The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature (review)

Abstract

ARCHER, ROBERT. Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature. Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005. 227 pages.This book is effort to question critical assumptions about late medieval Iberian literature on women, in particular, of debate as a conceptual framework for works by authors such as Francesc Eiximenis, Martin de Cordoba, Jaume Roig, Alfonso Martinez de Toledo, Juan Rodriguez del Padron, Joan Rois de Corella, and Pere Toroella (6). Archer rejects facile divide between misogynist texts and works in women's defense and instead aims to show that discourse on women was varied and included a number of works whose authors demonstrated indeterminacy of notion of He claims that pervasiveness of this literature was due to need of presumably writers to address contradictions in writings of auctoritates, such as Aristotle, on women's makeup. While this explanation is certainly credible, it is also unsatisfying as absolute account in face of plethora of texts on women (and men) that surfaced during late fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries and beyond. Archer docs not address in a systematic way nagging question of why they emerged at that time. Instead, he deals with it occasionally, as in fifth and final chapter, Toroella's Maldezir de mugeres and Its Legacy, where he opines persuasively that cancioncro poets were more concerned with place of misogynist materials in social code of cortesia than with their veracity or falsity, suggesting that literate noble class produced writings about women not to deliberate on latter's definition, but to find a way to place them in cortesia (185-86). book's fourth chapter, called The Defences, Archer links Castilian writing on women to men's political advancement, as in cases of Rodriguez del Padron (Triunfo de las donas), Diego de Valera (Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres), and Alvaro de Luna (Libro dc las virtuosos e dams mugeres). Yet this reasoning is not integrated into a broader discussion about emergence of this literature as a whole.While I appreciated Archer's review of much of main literature on women from late medieval Iberia, his book left me with many questions and doubts. book's title was surprising, given tremendous recent critical work on gender and language. title's phrasing suggests agreement with notion of woman as a lone, reified object, in contrast to, for instance, a statement such as the late medieval ot defining women. addition, to call woman a already implies complicity with very statement, although undoubtedly this was not Archer's intent. Did women truly constitute a societal problem, or did some men perceive them as such? Did women during this period describe themselves as problems? Does not literature on men at this time also suggest problem of defining man, albeit differently than defining woman, a question that Archer treats only in passing? effort to answer these issues Archer's book would have been aided by historical data about women and by a more comparative approach to studying discourses on women and men.Another vexation concerns Archer's notion of gender, since he leads us to believe that a study of gender will constitute part of his analysis when he argues that an underlying concern with question of how to define gender identity [. . .] pervades texts as a whole (7). However, his use of term Js perplexing because he erroneously connects gender to women alone, without entertaining gender and men. His brief discussion of men on page nineteen portends some analysis of relations between men and women: In texts to be studied here there are signs that already a need existed to confirm men's position in face of obvious ability ot women to operate effectively in areas authoritatively defined as male (19). …