OF SIX MEDIÆVAL WOMEN
fectionery, 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 interesting accounts extant in Northern Europe of a journey to Palestine.
To learn something of those living in the world, who were the inspirers, the helpmates, and the companions of men in everyday life, we must turn to the poems and romances. These form the key to the domestic life of the time. Though ordinary life may be somewhat idealised in them, still it is ordinary life on which they are based. Moreover, many of the MSS. in which they are written down contain miniatures — a legacy of exceeding worth to the student. But if we seek some knowledge of mediæval life from miniatures, it is not necessary to confine our researches to MSS. of romances. Transcripts of the classics, of the moralised Bible, and of other religious works also supply many pictures of everyday life, adapted quite regardless of incongruity, for one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages was a profound incapacity
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