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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.