5 - Torroella's Maldezir de mugeres and its Legacy

Summary

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). 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. 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.

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.