 The allegory was also invoked in his famous eulogy of women, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (On the Nobility and Superiority of the Feminine Sex), by which Agrippa hoped to ingratiate himself with Margaret of Austria. Among all the topics which he meticulously collected from the rich repository of this literary genre, he also proposed a more philosophical argument in favor of women, analyzing Eve’s role in original sin. It was Adam, who introduced spiritual death into the world, since Eve was not prohibited from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: thus, she was not guilty of disobeying God. Agrippa did not claim that Eve was completely without sin. More modestly, he maintained that her sin did not entail transgressing God’s commandment; she sinned nevertheless because she allowed the snake to tempt her and became the occasion of Adam’s sin. She was deceived and went astray—not “involuntarily” (Van der Poel 1997: 210), but “ignorantly”. What should we understand by “ignorantly”? Agrippa could not seriously regard Eve’s ignorance as a defect in her spiritual progress (as Augustine did in his The Literal Meaning of Genesis) or as a weakness of her spiritual faculties (as Isotta Nogarola did in her Dialogue on Adam and Eve). In the opening of the treatise, Agrippa, recalling humankind’s creation (Genesis 1:26–7), underlined that both Adam and Eve had been created in God’s image and likeness: as rational souls, both shared the same psychological faculties, the same teleology, and the same moral freedom. The seeming inconsistency can be resolved by interpreting the biblical progenitors as “figures” of Neoplatonic psychology. Reason’s ignorantia Dei (“ignorance of God”) is not a passive “not-knowing” (which is, in any case, unthinkable, because God is not concealed in unfathomable transcendence, but “shines everywhere” in nature, and, above all, inside humans). On the contrary, reason’s ignorantia Dei is an active “neglecting”, a will to turn away from God and a pride in being an end in itself.