Conclusion

Summary

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.