Women are not human

In 1595 an anonymous Latin treatise was published in Germany that claimed that women are not human and are thus incapable of salvation. In an intentionally outrageous parody of contemporary Anabaptist theology, the author argues that, just as the Anabaptists deny the divinity of Jesus Christ on the principle that nothing is to be accepted as true that is not explicitly stated in the Bible, the idea of the humanity of women is to be rejected because there is no explicit scriptural warrant for it.

This lampoon of biblical interpretation, however, provoked strong responses from those who saw this as no laughing matter. Simon Gedik, a Lutheran doctor of theology, very earnestly rushed to the defense of women with a pamphlet he managed to have published within months. In 1651, the same year that the Roman Catholic Church put the treatise on the Index of Prohibited Books, Arcangela Tarabotti, an Italian nun, published her own spirited rejoinder.

This volume provides the texts of the anonymous treatise and of the responses by Gedik and Tarabotti, along with an introduction by the editor and translator.