It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the general question of woman's position. Boccaccio was no feminist, but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was bound to suggest the question of woman's capacity. An Italian monk so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of 800 pages each) on distinguished women--170 in number--of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845 distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some distinction in theology. It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany, France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505--the Latin treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa, _De nobilitate et præcellentia feminini sexus_ ("Of the nobility and excellence of the female sex"). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman's capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have given.