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.