Kudos to all the women who read when they didn’t have to.
One such woman was Lady Elena Lucretia Cornaro-Piscopia – born 375 years ago today on 5 June 1646. A true Renaissance woman, Elena Cornaro owns the distinction of being the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. (University of Padua, 1678). An expert musician, she mastered the harpsichord, the clavichord, the harp, and the violin. By age 11, she was proficient in Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, adding Hebrew and Arabic in her teens. Before she was 20, she was studying physics, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and linguistics… then set her sights on a doctorate in theology.
Despite the support of Elena’s many tutors and the University of Padua faculty, the Bishop of Padua would not allow her to receive a doctorate in theology because of her sex. He did permit her to obtain the advanced degree in the subject of philosophy.
The entire student body and faculty, most of the Senators from her hometown of Venice, and members of the universities in Rome and other cities crowded into the Padua Cathedral to witness the conferral of Elena’s doctorate on 25 June 1678. Elena spoke to her rapt audience for an hour – in Latin – on passages from Aristotle’s writings, before receiving a special ring for her finger, a laurel on her head, and an ermine cape around her shoulders. The historic conferral of her degree is depicted in the stunning stained-glass window in the Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College pictured here.
Academic societies were soon clamoring for her to join their all-male ranks, and she became president of the society based in Venice. When Elena died of tuberculosis six years later, memorial services were held in cities across Italy – and at least three volumes of tributes to her were published.
Some might label Elena Cornaro an overachiever. Others might discount her incredible accomplishments because her family had money, implying that “it was easy for her – she could afford tutors.” I call her a woman of substance.
Elena Cornaro was not unique in her thirst for knowledge or her appetite for achievement. We should also hold in esteem the women who wrote when they didn’t have to.
Metrodora was a Greek physician who wrote On the Diseases and Cures of Women. She is attributed with pioneering surgical treatments for breast and uterine cancers. That Metrodora’s work was referenced by other physicians in their own writings attests to the “substance of her work,” as described by Lilian R. Furst in Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (138).
Furst, who was a professor of comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that this Ancient Greek doctor who lived sometime between 200 and 400 A.D. “differed from many male medical writers of her era in analyzing and referring to the writings of Hippocrates directly” (138-139). Metrodora’s certainty about what she understood of medical theory and etiology, and her confidence that she would make significant contributions to women’s health, are indisputable. Why else would she have written it down!
The 12th-century German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a voracious reader in her monastery’s library, according to Florence Eliza Glaze, a historian of medicine, the medieval period, and Latin palaeography who contributed a chapter to Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. The reading of theoretical information coupled with her experience in the monastery’s herbal garden and infirmary formed the foundation for Hildegard’s two scientific works: Physica and Causae et Curae. The first is a detailed description of both the scientific and medicinal properties of various plants and animals. The second, an exploration of the human body, also describes the causes and cures of various diseases.
Hildegard referred to herself as “an unlearned woman.” She may not have had a formal education as defined by the learned classes of the Middle Ages, but it takes a woman with focused tenacity to accomplish what she did almost 850 years ago – writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and polymath. Hildegard of Bingen, the definitive multitasker!
This is only my first brief look into the lives of three compelling women from history. I have much more to learn about them and a plethora of others. Unlike in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, where the author is more interested in highlighting how men still have power over women (in the professions), I prefer to applaud the women who have overcome that power. How about you?
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Bibliography
Furst, Lilian R., ed. Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Guernsey, Jane Howard. The Lady Cornaro: Pride and Prodigy of Venice. Clinton Corners, N.Y.: College Avenue Press/The Attic Studio Press, 1999.
Glaze, Florence Eliza. “Medical Writer: ‘Behold the Human Creature.'” Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Edited by Barbara Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1966. Originally published in 1938.