One of the major casualties of the entrenched critical assumption that there was a Hispanic medieval debate on women is Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s Arcipreste de Talavera or Corbacho. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that in those works concerning women produced during the fifteenth century which are deemed to fall on the negative side of the divide in this debate, the subject is treated from a consistent ideological basis, so that it is taken to be unproblematic to discuss the concept of misogyny with reference to Arcipreste de Talavera, Pere Torroella's notorious poem ‘Quien bien amando persigue’, Juan de Tapia's gloss on Torroella's ‘Yerra con poco saber’, or Luis de Lucena's Repetiçión de amores, all of which were written in different decades, in different socio-political contexts, and with what an attentive reading would suggest are clearly different aims. According to this model of interpretation, the Arcipreste de Talavera becomes, as the title of a recent important article puts it, a ‘maldezir de mugeres’ written, so the label implies, within the same ideological framework as the poem of Torroella known by that title. Here it is proposed that Martínez's book deserves to be read on its own terms, that is as one finished in 1438, well before any of the texts with which it has been bracketed as a misogynous work of the supposed debate. To do this, we need to read Arcipreste de Talavera in the light of earlier texts, not later ones, and to be aware of that same persistent problem of instability in the notion of women that has surfaced in the texts we have seen so far.

Martínez and Eiximenis

One of those earlier texts is Eiximenis's Libre de les dones, a work which, as we saw in the last chapter, sets out to show how women could become better Christians specifically as women by first identifying the defects that were deemed to be inherent to their sex, and then to remedy them through a programme of self-awareness and moral reform. It was also a work which Martínez definitely knew, and it is documented that he paid for a copy of it to be made. There is, as we saw, no apparent intention in Eiximenis's book to emphasize the role of women as a major factor in human sin or to denounce them as protagonists in evil.