Then comments:
      "Given impetus by these seductive and widely read works, the "defense of women" began to crystallize into a well-defined genre, with an established repertoire of arguments, authorities, and examples. It was an extremely popular one: one recent bibliography, which limits itself to Italian sources, lists around fifty texts in the century fro 1524 to 1632, from brief polemical broadsides to vast, heavily documented tomes.

      Moderata Fonte was clearly well acquainted with the humanistic tradition of defenses of women, and readers of Castiglione or Agrippa will find much that is familiar here. Many of the key topics discussed in the first book of The Worth of Women - the balance of biological and cultural factors in determining gender roles, the role of literature and history in perpetuating misogynistic values, the relative dignity and relative guilt of Adam and Eve -were eminently well established in the "defense" tradition, while the long list of classical exempla of notable women that occupies a substantial portion of the first book draws heavily on the accumulated findings of two centuries of humanistic research. Despite these fairly substantial debts, however, it would be misleading to portray Fonte's dialogue as in any way a typical product of the genre of defenses of women; indeed, when a comparison is made with a work like Lucrezia Marinella's On the Nobility and Excellence of Women (1600), The Worth of Women's relation to the formal tradition of "defenses" is revealed as distinctly semidetached. Marinella's treatise, written in response to a misogynistic tract, Giuseppe Passi's The Defects of Women operates consciously within the boundaries of a well-defined polemical context. Sources and authorities are cited and academic conventions of argument respected; even the title, a popular choice with "defenders of women" from Agrippa onward, announces the work's adherence to an established tradition of debate. The Worth of Women is quite different in this respect. The dialogue does draw extensively on the tradition of "defenses", as has been noted, and Fonte shows an awareness that her work is likely to be read within this polemical context. She makes only the most indirect attempts to engage with contemporary academic debate on the subject, however, and occasionally her speaker's comments even appear to betray a certain skepticism about the utility of the debate as it was conventionally conducted. "Men should be told of these examples," exclaims one speaker, interrupting a list of historical evidence of women's virtues and achievements. "They already know all about them," her interlocutor replies, "They just like to pretend that they don't" (p. 111).

      A degree of caution seems advisable, then, when assessing The Worth of Women's relation to the preceding tradition of defenses of women: there are fidelities to, but also departures from, the established conventions of the genre. Perhaps the best way of gauging Fonte's distance from the tradition is to point to the shift in emphasis in her dialogue away from a concern with demonstrating the "nobility and excellence" of women (although this is still a vital part of her argument) to a concern with the concrete consequences for women of men's failure to recognize their worth. As will be clear from my summary of her work, the question of women's equality with men is dispatched in a fairly perfunctory manner at the beginning of Day 1, while most of the remainder of the work is taken up by a litany of complaints about men's cruelty to women, followed by a semi-serious search for a cure. At the end of the work, one of the main speakers, Leonora, expresses her hopes that her arguments may have "converted" some men from their wrongful conviction of their superiority to women. But she makes it clear that her concern is not so much with simply establishing the truth for its own sake as with improving the lot of the "many suffering women" she sees al around her- suffering, precisely, as a result of their menfolk's conviction of their own superiority, which leads them to consider themselves justified in resorting to "any sort of tyranny and cruelty" (pp. 258-59)

      Of course, Fonte was not the first "defender of women" to make a connection between misogynist cultural assumptions and concrete social abuses. She is, however, unusual, if not unique, in the insistence and conviction with which she makes these connections. Thus we learn in the dialogue not only of women's exclusion from education (a frequent complaint among humanist "defenders of women") and of the various sufferings visited by husbands on their wives (a common theme among at least the more enlightened writers on marriage), but also of less frequently addressed abuses, from the number of women left without dowries as a result of male relatives' thoughtlessness or greed (p. 63), to men's hypocrisy in censoring women's "provocative" dress rather than acknowledging their own lechery (p. 236), to - most surprising of all, perhaps, especially in the work of a "respectable" married woman - male society's hypocritical condemnation of the rapacity and shamelessness of prostitutes, when many of them have in fact been forced into the trade after being seduced and abandoned by men (pp. 88-89)." page 13-15

Castiglione, Baldassare, (1994) The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), edited by Virginia Cox, London, Everyman

Elyot, Thomas (1980) Defense of Good Women: The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance edited by Diane Bornstein, Facsimile Reproductions. New York: Delmar

King, Margaret (1991) Women of the Renaissance, foreword by Catherine R. Stimpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Labalme, Patricia H. (1980) "Women's Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case." In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme, 129-52, New York: New York University Press

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