Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

It is needless to follow their dark wanderings. Suffice it to say that they found refuge at last in Heidelberg, where the husband was given a professorship, and the wife, too, was offered the chair of Greek, which she was never able to take. Her health had succumbed to her many sufferings and hardships, and she died before she was twenty-nine. But her strong soul rose above them all. “I am happy—entirely happy,” she said at the close. “I have never known a spirit so bright and fair, or a disposition so amiable and upright,” wrote her husband, who could not survive her loss and followed her within a few months.

There is more than the many-colored tissue of a life as sad as it was brilliant in these records. They carry within them all the possibilities of a strong and symmetrical womanhood. The rare quality of her scholarship was never questioned. She was the admitted peer of the most learned men of her time, one of whom expects her to “produce something worthy of Sophocles.” But she was clever, winning, and fascinating, as well as serious. Living for years among the gaieties of a court, she went out into a world of storms and gloom without a murmur or a regret, buoyed up by her love and unquestioning faith. She refers more to the joys than to the sorrows of this tempestuous time. Lavinia and the Duchess of Guise, the friends of her youth, were true to the end. In her letters to them and to the learned men who never lost sight of her, we have curious glimpses of the home of a woman who was a disciple of the Muses and a savante of intrinsic quality. While her husband prepares his lectures, she puts the house in order, buys furniture, and manages servants who were about as troublesome as they are to-day. One asks a florin a month, and reserves a part of the time for her own profit. Others insist upon staying out late and running in the streets. Most of them are grossly incompetent. Poor as she is, she is always ready to help those who are in greater need, and is constantly imposed upon. She even borrows money to send to an old servant in distress.

Then there are the evenings when grave professors come in, and they talk in Latin of the affairs of the day, the religious persecutions, or some disputed dogma. Sometimes they sing one of her Greek psalms which her husband has set to music. She has her heart full with the care of her young brother and the little daughter of a friend, who has been sent to her for instruction. But her life is bound up in that of her husband, whom she “cannot live without.” A pure and generous spirit, happy in her sacrifices, and true to every relation, she is a living refutation of the fallacy, too often heard even now, that learning and the gentler qualities of womanhood do not go together.

There were many other women of great distinction in the universities, whose names still live in enduring characters after four or five centuries—professors, and wives of professors who worked side by side with their husbands, and received their due meed of consideration. We have women of fine scholarly attainments to-day, though in the great universities they are mostly relegated to the anterooms and honored with second-class degrees; but fancy the consternation of the students of Harvard or Oxford if asked to listen to the lecture of a woman on law or philosophy, or, indeed, on any subject whatever! Yet there were great men and great scholars in Italy, possibly too great to fear competition. Society was in no sense upset, and, so far as women were concerned, the harmony of creation was not interfered with. Indeed, the best mothers and the most devoted, helpful wives in Italy of whom we have any knowledge were among the women who spoke Latin, read Greek, and worshiped at the shrine of the Muses—all of which may be commended to the college girls of to-day as well as to their critics.

V

In other fields there were equally accomplished women. Cassandra Fidelis was the pride and glory of Venice in the days when Titian walked along the shores of the Adriatic, absorbing the luminous tints of sea and sky, and picturing to himself the faces that look out upon us to-day from the buried centuries, instinct with color and the fullness of life. Poet and philosopher, she wrote in many languages, even spoke publicly at Padua. She caught, too, the spirit of beauty and song, and was as noted for her music and her graceful manners as for her learning. Men of letters paid court to her, Leo X wrote to her, and Ferdinand tried to draw her to Naples; but the Doge refused to part with this model of so many gifts and virtues. She lived a century divided between literature and piety, but drifted at last, in her widowhood, to the refuge of so many tired souls, and ended her brilliant career in a convent.

This remarkable flowering of the feminine intellect was not confined to Italy. Besides the noted Spanish women already mentioned, there were celebrated professors of rhetoric in the universities of Alcala and Salamanca. Even more distinguished was Aloysia Sigea, a poet and savante of Toledo, who surprised Paul III with a letter in five languages, which he was able to answer in only three. Just why she found it necessary to put what she had to say in five languages, instead of one, does not appear, but she proved her right to be considered a prodigy. Her fame was great, and she died young.

Frenchwomen were less serious and made a stronger point of the arts of pleasing. They approached literature with the air of a dilettante, who finds in it an amusement or accomplishment rather than a passion or an aim. At a later period they brought to its height a society based upon talent and the less tangible quality of esprit. But we have the virile intellect and versatile knowledge of the Renaissance in Mlle. de Gournay, who aspired to the highest things, including the perfection of friendship, which she said her sex had never been able to reach; and the famous Marguerite, the witty, learned, independent, and original sister of Francis I, who aimed at all knowledge, and tried her hand at everything from writing verses and tales, patronizing letters, and gathering a society of philosophers and poets, to reforming religion and ruling a state.

In England we find Lady Jane Grey at sixteen a mistress of many languages and preferring Plato to a hunting-party; the Seymour sisters, who were familiar with the sciences and wrote Latin verses; the daughters of Sir Thomas More, whose talents and accomplishments were only surpassed by their virtues; and many others, by no means least Queen Elizabeth herself, whose attainments were overshadowed by her genius of administration. The taste for knowledge was widely spread, and it would take us far beyond the limits of this essay to recall the women of many countries who were noted for learning and gifts that must always be relatively rare in any age, though pretenders may be as numerous as parrots in a tropical forest.

But it is mainly the women of Italy, where this movement had its birth, that we are considering here, and their talents were not confined to the acquisition of knowledge. There were many poets among them. To be sure, we find no Dante, or Petrarch, or Ariosto, or Tasso. Of creative genius there was very little; of taste and skill and poetic feeling there was a great deal. Domenichi made a collection of fifty women poets who compared well with the average men of their time and far surpassed them in refinement and moral purity. In their new enthusiasm for things of the intellect, they never lost their simplicity of faith, and were infected little, if at all, with the cynical skepticism of the age. Some of these numerous poets were connected with the universities, others belonged to the great world, and still others were women of moderate station, who were honored at the various courts for their gifts of mind.