It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe, women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin; still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover, the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the women's minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any large change. These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About 1350 appeared Boccaccio's _Decameron_, with its fairer promise of woman's position, and from that time the women of Italy show the remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished. The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11] The picture that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities, women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d'Andrea and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world knows.