there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the Renaissance,
with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the
time. It was they who insisted on the building of the town houses,
finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. It was for
them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. They
were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from
artists the wonderful paintings of the time. The sculptors made for
them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. The artists laid out
beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to {205} appreciate
again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly
cultivated. They bought the books that were issued by the Manutiuses
at Venice. Isabella D'Este had a standing order that all the books
issued from this great Venetian press should be sent to her. Books
were costly treasures in these times. A single volume of one of these
incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from Manutius's printing
establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money.
The women designed their own dresses. They encouraged the miniature
painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally
took up these arts themselves. They fostered the development of
textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth,
so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at
this time. Tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of
their patronage. They wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of
marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. As
can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are
not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a
period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women
are responsible for it. These women of the Renaissance decorated their
homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste
and, above all, had them set charmingly in the Italian {206}
Renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired.
While they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some
of them wrote poetry that has lived (Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici,
Vittoria Colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (Marguerite of
Navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing
responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics
and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for
their sons (Forli, D'Este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we
have every phase of development of woman's power. There can be no
doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the
development of her intellectual life, and that she took her
opportunities with great success.
We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women
than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There
was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in
the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her
Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and
having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was
Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women
connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the
great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real
literary power. The D'Este family is {207} better known generally, and
then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli,
Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her
genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere
women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life.
Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary
and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would
now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and
so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary
for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.
It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it
was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and
intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance
movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the
literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time
and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere
we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the
Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and
was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of
Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in
literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a
woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renee of Anjou, while the name
{208} of Louise La Cordiere shows, for _la cordiere_ means the
cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not
confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France,
whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin,
show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten
that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got
out,--is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told
the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to
know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to
him.
In Spain, too, the Renaissance movement made itself felt in every
department. Most of Spain's cathedrals were finished during the
Renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world.
Spain's literary Renaissance came a little later, but when it did it
contributed at least two great names to the world
literature--Cervantes and Calderon. The women of the nation were also
affected, and Queen Isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many
interests. Spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the
greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in St.
Teresa. How much of sympathy there was with this great expression of
feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that
Spanish ecclesiastics talk of Teresa as their Spanish Doctor of the
Church, and that in Rome there is amongst the statues {209} of the
Doctors and the Fathers in the Church one woman figure, that of St.
Teresa, with the title _mater spiritualium_--mother of spiritual
things. Her books, profoundly admired by the Spaniards, Were the
favorite reading for such extremely different minds as Fenelon and
Bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for German mystics.
They were beautifully translated by Crashaw into English, and have
been the subject of great interest during the present feministic
movement, especially since George Eliot's reference to her in the
preface of "Middlemarch."
In England the Renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture,
though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great
Elizabethan period of English literature is really an expression of
the Renaissance in England. Here almost more than anywhere else in
Europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things
intellectual that developed. Queen Mary was a well-educated woman,
Queen Elizabeth read Greek as well as Latin easily, Lady Jane Grey
preferred her lessons in Greek, under Roger Ascham, to going to balls
and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest
sense of the term. It has been hinted that it was perhaps this that
disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so
easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. The
losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean
the losing of it {210} more literally when crowns are at stake. There
are many other names of noble women of this time that might be
mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development.
That the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can
be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so
also are they imitated when they do well. Besides, the story that we
have of Margaret More and her friends shows that the middle classes
were also stirred to interest in things intellectual.
The usual objection, when this story of the Renaissance and the
feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would
urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours,
is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only
a few of the nobility. This is not true, and there are many reasons
why it is not true. First, the upper classes are always imitated by
the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure
that it spread. We have not the records of many educated women, but
those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined
to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could
readily secure it. There were probably as many women to the population
of Europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are
proportionately in America at the present time. Europe had but a small
population altogether in the fifteenth century. There {211} were
probably less than 4,000,000 of people in England at the end, even, of
the sixteenth century. In Elizabeth's time when the census was taken,
because of the Spanish Armada, these were the figures. There were not
many more people in all Europe then than there are now in England. If
out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of
distinguished women whom I have just spoken of, then there must have
been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education.
[Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: What an interesting reflection on the notion of
supposed progress is the fact pointed out by Ambassador Bryce in his
address on Progress (_Atlantic_ July, 1907), that while out of
40,000,000 of people there were so many genius men and women
accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we
with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as
many. Most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern
mind come in a single century,--the sixteenth. At the present time
the western civilization then represented by 40,000,000 has near to
500,000,000 of people. We make no pretension at all, however, to the
claim that we have more great men than they had. We should have ten
times as many, but on the contrary we are quite willing to concede
that we have very few compared to their number and almost none, if
indeed there are any, who measure up to the high standards of
achievement of that time more than four centuries ago. It is
thoughts of this kind that show one how much we must correct the
ordinarily accepted notions with regard to progress and inevitable
development, and each generation improving on its predecessors and
the like, that are so commonly diffused but that represent no
reality in history at all.]
It is true that it was, as a rule, only the daughters of the nobility
who received the opportunity for the higher education, or at least
obtained it with facility. It must not be forgotten, however, just
what the nobility of Italy, and, {212} indeed, of other countries
also, represented. The conditions there are most typical and it is
worth while studying them out. The Medici, for instance, of Florence,
whose women folk were so well educated, were members of the gilds of
the apothecaries, as their name indicates, who made a fortune on drugs
and precious stones and beautiful stuffs from the East, and then
became the bankers of Europe. Noblemen were created because of success
in war, success in politics, success in diplomacy, but also because of
success in commerce, and occasionally success in the arts. Not many
educators and artists were among them any more than in our time,
because they were not, as a rule, possessed of the fortune properly to
keep up the dignity of a patent of nobility. The daughters of the
nobility of Italy, however, were not very different, certainly their
origin was very similar to that of the daughters of the wealthy men of
America, who are, after all, the only ones who can take advantage of
the higher education in our time. We must not forget that, compared to
the whole population, the number of women securing the higher
education is very limited.
To think that the Renaissance with this provision of ample
opportunities for feminine education was the first epoch of this kind
in the world's history would be to miss sadly a host of historical
facts and their significance. Unfortunately history has been so
written from the standpoint of {213} man and his interests, that this
phase of history is not well known and probably less understood.
History has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to
war, diplomacy and politics. While we have known much of heroes and
battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic
achievement of all kinds. We have known even less of popular
movements. We have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the
masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the Middle
Ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our
admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic
development. Kings and warriors and kings' mistresses and ugly
diplomacy and rotten politics, have occupied the centre of the stage
in history. Surely we are coming to a time when other matters, the
human things and not the animal instincts, will be the main subject of
history; when fighting and sex and acquisitiveness and selfishness
shall give place in history to mutual aid, uplift, unselfishness and
thoughtfulness for others.
As soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human
interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not
only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times.
Before the Renaissance the great phase of education had been that of
the universities. The first of the universities was founded down at
Salerno around a medical school, the {214} second that of Bologna
around a law school and the third that of Paris with a school of
philosophy and theology as a nucleus. This seems to be about the way
that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development.
First, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his
property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher
things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his Creator come to be
profound vital interests. Such, at least, is the story of the origin
of the universities in the thirteenth century.
The surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine
education and influence is what happened at Salerno. Here some twenty
miles back from Naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the
Mediterranean, where old Greek traditions had maintained themselves,
for Southern Italy was called Magna Graecia, where the intercourse
with the Arabs and with the northern shores of Africa and with the
Near East, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the
first modern medical school came into existence. In the department of
women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and
evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate
professors in the university. We have the text-book of one of them,
Trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the Salernitan School of
Women Physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when
we talk of a school of {215} painting, and not at all in the sense of
our modern women's medical schools. Trotula was the wife of the
professor of medicine at the university, Plataerius I, and the mother
of another professor at the university, Plataerius II, herself a
professor like them.
There are many other names of women professors at the University of
Salerno in this department. Women, however, were not alone allowed to
practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted
to women in Naples, of which at this time Salerno was the university,
to practise both medicine and surgery. It seems to have been quite
common, I should say, at least as common as in our own time for women
to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and
the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the
difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been
removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a
footing of absolute equality.
Probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and
unexpected development of professional education for women is to be
found in the conditions out of which Salerno developed. The school was
originally a monastic school under the influence of the Benedictine
monks from Monte Cassino not far away. The great Archbishop Alphanus
I, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor
there, was himself {216} a Benedictine monk. How intimately the
relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized
from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of
Salerno, Constantine Africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his
great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the
monastery of Monte Cassino. His great friend Desiderius was the abbot
there, and his influence was still very strong at Salerno. Desiderius
afterwards became Pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this
Southern Italian university. In a word, it was in the midst of the
most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing
over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great
teaching institution occurred. The wise old monks were thoroughly
practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of
mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of
problems.
When the next great university, that of Bologna, was founded, it
developed, as I have suggested, around a law school. Irnerius revived
the study of the old Roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so
much attention that students from all over Europe flocked to Bologna.
Law is different from medicine in many respects. The right of women to
study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of
medical education is manifest. With regard to law, however, there can
scarcely be grave question as to the {217} advisability of woman
studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. This was
particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had
no rights until she married. In spite of the many inherent
improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely
opened at Bologna before women became students in it. Probably
Irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students,
but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been
quite open to them. As out of the law school the university gradually
developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were
accorded to women at Bologna. We have the story of their success in
mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy.
According to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition,
one distinguished woman student of Bologna, Maria Di Novella, achieved
such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century
that she was appointed professor of mathematics. Apparently the
faculty of Bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook
themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties,
which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in
the mathematical tripos than the Senior Wrangler, though they do not
accord her the Senior Wranglership. The story goes on to say that
Signorina Di Novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that
her {218} beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male
students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. This would seem
to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as
surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. I remember once telling
this story before a convent audience. The dear old Mother Superior,
who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "Did
you say that she was young?" and I said yes, according to the
tradition; "and handsome?" and I nodded the affirmative, "Well, then,"
she said, "I do not believe the rest of the story." But then, after
all, what do dear old Mothers Superior know about the world or its
ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the
significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty,
intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal
their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the
feelings of others?
It was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were
given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional
work at the University of Bologna. In medicine, as well as in law,
women reached distinction. The first great professor of anatomy of
modern times is Mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at
the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the
medical schools for two centuries. One of his assistants was {219}
Alessandra Giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy.
At the Surgeon General's Library in Washington, in one of the early
printed editions of Mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young
woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. To
her, according to an old Italian chronicle, we owe the invention of
methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that
they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that
they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent
the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of
dissection, even more deterrent at that time.
It is curiously interesting to find that another great improvement in
the teaching of anatomy, invented in Italy nearly four centuries
later, came also from a woman teaching at an Italian university,
Madame Manzolini. The tradition connecting these two women is
unbroken. There is not a century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth
in which there were not distinguished women professors at the
universities of Italy, and, therefore, also students in large numbers.
Just how many women students there were we do not know. It might seem
to be a comparatively easy problem to find out just how many there
were at any given time by looking up the registers of the
universities. Once in Bologna itself I got hold of the old university
registers, confident that now I would learn just what was {220} the
proportion of women students at the university. I was utterly
disappointed, however, Italian mothers had, so far as the settlement
of this question is concerned, the unfortunate habit occasionally of
giving boys' names to girls, and girls' names to boys. They called
their children after favorite saints. A girl might well be called
Antonio, for the feminine form was not in common use in earlier times.
Many boys had for first name Maria. It used to be the custom in Venice
for every child, no matter what its sex, to receive from the Church
the two names Maria Giovanni, and then the parents might add what
other names they pleased. The names of royalty, with their frequent
use of mingled masculine and feminine names, show how much confusion
can be worked to any scheme for the determination of the sex of
students at the old universities by this, for us, unfortunate habit.