THE POWER OF WOMAN'S WORDS, THE POWER OF WOMAN'S SILENCE: HOW THE

MADRASTRA SPEAKS IN THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTILIAN SENDEBAR

Author(s): Andreea Weisl-Shaw
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 109, No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 110-120
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.109.1.0110
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 THE POWER OF WOMAN’S WORDS, THE POWER OF
WOMAN’S SILENCE: HOW THE MADRASTRA SPEAKS
IN THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTILIAN SENDEBAR
Because of the last line of its prologue, the Castilian Sendebar was dubbed
by its first editor José Amador de los Rios in  as Libro de los engaños e
los asayamientos de las mugeres. Amador’s title is less used nowadays, and for
purposes of simplicity as well as in order to keep with the wider textual tra-
dition, the shorter Sendebar is preferred. None the less, the reference to ‘los
engaños e los asayamientos de las mugeres’ is very telling, and the structure
of the text as a literary construct, as well as the role of the female protagonist
within it, warrants further discussion.
e plot is arranged in the traditional format of a frame narrative: twenty-
three exempla are inserted within an overarching frame which resembles the
motif of the wife of Potiphar: the son of King Alcos of Judaea is unjustly
accused by one of his father’s ninety wives of attempting to seduce her. e
Prince, however, is unable to speak in his own defence, because an ominous
horoscope has forced him to keep silent for seven days, lest death befall him.
us the Prince’s defence is taken up by his father’s seven privados, who
attempt to temper the king’s anger and save the young man’s life with the aid
of moralizing stories. e privados are confronted with the devious madrastra,
who tells stories in her own turn in order to secure the Prince’s conviction. Yet
the woman’s tales are arguably underdeveloped and of a lesser narrative qua-
lity than those of the privados, and on the seventh day she even replaces the
narrative with a mere threat to commit suicide in order to persuade the King
once and for all. In this article, I shall examine the function of the woman’s
stories within the narrative construct, focusing in particular on their symbolic
role as persuasive arguments whose content matters less than their form. I
shall argue that, in Sendebar, the power of the woman’s words resides not in
their content but rather in their very utterance, or even in their silence, and
by extension that the power of woman herself resides in her ascribed status as
an agent of destruction or a troublesome and uncontainable element.
It is important to note that, within the main narrative plot, the evil step-
 See, for instance, the two recent editions of the text, which both use the shorter title: Sendebar,
ed. by María Jesús Lacarra, th edn (Madrid: Cátedra, ), and Sendebar, ed. by Veronica Orazi
(Barcelona: Crítica, ). All references to the Castilian text will be to Lacarra’s edition.
 I shall be discussing only the Castilian version of the text, not the Sendebar tradition as a
whole, although I shall draw brief comparisons with the Hebrew version, Mishle Sendebar, which
would have been widely known around the time the Libro de los engaños was composed, and
could well date to much earlier. See Tales of Sendebar/Mishle Sendebar: An Edition and Translation
of the Hebrew Version of the Seven Sages Based on Unpublished Manuscripts, ed. by Morris Epstein
(Philadelphia: e Jewish Publication Society of America, ), esp. pp. –.
 I have already made a similar argument elsewhere, but without engaging in detailed ana-

Modern Language Review,  (), –

© Modern Humanities Research Association 
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         -    

mother is not the only female protagonist, but rather she is counterbalanced
by her radical opposite. Although the critical tradition oen overlooks this,
the text opens with the tale of a good wife, who is able to advise the King
and provide him with a son and heir—precisely the Prince, who will later
be accused by the bad wife. We are told that at the beginning, despite all his
ninety wives, the king is plagued with sterility and incapable of producing an
heir with any of them: ‘Estando con todas, según era ley, non podía aver de
ninguna dellas fijo’ (p. ). However, with the help and advice of the good
wife, he prays to God together with her, and is finally granted the son he so
desires. is is the common folk tale of the sterile older man who is granted
an heir by the grace of God, which goes back to the biblical story of Abraham
and Isaac. Yet, what is interesting here is the figure of the good wife, which
counterbalances that of the bad wife who appears later.
e two women could not be further from each other: the good wife is fully
devoted to the King while the other is devious and dangerous, first plotting the
King’s death and then that of the Prince, the only heir to the throne. However,
on the surface the two women are still described in similar terms: the good
wife is described as ‘aquella q’él más quería, e era cuerda e entendida, e avíala
él provado en algunas cosas’ (p. ), whereas the bad wife is introduced as
‘una muger, la qual más amava e onrávala más que a todas las otras mugeres
qu’él avía’ (p. ). Apart from their obvious difference in intention, a few
differences are immediately apparent in these descriptions: the good wife is
good because she is wise and prudent, and more importantly still because
she has been tested by the King. In contrast, the bad wife is described only
through the love that the King feels for her and through the primary position
in which he places her among his wives. Moreover, the good wife advises
the King to turn to God in his distress, thus helping him to obtain a son:
‘Yo te daré consejo bueno a esto. Ruega a Dios, qu’Él que de todos bienes es
conplido, ca poderoso es de te fazer e de te dar fijo, si le pluguiere, ca Él nunca
cansó de fazer merçed e nunca le demandeste cosa que la non diese’ (p. ).
e bad wife acts in direct opposition to the King’s best interests: she accuses
his beloved son of attempting to rape her and, through her stories, she advises

lysis. See Andreea Weisl-Shaw, ‘e Comedy of Didacticism and the Didacticism of Comedy’,
MLR,  (), – (p. ).
 Genesis –. is narrative type comprises two motifs categorized by Stith ompson: the
motif of barrenness, M (‘Curse of childlessness’); and Q (‘Reward for saying of prayers’). See
Stith ompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature,  vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
–). In her Motif-Index of Medieval Spanish Folk Narratives (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, ), Harriet Goldberg lists this tale-type under four different
motifs: D. (‘Barrenness removed by prayer. Aer years of prayer childless couple have child’);
T (‘Conception because of prayer. King and favourite wife have son aer much prayer’); T.
(‘Child born in answer to prayer’); and V. (‘Prayers for child answered. Childless couple have
baby’).

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 e Power of Woman’s Words in ‘Sendebar’
King Alcos to have the Prince put to death: ‘Este [. . .] me quiso forçar de todo
en todo, e yo non lo tenía a él por tal’ (p. ).
e bad wife is thus guilty of the worst sins women are thought to commit
(dishonesty, lasciviousness, and even murder), while the good wife fulfils the
role of the perfect subordinated wife, and is presented as the model that all
women should follow: ‘una mujer llena de virtudes morales, con un fuerte
sentido de la fidelidad y, más que nada, de obediencia al marido es el recipiente
idóneo y adecuado para crear el modelo a seguir por parte de todas las demás
mujeres’. However, what is significant here is that, on both occasions, the
King immediately believes his wives and acts upon their word. In the case of
the first wife, we are told: ‘E después que ovo dicho esto, pagóse él dello e
sopo que lo que ella dixo que era verdat, e levantárose amos e fiziéronlo así’
(p. ). Later, when the bad wife makes her accusation against the Prince, the
King is even quicker to take her at her word and act upon it: ‘E el Rey, quando
esto oyó, creçiól’ gran saña por matar su fijo, e fue muy bravo e mandólo
matar’ (pp. –). us, it does not seem far-fetched to argue that part of the
problem here lies with the King himself, and the presence of the two wives
clarifies this. e King seems to love and esteem the good wife because he
knows her to be good (we are told that he has tested her), but his love for the
bad wife seems to have no justification. Without the test of her loyalty, the
second wife should not be trusted, and yet the King places his love above his
prudence, which therefore leads to bad consequences. His inability to keep
his wives (particularly the bad one) silenced and under control triggers the
entire sequence of events, and this is revealing for the role that women play
within Sendebar as a whole.
It is clear that the bad wife is no mean adversary. When she engages in
an exemplum debate with the privados, it takes two stories from each privado
to determine the King to turn away from her. In contrast, all the madrastra
 José Carlos Vilchis, ‘Mujeres “comunes” y “extraordinarias” en Sendebar’, Medievalia, 
(), – (p. , emphasis original). As Vilchis points out, the very fact that this wife is so
perfect is problematic in the context of Sendebar as a whole, since motherhood stands in stark
contrast with the image of woman as ‘de naturaleza adúltera y en el peor de los casos perversa’
(p. ). is is only superficially resolved by the immediate disappearance of the good wife from
the frame narrative as soon as she gives the King his much-desired son, and, as Vilchis concludes,
this avoids any debate ‘sobre el hecho de ser mujer y madre al mismo tiempo’ (p. ).
 I have already argued that King Alcos proves to be a deficient reader of exemplary tales,
which is why he is so prone to being swayed by both his privados and the evil wife: Weisl-Shaw,
‘Comedy of Didacticism’, p. .
 On the importance of wife-testing see Louise M. Haywood, ‘Choosing and Testing Spouses in
Medieval Exemplary Literature’, in A Companion to Spanish Women Studies, ed. by Xon de Ros
and Geraldine Hazbun (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Tamesis, ), pp. –.
 e only exception is the third privado, who tells just one story; however, the rigorous
construction of the text suggests that the third privado’s second story might have been lost in
transmission: see María Jesús Lacarra, Cuentística medieval en España: los orígenes (Zaragoza:
Universidad de Zaragoza, ), p. , and Sendebar, ed. by Lacarra, p. .

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         -    

seems to need to do is to tell one single story—and not of the most narra-
tively accomplished—in order instantly to persuade the King that she is right.
roughout the entire text, she tells only five stories in contrast with the ad-
visers’ thirteen (or possibly fourteen if, indeed, the third adviser’s exemplum
was lost in transmission).
e madrastra’s stories in the Castilian Sendebar are underdeveloped in
terms of plot, being generally much shorter, sketchier, and less polished than
the advisers’ tales. In María Jesús Lacarra’s edition of the text only two of the
woman’s stories (‘Striges’ and ‘Fontes’) reach the length of two pages, while
her shortest tale (‘Aper’) is barely longer than eight lines, and is shorter than
the preamble with which she introduces it. In contrast, the privados’ stories
are all at least one page long in Lacarra’s edition, and are on average around
two pages long. In fact, even with the presumed fourteenth story by a privado
missing, their stories total sixteen and a half pages in Lacarra’s edition—over
twice the length of the bad wife’s stories.
Moreover, the exemplary structure of the madrastra’s stories is flawed and
unconvincing, with the lessons seeming to match the narratives only loosely
and by approximation; while this is a general trait of exempla, the mismatch
is even more pronounced here than usual. e madrastra’s first story, ‘La-
vator’, expands upon the moral lesson about the necessity of educating one’s
children, focusing on the mortal dangers posed to the parents if they fail to
do so. Her moral, ‘E señor, si tú non te antuvias a castigar tu fijo ante que más
enemiga te faga, matarte á’ (p. ), obviously suits her own purposes, but it is
far from what might be termed a logical conclusion to the story. e second
story, ‘Striges’, is more narratively interesting, as it deals with a young prince’s
dangerous encounter with a she-devil; however, it is only barely connected to
its moral. e woman introduces her story by accusing the King’s advisers of
attempting to kill him: ‘Señor, estos tus privados son malos e matarte an, así
commo mató un privado a un rey una vez’ (p. ). While this introduction
is not in itself unreasonable, it does not really match the story itself, within
which an adviser features only at the beginning, and not in a very important
way. In fact, the madrastra’s moralizing reveals quite clearly her awareness
 is is slightly different from the Mishle Sendebar, where the bad wife tells seven stories,
including a double story (‘Striga et Fons’) on the third day, in contrast to the advisers’ fourteen
stories, so while there is still a clear imbalance between the woman’s tales and those of the
advisers, the disparity seems less striking than in the Castilian text: see Tales of Sendebar, ed. by
Epstein.
 is is not so blatantly the case in the Mishle Sendebar, for instance, where the bad wife’s
tales are comparable in length and narrative development to those told by the advisers.
 On the loose connection between exempla and their morals see e.g. Alexander Gelley, Unruly
Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), and Olivier
Biaggini, ‘Quelques enjeux de l’exemplarité dans le Calila e Dimna et le Sendebar’, Cahiers de
narratologie: récit et éthique,  () <http://narratologie.revues.org/28?lang= en< [accessed 
July ].

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 e Power of Woman’s Words in ‘Sendebar’
that she has failed to manipulate exemplarity to her advantage: ‘E, señor, non
te di este enxenplo sinon que non te esfuerçes en tus malos privados. Si non me
dieres derecho de quien mal me fizo, yo me mataré con mis manos’ (p. ).
While the story of ‘Striges’ is in itself complex and exciting, the madrastra
is unskilled in making use of it: not only does she draw an unconvincing
lesson from it, but she also fails to notice the much more obvious parallel that
the story elicits. As Olivier Biaggini argues, exemplary tales inserted within
frame narratives always have at least two possible layers of meaning: the
explicit lesson, stated in the moral, and the implicit reading, which emerges
by drawing parallels between the story and the overarching frame. us, in
‘Striges’, the she-devil who attempts to deceive the young prince and to make
him stray from the right path can be seen to remind us much more of the
bad wife herself, and of her attempt at seducing her stepson and plotting the
King’s death. However, just as the bad wife herself seems to be oblivious to
the exemplary potential of her own story, which points the accusing finger
back at herself, King Alcos is equally incapable of perceiving the message
between the lines, and this allows the debate of exempla to carry on.
e rest of the madrastra’s tales are equally unconvincing as exemplary con-
structs. Like ‘Striges’, ‘Fontes’ (which she tells on the third day) also points
an accusing finger at the woman herself: its complicated plot about the prince
who swaps genders with the devil and almost falls prey to the devil’s cunning,
reminds us of the son of King Alcos, who in a sense has swapped roles with his
stepmother: the Prince is now relegated to silence, while the bad wife is free
and able to proceed with her false accusations, instead of perhaps the more
traditional structure, in which the woman is reduced to silence while the men
are in control. e madrastra once more fails to draw a proper moralizing
message from the story, however, now stressing her reliance on God in order
to be saved from her predicament, which here clearly seems to be that of the
exemplum debate: ‘E por ende yo he fiuza que me ayudará Dios contra tus
malos privados’ (p. ).
e moral frame to ‘Aper’ is equally loose, and this is unsurprising given
the absurdity of the plot, which features a wild boar which likes to eat figs and
which dies when it stops eating them because it waits for a monkey in the fig
tree to throw it fruit. e King’s reaction at the end of the tale shows that he is
more worried about listening to whatever his wife says rather than to reason:
‘E quando esto ovo dicho, ovo miedo el Rey que se mataría con el tósigo que
tenía en la mano, e mandó matar su fijo’ (p. ). is suggests that, for the
second time, the bad wife is trying to kill herself, even though this is never
made explicit in the text. And again it becomes clear that the stepmother is
 is is the woman’s first of three threats to commit suicide; I shall return to this issue later.
 See Biaggini, ‘Quelques enjeux’.

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         -    

less than confident about her own persuasive powers, so from her introduc-
tion to the story she attempts to make the King feel guilty, warning him about
her imminent death if he fails to listen to her: ‘después que yo sea muerta,
veremos qué farás con estos tus consejeros e, quando ante Dios fueres, ¿qué
dirás…?’ (p. ).
Finally, the madrastra’s last story, ‘Simia’, seems more logically correct,
albeit equally dishonest, in its exemplary message: the wife’s lesson here is
‘Fío por Dios que me ayudará contra tus malos privados, así commo ayudó al
ladrón contra el león’ (p. ). However, once more the parallels that can be
drawn between the story and the bad wife’s own situation are not as clear-cut
as she seems to intend them to be. True enough, on the surface the foolish
monkey which attempts to help the lion against the man might be likened to
the privados. But just as well, the monkey can be compared to the madrastra
herself, particularly given the way in which the two stories end, one with the
castration and death of the monkey and the other with the death of the bad
wife herself.
So how can we explain the narrative and exemplary inadequacy of the
madrastra’s stories? In discussing the smaller number of tales told by the
bad wife, María Jesús Lacarra explains this through the woman’s position as
active character of the main narrative plot, which, as she puts it, ‘le impide
mantener la serenidad y la objetividad de los privados, meros espectadores’.
However, I should like to suggest that this discrepancy is also due simply to
the wife’s position as a woman who tells stories. From a modern perspective,
her narrative inability can be interpreted through Hélène Cixous’s discussion
of feminine writing, which, according to Cixous, is circumscribed not only
by tradition but, even more, by women’s own mental blocks: ‘writing is at
once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for “great
men” ’. Moreover, for Cixous, writing (or here, storytelling) is not the only
field in which a woman experiences difficulty. e same happens even with
the act of speech itself, which represents a brave, but always already doomed,
attempt at self-liberation:
Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times
entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away—that’s how daring a feat,
how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak—even just open her mouth in
public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon
the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.

 Lacarra, Cuentística medieval en España, p. .

 In making this argument, I am not trying to analyse the bad wife as a real character, but
rather I am suggesting that the text itself is constructed on the basis of such an assumption.
 Hélène Cixous, ‘e Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 
(), – (p. ).
 Ibid., pp. –.

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 e Power of Woman’s Words in ‘Sendebar’
us, we could argue, the madrastra is, like the good wife at the beginning of
the Castilian Sendebar, given the right to speak, to tell stories; however, her
inferior position and her inability to rise to the occasion are already inscribed
within this from the outset.
And yet the argument regarding a woman’s inability to speak, or to speak
adequately, due to social prohibitions seems to stand in precise opposition to
the medieval context. As Richard Howard Bloch incisively puts it: ‘If one were
to pose the question made famous by Freud at the end of the last century,
“What does a woman want?” within the context of medieval antifeminism,
the answer would be clear: “A woman wants to speak”.’ Bloch shows that
this stereotype is particularly prevalent within the rhetorical context of an-
timatrimonial literature of the late Middle Ages. According to Book  of
Andreas Capellanus’s fourteenth-century Art of Courtly Love, women are not
only endlessly garrulous, but also obstinately contrary:
Even for a trifle a woman will swear falsely a thousand times. [. . .] Every woman is
also loud-mouthed. [. . .] When she is with other women, no one of them will give the
others a chance to speak, but each always tries to be the one to say whatever is to be
said and to keep on talking longer than the rest; and neither her tongue nor her spirit
ever gets tired out by talking. [. . .] A woman will boldly contradict everything you
say.

e same misogynist discourse appears in late medieval Spanish texts such as,
most notably, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s Arcipreste de Talavera, in which
the Archpriest devotes an entire section to mimicking women in order to
expose their vices. In every case, women’s avarice, disobedience, falseness,
envy, or lust emerge in long tirades in which the Archpriest purports to speak
like a woman, for whom, he claims, ‘El callar le es muerte muy aspera: non
podría una sola ora estar que non profaçase de buenos e malos.’
e late medieval image of women as ceaselessly babbling, however, is not
what transpires in the Sendebar, and the madrastra’s exempla seems more in
tune with Cixous’s model of women as inhibited in their linguistic manifes-
tation by an oppressive society. In fact, less at the level of language as such
but certainly at the level of their meaning and effect, the madrastra’s stories
 Of course we cannot take this very far, since from the outset the woman is shown to be
devious and dangerous, and so her ultimate failure is portrayed as a mere act of justice; however,
her lack of skill in furthering her deception is still striking in comparison with male tricksters
who engage in exemplum debates, such as, for instance, Dimna in Calila e Dimna. See Calila e
Dimna, ed. by María Jesús Lacarra and Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua (Madrid: Castalia, ).
 Richard Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
 Andreas Capellanus, e Art of Courtly Love, ed. by John J. Parry (New York: Norton, ),
pp.  and , cited in Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. .
 Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera, ed. by Michael Gerli (Madrid: Cátedra,
), p. .

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         -    

function like what Robin Lakoff defines as ‘woman’s language’ in modern

American society, a language taught to women from their childhood, and
which ‘submerges a woman’s personal identity, by denying her the means of
expressing herself strongly, on the one hand, and encouraging expressions
that suggest triviality in subject matter and uncertainty about it’.
And yet, despite the poor narrative and exemplary quality of her stories,
the madrastra manages to uphold the exemplum debate for seven days before
she is finally defeated. At first glance, her temporary success can be explained
in two simple ways. e first explanation could be the narrative necessity
of keeping the text going until seven days have passed and the wrongfully
accused Prince can finally defend himself—what Federico Bravo calls ‘una
estrategia de legitimación narrativa’. Secondly, King Alcos is obviously gull-
ible and unable to choose the right course of action, which pushes the story
contest to carry on. Nevertheless, I would argue that the mere fact that the
madrastra can concoct her plot in the first place and uphold it for so long
can also be explained through her position as a woman. As Graciela Cándano
puts it, ‘el saber de la mujer se ligaba a las fuerzas de la naturaleza, a lo
misterioso, a lo irracional’. Women’s advantage over men, with all the threat
this posed, was considered to lie precisely in this feminine knowledge, which
was thought to be opposed to reason, natural and instinctive and therefore
difficult to combat.
It is thus not difficult to understand why the advisers work so hard to
convince the King of the dangers that women pose, and this offers a poten-
tial explanation for the fact that the advisers need two stories each time to
combat the madrastra’s one: one story merely to catch the King’s attention
and dissuade him from acting rashly, and the second intended to stress, again
and again, the cunning of women. is also explains why the women in the
 Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, rev. and
expanded edn, ed. by Mary Bucholz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
 Federico Bravo, ‘El tríptico del diablo: en torno al libro de Sendebar’, Bulletin hispanique, 
(), – (p. ).
 Graciela Cándano, ‘Mujer frente a saber en las colecciones de “exempla” (Siglo XIII)’, in Edad
Media: marginalidad y oficialidad, ed. by Aurelio González and Lilian von der Walde (México,
DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, ),
pp. – (p. ).
 is belief was common in the medieval period and frequently found in literary texts: for
instance, Cándano quotes the thirteenth-century Libro de los buenos proverbios (also translated
from Arabic, from a text dating from the ninth century), which instructs men as follows: ‘Qui
quier aprender la sapiençia guárdese de apoderar las mugeres sobre sí’ (Cándano, ‘Mujer frente
a saber’, p. ). See also F. Regina Psaki’s discussion of Boccaccio’s representation of feminine
knowledge, ‘oen posited as a corrosive counteragent to the normative knowledge and power of
women’, which only reveals ‘the masculine fear which underlies and generates misogyny as a
cultural discourse’ (‘ “Women Make All ings Lose their Power”: Women’s Knowledge, Men’s
Fear in the Decameron and the Corbaccio’, Heliotropia, . (), <http://www.brown.edu/
Departments/Italian_Studies/heliotropia/01-01/psaki.pdf< [accessed  July ]).

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 e Power of Woman’s Words in ‘Sendebar’
advisers’ anti-feminist exempla are shown to be so cunning and so persuasive.
e women of these stories deceive not only their husbands: in ‘Avis’, told
by the first privado, the female protagonist dupes even the husband’s spy, a
clever parrot which is supposed to watch over her, by pouring water over its
cage and using a candle, a mirror, and the noise caused by the movement
of furniture in order to persuade it that it is witnessing a storm (pp. –).
In other stories women team up against men in order to deceive them; two
exempla, ‘Canicula’, told by the fourth privado, and ‘Pallium’, told by the fih,
deal with go-betweens. Moreover, women employ deception even when
their intentions are not adulterous, as in the case of ‘Elephantinus’, told by the
sixth privado: here a woman lies to her husband in order to cover up the fact
that she was robbed of the bread she was taking for him to eat in the fields,
and to explain the ‘imagen de marfil’ that one of the thieves put in her basket
‘por escarnio’ (pp. –).
In each case, however, the husbands are convinced of the women’s good
intentions and upright moral behaviour. ey would rather disbelieve their
spies and even their own eyes in favour of what their wives tell them. For
instance, when he becomes convinced that the parrot is lying to him about
the storm which obviously never happened, the husband of ‘Avis’ chastises
the bird, accusing it of having attempted to defame his wife by accusing her
of adultery: ‘En quanto me as dicho es verdat de mi muger así commo esto’
(p. ). Similarly, the husband in the second privado’s story, ‘Gladius’, ends
up commending his wife on her good deed (her double adultery, which she
has concealed under his own nose by pretending that she was protecting a
young man from his master’s wrath): ‘El marido se tornó a ella bien pagado, e
dixo: —Feziste a guisa de buena muger, e feziste bien, e gradéscotelo mucho’
(p. ). And finally, the husband in ‘Pallium’, who had justly accused his
wife of adultery, becomes persuaded of her innocence and actually asks her
forgiveness in the end: ‘enbió por su muger a casa de sus parientes, e rogóla
que l’perdonase, e ella fízolo así’ (p. ).
us, again and again the privados stress the dangers of female cunning,
manifested mostly through women’s deceptive words, which deprive men of
their very senses. If we take this further, however, we can see that the manifest
fear expressed in these tales, as in Sendebar as a whole, is that women’s power
resides not only in their stories, that is to say in their words, but in their
actions, and even in their very presence. is could be seen to account for the
good wife’s ability at the beginning of the text to persuade the King that she
is right even without telling a moralizing story; it could easily be argued that
she is motivated by very personal interests in putting herself forward as the
 ‘Pallium’, in Sendebar, pp. –; ‘Canicula’, ibid., pp. –.
 ‘Gladius’, ibid., pp. –.

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         -    

mother of the King’s heir, out of all his ninety wives. is also explains why
the bad wife does not always have to offer a clever moral application for her
stories, yet her powers of conviction remain as great and as instantaneous.
e madrastra’s power over the King is equally clear in her repeated threats
of suicide. First, as I have shown already, aer telling ‘Striges’ on the second
day, she insists that she will kill herself if the King fails to listen to her. Later,
on the sixth day, aer telling ‘Aper’, she threatens to poison herself. As the
narrative tells us: ‘E quando esto ovo dicho, ovo miedo el Rey que se mataría
con el tósigo que tenía en la mano, e mandó matar si fijo’ (p. ). And finally,
on the seventh day, the bad wife goes so far as to renounce the stories, but
instead commits a symbolic act: she gives all she has to the poor then sits on
a pile of wood which is set on fire. As expected, this third threat has the effect
that the madrastra desires: ‘el Rey, quando esto oyó, ante que se quemase,
mandó matar al moço’ (p. ). e woman’s actions here remind us once
again of Cixous, according to whom woman, deprived of the proper right to
speak, ‘physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her
body’. In this way, it is the very female body which becomes threatening in
the text.
e disparity in quality and quantity between the madrastra’s tales and
those of the privados, therefore, as well as the woman’s almost inexplicable
ability to keep the King under her spell, is not as difficult to explain as might
at first appear. Far from being a mere coincidence caused by imperfect textual
transmission, this discrepancy reflects the text’s own masculine ideology and
cultural context. It is significant that, within the overarching frame, the bad
wife is not the sole female protagonist, but that she is prefaced by her radical
opposite, the epitome of the good wife, who has only the King’s interest at
 For instance, ‘Aper’ has no moral as such, yet has the instantaneous effect of all the other
tales: ‘e mandó matar su fijo’ (Sendebar, p. ).
 In Mishle Sendebar the bad wife’s threats of suicide come only on the seventh day. First, at
the beginning of the day, rather than telling a story, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping
into the river; however, when the advisers continue with their stories, she counterbalances these
with a new one of her own, ‘Fur et luna’, which does not appear in the Castilian Sendebar but
does in fact feature in Calila e Dimna, pp. –. en, when this final story proves ineffective,
she again tries to kill herself by ingesting poison and forcing the King to give her some balm to
drink in order to save her (Mishle Sendebar, pp. –). us, arguably, the bad wife of Mishle
Sendebar uses actions more than words in order to sway the King, whereas the Castilian Sendebar
places more of an emphasis on the power of the woman’s words.
 Cixous, ‘e Laugh of the Medusa’, p. .
 As we learn from the Prologue, the Castilian Sendebar was commissioned around  by
the Infante Fradrique, brother of Alfonso X ‘el Sabio’, so it seems reasonable to suggest that the
text pertains to what Hélène Cixous calls ‘male writing’: as Cixous puts it, male writing is ‘a locus
where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously,
and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s oen hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms
of fiction’, a locus which ‘has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not
sexual difference), where woman has never her turn to speak’ (‘e Laugh of the Medusa’, p. ,
emphasis original).

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 e Power of Woman’s Words in ‘Sendebar’
heart. By using two hyperbolically contoured female figures, the text makes its
position on femininity clear. As María Eugenia Lacarra puts it in discussing
the figure of the Lady in courtly love:
Since masculine ideology defined women as naturally inferior to men, it was necessary
that the beloved, the Lady, be an exceptional woman in the literal sense of the word,
that is to say, an exception to the rule. Only by being a unique specimen, could a
female be considered worthy of the love of a man.

Or, I should add, only by being truly extraordinary, whether in the positive
or the negative sense, could she be worthy of his attention.
None the less, the fear of woman’s mysterious powers pervades the text: her
words are less important in their content than in their very utterance, and
she herself is a distorting element not so much because of her acts, whether
these acts be simply storytelling or anything else, but rather through her very
presence. And it is because of this danger that, in the end, the good wife
disappears from the picture altogether, and the bad wife loses the exemplum
debate and is punished for her transgression: ‘E el Rey mandóla quemar en
un[a] caldera en seco’ (p. ). is punishment varies in the other versions
of the Sendebar tradition, and in the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar, for instance,
the King ends up forgiving his wife. However, the fact that the announcement
of the bad wife’s brutal punishment is the last sentence of the Castilian text
is very significant: it shows not only the importance this punishment is given
within the text as a whole, but also the inability to deal with the danger and
mystery of woman in any other way.
U  C A W-S
 María Eugenia Lacarra, ‘Notes on Feminist Analysis of Medieval Spanish Literature and
History’, La Córonica,  (), – (p. ).

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