 The Nobility appeared when the debate had been running for two hundred years. Marinella was responding directly to the treatise by Giuseppe Passi, I donneschi diffetti (The Defects of Women), published in 1599 in Venice and Milan, and so the structure and methodology of The Nobility mirror those of The Defects of Women (Kolsky 2001, 974). Passi had cited a variety of ancient and medieval authorities, many of whom cite Aristotle as the source of their arguments, which may explain Marinella’s particular concern both to use and to discredit Aristotle; at any rate, she takes Passi to be a contemporary representative of a misogynist tradition beginning with Aristotle and extending forward through Boccaccio. The Defects of Women stands as an extreme example of the genre of attacks on women, with Passi claiming that women are covered from head to toe in vices and defects (Passi 1599, 240). The argument of the treatise begins with the claim that the female is imperfect, created only as a ‘necessary evil’. The imperfection of women is fundamentally that they are especially subject to passion (8). The heat of women’s bodies is both the source and the sign of her subjection to passion (29). Because women are in thrall to their passions, they may not, strictly speaking, be rational animals (216). This possibility is suggested and legitimized by Aristotle’s assertion that the deliberative faculty of women has no authority (215). Passi satirizes intellectual women (278–9), and comes close to suggesting that women are a different species from men, insisting that women should be treated like animals because both women and animals lack reason and virtue (Malpezzi Price and Ristaino 2008, 108). The Defects of Women treatise is remarkable for its virulence, but in no way original in substance. 