book and standard works on the medical underpinnings of medieval attitudes to women show.38 Cantavella, who argues for the comic intranscendence of misogynistic discourse, does not take into account this aspect of Roig’s misogyny. For his part, Solomon makes no reference to Cantavella’s important work and does not address at all the role of humour in Roig’s clinical method, if that is what it is. Between the fingers of these contradictory opinions Roig’s slippery text manages to wriggle free. Here it will be argued that the comic style of Spill can and does coexist meaningfully with its status as an earnest defence of the ascetic position which advocates that a man who seeks wisdom should exclude women from his immediate domestic life, should overcome the passions, including lust, should direct his thoughts towards Christ, and should generally avoid women since they are the site of moral and physical disease (concepts that are inseparably linked in medieval thought).39 Roig himself gives two reasons for writing his book, both of them concerning the denunciation of women as that part of the human race which prudent men avoid. In his dedication to Joan Fabra, written in the midst of disease (he has fled from Valencia to escape the Plague), he declares that he tema comodí poc compromès, i que contrasta amb la gravetat que té a l’época la qüestió de la Immaculada’ (162). 38 Solomon 1997: 17–48 and 161–173; Jacquart and Thomasset 1988; Claude Thomasset in Lapisch-Zuber and Pastor 1992: 60–92. 39 About Roig’s personal views on what he had written about women or anything else, nothing can be said. What is discussed here is the ‘intention’ inferable from the text. In other words, the question being asked is: ‘What sort of text did Roig mean Spill to be?’, not ‘What did Roig really think about the issues he had written on?’ The two questions are often confused in criticism on the book, with the notable exception of very recent work by Ana Isabel Peirats Navarro (2003). An important perspective on the moral dimension of Roig’s work is to be found in the study by Hauf (2001), in which he shows the influence of illustrated exegetical works of the kind represented by the Speculum Humanae Salvationis.

110

ROBERT ARCHER

has written the book as an act of worship of the Virgin and that he describes the truth about women so that Her ineffable worth will be easier to comprehend: emprès he,/ no sens treball,/ de dones scriure lur tall/ natural e voluntari,/ per Una, qui té l contrari,/ descrivir pus fàcilment, /he mostrar [. . .]/ de dones tenir en vil,/ comportant-les virilment,/ sola [A]quella gentilment/ tembre y amar [. . .] (12–22).40

This concurs entirely with what he will say at the end of the work, in the final part of the Quart Libre, where he summarizes the moral lesson of what he has said as ‘bé specular/ he inquirir/, bé disçernir/ què.s deu amar,/ què elegir,/ què avorrir.’ (16250–16256). This declaration of authorial intention explains the fact that some 3,500 lines are taken up with arguments in support of the immaculate conception of Mary and the exposition of the Passion, aspects of the work which, Roig affirms, he has endeavoured to make as accessible as possible to readers by using particular effects of style (16266–16319). Another early statement of intention comes soon after this, in the Segona Part del Prefaci. Here Roig, who assumes in the core of the book the identity of his narrator and protagonist, addresses his probably real-life nephew Baltasar Bou (241), declaring that his aim is to persuade men, Baltasar among them, from associating either with women or with the sinful love that any traffic with them will lead to. Si y llegireu,/ conexereu/ ab prou claror/ la gran error/ tan manifesta,/ la desonesta/ he viçiosa,/ tant perillosa/ amor inica/ que huy.s pratica,/ [. . .] elegirau/ no may amar,/ ans desamar [. . .]/ d’infern portal:/ dones dampnades,/ enverinades/ d’aquell verí/ ab què ferí,/ ab llur antich/ primer amich,/ Eva de mort,/ dins aquell ort/ hon fon formada. (323–359)

The third section of the Prefaci (412–671) moves straight from this into a catalogue of negative qualities and defects of nature predicated on the subject of women, all women (‘Donchs, dich que totes’, 412). Women make judgements on what they know nothing about, have false sentiments, are subject to inconstancy and mutability, sham illness when they are perfectly healthy, fake tears and laughter, always deny their wrong-doing and look for others to blame, are interested only in spending a man’s money and in social climbing, unfailingly take advantage of any weakness they find in their husbands or 40 Quotations are from Roig 1929–1950. Modern accentuation has been added and the use of u and v has been regularized. The text of Spill is transmitted by one manuscript (Vatican Library, Latina MS 4806), scrupulously edited by Miquel i Planas, and by three mid-sixteenth-century editions which contain various cuts. For recent work on the manuscript see Carré 1993–1994.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

111

lovers, hold in contempt any man who loves them, apply disgusting cosmetics to their bodies and are full of hair that they constantly remove, and are by nature contrary, prodigal, and irrational with money. Rosanna Cantavella has argued that by the end of this passage all the major arguments of the misogynous tradition have been made and that a ‘serious misogynist’ would have felt that he had said all that needed saying.41 It is not quite true that every antifeminine topic is aired here since, for instance, there is no explicit reference to greed (this is perhaps implicit) or to their excessive (or insufficient) interest in sex. But this section of the Prefaci is indeed that part of the work in which the narrator is at his least diffuse and anecdotal, succinctly restating most of the central tenets of the misogynous tradition.42 In effect, even though Roig himself had previously announced it as an exordium to the work as a whole (401–404), it functions rhetorically as the propositio which the vast rhetorical artifice of the following 3,000 lines are designed to substantiate. Before Roig begins properly to develop this proposition, he includes a Quarta Part del Prefaci where he summarizes the contents of four Libres and addresses questions of language and style. It is here that he acknowledges, albeit very briefly, the humour of the style in which he has chosen to write. He refers to his verses as not only aphorismals – that is, imparting traditional wisdom, and therefore consciously didactic – but also ffaçesials, in other words, comically entertaining in the style of facetiae (683–684) such as those of Poggio Bracciolini. Partly he achieves these comic effects by the use of the short metre in rhyming couplets which, as he tells us, he chose deliberately, together with the use of the language of the Valencian horta, for the practical purposes of didacticism (672–690). Every four syllables (as counted in Catalan metrics) there is an obligatory stress, which isolates a word at the end of the line; the comic possibilities of emphatic iteration which this metrical situation offers are regularly exploited by Roig, as in: So que pratiquen/ no.s pot entendre,/ ni menys conpendre/ s[a] ntençió;/ l’afecció/ nunca l’an ferma,/ que les desferma;/ no [é]s al món,/ ni may hi fon,/ haja vist quart/ ni quinta part/ del que yo.n sé. (7028–7039)

There is also humour of a traditional kind embedded in the structure of certain narrative situations, such as that of the passages belonging to the tradition of the fabliaux, some of which contain strongly misogynist assump-

41 ‘Un refutador seriós de les dones, amb els arguments de la tercera part del prefaci ja s’hauria tingut per satisfet’ (Cantavella 1992a: 161). 42 The passage is discussed in detail in relation to the misogynous tradition in Cantavella 1992a: 53–60.

112

ROBERT ARCHER

tions.43 Such is the case of the bride of Requena who covers up her lack of a maidenhead by pretending that her body is inhabited by a devil who cannot be exorcised unless he passes through her hymen (3184–3271). Most often, however, the humour lies in the hyperbole that is characteristic of much misogynistic discourse, as in this list of epithets and comparisons about women: són balansa/ de carniçer,/ he de barquer/ retorçut rem;/ són munts de fem:/ si gen se muden,/ olen e puden;/ çabata streta,/ qui par ben feta/ al mirador,/ he fa olor,/ he hulls de poll/ al peu del foll;/ correns atzebres,/ llúdries, vebres,/ hon bo ni bell/ sinó la pell/ àls no s’i troba;/ de pelles roba:/ a grans, chichs cossos,/ als flachs e grossos,/ a tots servexen/ mas prest se squexen;/ son roçí sart,/ car sols apart/ giren la squerre;/ pus prest que.l ferre,/ si hom no.l malla/ ho no.l treballa,/ prenen rovell;/ son oripell/ he brut estany;/ portes de bany/ he riu de nores;/ són cantinplores,/ grunyents poliges,/ hubertes çiges,/ pintat carner;/ sens çentener,/ són la madexa;/ he joch de flexa,/ per çeguo fet:/ ffir cascun tret/ forr’al terrer;/ sens cap carrer/ o atzucach,/ he sens fons lach/ he brolladós;/ de voladós/ vidres ampolles,/ grosses banbolles/ de moll çabó,/ ffum de carbó,/ d’aguila ploma,/ cascada poma,/ ram de tavernes,/ buides sisternes;/ res no retenen;/ pedra [a]l cor tenen/ com les esponges;/ torbats rellonges,/ per rodes, cordes,/ sonen discordes;/ son contrapes/ falssant lo pes/ de la romana. (7762–7827)

Antònia Carré identifies several other categories of the comic in Spill: the use of unusual items of lexis, jocose humour of a facile or earthy kind, including comic euphemisms, the use of rhetorical figures such as traductio and adnominatio, and the contrastive juxtaposition of concepts, the alteration of the meaning of Biblical exempla, and changes to the form of standard defence arguments and exempla. Humour is, as she shows, both abundant and stylistically varied in Spill and an integral part of the misogynistic thought of the book.44 43 44

See, for instance, the discussion in Gaunt 1995: 234–285, especially 274–275. Carré 1994a; see also Peirats 2003, who provides a further detailed analysis of comic elements. At the beginning of her article, Carré sees the misogyny as the rehearsal of already accepted ideas of which no reader needed persuading, so that the point of writing the book lies not in its contents so much as in the stylistic and compositional innovations with which Roig handles a well-worn topic: ‘[Roig] parteix de la impossibilitat de convèncer ningú sobre la naturalesa femenina, car tothom està, de bell antuvi, convençut. [. . .] L’única possibilitat, doncs, de construir una obra diferent radica en la composició i en l’estil’ (Carré 1994a: 185). At the end of the same piece, however, she contends that Roig uses the comic effects not merely as a means of entertainment but rather in order to support a misogynistic position: ‘L’estil de Jaume Roig, doncs, i sobretot l’ús que fa de les diverses formes de la comicitat, contribueix a l’èxit de la postura misògina que el metge de València defensa sense pal.liatius en la seva obra’ (1994a: 219). The contradictory position on Roig’s misogynistic intentions that emerges here only confirms the troublesome nature of the comic in this type of discourse.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

113

Roig divides the work into four libres. In all four the narrator writes from the assumed vantage-point of the very old man he later reveals himself to be (15723–15724). The first of these books (793–1954) concerns his experience with women during his youth. This begins, for good measure, with his harsh treatment at the hands of his widowed mother; she throws him out and takes a young husband, who soon starts to beat her (‘ffa lo que deu’, the protagonist notes approvingly, 1167). In his wanderings in Spain and France he encounters further ill-treatment at the hands of women (they have no charity, steal from him, or plan to poison him) and witnesses or hears of horrendous crimes by women, or of their punishment for such crimes: the patissière who uses human flesh for her pies, the baker’s wife who sells her son’s body for sex with her female neighbours, and the peasant adulteress whose husband takes a red-hot iron to her vagina, a form of revenge heartily praised by the narrator (1907–1915). The Libre segon (1955–6374) describes the protagonist’s relationships with women from all four social estates: a virgin, a widow, and a former novice who represents the estate of the nuns; his experience of the fourth estate of women, the wife, comes through his marriages to all of them. His experiences with each of these women takes up three of the four Parts; the other one (Segona Part) concerns his relationship with a Beghard and a further journey which allows him to witness various forms of female evil. The Libre segon contains a sizeable amount of material on the hypocrisy of the Beghards and of the clergy, but there is also a denunciation of the practice of wet-nursing and a long indictment (almost a thousand lines) of the convent education of girls. All this is social criticism of the most direct kind concerning the physical and moral well-being of children and the moral corruption of girls in particular, and only secondarily is it part of the misogynistic fabric of the book. Moreover, in at least two places, the author’s gaze wanders away from women and becomes fixed on evidence of the intervention of heaven and the saints in the doings of men. Even so, the greater part of the Libre segon consists of the exemplification through first-person narrative of the kinds of female defects of character listed in the Third Part of the Prefaci. The following brief summary of the Libre segon is meant to give an impression of the range of misogynistic concepts that are reworked as narrative within it. The protagonist’s first wife turns out not to be a virgin and to have no dowry. There is much detailed description of her repugnant personal habits and several passages on her use of disgusting cosmetics and her extravagance in dress. She is totally incompetent as an administrator of her husband’s house, gets up late, and never does any embroidery (one of the practical activities most recommended by moralists since it is guaranteed to keep a woman safely occupied and out of harm’s way).45 She prefers throwing parties for 45

For instance Eiximenis 1981: I, 33–34 or Vives 1996: 22–23; for references to the

114

ROBERT ARCHER

young gallants and indulging her literary pretensions instead of providing company and sexual solace for her husband. She refuses to listen to his reprimands, and in reply hurls at him insults about his manhood. The naive protagonist reveals his secrets to his wife hoping that this will make for greater intimacy, but she only spreads these around, exaggerating them as she does so. He tries further to encourage her to behave as he would wish by making her his universal heir, but her perverse nature proves finally to be resistant to all his efforts. At this he excludes her from his will, and is able to have the marriage annulled by showing that, as it turns out, she was already married. This concludes the first Part of the Libre segon. In the Segona part, during a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela he comes across examples of female evil almost at every step: the bride of Requena already mentioned who covers up her lack of a maidenhead by feigning possession by the Devil; a woman who falsely accuses a man of theft when he refuses to sleep with her (he is saved by the miraculous intervention of St James); an adulteress whose throat is cut by her husband; the funeral of an old woman who has had twenty-five husbands, the last of them a young man (the protagonist laughs scornfully when he hears the mourners complain that the husband has not died of grief, 3374–3375); in Saragossa, before the very effigy of the Virgin of the Pillar, he sees women in all their finery, idle, vain, and short on virtue; in the same city, he witnesses the execution of a woman who had been three years in prison, saving herself from the gallows by repeated pregnancies (but this time too, a post-mortem reveals she was again with child: the protagonist laments the death of the unbaptized infant within her); then a further scandal in the city as a woman who enlists the help of a Moorish sorcerer to help stop the beatings at home, and steals the sacred host for him, only to see it turn into a new-born baby which survives even the fire into which it is thrown and which returns to its original form as the sacramental wafer (the woman is later struck down by lightning). His last anecdote concerns his enlistment as godfather at a baptism, where it becomes clear to him that the godmother is really the mother and the baptizing priest the father. In all these encounters, except in the case of the women he observes in Saragossa cathedral, the role of the protagonist complements the one he performs in relation to the four women he marries or considers marrying; that is, he witnesses or hears of these crimes as a member of a social group which in many instances expresses its outrage at the evil perpetrated by individual women. The experiences he has with women in his private life are thus seen against the backdrop of generalized female evil, confirming the status of his wives as valid particular examples rather than atypical instances of perversity.

equally commended occupation of spinning in Tertullian and Boccaccio, see Blamires 1992: 58 and 171.

PRESENT LAUGHTER

115

The juxtaposition of these anecdotes with instances of the miraculous intervention of saints further authenticates their negative exemplarity and, in case the reader was in any doubt, confirms the earnest nature of the narrator’s professed alarm at the universality of evil perpetrated by women. On the way back to Valencia he contemplates marrying the Beghard to whom he has entrusted his house during his absence, but the more he observes her, the more suspicious he becomes that her character is not what it had seemed, and he eventually discovers that she has lovers, has undergone an abortion, and is a religious hypocrite. He reports that she later became a procuress and was publicly flogged. Saved from the mistake of marriage with the Beghard, the protagonist walks ingenuously into matrimony with a forty-year-old widow who soon shows her true colours. Here the female defects depicted are deception, the inability to be content with what she has, the habit of constant recrimination, a lack of interest in fulfilling the debitum coniugale, a tendency to compare the protagonist unfavourably with her previous husband, bad treatment of the servants, and lack of respect for his family. In an effort to conceive, she consults a procuress, a series of quack doctors and astrologers. Bad in every way, except when she declines the services of young men available through the procuress (‘sol aquell dia/ ffon hun poch bona’, the narrator concedes, 4578–4579), finally she accidentally suffocates another woman’s baby which she had pretended was her own and, the deception uncovered, hangs herself. Since he has been unable to find a good wife from the estates of maiden or widow, he turns to the remaining of the four estates of women in medieval society, the nuns. The ex-novice he finds for himself is useless in the house, but she is at least affectionate and obedient – that is until she has a child. After this, her character changes completely, and she treats him with contempt. She comes to see the error of her ways only when the child dies due to its malnourishment and mistreatment by a string of wet-nurses. It is at this point, in her long confession of how she had been brought up by the nuns, that the previous change of character is explained: the Prioress had taught her that, once she had given birth to a child from a suitably old husband, she could then become the lady of the house and let him know who is in charge. But in spite of her repentance, the effects of a convent education prove to be irrevocable and she dies drunk, while again pregnant, her head stuck in a wine-vat; the protagonist buries her unmourned. Here the principal accusations against nuns are wordliness, greed, lust, vanity, the practice of abortion, faked illness, and the production of forged documents; girls brought up in convents, moreover, are seen as corrupt creatures who are taught to think perversely of their future husbands as no more than sources of money to be exploited for themselves and for the convent. By the end of the Libre segon the protagonist has become a man with ample knowledge, both through observation and by first-hand experience, of the nature of women in the terms in which it is understood by the narrator.

116

ROBERT ARCHER

Four times he has tried to share his life with a woman and, although sometimes cautious (as with the Beghard), he has nevertheless shown himself to be incapable of rejecting the belief that a suitable mate is to be found. The obvious parallel with the protagonist at the end of Lo somni is instructive since it draws attention to the way in which both narratives represent the stubborn resistance of male desire in the face of unpalatable realities concerning women. Bernat refuses to accept that Tirèsies’s account of their defects applies to them all without exception; on the basis of his love for a lady, he tries to undo the accusations, even though his underlying notion of women generally does not essentially conflict with these. In similar fashion, the protagonist of Spill still is unable to accept at this point in the narrative what his own experience should have taught him, namely that there are, for all intents and purposes, no good women. Thus we see him at the beginning of the Libre tercer again considering marriage, torn between his dread of yet more subjection to female folly and his desire for an heir. It is at this point, in the ambiguous circumstances between waking and sleeping that characterize the literary device of the oracular vision, that he is visited by the figure of Salamó who proceeds to deliver the sermon on women – and his defence of the immaculate conception of Mary – that will take up more than half the entire work. The liçó de Salamó (6457–15407) is divided into four parts, each with a different function, but which are all designed to drive home jointly the message that the protagonist should abandon for once and for all his lingering desire for marriage and children. The ideological basis for much of what Salamó says is Jerome’s anti-matrimonial Adversus Jovinianum: there is no such thing as a good wife (there is no mention of the exceptions cited by Jerome), and if a man must marry, then he should expect the worst. By now the general misogyny summarized in the Tercera Part del Prefaci has evolved into a definitively misogamous form. It is no coincidence that, as Carré points out (1994a: 202), the more subtle forms of the comic elements used by Roig are especially abundant in the Tercer Libre. The first of its four parts (6457–9961) is a long tirade against women, with copious examples from Biblical, Classsical, and Hispanic sources, and with several local Valencian references. As in Boccaccio and Boccaccio/Metge, the constant exaggeration in the detailed satire of women ensures that comic elements arise at every turn. Early in this section, Roig places in Salamó’s mouth the contention that a good wife can be found on the earth only very exceptionally: Dona conplida/ he provehida/ de saviea,/ virtuts, bonea/ he seny clar,/ no.n cal çercar,/ car no hi ha./ Be.s trobarà/ en qualque part,/ mas lluny e tart,/ muller tal qual/ he cominal,/ tolleradora, ordenadora,/ queucom curosa,/ en abundosa/ casa fornida,/ però regida/ per lo marit. (6635–6653)

These lines allude specifically to the epilogue of Proverbs (31: 10–31), a core text of defence literature, which celebrates a family-based feminine virtue. In

PRESENT LAUGHTER

117

it the good wife is described as an unsupervised figure who moves about the house creating domestic bliss, motivated only by her unselfish desire to serve her family: Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value, She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. [. . .] She gets up while it is still dark; she provides for her family and portions for her servant girls. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. (31:11–17)46

Roig’s text contextualizes the Biblical one: where there are such women as Solomon praises, these are to be found only in households where the man is properly in charge. With this, Roig neatly sweeps aside the problem of authority that arises from the attribution to Solomon of this passage in spite of his authorship of the misogynistic material of other parts of Proverbs. Solomon himself, in the form of Salamó, is seen to undermine the validity of his own text, speaking with the voice of the other Biblical Solomon, the one whose direct knowledge of women (seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, 7049–7050) supports his claim to authority on the matter. As such he reprimands the protagonist, telling him that, even from what he has seen, he should already have learnt his lesson: ‘Tu bé.lls ulls tens,/ he no y vols veure;/ tornes a beure/ lo vomitat’ (6972–6975). In much of the First Part of the liçó (6375–9961) Salamó describes aspects of female nature and behaviour that relate directly to the experience of the protagonist, so that he in fact conducts an analysis of what the protagonist has seen at first hand (the lesson is learnt by the narrator, and what he learns informs retrospectively the Tercera Part del Prefaci). In this way, what Salamó says glosses with general comment or example the Libre Segon. For instance, the inconstancy of women’s affections (7032–7035/ his third marriage), their inability to keep a secret (7828–7833/ his first wife), deception (7919–7956/ passim), inability to be taught or reformed (7597–8015/ passim), the desperate measures they take in order to have children (8630–8949/ the widow), their mistreatment of children and irresponsible use of wet-nurses (8986–9265/ the woman in Saragossa who sold her son’s body for sex, the widow), their bad relations with the husband’s relatives (9802–9820/ the widow).47 To these accusations that relate to the protagonist’s experience, Salamó appends many other elements: women are thieves

46 47

Bible 1983. The abuses of wet-nursing are implicitly contrasted with the later representation of the Virgin Mary as a mother who breast-feeds her baby until he is ready for weaning (11602–11623).

118

ROBERT ARCHER

of a man’s estate and that of his children (6944–6971; this allegation is made by Boccaccio and repeated by Metge);48 their histrionic behaviour during sickness; their jealousy and readiness to mate (woman as an animal semper parata ad coitum) that distinguishes them from all other females in the animal world;49 their production of monsters because of carelessnes or perversity during pregnancy; their mostly faked screams during childbirth (though Roig admits that they do sometimes die in labour); their general cruelty; their dangerous incompetence as healers of the sick; their invention of the sin of sodomy;50 their flatulence; their poisonous nature, closely linked to menstruation (this is also in Eiximenis);51 their practice of witchcraft for which many of them have been burned at the stake. The whole passage is crammed with exempla and topical allusions with which Roig seeks to substantiate his contentions.52 After this, Salamó again reproves the protagonist for his failure to learn his lesson, and briefly suggests some remedia amoris – tactics for overcoming his desire for a woman – together with ways of resisting the temptations of the flesh, counselling him to marry only if he really must, in accordance with Paul’s advice that it is better to wed than to burn. To discourage him from this option he glosses the account in Genesis of the creation of Eve and the Fall of Man: she was made from the rib because this particular part of the body is ‘flach, curvat’ like woman’s nature (10313–10338); there is also a brief ironic reference to the story (also recounted by Eiximenis) of the creation of woman’s tongue from a goat’s tail (10339–10343) to argue that women have inherited the pact that Eve made with the Devil (10478–10563).53 48 ‘Tutti i pensieri delle femmine, tutto lo studio, tutte l’opere, a niuna altra cosa tirano se non a rubare, a signoreggiare e ad ingannare gli uomini’ (Boccaccio 1992: 60; Boccaccio 1975: 28–29); ‘Tot llur estudi e pensament e altres coses no giren sinó a robar e enganar los hòmens’ (Metge 1999: 133). 49 Jacquart and Thomasset 1988: 81. 50 Lines 9589–9625. Roig, in the face of the traditional interpretation of the biblical story of Sodom, accuses women of having invented the practice of buggery. The word sodomia (9594) usually has the broad sense of homosexuality, especially as applied to what was deemed to be the ‘active’ male, but here it has the very unusual specific sense of anal intercourse. Roig describes how the practice leads to the formation inside the body of lizards, snakes, toads, bats, and other creatures of the kind which try to live hidden from view. He alludes in the same passage to what seem to be haemorrhoids, and from this moves on to denounce the constant flatulence of women. I have been unable to find a source for this idea (also Cantavella 1992a: 112–113). 51 ‘Per tal cant més amà creure a la serp que a Déu, li és dat en pena que sia tota serpentina e verinosa, en tant que del cap fins als peus no.y aja loch qui tot no sia verí e mort d’òmens’ (Eiximenis 1981: I, 20). 52 For a detailed analysis of ll. 7913–8078 (according to the line numbering of Miquel i Planas), see Peirats Navarro 2001–2002 (who uses a different numbering in anticipation of a new edition). 53 Roig is atypically restrained here. He could have used other negative, and latently comic, arguments in relation to the rib, such as that referred to by Eiximenis: ‘ossos ab

PRESENT LAUGHTER

119

The rest of the Second Part of the liçó de Salamó (10564–12075), in deliberate contrast to the denunciation of Eve and her heirs, is an eulogy of the Blessed Virgin and a defence of the immaculate conception of Mary. These 1,500 lines of argument in support of a polemical belief (it did not finally become doctrine until the nineteenth century) are followed in the Tercera Part by nearly 2,000 further lines in which the narrator describes several aspects of doctrine and Church history: the Passion and Resurrection, the institution of the Eucharist, the founding of the new Church. This section includes further attacks on the Beghards and the expression of suspicion about converses (Jewish women converts to Christianity). Following immediately after these two sections on matters of faith, Salamó, after briefly describing the insatiable nature of female lust (12076–12895), enjoins the protagonist to follow the example of many wise men and to cast women aside for ever. But even after all he has included in his liçó so far – an exhaustive denunciation of women’s defects and their relation to the protagonist’s experience, the emphatic contrast with the Virgin Mary, the call to faith in his story of the founding concepts of the Church – Salamó can see that the protagonist is preparing to make objections to his arguments in favour of the idea of totally rejecting women. Before he has a chance to speak, Salamó, who has already addressed some of the traditional arguments used in defence writings, precludes any possibility of debate about women by demolishing yet more defence arguments. The first of these involves rebutting the objection that men must have truck with women because God created them with the specific divine intention that human beings should go forth and multiply (15045–15153): Salamó assures the protagonist that this instruction was meant for Adam alone and not for every man who came after him. He then turns to the question of the examples of famous women which are often cited as proof that the female sex is capable of great virtue. He concedes that there may be a few genuine cases, such as Saba, who prophesized the Crucifixion, but he notes that among them there have been few married women (15255), and also that all the virtuous women that could be named do not change the general rule: ‘hun[a] oreneta/ cert no fa stiu’ (15240–15241).54 After this Salamó returns to his previous point to say that any woman a man marries has to be tolerated solely for her ability to provide children, and even then he can never be sure they are his ossos tostemps fan gran brogit, e per tal hon que fembres aja, ha tostemps gran parleria’ (Eiximenis 1981: I, 21). The story of the goat’s tail used by God to form Eve’s tongue is alluded to by Eiximenis in Llibre de les dones (1981: I, 21) with the remark ‘emperò, açò són truffes’. He tells the story also in Terç del Crestià where he notes that ‘jatsia açò sia ficció poètica, emperò prova assats lo nostro propòsit’, which is that ‘la fembra contínuament mouria la llengua a parlar, si trobava que li tingués corda’ (reproduced in Eiximenis 1925: 67–68; also in Archer 2000: 211–212) . 54 A similar proverbial argument is used by Tirèsies in his dismissal of Bernat’s praise of certain contemporary women: ‘una flor no fa primavera’ (Metge 1999: 148).

120

ROBERT ARCHER

own. At best women are like brooding hens: they befoul everything around them, but they do produce eggs (15294–15301). The third defence argument to be addressed is the Biblical evidence that when God created the world, including woman, He saw that it was good. Salamó discounts this supposed goodness, alleging that it is clear that since the creation most women have chosen not to practise it; if the protagonist should come across cases of virtuous women in history he would do well to love the virtue but not the woman. At this point he gives a long list of the names of famous women (15334–15381), each of whom is assigned a specific virtue that is to be admired. But he emphasizes that admiration must be limited to the specific virtue involved and cannot include any other aspect of their nature. This concession applies only to those who are dead and gone: he should not expect to find such women among the living. With this, and the injunction to cease looking for ways of disputing what he has told him, Salamó abruptly takes his leave. In marked contrast to what happens at the end of Lo somni when Tirèsies returns with similar haste to the shadows, Salamó’s departure marks an equally abrupt change in the attitude of the narrator/protagonist towards women. It becomes clear at this point that the narrative structure of Spill is designed to represent the protagonist as a man flawed by two universal defects of the male species, namely the inability to learn about women from experience, and (as also in the case of Bernat) to assimilate fully the received wisdom about the nature of women. For Roig’s protagonist as for most men, experience is not enough. It is only the long harangue delivered by Salamó that will be able finally to persuade him, as we see in the fourth Libre, that he should give up the idea of a wife and heir. The book enacts a process in which the power of misogynist discourse drives home what ought to be the lessons of experience, lessons that most men do not learn because of their inherent indisposition fully to believe their own eyes. That is, the book functions as the representation of the way in which a fictional character (whose identity is confused deliberately with the author) begins to learn from the lessons of a life spent with women, and does so thanks only to his protracted exposure to arguments of the most negative form (together with the parallel positive influence of Salamó’s praise of the Virgin). It is in this way a vindication of misogynous didactism, aimed at persuading men that women in both a general and a particular sense are sites of moral and physical disease. By extension, it is also in some sense a sort of course for the reader in which he learns to interpret experience in the light of the truth as made accessible through the misogynistic and ascetic Christian tradition, informed by Marian devotion. The whole narrative enacts the acquistion of misogynous wisdom in which only the language of denunciation, forcefully and relentlessly trained on the reluctant protagonist, is seen to equip a man with eyes to see and ears to hear. The transformation of the protagonist by means of this process is

PRESENT LAUGHTER

121

described in the fourth Libre in which we see that the narrator, who now reveals that he is very ancient, has become a more than adept pupil of Salamó, since in many ways he outdoes his master. He recounts with approval various cases of male vengeance upon errant women, and gleefully mentions notorious massacres such as that of the ‘onze mil belles/ vergens punçelles/ de la Bretanya’ (15971–15973) and declares that Lucretia (‘aquella neçia’, 15983), a stock example of sexual virtue, did the world a favour when she killed herself. A few more murders and female suicides, he adds, would be a very good thing. Even if, in the midst of this black humour, there is the suggestion that the protagonist/narrator has learned his lesson too well, he is at least seen to be on the safe side of the moral fence. The out-and-out misogyny of the narrator only intensifies in the final sections, and while he announces a palinode in the third Part of the Quart Libre (16016–16301), this turns out to be completely ironic. The ‘consolation’ (‘confort’, 16037) he offers women for what he has said about them is that he has in his lifetime found one exception to the general rule: here there is an allusion to Roig’s wife, already dead at the time of writing. But then, he adds, defining the basis for her exclusion from the general rule, she was ‘més hom que dona’ (16088); female nature itself ensures that there are no further exceptions. This enactment in Spill of the process by which a man learns from the misogynistic tradition to push his understanding of the other sex to the point at which he will be able to resist the counter-offensive of his own sexual and domestic desires is as deliberately comic as it is declaredly earnest. In an important sense it also enacts the process whereby comicity is disassociated from levity, and the type of laughter which is prompted in the reader is narrowed to that which derives from scorn. This final stage in the development of the misogynous view of the world is not so far from what is described at the end of Lo somni. There laughter had sounded out loudly in the narrative itself, cueing the reader to assume that the reworking of the grotesque satire of Il Corbaccio is now unambiguously comic, and urging him to laugh again in Book 4 when Bernat turns Tirèsies’s general accusations on their head. But Bernat’s laughter serves in the end to declare his complicity, and the only effect his witty gender inversion has in the text is to soften Tirèsies’s scowl and draw from him words of admiration for his skill in performing a rhetorical exercise which has no inherent bearing on the status of the argument regarding the realities of man’s coexistence with woman. In both texts, by means of humour and laughter – or alongside them – the working assumptions about women that the protagonists carry with them as part of their common cultural baggage ultimately impose themselves as truths, either grudgingly half-perceived (in Bernat’s case) or fully assumed (as in Roig). Both works attest to the difficulty for men – creatures of laughter who are prey to sexual urges, to the desire for the ideal, and to the social needs of

122

ROBERT ARCHER

family and progeny – to embrace fully the misogyny inherent in the unexamined notion of woman that was an integral part of their view of the world. The attainment of such blissful negativity, in which Roig’s protagonist finally succeeds and from which Bernat only just falls short, was made all the more difficult by the persistence, and sporadic flourishing, of the countertradition on which Metge draws in his Book 4 and to which Roig has referred in some detail at the end of the liçó de Salamó: the defence of women.

4 THE DEFENCES THE DEFENCES

A Minor Defence Tradition Works written specifically in defence of women do not appear in Spain until the fourth decade of the fifteenth century, a considerable time after the literature of defence began to be produced in France in relation to the Roman de la Rose in the last decades of the fourteenth. There is no evidence that any texts of the French debate, even the extraordinary writings of Christine de Pizan, filtered into the courts of the Spanish kingdoms.1 However, both before and after the better-known Castilian defences of the 1440s by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Diego de Valera and Álvaro de Luna, passages of what is essentially defence material appear sporadically in verse and prose works, and point strongly to the existence of a fragmentary background tradition to the defence as a genre. Such passages took their cue, not from any local context of debate, but rather from the broad European defence tradition with its roots in the Bible, including the Apocrypha, in Classical Latin works like Valerius Maximus where some of the standard exempla of virtuous women originate, and in medieval Latin works like the section on the good woman in Marbod of Rennes.2 Further influences assuredly lie in works like the immensely popular Fiore di virtù, translated into Spanish and Catalan, or Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii of 1246, translated into Catalan and Spanish in the fourteenth century, where the wise and stoic Prudentia, mostly drawing on the Bible and Seneca, gently dismisses the rough misogynist arguments with which her husband tries to reject her role as counsellor in their misfortunes.3 In all these medieval texts in Latin and Romance languages, defence arguments (often set alongside contrasted misogynous accusations) appear only as relatively short sections of a larger

1 There is, however, some possibility of a connection between Spill and the much earlier Latin Matheolus, later translated by Jehan le Fèvre, as Cantavella (1992a: 139–145) argues. 2 Blamires (1997: 50–61) argues for the apocryphal Third Book of Esdras as a major source for profeminine argument. 3 Azáceta 1956 and Cornagliotti 1975; Albertano da Brescia 1965. For a discussion of the Spanish Flor de virtudes, see Introduction; Albertanus is discussed in Blamires 1997: 23–26.

124

ROBERT ARCHER

work. The Spanish and Catalan works to be discussed below are similarly brief. The earliest of these short texts is Cerverí de Girona’s poem known as the Mal dit ben dit, written in 1271.4 As Cerverí discusses with a hypothetical interlocutor the relative merits and defects of women in general, a number of defence arguments are proposed, discussed, and then rejected or accepted. Initially (ll. 1–156) Cerverí assumes the voice of the misogynist as he insists on the capacity of women – referred to both generically (‘femna’, l. 25; ‘femnas’, l. 90) and with qualifiers (‘vil’, l. 25; ‘falsa’; l. 138; ‘la vils’, l. 182) – to lie, deceive and cause conflicts, characteristics that are deemed to be proven by Eve’s corruption of Adam and by the fall of David, Solomon, Lot, Samson, and Tristan. The argument moves to the defence position after the quotation of some lines from the troubadour Perdigon to the effect that evil must exist in the world so that good may be appreciated. At this point (ll. 157–184) Cerverí assumes the voice of a hypothetical objector, taking him to task for speaking ill of women and answers on behalf of ‘all true lovers’ (‘tuit li fi amador’, l. 219). This voice responds to the allegation of evil in women by arguing that there is much ill-doing in the world generally, not least because of the bad examples of those in power who ought to set a better example. The pervasiveness of evil, he implies, has distorted Cerverí’s view of the world and of women. After reminding Cerverí of the essential role of women in courtly love and in knightly activities (ll. 193–208), he adduces three arguments (ll. 290–352) designed to show that women are to be honoured above all else in the world: (1) human life is impossible without women (that is, one should honour mothers), (2) the question of materia during the creation of Eve, and (3) men will do anything to attain a woman’s love. In his reply to this (ll. 353–476), the poet, speaking as Cerverí, accepts that there are at least some good women, but no more than three in every hundred; they may be the inspiration for courtliness and liberality, but they also incite treachery and villainy. But for most of his response he focuses on Eve, rejecting the argument from materia (if Adam was made from clay and Eve from Adam, then she is of clay too) and generally arguing that the world would have been a better place without her. After justifying his having spoken ill of women by claiming that it is part of his calling as a jutglars to propagate uncomfortable truths, ll. 472–524, Cerverí draws a conclusion in his address to the king. He affirms the central role of women in the life of the properly courtly man (ll. 580–581) and asserts every man’s need for love (and hence for its female object), and finally (ll. 668–673) cites the Virgin as a reason in herself why men should not speak ill of women. At the end of the dialogue, Cerverí has, of course, conceded very little: his 4 The text used is that of Riquer (1947: 323–341). An important recent study of the poetic tradition of Cerverí is that of Miriam Cabré 1999.

THE DEFENCES

125

interlocutor’s arguments serve only to strengthen the author’s hand: women hold men in a position of subjugation through love and, except for the Virgin Mary and a small number of others, she is capable of all the treachery of which Cerverí accuses her, although he admits in the end that it is better not to say so. After Cerverí there is a long gap until defence passages reappear in the late fourteenth century in the form of the refutation of the maldients in Eiximenis’s Libre de les dones and then in Bernat’s response to Tirèsies’s Boccaccian invective in Lo somni, both of which have been discussed in previous chapters. But Cerverí’s influence is to be seen directly in a text from the early fifteenth century, Francesc de la Via’s Llibre de fra Bernat.5 In this work a debate takes place (ll. 818–1109) between fra Bernat, embittered against all womankind because of his treatment at the hands of a nun, and the protagonist, who censures Bernat for expecting a woman to do his will – any married man would tell him how unrealistic a demand that is (872–883) – and for generalizing from the particular. The exchange includes a brief volley of arguments that, on both sides, are essentially those that had been used by Ceverí; the defence is limited to the role of the Virgin in man’s salvation (ll. 906–911) and to the requirement that men should honour mothers (ll. 949–950). Another early-fifteenth-century Catalan text, later rewritten in Spanish, considers quite different aspects of defence. In the twelfth and last of Los doze trabajos de Hércules of Enrique de Villena women are compared with Hercules when he took on the burden of Atlas: so must women shoulder the responsibility of their sex through the exercise of the virtues of obedience and charity (134) in spite of the disadvantage of their natural moral inferiority to men.6 Villena stresses the extraordinary capacity of virtuous women to overcome their naturally ‘flaco stado’. In the aplicaçión of the last labour he uses the case of women in their fight against ‘los gigantes de peligrosas tentaçiones’ that assail women as virgin, wife, or widow, an example to all the other eleven estados (‘todos los otros estados desto [pueden] tomar exemplo’, 134). In particular there is an example for those men who might waver in their intentions to live virtuously: Por çierto ellas sostienen el cielo, ca veyéndose los omnes de sçiencia e virtuosos que son por el çielo entendidos [. . .] esto hazer e mantener la muger, entendida la frágil o flaca condiçión suya perseverando en las çelestiales costunbres, non osan tanto estenderse de los viçios. (135)

Villena’s treatment of the question of exceptionality from the female norm derives from the particular needs of his work; the existence of such 5 6

References are to Pacheco 1997. The text used is that of Morreale (Villena 1958: 123–137), with accentuation added and some emendations to punctuation.

126

ROBERT ARCHER

exceptionality is used not as an argument to refute the slanderers of women, but because of the author’s specific allegorico-didactic aim; functionally the passage is not a defence at all. In another, totally different, kind of text, written also in the early fifteenth century, there is a similar detachment from the concept of defence as part of a traditional polarity. Alonso de Cartagena’s Cinco libros de Séneca contains a gloss on a passage from Phaedra in which the author responds to the two opposing views of women presented in the dialogue between Hippolytus and the Nurse (Aya) concerning the extent to which women can be held responsible for the evils that plague the world, an idea that arises when Ypólito makes the remark that ‘las mugeres son causa poco menos de todos los males’.7 Ypólito alleges cruelty in mothers and stepmothers, and attributes to women moral responsibility for the destruction of cities and the slaughter that results from war. In the first of his two glosses on the passage, Cartagena explains the references to the examples quoted by Ypólito of Clitemnestra and Medea and adds one of his own (Procne).8 He enlarges on the other allegations of Ypólito: ‘E muchas mugeres mataron a sus maridos. E algunas ay que matan a sus hijos [. . .]; muchas çibdades son quemadas por los adulterios et fornicaçiones que las mugeres cometieron [. . .] E muchas gentes ovieron guerra por los adulterios dellas’ (92v). While this gloss supports Ypólito’s condemnation of women, in the second gloss, prompted by the Aya’s response, there is a shift in perspective. The Aya asks: ‘Por el malefiçio de pocas, ¿por qué [se] echa la culpa a todas?’ Initially Cartagena does no more than add the support of Biblical authority (especially Ecclesiastes) and of las historias to what Ypólito had said, adducing the topical case of La Cava who brought such disaster to ‘esta España’. But once he turns more directly to the Aya’s answer, he reverses the accusatory line of argument: while it is because of women that many misfortunes, both long past and closer to the present, have occurred, ‘todo esto no es de echar a su culpa’ (93). Cartagena draws an analogy with money: men kill each other over gold, but we do not blame gold for men’s actions, but rather the men themselves. He then enlarges upon this idea by arguing that it is generally the case that men seek out women, not the reverse (‘Ca no vino Medea a buscar a Jasón, mas Jasón fue a buscar a Medea’), and that it is male carnal desire which is behind many of the evil events associated with women. The Bible cannot be cited as an authority for the belief that women – and women only – are to blame, because where it does denounce all women (for instance in the passages quoted in the previous gloss), ‘women’ has to be understood in the allegorical sense of male lust:

7 For the text (Cartagena 1491) I have used the exemplar in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, I. 661, fols 92v–93. 8 The text reads ‘como Pregnes que mato a su hijo a çito et lo dio a comer a su padre’ (92v) although clearly the reference is to Procne, Itys, and Tereus.

THE DEFENCES

127

Por ende no es de atender que la Escriptura Sancta acuse todo el estado de las mugeres, ca segund dizen los legistas, no devemos ser acusadores de la natura. Mas su nombre dellas reprehende la humanal concupisçiencia que se entiende en las dessear allende de lo que deve. (93)

Certainly some women have committed terrible crimes, but men can be blamed for much of what is falsely alleged of them. It is clearly unfair to load them with the sins of men as well as those for which they are genuinely responsible; and women can no more be generically condemned for the evil-doing of some of their sex than men can. Cartagena ends by citing counter-examples to those given by Ypólito: not only those of Christian hagiography, who need no mortal praise, but also similarly pagan examples (all from Valerius Maximus): Lucretia, Portia, Artemisia.9 In stark contrast to this ostensibly disinterested and abstract defence, that to be found in Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanch (mid-fifteenth century) is conditioned entirely by the narrative context in which it appears. A brief discussion of the nature of women takes place towards the end of the intense exchange in chapters 169–173 between Tirant and Princess Carmesina, during which Tirant, in spite of the presence of Carmesina’s attendants, Stephania, the Viuda Reposada, and Plaerdemavida, is scarcely able to control his desire to touch her.10 The convalescent Tirant has been asked by his followers to return to the battlefield to lead them against the Turks, and Carmesina reproves him for apparently placing his desire to stay with her before the consideration of his honour, thereby running the risk of being called ‘desleal e afeminat’ (I, 415). She attempts with the use of two misogynous arguments to instil caution and restraint. She points to the long history of women’s treachery, recalling the exempla of Solomon, Samson, David, and the medieval figures of Virgil, Aristotle, and Hippocrates. She asks Tirant if he can be sure that she does not possess just as much astúcia – here intended in the specific sense of treachery – as the women who tricked these men. No man, she goes on to insist, can really know what is in a woman’s heart. Why risk his honour for the sake of one?: ‘Dexeu amor e conquistau honor’ (I, 416). Her brief maldit of her sex and the negative suggestions about her own character are not attributable to a lack of response to Tirant’s love. On the contrary, she confesses that God could not have created a man closer to her own concept of male perfection (I, 417), and at the end of their meeting she is overcome by ‘un endolciment al cor de sobres de amor’ (I, 418). But the intention to discourage Tirant out of regard for his honour is presented as 9 ‘Lucreçia et parçia hija de caton. Etenesia reyna quien de leales fueron a sus maridos; aunque aqui no lo digamos, valerio lo puede dezir’; the reference is to Valerius Maximus, IV, vi (Valerius Maximus 1956: 354–356). 10 References are to Martorell 1990.

128

ROBERT ARCHER

something which she does in earnest; to achieve it, Carmesina offers a remedy for love on the basis of the general defamation of her own sex. Tirant discounts the need for the warning and alleges, surprisingly, that all the authorities – ‘tots los doctors, axí antichs com moderns’ (I, 417) – hold woman to be superior to men. He cites the Bible in particular as the source for the two standard arguments of divine privilege he puts forward: the fact that Christ chose to appear first to women after His resurrection rather than to His disciples, and the question of materia. In connection with the latter, he adds additional proof ‘per speriència’ (I, 417) of the naturally inferior status of men, using for this Rodríguez del Padrón’s Triunfo de las donas: si una dona se lavarà les mans e aprés les se torne a lavar no donant spay sinó que sien exutes, l’aygua que n’exirà serà molt clara e neta. Feu lavar les mans a hun home e torne-les-se a lavar, sens que no toque res, e veureu l’aygua que n’ix ésser tèrbola e sútzia per moltes vegades que les se lave. E ací se mostra l’ome que tira a son semblant, del que és format, e no pot jamés donar sinó del que té.11

Tirant considers that these arguments are enough to demonstrate the ‘major dignitat e excel.lència’ (I, 418) of women and leaves ‘per altre dia’ the other arguments he claims he could adduce. It is a brief excursion into the debate tradition, but an exceptional one: the misogynous viewpoint is put forward by a female character who attributes the negative qualities she describes not to ‘bad women’, but rather to the female sex generally and to include herself. She uses misogyny as a remedium amoris, and yet this is in itself an act of love: Carmesina has only Tirant’s honour at heart. And when Tirant rejects the remedy that is proffered, he contends that the basis for his love lies in a concept of woman as essentially a superior being, almost a divine one in the case of Carmesina: Ultra lo general desig que yo tinch en la magestat vostra veure e servir, aquella me fa ésser més que home e quasi Déu, pujant-me en tan alt grau 11 I, 417–418. This and other possible parallels between Tirant and Rodríguez del Padrón are discussed by Lida de Malkiel (1954: 28–31). The passage quoted here contains the most convincing case amongst those quoted by Lida for the influence of Triunfo; it corresponds to razón 6, one of the Triunfo’s most distinctive arguments: ‘La sexta razón es por ser más limpia; de lo cual da testimonio el natural esperimento por los antiguos provado; es a saber, que después que una mujer se oviere la faz o las manos con diligençia lavado, quantas vezes después fuere vista lavarse, tantas quedará sinple el augua, como era de su prinçipio clara; y por el contrario al onbre aviene, el qual, si vezes se lavare innumerables, siempre jamás el augua deverná turvia, commo sea criado del non limpio vapor de la tierra, e la muger de carne linpia purificada’ (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 219). Additionally, the fact that Tirant argues for the natural superiority of women – her ‘major dignitat e excel.lència’ (I, 418) in itself strongly suggests the presence of Rodríguez.

THE DEFENCES

129

que a la nobla vista de l’enteniment li aparen poques les coses de la terra, sens vostra celsitud, que ab fastijós menyspreu les mira. (417)12

Neither of them is interested in taking their discussion any further. In the narrative the question of the nature of women becomes largely an irrelevance before the huge pressures of love upon the protagonists. In effect it becomes part of the ritual of courtship that is enacted in these chapters. It is surely meant to be an ironic comment on the feebleness of the male discourse on women which she borrows that Carmesina swoons with love, unable to withstand the force of her own desire and the passionate idealism of Tirant’s conviction that, because she is the object of his love, misogyny is a falsehood. Martorell seems to make the point that the rational debate about the nature of women is one which, for both sexes, can have little practical value wherever there is love between a man and a woman. Both the human perspective of the Tirant passage and the attempt at balance that we saw in Cartagena are particularly valuable perspectives since these are both almost completely absent from the more extensive defence works of the fifteenth century – works which are by their very nature solemnly concerned with disputing specific antifeminine arguments, with insisting on the frequency of exceptionality to the female norm, or with arguing for the superiority of women over men.

The First Major Castilian Defences It is no coincidence that the first three such works to appear in Spanish were produced by men associated with the court of Juan II, which clearly provided a specific cultural context for such writings and an audience for them. Two of them, Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’s Triunfo de las donas and Diego de Valera’s Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres, were to have considerable influence on later defences. Both of these are addressed to María, Juan II’s first wife, who died in 1445; the third, Álvaro de Luna’s Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres was finished one year after the Queen’s death in 1446 and contains no reference to her. The natural and inevitable dedication of the first two works to María has given rise to the persistent belief that, since Martínez de Toledo was also closely associated with the court as the king’s chaplain, these were written at the instigation of the Queen herself, supposedly offended by the misogynous tendencies in Arcipreste de Talavera. In fact, there is no evidence that the 12 In spite of the declared attitude of adoration of the female (here the language reveals the influence of Ausiàs March), the book as a whole, as Lola Badia has argued, is full of assumptions about women’s enjoyment of the use of force in sexual encounters, and there is a military concept of sexual conquest which is applied to the love of Tirant and Carmesina as much as to other amorous relationships (Badia 1993–1994).

130

ROBERT ARCHER

Queen reacted in any way to Martínez’s book or that she even read it, and none of the fifteenth-century defences, either these or the others written at later dates and in different contexts, alludes in any way to Arcipreste de Talavera. The idea that María and Martínez’s book were catalysts in the writing of the first three texts actually originates in some remarks by Arturo Farinelli: Quale angelo di bellezza e raggiante d’ogni virtù celebravasi allora, per comune consenso, Donna Maria, prima sposa al monarca di Castiglia, Don Juan II. A lei, e certo anche alle dame del suo seguito, incensate, sospirate dai più valenti, sapeva male che uomini seri avessero osato oltraggiare le donne, con brutture e villanie. E irata forse un giorno la virtuosa regina contro il ‘Corbaccio’, per quel che ne lesse o udì riferire, manifestò il desiderio che a tanto veleno si opponesse un salutare antidoto.13

Farinelli is discussing the impact of Boccaccio’s Il corbaccio, not of El corbacho, and he presents these ideas on the origins of the Castilian defences of the 1440s as conjecture only. Thereafter, however, they are misinterpreted by Barbara Matulka, and then by Jacob Ornstein – and the notion of María’s involvement becomes established.14 Before discussing these three texts, then, we have first to discard the notion that they were a reaction to Arcipreste de Talavera or (although this has little bearing on how we read the texts) that the Queen had any active part in encouraging their composition. These and the later treatises produced in the fifteenth century did not need either of these catalysts: the underlying misogynous tradition, both verbal and literary, had always provided material for those men who decided to try to dispute it. If not at royal command, then why were these works written? At the broader level, there is, as Julian Weiss has recently argued, a common motive among all three texts. Each of them in their different ways makes the claims of the lay literate to the right to the written word in its efforts to wrest power from the clerics and assert class hierarchies. The subject of women was one of the ways in which the noble laity was able to ‘carve out a legitimate space within the division of intellectual labour’ and within that space to use material that was usually the domain of the clerics such as theology or natural philosophy.15 Certainly in all three texts a display of knowledge – the use of 13 14

Farinelli 1929: I, 301. ‘The Queen, Doña María, was greatly incensed at the brutal and villainous attack of Talavera. She called upon defenders to uphold women’s honour’ (Matulka 1931: 13); that Matulka’s source is Farinelli is borne out by the verbal parallels in the rest of this sentence and what Farinelli says in an earlier paragraph on the same page as the passage quoted. Ornstein (1941: 221–222), who does not refer to Matulka’s book in his article, in spite of its importance, similarly misreads Farinelli. The idea of María’s instigation of the defences is transmitted, to cite only a few examples, by Whitbourn (1970: 51), Montoya Ramírez (1995: 404), Flood (2002: 33), and Cortijo Ocaña (2001: 60). 15 Weiss 2002: 249–250.

THE DEFENCES

131

biblical and classical sources – is the means whereby a distance is established between, on the one hand, the ignorant and unthinking (those deemed to suffer from ‘grosedat de ingeño’ by the defending protagonist of Rodríguez’s Triunfo or labelled by Valera as possessing ‘los coraçones [. . .] ligeros’ in their judgement or identified as ‘el pueblo movible’ by Luna) and, on the other, the enlightened class of the literate nobility.16 As such, at least in the 1440s in Castile, the defences can be seen as a collective exercise in the assertion of claims to a particular form of power. At a more specific level, the motives of Rodríguez del Padrón, Valera, and Luna for writing on the subject can only be a matter of conjecture, and these assuredly differed considerably, given the huge variation in the circumstances of the authors and the degree and nature of their relationship to the court. The poorly documented Rodríguez, while a writer of literature in several genres who wrote from a courtly persona, spent several years in the service of cardinal Cervantes and may already have joined the Franciscan order by the time he wrote Triunfo.17 Valera, of converso origins, rose to knighthood through his military prowess, and used these skills and his writings, of which his Defensa must be an early example, to build a career in the courts of Juan II and then of Enrique IV and Fernando de Aragón.18 At the time of its completion in 1446, the year after María’s death, Álvaro de Luna, the King’s valido, was the most powerful man in Castile and was involved in a war against the barons who opposed him and who a few years later (together with men like Valera) would bring about his death on the scaffold. Luna is a particularly interesting case. It might seem reasonable to assume that he was a completely political animal, and that only some underlying political reason would account for his having written (no doubt dictated) the book in the midst of affairs of state or on campaigns, as he claims.19 Indeed, political elements, albeit in a shadowy form, are to be found here and there in the book. One instance is the chapter on Sophonisba in which Luna develops a discourse of loyalty and sacrifice by women and men for the sake of the common good (266–269). A more striking example is the story of Queen Tanaquil (137–145). The story as such exemplifies female wisdom or astutia (although Luna never uses the word or directly makes a distinction of intellect between men and women). Queen Tanaquil is the wife of Lucomón, a rich noble from Tarquina; they move to Rome ‘ca le pareció que aquel era lugar más aparejado del mundo, donde los hombres podían vivir honrrados como 16 17

Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 215; Valera 1983: 50; Luna 1891: 12. The earliest document linking Rodriguez to the Franciscans dates from 1441, almost certainly the period in which he wrote Triunfo (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 12). 18 Round (1989: 146) sums up Valera’s career: ‘Short of stature, vulnerable in his origins, half-pedant, half-martinet, as one imagines him, Valera had used his travels and his writings to create his public personality’; see also Salvador Miguel 1977: 242–254 and Rodríguez Puértolas 1996. 19 Luna 1891: 364.

132

ROBERT ARCHER

en pueblo nuevo’ (138). Ancius leaves his young sons in the tutelage of Lucomón, but has himself crowned as King Prisco Tarquino while the boys are growing up; soon Tarquino is the object of their envy and hatred, not only because they are ‘quejados porque fueran privados del reyno de su tutor’ but also because ‘veýan reynar en Roma hombre que non era del linaje romano ni de su vecindad’. At the very least Luna would have found in the retelling of this story significant parallels with his own career as an outsider and a powerful political favourite. But if there are more specific political reasons for writing the book, none is evident. More than in the cases of Rodríguez and Valera, for whom literary composition was an integral part of their advancement at court, the question of why Luna wrote this book – an achievement not even mentioned in his biography in spite of the praise lavished on his courtliness – is a fascinating one.20 The need to please can be discounted: that was for lesser mortals like Juan de Mena, who not only writes an appropriately deferential Prologue to Luna’s book but structures his own Laberinto de Fortuna around such necessary political deference. But it is, as Mena essentially claims, a big book by a big man: the length and ambitiousness of this, Luna’s only surviving major literary work, are not out of keeping with the other dimensions of the author’s life.21 If such a man was to have literary ambitions – and contemporary accounts suggest that he did – then this was a good project for him to take on. Moreover, it is indisputable that, much as Luna claims, the book fills an important gap, and does so in the language of the Crown. Another reason is that described by Lida de Malkiel: genuine longing for fame beyond mortal life, not only as a leader of men and nations, but as an author, like Boccaccio whose work Luna uses.22 Mena does not lose the opportunity to insist on the power of the literary artefact as a means of attaining lasting fame when he assures Luna that the effect of his book will be that ‘por fama gloriosa los vuestros títulos inmortales puedan quedar e permanecer’ (Luna 1891: 7). His assertion that Luna’s reputation will endure because of the virtuous nature of the subject he had chosen is probably not far from Luna’s own concept of the value of what he was doing. Besides which, in the short term, it was the means of acquiring another form of power, one derived not from the men over whose lives he held sway but from the women for whom he now writes.23 Whatever the conscious motives of these three writers and of those others to be discussed in this chapter who wrote defences at later periods during the

20 Crónica de don Álvaro de Luna, possibly attributable to Gonzalo Chacón, written between 1453 and 1466 (Carriazo 1940). 21 There are also fifteen works in verse attributed to Luna in the Cancionero de Palacio (Álvarez Pellitero 1993): ID 2259, 2396, 2397, 2440, 2560, 2576–2583, 2585, and 2586. 22 Lida de Malkiel 1952: 252. 23 Weiss analyses Mena’s prologue to good effect on this point (1991: 243).

THE DEFENCES

133

fifteenth century, few of them were able to address this task without being aware of what others had written, which is why we must start with Juan Rodríguez del Padrón or de la Cámara, whose work almost certainly antedates all the other defence treatises.

Triunfo de las donas There is, as we shall see, plenty of evidence that Triunfo had considerable importance in the development of the defence literature that was written a few decades after Rodríguez’s work, like Pere Torroella’s Razonamiento en deffensión de las donas, Joan Roís de Corella’s Triümfo de les dones, and Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de Amor. But it might be surmised that his ingenious assembly of no fewer than fifty-four arguments in support of the superiority of women over men necessarily obliged his two most immediate contemporaries, in spite of their lack of direct reference to him, to find quite different tactics with which to deal with the same subject. An awareness of Rodríguez’s achievements may partly explain why the other two works from the period are so very different from Triunfo: Valera concentrates on four arguments only and supplements them with an erudite gloss, while Luna limits his arguments to the preámbulos of his book and follows the Boccaccian model of the narration of the lives of famous women. The arguments of Triunfo, together with the ample use of brief exempla, are set within a narrative framework in which the narrator retires to a solitary place in order to rehearse aloud arguments from both sides about the ‘questión odiosa: ¿quál sea, la muger o el hombre, más noble o de más excelençia?’.24 As he recites the negative arguments, a voice, which turns out to be the transmuted form of the lovelorn Cardiana, suddenly rises from a nearby stream to rebuke him. The voice singles Boccaccio out for blame, the author of ‘el maldiciente et vituperoso Corvacho’ (216), the promulgator of defamatory notions of women like those she hears the protagonist repeat. But none of the misogynistic arguments rehearsed by the protagonist is actually stated in the narrative and none is quoted by the reproving stream. Instead, Cardiana puts forward her profeminine arguments in support of two propositions: first, that women deserve more respect and gratitude (‘mayor affecçión’) from men than is the reverse case (for this four brief arguments are adduced), and secondly that women are the superior sex. For the latter proposition, fifty arguments are put forward, most of them in a brief form, and with the observation that they constitute only a selection of all the

24 Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 213; all references are to this edition. After the following pages had been sent to press, the author learned of the unpublished doctoral thesis of Mercedes Pampín Barral, ‘El Triunfo de las donas de Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’ (Universidade de A Coruña, 2003), in which there is a detailed analysis of the work.

134

ROBERT ARCHER

possible arguments: ‘non fengidas razones, de las quales sumariamente algunas diré’ (217). The arguments for the idea that women deserve of men the utmost esteem (mayor affecçión) fall into the category identified by Blamires as ‘honouring mothers’.25 Every man is a mother’s son, and she is naturally the object of his love; she is the only parent whose identity cannot be subject to doubt (we are not encouraged to think that this idea might carry ironic undertones); she has a more important role in the nurturing of the child, and it is she who suffers in the process of birth (the admonition to remember the maternal birthpangs is in Tobit 4: 3–4).26 These four naturales razones why men should feel a natural respectful affection for women, since they all have mothers, are presented by Cardiana as sufficient in themselves to serve as a response to the protagonist’s overheard allegations, which she assumes to be the result of emotional impulse (affecçión, 216–217), that is, the same kind of personal motive as that which is later attributed to the Boccaccio of Il Corbaccio (229), or else the consequence of defective reasoning. Cardiana insists that none of the fifty arguments she will now put forward can be dismissed as mere female retaliation (‘ninguna [razón] de muger allegando, porque el mi fablar en todo carezca de suspiçión’, 217). She thus claims an origin for them all in an alternative male discourse, while also implying that a specifically female response also exists. While all but the last five of the arguments with which Cardiana sets out to demonstrate that women are superior to men are ostensibly linked only by the sequence of ordinal numbers that run through her speech, there is also an underlying thematic structure that almost entirely follows the numerical order. This is as follows: 1–4 and 42 Women and the privileges of creation. The first two privileges correspond to the arguments of ordo and locus, the third to materia, and the fourth to a further consideration of materia, namely why the rib and not another part of the body was used to create Eve. Razón 42 is an addendum to the argument from materia, insisting that woman was ‘de una terçera esençia criada, e la primera el ombre’ by drawing an analogy with gold, which becomes the noblest of ores only once it has been separated from other metals (245).27 5–7 Women as created perfection. This idea, affirmed in the seventh razón, is based on the notion of her beauty (Aristotle is quoted in support of this) and her cleanliness of nature.28 25 26 27

Blamires 1997: 70–76. Blamires 1997: 72. Flood (2002) makes several interesting suggestions about sources for some of the privileges discussed. Lida de Malkiel (1954: 30–31) points to a less specific underlying tradition. 28 Razones 6 and 14 and some of the tradition behind them are discussed by Pampín Barral 1997a and there is a brief analysis of Cardiana’s speech in 1997b.

THE DEFENCES

135

8–13 Woman and Paradise. Woman embodies the placeres del paraíso; Adam received God’s blessing only after Eve was created; the apple was forbidden to Adam, but not to Eve; she was chosen by the Devil for temptation because he mistook her for the Virgin Mary who was to occupy a place in Heaven even higher than the angels; while Adam sinned knowingly, Eve did so through ignorance and was a victim of the Devil’s cunning; Adam caused man’s fall from grace by eating the apple, but Eve was rebuked by God only for offering it to Adam. 14–22 Woman’s superior moral qualities. These are given as natural modesty, particularly in relation to the act of procreation;29 charitableness; a greater capacity for love; compassion; courage in Zurobabel in the apocryphal Book of Esdras;30 prudence (here there are six exempla from Classical mythology);31 justice; temperance. 23–24 Men, women and evil-doing. The greatest crimes have been committed by men. Here there is a relatively long list of Classical and Biblical exempla of men who have committed atrocities, and the women who have been their victims. It was because of men’s record as evil-doers that Christ chose to take the form of a man rather than that of a woman (that is, because men had greater need of redemption through Christ than women did).32 25–32 Women and Christ. Christ chose to assume humanity through a woman; that is, he chose to have a woman as a mother, but not a man as a father.33 By doing so, Christ elected to place Himself, on the level of humanity, in a position of inferior status to women, since everyone is the inferior of his progenitors. In this world, Christ was attended by a woman, Mary Magdalene, not a man, and it was a woman, the sybil Erythrea, who foretold the coming of Christ.34 It was men, not women, who clamoured for Christ to be crucified and who insulted Him, while women wept. It was the women associated with Christ who kept their faith in Him, while the male disciples failed Him. Upon His resurrection, He chose to appear first to women, rather than men, since women bore him greater love. 33–36 Women and Christianity. The first persecutor of Christians, Nero, was a man, and while there were more male martyrs than female, their 29 During coitus, the woman is not obliged, unlike the man, to touch the private parts, and the natural human position for it involves lifting her eyes towards the heavens while the man, like a brute beast, must stare at the earth (221–222). 30 See Blamires 1997: 52–59. 31 These are the nine daughters of Pierides, the maidens of Lesbos, the nymphs of Mt Castalia, the muses of Parnassus, Minerva, and Nicostrata; the last two are found in Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus. 32 Razón 34 largely repeats this idea. 33 The same idea is in Jacques de Vitry (quoted by Blamires 1997: 98). 34 The notion is taken from Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus, 21 (Boccaccio 2001: 86–87); it is repeated also by Christine de Pizan in Le Livre de la cité des dames (Pizan 1982: 101).

136

ROBERT ARCHER

numerous oppressors were all male. This is one example of how the number of evil men has always been greater than the number of evil women. All the great heresies were instigated by men, not women, and the Antichrist is prophesied as taking a male, not a female, form. 37 The gender of good and evil. The most virtuous of all human beings was the Blessed Virgin, while the most evil was a man, Judas Iscariot. Similarly, the eagle (el águila), ‘de femenina naturaleza’, is the most noble of beasts and in Scripture represents ‘la muy alta contemplación de la divinidat’, while the basilisk, of which there are only males, is the most dangerous beast to humans and is the symbol of the Antichrist. 38–39 Women and nature. Wild animals treat women with reverence, while they attack men (the example of the unicorn is cited). The elements themselves accord greater respect to women than to men. First, air, since women are less subject to vertigo than men, as their sex was created on the high ground of Paradise and man on the lowest part of the earth; and secondly, water, since it is commonly known that women float for much longer than men before sinking. 40–41 Old Testament evidence. In Ecclesiaticus 26: 1, woman is called ‘folgança del hombre’ (‘Mulieris bonae beatus vir’), from which Rodríguez argues with deft sophistry (discussed below) that women are superior to the men whose lives they make blessed. Again, in Ecclesiasticus 26: 21 (‘Sicut sol oriens mundo in altissimis Dei,/ sic mulieris bonae species in ornamentum domus eius’) woman is put above man when she is compared to the greatest of heavenly lights. 43 Women as rulers. The three continents were named after great women rulers, and there have been many more such women in history, some of them maligned and misrepresented. Within razón 43 Rodríguez dedicates quite a lot of space to discussing examples of female rulers and to the denunciation of the way in which these are misrepresented by the poets, before moving on to the last seven arguments (razones 44–50). These consist of brief quotations from the Bible, Aristotle, and Seneca with which it is argued that women can authoritatively be seen as possessing the qualities of grace, dignity, sovereignty (corona), honour, excellence, glory, and blessedness. But by this stage in Clariana’s speech, Rodríguez is having to fudge. These last seven qualidades include one, corona, that is ill-defined as a quality; it is in origin simply an epithet in Proverbs 12. 4: ‘La virtuosa muger es corona del varón’ (‘mulier diligens corona est viro suo’). Another, razón 50, is only a slight variation on razón 40, and is based on the same passage (Ecclesiasticus 26: 1). Nevertheless, he has amassed an impressive body of arguments, with support from exempla, which leaves other such texts far behind.35 These 35

The sheer number of the arguments marshalled by Rodríguez is probably the

THE DEFENCES

137

include no fewer than twelve ‘privileges’ of women (1–4, 24, 25–27, 32, 37–39), even though he does not label them as such, many more than the traditional six or seven.36 Moreover, the list includes only a small number of Biblical references to woman’s role as the supporting spouse (razones 40–41) and it is striking that there is only one possible reference to the passage in praise of the perfect wife in Proverbs 31: 10–31, used as a basis of defence by texts like Fiore di virtù and quoted approvingly by Christine de Pizan and the author of Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas. Here the narrative context is surely the determining factor: Cardiana sets out to show that women are superior beings to men, not merely the efficient and praiseworthy handmaidens extolled in Proverbs. But even more interesting is the way in which, alongside its overt arguments, Triunfo develops a series of reponses to misogynist discourse (that very discourse heard by Cardiana but not reported in the text), so that it demolishes arguments for disparaging women even as it creates the conditions for praising them. The most fundamental of the misogynist allegations to be addressed is the primacy of Eve’s role in the Fall. In razón 11, Rodríguez in effect inverts the standard notion that Satan saw Eve as the weaker of the two beings and claims, instead, citing St Bernard, that he saw in her one whose presencia divina made him mistake her for the woman who was to preside over the angels (and would thus become his direct enemy). Further arguments (razones 10, 12, 13) reverse the charge of her guilt, directing it towards Adam, and emphasizing her divinely appointed subordination to the man, and his consequently greater responsibility. Other counter-misogynist arguments appear in a more submerged form in Cardiana’s list, some of which may be linked directly, much as Impey argues, to Il Corbaccio, but which largely refer to a much broader misogynous tradition.37 The first of these concerns the accusation of vanity in women, their concern with appearances, and their recourse to finery and cosmetics as a means of hiding their ugliness and deceiving gullible males. This accusation, deriving largely from Jerome, Tertullian, and Cyprian and taking up much of the space in the notorious chapter on women (‘In mulieres’) in Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (I, 18) was a standard part of the notion of

principal reason for the book’s success in France, where it was translated as early as 1460 by Fernando de Lucena for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and was published probably before the end of the sixtenth century; see Willard 1965, Angenot 1977, and Pampín Barral 1999. 36 Blamires 1997: 96. 37 Impey 1986 (especially pp. 136–137). To the extent that Rodríguez alludes to the broad misogynous tradition, Impey’s statement that ‘Rodríguez del Padrón concibe el Triunfo como una réplica al Corbaccio’ (136) is an exaggeration, but she is clearly right to assume that he had in mind Il Corbaccio (and almost certainly De claris mulieribus) since he refers directly to Boccaccio (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 229).

138

ROBERT ARCHER

women until at least Vives, as we have seen.38 Rodríguez links this characteristic, which he does not deny, to the concept of the superiority of the female form, and, citing Aristotle, describes it according to a largely courtly notion of a woman’s beauty and its effects on men: La quinta, por ser más fermosa, lo qual afirma el Filósofo en el libro de la naturaleza de los animales, diziendo el cuerpo de la muger ser más liso, el color más blanco, la faz más alegre, más clara e más plazible, el cuello más largo, los cabellos más blandos, a filos de oro más pareçientes; la voz más suave, más clara e más delgada; los pies e las manos e las otras estremidades más sotiles e más delicadas. ¿Quién negará ser en la vista de las donas una occulta divinidat que, por la divina mano en su criaçión le seyendo infussa, las partes donde el su rayo alcança en un súbito plazer ençiende, que non paresçe de humana, mas de divina luz descender? E aquesta natural inclinaçión le faze amar al precioso vestir, el componerse e desear sobre todas cosas bien paresçer. (218–219)

Her concern with her physical appearance can thus be explained by an obligation to make use of a divine gift. This idea is supported by part of the argument in razón 6, where Rodríguez claims a superior natural cleanliness in women, positing a ‘natural prinçipio que más faze a las donas amar preçiosas unçiones, e traher consigo especias olorosas, aborresçiendo el su contrario’ (219). In the long entry under honestidat (221–224, razón 14), the argument arises again, this time to assert that the use of finery and cosmetics is meant to help nature rather than go against it: Nin contradize a la su honestidat, commo algunos, en Maldezir se gloriando, afirman el componer o acresçentar con estudiosa mano la su fermosura; lo qual es ayudar a la naturaleza, que se esforçó quanto pudo fazer la fermosura, e non es fazer contra ella. (222)

In relation to this argument a contrast with men is brought into play: while Nature gave men beards, many shave them off, even though to do so is allowed only to priests, and men of all ages spend much time and money in trying to cheat nature through the artful use of clothes and perfumes.39 A further misogynist argument challenged by Cardiana is that based on the Aristotelian dictum that woman is an imperfect form of man.40 This is 38 Boccaccio 1983: 90–101; this section of the Castilian translation, Caídas de príncipes (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS 12733) is edited in Archer 2000: 106–110. 39 There are interesting thematic parallels between Rodríguez 223–224 and the denunciation of the vanity of the male toilette and concern with dress in Bernat Metge (Metge 1999: 163–164) and Eiximenis, Terç del Crestià, chapter 670 (Eiximenis 1983: 156–158). 40 The Madrina in Triste deleytaçión attributes the divulgation of this idea to Egidius Romanus’s De regimine principum: ‘Otra razón de Aristótilles, provada del Egidio Romano, diziendo la mujer ser animal imperfeto’ (Gerli 1982: 54). The passage to which the Madrina refers is II, i, 8 (Egidius Romanus 1968: 160v).

THE DEFENCES

139

addressed in razón 6 where it is ostensibly argued that, because of Adam’s origins in clay, dirtiness is of man’s essence, which is why a man can never wash his hands clean, while a woman, created in Paradise from the ‘carne linpia purificada’ of Adam’s rib, will wash herself without discolouring the water.41 The argument goes on to challenge Galenic physiology and its Aristotelian roots: Nin contrasta a la su linpieza el manjar de la criatura que, durantes los nueve meses, prende de la superfluidat de los contrarios humores; como sea acto más linpio deverlo a cierto tienpo enbiar por las secretas partes, sin deturpar el divino gesto, que todas horas, como dize el Filósofo, en barvas se convertiendo, por la faz enbiarlo, aquella deturpando, segund que a los onbres aviene, en los quales, si alguna linpieza se falla, verdaderamente de las mugeres, non dellos, procede. (219–220)

Galen and later medical writers had argued that menstruation was the means by which the female body rid itself of superfluities; these superfluities also occurred in animals and took the form of hairs and bristles, but in male humans were burned off by the naturally occurring heat of the body. This same natural heat is present in the womb at the moment of conception, determining the male child; where this natural heat was lacking, a female foetus was produced. It was this lack of natural heat at conception that was the cause of the necessary imperfection of women, and was the reason why the genitalia were not expelled outwards as in the male but remained inside the body in an inverted form. During pregancy, the superfluities that were otherwise purged through menstruation were converted into nourishing milk. While medical theory seemed to support the misogynist argument of woman’s natural imperfection and could be used to confirm the validity of popular beliefs in the venomous effects of a menstruating woman, Rodríguez argues for a natural female superiority in the processing of the body’s superfluities. According to this argument, not only animals, but also men are deemed to manifest the superfluities in the form of body hair – hence the male beard – while the same process in women results in no visible marring of their beauty (that is, no facial hair). Even though this idea of unpurged bodily superfluities in the male is highly questionable in terms of contemporary medical theory – men, with their greater body heat, were conventionally believed to purge the superfluitities through natural combustion – he uses it to set up a contrast with the orthodox idea that these went to produce in the pregnant woman the manjar with which the human child is to be nourished.42 This is the basis of his assertion in razón 7 that, contrary to what the 41 This curious idea is repeated by Joanot Martorell, as we have seen, and by French writers up to the eighteenth century (Angenot 1977: 18). 42 For all the above, see Jacquart & Thomasset 1988, Bullough 1973b, and Thomasset 1992.

140

ROBERT ARCHER

much-quoted Aristotelian dictum maintains, woman is de más perfectión, not less. A further notion of woman used in misogynistic discourse is addressed in razón 20: the inferiority of female intelligence. Cardiana’s argument is based on the Aristotelian notion of superior intelligence as a quality found in soft-skinned and delicate men, one which ignored the uncomfortable anomaly of seeming to locate intelligence in bodies whose characteristics were thus essentially feminine, in spite of the assumption that women were a less intelligent sex. The anomaly was usually explained away by astutia, a more instinctive and less rational form of intelligence than the properly male one. Rodríguez ignores both the anomaly and the concept of astutia, arguing instead for the superior wisdom (prudencia) of women as the way in which Nature compensated them for their lesser physical strength: segund dize el filósofo en los Retóricos, todo cuerpo más liso, más sentible et más delicado, es más sotil e más enseñable, e por consiguiente mejor dispuesto pora regir et saber governar, por quanto lo que fallesçió en las corporales fuerças, naturaleza en las del ánima, que son más exçelentes, acresçentó. (220–230)43

Some of Cardiana’s arguments address misogynist accusations against women that are often made in the context of love (for instance, in Arcipreste de Talavera). One of these (razón 17) simply claims, with the supposed authority of Aristotle, that women have a greater capacity for love (‘segund dize el filósofo, vençe al onbre en amar’). This is supported later (razón 21) by the reference to a woman condemned to death for using illicit potions in order to make her husband love her as much as she loves him: ‘por aver dado yervas amigables a su desleal marido, a fin que sea de él amada en aquel mesmo grado que de ella es amado’ (231). Other references to love follow directly after this (razón 18), arising in the context of the argument for woman’s greater sense of compassion. This female virtue – allowed by authorities like Egidius Romanus – in itself answers the accusation of ingratitude and cruelty levelled against women in the context of love.44 But the passage then goes on to address another implicit accusation: the idea that no woman is truly chaste, since any of them will eventually give in to any man if he is insistent enough. Cardiana, far from denying it, cites it as further proof of female compassion: E aquesta es la virtud que faze a la muger, más vezes que el enemigo viçio,

43 Pere Torroella in his Razonamiento uses Rodríguez in several places as Lida de Malkiel (1954: 31) points out, but restores the concept of astutia to the female intelligence for which he also argues. 44 ‘Sunt piae et misericordes’ (Egidius Romanus 1968: fol. 161v).

THE DEFENCES

141

de la castidat errar, [. . .] piadosamente de la plaga eternable curando de la dorada flecha al su amador. (228)45

The same passage immediately addresses yet another implicit misogynistic cliché, namely that women cannot keep a secret and are unable to stop their tongues wagging. Cardiana depicts men as guilty of precisely this shortcoming, ready to rush off and tell all to their friends either directly or in so many words, without stopping to ask themselves if it would be better to keep the matter to themselves (228). It is when women are unable to exercise their natural compassion, she argues, that men rail against them generally, either verbally or in writing. As in Valera’s Defensa, Boccaccio is the prime example of the true origins of maldezir in the thwarted desire of the aged male: E por el contrario aviene que non se mueva contra ellos a piadat, a la ora convertiendo la usada virtut en viçios; el honor de todas por diversos modos non çesan ofender, unos, por palabra, aquellos que más tienen las lenguas para mal dezir espedidas; otros, que más en la fuerça de sus juizios confían, poetando en verso; e algunos otros que más excelentes de ingenio se creen, entendiendo la prosa, segund fizo el non menos lleno de viçios que de años Vocaçio, que a todas las donas, porque una, de virtud usando, non quiso fazer su desonesto querer, componiendo maliçias non pensadas jamás, fingiendo con viçiosa passión, ofendió (228–229)

The virtuous resistance that unleashes such male venom as Boccaccio’s is further testimony to woman’s fortitude (razón 19). Contrary to what is alleged by the slanderers, deception in love is a male vice, developed into a fine art by the engañoso amante (229). Against the common allegation of woman’s tendency to extremes, making her especially vulnerable to sin, Rodríguez affirms her greater temperance in food and drink and language (razón 20). The notion of greater lustfulness (once she has known carnal pleasure, she is insatiable, a fire slow to ignite but difficult to extinguish), is countered with the accusation in razón 23 of the exclusively male vice of sodomy, to which is attributed God’s decision to send the great flood: Por onbres fue en la hedad cometido aquel sobre todos odioso viçio; e la pena e purgaçión del qual, segund divina justiçia, al diluvio universal requirió. (232)

Additionally, one of the examples cited in the same razón 23 to argue that 45 Here the punctuation given differs from that of Hernández Alonso who reads ‘más vezes que el enemigo viçio de la castidat, errar’. The ‘enemigo viçio’ of chastity is lust: women fall not to lust but to their own compassion.

142

ROBERT ARCHER

there is a greater propensity for vice and for violence in men than in women is the specifically sexual one of the male worship of Priapus (‘Los onbres adoravan e fazían tenplos al viçioso Príapo, porque en el instrumento e acto generativo fue más poderoso’), while women worshipped the virginal Vesta or chaste Diana (233). In this way, Cardiana refutes many of the more common arguments used in misogynistic discourse. But the most fundamental challenge occurs in razón 37: La treçésima séptima razón es por aver seido muger la criatura más virtuosa, e más digna e más perfecta de todas las criaturas que fueron en el mundo de humano padre engendradas; et aver estado onbre la criatura más viçiosa, más profunda en maliçia e más demérito de quantas fueron criadas. La una fue aquella que, después de madre, donzella quedó. La otra fue aquel que su fruto saludable por preçio vendió. Et por vía semejable, es de femenina naturaleza la más noble de las bestias, que es el águila prima; et de la masculina la bestia más enemiga de la salud humana, e peor de todas las bestias, conviene a saber, el basilisco, que de femenina naturaleza non fue visto jamás. La una es en la devina Escritura al poco ante nombrado Antecristo, e la otra a la muy alta contenplaçión de la divindat comparada. En lo qual naturaleza quiso demostrar las cosas femeninas ser más exçelentes. (243)

In this passage Eve is strikingly absent. The importance of the Mother of God as the embodiment of all female goodness depended to a large extent on the maintenance of the contrast beween her and Eve: the gateway to Heaven versus the ianua diaboli. The greater the Virgin’s virtues, the more heinous was Eve’s single momentous sin. As Flor de virtudes puts it: ‘bien es verdad que Eva dañó, y la Virgen María salvó. Asimesmo dice San Agustín, ninguna cosa no fue peor ni mejor al mundo que la mujer’.46 Mary’s perfection leaned heavily on Eve’s weakness: the notion of the perfect Mary had necessarily to be developed at a point that was as far from Eve as possible, and the wider the gap, the more did Eve come to embody all that was deemed negative in woman. Rodríguez breaks with this polarity, by placing Mary at one end of a moral scale of values that is outside the confines of gender imposed by tradition. Instead, insisting on the inferiority of men even as it stresses the superior worth of women, it sets up a contrast between Mary and Judas Iscariot, and supports this with a gendered interpretation of the bestiary figures of the águila and the basilisco. Eve, already relieved of her burden of eternal guilt in razones 11–13, is here fully vindicated by her removal from the negative side of the moral dichotomy in which she had always been trapped.

46

Azáceta 1956: II, 694.

THE DEFENCES

143

Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres While Rodríguez addresses such fundmental misogynist arguments in this indirect way, Diego de Valera, writing almost certainly at a slightly later date than Rodríguez, structures his Tratado specifically around a small number of antifeminine arguments, supplementing these with the gloss (Espusiçión) which he writes on his own text. The gloss is twice the length of the main text, and is relegated to a secondary physical position. In two of the manuscripts of the work, that of the Escorial Library MS N–1–13 and BNM MS 9985, the Espusiçión is copied by the same hand in letters half the size of those used for the main text, and is squeezed into the margins. In two other manuscripts (BNM 1341 and BNM 12672) it is copied in between sections of the main text, and the copyist uses a smaller hand. But the compositional status of the gloss in all the manuscripts belies its importance, since many of the entries complement the arguments of the main text or introduce others, while the different format in which it is copied has the effect of foregrounding the erudition which it is meant to proclaim, and which in itself is a substantiating device in the development of the main arguments. The first of these concerns the identity of the maldizientes whom Valera is denouncing. Initially he refers to ‘algunos que de la femenyl naçión generalmente detraen’ (49) and accuses them of being ‘començadores de nueva seta que rotamente les plaze en general de todas las mugeres maldezir’ (50). Towards the end of the treatise, however, Valera qualifies the earlier idea of the modernity of the tendency towards the general denunciation of women by setting it in the context of a long literary tradition, complaining to Fortune that ‘largo tiempo has querido prestar audaçia a los maluados labrios de aquestos’ (54). In practice, he identifies only two names, Ovid and Boccaccio, but he clearly does not see these writers as the main source for the four misogynist arguments he specifically addresses (58–59).47 Rather, he seems deliberately to refer to a tendency that he claims has come into vogue in male talk rather than in writing. Valera replies to the slanderers by first identifying three arguments (‘conclusiones’) which he claims are the basis of their position: (1) the authority of Seneca when he said that ‘Estonçe es buena la muger quando claramente es mala’; (2) the fact that all human beings are weak of flesh, and women more so than men, means that women are less able to resist temptation; (3) there is no woman that is not adulterous, at least in thought. Valera depicts the adherents of such notions as pathetically impressionable men, prey to facile arguments largely because of a lack of reading (50). With careful irony, he describes them with the comparison that is usually quoted in relation to women’s inconstancy: ‘los coraçones de los tales son como las 47 References are to the edition of Suz Ruiz (Valera 1983). Excerpts in Archer 2000: 289–294.

144

ROBERT ARCHER

foias de los árboles que todo viento los mueve’ (50). He declares his intention to instruct them properly from a solid basis in scholarship and philosophy. The first part of Valera’s rebuttal of the misogynist position (51–52) centres on the dictum attributed to Seneca, one of the most frequently quoted auctoritates in medieval works, usually in the form of isolated apothegms like this one. It is significant that Valera chooses as the textual authority of the misogynists a source that is neither Biblical nor Aristotelian, since by doing so he is able to side-step the larger complexities of contradictory textual authority on the topic of women. The problem becomes limited to the more manageable dimensions of ‘What Seneca (variously quoted) really meant’. Valera, without quoting a Latin form of the dictum, suggests how it ought to read in Spanish, namely that ‘estonçe es buena la mala muger quando claramente es mala’: a bad woman is good only when she ceases to pretend that she is not bad, thus making it easier for good men to avoid her. He then challenges the very idea that Seneca could have said what is attributed to him since another Senecan quotation holds that one cannot praise or condemn the general (that is, in this case all women), but only the particular (some women). A wise man like Seneca would not have contradicted himself in this way. Moreover, a further number of quotations are given in praise of virtuous women. Valera ends by questioning Seneca’s status as an auctoritas: even if he did say what the maldizientes allege, Augustine has already challenged the credibility of all pagan philosophers of his kind. The second misogynist argument – that women are weaker and therefore more prone than men to sin – is answered with quotations from Biblical and classsical authorities on free will and with exempla of virtuous women (52–55). To imply, as this argument does, that women or men cannot resist temptation is to deny the existence of free will in the face of the teachings of the Bible and Christian as well as pagan thought. Numerous women in ancient and Biblical history have shown that they are capable of exercising this free will in order to act virtuously (the list of names is the pretext for thirty entries in the Espusiçión, about half of its total length). At this point Valera compares the exempla with male history, so that chastity and fidelity emerge as largely feminine virtues (54). He clinches his argument by repeating practically verbatim a phrase from the Preface to De claris mulieribus with which Boccaccio argues for the exceptional merits of some women from the basis of the natural shortcomings of their sex: ¿Puede ser cosa más virtuosa que aquellas que la natura crió cuerpos flacos, coraçones tiernos, comunmente yngenio perezoso, ser falladas en muchas virtudes antepuestas a los varones, a quien por don natual, fue otorgado cuerpos valientes, diligente yngenio, coraçones duros? (55)48 48 ‘Et si extollendi sunt homines dum, concesso sibi robore, magna perfecerint, quanto amplius mulieres, quibus fere omnibus a natura rerum mollities insita et corpus debile ac

THE DEFENCES

145

The Espusiçión supports this Boccaccian argument for female virtue as an exceptional overcoming of a natural weakness by sporadic reference to other underlying aspects of the notion of women. Penelope is not only praised for her constancy but is also deemed to be endowed with femenil astucia, that is, the female intelligence which makes up for the ‘yngenio perezoso’ natural to her sex. Argis achieves military glory once she abandons ‘la blandura de la femenil naçión’ (71). Tamaris and Deborah do the same, achieving a specifically male virtue by evincing a ‘viril coraçón’ (70) and ‘viril osadía’ (73). This argument from inherent female weakness is essential to the reply to the third allegation of the maldizientes, in which Valera argues that if women were not subject to temptation because of this natural weakness, they could not put their virtue to the test. An entry in the Espusiçión (79–80) takes the idea further: the Devil only tempts those who are already ‘siervos de Dios’. The majority of those who have resisted such temptation are women. Thus, to be subject to temptation is very far from being adulterous in thought, as the maldizientes allege, since temptation occurs only with God’s consent, and only He knows what is in a woman’s or a man’s mind. At this point Valera addresses a fourth misogynist conclusión, namely that today’s women do not measure up to the standards of those from past eras. He answers this partly by insisting on the unchanging nature of women through the ages. But the remainder of his arguments in effect concern, to a greater extent than has been the case up to this point, the role of the written word in the misogynous misconception of women. Part of the problem is a wilful misreading of the authorities: que caresçen de verdadero conosçimiento de las cosas, e no saben rronper el velo de que los filósofos dexaron sus obras cubiertas, iúsganlas no por lo que son, mas por lo que paresçen, de lo qual grandes herrores se siguen, a los quales bien convenía dezir’ ¡O, quién no supiese leer!’ (58)

But partly also it is a question of neglect, since modern writers fail to mention recent cases of exceptionally virtuous women.49 Valera is at pains in the Espusiçión both to show his own diligence in trying to document the historical cases and to cite modern examples. In a manner similar to Boccaccio, as Suz Ruiz points out (23), he laments the incompleteness of his tardum ingenium datum est, si in virilem evaserint animum et ingenio celebri atque virtute conspicua audeant atque perficiant etiam difficillima viris, extollende sunt?’ (Boccaccio 2001: 8). 49 Valera doubtless has in mind De mulieribus claris, which includes no modern examples of ‘famous women’, and Rodríguez del Padrón. Conceivably too, if the contents of Luna’s Libro were known to him, he might be referring to it since this also has no modern examples (the Libro was finished in 1446, that is after Valera’s treatise could have been presented to Queen María, so that, if he knew it at all, it could only be as a project or draft).

146

ROBERT ARCHER

information, as when he says that ‘La mujer del rrey Amet de Tessalia quál nonbre aya avido no lo leo’ (71), and that he does not know how many were the famous women of the tudescos, perhaps because he has not read enough (‘por yo aver leýdo pocas ystorias’, 72). As for the need to give modern examples of virtuous women in order to counter the argument that the good ones all lived long ago, he offers three Castilian examples, including that of María Coronel cited by Mena, Torroella, and others. The final aspect of the role of the text in perpetuating misogynist ideas is his denunciation of Ovid and Boccaccio. Both are accused of contradicting themselves on the subject of women, composing while in their prime fine works that, according to Valera, praise women – Metamorphoses and De claris mulieribus – only to besmirch their own reputations by writing malicious slander against them once they had turned into embittered old men. His denunciation of Boccaccio (59) traces an evolution in his thinking from one extreme to the other, following what he assumes to be the chronology of his work. This begins with the unalloyed praise of ‘muchas castas e vírgines’ (82) in De claris mulieribus (Valera overlooks the negative and ambiguous aspects of the work), and then focuses on las ‘condiçiones de las mugeres no buenas’ in De casibus virorum illustrium, I, 18, ‘rrecontando las condiçiones de las mugeres no buenas’ but allowing that there were also ‘muchas santas, e castas e virtuosas’, only to finish his days writing a work in which he denounces all women without exception.50 With Il Corbaccio he brought into the world a book which is not only odious in itself but is also heinous in its effects on the unworldly. The reasons, entirely personal, for Boccaccio’s change in attitudes towards women is explained by Valera in his gloss: quando Iohn Uocaçio escriuió este libro intitulado Coruacho era enamorado de vna dueña florentina, e como él fuese en hedat aborresçible para ser amado, ella burlaua mucho dél, e amava a vn mançebo florentín, y el mesmo Iohn Uocaçio, en este Coruacho, dize que la dueña, estando con aquel mancebo muchas vezes burlando dél, dezía: ‘Ves allí el enamorado mío’, de lo qual mucho indinado, Iuan Uocaçio escriuió en este libro muchas fealdades generalmente de todas las mugeres; aquí rreprehendíalo yo porque en los postrimeros días de su vida el amortiguado amor quiso rrebiuar, como naturalmente en los vieios el tal amor sea mucho rreprehendedero sy por ellos se ha inçitado; e mayormente lo rreprendía porque, por causa de vna, asý osadamente de todas maldezía. (82)

Boccaccio’s case illustrates what Valera then says in the main text immediately after the gloss about the effects of love, denouncing it as the cause of much earthly suffering and as the reason why the wisdom of Boccaccio can be turned upon its head:

50

Boccaccio 1983: 90–101; see Archer 2000: 106–110.

THE DEFENCES

147

¡O passión çegadora del coraçón! ¿Qué puedo decir de ty, saluo tú aver seydo no dudosa causa de todos los males al mundo venidos? O desterradora pasión del vmano yngenio!; [. . .] aquel que con tantos trabaios el virtuoso nonbre cobró, así, ligeramente, firiéndolo tú con tus dardos, a la cuenta de los no sabios lo tornaste. (59)

Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres While Luna’s book shares with Valera’s treatise a Boccaccian emphasis on the female capacity to exhibit male virtues, the effects of love like those we have just seen in Defensa scarcely rate a mention in it. The Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres moves on a quite different plane, solely concerned with virtuous women and with the positive role of such women in the world of men. Nor does Luna aim, as Rodríguez had, to demonstrate that women are the superior sex; indeed his defence is based on the normal assumption of the inferiority of the female in nature. His declared intentions, as set out in his Proemio, are twofold.51 The first of these relates, to a greater extent than Luna allows, to Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. He takes his cue from what Boccaccio had said in his Preface, namely that while much had been written or was being written about famous men (such as that which his declared master Petrarch was writing at the time, the unfinished De viris illustribus), women had been totally overlooked.52 Luna, singling out Petrarch much as Boccaccio had done, but giving Boccaccio himself only a passing mention, makes much the same claim.53 The principal difference in conception between the two works is that Boccaccio had deliberately excluded Biblical and Christian exempla from his collection whereas the first of the three books that make up Luna’s work concern women from the Old Testament and the Virgin Mary and the last is largely a hagiography. While these two books are considerably shorter than

51 Quotations, with emended spelling and punctuation, are from the edition of Menéndez Pelayo (Luna 1891), which is based on an eighteenth-century copy at the time in his personal library. A later edition, by M. Castillo, is based almost in its entirety on an earlier copy in the University of Salamanca, but uses Menéndez Pelayo’s edition for Juan de Mena’s prologue. A critical edition that takes account of all five manuscripts is still awaited, for reasons explained by Fradejas Rueda (1997). At this time the filiation between the manuscripts is unknown; the text quoted is thus entirely provisional. For a general description of the work, see the unpublished PhD thesis of Boyer (1988). 52 Boccaccio 2001: 9 and 481. 53 ‘porque inhumana cosa nos pareció de sofrir que tantas obras de virtud, y ejemplos de bondad fallados en el linaje de las mujeres fuessen callados y enterrados en las escuras tinieblas de la olvidanza, non poco maravillándonos de tantos prudentes e santos autores que de los fechos e virtudes de los claros varones hayan fecho extendida e cumplida mención [. . .]; por qual razón la memoria de las virtuosas mujeres e sus claros fechos hayan assí callado, traspasado aquestos en los sus libros e tratados, salvo Joan Boccacio, que de aquellas algunas cosas trata’ (10).

148

ROBERT ARCHER

the long second book containing Classical examples, Luna’s claim to originality in his selection of women is well founded: he sets out to do what Boccaccio, with his humanistic interests in the values of the pagan world and with one eye on Petrarch’s project on famous men, had specifically decided to avoid.54 Luna’s second declared aim is to write a defence. This is absent from Boccaccio, who makes no reference to the defamation of women but merely to the existence of an oversight in the male account of history. But even in the defence aspect of his book Luna argues from the basis of assumptions that are exactly those of Boccaccio. For both authors the notion of mulier clara is rooted in exceptionality. All the examples they give – Luna sometimes following Boccaccio verbatim – are of women who surpassed the natural limitations of their sex.55 Boccaccio is explicit about what these are. Women are ‘almost all [. . .] endowed by nature with soft, frail bodies and sluggish minds’ and yet in spite of this the women he describes acquired ‘a manly spirit’ and show ‘remarkable intelligence and bravery’.56 Luna avoids this kind of open reference to standard notions of the natural limitations of women, but they inevitably surface as soon as he tries to find words with which to praise those he selects for inclusion in his gallery of exceptional women. He concludes of Ortensia, for instance, ‘non semejaba que ella oviesse corazón de mujer, mas aun de varón’ (208), while Cenobia’s chastity gave her ‘fuerza varonil’ (276), or he tells the story of the chaste widow Antonia whose case was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that it is naturally difficult for a young woman such as she was to exercise continence (154). Refuting the existence of the inferior female like Rodríguez del Padrón is not the task that Luna sets himself. Rather, his principal aim is to take Boccaccio’s thesis further by showing that women are as capable as men are of greatness – by which, differing from Boccaccio, he means only virtuous greatness – and often behave no less admirably. Several chapters contain comparisons with men’s behaviour in similar situations of moral difficulty, but the negative depiction of men is avoided. In the Proemios Luna makes it clear that he is addressing men in general – the ‘pueblo común e rudo’ (14) – rather than those men of courtly circles who live by its code; in the latter type of man, Luna implies, the possession of such prejudices against women would be quite out of place since it would break all the norms of courtliness. Instead, he speaks of the prejudices ‘que el puebo comúnmente tiene contra las mugeres, dicendo mal dellas’ (11) and ‘los vicios [. . .] por los quales el pueblo movible presume querer amenguar 54 Boccaccio explains that he deliberately chose not to mix pagan women with Christian; Eve is the only figure taken from the Bible (Boccaccio 2001: 13). 55 Some of the parallels between Luna’s text and Boccaccio are discussed by Vélez-Sainz 2002. 56 Boccaccio 2001: 9.

THE DEFENCES

149

las mujeres’ (12). It is only at the end of the book that Luna refers to misogyny as a literary phenomenon, admitting that some men have written ‘cosas non honestas’ against women (360) either because they have wilfully misinterpreted Patristic authorities or because they have misunderstood them through ignorance.57 But his initial declared intention is to answer by means of the written word those accusations against women that exist primarily in a spoken form. The book is not only the chastisement of vulgar misogynous tongues. It is also the word of ‘Don Álbaro de Luna, Maestre de la orden de la Cavallería del Apóstol Santiago del Espada, Condestable, conde de San Esteban, e señor del Infantazgo’ (1), the most powerful man in Castile for over two decades. Luna, because he is who he is, seeks to correct the habits of thought of the people at large, ‘el pueblo común e rudo’, rather than bandy arguments with mere writers. Nor does he seek, as Valera does initially with his reference to the ‘nueva seta’, to challenge the ideas of a particular group. The selection of audience is one of the ways in which the proemios of Mena and Luna set the book in the context of the author’s political identity. Another more direct way of doing this is the emphasis that both Luna and Mena place on the dificult political circumstances in which the book was composed, completed in snatches of time between attendance to affairs of state or while camped on the edge of the battlefield. It falls to Mena to make this point first, expressing the gratitude of womankind that Luna has written the work mayormente seyendo ocupado en los fechos reales, tanto trabajosos e grandes, el cuydado de los quales por la mucha excelencia de vuestra virtud fueron e son encargados a vós más que a ninguna otra persona por el rey nuestro Señor después que el regimiento de los sus reynos ovo rescevido. (5)

Luna makes the same point about the burdens of office at the beginning of his own Proemio – this clearly had served as Mena’s cue – but enlarges on the particular circumstances in the final pages, describing at length the difficulties of composition in the midst of court business or while laying siege to the rebeldes (363–364). Luna devotes the rest of his Proemio to five preámbulos. The last of these draws conclusions from the previous four and contains an eulogy of the Blessed Virgin who will be the subject of the first, relatively brief, chapter. The first four preámbulos contain Luna’s argued response to the maldizientes. He identifies four fundamental misogynistic arguments which sustain the belief that the negative view of women can be shown to be universally valid

57 Mena in his Proemio seems to assume that Luna is addressing written texts when he says that Luna sets out to ‘reprehender por escritura, siempre duradera, los siniestros dichos de algunos que no dudaban su nombre e fama mancillar e ofender’ (5–6).

150

ROBERT ARCHER

and that there are no exceptions. These arguments and Luna’s rebuttal of them are as follows: (1) Nature and habit. The defects of women alleged by the misogynists could only exist in them either through habit or through nature. It cannot be through nature, since otherwise female nature would never have manifested itself in the form of devotion to religion or chastity, which is contrary to the evidence of the many cases of virtuous women in history. If the argument is that women are morally defective because of a habit of sin, then they are on the same moral footing as men since they too are good or bad through habit rather than nature. Nature merely disposes, as is evidenced by the fact that the humoral complexiones are conditions that exist prior to free moral action, and they are not determining factors in such action (14). It is always voluntad not natura that determines the moral status of men or women.58 (2) The human striving for the good. Luna develops an argument based on the Aristotelian concept of the good (bienaventuranza). Since both men and women seek this good, and since such a desire could not exist in them unless there was a means to achieve it – Nature creates nothing in vain – women must be capable of attaining the good. For Christians (Luna also briefly discusses other viewpoints), the good can be attained only through virtue. Therefore women must be inherently capable of virtue. (3) Creation and Fall. Luna cites Genesis and Corinthians I to argue that men and women were created equal before God; while the man is the image and glory of God, the woman is the image and glory of man, and both are by God and in God. While ‘el varón ha mayor excelencia que la mujer, e él sea cabeza de la mujer’, as far as virtue is concerned, they are equal (18). In the Bible original sin is mostly attributed to Adam, both in Genesis and in other texts such as Isaiah 43 where the sin is explicitly attributed to him. When God forbade that the fruit should be eaten, He was above all addressing Adam, who was given dominion over woman. Luna cites Genesis to argue that God’s ire was principally aimed at Adam, to whom he had given greater responsibility. He punished Eve for eating the fruit, but He limited the punishment to Eve personally whereas Adam’s sin brought punishment for himself and for nature. From this it can be concluded that ‘el pecado fue contado a Adán, como él fuese razón e cabeza, e a él havía fecho Dios el vedamiento, e a él pertenecía

58 The argument is taken up again in relation to the chapter on Debora where Luna insists that the maldicientes err in condemning all women on the basis that some of them are bad, since the ‘altas autoridades’ provide so many examples of virtuous women. By the same token, they would have to condemn all men, since some men are bad, ignoring the many cases of virtuous men. Sin and virtue are found in men and women alike (58–59).

THE DEFENCES

151

principalmente guardar el mandamiento e vedar el pecado’ (19). Luna’s arguments are notably different from Rodríguez’s razones 8–13 on the question of original sin, a direct consequence of their quite distinct aims: Rodríguez sought to demonstrate woman’s superiority, while Luna argued for an equality within defined limits. Luna concludes that whatever guilt attached to Eve for allowing herself to be deceived by the Devil, she was later redeemed through the Virgin Mary. (4) The interpretation of biblical authority. Those who have written against women have done so believing that their views were supported by Scripture, especially the writings attributed to Solomon. Luna argues that Solomon and other biblical authors wrote mostly against sin in men and women without distinction, and that when they denounce the sin of women specifically, they are referring to ‘las desordenadas mujeres’ only, just as, when they denounce sin in men, they refer to the sinful, not the righteous. He also cites the praise of women in Proverbs 5 and Ecclesiasticus and the eulogy of the virtuous women in the last chapter of Proverbs. But while in this way the preámbulos leave many misogynistic arguments unchallenged, it is one of the functions of the main chapters to address them in a less direct form. The commonly alleged defect of avarice, for instance, is answered at the end of a chapter on Ana, mother of Samuel (I, 10), in which Luna affirms the generosity of women, citing the evidence of Exodus 35 which describes the part played in building the Tabernacle: ‘e si algunos fablando de voluntad ayan dicho las mujeres ser escasas, naturalmente por éstas podemos decir e afirmar lo contrario’ (68). Another accusation is addressed less directly in those chapters (I, 14 and II, 3) in which women are praised for their ‘eloquencia’ (78) and ‘bien fablar’ (134) when these skills are put to use in the counselling of men; there is an underlying rejection of the idea that they are all ‘parleras’. The notion that women are all prey to jealousy underlies the exemplarity of Tertia Aemilia (II, 22), whose exceptional paciencia extends to her personally ensuring that her husband Scipio Africanus has discreet access to the slave-girl with whom he is besotted, thus preventing his public disgrace. Remarks like that of Boccaccio in his account of the story (he like Luna had taken it from Valerius Maximus, VI, vi, 1) – ‘suspitiosissimum animal est femina’ – are absent.59 Some exempla counter the notion that women have inferior intelligence to men. In his story of the scholarly Proba (II, 69), Luna pointedly eschews the extensive moralizing about female sloth that is found in Boccaccio’s account.60 Another concept that Luna carefully avoids is that of female astutia. It is not this specifically female form of intelligence but rather an 59 60

Boccaccio 2001: 312; Valerius Maximus 1956: 358. Boccaccio 2001: 415.

152

ROBERT ARCHER

ingenio floresciente which equips Judith to plot, for the sake of the common good, the murder of Holofernes by means of a deception which involves the use of sexual allurement during her carefully prepared visit: [Holofernes] la recivió muy bien, e vista su gran fermosura e graciosidad, luego fue preso del su amor, e finalmente él trabajó de la aver para sí; e como que ella respondiese que era presta de facer su mandado, pero su voluntad della non era ésta. (44)

The intentional sexual excitement of men which is frequently levelled against women by misogynist writers is here condoned since the end – rightful tyrranicide – justifies the means. St Juliana (III, 7) uses sex in a similar way, denying her husband his marital rights unless he becomes a Christian.61 In both these instances, a writer less concerned with neutralizing some of the common notions of women would have pointed up the female astutia that is brought into operation. Rodríguez, as we saw, similarly avoids referring to it, while Valera praises female astucia, as Torroella also will.62 But while Luna’s book contains these kinds of indirect response to some of the negative characteristics attributed by misogynistic discourse to female nature, his main concern is to demonstrate women’s ability to overcome their nature – for all that he avoids defining what this is – and act as if they were men, or, when he can find appropriate exempla, better than men. The unnamed maiden of Sichen who frees her city of the usurper Abimelech by heaving part of a mill-stone onto his head is compared with the Roman men who liberated their city from tyranny: ¡O grande fortaleza de corazón desta noble mujer!, que tomado el oficio de las armas, que es propio de los varones, deseando librar de muerte e cruel servidumbre la su tierra e pueblo, con tan grande fortaleza de su corazón mató a aquel tirano que avía exheredado sus hermanos y los avía muerto injustamente [e] se apoderado por tiranía de aquel Reyno; assí que ella fue causa de lo tornar e poner en su primera libertad, en la qual esta muy noble e virtuosa dueña es de igualar a los nobles romanos e a los otros virtuosos varones que por salud de la cosa pública se pusieron a muchos peligros e la libraron de servidumbre e la pusieron en libertad. ¿E quál cosa puede ser más honesta que matar el tirano por la libertad de la tierra? (73)

The chapter continues with a less than convincing comparison of this Biblical maiden’s act of tyrranicide with the decision of Marcus Regulus to remain in prison in Carthage rather than allow Rome to give up its Carthaginian captives in exchange for his own freedom (73–74). In the 61 62

The source is Legenda aurea, I, 174 (Jacobus de la Vorágine 1982: I, 174–175). Valera 1983: 71; Torroella alludes to astutia in his Razonamiento[. . .] en deffensión de las donas (Aubrun 1951: 34).

THE DEFENCES

153

following chapter (I, 13), the self-sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11: 34–40) is compared with Cato’s decision to take his own life. But some of Luna’s women exceed the bounds of comparison with male achievement by virtually becoming male themselves. Thus Amesia (II, 28) defends herself against her accusers so well that ‘non semejaba que ella oviesse corazón de mujer, mas aun de varón, e por esta razón el pueblo romano la llamaron dende en adelante varonil’ (208). Other women win their inclusion in the book by their ability not so much to overcome inherent shortcomings such as a natural lack of the valour that more commonly obtains in men, but actually to overcome those characteristics that only women possess. This manifests itself especially in the suppression of maternal feelings. The mother of the seven Maccabees (Maccabees 2: 7) watches her children being tortured and yet ‘lo sufrió todo con gran paciencia, rogando e amonestando todavía a cada uno de sus fijos [. . .] que no dejassen la ley de Dios, non mostrando flaqueza de corazón según las mujeres suelen mostrar’ (91).63 Several examples of men who have sacrificed their children are cited to emphasize the essential masculinity of her act (93–94). In her speech to the youngest son she borrows the manner of the Biblical patriarchs as she defines herself as subject in all things to the will of God, even as she reminds him of the uniqueness of her part in his life, and enjoins him to endure the torture. He replies with the appropriate masculine fortitude (91–92). Similarly, in his account of St Paula, in which he claims to follow Jerome, he praises her ability to overcome her maternal instinct in order to fulfill her vow to go to the Holy Land: Ésta, aviendo dado muy magníficas casas e muy grandes riquezas a los pobres, es sabido que, encendida en el amor de Dios, acordó de visitar la Tierra Santa, e descendió al puerto, yendo con ella su hermano e cuñados e parientes e, lo que más piadoso es, sus fixos. Ca, non aviendo aún el navío viento, nin seyendo la varca llevada en lo alto por la guía de los remos, los fijos pequeños, llenas las caras de lágrimas, le tendían las palmas con reverencia. Mas nin por esso el su corazón, lleno del celo de Dios, se quebró [. . .]; e en quanto la barca facía sus sulcos en la sosegada mar, los otros mirando, ella sola volvió los ojos por non ver lo que sin tormento por ventura non podía. (295–296)

In other chapters of the hagiographical part of Luna’s book some forms of torture provide another means to overcome the limits of the feminine. St Agatha’s breasts are not only the site of lust (in Quintianus) but also of torture, then divine intervention (the severed breast is returned to her after the the appearance of St Peter), and finally the negation of womanhood for the

63 The story also appears in Rodríguez del Padrón (1982: 236) and in Roís de Corella (Martínez Romero 1996b: 226–227).

154

ROBERT ARCHER

sake of faith (III, 5). Crispina’s gruesome torture (III, 15) and Catherine’s (III, 21) similarly involve the removal of the outward signs of womanhood. A further dimension of Luna’s book is the way in which he rewrites his sources so as to modify or eliminate some of the ideas about women that these contain. A case in point is his account of Eve. Boccaccio places Eve at the head of his collection, stressing her former glory and the privileges of her creation, but then explains that the Devil’s success was due to ‘a woman’s fickleness’, and gives a brief account of her death.64 Even though Luna places her in second place after the Blessed Virgin, he avoids pointing up the traditional polarity that these two figures occupy in the common notion of women. Instead, after stressing her primacy in any consideration of woman just as Boccaccio did, he begins his account of her with a discussion of two of the privileges (the term ‘privilegio’(29) is used): first and briefly that of materia and then at length that of locus.65 Boccaccio talks especially of the beauty of Eve and defines Paradise as a place of earthly delights. Luna fuses the two: the language with which he describes Paradise is full of elements that overlap with the language of praise of women in courtly poetry and in defence works: ‘logar [. . .] apacible’, ‘fermosos colores’, ‘campos olientes’, ‘ríos muy limpios’, ‘suelo suave’, ‘fermosa melodía’, ‘se homillan avajo’, ‘manso ayre’, ‘agradable’. Paradise is Eva, the site of a primordial femininity that is all beauty and humility (28–31). And yet, the ostensible basis of Luna’s explicit praise of Eva later in the chapter is that such generic distinctiveness did not obtain while she was still in Paradise. Eva was ‘pura de toda mancilla’ – the phrase is an attribute of the Virgin, of course – but she was so in the same way as Adam, ‘donde la qual es llamada Virago, que quiere decir varonil’. God gave her ‘muy claro ingenio’ as well as virtue and ‘marabillosos dones del cuerpo e del alma’, thus making woman as well as man in His own divine image (‘porque la fechura correspondiese a su facedor’). This, he insists (30–31), is self-evident, since God cannot create anything that is is not perfect. Pointedly, he makes no mention, unlike Boccaccio, of Eve’s role in the Fall or to the sufferings of men and women that followed it (in a preámbulo he had already rejected her guilt), but returns briefly to the privilege of materia, implying that, since Eve was not made of base clay like Adam, she must have been especially endowed with gifts of the spirit ‘que dura siempre, la qual non tenga cosa alguna de las heces de la tierra’ (31). This idea, even though it is only obscurely stated in the midst of the long and complex sentence with which Luna concludes the chapter, flies in the face of the standard Aristotelian notion of the male as spirit and the woman as matter. 64 The 1494 Spanish translation (Boccaccio 1951: fols 5–6) extends Boccaccio’s chapter to stress Eve’s repentance; also in Archer 2000: 111–114. 65 In the phrase ‘Cosa conveniente es [. . .] ser fecha mención de la muy vieja madre de todos’ (28) Luna follows Boccaccio: ‘a matre omnium sumpsisse exordium non apparebit indignum’ (Boccaccio 2001: 14).

THE DEFENCES

155

Luna’s account of other famous women shows him ignoring in a similar way the tradition on which he was drawing. Bathsheba (81–82), for instance, is one of the archetypes of the seductress who either deliberately sets out to seduce – this is the interpretation of the David and Bathsheba passage in Arcipreste de Talavera – or who, by insufficient awareness of the consequences of her unguarded behaviour, rouses lust in the unwary male.66 Luna refers to Bathsheba only in the context of David’s later life, passing over in silence the early episode of their illicit union and the procurement of Urias’s death. He mentions her as one of five Biblical women whose eloquence persuades their men to prudent action: it is Bathsheba who ensures that Solomon takes over the throne from his ailing father. She is defined in this way only as a mother (‘Bersabé, madre de Salomón’, 78) and as the source of wise counsel; the purely sexual body as which she is normally defined is pointedly erased. Most of Luna’s book, then, is a defence of women on the basis of examples which are designed to show the range of areas of human endeavour in which exceptions to the female norm can occur, while also addressing many more misogynist arguments than he deals with explicitly in the preámbulos. In his rereading of his sources and of tradition Luna keeps faithfully to his concept of the virtuous woman as an extension of the essentially male, holding the high ground of defence literature even against the values of courtliness that he is known to have cultivated: woman is seen not, as texts written later in the century will have it, as the inspiration for the courtly man but as one herself capable of manliness.

Triümfo de les dones After Luna’s book there is a gap of almost two decades before other defence works appear. One of these is Pere Torroella’s Razonamiento [. . .] en deffensión de las donas (probably before 1465) which will be discussed in the next chapter. Another is Joan Roís de Corella’s Triümfo de les dones composed about 1462 in Valencia, while the author was still a student of theology.67 Corella did not write as a member of a court like the three authors discussed so far, but it is clear that for his secular works he had in Valencia a receptive reading public, one in which, as Joan Fuster has suggested, women were a major element.68 The title declares the work’s conscious relationship with the Triunfo of Rodríguez del Padrón, but there is little influence in a simple imitative

66 67

Martínez de Toledo 1992: 101–102. Martínez Romero (1996a: 45–46) suggests very reservedly some intertextuality in Corella and Torroella. 68 Fuster 1995: 222–223.

156

ROBERT ARCHER

sense.69 Rather, by giving his work the same title as Rodríguez’s, Corella seeks to mark out a distance between his Catalan treatise and the already famous Castilian defence. Corella’s Triümfo takes the form of a letter from the figure of Truth (Veritat) addressed to all virtuous women – the existence of non-virtuous women is accepted from the first – in which she denounces the misogynous practices of men in their spoken and written forms. In a way pointedly dissimilar from Cardiana’s declamation, she declares that she does not intend to respond to misogynous arguments (although in practice she inevitably does address them, as we shall see). She dismisses as counterproductive the strategy of the point-by-point response to the calumnies of the slanderers which a good number of Rodríguez’s fifty-four razones in effect are, since this involves stooping to the level of the accusers: Çessen donchs mal dir aquells que, sens fonament de rahó, de nosaltres, piadoses, parlen, als quals respondre seria, a tan vanes paraules donant auctoritat, en viltat, desonest parlar a ells ésser contrasembles.70

In particular, Veritat specifically rejects the arguments of the two main privileges of women – those of materia and locus – which Rodríguez places almost at the head of Cardiana’s declamation (only the other privilege of ordo precedes them), discounting them as frèvols rahons (100) that do not stand up to scrutiny. Those who have summoned up such arguments in the cause of women are described as inútils defensors (106–107).71 The very basis for the notable success of Rodríguez’s work – that is, its apparent comprehensiveness as a defence response – is challenged as valueless, and the author himself is by implication discounted as ineffectual. At a later point in the work Veritat makes much of her own restraint in the use of the historical examples of female perfection, ‘dels quals tenyir lo paper deixe, tement prolixitat, que sovint de gentil stil és enemiga’ (226–227). She mentions only Susanna, Judith, the mother of the seven Maccabees tortured to death with her sons, Mary Magdalen, and Saints Lucy, Catherine, and Ursula.72 She 69 Riquer 1964: III, 283–285; Cantavella 1992b: 222; Martínez Romero 1996a: 46–47. 70 Martínez Romero 1996a: 57–59. All references are to Martínez’s text by line numbers. He gives the text of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.14.17, which is clearly to be preferred to the other surviving text (Valencia, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 728) used by Ramon Miquel i Planas (Roís de Corella 1913); a regularized version of Martínez’s text is to be found in Roís de Corella 1994: 119–133. 71 The arguments from materia and locus are used by practically every European writer of defences, including Pere Torroella in his Razonamiento. 72 Of these figures, Judith, Susanna, and the mother of the Maccabees (Maccabees 2: 7) appear together in lists of good women that circulated widely in the Middle Ages, for instance in the thirteenth-century Miroir des bonnes femmes discussed by Blamires (1997: 28–29); the mother of the Maccabees is also given several lines by Rodríguez del Padrón (1982: 236): ‘Los infieles tiranos trabajavan con fieros tormentos fazer quebrantar la ley a

THE DEFENCES

157

specifically denies any merit to the examples of ‘les infels, gregues e romanes, les quals ignorants la ley divina, a la mundana glòria la fi de ses obres endreçant, nenguna vertadera virtut jamés obraren’ (244–245) – an obvious allusion to Boccaccio’s decision to limit his De claris mulieribus to Classical exempla. Corella thus defies not only literary misogyny but also the preceding tradition of defence in Spain and Europe, putting forward Veritat’s letter as a model of how the defamation of women should be answered. The model provided combines the already well-tried tactic of exposing the underlying contradictions of the misogynist position by inverting some of its clichés, with the equally standard technique of stressing the role of the Virgin in preference to Eve as the true measure of woman’s superiority in nature. Veritat attributes the practice of general misogyny and particular invective against women – no distinction is made – to male stupidity. Men are presented from the outset as beings who, far from possessing superior reason, are ‘de enteniment fallits’ (22), since they want women to surrender their chastity to them and, when they refuse, vilify them for their supposed cruelty, and yet are just as ready to denounce them as unchaste if, out of kindness, they consent. In a striking Biblical image, found also in Juan de Mena, Veritat depicts men as witless children clutching at motes in a sunbeam.73 Veritat’s next target are the auctoritates. Solomon is singled out as the archmisogynist, even though only one of the many statements against women traditionally attributed to him is quoted: ‘aquell ingrat, fill de Barsabé, gosà sens temor scriure que, de mil, un home bo havia attrobat havia, e de les dones no alguna’ (27–28).74 Veritat attributes the later fall of the Temple not only to Solomon’s idolatry but also to the unbridled lust that he was able to satisfy only with that other class of women, distinct from Veritat’s addressees, who do not practice virtue (the reference to his mother Bathsheba seems to be meant to explain in part his depraved character). Solomon’s misogynous rantings are explained by the same cause that had been stated earlier for men generally, namely the frustration of male lust before the virtuous woman. los Macabeos: e la constante madre, non vençida de piedat, nin de la crueza dellos, con voz consolable, a ser en la fe e muerte constantes los esforçava’; she is also the subject, as we have seen, of a chapter in Luna’s Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres (Luna 1891: 90–95). 73 ‘Com ha pochs discrets infants, los àthomes del sol affectadament strenyen’ (23–24). The parallel with Laberinto de Fortuna 295 is pointed out by Riquer (1964: III, 284–285). 74 The reference is to Ecclesiastes 7: 29: ‘Virum de mille unum reperi;/ Mulierem ex omnibus non inveni’. Cantavella (1992b: 221) suggests that the treatment of Solomon as archmisogynist may be related to the role accorded the figure of Salamó in Book 3 of Roig’s Espill. Certainly it is striking that Solomon is not given the role traditionally allowed him in works of defence as the author of the passage in praise of the good wife in Proverbs 31: 10–31, cited approvingly, for instance, by Christine de Pizan (1982: 89–90) and the author of Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas (Knust 1878: 291–292).

158

ROBERT ARCHER

Having thus dispatched Old Testament misogyny, Veritat turns to the problem of the later auctoritates – the Church Fathers and the medieval theologians – and the unavoidable fact that these ‘molts il.lustres doctors de la femenil condició blasfemat hajen (la llengua dels quals lo Sanct Sperit sempre endreçant)’ (43–44). Here her tactic is to propose the two options of applying either a selective or a purely allegorical reading of what these authorities say: no entenien de nosaltres, mansuetes, mal dir, segons que.ls pochs havisats, maliciosos glosar se sforcen; ans moltes vegades en lo nom de dona la humana censualitat entenen, o a les no bones llur parlar endreçen. (44–47)

Either they were referring to ‘woman’ as an abstract term denoting human sensuality or they alluded solely to unvirtuous women. If they were unspecific about the real meaning that the term ‘women’ had for them, this was because they were aware that, where the sensual male is concerned, even good can be the cause of bad, following the general rule that also allows good to come from bad (such as the felix culpa of original sin which brought the need for a Redeemer into the world of men). At this point, Veritat rejects the idea of responding to misogynist clichés and states the main propositio: En stil de gentils paraules mostrant egual és nostra perfectió a la dels hòmens; e si és ver desegualtat s’i trobe, essent nosaltres més perfetes, nostra vàlua sens algun dubte la d’ells en perfectió avança. (61–64)

Since Rodríguez had produced such a large number of arguments to substantiate the same claim, it might reasonably be assumed that Corella’s attempt would inevitably include some arguments also found in the Castilian defence, for all his scorn for the inútils defensors and their specious arguments. Even so, there is little that could be attributed to Rodríguez, at least not at a detailed level. References to women’s misericòrdia or greater physical beauty or to the role of the Virgin can hardly be avoided. But Corella’s consideration of another defence commonplace such as female prudència plainly contradicts Rodríguez. Where Rodríguez claims that this is more manifest in women (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 229–230), Corella argues that men are essentially més [. . .] prudents but that their wisdom pales before the greater virtue of women that is fed by the condició vergonyosa that governs their actions (94–95). This kind of marking of distance from Rodríguez by refinement of argumentation is typical of Corella’s procedure throughout this piece. The first argument he uses depends on the Aristotelian notion that the determining factor in the superiority of one excellent thing over another is the relative level of its inherent nobility.75 This idea is used to claim that, since 75

The reading of the Cambridge manuscript for this passage (65–68) is as follows:

THE DEFENCES

159

mankind occupies a higher place in the order of being than animals because part of human nature is spiritual and, since the soul is created equally noble in all men and women, there is no basis for believing that men are essentially superior, or that any difference between one human being and another is always weighted in favour of men: que si les ànimes, per qui perfectió e viure los cósors attenyen, en llur creació eguals són creades, ¿d’on ve als hòmens aquesta gran follia, que majors de nosaltres s’estimen? E si en llur creació les unes a les altres en perfectió avançen, no totes les dels hòmens a les nostres sobrepujen, ni totes les de nosaltres de major perfectió són dotades. (75–80)

The rhetorical question here of d’on ve? is ironically meant since the answer that would have been obvious to many readers is one that is provided by that same Aristotle whose authority was invoked at the beginning of the argument. It was to Aristotle that was ultimately attributed the fundamental physiological concept, repeated again and again in the medieval discourse on women, that woman was an ‘imperfect man’, naturally inferior to the male.76 A little further on, when rejecting the arguments of female superiority on the basis of the materia and locus of her creation, Corella adds to his earlier irony

‘Públiqua e vertadera sentència, ab cònsona veu, entona lo nostre antich criat Aristòtil, que, çerquant de dos coses qual és la més perfeta, deuen ésser acomparades en aquella perfectió que en qualsevol d’elles més excel.lent se troba’; the Valencia manuscript (Roís de Corella 1913: 137–138, ll. 166–171) does not differ in any important way. Clearly, however, the passage should contain a reference to the concept of nobility (should ‘excel.lent’ read ‘noble’?), since this is fundamental to the concept being developed, as its application in the next sentence makes clear: ‘ E per ço tots los animals, de rahó exemps, menors que.l home s’estimen, perquè l’ànima, que en ells és la més noble cosa, a la del home acomparada, de neguna valor se jutja’ (68–70); the importance of the reference to nobility arises again in the later passage in which the Aristotelian quotation is again invoked with reference to the Virgin: ‘y stant del Aristòtil la ja scrita sentència, [los hòmens] elegeixquen de tots lo més noble, perquè ab la que més val de nosaltres comparació sia feta’ (115–116). This interpretation of the two passages differs from that of Martínez Romero (1996 b: 230–231) who discusses them directly in the light of Aristotelian thought. 76 With this argument Corella also probably refutes implicitly the misogynist notion for which Aristotle is also the cited authority, which held that there was a natural difference in the level of perfection attributable to the male and female souls. The use of this argument is described by the Madrina in Triste deleytaçión: men like to affirm their natural superiority, ‘trayendo en favor dellos, por virificaçión de sus dichos sobre las cosas naturales, Aristótliles por testimonio, diziendo cómo sea l’ánima del honbre más perfeta que de la dona quanto a la virtut de los sesos, de donde proçeden los cinquo sentidos de dentro y cinquo de fuera, y quanto a la del coraçón y fígado, que son causa de nuestro vivir, y que, quanto más perfeta es la forma qu’es l’ánima, que no menos exçelente a de ser la materia qu’es el cuerpo; e quanto más noble es el uno y el otro, tanto an de ser más dignas, más perfetas y nobles las operaciones suyas’ (Gerli 1982: 53).

160

ROBERT ARCHER

when he defines the condition of ‘imperfect animal’ in a moral rather than a physiological sense: e axí, de quada día, de nosaltres e dels hòmens se fan imperfets animals, que sols lo nomenar grandíssim fastig porta. (104–106)

Woman, the ‘imperfect man’, is incidentally redefined as a being who, in some cases (where virtue is not present), is imperfect in the same way as certain men. Veritat next sets male qualities side by side with female ones (81–99), conceding that some are exclusive to men, even though Boccaccio had long since claimed by means of classical exempla that certain male qualities, both good and bad, were obtainable in women.Thus, it is allowed that men are more courageous, but the lack of courage in women is seen as the cause of ‘humilitat, fonament de virtuts’; men are physically stronger, but God has endowed women with ‘mansuetud, misericòrdia’; the male is more decisive, but women ‘ab promptitud de perdonar’ are better equipped for salvation; the male capacity for endurance and their greater corporal stature are no match for the ‘delicada forma’ of feminine beauty; womanly modesty leads them to do better works than the wisdom to which men lay claim. After scornfully rejecting the standard arguments used by defence writers like Rodríguez of the privileges of woman’s creation in place and matter (99–112), Veritat launches into a lengthy eulogy of the Virgin (113–156), invoking again the Aristotelian concept quoted before. The Virgin represents what is most noble not only in womankind but in all men and women, and thereby is the most perfect being ever created. No doubt in order to give greater weight to the previous statement about the moral superiority of female beauty over male strength, Veritat stresses not only the superior intellect but also the unsurpassed physical beauty of the Virgin, who was ravishing even at fifty, claiming that: la sua sobre totes bellíssima e proporcionada persona de Déu infinit era imatge, essent la pus noble e bella figura que, ab venustat de color, a nostres ulls presentar se podia. (149–152)

After this, Veritat turns from the arguments of ‘los morals philòsophs’ like the one from Aristotle which he has just used, to those provided by theology.77 Now it is argued that those things can be deemed superior which God loves best. Women are more excellent than men precisely because they are more loved by God (that is to say, they are not more loved by Him because they are better, but are better because they are more loved). Proof of this greater love is to be found above all in the misericòrdia that characterizes 77

This aspect of Triümfo is discussed by Martínez Romero (1996b).

THE DEFENCES

161

them (again, Corella strategically ignores Boccaccio’s exempla of womanly cruelty). It is this virtue instilled in them by God that, as Veritat had asserted earlier, makes women better candidates for salvation: E com sia palès als qui defalt de entendre no tenen les dones, segons llurs complexions, pus fàcilment poder acabar aquells actes de misericòrdia – ab los quals, segons lo universal Redemptor determena, la última felicitat attènyer se deixa –, clarament se mostra elles, misericordes, del omnipotent Creador més amades, e axí més perfetes. (182–186)

This natural and divinely inspired compassion is then contrasted with the warmongering and the bloodthirsty ways of men, and with their constant internecine strife, their combats to the death, and their blasphemous chivalresque Orders like that of the Garter, all of them activities with which men condemn their souls to Hell (196–219). A section, already discussed, then follows containing Biblical and hagiographical exempla, after which Veritat, for all her declared intentions to the contrary (99–101), turns her attention to specific misogynist accusations. The first of these is that a bad woman is far worse than a bad man: crueller, fiercer, more arrogant, and utterly shameless. Veritat concedes that this is true (246–252), but only because it is yet another proof of female superiority: E açò ésser senyal de nostra major perfectió mostra, com aquell naturalment sia millor que, mal obrant, pot ésser pus mal. (253–255)

This rule is analogically demonstrated by the evidence of the fallen angels, the highest spiritual beings who were reduced to the lowest as a consequence of sin (240–260). Veritat adds (261–268) that it is precisely because of their natural excellence that even small defects in women are made more manifest than in men: ‘la singularitat e bellea de nostra natural condició fa nostres taques més ésser mirades’ (264–265). The second of the misogynist arguments to be addressed concerns the gender of Christ. If women are superior, why did He choose to take the male form? Here again, Corella shows himself to be conscious of the explanation given by Rodríguez (in his razón 26), namely that He did not wish women to believe that they were in greater need of salvation and that, on the contrary, the greater sins of men made it essential that He take their shape. Corella seems to formulate the idea with studied circumlocution: Que no pensen ell, Déu infinit, per nosaltres incarnat, no pres totes les perfeccions que poguera pendre, mas aquelles ab molts defalts acompanyades que a nostra redemptió eren més abtes. (271–273)

Like Rodríguez, he argues that, as a representative of fallen mankind in need of redemption, the male was by far the better exemplar.

162

ROBERT ARCHER

Corella then adds three further profeminine arguments in relation to Christ that are not in Rodríguez’s work: if He had been a woman, he could not have spoken to many kinds of people, some of them ‘impiadoses persones’ (274–276); feminine modesty would have made it impossible for Him to die on the Cross (276–283); and there was a divine intention in the generic roles afforded Christ, incarnate in the form of the more sinful male, and Mary, whose virgin birth ensured that Christ’s flesh was unsullied by human sin and set her above all other mortals (283–287). In the peroratio of Veritat’s letter (288–323) she makes the last of her apostrophes to male slanderers (there have been two previously in 57–64 and 157–161), denouncing the contradictory attitude she had described at the outset: men strive relentlessly to win the love of beings they consider to be imperfect and inferior and even think themselves ‘eguals a Déu’ if they are accepted, and yet they never cease to slander them mercilessly. She invokes the authority of the Virgin on the matter of women’s alleged inferiority, and the verses with which the treatise ends celebrate Mary’s bringing into the world the Redeemer who is deemed to be the most beautiful of all men precisely because He took his human likeness from His mother (317–318). In all this there is a consciousness of an existing tradition of defence, and an engagement with it, that is quite absent from Rodríguez, Valera, or Luna (although Luna sets his compilation of exempla in the context of Boccaccio and Valerius Maximus) as well as from Torroella. Corella rejects the efficacy of citing countless exempla and denounces some of the standard arguments as useless, largely in an undeclared attempt to outdo Rodríguez’s Triunfo on his own terms with a work of the same title. In the next defence to be discussed there is a similar consciousness of antecedents, but the striving for distinctiveness is conducted along quite different lines.

Cárcel de Amor Diego de San Pedro, writing his Cárcel de Amor in Castile some time between 1483 and 1492, is unlikely to have been aware of Roís de Corella’s work, but he certainly knew that of Valera and Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, since he uses them both for the defence treatise he incorporates into this work. The narrative context in which the defence appears determines the form it takes and it is this context that accounts for the fact that, yet again, it is distinctly unlike what had been done by previous writers. Towards the end of San Pedro’s sentimental romance the languishing Leriano, barred by his beloved Laureola from seeing her again, causes consternation among his friends when he appears to be determined to die of longing for her. One of them, Tefeo, applies the balm of misogynous discourse, the traditional method of the remedia amoris with which Carmesina tries to discourage Tirant, but his well-intentioned efforts backfire. Leriano tells him peevishly that he is so distressed by the accusations he has made against women, one of

THE DEFENCES

163

whose number he loves, that ‘de pasión de haverte oído beviré menos de lo que creía’.78 Then, with almost his last breath, he gasps out his fifteen objections to the practice of maldezir and follows these with twenty arguments and a string of exempla with which he protests the huge extent to which men are indebted to women.79 Leriano’s defence is entirely homogeneous with the concept of love and amorous service that informs his role in the work as a whole. More than any of the other treatises we have seen, this passage is a defence of woman as the vital focus of the courtly ideal. As in Rodríguez’s narrative, we are not told what are the specific allegations against womankind to which Leriano is responding, but it is probably assumed that the reader hardly needs telling. In San Pedro’s work, however, given the intensity with which the courtly ideal is lived out by Leriano in the preceding narrative, there is an even stronger sense that a misogynous diatribe would be a gross impropriety in the ideological terms of the narrative itself, one which upholds a set of values inextricably associated with him. Leriano is physically harmed by being forced to listen to Tefeo’s antifeminine discourse, a list of ‘infinitos males de las mugeres’ which is not given in the narrative itself. For Leriano, what he hears – and what the readers are not allowed to hear for themselves – is an unspeakable obscenity that threatens his security in the symbolic order in which he has lived and for which he is now dying. Leriano’s defence itself is concerned almost entirely with upholding the values of this symbolic order. His first fifteen arguments are directed at the practice of maldezir – he shows himself to be perfectly familiar with its widespread nature – as a threat to the ideal of courtly behaviour towards women, to cortesía as the cancionero poets discussed in the next chapter called it. Only a few of these arguments (causas) are not related directly to cortesía: the first of them points to woman’s status as God’s handiwork, the second cites the Virgin as the paragon of all women and gives her as the main reason why her sex is blessed; causas 4, 5, and 15 belong to the defence topic of ‘honouring mothers’; causa 9 points to the danger that the practice of slander entails for the soul. All the other arguments measure maldezir against the ideal of courtly behaviour, one which proscribes the general slander of women.80 No man 78 79

San Pedro 1972: 156; all references to Cárcel de Amor are to this edition. For the dating of Cárcel de Amor see Keith Whinnom in San Pedro 1973: 47–48; the influence of Valera and in particular Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres has been studied extensively by Round (1989); Lida de Malkiel (1954: 18–19) suggests Rodríguez as a general influence and also, less convincingly, Álvaro de Luna as a source of Classical exempla. Parrilla (1995: 151–152) points out three differences between the texts of San Pedro and Rodríguez. 80 San Pedro does not refer to particularized slander, but only to general maldezir, as is clear from causa 13: ‘algun[o]s por satisfazer a sus amig[a]s, puesto que ellas no lo pidan ni lo qu[ie]ran, ponen las manos en los que en todas ponen la lengua’ (159).

164

ROBERT ARCHER

with any sense of virtue would attack the defenceless in the way that the maldizientes do with women (causa 3). Speaking ill of women can only create enemies of them (causa 10), and has serious social consequences, causing men to regret that they have married, and to treat their wives badly or to leave them (causa 11). Men guilty of this vicio will become the object of adverse opinion themselves (causa 12), and expose themselves to danger, since enamoured men may take it upon themselves to reprimand them with violence (causa 13). Moreover, female beauty in itself should be enough to persuade the slanderers that they should seek to praise one woman truthfully rather than maliciously to defame them all (causa 14). Three arguments in particular are worth quoting in full, since they express the essence of the ideal from which Leriano speaks: La sesta es porque todo noble es obligado a ocuparse en autos virtuosos, assí en los hechos como en las hablas, pues si las palabras torpes ensu[z]ian la linpieza, muy a peligro de infamia tienen la honrra de los que en tales pláticas gastan su vida. La sétima es porque cuando se estableció la cavallería, entre las otras cosas que era tenudo a guardar el que se armava cavallero era una que a las mugeres guardase toda reverencia y honestad, por donde se conosce que quiebra la ley de nobleza quien usa el contrario della. La otava es por quitar de peligro la honrra; los antiguos nobles tanto adelgazavan las cosas de bondad y en tanto la tenían, que no havían mayor miedo de cosa que de memoria culpada, lo que no me parece que guardan los que anteponen la fealdad [a] la virtud, poniendo mácula con su lengua en su fama, que cualquiera se juzga lo que es en lo que habla. (158)

Maldezir is a transgression of the code by which the enamoured knight should live and is a contradiction of the requirement that he engage only in autos virtuosos. San Pedro appeals to a long tradition of chivalry in which a man’s reputation for virtue was a priority. Nowadays, the defamers of women fail to realise how they expose their own honour to infamy, and do not attach sufficient importance to the preservation of their good name. The next part of Leriano’s speech, consisting of ‘veinte razones por que los honbres son obligados a las mugeres’ (160), largely considers the specific ways in which women enable men to aspire to the courtly ideal. However, of these twenty arguments we have to set aside a sequence of five (razones 10–14) which consider woman as a wife rather than the object of courtly devotion. Here she is seen both as the medium by which a man may acquire greater honour and wealth – worldly goods which in themselves can cause a man to behave more virtuously, since they make him even more conscious of his obligations – and also in terms that are familiar from the tradition of advice to brides discussed in chapter 1. In this latter aspect she is the giver of good counsel, by which she saves her husband from conflicts as well as being the means of tempering his destructive ire. She is the one who encourages

THE DEFENCES

165

him to be liberal with his wealth and so secure the good will of those around him, and the reason why he keeps himself personally cleaner in his new domestic context.81 All the other fifteen arguments consider woman in a broader courtly context, essentially outside matrimony. The first four (razones 1–4), all deriving from a sequence in Rodríguez del Padrón, argue that certain intellectual and moral benefits derive from woman through the knight’s love for her: sutileza, justicia, templanza, and fortaleza.82 Then come five religious and spiritual reasons why the courtly lover is more worthy because of the woman he serves (razones 5–9): he practices the three theological virtues, he becomes more contemplative and more receptive to the image of Christ, he is more contrite because of his own suffering in love and goes to confession more frequently. Razones 15–19 concern qualities that are more specific to courtly behaviour. The buena criança that women inspire translates into cortesía in a man’s manner of dealing with great and small; women inspire men to become fine musicians, since lovers play only for them; their presence in his life gives him greater strength for all kinds of spectator sports (some of them not specifically courtly, like wrestling or running). Razones 16 and 19 attribute to the influence of women a whole range of other skills and accomplishments in the lover: La razón de[z]iséis es porque nos hazen ser galanes; por ellas nos desvelamos en el vestir, por ellas estudiamos en el traer, por ellas nos ataviamos de manera que ponemos por industria en nuestras personas la buena disposición que naturaleza [a] algunos negó; por artificio se endereçan los cuerpos, pidiendo las ropas con agudeza, y por el mismo se pone cabello donde fallece, y se adelgazan o engordan las piernas si conviene hazello; por las mugeres se inventan los galanes entretales, las discretas bordaduras, las nuevas invenciones; de grandes bienes por cierto son causa. [. . .] La decinueve razón es porque afinan las gracias; los que, como es dicho, tañen y cantan, por ellas se desvelan tanto, que suben a lo más perfeto que en aquella gracia se alcança; los trobadores ponen por ellas tanto estudio en lo que troban, que lo bien dicho hazen parecer mejor, y en tanta manera se adelgazan, que propiamente lo que sienten en el coraçón ponen por nuevo y galán estilo en la canción o invención o copla que quieren hazer.

81 Argument 12, ‘porque apartándonos del avaricia nos juntan con la libertad’ (163) is also an ironic inversion of the misogynous cliché which held that avarice was an almost entirely feminine vice. Superior personal hygiene is attributed to women by Rodríguez del Padrón (1982: 219–220). 82 The arguments of sutileza, justicia, templanza, and fortaleza are based in Rodríguez’s razones 20, 21, 22 and 19 respectively, namely that woman is más prudente, más justa, más temprada, and in possession of greater fortaleza del ánimo (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 229–231).

166

ROBERT ARCHER

For his last argument San Pedro resorts to a standard defence idea, possibly returning for it to Rodríguez del Padrón, namely that all men are born to women.83 In the conclusion to this second section (165–166) San Pedro insists on the central role of women in the whole collective enterprise of courtliness: Por ellas se ordenaron las reales justas y los ponposos torneos y las alegres fiestas; por ellas aprovechan las gracias y se acaban y comiençan todas las cosas de gentileza. (165)

It is conceivable that San Pedro had in mind here one of the stanzas from Hugo de Urriés’s poem ‘En laor de las mugeres’ where a similar argument from courtliness is developed and where there are references to the same chivalresque activities.84 However, another important point is also made in this paragraph: the condemnation of the practice of maldezir. Here San Pedro almost certainly had in mind both the argument of Rodríguez’s razón 18, namely that it is precisely because women are ‘más piadosas’ that they are vulnerable to the assays of tenacious lovers, and the development of this idea by Pere Torroella in his Razonamiento: ¡O culpa merecedora de grave castigo, que porque algunas hayan piedad de los que por ellas penan, les dan tan galardón! ¿A qué muger deste mundo no harán conpasión las lágrimas que vertemos, las lástimas que dezimos, los sospiros que damos? ¿Cuál no creerá las razones juradas? ¿Cuál no creerá la fe certificada? ¿A cuál no moverán las dádivas grandes? ¿En cuál coraçón no harán fruto las alabanças devidas? ¿En cuál voluntad no hará mudança la firmeza cierta? ¿Cuál se podrá defender del continuo seguir? Por cierto, segund las armas con que son conbatidas, aunque las menos se defendiesen no era cosa de maravillar, y antes devrían ser las que no pueden defenderse alabadas por piadosas que retraídas por culpadas. (165–166)

Rodríguez in his razón 18 had argued that ‘aquesta es la virtud que faze a la muger, más vezes que el enemigo viçio, de la castidat errar’ and had then gone on to decry the inability of men to keep their conquests secret, thus endangering the honour of the women concerned, and had explained general maldezir as a malicious reaction by some of those less fortunate men who are rejected by the lady they desire. Torroella had developed the first part of this, 83 The four others in justification of the proposition that ‘mayor afecçión se deve a la muger que al varón traher’ with which Rodríguez prefaces his fifty razones, all concern man’s birth to woman (Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 216–217). 84 ‘¿Pues quál real sala, nin fiesta, ni dança,/ quál justa, torneo, nin plazer privado,/ vistes delectables, nin nada preciado,/ sin ser las mugeres la su concordança?/ Tan propias sois vos en todas las cosas/ como es el çucre en todas las salsas;/ todas las fiestas son frías e falsas/ a donde fallecen mugeres fermosas’ (Pérez Priego 1990: 156, ll. 129–136).

THE DEFENCES

167

arguing that innate female weakness made it all the more praiseworthy that women were able to withstand the frontal attacks of men upon their virtue. There are several verbal parallels which point clearly to San Pedro’s use of the passage, after appropriately minimizing, in line with his practice throughout his defence, the implied idea of female weakness: E si de los hombres los muy solíçitos, los sçientes e los mucho feroces por propria inducçión amando fallecen, ¿las ociosas, simples e febles mugeres continuamente requeridas es maravilla errar? Yo veo que quando con humildes ruegos, quando con esforçadas juras, quando con piadosas lágrimas, quando con ricas dádivas, quando con appassionados gestos, quando con mañosas terçeras, quando con virtuosas aparenças, por tantas maneras e artes, las tentamos e requerimos, que no a la amable muger de carne humana vestida mas a la imagen de dura piedra escolpida deviéramos mover. E con todo se fallan assaz las quales, no por vicioso apetito mas por agradable juizio atraídas, e otras que, no de vana inclinaçión mas de humana compassión movidas, vienen a la obediençia d’amor. Lo qual devidamente considerado faze la culpa del tal consentimiento quasi ninguna.85

However, in his development of Rodríguez with the aid of Torroella, San Pedro conflates the idea of general slander with that of women’s occasional debility through compassion: they are spoken ill of collectively because it is demonstrably true that some of them do give in, and for this they are held in scorn by the very men who seduced them. This insistence on the difficulties confronting women in the preservation of their virtue sets into relief the material presented in the next and final section of Leriano’s speech. This consists of twenty-two exempla, all drawn from the text and gloss of Valera’s Tratado, most of which are cited as models of chastity or fidelity.86 As Round points out, the selection is carefully made, partly with the Inquisition in mind, and partly in order to give relative prominence to the example, added by himself, of Doña Isabel de las Casas, mother of San Pedro’s patrons, the counts of Urueña, whom the author describes as choosing a chaste widowhood over remarriage, in defiance of doctors’ advice.87 Leriano’s defence has carefully avoided praising women according to male values (there is no praise of ‘virile’ qualities), and it is perfectly consonant with this 85 86

Aubrun 1951: 35–36, revised with my edition (Archer at press). Lucrecia, Porcia, Penélope, Julia, Artemisia, Argia, Hipo [Ypola], the wife of Admeto [Amet], Sara, Débora, Ester, Elisabet, and the group Eritrea [Erigola], Minerva, Atalante, Camila, Claudia and Colelia are all found in Valera’s gloss (Valera 1983: 67–75), while Doña María Cornel or Coronel and Doña Mari de Toledo appear as descriptive references in the text (Valera 1983: 56). Of these only Deborah, Esther and Elizabeth, mother of St John the Baptist, are not presented primarily under the aspect of chastity in either San Pedro or his source. 87 Round 1989: 149–152.

168

ROBERT ARCHER

that he should modify Valera in some of the detail.88 Thus, the ‘femenil astucia’ of Penélope is changed to ‘astucia sutil’, almost as if San Pedro wanted to avoid the traditional connection that had been emphasized by Valera and Torroella between female intelligence and astutia (Rodríguez had also avoided mentioning it). In the account of Argia Valera’s ‘dexada la blandura de la femenil nasçión’ is dropped, while the description of Deborah is subtly modified to remove masculinity as a measure of her achievements: Valera’s ‘Esta no tan solamente su virtud demostró en lo que pertenesçe al mugeril estado, mas aun en la batallas con viril osadía fue rregidora e governadora’ becomes in San Pedro ‘dotada de tantas virtudes, [. . .] no solamente mostró su bondad en las artes mugeriles, mas en las feroces batall[a]s, peleando contra los enemigos con virtuoso ánimo’. In the abbreviation of Valera’s description of Camilla and Claudia references to ‘las mugeriles blanduras’ and ‘los femeniles temores’ are omitted.89 San Pedro’s intention, through Leriano, is not to praise these exemplary figures for the manly qualities they occasionally display and thereby to set limits to the capacity for virtue inherent naturally in female nature, but rather to define woman as the worthy focus of courtly endeavour. There is, of course, a fundamental irony here. The representative of this ideal is a character who, even as he speaks, succumbs to the fatal effects of a pathological excess of love and whose last act will be to eat the far from incriminating letters of Laureola in order to ensure absolute courtly secrecy. In his personal pursuit of love, he has gone too far, like so many courtly lovers, and has exposed himself to the ravages of amor hereos.90 He is beyond the reach of the remedium amoris of misogynistic discourse that his friend supposes to be effective in any male still in the possession of his faculties. Leriano’s defence of women can hardly claim a solid basis in reason.91 There is a further level at which this irony is important. San Pedro, as we have seen, was well aware of what others had written in the genre of the defence in Spanish. Each of the predecessors whose work we can be sure he knew – Rodríguez del Padrón, Valera and Torroella – had successfully devel88 89

The exempla are found in Valera 1983: 66–75. This modification of Valera’s terms of reference is discussed by Round (1989: 151–152). 90 Amor hereos is the clinical term for the sickness believed to be caused by love, whose symptoms often coincide with those described in courtly literature: pallour, sleeplessness, faintness, loss of appetite, obsessive behaviour. See Lowes 1913–14 and 1916, Arnald de Villanova 1985. 91 The denunciation of the evils of women made by Sempronio in Celestina is in the same tradition of misogyny as remedium amoris as that represented in Cárcel de Amor, with the important difference that we hear the denunciation itself, one which Calisto makes no attempt to refute. Sempronio excludes the ‘muchas’ who have been ‘santas, virtuosas y notables’, but lists many of the traditional defects to be found in ‘estas otras’. In the narrative context, in the face of Calisto’s love sickness, here too the strategy proves to be futile (Rojas 1989: 96–99).

THE DEFENCES

169

oped the genre in his own individual and innovative way. It seems not unreasonable to surmise that San Pedro strove similarly for generic innovation and that it was this that led him to place his defence within an elaborately structured narrative. The idea of the narrative framework already exists in Rodríguez del Padrón, but there it has the minimal function of serving to underline the unthinking nature of the protagonist’s rehearsal of misogynous ideas and to offer in this way a supportive ideological framework for Cardiana’s exaltation of women. San Pedro takes Rodríguez’s narrative complication of the genre a very large step further: he problematizes both the narrative defender and his defence as well as the act of misogynous denunciation itself, which appears in the narrative not as the result of male spite but as a well-intentioned cure for the ailing Leriano in which the ostensible subject of defamation is essentially irrelevant. In an important sense Leriano’s extreme espousal of the notion of woman as the focal point of the ideal by which he lives and his rejection of the restoring balm of misogyny relativizes all that he is given to say in defence of women. Such a complex work as Cárcel de Amor cannot confidently be defined in terms of a single purpose; nevertheless, in the light of earlier works that are dedicated exclusively to defence and San Pedro’s relation to them, a major part of the intention would certainly seem to be to write a defence which is as at least as innovative as those of his predecessors and certainly more fundamentally challenging to the structure of misogyny/defence polarities in which those works operate. The overall consequences of this production of defences in a culture of literary rivalry that spanned several decades of the fifteenth century is to lend a more intense complexity to the underlying question of what a woman is. As the authors, each in turn, strive to take the genre into new directions, the contours of definition are constantly redrawn. No two sets of these defence arguments are alike, and the essentially feminine is variously defined on a scale that ranges from, at one extreme, natural weakness and inferiority with an inherent capacity for attaining male virtues, to, at the other, an essential superiority marked out by virtues that are inherent in the female. The question of women drifts inexorably beyond the immediate conscious concerns of those writing on the subject as the striving for literary innovation increasingly takes precedence over the kind of direct engagement with it that we have seen in the other texts discussed so far. But by the time San Pedro was writing in the court of the Catholic Monarchs, the way in which the question of women was being addressed had been changed not only by these internal dynamics of defence writing but also by the impact of a single poem: Pere Torroella’s Maldezir.

5 TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES AND ITS LEGACY TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

The poem by Pere Torroella, or Pedro Torrellas, variously known as ‘Maldezir de mugeres’ and ‘Coplas de las calidades de las donas’ is one of the most successful in the whole cancionero tradition, copied in no fewer than seventeen manuscripts between the 1460s and 1541, as well as in the Cancionero general of Hernando del Castillo (1511, enlarged in 1514, and with several reprintings during the sixteenth century).1 A quotation from it by Juan Luis Vives in his De institutione feminae christianae attests to the breadth of its impact in the first decades of the sixteenth century, while Barbara Matulka’s study suggests that the poem and its author enjoyed notoriety for several decades more.2 It can be stated confidently that there were few readers or writers of Hispanic vernacular texts between the mid-fifteenth century and the mid-sixteenth who did not know Torroella’s poem. Its diffusion in the second half of the fifteenth century in particular was fundamental for the development of a courtly literature in prose and verse on the subject of women which is distinct in one important way from what had been written before: once Torroella’s poem became widely known, an author who wished to write against or for women could do so with reference to a specifically Hispanic maldiziente rather than the more distant figures of Solomon or Boccaccio, and could refer to a Hispanic text which was in effect a rosary of neatly phrased misogynistic ideas. 1 The manuscript tradition of the poem is studied in Bach y Rita 1930: 73–87, 192–197; Archer 1999–2000 and Archer (in Torroella in press). The work of Martín de Riquer (1964: III, 173–175) and, especially, Rodríguez Risquete (2000) leave no room for doubt that Torroella was born c. 1420 in Catalonia before going to the Navarrese court in his boyhood. Salvador Miguel (1977: 223) had suggested c. 1410, while Dutton (Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991, III, 48–49) implies a similar date by identifying the addressee of a related poem, Torroella’s own gloss on the final stanza of the poem, as Giovanna d’Angiò Durazzo, who died in 1435 (the suggestion is taken up by Weiss, 2002: 268), so that the composition of the Maldezir by implication would also have to be prior to that date. The poem concerned (Torroella in press, poem 48.3) is found only in one manuscript, which has been dated 1477–1482; it is surely significant that it is absent from the ‘Neapolitan’ group of five manuscripts, all of which contain the text of the Maldezir, which Dutton dates (1979: 458) at 1442–1445. 2 Vives 1996: 186–188 (the passage is discussed in chapter 1 and below); Matulka 1931: 107–137.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

171

In this way Torroella’s poem and Torroella the author filled an important gap. But why did this gap still exist in the mid-fifteenth century, given that a poem like this, saying largely unremarkable things about women, could in theory have been written at any time from the late fourteenth century onwards? What do the texts arising from or related to the poem during the rest of the century tell us about the development of attitudes to literary misogyny? And where in all this activity unleashed by a single poem is the question of woman? These are the matters to be addressed in this chapter.

The ‘Maldezir’ and the shock of the new The manuscript tradition of the Maldezir is complex and can only partly be described on the basis of the surviving manuscripts, but it can safely be deduced that the original version had thirteen coplas in the order transmitted by a group of four of the extant texts, one of which, the Cancionero de Estúñiga, provides the most usable base.3 The edited text is as follows: I

II

III

Quien bien amando persigue dona, a sí mesmo destruye, que siguen a quien las fuye e fuyen de quien las sigue; non quieren por ser queridas nin galardonan servicios, mas todas, desconoscidas, por sola tema regidas, reparten sus beneficios. Donde apeteçen los ojos sin otro conoscimiento allí va el consentimiento, acompañado de antojos, y non es más su bondat que vana parencería: a quien non han voluntad muestran que por honestad contrastan a su porfía. De natura de lobas son ciertamente en escoger, de anguillas en retener, en contrastar de erisón;

5

10

15

20

3 Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS Vitrina 17–7. References to all poetic texts by Torroella are to the edition of Archer where a full discussion of the textual tradition of the text can be found (Torroella in press, poem 48). The following text of the coplas based on Estúñiga contains necessary emendations for reasons of metrics and rhyme and in the light of readings from other manuscripts.

172

ROBERT ARCHER

no estiman virtud ni abteça, seso, bondat nin saber, mas catan abinenteza, talle de obrar e franqueza do puedan bienes aver. IV

V

VI

VII

Tened aqueste conçepto, amadores, vos supplico: con quien riñen en publico fazen la pas en secreto; dissimulan el entender, denuestan lo que desean; fingen de enojo plaser, lo que quieren non querer y dubdar quando más crean. Por non ser poco estimadas de quien mucho las estima, fasiendo de honestad rima, fingen de mucho guardadas, mas con quien las tracta en son de sentir lo que meresçen, sin detener galardón, la persona y el coraçón abandonan et ofreçen. Muchas por non descobrir algunas faltas secretas, a las personas, discretas, non dexan al fin venir; bien les demuestran amar y que bondat las detiene; mas, con aquello trattar, han sus engaños lugar lo que en secreto contiene. Son todas naturalmente malignas et sospechosas, non secretas et mintrosas et movibles ciertamente; buelven como foja al viento, ponen’l absente en olvido; quieren comportar a çiento, así que el más contento es cerca de aborresçido.

VIII Si las queréis emendar, las avéis por enemigas, et son muy grandes amigas de quien las quier’ lisonjar;

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

por gana de ser loadas qualquier alabança cogen; van a las cosas vedadas, desdeñan las sojusgadas, e las peores escogen. IX

X

XI

XII

Sintiendo que son subjectas e sin nengund poderío, a fin de aver señorío tienen engañosas sectas; entienden en afeitar y en gestos por atraer; saben mentir sin pensar, reír sin causa et llorar e aun enbaidoras ser. Provecho et deleite son el fin de todas sus obras; en guarda de las soçobras suplen temor et fectión; si por temor detenida la maldat d’ellas non fuese o por fectión escondida, non sería hombre que vida con ellas fazer pudiese. Muger es un animal que se diz’ hombre inperfecto, procreado en el defecto del buen calor natural; aquí se incluyen sus males e la falta del bien suyo e pues les son naturales quando se demuestran tales, que son sin culpa concluyo. Aquesta es la condición de las mugeres comuna, pero virtud las repuna que les consienta rasón; así la parte mayor muchas disponen seguir, et tanto han meyor loor quando el defecto mayor ellas merescen venir.

70

75

80

85

90

95

100

105

Conclusión XIII Entre las otras sois vós, dama de aquesta mi vida,

110

173

174

ROBERT ARCHER

del traste común salida, una en el mundo de dos; vós sois la que desfaséis lo que contienen mis versos; vós sois la que meresçéis renonbre, et loor cobréis entre las otras, diversos.

115

The poem begins with a proposition that at first seems unproblematic: a complaint like so many in the cancioneros about the lady’s inability to respond to the true lover. Significantly, nearly all the sources read dona in line 2 or a variant in the singular rather than the generic donas: the poem starts out like a run-of-the-mill love poem adressed to a particular lady in the mode of the lover’s complaint. Then, using a concept which was traditionally applied to death, Torroella enlarges on the complaint by a reference to women in the plural: ‘siguen a quien las fuye/ e fuyen de quien las sigue’ (ll. 3–4).4 By the end of the first stanza, Torroella is beginning to make unqualified denunciations of women’s behaviour: ‘por sola tema regidas/ reparten sus beneficios’, a phrase which refers either to the idea that only fear (tema, an Italianism) keeps women from giving in to their worst instincts (as in ll. 86–90), or the notion that women are obsessed (tema interpreted in the sense of ‘obsession’) with achieving one goal, not named here, but probably referring to profit. But it is important that in this stanza and in the following four (ll. 10–45), Torroella speaks of women purely as the objects of the lover’s service. In stanza II, they are accused of being attracted only by what their eyes approve; they love where their fancy takes them, and if they reject a suitor, they do so claiming that ‘honestad’ prevents them (such virtue, however, is all ‘vana parencería’). The third stanza contains a series of animal metaphors applied to women as seen by the frustrated suitor: they are like she-wolves, who were believed always to choose the worst specimen to mate with, as slippery as eels when a man would try to hold their affections, or as prickly as porcupines when he seeks the solace of her embraces.5 Women set 4 For this characterization of death, cf. Ausiàs March, XI: 13–16: ‘En delit prenc donar-te ma favor/ que per null temps home nat l’ha sentida,/ car jo defuig a tot home que.m crida,/ prenent aquell qui fuig de ma rigor’ (March 1997). 5 The tradition of the animal comparisons is studied in Salvador Miguel 1985: 217–220. The she-wolf image appears in Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, 402, and in Arcipreste de Talavera: ‘frío e amor non guarda donde entra, e son en esto como loba fechos e fechas, así el ombre como la muger, que con el primero que delante le viene toma amorío e se ajoba’ (Martínez de Toledo: 1992: 104–105). The passage from Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae, discussed in chapter 1, clarifies much of the traditional sense: ‘No sin propósito dixo aquél [i.e. Torroella] que en escoger son de natura de lobas, y tienen esto: cuando muchos las siguen y demandan, se ciegan en tanta manera que siempre escogen y toman al que peor es, suzio e nescio; e de allí vino el refrán muy común que a las mugeres llama[n] lobas’ (from the 1529 Spanish translation in Vives 1529: fol.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

175

no store by the virtues or abilities of their suitors, and are interested only in making the most they can from them.6 In the fourth stanza, apostrophizing fellow-lovers, Torroella declares that women make a show of having sentiments or attitudes that are quite the reverse of what they really feel or think. In stanza V he denounces the practice among women of enjoying the high esteem in which men hold them when they profess virtue and chastity, while in reality they will give the man who can pay their price everything he asks for. In the sixth stanza Torroella suggests another reason why women say ‘No’: it is because they have some nasty physical defect that they want to keep hidden. Up to this point Torroella has limited his denunciation of women to the context of the complaint of the snubbed lover. But for most of the rest of the poem (stanzas VII to XI) he abandons this specific context to launch into a more generalized misogyny. This new section begins with a series of epithets with which he seeks to define the ‘calidades’ of women. They are all ‘malignas’, ‘sospechosas’, ‘mal secretas’, ‘mentirosas’ and ‘movibles’, and this is why in their dealings with the men who desire them they forget the absent lover as soon as he is out of sight, and want to string along a hundred men at the same time, while feeling something close to hatred for those whom they make happy with their attentions (ll. 55–63). The following stanzas continue in the same vein: they cannot tolerate criticism, but they like nothing better than to be praised. Perversely, they always want precisely what is not good for them (ll. 64–72). What they resent most is the fact that they are subject to men, and they use all kinds of deception for the sake of attaining power over them. Hence their use of cosmetics, their bodily gestures designed to attract, their natural tendency to lie or to laugh and weep without apparent cause (ll. 73–81). For such a creature, since she is motivated only by the desire for profit and pleasure, while her tendency to do evil is constrained only by her natural fear (ll. 82–90), men count for nothing. Most men little realize how bad such women really are since they are so very skilled at keeping their true selves hidden. 66v). Jaume Roig also refers to the same idea: ‘Dels pus estranys/boliçiosos/he ocçiosos,/ menys vergonyós/ he pus ronyòs/ prem com la lloba’ (Roig 1929–1950: vv. 1190–1195). In l. 21, de anguillas en retener is taken here as referring to female slipperiness (this differs from the interpretation of Salvador Miguel 1985: 221–223 who assumes that women are the subject rather than the oject of the verb ‘detener’. For the porcupine comparison, cf. Roig ‘Primer, volent/ la solaçar/ he abracar,/ a totes parts/ ariçons, carts,/ porca crespina/ no tenen spina/ pus fort punyent’ (Roig 1929–1950: ll. 2346–2353). 6 Similar ideas to those in ll. 23–27 appear in another poem by Torroella (‘Doleu-vos enamorats’, ll. 77–80), in which he describes a visit to a brothel and the lesson about women which the protagonist learns from it: ‘Mes puis vinguí a pensar/ que dons, ab avinentesa,/ basten més dones cobrar/ que virtuts, amor ne aptesa.’ The notion of opportunity in relation to women appears also in Martínez de Toledo, who uses the same word of Catalan origin to refer to it: ‘e están dispuestas en aquel punto – si ay avinenteza o logar – para todo mal obrar’ (Martínez de Toledo 1992: 193).

176

ROBERT ARCHER

The next stanza contains the famous Galenic definition of woman, popularized through Egidius Romanus, as ‘un animal/ que se dize hombre imperfecto/ procreado en el defecto/ del buen calor natural’ (ll. 91–94), that is, a being whose creation is due to a failure of natural heat at the moment of conception, a phenomenon reflected, according to humoral theory, in her characteristic cold and humidity. Torroella cites this almost universally accepted medical notion of women as the basis for stating in the following lines that the defects he has listed are all ‘naturales’. This is the way women naturally behave, so that – even though he has written ten stanzas of unrelenting attack – he concedes that they are not to blame for being the way they are (ll. 97–99). This backhanded compliment prepares the way for the limitation of referent that takes place in stanza XII: what he has said refers to the ‘condición comuna’, but there are many women (‘muchas’, l. 105) who, since they all necessarily possess reason to a limited extent, are able to overcome natural inclination. And this is all the more praiseworthy since they are naturally less endowed with the means to practise virtue than men. This backpedalling leads into the final stanza, which in some manuscripts carries the rubric conclusión, where Torroella addresses a particular lady to extol her worth as one of the exceptions he has just mentioned (‘entre las otras sois vos’, l. 109). Here he claims that he has said all those unpleasant things in order to elevate by contrast his own lady: logically, he argues, since there are only one or two of her kind, it follows that all the rest are dross. Later, when he comes to write an exculpatory poem about what he had said in it, he insists that this is the real meaning of the Maldezir. What was Torroella trying to do when he turned his misogynistic denunciation of all women into the eulogy of one particular lady? In the first place, of course, the lady functions as the exception that proves the rule. But there may also have been a specific rhetorical intention here. As Juan Casas Rigall suggests, the poem can be read as a case of suspensio or sustentatio, a tactic which Keith Whinnom called ‘la defraudación del lector’.7 The reader thinks he is reading a misogynous diatribe, but then in the final stanza a palinode changes the poem into one of praise for a particular lady. If this is what Torroella had in mind, then the poem is a rhetorical failure, since contemporary readers stubbornly refused to see in it anything but a general denunciation of women. Besides this, Torroella himself, in the prose work Razonamiento [. . .] en deffensión de las donas (to be discussed later in this chapter) explains that he had written the Maldezir as a means of venting his spleen about a particular lady by means of a general denunciation of all women. This explanation of misogynous discourse as the result of personal embitterment in love has its basis, as we have seen, in a long tradition that dates back at least as far as Fiore di virtù and is used by Eiximenis, Rodríguez del Padrón, and Valera: 7

Casas Rigall 1995: 209; Whinnom 1981: 63–72.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

177

Solomon, Ovid, and Boccaccio are all alleged to have the same personal motives for their misogyny. But it is neverthless true that the emphasis on the context of amorous service in the first six stanzas supports Torroella’s claim that he had been writing out of spite. In order to grasp the importance of Torroella’s poem in its context, it has to be borne in mind that both the general vilification of women and the defamation of a particular lady are poetic genres which are largely unknown in Castilian cancionero verse. As far as I am aware, there are no poems of general misogyny in Castilian before the second half of the fifteenth century, when a few examples begin to appear, such as the compositions of Hernán Mexía and Antonio de Medina.8 There are several examples, however, of poems of particular defamation of women which are written in the tradition of the cantigas d’escarnho e maldizer. There are, for instance, the cantiga attributed to Diego de Valencia ‘contra una mujer de León que era mala e puta’, the poem in Galician-Portuguese by Pero Vélez de Guevara on ‘una dueña muy vieja que andava en palaçio del infante don Ferrando’, the ‘cuatro coplas de cuatro gentiles ombres maldiziendo a una dama’, the poem by Antón Montoro ‘a una mujer enamorada porque le vido tomar ceniza el miércoles de quaresma’ and another ‘a una mujer que tenía grandes caderas’. This genre is cultivated sporadically throughout the fifteenth century and beyond, and examples of it were numerous enough to merit their inclusion in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa.9 These Castilian poems of maldezir have in common the complete absence of any supposed amorous link between poet and lady. The woman in these jocular poems is nothing more than an object of crude mockery. She is accused of physical defects or shortcomings of character (large hips, a love of the bottle) which have nothing in common with the accusations of the embittered lover. There are also, of course, the celebrated poems of Villasandino, ‘Señora, pues que non puedo’ and its respuesta and replicaçión, but these poems too describe a context quite different from that of the frustrated courtly lover. The notorious dezir was written at the request of someone other 8 9

For these texts see Pérez Priego 1990: 171–190. The poems by Diego de Valencia (ID 1624) and Pero Vélez de Guevara (ID 1448) are edited in Dutton and González 1993 (numbers 499 and 322); Forcén, Gauberte, Muñoz, Mur, ‘Quatro coplas de cuatro gentiles ombres maldiziendo a una dama’ (ID 6758–6761), Antón de Montoro (ID 3006), and various others either attributed or anonymous are edited in Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa (Domínguez 1978). The following compositions are in the same vein: Juan de Mendoza: ‘A una muger mui gorda porque estando delante de su Señora se durmió y tiró’ (ID 2053); Rodrigo de Reinosa, Pater noster trobado a las damas (ID 5040) y ‘A la chinagala la gala chinela’, (ID 5041); Antón de Montoro, ‘A una señora que le olía mal la boca y era un poco caliente’ (ID 1135) y ‘A dos mugeres la una puta y la otra beuda’ (ID 6780); the anonymous ‘A una dama fea’ (ID 6776); and Antón de Velasco, ‘A una dama de la reina porque teniendo seys seruidores en unas justas que se hizieron no salió ninguno dellos a justar’ (ID 6820).

178

ROBERT ARCHER

than the poet, according to the rubric in the Cancionero de Baena, if indeed all three pieces are not simply a poetic prank set up by Villasandino and Francisco de Baena. Whatever its origins, the poet restricts his vengeance on the lady to describing a copulatory fantasy with her person (in the respuesta she scoffs at his boastful pretensions) and no general misogynous language is used.10 Clearly these poems from the Galician-Portuguese tradition, one which had fallen from use some time before in the Spanish courts, cannot be considered a precedent for Torroella’s Maldezir in which general misogyny arises in the context of courtly love, although the familiarity of most Castilianspeaking courtiers with that tradition may in part account, as Weiss has suggested, for the impact of the poem. That is, Torroella could have been seen, as Weiss puts it, as ‘misappropriating’ that tradition in so far as he seemed to be applying it to women of the same class as the courtly poets rather than to the low-life soldadeiras to whom the Galician-Portuguese poems specifically alluded.11 But as for Torroella himself, the origins of his poem, as Martín de Riquer pointed out long ago, are far more likely to be found in the other, non-Castilian, tradition which formed him as a poet.12 Almost half of Torroella’s surviving work is in Catalan.13 In the OccitanCatalan tradition which he inherited from his Catalan side, particular and sometimes general invective against women had been written since the last decades of the fourteenth century, a practice which was supported by the genre of the mala cansó of classical Provençal literature, which had close historic and linguistic links to the culture of the Crown of Aragon. There are thirteen known examples of the mala cansó, all of them written during a brief period between the last decade of the twelfth century and the first decades of the thirteenth, which is when Bernat de Ventadorn composes the last of them, ‘La dousa votz ai auzida’. In these compositions the poet proclaims that he no longer loves the lady and accuses her of reprehensible behaviour (Gui d’Ussel calls her ‘mala domna’) in allowing herself to be courted for many years without showing him the desired mercé or of having betrayed him by accepting a man who is richer than he. For the authors of these poems these two circumstances justify in themselves an invective against the lady. Several of the poems contain an element of camjat or leave-taking in which the poet declares that he is putting an end to the relationship and is forsaking the lady

10 11 12 13

ID 1244–1246. Dutton & González 1993: 131–136 (numbers 104–106). Weiss 2002: 247. Riquer 1964: III, 11 and 172. Torroella’s work includes twenty-one poems in Catalan, thirty-one in Castilian, and fourteen further poems possibly attributable to him (eight in Catalan, six in Castilian); there are four prose works in Castilian together with four letters to Pedro d’Urrea and one further Castilian work possibly attributable to him; there are two respostes and one demanda in Catalan.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

179

or changing her for another. Some contain allegations of sexual dissipation like the following stanza of Gaucelm Faidit: Q’ieu.n sai una q’es de tant franc usatge c’anc non gardet honor sotz sa centura – sieus es lo tortz s’ieu en dic vilanatge! – qe, senes geing e senes cobertura, fai a totz vezer cum poing en se deshazer. E dompna q’ab tans s’essaia non cuich ja m’alezer, que ja de lieis ben retraia, ni.m vuoill qe.m deiz eschazer.14

Apart from the mala cansó, there are also several examples of the mala cobla. This is a stanza in which, even in a composition largely taken up with declaring the poet’s love, there is a strong denunciation of the behaviour of women towards the men who love them. The most famous of these passages appears in Bernat de Ventadorn’s ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’: De las dompnas me dezesper; ja mais en lor me fiarai; c’aissi com las solh chaptener, enaissi las deschaptenrai. Pois vei c’una pro no m’en te vas leis que.m destrui e.m cofon, totas las dopt’e las mescre, car be sai c’atretals se son. D’aisso-s fa be femma parer ma domna, per qu’e.lh o retrai, car no vol so c’om deu voler, e so c’om li deveda, fai.15

Bernat declares his loss of faith in women generally after the treatment he has received from his lady, moving from the amorous complaint to general misogyny. This cobla was much copied and quoted, and it appears in the lengthy misogynous Lo conhort of one of Torroella’s poetic correspondents, Francesc Ferrer.16 It is also found in a work of great influence in the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor.17 In one of the sections of this encyclopaedic work, there is a 14 15 16 17

Text and translation in Archer & Riquer 1998: 124–129. Riquer 1975: I, 384–387. Ferrer 1989: 230. See also Isabel de Riquer 1993 and Lluís Cabré 1997. Matfre Ermengaud 1976: 1–6; Ferrando 1981: I, xvii–xx. It is a strong indication of the extent of the book’s influence in the Crown of Aragon that six of the surviving twelve manuscripts are in Catalan.

180

ROBERT ARCHER

debate about whether the sufferings experienced in love can be blamed on women. Bernat’s cobla is quoted as part of the argument in support of this idea. It is especially important for the understanding of Torroella’s poem that in Matfre’s work it is assumed that when a troubadour makes a general misogynistic statement this arises from his resentment over the way in which a particular lady has rejected him. The troubadours who have written such statements are accused of using general invective to give expression to personal rancour arising from an offence for which in reality they have only themselves to blame: Pus doncs comensa dels aimans le mals, l’engans e la folors, non degron far aitals clamors de las donas, si.s tenon car e volon lur honor gardar; per sso han fag mout gran peccat, gran error e malvestat, sens dubte, ceilh quez an dig mal de las donas en general.18

These two forms of misogynous discourse in troubadour poetry – the mala cansó written against a particular lady, and the general denunciation of women – are developed in Catalan poetry from the end of the fourteenth century until the last third of the fifteenth. Some forty poems with one or other of these characteristics have survived in the form of the genre known as the maldit, which was practised by a good number of poets: Bernat de Palaol, Pere de Queralt, Pau de Bellviure (the same Pao de Benbinbre mentioned by Santillana in his Prohemio y Carta), Francí Guerau, fra Joan Basset, and the three poets of the Masdovelles family (Guillem, Pere Joan, and the prodigious Joan Berenguer), Jordi de Sant Jordi, Ausiàs March, and Joan Roís de Corella; there are also various anonymous pieces. The majority of the Catalan maldits refer to the existence of an amorous relationship, current or past, between the poet and the addressed lady. The poet complains about a perceived shift in the lady’s affections to another man, and in some cases to a broken marriage-pledge. But the offended man is not always the poet himself, since there are some maldits that are clearly written for a third party, in spite of the poet’s use of the first person. Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, for instance, composed two such pieces for his cousin, explaining the circumstances of the request in a long rubric: La cobbla devall scrita trematí jo, Johan Berenguer, a un meu cossí qui amava una dona, la qual avia a sa volentat, e sabie-u jo; e sobre una trena

18

Matfre Ermengaud 1976: 154 (ll. 30196–30204).

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

181

que ella avia feta dels seus cabells, la qual lo dit mon cossí li demenà, ells se barallaren, car ella no la y volch donar, ans li dix que li paguàs dues camisses que li avia donades, les quals aquell avia ja rompudes, e més, que li paguàs ho li tornàs un diamant que li avia donat, e partiren-se fort mal. He per la dita rahó jo trematí-li la dita cobbla, a la qual me respòs no en rims, car no sap de trobar, preguant-me li fes un maldit sobre lo dit cas; he fiu-ne dos, qui són dejús scrits [. . .].19

Usually the poet expresses his utter perplexity before the behaviour of the lady, who is accused of giving herself in heart and body to a man whom the poet considers to be beneath her and inferior to himself, such as a merchant, although it is also not uncommon to claim that she sleeps with peasants. Sometimes the poet claims that, unlike his rival, he has contained his desire for the lady on those occasions on which she has offered herself to him, concerned about preserving her good name amidst the danger that surrounds her in her own household. Guillem de Masdovelles regrets in one of his maldits that he has had any such qualms: Per vos ssospir, Na Mondina, tot dia, pensant lo temps que.us solia baysar los pits tots nutz e les cuxes palpar: planch com no ffiu tot sso que far podia.20

Authors of maldits frequently accuse the lady of unbridled lust, but they rarely do so without protesting their ethical reluctance to denounce her. On the one hand, the poet considers that it is his moral and civic duty to publish the lady’s wrongdoings, but on the other cortesia would normally prevent him from speaking so openly of them. As Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles puts it: Voler m’enpeny, he raho m’o consent, en poblicar, mala dona, de vos lo barat gran, ab giyn molt cautalos, que ffet m’aveu, usant vilanament; mas seny me diu, ensemps ab cortesia, que.m call del tot de sso que dir volria, que.l perlar mal, ab tota varitat, gens per los bons no pot esser llouat.21

This professed discomfort with particular invective against a woman – one which, to judge by the lack of a tradition of such poems in Spanish, clearly

19 20 21

Aramon i Serra 1938: 117–118; also Archer & Riquer 1998: 258–259. Aramon i Serra 1938: 128. ‘Voler m’enpeny, he raho m’o consent’, ll. 1–8 (Aramon i Serra 1938: 128–129).

182

ROBERT ARCHER

makes itself felt even more strongly in Castile – is a response to the way this genre is dealt with in the rhetorical texts of the gai saber of the midfourteenth century, especially the encyclopaedic Leys d’amor which had a considerable influence on poets writing in Catalan until the mid-fifteenth century.22 The particular maldit was proscribed by these rhetorics, and the only kind of satire permitted was the general sirventés directed at a social group or class. The idea that a poet would want to write a satire, general or particular, against women is not even raised in these texts. Such is the strength of this traditional discomfort with mal dir in connection with women that some authors feel obliged to write in justification of the practice, arguing, for instance, that an invective against a particular woman could help her to reform her conscience and thus better prepare her for salvation. In Ferrer’s Lo conhort, such invective is seen as the only way to control the evil ways of women. The poet asks: ¿Que farien si fóssem muts o.ns estiguéssim de maldir?23

Jordi de Sant Jordi wrote one poem with the manuscript title maldit that contains a restrained criticism of the lady’s behaviour, but in another poem (which is referred to as a camjat when it is cited by Ferrer in his long poem, but is clearly also a maldit) he opted to couch his insults against the lady in a series of numismatic metaphors whose underlying meaning escaped interpreters until very recently.24 Faced with the traditional ethical opposition to the maldit, particularly in the courtly context in which he wrote, Jordi took refuge in ambiguous language. When Ausiàs March wrote his famous maldit against Na Monboí and her new lover, he prefaced it with an entire poem in which he sought to justify the practice of mal dir. But then March did go a step further than any other poet in the genre by actually naming the lady in question.25 From all the foregoing it is clear that when Torroella wrote his Maldezir he brought to Castilian poetry the deep-rooted conventions of an OccitanCatalan tradition of invective against a woman who is or has been the object of the poet’s real or feigned amorous service, a tradition that did not exist in Spanish. While it would be easy to find examples of misogynistic discourse in the cancioneros, there are no poems in Spanish before Torroella’s that overtly develop the theme of ‘What is wrong with women?’ The Maldezir is in this sense an act of cultural transference: Castilian courtly verse simply had not been used for such purposes before. 22 23 24

For this see Archer 1996: 119–139. Ferrer 1989: 225, ll. 300–301. The true meaning of the poem does not come to light until it is edited by Auferil (Ferrer 1989); see Isabel de Riquer 1995–1996. 25 The two poems are numbers XLI and XLII; see Archer 1996: 135–137.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

183

Torroella seemingly had overstepped the current bounds of Castilian literary ethics and courtly good manners, and he found himself having to make amends. In his poem ‘A quien basta el conocer’ (ID 6131), he defends himself against the charge that he has behaved like a discourteous womanhater. The whole point of the Maldezir, he tells us in this poem, was to exalt one woman by comparing her with the majority of the others, rather than to attack all women and gratuitously exclude one of them from his general denunciation. He contends that his detractors fail to understand that his intention had been to praise one woman – and by extension all good women – and to speak ill only of those who deserve it, ‘que no contradize/ni desdice/ bien de ninguna muger;/ ante por su merecer/ y valer/ nueva alabança requiere’ (ll. 5–9). In his Maldezir ‘verá qualquiere/ si no oviere/ defecto de buen saber,/ que es su renombre valer’ (ll. 10–13). This is not the only attempt that Torroella made in verse to defend himself. A manuscript in the library of the Hispanic Society of America contains a glosa which shows him still justifying himself some twenty years on by identifying the exalted lady with a woman whose claim to exceptionality is backed by blood and position.26 Torroella’s most lengthy piece of self-defence is the Razonamiento [. . .] en deffensión de las donas contra los maldezientes, por satisfaçión de unas coplas que’en dezir mal de aquellas compuso.27 The Razonamiento is unique as an example of the genre of defence since, as we have seen, all the authors of such works in the Iberian Peninsula at this time discuss misogynistic ideas which, as a matter of course, they attribute to men other than themselves. In the case of Torroella, however, the starting-point is his own, already notorious, Maldezir. In this piece Torroella stresses the origins of the practice of maldezir in personal rancour and accuses his fellow men of having the same defects, or worse, than those for which they slander women, although without mounting a defence on the basis of female superiority as Rodríguez del Padrón had. Above all the work is structured by Torroella’s meticulous inversion of the sense of important passages of his poem, presenting himself as the champion of maligned womanhood and distancing himself from the maldizientes. Thus, for instance, he redefines the meaning of dona, rewrites the arguments from nature that he had used against women so that they are now in their favour, recontextualizes in a positive sense concepts like bondat, or justifies the characteristics he had condemned in the poem like their use of cosmetics or gestos, while intercalating arguments from materia and locus, a 26 Glosa feta per mossen pera torroella ha esta cobla quis seguex per la illustra senyora dona johana darago Reyna de Napols, ID 2390, ‘Entre las otras sois vos’ (Ramírez de Arellano 1976: 130–132). The poem is addressed to Juana, daughter of Juan II of Aragon, who is called in the Catalan rubric ‘reina de Nàpols’, a title she held only from 1477; Riquer suggests unconvincingly that the poem may be by Juana herself rather than addressed to her (Riquer 1964: III, 165). 27 In the apparently complete version as it appears in the Chansonnier d’Herberay it occupies thirteen pages; there are two other copies.

184

ROBERT ARCHER

list of over one hundred exempla of good women, and praise for feminine astutia. The unacknowledged reference in detail he makes to his poem also suggests that there was sufficient circulation of the written version to allow Torroella’s audience to gauge how far he had taken his retraction.28 Even so, contemporary readers could hardly have missed the irony of the peroratio where the tone of earnest defence vanishes as Torroella makes the impish suggestion that if rejected lovers do write pieces of general misogyny out of simple spite this may be because of the manner in which they have been told by the ladies that their attentions are not welcome: ‘E vos, las señoras, si bien amadas de aquellos dispuestos a ser amados vos veys, suplico sean no en tal manera tratados que de servidores tornen enemigos’.29 But while the Razonamiento assuredly was read by contemporaries and while there is some evidence that later writers knew it, the work did nothing to impede the growing notoriety of the Maldezir and its author.30 Its persistent status as a summary of misogynous ideas can be seen in a work from late in the century like Juan del Encina’s Égloga de Fileno, Zambardo y Cardonio, where the embittered Fileno rails against women.31 Lines 256–392 contain Fileno’s denunciation of women and Cardonio’s briefer defence on the basis of exempla. Fileno gives Boccaccio as an authority (‘el Corvacho’, l. 310), but the substance of his accusation derives amost entirely from the Maldezir. This is a case of a simple borrowing of what is deemed to be appropriate material; in several other texts, however, the Maldezir itself is problematized. This occurs in several poems of the cancioneros, the anonymous Triste deleytaçión, Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella, and Luis de Lucena’s Repetición de amores, each of which I shall examine in turn in the following pages.

The ‘Cancionero’ Responses Torroella’s claim in his Razonamiento that he is writing to assuage the indignation of the ladies at what he had said in his Maldezir is something more than a piece of rhetorical gallantry, since there is plenty of evidence in the cancioneros that the poem gave rise to controversy both in the Navarrese and, probably somewhat later, in the Castilian courts. The writing about the 28 A detailed discussion of Torroella’s inversion in Razonamiento of the allegations made in the Maldezir is to be found in Archer 2001. 29 Aubrun 1951: 35, ll. 32–34. 30 Its impact seems to have been only small; I have already discussed in chapter 4 San Pedro’s probable use of it for his razón 18. Barbara Matulka suggests that Juan de Flores alludes to it, but I see no evidence for this (1931: 118). Tomàs Martínez Romero (1996: 44–45) ventures that there is ‘algun punt de comparació [. . .] directa’ between the Razonamiento and Joan Roís de Corella’s Triümfo de les dones although, as he concedes, these may be no more than shared commonplaces. 31 Text in Pérez Priego 1996: 903–906.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

185

poem has most often been seen as part of the conceptual debate about the nature of women during the fifteenth century, but some recent readings of the texts concerned have opened up the meaning of the concept of the debate to extend it to one which encompasses a number of contemporary anxieties (race, sexuality, religion) or which reveals the ambivalence of the writers towards the power-bound social structures in which they find themselves as courtiers.32 Yet even at a surface level of discourse, it soon becomes obvious that these texts are only secondarily about women and that their main concern is that same cortesía which is at the heart of Diego de San Pedro’s defence and which was a major factor in attitudes to misogynous writing from at least as early as Cerverí de Girona and Matfre Ermengaud. That is, the problem discussed in these poems is the place of misogynistic notions in courtly practice rather than the inherent validity of such ideas that is the focus of the Castilian and Catalan defences. As we have seen, the Occitan-Catalan rhetorics rejected in theory all forms of invective against women, but in practice poets in that tradition cultivated it regularly, alleging that they were swayed to do so by an overriding moral imperative. Torroella’s cultural transference of general mal dir to the context of Castilian verse unleashed a similar conflict between courtly theory and practice, but one in which his Maldezir remains an almost completely isolated example, imitated by almost no other poet. Instead, it became the catalyst for the affirmation of courtly ideals with regard to the role of the lady whose position Torroella’s poem was believed to undermine. According to the courtly ideal, she was to be the unsullied object of the poet’s love, real or assumed, as Juan Alfonso de Baena insists in a famous passage in the prologue to his anthology: e otrosí que sea [the courtly poet] amador, e que siempre se preçie e se finja de ser enamorado; porque es opinión de muchos sabios que todo omne que sea enamorado, conviene a saber, que ame a quien deve e donde deve, afirman e dizen qu’el tal de todas buenas doctrinas [. . .] [es doctado]’.33

The overriding concern with the problem of cortesía is evident even in the most elaborate response to the poem, the respuesta of Gómez Manrique in which he uses the same metre and rhyme-scheme of eleven of the stanzas in the poem.34 In spite of this close reply, few lines are spent on matters of defence. It is argued only that women ‘de nobleza/ usan’ and resist men’s 32 33 34

Weissberger 2002: 212–214 and Weiss 2002: 253–256. Dutton & González Cuenca 1993: 8. The respuesta (ID 2770) is intercalated with the eleven stanzas in three manuscripts, and is copied after them in one other. The poem had thirteen stanzas in its original form as discussed in Archer (in press). Text in Pérez Priego 1989: 147–151; also Vidal González 2003: 191–202.

186

ROBERT ARCHER

advances admirably (23–27), even sometimes preferring death to capitulation to their demands (35–36); they will never approach a man to seek his love, as men do to women (51–52); they are the means by which all men come into the world (the topic of ‘honouring mothers’, 53–54); many of them have won fame for their virtue (57–58, 61), and there are many examples of virtuous women in the past, such as Lucretia (68–72); finally, they are God’s handiwork (91–94). This takes up only a small part of the poem: defence as such is not what Gómez Manrique is attempting here. Rather, most of what he says is aimed at the maldizientes, and especially Torroella, who ‘olvidó la cortesía’ (15). What is of concern to him is that such things can be said in a poem, when poetry functions as one of the principal means of sustaining courtliness. The longest poem that can be related to the Maldezir, Hugo de Urriés’s ‘En laor de las mugeres’ (three hundred and twenty-two lines in arte mayor) proportionately gives about the same amount of space to defence argument as Gómez Manrique’s piece.35 Most of Urriés’s defence consists of an unfavourable comparison between men and women: for every good woman there are a thousand barateros (165–168); all the murder, treason, and perverse forms of sin are committed by men (169–173), and in matters of love it is always the man who swears false promises and constantly pesters women with his attentions, while a woman will never do so (174–184 and cf. Gómez Manrique 46–54). If temperance ever occurs in males, this is not because of virtue but rather is due to old age or cautiousness (185–192, 217–224); women are naturally charitable and, in comparison with the genus viril, are all good; if one occasionally falls this is only because of male persistence, capable of leading even the most prudent women to temptation (201–216). Alluding perhaps to Torroella’s notorious repetition of the Aristotelian dictum (Maldezir, ll. 91–94), Urriés relativizes the notion of women’s imperfection, asking what kind of perfection the male one is supposed to be and pointing out that any lesser perfection there might be in women would serve only to confirm the guilt of men when they lead them into sin (241–268). Urriés specifically declines to take the arguments from lesser perfection any further, alleging simply that ‘daquestas razones yo sé un millar’ (257) and mentioning only in passing the privileges of ‘materia, lugar e facción’ in Eva’s creation (261–264). He adds that men allege extremes of behaviour in women and yet fail to recognize them in themselves (269–272). His concluding defence argument is a solidly traditional one: God’s creation of the mother of the world’s redeemer, whose deeds eclipse the actions of Eve (273–280). Urriés also addresses in three places the notion of woman as seductress (225–240, 281–289, 305–312): the gallant counter-argument to this is that woman’s beauty will innocently inspire great passions even in the wisest and strongest (here standard exempla are cited), but their harmful effects are due 35 ‘Señora discreta e mucho prudente’ (ID 2365; Pérez Priego 1989: 152–163). For Urriés see Salvador Miguel 1977: 238–242.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

187

to the fact that men wilfully indulge these passions (they are voluntarios, 233). When such men vilify women they do so for the basest reasons: the impotence of old age, lack of true courtliness, envy, resentment (297–314). All this is placed from the outset in the context of courtly love: there is an opening apostrophe to the lady and a closing Endreça, and most of the first third of the poem (ll. 9–56) is taken up with a discussion of the casuistry of love, developing the idea of the addressed lady as the determining objecto (9) of the poet’s passion. This kind of theorizing in Scholastic terms is frequent in poets like Torroella and his poetic correspondents, one of whom almost certainly was Urriés himself.36 The theory serves to justify the claim that the effect of a man’s love for a virtuous woman brings about a positive change in the lover so that by means of it ‘no es maravilla de ser transformada/ la nostra esencia en su gentileza’ (5–56). Courtliness without the inspiring presence of women is unthinkable: ¿Pues quál real sala, nin fiesta, ni dança, quál justa, torneo, nin plazer privado, vistas delectables, nin nada preciado, sin ser las mugeres la su concordança? Tan propias sois vos en todas las cosas como es el çucre en todas las salsas; todas las fiestas son frías e falsas a donde fallecen mugeres fermosas. (129–136)

Urriés’s concern is with the preservation in courtly life of this ideal of femininity and with the threat to it of a poem like Torroella’s. The elements of defence argument in his poem serve only to discuss this concern. In an important sense this poem addresses the same problem of anti-courtliness with which he deals in the two hundred and ninety-four octosyllables of ‘De los galanes’: while this poem denounces the practice of particular verbal slander, he seeks in ‘En laor de las mugeres’ to correct the error of writing general invective in verse against women.37 A playfully ambiguous poem by Íñigo Beltrán de Valdelomar takes the perception of the defence of women as a defence of courtliness even further.38 The poet does not enter into the allegations of the maldizientes, but merely accuses them from the outset of gran necedad, and then launches into a 36 Cátedra (1989: 181) suggests that the text in Herberay, fols 15v–17v (‘Reduze amor dos voluntades en una [. . .]’, given the title by Aubrun of Leyes de amor, is a reply by Pere Torroella to a lost Demanda by Urriés (who is assumed to be the ‘Mosén Ugo’ mentioned in the text). 37 ‘De los galanes’, ID 2188; Aubrun 1951: 60–64. 38 ‘Peca de gran necedad’, ID 5020 R0043 (Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991: VII. 340–341). The poem appears in a collection whoe possible date, according to Dutton & Krogstad, is 1520.

188

ROBERT ARCHER

lengthy praise of ladies as the direct cause of ennobling sentiments and actions in the properly disposed male: ellas a los coraçones couardes ponen esfuerço, ellas al más tosco escuerzo le hacen andar galán; ellas son que nos dan mil congoxas y çoçobras, ellas hacen trobar obras a quien no sabe leer. (9–16)

But Valdelomar also presents as praiseworthy those characteristics which Torroella denounced, in a deliberate inversion of the opening accusation of the Maldezir (ll. 5–6): ellas salvan a quien quieren, y aquél que quieren condenan (55–56) Ellas no muy liberal gualardón dan al seruicio (67–68)

His point is that some of what Torroella said was true, but that welcoming treatment of this kind from one’s lady is part of the courtly contract. Suero de Ribera’s poem on the maldicientes attributes to them, as Urriés does, the motives of malice or impotence (7–8), and argues that the lack of cortesía reflects on the slanderer, putting his own nobility in doubt (11–12).39 He suggests that all invective should be general (‘razonar a la comuna/ sin dezir ál de ninguna’, 15–16), by which he seems to mean a general denunciation of evil-doing without distinctions of gender in much the same way as in the Provençal Leys d’amor.40 Where there are cases of unfaithful women, cortesía requires that they are passed over in silence (33–36). Again, the practice of maldezir is seen as threatening the courtly ideal. In Juan del Encina’s poem with the rubric ‘Contra los que dicen mal de las mujeres’, probably from the last decade of the century, the role of women in inspiring the courtly endeavours of the male is still given considerable importance (104–126), alongside several defence arguments and a general condemnation of maldizientes.41 The problem of courtliness is evident even in the two well-known 39 ‘Pestilencia por las lenguas’ (ID 0657), in Pérez Priego 1989: 142–144. Another response, that of Antón de Montoro (‘Contra Torrellas porque fizo contra las donas’) is completely ad hominem and crudely suggests that Torroella did not have a mother at all (for which see the excellent edition of Costa 1990). 40 Gatien-Arnoult 1841–1843: III, 124–126. 41 ‘Quien dize mal de las mugeres’ (ID 6962) in Pérez Priego 1989: 202–208.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

189

cancionero pieces where the poets profess that they espouse the notions of women described in the Maldezir. Tapia’s gloss to a widely-known misogynistic canción of Torroella, ‘Yerro con poco saber’, using many ideas and phrases from the Maldezir, and with the occasional obscene ambiguity, includes a rubric before the final stanza in which Tapia renounces responsibility for what he has written:42 Ha salido de la glosa y despídese de la dama que le mandó glosar la canción, y muestra cómo lo hizo más con gana de obedescer que con intinción de publicar la verdad. (Pérez Priego 1989: 169)

The rubric implies that misogynistic accusations might be permissible in a courtly context as long as they were seen as part of a deliberate pretence at unchivalrous prejudice, chivalrously conceded to the lady who specifically requested it. Courtliness is upheld in the name of that courtly virtue, obedience. Similarly, Hernán Mexía begins his lengthy poem on the ‘defectos de las condiciones de las mujeres’ protesting that he has not really joined the ranks of ‘aquella seta enemiga’ (3) of the maldizientes (of which Boccaccio and Torrellas are praised as the wise godfathers, 81–82), but merely pretends to do so at the request of two ladies, as the rubric and the first lines explain.43 In another and quite different poem, ‘Como el buen pintor que pule’ he alludes to Torrellas again, but this time with unambiguous condemnation.44 In this poem, as the rubric explains, he takes to task his friend Juan Álvarez, ‘pensando que unas coplas que halló en un cancionero de mal decir de las mugeres eran suyas’. He regrets to learn that he has written such material since ‘no fue de cauallero/ dezir tan mal de las mugeres’ (20–21): this kind of composition should be left to people like ‘torrellas/ de obra tan enemiga’ (62–63).45 But in spite of the disclaimer it is for the misogynistic poem that Pedro Manuel de Urrea denounces Mexía, together with Torrellas, in his lengthy

42 Tapia, ‘Quien d’amor y de mugeres’ (ID 6619), found in the Cancionero general of 1411, fols 178v–179 (Pérez Priego 1989: 164–170). Torroella’s ‘Yerra con poco saber’ (ID 1095) is found in four manuscripts, one of which, in the library of Monte Cassino, also gives the music of Johannes Cornago, a contemporary of Torroella. In one sense Tapia takes the matter of maldezir a step further in ll. 135–144 where he includes the accusation of sexual insatiability (‘porque se quieren curar/ con ombre duro y que dure/ hasta que la vida apure’, 142–144). 43 Hernán Mexía, ‘Porfiáis, damas, que diga’ (ID 6097) in Pérez Priego 1989: 171–185. 44 ‘Como el buen pintor que pule’ (ID 3125) in Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991: I, 567–568. 45 Juan Álvarez replies in ‘A vos, virtud acabada’ (ID 3126), protesting that he is not the author of any poems against women, and that he has always striven to praise them (Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991: I, 568–569).

190

ROBERT ARCHER

‘coplas [. . .] en alabança de las mugeres’.46 Here he condemns the ‘cobarde osadía’ and ‘loca fantasía’ of the two poets and, like Urriés and Valdelomar, foregrounds the vital role of ladies in enabling men to strive to attain the courtly ideal: Son nuestras honras guardadas por que ellas no nos desamen; cañas, justas, inventadas músicas bien acordadas, todas son por que nos amen. (70–74)

An attack on women is an attack on the very foundations of courtliness. Some of these poems (those of Mexía, Tapia, and Montoro) refer specifically to ‘Torrellas’, and at least one (that of Gómez Manrique) follows the metre and rhymes of the Maldezir; others make no reference to Torroella or his poem at all, particularly perhaps when the author of the Maldezir was known to the poet concerned, as was certainly the case with Hugo de Urriés. The scurrilous Montoro professes not to know who this ‘Torrellas’ is. Later references in the cancioneros make of Torroella a figure from the distant past. By the time Juan del Encina’s Cancionero is published in 1496 the author of the Maldezir is already a remote figure, transmuted into the Torrellas of Juan de Flores, as a reference in the final stanza of Encina’s poem attests: Muera quien mal les dessea peor muerte que Torrellas. (176–177)

The author of ‘No sabes lo que e contemplado’, possibly Cartagena, alludes to the fact that, even though the lady whose behaviour he condemns was born after the Maldezir was written, the poem describes perfectly her evil nature.47 As well as these minor references, the figure of ‘Torrellas’ appears in a major role in three important prose works, namely Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella and Luis de Lucena’s Repetiçión de amores, both written probably some time after the death of Torroella in Catalonia in the late 1470s, and the earlier anonymous sentimental romance, Triste deleytaçión. This work, which will be discussed first, was written in Catalonia some time after 1458.48 46 ‘Torrellas y Hernán Mexía’ (ID 7545) in Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991: VI, 262–263. Significantly, the two poets are confused by Luis de Lucena in Repetiçión de amores where lines 301–310 of Mexía’s poem are attributed to Torrellas (Lucena 1954: 75). 47 ID 1821 (Dutton & Krogstad 1990–1991: IV, 253). 48 The year 1458 appears in the narrative itself as that in which the events described occurred. Martín de Riquer posits a terminus a quo of 1467, but solely on the basis of an implicit reference to the Condesa de Luna (Riquer 1956). A more recent hypothesis (Gómez-Fargas 1992), posits an underlying allusion to Queen Juana Enríquez, Carlos de

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

191

Triste deleytaçión Torroella and his poem appear in the long razonamiento of the elderly Madrina with the enamoured young Doncella in which the older woman explains the truth about the behaviour of men and women in questions of love (37–68); the reference appears in a section in which the Madrina discusses some of the arguments put forward by men to justify their assertion that the male sex is superior (52–55): Otra razón de Aristótilles, provada del Egidio Romano, diziendo la mujer ser animal imperfeto; y d’aquí vino aquel nuestro enemigo mortal, Mosén Pero Torrellas, dezir contra la honor nuestra en aquellas abominables coplas: Mujer es un animal qual dizen honbre inperfeto, proqueado en el defeto del buen calor natural, confirmando con sus maliçias las maldades suyas y de los pasados que, por vergüença de los grandes desdenes que sus senyoras por el poco grado que dellos tenían, cadal día les davan, con yra d’enamorada pasión, [e] dixeron dellas infinitas lástimas, las quales con verdat fallar non se pueden.49

The passage quoted is of some importance in the Madrina’s account of the arguments (razones) put forward by men in support of the notion of the inferior nature of women. She is responding to a question that has been put to her by the Doncella, who has described how she has been present during a discussion, which she has found hard to follow, between some ladies who were lamenting the subjugation of women to men, in spite of the greater perfection of the female sex. During that discussion, one of the ladies had praised Juan Rodríguez del Padrón as ‘aquel más virtuoso de todos los onbres [. . .], coronándonos de gloria en el Triunfo de las donas’ (52). The Doncella summarizes two of the arguments with which the lady claimed to be supplementing those that had been advanced by Rodríguez del Padrón: (1) since every beginning is necessarily imperfect until completed, woman, who Viana’s stepmother, which would, if correct, suggest upper dates of 1472, 1479, or (with greater improbability) even 1516. A reference to Torroella towards the end of the work (Gerli 1982: 121) is of potential importance for its dating since it depicts ‘jentil Torrellas’ in a lovers’ Paradise together with other poets and local personalities; if it can be assumed that this Paradise contains only the souls of those who are already dead at the time of writing, then Triste deleytaçión must have been written after 1475, the date of the last known document that refers to a still living Torroella (Riquer 1964: III, 184). 49 Gerli 1982: 54; some emendations of punctuation have been introduced. The passage of Egidius Romanus to which the Madrina refers is in De regimine principum, II, i, 18: ‘est enim foeminae quasi masculus occasionatus & quasi vir incompletus’ (Egidius Romanus 1968: 160v).

192

ROBERT ARCHER

completed man when God created Eve, is necesssarily superior; (2) those who can sin and choose not to are superior to those who try to lead others into sin, the way men do, with their amorous assaults upon women.50 After this the Doncella is unable to recall any further arguments because she had not understood them. The Madrina takes her cue from these two points, claiming that she agrees with the lady’s contention of female superiority and that she supports her praise of Rodríguez for his services to women: ese cavallero allegado, Rodrigo del Pedrón, quiso por su virtut scribir el que el restante de llos onbres por pura e inbidiosa maliçia nos tenían scondido. (52)

The Madrina’s explicit praise of Rodríguez as champion of women sets up the basis for a contrast with the later reference to Torroella, quoted above, as their ‘enemigo’. Between these references to the two poets the Madrina develops four of her nine arguments. First, she speaks in support of the lady’s first argument, adding that since women are that which men most love, and only the noblest things can be most loved, it follows that they deserve to have authority over men. Her second argument is similarly Aristotelian: female softness and gentleness make them naturally better disposed to be the bearers of wisdom and knowledge. However, men will not accept even the Biblical evidence (Eve’s creation from the rib rather than the foot) for the female right to be considered equal, and deliberately restrict their access to knowlege with the consequence that female intelligence is not allowed to show its true capacity.51 In her third argument, using an idea which is taken for granted in the literature of advice to brides, the Madrina points out the proven ability of women to ensure that a man’s household prospers, a fact which should argue for their superiority, but which is ignored in favour of another Aristotelian notion, namely that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, women possess an inferior intelligence and thereby also have inferior bodies, not least in the way they are equipped for love. She denounces the misuse of this idea to support the gross claim commonly made by men (‘un dezir entre ellos muy llexos de jentilleza’, 53) according to which the only occasion on which a woman is fulfilled is during coitus since she then possesses, through the man, ‘lo que delante nos falleçe’ – the most obvious sign of the imperfection of the female species which is produced in nature through a lack of natural heat at the moment of conception, causing the sexual organs to grow inversely. This idea underlies the quotation from the Maldezir and the reference to 50 The first argument is based in the Aristotelian idea that the end is of superior excellence to the means, used in razones 40 and 50 of Triunfo de las donas, but it is true that both arguments in the form that they are given are supplementary to Rodríguez’s. 51 The argument about male restriction of access to education also appears in Torroella’s Razonamiento (Aubrun 1951: 31, ll. 20–22).

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

193

Torroella, which comes as part of the fourth point made by the Madrina. Here too she stresses the origin of the notion of woman’s inferiority in Aristotelian theory. But, significantly, she also describes the idea as having been confirmed by Egidius Romanus. Her complaint against Torrellas is not that he repeated this idea, which, in its unadorned Aristotelian form, she does not contest, but that he chose to use it to try to give substance to the calumnies made in his ‘abominables coplas’. She then exposes the pseudo-science of Torroella’s use of the Aristotelian argument, denouncing its origin in the simple personal spite that arises when amorous desire is frustrated in the male. The phrase used to describe this condition, ‘yra d’enamorada pasión’ is perhaps only coincidentally close to that used by Torroella, ‘desatiento d’enamorada passión’, in his Razonamiento, but the explanation for the concrete cause of male ‘maliçias’ in amorous suffering (pasión) sets the Madrina’s argument closer to the exculpatory phrase of Torroella than to the condemnatory ones used by Rodríguez and Valera in relation to the Boccaccio of Il corbaccio.52 Significantly, too, the Madrina has not openly rebutted this fourth male argument of natural superiority. In the remaining five razones she is even more ambiguous, prompting the Doncella to remark that ‘deleytáys en darnos una vez del pan y otra del bastón’ (55). But this double-handedness has characterized her method of reply throughout the previous discussion of the ways of men and women in which the Doncella attempts several times to interrupt the Madrina’s general condemnation of the behaviour of women, a tactic by which she seeks to stress the moral danger to which the Doncella herself, because of her female nature, is exposed. While counselling that women need to be circumspect in dealing with men in matters of love, she has held forth at length on the ‘enganyos que las mujeres saben azer a los honbres’ (41–49), and has denounced the prodigality (‘strago grande’, 48) with which women deplete the fortune of their husbands or lovers. This passage contains several criticisms of common female behaviour that coincide with accusations made in the Maldezir: ‘las demás mujeres, sentiéndose amadas, luego desdenyan y aborreçen el que tienen’ (44);53 ‘las más mujeres [. . .], quieren siempre cosas nuevas y no curan, por alcançar aquel nuevo deleyte, dar razón al que tienen ni al que deven [. . .] sino sólo seguir sus apetitos [. . .]’ (45).54 The Madrina uses this same tactic of focusing negatively on women when she develops the last five razones in relation to the question of female superi-

52 53 54

Aubrun 1951: 27; Rodríguez del Padrón 1982: 229; Valera 1983: 58–59. Maldezir, ll. 62–63: ‘el más contento/ es cerca de aborresçido’. Maldezir, ll. 81–82: ‘Provecho e deleite son/ el fin de todas sus obras’ and ll. 70–72: ‘van a las cosas vedadas,/ desdeñan las sojusgadas/ e las peores escogen.’ Another probable source in this passage is Valera: the Madrina glosses one of the four misogynous arguments that had been identified in the Defensa (Valera 1983: 50), namely that ‘Quando las mujeres son buenas, son malas; y quando son malas, son buenas’ (42).

194

ROBERT ARCHER

ority. Thus, the fifth argument develops the notion of the imperfection of the female form that had been raised in the fourth: the male is the sole engenderer in the creation of the foetus, while woman’s role is merely nutritive (‘no empresta sino sólo el baso o cuerpo en el tal exerciçio’), and the primacy of the male form is confirmed by the fact that all references to angels in the Bible mention that they appear in the form of a man. It is surely significant that, even though she has cited with praise Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, none of the remaining arguments she chooses to use against women take any account of his responses to these same arguments. The brief sixth argument adds further to the preceding one, adducing the role of the all-male prophets inspired by the Holy Spirit, but this too goes uncontested by the Madrina who thereby implicitly discounts the counter-argument of Triunfo de las donas (where it appears as razón 28), namely that some women were especially privileged in hisory with the power of prophecy, since one of the pagan sibyls prophesied the coming of Christ and saw the Virgin and Child in a vision. The next brief razón – ‘que el fijo de Dios, tomando carne umana, en forma de ombre y no de mujer quiso venir, por no careçer de perfeçión’ – continues to ignore the response of Rodríguez, in this case razón 24, namely that ‘visto los yerros e viçios innumerables por los onbres acometidos, et consideradas las virtudes e los méritos de las mugeres, non de varón, mas de muger, aquel que por nuestra salud quiso padesçer, tomó la humanidat’. The Madrina’s razón 8, citing Christ’s institution of the Eucharist in the presence of men (Luke 22: 14–20), is in itself a response to the profeminine argument, cited briefly by Rodríguez (razón 32), that Christ chose to appear to women rather than men after His Resurrection. The final argument – that the priesthood, and hence the means of salvation, was granted to men rather than women, also indicates that the Madrina chose to ignore Rodríguez’s convoluted attempt to argue it away (razón 26). The Madrina’s explanation as to why she has chosen to contest only some of the arguments for male superiority is that: ‘cosas ay que no se pueden dezir el contrario, por tener las fines y evidençias muy çiertas’ (55) and that it is counterproductive to attempt to refute every argument put forward in support of male superiority. Since this is precisely what Rodríguez tries to do in Triunfo de las donas, she in effect implicitly discounts the value of much of his enterprise, in spite of her earlier words of praise. Nevertheless, immediately afterwards, when she describes the treachery of men (55–56), she has recourse once again to a traditional argument that is used in Triunfo de las donas: the betrayal of Christ by men is contrasted with the unwavering faith of the women about him (Rodríguez’s razones 29 to 31). This long section of Triste deleytaçión on the ways of men and women in love in has been described often as a ‘debate’. But again this is a misnomer: the Madrina and the Doncella do not argue from opposed viewpoints and, as we have seen, the Madrina speaks with one foot in each camp. Moreover, the rhetorical impetus of the discussion is largely controlled by the Madrina,

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

195

while the Doncella is only occasionally an interlocutor. The interaction of the two here illustrates the enormous malleability of the material both for declaredly misogynous arguments and for those that are written from the standpoint of self-declared misogynous and defence texts. Arguments from Rodríguez del Padrón and Pere Torroella are modified or turned on their head under the implacably realist gaze of the Madrina. This use of the material responds to the specific needs of the characters in the narrative context: the Madrina’s task of instructing the Doncella by making her as equally aware of the dangers of female nature as of the ways of men – the method, in effect, of Eiximenis and Córdoba transferred to a narrative mode.

Grisel y Mirabella A conventionally structured debate – one between interlocutors who defend opposed viewpoints – is to be found only in the brief passages in Tirant lo Blanch and the Llibre de fra Bernat discussed in the last chapter and, in a much lengthier form, in one fifteenth-century work, Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella.55 In it the arguments put forward by ‘Torrellas’, in support of the proposition that women bear the greater guilt in the incitement to love, are countered in an alternating exchange, by the unvanquished virgin Braçayda.56 The presence of ‘Torrellas’ in Flores’s fiction is due to much more than his availability as a convenient misogynist figure from the recent past.57 Braçayda makes it clear from the start that she intends their contest to be one in which he will be made to ‘satisfacer y pagar a las damas las de vos recibidas injurias’.58 That is, what the two of them debate is not only the 55 Flores was a nobleman and official of high rank in the courts of Enrique IV and Isabel, who lived until at least 1503, and was the author not only of other literary works (Grimalte y Gradisa, Triunfo de amor) but also of the Crónica incompleta de los Reyes Católicos. See Gwara 1986–87, and Parrilla 1989. Grisel y Mirabella cannot be dated exactly, but it was almost certainly written later than Triste deleytaçión; it has been argued rather inconclusively by Rohland de Langbehn that there is evidence of direct influence of one work upon the other; see the same study for the relation of Grisel y Mirabella to the medieval debate (Rohland de Langbehn 1999: 99–119). 56 The figure of Braçayda derives ultimately from the archetypes of the resolute virgin and the female endowed with an intelligence resembling the male one that were made popular by Boccaccio in De claris mulieribus. It is surely an exaggeration, however, to describe her as a misandrist as Marina Scordilis Brownlee does in a fine Foucaultian reading (1991: 170); Braçayda’s first argument (Matulka 1931: 344–345) in itself confirms that she is meant to represent the woman tempted by men as much as the tempter of them. 57 It is conceivable, as the arguments put forward by Joseph Gwara suggest (Gwara 1986–87) that Flores was writing at a date not very long after the death of Torroella who is last documented in 1475 (Riquer 1964: III, 184). 58 Matulka 1931: 344. All references are to Matulka’s edition (1931: 332–370), with emended punctuation.

196

ROBERT ARCHER

question set them by the king but also the validity of the allegations made in the Maldezir. In her first argument – the intrinsically deceptive nature of men (344–345) – Braçayda describes precisely the context of courtliness to which the cancionero poets allude in their rejection of the practice of maldezir and their advocacy of the praise of women as a prerequisite for all courtly endeavour: Digo, pues, Torrellas, como a todos sea manifiesto la vuestra solicitud ser grande en el seguimiento nuestro. Y si algunas con sano consejo se partan de oýr vuestras enganyosas fablas, non pueden apartarse de oýr en las calladas noches el dulçor de los instrumentos y cantos de la suave música, la qual para l’enganyo nuestro fue por vosotros inventada, y bien se conosce ser una sobtil ret para las erradas nuestras. Y si algunas desto refuyen, de las danças, justas, tonos, toros y canyas y otros muchos sin cuenta deportes, todos para nos atraher a veros, fuýr no pueden. (344)

The very courtliness that the poets believed to be threatened by the practice of maldezir de mugeres in its literary or verbal forms is depicted by Braçayda as the elaborate machinery of seduction.59 Torrellas in his reply (345–347) accepts that this is indeed the case, but he asserts that women fall into the trap that is laid for them because they all seek above everything else to be loved. They would immediately consent to the demands of any man they liked if vergüenza did not prevent them, while their protestations of honestad are false. Braçayda counters that, since women are naturally less intelligent than men, while the male species, as in nature, is more attractive, men are more at fault if they use this superiority to seduce them (347–348). To this Torroella says (348–350) that, on the contrary, women are the more beautiful sex, and moreover spend much effort in improving on that natural beauty with cosmetics and dress to attract men even further. If men ceased trying to seduce them, then women would importune men, and indeed some already do. Braçayda insists on the male abuse of intelligence (sobrado saber, 350) to make a woman capitulate and on the way men threaten to defame a woman if she refuses (350–351). Torrellas replies that women are the cause of the greatest evils in the world and the perpetrators of sotiles enganyos, and that the argument of female ignorance is flaca scusa since even the cleverest are easily won over (351–352). Braçayda denies the universality of female deception alleged by Torrellas and protests that most women are virtuous; the only evil present in women derives from their having been engendered by men (352–353). In the final reply reported by the auctor, who explains that he does not give a full account

59 Courtly activities like those described by Braçayda are patronised by women according to Pedro Manuel de Urrea in the poem ‘Coplas [. . .] en alabança de las mugeres’ (Dutton ID 7545) previously discussed.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

197

of their debate, Torrellas questions the basis in truth of all the historical exempla of virtuous women, and rejects the importance of any case that might have occurred, deeming it insignificant in comparison with the number of bad women there have been (355). His trump card is the case of Eve with which he seeks to prove the greater evil of women: since the sin of the first woman, evil-doing has become a habit among them. They seek only the pleasure of being loved: they even prefer to give birth to males so that they will afford pleasure to other women.60 In short, women think only of how to attract men and secure their love. The Maldezir of Torroella underlies much of this debate, and there are several references, direct or indirect, to the poem. The main thrust of the argumentation hinges on allegations made by Torrellas in ll. 10–18 and 73–76 of the poem: Donde apeteçen los ojos sin otro conoscimiento allí va el consentimiento, acompañado de antojos, y non es más su bondat que vana parencería: a quien non han voluntad muestran que por honestad contrastan a su porfía [. . .] Sintiendo que son subjectas e sin nengund poderío, a fin de aver señorío tienen engañosas sectas.

Further allegations made by Torrellas also have their origins in the Maldezir, such as that only vergüenza prevents women from assailing men with their desires (Grisel y Mirabella 345 and 348/ Maldezir 86–90) and the reference to honestad as a feminine pretence (Grisel y Mirabella 345 and 348/ Maldezir 17). At one point Torrellas directly assumes the identity of the poet, alluding to ‘mis trobados renglones’ (352) in which he had denounced the female use of lies and tears: a los tiempos que necessidad os costrinye apariencias y mudamientos de palabras fingíys, en las quales luego coloráys con las non tenyidas lágrimas, ahun ad algunos mostráys amar desamando, y a otros, amando, los desdenyáys. (352)

Here Flores refers loosely to the ideas developed in ll. 18–36, 62–63, and 60 For Flores’s treatment of female lust in other works, especially his account of Doña Juana in the Crónica incompleta, see Castro Lingl (1995).

198

ROBERT ARCHER

79–80 of the Maldezir. A little later there is a direct quotation from l. 19: women are ‘lobas en scojer’ (Grisel y Mirabella, 354). But Torrellas’s triumph in the debate, bringing tragic consequences for the two lovers, is only momentarily a vindication of the Maldezir. Now enamoured of Braçayda, or perhaps claiming to be so for the purposes of seduction, Torrellas rejects his former misogyny, accusing himself of having been ‘perverso, malo’ and the creator of ‘malicias’, while also lamenting that his fame has come at a cost: Quando alguno quiere contra las damas mal dezir, con malicias del perverso Torrellas se favoreçe, y ahunque digan lo que yo por ventura no dixe, mi fama me haze digno que se atribuyan a mí todas palabras contra mujeres danyosas. (365)

The cost soon proves to be even greater than he thinks since, in an ironic role-reversal, he falls victim to the same courtly discourse of deception that Braçayda had denounced, proving Torroella’s point about women’s ‘engañosas sectas’.61 When he is torn limb from limb by the enraged Bacchantes of the Scottish court, they avenge not only the suicide of Mirabella but also the offence against all women perpetrated by the author of the Maldezir: Y allí praticando las maldades dell, y trayendo a la memoria sus maliciosas obras, cada una dezía a la Reyna que no les parecía que quantas muertes ad aquell mal hombre se pudiessen dar por que passase largos anyos non compliría, ahunque cada noche de aquellas penitencias oviesse, y otras dezían mil maneras de tormentos cada qual cómo le agradava. (369)

The worst consequences of the blatant disregard of the norms of that courtliness that the cancionero poets had decried in the practice of maldezir are graphically represented in Flores’s grisly account of unleashed female wrath. Such a creature of extremes easily passes from performing her role as the focal point of the male courtly ideal to a harpy whose savage revenge makes the accusations of both Pere Torroella and Flores’s Torrellas seem tame stuff indeed.

Repetición de amores Flores’s work thus ends in a way that points to an ironic comment on the Maldezir: given the cruelty of which women are innately capable, Torroella’s invective, to which courtly literary circles had given such importance, falls 61 Weissberger 2002: 219–221; see also Weissberger 1997 (181) where she points out that Braçayda’s love-letter to Torrellas ‘is itself a self-interested fiction, a ruse to lure Torrellas to his death [. . .] that violently and grotesquely literalizes his courtly wish to die for love’.

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

199

short of the mark. Luis de Lucena’s prose work, Repetición de amores, dating from the last decade of the fifteenth century, achieves much the same effect when it sets the poem against the context of the broad tradition of European misogyny.62 Ostensibly Repetición is structured as a gloss on the first stanza of Torroella’s poem, but there is no reference by name to ‘Torrellas’ in connection with the stanza, and no allusion to maldezir or to maldizientes. Nor is there any concern with the relationship between misogyny and courtliness. Repetición is a slippery work to define, precisely because of its burlesque nature: a tratado de amor in the form of a parody of a Latin academic exercise, the repetitio, using one of the most popular poems of the fifteenth century for the texto of which it is the gloss, and characterized, as Pedro M. Cátedra has suggested, by the ‘uso paródico del plagio’ in its extensive borrowings.63 But it is a text of considerable interest for present purposes since, while it contains a collection of misogynistic ideas unequalled in medieval Hispanic literature, it pays only lip-service to Torroella’s poem, alluding to it in substance scarcely at all. This marks it out from all the other texts we have seen in relation to Torroella, since these tend to use the Maldezir as a basic summary of the arguments against women, from which each selects and to which each makes its own additions. In the Repetición, on the other hand, while the author ostensibly privileges the poem from the outset, the material used in the section denouncing women (a little under one quarter of the work) is drawn from several other sources, medieval, classical, Patristic, and Spanish. Lucena pours into his long diatribe material from all of them, usually without acknowledgement, including Il Corbaccio, the Spanish translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1641–1711), Juvenal (1542– 1582), a version of the Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Secundi Philosophi (1716–1722), Ecclesiasticus (1722–1728), the Siete sabios de Roma (1757– 1761), and Íñigo de Mendoza.64 Lucena begins and ends the passage with lists of epithets (137–177, 1806–1826) and there is another set in 1716–1722 from the Altercatio, but mostly it consists of the discursive treatment of specific female traits: instability (1391–1422), the falseness and moral dangers of female beauty (1422– 1466), the vanity and vacuousness of female conversation (1447–1456), woman’s generally poisonous nature (1456–1461), deception (1427–1487, 62 Ornstein (Lucena 1954: 2) dates Repetición as between 1495 and 1497; Thompson 1977 argues that it could be earlier. References are to the edition of Ornstein 1954 (based on the edition in the British Library), using his line numbers; see also the edition of Miguel M. García-Bermejo based on the Salamanca manuscript in Cátedra 2001: 93–160. 63 Cátedra 2001: 307. 64 For Petrarch see Thompson 1977; the identification of the stanza (1379–1390) from Íñigo de Mendoza’s ‘En este mundo disforme’ (ID 0271, ll. 73–84) is made in the Salamanca manuscript edited by García-Bermejo where ‘fray Íñigo’ is mentioned (Cátedra 2001: 136).

200

ROBERT ARCHER

with several exempla), lust (1487–1503), anger and quarrelsomeness (1503– 1520), the inability to keep a secret (1521–1522), vainglory (1522–1536), gluttony (1537–1542), unreliability as wives (1543–1581, following Juvenal, this time acknowledged), contempt for husbands (1582–1603), lack of chastity or moderation in matters of food, drink, or money (1604–1620), vain and sinful use of cosmetics and clothes (1620–1711, partly using the Spanish translation of De casibus virorum illustrium, I, 18), frivolity (1712–1716, in the form of a catechism), and incitement to sin (1722–1728, from Ecclesiasticus), brevity and vanity of female beauty (1729–1739), imperfection compared to man (1740–1756), a widow’s contempt for a husband’s memory (1782–1785, summarizing a tale from Siete sabios de Roma). This is followed by a general condemnation of the muger mala (1761–1781), with a dismissal of the muger buena as nothing more than a further source of anxiety for the husband (1782–1785), and a list of men who renounced all women (1785–1805). All would-be lovers are enjoined to think again (1461– 1472, 1618, 1827–1848), and women too are encouraged to use the gift of their feminine vergüenza to overcome their own nature (1585–1592). In all this there are no references to Torroella’s poem or to the author. There are only three points in the whole diatribe at which there is a thematic overlap with the Maldezir: the inability to keep a secret (Repetición 1521– 1522/ Maldezir 79), use of afeites (Repetición 1620–1711/ Maldezir 77), and vainglory (Repetición 1522–1536/ Maldezir 66–69). But there is nothing specific with which to relate one text to the other. The only lines attributed to ‘Torrellas’ (75), apart from those of the texto, are not by Torroella at all, but by Hernán Mexía (with whom, as we have seen, Torroella was linked by others as a fellow maldiziente). The other two quotations for which, aside from the first stanza, the Maldezir was well known are not referred to at all. The definition of woman as ‘hombre imperfecto’ is not related to ll. 91–94 as in Triste deleytaçión, but rather to its Aristotelian source (1418, 1740–1741), and even then with no reference to her conception without natural heat as in Torroella; instead, Lucena stresses the proof of her imperfection in her accelerated maturity; and the famous comparison of women to lobas in their choice of mates does not appear. Most significantly of all, when Lucena expounds his interpretation of ll. 1–2 of the Maldezir, he does not take them as the cue for a misogynistic exposé of the work (this comes later) but rather as a statement about the folly of the lover: quel hombre enamorado deve mucho culpar a sí mesmo y no a la fuerza de las estrellas o al predistincto orden de las cosas que han de venir, o a la disposición de los objectos donde nasce el plazer y deleyte, como hazen algunos. (68)

The quotation of the stanza from the Maldezir leads into a discussion of onestidad in men (1132–1277), deemed to be attainable through the exercise

TORROELLA’S MALDEZIR DE MUGERES

201

of reason, enabling them to withstand the onslaught of love and sexual desire which had been described in the long section on Cupid (356–1111). It is in this context that Repetición develops into a work of remedia amoris (1278– 1860): the author enjoins his male readers to flee love (1278), claiming authority on the subject by virtue of his painful infatuation with a fifteenyear-old, described in the pseudo-autobiographical prelude to his exposition (163–355). Love is then defined as a sickness (1290–1335), there is an injunction to love God rather than women (1336–1357), and finally comes the cure of love itself in the form of the misogynous diatribe. The misogynous passage ends with the same kind of disclaimer as is to be found in the Maldezir itself: the author again addresses the lady of the preámbulo and the señoras of the exordio (1–140), he protests that he is not referring to all women, only the bad ones who must be condemned so as better to praise the good. But the Repetición by this stage is at such a distance from Torroella’s Maldezir that the subject of female ingratitude that is described in the rest of the first stanza Lucena had quoted initially but which he had not directly glossed (ll. 3–9) is totally ignored in favour of the question of ‘aquello por lo qual todas más estimáys a los hombres’, in itself a pretext for a discussion of the topic of arms versus letters. Lucena studiously avoids giving any hint of apology for the misogynous section, presenting it as a work of remedia amoris linked to the moral injunction to turn to God.65 But this moral context is itself set within the ambiguous framework of the narrator’s personal situation, which he signals as being of key importance for understanding the work when he describes the tale of his deception in love as containing ‘ciertos principios necesarios a la inteligencia suya’ (164–165). Is this meant to indicate, as Ornstein thought, that the protagonist, ‘stung and embittered by this turn of events, [. . .] takes pen in hand, determined to exact literary revenge at the expense of the entire feminine sex’?66 Or is it that the experience leads him to moral illumination and to the desire to help his fellow-men by stressing the triumph of reason and celibacy over the power of Cupid? The question is, of course, otiose: parody, not moral instruction, is the most important dimension to the work, a display case for signposted erudition and the reworking of unacknowledged large-scale borrowings. In these terms, what Lucena says about Cupid (lines 356–1111, about one third of the work as a whole) is as important as the passage on women for which Repetición is best known. What really mattered to Lucena, it appears, was his skill in writing in Spanish in an academic genre that was meant to be in Latin, and giving as the text for the repetitio a stanza from one of the most widely 65 The advice to turn to God as part of the process of overcoming love is given also by Gómez Manrique in his Respuesta to the Carta de buena nota (Cátedra 2001: 73–80) but without recommending the use of misogynous thoughts or words. 66 Lucena 1954: 12.

202

ROBERT ARCHER

known vernacular poems of the time. In the process he produced a work which marks out the distance between the European misogynous tradition with its mass of arguments and accusations, and the relatively insignificant laundry-list of misogynous topics to be found in Torroella’s poem, for which, in effect, he had little use outside that of providing a texto for his gloss. The Repetición in this way underlines the status of the Maldezir and much of the literature arising from it as a courtly interlude in misogynous discourse, a conceptually limited formulation of ideas against women born specifically in the context of courtly love-poetry and its conventions, and challenged on the grounds of its threat to cortesía. It is within the limited context of cortesía that the underlying question of woman during much of this period can be set aside by many writers in favour of a preoccupation with ideals of highly stylized behaviour in both sexes. But the reductionist account of misogynist ideas contained in Torroella’s poem continued to be for others a convenient, even if deceptive, handle on a persistent problem – one for which those who wrote about women across the whole field we have studied here were only too eager to find easy solutions.

CONCLUSION CONCLUSION

Even a brief review of some of the more substantial Hispanic texts I have examined here suggests a very wide range of ostensible reasons for writing about women. Eiximenis attempts to define the more negative aspects of female nature precisely so that through knowledge of them women may overcome their inherent defects and live as better Christian women. Córdoba, for his part, following Egidius Romanus and supported by García de Castrojeriz, has similar moral aims, but he also is conscious of the need to persuade other male readers, whose assumptions about women he echoes, that his programme of moral reform is an adequate one for the production of a competent monarch whose gender is abnormal. The three texts concerning advice to brides and maidens push the negative qualities to the background under the pressure of the social need for an ideal of married womanhood, connecting this ideal with negative notions of women only when the ideal threatens the male order. St Vincent Ferrer’s extant sermons minimize distinctions of gender at the moral level, so that the representation of vice is scarcely ever allowed to appear in a specifically female form. Metge’s Lo somni uses a narrative debate to enact the qualities in himself that, for purely political reasons, the author wishes to project. A close reading of Martínez de Toledo reveals his struggle to cope with the contradictions implicit in the misogynous discourse he has chosen to develop for moral ends. Roig writes a relentless denunciation of the female based in a widespread belief in women as a site of disease while also arguing on moral grounds for the rejection of human love in a similar way to Martínez. The fifteenth-century defences are written almost entirely for reasons of literary ambition, particularly manifest in the efforts made by their authors to outdo their predecessors. The last of these texts, that of Diego de San Pedro, situates its defence of women within the ideal of cortesía which is the primary concern of several of the cancionero poems in the latter half of the fifteenth century, written in response to Torroella’s Maldezir, while Triste deleytaçión and Grisel y Mirabella take both the poem and the mythified author as the basis for exploiting the dramatic possibilities of some of its concepts. The range of explicit aims of all these texts and of the various others we have studied here, and the variety of ways in which those aims are met, force us to discard at least three of the assumptions that have often informed discussion. First, there is clearly no debate in any real sense: each of the texts

204

ROBERT ARCHER

is defined by the kind of historical, ideological, political, or literary contexts outlined above as well as by considerations of genre, and there is scarcely any sign of the kind of direct exchange of arguments that would indicate that their authors saw themselves as participating in a form of disputational forum. Other forms of intertextuality than the disputational are indeed at work: common sources like Egidius Romanus appear in different guises; Cerverí de Girona’s Mal dit ben dit of 1271 is discussed by Eiximenis in the late fourteenth century, while Eiximenis’s own Libre de les dones is praised by Juan Justiniano in 1528 as an important precedent for Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae; Rodríguez del Padrón is a pervasive presence from the 1440s onwards, while authors of defences clearly strive to outdo not only his Triunfo but their other predecessors; Torroella’s Maldezir becomes a point of reference for the whole of the second half of the fifteenth century and beyond. In terms of a debate in the disputational sense, however, there is no significant interaction between the texts at all. A second assumption we can safely set aside is the one which holds that writing about women inevitably took the form of an empty rehearsal of argumentational clichés from the position of either misogyny or defence. In practice, the localized context in which each of the texts is written ensures that the combination of common ideas about women they each contain – that is, the inclusion and exclusion of such ideas – is nearly always unique. The selection of female characteristics tends to differ markedly from one text to the other: they differ in overall intention, in emphasis, and in the way that elements of the underlying concept of woman are developed or modified or rejected according to specific rhetorical ends. A third false assumption is that the subject in itself was of little or no intrinsic interest to most of those who wrote about it, but was rather an essentially unproblematic subject that was readily available for use in whichever rhetorical context the writer required or whichever ‘game’ of social positioning he found himself in. A close analysis of all the texts reveals a lack of homogeneity in the way they deal with the subject, which substantiates the claim made at the outset of this study, namely that they are all characterized by a real concern with the viability of the authoritative view of women handed down to them from the auctoritates – a view that is essentially contradictory and self-undermining. The problem, we have seen, only intensifies once that authoritative view is subjected to the discursive elaboration of declaredly contra or pro positions which dominates the corpus. All this means in practice that the notion of woman that is reflected in the Hispanic texts is infused with a strong sense of indeterminacy. This is why the concept is explicitly defined only to the extent that such definition is required for the specific purposes of the text. Most writers, when faced with the task of defining the nature of women, allude only to those aspects which are essential to their particular needs; they regularly avoid entering into the subject in more detail than the aims of the text require. Descriptions of what

CONCLUSION

205

women are tend thus to be pragmatically conceived: the notion of woman, for most men a largely unscrutinized mass of loosely connected ideas, continues to be unproblematic only as long as the writer avoids trying to formulate precisely what the notion is. For the same reason, in spite of what is often assumed about the ‘medieval misogyny’ in many of these texts, few actually develop a wholly negative line of thought. An educationalist like Eiximenis and a politically motivated apologist like Córdoba attempt a substantial negative definition because they are aware that their goals can be achieved only by making as explicit as possible the underlying notion of women they believe to be shared by their readers. Other writers who allege the need for male defence in the face of the moral and physical dangers of the female, or who present misogyny as a remedium amoris, seldom attempt more than a partial definition since there seems to be a consciousness that the discourse of misogyny itself sooner or later throws up inherent anomalies and contradictions that are best avoided. The one exception is Repetición de amores which, to an even greater extent than Torroella’s Maldezir before it, assumes the form of a catalogue of defects and avoids discursive argument. For most writers, taking a determinedly negative line rarely proves to be an effective means of avoiding the challenge of definition that lies in wait for every would-be maldiziente. Hence Martínez de Toledo, committed to a condemnation of earthly love and the women who are its object, constantly comes up against the problem of inclusiveness or limitation of reference: should his condemnation refer to all women or to certain women only, to some, most, or to all with just a few exceptions? Nor is he able to prevent a sense of pastoral concern – one similar to that which characterizes St Vincent Ferrer’s many pronouncements on women – from sporadically undermining his negative generalities. If his book is a maldezir de mugeres, then it is a failed one, since it ends up being in effect a dramatic representation of the self-controverting nature of the antifeminine discourse he has attempted to write. It is thus a general rule that the misogynous view in the Hispanic texts thrives only in conditions of limited exposure: the more the tenets of misogyny are discursively explored, the more its internal incoherence is laid bare. Hence the rarity of extensive misogynous statements like Torroella’s list of female defects – and it is this rarity which partly explains why the poem was so widely copied, in spite of the fact that it is, as a comparison with Lucena’s Repetición shows, a limited account of the range of negative aspects available in the traditional notion of women. In this sense Jaume Roig is the only writer in the Hispanic corpus who succeeds in representing misogyny as a convincingly attainable goal, and he achieves this only by deftly combining a narrative of experience with discursive antifeminine denunciation. It is no coincidence that it is precisely the rare texts of uncompromising misogyny like Roig’s Spill that most force to the surface the humour that is latent in all misogynist writing. Both Roig and Metge acknowledge the problem that

206

ROBERT ARCHER

arises from it (and each uses it rhetorically to his own advantage), namely that what may be an earnestly intended denunciation of the female may trigger laughter in the reader – not only the laughter of derision, but also that of mirth with its peculiar ability to undermine reception of the earnest intention. Authors who declare a defence position have to struggle in a similar way with the problematic nature of authoritative wisdom; much of the discussion in the major Castilian and Catalan defence works concerns the difficulty of reaching effective closure on the meaning of Biblical and other authoritative texts and of dealing with the contradictions they generate collectively. Even the more extensive defence writings address head-on only a small number of specifically misogynous arguments and again tend to avoid exhaustiveness: a few arguments are selected (as for instance in Valera or Luna) and others are indirectly dealt with, or else only this indirect method is used (Rodríguez del Padrón and Diego de San Pedro, for instance); Torroella in his Razonamiento includes more than other writers only because he responds point by point (but always indirectly) to his own list of female defects. The defences rarely deal with the same misogynous arguments, and this in itself is yet further evidence of the lack of homogeneity in the notion of women they were discussing. Rather, their authors tend generally to prefer the easier target of the agent of misogyny, the maldiziente, a figure who typically is engaged with the general disparagement of women rather than with the adumbration of a body of arguments that have to be answered. Torroellian misogyny, defences developed on the basis of argument or exempla, or a renewed espousal of the old values of cortesía, become in the second half of the fifteenth century the modes of refuge from the unresolved struggle with the problem of defining that which, in terms of authoritative wisdom itself, was inherently undefinable. But the very elaborateness of these late forms of evasion only points up the persistence, far beyond the period studied here, of the anxieties which, in one form or another, the problem had always begotten.

BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACEBRÓN RUIZ, Julián, ed., 2000. Flors de virtut: facsímil de l’incunable de 1489 (Enric Botel, Lleida) (Lleida: Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs/ Fundació Pública de la Diputació de Lleida). ACOSTA, Cristóbal, 1592. Tratado en loor de las mugeres (Venetia: Giacomo Cornetti). [exemplar: Biblioteca de Catalunya Toda 2–V–11] ALBERTANO DA BRESCIA, 1965. Llibre de consolació i de consell, ed. G. E. Sansone (Barcelona: Barcino). ALLEN, Prudence, 1985. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montréal–London: Eden Press). ———, 2001. The Concept of Woman, II: The Early Humanist Reformation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans). ALMAZÁN, Vincent, 1967. ‘L’Exemplum chez Vicente Ferrer’, Romanische Forschungen, 79: 288–332. ÁLVAREZ PELLITERO, Ana María, ed., 1993. Cancionero de Palacio (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Cultura y Turismo). ANDREAS CAPELLANUS, 1931. Andreae Capellani regii francorum De amore libri tres. Text llatí amb la traducció catalana del segle XIV, ed. Amadeu Pagès (Castellón de la Plana: Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura). ———, 1985. Andreas Capellanus/Andrés el Capellá. De amore. Tratado sobre el amor, trans. Inés Creixell Vidal-Quadras (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). ANGENOT, Marc, 1977. Les Champions des femmes: examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes 1400–1800 (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université). ARAMON I SERRA, Ramon, ed., 1938. El Cançoner des Masdovelles (manuscrit no. 11 de la Biblioteca de Catalunya) (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans). ARCHER, Robert, 1993. ‘Ausiàs March and the Baena Debate on Predestination’, Medium Aevum, 62: 35–50. ———, 1996. Aproximació a Ausiàs March: estructura, tradició, metàfora (Barcelona: Empúries). ———, 1999–2000. ‘Las coplas “de las calidades de las donas” de Pere Torroella y la tradición lírica catalana’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 47: 405–423. ———, 2000. Misoginia y defensa de las mujeres: una antología de textos medievales (Madrid: Cátedra & Instituto de la Mujer; Valencia: Universitat de València). ———, 2001. ‘Tus falsas querellas y mis verdaderas razones: Pere Torroella and the Woman-Haters’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies [Glasgow], 78: 551–566.

208

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHER, Robert, & Isabel de RIQUER, 1998. Contra las mujeres: poemas medievales de rechazo y vituperio (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). ARNALD DE VILLANOVA, 1985. Arnaldi de Villanova. Opera Medica Omnia, III: Tractatus de amore heroico. Epistola de Dosi Tyriacalium medicinarum (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona). AUBRUN, Charles V., 1951. Le Chansonnier espagnol d’Herberay des Essarts (XVe siècle) (Bordeaux: Féret). AZÁCETA, José María, ed., 1956. Cancionero de Juan Fernández de Ixar, 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC). BACH Y RITA, Pedro, 1930: The Works of Pere Torroella (New York: Instituto de las Españas en Estados Unidos). BADIA, Lola, 1988. De Bernat Metge a Joan Roís de Corella (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). ———, 1993–1994. ‘Tot per a la dona però sense la dona: notes sobre el punt de vista masculí al Tirant lo Blanc’, Journal of Hispanic Research, 2: 39–60. BAKHTIN, Mikhail, 1984. Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Moscow, 1965: Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable. BALLESTEROS GAIBROIS, Manuel, 1970. Isabel de Castilla, Reina Católica de España, 2nd edition (Madrid: Editora Nacional). BALZARETTI, Ross, 2002. ‘Liutprand of Cremona’s Sense of Humour’, in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BARANDA, Nieves, & Víctor INFANTES, eds., 1995. La doncella Teodor, in Narrativa popular de la Edad Media (Madrid: Akal), pp. 58–83. BENEYTO PÉREZ, Juan, ed. 1947. Glosa castellana al ‘Regimiento de príncipes’ de Egidio Romano, 3 vols (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos). BERGSON, Henri, 1927. Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Félix Alcan). ———, 1935. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan). Bible 1983. Holy Bible (Colorado Springs: New International Version). Biblia Vulgata 1965. Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, 4th ed., ed. Alberto Colunga & Laurentio Turrado (Madrid: Editorial Católica). BLACKMORE, Josiah, & Gregory S. HUTCHESON, eds., 1999. Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, N. Carolina: Duke University Press). BLAMIRES, Alcuin, ed., 1992. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ———, 1997. The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BOASE, Roger, 1978. The Troubadour Revival: A Study of Social Change and Traditionalism in Late Medieval Spain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). BOCCACCIO, Giovanni. Caídas de príncipes. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS 12733. ———, 1951. De las ilustres mujeres en romance por Juan Boccaccio (Zaragoza, 1494), edición facsímil (Madrid: Real Academia Española).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

209

———, 1975. The Corbaccio, trans. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). ———, 1983. De casibus virorum illustrium, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, vol. 9, ed. P. G. Ricci & V. Zaccaria (Milano: Mondadori). ———, 1985. Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milano: Mondadori). ———, 1992. Il Corbaccio, ed. Giulia Natalia (Milano: Mursia). ———, 2001. Famous Women, ed. & trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). BONILLA Y SAN MARTÍN, Adolfo, 1903. Luis Vives y la filosofía del renacimiento (Madrid: Asilo de Huérfanos de la S. C. de Jesús). BOYER, Agustín, 1988. ‘Estudio descriptivo del Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres de Don Álvaro de Luna: fuentes, género y ubicación en el debate feminista del siglo XV’, PhD thesis (University of California, Berkeley). BROWN, Carleton, 1920. ‘Mulier est hominis confusio’, Modern Language Notes, 35: 479–482. BROWN, Catherine, 1999. ‘Queer Representation in the Arçipreste de Talavera, or the Maldezir de mugeres is a Drag’, in Queer Iberia, ed. Blackmore & Hutcheson, pp. 73–103. BROWNLEE, Marina Scordilis, 1991. ‘Language and Incest in Grisel y Mirabella’, in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina Scordilis Brownlee et al. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 157–182. BULLOUGH, Vern L., 1973a. The Subordinate Sex: A History of Attitudes Toward Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). ———, 1973b. ‘Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women’, Viator, 4: 485–501. BUTIÑÁ, Julia, 1993. ‘Bernat Metge y su terrorífica amante: una relectura de Lo Somni’, Antípodas, V: Catalan Literature, ed. Robert Archer, pp. 129–141. ———, 2001. ‘Al voltant dels conceptes de la gentilitat i el profetisme a Lo somni de Bernat Metge i la font del Secretum’, Llengua i Literatura, 12: 47–75. ———, 2002. En los orígenes del humanismo: Bernat Metge (Madrid: UNED). BUTLER, Judith, 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge). CABRÉ, Lluís, 1997. ‘From Ausiàs March to Petrarch: Torroella, Urrea, and Other Ausmarchides’, in The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Ian Macpherson & Ralph Penny (London: Tamesis), pp. 57–73. CABRÉ, Miriam, 1999. Cerverí de Girona and his Poetic Traditions (London: Tamesis). CÁNDANO, Graciela, 1997. ‘Convergencias de la misoginia pre-cristiana y la misoginia de las colecciones de exempla’, in ‘Quien hubiese tal ventura’: Medieval Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Andrew M. Beresford (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary & Westfield College), pp. 109–118. CANTAVELLA, Rosanna, 1982. ‘Lectura i cultura de la dona a l’Edat Mitjana: opinions d’autors en català’, Caplletra, 3: 109–117. ———, 1991. ‘L’educació femenina per al matrimoni: dos opuscles catalans

210

BIBLIOGRAPHY

medievals’, in Miscel.lània Joan Fuster: Estudis de Llengua i Literatura, IV, ed. Antoni Ferrando and Albert Hauf (Barcelona: PAM), pp. 33–57. ———, 1992a. Els cards i el llir: una lectura de l’ Espill de Jaume Roig (Barcelona, Quaderns Crema). ———, 1992b. ‘Sobre el Triunfo de les dones de Roís de Corella’, in II Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Segovia, del 5 al [9] de octubre de 1987), ed. José Manuel Lucía Megías et al. (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá), I, 217–228. CARRÉ, Antònia, 1993–1994. ‘El manuscrit únic de l’Espill de Jaume Roig’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 44: 231–273. ———, 1994a. ‘L’estil de Jaume Roig: les propostes ètica i estètica de l’Espill de Jaume Roig’, in Intel.lectuals i escriptors a la baixa Edat Mitjana catalana’, ed. Lola Badia & Albert Soler (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat/ Curial Edicions), pp. 185–219. CARRIAZO, Juan de Mata, ed., 1940. Crónica de don Álvaro de Luna, Condestable de Castilla, Maestre de Santiago (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe). CARTAGENA, Alonso de, 1491. Cinco libros de Séneca (Seville: Meynardo Ungut Alimano & Stanislao Polono). CASAS RIGALL, Juan, 1995. Agudeza y retórica en la poesía amorosa de cancionero (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade). CASTILLEJO, Cristóbal de, 1986. Diálogo de mujeres, ed. Rogelio Reyes Cano (Madrid: Castalia). CASTRO LINGL, Vera, 1995. ‘Juan de Flores and Lustful Women: The Crónica incompleta de los reyes católicos’, La Corónica 24.1: 74–89. CASTROJERIZ, Juan García de, 1494. Regimiento de principes fecho y ordenado por don fray Gil de Roma (Sevilla: Meynardo Ungut alemano & Stanislao Polono). CÁTEDRA, Pedro M., 1986. ‘La mujer en el sermón medieval (a través de textos españoles)’, in La condición de la mujer en la Edad Media. Actas del coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez, del 5 al 7 de noviembre de 1984 (Casa de Velázquez/Universidad Complutense), pp. 39–50. ———, 1989. Amor y pedagogía en la Edad Media: estudios de doctrina amorosa y práctica literaria (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca). ———, 1993. ‘Los exempla de los sermones castellanos de San Vicente Ferrer’, in Homenaje al profesor José Fradejas Lebrero, 2 vols, ed. José Romera Castillo et al. (Madrid: UNED), I, 59–94. ———, 1994. Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media: San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Cultura y Turismo). ———, ed., 2001. Tratados de amor en el entorno de ‘Celestina’ (siglos XV–XVI) (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio). CERDA, Juan de la, 1599. Vida política de todos los estados de las mugeres (Alcalá de Henares: Juan Gracián). [exemplar: Lobkowicz Library, Nelahovezes, N De 43] CHAPMAN, Anthony J., & Hugh C. FOOT, ed., 1976. Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications (London: Wiley). CHAUCER, Geoffrey, 1957. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

211

CICERI, Marcella, ed., 1975. Arcipreste de Talavera, 2 vols (Modena: STEMMucchi & Istituto di Filologia Romanza dell’Università di Roma). ———, 1983. ‘Arcipreste di Talavera: il linguaggio del corpo’, Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature, 8: 121–136, partly translated in Historia y crítica de la literatura española. Edad Media: Primer Suplemento, ed. Alan Deyermond (Barcelona: Crítica, 1991), pp. 348–352. CINGOLANI, Stefano M., 2002. El somni d’una cultura: ‘Lo somni’ de Bernat Metge (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). CÓRDOBA, Martín de, 1974. Jardín de nobles doncellas, Fray Martín de Córdoba: A Critical Edition and Study, ed. Harriet Goldberg (Chapel Hill: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina). CORNAGLIOTTI, Anna, ed., 1975. Flors de virtut e de costums. Versió catalana de F. De Santcliment (Barcelona: Barcino). CORRELL, Barbara, 1990. ‘Malleable Material, Models of Power: Woman in Erasmus’s “Marriage Group” and Civility in Boys’, English Literary History, 57: 241–261. CORTIJO OCAÑA, Antonio, 2001. La evolución genérica de la ficción sentimental de los siglos XV y XVI: género literario y contexto social (London: Tamesis). CROMBACH, Mechthild, ed., 1971. ‘Bocados de oro’. Kritische Ausgabe des altspanischen Textes (Bonn: Romanisches Seminar der Universität Bonn). CRUZ TAPIA, María Cruz, 1991. Antifeminismo y subestimación de la mujer en la literatura medieval castellana (Cáceres: Guadiloba). CURTIUS, Ernst Robert, 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press). DEL PIERO, Raúl A., 1960. ‘El “Arcipreste de Talavera” y Juan de Ausim’, Bulletin Hispanique, 62: 125–135. DEYERMOND, Alan, 1985. ‘The Libro de los engaños: Its Social and Literary Context’, in The Spirit of the Court. Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto, 1983), ed. Glyn S. Burgess & Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer), pp. 158–167. DOMÍNGUEZ, Frank, ed. 1978. Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa (Valencia: Albatros). DUTTON, Brian, 1979. ‘Spanish Fifteenth-Century Cancioneros: A General Survey to 1465’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 26: 445–460. ———, & Joaquín GONZÁLEZ CUENCA, ed., 1993. Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena (Madrid: Visor). ———, & Jineen KROGSTAD, ed., 1990–1991. El cancionero del siglo XV (c. 1460–1520), 7 vols (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca). EGIDIUS ROMANUS, 1968. Aegidius Romanus (Colonna). De regimine principum Libri III (Rom 1556), facsimile edition (Frankfurt: Minerva). ———, 1480. Epistola de frare Egidi roma al Rey de frança sobre lo libre del regiment dels princeps (Barcelona: Nicolau Spindeler) [exemplar of Biblioteca de Catalunya, 11–VII–26]. EIXIMENIS, Francesc, 1925. Contes i faules, ed. Marçal Olivar (Barcelona: Barcino).

212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———, 1929. Terç del Crestià, 3 vols, ed. Martí de Barcelona & Norbert d’Ordal (Barcelona: Barcino). ———, 1981. Lo libre de les dones, 2 vols, ed. Frank Naccarato, Curt Wittlin & Antoni Comas (Barcelona: Departament de Filologia Catalana, Universitat de Barcelona/ Curial). ———, 1983. Lo crestià, ed. Albert Hauf (Barcelona: Edicions 62). ———, 1986. Dotzè llibre del Crestià. Segona Part, volum primer, ed. Curt Wittlin et al. (Girona: Col.legi Universitari de Girona/Diputació de Girona). ESPINOSA, Juan de, 1990. Diálogo en laude de las mujeres, ed. José López Romero (Granada: Ediciones A. Ubago). FARINELLI, Arturo, 1929. Italia e Spagna, 2 vols (Torino: Bocca). FARMER, Sharon, 1986. ‘Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives’, Speculum, 61: 517–543. FAVATA, M., 1991. ‘Women’s Deceits in Medieval Spanish Exempla’, in Estudios alfonsinos y otros escritos en homenaje a John Esten Keller y a Aníbal A. Biglieri, ed. Nicolás Toscano (New York: National Hispanic Foundation for the Humanities), pp. 53–59. FENSTER, Thelma S., & Clare A. LEES, eds., 2002. Gender in Debate From the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave). FERRANDO, Antoni, ed., 1981. Breviari d’amor: manuscrit valencià del segle XV (Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid), 2 vols (Valencia: Vicent García). FERRER, Francesc, 1989. Obra completa, ed. Jaume Auferil (Barcelona: Barcino). FERRER, St Vincent, 1693–1695. Opera omnia [. . .] studio ac diligentia fratrum Predicatorum Regii Valentini Conventus, 5 vols (Valencia: Jaime Bordazar). FISHER, Sheila, & Janet E. HALLEY, ed., 1989. Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press). FLOOD, John, 2002. ‘ “Dentro del paraíso, en compañía de los ángeles formada”: Eve and the Dignity of Women in Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’s Triunfo de las donas’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 79: 33–43. FRADEJAS RUEDA, José Manuel, 1997. ‘Manuscritos y ediciones de las Virtuosas e claras mugeres de don Álvaro de Luna’, in The Medieval Mind. Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Ian Macpherson & Ralph Penny (London: Tamesis), pp. 139–152. FUSTER, Joan, 1968. ‘Jaume Roig i sor Isabel de Villena’, in Obres completes, I: Llengua, literatura, història (Barcelona: Edicions 62), pp. 175–210. ———, 1989. ‘Juan Luis Vives i València, 1528’, in Llibres i problemes del Renaixement (València: Institut de Filologia Valenciana/ Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat), pp. 9–42. ———, 1995. ‘Lectura de Joan Roís de Corella’, in Misògins i enamorats (València: Bromera), pp. 207–236. GARCÍA HERRERO, María del Carmen, 1990. Las mujeres en Zaragoza en el siglo XV, 2 vols (Zaragoza: Ayuntamiento). GATIEN-ARNOULT, M., ed., 1841–1843. Flors del gay saber estiers dichas Leys d’amors, 3 vols (Paris–Toulouse; reprint Genève: Slatkine, 1977).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

213

GAUNT, Simon, 1995. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). GERLI, E. Michael, 1969. ‘Monólogo y diálogo en Arcipreste de Talavera’, Revista de Literatura, 35: 107–111. ———, 1976. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (Boston: Twayne). ———, 1981. ‘La religión del amor y el antifeminismo en las letras castellanas del siglo XV’, Hispanic Review, 49 (1981), 65–86. ———, ed., 1982. Triste deleytaçión: An Anonymous Fifteenth Century Castilian Romance (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). GOLDBERG, Harriet, 1983. ‘Sexual Humor in Misogynist Medieval exempla’, in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 67–83. GÓMEZ-FARGAS, Rosa María, 1992. ‘Triste deleytaçión, ¿novela de clave?’, Revista de Literatura Medieval, 4: 101–122. GONZÁLEZ Y GONZÁLEZ, Enrique, 1987. Juan Lluís Vives: de la escolástica al humanismo (València: Generalitat). GONZÁLEZ MUELA, Joaquín, ed., 1970. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo. Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho (Madrid: Castalia). GWARA, Joseph J., 1986–87. ‘The Identity of Juan de Flores: The Evidence of the Crónica incompleta de los Reyes Católicos’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 11: 103–130 and 205–222. HARO, Marta, 1993. ‘La concepción del amor cristiano a través de la virtuosa casada: Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daua a sus hijas’, in Actas do IV Congresso da Associação Hispânica de Literatura Medieval (Lisboa, 1–5 outubro 1991), ed. Aires A. Nascimento & Cristina Almeida Ribeiro (Lisboa: Edições Cosmos), IV, 155–159. ———, 1995. ‘ “De las buenas mujeres”: su imagen y caracterización en la literatura ejemplar de la Edad Media’, in Medioevo y Literatura: Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Granada, 27 septiembre – 1 octubre 1993), ed. Juan Paredes (Granada: Universidad de Granada), II, 457–476. HAUF, Albert G., 1983. ‘Fr. Francesc Eiximenis, O.F.M., De la predestinaçión de Jesucristo, y el consejo del Arcipreste de Talavera “a los que deólogos mucho fundados no son” ’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 76: 239–295. ———, 2001. ‘De l’Speculum Humanae Salvationis a l’Spill de Jaume Roig: itinerari especular i figural’, Estudis Romànics, 23: 173–219. HENTSCH, Alice A. 1975. De la littérature didactique du Moyen Age s’adressant spécialement aux femmes (Halle, 1903; rpt. Genève: Slatkine). IMPEY, Olga Tudorica, 1980. ‘Ovid, Alfonso X, and Juan Rodríguez del Padrón: Two Castilian Translations of the Heroides and the Beginnings of Spanish Sentimental Prose’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 57: 283–297. ———, 1986. ‘Boccaccio y Rodríguez del Padrón: la espuela de la emulación en el Triunfo de las donas’, in Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan D. Deyermond: A North American Tribute, ed. John S. Miletich (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies), pp. 135–50. JACOBUS DE LA VORAGINE, 1982. Santiago de la Vorágine: La leyenda dorada, 2 vols, trans. José Manuel Macías (Madrid: Alianza).

214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JACQUART, Danielle, & Claude THOMASSET, 1988. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press). JEROME, St. Adversus Jovinianum in Patrologia Latina, 23, cols 215–354. ———, 1892. Against Jovinianus, in St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, vol. 6, trans. Philip Schaff & Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans), pp. 346–414. JORDAN, Constance, 1987. ‘Boccacccio’s Infamous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De mulieribus claris’, in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin & Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), pp. 25–47. JUAN MANUEL, Don, 1982–83. Obras completas, 2 vols, ed. José Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Gredos). KANY, C. E., 1925. ‘Proverbios de Salamón. An Unedited Old Spanish Poem’, in Homenaje ofrecido a don Ramón Menéndez Pidal: miscelánea de estudios lingüísticos, literarios e históricos, 2 vols (Madrid: Editorial Hernando), I, 269–285. KELLY, Joan, 1984. ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Women, History and Theory. The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 19–50. KINKADE, Richard P., ed. 1968. Los ‘Lucidarios’ españoles (Madrid: Gredos). KNUST, H., ed., 1878. Dos obras didácticas y dos leyendas sacadas de manuscritos de la Biblioteca del Escorial (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles). LACARRA, María Jesús, 1986. ‘Algunos datos para la historia de la misoginia en la Edad Media’, Studia in honorem Prof. M. de Riquer (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema), I, 339–361. ———, ed., 1995. Sendebar (Madrid: Cátedra). ———, 1997. ‘Hacia un Thesaurus exemplorum hispanicorum (con especial referencia a las aportaciones de la crítica en los últimos diez años, 1985–1995)’, in Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Alcalá de Henares, 12–16 de septiembre de 1995), ed. José Manuel Lucía Megías (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá), I, 111–132. ———, ed., 1999. Cuento y novela en España. 1: Edad Media (Barcelona: Crítica). LAPISCH-ZUBER, Christianne, & Reyna PASTOR, eds, 1992. Historia de las mujeres en Occidente, vol. 2: La Edad Media, general eds. Georges Duby & Michelle Perrot (Madrid: Taurus). LE GOFF, Jacques, 1997. ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, in A Cultural History of Humour from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer & Hermann Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 40–53. LIDA DE MALKIEL, María Rosa, 1952. La idea de la fama en la Edad Media castellana (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica). ———, 1954. ‘Juan Rodríguez del Padrón: influencia’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 8: 1–38. LLABRÉS I QUINTANAR, Gabriel, ed., 1889. Llibre de paraules e dits de savis e filòsofs, in Llibre de paraules e dits de savis e filòsofs, los proverbis de Salomó, Llibre de Cató (Palma de Mallorca: Colomar y Salas), pp. 46–47.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

215

LOMPERIS, Linda, & Sarah STANBURY, ed., 1993. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). LÓPEZ-BARALT, Luce, & Francisco MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA, ed., 1995. Erotismo en las letras hispánicas: aspectos, modos y fronteras, Publicaciones de la Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 7 (México: El Colegio de México). LOWES, John Livingstone, 1913–14. ‘The Loveres Maladye of Hereos’, Modern Philology, 11: 491–457. ———, 1916. ‘Hereos Again’, Modern Language Notes, 31: 185–187. LUCAS, Angela M., 1983. Women in the Middle Ages. Religion, Marriage and Letters (Brighton: Harvester Press). LUCENA, Luis de, 1954. Repetición de amores, ed. Jacob Ornstein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). LUNA, Álvaro de, 1891. Libro de las virtuosas e claras mujeres el qual fizo é compuso el condestable don Álvaro de Luna, ed. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles). ———, 1910. Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres, ed. M. Castillo (Valencia: Prometeo). MACLEAN, Ian, 1980. The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), rpt. 1995. McCLEOD, Glenda, 1991. Virtue and Vice: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). MACPHERSON, Ian, & Angus MACKAY, 1998. Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden: Brill). MANN, Jill, 1991. Apologies to Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MARCH, Ausiàs, 1997. Ausiàs March: Obra completa, 2 vols, ed. Robert Archer (Barcelona: Barcanova). MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA, Francisco, 1977. ‘Cárcel de amor: novela política’, in his Relecciones de literatura medieval (Sevilla: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla), pp. 75–94. rpt. of Revista de Occidente, 4 (1966), 185–200. MARTÍNEZ DE TOLEDO, Alfonso, 1992. Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho, ed. E. Michael Gerli (Madrid: Cátedra). MARTÍNEZ ROMERO, Tomàs, 1996a. ‘Per a una interpretació del Triümfo de les dones, de Roís de Corella: claus ecdòtiques literàries’, Estudis de llengua i literatura catalanes, XXIII: Miscel.lània Germà Colón (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat), pp. 37–69. ———, 1996b. ‘Literatura i teologia en una proposta profeminista: el Triümfo de les dones de Joan Roís de Corella (1462)’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 35: 225–236. MARTORELL, Joanot, 1990. Tirant lo Blanch, 2 vols, ed. Albert G. Hauf & Vicent Josep Escartí (València: Generalitat Valenciana). MATEO, León Esteban, 1994. Hombre-mujer en Vives. Itinerario para la reflexión (Valencia: Ajuntament). MATFRE ERMENGAUD, 1976. Le Breviari d’Amor de Matfre Ermengaud, Tome V (27252T–34597), ed. Peter T. Ricketts (Leiden: Brill).

216

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MATULKA, Barbara, 1931. The Novels of Juan de Flores and their European Diffusion. A Study in Comparative Literature (New York: Institute of French Studies). MENÉNDEZ PIDAL, Ramón, ed.,1955. Primera Crónica General de España, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Madrid: Seminario Menéndez Pidal & Gredos). METGE, Bernat, 1999. Lo somni, ed. Lola Badia (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). MOI, Toril, 1999. What is a Woman? and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press). MONTAIGLON, Anatole, ed. 1854. Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles (Paris: Jannet). MONTOYA RAMÍREZ, María Isabel, 1995. ‘Observaciones sobre la defensa de las mujeres en algunos textos medievales’, in Medioevo y Literatura. Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Granada, 27 septiembre–1 octubre 1993), 4 vols, ed. Juan Paredes (Granada: Universidad de Granada), III, 397–405. MURIEL TAPIA, María Cruz, 1991. Antifeminismo y subestimación de la mujer en la literatura medieval castellana (Cáceres: Guadiloba). ORNSTEIN, Jacob, 1941. ‘Misoginia y el profeminismo en la literatura castellana’, Revista de Filología Hispánica, 1: 219–232. OROZCO, Ana, 1995. ‘El amor conyugal en algunos textos cancioneriles’, in Medioevo y Literatura Medieval: Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Granada, 27 septiembre–1 octubre 1993), 4 vols, ed. Juan Paredes (Granada: Universidad de Granada), III, 513–530. OWST, G. R., 1933. Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters & of the English People (Cambridge: University Press). 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961. PACHECO, Arseni, ed., 1997. Francesc de la Via. Obres (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema). PALAU Y DULCET, Antonio, 1976. Manual del librero hispanoamericano, XXVII (rpt. Oxford: Dolphin). PAMPÍN BARRAL, Mercedes, 1997a. ‘ “Por ser más limpia” y “más honesta”: Juan Rodríguez del Padrón y la visión de la sexualidad feminina en el Triunfo de las donas’, Medievalia, 26: 26–34. ———, 1997b. ‘ “La excellençia de las donas sobre los onbres manifiesta ser te demostraré”: el parlamento de la ninfa Cardiana en el Triunfo de las donas de Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’, in ‘Quién hubiese tal ventura’: Medieval Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Andrew M. Beresford (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College), pp. 259–268. ———, 1999. ‘Una traducción al francés del Triunfo de las donas de Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’, in Edición y anotación de textos: Actas del Congreso de Jóvenes Filólogos (A Coruña, 25–28 de septiembre de 1996), ed. Carmen Parrilla et al. (A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña), II, 509–517. PARRILLA, Carmen, 1989. ‘Un cronista olvidado: Juan de Flores, autor de la Crónica incompleta de los Reyes Católicos’, in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516: Literary Studies in Memory of Keith Whinnom, ed. Alan Deyermond & Ian Macpherson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 123–133.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

———, [& Keith WHINNOM], ed. 1995. Diego de San Pedro: Cárcel de Amor (Barcelona: Crítica). PEIRATS NAVARRO, 2001–2002. Anna Isabel, ‘Consilia, Disciplina, Doctrina: Lectura d’un fragment de l’Spill de Jaume Roig’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 48: 289–311. ———, 2003. ‘Jaume Roig: la comicitat de la moral o la moral de la comicitat?’, Estudis Romànics, 25: 251–277. PENNA, Mario, ed., 1955. Arcipreste de Talavera (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier). PÉREZ PRIEGO, Miguel Ángel, ed., 1990. Poesía femenina en los cancioneros (Madrid: Castalia & Instituto de la Mujer). ———, ed., 1996. Juan del Encina: Obra completa (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro). PETRARCA, Francesco, 1510. De los remedios contra próspera y adversa forma, trans. Francisco de Madrid (Valladolid: Diego de Gumiel). ———, 1942. ‘Ad Annam imperatricem, responsio congratulatoria super eius femineo licet partu et ob id ipsum multa de laudibus feminarum’, Familiarum Rerum 21: 8, in Francesco Petrarca, Le Familiari: Edizione Critica, IV, general ed. Umberto Bosco, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Francesco Petrarca, ed. Vittorio Rossi, 13 (Firenze: Sansoni), pp. 61–68. ———, 1975. Opere latine, vol. 2, ed. Antonietta Bufano et al. (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese). PIZAN, Christine de, 1982. The Book of the City of the Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books). PUIG RODRÍGUEZ-ESCALONA, Mercè, 1995. Poesía misógina en la Edad Media latina (siglos XI–XIII) (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona). RAMÍREZ DE ARELLANO Y LYNCH, Rafael W., 1976. La poesía cortesana del siglo XV y el ‘Cancionero de Vindel’, contribución al estudio de la temprana lírica española (Barcelona: Vosgos). RAWCLIFFE, Carole, 1999. Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (London: Sandpiper). REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA, 1992. Diccionario de la lengua española (Madrid: Real Academia Española). RENIER, R., 1894. ‘Di una ignota traduzione spagnuola del Fiore di virtù’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 18: 305–318. RICHTHOFEN, Eric von, 1941. ‘Alfonso Martínez de Toledo und sein Arcipreste de Talavera, ein kastilisches Prosawerk des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 61: 417–537. RIQUER, Isabel de, 1993. ‘Poemas catalanes con citas de trovadores provenzales y de poetas de otras lenguas’, in O cantar dos trobadores: Actas do Congreso celebrado en Santiago de Compostela entre os días 26 e 29 de abril de 1993, ed. Mercedes Brea (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia), pp. 289–314. RIQUER, Martín de, ed., 1947. Obras completas del trovador Cerverí de Girona (Barcelona: Instituto Español de Estudios Mediterráneos). ———, ed., 1949. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera, Corvacho, o reprobación del amor mundano (Barcelona: Selecciones Bibliófilas). ———, 1956. ‘Triste deleytaçión, novela castellana del siglo XV’, Revista de Filología Española, 40: 33–65.

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———, ed., 1959. Obras de Bernat Metge (Barcelona: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Barcelona). ———, 1964. Història de la literatura catalana: Part antiga, 4 vols (Barcelona: Ariel). RODRÍGUEZ DEL PADRÓN, Juan, 1982. Obras completas, ed. César Hernández Alonso (Madrid: Editora Nacional). RODRÍGUEZ PUÉRTOLAS, Julio, 1996. ‘Mosén Diego de Valera: ideología y poesía’, in Mosén Diego de Valera y su tiempo, ed. José Luis Muñoz (Cuenca: Diputación de Cuenca & Instituto Juan de Valdés), pp. 13–46. RODRÍGUEZ RISQUETE, Francisco J., 2000. ‘Pere Torroella i les corts dels infants d’Aragó al s.XV’. Htttp://www.udg/illcc/fe.htm. ROGERS, Katharine M., 1966. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press). ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN, Regula, 1999. La unidad genérica de la novela sentimental española de los siglos XV y XVI (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary & Wesfield College). ROIG, Jaume, 1929–1950. Spill o Llibre de consells, 2 vols, ed. Ramon Miquel i Planas (Barcelona: Biblioteca Catalana–Orbis) ROÍS DE CORELLA, Joan, 1913. Joan Roíç de Corella, Obres, ed. Ramon Miquel i Planas (Barcelona: Biblioteca Catalana). ———, 1994. Joan Roís de Corella, Rims i proses, ed. Tomàs Martínez (Barcelona: Edicions 62). ROJAS, Fernando de, 1989. La Celestina, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Cátedra). ROUND, Nicholas G., 1989. ‘The Presence of Mosén Diego de Valera, in Cárcel de Amor’, in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1471–1516: Literary Studies in Memory of Keith Whinnom, ed. Alan Deyermond & Ian Macpherson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 144–154. RUBIO, Fernando, 1960. ‘De regimine principum, de Egidio Romano, en la literatura castellana de la Edad Media’, La Ciudad de Dios, 173: 32–71. ———, ed., 1964. Fray Martín Alfonso de Córdoba, Tratado de la predestinación, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, II, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 171 (Madrid: Atlas). SALVADOR MIGUEL, Nicasio, 1977. La poesía cancioneril: el ‘Cancionero de Estúñiga’ (Madrid: Alhambra). ———, 1985. ‘La tradición animalística en las Coplas de las calidades de las donas, de Pere Torrellas’, El Crotalón: Anuario de Filología Española, 2: 215–224. SANCHIS SIVERA, Josep, ed. 1927. Quaresma de Sant Vicent Ferrer predicada a València l’any 1413 (Barcelona: Institut Patxot). ———, 1932. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 1 (Barcelona: Barcino). ———, 1934. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 2 (Barcelona: Barcino). SÁNCHEZ DE VERCIAL, Clemente, 1961. Libro de los enxemplos por ABC, ed. John Esten Keller (Madrid: CSIC). SANDOVAL, Alberto, 1989. ‘De-centering Misogyny in Spanish Medieval Texts: the Case of don Juan Manuel’s XXXV Exemplum’, Ideologies & Literature: Journal of Hispanic and Lusophone Discourse Analysis, 4: 65–94.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

SAN PEDRO, Diego de, 1972. Obras completas, II: Cárcel de Amor, ed. Keith Whinnom (Madrid: Castalia). ———, 1973. Obras completas, I: Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda; Sermón (Madrid: Castalia). SCHIB, Gret, ed., 1975. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 3 (Barcelona: Barcino). ———, ed., 1977a. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 4 (Barcelona: Barcino). ———, 1977b. Vocabulari de Sant Vicent Ferrer (Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana). ———, ed., 1984. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 5 (Barcelona: Barcino). ———, ed., 1988. Sant Vicent Ferrer. Sermons, 6 (Barcelona: Barcino). SHAW, K. E., 1961. ‘Provincial and Pundit: Juan de Castrojeriz’s Version of De Regimine Principum’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 38: 55–63. SIMS, Edna N., 1974. ‘The Antifeminist Element in the Works of Alonso Martínez de Toledo and Juan Luis Vives’, College Language Association Journal, 18: 52–68. SOLOMON, Michael, 1997. The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain. The ‘Arcipreste de Talavera’ and the ‘Spill’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ———, 1999. ‘Fictions of Infection: Diseasing the Sexual Other in Francesc Eiximenis’s Lo llibre de les dones’, in Queer Iberia, ed. Blackmore & Hutcheson, pp. 277–290. SORIANO, Catherine, 1997. ‘Conveniencia política y tópico literario en el Jardín de nobles doncellas (1468?) de Fray Martín Alonso de Córdoba’, in Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Alcalá de Henares, 12–16 de septiembre de 1995), ed. José Manuel Lucía Megías (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá), II, 1457–1466. STURM, Harlam, ed., 1970. Libro de los buenos proverbios (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). THOMASSET, Claude, 1992. ‘La naturaleza de la mujer’, in Historia de las mujeres en Occidente, ed. Georges Duby & Michelle Perrot, II: La Edad Media, ed. Christiane Lapisch-Zuber & Reyna Pastor (Madrid: Taurus), pp. 60–92. THOMPSON, B. Bussell, 1977. ‘Another Source for Lucena’s Repetición de amores’, Hispanic Review, 45: 337–345. TORRE, Fernando de la, 1907. Cancionero y obras en prosa, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia (Dresden: Gesellschaft für Romanische Literature). TORRE, Ventura de la, ed., 1993. Los siete sabios de Roma (Madrid: Miraguano Ediciones). TORROELLA, Pere, in press. Obra completa, ed. Robert Archer (Cosenza: Fondazione Rubbettino). TORROJA MENÉNDEZ, Carmen, & María RIVAS PALÁ, 1977. Teatro en Toledo en el siglo XV. “Auto de la Pasión” de Alonso del Campo (Madrid: Real Academia Española). VALERA, Diego de, 1983. Tratado en defensa de las mujeres, ed. María Ángeles Suz Ruiz (Madrid: El Archipiélago). VALERIUS MAXIMUS, 1956. Valère Maxime: Actions et paroles mémorables, ed. Pierre Constant, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier).

220

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VAN HAMEL, A. G., ed., 1892–1905. ‘Les Lamentations de Matheolus’ et ‘Le Livre de Leesce’ de Jehan Le Fèvre, 2 vols (Paris: Bouillon). VÁZQUEZ JANEIRO, Isaac, ed., 1984. Tratados castellanos sobre la predestinación y sobre la trinidad y la encarnación, del maestro fray Diego de Valencia OFM (siglo XV) (Madrid: CSIC, Instituto Francisco Suárez). VECCHIO, Silvana, ‘La buena esposa’, in Duby & Perrot 1991: 133–169. VÉLEZ-SAINZ, Julio, 2002. ‘Boccaccio, virtud y poder en el Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres de Álvaro de Luna’, La Corónica, 31: 107–122. VIDAL GONZÁLEZ, Francisco, ed., 2003. Gómez Manrique. Cancionero (Madrid: Cátedra). VIERA, David J., 1975. ‘Francesc Eiximenis (1340?–1409?) y Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (1398?–1470?): las ideas convergentes en sus obras’, Estudios Franciscanos, 76: 5–10. ———, 1978. ‘¿Influyó el Libre de les dones, de Francesc Eiximenis (1340?– 1409?), en el De Institutione Foeminae Christianae, de Luis Vives?’, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonenca de Cultura, 54: 145–155. VIERA, David J., & Jordi PIQUÉ, 1987. La dona en Francesc Eiximenis (Barcelona Curial). VIGIL, Mariló, 1994. La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Siglo XXI). VILLENA, Enrique de, 1958. Los doze trabajos de Hércules, ed. Margherita Morreale (Madrid: Real Academia Española). VIVES, Juan Luis, 1996. De institutione feminae christianae, Liber primus, ed. C. Fantazzi & C. Matheeussen, trans. C. Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill). [VIVES, Juan Luis], 1528. Libro llamado Instrucción de la muger christiana [. . .] traduzido agora nuevamente de Latin en Romance por Juan Justiniano [. . .] (Valencia: Jorge Costilla, 1528). [exemplar: Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R1289] ———, 1529. Instrucción de la muger christiana [. . .] agora nuevamente corregido y emendado y reduzido en buen estilo castellano (Alcalá). [exemplar: Biblioteca de Catalunya 13–II–8] WEISS, Julian, 1991. ‘Álvaro de Luna, Juan de Mena, and the Power of Courtly Love’, Modern Language Notes, 106: 241–256. ———, 2002. ‘ “¿Qué demandamos de las mugeres?”: Forming the Debate about Women in Late Medieval Spain (with a Baroque Response)’, in Fenster & Lees 2002: 237–281. WEISSBERGER, Barbara, 1997. ‘Resisting Readers and Writers in the Sentimental Romances and the Problem of Female Literacy’, in Studies on the Spanish Sentimental Romance (1440–1550), ed. Joseph J. Gwara & E. Michael Gerli (London: Tamesis), pp. 173–190. ———, 1998. ‘Male Sexual Anxieties in Carajicomedia: A Response to Female Sovereignty’, in Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the ‘Cancionero de Baena’ to the ‘Cancionero general’, ed. E. Michael Gerli & Julian Weiss (Tempe, Arizona : Medeival & Renaissance Texts & Studies), pp. 222–234. ———, 2002. ‘ “Deceitful Sects”: The Debate about Women in the Age of Isabel the Catholic’, in Fenster & Lees 2002: 207–235. WHINNOM, Keith, 1981. La poesia amatoria en la época de los Reyes Católicos (Durham: University of Durham).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

221

WHITBOURN, Christine J., 1970. The ‘Arcipreste de Talavera’ and the Literature of Love (Hull: University of Hull). WIESNER, Merry E., 1993. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). WILLARD, Charity Cannon, 1965. ‘Isabel of Portugal and the French Translation of the Triunfo de las donas’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 43: 961–969. WILSON, Katharina M., & Elizabeth. M. MAKOWSKI, 1990. Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press). YSERN LAGARDA, Josep Antoni, 1992. ‘El cos, el sexe i la dona en el Recull d’Eximplis’, Caplletra, 13: 31–52. ———, 2004, ed. Arnau de Lieja: ‘Recull d’exemples i miracles ordenat per alfabet’, 2 vols (Barcelona: Barcino).

INDEX Abraham 48 Acosta, Cristóbal de 2n advice to Brides, tradition of 28, 43–54 Agatha, St 153 Albertanus of Brescia 123 Allen, Prudence 4, 6 Álvarez, Juan 189 Ambrose, St 30 Amesia 153 Amet, King 146, 167 Ana, mother of Samuel 151 Andreas Capellanus 67–79, 83–84 Antonia 148 Aquinas, St Thomas 29n Archer, Robert 170n Argia 168 Aristotle 11, 15, 30, 35–36, 97, 127, 136, 138, 139, 140, 150, 154, 158, 158–59n, 159, 160, 186, 191, 192, 193, 200 Aristotle (medieval figure of) 26n, 71, 127, 134, 138 Artemisia 127, 167n auctoritates, medieval 8, 10–11, 16, 18, 145, 157–58, 204 Augustine, St 9 Avicenna 9 Baena, Francisco de 176 Baena, Juan Alfonso de 185 Bakhtin, Mikhail 92, 94, 99 Basset, fra Joan 180 Bathsheba 155 [see also David and Bathsheba] Beltrán de Valdelomar, Íñigo 187–88 Bergson, Henri 93 Bernard, St 51 Bernat de Palaol 180 Bernat de Ventadorn 178, 179 Blamires, Alcuin 5, 6, 49–50, 53n, 90n, 134 Bocados de oro 9 Boccaccio, Giovanni 76, 93–94, 99, 100,

102, 116, 118, 121, 132, 133, 134, 137–38, 141, 144–48, 151, 154, 157, 161, 170, 177, 184, 185, 195n, 199, 200 Brown, Catherine 85 Brownlee, Marina Scordilis 195 Butler, Judith 18 Camilla 168 Cancionero de Baena 178 Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa 177 Cantavella, Rosanna 3n, 108–09, 157n Cantigas d’escarnho e maldizer 2, 177–78 Capellà de Folquera 26n Carré, Antònia 112, 116 Cartagena, Alonso de 126–27, 129 Cartagena (cancionero poet) 190 Casas Rigall, Juan 176 Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas 21, 47–54, 137 Castillejo, Cristóbal de 2 Castillo, Hernando de 170 Castrojeriz, Juan García de 33–38, 203 Cátedra, Pedro M. 199 Catherine, St 154, 156 Cava, La 126 Celestina 2, 41–43 Cenobia 148 Cerda, Juan de la 2n Cerverí de Girona 26n, 124–25, 185, 204 Cingolani, Stefano 106 Claudia 168 Clytemnestra 126 concubines, clerical 56, 62, 70 Conseyll de bones dotrines 21, 44–45 Córdoba, Martín de 21, 28–38, 39, 42, 91, 203, 205 Coronel, María, exemplum of 146, 167n courtliness 124, 132, 138, 148, 163–69, 181, 185–90, 196 Crispina 154

224

INDEX

Cyprian 24, 25, 37, 51, 137 David and Bathsheba 57, 71, 72–74, 127, 157 [see also Bathsheba] debate on women 6–7, 10–11, 194, 195–98, 203–04 debitum coniugale 45, 115, 152 Deborah 168 defence arguments 3, 8, 9–11, 26–27, 31–32, 101–05, 119–20, 124, 125, 128, 133–42, 148–55, 156–62, 163–69, 183–84, 186, 195–98, 204, 205 Dutton, Brian 170 Egidius Romanus 11, 21, 29n, 33–38, 191, 192, 203, 204 Eiximenis, Francesc 16, 21, 22–28, 37, 39, 42, 64–67, 74, 86, 118, 125, 176, 204, 205 Encina, Juan del 87n, 184, 188, 190 Erasmus 39 Erythea 135 Espinosa, Juan de 2n exemplum collections 11–15 Farinelli, Arturo 130 Ferrer, Francesc 179–80, 182 Ferrer, St Vincent 42, 54–63, 203, 205 Flor de virtudes (Fiore di virtú) 8–11, 15, 86, 123, 176 Flores, Juan de 87, 184, 190, 195–98, 203 Fuster, Joan 155 Galen 139, 176 Gaucelm Faidit 179 Gerli, Michael 5 Goldberg, Harriet 12 Gómez Fargas, Rosa María 190 Gómez Manrique 185–86, 190, 201n good and evil, gender of 136 Griselda, patient 48–50 Guerau, Francí 180 Gui d’Ussel 178 Gwara, Joseph 195 Haro, Marta 12 Hippocrates (auctoritas and medieval figure of) 9, 127 Hobbes, Thomas 92 Homer 9 Humour 89, 90–122 [see also: Jokes, Laughter] laughter, difference from 92–93 theories of 92–93 types of 111–12 Impey, Olga Tudoric# 137 Isabel of Castile 28

Jacques de Vitry 11, 135n Jerome, St 29n, 34–35, 37, 51, 72, 116, 137 jokes 30, 90–91 Juan Manuel, Don 12 Judas Iscariot 142 Judith 152, 156 Julia 167n Juliana, St 152 Justiniano, Juan (Giovanni Giustiniani) 15–19, 21, 39, 204 Juvenal 17, 91, 98, 199, 200 Lacarra, María Jesús 11–12 laughter 91–92, 121 lay literacy 130–31 Le Goff, Jacques 92 Letra [. . .] per dona Joana 21, 45–47 Leys d’amor 182, 188 Libro de buen amor 2 Libro de los buenos proverbios 9 Libro de los engaños 12, 14–15 Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa 132, 163n Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry 44 Llibre de paraules e dits de savis e filòsofs 9 love, forms of 8, 79 Lucena, Luis de 184, 190, 199, 205 Lucretia 121, 127, 167n, 185 Lucy, St 156 Luna, Álvaro de 86, 123, 129, 131, 133, 147–55, 162, 163, 206 Maccabees, mother of the seven 153, 156 Maclean, Ian 5n mala cansó 178 maldezir (mal favlar) 60, 64, 65–66, 68,71, 79–85, 124, 138, 163–66, 196 [see also malparlar] maldits 2, 180–82 maldizientes 9, 43, 80, 143, 144, 146, 148–49, 164, 170, 187, 188, 190, 205, 206 malparlar 26, 65 [see also maldezir] Mann, Jill 5 Marbod of Rennes 93, 123 March, Ausiàs 174n, 180, 182 María, first wife of Juan II of Castile 129–30 Maria de Luna, wife of King Martí 103 Martínez de Toledo, Alfonso 5, 17, 42, 57, 64–89, 94–95, 109, 129–30, 155, 175, 203, 205 Martínez Romero, Tomàs 184

INDEX

Martorell, Joanot 127–29, 162, 195 Mary Magdalen 156 Mary, mother of God 9, 30, 48, 58, 60, 101, 110, 119, 124, 142, 147, 149, 154, 157, 160, 162 Masdovelles, Guillem de 180, 181 Masdovelles, Joan Berenguer 180–81 Masdovelles, Pere Joan 180 Matfre Ermengaud 179, 180, 185 Matheolus 93 Matulka, Barbara 87n, 130, 170, 184n Medea 126 medicine 4, 139 Medina, Antonio de 177 men dangers of for women 51 deceivers 80–81, 196 defects of 46, 186 drunkards 45, 79 evil-doers 10, 71, 76, 127, 135, 142, 161 humoral complexions of 80–83 husbands, behaviour as 45, 50 inferior to women 10, 157, 160 infidelity of 52 stupidity of 69, 157 vices of: impact on domestic life 58–59 virtue, power of 200–01 war-mongering 161 Mena, Juan de 132, 146, 149, 157 Mendoza, fray Íñigo de 199 menstruation 24, 66–67, 139–40 Metge, Bernat 76, 95–108, 116, 118, 120, 121–22, 125, 203, 205 Mexía, Hernán 88n, 177, 189, 190, 200 misogyny arguments of 8, 33, 97–99, 104–05, 110–11, 125, 127, 137–42, 143–44, 150–51, 162–63, 169, 174–76, 193, 195–98, 199–200, 204, 205 definitions 3n forms of 93–95 grief, as a reaction to 97 history of 17–18 motives for 10, 11, 157, 187, 193 remedium amoris 128–29, 162, 168–69, 201 Moi, Toril 6–7 Montoro, Antón de 177, 188, 190 Muriel Tapia, María Cruz 3 Orithya 103 Ornstein, Jacob 6, 130, 199, 201 Ortensia 148

225

Ovid 146, 177 Owst, G. R. 61 Pampín Barral, Mercedes 133n, 134n Parrilla, Carmen 163n Pasiphae 41 Pau de Bellviure 180 Paul, St 16 Paula, St 153 Peirats Navarro, Anna Isabel 112n, 118 Penelope 167, 168 Pere de Queralt 180 Petrarch 102, 147 Petrus Alfonsi 11 Pizan, Christine de 90–91, 123, 137 Plato 9, 15 Poggio Bracciolini 15, 111 Portia 127, 167n Proba 151 Procne 126 prostitutes 62, 69 Proverbios de Salamón 9 Proverbs 31 116–17, 137, 157n Querelle de la Rose, La 6 Rawcliffe, Carole 4n Recull d’exemples 11 religio amoris 76–77 Riquer, Martín de 87, 95, 170n, 178, 190n, 195n Rodríguez del Padrón, Juan 86, 123, 129, 131, 133–42, 143, 147, 148, 155– 56, 160, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 176, 191, 193, 194, 195, 204, 206 Rodríguez Risquete, Francisco J. 170n Rohland de Langbehn, Regula 195n Roig, Jaume 5, 108–22, 175n, 203, 205 Roís de Corella, Joan 133, 155–62, 180 Round, Nicholas 163, 167 Ruiz, Juan 174 Saba 119 Salvador Miguel, Nicolás 170n, 174 Samson 78, 124, 127 San Pedro, Diego de 133, 162–69, 203, 206 Sant Jordi, Jordi de 180, 182 Secundus 1, 2 Semiramis 103 Seneca 126, 136, 143–44 sexual attraction 55–56 Sichen, maiden of 152 Siete sabios de Roma 13, 199, 200 sodomy 118n, 141 Solomon 9, 10, 26n, 71, 127, 157, 170, 177

226

INDEX

Solomon, Michael 5, 67, 108–09 Sophonisba 131 Suero de Ribera 188 Susanna 156 Suz Ruiz, María Ángeles 145 Tamar and Amnon 51 Tamyris 103 Tanaquil 131–32 Tapia 88n, 189, 190 Teodor 1, 2 Tertia Aemilia 151 Tertullian 37, 51, 137 Torrellas [literary figure] 87, 189, 190 [see also Torroella, Pere] Torroella, Pere 17, 41–42, 43, 75, 86, 88, 146, 155, 162, 166–67, 168, 169, 170–202, 203, 204, 205, 206 Triste deleytaçión 32, 159, 184, 190, 191–95, 200, 203 Urrea, Pedro de 178n Urrea, Pedro Manuel de 189–90, 196n Urriés, Hugo de 166, 186–87, 190 Ursula, St 156 Valencia, Diego de 177 Valera, Diego de 86, 123, 129, 131, 133, 141, 143–47, 162, 168, 176, 193, 206 Valerius Maximus 102, 123, 127, 151, 162 Vélez de Guevara, Pero 177 Via, Francesc de la 125, 195 Villasandino, Alfonso Álvarez de 177–78 Villena, Enrique de 125–26 Virgil (medieval figure of) 26n, 71, 127 Vives, Juan Luis 7, 15n, 17, 21, 38–43, 170, 174n, 204 Weiss, Julian 7, 130, 170n, 178 Weissberger, Barbara 7, 198n wet nursing 39, 113, 117 Whinnom, Keith 176 woman administrator 46, 52–53, 113, 192 advice-giving by 35–36, 151, 164 anger in 40, 53, 61, 65, 83, 198, 200 animals, analogies with 24, 41–42, 75, 118, 142, 174 ‘bad women’ as a category 9–10, 56, 68, 69–70, 73–74, 75, 78, 79, 88, 146, 200 chastity in 50–51, 140–41, 200 choice of mate, perverse 41 Christ and 30, 135, 161, 162, 194 Christianity and 135–36 cleanliness 138

comforter of husband 58 compassion 31, 34, 140, 141, 186 contrariness 24–25, 27, 35, 65, 193 cosmetics 40, 60, 65, 97, 113, 183, 196, 200 courtliness, essential to 187, 188 creation of, God’s reasons for 23, 27, 29–30 cruelty of 32, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43–54, 126, 198 damnation of men, potential cause of 37 deception in 65, 98, 175, 198, 199 devotion, dangers of excessive 62 disease, site of 108–09, 120 drunkards 79 duped by men 80, 82 education of 17, 22–28, 29–38, 38–43, 113, 115 envy in 40–41, 61, 77, 78, 79 Eve, cause of coming of Christ 27, 158; – embodiment of Paradise 154; – Fall of Man, and the 9, 23–24, 25, 26, 59–60, 71, 78, 101, 110, 118, 124, 137, 142, 150, 197; – as intercessor 27 evils, cause of 9, 126, 196 fearfulness 24, 32, 174, 175 fickleness 174, 193 fidelity 50, 194, 135 form, inferiority/superiority 138, 192, 194, 196 frivolity 200 garrulity 25, 33, 37, 38, 47, 65, 77, 78, 80, 98, 141, 199 gluttony 98, 200 God’s greater love for 160 good, and the 150 greed in 25, 40, 55, 65, 73, 76, 79, 82, 83, 98, 151, 175 ‘honouring mothers’ 124, 125, 134, 166, 186 humoral complexion 30, 31, 35 husband, behaviour with 44–45 –, burden to 24 –, positive influence over 53, 164–65 ianua diaboli 58, 110, 142 imperfection 23, 30, 97, 138, 159, 160, 176, 186, 191–92, 194, 200 instabilitas loci 34 intelligence in 13, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 27, 28, 38, 66, 69, 140, 152, 168, 192, 196 intemperance 31, 34, 38, 141, 186, 200

INDEX

jealousy in 46, 47, 52 lustfulness 9, 13, 55, 57, 74, 79, 119, 141, 181 male wisdom about 14–15 malice of 9, 25, 27, 35, 81, 175 manipulative nature 99 manly spirit 148, 153, 154 mercenary nature 175 modern: inferior to the past 145 moral qualities 135 mugeres as metonym for male lust 126 mutability of 24, 25, 27–28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 51, 65, 69, 78, 98, 117, 175, 199 nagging 35, 98 nature, and 23, 35, 125, 136, 150, 157, 183 nobility of 48, 192 obedience in 47, 49, 65 obsequiosa 32 Old Testament and 9, 10, 136 paradise, embodiment of 135 penis envy 192 perfection 134 poisonous 24, 66–67, 199 pride in 9, 24, 41, 65, 78 ‘privileges’ of 27, 29–30, 124, 128, 134, 136–37, 156, 159–60, 183, 186 prudence in 158 rapacity 98, 118

227

rulers, as 136 salvation, better chance of 161 Satan’s snare 30, 37, 38 scorn for men who love her 175, 193 secrets, keeping of 25, 35, 41, 44, 46, 114, 117, 141, 175, 200 seductress 57, 73, 152, 186, 196, 197, 200 self-knowledge, importance of 22, 37 sin: less tendency to than men 27 slander, love of 40, 200 sloth 98 squandering of money 98 stubbornness 31, 34, 38, 82 superiority to men 107, 128, 160–61 temptation and 24, 143 tongue of 118 treachery of 127 typology of in exemplum collections 11 ugliness, hidden 97 vanity 25, 40, 60, 65, 78, 97, 98, 175, 199, 200 vergüenza/ vergonya 22, 31, 32, 34, 37, 57, 66, 81, 200 virtue in 10, 22, 138, 174, 196 widows 13, 200 wife 164, 200 Xenophon 15 Zurobabel 135