Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

It has always been true, as a rule, that the woman who accomplished anything in the intellectual life must be either a celibate, or at most, the mother of but a child or two. The mother of a large family, unless she is extremely exceptional, cannot be expected to be productive in the intellectual life. She has not the time for original work, and still less for the filing process necessary for appropriate expression. There are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule. One of the two forms of production apparently women must give up to devote themselves to the other. The nuns in the Middle Ages, in the retirement of their convents, gave themselves much more than we are likely to think possible, to literary and scientific production. Within the past year I have published sketches of two distinguished women of the tenth and twelfth centuries whose books show us the intellectual interests of the women of this time. Only that women were having opportunities for mental development [{227}] these would not have been written, and as they were written for women, it is evident that those interests were quite widely diffused. One of these two authors comes in what is sometimes called the darkest of the Dark Ages, the tenth century; the other was born in the eleventh. They serve to show how much more intense than we are likely to think was the interest of the time in things intellectual. Without printing and without any proper means of publication, somehow these women succeeded in making literary monuments that have outlasted the wreck and ruin of time, and that have been of sufficient interest to mankind to be preserved among vicissitudes which seemed surely destined to destroy them.

One of the two ladies was Roswitha, or Hrotswitha, a nun of Gandersheim, in what is now Hanover, who in the tenth century wrote a series of comedies in imitation of Terence, probably not meant to be played but to be read. She says in the preface that the reason for writing them was that so many religious were reading the indecent literature of classical Rome, with the excuse that it was necessary for the cultivation of style or for the completion of their education, that she wanted and had striven to write something moral and Christian to replace the older writings. That preface of itself ought to be enough to show us that in the nunneries along the Rhine, of which we know that there were many, there must have been a much more [{228}] widespread and ardent interest in literature, and, above all, in classic literature, than we have had any idea of until recently. Hrotswitha, to give her her Saxon name, was only a young woman of twenty-five when she wrote the series of stories and plays thus prefaced, and while her style, of course, does not compare with the classics, worse Latin has often been written by people who were sure that they knew more about Latinity than any nun of the obscure tenth century could possibly have known.

The other woman writer of about this time was Hildegarde, the abbess of a monastery along the Rhine, born at the end of the eleventh century, who wrote a text-book of medicine, which was the most important document in the history of medicine in this century. The nuns were the nurses and the hospital attendants and in the country places, to a great extent, the physicians of this time. In the cities there were regular practitioners of medicine, but the infirmarian of a monastery cared for the ailing monks and the people on the monastery estates when ill, and often they were many in number, and the infirmarian of a convent did the same thing for the sisters and for at least the women folk among the people of the neighborhood. It was in order to gather together and preserve the medical traditions of the monasteries and convents that Hildegarde, who afterwards came to be known as St. Hildegarde, wrote her volume on medicine. It has been recently [{229}] issued in the collection of old writings called "Migne's Patrologia," and has drawn many praises from historical critics for the amount of information which it contains. These two, Hroswitha and Hildegarde, furnish abundant evidence of the intellectual life of the convents of this old time and more than hint at how much has been lost that might have helped us to a larger knowledge of them.

With this in mind it will be easier to understand a preceding phase of the history of feminine education in Europe. The first nation that was converted to Christianity in a body, so that Christian ideas and ideals had a chance for assertion and application in the life of the people, was Ireland. Christianity when introduced into Rome met with the determined opposition of old paganism. After the migration of nations and the coming down of the barbarians upon the Roman Empire, there was little opportunity for Christianity to assert itself until after these Teutonic peoples had been lifted out of their barbarism to a higher plane of civilization. In Ireland, however, not only did conversion to Christianity convert the whole people, but it came to a people who possessed already a high degree of civilization and culture, a literature that we have been learning to think more and more of in recent years, many arts, and the development of science, in the form of medicine at least, to a high degree. The law and music, the language and the literature of [{230}] the early Irish all show us a highly cultivated people. When Christianity came to them, then, education became its watchword. Schools were opened everywhere on the island. Ireland became The Island of Saints and of Scholars, and literally thousands of students flocked from England and the mainland to these Irish schools. The first and the greatest of these was that founded by St. Patrick himself at Armagh. During the century after his death there were probably at one time as many as 5,000 students at Armagh. Only next in importance to this great school of the Irish apostle was that of his great feminine co-worker, St. Brigid, who did for the women of Ireland what St. Patrick had been doing for the men. It is probable that there were 8,000 students at Kildare, Brigid's great school, at one time. It is curious to think that there should have been something like co-education 1,500 years ago, and, above all, in Ireland, but Kildare seems to have had a system not unlike that in vogue at many of our universities in the modern time. The male and female students were thoroughly segregated,--may I say this is not the last time in the world's history that segregation was the distinguishing trait of co-education,--but the teachers of the men at Kildare seem also to have lectured to the women. The men occupied an entirely subsidiary position, however; even the bishops of Kildare in Brigid's time were appointed on her recommendation. For centuries [{231}] afterwards the Abbess of Kildare, Brigid's successor, had the privilege of a commanding voice in the selection of the bishop. The school at Kildare was conducted mainly by and for women, though there were men in the neighboring monastery who taught both classes of pupils.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the education of Kildare is that it was not concerned exclusively, nor even for the major part apparently, with book-learning. The book-learning of the Irish schools was celebrated. Down at Kildare, however, certain of the arts and crafts were cultivated with special success. Lace-making and the illumination of books were two of the favorite occupations of these students at Kildare in which marvellous success was achieved. The tradition of Irish lace-making which has maintained itself during all the centuries began, or at least, secured its first great prestige, in Brigid's time. Gerald the Welshman, sometimes spoken of as Giraldus Cambrensis, told of having seen during a journey in Ireland centuries after Brigid's time, but nearly a thousand years ago, a copy of the Scriptures that was wonderfully illuminated. He thought it the most beautiful book in the world. His description tallies very closely with that of the Book of Kells. Some have even ventured to suggest that he actually saw the Book of Kells at Kildare. This is extremely improbable, however, and the Book of Kells almost surely originated elsewhere. There [{232}] seems, however, to have been at Kildare some book nearly as beautiful as the Book of Kells, made there, and establishing peradventure the thoroughness of the artistic education given at Kildare at this time.

So much for feminine influence and education under Christianity. Most people are likely to know much more of the place of women in Greece and Rome than during Christian times. We are prone, however, to exaggerate the dependence of woman among both Latins and Greeks and to think that she had very few opportunities for intellectual development and almost none for expression of her personality and the exertion of her influence. Here, once more, as in many other phases of this subject we are, through ignorance, assuming conditions in the past that are quite unlike those which actually existed. Recently in the Atlantic Monthly, Mrs. Emily James Putnam, sometime the Dean of Barnard, in an article on "The Roman Lady," [Footnote 17] has completely undermined usual notions with regard to the position of the Roman woman. The Roman matrons had rights all their own, and succeeded in asserting themselves in many ways. There was never any seclusion of the women in Rome and the Roman matrona at all times enjoyed personal freedom, entertained her husband's guests, had a voice in his affairs, managed his house and came and went as she pleased. Mrs. Putnam suggests that "in [{233}] early days she shared the labors and the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile neighbors. It may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the Roman woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of a pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the American woman to-day comes to her from the brave Colonial housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight."

[Footnote 17: Atlantic Monthly, June, 1910.]

Indeed the more one studies social life in Rome the more clear does it become that conditions were very similar for women to what they are in this latest of the republics here in America. This will not be surprising if we but learn to realize that the circumstances of the development of Rome itself, the environment in which the women were placed resembled ours of the later time much more closely than we have had any idea of until recent years. The Italian historian, Ferrero, has read new lessons into Roman history for us by showing us the past in terms of the present.

The conditions that developed at Rome, as I have said, were very similar to those which developed in the modern American republic. Riches came, luxury arose. Eastern slaves came to do all the work in the household that could formerly be accomplished by the women, Greek hand-maidens particularly took every solicitude out of her hands, and then the Roman matron looked around for something to occupy herself with, and [{234}] it was not long before we have expressions from the men that would remind us of many things that have been said in the last generation or so. There is a well-known speech of Cato delivered in opposition to the repeal of the Oppian Law which forbade women to hold property, that is reported by Livy and sounds strangely modern. Mrs. Putnam talks of it very aptly, "as an expression of the ever recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent female."

"'If, Romans,' said he, 'every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. It was not without painful emotions of shame that I just now made my way into the forum through a crowd of women. Had I not been restrained by respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, I should have said to them, "What sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women's husbands? Could not each have made the same request to her husband at home? Are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private, and with other women's husbands than your own?"