WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 51 



her triumphant knight, ' ' and quite different, too, from that 

 of the castle lady-loves whose sole attractions were often 

 no more than youth and beauty who inspired the impas- 

 sioned lyrics of troubadour and minnesinger. 



A recent writer sums up in a few words the status and 

 the accomplishments of the lady of the abbey in the follow- 

 ing paragraph : 



' ' No institution of Europe has ever won for the lady the 

 freedom and development that she enjoyed in the con- 

 vent in early days. The modern college for women only 

 feebly reproduces it, since the college for women has arisen 

 at a time when colleges in general are under a cloud. The 

 lady-abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great 

 social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church. Great 

 spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike with- 

 in her grasp. She was treated as an equal by the men of 

 her class, as is witnessed by letters we still have from 

 popes and emperors to abbesses. She had the stimulus of 

 competition with men in executive capacity, in scholarship, 

 and in artistic production, since her work was freely set 

 before the general public ; but she was relieved by the cir- 

 cumstances of her environment from the ceaseless competi- 

 tion in common life of woman with woman for the favor of 

 the individual man. In the cloister of the great days, as 

 on a small scale in the college for women to-day, women 

 were judged by each other as men are everywhere judged 

 by each other, for sterling qualities of head and heart and 

 character. ' ' 1 



Nor is this all. Never was woman more highly hon- 

 ored, never was her power and influence greater than dur- 

 ing the period of conventual life extending from Hilda of 

 Whitby to Gertrude and the Matildas of Helfta, and espe- 

 cially during that golden period of monasticism and chiv- 

 alry when cloister and court were the radiant centers of 

 learning and culture. Abbesses took part in ecclesiastical 

 i The Lady, p. 71, by Emily James Putnam, New York, 1910. 



