Page:Of Six Mediaeval Women (1913).djvu/187

 woman—even if, as some think, he personified some abstract quality—and placed her in heaven beside the Deity. Chivalry had also idealised woman, but in an exotic, exaggerated manner, which was bound to reach its zenith, and bound also to have its darker side. So we find that to speak good or ill of womankind became a conventionalism in the Middle Ages. Black or white was the tone chosen by the artist in words. There was no blending, no shading. Women were either deified, or held to be evil incarnate. The material side of life men understood, and could depict with some exactness, but to grasp in any way its subtler aspects required an education which could be attained only by slow degrees, since it meant the gradual modification of the long-cherished illusion that brute force is the world's only weapon. A want of capacity to discern is often responsible for a depreciatory opinion, and we can but ascribe this strangely narrow-minded and superficial attitude towards woman to some such want. Christine set herself the task of trying to remedy this evil, not by shouting in the market-place, but by studying men and women as God made them and as she found them. Before she began her work, a new day seemed to be dawning. Just as, when classicism was in full decadence, Plutarch wrote De mulierum virtutibus (of the virtue of women), so, in the fourteenth century, Boccaccio gave to the world De claris mulieribus (of right-renowned women). We do not expect