Limited lessons were given to girls, such as “embroidery, reading, writing, and dancing… [and] music,” (Doc. 9) and they were expected to learn only “good manners… and when she learns to write, let not her example be trifling songs but some sober sentences, prudent and chaste, taken out of holy scripture or they sayings of philosophers.” (Doc. 5) Unlike men, women were given the privilege to explore these new fields of learning, they were only learned for good manners, to better run a household, and to provide entertainment for their husbands. They were treated as a decorative property, even “ornaments” to glorify their husbands; their renewed education only led to the declination of their status. In reality, the Renaissance was only an elitist movement where along the way, even elite women had their …show more content…
To begin, fundamentally, the Northern Renaissance shared the same value of antiquity and based education systems off the works of ancient Greek and Roman text as well. The importance of classics was of equal status of that in the Italian Renaissance as represented by northern humanist Desiderius Erasmus, where “the whole stress of teaching must be laid upon a close yet wide study of greater writers,” and a student should, “devote his attention to the content of the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome because with the slight qualification the whole of attainable knowledge lies therein.” (Doc. 4) Similar to other northern humanists such as Rabelais, Erasmus believed that people should gain knowledge from the studying of ancient literature. Yet Erasmus’s views must be taken with a grain of salt when compared to the values of the Italian Renaissance for he was a devoted