VII. AMERICA IN COLUMBUS' CENTURY
Since our English colonization of America did not take place until the seventeenth century--Jamestown, 1607; Plymouth, 1620--it is ordinarily presumed, in English-speaking countries at least, that there is little or nothing worth while talking about in American history during Columbus' Century, ending as it does in 1550. As a matter of fact, however, though America was discovered only in 1492, there is an extremely interesting and significant chapter of American history between 1500 and 1550. This is, of course, all in the Spanish-American countries. It has unfortunately been the custom to think of the Spanish colonies as backward in all that relates to education and culture, but the history of even this half century here in America, when some magnificent progress was made, the landmarks of which still remain, is quite enough to show how far from the realities of things as they were some of our fondly cherished historic impressions are. There is not a single phase of civilization that did not receive diligent attention very early in the history of Spanish America, and the results achieved were such as to represent enduring progress in the intellectual life. In education, in printing and the distribution of books, in art and architecture, in the training of the Indians in the arts and crafts as well as in the principles of self-government, and even in science, though this department of human accomplishment is usually not supposed to be seriously taken at this time, there are many significant early American achievements.
It is only in comparatively recent years that in English-speaking countries there has come anything like a proper recognition of the work done by the Spaniards in America in the early days of the history of this continent. It has been the custom to think that, while the English colonists came {276} to make a home here, the main purpose of the Spaniards in America was to exploit the inhabitants and the country and to do just as little as possible for either, provided only the members of the Spanish expeditions made money enough to enable them to live in comfort at home in Spain after a few years of stay here in America. Mr. Sidney Lee, the distinguished editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and an authority on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period, as well as the sixteenth century generally, in a series of articles which appeared in Scribner's for 1907 on "The Call of the West," contradicted most of these notions that are so prevalent with regard to the contrasted attitude of the English colonists and the Spanish colonizers during the early history of the continent. He said, for instance, not hesitating properly to characterize the principal reason for this historical deception:
"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the {277} New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine protecting providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.
"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed books, maps and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light which illumes every corner of the picture the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler." (Italics ours.)
In education particularly the Spaniards accomplished much for which they have been given almost no credit in English-speaking countries until the last few years. As a matter of fact, as the President of a great Eastern university said at a public dinner not long since, "We have only just discovered Spanish America." The lamented Professor Bourne of Yale, who wrote the third volume of "The American Nation" [Footnote 24] {278} on Spain in America, was one of the earliest American students of history to realize how much of injustice had been done by the ordinarily accepted notions of Spanish-American history that are common in English-speaking countries. In his chapter on "The Transmission of European Culture," which is a vindication of Spanish-American intellectual achievements, Professor Bourne proceeds to institute comparisons between what was done in Spanish and in English America in the early centuries for education and intellectual development, and constantly to the disadvantage of the English-speaking countries. He said:
[Footnote 24: Harpers, New York.]
"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standards of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century. (Italics ours.) Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana,' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion." Most of these works were written after the close of Columbus' Century, but the ground had been prepared for them and some of the actual accumulation of facts for them begun in our period. They followed as a natural development out of the scholarly interests already displayed in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Spanish-American development of education is the fact that its first landmark is a school for the education of Indians. Not a few of the Spaniards who came to Mexico in the first half of the sixteenth century had enjoyed the advantage of a university education. As their children grew up they felt like sending them back to Spain for university education, and many were {279} so sent. The need for the education of the Indians was recognized early, however, and in 1535 the College of Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, the quarter of the City of Mexico reserved for the Indians, was founded under the patronage of Bishop Zumarata. Among the faculty were, as might be expected, graduates not only of Salamanca, the great Spanish university of the time, but also of the University of Paris, which was at this period the leading university of the world. It is interesting to realize that these professors did not consider that they were fulfilling their whole duty by teaching alone, but also devoted themselves faithfully to what many have come to look upon apparently as a modern development of university life, the duty of investigating and writing. This is the real index of the vitality of a university and the sincerity of its professors. Among the teachers of Santa Cruz were such eminent scholars as Bernardino de Sahagun, the founder of American anthropology, and Juan de Torquemada, himself a graduate of a Mexican college, whose "Monarquia Indiana" is a great storehouse of facts concerning Mexico before the coming of the whites, containing many precious details with regard to Mexican antiquity.
Just as Columbus' Century was closing, arrangements were made for the organization of two universities in Spanish America--the one in Mexico City and the other in Lima, Peru. They received their royal charters the same year, 1551, but besides the granting of their charters a definite amount of the Spanish revenues was set aside by the Crown as a government contribution to their support. It seems worth while to note that such encouragement on the part of the English Government for an institution of learning in the American colonies a full century, or even two, later than this would have been quite out of the question. Whatever the English colonists did for education they had to do for themselves. There was no aid and not even sympathy with their efforts. English universities for several centuries refused to recognize American universities as on a par with them, and rightly, for their standards were too low, though it is an extremely interesting commentary on the educational situation in America, and especially on the usually accepted {280} notions as to the relative significance of Spanish and English education here, that both the University of Lima and of Mexico came to be recognized during the sixteenth century as sister institutions of learning not only by Salamanca and the other Spanish universities, at this time among the best institutions of learning in Europe, but also by the other university of Europe, whose prestige was the highest, that of Paris. There was a certain interchange of professors among them, though this was not formally organized, and graduates of Salamanca and Paris taught at both Mexico and Lima. Students from these American universities were accorded their American ratings and allowed to proceed with their work on an equality with European university men, a privilege scarcely accorded to English-American university students even yet.
The scholars of the Old World were quite well aware that the New Learning was penetrating into the Western Hemisphere and were proud to think that the humanities were being cultivated beyond the Western ocean. Before the end of Columbus' Century, Marcantonio Flaminio, whom Sandys in his "Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning" calls the purest of the Latin poets of the age, a man who was a great friend of Vittoria Colonna, in sending to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese a volume of Latin poems by the scholars of Northern Italy, assures the Cardinal that France and Spain and Germany and distant Brittany would do honor to those Latin muses, and that even the New World would share in admiration for them. As he puts it: "Those on whom the light of dawn arises when the skies of Italy are wrapped in darkness will devote their nights and days to the study of the Latin poets of Italy."
"For strange to tell, e'en on that far-off shore Doth flourish now the love of Latin lore."
The newly created Universities of Mexico and Lima developed during the half century following Columbus' Century into full-fledged institutions of learning amply deserving the name university. Lectures in medicine were delivered in {281} Mexico in 1578, and a full medical faculty was organized before the close of the century. Our first school of medicine in English America did not come into existence for fully two centuries later. More than half a century before this, however, special care had been exercised by the Spanish authorities to prevent the exploitation of the Spanish colonists or the Indians by pretenders to knowledge in medicine. As early as 1527 strict medical regulations were drawn up by the municipal council of the City of Mexico, granting the license to practise medicine only to those who showed the possession of a university degree in medicine. Even earlier than this arrangements had been made for the regular training of barber surgeons, so that injuries and wounds of various kinds might be treated promptly as well as properly, so that even the poorer classes might have the benefit of some regular training in those whose ministrations they could afford to pay for. A pure-drug ordinance, regulating the practice of the apothecaries, was issued as early as 1529. It was practically only in our own time that similar regulations were adopted in this country.
Standards in university teaching were well maintained. Post-graduate work was literally post-graduate work, and students might take up the study of medicine or of law or of divinity only after having made proper preliminary studies in the undergraduate departments of the university. The Spanish-American universities received a charter not only from the Spanish crown, but also from the Pope. The formal title of the University of Mexico was the Pontifical University of the city. The Papal charter was sought because it was the only way to secure an international value for academic degrees, for the Papacy was the international authority of the time. Papal charters for the universities, however, were granted only on condition that standards should be maintained. There are any number of these Papal university charters extant which emphasize this necessity. On the establishment of a new university the professors had to be graduates of well-recognized, authoritative universities, in which the examinations were held in oath-bound secrecy, in order {282} to assure as far as possible absolute fairness and the maintenance of standards. The course of studies and the length of time for them had to be arranged in accordance with the standards of older universities.
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The Spanish-American universities had the advantage of being closely in touch with the European universities, and as a consequence had taken their traditions direct from them. Papal university charters, as a rule, required explicitly that there should be three years of university work before medicine or other graduate work might be taken up, and then four years of medicine before the degree of doctor would be granted. Even after this, according to the Italian laws of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the practice of medicine must not be begun by the graduate until he had spent a year in practice with an experienced physician. This is the year of hospital work that we are now trying to introduce into the medical schools as a requirement and which is taken, but voluntarily, by most of those who are seriously interested in their professional studies. The preliminary requirements, that is, such formal academic preparation for the study of medicine as makes it possible for a young man to take up the subject and properly benefit by it, have only become obligatory by law in very recent years here in America, and that to a very limited degree.
The letter written to the Municipal Council of his native city, Seville, by Dr. Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his second expedition, shows the thoroughly scientific interest and the acute powers of observation of the Spanish physicians of this time. This is unquestionably the first written document about the flora, the fauna, the ethnology and the anthropology of America. Dr. Fernandez de Ybarra published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, September 29, 1906, some abstracts from this letter which show that these expressions are justified by its contents and are not mere enthusiastic terms for rather commonplace observations. Chanca described in detail woods of various kinds, fruit, spices, plants such as cotton, the birds and animals, and above all the customs, appearance and mode of living of the inhabitants. He gives in detail their slave-making and cannibalistic tendencies. There was nothing that escaped Chanca's observation. He found turpentine, tar, nutmegs, ginger, aloes, though he noted that the aloes were not the same kind as those in Spain (Barbadoes aloes are still {285} considered inferior), cinnamon, cloves, mastic and many other things. He notes the food of the inhabitants, their mode of working, the absence of iron, yet the well-made implements, the presence of gold in many places, describes the climate of the country and gives important details with regard to its meteorology.
Dr. Chanca had been the physician to their majesties, and he gave up not only this position, but a large and lucrative practice in order to become the physician of the colonies. It is principally through him that we have any account of Columbus' second voyage. This second voyage was, of course, very different from the first and carried a thousand five hundred persons, among them many of the nobility who had recently been in the wars with the Moors and who were looking for new conquests in America. They were restless and hard to manage, negligent and rash, they tasted many things without due care and succeeded in poisoning themselves on a number of occasions, they caught the fevers of the country and only for the presence of Dr. Chanca it is very probable that most of them would have perished. Columbus, who thought that he owed him his life, praises him highly in a letter to the Sovereigns, asking permission to pay him special fees in addition to the salary and rations which he was allowed as scrivener in the Indies. His letter and the estimation in which he was held at the time is the best possible evidence of the standard of attainments of the Spanish physicians of Columbus' Century.
One of the memorable products of American scholarship during Columbus' Century, that must not be passed over without mention here, is Garcilaso de la Vega, the historian of Peru, born in our period, though he did his work afterwards. He was the son of a daughter of the Incas, the reigning family in Peru when the Spaniards came, and owed to his mother the suggestion of writing a history of his ancestors and their land. He travelled over the country consulting the old inhabitants, the principal among whom were relatives through his mother and his father was the Spanish Governor of Cuzco, one of the few Spanish governors, be it said, who did not die a violent death. Garcilaso was then in an {286} excellent position to gather all the details of the story, yet without prejudice against the Spaniards. As he spent his life after the age of twenty mainly in Europe, his opportunities for thorough understanding of all the conditions were complete. His work is of a great historic value, and indeed is the foundation of all that we know of old Peru. It has been translated into all the modern languages.
Besides this attention to the higher education and to the education of the Indians, popular education was cared for sedulously and, above all, the Indians were instructed in the use of their hands, in the arts and crafts, and in every way that would make them useful, happy citizens. The contrast between English America and Spanish America in this matter is rather striking and has been emphasized by Professor Bourne in the chapter of his book to which we have already referred. He said:
"Both the crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each Church and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters." (Italics ours.)
Almost needless to say it is only in quite recent years that we have awakened to the necessity for such teaching for our Indians and, may it be added, for the poorer classes of our population generally.
The printing press early found its home in America, and even during Columbus' Century quite a number of books were published in the Spanish-American countries. It is often said that the first book printed in America was the {287} Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book, issued, I believe, in 1638, but of course this was long anticipated in Mexico and in South America. In this, as in many other of the details of Spanish-American culture. Professor Bourne has given authoritative information. He said:
"The early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the distant European presses for the publication of their manuals. The printing press was introduced into the New World probably as early as 1536, and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary Christian doctrine called 'La Escala Espiritual' (the ladder of the spirit), was issued in 1537. No copy of it, however, is known to exist. Seven different printers plied their craft in New Spain in the sixteenth century. Among the notable issues of these presses, besides the religious works and church service works, were dictionaries and grammars of the Mexican languages, Pufa's 'Cedulario' in 1563, a compilation of royal ordinances, Farfan's 'Tractado de Medicina.'"
An enduring and very striking monument of the humanitarian progress made in Spanish America at this time in medicine is a hospital that still stands in the City of Mexico. It was built originally by Cortes and endowed by him, and his descendants still appoint the superintendent and have much to do with the support of the hospital. It was erected in 1524, and it might well be thought that at any such early date as this it would be a very rude structure and the surprise would be that it is still standing. Miss Nutting and Miss Dock, however, in their "History of Nursing," have given two pictures of it, both of which we reproduce here, and which show that it was a beautiful hospital building and quite worthy of the great beginnings that were made in other ways in Mexican educational and humanitarian progress. The pretty courtyard and porticoes were eminently suitable for the changeable climate of Mexico, and the whole building is a monument of Spanish culture as well as Spanish charity. [Footnote 25]
[Footnote 25: The surprise inevitable for many at finding that such a handsome hospital was erected at this time will be tempered by recalling that this is the period when some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world were erected. (See the chapter on Social Work and Workers.) Besides they began very early to erect beautiful buildings in Mexico City. The University Buildings, the Cathedral and other public buildings were worthy of the fine traditions of architecture prevalent in Europe and especially in Spain at this time.]
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Champlain, the French navigator, having visited the City of Mexico before the end of the sixteenth century, said of it: "But all the contentment I felt at the sight of things so agreeable (the beautiful natural scenery) was but little in comparison with that which I experienced when I beheld the beautiful City of Mexico, which I did not suppose had such superb buildings with splendid ample palaces and fine houses and the streets well laid and where are seen the large and handsome shops of the merchants full of all sorts of every kind of merchandise."
Nor must it be thought that Mexico was the only progressive part of Spanish America so early in our history. Indeed, so much had been accomplished in the Panama region by the end of Columbus' Century that, when Sir Francis Drake raided the place some twenty years later, the bank of the Chagres River was lined with warehouses, there was a handsome monastery and beautiful church, and there were many houses of stone decorated with carvings of many kinds, the residences of the Governor and the royal officials. When the flow of the Chagres was arrested in order to make the Gatun dam for the Panama Canal, all vestiges of this disappeared, though the church was practically the only building of any importance then standing. It showed by the charm of its architecture and its interesting carvings how high had been the culture and how good the taste of the builders almost a century before there was any permanent settlement in English America. The rise of the waters of the dam did not cover as important records of human progress as when the great irrigation dam at Assuan submerged the ruins of the ancient Temple of Philae in Egypt, nor cover up such interesting works of art, but it did obliterate some of the evidence for a stage of civilization in America that in English-speaking countries at least has been wantonly minimized or sadly misunderstood.
There are many remains in Panama that give some idea {289} of how much the Spaniards did during Columbus' Century and how permanent were many of their constructions. There is an old bridge from the early part of the sixteenth century which, though built without a keystone, has its main arch still standing. There is the famous flat arch which demonstrates so clearly that this region must have been very little disturbed by earthquakes ever since, because it seems almost incredible that a structure should stand with so slight curvature for any length of time, even in an absolutely undisturbed country, yet this has been in place for nearly four centuries in Panama. There was a magnificent paved road across the isthmus, the King's Highway, remains of which are still to be found in excellent preservation. Some portions of it were used during the course of the construction of the Panama Canal and proved very serviceable. When we realize what would have happened to one of our roads in a century, much less four hundred years, a good idea of their permanency of construction is reached. The old tower of St. Jerome, still standing, shows how solidly and yet how ornately the Spaniards built, and there was evidently a magnificent set of monumental constructions for religious and civil purposes on the isthmus almost a century before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. The story of these early days in American history has not yet been told in its entirety, but even the details that are available show us how well the Spaniards labored for permanency of their foundations in America.
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VIII. SOME GREAT WOMEN
Probably what must be considered the most interesting chapter in the history of Columbus' Century for our generation is that which tells the story of the women of the time who accomplished purposes that make their names forever memorable. Great as were the men, the women were in every way worthy of them, and these women of the Renaissance have attracted attention ever since, though never more so than now, when we are beginning to take seriously once more the problem of giving to women the amplest opportunities for intellectual development and achievement that they may desire. The Italian ladies of the Renaissance have been the subject of particular attention, sometimes indeed to the almost total eclipse of their equally as interesting sisters of the other nationalities, for in every country in Europe the Renaissance brought a magnificent development of feminine intellectual incentive and accomplishment and brought out a fine demonstration of women's powers.
It would be quite impossible to give any adequate idea of the large numbers of women who at this period manifested intellectual ability of a high order. All that can be done is to select from the various countries of Europe those women who at this time did work of such high order that their names will never willingly be let die and whose careers will have an enduring interest for mankind so long as our present form of civilization continues. They not only merit a place beside the men of the time, but some of them indeed must be classed as surpassing all but the very highest geniuses of the period. The variety of their achievement is quite as interesting as its quality. Above all, the women of Columbus' Century demonstrated their ability to administer government, to organize particularly charitable purposes, to secure the building of fine {291} hospitals and proper care for the ailing poor, and to direct the decoration of their homes and the beauty of home surroundings, so that Renaissance interior decoration and gardens have been the special subject of imitation whenever in the after-time the beautifying of the home has come to occupy the position that it should.
The first woman to be considered in Columbus' Century should naturally be Isabella of Castile, to whom so much of the possibility of Columbus' achievement is due. Fortunately in recent years her life and career have come to be much better known and we have reached a more fitting appreciation of her wonderful administrative ability and profound influence on her time. There is probably no woman in history who so deeply influenced her own nation and generation as Isabella. In a time of very great women she was the greatest. Withal, she was charmingly feminine and did much to lift the position of her sex in Spain up to the height of Renaissance achievements.
There is scarcely any mode of activity on which Isabella has not left traces of her genius. Her power of inspiring men was very great. She led her armies in person, and undoubtedly to her more than anyone else is due the success of the Spaniards against the Moors at this time. Her genius for peace as well as for war is evidenced by the formation of a constabulary force in Spain, the Santa Hermandad, intended for the protection of persons and property against injustice of any kind, though particularly against the violence of the nobles. She found Spain anarchic, without any power over disorders and with so many elements of disaffection that it seemed hopeless to think of making it a unified powerful country. She left it peaceful and prosperous, and when she died she was the ruler of a greater domain than the Roman Empire ever possessed. Some of this was undoubtedly her good fortune, but the happy accidents of history occur, as a rule, only to those who are able to take advantage of them. She encouraged education and, above all, obtained a fine education for herself. Her Castilian has been ranked as the standard of the language by the Spanish Royal Academy. When a mother, she took up the study of Latin so as to share her {292} children's education, and learned to know it well. She was extremely solicitous for the education of her children and, in order to secure the best possible mental training for them, she established a palace school, where some of the most scholarly men of the time were invited to teach.
As a rule, all that most of us know about Isabella is that she recalled Columbus to her presence with the words: "I will assume the undertaking for my own crown of Castile and am ready to pawn my jewels to defray the expenses of it if the funds in the treasury should be found inadequate." It was a woman's intuition surpassing in its insight all the knowledge of those around her. There is perhaps one other fact that a great many people know, and that is, that during the siege of Granada she declared that she would not change her shift until the town had been taken. Told of her in praise at the beginning, the story has come in more refined times to seem a little ridiculous. But for anyone who knows the strenuous life, most of which was passed in the saddle, encouraging, cajoling, threatening, urging, leading, inspiring the men of her time until what was the most disturbed and unhappy country in Europe became a firmly consolidated nation, where prosperity and happiness went hand in hand, the spirit of the woman will be better revealed in that expression than in anything else.
There is perhaps no greater woman ruler in all the history of the world. What she was capable of physically in her long rides on horseback would seem almost incredible, and yet with all that she was eminently womanly, a fond mother to her children, noted for her care of her household and, strangest of all perhaps, a great needlewoman. Many a church in Spain was proud to display an altar cloth that was worked by her hands, and the historical traditions that traced them to her actual hand labor are well authenticated.
Her daughters as well as her sons received the benefit of the best education, though, with their mother's example and encouragement, they devoted themselves to needlework and even to the arts of spinning and weaving. It is said that Ferdinand the Catholic, her husband, could declare, as Charlemagne had done, that he used no article of clothing that {293} had not been made for him by his wife or his daughters. When she was married to Ferdinand they were so poor that they had to borrow the money to make the presents to the servants that were customary on such occasions. It is said that she mended one doublet for her husband, the King, as often as seven times. Her deep piety, her firm character, her habits of industry and thrift, and yet her ability to recognize what was likely to be good for her kingdom and her people and to spend money freely on it, made an admirable example for the time. Above all, she discouraged the idle extravagance of the nobility and succeeded in greatly lessening the immorality at court. She made a magnificent collection of books, fostered learning at the universities, encouraged it among the women of the time, and it is no wonder that historians have spoken so much in praise of her. With all this she was extremely unhappy in her children--she saw her son die in the promise of youth, her daughter went mad, other daughters, including Queen Catherine of England, were destined, in spite of felicitous auguries in early life, to the most poignant unhappiness--and mother had to be the source of consolation for them all.
The spirit of Isabella in the matter of the rights of her subjects will perhaps be best appreciated from the famous expression which she used on hearing that Columbus had offered some of the Indians whom he brought home with him to some of the Spanish nobility as gifts. The Queen indignantly demanded when she heard of it, "Who gave permission to Columbus to parcel out my vassals to anyone?" Having learned that some of the Indians were being held as slaves in Spain she issued a decree that they should be returned to their native country at the expense of the person in whose possession they were found.
Prescott has drawn a striking contrast between the character of Isabella and of Elizabeth. The two names are in origin the same and there are many details of their careers that tempt to the making of a comparison. Because Elizabeth is really a product of Columbus' Century, seventeen years of age before the century closed, Prescott's comparison is a document of special value for us here, for it tells the {294} story of two great women of the time, though the work of one of them was accomplished after the close of our period. He says (p. 188, Vol. III):
"Both succeeded in establishing themselves on the throne after the most precarious vicissitudes. Each conducted her kingdom, through a long and triumphant reign, to a height of glory to which it had never before reached. Both lived to see the vanity of all earthly grandeur, and to fall the victims of an inconsolable melancholy; and both left behind an illustrious name, unrivalled in the subsequent annals of their country.
"But with these few circumstances of their history, the resemblance ceases. Their characters afford scarcely a point of contact. Elizabeth, inheriting a large share of the bold and bluff King Harry's temperament, was haughty, arrogant, coarse and irascible; while with these fiercer qualities she mingled deep dissimulation and strange irresolution. Isabella, on the other hand, tempered the dignity of royal station with the most bland and courteous manners. Once resolved, she was constant in her purposes, and her conduct in public and private life was characterized by candour and integrity. Both may be said to have shown that magnanimity which is implied by the accomplishment of great objects in the face of great obstacles. But Elizabeth was desperately selfish; she was incapable of forgiving, not merely a real injury, but the slightest affront to her vanity; and she was merciless in exacting retribution. Isabella, on the other hand, lived only for others,--was ready at all times to sacrifice self to considerations of public duty; and, far from personal resentments, showed the greatest condescension and kindness to those who had most sensibly injured her; while her benevolent heart sought every means to mitigate the authorized severities of the law, even towards the guilty. . . .
"To estimate this (contrast) aright, we must contemplate the results of their respective reigns. Elizabeth found all the materials of prosperity at hand, and availed herself of them most ably to build up a solid fabric of national grandeur. Isabella created these materials. She saw the faculties of her people locked up in a death-like lethargy, and she breathed {295} into them the breath of life for those great and heroic enterprises which terminated in such glorious consequences to the monarchy. It is when viewed from the depressed position of her early days, that the achievements of her reign seem scarcely less than miraculous."
Prescott has declared that her heart was filled with benevolence to all mankind. In the most fiery heat of war she was engaged in devising means for mitigating its horror. She is said to have been the first to introduce the benevolent institution of camp hospitals and her lively solicitude to spare the effusion of blood even of her enemies is often told. Her establishment of the Inquisition and the exile of the Jews are often set over against this, but Prescott did not hesitate to say, "It will be difficult to condemn her indeed without condemning her age; for these acts are not only excused, but extolled by her contemporaries as constituting her constant claims to renown and to the gratitude of her country." Spaniards of much more modern time have not scrupled to pronounce the Inquisition "the great evidence of her prudence and piety; whose uncommon utility not only Spain but all Christendom freely acknowledged." Undoubtedly it saved Spain from some of the troubles which devastated Germany during the Hundred Years' War after the Reformation, when religious divisions so embittered the struggle and made it impossible for national affairs to prosper or for men to be brought to any common understanding with regard to anything for the good of the commonwealth. The difference between the position of Spain and of Germany in this regard is highly instructive.
There are so many distinguished women of this period in Italy that a choice indeed is embarrassing. Probably, however, the general consensus of opinion would be that the typical great intellectual woman of this time is Vittoria Colonna, the daughter of the great Roman family of that name, who became the wife of the Marquis of Pescara. The Colonnas were at this time in exile at Naples, where her father was the Grand Constable. Her mother was Agnesina de Montefeltro of the Ducal house of Urbino and she was brought up after the age of ten by her prospective sister-in-law, the Duchess {296} Costanza, in the Island of Ischia. She was intimately related, then, to many of the important noble families of Italy and her career may be taken as a type of the possibilities of education and intellectual influence in her class at this time. Her husband became distinguished as a military leader and finally at scarcely more than thirty years of age was made the General of the Imperial forces when the Pope and the Emperor Charles V made an alliance and drove the French from Milan in 1528. He had been the commander of the Imperial Army at the battle of Pavia in 1525, after which Francis I, badly beaten and taken prisoner, sent his mother the famous despatch from his captive cell in the Certosa near Pavia, "All is lost save honor."
Francis was too important a prisoner to be left to the fortunes of war in Italy, so Charles V had him transferred by ship to Madrid. Emissaries of the French, who tried to win the Marquis of Pescara from his allegiance to the Emperor, represented this action to him as something of an insult or at least a lack of trust. They offered him the throne of Naples if he should abandon the Emperor and come over to the French. The Marquis had been wounded and was just recovering when these offers were made. He wrote to his wife, Vittoria, with whom he was on terms of the most charming affection, telling her of the offer and asking her advice. With a crown dangling before her and the added temptation, the subtlest there could be for a woman, of going back as Queen where she had been only a lady-in-waiting at Court, Vittoria wrote the famous letter which has deservedly so often been quoted:
"Consider well what you are doing, mindful of the fame and estimation which you have always enjoyed; and in truth, for my part, I care not to be the wife of a king, but rather to be joined to a faithful and loyal man; for it is not riches, titles, and kingdoms which can give true glory, infinite praise, and perpetual renown to noble spirits desirous of eternal fame; but faith, sincerity, and other virtues of the soul; and with these man may rise higher than the highest kings, not only in war, but in peace."
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Not long afterwards her husband died as a consequence of his wounds and Vittoria was broken-hearted. The letters which they had written to each other show how much of a love match this was and all the sixteen years of married life there seems to have been nothing to disturb it. Vittoria's only consolation now was in religion, and she thought of entering a convent, but it was felt that she could accomplish much more good in the world and a special Papal brief was issued permitting her to spend as much time as she wished in convents, but forbidding superiors to allow her to take the veil until the poignancy of her grief subsided and she might be able to make up her mind without being too much overborne by her sense of loss. Most of the rest of her life was spent in convents or in almost conventual seclusion. She wrote a series of poems, many of which are religious. A long series constitutes a sort of In Memoriam for her dead husband. They are written in very charming Italian verse and a well-known critic and writer on Italian literature has described these poems "as penetrated with genuine feeling. They have that dignity and sweetness which belong to the spontaneous utterances of a noble heart." During the last fifteen years of her life she lived very retired in Rome and exercised her profound influence over many of the great men of the Renaissance and particularly over Michelangelo.
Some idea of the place that she held in the cultured society of Italy at this time may be gathered from the fact that in 1528 Castiglione submitted his "Il Cortigiano" to her in manuscript for her approval and criticism. She kept it for a considerable time, read portions of it to her friends, submitted others to them and then returned it with the highest praise. She declared that she was quite jealous of the persons that are quoted in the book, even though they were dead. A writer who knew this period very thoroughly and who had studied particularly the lives of the women of the Renaissance declared:
"Vittoria Colonna was indeed a woman to be proud of: untouched by scandal, unspoiled by praise, incapable of any ungenerous action, unconvicted of one uncharitable word. Long in the midst of such religious and political dissensions {298} as divided and uprooted families, she yet preserved in all the relations of life that jewel of perfect loyalty which does not ask to be justified."
Only too often it seems to be the impression that Vittoria Colonna stands almost alone in her supreme nobility of character, but that is only due to the fact that she has been deservedly much talked of. There are, however, many rivals in all that is best among the women of Italy at this time. The charm of certain of these women of the Renaissance can be best understood from the expressions of praise with regard to them that we have from the distinguished literary men of the time. One of them, Elizabeth Gonzaga, had some of the most beautiful things said with regard to her by men whose judgment and critical faculty commend them to the after world as great scholarly writers. In the prefatory epistle to his "Cortigiano" Castiglione says in allusion to the death of this peerless lady, "but that which cannot be spoken without tears is that the Duchess, also, is dead. And if my mind be troubled also with the loss of so many friends that have left me in this life as it were in a wilderness full of sorrow, yet with how much more grief do I bear the affliction of my dear lady's death than of all the rest; since she was more worthy than all and I more bounden to her." Indeed Catiglione's great work was partly written as a memorial to her. Pietro Bembo, recalling the happy days he had spent at her court, says, "I have seen many excellent and noble women and have heard of some who are as illustrious for certain qualities, but in her alone among women all virtues were united and brought together. I have never seen nor heard of anyone who was her equal and know very few who have even come near her."
Every city in Italy possessed some of these noble women at this time. Prominent among those who are not known as well as they deserve is Donna Catarina Fiesco or Adorno of Genoa, one of the saintly women of the time, who, in forgetfulness of self knew how to be so helpful to others in a wise and womanly way that she has been given the title of St. Catharine of Genoa. She was the daughter of one of the noble Genoese ruling families, the Fieschi, the daughter {299} of Conte Giacomo Fiesco, who was Viceroy of Naples and Papal Chamberlain during the first half of the fifteenth century. Catarina was born July 10, 1447, the third of seven daughters whose mother also came from an ancient house of Genoa enrolled in the first Libro d'Oro. Very early she chose to be a religious, but Giuliano Adorno, a son of Doge Antoniotto Adorno, fell in love with her and though his reputation was that of a young blade and sport, he was good-looking and handsome of figure, and Donna Catarina, having seen him several times at mass, fell in love with him. Political considerations helped on the match and indeed seemed to have been most powerful, for after Catarina had been told of Giuliano's wild ways she refused to marry him and finally was married in black, positively declining to don the customary red velvet robe and lavish ornaments of gold and jewels of Genoese brides. Their marriage, as Catarina evidently had dreaded, was not happy and after five years Catarina betook herself to a convent. After her departure her husband went from bad to worse, and finally, cast off by his indulgent father, was reduced to abject poverty and despair. His wife sought him out, lifted him up and together they took a house near the Spedale Maggiore where they received and cared for poor incurables. Five years later her husband died, "his death having paid all debts," and Catarina was elected prioress of the women's department of the hospital. She organized the nursing, reorganized the hospital service, especially as regards the poor, and took her official duties as prioress very seriously. She found time, however, to compose a number of little books for persons in distress of mind and of body, and some of them have been translated into French and Spanish. Her "Treatise on Purgatory," setting forth the strength of Christian piety in the face of death, was published in 1502 and had a wide popularity in the Latin countries of Europe. She wrote a series of dialogues that became very popular and were widely used by the parish clergy in dramatic form in the churches. The two characters in the dialogues were Good and Evil, and from rival pulpits these presented their various claims. The custom of having this dialogic form of church instruction is still extant in {300} Genoa. In 1509 she died, leaving all of her property and possessions to the hospital, and her body, miraculously preserved, reposes in a superb crystal casket within the chapel of the hospital. Of her, as Edgcumbe Staley says in his "Heroines of Genoa," the well-known Italian proverb has been quoted: Vera felicita senza Dio non si da--True happiness without God there is none.
Another of these distinguished intellectual women of the Renaissance in Italy was the venerable Battistina Vernazza, whose parents were famous for their benevolence and had a high place in the Libro d'Oro de' Benemeriti of Genoa. She was born in 1497. Early in life she showed remarkable talents as a student of Latin and a writer of verses in Latin and in the vernacular. She entered the Convento delle Grazie but declined to take the veil until both her parents gave their consent, and though her father was willing her mother refused to permit her to be separated from her. After her mother's early death she entered the convent and there became noted for her piety and learning. Her writings are mainly controversial and were very famous in her time. Letters of hers to well-known leaders of the Protestantizing party are extant. At the death of her father, her father's considerable fortune came to her. She applied it all to works of charity, and especially in the direction of the rescue of young girls from evil associations. She lived to be ninety years of age and her memory is still so green among the Genoese because of all that she did for the good of the people that in the quarter of the city where she was born the Municipal School for Girls bears her name of Battistina Vernazza.
Even the smaller towns gave birth to great women, and one of the most distinguished women of the Century whose name is very little known, mainly because her modesty would have it so, is Angela of Merici, the distinguished founder of a religious order for the education of girls of all classes, whose work has endured down to our time and whose religious daughters are literally all over the world at the present day. It is probable that the work of no woman of the Renaissance has had so far-reaching an effect as that of this humble village maiden whose one asset in life was her thought for {301} others and for duty. An all too brief abstract of her story will be found in the chapter on Feminine Education.
An important phase of the careers of the women of the Renaissance is the manliness and independence of spirit which became manifest. It was at this time that the word virago was first used but employed not as now as a mark of disrespect, but on the contrary as a high compliment. Catherine of Sforza, whose manly defence of her castle is well known and whose life exhibited a series of thoroughly courageous incidents, was known as the Virago of Forli, though at the same time she was hailed as "the best gentlewoman of Italy." Isabella Gonzaga manifests something of this same heroic vein and Clarice de Medici, the wife of Filippo Strozzi, is in the same group. These women stand out as remarkable, and yet many of the women of the Renaissance exhibited an independence of character which is usually thought to be of much later development.
There are many educated people who are quite convinced that while the Renaissance possessed distinguished women deservedly famous for their unselfish character and their fine moral influence, it possessed an even greater proportion of women whose vices made them a scandal for all time and whose influence was far-reaching for evil. Indeed for many the name of Lucretia Borgia, which has become a byword for everything worst in human life, is supposed to be a better symbol of the Renaissance than that of Vittoria Colonna. Probably the best way--apart from the actual facts in the lives of women already cited--to show the absolute untruth of this very prevalent impression is to take the life of Lucretia Borgia herself, for it makes clear not only how absolutely lacking in historical confirmation are the ordinary traditions with regard to her, but on the contrary how well she deserves to be classed among the great good women of the Renaissance, all the scurrilous abuse of her that has accumulated to the contrary notwithstanding. There is probably nothing that shows how little of trust can be placed in contemporary documents unless these are critically considered, than the complete change of view with regard to the Borgia family, particularly Lucretia, which has taken place in the last few years, as a consequence {302} of the more careful scientific scholarly historical research of recent years.
The facts in Lucretia's life are comparatively few and rather easy to understand. Its first part is shrouded in the calumnies so common with regard to the Borgias. They were Spaniards making their way in Italy and nothing was too bad to say of them. Her later life was all in the limelight of publicity and should be the basis of any judgment of her. When she was about twenty-four after two sad matrimonial experiences she was married by political arrangement to Alfonso, the son of Ercole, Duke of Ferrara. Before that marriage careful investigation as to her character was made and a special envoy sent for that purpose wrote that "there was nothing at all out of the way with Lucretia herself. She was sensible, discreet, of good and loving nature and her manners full of modesty and decorum; a good Christian filled with the fear of God. ... In truth such are her good qualities that I rest assured there is nothing to fear from her or rather everything to hope from her." After her marriage Lucretia lived for nearly twenty years at Ferrara. When she died in early middle life her funeral was followed to the tomb by all the people of the city, who revered her as a saint and looked up to her as one who had done everything that she could to make life happier for her people. She was buried in the Convent of the Sisters of the Corpus Christi, in the same tomb as the Mother of Alfonso, the Duchess Leonora, of whose goodness we have spoken, and her praises were on every tongue.
Whatever there is defamatory that is said about Lucretia concerns the years before this marriage while she was living at Rome up to the age of twenty-three. A knowledge of that fact alone is quite sufficient to make the stories with regard to her unexampled viciousness very dubious. Gregorovius has recently re-examined all the documents and has completely vindicated her. She was merely the victim of the violent political hatreds of the time. To take the one item of poisoning with regard to which her name has been so infamous and her reputation so notorious, Garnett, in the "Cambridge Modern History," declares that there is only one case in which the Borgias are supposed to have used poison for which there is {303} any evidence, and that is very dubious. With that one Lucretia had nothing to do. In discussing her divorce from Sforza, he says: "The transaction also served to discredit in some measure the charges against the Borgias of secret poisoning, which would have been more easily and conveniently employed than the disagreeable and scandalous method of a legal process."
Some of the tributes to Lucretia Borgia from her contemporaries are highly laudatory. Among her friends were some of the best people of the time. Aldus Manutius praises her to the skies, lauds her benevolence to the poor, her care for the afflicted and her ability as a ruler. There is no doubt at all that she was one of these wonderful women of the Renaissance whose administrative ability must be admired more than any other quality. During the absence of her husband she ruled the State with wonderful prudence, and yet with a justice tempered always with mercy. It was through her that a law was passed, protecting the Jews of Ferrara, that became a model for other similar legislation in the cities of Italy.
It is interesting to trace the change of attitude of mind toward her on the part of those who either did not care for her or were actually bitterly opposed to her. Her sister-in-law, Isabella D'Este, became a real friend, as her letters attest, though at first she did not like at all the idea of the union of the house of D'Este with that of the Borgias, and it required all her father's force of will and all his political astuteness besides to secure her presence at the marriage. The letters of ten years later reveal a most intimate friendship between these two women. Within a year after her marriage she had completely won her husband, who was altogether indifferent at the beginning and who married her because of his father's insistence and entirely for political reasons. When her first baby died at birth her husband was most solicitous for her, anxious about her health and made a vow that he would go on a pilgrimage to Loretto for her recovery, a vow which he fulfilled just as soon as her convalescence was assured.
The biographer of Bayard, the famous French Chevalier of the time, sans peur et sans reproche, declared apropos of the visit of Bayard to Madonna Lucretia at Ferrara: "I venture {304} to say that neither in her time nor for many years before has there been such a glorious princess. For she is beautiful and good, gentle and amiable to everyone." Gregorovius declares in his "Lucretia Borgia, According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day": [Footnote 26] "Lucretia had won universal esteem and affection; she had become the mother of her people. She lent a ready ear to the suffering and helped all who were in need. She put aside, as Jovius, a contemporary, said, 'the pomps and vanities of the world to which she had been accustomed from childhood and gave herself up to pious works and founded and endowed convents and hospitals.'" She died at the early age of forty, so that the nearly twenty years of service for others represent not the aftermath of a long stormy life, when human passions had burnt themselves out, but the ripe years of maturity and highest vitality.
[Footnote 26: Translated by Garner, Appleton, 1913, New York.]
Caviceo even ventured when he wished to praise the famous Isabella Gonzaga to say that she approached the perfection of Lucretia. He adds, and Gregorovius has emphasized this opinion, "she redeemed the name of Borgia, which now was always mentioned with respect." Indeed there are few women who ever lived of whom such marvellous encomiums have been given by men who knew her well personally and who were themselves often among those in a period of great men and women whose memory the world will not willingly let die. Whatever of evil is said of her is said by writers of scandal and littleness in her own time, Italian enemies of the Spanish house of Borgia, which had come into Italy and had a great success. These vile traditions, the kitchen stories of the Renaissance, were gathered together and preserved because so many people are interested in what is evil rather than good. At a time when the greatness of the period in which she lived was ill appreciated and when religious motives tempted to credulity they came to be generally reported until Victor Hugo gathered them all together for his characterization of her and with Donizetti's opera popularized the idea that Lucretia was probably the worst woman who had ever lived. It has taken much writing of real history to modify this popular notion, which is not yet corrected, and nothing illustrates {305} better the fallibility of popular historical information than this Lucretia story.
When she came to die her husband said of her, writing to his nephew in whose regard there was not the slightest question of hypocrisy or pretence: "I cannot write this without tears, knowing myself to be deprived of such a dear and sweet companion. For such her exemplary conduct and the tender love which existed between us made her to me."
The greatest woman of the French Renaissance and probably the most influential of the women of the time, with the possible exception of Vittoria Colonna, was Marguerite of Angouleme. In English-speaking countries she is better known as Marguerite of Navarre, though in France she is sometimes spoken of also as Marguerite of Valois or of France. She was the sister of Francis I, King of France, and devoted in her affection towards him. Undoubtedly it was she more than any other who inspired her brother with the idea of founding the College of France, and it was she who was the patron and guardian of the French Renaissance. After Francis had been captured at the battle of Pavia and shipped as a prisoner to Spain she made the long, perilous, difficult journey that it was in those days from Paris to Madrid with sisterly devotion, and in spite of trying hardships stayed near her brother during his confinement.
The world generally knows her as the author of the "Heptameron" and has condemned her rather severely because of its too great freedom of manners and morals. Our own generation, however, which from its youngest years reads in our daily newspapers much worse stories than Margaret ever wrote, should not be ready to condemn her. It is difficult to understand her writing of these stories unless one knows the conditions of the time. The license that had come in among the novelists led to the telling of many stories that even our age, accustomed to the greatest license in this matter, finds too frank. Margaret, whom her generation has agreed in calling a saint, hoped to undo the evil of such stories by telling them frankly and adding morals to them. The stories have been read and the morals neglected. Her idea was very much the same as the excuse made for the publication of many {306} criminal stories of all kinds in our time, that publicity makes for deterrence. The erroneous psychology of this attempt at justification for a serious breach of ethics is only too patent. Margaret's good intentions in the matter are undoubted. Good intentions, however, do not guarantee that acts will be without evil effects. Margaret was trying to correct the corruption of her time in very much the same way as many women have been aroused into activity in ours, only she made the sad mistake of using the wrong means by thinking that publicity or information would prove a safeguard against evil instead of an incentive to the very forms of vice that she was trying to correct--above all for the young. Her significance in literature is discussed in the chapter on French literature.
Margaret's personal character is one of the most beautiful in history and it fully justifies the praise of her contemporaries and even Vittoria Colonna's words, which would seem fulsome. The most interesting phase of Marguerite's character is her devotion to the sick poor. Down at Alencon the large hospital owed its origin to her and her name was in benediction among the people because of all that she did. Hers was no mere distant service such as a queen might render because of the power she had to employ others, but she devoted herself to personal work for them that made them feel her saintly unselfishness. The king, her brother, gave her a grant for a foundling school in Paris. This was known as La Maison des Enfants Rouges, The House of the Red Children, because of the scarlet dresses which were the uniforms. Francis in his grant says that his sister had told him how these little children that had been picked up on the streets of Paris die when they are taken to the Hotel Dieu and that they need the more special care of an institution for themselves and he is very glad to come to her assistance.
When her own boy died at the age of a few months Marguerite, whose tender family affection can be very well appreciated from her relations with her brother, was stricken with grief. We have the naive description, however, of the strength of soul with which she bore it: "She went into her room, refusing the aid of any of the women attached to the Court, she thanked the Lord very humbly for all the good it had pleased {307} Him to do her." She went even farther than that, however, she forbade that there should be any public grief, had the Te Deum sung for joy in the church because the death meant the welcoming into Heaven of an angel and she had placards made to be posted throughout the city bearing the inscription, "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." And yet she herself wore black after this and never changed it and after a time this became the formal color of ladies' dress at her court.
One of the important women of the century whose administrative ability surpassed that of the men of the time is Mary of Burgundy, whose beautiful tomb is to be seen in Bruges. The monument is one of the gems of the old town, but is not more than befitting the character of the lady it was meant to commemorate. Her dealings with the proud burghers of the Netherlands were those of a sympathetic sovereign trying to assure prosperity to these thrifty towns whose trade made it possible for so many of their people to become wealthy and happy citizens. Had her mode of treating them descended to some of her successors we would have been spared that ugly record of nearly a hundred years of bloodshed and war and famine in the Low Countries, which makes one of the saddest blots on modern history. Her granting of privileges and conferring of rights with recognition of old customs in formal documents is now commemorated in many places in the modern art of the Low Countries, and these constitute her finest tribute and memorial.
The last of the women of this century who deserves to be mentioned and without whom indeed any account of the century would be quite incomplete is probably the greatest of all the women of the period and perhaps the greatest intellectual woman who ever lived. The end of the chapter brings us back to Spain to Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, whom the world knows as St. Teresa. It is true that most of her work was accomplished after the close of the century, but as she was born in 1515 and was therefore thirty-five years of age before Columbus' Century closed, receiving all of her training and formation of mind in the great Renaissance period, her place is naturally in this epoch. She is the most important {308} of the women of the Renaissance, though this is seldom realized, and her reputation instead of decreasing with the years has rather increased. Even within the last twenty years a number of lives of her was written in every language in Europe and no less than a dozen of them have appeared in English. The feminists of the modern time have turned to her as one of the great representative women of all time.
It is worth while recording some of the great tributes to her. Her own Spanish compatriots call her lovingly their Doctor of the Church. At Rome at the entrance of the Vatican Basilica where appear in marble the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church you will see one single statue raised to a woman and bearing this inscription, "Mater Spiritualium"--Mother of Things Spiritual. It is the statue of Teresa who has been gloriously proclaimed the Mother of Spirituality, the Mistress of Mystical Theology and practically a Doctor of the Church, in the principles of the spiritual life.
The French and the Spanish are almost at opposite poles in their critical appreciations, yet Teresa has been honored almost as much in France as in her native country. Men so different as Bossuet and Fenelon have united in proclaiming her their teacher in the science of the saints and have declared her books, "The Way of Perfection," "The Castle of the Soul," "The Book of Foundations" and "Spiritual Advice," the most wonderful contributions to human knowledge that have ever been made.
Nor was her appeal only to the Latin races in Europe. The German mystics have always found a special attraction in St. Teresa's work and this was true not only among the Catholic students in Germany, but also at nearly all times among the Protestants. In the modern time Teresa has been the subject of many monographs by German writers.
In English, though national feeling and religious prejudice might be expected to make Teresa little known or even deliberately neglected, her works came to be very well known. In the middle of the seventeenth century Crashaw became enamored (no other word will express his lofty sentiments) of her writings and literally thought that no one had ever had so high a vision of things other-worldly. George Eliot paid {309} her tribute in the preface to "Middlemarch," and while her own dissatisfaction with life makes that tribute somewhat grudging and half-hearted, there is no doubt that our greatest woman novelist of the nineteenth century had been very deeply influenced by the writings of the calm light of the sixteenth.
Scarcely any writer has had as wide a European influence as this cloistered saint, who wrote only because her confessor commanded her to and who had no thought of style or of anything other than getting the thoughts that would come to her as simply as possible before her Spanish religious brethren. Her Spanish prose is a marvel of simple dignity and correctness representing the best Spanish prose, even down to our time. When Echegaray, the well-known Spanish novelist of our time, received the Nobel Prize for literature a few years ago, he was asked what he did for the perfection of his Spanish style. He declared that almost the only book that he read for the sake of its style was "The Letters of St. Teresa." We have nothing quite like these letters in English, though Cowper's letters approach nearest to them. They are full of simplicity, are deeply interesting in their detail of ordinary life and above all are full of humor. This is the quality that most people would be quite sure was lacking in the great Spanish nun. Those who would explain her visions and her mortification on the ground of hysteria or psycho-neurotic conditions would be undeceived at once in their estimation of her character did they but read her letters. The hysterical are above all lacking in a sense of humor and take themselves very seriously.
Dante is probably the only writer in European literature with whom St. Teresa can properly be compared. She has the same power to convey all the deep significance of other-worldliness, the same universality of interest, the same marvellous quality that draws to her particularly those who are themselves of deeply poetic or profoundly spiritual nature. Men who have spent long years in the study and the experience of the things with which her writings are concerned, find them most wondrously full of meaning and are most willing to devote time to them. The editions of her various works would fill a very large library, and there is no doubt at all that the {310} writings of no woman who ever lived occupy so large a place in libraries all over the world at the present time as those of St. Teresa.
Beside St. Thomas and Dante as a worthy member of a glorious trinity of writers, with regard to the subjects that have been most elusive though most alluring for men, St. Teresa deserves a place. Anyone who would think, however, that she was merely a mystic would be sadly mistaken in the estimate of her career. She was above all a thoroughly practical woman. Her many foundations of the reform Carmelites under the most discouraging circumstances show the indomitable will of the woman and her power to live to accomplish. It was she who said when her poverty was urged as a reason for not making further foundations, "Teresa and five ducats can do nothing, but Teresa with God and five ducats can do everything." There is no doubt now that she more than any other in Spain turned back the tide of the Reformation. Her advice was eagerly sought on all sides. While carefully maintaining her cloistered life, she made many friends and influenced all of them for what was best in them. Her reform of the Carmelites brought many enemies, above all because other religious orders recognized that they too would have to share in the reform, yet all was carried out to a marvellously successful issue with gentleness and sweetness, but with a firmness and courage that nothing could daunt and a power of accomplishment that nothing could balk.
Those who think that Teresa's books are mere essays in pietism or pleasant reading for moments of spiritual exaltation will be sadly mistaken. For depth of meaning and profundity of aspiration after the unknowable, yet approaching it nearer than any other has ever done, St. Teresa's books are unmatched. For analysis of the soul and for the manner of its unfolding in its strivings after higher things, Teresa has no equal. Her pictures of celestial things are a constant reminder of Dante. Most people think of the "Inferno" as Dante's masterpiece. Those who know him best think rather of the "Purgatorio," but a few lofty, poetic souls, steeped in the spiritual, have found his "Paradiso" the sublimest of human documents. While there are constant reminders of the {311} "Purgatorio" in many of Teresa's writings, it is the "Paradise," however, that most frequently recurs in comparison. What Cardinal Manning said of the "Paradiso" may well be repeated of Teresa's mystical works. It has been said, "After the 'Summa' of St. Thomas nothing remains but the vision of God." To this Cardinal Manning added, "after the 'Paradiso' of Dante there remains nothing but the beatific vision." Those whose life and studies have best fitted them as judges have felt thus about the Spanish Doctress of the Church.
Teresa was eminently human in every regard, and though what might be considered harsh with herself, she was always kind to those who were around her, and especially any who were in real suffering. She came by these qualities very naturally, for her father is noted as an extremely good man and exceptionally good to his servants and charitable toward the poor of Avila. Indeed Teresa's biographers insist so much on these qualities as to make it very clear that the spirit of the time is represented by this member of the old Spanish nobility, who took his duties towards others so seriously. Teresa was not one of the exceptional souls who find convent life easy and even consoling from the beginning, but on the contrary she has told herself that she found the first eight days of her convent life terrible. It seemed to her a prison. She had a physical fear of austerities and pious books bored her. Perhaps the one very human thought that tempted her more than any other to enter the convent was her feeling of independence. The idea of marriage was quite distasteful. As she expressed it, it was one thing to obey God, but quite another thing to bind oneself to obey a man for a lifetime.
As if in compensation for all that the neurologists and psychiatrists had to say of her, she herself had something to say of nervous patients. For her, nervousness so-called was largely selfishness. While sympathetic for feelings of depression, she had no sympathy for those who would not throw them off by occupation of mind, but yielded to them. She said, "What is called melancholy is at bottom only a desire to have one's own way." She believed firmly that one could not be made good by many rules, but goodness had to come from within and from the spirit. She was quite impatient with the {312} religious visitors, that is, special superiors sent to make inspections of houses of religious who gave a number of new rules for the communities. She said: "I am so tired with having to read all these rules that I do not know what would become of me if I were obliged to keep them."
It is easy to understand then why Cardinal Manning should have said that St. Teresa furnishes an example that "spirituality perfects common sense." She herself was one of the most sensible, joyous and charming persons. Miss Field in the Atlantic for March, 1903, says: "Her charm, her sweetness, the loveliness of her conversation were irresistible." It was Cardinal Manning, I believe, who declared that "she was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time to time as if to show what her race was created for at first and to what it is still destined."
Teresa once said: "God preserve me from those great nobles who can do something, yet who are such strange cranks." She reminded her nuns on more than one occasion when she found in them a tendency to go to too great lengths in austerity that we have a body as well as a soul, and that this body when disregarded revenges itself upon the soul. There are few subjects of importance in life on which St. Teresa has not expressed herself wisely, and to know her writings is to be able to quote many marvellous summations of worldly experience that the cloister might seem to have precluded in her. On the subject of the relation of low wages and virtue, Miss Repplier in the article on "Our Loss of Nerve" (Atlantic Monthly, September, 1913) quoted St. Teresa's profound comment which sums up so well our whole social situation "where virtue is well rooted provocations matter little."
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IX. FEMININE EDUCATION
There is probably no more interesting phase of Columbus' Century for our time than its feminine education, for the education of women had a period of important development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which affected a very large number of women of the time and afforded abundant opportunity to all those who wished to obtain the highest intellectual culture. This was not, in spite of the apparently very prevalent impression to that effect, the first time that women had been given a chance to secure the higher education, for on the contrary whenever there was a new awakening of educational interest, women asked and obtained the privilege of sharing in it and showed how thoroughly they could take advantage of such opportunities as were afforded them. In the early days of the universities women had been welcomed not only among the students but also the professors. They had full charge of the department of women's diseases down in the south of Italy where the most important part of the university was the medical school, and then later at Bologna they had been professors in every department,--in law, when the law school was the central university feature, in mathematics, in literature, even in anatomy. As a consequence of the tradition thus established there has never been a century since the twelfth in which there have not been distinguished women professors at some of the Italian universities.
Earlier when Charlemagne was reorganizing education on the continent with the help of the Irish and English monks, the women of the court attended the palace school as well as the men, and we have many records of their interest. The women of the Benedictine monasteries shared the interest of the Benedictines generally in literature, made many copies of books, possessed large and important libraries and even {314} became distinguished as writers. Hroswitha, the nun dramatist of the tenth century, who came into prominence in Columbus' Century because of the issuance of an edition of her work by Celtes, the German Renaissance humanist, is but one example of the literary interest in the Benedictine convents which must have been ardent and widespread. Later we have the works of the great Abbess Hildegarde, who wrote on many subjects and who was probably the most important writer of her time. This is certainly true so far as physical sciences are concerned. St. Bernard, who was her contemporary, has enjoyed more reputation in subsequent generations than Hildegarde but she was almost as well known in her own as the great founder of the Cistercians.
Earlier still than Charlemagne or the foundation of the convent schools St. Brigid had established a college for women at Kildare, in Ireland, to which there came many of the nobility not only of Ireland itself but also of England and of the neighboring shores of Europe, seeking the opportunity for higher education. We have learned more of the details of this Irish phase of feminine education in recent years, and it has grown ever more and more important in the history of education.
At every new phase of educational development, then, the women had had their share in the movement, and it is not surprising that when the Renaissance brought with it that deep interest in the ancient classics, that was known as the New Learning, women also had their share in this. The very first of the great Italian teachers of the Renaissance Vittorino da Feltre insisted that there should be two conditions for his teaching. One was that the young women should be allowed to take advantage of it as well as the young men and the other that the poor who desired to study should not be denied access to his classes. The magnificent success that he made of education at Mantua was soon followed by similar movements in other Italian cities and everywhere the tradition of feminine education for those who desired to have it, came into existence. Guarino's influence for feminine education is only less than that of Vittorino. As a consequence there was not a city of any importance in Italy in which there were not some women {315} noted for their knowledge of the classics and their interest in the New Learning, and in many of the cities there were distinguished woman students who, even in their early years, exhibited scholarly qualifications that made them famous.
Vittorino da Feltre, the great teacher of the beginning Renaissance, had during the first half of the fifteenth century a school at Mantua, where on the border of the lake he was teaching a group of noble youths and maidens according to the high ideals of education which he has so well laid down. Their course of study included Latin, Greek, philosophy, mathematics, grammar, logic, music, singing and dancing. Besides this, however, his scholars were taught "to live the simple life, to tell the truth and to remember that true scholarship was inseparable from virtue and a sense of lofty gratitude towards the Creator." As might have been expected from the Greek traditions of education, which were then attracting so much attention, the training of the body was not neglected and various outdoor games were insisted on so that there might be a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Some of the traditions of that school at Mantua make very interesting reading and show how much some of the intervening periods in the history of education degenerated from those early days. For instance, we hear that not infrequently when Vittorino wanted to make a passage of Virgil impressive his scholars were taken out to Pietole, which has been identified as probably the village of Andes, in which, according to Donatus, Virgil was born, and here in the shady groves Virgil would be read and discussed and then there would be games and a return to the castle. While Vittorino was broad in his selections in the classic authors, and Virgil and Cicero and Homer and Demosthenes were read with explanations and then certain passages required to be learned by heart so as to form their style, he was no pedant and no friend of any exhibition of mere erudition. His most important bit of advice for his students was "First be sure that you have something to say, then say it simply." No wonder one of the D'Estes declared "that for virtue, learning and a rare and excellent way of teaching good manners, this master surpassed all others."
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It would be easy to think that perhaps the young noblewomen of the time got but a very superficial knowledge of the classics, but we have a tradition of Cecilia Gonzaga, the daughter of the reigning house of Mantua and Vittorino's favorite pupil, that she could read Chrysostom at the age of eight and could write Greek with singular purity at the age of twelve. No wonder we hear of her later as the marvel of the age. Evidently all prejudice with regard to feminine education was at an end when Bembo said: "A girl ought to learn Latin, it puts the finishing touch to her charm."
Sandys in his Harvard lectures on the Revival of Learning, has told the story of some of these young women scholars of Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino with some interesting details which show that success in scholarship did not prove an inflater of vanity in the young women of the time nor impair their religious spirit.
"Women, as well as men, retained a grateful remembrance of the intellectual training, which they had received from Guarino and Vittorino. Vittorino's pupil, Cecilia Gonzaga, a daughter of the ruling house of Mantua, whose fresh and simple grace may be admired in the medallion of Pisanello, was already learning Greek at the age of seven; while, among the pupils of Guarino, Isotta Nogarola was skilled in Latin verse and prose, and quoted Greek and Latin authors in the course of those learned letters to her tutor, which were not entirely approved by the public opinion of Verona. In cases such as these, the studious temper was often associated with retiring habits and with strong religious feeling; and, like Baptista dei Malatesti, the former correspondent of Leonardo Bruni, both of these learned ladies ultimately took the veil."
While so much attention was paid to the classics, the great Italian authors were not neglected and the Italian girls of the Renaissance were brought up to know the classic literature of the vernacular. It was the custom to have Dante and Petrarch and Ariosto read to them while they were doing embroidery, and these charming young women of the Renaissance in every country in Europe had the reputation for doing most wonderful embroidery. They also learned to play on {317} various musical instruments, and their voices were cultivated to the best possible advantage. It is often a source of wonder where they got the time to do all these things. Some of the letters from the French and Spanish ambassadors at these various Italian courts tell of the marvellous ability of these charming young women. As a rule the ambassador's idea in writing such descriptions was to suggest the possibility of marriages being arranged between the scions of the noble houses of their own countries with these women. It was rather important, therefore, that there should not be much exaggeration or the ambassador might well be discredited.
It is easy to think that with all this of intellectual life the young women of the time must have had very little exercise, especially in the outer air, and above all must not have indulged in what we think of as sport. The story of Vittorino da Feltre's school is a contradiction of this, and besides the traditions that have come to us show that every young woman of the nobility learned to ride horseback at this time. All of them could ride boldly. They hunted and many of them went hawking. Riding was of course an absolutely necessary accomplishment at that time, for carriages were very rare, and such as there were were almost impossibly uncomfortable for long journeys. Good roads had not as yet been made outside of the towns, and the only way to go visiting friends at any distance was on horseback. Many of these young women had to travel long distances, especially at the time of their marriage, and later on they sometimes accompanied their husbands on rather long journeys.
In spite of their reputation for scholarship, we have not any very serious remains of their intellectual efforts, and yet some of them wrote poetry and prose well above the average in merit, and at least in Italy their works are still read by students of Italian literature. For instance, we have the poems of Lucretia de Medici, the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had been one of the Tornabuoni family, merchant princes of Florence, with many of the solid virtues of the middle class from which she sprang. Tradition tells us that she was ever her great son's most trusted councillor, and he has left it on record that he thought her the wisest. She was {318} noted for her princely alms, her endowment of poor convents, her dowries to orphan girls, and though it has sometimes been said that these were all so many bids for popularity, any such discount of her good works wrongs her deeply, for she was profoundly religious, took particular care to bring up her children piously, and it is to the fact that she wrote hymns for them that we owe the poetic works that have come to us and which rank high among this form of poetry.
The best known of these women of the Renaissance, that is, the most famous for their learning, were the sisters D'Este, Isabella and Beatrice, of whom we have so many interesting traditions. The famous Battista Guarino of Verona was chosen as teacher for the girls, and with him they learned to read Cicero and Virgil and study the history of Greece. They learned Italian literature from the many distinguished literary men, some of them themselves gifted poets, who came to the beautiful palace and its gardens at Ferrara, and were welcomed by the well-known patron of learning, the Duke of Ferrara. They learned to read French at least and to enjoy Provencal poetry. Their mother, Leonora of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand, or as he is sometimes called, Ferrante, King of Naples, was herself a scholarly woman. The traditions of scholarship at the Court of Naples were deep, and of long duration. As their father was the famous scholar and patron of learning, Duke Ercole I, there was a precious heritage of culture on both sides. Their mother, however, was more known for her piety even than for her learning, though this was so noteworthy as to be historical. Her charities made her looked up to by all of her people until it is not surprising that the chroniclers of her time speak of her as a saint.
Often it is said that only a few of the daughters of the nobility had the opportunity for the higher education, and it is even the custom to declare that most of these were instances where fathers had expected sons instead of daughters and then raised the girls as companions and gave them the education that ordinarily was reserved for boys. George Eliot's picture of the times as given in "Romola," has sometimes emphasized this, and she herself seems not to have been quite able to persuade herself that there were liberal and abundant {319} opportunities for the education of women in Italy towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was so difficult in her (George Eliot's) time for a woman to obtain education that it was almost impossible to bring oneself to think of ample facilities existing nearly four centuries before. Anyone who reads Burckhardt, however, or indeed any of the modern writers on the Renaissance, will not be likely to think that education was reserved for single daughters of families, or that they indeed had any better opportunities than others except for the fact that family attention was centred on them as it is now. Burckhardt notes that it was especially the wives and daughters of the condottieri, that is, of the hired leaders of armies, the self-made men of the time, who were lifting themselves up into positions of prominence, who were the most frequent among the educated women of the Renaissance.
The records are complete enough to show that there was probably as much, if not more, feminine education in Italy at least than in our own time. This will probably be hard for many people to believe, but, as I have said, no important city was without it. What may be called the important cities of that time nearly all contained less than 100,000 inhabitants and many of them had not more than ten to twenty thousand. When one finds schools for the higher education of women in every one of these it is easy to understand how widely diffused the feminine movement was. Lest it should be thought that the education provided for or allowed the women of the time was narrow in its scope, with so many limitations that intellectual development in the true sense of the word was hampered, it may be as well to recall that women were even encouraged in the public display of their talents. We read of the young princesses and their court attendants taking part in Latin plays given before the Pope and other high ecclesiastics, as well as visiting rulers at this time. We have the story of Ippolita Sforza saluting Pope Pius II, who had been the scholarly AEneas Sylvius before his elevation to the pontificate, with a graceful Latin address when he came to the Congress at Mantua. Another of the oratorical princesses of the time was Battista Montefeltro, who is famous for addresses delivered on many important occasions.
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While the D'Estes have been probably better known, historians declare that the women of the House of Gonzaga reached the highest excellence in this Renaissance period of feminine education. Everywhere, however, woman received the opportunity for whatever education she desired. Down in Naples the old Greek traditions had survived, and when the disturbance of the Grecian Empire by the Turks brought about a reawakening of Greek culture in the south of Italy, the women shared it as well as the men. At the Court of Joanna or Giovanna, whose career is of special interest as an anticipation of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, many of the women reached high intellectual distinction. It is to these lofty Neapolitan educational influences that we owe the intellectual development of Vittoria Colonna. Everywhere, however, the same story might be told. At Rome, at Florence, at Verona, at Padua, even at Forli and Ravenna and Rimini, as well as at Genoa, though Genoa was so much more intent on making money than developing its culture, the women took excellent advantage of the opportunities for learning, often proved to be more successful in their studies than their brothers, and though they did not accomplish much that was to endure in the intellectual life, they seem to have been thoroughly respected by their contemporaries and looked up to as cultured, scholarly personalities.
In his "Heroines of Genoa and the Rivieras," Edgcumbe Staley [Footnote 27] has said something of the productivity of the literary women even of Genoa during this period. Genoa was known as probably more interested in mere luxury and less interested in the intellectual life for its own sake than any of the cities of Italy with which we are familiar. The Genoese were the merchant princes whose wives and children, like our own, were much more occupied with the display of their wealth than in the development of a taste for art and letters and the cultivation of a true critical faculty. I have already mentioned some of the products of the Genoese intellectual life among women, however, and this will add to the impression that I think is so true that in proportion to the population there were just as many women interested in education and in {321} literature, women writers and poets in that time as there are in our own. Mr. Staley said:
[Footnote 27: Scribner & Sons, New York.]
"Among the glittering bevies of intellectual and virtuous damsels, who delighted in the beauties and revelled in the romances of the Villetta di Negro and similar pleasures, were such gentildonne as Peretta Scarpa-Negrone and Livia Spinola, who wrote poems of the heart and the home; Benedetta--Livia's sister--and Caterina Gastadenghi--she sang and played the folk songs of Liguria; Leonora Cibo and Pellegrina Lescara, sweet translators of the 'Aeneid' of Virgil and the 'Odes' of Horace."
These educated women of the Renaissance were particularly noted for the application of their education to the concerns of their home. Their artistic taste was exercised, as we have already shown, in selecting various ornaments for it and in directing artists in its decoration. They did not have many art objects around them, but what few there were had been made as a rule by distinguished artists and represented something of the personality of the mistresses of the household. But it must not be thought that they devoted themselves exclusively to the cult of beauty in things. They realized their influence for good over the men of their time and exercised it. The example of Vittoria Colonna is often cited in this regard, but not because it is exceptional, rather what was characteristic. These educated women of the Renaissance were model wives and mothers. They were sedulous for the education of their children, and the poetry that we have from them, or the letters that have been preserved, and which show very clearly their high intellectual development, were meant for their children or for their relatives. Their homes were evidently always their first thought. They planned their own dresses, often executed some of the decoration for them, or had them designed or made under their direction, bought beautiful books for the home, encouraged the illuminators and the embroiderers and beautiful needleworkers of the time, and in general proved to be ready and able to help through their households to give opportunities for the artists, but also for the artisans and the arts and crafts workers of the time.
We find a number of their names on the list of Aldus' {322} regular customers at Venice, his subscribers, who made it possible by assuring him at least the cost of his books to go on with his magnificent editions of the classics. We have letters in which they complain of the cost of these first editions because there were other household expenses to be met, but undoubtedly they were always greatly helpful in the educational cause.
Most interesting perhaps of all that they did is the beautiful gardens, which, now that our generation through better transportation facilities is able to live out of town, are coming to be more properly appreciated than before. The Renaissance gardens have been the subject of much writing and illustration in our magazines and books in recent years, and it must not be forgotten that we owe them above all to the women of the Renaissance. They invited artists and architects, who designed them, and trained landscape gardeners to execute them, but it was their interest that was most important. Their gardens came to be an enlargement of their houses, and in the sunny land of Italy afforded many refuges for pleasant living, even in the warmest weather, and for the privacy of even their crowds of guests, which made their homes welcome repairs for the nobility of the time.
Perhaps the best criterion of the thoroughness of the education given women at this time is the influence exerted by the women of the period on art and artists and literary men of the time, and above all the cultivated taste displayed in their homes. A typical example is afforded by Isabelle D'Este whose camerini, her private apartments, are reproduced at South Kensington and described in one of their manuals on Interior Decoration in Italy in the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century. As these decorations for the dowager Duchess D'Este were made just about the middle of Columbus' Century, the authoritative description of them will be the best document. The Museum of South Kensington has had one side of her painting room reconstructed, and it shows, as no mere description could, the beauty of the apartment and the taste of its owner.
A quotation from the description of the three rooms as given in the South Kensington Art Handbook "Italian Wall Decorations of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" will {323} serve better than any praise to give an idea of the charming retreat that Isabella made for herself when her position as Dowager Duchess gave her the leisure as well as the opportunity to devote herself to the construction of a retreat which should reflect her personality.
"The 'Grotta,' on the ground floor of the old Palazzo Bonnacolsi, remained set apart for her collections of art and for receptions; princes on their travels, ambassadors on their missions, travellers of distinction and artists came to visit her. She accumulated in it statues and rare objects, and even added a 'Cortile,' with fountains playing during the summer. But the three new rooms at the top of the 'Paradiso' became the object of her predilection, and it is amidst such surroundings, the real 'paradise' of Isabella D'Este, that historians must place her portrait.
"The first room was dedicated to music, the favorite pursuit of Isabella. The cupboards were filled with beautiful instruments: mandolines, lutes, clavichords inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and made specially for her by Lorenzo of Pavia; and here stood the famous organ by the same master, the description of which is to be found in the princess's correspondence. Round the walls of this first room were reproduced views of towns in 'intarsia' of rare woods, and on one of the panels figured a few bars of a 'Strambotto,' composed by Okenghem to words dictated by Isabella, and signed by that famous singing master. On the ceiling was the 'Stave,' which exists in the coat-of-arms of the House of Este, and along the cornices friezes were formed of musical instruments carved in the wood.
"In the second room, devoted to painting and also to study, six masterpieces by the greatest painters of the time adorned the walls above the panelling.
"The third room was reserved for receptions. Everywhere in the ceiling, in the compartments, in the friezes (delicately carved in gilded stucco upon an azure background) are found the devices commented on at length by the humanists of her court: 'Alpha and Omega' and the golden candlestick with seven branches, on which a single light has resisted the effects of the wind, with the motto, 'Unum sufficit in tenebris;' and {324} everywhere is to be read the mysterious motto of which she was so proud, 'Nec Spe nec Metu,' the highest resolution of a strong mind, which henceforth 'without hope, without fear,' ended in solitude a tormented life. In the recess of the thick wall slightly raised above the floor, Isabella placed her writing table within reach of the shelves containing her favorite books; while she read there or wrote those letters addressed to the poets and artists of Italy, overflowing with enthusiasm for arts and letters, when she lifted her eyes beyond the tranquil waters at the mouth of the Po, towards Governolo, she would see coming the gilded Bucentaur with the coat-of-arms of Ferrara, which brought her news of her family, D'Este, and that of Aragon."
Lucretia Borgia at Ferrara not only continued the tradition of aesthetic good taste so characteristic of the D'Este family into which she had married, but even her years as mistress of the palace at Ferrara mark an epoch in its history. She succeeded in securing the services of some of the greatest of the artists of this wonderful period, who came and contributed to the decoration of her private apartments. Unfortunately her camerini, private apartments, in the Castello Rosso of Ferrara were destroyed by fire in 1634. They had been adorned with paintings by Bellini, Titian and Dosso Dossi, fitted into recesses of white marble carved by Antonio Lombardi. These rooms as elsewhere were of small size, real living rooms, reflecting the character of the personal taste of the owner. They were sanctuaries of art and of literature with selected libraries of chosen volumes in fine bindings and of music with beautiful musical instruments.
Many of these women of the Renaissance in Italy were famous for their devotion to works of charity. Indeed I know nothing that is more admirable than the story of their care for the ailing poor. It is often presumed that between their interest in education and literature and the artists of the time, and above all their devotion to the pleasures of dress and decoration, silks and jewels and perfumes, then coming in so rapidly from the East, these women must have had very little time for anything but selfish display of their personal beauty or intellectual talent. The rapid accumulation of wealth, {325} proportionally at least as great as in our time, might very readily be supposed to direct them as it has many other generations from the more serious side of life. The actual story of their lives is very different. There were exceptions, who have unfortunately attracted more attention than others, of whom little that is good can be said. The proportion, however, who devoted themselves with a nobility of soul that deserves to be commemorated to unselfish care for those who needed it was very large. Mr. Staley in his "Heroines of Genoa" (p. 225) has a paragraph on this subject which well deserves to be recalled, for it refers almost entirely to the women of Columbus' Century, and it must not be forgotten that Genoa was much more of a commercial city, with a more rapid rise in wealth, than any other in Italy except possibly Venice, and the beautiful spirit of personal service for the poor is therefore all the more admirable.
"Women in every age and land are prone much more to works of mercy and religion; of such surely was 'the crown of daughters of Genoa'--so-called by many writers. Benedettina Grimaldi, 'chaste, self-denying, amiable, charitable, moderate in dress and personal pleasures,' a munificent patroness of the great Ospedale di Pammatone, nursed patients suffering from plague and leprosy and endowed beds for their treatment and alleviation; Argentina, daughter of Signore Opicio Spinola, and wife of the Marchese di Monferrato: Violanta, daughter of Signore Gianandrea Doria; and Isabella, daughter of Signore Luca Fiasco, and wife of Luchino, Prince of Milan, were contemporaries in the beneficent field of charity. Devoted to the offices of religion, they proved the sincerity of their faith by their eleemosynary services to sick and dying men and women in prison and to debased mariners in port. Benevolent institutions were founded and endowed, under the style of 'Le Donne di Misericordia,' in 1478 and in 1497, 'La Campagnia del Mantiletto'--'Wearers of the Veil,' by the munificence of noble-hearted women. All these threw open to the suffering objects of their regard the healthful pleasure grounds of their villas, and it was no rare sight to find a lady, fashionably attired, seated under the {326} colonnade of a temple, or beneath a shady tree, talking to and cheering poor and friendless sufferers."
The names of the princesses who were prominent in the feminine education of this time have led many to conclude that only women of the higher classes were given the chance to be educated at this time. To a certain extent this is true, but at all times it must be true, for they alone have the leisure for the intellectual life. To recall what the nobility of Italy were at this time is to appreciate better the real situation. They were the successful merchant-bankers and their descendants (as the House of Medici), leaders of victorious armies, the scions of old families, who had made their influence felt in the politics of their cities for from three, sometimes even less, to ten, rarely more generations, the children of great navigators or admirals, even of successful traders and manufacturers--as the glass makers of Murano and the merchant princes of Genoa--in a word they represented exactly the same elements of the population as our better-to-do classes of to-day. It was the daughters of these who were accorded and took so well at this time the opportunity for education and culture.
Besides these there were not a few of what may be called the lower classes who became famous for their scholarship. This had always been true in Italy particularly. Catherine of Siena was a dyer's daughter. Dante's inamorata and her companions, whom we think of as cultured because of the poems addressed to them, were the daughters of men in trade. But in the Renaissance the opportunities even for the comparatively poor to obtain education were greatly widened, and it is evident that any of the young women of the time who had the ambition for learning might obtain it and undoubtedly many of them did. The tradition created by Vittorino da Feltre, according to which women and those of less means might obtain education, maintained itself and proved the seed of further developments in the liberal provision of opportunities for education for all classes.
The names of a number of women scholars have come down to us who did not belong to the higher nobility, and some of {327} their achievements have become a part of the great tradition of scholarship of the time. Alessandra Scala and Cassandra Fedele, for instance, were among the most learned correspondents of Politian and were looked upon as ladies with whom deep questions of scholarship might be discussed seriously. Domitilla Trivulzio delivered Latin orations before thronged assemblies and women orators were quite common. The tradition that women should not speak in public did not obtain at all at this time in Italy and we hear much of their eloquence. The impression so prevalent at the present moment, that this is the first time in history that women have dared to proclaim their rights publicly, is quite erroneous and is founded on a deep ignorance of realities, with a corresponding characteristic presumption of knowledge. Isotta of Verona took part in public controversies with regard to the relative value of men and women in life. It is strangely familiar to find that, for instance, one of the subjects which she discussed was whether man or woman was most to be blamed for what happened in the Garden of Eden, and still more familiar to find that her argument was that man was the responsible party. These learned women, however, were touched also by the tender passion, and one of the most distinguished of the feminine scholars, Veronica de Gambara, comes down to us in history as a pattern of conjugal faithfulness, while Gaspara Stampa, the distinguished poetess, according to tradition, died of love.
One of the little known scholars among the Women of the Renaissance, who deserves a better fate than oblivion, is Olympia Morata, a veritable prodigy of learning. She received most of her education at the court of Duchess Renee at Ferrara. When she came, at the age of twelve, to be the companion of the Duchess's daughter, she was already familiar with Greek and Latin literature. This is surprising enough, but her subsequent progress is even more remarkable. "At fourteen she wrote Latin letters and essayed to imitate the dialogues of Cicero and Plato. At sixteen she lectured at the University of Ferrara on the Ciceronian Paradoxes" (Sandys). At twenty she married a good German, of whom almost the only thing we know is that he was her husband, and she {328} died at the early age of twenty-nine at Heidelberg. When her literary remains were collected they were dedicated to one who was reputed "the most learned lady of her age, Queen Elizabeth of England."
The movement for the education of women of this time would have been quite incomplete, however, if the women themselves had not taken part in the organization of feminine education. In treating of "The Women of the Century" I have already suggested that this important element of feminine education was not lacking. There is abundant evidence of the presence and enduring work of at least one great woman educator, in the sense of an organizer of educational methods, whose influence has been continuously felt in many parts of the world ever since and whose work is not only alive in our time but has shown its power to adapt itself even to the needs and demands of the twentieth-century woman. This is, after all, only what might be expected of an educator of this time, since the other accomplishments of her contemporaries have proved so lasting in their effects.
This very interesting woman of Columbus' Century, whose life is comparatively little known, though her work occupies a very important place in the history of education ever since, was Angela Merici, the foundress of the Ursulines. When twenty years of age this daughter of the lesser Italian nobility became convinced that the great need of that time was the better instruction of young girls in Christian doctrine and their training in a thoroughly Christian life. She converted her home into a school, where at certain hours of the day she gathered all the little girls of her native town of Desenzano, a small municipality on the southwestern shore of Lake Garda in Lombardy, and gave them lessons in the elements of Christianity. The work, thus humbly begun, proved to have so many factors of worth in it that it very soon attracted attention. Before long she was invited to the neighboring city of Brescia to establish a similar school, but on a much larger scale and more ambitious scope. She did so all the more willingly because one day during her earlier life in the small town of Desenzano she had had a vision in which it was revealed to her that she was to found an association of young women {329} who would take vows of chastity and devote their lives to the religious training of young girls.
After years of patient waiting and thoughtful consideration of the subject of organizing the education of young women and providing for continuance of her work--the delay mainly due to the fact that Angela feared that she might not be capable of accomplishing it properly--she came to the establishment of a religious order that would take up this service. When the constitutions which she had written were presented to Paul III, the Pope, who in spite of his resolve not to increase the number of religious orders, had felt compelled to approve the Jesuits after reading their constitutions because, as he said, he perceived "the finger of God is here"; also found himself forced to approve of those written by Angela Merici, saying to St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, as he did so, "I have given you sisters." What the Jesuits did for the education of young men during the next two centuries, the Ursulines did for the young women. They spread rapidly until they had communities in all the Catholic countries of Europe, and then houses were established beyond the seas in the Latin-American countries and almost wherever missionaries succeeded in founding churches. Mother Incarnation came to Quebec and is one of the most wonderful women in the early history of the continent. That was before the end of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth (1726) they established a house in New Orleans.
When persecutions came the Ursulines were, as a rule, picked out as an object of special enmity by those who sought to injure the Church. During the French Revolution they were the special butt of the intolerance of the French Republic and gave many martyrs to the cause of religion. When the Kulturkampf came in Germany they were as specifically selected for banishment as the Jesuits, and indeed they have nearly always shared the fate of the Jesuits in times of trial. They have not been without special distinction by persecution even here in America. Their convent was burned down at Charlestown in Massachusetts during the bitter wave of feelings against the religious orders that had been aroused among Protestants in 1835. Their house was the very centre of {330} danger in the "Know Nothing" riots in Philadelphia some twenty years later.
To-day, four centuries after their foundation, the institute is still actively alive and doing its work in every part of the world. When the first sisters elected Angela as their superior they asked that the name of the institute should be the Angelines, after her own name. She was shocked and insisted that, as their superior, she would require them to take the name of Ursulines in honor of St. Ursula. With all this humility, her personality was so pervasive that it still lives in all her houses. There are schools for young women in many of the States of the Union and in many parts of Canada. They are to be found in distant Alaska, teaching within the Arctic Circle. There are Ursulines under the equator, both on this continent, in Brazil and in Africa. This is only another example of the sort of work that the wonderful characters of Columbus' Century accomplished. Whatever they did had a vital force in it that made it live and prove a stimulus and an example to the generations and the centuries down to our own time. Angela of Merici, though almost unknown outside of the Catholic Church, was one of the very great women of the Renaissance. Probably no woman of the time, not even St. Teresa, has had so wide and deep an influence over succeeding generations as the retiring Angela of Merici.
As might well be expected, the movement for feminine education which was felt so strongly in Italy affected France to a scarcely less degree. Indeed, there were much more intimate relations between the nobility of the two countries and among the scholars of the time all over Europe than is usually supposed. As all the scholarly writing was done in Latin, the barrier of language was removed and educational interests readily became very widely diffused. Early in Columbus' Century, Queen Anne of Bretagne is famous for her insistence on education for the women of the French Court. There was a school of Latin at which they all attended, but besides they were expected to know Italian as well as French, and while doing their needlework books were read to them that were calculated to enrich their memories and enhance their literary taste. Queen Anne believed very thoroughly in the fullest of {331} intellectual development for women, and yet insisted also on their duties as managers of their households, and above all as home-makers in the best sense of the term. She knew the dangers of merely intellectual education, and expressions of hers on this subject are often quoted.
The court of Queen Marguerite of Navarre was at least as intellectual as that of Queen Anne, and besides it had the advantage of the deeper knowledge of the classics that had come in the meantime. Marguerite encouraged literature, and herself contributed to it. She had the large tolerance of mind of the educated woman and used it to protect some of those who had fallen under the suspicion, so rife at the time because of the religious troubles in Germany, of favoring or attempting to teach heretical doctrines. As a consequence, she has herself fallen under the suspicion of leanings towards heresy and sympathy with the reformers. This was only, however, to the extent in which that sympathy was shared by Erasmus and others of the time, who saw the abuses that needed correction and hoped that the reform movement would correct them, but who broke with it at once when they realized that revolution and not true reformation was intended. The correspondence between Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite is evidence at once of the intimate relations of the learned women of different countries and also of the sympathy existing between these two scholarly women whose influence over their contemporaries meant so much for the intellectual life of the time. The education given Mary Queen of Scots, which is mentioned later in this chapter, shows how much intellectual development was appreciated for the ruling classes of the time in France.
There are certain expressions from some of these educated women, especially those without much to do, that are wonderful anticipations of some of the things that are heard very commonly now as regards the attitude of educated women toward man's suppression of her in the preceding time. How strangely familiar are these words from Louise Labe, the French poetess of the middle class, one of whose poems of passion will be found in the chapter on French literature. "The hour has now struck," she declared, "when man can no {332} longer shackle the honest liberty which our sex has so long yearned for, when women are to prove how deeply men have hitherto wronged them." That expression is not, however, any more familiar than one of the comments of a masculine contemporary on this occupation of the educated women of the time with political ideas, which is quoted by Miss Sichel in her "Men and Women of the French Renaissance": "Political women go on chattering as if it were they who did everything."
The women of the time, however, occupied themselves with practical work of many kinds, and not merely with book-learning or political scheming. There is a tradition of a feminine architect of the Tuileries--Mlle. Perron (Porch) being her not inappropriate name. Many Frenchwomen were particularly interested in the diffusion of education among the poorer classes, and we have the story of many school foundations. Mlle. Ste. Beuve, who founded a school and took up her residence opposite to it, became very much interested in the pupils, whom she called her "bees," and whom she encouraged by prizes and distinctions of various kinds. After her death, by the request of the scholars her place was set at table in their midst for the occasions on which she used to come to them, for they felt that her spirit was still with them. Mlle. Saintonge wanted to take up the work of education, but was opposed by her father. She was very much misunderstood, and at one time was stoned by the children on the street. She began with the teaching of five little girls in a garret. Ten years later she was brought in procession by all the people to the great new convent school erected for her, because they realized now how much her work was to mean and how thoroughly unselfish was her devotion to the cause of education and uplift for their children. In the course of the single century after the beginning of our period over three hundred Ursuline schools were opened in France for the education of girls, and the opportunities for education were greatly extended.
Perhaps the greatest surprise for most people in our time is the fine development of feminine education that took place in Spain during this period. English-speaking people have, {333} as a rule, inherited English prejudices with regard to Spain and are likely to be somewhat in the position of asking, Has any good ever come out of Spain? As a matter of fact, the century just after Columbus' Century belongs to Spain for achievement in every department of intellectual and artistic culture. Her literature, her painting, her philosophy, her educators ruled the world of thought and aesthetics. For those who know something of the high worth of Spanish achievement it is no surprise to learn that education reached a high standard of development in the peninsula during Columbus' Century and that, above all, feminine education was magnificently organized, so that the intellectual achievements of the women of this time deserve a high place in the world's history. All this is mainly due to the influence of Isabella of Castile, and has been known for as long as the history of this period has been properly understood.
In his "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" Prescott has told the story of the education and scholarship of Spain with words of high praise. With regard to the feminine education of the time he said in the chapter on "Castilian Literature" (Vol. II):
"In this brilliant exhibition, those of the other sex must not be omitted who contributed by their intellectual endowments to the general illumination of the period. Among them the writers of that day lavish their panegyrics on the Marchioness of Monteagudo, and Dona Maria Pacheco, of the ancient house of Mendoza, sisters of the historian, Don Diego Hurtado, and daughters of the accomplished Count of Tendilla, who, while ambassador at Rome, induced Martyr to visit Spain and who was grandson of the famous Marquis of Santillana, and nephew of the Grand Cardinal. This illustrious family, rendered yet more illustrious by its merits than its birth, is worthy of specification, as affording altogether the most remarkable combination of literary talent in the enlightened court of Castile. The queen's instructor in the Latin language was a lady named Dona Beatriz de Galindo, called from her peculiar attainments La Latina. Another lady, Dona Lucia de Medrano, publicly lectured on the Latin classics in the University of Salamanca. And another, Dona Francisca de Lebrija, {334} daughter of the historian of that name, filled the chair of rhetoric with applause at Alcala. But our limits will not allow a further enumeration of names which should never be permitted to sink into oblivion, were it only for the rare scholarship, peculiarly rare in the female sex, which they displayed in an age comparatively unenlightened. Female education in that day embraced a wider compass of erudition, in reference to the ancient languages, than is common at present; a circumstance attributable, probably, to the poverty of modern literature at that time, and the new and general appetite excited by the revival of classical learning in Italy. I am not aware, however, that it was usual for learned ladies, in any other country than Spain, to take part in the public exercises of the gymnasium, and deliver lectures from the chairs of the universities. This peculiarity, which may be referred in part to the queen's influence, who encouraged the love of study by her own example as well as by personal attendance on the academic examinations, may have been also suggested by a similar usage, already noticed among the Spanish Arabs." [Footnote 28]
[Footnote 28: While Prescott's information with regard to the education of Spanish women is very interesting, certain parts of this passage are amusing because they represent mid-nineteenth century ideas with regard to the Renaissance period. Prescott talks of the age as "comparatively unenlightened," but then at that time we had not taken to imitating Renaissance architecture, studying Renaissance literature and art, copying Renaissance book-making and binding, admiring the marvellous workers of the Renaissance in every department and wondering how we could get some of the superabundant intellectual and artistic life of that time into ours. Prescott's complacency is typically American of two generations ago. Since his time we have learned much more of the old-time phases of feminine education as I have reviewed them briefly at the beginning of this chapter. We have learned that every country in Europe had a corresponding feministic movement to that of Spain, with learned ladies in profusion everywhere. His innuendo at the end of his paragraph on the subject that the Spanish development was probably due to similar Arabian customs is of a piece with that marked tendency in his time to find any source for good except Christianity. The Christian nations were supposed to have done nothing worth while till the Reformation. The Middle Ages were still the dark ages and men were supposed to have accomplished nothing. I need scarcely say that we have changed all that and that now the later Middle Ages are looked upon as one of the most productive periods of human history.]
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The English ladies of the Renaissance are quite as distinguished as their sisters of Italy, France and Spain for their interest in education and the intellectual life. The first one who deserves mention was, though a Queen of England, a Frenchwoman by birth. This was Margaret of Anjou, the wife of the unfortunate Henry VI. If her husband had possessed half the spirit or administrative ability of his wife, the future history of England might have been very different. As it was, the failure of Margaret to secure the throne either for her husband or her children, left it to the Tudors with all that their tyranny meant for England and with the unfortunate religious disturbances which came as a consequence of the headstrong ways of the passionate descendants of the Welsh knight. Margaret founded Queen's College, Cambridge, just about the beginning of Columbus' Century and gave that example of enlightened patronage of learning which was to bear ample fruit among the Englishwomen of the Renaissance during the succeeding centuries. One of her successors, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who refounded Queen's College when it was threatened with disaster because of the impairment of its endowment and efficiency by the Wars of the Roses, is another of the enlightened patronesses of learning at this time.
About the middle of Columbus' Century, Margaret Beaufort founded the Divinity Lectureships of Oxford and Cambridge, since known as the Margaret Lectureships. She refounded Christ's College and St. John's College in Cambridge a few years later. She also founded a free school at Wymbourn in Dorsetshire. Her own intellectual abilities and education are attested by her translation of the "Imitation of Christ" at this time. Her wise counsellor in all of her efforts for the benefit of education was the martyred Bishop Fisher, who has left us a panegyric of her which enables us to appreciate her place as one of the distinguished learned women of the Renaissance. Like nearly all of these women, she was interested not only in books, but also in artistic work of many kinds and believed that an educated woman's first duty must be the decoration of the home. She excelled in ornamental needlework at a time {336} when a great many of the noble ladies were accustomed to do this sort of art work and when many beautiful examples of it were produced. Another member of the nobility who became well known for her intellectual attainments was Mary, Countess of Arundel, the compiler of "Certain Ingenious Sentences," a collection of proverbial expressions that had a wide popularity at this time.
Toward the end of our Century came the women on whom the Renaissance had a more direct influence. A great many of the daughters of the nobility were given the opportunity for the highest education, and many of them took it very brilliantly. The names of the distinguished women scholars, or at least of women who were noted for their attainments, are numerous and include many even of royal blood. Evidently feminine education had become the fashion, and many others must have been interested in it since it affected the great ladies so deeply. It would be quite impossible to think that what occupied so much the attention of the daughters of the highest nobility would not also prove a great attraction for many others. Perhaps the best known of the "blue stockings" of the time is Lady Jane Grey, of whose attainments we have so sympathetic an account from Roger Ascham. He says that she was deeply read in philosophy, and that she knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic and French. We are told that she cared much more to read her Greek authors than to go to routs and parties, or even to go hunting, which was the most fashionable amusement of the time. Besides, she knew music well and was particularly skilled in needlework. Indeed, there is none of these distinguished scholarly women of England of whose devotion to needlework we do not hear.
Mary Queen of Scots comes at the very end of the century, and French rather than English or Scotch influence was at work in her education, but the roll of her distinguished teachers shows how seriously the question of proper education for the future queen was taken at this period. George Buchanan was her professor of Latin, she studied rhetoric with Fauchet, history with Pasquier and poetry with Ronsard. We have at least one very interesting Latin poem that has been {337} attributed to her, and if the attribution be correct it is excellent evidence for her scholarliness. [Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: "O Domine Deus! Speravi in te; O care mi Iesu! Nunc libera me: In dura catena, In misera poena Desidero te; Languendo, gemendo, Et genuflectendo Adoro, imploro, Ut liberes me!" ]
Her rival, Elizabeth, was only seventeen years of age when the century closed, but this was also the age of Lady Jane Grey, when she was put to death, yet we hear much of her attainments and Elizabeth was one of her great scholarly rivals. Like Lady Jane, Elizabeth is said to have known five languages and to have studied music, philosophy, rhetoric and history to such good purpose that her accomplishments were much more than mediocre or conventional. With these examples before us there can be no doubt at all of the fashionableness of the higher education for women, and whatever is fashionable attracts the attention of all classes of women.
Probably the best example of the provision of opportunities for even the highest education for women is to be found in Sir Thomas More's household. He thought that his girls should share equally with his boys in their opportunities for the new learning. His daughter Margaret is quite famous for her attainments, Erasmus and others having praised her so highly. She had a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin and much more than a passing or superficial acquaintance with philosophy, astronomy, physics, arithmetic, logic, rhetoric and music. The affection of her father for her, his encouragement of her studies and the intimate relations between them have made her illustrious not only in the history of feminine education, but in world history. While near the end of his life More was Lord Chancellor, his family was not of the higher nobility, and he himself, as practically a self-made man, belonged only to the professional classes of the time. It seems not far-fetched, then, to conclude that a good many of the daughters of lawyers and physicians at this time must have had abundant opportunities afforded them for as much education as they cared to have, though of course they would {338} not have the advantages of More's children, which were due, however, not to his political importance, but to his friendship for the great scholars of the time. While Margaret is so well known it must not be forgotten, though we hear so much less of them, that More's two other daughters were also very well educated. Leland, the antiquary, wrote of "the three learned nymphs, great More's fair progeny." If so little is known of More's other daughters, it is probable that there were not a few others who had similar advantages to theirs, though no record of it is in history.
Among the many demonstrations that this intellectual movement among women was not confined to Italy, nor even to the Southern nations, is the career of Charitas Pirkheimer, the Abbess of the Convent of the Poor Clares in Nuremberg. She became famous as an educated woman with whom many of the distinguished scholars of the Renaissance were proud to be associated. Her brother Wilibald, who was her guide and teacher, appreciated her so much that he dedicated several of his books to her, and in the preface of one, "On the Delayed Vengeance of the Deity," a Latin translation of Plutarch's treatise, he praises her education and her successful devotion to study. More disturbed than astonished, she protested that she was only the friend of scholars, but not herself a scholar. When Conrad Celtes published his collection of the works of Roswitha, he presented one of the first copies of the book to Charity Pirkheimer, and in a eulogy written on that occasion lauds her as one of the glorious ornaments of the German Fatherland. He enclosed a volume of his poems at the same time, and the good abbess very candidly asked him to devote himself rather to the study of the sacred books and the contemplation of high things than to the study of the sensual and low in the ancients. She was a great friend of Johann Butzbach and of Albrecht Duerer. Christopher Scheurl dedicated to her his book on "The Uses of the Mass," In his article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Klemens Loffler says of her: "But all the praise she received excited no pride in Charitas; she remained simple, affable, modest and independent, uniting in perfect harmony high education and deep piety. It was thus she resisted the severe temptations which hung over the last ten years of her life."
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Some expressions of the women of the Renaissance are famous for their wit and aptness. The famous reply of one of them, the Princess Christina of Denmark, may be taken as evidence that witty power of expression was not confined to the women of the Southern countries. Her picture by Holbein, "The Lady with the Cloak," is so well known that we seem to be able to recreate her personality rather completely. She was approached by the ambassadors of Henry VIII after the death of Jane Seymour with a proposal of marriage. Indeed, Holbein's picture was made for the purpose of giving the uxorious Henry an idea of the charms of the young woman. She was only eighteen at the time, but she was already the widow of Francesco Sforza, and she is said to have replied she would be quite willing to be the Queen of England if she had two heads and could be sure of retaining one of them. As she had only one, however, she could not take any risks in the matter. Julia Cartwright's life of her, recently published, shows what a clever woman of the Renaissance she was. Her reply is quite worthy of the Italian ladies of the time, some of whom were noted for their rather biting wit. One of the nobility in Italy having said that man's duty was to fight and not to take part in social ceremonies, one of the Gonzagas said; "It is too bad, then, that he does not hang himself up in a closet with his armor whenever he is not actually engaged in warfare."
It is often assumed that intellectual development, and especially the higher education, has a tendency to take women away from that devout attitude of mind which makes them religious. There are many examples in the Renaissance time, however, which serve to disprove this idea. The smaller and more superficial minds may be thus affected. It is not true for the larger, more profound intelligence. St. Teresa, in her directions to the Mothers of houses as regards the reception of postulants, said: "Where there is ignorance and piety do not forget that the piety may evaporate and the ignorance remain." Many of the best-known intellectual ladies of the Renaissance time were deeply pious, Vittoria Colonna is a typical example, so in spite of the apparent testimony of her famous book to the contrary is Marguerite of Navarre.
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Lucretia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, wrote some charming religious verse. The difference of opinion between Clarice dei Orsini, the wife of Lorenzo, and Politian as regards the teaching of religion to her children, in which she came off victor, is well known. Above all, these women were all close to the religious women of the time. Many of them spent some days every year at least, often some weeks, in favorite convents. They took their rest by following the daily exercises of the monastic life in various convents. Vittoria Colonna was noted for this, and during her widowhood spent very much time in this way. Nothing that I know contradicts so completely the slanders as to convent life at this time as these intimate relations with the religious.
It is noteworthy that in our country and time, just in proportion as education for women is widely diffused, the practice of more intimate relations with convents grows more common. Many women of the world, teachers, writers, take a few days each year now for a retreat in a convent. Not a few of those who enter religion are very well educated. A great many of those who belong to the teaching orders are thoroughly trained, and often fine experts in their specialties. In the Renaissance period the daughters of the great noble houses sometimes entered religious orders. Not infrequently they met with opposition, and especially parental and family influence was exerted to divert them from their purpose. Paola and Cecilia Gonzaga both became religious. There was considerable family opposition, especially on her father's part, against Cecilia's accomplishment of her purpose, but her great teacher, Vittorino da Feltre, one of whose favorite pupils Cecilia was, took her side. When her father insisted on finding a husband for her, Vittorino urged that women should be allowed to choose their careers for themselves, and above all, if they felt the call to the spiritual and intellectual life, should be given the opportunity for the self-development that the peace and ordered life of the cloister afforded.
Burckhardt has summed up the qualities of the women of {342} the Renaissance in a single sentence, that is worth while recalling. So much is said about the influence of the study of the classics in producing pagan ideas and looseness of morals and relaxation of old ethical standards during the Renaissance that it is well to recall what this deep student of the time thought. His words will be found to corroborate and sum up the character that we have been trying to paint of the women of the Renaissance in these pages:
"Their distinction consisted in the fact that their beauty, disposition, education, virtue and piety combined to make them harmonious human beings."
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X. PHYSICAL SCIENCE OF THE CENTURY
While it is universally conceded that the Renaissance was a supremely great period in all the arts and literature, in education and scholarship, and that its geographical discoveries made it noteworthy from another standpoint, there is a very prevalent impression that it was distinctly lacking in scientific development and that indeed the proper attitude of mind for successful scientific investigation was a much later evolution. Most of the discoveries of even basic notions in science are almost universally thought to have been reserved for our time or at least for generations much nearer to us than Columbus' Century.
Nothing could well be less consonant with the actual history of science than any such impression. At many times before ours man has made great scientific progress. The greatest mystery of human history is that often after great discoveries were made they were somehow lost sight of. Over and over again men forget their previous knowledge and have to begin once more. There was one of these magnificent developments of scientific thought in every department during Columbus' Century and discoveries were made and conclusions reached which revolutionized other modes of scientific thinking just as much as Columbus' discovery of America revolutionized geography, or the work of Raphael or Michelangelo and Leonardo revolutionized the artistic thought of the world.
When we recall that it was at this time that Copernicus set forth the theory which has probably more influenced human thinking than any other and that this discovery developed directly from the mathematics of the time and while Vesalius revolutionized anatomy, the discovery of the circulation of the blood began a similar revolution in physiology and the foundations of botany and of modern chemistry in their relations to medicine were laid, some idea of the greatness of the {344} scientific advance of this period will be realized. Mathematics, particularly, developed marvellously and it is always when new horizons are opening out in mathematics that the exact sciences are sure to have a period of wonderful progress. Beautiful hospitals were erected and whenever there are good hospitals, surgery makes progress and that care for the patient which constitutes the essential part of medicine at all times, receives careful attention.
Above all the men of the Renaissance took it on themselves to edit and translate and publish the ancient classics of science and make them available for the study of their own and subsequent generations. The debt which the modern world owes to the Renaissance in this matter is only coming to be properly realized as a consequence of our own development of scholarship in this generation. Only the profound scholar is likely to appreciate properly how much we are indebted to the patient, time-taking work of this period in making books available. Not only the ancient classics but also the works of the Middle Ages on scientific subjects were all published. The early Christian scholars, the Arabians, and above all, the great teachers of the later Middle Ages were edited and printed as an enduring heritage for mankind.
The index of the feeling of the time toward physical science as well as the interest of the scholars of the period in nearly every phase of it is illustrated by the life of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who is usually known as Cusanus. He was a distinguished German churchman who was made Bishop of Brixen and afterwards Cardinal and who had the confidence of the Popes to such a degree that he was sent out as Legate for the correction of abuses in Germany. He was particularly interested in mathematics and the great German historian of mathematics. Cantor, devotes a score of pages to the advances in mathematics which we owe to Cusanus. According to tradition during his journeys over the rough roads in the rude carriage of the time, he studied the curve described through the air by a fly as it was carried round the wheel after alighting on the top of it. He recognized this as a particular kind of curve which we know now as the cycloid and he studied many of its peculiarities and suggested its mathematical import.
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He was particularly interested in astronomy and declared that the earth was round, was not the centre of the universe and that it could not be absolutely at rest. As he put it in Latin: terra igitur, quae centrum esse nequit, motu omni carere non potest. He described very clearly how the earth moved around its own axis, and then he added what cannot but seem a surprising declaration for those who in our time think such an idea of much later origin, that he considered that the earth itself cannot be fixed, but moves as do the other stars in the heavens, Consideravi quod terra ista non potest esse fixa sed movetur ut aliae stellae. More surprising still, he even seems to have reached by anticipation some idea of the constitution of the sun. He said: "To a spectator on the surface of the sun the splendor which appears to us would be invisible since it contains as it were an earth for its central mass with a circumferential envelope of light and heat and between the two an atmosphere of water and clouds and of ambient air."
These expressions occur mainly in a book "De Docta Ignorantia," in which the Cardinal points out how many things which even educated people think they know are quite wrong. His other books are on mathematics, though there is a little treatise on the correction of the calendar which shows how thoroughly the men of the time recognized the error that had crept into the year and how capable they were of making the correction. In a book of his on "Static Experiments" he has a very original discussion of laboratory methods for the study of disease which is eminently scientific, and which is described in the chapter on Medicine.
The life of George von Peuerbach, also Puerbach and Purbachius, the Austrian astronomer, one of Cardinal Nicholas' proteges who lived to be scarcely forty and whose greatest work was done just at the beginning of Columbus' Century, is an excellent index of the scientific spirit of the time. About 1440, when he was not yet twenty years of age, he received the degree of Master of Philosophy and of the Liberal Arts with the highest honors at the University of Vienna. After this he seemed to have spent some time at postgraduate work in Vienna, especially in mathematics under Johann von Gmuenden. Just about the beginning of Columbus' Century he went to {346} Italy. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa became interested in him and secured him a lectureship on Astronomy at the University of Ferrara. During the next few years he refused offers of professorships, at Bologna and Padua, because he wanted to go back to Vienna to teach in his alma mater. There, with the true Renaissance spirit of non-specialism, he lectured on philology and classical literature, giving special postgraduate courses in mathematics and astronomy. It was at this time that Johann Mueller, Regiomontanus, as he is known, came under his tutelage. Purbach deserves the name that has been given him of the father of mathematical astronomy in modern times.
He introduced the decimal system to replace the cumbersome duodecimal method of calculation, which up to his time had been used in mathematical astronomy. He took up the translation of Ptolemy's "Almagest," replaced chords by sines and calculated tables of sines for every minute of arc for a radius of 600,000 units. This wonderful work of simplification naturally attracted wide attention. Cardinal Bessarion was brought in touch with him during a visit to Vienna and was impressed with his genius as an observer and a teacher. He suggested that the work on Ptolemy should not be done on the faulty Latin translation which was the only one available in Vienna at the moment, but on some of the Greek manuscripts of the great Alexandrian astronomer. He offered to secure them and also to provide for Purbach's support during the stay in Rome necessary for the study. The invitation was accepted on condition that his pupil Regiomontanus should go with him. Unfortunately, however, Purbach died before his journey to Rome. His works were very popular in his own time and his commentary on the "Almagest of Ptolemy" as completed by Regiomontanus became one of the standard text-books of the time. Altogether there are some twenty of his works extant and his "New Theory of the Planets" remained a favorite book of reference for astronomers even long after the publication of Copernicus. His industry must have been enormous but was after all not different from that of many of his contemporaries.
Astronomy was to be the great stimulating physical science of the early part of Columbus' Century and Purbach's successor {347} in the chain of scientific genius at this time was his pupil Johann Mueller, or as he has come to be known from the Latinization of the name of the place of his birth, Koenigsberg (in Franconia, not far from Munich), Regiomontanus. As we have said, young Mueller made his studies with Purbach at Vienna, became very much interested in astronomy and mathematics, at his master's suggestion accompanied Cardinal Bessarion to Italy and under his patronage took up the work of providing an abridgment of Ptolemy's great work, the "Almagest," in a Latin translation for those who might be deterred from the Greek.
Cardinal Bessarion became very much interested in him and gave him a chance to study in Italy. Mueller chose Padua and spent nearly ten years there. Whenever anybody in almost any country in Europe wanted to secure opportunities for study beyond those afforded by his native land at this time he went down to Padua. Linacre, Vesalius, John Caius went there for medicine, Copernicus, a little later than Regiomontanus, for mathematics and astronomy and it was the ardently desired goal of many a student's wishes. Mueller spent nearly ten years in Italy, most of it at Padua and at the age of about thirty-five returned to Germany to take up his life work. He settled down in Nuremberg, where in connection with Bernard Walther he secured the erection of an observatory. Nuremberg, because of its fine work in the metals, was the best place to obtain mechanical contrivances of all kinds, and many of these were used for the first time for scientific purposes at this observatory. It became quite a show place for visitors and while Nuremberg was developing the literary and artistic circles in which the Pirkheimers, Albrecht Duerer and the Vischers and Adam Kraft shone conspicuously, scientific interest in the city was at a similar high level.
Mueller made a series of observations of great value in the astronomy of the time and substituted Venus for the moon as a connecting link between observations of the sun, the stars and the earth. He recognized the influence of refraction in altering the apparent places of the stars and he introduced the use of the tangent in mathematics. His most important work for the time, however, was the publication of a series of astronomical {348} leaflets, "Ephemerides Astronomicae" in which his observations were published and also a series of calendars for popular information. These announced the eclipses, solar and lunar, for years before their recurrence and gave a high standing to astronomy as a science. Some of these leaflets even reached Spain and Portugal and encouraged Spanish and Portuguese navigators with the thought that they could depend on observations of the stars for their guidance at sea. In a way, then, Regiomontanus' work prepared the path along which Columbus' discovery was made.
Regiomontanus' work attracted so much attention that he was invited to Rome to become the Papal Astronomer and to take up the practical work of correcting the Calendar. Unfortunately he died not long after his arrival in Rome, though not before he had been chosen as Bishop of Regensberg (Ratisbon) as a tribute to his scholarship and his piety. He thus became a successor of Albertus Magnus (in the bishopric), who had been in his time one of the profoundest of scholars and greatest of scientists. The tradition of appreciation of scholarship and original research had evidently been maintained for the three centuries that separate the two bishop scientists.
A distinguished scientific student born at Nuremberg the same year as Regiomontanus was Martin Behem or Behaim, the well-known navigator and cartographer, who on his return to Nuremberg in 1493 made the famous terrestrial globe which was meant to illustrate for his townsmen the present state of geography as the Spaniards and Portuguese had been remaking it. Behem's work is a striking testimony to the excellence of geographic knowledge at this time, and only for the preservation of this globe we could scarcely have believed in the modern time how correct were the notions of the scholars of the period with regard to the older continent at least.
One of the great physical scientists of this time is Toscanelli, the physician, mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer, over whose connection with Columbus such a controversy has raged in recent years. He and Cardinal Cusanus were fellow students at the University of Padua, where Toscanelli's course consisted of mathematics, philosophy and medicine. He settled down as a practising physician in Florence and took up {349} scientific studies of many kinds which brought him into connection not only with the students of science, but with the scholars and artists of the time. Brunelleschi and he were intimate friends, but he was well known outside of Italy, and Regiomontanus often consulted him. His services to astronomy consist in the painstaking and exact observations on the orbit of the comets of 1433, 1449-50 and especially of Halley's comet on its appearance in 1456 and of the comets of May, 1457, June, July and August of the same year. These show a most accurate power of astronomical observation and profound mathematical knowledge for that time. His famous chart indicated just how a navigator might reach the coast of India by sailing westward, and Columbus is said to have carried a copy of this chart with him on his first voyage. Whether this is true or not, there is no doubt of Toscanelli's place in the history of science because of original work in astronomy, geodesy and geography.
The most important protagonist of physical science during Columbus' Century, however, was undoubtedly Copernicus. Columbus gave the men of his time a new world, but Copernicus gave them a new creation. When early in the sixteenth century he published a preliminary sketch of his theory, one of his ecclesiastical friends remarked to him that he was giving his generation a new universe. There has probably never been a theory advanced which has changed men's modes of thinking with regard to the world they live in and their relation to it as the Copernican hypothesis has done, though it must not be forgotten that there are some as yet insuperable difficulties which keep it still in the class of scientific hypotheses.
The earth had up to this time been universally thought of as the centre of the universe, much more important than any of the other bodies, sun, moon or stars, and all the others were thought to move around it. Their apparent movement was due to the rotation of the earth, which was quite unrecognized. The immense distances of space were entirely undreamt of. In the new order of thinking the earth became a minor planet of small size in our solar system which was of inconspicuous magnitude when compared to the totality of the other bodies of the universe. The acceptance of the new theory sank man in his own estimation very considerably. The change of point of view of {350} the meaning of the universe necessitated by the Copernican theory was ever so much greater than that demanded by evolution in our time.
It took two centuries for men to adjust their thinking to these new ideas. Francis Bacon, a full century after Copernicus' time, declared emphatically that the Copernican theory did not explain the known facts of astronomy as well as the Ptolemaic theory. In Bacon's time Galileo was the subject of persecution and the reason for the persecution was that he was advancing a doctrine which no other great astronomer of his time accepted, and advancing it for reasons which have not held in the after-time. The Copernican theory came eventually to be accepted for quite different reasons from those advanced by Galileo.
How Copernicus succeeded in coming to this magnificent generalization is indeed hard to understand. It is easier to get some notion of it, however, when his achievement is taken in connection with what was being done all around him at this time. Living in a century when great men were accomplishing triumphs in painting, sculpture, architecture that have been the wonder of the world ever since, and when geography was being revolutionized, and nearly every science awakened, it is not surprising that he should have reached a height of mathematical and astronomical expression beyond any that men had ever conceived before and that he should have surpassed many of the generations to come after him, by the clearness of his intuition of the astronomical mystery of the universe.
Copernicus had not made many observations nor were such observations as had been made by him worked out with that painstaking accuracy which might be thought necessary to reach a great new conception of the universe. He had the genius to see from even the few and imperfect data that he had at hand what the true explanation of the diverse phenomena of the heavens was. He had no demonstrations to advance. He argued merely from analogy. Even Galileo, a century later, admitted to Cardinal Bellarmine that he had no strict demonstration of his views to offer, but that "the system seems to be true." While the feeling of many scientists in the modern time is that great discoveries come from patient {351} accumulation of accurate observations in large numbers, the history of science shows that almost invariably the epochal steps in progress have come from men who were comparatively young as a rule and who were not overloaded with the information of their time. The great artists of the Renaissance could probably have given no better reasons for their artistic conceptions than Copernicus for his stroke of genius, but they were all working at a time when somehow men were capable as they never have been since of these far-reaching intellectual achievements.
Copernicus was a Pole who, like other students of his time, gladly welcomed the opportunity to go down to Italy for post-graduate work, studied with Novara at Padua mathematics and astronomy and was quite willing to add the study of medicine, because by so doing he could secure an extension of the length of time he would be allowed to remain in Italy. He then returned to be a canon of the Cathedral of Frauenberg, and spent forty years in quiet patient observation and in the practice of his medical profession not for money, but for the benefit of the poor and such friends of the chapter of the Cathedral as he was under obligations to because of the years they had supported him in Italy. He probably reached his great astronomical theory when he was about thirty. He did not publish the preliminary sketch of it for twenty-five years. He did not publish his great book until just before his death, keeping it by him, making changes in it and while thoroughly convinced of its importance, quite sure that, owing to its lack of definite demonstration, it would not be generally accepted.
Like so many of these geniuses of the Renaissance he was a simple kindly man who had many good friends among those around him and who had one of the very happy lives accorded to those who, having some great thought and great work to occupy themselves with, have daily duties that afford them diversion and bring them into contact with friends in many ordinary relations in life. His humility of heart and simplicity of character, as well as his deep religious faith, can be very well appreciated from the prayer which at his own request was the only inscription upon his tombstone: "I ask not the {352} grace accorded to Paul, not that given to Peter; give me only the favor Thou didst show to the thief on the Cross."
His attitude toward the reform movement, twenty years of which he lived through in Germany, is interesting. He was an intimate friend of Bishop Maurice Ferber of Ermland, who kept his see loyal to Rome at an epoch when the secularization of the Teutonic Order and the falling away of many bishops all around him make his position and that of his diocese noteworthy in the history of that place and time. Copernicus continued loyal to the old Church and in 1541 his great book "De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium" was dedicated to Pope Paul III, who accepted the dedication and until the Galileo matter brought Copemicanism prominently into question there was never any thought of Copernicus' book as containing matters opposed to faith. It was then placed on the Index, but only until some minor passages should be corrected which set forth the new theory as if it were an astronomical doctrine founded on facts and demonstrations and not a hypothesis still to be discussed by scientists.
The scientific spirit of this century is often scouted because in spite of their scientific knowledge many of the astronomers and mathematicians of this time as well as, of course, other educated men following their example, could not quite rid themselves of the idea that the stars were powerful influences over man's life and health. The history of this idea, however, minimizes the objection. All down the centuries men like Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola insisted that there could be nothing in what we now call astrology. Men parted with the older ideas very slowly, however. Almost a hundred years after Columbus' Century even Galileo made horoscopes and seems to have thoroughly believed in them, though some of his prophecies were sadly mistaken. Kepler drew up horoscopes, confessing that he had not much confidence in them but that they were paid for much better than other mathematical work and he sadly needed the money. Lord Bacon could not quite persuade himself that there was nothing in astrology. As late as after the middle of the eighteenth century Mesmer's thesis for graduation in medicine at the University of Vienna, which {353} at that time had one of the best medical schools of Europe, was on the influence of the stars on human constitutions. It was accepted by the faculty and he got his degree. Even in our time, though now the educated contemn, the mass of the people still have not entirely rejected astrology. The men of Columbus' Century can scarcely be thought less of for having accepted it, though many of the scientists of the time did not.
The counterpart to the great scientific genius that Copernicus was, the generalizer who discloses a new horizon, was to be found in his contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, who was an inventor, a practical genius applying discoveries to everyday life. He solved most of the mechanical problems, invented locks for canals, the wheelbarrow and special methods of excavation, a machine for making files by machinery, run by a weight, a machine for sawing marble blocks instead of separating them by natural cleavage, the model of those still employed at Carrara, as well as machines for planing iron, for making vices, saws and planes, for spinning, for shearing the nap of cloth, as well as an artist's sketching stool, a color grinder, a spring to keep doors shut, a roasting jack, a hood for chimneys, movable derricks quite similar to those in use among us to-day, with contrivances for setting up marble columns on their bases, one of which in principle was used to set up Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment in London in our time. A favorite field of invention was that of all sorts of apparatus relating to war, military engines, devices for pushing scaling ladders away from walls and many others. He was probably the greatest inventive genius in the world's history. He had an eminently practical mind. He devoted himself to the problem of flying, studied the wings of birds and produced a series of mechanical devices, tending toward the solution of that problem.
Taine said of him: "Leonardo da Vinci is the inventor by anticipation of all the modern ideas and of all the modern curiosities, a universal and refined genius, a solitary and inappeasable investigator, pushing his divinations beyond his century so as at some times to reach ours." There was scarcely anything that he touched that he did not illuminate wonderfully by his genius. In studying the muscles of animals he invented a {354} dynamometer, he improved spectacles and studied the laws of light, invented the camera obscura and in his steam experiments anticipated Watt. A very curious feature of his work is his series of experiments with the steam gun, with which he was sure that great destruction might be worked.
A very interesting invention of a scientific instrument of some precision by Leonardo was what may be called a weather gauge. This was made of a copper ring with a small rod of wood, which acted as a balance. On it were two little balls, one covered with wax and the other with material that absorbed moisture readily. When the air was saturated with moisture this ball grew heavy and inclined the beam till it touched one of the divisions marked on the copper ring set behind it. The degree of moisture could thus be seen and the weather, or at least changes in it, could be predicted. We have a whole series of such arrangements mainly in the shape of toys in the modern time. The hygroscopic qualities of cord or the tendency of certain colors to change their tints when more moisture is present are used to indicate approaching changes in the weather. Leonardo seems to have been the first to make use of this practically and he deserves the credit of priority in the invention.
His studies in optics might almost naturally be expected from a painter so much occupied with color and whose intense curiosity prompted him to know not merely the use of things but the causes of and the reasons for them. He evolved much of the science of color vision, suggested the principles of optics that came to be known only much later, analyzed and explained the construction of the eye, invented the camera obscura in imitation of it and gave us a theory of color vision which is as good as any other that we have down to the present day. These optical studies alone might well be considered as enough to occupy an ordinary lifetime, but they seem to have been only the results of a series of interludes of the nature of recreation for Leonardo. He made his notes on the subject, filed them away with others, made no attempt to print his conclusions, probably found very few with whom he could discuss the subject, but he had satisfied himself. That was what he wanted.
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After knowing such facts as this we are not surprised to learn of his anticipating by some sort of divination the laws of gravitation, the molecular composition of water, the motion of waves, the undulatory theory of light and heat, the earth's rotation and rotundity before Columbus' time and many other surprising things. One finds in his diary that he was planning the construction of a harbor and studying the music of the waves on the beach at the same time.
Poggendorff, in his great Biographical Dictionary of prominent men of science, quotes Libri's "History of Mathematics in Italy" as authority for the declaration that Leonardo discovered capillarity and diffraction, made use of the signs + and -, knew the camera obscura (without a lens), made observations on resistance, on density, on the weight of the air, on dust figures, on vibrating surfaces and on friction and its effects.
All sorts of machines came from Leonardo's hands. He had a positive genius for practical invention that has probably never been equalled, surely not surpassed, even down to our own day. His inventive faculty worked itself out, in machines of such variety as have never come from the brain of a single individual before. Nor were these merely primitive mechanical devices that we would surely despise now. On the contrary, nearly all of them have endured in principle at least and some of them almost as they came from him.
Leonardo also did distinguished work in the biological sciences, so that Duval, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Paris and himself well known both for his researches in biology and his knowledge of the history of science, entitles an article with regard to him in the French Revue Scientifique (Dec. 7, 1889), "A Biologist of the Fifteenth Century." His biological discoveries are discussed in the chapter on the Biological Sciences.
Sometimes it is asserted by those who are so little familiar with the history of science that they venture on such assertions rather easily, that the true scientific spirit had not yet awakened and that while men were making many observations and acquiring new information they had not as yet the proper scientific attitude of mind to make really great discoveries. It is {356} rather amusing to be told that of a century when Copernicus and Vesalius and so many other distinguished modern scientists were alive. Some writers suggest that the true rising of the modern spirit of scientific inquiry did not come until Francis Bacon's time. Francis Bacon is one of the idols of the marketplace, but surely no serious student of history accords him the place in science that our English forbears gave him when they were insular enough to know very little about continental work, and above all about Italian workers.
Francis Bacon, of course, had been long anticipated in all that concerns the inductive method in science by his much greater namesake Roger Bacon. In Columbus' Century however, a hundred years before Bacon's time, Bernardino Telesio, the Italian philosopher, stated fully the inductive method and recognized all its possibilities. In Science for December 19, 1913, Professor Carmichael said of him:
"He abandoned completely the purely intellectual sphere of the ancient Greeks and other thinkers prior to his time and proposed an inquiry into the data given by the senses. He held that from these data all true knowledge really comes. The work of Telesio, therefore, marks the fundamental revolution in scientific thought by which we pass over from the ancient to the modern methods. He was successful in showing that from Aristotle the appeal lay to nature, and he made possible the day when men would no longer treat the ipse dixit of the Stagirite philosopher as the final authority in matters of science."
The tendency of this century to make scientific principles of value for practical purposes is well illustrated by the references to the sympathetic telegraph which began to be much talked of at this time. According to the story as told, friends at a distance might be able to communicate with each other by having two dials around which the letters of the alphabet were arranged with a magnetic needle swinging free as the indicator. When the needle on one of the dials was moved to a letter, the other by magnetic attraction was supposed to turn to the same letter. This ingenious conceit has been attributed to Cardinal Bembo, one of the great scholars of the Renaissance, who was private secretary to Pope Leo X. His friend {357} Porta, the versatile philosopher, made it widely known by the vivid description which he gave of it in his celebrated work on "Natural Magic," published just after the close of Columbus' Century.
A very important development in science came in the application of chemistry to medicine, both as regards physiology and pathology. Basil Valentine at the beginning of Columbus' Century led the way and Paracelsus did much to indicate what the advantage of the application of chemistry to medicine would be. Paracelsus compared the processes in the human body with chemical phenomena and declared that alterations in the chemical conditions of organs were the causes of disease. He set himself up in opposition to the humoral theory of the ancients and denied that the heart was the seat of heat manufacture in the body, for every portion of the system had, he asserted, its source of heat. It was through Paracelsus that chemistry was added to the medical curriculum and George Korn in his chapter on Medical Chemistry in Puschmann's "Handbook" attributes the foundation of certain professorships for chemistry at the universities of this time to Paracelsus' influence. Andreas Libavius did much to advance chemical science in various directions by his study and preparation of sulphuric acid and his recognition of the identity of the substance made from sulphur and saltpeter with that obtained from vitriol and alum. Studies of this kind brought a broad realization of the possibilities of chemistry.
The spirit of the period as regards science and the development of the faculty of observation at this time is very well illustrated by Columbus' own observations on the declination of the magnetic needle during his first voyage across the ocean. Brother Potamian has told the story in "Makers of Electricity" (Fordham University Press, New York, 1909), page 22:
"It is one of the gems in the crown of Columbus, that he observed, measured and recorded this strange behavior of the magnetic needle in his narrative of the voyage. True, he did not notice it until he was far out on the trackless ocean. A week had elapsed since he left the lordly Teneriffe, and a few days since the mountainous outline of Gomera had disappeared {358} from sight. The memorable night was that of September 13th, 1492. There was no mistaking it; the needle of the Santa Maria pointed a little west of north instead of due north. Some days later on September 17th, the pilots, having taken the sun's amplitude, reported that the variation had reached a whole point of the compass, the alarming amount of 11 degrees.
"The surprise and anxiety which Columbus manifested on those occasions may be taken as indications that the phenomenon was new to him. As a matter of fact, however, his needles were not true even at the outset of the voyage from the port of Palos, where, though no one was aware of it, they pointed about 3 deg. east of north. This angle diminished from day to day as the Admiral kept the prow of his caravel directed to the West, until it vanished altogether, after which the needles veered to the West, and kept moving westward for a time as the flagship proceeded on her voyage.
"Columbus thus determined a place on the Atlantic in which the magnetic meridian coincided with the geographical and in which the needle stood true to the pole. Six years later, in 1498, Sebastian Cabot found another place on the same ocean, a little further north, in which the compass lay exactly in the north-and-south line. These two observations, one by Columbus and the other by Cabot, sufficed to determine the position of the agonic line, or line of no variation, for that locality and epoch.
"The Columbian line acquired at once considerable importance in the geographical and the political world, because of the proposal that was made to discard the Island of Ferro and take it for the prime meridian from which longitude would be reckoned east and west, and also because it was selected by Pope Alexander VI to serve as a line of reference in settling the rival claims of the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile with regard to their respective discoveries. It was decided that all recently discovered lands lying to the east of that line should belong to Portugal; and those of the west to Castile."
The first observation of magnetic declination on land appears to have been made about the year 1510 by {359} George Hartmann, Vicar of the Church of St. Sebald, Nuremberg, who found it to be 6 deg. East in Rome, where he was living at the time. He observed it also in Nuremberg, where the needle pointed ten degrees East of North. Columbus' explanation of the declination to his sailors is interesting. He kept silence about it at first, but when they grew alarmed, believing that the laws of nature were changing as they advanced farther and farther into the unknown, he told them that the needle did not point to the North Star, which had been called the Cynosure, but to a fixed point in the celestial sphere and that Polaris itself was not stationary, but had a rotational movement of its own, like all other heavenly bodies. They trusted him and their fears were allayed and a mutiny averted. When on his return to Spain he reported the many and definite observations on the variation of the compass which he had made he was told by the scientists of the time that he, and not the needle, was in error, because the latter was everywhere true to the pole. Just why they were sure it was so they could not tell, but they refused to believe even observations which showed that it was not so; though these were reported by a man who had just overturned quite as strong convictions by sailing westward and reaching land. It is such contradictions of what seem to be obviously first principles of science that in all ages have constituted great discoveries and required genius to make them.
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XI. BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
It is usually assumed that the biological sciences have developed in comparatively recent years and that above all nearly 500 years ago in the fifteenth century there could be no question of any developments that would be of any serious significance in the history of science. The word biology itself is only about a hundred years old and very often it is assumed that human interest in departments of knowledge begins with the naming of them. A period, however, that saw such magnificent work in the physical sciences and especially such a revolution of thought by means of observation as came through Copernicus' theory, was not likely to neglect the biological sciences entirely. As a matter of fact, biology, taking the word in its broadest sense, made some magnificent strides at this time. Perhaps no period until our own witnessed such significant advances in every department of the biological sciences.
It is often said that the people of the Middle Ages had very little interest in the world around them. Indeed, surprise is often expressed that they should not have occupied themselves more with the wonderful book of nature lying so invitingly open before them and given themselves more to nature study. Some have even ventured to seek the reason and have thought that they found in it an exaggeration of interest in another world than this, and mediaeval lack of interest in natural truth has been attributed to over-occupation with the supernatural. Those who dare to think, however, that the people of the Middle Ages were not interested in nature know nothing at all of the great writers of that time. They are profoundly ignorant of the broad interests of those whom they so lightly criticise. Dante is full of nature study. More than any modern poet, with perhaps one or two exceptions, he has used his {361} knowledge of nature and of science to illustrate his meaning in many passages of his poetry. One needs but turn to the "Divine Comedy" almost anywhere to prove this. In his "Treatment of Nature in Dante." Professor Oscar Kuhns of Wesleyan University has demonstrated this beyond all doubt.
Three voluminous encyclopaedias of knowledge, including many of the wonderful facts of nature, were compiled in the thirteenth century. Such men as Albertus Magnus, who has many volumes of scientific writing on natural subjects and who made collections and observations of all kinds, Roger Bacon, who has so many almost incredible anticipations of modern knowledge, and Thomas Aquinas, who used the facts of nature as known in his time for the basis of his philosophy quite as Aristotle did long before, all were enthusiastic nature students. They did not know many things which the modern schoolboy can easily learn, for we have accumulated a great deal of information; since not a little that they thought they knew was wrong,--but that has been true in every period of the world's history of science and even our own will not escape that inevitable law, but they knew ever so much more than is usually thought and what they knew was much more significant for real scientific progress than any but special students of their works have any idea of.
It will not be surprising, then, to find that there were magnificent foundations laid in the biological sciences in Columbus' Century, and that indeed the work of this period represents some of the most important fundamental truths in these sciences. Anatomy, for instance, received a development during the Renaissance period that made it an independent scientific department. Men began to think again for themselves and make their own observations in the first half of the century. It is rather interesting to see the details that were added to the previous knowledge of anatomy, for these demonstrate the fact that they were observing accurately; A few examples will suffice to make this clear.
Achillini noticed the ductus choledochus, the duct leading from the liver into the duodenum, and described the ilio-caecal valves. Berengar of Carpi corrected a number of mistakes that had existed in Mondino's Anathomia, the text-book {362} which had been most used since the beginning of the fourteenth century, and he discovered the foramina in the sphenoid bone. He will have, perhaps, still more of interest for our time, because he was the first to describe the vermiform appendix. He was also the first apparently to call attention to the fact that the thorax in men and the pelvis in women are wider in each case proportionately than in the other sex, and that roughly, while the feminine form is conical, the masculine is an inverted cone. Canani added much to the description of the muscles and was the first to notice the presence of valves in veins, discovering them in the vena azygos. Gabriele Zerbi noted the oblique and the circular muscles of the stomach and described the puncta lachrymalia, the ligamenta uteri and other anatomical details which had escaped description previously. His book on anatomy divided the bones and muscles and blood vessels into different chapters, and order was beginning to come out of the confusion that had existed because of the too-generalized teaching before.
It is of the anatomists of this time that Puschmann in his "History of Medical Education" says, "The Italian anatomists had the habit of making the dissections of bodies for themselves, and it is for this reason that all the great anatomical discoveries of the time come from Italy. The anatomical schools of that country were the best in the world. All the greatest anatomists of the sixteenth century received their education there, and among the masters of the Italian schools are to be found the greatest names of which the science of anatomy can boast." Neuberger in his "Handbook of the History of Medicine" [Footnote 30] says, "The Italian professors, incited by the brilliant example of 'Mondino,' surpassed all the other anatomists of the world because they did not disdain to take in their own hands the anatomical scalpel, and it is for that reason that at this time anatomy in Italy was cultivated with greater breadth of vision than elsewhere. The Italian anatomists initiated at the end of the fifteenth century the most famous period in the history of the art of dissection {363} and became the teachers to the physicians of the whole world."
[Footnote 30: Neuberger u. Pagel: "Handbuch der Geschichte der Medicin"; Jena, 1903, Vol. II, p. 23.]
Martinotti in his "The Teaching of Anatomy in Bologna Before the Nineteenth Century" [Footnote 31] gives a very good idea of the thoroughly scientific spirit of their investigations and their ardent curiosity with regard to anatomical details, as these may be gathered from the commentaries of Berengar of Carpi. He says, for instance, "Let no one think that by word of mouth alone or the study of books, this science of anatomy" [he calls it discipline] "can be learned. For this the sight and touch are absolutely necessary." "Nor can any real knowledge of the members of the human body be obtained from a single dissection, for this a number of dissections are required." He himself says in suggesting with true scholarly spirit how little he knows in spite of his opportunities, in order that others may be encouraged to take as many opportunities as possible, "how many hundreds of cadavers have I not dissected." This expression is sometimes said to be an exaggeration, but it is in accord with the whole trend of Berengar's method of study. A dissection in the old time did not mean a complete study of the anatomy of the body by anatomical methods, but any opening of the body, in order to determine a particular point or to study any special part, was called an anatomy or dissection. Berengar insists frequently that a number of preparations and sections of the same viscus should be studied. He confesses that he had sectioned more than 100 cadavers in order to determine a question in brain anatomy and yet was not satisfied.
[Footnote 31: G. Martinotti: L'Insegnamento dell' Anatomia in Bologna Prima del Secolo XIX; Bologna, 1911.]
The interests of the artists of the Renaissance in painting not merely the surface of things, but giving an idea of what they actually were, led to a great development of curiosity as to the constitution of human beings. Not a single great artist of the Renaissance failed to make dissections for himself, and the greater the artist, the more dissections, as a rule, we know he made. Michelangelo dissected portions at least of more than 100 bodies, and Leonardo da Vinci probably did even much more than that. He proposed at one time to write a {364} textbook of anatomy. Ordinarily, it would be presumed that any such proposition from an artist could scarcely be taken seriously in the sense of a scientific text-book to represent real contributions to anatomy as a science, though it might, of course, be valuable for artists. In recent years, however, the republication of the sketches of his dissections shows that Leonardo da Vinci might have written a very wonderful textbook of anatomy and that his plates are still valuable for the study of professed anatomists.
William Hunter declared that "Leonardo was the greatest anatomist of this period," and, as altogether we have some 750 separate sketches of dissections which he had actually studied, some idea of how much he accomplished can be obtained. These sketches represent not merely the muscles and the skeleton, though they give these very well and especially suggest their functions very completely, but they also contain sketches of all the viscera and even cross-sections of the brain at different planes. This book alone, without anything further, would give Leonardo a distinguished place in the history of physiology as well as of anatomy.
With all this in mind, it is amusing to know the impression rather prevalent among even educated people that there was Church opposition to dissection at this time, and to have such books as President White's "Warfare of Science with Theology" represent Vesalius a generation after this as dissecting in fear and trembling because of the danger he was incurring from the violation of ecclesiastical laws against dissection. No such laws were ever in existence, and dissection for scientific and artistic purposes was apparently much better provided for than it is even in our time, and above all much better cared for by the ecclesiastical authorities who might have hampered it so much, than it was in the English-speaking countries two or three generations ago, when ardent students of anatomy had either to "resurrect" bodies themselves or buy them--as many of them did--from "resurrectionists," with all the abuses connected with this practice, in order to secure anatomical material.
The supreme development of anatomy in Columbus' Century came with Vesalius. After exhibiting his trend of mind {365} towards scientific and especially biological studies as a boy by the dissection of small animals, the suggestion for which had come to him from the study of Albertus Magnus' books, Vesalius went to Paris in order to find opportunities for anatomical study; but while profiting not a little there, he was rather disappointed because of the lack of facilities. The jealousy of his teacher, Sylvius, which he aroused, made his work still more difficult, so he went down to Italy, where he knew that he could secure material for dissection and opportunities for study. There, before he was twenty-five, they made him professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, and he had the opportunity to write his great text-book on anatomy, the "De Fabrica Humani Corporis," which has remained a classic down to our day.
It would be rather difficult to enumerate all the discoveries that we owe to Vesalius. He well deserves the name of the Father of Modern Anatomy. Practically all of his productive life comes in Columbus' Century, and he illustrates how thorough the scientific men of the time were in their modes of thinking and ways of observation. Details that might have been expected to escape him are described most clearly. He was the first to point out that nerves penetrated muscles and to suggest the physiological function that they performed of bringing about contraction. He discovered the little blood vessels that enter bones, the nutrient arteries, but still more definitely described the nutrition of bones through the periosteum and its rich blood supply. He added greatly to the knowledge of the time as regards the anatomy of the abdominal wall and of the large organs of the abdominal cavity, especially the stomach and the liver. His descriptions of the sex organs are far in advance of all that his predecessors had known, and here his anatomical knowledge also became of value for suggestions in physiology,--the two cognate sciences were, as might be expected, developing together. Vesalius described the heart completely and suggested its mechanism, and yet could not get away from Galen's declaration that the blood passes through the septum of the heart. His description of blood vessels and their inner and outer coat shows how carefully his observations were made. He declared {366} afterwards that he was led to make these investigations by the memory of his dissection of the bladders with which he used to play as a boy and which he found to consist of several coats.
There is scarcely a department of anatomy on which Vesalius' name is not stamped deeply. He devoted great care, for instance, to the examination of the brain, emphasized the distinction between the gray and white matter, described the corpus callosum, the septum lucidum, the pineal gland and the corpora quadrigemina.
Two at least of Vesalius' disciples and assistants in teaching deserve to be named in the great development of anatomy that came at this time. One of them is Realdus Columbus, to whom we owe the discovery of the circulation of the blood in the lungs, and the other, Fallopius, whose name is familiar from its attachment to important structures in the body which he first described. Columbus we shall have more to say of under physiology, for the circulation of the blood was an important contribution to that science. Columbus' work was done at Rome, whither he was invited by the Popes to teach at the Papal Medical School, and where his directions and demonstrations were attended by cardinals, archbishops, and distinguished ecclesiastics. He had been Vesalius' prosector at Padua and had succeeded him at Bologna, and then was invited to Rome. He wrote a great text-book of anatomy, which was dedicated to Pope Paul IV, and it was one of the treasures of the Renaissance both because of the development of anatomy which it represents, and its value as one of the early beautifully printed and illustrated books of the medicine of this time.
Fallopius, the gifted pupil of Vesalius, of whom Haeser, the modern historian of medicine, has said that he was "one of the most important of the many-sided physicians of the sixteenth century," followed his master's work, corrected some details of it and added many new facts. We are not quite sure of the time of his birth, but he was probably less than thirty, perhaps only twenty-five, when he became professor of anatomy at Ferrara. He subsequently occupied the chair of anatomy at Pisa, and later of anatomy and surgery at Padua. He {367} added much to what was known before about the internal ear and described in detail the tympanum and its relations to the osseous ring in which it is situated. He also described minutely the circular and oval windows and their communication with the vestibule and cochlea. He was the first to point out the connection between the mastoid cells and the middle ear. His description of the lachrymal passages in the eye was a marked advance on those of his predecessors, and he also gave a detailed account of the ethmoid bone and its cells in the nose. His contributions to the anatomy of the bones and muscles were very valuable. It was in myology particularly that he corrected Vesalius. He studied the organs of generation in both sexes, and his description of the canal or tube which leads from the ovary to the uterus attached his name to the structure. Another discovery, the little canal through which the facial nerve passes after leaving the auditory, is also called after him the aquaeductus Fallopii.
Puschmann in his "History of Medical Education" says of Fallopius (p. 297): "He furnished valuable information upon the development of the bones and teeth, described the petrous bone more accurately, enriched myology by admirable descriptions of the muscles of the external ear, of the face, of the palate and of the tongue, made explicit statements upon the anastomotic connections of certain blood-vessels--for instance, of the carotid and vertebral arteries--and discovered the nervus trochlearis. He instituted accurate investigations upon particular parts of the organ of hearing and of the eye, by which he was able to give fuller information upon the ligamentum ciliare, the tunica hyaloidea, the lens, and other anatomical points."
As great, if not greater, than either as an anatomist was Eustachius, to whom we owe a series of important discoveries. He studied particularly the renal system and the head. His name is enshrined in the Eustachian tube named after him. It has been said that after Eustachius' time very little was added to our knowledge of the gross anatomy of the teeth. He also made important discoveries in brain anatomy. Unfortunately his text-book was never finished, and the beautiful illustrations, the first copperplates for an anatomical work ever made, were {368} not published in his lifetime. They were faithfully preserved, however, in the Library of the Vatican, for, like Columbus, he was a professor at the Papal Medical School in Rome, and were published at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Lancisi, himself, another Papal physician.
Another of the distinguished anatomists of the time was Aranzius, who was the Professor of Anatomy in the Papal University of Bologna for some thirty-two years just after the close of our period, having received his training, however, in our century. He gave the first correct account of the anatomy of the foetus and was the first to show that the muscles of the eye do not arise from the dura mater but from the margin of the optic cavity. He confirmed Columbus' views with regard to the course of the blood in passing from the left to the right side of the heart, and made a number of discoveries in the anatomy of the brain. To him we owe the term hippocampus, and he described the fourth ventricle very accurately, calling it the cistern of the cerebellum.
The scientific development of physiology followed immediately, as might be expected, on that of anatomy. Indeed, Vesalius deserves almost as much credit for what he did for physiology as for his researches in anatomy. The functions of bones, muscles and organs were, as we have said, carefully discussed in connection with the descriptions of their form, location and relations to other organs.
Probably the best way to present the advance made in physiology at this time is to review the important steps of progress toward that greatest generalization in modern physiology, the circulation of the blood. Much more had been known of it before this time than is usually thought, and probably even the ancients, especially in Greece, had more than a hint of it. Before Columbus' Century closed, the discovery of the pulmonary circulation was an accomplished fact, and there was more than an inkling of the existence of the general circulation. The full description of this was not made until afterwards, but it was not long delayed, and it came from a man who belongs to our time. It did not receive that thorough scientific statement which was to make it a fundamental principle in the biological science of the time until Harvey's day, nor indeed for some {369} time after Harvey's thoroughly scientific description and demonstration. [Footnote 32]
[Footnote 32: How clearly Rabelais understood the function of the circulation, though he did not properly appreciate its physiological anatomy, may be readily seen from his famous passage on the circulation, in which he talks about the blood as "the rivulet of gold which is received with such joy by all the organs because it is their sole restorative." A portion of the passage is worth while quoting because it represents a popularization of the scientific knowledge of the time. Rabelais was writing not for physicians nor even medical students, but for the educated general public of the time. He said:
"The Spleen draweth from the Blood its terrestrial parts, viz., the Grounds, Lees or thick Substance settled in the bottom thereof, which you term Melancholy; the Bottle of the Gall subtracts from thence all the superfluous Choler: whence it is brought to another Shop or Workhouse to be yet better purified and refined, that is the Heart, which by its agitation of Diastolick and Systolick Motions so neatly subtiliseth and inflames it, that in the right-side Ventricle it is brought to Perfection and through the Veins is sent to all the Members; each Parcel of the Body draws it then into itself, and after it's own fashion, is cherished and alimented by it: Feet, Hands, Thighs, Arms, Eyes, Ears, Back, Breast, yea, all; and thus it is that who before were Lenders, now become Debtors, The Heart doth in its left-side Ventricle so thinnify the Blood that it thereby obtains the name of Spiritual; which being sent through the Arteries to all the members of the Body, serveth to warm and winnow or fan the other Blood which runneth through the Veins; The Lights never cease with its Lappets and Bellows to cool and refresh it; in Acknowledgment of which good the Heart through the Arterial Vein imparts unto it the choicest of it's Blood: At last it is made so fine and subtle within the Rete Mirabile, that thereafter those Animal Spirits are framed and composed of it; by means whereof the Imagination, Discourse, Judgment, Resolution, Deliberation, Ratiocination, and Memory have their Rise, Actings and Operations."]
Harvey himself indeed has acknowledged his indebtedness to these men of preceding generations, and any fair-minded review of the subject makes it clear that there was a gradual progress towards this all-important generalization for several generations, and not that sudden discovery which is sometimes thought to have taken place. In 1546 Servetus, who had been Professor of Anatomy at Paris, but who had a tendency to dabble in theology that subsequently proved unfortunate for him, for, as will be recalled, he was burnt to death by Calvin {370} at Geneva in 1553, sent to Curio, who was teaching anatomy at Padua, a manuscript copy of his "Restitutio Christianismi," "The Restoration of Christendom," in which he described completely the circulation of the blood in the lungs.
Because Servetus' description first appeared in a theological work, it has sometimes seemed to commentators that his expressions were scarcely more than accidental and that it was only by chance that he reached such a generalization. To say this, however, is to ignore Servetus' career. He was an investigator of a thoroughly scientific spirit, living in a time when discoveries, particularly in the biological sciences, were being made all round him, and he had made many dissections, had taught anatomy at the University of Paris and was exactly in the most appropriate position to make such a new discovery. He had done some distinguished work in botany, he had suggested some modifications in pharmacology which met with violent opposition, but have since been approved, and like so many of the men of the Renaissance he had "taken all knowledge for his province" with a wonderful degree of success. Unfortunately he invaded theology and then got into trouble. He had to fly from Paris, though probably the prosecution of him was due not a little to the enemies created by his uncompromising spirit in the controversy over the use of syrups. He was protected by the Archbishop of Vienne, who had him as physician for a dozen of years, and it was Calvin who denounced him to the Roman authorities in such a way that even the friendly Archbishop could no longer protect him. He was allowed to escape from jail by connivance, went to Geneva and there met his sad fate.
It may not be true, as has been said, that by putting him to death Calvin put back the development of physiology for three-quarters of a century until Harvey's time, but undoubtedly Servetus' death was a very unfortunate incident for science.
Just about this same time a series of discoveries in Italy led up to the thought of the existence of a circulation of the blood in lungs and body. Already in the first edition of his great text-book of anatomy in 1543, Vesalius had expressed doubts {371} with regard to the Galenic doctrine that the blood passed through the septum of the heart from one ventricle to another, and these doubts he emphasized in the second edition. In 1547 Cananus, Professor of Anatomy at Ferrara, observed the valves in the veins, and these are said to have been described even before this, though the doctrine of their existence and function was not generally accepted in science until after the more complete description made by Fabricius of Aquapendente, who was born in our century but did his important work afterwards. Columbus, who was teaching anatomy at the Papal University of the Sapienza in Rome, was even more complete and explicit in his description of the pulmonary circulation than had been Servetus. The question as to whether he knew of Servetus' discovery has never been absolutely settled, though there seems very little likelihood of it. Apparently the one possibility is that a copy of the edition of the "Restitutio Christianismi" which was burned with its unfortunate author, may have been spared and found its way to Rome. Rome is indeed the least likely place for such a book to have wandered, and only two copies of that first edition are definitely known to have escaped. Of these Columbus could have known nothing. Harvey himself, to quote Professor Foster in his "History of Physiology," spoke of Columbus with respect as of a great authority.
Columbus' work has sometimes been minimized in Western Europe, especially by the English, apparently in the fear lest recognition for him should lessen Harvey's glory. Harvey himself, however, quotes Columbus as an authority in his work on the circulation, and the Italian anatomist, who had been Vesalius' assistant, was undoubtedly a great teacher, investigator, dissector, experimenter, observer and writer with regard to a number of phases of medical science. He was the first to insist on demonstrations of living animals as valuable in the teaching of medicine. He declared that one could learn more about the functions of the body from the dissection of a single dog than from feeling the pulse for hours and merely studying Galen. He made demonstrations on living animals and was constantly engaged in trying to find out function as well as anatomical details. A number of workers in the medical {372} sciences toward the end of Columbus' Century were making experiments of various kinds on living and dead animals in order to develop physiology. Eustachius studied the kidneys experimentally, and the sensory functions were investigated very carefully and with the true scientific spirit.
The completion of the discovery of the circulation of the blood came in the person of Caesalpinus, who had received all of his education in Columbus' Century. Anyone who reads his description of the systemic circulation cannot fail to recognize that he really understood it. His discovery did not impress his generation as did that of Harvey in the next generation, nor did he understand so thoroughly the significance of his discovery. The Italians, however, have quite rightly insisted on vindicating for him the merit of having discovered the circulation of the blood, and some of them have even suggested that Harvey learned of it from him, but nothing can dim Harvey's glory as a great trained observer and original genius, who appreciated thoroughly the nature of the revolution that his discovery would work in the medical sciences. Harvey himself would have been the first to deprecate the lessening of the glory that was due to his predecessors or to his great teachers in Italy, one of whom, Fabricius da Aquapendente, belongs partly to our century. Indeed, in his book on the circulation, Harvey has given more credit to his predecessors than many of his ardent English advocates are prone to do in the modern time.
Professor Foster in his "Lectures on the History of Physiology During the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," which were delivered as the Lane Lectures in San Francisco, and some of them also at Johns Hopkins, concedes Caesalpinus' priority of description. He says (page 33):
"He thus appears to have grasped the important truth, hidden, it would seem, from all before him, that the heart, at its systole, discharges its contents into the aorta (and pulmonary artery), and at its diastole receives blood from the vena cava (and pulmonary vein).
"Again in his 'Medical Questions,' he seems to have grasped the facts of the flow from the arteries to the veins, and of flow along the veins to the heart"
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On page 35 of the same work Professor Foster says: "We must, therefore, admit that Caesalpinus had not only clearly grasped the pulmonary circulation, but had also laid hold of the systemic circulation; he recognized that the flow of blood to the tissues took place by the arteries and by the arteries alone, and that the return of the blood from the tissues took place by the veins and not by the arteries."
Foster is prone to make little of Caesalpinus as a man of book-learning rather than experimental or observational knowledge and as a scholarly writer rather than a scientific discoverer. It must not be forgotten, however, that Caesalpinus, besides being a great anatomist, is one of the most important contributors to the botany of this time. He was the director of the first botanical garden regularly established in Italy, that at Pisa, which still exists, and he is called by Linnaeus the first true systematic botanist. His work on plants distributed more than 1500 plants into fifteen classes distinguished by their fruits.
Every detail of the circulation is thus seen to have been understood, and Professor Foster has quoted the passages from Caesalpinus' books which make the necessity for such an admission very clear. The Italians have always claimed the discovery of the circulation for Caesalpinus, and the Southern nations of Europe generally have been inclined to favor that claim, though the Germans and English have refused to admit that even Caesalpinus' description, with all its clearness of detail, can be taken to mean that he understood the new doctrine that he thus was teaching. Besides, it is pointed out that Caesalpinus' new doctrines met with very little response and indeed scarcely any notice from his contemporaries. It must not be forgotten, however, that Harvey himself hesitated for some dozen years to publish his demonstration of the circulation of the blood, and there is good reason to believe that while he presented his views to his class in 1616 and wrote his treatise in 1619, he delayed its publication until 1628 and was even then apprehensive lest its appearance make "mankind his enemy." It is not surprising, then, in the light of this recognized attitude of the scientific mind of the time that Caesalpinus' declarations of half a century before should have been passed {374} over by scientists without proper recognition of their significance.
Any account of the development of the biological sciences at this time would be quite incomplete without the great story of the botanists who laid the broad, deep foundation of their favorite science during this century. The first distinguished name among them is that of Leonardo da Vinci, the story of whose work in botany seems almost incredible until the actual notes of his observations are before one. While Leonardo has been thought of always as a painter and only recently has the idea of his greatness as a scientist become generally known, he deserves eminently to be classed as one of the greatest of scientific geniuses. It was in the biological sciences that he did his most wonderful work. He knew the anatomy of men and animals very well and studied whole series of questions touching living beings. He did work in botany, palaeontology, zoology, physiology, so that Duval did not hesitate to speak of him in the Revue Scientifique [Footnote 33] as A Biologist of the Fifteenth Century. He made special observations on flying, on swimming, on the saving of life in shipwreck, on the mechanics of joints, on horse movement, so that he anticipated what we have learned by the camera. His special contribution to physiology was that certain acts of the nervous system are reflex, that is, without requiring attention from the higher centres.
[Footnote 33: December 7, 1889.]
His studies in color are among the most interesting done up to his time. These were not merely taken up from the physical standpoint but especially from the physiological, and his theory of color vision still attracts attention. He studied sound and made many valuable observations once more physiological as well as physical. His most interesting scientific conclusion was doubtless that with regard to fossils. Having met with them deep below the surface of the earth, he declared that they were not there by accident nor by any incompleteness of creation, but that they represented living things which had been covered up. He even suggested that marine fossils pointed to the fact that the sea had at some time covered this spot where {375} the fossils were found, though this was now far from water and well above its level.
Some of his information with regard to botany was far ahead of his time. He not only knew that the rings seen in the wood of the trunk of a tree represent its age, one ring for each year, but he also knew how to deduce from the differing thickness of the various rings the particular kind of season and how favorable it was for growth. In Italy moisture represents to a great extent the most important element in a favorable year for plant growth. Leonardo seems to have shown by the story of certain years in the past that when moisture was abundant the rings of the trees were thicker than they had been in other years. He pointed out, too, that the core of the trunk of a tree, the heart of the wood as we call it, was not in the centre of the tree as a rule, but always a little to one side because the tree had more sunlight and heat on one side and grew more in that direction. He pointed out too that when a tree is injured an abundance of sap is carried to that spot in order to bring about repair, and that these processes of repair always make a super-abundance of tissue, as if to overstrengthen a weaker part--hence the irregularities that are likely to exist on a tree where injuries have been inflicted. The sketches of dissections of flowers found in his notebooks show how well he anticipated many methods of study and details of knowledge in botany supposed to be much more modern. They have proved as great a surprise as his anatomical plates.
The professional botanists of this period have been very thoroughly reviewed by Professor Edward Lee Greene, Professor of Botany at the Catholic University and Associate in Botany in the United States National Museum, in his "Landmarks of Botanical History," which forms part of Volume LIV in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. He has called attention particularly to the work of the great German Fathers of modern botany during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There are five of them who deserve a prominent place in the history of botany. Otho Brunfelsius (1464-1534), Leonhardus Fuchsius (1506-1566), Hieronymus Tragus (1498-1554), Euricius Cordus (1486-1535) and Valerius Cordus (1515-1544). The four first named represent two distinct {376} kinds of botanical work. Brunfels and Fuchs busy themselves almost wholly with medical botany. Their one idea was to describe plants that could be used in medicine or make special additions to the diet. Most of their plant descriptions are copied from older authors, some of them even the Greeks, but for practical purposes they sought to render the identification of medical plants more easy and certain by supplying pictures of them. There had been botanical pictures before but they were miserable as a rule, and both Brunfels and Fuchs greatly improved the representations. As Greene says "these two might worthily have been styled Fathers of Plant Iconography."
Books of botany must have been popular before this and indeed it was probably because of the ready sale of such works that Brunfels and Fuchs took up their elaboration of them. Their large picture books now made it possible for all sorts and conditions of men, lettered and illiterate, to identify some hundreds of useful plants; a thing which had never happened in the world before that day. They added little to scientific botany, however, but fortunately other men, Tragus and Valerius Cordus, laid serious scientific foundations for the true science of botany. Neither of these men wished to popularize botany so much as to make it possible for plants to be so described as to be readily identifiable by description. As Greene says "on Cordus' part it is unmistakable that there is a deliberate plan of creating a new phytography. Therefore and by study of the men and their books I think we shall perceive that in the Germany of the first half of the sixteenth century there were two fathers of plant iconography and two fathers of descriptive botany."
Greene can scarcely say too much of the work of young Cordus. He says (page 272): "To understand the exalted character of this genius it is only necessary to canvass what the youth had also attained to along other and different lines at the same time.
"In field work in Germany--for botany alone--not to speak of geology and mineralogy, in both of which he was, for his time, an expert--he had wrought out more results than had his older contemporaries, Brunfelsius, Tragus, and Fuchsius combined. In his repeated journeys to the great forests and {377} wildest mountain districts, it is estimated that he discovered several hundred new plants. Sprengel has given the Linnaean names of some twenty-five of these new discoveries of Cordus; and that is perhaps double or treble the number of novelties gathered in by the whole three above named; and they both were men of longer life and more or less extensive travel."
Greene re-echoes the praise of a contemporary in terms which show us that this young man, who lived less than thirty years, had all the qualities of a modern successful scientific investigator. Indeed that contemporary description is worth while having near one as a catalogue of qualities of the men who in every age succeed in science as a rule. It comes from Riffius' Preface to Cordus' "Annotations on Dioscorides":
"To the best possible education of an intellect naturally keen, there was united in him that happy temperament to which nothing is impossible, or even difficult of attainment. To these gifts he added a truly marvellous industry and assiduity in research; and above all, a most wonderfully retentive memory for everything he either saw in nature or read in books. In this he so greatly excelled as to be able to carry in mind in their entirety descriptions of things which he had not seen but was looking to find; thus having the descriptions always available whenever occasion called for the use of them."
Conrad Gesner at Zurich declared that the four books of Cordus are "truly extraordinary because of the accuracy with which the plants are described. A century and a half later, Tournefort named Valerius Cordus as having been the first of all men to excel in plant description. Haller, the distinguished botanist and historian in Linnaeus' time, credited Valerius Cordus with having been "the first to teach independence of the poor descriptions of the ancients and to describe plants anew." Greene says of him: "One sees that in all his descriptions the same attention is given to the morphology and also to the life history of the plant in as far as this is known to him. In his practice of describing each species, both morphologically and biologically, he is a herald of our late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers who now that we have the microscope give life histories with minuteness of detail before impossible."
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Evidently Columbus' period gave birth to men as great in the investigation of plants and as ardent in their desires to get the last details of truth as were the geographers and the navigators of the time to reach the ends of the earth and be able to map it out. There was a great wind of the spirit of investigation abroad and everywhere there were magnificent results from it. This school of botany in Germany with Valerius Cordus as the climax of it, whose untimely death before thirty was indeed an irremediable loss to science, illustrates this very well.
While the most important contributions to the science of botany during that period came from the Germans, Italy did not lag far behind in this subject, and France, Spain and Portugal supplied their quota to the science. Above all, it is to the Italians that we owe editions of Theophrastus, Dioscorides and the elder Pliny, works which contained so much of information with regard to the science of botany in ancient times and the modern publication of which brought about a reawakening of interest in that subject corresponding to what was noted in connection with every other republication of classical thought in the various departments of the intellectual life. The most important of the botanists of Italy was Caesalpinus, professor of botany at Padua and director of the botanic garden there at the close of the Columbus' Century, but who was afterwards physician to Pope Clement VIII. To him, as we have seen in discussing the physiology of the time, we owe a complete description of the circulation of the blood in the century before Harvey. Caesalpinus is called by Linnaeus primus verus systematicus, the first true systematic botanist. His work, "De Plantis," contains an immense amount of information and a complete classification of all the then known plants, some 1520 in number, into fifteen classes. The distinguishing characters of this classification are taken from the fruit and show careful observation and thoroughly scientific attention to details.
Caesalpinus' place in the history of botany can be best appreciated from the praise of his colleagues in this department of science. John Ray, the English botanist of the end of the seventeenth century, in his history of plants declared that {379} Caesalpinus' book "On Plants" was indeed a work from which much might be learned. Fabrucci and Carl Fuchs declare Caesalpinus' treatise to be of first rank. Thomas Garzon, Pona of Verona and Balthazar and Michael Campi in the eighteenth century praised his work as thoroughly scientific. We have already quoted Linnaeus' opinion of him and the modern father of botany gladly accepted the suggestion of Plumier that a newly discovered plant should be given the name of Caesalpinus, in order that that name might be forever memorable in botany. Boerhaave, whom we think of much more as a physician than a botanist, but some of whose greatest work was done with regard to medical botany in the University garden of Leyden, advised a friend and disciple if he could buy any of Caesalpinus' works, to do so, for they were among the best on the subject.
In France Ruellius, whose life is about equally divided between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was the physician to Francis I and a distinguished botanist. He wrote scientific descriptions of a large number of plants and put beside them the ordinary names which they were called in various countries as he had obtained them from peasants, farmers and country-people generally in his travels. His work was an important contribution to the science of botany. Toward the end of his life Ruellius, like his distinguished contemporary and colleague, Linacre in England, became a priest. Another important French contributor to the science is Pierre Belon of the first half of the sixteenth century, though he had an interest in many other biological sciences. He wrote a valuable treatise on coniferous plants and a monograph on birds. This has attracted particular attention, because in it "he compared the skeletons of birds and man in the same posture and nearly as possible, bone for bone." As Garrison in his "History of Medicine" (New York, 1913) says: "this was the first of these serial arrangements of homologies which Owen and Haeckel made famous." Belon travelled in Greece, Egypt and the Orient as well as widely in Europe, mainly in the interests of materia medica, but everywhere picking up scientific information.
In Spain and Portugal writers in botany are the medical {380} scientists and especially those who searched the Indies, West and East, for plants with medicinal virtues. They did much both for pure science and for medicine and some account of their work will be found in the chapter on "Medicine" and "America in Columbus' Century." As accumulators of information the biological scientists of all the countries of Europe during Columbus' Century probably contributed more to their various departments than their colleagues of any other corresponding period in the history of science, even our own. They had, of course, the advantage of fields ripe for the harvest, but they undoubtedly took full advantage of their opportunities. Of all of them might be said what Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the anatomists of the Renaissance. They gathered in the rich harvest of discovery like the harvesters in a grain field. After them in the next century came the gleaners, who found many scattered precious grains of knowledge that their predecessors with their rich harvest to care for had neglected. Finally, in the later time, came into the field the geese, who found here and there a grain of knowledge missed even by the gleaners and who made a great cackling whenever they found one. The kindly satirist was himself an anatomist, and we may take the exaggeration of his picture with proper discount, yet with a recognition that it has much more of truth than we always like to confess even to ourselves.
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