Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

It was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional work at the University of Bologna. In medicine, as well as in law, women reached distinction. The first great professor of anatomy of modern times is Mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the medical schools for two centuries. One of his assistants was [{219}] Alessandra Giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy. At the Surgeon General's Library in Washington, in one of the early printed editions of Mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. To her, according to an old Italian chronicle, we owe the invention of methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of dissection, even more deterrent at that time.

It is curiously interesting to find that another great improvement in the teaching of anatomy, invented in Italy nearly four centuries later, came also from a woman teaching at an Italian university, Madame Manzolini. The tradition connecting these two women is unbroken. There is not a century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth in which there were not distinguished women professors at the universities of Italy, and, therefore, also students in large numbers.

Just how many women students there were we do not know. It might seem to be a comparatively easy problem to find out just how many there were at any given time by looking up the registers of the universities. Once in Bologna itself I got hold of the old university registers, confident that now I would learn just what was [{220}] the proportion of women students at the university. I was utterly disappointed, however, Italian mothers had, so far as the settlement of this question is concerned, the unfortunate habit occasionally of giving boys' names to girls, and girls' names to boys. They called their children after favorite saints. A girl might well be called Antonio, for the feminine form was not in common use in earlier times. Many boys had for first name Maria. It used to be the custom in Venice for every child, no matter what its sex, to receive from the Church the two names Maria Giovanni, and then the parents might add what other names they pleased. The names of royalty, with their frequent use of mingled masculine and feminine names, show how much confusion can be worked to any scheme for the determination of the sex of students at the old universities by this, for us, unfortunate habit.

Curiously enough, it was during the thirteenth century when the development of feminine education in the early university period was at its height, that certain changes in the domestic economy of the Bolognese are worthy of notice. Two kinds of prepared food became popular, if they were not, indeed, both invented at this time. One of them, bearing the classic name Bologna, is still with us, has spread throughout the world, and is likely to continue to be an important article of food for many centuries more. Another form of prepared food was a sort of dessert called Bologna [{221}] pudding, prepared from cereals, and which can still be purchased in Bologna, though foreigners, as a rule, do not care much for it. These two articles of food modified materially the preparation of food for meals at this time. It was possible to buy both of these, as now, ready made, and so the housewife was spared the bother and trouble and expenditure of time required for this work. We have here one phase of the origin of the delicatessen stores. This sort of change in domestic economy has always been noted whenever women have gone out of the home for other occupations and have become something less--or more--than the housewives and mothers they were before. Such changes in the dietary, however, in the direction of ready-made food are never popular with men. One German historical writer has been unkind enough to say that this is one of the reasons why the higher education gradually became much less popular, or at least attracted less attention than before. "Women want things for themselves, and if they are opposed insist on getting them," is the way this cynic Teuton puts it. "If, after a time, however, having got what they want, they find that the men do not like them to have it, they gradually abandon it." According to him Bologna and Bologna pudding saved the stooping over the kitchen range, or whatever took its place in those days, and gave all classes of women more opportunity for intellectual development or at least [{222}] for occupation with things different from household duties, but after a time the more or less resentful attitude of the men brought about a change. However that may be is hard to say.

Another interesting feature of the history of these times connected in some way with feminine education or, at least, with feminine occupation with other things besides their households, was a great devotion to a particular breed of pet dogs of which one hears much in the accounts of the life at Bologna at this time. Here, once more, the German cynic has had his say. He has suggested that, whenever women became occupied with things outside their home, with a consequent diminution in the number of children, they are almost sure to find an outlet for their affections in devotion to dogs and other pets. Apparently he would suggest that they literally go to the dogs. It is very curious that just during this thirteenth century, when feminine education at Bologna is at its height, one hears so much of these pets. At other times in the world's history, when women have taken to intellectual interests and especially when there has been a fall in the birth-rate, this same attention to pet animals is worthy of study.

After the thirteenth century there seems to have been a reaction against these pets. It is to be hoped that there is no connection between this and the prepared foods spoken of, but the decline in the popularity of pets and of woman's [{223}] occupation with intellectual interests went hand in hand. For all of this I am indebted to German authorities whose attitude towards feminine education may somewhat prejudice them and, indeed, probably does so, but these things are only mentioned as showing certain views that are held. The interesting thing for us is that after a period of somewhat more than a century of rather intense interest on the part of the women in nearly every phase of the intellectual life, there is then a diminution of interest, so that by the end of the fourteenth century women, even where feminine intellectual life was vigorous, are occupied almost without exception as they were before the university period, mainly with domestic concerns.

While feminine education was so common in the ecclesiastically ruled universities of Italy, the custom did not spread in Western Europe. The reason is not far to seek. All of the western universities owe their origins to Paris. Oxford was due to a withdrawal of English students from Paris, Cambridge to a similar withdrawal from Oxford. Many of the Scotch universities are grandchildren of Paris. All of the French universities are direct descendants, except Montpellier. The Spanish universities have a similar relation. The experience with feminine education at Paris had been unfortunate. The Héloïse and Abélard incident came in a formative stage of the university. It settled unfavorably the [{224}] whole question of feminine attendance at universities for the west. It seems a small thing to have such a wide and far-reaching influence, but it is very often on little things that the success or failure of great social movements of any kind depends. We have practically no record of any relaxation of university regulations in this matter in the west. Perhaps the Teutonic character was opposed to it, perhaps the Teutonic women were less anxious for it, being more occupied with Church and children and their home, but there was none, and its absence is responsible for the feeling so common among us, that now for the first time in the world women are enjoying the opportunity for the higher education.

Even the university epoch, however, is not the first phase of opportunities for the education of woman in modern history. Far from it, indeed, we can find much more than traces of a feminist movement in other centuries before this, and, indeed, in many of them. When Charlemagne established schools for his people and invited Alcuin, the English monk, to develop educational institutions for his people, the first and most important school was that of the imperial palace where Alcuin himself taught. In this the women of Paris were given opportunities quite as well as the men; indeed, they seem to have taken a more vivid interest and their example seems to have been the highest incentive for many of the men to take up a work so foreign to their natures, [{225}] for as yet they had all the barbarous instincts of their Gothic ancestors, only slightly tamed and modified by two or three centuries of gradual uplift and religious training of character. There are letters from the women of the palace, and especially Charlemagne's daughter, to Alcuin, discussing phases of his teaching and suggesting problems and questions with regard to the matters which he had been making the subject of his instruction.

It would be easy to think that this incident of the Palace School did not mean very much and that its passing influence did not make itself felt widely nor for long. The state of education at this time must not be forgotten. Only the clergy, as a rule, had leisure for it. All the rest of the world were engaged either in the frequent wars or in a tireless struggle for subsistence as farmers, merchants and craftsmen. The nobility neglected education just as much as the upper classes always do, though there were certain fashions which gained a foothold and that seem to show that they had some interest. Many a nobleman of the mediaeval centuries, however, boasted that he could not sign his own name. He was rather proud of the fact that he had not lowered himself to mere book knowledge. There were large numbers of the clergy and the monks, however, and these were the scholars of the period.

There were also at this time large numbers of religious women, and these in their leisure hours [{226}] spent much time at educational matters and some of them accomplished lasting results. The mother of the family, the court dame, the wife of the nobleman, whose castle was much more the home of work than it has ever been at any time since, had but little leisure for the intellectual life. The nuns devoted themselves to beautiful handiwork, to the composition as well as the transcription of books and to the cultural interests generally.