ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the views of four women from the Renaissance and early modern period – Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Marie de Gournay, and Marguerite Buffet – on equality and sexual difference. Fonte, Marinella, de Gournay, and Buffet were writing in the context of the querelle des femmes, a debate about the nature and worth of women spanning several hundred years (about 1400–1700). The chapter aims to show that (i) the rational soul was the basis of nobility or dignity which gave women a claim to equality with men, (ii) that most feminists who argued for the importance of differences between the sexes believed those differences had their source in the body, but at least one (Marinella) thought there were also differences in the degree of nobility of the soul, (iii) the differences in question were believed by many to affect the quality of intellectual and moral activities, and hence to affect the equality of the sexes and yet (iv) some authors argued for putting aside any discussion of physical differences between the sexes on the grounds that they did not affect the rational soul.
