 In the sixteenth century the Italian vernacular increasingly replaced Latin as the language appropriate to a broad range of topics and genres (Panizza and Wood 2000, 65, 195), so Marinella was not eccentric in her choice of the vernacular (her father also wrote in Italian, and had publicly urged others to do so). The choice did, nonetheless, mean that her treatise in defense of women was available to more people, especially women. In her own time she was renowned as learned and eloquent, and she acquired a reputation as a rigorous scholar and a skillful philosopher; this was certainly in part due to the merits of her published work, but the respect she enjoyed—very unusual for a feminist—may have had something to do with the seclusion of her life and a reputation for sexual modesty.