ABSTRACT
In the course of their work, women humanists made numerous contributions to Renaissance thought, but in the aggregate their most innovative contributions centered on arguments for the intellectual equality of the sexes. The pan-European querelle des femmes (debate on women), within which we find a substantive proportion of women humanists' literary production, attracted numerous male writers. Women's literary work, together with that of their male supporters and colleagues, threw Aristotelian misogyny some distance from Renaissance Europe's principal train of thought. Especially in the Physics and Generation of Animals, Aristotle situated the female consistently on the negative side of his characteristic binaries. On balance, before the advent of girls' schools with classical curricula, the most reliable site for women's advanced education remained the household. And contemporary observers viewed the household academy as at least equivalent to institutional schooling. The contributions of women humanists exhibit the same diversity as those of their male counterparts.
