An 18th Century Intellectual Giant You’ve Never Heard Of

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Bologna is an ancient city with a storied past.  It is also the home of the University of Bologna, the first European university to be established. And it was there, more than six hundred years after its founding in 1088, that one of the most extraordinary public events in that city’s history was to take place.

Even before the ceremonies to occur on April 17, 1732 commenced with great pomp and fanfare, the city was abuzz with excited anticipation about the woman who was to be honored and indeed crowned on that historic day. She was already known to be a polymath who could speak flawless Latin and expound learnedly on Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian science. She would be required to defend forty-nine “theses” – six on logic; sixteen on metaphysics; nine on topics having to do with nature of Being, Reason and God; others on the nature of the mind and soul; and eighteen, the largest of any category, on physics and astronomy. 

The event attracted an enormous crowd, including the who’s who of the city’s most prominent citizens as well as representatives of the University of Bologna. Government officials were present as were members of the nobility. Various Cardinals were also in attendance as was the representative of King Louis XVI of France.  Even the future Pope, Benedict XIV, was there.  They all were soon to be treated to a dazzling display of intellectual prowess by the candidate who after her performance would be awarded a doctorate in philosophy and appointed to a university chair not long afterward. Before the ceremony concluded, the candidate was fitted with a silver crown of laurels and given a bronze medal bearing the image of Minerva, the Goddess of wisdom, to whom she was compared.  Afterward, various poems were also written in her honor.

You may now be wondering who was this paragon of intellectual acumen and unparalleled achievement.  

You have never heard of her.

Her name was Laura Bassi – and now you have. At the time of this ceremony, she was only twenty years old.

When the University of Bologna awarded Laura her doctorate, she was only the second woman in history to acquire one and subsequently became the first European woman to hold a professorship in experimental physics.

After this glorious event, one of the Italian scientists who was present enthused: “All the gentlemen of Bologna make a great display of this girl, and depict her everywhere as the miracle of our age.”

Laura Bassi would indeed become famous in the world of science in her day. Yet today, she is virtually unknown.  You are about to learn why.

But first we have to understand just how she developed into a prodigy and what factors in her culture helped to nourish and further her natural gifts.

Italy in the 18th century was different from most other European countries in the way it related to women. Possibly because the Renaissance started in Italy two centuries earlier, Italians had a tradition of making an exception for exceptional women.  Most women were shunted into the usual conjugal life once they married and mostly just taught domestic arts (unless they went into the convent), but girls who showed unusual intellectual gifts were often encouraged and helped to develop in that direction.

So it was in Bologna where such children could bring renown and prestige to the city.  And so it was for Laura once her gifts became evident to her lawyer father.  He was not a member of the nobility, but was from what we would today call the middle class. So when he saw how extraordinarily bright his daughter was, he saw to it that when Laura was five, she had a tutor who could teach her Latin, French and arithmetic. It was very rare for women to know Latin, but Laura took to it like the proverbial duck to water.

Her education at home continued until by the age of thirteen under the tutelage of another teacher. She was learning about logic, metaphysics, and science, including becoming familiar with the work of Newton. Laura was already showing a proclivity for science, especially physics.  The writer – a scientist and professor of engineering named Monique Frize who has written about Laura – takes up to story of her development from here:

Between the ages of thirteen and twenty, Laura was given the opportunity to participate in many disputations on philosophical topics in the presence of the most noted natural philosophers of Bologna including several members of Bologna’s Academy of Science. It was soon obvious to her tutor, to her family and to several members of the Academy that she absorbed all knowledge with ease and debated with brilliance... By this time, Laura had mastered Greek, French and Philosophy, and her house was the scene of intense philosophical debates involving Bologna’s most prominent intellectuals. 

One of the persons who was especially taken with Laura’s brilliance was the then Archbishop of Bologna who would eventually become Pope Benedict XIV.  He was to become and remain a staunch supporter of Laura’s development, particularly when, against considerable opposition, she insisted on studying physics and mathematics. It surely benefitted Laura to have the Pope in her corner in these fights against the still strong male prejudices of the day.  It was fine for talented women to write poetry and sonnets, as Laura was forced to do for a time, and be trotted out for ceremonial occasions, but they were not at all welcomed in the field of science, which was regarded as an exclusively male preserve.  Laura’s career would always be hampered, even if not stymied, by this solid wall of male privilege she was determined to breach.

In any case, it soon became clear that the university administration and other influential members of the Bologna community had no intention to allow Laura access to the bastion of her male peers who were allowed to hold classes for their (exclusively) male students. Instead, she was regarded as a kind of trophy scholar, essentially an ornament to embellish the city’s reputation, but certainly, as a woman, not to be accorded the privileges granted to her male colleagues.

Indeed, the opposition to Laura was sometimes very strident. One friar groused that the nature of women hadn’t changed “in eternity” and that he would not accept that wisdom could be found in a young woman.  Cardinal Lambertini, the future Pope, quickly came to Laura’s defense and quashed the friar by calling him “a dunce.”

But the friar was hardly alone in his cavalier dismissal of Laura. The resistance she evoked was still formidable.

Nevertheless, as a kind of consolation prize, she was allowed to give a lecture three times a year “by reason of sex.”  This is how Laura, who had earlier been extolled as “the new light of philosophy” and “the luminous mirror of science” was treated.

Very well. But Laura would find a way to do an end-run around this obstacle. She would figure out how to teach and do her research in experimental physics.  She would hold classes and establish a laboratory in her own home.

There was still one problem.  For various cultural reasons, she could not do this as a single woman.  For one thing, many of the men who had supported her believed that “an extraordinary woman” should remain single and virtuous, and if she did marry, she should give up her studies and intellectual interests and settle into a domestic life.

Laura, who was a strong woman, would have none of this.  She would have to find a husband AND still have a career as a scientist. 

Fortunately, she did find a suitable candidate to marry. He was a fellow professor named Giuseppe Veratti who, although his degree was in medicine, shared many of Laura’s interests. They married in 1738, and had a long and fruitful marriage (perhaps too fruitful, as we will see) and spent many years in collaborative research in physics.

So they began their joint life together and for thirty years Laura held classes in her home and, after acquiring various instruments by which to do research in mechanics, hydraulics, optics and light, using Newton’s theories as a guide and his invention, calculus, as an intellectual tool, she instructed many physicists during her many years as a teacher and researcher.  

Indeed, since Laura was already something of a celebrity and phenomenon, and quite famous, students from all over the world were soon knocking, figurative speaking, at her door.

In those days, the way that knowledge was spread among physicists and other scientists was chiefly through correspondence.  During her active years, Laura had extensive contact in this way with many notable scientists.  One of them who wrote her what can only be called “a mash note” may surprise you. One day she received a letter from Voltaire. 

You may think of Voltaire, the author of Candide and many other literary works, mainly as a man of letters, but in fact he had become very interested in Newton’s theories and had already hooked up (in both senses) with another extraordinary French woman, Emilie du Châtelet, who, like Laura, was to become very well-known and respected for her original work in physics (see my next blog, if I can ever manage to put it together). Indeed, the story of their tempestuous affair lasting fifteen years is as fascinating as it was remarkable, but it would only be digressive to get into that here.  The odd thing is that at the time Voltaire wrote to Laura, so far as I can tell, he was already deeply involved with Châtelet. Well, you know the French... In any case, this is what Voltaire wrote to Laura, in one of his letters begging her to help him get into the Bolognese Academy of Sciences:

I have been wishing to journey to Bologna in order one day to tell my countrymen I have seen Signora Bassi…There is no Bassi in London [sic], and I would be much happier to be added to your Academy of Bologna than that of the English, even though it has produced a Newton.

Other scientists, who had been skeptical about the basis of Laura’s fame, who actually went to the trouble of visiting her, though they came to scoff ended up being converted and helped to spread her fame to their colleagues.

So the years passed, and eventually Laura was to be accorded the recognition she deserved by the University of Bologna.  In 1745, through the intervention of Pope Benedict, Laura was finally allowed to become a member of the Academy of Science, and to participate actively in the debates of that time.  Finally, in 1776, two years before her death, she was appointed to the Chair of the Physics Department and given the rank of what today would be recognized as a full professor, the first woman to hold such a position. By the time her career and life ended in 1778, she had become the highest paid faculty member of the university and was earning a salary as high as that of most prominent scientists of her day.

But for all her success and the recognition she ultimately received, however grudgingly it was granted by the conservative scientists of her time, she still was forced to pay a high price for her achievement.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is another aspect of Laura’s life, which was a consequence of her marriage.

She was often ill, and one reason for that was her many pregnancies. She seems to have become pregnant twelve times (!), though three of her children were stillborn and only five lived long enough to reach their adult years. Those who were close to her felt that all these illnesses and pregnancies had weakened her considerably and, in the end, resulted in the heart attack that killed her.

And yet, as Frize concludes in summing up her life and career:

Laura Bassi built a successful career, step by step, in spite of her opponents and detractors.. She was determined from an early age to be involved in the type of science that would help her city and community... She developed a strong curriculum in experimental physics and taught these classes for thirty years. 

Her reputation reached far and wide during her lifetime. Famous men knew of her; in their letters, they showed their respect for her knowledge and talent. 

For her funeral, silver laurels were placed on her head and her body was accompanied by the members of the Academy to the church where she was interred.

Unfortunately, little now remains of Laura’s scientific work. She didn’t publish many scientific papers, and there seems to be almost no documentation extant of her lectures and private classes. Her work only survived, in a sense, in those she taught and influenced during her lifetime.

During her life, she was as well-known as her countrymen, Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani, who are still remembered today.  Volta for his work in electricity, of course, for which we have the terms volt and voltage.  He even has a car named after him, the Volt.  Galvani was famous for discovering that frog legs twitched when stimulated by electricity, and today is remembered whenever the term “galvanic skin response” is mentioned.  But as Frize ruefully comments, “Who remembers Laura Bassi? She was well-known while she lived, but soon forgotten after her death.”

When Frize went to visit the church where Laura was buried, there was a plaque outside to honor Galvani who was also buried there, but no such plaque could be found to indicate that Laura’s tomb was also to be found inside.  In fact, only after repeated attempts to find it was Frize enabled to discover it.

It is under the floor in the middle aisle of the Church, and a main pathway for church-goers.  The letters bearing her name and others buried with her have paled over the years. It would have been more appropriate for her remains to lie, like Galvani’s, in one of the chapels of the Church, with a clear plaque and an epitaph.

Instead, it is as if Laura Bassi never existed.  She has been erased by historians, mostly men, and now is only remembered by a few devoted feminist scholars.

I can’t help thinking what she might have accomplished had she been born Lorenzo Bassi instead of Laura Bassi.  If she had had the chance to study and do research like her male colleagues in a university laboratory instead of one that she could only cobble together in her own hone. What she with her boundless energy, curiosity and great intelligence might have achieved!  If that had been the case, today she might be remembered alongside of Galvani and Volta.

But she had the misfortune to be born a woman, required to marry in order to have any kind of career, having to struggle against so much professional opposition because of her sex, and saddled year after year with a dozen pregnancies and then having to suffer the heartbreak of so many dead infants.

That she still achieved so much as she did despite all these handicaps is truly astonishing. That she should be virtually forgotten, as if she had never lived, makes me not just sad, but enraged.  How unfair life is to women, and not just gifted ones like Laura!  This is hardly news, of course, but it is one reason I wanted you, at least, to know who she was and why she should be remembered.