58 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



centuries, had been almost the only schools available for 

 girls, the women of Italy were taking an active part in the 

 great educational movement inaugurated by the revival of 

 learning, and winning the highest honors for their sex in 

 every department of science, art and literature. Not since 

 the days of Sappho and Aspasia had woman attained such 

 prominence, and never were they, irrespective of class- 

 condition, accorded greater liberty, privileges or honor. 

 The universities, which had been opened to them at the close 

 of the Middle Ages, gladly conferred upon them the doc- 

 torate, and eagerly welcomed them to the chairs of some 

 of their most important faculties. The Renaissance was, 

 indeed, the heydey of the intellectual woman throughout 

 the whole of the Italian peninsula a time when woman 

 enjoyed the same scholastic freedom as men, and when 

 Mme. de StaeVs dictum, Le genie n'a pas de sexe, ex- 

 pressed a doctrine admitted in practice and not an 

 academic theory. 



It would require a large volume, or rather many vol- 

 umes, to do justice to the learned women of Italy who 

 conferred such honor upon their sex during the period we 

 are considering. Suffice it to mention a few of those who 

 achieved special distinction and whose memories are still 

 green in the land which had been made so illustrious by 

 their talent and genius. 



That which the modern reader finds the most surprising 

 in the Italian women of the Renaissance is their enthusiasm 

 for the literce Jiumaniores the Latin and Greek classics 

 and the proficiency which so many of them, even at an 

 early age, attained in the literature and philosophy of 

 antiquity. It was no uncommon thing for a girl in her 

 teens to write and speak Latin, while many of them were 

 almost equally familiar with Greek. 1 Thus Laura Bren- 



i Cecelia Gonzaga, a pupil of the celebrated humanist, Vittorino 

 da Feltre, read the Gospels in Greek when she was only seven years 

 old. Isotta and Ginevra Nogorola, pupils of the humanist, Guarino 



