She Used Aristotle to Prove Women Were Superior
Venice, 1600: A Writer Picks Up Her Pen
The canals of Venice shimmered in the summer light, but inside a quiet room, a woman sat at her desk, furious. Her name was Lucrezia Marinella (1571 or possibly 1579–1653), and she had just read the most insulting book she could imagine. Giuseppe Passi’s The Defects of Women, published in 1599, insisted that women were covered from head to toe in vices, ruled by their passions, and maybe not even fully rational animals. Passi loaded his book with quotes from Aristotle and other ancient authorities to make his case sound unshakable.
Marinella decided to answer him. She was no stranger to big ideas. Her father, a doctor, had given her access to works of medicine, philosophy, and literature—an education almost unheard of for a girl at the time. She knew Plato, Aristotle, and the latest Italian humanist writers. Within a year, she published a fierce and systematic reply, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men. It would make her famous across Europe.
The Big Claim: Nobility Means Capacity for Virtue
Marinella’s central claim was bold and blunt: “the female sex is nobler and more excellent than the male.” But “nobility” here did not just mean having expensive clothes or a fancy title. Drawing on the poet Dante, she defined nobility as a moral and intellectual seed planted in every human being—a capacity to develop virtues like wisdom, courage, and temperance. Some people, she believed, are born with that seed in richer soil than others. And she set out to prove that women have the greater inborn capacity.
She organized her argument around four kinds of evidence: the names given to women, the causes that produced them, their nature, and their actions. She also pored over the things men themselves said about women, often twisting those claims until they accidentally proved the opposite. Her goal was not just to defend women from insults, but to show that women are actually better than men at the very qualities men claimed to own alone.
Why a Better Blueprint Leads to Better Souls
To argue that women were superior, Marinella had to explain how they came to be that way. She borrowed a theory of four causes from Aristotle and gave it a Platonist twist. The efficient cause of every creature is God, who starts the whole process of creation. Here men and women are equal, since the same divine hand made both. The material cause of woman, however, was better: according to the Bible, woman was formed from a living rib, while man was made from lifeless clay. So woman’s body began with a more noble raw material.
But the key to her argument was the formal cause—the blueprint in God’s mind that gives each kind of thing its shape and purpose. Drawing on Platonic ideas, Marinella compared God to an architect or a painter. An architect might design both a palace and a shed; both have blueprints, but one idea is far grander than the other. In the same way, God’s Idea of woman could be nobler and more excellent than God’s Idea of man. If that were so, then women would be born with superior souls, even though they still share the same rational species as men. This let her claim that within a species, individual forms can differ in worth—a controversial view among philosophers.
Cool Bodies, Clear Thinking
The next step was to show that the female body itself was better suited to virtue. In Marinella’s time, many thinkers believed that the body’s temperature determined moral character. Hotter blood was thought to make creatures brave and intelligent—and men were said to be hotter than women. Her opponents used this to argue that women were morally and intellectually defective by nature.
Marinella flipped the story. She granted that women’s bodies are cooler than men’s, but she insisted they are temperate—just right, not cold. Cooler blood, she argued, actually helps reason stay in control. Too much heat, by contrast, makes the soul “precipitous and unbridled.” Men’s excessive warmth, she said, drives them to intemperate passions, rash decisions, and violence. This explained, in her view, why men were always the ones getting drunk in taverns or flying into jealous rages.
She then used a clever trick to undermine Aristotle. If heat always equals greater nobility, she pointed out, then African and Spanish women—who live in warmer climates and have hotter bodies—must be more virtuous than German men. No-one who believed in male superiority was willing to draw that conclusion. So the simple link between heat and worth had to be false. Marinella concluded that when a man does something excellent, it is because his body has cooled with age and become “more feminine,” operating with the wisdom of a moderate temperature.
Beauty as a Ray of Light from the Soul
If temperature was a cause of superiority, beauty was the visible proof of it. Marinella drew on Platonist philosophy, which taught that physical beauty is an image of divine beauty—a ray of light from the soul shining through the body. Because women were widely acknowledged to be more beautiful than men, she took this as direct evidence that their souls must be nobler.
She then made a startling move. Men, she said, constantly desire women because they perceive their beauty and goodness. But, she argued, we never deeply desire what we already possess in equal measure. The fact that men chase after women shows that they instinctively recognize something in women that they themselves lack. Women, by contrast, do not naturally burn with the same passionate desire for men—she claimed they only ever feel a polite affection in return, motivated by courtesy rather than need. Whether or not that was true of everyone, her point was philosophical: if desire points toward what is better, then male desire for women is a confession of female superiority.
In this way, Marinella took the accusations that women were seductive or dangerous and transformed them into a sign that women were closer to the divine. The very things men used to insult women became, in her hands, proof of women’s excellent nature.
Why Her Method Still Matters
Marinella’s most unsettling move was not what she argued, but how she argued it. She used Aristotle, the Bible, and a host of respected authorities, but she turned them against the very tradition that had claimed them. She showed that the same expert could be made to prove both that women were inferior and that they were superior. This raised a worrying question: if the masters can prove anything, why should we trust their claims about what is “natural”?
Some scholars today suspect that Marinella did not fully believe her own argument for superiority. Instead, she may have been writing a kind of skeptical experiment—showing that if you handle the evidence cleverly enough, you can make it support any side. That would mean her real target was not just Passi, but the whole habit of using ancient books to settle who counts as fully human.
Either way, Marinella’s work invites you to notice something powerful. When someone insists that one group is naturally better than another—smarter, more rational, more virtuous—they are almost always picking and choosing evidence. Marinella read the same data and drew opposite conclusions. Her story is a reminder that before you accept that something is “just nature,” you might ask: who is doing the interpreting, and what do they want to be true?
Think about it
- If someone tells you that a group of people is naturally less intelligent, what kinds of evidence would you need to check that claim—or to challenge it?
- Marinella argued that women are superior, not just equal. Is arguing for the superiority of one group always wrong, or can it ever be a fair way to push back against years of being told you are inferior?
- Marinella used the same authorities as her opponents but made them say the opposite. When is it acceptable to reinterpret someone’s words to mean something they probably never intended?
