Little girls in the Middle Ages were entrusted to the saints of the convents to be made nuns; during the Renaissance parents consecrated gifted children to the Muses.

Jacopo da Bergamo, speaking of Trivulzia of Milan, a contemporary of Lucretia, who excited great amazement as an orator when she was only fourteen years of age, says, "When her parents noticed the child's extraordinary gifts they dedicated her to the Muses--this was in her seventh year--for her education." The course of study followed by women at that time included the classic languages and their literature, oratory, poetry, or the art of versifying, and music.

Dilettanteism in the graphic and plastic arts of course followed, and the vast number of paintings and statues produced during the Renaissance inspired every cultivated woman in Italy with a desire to become a connoisseur.
Even philosophy and theology were cultivated by women.

Debates on questions in these fields of inquiry were the order of the day at the courts and in the halls of the universities, and women endeavored to acquire renown by taking part in them.

At the end of the fifteenth century the Venetian, Cassandra Fedeli, the wonder of her age, was as well versed in philosophy and theology as a learned man.