SOURCE: "The Early Tudor Controversy," in Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620, University of Illinois Press, 1984, pp. 18-48.

Woodbridge comments on The Nobility of the Feminine Sex in the context of the early Tudor debate about women. She notes that in "sensing the [debate's ultimate irrelevance to women's struggles, [Agrippa] stood virtually alone."]

When the great Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, scholar of international reputation, theorist of magic, at once humanist and critic of humanist pursuits, undertook a defense of women, something out of the ordinary was to be expected. It is true that his defense, De nobilitate et praecellentia Foemenei sexus, called in Clapham's 1542 translation A Treatise of the Nobilitie and excellencye of woman kynde, is more generously endowed than any other early Renaissance defense with tedious lists of great women in biblical and classical history: women who inspired the love...