e
spiritual and the temporal powers. And as regards temporal power she
adds--perhaps borrowing the idea from Dante's _De Monarchia_, and
anticipating Napoleon's dream--that in order to ensure peace on earth,
it is necessary that one supreme ruler should reign over the whole
world. "La sua volontade e nostra pace," sang a soul in Dante's heaven
of the Moon--the lowest in the celestial system--when questioned
whether it was content with its lowly place. The poet therefore adds,
"ogni dove in cielo e paradiso." Christine, echoing these thoughts,
would fain apply them to life on earth, giving them their deepest and
fullest meaning.

Though she laboured so unceasingly for the good of her country, she
also did her utmost to defend her sex from the indiscriminate censure
which had been heaped upon it, for the evil spoken seemed to her far
to outweigh the good. A century before, Dante had also idealised
woman--even if, as some think, he personified some abstract
quality--and placed her in heaven beside the Deity. Chivalry had also
idealised woman, but in an exotic, exaggerated manner, which was bound
to reach its zenith, and bound also to have its darker side. So we
find that to speak good or ill of womankind became a conventionalism
in the Middle Ages. Black or white was the tone chosen by the artist
in words. There was no blending, no shading. Women were either
deified, or held to be evil incarnate. The material side of life men
understood, and could depict with some exactness, but to grasp in any
way its subtler aspects required an education which could be attained
only by slow degrees, since it meant the gradual modification of the
long-cherished illusion that brute force is the world's only weapon. A
want of capacity to discern is often responsible for a depreciatory
opinion, and we can but ascribe this strangely narrow-minded and
superficial attitude towards woman to some such want. Christine set
herself the task of trying to remedy this evil, not by shouting in the
market-place, but by studying men and women as God made them and as
she found them. Before she began her work, a new day seemed to be
dawning. Just as, when classicism was in full decadence, Plutarch
wrote _De mulierum virtutibus_ (of the virtue of women), so, in the
fourteenth century, Boccaccio gave to the world _De claris mulieribus_
(of right-renowned women). We do not expect to find woman treated on
a very high plane by Boccaccio, but we recognise that,