Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

It is needless to extend the list of writers on this subject, but it is a long and remarkable one. The books would make rather interesting reading to-day, whatever we might think of their quality, as problems familiar to us were pretty thoroughly if not always ably discussed, and apparently with great good nature. A distinguished Frenchman, well known in the salons of the eighteenth century, unearthed a great many curious facts and opinions hidden away in these books, which are now mostly buried too deep in the dust of old libraries for resurrection, and his own wise and quite modern conclusions entitled him to more consideration than he received from the women of his time. But this rapid glimpse will suffice, perhaps, to show the spirit in which latter-day questions were treated four or five centuries ago; also to throw a strong light on the position of women during the period, without very precise limits, known as the Renaissance—a period of special interest to us, as it marks the dawn of a new era of feminine intelligence.

II

We do not know how it happened that Bitisia Gozzadina stepped out of the traditional seclusion of her sex as early as the benighted thirteenth century, to be made doctor of civil and canon law in the University of Bologna at the age of twenty-seven. She had already pronounced a funeral oration in Latin and otherwise distinguished herself several years before. It is no longer the fashion to give Latin orations outside of the universities, but we know how women fared a few decades ago, when they tried to speak publicly in their own language. It was perfectly understood that women of such oratorical proclivities forfeited all right to social consideration. They were practically ostracized. Happily, now they are treated about as well as they were six hundred years ago, when people crowded the university halls and even the public squares to listen to this remarkable woman. We do not hear that she was called any disagreeable names, not even a bas-bleu, though there is a vague tradition that she had peculiar notions about dress. It is said that she had rare beauty, but her charm and esprit made people forget it.

There is nothing in the medieval ideals of womanhood to suggest such a phenomenon, still less its cordial acceptance. Not even in the early poets is there a trace of the type of woman which played so distinguished a part in the golden age of the Renaissance. Beatrice was little more than a beautiful abstraction, the spiritual ideal of a man who dwelt mainly upon other-worldly matters. Petrarch found it interesting to kneel before Madonna Laura in the clouds, and sing hymns in her praise; but she was only an elusive figure on which to drape poetic fancies. In these days, when it is quite the fashion to pull the halos from the saints and put them on the sinners,—when even the wicked Lucrezia Borgia has become a respectable wife and a particularly good mother, who expiated the sins of her youth, if she had any, by her pious devotion, her kindness to the poor, and her patronage of art and literature,—it is not surprising to hear that Laura was a common-place matron, “fair, fat, and forty,” who would have found it difficult to live up to the ideals of her adorer,—even if she had known what they were,—and prudently kept out of so rarefied an air. This blending of chivalry and mysticism made fine poetry but not very substantial women.

Boccaccio paid a generous tribute to the heroic qualities of the women of the past, but he evidently preferred them at a distance or in books. Personally he seems to have had no more taste for savantes than for saints. He belonged to the new age, which glorified the joys of life and liked to sing love-songs—not of the choicest—to frail beauties. Fiammetta was, no doubt, a clever woman and a beautiful one, but she was no divine Egeria to inspire him with high thoughts. If he did brilliant things at her bidding, the trail of the serpent was over them all. Perhaps he aimed to suit the taste of the day, which was neither delicate nor moral; or he may have lived in bad company from which he took his models. We should be sorry to take as representative the heroines of the Decameron, who must have brought blushes, which the twilight could not hide, to the faces of the little coterie of friends that sat on the grass telling or listening to these tales during the long summer evenings at Florence, when men and women were dying all about them. But they give us one phase of the life of the time, and reflect the taste of an audience composed mainly of men who laughed at morals and deified art, regardless of its aim or its subject. The age was not strait-laced, but Italian ladies were not permitted to read Boccaccio. One story, however, they might read. When the poet wished to portray a good woman, for a change, he made a fine little picture of Griselda, the patient, who was duly thankful for every indignity her amiable lord chose to offer, mainly because she thought her sufferings made him happy. When these incredible cruelties culminated in sending her away loaded with unmerited disgrace, she still thanked him like a good wife who was grateful for being trampled upon, even when her innocent heart was breaking. It was a fine object-lesson for the proper education of girls, and this marvel of self-sacrifice was held up from one end of Europe to the other as a model of womanhood. Poets painted her over and over again, with race variations; moralists praised her; and men quoted her to their wives. Some instinct of justice prompted Boccaccio to reward her in the end for all this useless misery, which was simply a test of her servile quality, by putting her again, after a series of years, into the good graces of her inhuman husband; but it is needless to say that such rewards of virtue, if they could be considered rewards, are not in the way of a world in which these lessons are read.

All this shows how far the heroines of the early poets, whether good or bad, differed from the strong, able, and accomplished women who were recognized as the glories of the Renaissance. It suggests also the lurid or colorless background against which the latter were outlined. The cynical bachelor in Molière’s comedy summed up the whole duty of woman according to the gospel of the middle ages—and, it might be added, of many other ages—when he said that his wife must know only how to “pray to God, love, sew, and spin.” The last three qualifications were necessary for his own comfort, and he had the penetration to divine that she might have ample need of the first on her own account. Then it gave him an agreeable sense of security to have a certain proprietorship in some one mildly affiliated with the next world. “In thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” says Hamlet to the fair Ophelia. A man might be the worst of sinners himself, but he liked a seasoning of piety in his wife, provided it was not too aggressive and left him free to be wicked if he chose. It was like having an altar in the home, and gave it a desirable flavor of saintliness.

Beyond the fireside and the docile domestic slave, however, there was another medieval ideal of womanhood, a religieuse who prayed and sang hymns in the cloister. Aside from this, it was her special mission to help the poor, care for the sick, console the sorrowful, and advance the interests of the church. But these women of the cloister, who had the altar without the home, found a possible outlet for their imprisoned intellects, if they had sufficient natural force. The Roman Church, which had always frowned upon any exercise of a woman’s mental gifts in a worldly sphere, was glad to avail itself of them in its own interest, and there were a few women more or less distinguished both as leaders of religious organizations and counselors of ecclesiastics, who kept alive the prestige of their sex through centuries of darkness. It was one of the strange paradoxes of that age, as of many others, that a woman is an irrational being, too fragile to bear distinction of any sort, except when her talents make for the glory of men or the church. Activity in public affairs, so long as they were religious ones, was not considered unwomanly, notwithstanding the conservative opinions of St. Paul. No one took it amiss when Catherine of Siena used her wisdom and eloquence in persuading the Pope to return from Avignon to Rome after men’s counsels had failed. No one found fault because her emotional exaltation was tempered by a vigorous intellect. She was a thinker and seer, and wrote ably on political as well as ecclesiastical questions. Her style was simple and classic; indeed, she was altogether phenomenal, and had strange influence over the popes and kings to whom she did not hesitate to tell unpleasant truths. It was quite fitting that she should devote these gifts to the interests of her church and incidentally of her country. Men honored her for it, and canonized her.

This was a hundred and fifty years or so before the beautiful Isabella of Cordova, who was more learned and less mystical, gave up mundane pleasures for the classics and a degree in theology; and Isabella Rosera devoted herself to the conversion of the Jews, dazzled multitudes with her eloquence in the cathedral at Barcelona, and expounded the subtleties of Duns Scotus before prelates and cardinals at Rome. But in that interval women had made great strides in intelligence, and the talents that shone so conspicuously in great moral and religious movements had become a powerful factor in other directions. Bitisia Gozzadina had multitudes of successors to her honors.

III

That women emerged so suddenly from a state of ignorance, superstition, and mystic dreams to a position of intellectual distinction and virtual though not legal equality with men, is one of the marvels of the Renaissance. The change was as rapid and complete as that which came over the women of the nineteenth century. It is scarcely less remarkable, in the light of our own experience, that their new-born passion for learning met with so little opposition. They did not find it necessary to fight their own battles. There was no question of asserting their right to the higher education, as we have been forced to do. This was taken as a matter of course and without controversy. They were educated on equal lines with men, and by the same masters; nor were the most distinguished teachers of the age afraid of being enervated by this contact with the feminine mind, as certain modern professors claim to be. Doubtless they would have smiled at such a reflection on their own mental vigor.