54 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



daughters of one Mangord, a professor of Paris, whose 

 daughters taught Sacred Scripture. 1 There were few in 

 number, it is true, but they were the worthy prototypes 

 of those learned and brilliant women who achieved such 

 distinction and glory for their sex during that most inter- 

 esting period of history known as the Renaissance. 



WOMAN AND EDUCATION DURING THE RENAISSANCE 



By the Renaissance we understand not only a phase in 

 the development of the nations of Europe but also that 

 period of transition between the mediaeval and the modern 

 world during which the latent spiritual energies of the 

 Middle Ages developed into the intellectual forces and 

 moral habits of thought which now pervade the civilized 

 world. Various dates are assigned for its starting point. 

 Among them is the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when 

 there was a great influx of scholars from the famed metrop- 

 olis on the Bosphorus to the Italian peninsula, who brought 

 with them those forgotten treasures of science and litera- 



of the eleventh century, wrote on the diseases of women as well as 

 on other medical subjects. Compare the attitude of the school of 

 Salerno towards women with that of the University of London, eight 

 hundred years later. When, in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, women applied to this university for degrees in medicine, they 

 were informed, as H. Eashdall writes in The Universities of Eu- 

 rope in the Middle Ages, Vol. II, Part II, p. 712, Oxford, 1895, that 

 "the University of London, although it had been empowered by Royal 

 Charter to do all things that could be done by any University, was 

 legally advised that it could not grant degrees to women without a 

 fresh Charter, because no University had ever granted such de- 

 grees. ' ' Cf . also Haeser 's Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, Band 

 I, p. 645, et seq., Jena, 1875. Verily, the so-called dark ages have 

 risen up to condemn our vaunted age of enlightenment! 



*Die Entstehung der Universitdten des Mittelalters bis 1400, Band 

 I, p. 233, Berlin, 1885, von P. Heinrick Denifle, assistant archivist of 

 the Vatican Library, and Histoire Literaire de la France, Commence 

 par des Eeligieux Benedictins de S. Maur et Continue par des Mem- 

 bres de I'Institut, Tom. IX, 281, Paris, 1733-1906. 



