The contribution of women to the Spanish linguistic tradition: Four centuries of surviving words

Abstract

In Spain, despite the unfavourable environment, some exceptional women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eager readers of the classics; ‘learned in grammar’ and professors of Latin. At the same time, female ascetic-mystic writers helped to dignify the Spanish Romance language. The eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation of literary salons presided over by distinguished women, while translators abounded. By the late nineteenth century, female university professors were ceasing to be uncommon; they shone as translators and philologists, although certain renowned linguistic and literary institutions continued to close their doors to them. These women with a passion for languages made a key contribution to linguistics in Spain, but were sidelined due to the historical circumstances in which they lived; since then, they have faced a further exclusion, in that they are conspicuously absent from official linguistic historiography.