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

ARCHER, ROBERT. The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature. Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005. 227 pages.This book is an effort to question critical assumptions about late medieval Iberian literature on women, in particular, the problem 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 the 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 the "indeterminacy" of the notion of women. He claims that the pervasiveness of this literature was due to the need of presumably male writers to address the contradictions in the writings of the auctoritates, such as Aristotle, on women's makeup. While this explanation is certainly credible, it is also unsatisfying as an absolute account in the face of the plethora of texts on women (and men) that surfaced during the late fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries and beyond. Archer docs not address in a systematic way the nagging question of why they emerged at that time. Instead, he deals with it occasionally, as in the fifth and final chapter, "Toroella's Maldezir de mugeres and Its Legacy," where he opines persuasively that cancioncro poets were more concerned with the place of misogynist materials in the social code of cortesia than with their veracity or falsity, suggesting that the literate noble class produced writings about women not to deliberate on the latter's definition, but to find a way to place them in cortesia (185-86). In the book's fourth chapter, called "The Defences," Archer links Castilian writing on women to men's political advancement, as in the 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 the emergence of this literature as a whole.While I appreciated Archer's review of much of the main literature on women from late medieval Iberia, his book left me with many questions and doubts. The book's title was surprising, given the tremendous recent critical work on gender and language. The title's phrasing suggests agreement with the notion of "woman" as a lone, reified object, in contrast to, for instance, a statement such as "the late medieval problem ot defining women." In addition, to call "woman" a problem already implies complicity with the 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 the literature on men at this time also suggest the "problem" of defining "man," albeit differently than defining "woman," a question that Archer treats only in passing? In the 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 the 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 the question of how to define gender identity [. . .] pervades the texts as a whole" (7). However, his use of the 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 the relations between men and women: "In the texts to be studied here there are signs that already a need existed to confirm men's position in the face of the obvious ability ot women to operate effectively in areas authoritatively defined as male" (19). …