Annette Kolodny, «Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism», The New Feminist Criticism (London: Virago Press, 1986), p. 160.

On the theory of muted groups, see Mary Crawford and Roger Chaffin, «The Reader's Construction of Meaning: Cognitive Research on Gender and Comprehension», in Gender and Reading, Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, eds. Elizabeth Flynn, Patrocinio Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 3-30. (Collection subsequently cited as Gender and Reading).

Quoted from the article and edition by P. E. Russell, «Secular Literature and the Censors: a Sixteenth-Century Document Re-examined», BHS, 59 (1982), 219-25, at p. 224. Gómez's criteria for evaluating the literature to which he refers are clearly based on standards more related to art (verisimilitude, decorum, and «artificio») than to religion or morality, and he displays an expectable prejudice toward works that successfully imitate the classics. Nonetheless, he also insists on a direct, critical association between women readers and the first three published Dianas.

What little material there is in chivalric fiction with which women could identify directly is cast through the masculine codes of chivalric/courtly love and honor, which generally depersonalize and repress the woman or man who plays the beloved. The well-documented pleasure with which women read books of chivalry does not necessarily indicate that those books reflect the feminine experience with any sort of accuracy at all: research in gender patterns of cognition and reading shows that women are trained by their sex's role in society to identify with and understand a text through the male voice in literature, because it is the dominant one (often the only one). Men, on the contrary, have been typically unable to adjust their reading sensitivities to literature (by men or women) that expresses the female voice because their exposure to it has been so limited. See Elizabeth Segel, «'As the Twig is Bent...' Gender and Childhood Reading», in Gender and Reading, pp. 165-86. Segel studies gender-specific English literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the production of gender-specific literature in the sixteenth century and the fact that codes of behavior for men and women were equally (if not identically) distinguished in the sixteenth and the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, it is reasonable to assume that language cognition (and therefore reading patterns) were gender-specific long before the age from which Segel draws her conclusions.

Several critics wrongly attribute the equation pastoral = eroticism to Renato Poggioli, who does single out some cases of erotic pastoral literature (i. e., Tasso's Aminta) but is careful to distinguish between the calm hedonism of the pastoral impulse and its different manifestations across history. See his collected essays in The Oaten Flute. Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). John Cull says in this context, «the popularity of the pastoral romances derived from their manifestly erotic nature» («Another Look at Love in La Galatea» in Cervantes and the Pastoral, eds. José Labrador and Juan Fernández Jiménez [Cleveland: Cleveland State Univ., 1986], p. 66).

Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana, ed. Francisco López Estrada, Clásicos castellanos 127, 4th ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), pp. 78 and 87 (subsequent references are to this edition). Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, La Galatea, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Clásicos castellanos 154 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1961), I, 51.

See Jane P. Tompkins, «Sentimental Power», in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp. 81-104.

However, the intellectual level of Spanish women's involvement in literary endeavors still appears to have been far below that of their counterparts in other European countries. See Roland H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1971-77).

Notas sobre la espiritualidad española de los siglos de oro. Estudio del Tratado llamado el Deseoso, ed. Francisco López Estrada (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1972), pp. 71-75.

Juan Luis Vives, Instrucción de la mujer cristiana, Colección austral, 138 (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1940), p. 34.