ABSTRACT
During the italian renaissance humanist teachers guided and encouraged an increase in secular learning among the middle and upper classes. Most of their students were men. A few were women. In commenting upon this fact, some scholars have argued that those Renaissance women who were educated received an education equal to that of men and—explicitly or implicitly—may be considered on that account to have achieved equality with them. The Veronese noblewoman Isotta Nogarola, who in her youth had been the pupil of a pupil of one of northern Italy's greatest humanists, recognized as she approached maturity that there was no way in which she, like the learned young men of her generation, could pursue her humanist studies professionally or even receive due recognition for her intellectual achievements. The attitudes of male humanists and the general male public thus combined to impede Isotta in her pursuit of a humanist career.
