Laura Cereta was unique among Renaissance female humanists. Cereta directly addressed the position of women as wives and as friends in her extensive body of Latin epistolary work. Questioning the ideals that presided over intellectual, social, and personal expectations of marriage, Cereta's letters reflected her triple status as humanist, feminist, and wife. What made Cereta well known as an early feminist, is that she believed all human beings, women included, are born with the right to an education. Cereta felt that women should be educated and that their role was not to just be wives and bear children, but to have a purpose in society. Cereta's contribution to early feminism was one of the most significant and influential movements of the Renaissance. She was a voice for those who could not speak nor be heard in the fight towards complete equality. She published private letters which detailed her thoughts and opinions regarding the lives of women, their rights to an education, and the slavery of women in marriage and her need to witness justice prevail. Born in Brescia, Italy, in 1469, Laura Cereta was the eldest of six children in a prominent, upper-middle class Italian family. Unlike many women of the Renaissance, Cereta received an education which started at the age of seven. She was sent to a convent where she received fundamental education and learned Latin, reading, writing, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and because she was female, embroidery (something she resented and would later argue as an example in many of her works). "The daughter of a Brescian attorney, at the age of fifteen, Cereta married a Venetian merchant, Pietro Serina, and was widowed a year later. Unlike most educated women of her time," she studied just as much before the wedding as she did so after. Once Pietro Serina died, quite possibly because of the bubonic plague, Cereta remained childless3 and to ease her grief, Cereta turned to her studies and found consolation. She was only seventeen or eighteen when her husband died, and she never remarried. When she was eighteen years old, she delivered her first public speech, and two years later, "it is believed by her early biographers that she began a seven year career of teaching moral philosophy, although there are no public records that verify her position as a teacher." At the age of nineteen, in 1488, she produced her first and only book, a collection of autobiographical Latin letters entitled, Epistolae Familiares. Cereta was highly criticized for publishing these letters. Six months after she published her book, her father, who was a major figure and a huge supporter of her work, died leaving her with little support. Though she was temporarily hailed as a genius, her work soon came under heavy criticism and she never published again. Laura Cereta's letters were mostly addressed to women. Her letters mingle themes characteristic of Petrarchan humanist dialogue with those anticipating modern feminism, which marks her work as distinct from that of any other writer of her time. Some of her letters openly air feelings her male humanist colleagues considered too intimate for a humanist letter style book, such as those concerning her troubled relationships with her husband and mother. Other letters, such as those on the history of educated women, women's right to an education equal to that of men, and the slavery of women in marriage, stand among the first feminist arguments ever to be delivered in a public forum in Europe. Cereta defended women's rights to higher education. She believed women and men alike had the right to be someone great. She argued that the female sex was already brilliant and that we had a history of poets, scholars, and prophets who were educated before us. Laura Cereta wrote a letter to Bibolo Semproni, who was said to be a fictitious character that praised Cereta as a rare exception to young women, stating her opinions and examples of education and women through history: The majesty of the Roman state deemed worthy a little Greek woman, Semiramis, for she spoke her mind