From Carmenta to Justina: A Sketch of Female Readers in Early Modern European Prose

This essay traces the path of a series of female voices across genres to outline a blueprint of the networks throughout which they shape-shifted in several languages and traditions, from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Neo-Latin Nicostrata and his Italian Fiammetta to Francisco López de Úbeda’s Spanish Justina and Teresa of Ávila’s autobiographical persona. This path leads from the mythical invention of the pen and the Latin alphabet, the use of script as a textual mirror, and epistolography as a dialogic strategy for sentimental self-fashioning to the changes brought about by the transition from manuscript to print traditions like that built around Ovid’s Heroides. It concludes with an approach to the narrative techniques used to produce underexplored cases of metafiction in sentimental novels like Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradissa, in the picaresque prose of López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina, and in the contrasting prose of Teresa’s autobiography. In all cases, these female protagonists appear as producers of texts and/or as readers for whom the material dimensions of language are among the fundamental constituents in their emotional biographies, not only in a metaphorical but also in a literal sense.