 Women and men might then be different with respect to the idea and purpose (the formal and final causes) in the mind of God, but they are not different with respect to the efficient cause that brings them into being—God himself. Marinella’s discussion of the fourth kind of cause, the material cause, forms an important part of her argument, in which she makes a number of distinct points about the body as material cause of the ensouled being. She believes women are better than men with respect to the material cause, first citing an argument made by Christine de Pizan and restated by Agrippa: because woman was created from the rib of man, and man was already an ensouled being, and hence a living being, the material cause of woman is better than that of man, who was made from earth, which is lifeless  matter.[2]  This argument depends on the implicit premise that ensouled beings are superior to inanimate beings, but that was a view of the hierarchy of being current since antiquity, and so one that Marinella believes herself entitled to use. This is only the first demonstration of the superiority of women’s bodies to men; Marinella has quite a lot to add on the subject of the material or bodily superiority of women (discussed in  Section 5 below),  insofar as that superiority is a sign or mark of a better soul.