The real story of woman's intellectual position in the century is to be found in its literature. How deep was the general culture of the women of the Thirteenth Century, in Italy at least, can be judged from the Sonnets of Dante and his friends to their loved ones at the end of this century. Some of the most beautiful poetry that was ever written was inspired by these women and like the law of hydrostatics, it is one of the rules of the history of poetry, that inspiration never rises higher than its source and that poetry addressed to women is always the best index of the estimation in which they are held, the reflection of the highest qualities of the objects to which it is addressed. Anyone who reads certain of the sonnets of Dante, or of his friends Guido Cavalcanti or Gino da Pistoia or Dante da Maiano, will find ready assurance of the high state of culture and of intellectual refinement that must have existed among the women to whom they were dedicated. This same form of reasoning will apply also with regard to the women of the South of France to whom the Troubadours addressed their poetry; to those of the north of France who were greeted by the Trouvères; and those of the south of Germany for whom the Minnesingers tuned their lyres and invoked the Muses to enable them to sing their praises properly. It would seem sometimes to be forgotten that poetry generally is written much more for women than for men. Everyone realizes that for one man who has read Tennyson's "Idyls of the King" there are probably five women to whom they have been a source of delight. When we think of the Thirteenth Century as not affording opportunities of intellectual culture for its women, we should ask ourselves where then did the Meistersingers and the poets of England, Germany and France who told their romantic tales in verse find an audience, if it was not among the women. The stories selected by the Meistersingers are just those which proved so popular to feminine readers of Tennyson in the Nineteenth Century, and the chosen subjects of interest in the stories show that men and women have not changed much during the intervening centuries. The literature of any {335} period reflects the interest of the women in it and, as interest is itself an index of intellectual development, Thirteenth Century literature must be taken as the vivid reflection of the cultural character of the women of the time, and this is of itself the highest possible tribute to their intelligence and education.