Fairouz Hussein Naranjo

SELIM XXV: “Violence against Women in Medieval England and Spain

through Literary Sources” by Ana Sáez

Ana Sáez, an Associate Professor at the University of Valladolid focused her paper on
historical, cultural, attitude, and violence in women as it transmitted and perpetuated by
literary texts, and how they resonate nowadays.

She draws her research on several authors and texts that talk about violence against
women. In literary aspect the best known case of rape in Middle English literature is
Geoffrey Chaucer. These documents have contributed a lot to the research about what
violence against women was in the middle ages both from the legal point of view, and
in that sense the notion of rape. But also what many scholars have been trying to do is to
see whether there is a connection between those accusations he was released. But a line
of scholars have been studying how would that be connected to Chaucer own view on
women and how they are treated in his texts. For instances, in some of Chaucer’s texts
he focuses in the punishment of adultery, and the wife is killed, and this is represented
as some kind of justice. The explanation of this attitude in Chaucer´s text seems that and
according to him, the female nature is driven to this kind of action. Similarly, there has
been a lot of research on this kind of attitude toward women that comes from Aristotle
and the Bible. It is true that throughout the middle Ages this notion that woman had a
nature that take them to end up with shrewdness, wickedness, or committing sin, was
quite expressed and normally portrayed in many medieval texts.

However, she focuses her paper on comparative approach to Spanish and English
literary texts that show violence against women, and their connection mostly with the
literary traditions and the social historical circumstances, including something of unfair
treatment. The main argument for violence against women is that they have committed
crime and that has to be punished. Normally, that would be adultery, and this is
reflecting basically what the law said.

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Instance of women´s wickedness, we can find in the 12 th century, in the Spanish
chronicle texts the story of the wife of the Count of Castile. She was tempted to
adultery by the Arabic leader Almanzour, and decides to start a plot to get what he has
offered, which is to be a queen. Therefore, she does two basic things: she manages to
undernourished horses, and she persuades her husband to give holidays to the soldier. In
this way, soldiers are out and the horses are weak enough. Hence, she takes the
opportunity to urge Almanzour to kill The Count of Castile, so she can become queen.
However, there is a problem here; the Count of Castile had a successor and obviously
this will be an obstacle to her, so she decides to poison him. Nevertheless, she ends up
punished for all her wickedness.

She also mentions another Spanish examples text; Don Juan Manuel creates a symbolic
world in which the woman is assigned a secondary role, somewhat evil and almost
exclusively sexual. Here, the identity of the woman is practically null and void. In all
these cases, she states that women are not the other part, but one more of the elements
that belong to the man.

To conclude she mentions one of Catalan author, who wrote a poem like ten stanzas,
and were absolutely deadly against women, which created many responses. One of the
most amazing responses was by a novelist at the end of the 15 th century, Juan de Flores,
who wrote a novel Grisel y Mirabella, accounting the story of two lovers. In the
kingdom of Scotland, at some undetermined time, the king's daughter Mirabella falls in
love with one of the king´s knight, and both have to be punished. According to the law
at that time, whoever has been seduced is condemned to exile, but the seducer is
condemned to death. Interestingly, in this text the woman finally was condemned, and
this is because the lawyer in the novel is the Catalan author mentioned above.

There have been some contemporary treatises, in which women had started to claim that
how could be ever have any positive response from the law or from texts, if they are all
written by men. These treatises seem to response to that, because after the women is
condemned to death, they decide that is not the end. They decide to use all the tools they
have at hand, all the elements the system may need them. So the system here is to try to
seduce the Catalan poet. Hence, one of the women has a meeting with him and finally
kills him.

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Basically, they are many elements and features in common in the European English,
Spanish tradition; it is probably the historical, social, political circumstances, and even
the religious circumstances in England have something to do with the fact that this
developed this late attitude to women in the 15th century in Spain was different in
England.