Reseñas iberoamericanas

In La defensa de la mujer en la literatura hispánica. Siglos XV-XVII, Julio Vélez-Sainz presents a survey and evolutionary account of the case for women made in Hispanic literature. The author proposes a definition of la defensa as a rhetorical practice, built upon a series of commonplaces that crystalized in fifteenth century court literature, where arguing the case for women both reflected and promoted “the civilizing process” as understood by Norbert Elias, and which continued over the three centuries in which debating the nature of women became a prominent, if not ubiquitous, discursive mode in Castilian vernacular texts. According to this vision, la defensa, along with its civilizing force, spread from its initial courtly milieu and reached ever-wider audiences as it circulated via popular literature, print culture, and theater. In the process, the topoi were pressed into the service of varied authorial intentions and generic conventions, finally to be wholly transformed in their deployment by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.