Álvaro de Luna’s Virtuosas e claras mugeres: writing and scholarship at the court of Juan II

Abstract

Don Álvaro de Luna’s treatise entitled Virtuosas e claras mugeres (1446) is part of the debate on women that, with its roots in Catalonia, fuelled literary activity at the Castilian court, especially from the 1430s onwards. As critical editions and studies of the text as a whole have shown, Alvaro de Luna’s compilation presents linguistic and stylistic stratifications that coincide with the division of the books and depend on the sources used in each of them. Taking as a starting point one of the biographies in the second book, that of the Roman heroine Clelia, this work aims to exemplify the author’s use of sources and materials in order to place his work in the fifteenth-century cultural climate, a context of fundamental significance for the development and evolution of Hispanic literature in later periods.