SOURCE: An introduction to The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance: Facsimile Reproductions, by Guillaume Alexis, Sir Thomas Bird, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1980, pp. v-xiii.

In the following excerpt, Bornstein discusses The Nobility of the Feminine Sex, concluding that it is "an eloquent plea for the education and liberation of women."

[Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus was written] in 1509, [and] it was dedicated to Margaret of Austria to win her favor. Agrippa did not have a chance to present the treatise to Margaret and did not publish it until almost twenty years later. He had to leave the University of Dôle, where he had been lecturing, because of an attack on the orthodoxy of his lectures by Jean Catilinet, provincial superior of the Franciscans in Burgundy. Agrippa was deeply involved in cabalistic studies and had a reputation as a magician. He served as...