SOURCE: El Saffar, Ruth. “Ana/Lysis/Zayas: Reflections on Courtship and Literary Women in Maria de Zayas's Enchantments of Love.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 2, no. 1 (fall 1993): 7-28.

In the following essay, El Saffar offers a detailed explanation of Zayas's Enchantments, reflecting on how the narrative's multiple levels represent the problems faced by a female author living and working in a patriarchal society.

Maria de Zayas's 1637 collection of Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, The Enchantments of Love,¹ is, at the most obvious level, a multi-layered artifact in the tradition of Boccaccio. A group of well-born young men and women engaged in dancing, banqueting, singing, and storytelling assemble for five nights during the Christmas season as part of an effort to dispel the fever suffered by their hostess Lysis. In a fashion perhaps closer to the Thousand and One Nights than to the Decameron, however, the stories the gentlemen and...