‘What is a woman?’ When two early Hispanic texts describe the traditional scene in which this stark question is put to an oracular sage, substantially different, if equally peremptory, answers are given. The question circulated widely as the last of three included in a didactic catechism to which Secundus the Philosopher gives the responses. The following version is copied into the Primera Crónica General of Alfonso X:

Secundus caps the bleak moral denunciation of men and beauty he has made in his replies to two previous questions with an uncompromising rejection of woman as the undoing of men, hominis confusio. In the Historia de la doncella Teodor the same question produces this second answer:

While in this response woman is still labelled as an insatiable beast, she is first defined as a source of good as well as bad for the man of whom she is the divinely made image, rather than simply the means of confounding him. The response of the female sage Teodor, while it defines men in unambiguous Biblical terms that place his natural superiority to women beyond doubt, avoids the facile negativism of Secundus about the nature of women and replaces it with ambivalence. Woman – but only woman – is problematized, and Teodor's response acknowledges the inherent complexity of the problem.

The corpus of texts from medieval Spain that is the subject of this book contains a discussion of the nature of women. They include examples of wisdom literature; works which offer advice to women as wives or future wives or as a member of the other estates; enxemplos or illustrated tales derived from oriental as well as Latin sources; literary ‘debates’ about women; sentimental romances; works which declare a specific interest in praising virtuous women or in defending them generally from the accusations of slanderers;