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.

Handwringing about Handwriting

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D

Not long ago when junior high school students had to take the PSAT, an “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a sentence in cursive.  One student complained:  “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from grandma.”  It’s even more doubtful that they’ve even heard or of could identify such once celebrated cursive styles as Spencerian script (which always reminds me of Emily Dickinson, since it’s written with a distinct slant).

According to the author of a recent book called The Extinction of Experience, which is about the extent to which we now live in a largely technological world of mediated experience, “handwriting is disappearing.” This is hardly news, of course, but what most people don’t know is how much is being lost as a result of our present-day love affair with a life of swiping, tapping, typing and clicking. But you are about to find out.

First of all, many children these days are not even taught to write in, much less read, cursive script. Fully one-third of students in a recent study were unable to write legibly in cursive. And children who can’t write in cursive can’t read it either.  Let them try to read the original version of the Declaration of Independence.  Good luck!

But adults, too, now long away from having once written in cursive, can barely scrawl their name on a check. Take my son Dave, for example. I would defy anyone to figure out his name from looking at the signature on his checks, which seems to have been written in Chinese. Pastry chefs are beginning to complain because their assistants can no longer write a legible “happy birthday” on their cakes. Of course, doctors are notorious for their illegible handwriting. But this can have serious consequences.  For example, a woman in Texas won a $450,000 award from a jury because a pharmacist could not read a doctor’s signature and gave the women’s husband the wrong medicine, which killed him. Like any other habit, if you don’t practice it, it will atrophy. That seems to be the fate of handwriting for most people today.

What do we lose when handwriting goes the way of the dodo? As we will see, we lose or weaken various cognitive skills, and as Christine Rosen, the author of the book I mentioned above, states:

We also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another.  We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word.  We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.

Thousands of years of writing – gone in a trice as we abandon the ways of our ancestors for the convenience and efficiency of our keyboards and iPhones.  Pity the poor archivists of today who have to spend their careers trying to decipher the handwritten letters of George Eliot.

As Rosen puts it, “Shifting from handwriting to keyboarding is in fact a shift away from one way of being in the world to another, with consequences that are more complicated than they might at first appear.” Let’s begin to examine some of those consequences now by focusing on the costs of doing without handwriting skills.

A study by a neuroscientist at Indiana University of young children found after using a functional MRI that practicing handwriting was superior to just having to type or trace letters.  The scientist concluded:

Handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading and may facilitate reading acquisition in children.

In short, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, seems to prime the brain for reading.

Several other studies point in the same direction. One such study showed that children who demonstrated superior handwriting performed much better on a variety of tasks related to reading efficiency and other cognitive skills.  For example, they had better word recognition and reading skills, better recall of the words they wrote, and were more successful in expressing ideas.  They even reported that they enjoyed learning more than students with poorer handwriting.  “Handwriting,” this researcher concluded, “is also a memory process for letters – the building blocks for written language.”

In a follow-up study, this researcher, Virginia Beminger, found that students who practiced handwriting were better at planning and remaining attentive to their work. The advantages of learning to write were so obvious that the researcher concluded that children should learn both cursive and printing before learning to use a keyboard since, as many other studies have found,” starting around fourth grade, cursive skills conferred advantages in both spelling and composing” written words. Alas, this sound empirically-based advice will never be heard, much less heeded. by most parents today.

What about older students, e.g., those in college?

Here, too, the results of various studies point to the drawbacks of using laptops instead of writing by hand. One study, for instance, found that “even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still impair learning because their use results in shallower processing.” Furthermore, according to Rosen, in three separate studies, it was found that students using laptops performed worse on conceptual problems compared to students who took notes by hand. In summary, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to put things into our own words rather than merely transcribing them robotically on our laptops. Speed may not kill, but it does not seem to confer any advantages when it comes to learning. In fact, quite the opposite.

Researchers who study the increasing use of laptops and social media as opposed to handwriting documents worry about the consequences of living in our digital age when handwriting has almost become a lost art.  It may be that we have unwittingly entered into a kind of Faustian bargain in which we have sacrificed the benefits of traditional learning for the fool’s gold of technological efficiency and speed. As Rosen puts it:

It is popular to assume we have replaced one old-fashioned tool for with a more efficient alternative… But we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

******************* 

Of course, I’m aware of the irony that in writing about the drawbacks of our digital age – and in praise of the disappearing art of handwriting – I’m using my computer.  I’m one of those persons who, long ago, gave up writing by hand and switched my allegiance to my keyboard.  But, on the other hand (no pun intended), I was lucky to have grown up during an age – the dark ages, you will probably say – when in school we students could only write in cursive (or print).  But unlike my girlfriend Lauren who writes in an elegant script which I’ve always admired, my handwriting as a child and teen-ager was ungainly and unattractive. And when I got into college, I quickly made use of typewriters, at least to write my letters.

But when it came to writing my papers for my classes, I wrote everything by hand, which I doubt my professors appreciated. And, of course, when taking exams, I had to write my answers in what were then called "blue books." In those days, we had no choice. We had to write by hand. So, writing in cursive was not just a default option; it was our only one. 

When I become a professor myself and started writing my articles and books, I still wrote in cursive – until the secretaries objected because they could not read my execrable handwriting. After that, I switched to printing, but I still wrote out everything. I didn’t use a typewriter for my professional work. I remember I eventually developed a little nodule on the forefinger of my right hand from overuse in writing so much.

By the time computers came in, for me in the early 1980s, I quickly, avidly and gratefully made the switch to the keyboard-centered life.  I would not have been able to write my more than twenty books without my succession of trusty iMacs. But, still, there are many things I mourn about the passing into obsolescence of handwriting, which will soon, I fear, become just a memory of a bygone age.   

For example, take books.  I grew up with books and I still have many hundreds on my bookshelves.  In the course of my life, I have owned thousands of books. And books are still being written of course.  But now there are more e-books published every year than those in print.

Then there is the distinctiveness of a person’s handwriting. You can tell a lot about a person from his or her handwriting. Ask any reputable graphologist.

But that distinctiveness is lost with the uniformity of a digital text. The written word conveys more information than one generated by a computer.  This, too, is a loss.

And speaking of uniformity, what’s even worse and more troubling now that we live in the age of AI is that we can no longer be sure when we receive something on our computer or smart phone that it hasn’t been generated by a bot.  And it can even send us a facsimile of a written letter. Scary.

In the days when people handwrote letters, we often looked forward to receiving them, and when they were special to us, we may have preserved and cherished them. But when letter-writing went out of fashion, we were left with impersonal e-mails.  Who bothers to re-read e-mails even if we preserve them in our computer files?

In literature, such as detective stories, or some of the novels of Dickens like Bleak House, the plot may hinge on a written letter that might suddenly turn up. That’s not likely to be the case for any novels written today. 

Today, we live for speed, the faster the better. There are studies that show people are increasingly impatient for something to download.  If it takes more than a few seconds, they often give up. Waiting, as Rosen points out, is no longer acceptable.  It has to be NOW.

But writing, especially writing books, takes time. The average person can type 40 words a minute, but only write 13. Many novelists talk about the importance of slowing things down so they can think through their plot lines and other literary devices.  Slowness is not a fault; it can be a virtue.

Some years ago, I read a then popular book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. One of the themes of that book was the importance of working slowly with care. It’s not just about fixing your bike but your life.  

All of these things are in danger of passing away, along with handwriting, as we move deeper into our technologically dominant world that cherishes speed and efficiency above all things.

There are, of course, other dangers to which we are now subject owing to our reliance on non-face-to-face interactions. We are wired for social contacts, but our increasing reliance on social media has already provided an abundance of evidence of the harm it can do. A few years ago, for example, the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, in his book Together, pointed out how social media are fostering an epidemic of loneliness and disconnection from others and decreasing empathy, a finding that Rosen’s book also supports.

A troubling pattern is the rise in adolescents across the country of increasing rates of suicide, with youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth most affected—all against a backdrop of teens in general reporting high levels of hopelessness, sadness, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. And of course, there is the now well recognized problem of addiction to social media.  The list could go on, but I won’t since this blog is already long enough.

I will only add that I don’t think you can get addicted to handwriting. The pen is still mightier – and safer – than the mouse.

  

I will just let Rosen have all but the last word.  As she notes in the conclusion of her book:

We know... that the more time we spend in sedentary interaction with our screens, the higher the national obesity rate and increase in related physical ailments.  Likewise, an epidemic of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, particularly among young people, has occurred in tandem with increased time spent on social media platforms. 

But this is the world we must all live in, and of course, it goes without saying that despite its perils, we have many reasons to celebrate it and be grateful for everything it has made possible.  

BUT.

But let’s not forget to provide our kids with the tools of cursive and make them cognizant of the virtues of handwriting before they become fascinated with their technological toys. That way they will have a basis for living in both worlds, and we will all be better off for that.

Otherwise, this is the way we may come to live if we are not wise enough to wake up to the dangers posed by the over-use of social media in this brave new world of ours:

Finally, I encourage you to read Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience, which warns us of the dangers of overly relying on experiences mediated by technological gadgets by which the stars in the heavens are only seen on a screen instead of outdoors with what used to be called “our naked eye.”