“The Sun is more Dry, Hot, Active, and Powerfull every way than the Moon . . . for we find she is Pale and Wan, Cold, Moist, and Slow in all her Operations; and if it be as Philosophers hold, that the Moon hath no Light but what it borrows from the Sun, so Women have no strength nor light of Understanding, but what is given them from Men.”

—Margaret Cavendish, The World’s Olio, 1655; quoted in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, by Constance Classen. 1998.