Elyot's Defence of Good Women, published in 1540 and dedicated to Anne of Cleves, is one of many treatises on the nature and status of women which appeared during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These works were of various kinds: some were written for a popular audience, others for scholars; some were composed for wives and husbands, others were intended for teachers or the clergy.’ Within this large body of writing, Elyot's Defence belongs to a special class that is particularly easy to identify. Like such works as Boccaccio's De clans mulieribus (1361) and Bruni's De studiis et litteris (1409), Elyot's Defence is humanist in character and apologetic in purpose. Treatises of this class argue that the cardinal virtues, celebrated in antiquity and represented in classical philosophy and history, have been (and can be) as well exemplified by women as men.

Francesco Filelfo's stature as the first important Western European professor of Greek after Guarino Veronese has long been recognized. At thirty-six Filelfo had already held academic posts at Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence, and Siena. He spent the last four decades of his life, for the most part, in the service of the Visconti-Sforza Dukes of Milan. But even during these years the Este of Ferrara, the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the Malatesta of Rimini had entertained him too, and three successive popes had called him to Rome. At the same time his brush with death at the hands of an assassin in Florence and his battles with the Medici had made Filelfo the most notorious of the early humanists.