The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto Series Excellence and Nobility of Women

The first published defense of women by a Netherlandish author. Jehan Baptista Houwaert’s Excellence and Nobility of Women constitutes the eighth book of his Plain of the Nine Muses, or The Pleasure Garden of Virtuous Women (1582–1583), an immense conduct book for women in rhymed verse based on the many querelle texts of the French and Burgundian tradition but especially, in its French translation, on the pathbreaking Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (1529) by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Like its model, Houwaert’s work asserts not merely the equality but the superiority of women. It is unique in that it is addressed not to a wealthy noblewoman or princess, as were most such defenses, but more democratically to the “girls, unmarried women, wives, and widows of Belgica”—all of them!