Probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and unexpected development of professional education for women is to be found in the conditions out of which Salerno developed. The school was originally a monastic school under the influence of the Benedictine monks from Monte Cassino not far away. The great Archbishop Alphanus I, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor there, was himself {216} a Benedictine monk. How intimately the relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of Salerno, Constantine Africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the monastery of Monte Cassino. His great friend Desiderius was the abbot there, and his influence was still very strong at Salerno. Desiderius afterwards became Pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this Southern Italian university. In a word, it was in the midst of the most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great teaching institution occurred. The wise old monks were thoroughly practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of problems. When the next great university, that of Bologna, was founded, it developed, as I have suggested, around a law school. Irnerius revived the study of the old Roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so much attention that students from all over Europe flocked to Bologna. Law is different from medicine in many respects. The right of women to study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of medical education is manifest. With regard to law, however, there can scarcely be grave question as to the {217} advisability of woman studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. This was particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had no rights until she married. In spite of the many inherent improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely opened at Bologna before women became students in it. Probably Irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students, but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been quite open to them. As out of the law school the university gradually developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were accorded to women at Bologna. We have the story of their success in mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy.