"Are Women Human?

"-The Debate of 1595 between Valens Acidalius and Simon Gediccus

Author(s): Manfred P. Fleischer
Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 107-120
Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal
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The Sixteenth Century Journal
XII, No. 2 (1981)

"Are Women Human?"-The Debate of 1595 Between

Valens Acidalius and Simon Gediccus

Manfred P. Fleischer
University of California, Davis

In early 1595 there appeared anonymously in central Germany a

Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non esse. ' As a
whole, the Disputatio professed to be a satirical mimicry of the Anabap-
tists', i.e., the Socinians' alleged practice of Biblical exegesis. Thesis 1
referred to the situation in Sarmatia (Poland), where the Disputatio
probably had originated, because for a few decades after the Pax
dissidentium (1573) any religious opinion could be expressed there. If some
of the dissenters in Poland, the author contended, could believe on the basis
of the Bible that Christ, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit were not
divine, he was free to conclude, also according to Scripture, that women
were not human (thesis 4). In the Bible, Christ is often called God, and yet
the Anabaptists denied his divinity. Instead, they believed in the humanity
of women,2 although the Bible said nothing about that (thesis 5).
The most outrageous thesis was probably the ninth: During
procreation, man was the causa efficiens; woman, merely the causa in-
strumentalis. If a smith forged a sword with the help of a hammer, the
hammer remained his tool. It did not become a member of his body. By the
same token, woman did not become part of mankind when man used her to
perpetuate the human race. Furthermore, the word homo came from

*Portions of this paper were read at the U. C. Davis Renaissance Colloquium on February 22,
1979, and the Northern California Renaissance Conference at U.C. Berkeley on May 12, 1979.
The final version has benefitted from the thoughtful responses of these learned assemblies.

'The author used a microfilm of the extremely rare editio princeps from the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek in Munich.
2This did not mean that the writer of the Disputatio considered the Anabaptists
philogynists. In thesis 49,he stated the Anabaptists themselves admitted that women had no
souls." In thesis 43, he quoted Bernardino Ochino, the "coryphaeus of the Anabaptists," to the
effect that women did not rejoice when they gave birth to a daughter, only when "a man is
born into the world" (John 16:21). At the end of such negative outside impressions concerning
the Socinians' beliefs about the status of women stands an observation by Matthias Georg
Schroeder, De Misogynia Eruditorm (1717), in Selectorum Litterariorum Pentas Continens
Dissertationes Historico-Morales (Leipzig: Andr. Mart. Schedii Haeredes, 1730), p. 21, accor-
ding to which the Socinians denied that Eve had been created in the image of God, so that their
followers tended to count women among the animals.

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108 The Sixteenth Century Journal

humus, the stuff out of which only man was made. Woman was merely
formed from a rib of man. Because she was not originally created from
humus, she could not be human (thesis 19). The genealogical tables in the
Bible mentioned only men. The author conceded that St. Mary was a
human being, but not by nature, only through grace, just as her son, ac-
cording to the Anabaptists, was not God by nature, but through grace
(thesis 39).
From their non-human nature women even derived some benefits.
According to thesis 14, only Adam, not Eve had sinned, because the
Apostle said, ". . . by one man sin entered into the world." If Eve had
sinned, too, we would have needed two redeemers. Neither sinlessness, nor
faith, however, insured women's salvation. Although there were instances
of female baptism in the Book of Acts, this did not prove women were
human, nor in need of such salvation, because in the Catholic church bells
and buildings were being baptized, too (theses 46 and 47).
Nowhere did the 51 theses state what women actually were, although
theses 21 to 23 linked them in passing with dogs and demons (during a
discussion of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and the Gadarene swine). But in
general, the theses only pretended to be unable to find any Biblical evidence
for the humanity of women. The author was willing to forego his warranted
conclusions, if the Anabaptists, as he called the Socinians, would give up
their unbiblical objections to the divinity of Christ (thesis 51).
Whatever the original intent or overall thrust of the 51 theses may have
been, at its places of publication, presumably the Saxon cities of Leipzig and
Zerbst, the Disputatio was not aimed at the Socinians, because too few of
them were around. In keeping with its anticipated audience appeal,
however, the Disputatio immediately aroused a storm of controversy over
its catchphrase that women were not human. This headline was countered
at once by Simon Gediccus with a broadside entitled Defensio sexus
muliebris, which had been finished in Halle on February 10, 1595.3
Gediccus' rebuttal was seconded by the theological faculties of Wittenberg
and Leipzig. In public pronouncements the professors warned their students
and the young that the mere thought women were not human was poison to
the mind, and Lutheran preachers denounced the Disputatio accordingly.
The last academic trial of its leading question would be held at Wittenberg
as late as 1688.4 Back in 1595 the publisher of the pamphlet, Heinrich
3The full title was Defensio Sexus Muliebris, Opposita futilissimae disputationi recens
editae, qua suppresso Authoris & Typographi nomine blaspheme contenditur, MULIERES
HOMINES NON ESSE. See Disputatio Perjucunda, Qua Anonymus probare nititur Mulieres
Homines non esse: Cui opposita est Simonis Gedicci Sacros. Theologiae Doctoris Defensio
Sexus Muliebris, Qua singula Anonymi argumenta, distinctis Thesibus proposita, viriliter
enervantur (Hagae Comitis: I. Burchhornius, 1644), where both the Disputatio (pp. 3-63) and
the Defensio (pp.67-191) have been verbatim reprinted. The author used a microfilm of this
edition from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.
4See Valentin Heinrich Schmidt, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens Acidalius; besonders ueber
seinen Antheil an der Schrift eines Ungenannten, dass die Weiber keine Menschen sind," in
Friedrich Bucholz, ed., Journal fuir Deutschland historisch-politischen Inhalts, XIII (Berlin:
Enslin, 1819), 141.

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 109 "Are Women Human?" Debate

Osthausen, was subpoened and testified that the manuscript had been sent
to him by Valens Acidalius.5
From then on Acidalius would be associated with the Disputatio, at
least on the author cards of rare book collections. In an inventory of the
Bibliotheca erotica et curiosa in Munich, for instance, the name of Acidalius
figures first, before the Archives of Priapus.6 Both separately and together
with the Defensio, the Disputatio was re-issued time and again. There were
at least four or five printings of the original pamphlet.7 It appeared under
the title Disputatio periucunda, together with the Defensio, in The Hague in
1638, and was reprinted there in 1641 and 1644.8 A twelfth editon of this
combined feature came out in Paris in 1693.9 In 1744 Anne-Gabriel
Meusnier de Querlon, a tireless translator of the classics, published a French
version of the Disputatio in Amsterdam. '? An annotated French edition of
both the Disputatio and Defensio finally appeared in Paris in 1766. "
But the exchange between Acidalius and Gediccus did not only stay in
print for 174 years. It also was widely imitated and plagiarized. An im-
pudent student at the University of Cologne tried to repeat the arguments of
the Disputatio before an audience of outraged mothers, who are supposed
to have beaten him to death with the chairs on which they had been sitting.
This cruel and unusual punishment was declared just and deserved by an
expert on criminal court procedures, the Tibingen professor Johann
Harprecht (d. 1639).'2 By 1639, the dispute had "passed from the schools
into the conversations of the best companies" in Holland, where the
physician John Beverovicius (1594-1647) wrote another Defensio sexus
muliebris in which he 'verified by a thousand examples, that women were
not inferior to men in any qualities, either of mind or body."'3
5See especially the article on Acidalius in Pierre Des Maizeaux, trans. and ed., The Dic-
tionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 2nd ed., Vol. I (London: Knapton, 1734), p.
89. For the original article, see Dictionaire Historique et Critique de Pierre Bayle (Paris:
Desoer, 1820), I, 174-177.
6See Hugo Hayn, ed., Bibliotheca erotica et curiosa Monacensis (Berlin: Harrwitz, 1889),
penultimate page of unpaginated preface.
7See Schmidt, "Ueberden KritikerValens Acidalius," p. 128.
8See Hayn, Bibliotheca erotica et curiosa Monacensis, pp. 1 f. 9See Schmidt, p. 128.
'0Underthe title, Problemes sur les femmes, printed by la Compagnie.
"Translated and edited by the physician Charles Clapies (1724-1801) of Allais under the
title, Paradoxe sur les femmes, ozu l'on tache de prouver qu'elles ne sont pas de l'espece
humaine, and pretended to have been published a Cracovie.
I2See Georg Christian Lehms, Teutschlands Galante Poetinnen ... (Frankfurta.M., 1715;
reprinted Darmstadt: Bldschke, 1966), between "b3"and "b4."
"3Quotedfrom the article on Gediccus in Des Maizeaux, The Dictionary Historical and
Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 2nd ed., III (London: Knapton, 1736), 144. For the original article
on Gediccus, see Dictionnaire Historique et Critique de Pierre Bayle, VII, 46-50. The mental
and physical superiority of women over men had been maintained, not without ulterior
motives, by Agrippa of Nettesheim in his Oratio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus
(ca. 1510), published (with other works) in Cologne 1532, and then in various languages at
least as often and as long as the Disputatio. Agrippa's Oratio is supposed to have been put on
public record during the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603) in order to help in the
justification of her rule. The Queen also seems to have taken notice of the Disputatio. See Des
Maizeaux, III, 144.

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110 The Sixteenth Century Journal

About the same time, a translation or adaptation of the Disputatio ap-

peared in Italy under the title, Che le donne non siano delta specie
degl'huomini: Discorso piacevole, tradotto da Horatio Plata, Romano. This
pasquil was put on the Index in June 1651.'4 In spite of Rome's disapproval,
the dispute was popularized in Germany in Catholic disguise, perhaps by a
Protestant plagiarist who published anonymously in 1672 a Grind-und pro-
bierliche Beschreibung, Argument und Schluss-Articul, samt beigefiigten
Beantwortungen der Frage: ob die Weiber Menschen seyen oder nicht. In
this version, a Benedictine called Weiberfeind repeated the arguments at-
tributed to Acidalius while a Jesuit named Weiberfreund took the stand of
Gediccus. Here, too, the whole exchange was meant to be as the Latin edi-
tion or the Italian translation, a delightful Dialogue, Ein lustiges Gesprfich.'
Whether the effect was infuriating or amusing, the Disputatio and the
Defensio aroused enough interest to stay in print for one and three quarters
of a century. In order to be able to appreciate this protracted debate as a
denouement of Renaissance men's attitudes towards female participation in
the academic enterprise, let us introduce the speakers and inspect the
cultural corridors which echoed their opinions as well as the scholarly tradi-
tions they represented.
Valens Acidalius (1567-1595) "would have been one of the best of the
modern critics, if a longer life had permitted him to bring the talents he had
received from nature to perfection," as Pierre Bayle put it. 16 He also was
ranked among the outstanding physicians of all times.'7 Justus Lipsius, the
Erasmus of the second half of the sixteenth century, argued in 1594 that
Acidalius would become the "gem of Germany," if he lived long enough,
and the Frenchscholar and statesman Jacob Thuanus (1553-1617) called him
an "adolescent of the highest promise and erudition."8 The works which
Acidalius left behind, completely different in style from the Disputatio,
largely fulfilled the prophecy by Lipsius.'9 Adrian Baillet counted Acidalius
in 1688 among the child prodigies of poetry and scholarship.2oBesides these
abiding acclaims, based on his emendation of Velleius Paterculus, Quintus

"See ibid.
"See Schmidt, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens Acidalius," p. 136.
6Des Maizeaux, I, 88.
"7SeeHaberling-Hiubotter-Vierordt, eds., Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden
Arzte aller Zeiten und Volker, 1 (2nd ed., 1929), 17. Acidalius was also included at length in
the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, I (1875), 31-33, and Neue Deutsche Biographie, 1 (1953),
34.
"8SeeTh. Odebrecht, "Zur Erinnerung an den Markischen Dichter Valens Acidalius,"
Markische Forschungen, 7 (1861), 214.
"9Onthe literary aftereffects of Acidalius, see Fr. Adam, "Der neisser Rector Valens
Acidalius," Siebzehnter Bericht der Philomathie in Neisse (Neisse: Graveur, 1872), especially
pp. 40-44, and 52 f., as well as John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 2 (1908;
reprinted New York: Hafner, 1958), 273.
20Seethe edition of Des Enfans devenus celebres par leurs Etudes, et par leurs Ecrits by Ber-
nard de la Monnoye, Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs, par Adrien
Baillet, 5 (Amsterdam: Aux Depens de la Compagnie, 1725), 56.

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 111 "Are Women Human?" Debate

Curtius, Apuleius, Plautus, Seneca, Tacitus and the Latin Panegyrici, which
remained authoritative for centuries, Acidalius' academic career is
remarkable on the following three accounts:
(1) Acidalius preferred late sixteenth century Germany to Italy, not
only on the strength of Late Humanist scholarship, but also by virtue of
climate.21 As a native of the March of Brandenburg and alumnus of the
North German universities of Rostock, Greifswald and Helmstedt, which he
attended from 1585-1589, Acidalius had been accepted with open arms
by the academic leaders of Padua and Bologna where he earned his M.D.
from Hieronymus Mercurialis, lived with Ascanius Persius, and was a
steady guest at the villa of Camillus Palaeotus.22 Although Acidalus
warmly reciprocated the personal friendships of his Italian mentors, his
letters from Padua, Bologna, Rome, Naples and Venice abound with
complaints about the aridity of scholarship in the land of classical culture
and the unhealthiness of its climate. The recurrent fever which Acidalius
contracted in Italy may have influenced this view. In spite of the high praise
and patronage he received from Fulvius Ursinus in Rome, from Gian-
vincenzo Pinelli in Padua as well as from his friends in Bologna; in spite of
the instant success of his edition of Velleius Paterculus published 1590 in
Padua, and in spite of the offer of a professorship in Greek and Latin from
the University of Pisa, to which Mercurialis had moved from Bologna,
Acidalius returned in 1593 to a professionally uncertain future in Germany.
Here, he found for the last two years of his life the "home of humanity"
(humanitas) in Breslau, as the French statesman and publicist Hubert
Languet (1518-1581) had conceived the city.23 Acidalius himself called the
capital of Silesia an urbs litteratissima et letteratorum amantissima.24
(2) Acidalius is an outstanding example of the "literary cult of friend-
ship" (literarius cultus amicitiae), which was a major characteristic of the
Late Humanist republic of letters.25Because of his keenness as a scholar and
his modesty and kindness as a critic, Acidalius was cherished by the leaders
of those overlapping circles of scholars, who formed cultic centers of friend-
ship, such as Lipsius in Leyden, Mercurialis in Bologna, Pinelli in Padua,
and Ursinus in Rome. Within this network Acidalius entertained a special
triangular relationship with Daniel Bucretius, his constant companion and
probably also his provider from 1585 to early 1595, and the classicist
21Forquotations to these effects from his letters, see Schmidt, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens
Acidalius," pp. 30; as well as Erich Trunz, "Der deutsche Spathumanismus um 1600 als
Standeskultur," Zeitschrift fuir Geschichte der Erziehung und des Unterrichts, 21 (1931), 34 f.
Hereafter, I refer to Spathumanismus as "LateHumanism."
22The patrician Camillus Palaeotus the Younger (d. 1594), whose brother Gabriel was a
leading cardinal at the Council of Trent, commissioned Acidalius to compose a series of En-
comia Villae Illustris Palaeoti, published 1593.
23See Theodor Lindner, "Johann Wacker von Wackenfels," Zeitschrift des Vereins fur
Geschichte und Aterthum Schlesiens, 8 (1868), 322.
24For this and similar assessments by others, see Adam, "Der neisser Rector Valens
Acidalius," pp. 37-39.
25SeeTrunz, "Der deutsche Spathumanismus um 1600 als Standeskultur," pp. 38-45.

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112 The Sixteenth Century Journal

Johann Caselius, their teacher at Helmstedt. The names of Acidalius,

Bucretius and Caselius honeycomb Late Humanist collections of letters and
poetry editions of friendship.26
(3) In spite of his intense devotion to his male friends and fellow
scholars, which was the rule rather than the exception among Late
Humanists, Acidalius was not a misogynist. On the contrary, he had
Latinized his name, Havekenthal, as an allusion to the Acidalian spring in
Boeotia where Venus had bathed with the Graces. As a neo-Latin poet,
Acidalius professed a special relationship to Venus, the goddess of love and
beauty. Moreover, Acidalius was one of the two chief poets in and on the
garden of Laurentius Scholz in Breslau.27The hortus Scholzii was a unique
combination of a botanical garden for the study of plants and the prepara-
tion of medicine with an artistic and architectural setting for the cultivation
of friendship and the philosophical appreciation of female and floral beau-
ty, to which women were admitted as equals to men, a rare occasion among
neo-Platonic academies.
What then prompted Acidalius to get involved with raising publicly the
question whether women were human? It was the pestering of his publisher.
The Frankfurt printer and book dealer Heinrich Osthausen had published
Acidalius' Comments on Quintus Curtius (In Q. Curtium
Animadversiones, 1594). At once, the publisher started complaining that
the commentary was not selling. To compensate Osthausen for his alleged
losses, Acidalius sent him a hand-written copy of the Disputatio, which had
been circulating among his friends. In the scholar's opinion the manuscript
promised rich profit for the publisher. But Acidalius disclaimed any respon-
sibility for its content and did not want any royalties.
Acidalius, the transmitter and market analyst, if not the author, of the
Disputatio was well aware of its equivocation about the nature of women.
The Latin title could even be interpreted to mean that women were not men.
That no one could deny. Acidalius is supposed to have used this hatch to
escape personal reproach. When the secret came out that he had been in-
volved in the publication of the Disputatio, he was confronted with its
leading question by the female attendants of a banquet. Acidalius disarmed

26Seeibid., pp. 27 f., 40, 44, 52, f., but especially p. 41, where Acidalius is quoted to have
written to Caselius from Italy, "You know how deeply I honor you, and how highly I value
you. You saw how hard it was for me to leave you. You can imagine how sad I am now,
because I cannot see and hear you.... Between Bucretius and me, there is only one rivalry, in
spite of the harmony which unites us, to find out who of us two honors, values, and-please
do not despise the word, for it may sound sentimental-loves you more." On Daniel Bucretius
(1562-1621), a physician and scion of a rich Breslau merchant family, who 1611-1615 would
give room and board to the father of Modern High German literature, Martin Opitz (1597-
1639), see M. Rubensohn, "Martin Opitz and Breslau," Zeitschrift des Vereins ffir Geschichte
undAlterthum Schlesiens, 34 (1900), 230f.
27See Manfred P. Fleischer, 'The Garden of Laurentius Scholz: A Cultural Landmark of
Late Sixteenth Century Lutheranism," The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9
(1979), 29-48. Acidalius' Ianus Quadrifons in Hortum LaurenthiScholtizsii described this estate
as his Encomia had depicted the Villa Palaeoti.

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 113 "Are Women Human?" Debate

the ladies who were waiting for an answer with their plates in both hands
ready to break them over his head with the whisper that they were angels.28
Thus, it was not female disfavor which overshadowed the last days of
our devotee to Venus from February to May 1595. It rather was the
anathema with which his hoax had been greeted by the guardians of the
faith of his father. The threat of theological ostracism is supposed to have
driven Acidalius into a state of frenzy (phrenesis) in which he committed
suicide. According to another version, Acidalius, the son of a Lutheran
pastor who had signed the Book of Concord, converted to Catholicism,
went mad during a procession with the consecrated host (possibly on
Corpus Domini Thursday), and then died in a delirium. His brother and
literary heir, Christian, denied his conversion as well as his authorship of
the Disputatio. 29
The ascertainable facts are that in early 1595 Acidalius moved from
Breslau to Neisse, a Silesian city south of Breslau, where the bishop of
Breslau was the local prince. Whether the reason for this move was the
marriage of Bucretius, in whose house he had been living, we do not know.
In Neisse Acidalius resided in the palace of the episcopal chancellor, Johann
Wacker (1550-1619), who was also a former favorite of Mercurialis and had
been, together with the bishop, Andreas von Jerin (r. 1585-1596), an ad-
mirer and maecenas of Acidalius all along. Whether or not Acidalius was
appointed principal of the local Latin school, is again a matter of dispute.
He died on May 25, 1595, probably from a bout with his recurrent fever,
and received a lavish Catholic funeral.
While the Disputatio tarnished the reputation of Acidalius, the Defen-
sio spread the fame of Simon Gediccus (1551-1631).3?A University of Leip-
zig dissertation proudly referred to Gediccus in 1705 as "the theologian of
our church" who already before the previous century had definitively
refuted the "chilling jokes" of an anonymous author, identified in a footnote
as Valens Acidalius, who wanted to exclude women from the human
species.3' If Acidalius was an emblematic representative of Late Humanism,
Gediccus is an excellent example of another standard type in this age of con-

28See Schmidt, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens Acidalius," p. 145. Georg Christian Lehms in
his anonymous Lob-Rede Des Frauenzimmers in gebundener Rede (Leipzig: Joh. Christian
Martini, 1716), footnote 63, apparently confused this episode with an incident which is sup-
posed to have happened around 1300 to Jean de Meun for having written in his Romance of the
Rose that "all women are, have been, and always will be in thought, if not in deed, un-
virtuous." (See Nouvelle Biographie Generale, 35 (Paris, 1861), 245.) Schmidt, p. 145, also
referredalong this line of similar confrontations to the expulsion from the city of Turin and the
subsequent penitence of the Piedmontese jurist Giovanni Nevizzano (d. 1540) bescause of the
misogynist views expressed in his Sylva nuptialis (1516). (See Enciclopedia Italiana, 24 (Rome,
1949), 710.) The point of these comparisons was that women forgave Acidalius most easily.
29SeeAdam, "Der neisser Rector Valens Acidalius," pp. 51 f.
3oBayle included Gediccus in his Dictionary only because he was "known to (him) by the
answer he published to Mulieres non esse homines."
3'See Gottfried Boettner, De Malis Eruditorum Uxoribus in Selectorum Litterariorum
Pentas Continens Dissertationes Historico-Morales, p. 45.

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114 The Sixteenth Century Journal

fessionalism: the theologian who excelled in doctrinal controversy.

Acidalius used his philological training and critical abilities to edit ancient
secular or pagan texts. Gediccus employed his Humanist education to inter-
pret the Bible and the confession of his faith. However, he was equally
versed in ancient philology, philosophy, and history as in Biblical exegesis
and patristics. This his "defense of women" amply demonstrates. As
Hebrew professor in Leipzig, senior pastor in Halle, court preacher in
Berlin, a position he lost when he berated his prince for having converted to
Calvinism, and district dean in Saxony, Gediccus published explanations of
the Old Testament, baptism and the Lord's Supper as well as tracts against
the Calvinists and Jesuits.32
Among Gediccus' polemical writings, the "defense of women" seems to
have been his first. If Acidalius exposed certain ambivalent feelings about
the female sex current among the literary circles of his friends, even if he did
not share them himself, Gediccus showed the religious and intellectual at-
titudes and sensibilities towards women of the Wittenberg Reformation. In
order to make sense of this differentiation, let us briefly recall what
Humanism, starting with the Italian Renaissance, and what the Reforma-
tion, confining ourselves to Wittenberg, did for the admission of women to
the world of higher education outside of which there was no life (extra
academias non esse vitam), at least for the Late Humanists.33
The Italian Renaissance did not only revive ancient learning; it also
laicized it. But although sacerdotal celibacy was no longer a prerequisite for
intellectual leadership, male dominance of scholarship continued. The
revival of ancient learning did not entail a rebirth of ancient female
philosophers, such a Hypatia of Alexandria, Leontis the Epicurean, or Arete
of Cyrene, to say nothing of such congenial and conjugal relationships as
existed between Pythagoras and Theano, Aspasia and Pericles, or Crates
and Hipparchia. The closest approximation of women's restoration as foun-
tainheads of academic knowledge and caryatids of learned society brought
about by the Italian Renaissance was the revival of the Hellenistic in-
stitution of the hetaira, as embodied by Imperia of Rome (ca. 1455-1511), or
Tullia d'Aragona (ca. 1508-1556). Both cortesane famose and cortesane de
la minor sorte "were trained to be intelligent company; they took lessons in
singing, dancing, Latin, letter-writing, painting, and deportment, and one
earned immortality by memorizing everything that Petrarch and Boccaccio
ever wrote. In tribute to their unsurpassed command of the courtly graces,
humanists coined the euphemism cortigiana."'
32See C.G. Jbcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, 11(1750; reprinted Hildesheim: Ulms,
1961), 900 f. On Gediccus' courageous resistance against the Elector's Calvinism in the March
of Brandenburg, see Schmidt, "Ueberden KritikerValens Acidalius," pp. 131-136.
"The quote has been ascribed to Petrus Lotichius (1528-1560), son of a Lutheran reformer
and professor of medicine in Heidelberg.
34J H. Plumb in Richard M. Ketchum, ed., The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (New
York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1961), p. 378. On the re-assignment to women of
traditional subsidiary roles by Humanist secondary education, see William Harrison
Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (reprinted New York: Bureau
of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1963), pp. 247-250.

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 115 "Are Women Human?" Debate

Aside from this prostitution of poetry and philosophy, women were, of

course, assigned a central role in men's Platonic pursuit of love, truth, and
beauty by Castiglione's Cortegiano (1528). But although Simonetta Vespuz-
zi, Emilia Pia, Elisabetta Gonzaga, Isabella d'Este, Lucrezia Borgia, Con-
stanza Amaretta and Vittoria Colonna served as such midwives of
knowledge most successfully, females were not included in the inner circle
of Marsilio Ficino's neo-Platonic academy at Careggi (1462 ff.). Here, the
proverbial misogynia eruditorum35seems to have been matched with an in-
terpretation and practice of Platonic love as a rationale for men's intellec-
tual and emotional self-sufficiency.36
The academic self-sufficiency and social exclusiveness of the Late
Humanists look like a continuation of the scholarly conventions of neo-
Platonism. Professors and students, such as Acidalius, Bucretius and
Caselius, satisfied their need for intellectual companionship by the literary
cult of friendship, as it had been foreshadowed by Ficino's correspon-
dence.37 If scholars were married, the most comprehensive surveyor of
"GermanLate Humanism around 1600" noted, their marriages were usually
unsophisticated economic arrangements. The wives worked as
housekeepers and mothers. Intellectually, they were not valued very highly.
Occasionally, one even considered them a temptation of the devil. By
contrast, the male fellow member of the republic of letters did not only
serve as an understanding friend. He was treasured as an integral and in-
dispensable part in a vital enterprise, for scholarship was the way to God.38
Late Humanist scholarship as a way of life which minimized women
was evidently the cultural corridor through which the Disputatio passed
from study to study, amusing the learned behind closed doors.39 When its
Latin editors and French translators treated the whole controversy during
the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment as if it were classical literature,
commentators, including Pierre Bayle, played down the "abuse of women"
as objects of fun. Starting with the Nouvelles de la republique des lettres of
1685, these critics piously pretended to be taken aback by Gediccus'
misapprehension of the subject. They took the defender of women to task
for having missed the main point of the Disputatio, namely, to ridicule the

35See Matthias Georg Schroeder, De Misogynia Eruditorum (1717), in Selectorum Lit-

terariorum Pentas Continens Dissertationes Historico-Morales, pp. 17-29.
360n Ficino's understanding of "Platonic love" as the basis for an intimate academic
fellowship, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. by Virginia
Conant (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 285 f. I owe this reference to my
distinguished colleague Neal W. Gilbert, Professor of Philosophy, U.C. Davis.
37SeeThe Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. by members of the Language Department of the
School of Economic Science, London, Vols. I & II (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975-1978).
38See Trunz, "Der deutsche Spdthumanismus," pp.38 f.
39Des Maizeaux, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, III, 145,
reports of a related book containing the older thesis that women had no souls, "As long as this
book was printed only in Latin, the Inquisition was silent; but, as soon as it was translated into
Italian, they censured and prohibited it."

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116 The Sixteenth Century Journal

theological system of the Socinians by mimicking their method of exegesis.

The role of women in this raillery was merely incidental.Y0
But as we have seen from the outset, it was not the repudiation of a
minor sect which caused the circulation of the manuscript among Acidalius'
learned friends, which kept the Disputatio in print for 174 years,4' and
which relegated its surviving copies among the Erotica and Curiosa of rare
book collections. Whatever its main thesis, the Disputatio owed its abiding
success to the 49 satyr plays with words on the doubtful nature of women
for which the opening and closing paragraphs provided a pretext. It was
with the chorus line in support of a specious argument that Gediccus took
issue because he saw in it an insidious strain running through all of Western
intellectual history.
Gediccus was not blind to the jocular vein in the Disputatio. He
subtitled his Defensio a "refutation of the most trashy tract in which an
anonymous jester assaults the human nature of the feminine sex."42 But if
the author felt like joking, he ought to have chosen a different subject.43For
this question was no longer funny. The third Stoic scholarch, Chrysippus,
had exalted the masculine side of human nature to such an extent that the
female aspect was added to it as an afterthought in the manner in which a
tail is used to bestow beauty on a peacock. Evidently, the perverse
reasoning of the famous philosopher, according to which woman was only
incidental to the perfection of human life and society, had prevailed
through the ages. A certain Euripedean poet even paralleled women's in-
dispensability for the perpetuation of mankind with the necessary evil of a
plague and epidemic. Especially the educated were prone to such invidious
comparisons. The most recent addition to their vainglorious number was
the babbler who in the beginning of 1595 saw the despicable tract against
the female sex to the press. There was some novelty in this disputation
which struck Gediccus as "most atrocious and plainly diabolical."44
4OSeeibid., p. 143; Adam, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens Acidalius," pp. 138-141; and
Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, Vol. I (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1966), p. 488.
4'In seventeenth century Holland the Disputatio and Socinian literature were published
side by side because Amsterdam, often called Eleutheropolis on the title pages of prohibited
books, had become Europe's "free port" of expression. From the coincidence of place of
publication, however, one cannot conclude that the former was meant to serve as an antidote
against the latter. The comments and responses of the contemporaries clearly indicate that the
Disputatio owed its boom as a "bestseller"to its anti-feminine, not its anti-Socinian bias.
42See Disputatio Perjucunda, p. 73.
43Ibid., pp. 74 f.
44Ibid., p. 73. The passages which Gediccus had in mind are hard to pinpoint in the three
volumes of Chrysippi Stoici fragmenta. See Joannes ab Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum
Fragmenta (reprinted Stuttgart: Teubner, 1964), especially index volume IV. Likewise, the
Euripidaea quadam is not easily discernible from the Euripidean Fragments, emended by
Richard Johnson Walker (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920). The same sentiments,
however, to which Gediccus took exception, were voiced in Castiglione's Cortegiano by
Gaspar Pallavicino (1486-1511), a Lombard noble who like Acidalius died young after a life of
illness. Pallavicino recalled, "The most learned men have left in writing, that nature, which
ever aims at perfection, would always produce men; and that, when a woman is born, it is, as

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 117 "Are Women Human?" Debate

The novelty of the Disputatio did not lie in the use of the Bible as the
quarry for a spoof intended to discredit its misinterpreters. At least, Gedic-
cus was not side-tracked by picking a quarrel with this literary device,
although Johann Cochlaeus (1479-1552) had introduced it 75 years before in
his struggle against Luther, Gediccus' spiritual ancestor. In several of his
pamphlets, Cochlaeus had tried to obviate the Protestant appropriation of
Scripture by pretending to prove with the same exegetical sophistry as
Luther's that Jesus Christ was not God, that God ought to obey the devil,
and that St. Mary did not preserve her virginity.45 By the same token, the
headline, mulieres homines non esse, was not entirely new. In a legal sense
it had been made tongue in cheek by Jacob Cujacius (1522-1590), the
founder of the modern study of law in France.'
The novelty and secret of success of the Disputatio, which Gediccus
tried to nip in the bud, consisted in the uncanny confusion of ancient
philosophy and medieval etymology with Biblical authority, whose comical
effect was hard to resist. (With tragic consequences a similar confusion had
been created by the Malleus Maleficarum of 1490.) To give an example,
thesis 43 did not accept women's rationality as evidence for her humanity,
because Plato had said she was more of an irrational animal than a rational
one. To this, thesis 49 added that angels, devils and beasts had rational
souls, too, according to Cardinal Hosius. To see how this line of reasoning
was suddenly re-enforced by a ridiculous reference to Scripture (Balaam's
ass), hear ipsissima verba of the first seven lines of thesis 49: Clamant
mulieres, loquimur, habemus rationem & animam rationalem. Ergo sumus
homines. Sed ego nego haec omnia. Nam & multae sunt ayes, quae loquun-
tur, & Asinus Balaami locutus est, homo tamen non fuit.
Such double talk did not provoke Gediccus' wrath because he lacked a
sense of humor, but because it seems to have offended a new sensibility
created by the Wittenberg Reformation.47 Evidence for this is an equal

it were, by mistake, and an error of nature." Here, too, when it comes to the identification of
these writings, a recent editor states, E difficile cogliere referimenti precisi, suggesting Plato's
Symposium and Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals, I, xxi, as possible sources. See
Baldesar Castiglione, II Libro del Cortegiano, a cura di Giulio Preti ([Turin:) Einaudi, 1960), p.
260.
45SeeDes Maizeaux, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, III, 143 f.
46Ibid., p. 144.
47The author of this article is in no position to judge the typicality for the Reformed
tradition of The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558;
reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1972) by John Knox. At least, John
Knox was unequivocal while spokesmen for the Elizabethan Renaissance may have been hiding
their misogyny behind excessive praise of women. For such a perception, see Louise Schleiner,
"The Ingenu in Euphuist Fiction," a paper read at a conference of the Philological Association
of the Pacific Coast at the University of Southern California, November 11, 1977. On "City
Women and Religious Change" with special reference to Calvinism in late sixteenth century
France, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:
University Press, 1975), pp. 65-95; on a "transvestite"acceptance of the "monstrous regiment
of women" in art, letters, and during popular festivals, see also Davis, "Women on Top," pp.
124-151.

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118 The Sixteenth Century Journal

touchiness among fellow ministers of Gediccus' faith. In the 1598 volume of

his church history, for instance, Lucas Osiander (1534-1604), a supervisor
of the clergy and court preacher in Wirttemberg, added to his report of the
censure of a bishop by the synod of Macon (585) for saying that women
were not fully human the following personal reproach: "I would have sent
this bishop to pasture the pigs, for if his mother was not human, he must
have been born by a sow."48 The most elaborate defense of the human
nature and dignity of women against their detractors down through the ages
finally appeared in the Medulla theologianeVeteri Testamenti exegeticae
(Leipzig, 1680) by the Licentiatus Theologiae Johann Thilo (1637-1687).49
The sudden revulsion by Gediccus and company against the age-old
masculine condescension towards women apparently grew out of a new
state of consciousness. The Wittenberg Reformation had not only in-
stitutionalized a married clergy. It also introduced a new form of marital
intimacy. Luther had provided a special dispensation for husbands and
wives to enjoy the pleasures of Venus without a guilty conscience.50 This
new "blissful estate of marriage"was extolled in painting by Lucas Cranach
the Elder (1472-1553), the "most accomplished of the many propagandists
who served the Lutheran cause" (G.R. Elton). In literature it was celebrated
by such authors of wedding songs (epithalamia) and dramas as Andreas
Calagius (1549-1609) and Valens Acidalius, the two chief poets of the
garden of Scholz in Breslau. The ephithalamia were the opposite to the
Sylva nuptialis (1516) by Giovanni Nevizzano.5' That Acidalius, the
godfather of the Disputatio, contributed innumerable panegyrics to the
enthusiastic appreciation of nuptial bliss ought not to surprise us because
history proceeds by paradox, not by logic.52
Where Lutheran divines congregated in greater numbers, at the
faculties of the universities, or the pastoral colleges of large parishes, they
probably shared (with such notable exceptions as the garden of Scholz) the
general attitude towards women of the Late Humanist republic of letters.
But extra academias, in more isolated positions, clergymen depended more
than any other learned profession on the intellectual understanding and
spiritual support of their wives.53Furthermore, noblewomen and princesses
48Quoted after Schmidt, "Ueber den Kritiker Valens Acidalius," p. 139. On the decision
by the synod of Macon in Burgundy, see Charles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of
the Church, trans. by William R. Clark (Edinburgh:Clark, 1895), V. 406 f., and 409.
49This work of 1265 pages published by Justinus Brandis is available in the John Gordon
Wright Library of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
50For a fuller discussion and documentation, see Fleischer, "The Garden of Laurentius
Scholz," pp. 43-45.
-'See Gustav Bauch, Geschichte des Breslauer Schulwesens in der Zeit der Reformation
(Breslau: Hirt, 1911), p. 160, where the appreciation of the "blissful estate of marriage"by the
playwright Calagius has been documented. The book also records passim the various
epithalamia of the Breslau poets. Cf. this with Carlo Lessona, La Sylva nuptialis di Giovanni
Nevizzano (Turin: Locatelli, 1886).
52SeePage Smith, The Historian and History (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 35.
53Fora few outstanding examples, see Roland H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation in
Germany and Italy (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971), pp. 23-44, and 55-96. To marry a Lutheran
clergyman did not necessarily mean the renunciation of finery for the "plain garb befitting a

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 119 "Are Women Human?" Debate

with theological acumen were frequently more faithful and understanding

than their husbands as patrons and clients of the Lutheran clergy.54 The
cumulative effects of these novel marital and professional experiences begin
to show in the arguments of Gediccus' Defensio sexus muliebris.
Gediccus took great pains in repudiating every sentence of the 51 theses
from both sacred and profane literature. But he grew especially angry at
thesis 29, where women had been excluded from Luther's justification by
faith because they could be saved only by "generation"through men (mulier
... non fide, sed generatione salvatur), and virtually anathematized theses
43 and 49, which questioned women's possession of a rational soul.55In re-
asserting a rational world order along Aristotelian lines, in which both men
and women shared the same rational soul by which they both could have
faith in God and articulate it through their common gifts of speech and
reason, Gediccus prepared the ground for a plea for full-fledged female ad-
mission to the university, which would be made 120/1 years later.
For the time being, Gediccus took the following step in this direction.
After the theologica Platonica of the Late Humanist lay brotherhood had
created within the academic community the same sexual exclusiveness as
had formerly resulted from sacerdotal celibacy, Gediccus opened to women
an indirect access route to theology which had been the raison d'etre of the
medieval university, and which would remain the queen of the sciences
until the middle of the eighteenth century. In this respect, theology must be
understood as a highly rational and systematic attempt at making a body of
knowledge about God and his will logically consistent and coherent. As we
have seen, throughout most of Western history, women were thought by
men to be too emotional and intuitive for such a task. If women were to be
admitted to the university, it had to be shown that they were just as rational
as men to master theological subjects. This, at least, was the main argument
of a biographical dictionary on learned women, which appeared 120 years
after the debate of 1595, and whose author wanted to make the female sex
academically acceptable.
The first German Frauenrechtler who made this appeal was Georg
Christian Lehms (1684-1717). In his volume of 1715 he listed in the preface
42 self-educated female theologians, in comparison to twelve jurists and ten
minister's wife," as Bainton, p. 161, reported in the case of Anna Zwingli. In Lutheran Silesia,
for instance, the first Pietistic protests against the "worldliness"of the old-style Lutheran clergy
and their wives coincided with a Catholic Imperial edict of 1716 which declared the marriage
between a Lutheran pastor and a noblewoman "indecent," and another Counter-Reformatory
measure which denied Lutheranclergymen the title "Reverend."
54BesidesArgula von Grumbach (1492-after 1563), Elisabeth of Brandenburg (1485-1545),
and Elisabeth of Braunschweig (1510-1558), treated by Bainton, pp. 97-144, two more out-
standing examples are Anna of Prussia who in 1613, together with her daughters and second
son, refused to follow the conversion to Calvinism of her husband, and stiffened the resistance
of the Lutheran clergy, including Gediccus. Likewise, Christiane Eberhardine of Bayreuth did
not share in 1697 the conversion to Catholicism of her husband, Elector FrederickAugustus of
Saxony, but retired in protest to a country residence outside of Wittenberg where she died
1727.
55SeeDisputatio Perjucunda, pp. 178-191.

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120 The Sixteenth Century Journal

medical women,56 to show of what they were capable. Lehms made this
plea even more explicit in the preface to a postlude of this work, a versified
panegyric on women of 1716. There, he took issue with the half-way
concession which would allow women to study at a university, but not to
write or edit books on theology, because women were prone to
fanaticism. 7 In justifying the authorship of theological books by women,
Lehms insisted that one and the same God dwelled in the hearts of both men
and women, and he wanted to be recognized by both. Therefore, both sexes
ought to have access not only to scholarship but also to theology. Here, we
have a clear consequence and practical application of Gediccus' earlier
position.
Without pursuing the subject further, it can be safely concluded that
the exchange between Acidalius and Gediccus was one of the two great
debates of the sixteenth century about the rights and the dignity of
minorities who actually were majorities. Just as in the debate of 1550/51 at
Valladolid about the human rights of conquered people, in which Bishop
Bartolome de las Casas (1474-1566) upheld them whereas the classical
scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573) denied them,58 so in this
debate about the human nature of women, churchmen confirmed it while
secular academicians decried it. During the millennial drive towards full-
fledged female membership in the academic community, the exchange
between Acidalius and Gediccus was, of course, only a minor episode. But
it revealed major attitudes, and the stand taken by Gediccus may have even
marked a turning point.

56See Lehms, Teutschlands Galante Poetinnen, the first forty pages of the unpaginated
"Vorrede."
57See[Lehms], Lob-Rede Des Frauenzimmeries, pp. 4f.
58SeeA.A. Parker, "Expansion and Scholarship in Spain," in Denys Hay, ed., The Age of
the Renaissance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp. 238 f.

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