 The question she confronts is, then, if men and women have souls that make them the same in species—the same in rational capacity—how can women be superior to men? Marinella’s answer depends on distinctions in the faculties of soul, and in particular on a distinction between the rational part and the desiring part, in which moral virtues are located. She aims to show that women are morally superior to men, and that this causes them to be “even better than men at learning the same arts and sciences,” (1601b, 83). That is, her argument is that the moral superiority of women has an impact on their rational faculties, which causes them to be intellectually superior (better at the same arts and sciences) although they are created with the same rational faculty. The argument depends ultimately on Marinella’s views about the causal role of bodily temperature on the soul’s functions, and about the moral status of the actions that issue from the soul’s functioning, views that will be elaborated in the following section. But Marinella produces a variety of kinds of evidence that, with respect to the moral virtues, and especially with respect to the control of the passions, women are superior. First, she claims that women are superior to men with respect to a variety of individual moral and intellectual virtues, and provides evidence in the form of examples of excellent women who manifest these virtues (“It is a fact known to everyone that women are continent and temperate, for we never see or read about them getting drunk or spending all day in taverns, as dissolute men do, nor do they give themselves unrestrainedly to other pleasures,” (1601b, 94).) Second, she points out that since men, whatever they might say about women, treat women with signs of honor, and since “nobody honors another person unless they know that the person has some gift or quality that is superior to his own” (1601b, 69), we should conclude that men themselves recognize the superiority of women. But, as we will see in the next section, she ultimately traces the moral superiority of women, which is responsible for their intellectual superiority, to differences in men’s and women’s bodies.