Although post-war Spain produced an abundance of ecclesiastical writings, especially on the properties of the ideal woman and her societal role, Fray Luis de León's sixteenth-century moral treatise La perfecta casada (1583) was fundamental in legitimating the official Francoist model of womanhood, and enjoyed wide circulation as a staple wedding gift. An epistolary dedicated to María Varela Osorio (kin of Fray Luis), La perfecta casada presents a tropological exegesis of Proverbs 31: 10–31. Each of the work's twenty chapters opens with, and offers a gloss of, a particular verse (save chapter 8, which introduces verses 17–19). As such, the most obvious source for Fray Luis’ model of a perfect wife is the Bible. In that sense, Fray Luis undoubtedly saw his work, La perfecta casada, as presenting a timeless model, and its persistence throughout centuries would seem to support this. In spite of this consideration, and notwithstanding the fact that Fray Luis considered his depiction of an ideal wife divinely inspired—if for no other reason than to stave off the criticism of those who claimed his knowledge of feminine mores all too accurate for a man of the cloth—most studies point out the work's historicity, situating Fray Luis’ rendition of Scripture within its relevant religious, cultural, and socio-economic contexts (or, perhaps, laying bare the historicity of religious thought as it is enmeshed in specific cultural, economic, political, and social contexts).

The assertion that “Fray Luis de León se inspiró en la Escritura para escribir La perfecta casada. Pero le pesó también ser hijo de su tiempo” (“Scripture was the inspiration for Fray Luis de León to write La perfecta casada. But he was also a child of his time”) may, at first glance, seem too obvious to warrant repetition on its own merit (Castilla y Cortázar 193). It does, however, rather succinctly point us to two approaches discernible in the genealogy of Fray Luis’ representation of women. While the Scriptural influence on his work is indisputable, the critics’ sources of choice, when it comes to analyzing his model of perfection, range from St Paul to Erasmus.