Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia is known as the first woman in the world to graduate, having obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Padua in 1678.
The illegitimate daughter of the nobleman Giovanni Battista Cornaro, procurator of San Marco, and the commoner Zanetta Boni, she was born in venezia in 1646, the fifth of seven children. She was entered in the golden register of the nobility at the age of 18, when her father paid 100,000 ducats to raise her and her brothers to the rank of patricians.
She soon developed a passion for study, in which she was guided by her father, determined to restore the prestige of the Cornaro family through Elena’s talents; to this end he entrusted her to the theologian Giovanni Battista Fabris, the Latinist Giovanni Valier, the Hellenist Alvise Gradenigo, the professor of theology Felice Rotondi, and the rabbi Shemel Aboaf, from whom Elena learnt Hebrew. She also studied Spanish, French, Arabic and Aramaic, and came to possess a profound musical culture. She also deepened her knowledge of eloquence, dialectics and philosophy, taking lessons in the latter from Carlo Rinaldini, a professor at the University of Padua and a friend of her father.
Alongside her passion for study, Elena cultivated a genuine religious vocation, which led her to become a Benedictine oblate at the age of nineteen. This choice displeased her parents, who intended her to marry, but spared them the disappointment of monastic seclusion and allowed the young woman to live according to the Benedictine rule.
To crown her studies, in 1677 she applied to take a doctorate in theology. The College had been inclined to look favourably on her request, but Gregorio Barbarigo, bishop of Padua and therefore also Chancellor of the University of Padua, firmly refused, arguing that it was “absurd to award a doctorate to a woman” and that it would “make us ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world”.
After much insistence and thanks to the mediation of her teacher Carlo Rinaldini, Elena Lucrezia was finally able to graduate on 25 June 1678 in philosophy, and not in theology, as she had originally wished.
Elena, who had pursued her studies entirely in Venezia, moved to Padua only after graduating, going to live in Palazzo Cornaro, near the Santo. Her constitution, already weak, had been put to the test by study and ascetic mortifications; she frequently fell ill, often for long periods, until her death in July 1684. She was buried in the church of Santa Giustina in Padua.
For a long time, her family regarded her as a phenomenon to be displayed, an erudite woman capable of delivering philosophical dissertations and conversing in Latin. Hers was a solitude surrounded by amazement, made up of exceptional intellectual gifts in a woman’s body. But for Piscopia these were not a means of asserting female dignity, nor of claiming the right to compete with men in the intellectual sphere. Her degree was nothing more than a brief opening that was immediately closed again, so much so that it was only in 1732 that another woman in Italy, Laura Bassi, graduated.
In 1773 Caterina Dolfin donated to the Paduan University the statue depicting Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, which is now placed at the foot of the Cornaro staircase, in the Cortile Antico of Palazzo del Bo. A tribute to the first woman in the world to graduate, but today also a symbol of women’s emancipation.
In Elena’s name, the University of Padua established in 2018 the University Centre "Elena Cornaro", which promotes research and training activities from a gender perspective and aims to spread greater awareness of gender issues within the University of Padua and in society.
