In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun describes the _Cité des Dames_ of Christine de Pisan (fifteenth century) as the first plea for woman's emancipation, but a reader of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It ranges over the whole field of distinguished women--the women of Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity--with admiration of their learning or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne's adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of Navarre and--in a less degree--Margaret of Valois proved the capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu's own niece, Mme. de Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best writers of the day met. England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously, _A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest_. She tells of the learned women of Italy and France, and declares that woman's "incapacity" is "acquired, not natural." "How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?" she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she urges--a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation of Oxford and Cambridge--and have their sex fully educated.