Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

This same idea as to the Church deliberately fostering ignorance has been quite common in the writings of certain types of historians with regard to other departments of education, and those of us who are interested in the history of medicine have been rather surprised to be told that, because the Church wanted to keep people in readiness to look to Masses and prayers and relics and shrines for the cure of their ailments,--and, of course, pay for the privilege of taking advantage of these,--the development of medicine was discouraged, the people were kept in ignorance and all progress in scientific knowledge was hampered. It is, indeed, amusing to hear this when one knows that for seven centuries the greatest contributors to medical science have been the Papal physicians, deliberately called to Rome, many of them, because they were the great medical scientists of their day, and the Popes would have no others near. For centuries the Papal Medical School was the finest in the world for the original research done there, and Bologna at the height of its fame was in the Papal States.

With so many other presumptions with regard to the position of the Church towards education, it is not surprising that there should be a complete misunderstanding of her attitude toward feminine education, an absolute ignoring of the realities of the history of education, which show [{277}] exactly the opposite of anything like opposition to be true. I have had a good deal to do in laboring at least to correct many false ideas with regard to the history of education, and, above all, with what concerns supposed Church opposition to various phases of educational advance. I know no presumption of opposition on the part of the Church to education that is so groundless, however, as that which would insist that it is only now with what people are pleased to call the breaking up of Church influence generally, so that even the Catholic Church has to bow, though unwillingly, to the spirit of the times and to modern progress, that feminine education is receiving its due share of attention. Most people seem to be quite sure that the first serious development of opportunities for the higher education of women came in our time. They presume that never before has there been anything worth while talking about in this matter. Just inasmuch as they do they are completely perverting the realities of the history of education, which are in this matter particularly interesting and by no means lacking in detail.

Whenever there is any question of Church influence in education, or of the spirit of the Church with regard to education, those who wish to talk knowingly of the subject should turn to the period in which the Church was a predominant factor in human affairs throughout Europe. This is, as is well known, the thirteenth century. The [{278}] Pope who was on the throne at the beginning of this century, Innocent III, is famous in history for having set down kings from their thrones, dictated many modifications of political policy to the countries of Europe whenever secular governments were violating certain great principles of justice, and in general, was looked up to as the most powerful of rulers in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. A typical example of the place occupied by the Church is to be seen when Philip Augustus of France repudiated his lawful wife to marry another. Pope Innocent set himself sternly against the injustice, and the proud French King, at the time one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe, had to take back the neglected wife from the Scandinavian countries, the distance and weakness of whose relatives would seem to make it so easy for a determined monarch to put her aside. When King John in England violated the rights of his people, Innocent put the country under an Interdict, released John's subjects from their allegiance and promptly brought the shifty Plantagenet to terms. The Pope at the end of the century, the great Boniface VIII, was scarcely less assertive of the rights of the Church and of the Papacy than the first of the thirteenth-century Pontiffs. While he was not so successful as his great predecessor in maintaining his rights, the policy of the Church evidently had not changed. Most of the Popes of the interval wielded an immense influence for good [{279}] that was felt in every sphere of life in Europe in their time.

Now it is with regard to this period that it is fair to ask the question, What was the attitude of the Church toward education? Owing to her acknowledged supremacy in spiritual matters and the extension of the spiritual authority even over the temporal authorities whenever the essential principles of ethics or any question of morals was concerned, the Church could absolutely dictate the educational policy of Europe. Now, this is the century when the universities arose and received their most magnificent development. The great Lateran Council, held at the beginning of the century, required every bishop to establish professorships equivalent to what we now call a college in connection with his cathedral. The metropolitan archbishops were expected to develop university courses in connection with their colleges. Everywhere, then, in Europe universities arose, and there was the liveliest appreciation and the most ardent enthusiasm for education, so that not only were ample opportunities provided, but these were taken gloriously and the culture of modern Europe awoke and bloomed wonderfully.

Some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative statistics available, there were more students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the population of the England of that day, than there are [{280}] to the population of even such an educationally well provided city as Greater New York in the present year of grace 1910. This seems astounding to our modern ideas, but it is absolutely true if there is any truth in history. The statistics are provided by men who are not at all favorable to Catholic education or the Church's influence for education. At this same time there were probably more than 15,000 students at the University of Bologna, and almost beyond a doubt 20,000 at the University of Paris. We have not reached such figures for university attendance again, even down to the present. Students came from all over the world to these universities, but more than twenty other universities were founded throughout Europe in this century. The population was very scanty compared to what it is at the present time; there were probably not more than 25,000,000 of people on the whole continent. England had less than 3,000,000 of people and, as we know very well by the census made before the coming of the Armada, had only slightly more than 4,000,000 even in Elizabeth's time, some two centuries later.

Here is abundant evidence of the attitude of the Church towards education. Now comes the question for us. What about feminine education at the time of this great new awakening of educational purpose throughout Europe? If we can find no trace of it, then are we justified in saying that if the Church did not oppose, at least she did not [{281}] favor the higher education for women. Let us see what we find. The first university in our modern sense of the word came into existence down at Salerno around the great medical school which had existed there for several centuries. Probably the most interesting feature of the teaching at Salerno is the fact that the department of the diseases of women in the great medical school was in charge of women professors for several centuries, and we have the books they wrote on this subject, and know much of the position they occupied. The most distinguished of them, Trotula, left us a text-book on her subject which contained many interesting details of the medicine of the period, and we know of her that she was the wife of one professor of medicine at Salerno and the mother of another. She was the foundress of what was called the school of Salernitan women physicians, using the word school in the same sense in which it is employed when we talk of a school of painters.

This is all the more interesting because the University of Salerno was mainly under monastic influence. Originally the schools in connection with the school of medicine were founded from the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino not far away. The first great teacher of medicine at Salerno, Constantine Africanus, whose influence was dominant in his own time and continued afterwards through his writings, became a Benedictine monk in his early middle age. The [{282}] preparatory schools for the medical courses at Salerno were largely in the hands of the Benedictines. The university itself was under the influence of the Archbishop of Salerno more than any other, and the one who did most for it, the great Alphanus, had been a Benedictine monk. Ordinarily this would be presumed to preclude any possibility of the development of a great phase of education for women, and especially professional education for women at the University of Salerno. Just the contrary happened. The wise monks, who knew human life and appreciated its difficulties, recognized the necessity, or at least the advisability, for women as medical attendants on women and children, and so the first great modern school of medicine, mainly under monastic influence, had the department of women's diseases in the hands of women themselves.

In Naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the government in this matter. An almost exactly similar state of affairs to that thus seen at Salerno developed at Bologna, only there the university was founded round the law school, and the first women students were in that school. When Irnerius established his great lectureship of Roman Law at Bologna, to which students were attracted from all over Europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter [{283}] and several other women who reached distinction in the law school. As the other departments of the University of Bologna developed we find women as students and teachers in these. One of the assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at Bologna, Mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two centuries after this time, was a young woman, Alessandra Giliani. It is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues might be used for demonstrating purposes.

As the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of Italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when there have not been some distinguished women professors at the Italian universities. Nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came Madame Manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. Made in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. In the meantime many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at [{284}] the Italian universities. In the thirteenth century there was a great teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a curtain. It is evident that the educated women of the Middle Ages could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others, quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and not to the higher education. Women physicians, educators, mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are to be found at the universities of Italy while the Church and the ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities.

Unfortunately the spread of this feminine educational movement from Italy to the west of Europe was disturbed by the Héloïse and Abélard incident at the University of Paris, and as all the western universities owe their origin to Paris, they took the tradition created there after Abélard's time, that women should not be allowed to enter the university. When, however, three centuries later, the Renaissance brought in the new learning, the schools of humanism independent of the universities admitted women on absolute terms of equality with men, and some of the women became the distinguished scholars of the time. The Church's influence is plainly to be seen in this, and the women took part in plays given in Greek and classic Latin before the cardinals and prominent ecclesiastics, and everywhere the [{285}] feeling developed that, if women wanted to have the higher education of the humanities or, as it was then called, the New Learning, they should have it. This feminine educational movement spread all over Europe. Anne of Bretagne organized a school at the French Court for the women of the court, and such women as Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Navarre, Renée of Anjou, Louise La Cordiére are a few of the French women of the Renaissance who attained distinction for broad culture and education at this time.