Outside the convent, as the early modern era progresses, Stevenson puts together a fascinating account of the way cities and even countries came to regard the possession of an extensively educated woman scholar as a mark of pride, and someone to be paraded before important visitors, at which point they usually delivered a formal oration or similar. (So much for the theory that women were always supposed to remain silent.)
This was one factor that led parents - usually fathers - to decide that educating a daughter in Latin - and other Greek, Hebrew and even more esoteric languages - might be good not just for her but as a way of advancing the whole family. Often, but not always, such fathers were professional educators themselves. I'm very interested in the most prominent English example of this - Bathsua Makin, but was fascinated to find it a phenomena spread virtually the length and breadth of Europe.
So Juliana/Julienne Morell (1593-1853) was writing letters to her Catallan father in Latin at age seven in Barcelona. He committed murder and they were forced to flee to Lyon, where she defended a Latin philosophical thesis in a public audience before Margaret of Austria at the age of about 14. Her father then removed her to Avignon, where he wanted her to study to become a doctor of law. However, she was determined to become a nun, and attracted the support of local nobles with another Latin public defence, and so was able to enter the convent of her choice. Her father refused to pay her dowry; the Pope eventually did so. But even there she didn’t escape, or chose to escape, speaking her various languages (which also included Greek and Hebrew) for distinguished visitors.
But since writing in Latin was so often regarded as a male preserve, were these women merely aping men's work? Stevenson says not. She finds many cases in which the women Latinists wrote narratives in distinctly female ways.
To give just one example, she looks closely at a poem written by a German nun, Willetrudis, possibly in the early 1100s. It is the story of Susanna and the Elders who try to blackmail her into sleeping with them when they sneak into the garden where she is bathing. She instead cries out, and they claim they saw her with a lover. She is about to be judged when young Daniel steps forward, questions the men's story, and reveals its falsity.
Stevenson compares the nun's work with a roughly contemporary work by Petrus de Riga. She finds that the male writer in his choice of words subtly blames Susanna: "Her beauty captivates the old men; her desirability draws them." (original itals) Even when she tests the water before bathing - surely an innocent enough act - he draws attention to her nuda and she is a temptare, a temptress. The poet then lingers on her beauty, her milky neck in what, in medieval terms, says Stevenson, is "mildly pornographic" and says she went to the garden all alone - seemingly in itself a suspicious act.
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