tivation of heart and
soul, but in a strict observance of the forms of religion. Sin made no
woman repulsive, and the condition of even the most degraded female did
not prevent her from performing all her church duties, and appearing to
be a well-trained Christian. There were no women skeptics or
freethinkers; they would have been impossible in the society of that
day. The godless tyrant Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini built a
magnificent church, and in it a chapel in honor of his beloved Isotta,
who was a regular attendant at church. Vannozza built and embellished a
chapel in S. Maria del Popolo. She had a reputation for piety, even
during the life of Alexander VI. Her greatest maternal solicitude, like
that of Adriana, was to inculcate a Christian deportment in her
daughter, and this Lucretia possessed in such perfection that
subsequently a Ferrarese ambassador lauded her for her 'saintly
demeanor.'

It is wrong to regard this bearing simply as a mask; for that would
presuppose an independent consideration of religious questions or a
moral process which was altogether foreign to the women of that age, and
is still unknown among the women of Italy. There religion was, and still
is, a part of education; it consisted in a high respect for form and was
of small ethical worth.

The daughters of the well-to-do families did not receive instruction in
the humanities in the convents, but probably from the same teachers to
whom the education of the sons was entrusted. It is no exaggeration to
say that the women of the better classes during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries were as well educated as are the women of to-day.
Their education was not broad; it was limited to a few branches; for
then they did not have the almost inexhaustible means of improvement
which, thanks to the evolution of the human mind during the last three
hundred years, we now enjoy. The education of the women of the
Renaissance was based upon classical antiquity, in comparison with which
everything which could then be termed modern was insignificant. They
might, therefore, have been described as scholarly. Feminine education
is now entirely different, as it is derived wholly from modern sources
of culture. It is precisely its many-sidedness to which is due the
superficiality of the education of contemporary woman when compared with
that of her sister of the Renaissance.

The education of women at the present time, generally,--even in Germany,
which