Since the time of Hroswitha, Gertrude, the Matildas and Hildegard, the learned woman has never been the ideal woman in Germany. When Olympia Morati was on her way from Ferrara to Heidelberg to take the chair of Greek, she found the daughters of professors and humanists devoting themselves to sewing and embroidery instead of art and literature. Anna, the eldest daughter of Melanchthon, was almost alone among the German women of the Renaissance who had a knowledge of Latin. In France the most learned woman of her time was undoubtedly Margaret of Angouleme, queen of Navarre. So great was her knowledge and so enthusiastic was she in promoting the study of the Latin and Greek classics that Michelet, with something of exaggeration, perhaps, calls her "the amiable mother of the Renaissance in France."[65] She was noted for her devotion to the study of Scripture and theology as well as Greek and Hebrew. She always had around her, or was in correspondence with, the most distinguished scholars, poets, artists, philosophers and theologians of the age, and undoubtedly did much, as a patroness of men of letters, toward furthering the literary movement in France. She is, however, chiefly known to modern readers by her _Heptameron_--a work which reveals too clearly the tastes of her associates and the manners and customs of the time. With the exception of Margaret of Navarre, there were but few literary women of more than ephemeral reputation during the French Renaissance. Among these Louise Labe deserves mention, as she was the most distinguished poetess in France during the sixteenth century.[66] She, like Margaret, was the center of a coterie of men of letters; but the reunions over which she presided, as well as those of the author of the _Heptameron_, were entirely lacking in the dignity and refinement of those of the polished court of Urbino in the days of the peerless Elizabetta Gonzaga. From what has been said respecting the rare learning of the women of the Renaissance, one might infer that women in general enjoyed special educational facilities during this period of intellectual activity. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very contrary was the case. For, as history tells us, the education of the Renaissance was essentially aristocratic. It was only for the women of the nobility and for the wives and daughters of scholars, while the great majority of the sex remained in a state of complete illiteracy.