Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684): The First Woman in the World to Earn a University Degree (review)

The powerful claim of primacy for Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the quiet, pious daughter of a noble Venetian family, is breathtaking: the prima donna laureata nel mondo, the first woman in the world to earn a university degree, the doctorate in philosophy at the University of Padua in 1678. Nowhere else, at no prior moment; here begins a new history for women. After a generation of feminist scholarship and the tercentenary celebrations of 1978, Cornaro’s name is not entirely unknown in academic circles. But few Anglophone readers know her full story, and now they may. Thirty years after the tercentenary year, when Francesco Ludovico Maschietto (1909–2000) published his definitive biography of the Venetian paragon, it is available in an English translation.

Maschietto’s work is distinguished by its thorough foundation in archival documents. Where previous biographers had speculated, Maschietto determined the exact circumstances of birth, baptism, intellectual training, university career, medical care, death, and burial. A monk of the ancient monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, where Cornaro was buried, to where his own remains will be removed (p. 319), he operated in a long-established context of meticulous local history: Venetian, Paduan, and Benedictine.

Although other works on Cornaro have appeared since the original publication of the Maschietto volume, Maschietto is fundamental to all. The translation is competent, if marked by some errors (the expansion of a single aunt Elena Lucrezia into two, p. 28; an undigested Anassagora for Anaxagoras, p. 96; a mangled German title, p. 278); and the translators have obligingly included in the appendix, in documents 4 and 5, full translations of the wills of Cornaro’s father and sister (pp. 190–202, 203–11), thus providing exemplars of this genre most useful for pedagogical purposes.

Just as a confluence of particular interests—local, religious, feminist—have brought Cornaro into the limelight, particular interests nurtured and groomed her: undoubtedly gifted in her own right, she was nonetheless the product of the Venetian social and cultural system, and specifically of her father’s peculiar status.

Belonging to the highest nobility, Cornaro’s family was linked to the ruling dynasty of Cyprus and thus facilitated the transfer of that island to Venetian rule. By her birth in 1646, Venetian aristocrats, the Cornaro family conspicuous among them, had participated for 250 years in the flowering of Italian Renaissance culture in its humanist, scholarly, artistic, and musical dimensions. Among Cornaro’s forebears were intellectuals and patrons of the arts and letters. The young woman’s grandfather had collected a magnificent library of 1800 meticulously catalogued items, which he directed in his will was to “remain in the house equally accessible to all my children and their legitimate descendants as perpetual caretakers” (p. 38), as a cultural legacy to his posterity.

But Elena Lucrezia was not, at birth, legitimate, nor were any of her siblings before the last. As a young man, her father, Giovanni Battista, had made a love match with a peasant woman—a stupendously rare and awkward occurrence—with whom he fathered seven children and lived contentedly for some sixty years until his death in 1690 left his concubine, then wife, a widow and the heir for her lifetime to his property. He married the mother of his children in 1654, eight years after Elena Lucrezia’s birth. From 1659 to 1664, he entered successive petitions to the Venetian Senate to purchase the legitimacy of his children and thus secure noble status for his heirs; he finally succeeded on the fifth attempt at the immense cost of 105,000 ducats. By then he was procurator of San Marco, the highest office in the Republic short of the dogeship; but that high status could not compensate for the burden of illegitimacy he...