that I see you ready to go out to do your world's work, lived in the
midst of what has been until quite recent years the despised Middle
Ages, out of which as little good might be expected as out of Nazareth
in the olden time, yet she so stamped her personality on the world of
her day that now the after-time, neglectful, as a rule, of the
individual, so careless even of the world's (supposed) great ones,
will not willingly let her name die. She is still with us as a great
living force. They read a sketch of her life, I have heard, at the
meeting of the Neighborhood House in New York within the last few
months, as an incentive to that devotion to the needy that
characterized her. She was a woman who thought not at all of herself,
but all of others. As a consequence, mankind in its better moods has
never ceased to turn to her. Evidently the formula for being
remembered is to forget yourself. I am sure, however, that that has
been brought home to you so well during your {275} years at St.
Elizabeth's that it would, indeed, be bringing coals to Newcastle for
me to say anything about it in the few minutes I have to talk to you.
What I have chosen to say to you refers to that higher Catholic
education for women of which you are now going out as the
representatives. I do it all the more readily because, through the
kindness of your beloved teachers, I have had the privilege of
co-operating a little in that education, for I appreciate that
privilege very much.
Apparently a good many people cherish the idea that the Catholic
Church is opposed to feminine education, or at least to the higher
education of women as we know it now, and that in the past her
influence has been constantly and consistently exerted against any
development of this phase of human accomplishment. In the liturgy of
the Church women are usually spoken of as the devout female sex, and
it is supposed that the one effort of the Church itself, the unerring
purpose of ecclesiastical authorities, was to prevent women from
becoming learned lest they should lose something of their devoutness.
Apparently it is forgotten that some of the greatest devotees in the
Church, the saintly women who were held up to the admiration and
emulation of their sisters in the after-time, women like St. Catherine
of Sienna, St. Angela Merici, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and, above
all, St. Teresa, {276} were eminently intellectual women as well as
models of devotion.
This same idea as to the Church deliberately fostering ignorance has
been quite common in the writings of certain types of historians with
regard to other departments of education, and those of us who are
interested in the history of medicine have been rather surprised to be
told that, because the Church wanted to keep people in readiness to
look to Masses and prayers and relics and shrines for the cure of
their ailments,--and, of course, pay for the privilege of taking
advantage of these,--the development of medicine was discouraged, the
people were kept in ignorance and all progress in scientific knowledge
was hampered. It is, indeed, amusing to hear this when one knows that
for seven centuries the greatest contributors to medical science have
been the Papal physicians, deliberately called to Rome, many of them,
because they were the great medical scientists of their day, and the
Popes would have no others near. For centuries the Papal Medical
School was the finest in the world for the original research done
there, and Bologna at the height of its fame was in the Papal States.
With so many other presumptions with regard to the position of the
Church towards education, it is not surprising that there should be a
complete misunderstanding of her attitude toward feminine education,
an absolute ignoring of the realities of the history of education,
which show {277} exactly the opposite of anything like opposition to
be true. I have had a good deal to do in laboring at least to correct
many false ideas with regard to the history of education, and, above
all, with what concerns supposed Church opposition to various phases
of educational advance. I know no presumption of opposition on the
part of the Church to education that is so groundless, however, as
that which would insist that it is only now with what people are
pleased to call the breaking up of Church influence generally, so that
even the Catholic Church has to bow, though unwillingly, to the spirit
of the times and to modern progress, that feminine education is
receiving its due share of attention. Most people seem to be quite
sure that the first serious development of opportunities for the
higher education of women came in our time. They presume that never
before has there been anything worth while talking about in this
matter. Just inasmuch as they do they are completely perverting the
realities of the history of education, which are in this matter
particularly interesting and by no means lacking in detail.
Whenever there is any question of Church influence in education, or of
the spirit of the Church with regard to education, those who wish to
talk knowingly of the subject should turn to the period in which the
Church was a predominant factor in human affairs throughout Europe.
This is, as is well known, the thirteenth century. The {278} Pope who
was on the throne at the beginning of this century, Innocent III, is
famous in history for having set down kings from their thrones,
dictated many modifications of political policy to the countries of
Europe whenever secular governments were violating certain great
principles of justice, and in general, was looked up to as the most
powerful of rulers in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. A
typical example of the place occupied by the Church is to be seen when
Philip Augustus of France repudiated his lawful wife to marry another.
Pope Innocent set himself sternly against the injustice, and the proud
French King, at the time one of the most powerful sovereigns of
Europe, had to take back the neglected wife from the Scandinavian
countries, the distance and weakness of whose relatives would seem to
make it so easy for a determined monarch to put her aside. When King
John in England violated the rights of his people, Innocent put the
country under an Interdict, released John's subjects from their
allegiance and promptly brought the shifty Plantagenet to terms. The
Pope at the end of the century, the great Boniface VIII, was scarcely
less assertive of the rights of the Church and of the Papacy than the
first of the thirteenth-century Pontiffs. While he was not so
successful as his great predecessor in maintaining his rights, the
policy of the Church evidently had not changed. Most of the Popes of
the interval wielded an immense influence for good {279} that was felt
in every sphere of life in Europe in their time.
Now it is with regard to this period that it is fair to ask the
question, What was the attitude of the Church toward education? Owing
to her acknowledged supremacy in spiritual matters and the extension
of the spiritual authority even over the temporal authorities whenever
the essential principles of ethics or any question of morals was
concerned, the Church could absolutely dictate the educational policy
of Europe. Now, this is the century when the universities arose and
received their most magnificent development. The great Lateran
Council, held at the beginning of the century, required every bishop
to establish professorships equivalent to what we now call a college
in connection with his cathedral. The metropolitan archbishops were
expected to develop university courses in connection with their
colleges. Everywhere, then, in Europe universities arose, and there
was the liveliest appreciation and the most ardent enthusiasm for
education, so that not only were ample opportunities provided, but
these were taken gloriously and the culture of modern Europe awoke and
bloomed wonderfully.
Some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged
from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative
statistics available, there were more students at the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge to the population of the England of that day,
than there are {280} to the population of even such an educationally
well provided city as Greater New York in the present year of grace
1910. This seems astounding to our modern ideas, but it is absolutely
true if there is any truth in history. The statistics are provided by
men who are not at all favorable to Catholic education or the Church's
influence for education. At this same time there were probably more
than 15,000 students at the University of Bologna, and almost beyond a
doubt 20,000 at the University of Paris. We have not reached such
figures for university attendance again, even down to the present.
Students came from all over the world to these universities, but more
than twenty other universities were founded throughout Europe in this
century. The population was very scanty compared to what it is at the
present time; there were probably not more than 25,000,000 of people
on the whole continent. England had less than 3,000,000 of people and,
as we know very well by the census made before the coming of the
Armada, had only slightly more than 4,000,000 even in Elizabeth's
time, some two centuries later.
Here is abundant evidence of the attitude of the Church towards
education. Now comes the question for us. What about feminine
education at the time of this great new awakening of educational
purpose throughout Europe? If we can find no trace of it, then are we
justified in saying that if the Church did not oppose, at least she
did not {281} favor the higher education for women. Let us see what we
find. The first university in our modern sense of the word came into
existence down at Salerno around the great medical school which had
existed there for several centuries. Probably the most interesting
feature of the teaching at Salerno is the fact that the department of
the diseases of women in the great medical school was in charge of
women professors for several centuries, and we have the books they
wrote on this subject, and know much of the position they occupied.
The most distinguished of them, Trotula, left us a text-book on her
subject which contained many interesting details of the medicine of
the period, and we know of her that she was the wife of one professor
of medicine at Salerno and the mother of another. She was the
foundress of what was called the school of Salernitan women
physicians, using the word school in the same sense in which it is
employed when we talk of a school of painters.
This is all the more interesting because the University of Salerno was
mainly under monastic influence. Originally the schools in connection
with the school of medicine were founded from the great Benedictine
monastery of Monte Cassino not far away. The first great teacher of
medicine at Salerno, Constantine Africanus, whose influence was
dominant in his own time and continued afterwards through his
writings, became a Benedictine monk in his early middle age. The {282}
preparatory schools for the medical courses at Salerno were largely in
the hands of the Benedictines. The university itself was under the
influence of the Archbishop of Salerno more than any other, and the
one who did most for it, the great Alphanus, had been a Benedictine
monk. Ordinarily this would be presumed to preclude any possibility of
the development of a great phase of education for women, and
especially professional education for women at the University of
Salerno. Just the contrary happened. The wise monks, who knew human
life and appreciated its difficulties, recognized the necessity, or at
least the advisability, for women as medical attendants on women and
children, and so the first great modern school of medicine, mainly
under monastic influence, had the department of women's diseases in
the hands of women themselves.
In Naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of
the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the
government in this matter. An almost exactly similar state of affairs
to that thus seen at Salerno developed at Bologna, only there the
university was founded round the law school, and the first women
students were in that school. When Irnerius established his great
lectureship of Roman Law at Bologna, to which students were attracted
from all over Europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow
women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter
{283} and several other women who reached distinction in the law
school. As the other departments of the University of Bologna
developed we find women as students and teachers in these. One of the
assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at Bologna,
Mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two
centuries after this time, was a young woman, Alessandra Giliani. It
is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in
such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored
them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be
carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues
might be used for demonstrating purposes.
As the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established
women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of
Italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when
there have not been some distinguished women professors at the Italian
universities. Nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in
anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for
making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came Madame
Manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human
tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. Made
in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. In the meantime
many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at {284} the
Italian universities. In the thirteenth century there was a great
teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order
not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a
curtain. It is evident that the educated women of the Middle Ages
could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others,
quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and
not to the higher education. Women physicians, educators,
mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are
to be found at the universities of Italy while the Church and the
ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities.
Unfortunately the spread of this feminine educational movement from
Italy to the west of Europe was disturbed by the Heloise and Abelard
incident at the University of Paris, and as all the western
universities owe their origin to Paris, they took the tradition
created there after Abelard's time, that women should not be allowed
to enter the university. When, however, three centuries later, the
Renaissance brought in the new learning, the schools of humanism
independent of the universities admitted women on absolute terms of
equality with men, and some of the women became the distinguished
scholars of the time. The Church's influence is plainly to be seen in
this, and the women took part in plays given in Greek and classic
Latin before the cardinals and prominent ecclesiastics, and everywhere
the {285} feeling developed that, if women wanted to have the higher
education of the humanities or, as it was then called, the New
Learning, they should have it. This feminine educational movement
spread all over Europe. Anne of Bretagne organized a school at the
French Court for the women of the court, and such women as Mary Queen
of Scots, Margaret of Navarre, Renee of Anjou, Louise La Cordiere are
a few of the French women of the Renaissance who attained distinction
for broad culture and education at this time.
Spain, too, had its women of the Renaissance. One of the first of them
was Isabella of Castile, whose assistance to Columbus was no mere
accident, nor due so much to personal influence exerted on her, as to
her own broad interest in the things of the mind in her time. Her
daughter Catherine, who became Queen of England, was deeply educated,
while her daughter, Queen Mary of England, knew the classics and
especially Latin very well. During her time in England many of the
nobility of the higher classes were distinguished for education. Lady
Jane Grey preferred to study Greek to going to balls and routs, and
sacrificed hunting parties for her lessons under Roger Ascham, in the
great Greek authors. Queen Elizabeth knew Greek and Latin very well.
The famous Countess of Arundell at this time was a distinguished
scholar. Margaret More is a bright example of opportunities for the
higher education given and taken in the lower classes of {286} the
nobility of the England of her time. One thing we can be sure of in
the England of that time, if the Queen and the highest nobility were
interested in education and devoted their time to it so sedulously and
successfully, then without doubt those beneath them in rank did so
likewise. The upper classes are not alone imitated in things unworthy,
but also in what is best if they only provide the good example.
To anyone who knows the history of the Church, however, these
incidents in feminine education will not be surprising. Every time, as
a rule, that there has been a great new awakening in education, women,
too, have demanded the right to have their share in it, and the
Church, far from discouraging, has always helped to provide
educational opportunities. When in the ninth century Charlemagne
reorganized the education of Europe, or, at least, reinstituted it for
his people, the women of the Palace had their opportunities to attend
the Palace school as well as the men. That Palace school was a very
wonderful travelling university, wandering wherever the Court went. It
was at Aix, it was probably at Paris for a time; when Charlemagne went
down to Italy it went with him and seems to have held some sessions
even while he was in Rome; there is a tradition of its existence while
he stayed one winter in Verona. Though the teachers in it were monks,
for Charlemagne and Alfred, the great, broad-minded rulers, who did so
much for {287} their people, had no illusions about the high place
that the monks held in life in their time, women were taught at the
schools as well as men. Charlemagne and Alfred were in the best
possible position to know who were the best teachers in their time,
and they turned with confidence to the monks. People generally, and,
above all, their great rulers, knew nothing of the condemnation of the
monks in the Dark Ages which came a thousand years after their time;
from people who knew nothing about them and who had even less sympathy
with them. They both knew them and sympathized with all they were
doing, therefore their cordial encouragement of them. Their attitude
was eminently justified by the fact that the monks were broad enough,
in spite of their monastic habits and their supposed lack of
appreciation for women, to take up to a great extent even the teaching
of women. There are letters from the women of the court of Charlemagne
written to Alcuin and to other teachers of the time, which show how
interested were the women in the school work.
This is not surprising if we recall that, when Benedict founded the
monks of the west, who were to provide the homes where culture was to
be maintained and the classics preserved for us and education
gradually diffused, his sister St. Scholastica did the same thing for
the women as her brother was doing for the men. Anyone who knows the
story of the Benedictine convents for {288} women and the books there
produced, plays, stories, even works on medicine and other sciences,
will realize how much was accomplished for the higher education of
women in these institutions in unpromising times. The women who wanted
to follow the intellectual life were given the opportunity and many of
them did excellent work. Within the last year I have written and
published sketches of the lives of St. Hildegarde, who wrote books on
medicine in the twelfth century, and of Hroswitha, the nun of
Gandersheim, who wrote Latin comedies in imitation of Terence in the
tenth century. These serious literary and scientific writings by women
in what is usually presumed to be the darkest period of the so-called
Dark Ages, and preserved for us out of the wreck and ruin that came
down on nearly everything produced in those times, shows us very
clearly how much more than we have been accustomed to think these
women of the Middle Ages were interested in the intellectual life.
Books are written only when there are readers and appreciation for
them, and the interest of contemporaries and the hope of future
interest as an incentive.
Of course, even before the foundation of the Benedictines we have a
great living example of the encouragement of the Church for the higher
education of women. It came at a time and under circumstances that
furnish abundant evidence of how much the Church appreciates and is
ready to encourage education and how precious she realizes {289} it is
for her children. When the first nation was converted as a whole to
Christianity, when the Irish people came over under the Apostolic
Patrick's wonderful missionary zeal, the first thing that was done in
this first Christian nation was to found schools. Ireland became the
Island of Saints and of Scholars. While the barbarians had overrun
Europe and destroyed the schools there, Ireland became the home of the
best teachers in the world and men flocked to her from all over
Europe.
These schools, however, were not reserved for the men, but abundant
opportunities were also afforded women for scholarship and for culture
of every kind. Only second in importance to St. Patrick's great school
at Armagh during the first century in the history of Ireland as a
Christian nation was St. Brigid's school at Kildare. We know from
Giraldus Cambrensis, now better known as Gerald the Welshman, that, in
his travels in Ireland centuries afterwards, but before the
destruction of Kildare, he saw many wonderful evidences of the
intellectual life of that institution. Above all, he saw a famous copy
of the Holy Scripture so beautifully illuminated that he thought it
the finest book in the world. His description would show us that if
this copy of the Scriptures which Gerald saw was not the book of Kells
as some have ventured to suggest, it was at least a copy not unlike
that famous illuminated volume which is, perhaps, the most {290}
beautiful book that ever came from the hand of man. The arts and the
crafts evidently were studied and practised as well as book-learning
at Kildare, and Brigid's influence brought to her at her college of
Kildare, literally thousands of the daughters of the nobility of
Ireland, of England and of portions of the Continent, attracted by her
sanctity and her scholarship and the wonderful intellectual and
artistic work that was being accomplished there.