That the women were not ungrateful to the mediæval bards who first
discovered in them the possibilities of higher charms and virtues, is
shown by their treatment of Heinrich von Meissen, Minnesinger, who was
called Frauenlob, because he constantly sang the “praise of woman.” When
he died at Mainz in 1317 they carried his bier to church with their own
hands, and then, in accordance with the custom of the time, poured
libations of wine on his bier so freely that the whole floor of the
church was covered.
And there is every reason to believe that the women of Frauenlob’s
period deserved his praises, because they were in æsthetic, moral, and
intellectual culture far superior to the women before or directly after
their time. We read in Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem how Tristan,
while Isolde healed his wound, instructed her in the arts and manners of
court life. Isolde knew French and Latin besides her own language. She
played the violin and the harp, and sang; she wrote letters and poems,
and would indeed have been a model of culture even at the present day.
The twelfth century even had a genuine blue-stocking, the nun Herrad von
Landsberg, who wrote a cyclopædia of all human knowledge, in the Latin
tongue, called the _Hortus Deliciarum_. Learning throughout the mediæval
ages was all concentrated in the monasteries; but at the period in
question the monks did not retain everything for themselves, but aided
the knights and the poets in instructing the women of the court and
nobility.
Nor did these women neglect their domestic affairs or physical exercise.
They accompanied the men on their falcon-hunting parties, and at home
learned to spin, weave, sew, and make clothing for themselves and their
husbands and children. At the tournaments and other games they appeared
as Queens of Beauty to distribute prizes and inspire their admirers to
heroic deeds; and at banquets and other social gatherings they seem to
have supplied more of the wit and entertainment than the men, whose
military occupations left them less time for the cultivation of the
arts.
At the same time one cannot help smiling at the elementary rules of
conduct which had to be given even to women of the nobility. You must
not stare at a man long, or refuse to return his salutation, young
ladies were told; nor must you in walking take too long or too short
steps. A poet of the middle of the thirteenth century (quoted by Mr.
Hueffer) gives this advice to a girl: “If a gentleman takes you aside
and wishes to talk of courtship to you, do not show a strange or sullen
behaviour, but defend yourself with pleasant and pretty repartees. And
if his talk annoys you and makes you uneasy, I advise you to ask him
questions,” and contradict his statements, in order “to give a harmless
turn to the conversation.”
Like Greek and Roman civilisation, like the palmy days of Persian and
Arabian culture, this mediæval period of feminine ascendancy and
refinement unfortunately did not last many generations. Although,
undoubtedly, chivalry accomplished real good for the time being, most of
what went by that name was, after all, too much of a sham—less a matter
of actuality than of poetic fancy. “Sincere and beautiful as the
chivalrous ideal may have been,” says Mr. Symonds, “it speedily
degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism, existed,
even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration than a
reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the
imagination of the people. For the Italo-Provençal poets that code of
love was almost wholly formal.” Petrarch, like Alberti and Boccaccio,
indulges again in abuse of women as coarse and brutal as that of the
early “Christian Fathers”; and when we come to the sixteenth century,
the scholar Cornelius Agrippa complains of the old state of
affairs—woman’s complete subjection: “Unjust laws,” he says, “do their
worst to repress women; custom and education combine to make them
nonentities. From her childhood a girl is brought up in idleness at
home, and confined to needle and thread for sole employment. When she
reaches marriageable years, she has this alternative: the jealousy of a
husband, or the custody of a convent. All public duties, all legal
functions, all active ministrations of religion are closed against her.”
The manner in which a great English poet, much later still, treated the
women of his household was quite in consonance with the customs of
preceding times. As an English author wrote, forty years ago, “Milton
taught his daughters to pronounce Greek and Latin, so that they might
read the classics aloud for his pleasure, but forbade their
understanding the meaning of a word for their own—for which he deserved
to be blind.”
Regarding France we read in Compayré that “Even in the higher classes,
woman held herself aloof from instruction, and from things intellectual.
Madame Racine had never seen played, and had probably never read, the
tragedies of her husband.” Mme. de Lambert “reproaches Molière for
having excluded women from recreation, pastime, and pleasure.” Fénelon
advised girls to learn to read and write correctly and to learn grammar,
which “surpassed in the time of Fénelon the received custom.” “No one
knew better than Fénelon the faults that come to woman through
ignorance—unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply herself to solid
and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless imagination,
indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and talkativeness,
sentimentalism, and ... a mania for theology: women are too much
inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”