Some paint themselves many times a day
and have false teeth and hair. O Woman! are you not fearful, with the
hair of strangers on your heads? It may be the hair of some dead woman
to the injury of your souls!"

The Renaissance was a period of transition a liberation of mental force
which, from Italy, spread itself, invigoratingly, over the rest of
Europe. The modern world was rolling into light. With a gun in his
hands, the peasant soldier was the equal, physically at least, of his
former master. The art of printing and the invention of cheap paper had
given wings to thought and knowledge. Trade had penetrated strange
lands. Every returning sailor and adventurer brought back tales more
fascinating than fairy lore of mysterious golden islands newly
discovered in the west. Wonder and imagination were awakened. Money was
plentiful. In the German cities a leisure class existed. Conditions were
ripe for culture, and Humanism came.

The "New Learning," as Humanism was generally called, rapidly
overwhelmed the old, barren scholasticism and ecclesiasticism. Every
monastery and university became a battleground where Humanism fought
Scholasticism to the death.

Under the quickening influence of the "New Learning," free Latin schools
for boys were established over all Germany. The poorest boy might attend
any or all of the schools. Thus arose the specifically German
educational system of "wandering students," with its good and evil
influences.

At first little was done, educationally, for the girls. There were a
very few small, poorly equipped public schools where daughters of
artisans and laborers received religious teaching and slight rudimentary
instruction in reading, spelling, and writing. Girls belonging to noble
and patrician families were usually taught in convents. Music, dancing,
embroidery, deportment, and, above all, the supervision of a large
household were the studies upon which wealthy parents insisted for their
daughters. But the brighter girls soon became curious about the "New
Learning" of which their fathers and brothers spoke so frequently.
Sastrow, in his biography, writes:

"One of my five younger sisters, Catherine, was an excellent, amiable,
lovely, pious maiden. When my brother, Johannes, came home from
Wittenberg, where he was a student, she bade him tell her how one could
say in Latin, 'This is, truly, a beautiful maiden.' He replied,
'Profecto formosa puella.' She asked farther how one could say,