There is a tradition of misogynist scholarship which traces continuously from Ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. Legal, medical, philosophical, and theological arguements promoted the idea that women were inferior to men, and this was sincerely believed by many educated people. Yet this scholar pictured here — Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (1496-1535) — stood in refreshing contrast to many. “No one who is not utterly blind can fail to see that God gathered all the beauty of which the whole world is capable of in woman,” wrote Agrippa in his 1529 publication _On the Nobility and Pre-eminence of the Female Sex_. In that work, he built a formal arguement using Classical and scriptural sources, concluding that women were in fact superior to men. Although he might not have seriously hoped to change social institutions, the work was an important about-face against many misogynist writings.
Agrippa was unafraid to take unusual positions. Born in Germany, he worked for a variety of institutions and patrons, changing hands with the vicissitudes of fate. For instance, he was a lecturer at the University of Dole, but resigned after getting into trouble for defending a woman accused of witchcraft. He also wrote extensively on the occult, which also brought trouble with various authorities. Working as a scholar (in fact, he was an instructor of the anti-witch-trial advocate Johann Weyer whom I wrote about a few days ago), physician, philosopher, and even soldier, Agrippa embodied many of the Humanist characteristics of the Northern Renaissance of his day.
