Carro de las donas : Translating Francesc Eiximenis for Queenly Edification 1 I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (May 2008).

Abstract

Francesc Eiximenis’ Llibre de les dones (1396) was widely disseminated and read by a diverse array of readers between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, including Queen Isabel the Catholic and her descendants. The Catalan text was not only translated into Castilian in the fifteenth century (Libro de las donas) but was also adapted and refashioned in 1542 by an anonymous author who changed its title to Carro de las donas. My study seeks to investigate how the concept of female sovereignty becomes transformed from Eiximenis’ Catalan original to the 1542 Castilian rendition. A comparison between these two texts and their impact on their recipients equally enable us to validate some hypotheses about the dynamics of reading in the medieval and early modern period, namely, that the popularity of a text neither implies a tacit acceptance of everything contained therein nor inescapably demonstrates that all readers interpreted what they read equally.