made him their singer and his sympathy revealed, to their time and to themselves, their own being. Woman’s ideal of love became through poetry and courts of love the ideal also of the most cultured men. We see here a movement of the time which women already half consciously effected by their life of feeling and their culture. The authority which the wife exercised as lady of the manor during the absence, often of many years’ duration, of her husband gave her increased power to disseminate about her that finer culture which she herself had gained. But when the lords of the manor returned and again assumed power, then indeed at times strange thoughts might have come to their wives, while they fixed their glance, under the great arched eyelids, upon the missal or the romance of chivalry or, with long tapering fingers, moved the chessmen or played the harp, or while they bent the slender white neck over the embroidery frame or the lace-pillow upon which they wrought veritable marvels of handicraft. Perhaps even then there stirred under many a brow the presentiment of a time in which the relationship between man and woman would be different. Such thoughts must have arisen also in the manor-houses when the men began to arrogate to themselves one handicraft after another, occupations which in earlier times the daughters once learned from their fathers, at whose side they sometimes even entered the guild. Could even the nun’s veil prevent such thoughts from rising between the white temples of some of the women who—suffering or superfluous outside in the world—had found refuge in the cloister? Here was accomplished most peacefully the “emancipation,” of that time, of the intellectual and artistic gifts of woman, for whom religion and the life of the cloister had always employment. And if the soul of a nun was greater and richer than usual, then might it indeed have happened that she devoted herself to meditation, in a quandary as to whether all of God’s purposes for the gifts of her soul were truly fulfilled. And this the more intently since even then many women outside the cloister—women whose religious inspiration directed their genius to great ends—outside in the world, exercised a powerful influence upon the thought as upon the events of their time and, after death as saints, retained power over souls. Our Birgitta, for example, possessed herself of a great part of “woman’s rights.”