 The passionate love men experience for women is excited by the beauty of women, and that beauty is the second of the fundamental differences Marinella cites between the bodies of women and those of men, as evidence of the superiority of women’s souls and ultimately of women themselves. While temperature is a cause of superiority, beauty is a manifestation of the superior character of the souls of women, and evidence of the nobility of the idea in the mind of God that is the form of woman: “…the Idea of women is nobler than that of men. This can be seen by their beauty and goodness, which is known to everybody” (1601b, 53). Marinella understands the body to manifest the character of the soul, so she believes that we can know that women’s souls are nobler than men’s through “the effect they [the souls] have and from the beauty of their bodies,” (55). The beauty is an effect of “a grace or splendor proceeding from the soul as well as from the body,” (57). And Marinella states quite explicitly, “The soul…is the cause and origin of physical beauty,” (58). Taken together, these assertions suggest that the soul bestows grace or beauty on the body, and that those qualities then ‘proceed’ from the body as well as from the soul. If we accept that the soul is the cause of physical beauty, and we assume that effects resemble causes, then we can learn something about the character of the soul from the character of the body. To understand how Marinella conceives of beauty, and her philosophical purposes in appealing to beauty as evidence of moral and intellectual superiority, we need to consider her sources, and also the relation between beauty, heat, and the virtues of women as she contrasts them with the vices of men. We should also notice that she claims on the one hand that all women are beautiful, and that no man is: “I say that compared to women all men are ugly,” (63); and on the other hand, that she allows that there are variations in beauty between individual women, and that men can be more or less beautiful (167).