Such a maiden could only become an apostle to the heathen. Accordingly, we see her arrive at Corsica in a boat with neither oar nor sail, and start praying to the true God. A good-natured citizen warns her of the risks of such heresy, and the kindly ruler of Corsica himself adjures her to discretion, his monitions being emphasised by a man with an axe who stands behind him. But holding her prayer-book, and already crowned with her halo, she prays on. The next fresco shows the inevitable sequel. She is hanging by her hair to the bough of a pretty tree, while an executioner prods at her bleeding breasts with a three-pronged fork, though his head is turned away, as if he were not over-proud of his job. The kindly ruler, however, continues his remonstrances. In the distance a small, dim angel wings his way to her. Finally, she is stretched on a cross, and two ruffians batter her with massive clubs, but angels hold the palm and wreath over her head, and the Dove flies towards her. These celestial visions are a true interpretation and externalisation of the psychology of the martyr: these alone could support her. In our own day the visions of our martyrs are less concrete; they die for some far-seen ideal of Justice or Freedom, and this suffices to sustain them in Spanish prisons or under the Russian knout.
But what is peculiarly noteworthy in the story of Giulia is the status of woman in the Dark Ages and under the Catholic Church. St. Giulia appears to enjoy as great a roving licence as St. Augustine, her fellow-citizen in Carthage and “The City of God.” She is not considered unsexed, nor does her teaching rank below man’s, and she is canonised equally with the male. In fact, in leaving the home-nest to preach to the heathen, she is only following the model of Thekla in the Apocryphal “Acts of St. Paul,” whose story, though it was forged by a pious elder, is none the less proof of woman’s position in that highest of all ancient spheres, Religion. “I recommend unto you Phœbe, our sister,” says the misogynous St. Paul himself (Romans xvi), “for she hath been a succourer of many and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks.”
It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever have been established but for the courage and companionship of women. I feel sure they tidied up the catacombs and gave a feeling of home to the crypts and caves. “It was the women who spread Christianity in the family,” says Harnack. St. Augustine’s father was a heathen; it was his mother, Monica, who taught him to pray. The Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata of Florence, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the Roman calendar. As in all great movements, differences of station were forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of Lyons, played as majestic a part as the royal-blooded St. Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds such quaint perpetuation as a firework.
Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as a sort of female representative. In Tintoretto’s Paradise, as I have already noted, she figures as authoritatively as the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza, attributed to Tiepolo, she stands on the world, crushing the snake with her foot.
Her companions were usually divided in sex and united in glory. Luca della Robbia, in his charming relief in the cathedral of Arezzo, scrupulously places one male and one female saint on her either hand, and even one male and female angel: doubtless had cherubs possessed sex possibilities, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed. In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue’s Madonna is entirely surrounded by female saints, though a few males loom below her throne; Giotto’s shows a female surplus; Bernardo Daddi’s redresses the balance. Fra Angelico gives us Jesus carried to the Tomb by nine women to four men.
Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality, and if a church was decorated with male saints down one aisle, they would be scrupulously balanced by female saints along the other. An old Byzantine Basilica of Ravenna, which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against thirty saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether, since the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christendom instead of forward. Here at least was the atmosphere for the legend, if not for the reality, of a Pope Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened my eyes upon the world and woman, she appears to have become reduced to an absolute industrial dependence upon her lord like the fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista della Porta’s “Book of Natural Magic.” For according to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for inducing affection towards you in a chicken, you must—before it has its feathers—“break off its lower beak even to the jaw. Then, having not the wherewithal to peck up food, it must come to its master to be fed.”
I might cite in proof of woman’s retrogression since the Dark Ages the glorification of womanhood through “The Divine Comedy,” but the Italian poet’s translation of life into literature is, I fear, no more legal evidence of the real status of woman in the Middle Ages than her chivalrous deification at the hands of the Germanic or Provençal poets is a proof that she was treated even as an equal of her worshippers. Dante’s unknown Beatrice sounds like a woman who was snubbed by her husband and brothers. But Matilda, who plays second fiddle to her, and who is equally drawn by Dante as a mild flower-culling “bella Donna” was in reality the warrior Countess of Tuscany, and the fact that Dante feminises and floralises her shows that he had no real respect for feminine dominance in the actual shapes it took in life, and that he was only prepared to idealise woman on condition of her conforming to his ideal.
The scholars and commentators who have always been so puzzled at the metamorphosis of Matilda have forgotten man’s tendency to break off woman’s beak, whether in reality or in imagination. But even if Preger be correct in identifying Dante’s Matilda, not with the armoured Amazon of Tuscany, but with Mechtilde, the nun, whose mystic visions are the flowers she culls, it remains true that Dante’s ideal was never the “Virago,” a title of honour which was inscribed on her tomb, and which even at the epoch of the Renaissance implied nothing but praise. The word may serve to remind us that there is no sharp bisection of qualities between the sexes.
Matilda was, in fact, a sufficient refutation in herself of the notion that there is a rigid division between the qualities of men and women. Such a difference as is implied does, indeed, exist, but it is between men and men, and between women and women, as well as between men and women, and the popular nomenclature, which calls certain women mannish and certain men effeminate, recognises the possibility of deviation from the normal. Indeed, considering that both parents affect their child, the attempt to breed a special feminine psychology, immune from politics and fighting, must be perpetually thwarted by the criss-cross action of heredity, as upon the daughters of warriors and statesmen. Matilda—sired by the Magnificent Monster, Boniface—was a man in ten thousand. She led her own armies. She patronised learning and founded the law schools of Bologna. If she kept her husbands in subjection, casting off one after the other, she had none of the vices of the male despot; indeed, her second marriage-contract stipulated only a sexless union. There was nothing, indeed, except these vices in which she ranks below the Magnificent Monsters who preceded her in the lordship of Lucca or Lombardy. I must admit that the Countess of Tuscany fell under the influence of her spiritual director (as the Male Magnificent falls under the influence of his unspiritual directress), and that she used her power, and her treasure, as it is feared women will, to bolster up the Church; in fact, she, with her mother Beatrice, attended the Council of Rome in 1074, at which investiture by lay hands was declared illegal, and hers was the Castle of Canossa, to which Henry IV came to abase himself before the Pope. And that dubious temporal power of the Pope’s might not have come into such solid being had she not left her possessions to the See of Rome, and thus practically founded the States of the Church. This, of course, is the secret of her high position in the earthly paradise of the Purgatory. But, after all, religious zeal is not a female monopoly, and even Bloody Mary could not hold a candle to Torquemada.
Catherine of Siena exercised an equally critical influence upon the fortunes of the Papacy and upon European history when she persuaded Gregory XI to move the Papal seat back from Avignon to Rome; a mission in which Rienzi had failed a generation earlier. Catherine, for all her ecstasies and self-scourgings, had far more common sense than the male mystics.