And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, All About Eve, the Defense of Women.

In the previous episode, I talked about the way that humanists used their rhetorical skill to write

showpiece letters with plenty of style but not much substance.

But of course, they did write about substantive questions sometimes.

We've seen plenty of examples already.

Dialogues about ethics, treatises on the shortcomings of scholastic philosophy, meditations on the history of the Latin language itself.

Another conventional topic within humanist literature was the virtue of women, or lack thereof.

Actually, this genre of writing goes well back into the medieval age, as we saw in episode

293. Misogenous texts like the Romance of the Rose elicited defenses of women from the likes of Jean Le Verbr.

Back in the 12th century, Peter Abilard had already stood up for the virtue in honor of women.

This could be a rhetorical exercise, as is shown by the still earlier case of Mabelle-Davran, who wrote two poems on the

issue, one attacking women and one praising them.

Most influential among Italian authors of the Renaissance was probably Boccaccio, thanks to his

work on famous women, written in 1361. He helped inspire such works as In Praise of Women by

Bartolomeo Godjo and Christine de Pezans City of Ladies, which mentions Boccaccio explicitly.

When you look through catalogs of virtuous women, you see why it was a genre that would appeal

to Renaissance humanists.

They could show off their learning by recounting anecdotes about figures from the ancient world and from religious history.

Under the latter heading, one of the most frequent names that arises is an African one,

Nikola, also known as the Queen of Sheba.

Occasionally, authors also take pride in the excellence of more recent ladies from the

...