OF SIX MEDIEVAL WOMEN 



In honour of both, men strove in tournament 

 and fought in battle. With the cry, " For our 

 Lady/* or " For God and my Lady," men hurled 

 themselves into the thick of the strife as if the 

 goddess, whether divine or human, in whose 

 name they ventured, had made her champions 

 invulnerable. And, in a manner as it would 

 seem of action and re-action, the goddess became 

 humanised and the woman deified. The former 

 tendency may be traced in miracles attributed to 

 the Virgin, and, later, in the " Mysteries," and 

 the latter in tales of chivalry, where love is 

 treated as a gift from Heaven, and the recipients 

 of it are idealised. Stories which seem to con- 

 tradict this, and to refute all accepted ideas of 

 chivalry and honour, are frequently original only 

 in details, the bases being borrowed from Oriental 

 tales. Buddha's country, the land of the Zenana, 

 supplied much material of an exaggerated nature 

 which in the West became mere travesty. 



It is always difficult to determine exactly the 

 origin of anything so subtle as a sentiment, 

 especially one which gradually pervades and 

 influences a people. It is, in its way, at first 

 like a soft breeze, of which we can only see the 

 effect. But as we try to discover some definite, 

 if only partial, reason for this interchange of 

 simple human relations between the Virgin and 

 her votaries, we remember that St. Francis, the 

 embodiment of exalted human sentiment, had 

 lived, and that scholasticism, in that phase of it 

 which treated the dialectical subtleties of words 



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