42
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
shot arrows from his towers upon his neighbors, or sallied forth to encounter like assaults at their hands, the safe seclusion of the castle and the quiet occupations of cooking and spinning were, no doubt, the best for the women of the family. As refinement increased, women were able to come out of their seclusion a little, and to participate to some extent in the social life of the men. The growth of chivalry also helped to elevate the women of the higher classes in feudal days. Religion and gallantry were blended together. The love of God and the ladies was enjoined as a single duty. At the institution of the Order of the Golden Shield, Louis II., Duke of Bourbon, enjoined his knights to honor above all the ladies, “ because from them, after God, comes all the honor that men can acquire.” The laws also recognized this chivalrous homage and extended their protection. James II., of Aragon, enacted a law “that every man, whether knight or no, who shall be in company with a lady, pass safe and unmolested, unless he be guilty of murder.”
With the incoming of the Renaissance and the Reformation, with the new spirit of personal dignity and independence, begotten of a wider knowledge and broader culture, the crudities of chivalry and the restrictions of feudalism began to fade away. Expansion and independence took the place of restriction and submission. Since the condition of the higher classes of women had been tending toward a higher position of esteem and honor under the later feudal system, their advancement could not fail to be rapid under the new order of the new age. This is shown by their educational elevation at the close of the fifteenth century.
Spain and Italy had at that time begun to admit women to the higher education of the universities. The Spanish Arabs were devoted to letters, and many of their high-born women publicly contended for prizes in science and arts at Cordova and Seville. The reign of Isabella counts among its many glories a galaxy of women whose scholarship would have been rare in any age. Isabella herself was learned in the classics, and her Latin instructor was a woman, Dona Beatriz de Galindo, who was called La Latina, on account of her rare acquirements. At the same time the University of Salamanca had as lecturer in the Latin classics another learned woman, Dona Lucie de Medrano, while at Alcala, Dona Francisca de Lebrija filled the chair of rhetoric.
In Italy, a century earlier, Dotta, daughter of the celebrated Accursius, gave instruction in law at the University of Bologna, and nearly contemporary with her was Novella, the beautiful daughter of Andrea, who delivered her lectures upon the canon law from behind a curtain, as tradition has it, lest her beauty should distract the young men who were her pupils. These were the earliest of a long line of distinguished Italian women professors, reaching down to our own day, when Dr. Josephine Catani fills the chair of histology in the medical school of the ancient University of Bologna. The political status of woman in 1492 in Continental Europe was a survival of ancient ideas, of Roman jurisprudence. Even under the repression of the feudal system the capacity of woman to be a sovereign, a judge, an advocate and an arbitrator, was not denied. But the Roman law excluded her from all public offices, not, however, on the ground of incapacity, but simply on the ground of etiquette and expediency, as the Roman code puts it, “because it is not fitting that women and slaves should hold public offices.” The system of civil law, which was built up in the fifteenth century from the ruins of the Roman code, incorporated this idea, so that we find it declared in the laws of Continental Europe that a woman may not be an advocate or a judge.
In England, where the influence of the Roman law was slight, the capacity and fitness of women for public office was to some extent recognized, and when Queen Mary came to the throne she placed women in judicial office. Lady Berkeley was made a justice of the peace for Gloucestershire, and Lady Rous, as justice of the quorum for Suffolk, “ did usually sit on the bench at assizes among the other justices, cincta gladio, girt with the sword.” The hereditary office of high sheriff of Westmoreland was held at one time by a woman, and women were held to be eligible to election as burgesses, overseers of the poor, constables, sheriffs and marshals, and