Resumen de Jaume Escrivà and the Perils of female writing in late medieval València
In a poem directed to a woman who purportedly had asked him how she could learn to write, the early fifteenth-century Valencian poet Jaume Escrivà obliged with a list of the equipment needed for putting pen to paper. His interlocutor would need a sharpened pen at least a hand and two fingers long, an inkwell, ink mixed with gum arabic, and smooth white paper. The poem's refrain incongruously reminds the lady not to laugh when she writes, while the last strophe warns her not to write on a Friday or a Saturday. If the refrain suggests that there may be something inherently humorous about female writing, the prohibition to write on Fridays and Saturdays points in a different direction. To the extent that the Church forbade couples to engage in sexual relations on those days, it is a clue that the poem is really about having sex and that even as women lack the proper equipment for penetration, they are only equipped for writing if a male furnishes them with a "pen."
