Teresa once said: "God preserve me from those great nobles who can do something, yet who are such strange cranks." She reminded her nuns on more than one occasion when she found in them a tendency to go to too great lengths in austerity that we have a body as well as a soul, and that this body when disregarded revenges itself upon the soul. There are few subjects of importance in life on which St. Teresa has not expressed herself wisely, and to know her writings is to be able to quote many marvellous summations of worldly experience that the cloister might seem to have precluded in her. On the subject of the relation of low wages and virtue, Miss Repplier in the article on "Our Loss of Nerve" _(Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1913) quoted St. Teresa's profound comment which sums up so well our whole social situation "where virtue is well rooted provocations matter little." [Illustration: MOSTAERT, VIRGO DEIPARA (ANTWERP)] {313} CHAPTER IX FEMININE EDUCATION There is probably no more interesting phase of Columbus' Century for our time than its feminine education, for the education of women had a period of important development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which affected a very large number of women of the time and afforded abundant opportunity to all those who wished to obtain the highest intellectual culture. This was not, in spite of the apparently very prevalent impression to that effect, the first time that women had been given a chance to secure the higher education, for on the contrary whenever there was a new awakening of educational interest, women asked and obtained the privilege of sharing in it and showed how thoroughly they could take advantage of such opportunities as were afforded them. In the early days of the universities women had been welcomed not only among the students but also the professors. They had full charge of the department of women's diseases down in the south of Italy where the most important part of the university was the medical school, and then later at Bologna they had been professors in every department,--in law, when the law school was the central university feature, in mathematics, in literature, even in anatomy. As a consequence of the tradition thus established there has never been a century since the twelfth in which there have not been distinguished women professors at some of the Italian universities.