 If one effect of Marinella’s marshalling of the evidence for both sides of the woman question is to undermine the authority of those authors most frequently cited by her opponents, another effect is to raise the possibility of a skeptical agenda. Like many pro-woman authors, Marinella begins by accepting the claim that the rational souls of men and women are the same, before going on to argue for the superiority of women. We might wonder why she, and others, were not content to rest with the claim of equality at the level of the rational soul. To put the question another way: Did Marinella truly believe that women are better than men, or did she argue for that position for other reasons? It is possible that the arguments for superiority are intended to raise skeptical doubts in the minds of her audience, doubts which would make them reluctant to decide the question of superiority between men and women. If it seemed preposterous to argue that women were superior to men, and yet one could do so using unimpeachable authorities, then arguments for the superiority of men over women, constructed on the foundations of those same authorities, might seem less convincing. So, although many contemporary and later interpreters assume that The Nobility is a treatise in support of the superiority of women, there is some evidence to suggest that Marinella may have argued for the claim of superiority not so much to establish its truth as to call into skeptical doubt the truth of the claim of superiority for men made by her opponents (see O’Neill 2007 for an argument that skepticism informed the work of another sixteenth century feminist, Marie de Gournay).