Women During The Renaissance Era

Women throughout history have fought very hard to earn a respectable place in society, despite a patriarchal society and male dominance that remains. The roles of women have developed widely over time. Women frequently fall inferior to men politically, socially, and intellectually. This intellectual gap restricted many women to the role of a domestic caretaker. For others, an education was the foundation to discover new ideas and new ways of thinking. While many Renaissance women had access to an education, a small group of writers captured the attention of others. As Laura Cereta, a humanistic writer noted, “knowledge is not given as a gift, but is gained with diligence.” Humanistic writers fostered ideas of intellectual growth, independence,
Flourishing authors and poets emerged, each bringing new ideas and approaches to their work. Lucretia Marinella, a well known sixteenth-century humanists wrote pieces ranging in subject, genre, and objective. While her religious verses, madrigals, and epic poetry earned her much notoriety, her treatise, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, made her a leading female intellect throughout Italy during the Renaissance era. Throughout The Nobility, Marinella proposes a series of questions in which she disputes, debates, and comments on women’s role in society as well as arguing against influential authors and their opinion of misogyny, the prejudice against women.
This work was written into response to, The Defects of Women, a literary piece written in 1275 by Giuseppe Passi. Women were victims of slander and vilification in this text. Passi refers to the existence of women as a, “necessary evil”, and insisted that they be treated as animals, who, like women, lack in rationale and virtue. While these opinions and beliefs toward women were already prevalent, the mere fact Marinella responded to these attacks, displayed her persistence to truly live out what it meant to be as humanist. Marinella was not just a humanistic thinker, but a humanistic