The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

The movement for the education of women of this time would have been quite incomplete, however, if the women themselves had not taken part in the organization of feminine education. In treating of "The Women of the Century" I have already suggested that this important element of feminine education was not lacking. There is abundant evidence of the presence and enduring work of at least one great woman educator, in the sense of an organizer of educational methods, whose influence has been continuously felt in many parts of the world ever since and whose work is not only alive in our time but has shown its power to adapt itself even to the needs and demands of the twentieth-century woman. This is, after all, only what might be expected of an educator of this time, since the other accomplishments of her contemporaries have proved so lasting in their effects.

This very interesting woman of Columbus' Century, whose life is comparatively little known, though her work occupies a very important place in the history of education ever since, was Angela Merici, the foundress of the Ursulines. When twenty years of age this daughter of the lesser Italian nobility became convinced that the great need of that time was the better instruction of young girls in Christian doctrine and their training in a thoroughly Christian life. She converted her home into a school, where at certain hours of the day she gathered all the little girls of her native town of Desenzano, a small municipality on the southwestern shore of Lake Garda in Lombardy, and gave them lessons in the elements of Christianity. The work, thus humbly begun, proved to have so many factors of worth in it that it very soon attracted attention. Before long she was invited to the neighboring city of Brescia to establish a similar school, but on a much larger scale and more ambitious scope. She did so all the more willingly because one day during her earlier life in the small town of Desenzano she had had a vision in which it was revealed to her that she was to found an association of young women [{329}] who would take vows of chastity and devote their lives to the religious training of young girls.

After years of patient waiting and thoughtful consideration of the subject of organizing the education of young women and providing for continuance of her work--the delay mainly due to the fact that Angela feared that she might not be capable of accomplishing it properly--she came to the establishment of a religious order that would take up this service. When the constitutions which she had written were presented to Paul III, the Pope, who in spite of his resolve not to increase the number of religious orders, had felt compelled to approve the Jesuits after reading their constitutions because, as he said, he perceived "the finger of God is here"; also found himself forced to approve of those written by Angela Merici, saying to St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, as he did so, "I have given you sisters." What the Jesuits did for the education of young men during the next two centuries, the Ursulines did for the young women. They spread rapidly until they had communities in all the Catholic countries of Europe, and then houses were established beyond the seas in the Latin-American countries and almost wherever missionaries succeeded in founding churches. Mother Incarnation came to Quebec and is one of the most wonderful women in the early history of the continent. That was before the end of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth (1726) they established a house in New Orleans.

When persecutions came the Ursulines were, as a rule, picked out as an object of special enmity by those who sought to injure the Church. During the French Revolution they were the special butt of the intolerance of the French Republic and gave many martyrs to the cause of religion. When the Kulturkampf came in Germany they were as specifically selected for banishment as the Jesuits, and indeed they have nearly always shared the fate of the Jesuits in times of trial. They have not been without special distinction by persecution even here in America. Their convent was burned down at Charlestown in Massachusetts during the bitter wave of feelings against the religious orders that had been aroused among Protestants in 1835. Their house was the very centre of [{330}] danger in the "Know Nothing" riots in Philadelphia some twenty years later.

To-day, four centuries after their foundation, the institute is still actively alive and doing its work in every part of the world. When the first sisters elected Angela as their superior they asked that the name of the institute should be the Angelines, after her own name. She was shocked and insisted that, as their superior, she would require them to take the name of Ursulines in honor of St. Ursula. With all this humility, her personality was so pervasive that it still lives in all her houses. There are schools for young women in many of the States of the Union and in many parts of Canada. They are to be found in distant Alaska, teaching within the Arctic Circle. There are Ursulines under the equator, both on this continent, in Brazil and in Africa. This is only another example of the sort of work that the wonderful characters of Columbus' Century accomplished. Whatever they did had a vital force in it that made it live and prove a stimulus and an example to the generations and the centuries down to our own time. Angela of Merici, though almost unknown outside of the Catholic Church, was one of the very great women of the Renaissance. Probably no woman of the time, not even St. Teresa, has had so wide and deep an influence over succeeding generations as the retiring Angela of Merici.

As might well be expected, the movement for feminine education which was felt so strongly in Italy affected France to a scarcely less degree. Indeed, there were much more intimate relations between the nobility of the two countries and among the scholars of the time all over Europe than is usually supposed. As all the scholarly writing was done in Latin, the barrier of language was removed and educational interests readily became very widely diffused. Early in Columbus' Century, Queen Anne of Bretagne is famous for her insistence on education for the women of the French Court. There was a school of Latin at which they all attended, but besides they were expected to know Italian as well as French, and while doing their needlework books were read to them that were calculated to enrich their memories and enhance their literary taste. Queen Anne believed very thoroughly in the fullest of [{331}] intellectual development for women, and yet insisted also on their duties as managers of their households, and above all as home-makers in the best sense of the term. She knew the dangers of merely intellectual education, and expressions of hers on this subject are often quoted.

The court of Queen Marguerite of Navarre was at least as intellectual as that of Queen Anne, and besides it had the advantage of the deeper knowledge of the classics that had come in the meantime. Marguerite encouraged literature, and herself contributed to it. She had the large tolerance of mind of the educated woman and used it to protect some of those who had fallen under the suspicion, so rife at the time because of the religious troubles in Germany, of favoring or attempting to teach heretical doctrines. As a consequence, she has herself fallen under the suspicion of leanings towards heresy and sympathy with the reformers. This was only, however, to the extent in which that sympathy was shared by Erasmus and others of the time, who saw the abuses that needed correction and hoped that the reform movement would correct them, but who broke with it at once when they realized that revolution and not true reformation was intended. The correspondence between Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite is evidence at once of the intimate relations of the learned women of different countries and also of the sympathy existing between these two scholarly women whose influence over their contemporaries meant so much for the intellectual life of the time. The education given Mary Queen of Scots, which is mentioned later in this chapter, shows how much intellectual development was appreciated for the ruling classes of the time in France.

There are certain expressions from some of these educated women, especially those without much to do, that are wonderful anticipations of some of the things that are heard very commonly now as regards the attitude of educated women toward man's suppression of her in the preceding time. How strangely familiar are these words from Louise Labé, the French poetess of the middle class, one of whose poems of passion will be found in the chapter on French literature. "The hour has now struck," she declared, "when man can no [{332}] longer shackle the honest liberty which our sex has so long yearned for, when women are to prove how deeply men have hitherto wronged them." That expression is not, however, any more familiar than one of the comments of a masculine contemporary on this occupation of the educated women of the time with political ideas, which is quoted by Miss Sichel in her "Men and Women of the French Renaissance": "Political women go on chattering as if it were they who did everything."

The women of the time, however, occupied themselves with practical work of many kinds, and not merely with book-learning or political scheming. There is a tradition of a feminine architect of the Tuileries--Mlle. Perron (Porch) being her not inappropriate name. Many Frenchwomen were particularly interested in the diffusion of education among the poorer classes, and we have the story of many school foundations. Mlle. Ste. Beuve, who founded a school and took up her residence opposite to it, became very much interested in the pupils, whom she called her "bees," and whom she encouraged by prizes and distinctions of various kinds. After her death, by the request of the scholars her place was set at table in their midst for the occasions on which she used to come to them, for they felt that her spirit was still with them. Mlle. Saintonge wanted to take up the work of education, but was opposed by her father. She was very much misunderstood, and at one time was stoned by the children on the street. She began with the teaching of five little girls in a garret. Ten years later she was brought in procession by all the people to the great new convent school erected for her, because they realized now how much her work was to mean and how thoroughly unselfish was her devotion to the cause of education and uplift for their children. In the course of the single century after the beginning of our period over three hundred Ursuline schools were opened in France for the education of girls, and the opportunities for education were greatly extended.

Perhaps the greatest surprise for most people in our time is the fine development of feminine education that took place in Spain during this period. English-speaking people have, [{333}] as a rule, inherited English prejudices with regard to Spain and are likely to be somewhat in the position of asking, Has any good ever come out of Spain? As a matter of fact, the century just after Columbus' Century belongs to Spain for achievement in every department of intellectual and artistic culture. Her literature, her painting, her philosophy, her educators ruled the world of thought and aesthetics. For those who know something of the high worth of Spanish achievement it is no surprise to learn that education reached a high standard of development in the peninsula during Columbus' Century and that, above all, feminine education was magnificently organized, so that the intellectual achievements of the women of this time deserve a high place in the world's history. All this is mainly due to the influence of Isabella of Castile, and has been known for as long as the history of this period has been properly understood.