Lucrezia Marinella

Lucrezia Marinella (1571 to 1653) was a poet, writer, philosopher and women's rights advocate from the Republic of Venice. The daughter of the physician and natural philosopher Giovanni Marinelli, she married the physician Girolamo Vacca and lived in seclusion while publishing widely. She is best known for The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600), a polemical treatise that answered misogynist writers and challenged Aristotelian claims that women are inferior because of their humoral temperaments, though she still drew on Aristotle in her other arguments. Her works have been noted for bringing women into the philosophical and scientific community of the late Renaissance. She died in Venice of quartan fever in 1653.