Vices Of Men Research Articles

The Superiority of Women in the Seventeenth Century

AbstractEarly feminist or pro-woman works often combine the claim that the rational souls of men and women are the same with an argument for the superiority of women. This article considers two such works, Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (Venice, 1601 [1999]) and Marguerite Buffet's In Praise of Illustrious Learned Women, both Ancient and Modern (Paris, 1668), in order to show the continuities and distinctive features of feminist arguments for superiority, to emphasize the differences in the conceptions of reason and physiology that distinguish them, and to demonstrate that claims of superiority persisted even as those defending women's worth began to adopt egalitarian positions.

How Women Wrote about Themselves: A Corpus- informed Comparison of Women Writers’ Defences in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England

Women’s written defences of their sex developed within the literary context of the querelle des femmes, a mainly male debate on female intellectual worth, which started in the Middle Ages and came to a peak during the Renaissance. This paper focuses on the discourse some women writers started to develop in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England, when the growing number of misogynist attacks led some of them to respond in kind. The first works directly engaging the topics of the querelle are usually identified in Isabella Whitney’s poem The Copy of a Letter (1567) and Jane Anger’s Jane Anger Her Protection For Women (1589). These are coupled with three later pamphlets framed in the so-called Swetnam debate, from the name of the misogynist pamphleteer to whom these three women writers replied, namely A Muzell for Melastomus (1617) by Rachel Speght, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617) by Ester Sowernam and The Worming of a Mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus, a Redargution of the Bayter of Women (1617) by Constantia Munda. The qualitative reading of the texts reveals differences among them both in content and structure, which is supported by a corpus-informed quantitative comparison between the earlier and the later texts. The quantitative analysis also shows differences in the use of specific high and low frequency querelle-related lemmas, which signal a variation in the semantic fields related to the discourse on women. Such a mixed research method approach suggests that these variations could not be entirely ascribed to those literary works which had established the formal guidelines of the genre of the controversy, The Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus of Rotterdam and De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. To understand where these differences may come from, the English querelle texts are quantitatively compared with a small corpus of Italian defences of women, including Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600) by Moderata Fonte and La nobilità, et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’diffetti, et mancamenti, de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1600; 1621) by Lucrezia Marinella. This quantitative analysis shows that English and Italian women writers appear to share some structural and content-related characteristics which cannot be found in either Erasmus’ or Agrippa’s works or contemporary English writers dealing with the querelle. The hypothesis is thus advanced that there may have been literary contacts between England and Italy that indirectly influenced the development of the discourse on women within the context of the querelle des femmes.

Marinella and her interlocutors: hot blood, hot words, hot deeds

In the treatise called La nobilta et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini (The nobility and Excellence of women, and the Defects and Vices of Men) (1601) Lucrezia Marinella claims that women are superior to men. She argues that men are excessively hot, and that heat in a high degree is detrimental to the intellectual and moral capacities of a person. The aim of this paper is to set out Marinella’s views on temperature differences in the bodies of men and women and the effects of bodily constitution on the capacities necessary for political deliberation and rule. I situate Marinella’s argument in the context of an ongoing debate about physiological differences between the sexes, begun in antiquity and extending into the Renaissance. That debate is important for several reasons: (i) as part of a broader discussion of the nature and worth of women, (ii) as determining influential interpretations of ancient authorities on matters of physiology, and (iii) as anticipating later discussions of the relation between the sexed body and political roles. This paper considers Marinella in dialogue with a number of interlocutors, elements of whose work can be found in her own: Aristotle, Mario Equicola, Galeazzo Flavio Capra, Ludovico Domenichi and Torquato Tasso.

The Education of women; & The vices of men: two Qajar tracts

The Education of women; & The vices of men: two Qajar tracts

Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (review)

GENRE STUDIES: EAST AND WEST Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. By Wendy Heller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [xix, 386 p. ISBN 0-520-20933-8. $65.00.] Music examples, notes, bibliography, index. Music historians have long needed a thematic treatment of seventeenth-century opera, and here it is. Wendy Heller's Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, taking off from Ellen Rosand's influential and monumental text Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), offers an interpretive critique that makes early-modern Venetian opera accessible to students and interested nonspecialists as well as to experts in the field. Those of us who teach opera history welcome Emblems of Eloquence for the engaging fodder it provides for stimulating discussion and the development of alternative perspectives. Heller is a bold scholar who brings a provocative voice to the often staid realm of Baroque opera. Heller's argument in Emblems of Eloquence is three-fold, alternately highlighting conceptions of women, opera, and Venice as a republic. She integrates into her discussions the evolving modes of female eloquence in Venetian opera, the ambivalent ways in which the male-dominated republic of Venice incorporated emblematic women into its mythology, and the ways in which the representation of women forged a relationship between opera and the ancient world (pp. xiii-xiv). For Heller, opera is the medium in which Venice's querelles des femmes were fought, and opera is a metaphor for the Serenissima itself. Strikingly, this confluence of proto-feminist ideology, opera, and the mythology of the state runs its course by the end of the seventeenth century, and Heller therefore defines the early-modern manifestation of the genre along these lines. Heller's book presents five discrete case studies, circumscribed by three introductory chapters (the unnumbered Introduction plus two numbered chapters), and a rather pallid five-page conclusion. introduction lays the groundwork for ensuing discussions. Categories addressed are: opera and the myths of Venice; opera, carnival, and ritual; virtue and the body; courtesan culture; opera and theatrical gender; and representing female eloquence. As one might surmise from the book's title, the first and last categories get the most play, and chapter 1, The Emblematic Woman rightly addresses the confrontation of women writers with seventeenth-century humanists. Heller's discussion here, as well as in chapter 2, Bizzarrie Feminile: Opera and the Accademia degli Incogniti, offers a fine contextualization of the history of humanistic fascination with extraordinary women. One facet of this history is offered in didactic treatises of the sort Heller discusses in chapter 1, where she focuses on the writings of Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, written in response to Giuseppe Passi's misogynist diatribe on the defects of women. Interested readers should not neglect also to consult recent publications from the University of Chicago Press's Other Voices in Early Modern Europe series, most notably Lucrezia Marinella, Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill, introd. by Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999]), Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (ed. and trans. Virginia Cox [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997]), and Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny (ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004]). Another facet of this history is expressed in exchanges of letters between noted male humanists and prominent literary women. To Anthony Grafton's and Lisajardin's exposition of the letters of Isotta Nogarola with Guarino Guarini, and Cassandra Fedele with Angelo Poliziano (From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986]), and to this reviewer's examination of the correspondence between Isabella Andreini and Erycius Puteanus ( Women and Music of the Corn-media dell'arte in the I. …

The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men. Lucrezia Marinella , Anne Dunhill

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men. Lucrezia Marinella , Anne Dunhill Lynda Stephenson PayneLynda Stephenson Payne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 92, Number 4Dec., 2001 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/385391 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 2001 The History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men

Book Review: The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men

Robert Wallace on Population and Utopian Government

The two writers whose visions of a utopian future for humanity Malthus chiefly sought to puncture through his principle of population were Godwin and Condorcet. The objection Malthus had to both was that the prosperous and egalitarian society they envisaged would be undermined by the population growth it brought about. As Malthus himself acknowledged, this was not a novel argument: in the second (1803) edition of the Essay, he listed the authors from whom he had “deduced the principle”—David Hume, Robert Wallace, Adam Smith, and Richard Price. Wallace, the closest among these four to being a Utopian thinker, explicitly saw population growth as clouding the future: unlimited increase would impair prosperity, but efforts by the society to curtail it would require “cruel and unnatural customs.”Wallace's views of Utopia are set out in his book Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence, published in 1761. There are twelve “prospects” in all. The first is titled “A general view of the imperfections of human society, and of the sources from whence they flow”; the second presents a “model of a perfect government”; the third investigates the feasibility of this model; and the fourth adduces the proposition “The preceding model of government, tho' consistent with the human passions and appetites, is upon the whole inconsistent with the circumstances of mankind upon the Earth.” The remaining prospects go further into the natural world, the nature of happiness, and the afterlife. Prospects I and IV are excerpted below.Under a perfect government, “poverty, idleness, and war [would be] banished; the earth made a paradise; universal friendship and concord established, and human society rendered flourishing in all respects.” Yet paradoxically, such a society would be overturned “not by the vices of men, or their abuse of liberty, but by the order of nature itself.” This objection is enough to defeat the “airy systems” of the Utopians. Wallace calls for a middle way for government and society, “to set just bounds to every thing according to its nature, and to adjust all things in due proportion to one another.” He writes: “it is more contrary to just proportion, to suppose that such a perfect government should be established in such circumstances, than that by permitting vice, or the abuse of liberty in the wisdom of providence, mankind should never be able to multiply so greatly as to overstock the earth.”Wallace was born in Edinburgh in 1697 and died there in 1771. He was a presbyterian minister who held various offices in the Church of Scotland. In addition to the Prospects, his other major works were Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (1758) and Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times (1753). The latter included a vigorous rejoinder to Hume's argument (in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, published the preceding year) that the classical world was not more populous than the present. Wallace's argument for the populousness of ancient nations supported the view earlier put by Montesquieu—who arranged for a French translation of Wallace's book.Modern editions of Wallace's writings appear in the series Reprints of Economic Classics published by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.

The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men

A poet, a women's rights activist, and an expert on moral and natural philosophy, Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) was known throughout Italy as the leading female intellectual of her age. Born into a family of Venetian physicians, she was encouraged to study, and, fortunately, she did not share the fate of many of her female contemporaries, who were forced to join convents or were pressured to marry early. Marinella enjoyed a long literary career, writing mainly religious, epic and pastoral poetry, and biographies of famous women in both verse and prose. Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men was first published in 1600, composed at a furious pace in answer to Giusepe Passi's diatribe about women's alleged defects. This polemic displays Marinella's knowledge of the Italian poetic tradition and demonstrates her ability to argue against authors of the misogynist tradition from Boccaccio to Torquato Tasso. Trying to effect real social change, Marinella argued that morally, intellectually and in many other ways, women are superior to men.

Errata Corrige: The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men

Errata Corrige: The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men

Crime and Its Punishment in Chicago

commands, or the doing of that which the law forbids. Sociologists define it as a disease, and say that the criminal belongs to a class separate and distinct from the normal individual. They tell us that in order to determine the punishment for one who has violated the criminal laws the judge should hold a judicial clinicexamine his ears, the color and shape of his eyes, the height of his brow, the form of his head, and inquire somewhat into the morals and idiosyncrasies of his ancestors. Given this data, they will tell you to a certainty what will be the prisoner's conduct in the future, and what will be the conduct of all his progeny, even to the third and fourth generations. If crime is the doing of that which the law forbids, then we make or unmake criminals just as we make new laws or repeal old ones. Crimes of one age and country are the dominant virtues of another age and country, and the virtues of other times are the crimes of to-day. John Huss, a Bohemian professor in the University of Prague, was burned at the stake because he insisted on teaching and preaching according to the dictates of his own conscience. Captain Kidd, flaunting the black flag in the face of the world, was the hero of his time; Cotton Mather at Salem, preaching and hanging witches, was believed to be the special agent of Almighty God! John Brown died a felon's death, but the most popular refrain to-day is, His soul goes marching on ! The heroes of one age have been the criminals of another, and the criminals of one age have been canonized in the next! Captain Kidd would be a pickpocket to-day, and Cotton Mather a Wall Street broker! Crime is the ineffaceable birthmark of humanity. There are no criminal classes. The differences between virtues and vices of men are differences of degree only. No man is all virtuous, none all vicious. All men are both virtuous and vicious. What is it that makes one man more virtuous or