l notes. The day had not yet dawned when a woman
could, "with seemliness," said Willibald Pirkheimer, "enter the field of
public disputation." Pirkheimer told his sister, in somewhat brutal
language, that she had "better have held her woman's tongue."

Just when the future looked most dark for Saint Clare's, Philip
Melanchthon sweetest, calmest, sanest spirit of the Reformation came to
Nuernberg. He visited his old friend, Charitas Pirkheimer, in her
convent. "Would to God," Charitas writes afterward, "that every one were
as discreet as Master Philip. We might then hope to be rid of many
things that are vexatious." Melanchthon quietly put a stop to the
persecutions of the convent. From the date of his visit Saint Clare's
remained comparatively undisturbed.

It is easy to understand how the "Evangelist of Art," Albrecht Durer,
and Charitas Pirkheimer could be, as they were, the closest of friends.
But Conrad Celtes, the Heine of the Renaissance, and the stately, pious
abbess of Saint Clare's would seem, at first sight, to have little in
common. Nevertheless, a warm and long-continued friendship existed
between these two.

The ethical note of the Renaissance was first struck in Germany. Even
Conrad Celtes (the one Humanist in the Italian the Lorenzo de' Medici
sense of the term that Germany has ever produced) could not quite deaden
the Teutonic conscience. Celtes's writings are full of questionings that
are almost startlingly modern. "Is there, really, a God?" "Will the soul
live after death?" "What is the nature of the force that produces
lightning?" Then, in the very next line perhaps, the poet lapses again
into sensuality. "There is nothing sweeter under the sun than a pretty
maid in a man's arms to banish care." "This," says Bezold, "was Celtes's
heart-confession, and he lived up to it." Bezold adds: "In spite of his
voluminous correspondence with them, Celtes did not appreciate good
women. He really knew only alehouse wenches." In the light of Celtes's
letters to Charitas Pirkheimer, it is hard to accept this harsh judgment
unreservedly.

The Renaissance and the Reformation in Germany are so closely allied
that it is difficult to separate one energy from the other. Mental and
spiritual forces are not easily anchored to dates. For convenience,
however, we may say that the German Renaissance lasted from 1450 to 1519
as a distinct movement, while the Reformation largely an outgrowth of
the Renaissance fell between t