There is one amusing ceremony I must mention, particularly as it forms a convenient stepping-stone to the next division of my subject. It was a ceremony which lasted quite to the end of the Middle Ages, and fittingly belonged to a period when Grammar, the first of the Seven Liberal Arts, was always represented with a rod. On a certain day in the early summer, mediæval children went out to the woods to cut the rods, which were afterwards to be used with such effect on their own sturdy little persons. The mediæval schoolmaster had no need of a proverb to convince him that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. And even when Walther protests against the abuse of the “Gerte,” he, by no means, desires its abolition. At the age of seven the boys passed out of the women’s apartments and were given into the hands of a governor. The girls stayed behind with a “Meisterinne”; and it was the custom at princely courts to receive the daughters of the vassals to share the lessons of the Princesses. Thus we know that, among the companions who studied with Elizabeth was her faithful friend of the bitter years to come, Guta. Though girls and boys were educated separately, it is impossible to separate the ideals of education in the case of the two sexes. In order, indeed, to arrive at any comprehension of the ideals towards which the educators of girls in the Catholic Middle Ages strained, we must strive to realize the mediæval conception of the “verie parfit gentil knight.” For if ever it needed a certain type of woman to help to produce a certain type of man, it was during the Age of Chivalry. Moreover, the Catholic Church, the one great pedagogic authority of the Middle Ages, has always held that Education must concern itself with the Soul as well as the body of man. And “there is no sex in soul” to side with Bishop Spalding against Francis Thompson. The educational ideals held up by the Church before those who set themselves to train her sons, were for those who trained her daughters, too. The knightly virtues, “Staete” and “Maeze” (Steadfastness and Moderation) were womanly virtues, too. The pillars of chivalry, “theumuot” (= Demut, humility), and Treue (fidelity) are the pillars of all true womanhood. Something of the spirit of the education of the period may be gathered from the definition of the word Zûht (Zucht) in the Middle High German vocabulary: “that lofty culture of the mind, which is a fruit of education, and which expresses itself in outward modesty, inward chastity, self-restraint and self-denial, and in the externals of good breeding.” The chivalrous education aimed at cultivating “Self-Knowledge, Self-Reverence and Self-Control” in a man or woman whose corporal form had been developed to something as nearly approaching the ideal of perfection as possible. And it sought perfection in all things, because of Him Who is Infinite Perfection.