Are men or women more virtuous? The use of the dialogical formula in the fourth question of Alfonso de Cartagena’s Duodenarium

The work of Alfonso de Cartagena has been approached from different perspectives according to the different aspects he offered: humanist, literary author, translator of Seneca, diplomat at the service of the Crown of Castile, etc. However, this article will attend to one of his main works, the Duodenarium (c. 1442). Specifically, the analysis will focus on the last of the four questions posed there: who is more virtuous, man or woman? The work is structured as an epistle in which Alfonso de Cartagena answers various questions posed by his friend, Hernán Pérez de Guzmán. When he must answer the last of the demands, the author confesses that he finds himself in a dilemma, as he must decide whether men or women are better. The decision to choose one of the two sexes as the better will necessarily incur the wrath of the other, so the author decides to maintain a certain neutrality. To achieve this, he will set up a dialogue between different couples, each consisting of a man and a woman, about the goodness of one or the other. In this way, the reader will decide, after having witnessed the arguments, the solution to the dilemma. The strategy is ingenious and belongs to the humanist branch that promoted the recovery of classical genres such as the epistle or the dialogue. Nevertheless, the result that can be seen in the Duodenarium offers lights and shade. From the point of view of genre theorists, this research aims to analyse the successes and errors in the construction of the three talks that make up the fourth question. In this way, the conclusions will be able to verify the quality of Alfonso de Cartagena's work to bring the dialogue, a genre recovered by the Italian humanists, closer to the Spanish literary panorama.