Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

The most interesting phase of the woman movement in history is that which occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Because it is typical of the phases of the feministic movement at all times, and then, too, because it is closer to us and the records of it are more complete, it will be extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of it. It may be necessary for that to make a little excursion into the history of the period. During the early fifteenth century the Turks were bothering Constantinople so much, that Greek scholars, rendered uncomfortable at home, began making their way over into Italy rather frequently, bringing with them precious manuscripts and remains of old Greek art. Besides commerce aroused by the Crusades was making the intercourse between East and West much more intimate than it had been and, as a result, a taste for Greek letters and art was beginning to be felt in certain portions of Italy. When Constantinople fell, about the middle of the fifteenth century, the prestige of the old capital of the Greek empire was lost, and scholars abandoned it for Italy in large numbers. This is the time of the Renaissance. The rebirth that the word [{202}] signifies, is not a rebirth of art and architecture and literature into the modern world, as if there had been nothing before, for Gothic art and architecture and literature is quite as wonderful, if not more so, than anything that came after, and there are good authorities who insist that the Renaissance hurt, rather than helped, Europe. The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greek ideas and ideals in aesthetics into the European world, and while we may not agree with Sir Henry Maine that whatever lives and moves in the intellectual world is Greek in origin, there is no doubt that Greek can be the source of most wonderful incentive and such it proved to be during the fifteenth century.

Men and women began to study Greek and they paid much more attention as a consequence to the Latin classics modelled on the Greek, and so the New Learning, the so-called humanities, became the centre of intellectual interest. They were studied first in private schools, but before long a place for these new studies was demanded in the curriculum of the universities. The universities, however, were occupied with the so-called seven liberal arts, which were really scientific studies. There was geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, with considerable ethics and political science, so that they resembled in many ways our modern universities as they have been transformed since the re-introduction of scientific studies into them. [{203}] The university faculties were content and conservative after the fashion of universities ever, and they quite naturally refused to entertain the notion of such a radical change as the introduction of classical studies into the curriculum. This is just exactly what the classical universities of the early nineteenth century did when they were asked by scientific enthusiasts to re-introduce scientific studies into the curriculum, which in the course of 800 years had come to be made up almost exclusively of classical studies. In this curious way does history repeat itself.

Unable to obtain a place for the studies in humanism in the universities, ruling princes and wealthy members of the nobility proceeded to found special schools for these subjects. In these schools without the traditions of the past, the women asked and obtained the privilege of studying. There had come a noteworthy change in intellectual interest, a novelty was introduced into education. Whenever that happens woman always asks and always obtains the privilege of the higher education. During the Renaissance period she proceeded to show her intellectual power. Many of the women of the Renaissance became distinguished for scholarship. Perhaps one thing should be noted with regard to that. Their reputation for scholarship was largely confined to their younger years. They were more precocious, or applied themselves better to their studies, and accordingly knew more of the classics [{204}] at twenty than their male relatives who had the same opportunities. Indeed we hear of them as brilliant scholars at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. They took part in Latin plays that were brilliantly performed before the nobility, higher ecclesiastics, cardinals and even the Popes. They were brilliant in music, in the languages and in their taste for art. Later on in life we do not hear so much of them. They evidently were ready to leave the serious work of scholarship to the men and content themselves with being enlightened patrons of literature, beneficent advocates of the arts, liberal customers of the artistic geniuses of the time. Above all, we find no great original works from them. They are charming appreciators but not good inventors--at this time, of course.

While they do not occupy themselves with dry-as-dust scholarship, there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the Renaissance, with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the time. It was they who insisted on the building of the town houses, finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. It was for them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. They were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from artists the wonderful paintings of the time. The sculptors made for them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. The artists laid out beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to [{205}] appreciate again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly cultivated. They bought the books that were issued by the Manutiuses at Venice. Isabella D'Este had a standing order that all the books issued from this great Venetian press should be sent to her. Books were costly treasures in these times. A single volume of one of these incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from Manutius's printing establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money.

The women designed their own dresses. They encouraged the miniature painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally took up these arts themselves. They fostered the development of textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth, so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at this time. Tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of their patronage. They wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. As can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women are responsible for it. These women of the Renaissance decorated their homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste and, above all, had them set charmingly in the Italian [{206}] Renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired.

While they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some of them wrote poetry that has lived (Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici, Vittoria Colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (Marguerite of Navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for their sons (Forli, D'Este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we have every phase of development of woman's power. There can be no doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the development of her intellectual life, and that she took her opportunities with great success.

We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real literary power. The D'Este family is [{207}] better known generally, and then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli, Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life. Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.

It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renée of Anjou, while the name [{208}] of Louise La Cordière shows, for la cordière means the cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France, whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin, show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got out,--is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to him.

In Spain, too, the Renaissance movement made itself felt in every department. Most of Spain's cathedrals were finished during the Renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world. Spain's literary Renaissance came a little later, but when it did it contributed at least two great names to the world literature--Cervantes and Calderon. The women of the nation were also affected, and Queen Isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many interests. Spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in St. Teresa. How much of sympathy there was with this great expression of feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that Spanish ecclesiastics talk of Teresa as their Spanish Doctor of the Church, and that in Rome there is amongst the statues [{209}] of the Doctors and the Fathers in the Church one woman figure, that of St. Teresa, with the title mater spiritualium--mother of spiritual things. Her books, profoundly admired by the Spaniards, Were the favorite reading for such extremely different minds as Fénelon and Bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for German mystics. They were beautifully translated by Crashaw into English, and have been the subject of great interest during the present feministic movement, especially since George Eliot's reference to her in the preface of "Middlemarch."

In England the Renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture, though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great Elizabethan period of English literature is really an expression of the Renaissance in England. Here almost more than anywhere else in Europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things intellectual that developed. Queen Mary was a well-educated woman, Queen Elizabeth read Greek as well as Latin easily, Lady Jane Grey preferred her lessons in Greek, under Roger Ascham, to going to balls and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest sense of the term. It has been hinted that it was perhaps this that disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. The losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean the losing of it [{210}] more literally when crowns are at stake. There are many other names of noble women of this time that might be mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development. That the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so also are they imitated when they do well. Besides, the story that we have of Margaret More and her friends shows that the middle classes were also stirred to interest in things intellectual.