Acceso usuarios
Emily Francomano
This essay analyzes how Álvaro de Luna specifically repurposed the exemplary history of Rome in the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres as a series of proofs in the debate on women and in support of his own political and courtly self-fashioning, focusing on two figures: Lucrecia, the “example of examples” and icon of feminine with chastity, and Tanaquil, the social-climbing “woman behind the man” whose machinations make Lucrecia’s eventual rape possible and consequent suicide necessary. In highlighting Luna’s reframing of Roman history as a history of mothers, wives, and daughters who support patriarchy, this essay will also discuss the particular use and significance of the exemplum as a forensic device drew the querella into the tenor of vernacular humanism, by redeploying the traditionally masculine exemplary ethics of reading Roman history in fifteenth-century Castilian letters.
