[Woodbridge comments on The Nobility of the Feminine Sex in the context of the early Tudor debate about women. She notes that in "sensing the [debate's] ultimate irrelevance to women's struggles, [Agrippa] stood virtually alone."]

When the great Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, scholar of international reputation, theorist of magic, at once humanist and critic of humanist pursuits, undertook a defense of women, something out of the ordinary was to be expected. It is true that his defense, De nobilitate et praecellentia Foemenei sexus, called in Clapham's 1542 translation A Treatise of the Nobilitie and excellencye of woman kynde, is more generously endowed than any other early Renaissance defense with tedious lists of great women in biblical and classical history: women who inspired the love of Greek gods, beautiful women in the Bible, good wives of the Bible and the classics, great female names in religion, philosophy (Diotima et at), prophecy (the Sybils et at), oratory and poetry (Sappho et at), government (Semiramis, Dido, the Amazons), warfare, invention, and even—an Agrippan touch—magic. (Circe and Medea are, eccentrically, praised as better magicians than the male Zoroaster.) The Virgin puts in her statutory appearance, along with the women to whom Christ first showed himself after the resurrection, who serve as a contrast to the all male cast of malefactors involved in his trial and crucifixion. And Agrippa promotes a view of parents that cannot help striking the modern reader as painfully unfair to both sexes: the "chiefest offyce and duetye of woman," he declares (now ignoring Sappho, the Amazons, and the rest) "is to conceyue" in the course of defending childrearing as a worthy occupation, Agrippa avers that fathers have little influence on children, that mothers love children more than fathers do because they correctly perceive that children have "more of theyr mothers substance, than of theyr fathers" and that children love their mothers more than their fathers. He furthers stereotype by noting that women are more pitying and merciful than men: women, to whom milk is given, are nourishers by nature. (Woman's milk as a symbol of her gentle, nurturing qualities was a commonplace; Shakespeare twice employs it in ironic reversal: two of his least nurturing female characters, Goneril and Lady Macbeth, accuse their husbands of "milky gentleness" and of being "too full o' the milk of human kindness.")

But if Agrippa's treatise is predictable in these particulars, it is predictable in no others. His initial flat statement of the complete spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes sparkles in an age when other defenders contended themselves mainly with shaming the unchivalrousness of detractors. Dismissing physical differences between the sexes as negligible, Agrippa announces a credo: "The woman hathe that same mynd that a man hath, that same reason and speche, she gothe to the same ende of blysfulnes…. Betwene man and woman by substance of the soule, one hath no higher preemynence of nobylytye aboue the other, but both of them naturally haue equall libertie of dignitie and worthynesse." This, however unorthodox, is nothing to what follows: the rest of the essay argues the superiority of women in every area except equality of divine substance. The arguments Agrippa marshalls in support of this amazing thesis are ingenious if not outrageous: many have that bright casuistical flair that characterizes the work of Neoplatonists; a few are almost certainly tonguein-cheek.

On the sticky problem of our first mother, Agrippa expends a good deal of ingenuity. Eve was God's last and hence highest creation (since God was clearly working his way up the Great Chain of Being); she was made of nobler material, formed, unlike Adam, of animate substance. In explaining away Eve's part in the unpleasantness of the apple, Agrippa with a lawyer's mind locates a loophole: God forbade eating the fruit before Eve's creation; the stricture therefore did not apply to her. God deliberately declined to deny the fruit to Eve; he wished her, as a superior being, to be free of the rules governing the inferior Adam: "For god wolde [i. e., willed] her to be fre[e] from the begynning. Therefore the manne sinned in eatynyge, not the woman. And all we synned in Adam, not in Eva." This astonishing, thoroughly heretical, and perfectly delightful theory is not persuasive, and Agrippa must have known it was not. Although it is true that Adam is warned away from the fruit before Eve's creation, Eve demonstrates in her conversation with the serpent that she has been informed of the rules: "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." Eve clearly believes that "ye" includes herself, and since she does die, there is no doubt that God intended her to be included. Although Agrippa tries to buttress his argument by maintaining that "the man knew well he dyd amisse; but the woman being deceyued, erred ignorantly," he accomplishes no more than to render gullible his supposed superior creature. The argument remains the purest sophistry. Considering that Agrippa's argument has no smaller effect than to recreate Woman as a separate species, exempt from original sin, it is difficult to believe that his intention was other than to amuse his readers with the joy of outrageous ingenuity exercised for its own sake. Among all the defenses of Eve, it remains my personal favorite; but I cannot believe it was meant to be taken seriously.

No more can one take seriously Agrippa's treatment of the ghastly Old Testament episodes where God commands the victorious Israelites to kill all male captives and keep the women as prizes; Agrippa considers this evidence of the excellency of womankind! And then there is hair. Agrippa's contention that women are given long hair for modesty's sake was a commonplace: it went along with the argument that women's privy parts are more privy than men's; women are more modest than men by nature. What smacks of ingenuity for its own sake is the treatment of baldness and beards: first, women are superior because they do not go bald, baldness being an affront to human dignity by spoiling the appearance of that seat of reason, the head; second (diametrically opposed to the baldness argument), men are inferior because they possess beards: excessive hairiness reduces a human being to the animal level. The manifest absurdity of these arguments, particularly when taken together, militates against serious intent.

Human physicality calls forth more logical curiosities: women are cleaner than men (Agrippa claims that men dirty the bathwater more), and women are finer because it is worthier to void "superfluous humours" by "secrete partes" than by the face, "the moste worthy part of a mannes body." (This somewhat obscure remark seems to mean that menstruation is less disgusting than spitting.)

One of Agrippa's pleasantest moments is his defense of that universally-rued vice of womankind, talkativeness. "And is not a womãn better spoke, more eloquent, more copious and plentyfull of wordes than a man?" he unblushingly inquires, no doubt fully cognizant of the chagrined agreement to be expected from most readers. His defense is humanistic: "Is it not right faire and commendable, that women shulde excelle men in that thing, in whiche men chiefly passe all other beastes?" The argument is far from unreasonable: it is a logical extension of the humanist glorification of speech as a distinctive attribute of humankind; but it must have struck contemporaries, accustomed to satiric diatribes on women's irrepressible prattling, as perverse. Again, the argument is almost certainly facetious.

The real shock is Agrippa's contention that, given women's superiority, Christ as God would surely have descended to earth in female form had it not been necessary to exhibit humility, since the sin he had come to expiate was pride: "He toke vpon hym manhode, as the more humble and lower kynde, and not womankynde, the more hygher and noble." One can imagine clergymen fainting in their studies upon reading such a passage. And if one were not already convinced that Agrippa's tongue is planted firmly in his cheek, one could be left in very little doubt after encountering those venerable biblical bogey-women, Delilah, Lot's daughters, and Job's wife, now metamorphosed into examples of the superior power of womankind. When all this is capped with fantastic natural history (all eagles and the phoenix are female, all basilisks are male) one feels that here is no more than a rival "iest."

A later translator, Henry Care, who in 1670 refurbished this work as a rejoinder to a recent work listing women's imperfections alphabetically, took it as an elaborate jest, placing it in the classical tradition (revived in the Renaissance) of rhetorical paradox. The translator's preface suggests that the piece might gain pardon if not applause in an age of extravagant opinions and wild conceits; it is no worse than the paradoxical praises of tyranny, injustice, ugliness, and folly (here he names Erasmus's The Praise of Folly) which have gone before. Agrippa wrote it, Care suggests, for love of perversity: he enjoyed "stemming the impetuous Tide of popular opinion," as witness The Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, Agrippa's attack on humanist learning.

I see nothing in Agrippa's essay to preclude its being a rhetorical paradox. Agrippa called the work an oration. In form it is close to an epideictic oration, though an occasional foray into refutatio brings it closer at times to the more typical judicial oration. But Agrippa's use of this god-praising oration for that which is seldom praised, his outrageous arguments, his main thesis that flies in the face of received opinion, would seem to establish the work as rhetorical paradox. It is similar in kind to Montaigne's Apology of Raymond Sebonde, that trenchant argument for the superiority of animals to mankind that George Boas has discussed as part of the paradox tradition [in his The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeeth Century]. Such a view gains strength, if anything, from the pains Agrippa takes to deny that his arguments are sophistical: this seems a hint to the reader to view the work in a certain light. But Henry Care is unjust in assuming that the paradox's motive is love of perversity, its main purpose wit for its own sake. Paradoxical literature from Montaigne's Apology to Erasmus's The Praise of Folly exhibits serious intent: the need for such outlandish arguments to maintain an extreme opinion is meant to reflect on the outlandishness of argument that would be necessary to maintain the opposite extreme. Montaigne's argument for animal superiority undermines extravagant humanist claims for the superiority of mankind, while Erasmus's panegyrics to folly call into question the age's complacent reliance on the wisdom of this world. The rhetorical paradox is an overcorrection, pointing up the untenable nature of one extreme position by demonstrating the feasibility of arguing its opposite. Paradox is not like the mock-heroic mode, where the inadequacies of the subject are exposed by the inflated terms in which it is celebrated; Agrippa's hyperbolic praise of women is not an ironic vehicle for laying bare the sex's unworthiness but a graphic demonstration of the absurdities one must resort to if one claims superiority for either sex.

Like the sonnet, paradoxical works contain a volta, a point at which the author takes leave of outlandish argument and outrageous example and quietly asserts the mean between extremes that must represent the attitude of the reasonable thinker. Montaigne leaves behind tales of enamored elephants and soberly objects to human presumption; Erasmus's lively and ironic enumeration of human follies yields to devout reflections on the foolishness of mankind and the wisdom of God. And Agrippa, as if his ingenuity had reached its outer limit with the eagles, phoenix, and basilisks, turns sober and begins arguing straightforwardly what was always the real issue—the case for equality.

Agrippa now decries the double standard of sexual morality, argues that women's evil has been overestimated because most writers are male, and reminds the reader (with a near-anthropological modernity) that women's social and political inferiority in contemporary Europe is not based on natural law and has not, at other times and in other cultures, invariably obtained. He recalls marital equality in ancient Rome, Roman legal guarantees for joint ownership and disposal of marital property and for wives' right of inheritance; he notes ancient arguments for women's equality and rights, citing Lycurgus and Plato. Adducing other cultures where women had more rights than they now have—the Cantabrians, Scythians, Thracians—he observes, "That is nowe forbydden by lawes, abolished by custome, extincted by education. For anon as a woman is borne euen from her infancy, she is kept at home in ydelnes, & as thoughe she were vnmete for any hygher busynesse, she is p[er]mitted to know no farther, than her nedle and her threede." Women are forbidden to hold office, plead a case at law, be guardians or tutors, preach God's word (here he notes women preachers in the Bible). In his ringing conclusion, Agrippa stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries as a realist in the study of sexual politics. Controversialists seldom went farther than to judge women good or bad by the degree of their conformity to a code of behavior seen as part of the natural order. Agrippa questioned the existence of "natural" order, viewing women's condition as a product of forces less natural than cultural: "And thus by these lawes, the women being subdewed as it were by force of armes, are constrained to giue place to men, and to obeye theyr subdewers, not by no naturall, no diuyne necessitie or reason, but by custome, education, fortune, and a certayne Tyrannicall occasion." In the light of this statement, Agrippa's lists of great women in history take on new meaning: women have done more in the past than they are doing now, because contemporary society denies them the education and the legal rights they must have to perform what they are capable of. Not content with praising or blaming Woman as she now exists, Agrippa suggests reasons for the actual inferiority of so potentially excellent a creature. His initial coy disavowal of sophistry contrasts strikingly with the gravity of his final affirmation: "For neyther Ambition, nor the cause of myne own commendation, but my dutie and the very truthe moued me to wryte." The serious turn the work has taken, and the accuracy of his social analysis, incline me to believe him.

When Agrippa recognizes the opposition, he does not characterize it as misogynistic insult and jesting detraction: "There be somme men," he tells us, "whyche by relygion, clayme authoritie ouer women, and they proue theyr tyranny by holy scripture." The enemy, Agrippa sees, is not the misogynist but the male supremacist. The distinction is crucial: many men who have loved women have been male supremacists; open misogyny has always been less difficult for women to deal with than has wellintentioned paternalism of the sort in which defenders themselves indulged. The formal controversy's potential usefulness was undermined by the way defenders of women persistently depicted literary misogyny, "malicious detraction," as the major obstacle to women's happiness. Agrippa could play the literary game as well as any—better than most; but in sensing the game's ultimate irrelevance to women's struggles for freedom and dignity, he stood virtually alone. He saw that women suffer less from literary insults than from being "constrained to give place to men, and to obeye theyr subdewers."

The rhetorical paradox is itself a kind of jest—an intricate and exquisite jest, preëminently vulnerable to misinterpretation. Agrippa's feminist use of this mode reminds us that while composition of a defense is no guarantee of true authorial concern about the woman question, neither does literary sophistication evidence lack of such concern. One sometimes senses authorial "sincerity" in controversialist works, as I do with Agrippa; such impressions may frequently be wrong. But whatever the author's personal attitude toward women, it remains clear that the formal controversy, for all its preoccupation with stylistic finesse, could occasionally produce a thinker capable of laying philosophic foundations for modern feminism….