6 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



does, a wider revival of Art. The schools of Christendom 

 became thronged as they were never thronged before. A 

 passion for enquiry took the place of the old routine. The 

 Crusades brought different parts of Europe into contact 

 with one another and into contact with the new world of 

 the East with a new religion and a new philosophy, with 

 the Arabic Aristotle, with the Arabic commentators on 

 Aristotle, and eventually even with Aristotle in the original 

 Greek. "* 



Roughly speaking, the Renaissance attained its culmina- 

 tion during the second half of the fifteenth century. It 

 was during this period that gunpowder and printing with 

 movable types were invented the first completely revolu- 

 tionizing the methods of warfare and the second marvel- 

 ously facilitating the diffusion of knowledge. And it was 

 during the same period also that Vasca da Gama doubled 

 the Cape of Good Hope, that Columbus crossed the Sea of 

 Darkness and that Copernicus laid the foundation of mod- 

 ern astronomy. 



But this wonderful half-century constituted only a small 

 portion of the period embraced by the Renaissance. From 

 the fall of Constantinople until it attained the highest 

 phase of development in England, the Renaissance covers 

 a period of nearly two centuries. The progress of the 

 intellectual and moral movement which it represented, from 

 the land of its birth, to the northern and western parts of 

 Europe, was comparatively slow. Thus, while Italy was 

 exhibiting the full effulgence of the re-birth, England was 

 still in the feudal condition of the Middle Ages. A strik- 

 ing illustration of this truth is seen in the fact that "a 

 brother of the Black Prince banqueted with Petrarch in 

 the palace of Galeazzo Visconti that is to say, the founder 

 of Italian humanism, the representative of Italian despotic 

 state-craft, and the companion of Froissart's heroes met 



i The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, p. 31, 

 Oxford, 1895. 



