MARINELLA, Lucrezia.

A very good copy of the second, revised and augmented edition of this wonderful book in praise of women, by a major female author. The Venetian Lucrezia Marinella (or Marinelli, 1571-1653) was daughter of Giovanni Marinelli, a physician who wrote popular works on women’s illnesses. She never married, and lived a secluded life devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and literature, whilst encouraging other talented female writers of her time. A key theme of her works was the defence of women. First published in 1600, ‘La Nobilità […] delle donne’ rebutted a work on women’s defects by Giuseppe Passi. Part I celebrates women, describing their resilience in a man’s world, from the names they are called (‘donna’, ‘donno’, ‘giovinetta’) to their nature and beauty, and the sayings and proverbs created by men about women, moving on to various categories of women, illustrated through examples from literature and popular ‘wisdom’. These include ‘women learned in the sciences and the arts’ (‘some who have not read much history think there were never women knowledgeable in the sciences and the arts’), and women who are meek, strong, fearless, prudent, corteous, and just. A chapter is devoted to the tolerance, resilience and suffering of women, and how they love the men in their lives, and a rebuttal of the ‘feeble’ reasons men have contrived to feel superior to women, with a confutation of theories by Tasso and Boccaccio. Part II is a ruthless list of categories of men – avaricious, greedy, incontinent, arrogant, lazy, ambitious, cruel, unjust, evil, stubborn, ungrateful, rude, and then thieves, murderers, witches, charmers, liars, heretics, tearful, false, chatty, hypocrites, ‘holier-than thou’, ignorant and flatterers. Interesting is a section on men who are ‘well-dressed, trimmed, and wear make-up and bleached hair’, and generally vain. A most interesting, quite unusual work, by a woman.