ABSTRACT
This chapter considers representative foundational texts of the querella, which emerged in Spanish letters as a distinct and highly influential literary mode in the middle of the fifteenth century, when a series of texts defaming and championing women appeared within the cultural ambience of the court of Juan II of Castile and his queen consort, Maria of Aragon. The querella emerged in Spanish letters in a period marked by many struggles for dominance between powerful factions in the nobility, and by related cultural shifts concerning nobility, courtliness, and religious orthodoxy. Late medieval and early modern writers on the inferiority, instability, sexual depravity, garrulousness, and shrewdness of women, and the consequent danger they posed to men, had many authorities at their disposal. Medieval and early modern profeminine texts rarely offer new definitions of femininity, nor do they question women's frailty and physical inferiority to men.
