 The Nobility is divided into two parts, the first of which demonstrates the nobility and excellence of women, the second of which sets out the defects and failings of men. Both the respects in which she claims superiority for women and the contrast she draws between the excellences of women and the vices of men are standard in the contributions to the querelle des femmes that take the side of women. What is unusual with Marinella is the learning, the sophistication, and the systematic and cogent development of the arguments. Unlike most pro-woman authors, she makes no concessions to the convention of masculine excellence, asserting the superiority of women in all respects. The argument for women’s superiority is largely set out in the first part of the treatise. But the second part, on the defects of men, is not incidental to the central claim that women are nobler. Marinella details the defects of men, and in particular their evil motives, in order to support her positive argument for women’s nobility, by demonstrating that the motives men have for denigrating women are ignoble, stem from defects of nature, and are thus evidence of the inferiority of men. So the defects of men are introduced not only so that women might appear more excellent in comparison, but also, and more importantly, to show that the deficiencies attributed to women by men are more properly the deficiencies of male nature, and that those very deficiencies are responsible for the fallacious claims about women made by some men (Aristotle and Passi in particular). So Marinella offers an explanation for the misogynist claims to which she is responding, and that explanation supports her claim that women are better than men in certain precise respects.