We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real literary power. The D'Este family is { 207} better known generally, and then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli, Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life. Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.
It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renée of Anjou, while the name { 208} of Louise La Cordière shows, for _la cordière_ means the cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France, whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin, show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got out,--is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to him.