Feminist Approaches to Medieval Spanish History and Literature

Although many of Spain's earliest poetic texts give expression to a female voice, 1 it is not until the fifteenth century that Spain's first female authors are documented.2 It is perhaps for this reason that gender-conscious studies of medieval Spain have been so scarce in relation to those concerning other parts of Europe. Researchers with a feminist perspective have had to limit their investigations to the texts of male writers. Yet much can be learned from the images of women projected onto the literature, legal codes, and chronicles composed by medieval Spanish men, and a number of recent feminist studies have turned these texts to their advantage. Heath Dillard's superb book, Daughters of the Reconquest. Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300 (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), relies on the fueros (statutes) and town ordinances of the newly reconquered frontier to offer a fresh perspective on the position of women in medieval Castile. Dillard argues that both as heiresses of municipal property and as individuals capable of transmitting it to their children or to other heirs, women were a formidable presence in the property structure of the towns where the ownership of property was the fundamental basis for full and privileged membership. (26) She goes on to examine different categories of women (brides, widows, mistresses, go-betweens), using the large number of surviving fueros to substantiate her claim that many of the commonplace negative generalities about medieval women do not hold up in the geographical situation of the frontier. Other recent studies of women as seen through the lens of medieval Spanish law codes and chronicles include Lucy A. Sponsler's "The Status of Married Women under the Legal System of Spain" (Journal of Legal History 3.2 [1982]: 125-52), Marjorie Ratcliffe's "Adulteresses, Mistresses and Prostitutes: Extramarital Relationships in Medieval Castile (Hispania 67 [1984]: 346-50), and Clara Estow's "Women in the Historical Writings of Pedro Lopez de Ayala" (Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 11 [1984]: 145-52). Sponsler's work is less optimistic than Dillard's in setting to rest the stereotype of rampant misogyny in medieval Castile. Basing her analysis on Alfonso X's ambitious legal undertaking of the thirteenth century, the Siete Partidas, as well as the earlier Fuero Juzgo (promulgated in 654 A.D.), she describes such female-specific prohibitions as the one-year waiting period before remarriage in the context of what she sees as the law codes '