The “blunder” of a female graduate: Elena Lucrezia Corner, a pioneer of women in universities, was born in 1646

The first woman to graduate in the world? She was born just these days, almost four hundred years ago. Her name was Elena Lucrezia Corner – according to the Venetian pronunciation, or Cornaro, in Italian – Piscopia. She was born in Venice, on June 5, 1646. She was probably the first woman in the world to earn a degree. And it wasn't a walk in the park. From then on, a new page opened in the history of culture and women's emancipation.

From Hypatia to Saint Catherine of Siena

Thinking about it today, it seems incredible. We are in the second half of the seventeenth century, we are about to enter the "Age of Enlightenment", we are a century after the French Revolution. And still there is not a single woman graduate in the world. There was Hypatia, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, in Alexandria of Egypt already in the fourth century AD. There was Trotula de Ruggiero , who at the beginning of the 1100s was the most important Italian doctor, and wrote a treatise on gynecology that remained fundamental throughout the Middle Ages. There was Saint Catherine of Siena, who took up paper and stylus, and in the mid-fourteenth century wrote, without fear, to the Pope of the time, Gregory XI. But, despite a long history of cultured, erudite or influential women, none had ever obtained a degree.

Who was Elena Corner?

Elena Corner is the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. An important person, Giovanni Battista Corner, who is part of a patrician family a little distant from the political leaders of the Republic of Venice. Her mother is a woman, as they say, "of humble origins", Zanetta Boni. Little Elena has a remarkable, exceptional intelligence. Her father notices this, and lets her wander in his vast library. He entrusts her to a music teacher, Maddalena Cappelli, thanks to whom she learns to play the clavichord and the harpsichord. Elena studies with important tutors: the theologian Giovan Battista Fabris, the Latinist Giovanni Valier, the Greek scholar Alvise Gradenigo . There are countless languages ​​she learns: Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, a little Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. At nineteen, she chooses not to marry and to become a Benedictine oblate: oblates vow themselves to chastity, but they do not have to enter a monastery . Translated: he can continue studying.

The career

At just over twenty years old, Elena was already a phenomenon. She was welcomed into numerous Academies, such as the Ricovrati of Padua and the Intronati of Siena : the names may make you laugh, but they were the elite of scholars and men of letters of the time. They also sought her out from abroad: Cardinal Frederick of Hesse consulted her in 1670 on geometry problems, and in 1677 Cardinal Emanuel de Bouillon summoned her for dialectical confrontations with scholars. She showed off without fear.

In 1677, Elena applied to graduate in Theology. And here she encountered the main obstacle in her path: Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo, bishop of Padua. Cardinal Barbarigo, later canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, was very influential at the time: Pope Innocent XI had elected him as his advisor, and entrusted him with the supervision of the Church's Catholic teaching. And Barbarigo did not mince his words: he was scandalized by the idea of ​​a woman doctor. He considered it "a blunder", and added: "It would mean making us ridiculous to the whole world". But she did not lose heart, nor did Father Giovan Battista, who fought with the cardinal in letters. In the end, Barbarigo accepted a compromise: the girl could graduate, he said, but not in theology, but in philosophy.

The degree in philosophy

In 1678, on June 25, Elena – who studied with the philosopher Carlo Rinaldini – defends her doctoral thesis in Latin, discussing passages from Aristotle chosen at random by the commission. We are in Padua, there is a large audience gathered in the classroom to listen to her. Elena receives the ermine cloak and the laurel wreath. She is the first woman to graduate in Europe. However, she will not be able to teach. Why? Because she is a woman.

Her body, in the meantime, had suffered from the intense studies, perhaps also from the pressure, certainly from the ascetic tests to which she had subjected herself. She died, from an unspecified “gangrene”, or perhaps from tuberculosis, before reaching the age of forty, on 26 July 1684. It seems that she had arranged to destroy all her manuscripts, which did not happen. Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher of the twentieth century, dismissed them with a lapidary judgment: “The value of all this ascetic literature and spiritual poetry is very little or non-existent”. But let us remain on that day, that consecration, that degree that was not at all a given. We would have to wait more than sixty years to see another woman graduate. In 1732 , the Bolognese physicist Laura Bassi graduated. If you want to know what Elena Corner looked like, you can find a statue of her in Padua, at Palazzo del Bo, made in 1689 – just eleven years after her graduation – by the sculptor Bernardo Tabacco . It is a sign that her contemporaries had fully perceived the scope and revolutionary strength of that gesture, and the greatness of Elena Lucrezia's personality. There is also a portrait of her at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, there is a stained glass window depicting her at Vasser College, the first women's university in the United States; at the University of Pittsburgh there is a fresco depicting her. On the planet Venus, a 26 km crater bears her name.

Other women graduates

There is talk of other women graduates in the world, in times before Elena Lucrezia Corner. In particular, Bettisia Goddadini, a jurist in Bologna in the thirteenth century . But there is no certain documentation on her academic qualifications. It seems that, to gain credibility, she dressed in men's clothes, as Celso Faleoni wrote centuries later: "She always went dressed in male clothes, and, denying the female sex, she broke off the women's entertainments, and devoted herself entirely to the study of law, in which she took such advantage, that in the twelfth year of her age she received with public applause and admiration the honor of the doctorate". There is also talk of Costanza Calenda, who may have graduated as a doctor of Medicine in Naples in 1422: she was one of the women doctors known in the Middle Ages, together with Trotula de Ruggiero. The documents concerning her were destroyed during the Second World War.