For nearly 200 hundred years before Marinella started writing, Italy had been engaged in the same debate that first-graders everywhere have on the playground. Who's better? Men or women? When Marinella wrote her Nobility, she was responding to a pretty brutal criticism against women called The Defects of Women, a book that re-popularized ancient patriarchal arguments about how women were inherently morally flawed, while men were not.
Marinella's treatise is her way of saying, "Okay wait, if one of the genders is superior, it's certainly not men." She starts by rescuing the reputation of women by giving them a chance to celebrate how noble the female life is and beautiful and powerful women are.
Then she turns to say her piece to the men of her day. Why are men so brutish and competitive? Why do they always seem like they have something to prove? Why is everything about power to them? Why are they so angry and violent? It's because they have an inferiority complex, unable to cope with the obvious truth that men are the weaker sex.
This treatise is a humorous and facetious attack is a slap in the face to misogynists. Although it's playful, it's intended to be confrontational so that it can spark social dialogue.
