In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with Mohammedanism. In his fine work, Die Frauen des Orients (1904), Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had, like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.
It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe, women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin; still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover, the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the women’s minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any large change.
These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About 1350 appeared Boccaccio’s Decameron, with its fairer promise of woman’s position, and from that time the women of Italy show the remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished.
The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11] The picture that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities, women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d’Andrea and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world knows.
It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the general question of woman’s position. Boccaccio was no feminist, but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was bound to suggest the question of woman’s capacity. An Italian monk so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of 800 pages each) on distinguished women—170 in number—of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845 distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some distinction in theology.
It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany, France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505—the Latin treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa, De nobilitate et præcellentia feminini sexus (“Of the nobility and excellence of the female sex”). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman’s capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have given.
In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun describes the Cité des Dames of Christine de Pisan (fifteenth century) as the first plea for woman’s emancipation, but a reader of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It ranges over the whole field of distinguished women—the women of Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity—with admiration of their learning or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of Navarre and—in a less degree—Margaret of Valois proved the capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu’s own niece, Mme. de Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best writers of the day met.
England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. She tells of the learned women of Italy and France, and declares that woman’s “incapacity” is “acquired, not natural.” “How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?” she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she urges—a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation of Oxford and Cambridge—and have their sex fully educated.
Mary Astell’s appeal had little effect, though it was immediately supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written his Essay upon Projects, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher education of women. “I have often thought,” he said, “that it is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.” In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary Astell’s proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a “nunnery.” “Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven,” he says, “and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out sometimes that nature will prevail.” He is in favour of public schools more like those in the country for youths. Women’s faculties are equal to men’s, he insists; the only difference is in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on “man’s sphere,” and so condemns in advance any political ambition. How little response there was to these appeals, and how the education of English women remained at an almost medieval level until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known.