The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 2, Winter 2019 | Page 45

es of Quattrocento Venice:
arola’s Humanist Career
9
Venetians did everything in their power
to show that Venice was superior to
all other Italian city-states in every way,
especially in the functionality and stability
of its government. However, Venice
was similar to all other Italian citystates
during the Middle Ages in that
they incorporated Aristotle’s (384 BC–
322 BC) philosophies on logic, physics,
ethics, and metaphysics into their culture,
due to their close contact with the
Greek culture, which had been deeply
entrenched in Aristotelian philosophy
since the fourth century. 30 Through his
philosophies, Aristotle’s concepts and
arguments on women and their place
in the polis made a slow and steady integration
into religious philosophy over
several hundred years and then was
infused even more into the Italian culture
through the scholastic curriculum
at the Universities of Paris and Padua,
where men who ran the Italian governments
received their education, beginning
in 1250. 31 Those men then spread
the Aristotelian concept of women
beyond academia into their societies
through their governance, private dialogues,
and literary works.
One of the primary Aristotelian
philosophies that the medieval Italian
city-states incorporated into their culture
was that men were superior and
dominant over women because women
were inferior by nature. Prudence Allen
called this superiority and dominance
of one sex over another “gender polarity.”
32 According to Aristotle’s Politics
(350 BCE), “the male is by nature superior,
and the female inferior; and the
one rules, and the other is ruled; this
principle, of necessity, extends to all