In sixteenth-century Paris, businesses and crafts were still regulated by the guild system, which allowed women to take over the direction of the businesses after the deaths of their husbands, even in those businesses which were normally closed to women. One result of this was that many Parisian women led active and varied economic lives. A little noticed aspect is that some women became book publishers and printers. These women publishers and printers had to possess both scholarly training and managerial and business skills, in order to compete and survive in the publishing world. One such printer/publisher was Charlotte Guillard, who was active in Paris in the second quarter of the century, and whose life is instructive in that it illustrates what women could accomplish in business in sixteenth-century Paris.

El scholástico, written by Cristóbal de Villalón in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, is a typical philosophical treatise of the Renaissance, the most striking evidence of which is its very extensive employment of figures and learning from Classical literature. All but a handful of the 57I different names which appear in El scholástico, and a large majority of all materials used therein, originated in the period before A.D. 500.

A complex treatise, approximately two-thirds the length of the New Testament, El scholástico reflects at once a Renaissance ideal and a classical tradition in its setting, literary form, and format. The dialogue, which is essentially Ciceronian in style (although Villalón states that his models for the dialogue were Plato and Macrobius), represents a lengthy interchange between illustrious contemporary scholars of the University of Salamanca.