[69] Clavière, op. cit., p. 415.
[70] The noted English divine, Thomas Fuller, chaplain to Charles II, recognized the irreparable loss to women occasioned by the destruction of the nunneries by the Reformers. "There were," he tells us in his quaint language, "good she schools wherein the girls and maids of the neyghborhood were taught to read and work.... Yea, give me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, ... haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveniences, might be heyghtened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath been attained." Church History, Vol. III, p. 336, 1845.
[71] M. Thureau Dangin, the perpetual secretary of the French Academy, wrote, "La tradition ne veut pas d'académiciennes."
[72] Carlyle, in a lecture on Dante, and the Divina Commedia, declares that "Italy has produced a greater number of great men than any other nation, men distinguished in art, thinking, conduct, and everywhere in the departments of intellect." He could with equal truth have said that Italy has produced more great women than any other nation.
[73] Medical Women, p. 63, et seq., by Sophia Jex-Blake, Edinburgh, 1886, and Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, Chap. III, by Elizabeth Blackwell, London, 1895.
[74] Mme. Dacier was a remarkable exception chiefly because she was the daughter and pupil of one Hellenist before becoming the wife of another.
[75] Lettres et Entretiens sur l'Éducation de Filles, Tom. I, pp. 225-231.
Compare this superficial course of study at Saint-Cyr with the elaborate course mapped out by Lionardo d'Arezzo in a letter addressed to the illustrious lady, Baptista Malatesta. In the broad programme of education for women recommended by this eminent man of letters, "poet, orator, historian, and the rest, all must be studied, each must contribute a share. Our learning thus becomes full, ready, varied, elegant, available for action or for discourse on all subjects."
Lionardo's curriculum of studies for women was quite as comprehensive as that required for men, "with perhaps a little less stress upon rhetoric and more upon religion. There was no assumption that a lower standard of attainment is inevitably a consequence of smaller capacity."
Nor was this thorough study of letters by the women of Italy "unfavorably regarded by social opinion"; neither did it introduce "a new standard of womanly activity. Women, indeed, at this epoch, seem to have preserved their moral and intellectual balance under the stress of the new enthusiasm better than men. The learned ladies were, in actual life, good wives and mothers, domestic and virtuous women of strong judgment and not seldom of marked capacity in affairs." Cf. Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 122, 132, 197, by W. H. Woodward, Cambridge, 1905.