Taken together, then, the two contradictory views of woman just outlined provide, as it were, a philosophical portrait of her as she appeared to the later Middle Ages. There is also a practical picture more difficult to delineate because less was written about it at the time. Its early background in particular is obscure, since so very little is known about women during the Dark Ages. Some anthropologists hold that among Germanic peoples women were highly regarded; monogamy was the universal practice even before the advent of Christianity; women fought beside men in emergency; and certainly the Teutonic Valkyrie are a match for the Amazons of ancient Greece. Other social historians point out that the earliest epics, sagas, and _chansons de geste_ celebrate only the valor of men whose deeds insured the survival of their folk-groups, and in these tales women play negligible roles. It is known, too, that under feudalism in some parts of Europe women were treated as little more than adjuncts to the land holdings they inherited, and were promised in marriage by male relatives, sometimes when scarcely out of the cradle, with the sole end of cementing politically profitable jointures of territory.[4] Whatever the truth may be—and it is certain that no single truth can hold for so heterogeneous a geographic and temporal span as Europe in the Dark Ages—we come to relatively stable ground only with the crusades and the transition from feudalism to chivalry. For perhaps a dozen generations from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries many men of all classes were drawn off on ever-widening military campaigns, civil or religious. Thus, the management of affairs at home devolved to some extent upon women. Of the effect on lower-class women we know little that is specific, though the hysteria of witchcraft suggests one result of numerical imbalance between the sexes on that level. On the upper social levels history tells us that many women managed their lords’ estates, dispensed justice, marshalled armed forces when necessary, and sometimes even led those forces against rival lords—a circumstance commoner in Italy and southern France than in regions farther north. Consequently, these women acquired considerable learning. Hitherto even literacy had not been too common among laymen aside from those destined for very high positions, but it is probable that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries women were better educated than men of the same class, the latter being engaged in more strenuous pursuits. It is known that women were in charge of hospitals during this period, and a few rose to the status of lecturers in Italian universities.[5]