Discuss the feminist ideas of Laura Cereta and Lucretia Marinella, briefly describing the High Renaissance context from which they arose; then, suggest whether any of their arguments in defense of women’s equality still need to be made in some quarters

today.

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

1. Many fifteenth-century women strove for a level of education beyond that deemed appropriate for women by thinkers like Baldassare Castiglione. One of them is Laura Cereta, daughter of a prominent family from Brescia. At just 19 years of age, Cereta published Family Letters, a Latin manuscript containing 82 letters addressed to friends and family. The letter known as the Defense of Liberal Instruction for Women is a response to a critic who had implied that true women humanist scholars were rare and that, perhaps, her father had authored her letters. In the Defense, Cereta explains why so few women were scholars and then defends her own learning. She readily admits that many women choose to concentrate their energies on what she refers to as “lesser goals.” Clearly, Cereta is herself none of these. Rather, in her wakeful hours, she assures her reader, she reflects on a higher order of things and hardens herself against the trials of the outside world. She asserts that knowledge is not a gift but the reward for hard work and that her talent is no accident. She further asserts that such talent is by no means visited on women any less often than it is on men.
2. One hundred years later, Lucretia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men was published in Venice. Marinella published many works, but her sometimes vitriolic polemic against men is unique in the literature of the time. The Nobility and Excellence of Women is a response to a contemporary diatribe, The Defects of Women, written by Giuseppe Passi. Marinella asserts that any man who denigrates women is motivated by such reasons as anger and envy. In fact, from Marinella’s point of view, Renaissance women, not the courtiers themselves, possess the fullest measure of Castiglione’s moral virtue and humanist individualism. The second part of the book, on the defects and vices of men, is a reversal of Passi’s arguments, crediting men with all the vices he attributes to women. Perhaps Marinella’s most important argument is her insistence that women are autonomous beings who should not be defined only in relation to men.
3. Students’ estimations of whether these feminist arguments are relevant today will vary.