ABSTRACT
During the Middle Ages and the early modern era, personal ideals of behaviour were shaped according to gender. The catalogue of men’s qualities and virtues differed from the patterns that were obligatory for women. This was the case in the whole of Europe and it was closely connected to opinions on the genders’ different predispositions to vice. Since woman was regarded as a ‘weaker vessel’, it was taken for granted that she was more disposed to sin, that it was more difficult for her to be virtuous. At the threshold of the early modern era few people would risk the opinion that women were more virtuous than men. However, Father Hieronim Makowski, a Dominican from Lublin, held such a conviction in Poland in the seventeenth century.1
