Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/41

Rh natural love of the sexes. The horrors to which women were subjected in monasteries, priests' brothels, and courts of inquisition we will entirely omit. On the other hand, we shall attach no importance to the fact that at certain periods of the Middle Ages single women acquired distinction as artists, authors, etc. They acquired it, so to speak, merely as a reflex of monastic life. They were regarded as nuns, not as women.

After Christian contempt and abuse of women had reached the extreme, it began in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to retrace its steps to the other extreme, to glorify them and make them objects of idolatry. That brings us to the time of those noble knights who as highway robbers at one moment slew their fellow-men, and the next moment, as sighing paladins, lay on their knees before their lady-love. That these mooncalves even at a later time could be regarded as