Note 75 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

Lettres et Entretiens sur l'Éducation de Filles, Tom. I, pp. 225-231.

Compare this superficial course of study at Saint-Cyr with the elaborate course mapped out by Lionardo d'Arezzo in a letter addressed to the illustrious lady, Baptista Malatesta. In the broad programme of education for women recommended by this eminent man of letters, "poet, orator, historian, and the rest, all must be studied, each must contribute a share. Our learning thus becomes full, ready, varied, elegant, available for action or for discourse on all subjects."

Lionardo's curriculum of studies for women was quite as comprehensive as that required for men, "with perhaps a little less stress upon rhetoric and more upon religion. There was no assumption that a lower standard of attainment is inevitably a consequence of smaller capacity."

Nor was this thorough study of letters by the women of Italy "unfavorably regarded by social opinion"; neither did it introduce "a new standard of womanly activity. Women, indeed, at this epoch, seem to have preserved their moral and intellectual balance under the stress of the new enthusiasm better than men. The learned ladies were, in actual life, good wives and mothers, domestic and virtuous women of strong judgment and not seldom of marked capacity in affairs." Cf. Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 122, 132, 197, by W. H. Woodward, Cambridge, 1905.