Elena Cornaro Piscopia's story is a reminder that the gatekeepers do not always win, even when they manage to redirect you. The fact that it took three decades for another woman to follow her tells the other half of that story.
When your graduation is so well-attended that the university has to move it to a cathedral, you have done something genuinely unprecedented. On 25 June 1678, Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman in recorded history to be awarded a doctorate of philosophy, and the people of Padua apparently decided this was worth showing up for in enormous numbers.
The Woman the Bishop Could Not Stop
Elena was born into a Venetian noble family in 1646. By the time anyone thought to examine her formally, she was fluent in seven languages, a published theologian, an accomplished musician, and a Benedictine oblate.
Her father proposed her for a doctorate in theology; the Bishop of Padua objected. So the University of Padua examined her in philosophy instead, which seems to have suited everyone except the Bishop.
The ceremony took place in the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin because the university’s halls simply could not contain the crowd. She answered her examiners in Latin and was awarded her degree with distinction.
She died four years later, at thirty-eight. The University of Padua did not award another doctorate to a woman for three decades.
Also on 25 June
This date has form. In 1848, during the violent June Days Uprising in Paris, a photograph was taken of the barricades. Photography had only existed as a practical technology for about a decade at the time, which makes this image what many consider the first known example of photojournalism: history captured as it actually happened.
In 1900, a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered a hidden chamber in the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in China. Inside were tens of thousands of manuscripts, some dating as far back as the fourth century, sealed in the cave for approximately nine hundred years. It remains one of the most significant archaeological finds of the twentieth century.
And in 1982, West Germany and Austria played a World Cup match in Gijón that the crowd booed from beginning to end. West Germany scored in the tenth minute; both teams then appeared perfectly content with a result that would see them both advance at Algeria’s expense. FIFA subsequently changed its rules so that final group matches must now be played simultaneously. The match is still known, rather bluntly, as the Disgrace of Gijón.
Worth Ten Minutes of Your Day
Today’s episode covers a woman who earned her place in history despite being redirected at every turn, a football match that rewrote the rulebook, and a cave full of lost centuries. It is ten minutes well spent. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.