bella, Mercurialis, and
others--who played so important a part both as professors and
practitioners when this school of medicine was at its zenith in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, and who left behind them, as evidence
of their learning, treatises which are of interest to-day as showing
mediaeval methods in medicine.

[1] _The Book of the Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela
of Foligno._ The New Mediaeval Library.

[2] _Revelations of Divine Love recorded by Julian, Anchoress
of Norwich, 1373._

Still, even so, the records are scanty. In order, therefore, to form
some idea and estimate of women generally in the Middle Ages, we must
perforce fall back on reasoning from the known to the unknown, and,
by studying the few who are recorded in written history, judge of that
great majority who, though nameless, have yet so largely helped to
make up the world's unwritten history. Just as many a flower blooms
and dies unseen, so many a woman must have lived her life, serviceable
to her special environment, but wholly unrecorded. Just as, in the
course of ages, the seeds of some humble plant have been carried by
wind or water from some lonely region to one less remote, and made to
serve a purpose by adding to the sum-total of beauty and usefulness,
so the thoughts and deeds of many an unremembered woman have doubtless
passed into the great ocean of thought, encircling us to-day, and
influencing us as a living force.

Thus we have the women who figure in history, and whom we must take as
types of the influential woman of the time, and the women whom history
has not so honoured. Of the former, even when only portrayed in
outline, we can learn something, but how are we to learn anything of
the latter, whether living in the seclusion of religious houses or in
the world? Of those living in religious houses, we know from records
that, besides attending to their own spiritual and mental education
and tending the sick, they conducted the cloister schools and taught
in them needlework, the art of confectionery, surgery, writing, and
drawing. They also wove, and embroidered, and added their mite to the
sum-total of beauty by transcribing and illuminating MSS. of the
Gospels and of the lives of the Saints. But sometimes such a limited
sphere of activity was enlarged, and it is to an anonymous Anglo-Saxon
nun of the eighth century, to whom the experiences were related, that
we owe one of the earliest and most in