Page:Of Six Mediaeval Women (1913).djvu/18

 only women who were prominent through their high official positions, either political or religious, such as Blanche of Castile, or St. Catherine of Siena, or the Abbess Hildegarde, or women like the Blessed Angela of Foligno, or Julian, anchoress of Norwich, or some other of the devout women of mediæval Italy, who interpreted the mysteries of divine love to mediæval society, having in fact, as it were, religious salons, from whom the veil has been withdrawn, and even amongst such as these it has sometimes been only very slightly lifted. With these saintly and political women must be mentioned the women doctors of Salerno—Trothula, Abella, Mercurialis, and others—who played so important a part both as professors and practitioners when this school of medicine was at its zenith in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and who left behind them, as evidence of their learning, treatises which are of interest to-day as showing mediæval methods in medicine.

Still, even so, the records are scanty. In order, therefore, to form some idea and estimate of women generally in the Middle Ages, we must perforce fall back on reasoning from the