As it is, this florescence acquired only very slight _immediate_ influence upon the emancipation of woman—and the farther North one goes the slighter it becomes. The periods of the Counter-Reformation, of the Religious Wars and of the new Orthodoxy, on the contrary, had as result an enormous retrogression in the position of woman. The “Deliverance of the Flesh,” which was accomplished by the verdict of Protestantism upon the life of the cloister, and by its support of marriage, had little in common with the deep feeling for the right and beauty of corporeality by which the Renaissance, intoxicated with life, became the era of the great renascence of art. Luther’s conception of the sex life, as “sanctified” by marriage, was so crassly utilitarian that it again dragged woman down from that high level upon which the finest life of feeling and culture of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance had placed her. As matron of the household, woman retained her authority. The rational, common-sense marriage was the one most conformable to this literal doctrine of Luther, and the most usual. To the man who had chosen her, the wife bore children by the dozen and threescore. The Church gave her soul nourishment. If a woman occasionally sought to exercise her spiritual gifts in a “worldly” direction, she needed powerful protection, else she ran the danger of being burned as a witch! Yet in spite of all, even this period produced not a few women who procured for themselves the learning after which they thirsted, who succeeded in keeping their souls alive, in finding springs in the midst of the stony wastes of the desert. The more, however, the different branches of learning developed, and especially as Latin became the language of the learned, the more difficult it became for women to force their way to these springs, sealed for the majority of their sex. For a classical education became more and more infrequently extended to the daughter, for whom even the ability to read and write was considered a temptation to deviation from the path of virtue.[1] That women in time of persecution adhered to the new doctrine with warm belief and suffered for it with the whole strength of their souls, that in time of war they managed house and estate with power and understanding, altered in no respect, at the time, woman’s social or marriage position. Man was woman’s sovereign master and therefore a good bit nearer God than she. In marriage woman was considered, according to the bishop’s word, “man’s chattel,” outside of marriage as a tool of the devil. But however deeply the soul of woman was oppressed at this time, yet it still lived and endowed sons, in whom the strong but unexercised endowments of the mother became genius; it endowed daughters, who secretly procured sustenance for their souls and who in turn transmitted their rebellious spirit to a daughter or granddaughter.