ABSTRACT
THE question 'what was the estimation of women according to the rule or custom of chivalry?' is one not easily answered. if indeed it admits of an answer at all. It is easy to say that the ideal was different from the reality, and that a high conception of female virtue and manly devotion went side by side in practice with licence and brutality. But if we take the ideal alone, apart from the comment of facts, the ladies of Petrarch and Dante are very different from those of Boccaccio or the fabliaux.1 It is not a question of good or bad women, of which every age provides examples in fact
and in fiction. It is a question of ideals. Boccaccio's conception of what a woman should be, though it may inc1u<;le such types as Constance, Griselda, and the Lady of the Falcon, has room also for Fiammetta; and there is no suggestion of blame in the picture given by him of a society which was cultivated to the highest,degree of refinement-for no age has ever surpassed, if any has equalled, the refinement of that which conceived the figures of Beatrice in the Vila Nuova, Francesca and Piccarrla in the Comedy, or Yseult and Berthe, and which inspired Giotto, Memmi, and Mino da Fiesole-and yet accepted a rule of manners as licentious as that set forth by La Fontaine in his Conies el Notlve/les. The idealizing of women is the result of chivalry; nor can there be much doubt as to the lax morality which accom panied it. The problem does not present itself in other times, unless it be in Periclean Athens, where Aristophanes jostles Euripides, and Plato himself, the highest of moralists, confounds moralists by his treatment of sexual relations. The great ladies of Roman history and fiction, though exalted, are not attractive, and the Cinaras and Lesbias of the poets are merely pictures of the toys with which men amuse themselves. A better and a more modern type is found in some of those who live in the pages of Tacitus, in the women who corresponded with St. Jerome (though asceticism makes havoc of their graces) and generally in the times when paganism was giving place to Christianity, in the fourth and fifth centuries. We pass over the Middle Ages, and we find among the contemporaries of More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Herrick, both in reality and in fiction, a new type, unaffected and virtuous, and yet full of grace and
refinement of feeling, if not of speech; women who, if they lived among us now, would be at home in all the courtesies of modern life, neither highflown and unreal, nor coarse and licentious in thought.
