 Marinella’s central claim in The Nobility is, “…that the female sex is nobler and more excellent than the male,” (1601b, 39). More precisely, she says that she will show “…that they [women] surpass men in the nobility of their names, causes, nature, operations and the things men say about them,” (41). That names might indicate something about the things to which they refer was a commonplace of the Renaissance, with origins in the interpretation of Plato’s Cratylus. The causes of a phenomenon were similarly taken to indicate something important of the phenomenon itself—better causes producing better effects. The “nature” of woman Marinella shows to be, on the one hand, a nature shared with men and, on the other, a distinct nature; as the formal cause of a substance, the nature determines the worth of that substance. The “operations” of women are the things they are able to do insofar as they are ensouled beings rather than inanimate objects. Since Marinella argues that women have better souls than men, she takes as evidence for this the superior merit of the activities that they perform with the soul. Finally, Marinella’s objective to demonstrate that men themselves make evident the superiority of women (by means of “the things they say about women”) represents her most important strategy: to take the evidence usually adduced by men to demonstrate the inferiority of women, and reveal through interpretation that in fact it demonstrates the superiority of women.