In 1600, at the age of twenty-three, Rubens left Antwerp for Italy in search of gainful employment at an Italian court. Also in that year, Venice, Rubens's first port of call, saw the publication of two of the most influential and widely read northern Italian contributions to the querelle des femmes. It was the first time two such books by women had appeared simultaneously in the Republic. And it was more than coincidence. The books’ contemporaneous publication attests to a surge of interest among Italian readers in women's responses to literary attacks on their nature by male authors as well as the diverse rhetorical tactics available to women who wished to defend their sex. The works are quite different in approach: Lucrezia Marinella's On the Nobility and Excellence of Women is a sharply reasoned humanistic rebuttal to The Defects of Women (Padua 1595 and 1599), an anti-feminist work by Gisueppe Passi. Moderata Fonte's all-female dialogue, The Worth of Women, has been described by Virginia Cox as a more original and in some ways peerless polemic where the author, a married mother, launches fiery attacks on the institution of marriage and women's exclusion from education, among other sources of social inequality.

Fonte died in childbirth before her book was published. But the posthumous work was dedicated by the author's daughter, Cecilia de’ Zorzi, to the teenage duchess of Urbino, inscribing it further in the tradition of the courtly defense. Cox sees this seemingly arbitrary dedication, as “somewhat speculative” in view of the noble dedicatee's youth and lacking notoriety. When viewed as a strategic act of politesse, however, de’ Zorzi may have intended to invoke an earlier duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga. Referred to simply as ‘the Duchess,’ the fictional version of this distant cousin of Baldassare Castiglione presides circumspectly over the discussion and definition of the court lady in Book 3 of the Courtier. Urbino, the dialogue's purported setting, and Mantua, home to one of the greatest Renaissance art collections, shared an historic association with learned women and the love of music, science, and above all painting.