Bologna Science Classics Online
Laura Bassi
Marta Cavazza (Bologna University)
1. Laura Bassi (1711-1778): biographical and bibliographical profile
The fame of Laura Bassi, the “filosofessa di Bologna” [Algarotti 1739], and the symbolic
value of her position in eighteenth-century Italy and Europe, were mostly due to the sensation
created by the series of unheard-of honours and acknowledgements that the Senate, the University
and the Academy of Sciences of Bologna (the most important city of the Papal States, after Rome)
conferred on her in 1732. Laura Bassi was not the first woman to receive a degree (there had been
legendary precedents in the Italian Middle Ages, and the recent case of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro
Piscopia, who graduated in philosophy in Padua in 1678), but she was certainly the first to be given
a university readership, and thus the first, however special the conditions, to enter on a permanent
basis into that “world without women” [David F. Noble] which the university had been from its
very beginnings. The following years will see the Bologna dottoressa's determination and ability to
make a career for herself as a woman of science, something wholly new in those times. Going
beyond the restrictions that had been placed on her, “because of her sex”, by the City authorities
(she would have to teach in the university only by command of the Senate, on particularly solemn
occasions), Laura Bassi knew how to gain the esteem of the scientific community through the
courses in experimental physics she held for thirty years in her own home (officially recognised and
paid for), and through the memoirs presented to the city's Academy of Science. She had been
admitted to this prestigious assembly, as an honorary member, in 1732, and in 1745 was to obtain a
place in the select class of the Benedictine academicians, set up by Pope Benedict XIV with the aim
of increasing scientific productivity. The list of publications and the texts of the few dissertations
that have survived (for the most part because published in the Commentarii of the Academy), is a
testimony to her wide range of scientific interests, ranging from rational mechanics to the dynamic
of fluids, from electrical physics to the chemistry of gases. Together with her rich correspondence
(including letters from Lazzaro Spallanzani, Jean Antoine Nollet, Felice Fontana, Leopoldo
Caldani, and Alessandro Volta, the best possible evidence for the way she fitted perfectly into an
intense network of social and scientific relationships), these texts are our main sources for
understanding and evaluating her contribution to the scientific debates of her time. If her
correspondence is still awaiting a collected, complete edition, only recently have her academic
memoirs begun to be the object of detailed analysis [Ceranski, 1996], confirming the modernity of
the scientific themes and of the research methodologies she adopted, and in particular her role in the
diffusion in Italy of Newtonian physics and of Benjamin Franklin's explanation of electric
phenomena, further developed by Giambattista Beccaria. Her interest in electrical research, as well
as in chemistry, was shared by her husband, the doctor of medicine Giuseppe Veratti. They married
in 1739 and had eight children, of which only five survived. The name of Veratti is linked
especially to experiments on the therapeutic use of electricity and on atmospheric electricity, but he
also played a leading role in the research carried out in the Bologna Institute of Sciences on the
effects of electrical stimuli on the nervous system, research that opened up the way to the discovery
of animal electricity by Luigi Galvani, a pupil in his youth of both Veratti and Laura Bassi. The
home of the Bassi-Veratti couple, endowed with a well-equipped physics laboratory, became one of
the liveliest meeting places for the more innovative members of the Bologna scientific community,
and a place many visitors, Italian and foreign, made for. In 1776 Laura's scientific ability and
knowledge, as well as her teaching gifts, gained a final, official recognition from the Senate, when it
called upon her to take up the post of professor of experimental physics in the Institute of Sciences,
conferring on Veratti at the same time the role of assistant. Just two years later, when she died at the
age of sixty-seven, her husband succeeded to her tenured position.
2. Bologna, 1732: how a “woman-philosopher” was constructed. The glorification of Laura
Bassi.
The rich documentation concerning the events of 1732 which Laura Bassi was the centre of,
preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio and in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna,
is of special interest for the history of science, in that it allows us to reconstruct the beginnings of
the unique university career of a woman expert in science before the nineteenth century, and to
learn more about the social and cultural context that made it possible. That year in Bologna the
knowledge of a young woman was celebrated and rewarded with titles and honours that throughout
Europe had been reserved exclusively to men. We may ask ourselves whether it was just an episode
encouraged by the revival, in eighteenth-century Italy, of the old issue, the querelle des femmes, in a
social framework characterised by a new female determination to count, or whether it was a case
that at the end of the day came to confirm, if not perhaps even to strengthen, the intrinsically male
nature of the institutions - universities and scientific academies - in which at that time natural
philosophy and mathematics were cultivated. Certainly the promoters of those events were not
moved, as we might anachronistically think, by the desire to extend the right of access to learning
and to educational institutions to women in general. On the contrary, they stressed the singular
nature of the Bologna example to attract the attention of cultured Europe and create a sensational
event, putting some renewed gloss on the fame of the city and its ancient university. At least in a
first phase, the young Laura was just the instrument of a plan thought up and carried out by others:
teachers, senators, and prelates. Male, patriarchal authorities, certainly, in which however Laura's
father, Giuseppe Bassi, an obscure lawyer who had made his home in the city not long before,
played a minor role, out of the limelight. He was asked to agree to educate his daughter and then to
organise a public discussion of her theses: he agreed, and returned to the wings. His belonging to a
fairly low social class might explain his behaviour, quite unlike that of other fathers of brilliant
young women, who tried in every possible way to profit from the fame of their daughters to the
advantage of themselves and their families: from the procuratore of San Marco, Giovanni Battista
Cornaro Piscopia, father of Elena Lucrezia, to the wealthy Milan merchant don Pietro Agnesi,
father of the mathematician Maria Gaetana, and the Bologna count Alfonso Delfini Dosi, who tried
in vain to obtain a degree in law for his daughter Maria Vittoria.
It is also true, nevertheless, that Bologna in the 1720s had been the theatre of a heated debate
on the education of women, to be more precise on degrees for women, which had arisen from the
case of Delfini Dosi. Count Delfini Dosi had had his daughter study law with the aim of obtaining a
“doctoral degree”. On 3 July 1722 the young Maria Vittoria discussed her law theses on marriage in
the courtyard of the Collegio di Spagna, in the presence of the Queen of Spain Elisabetta Farnese,
who was passing through Bologna. Despite this, and despite the promises made earlier, the Collegio
dei dottori legisti refused to give her a degree in jurisprudence, justifying themselves with a series
of arguments, all centring on the upsetting of the social, juridical and even linguistic order that
would have been the result of a different decision: the fear that after the degree a “public
readership” might follow, and the concern that a woman reader would have diminished the
opportunities for male readers; the application to the “speaking academic woman” of the
prohibitions of St. Paul for female preaching; the forbidding of public offices to women established
by Roman law; and finally, the dishonour to the Collegio that would have derived from a similar
“unseemly” decision, contrary to both nature and logic, there being a “grammatical disharmony in
calling a female 'doctor', as there would be if a female was called a knight”[cit. in Toschi Traversi,
1988; Cavazza, 1997]. Supporters of the historical and legal legitimacy of degrees for women were
not lacking, however. Among them, especially prominent was the lawyer Alessandro Macchiavelli,
author of a work entitled Bitisia Gozzadina seu de Mulierum Doctoratu (published in 1722, using
his brother Carlo Antonio's name). The work cited medieval precedents for women graduates and/or
teachers at the ancient University of Bologna, in particular Bitisia Gozzadini, whose degree in law
was backed up by documentary proofs that were in actual fact false, and perhaps even forged by
himself. These Bologna debates certainly had some influence on the decision of the great naturalist
Antonio Vallisneri, in 1723, to dedicate a meeting of the Accademia dei Ricovrati of Padua, of
which he was the president, to the discussion of the subject: “Whether women should be admitted to
the study of the sciences and the fine arts”. After one speech in favour and another against,
Vallisneri brought the meeting to a close by pronouncing in favour of the admission to higher
studies not of all women, but only those of the upper classes. In 1729 these academic speeches were
published in a volume that appeared decidedly more in favour of women, in that it also contained an
impassioned intervention by the noble Siena lady Aretafila Savini de’ Rossi, who claimed for all
women, whatever their place in society, the right to education, and a Latin oration of the ten-yearold enfant prodige Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a living example of female intellectual potential.
These precedents (the degree for Elena Cornaro, the degree not given to the countess Delfini
Dosi, the discussions in Bologna and Padua on women's education), were certainly well-known to
the Bolognese Gaetano Tacconi, doctor and professor of medicine and philosophy in Bologna
University. It is in this context that we should be thinking of his idea of becoming the teacher of the
twelve-year-old Laura Bassi (whose exceptional intellectual gifts and great love for learning he had
been able to appreciate while visiting her home as the family doctor), and his offering to look after
her education on condition that her studies were kept secret until they were completed, when she
would be able to undertake a discussion in public of philosophical theses, like her male
contemporaries who had attended lectures at the university. It is likely that doctor Tacconi already
imagined himself as the Pygmalion figure who would be able to bask in part of the reflected glory
of such a rare and wonderful case.
As a child Laura had already begun to study grammar, Latin and French with a relation, the
priest Lorenzo Stegani. Tacconi impressed a more systematic quality on her schooling and,
according to later biographers, he wrote down especially for her his lectures on logic and
metaphysics. When he believed she was ready, in 1731, he invited some of his professor colleagues
from the University (among whom Francesco Maria Zanotti and Eustachio Manfredi) to examine
her on logic, philosophy and metaphysics. The archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Lambertini, the
future pope Benedict XIV, also came to listen to her. The general opinion on her preparation and
her dialectic abilities in the disputations was unanimously positive, and despite the fact that the
visitors had been asked not to divulge the information, in a very short time nothing else was being
spoken about in Bologna.
It was mainly through the influence of Cardinal Lambertini (right from the beginning Laura
Bassi's most ardent and authoritative patron), that in the City Senate the idea began to take root of
exploiting the celebrity such a unique event as a degree and university position for a woman would
create. The celebrations went well beyond the expectations of doctor Tacconi and his pupil, the
entire city being involved, including the civil, university and religious authorities, and both the
nobility and the people. The disputations in public and the solemn ceremonies through which
Bologna publicised the unheard-of spectacle of female knowledge in the city and beyond became
the main events of 1732, so much so that they were the subject of as many as three of the miniatures
that illustrated three insignia, parchments destined to celebrate every two months the appointment
of the new gonfaloniere of justice, a position as prestigious as it was uninfluential.
The first great honour was given by the Academy of Sciences, which in the sitting of 20
March 1732, welcomed Laura Bassi among its honorary members by acclamation. The academy
was a part of the public Institute of Sciences founded by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili at the beginning
of the century, with the aim of promoting the study and the teaching of modern methods and
disciplines, that the traditional university was reluctant to accept. Bassi was the first woman in
Europe to become member of a scientific academy.
The much awaited conclusioni, i.e. the public discussion [Miscellanea, p. 12] of the theses,
preceding the granting of the degree, took place on 17 April in the Palazzo Pubblico, in the gallery
of the Anziani suitably decked out for the occasion. It has to be remembered that normally the
disputations of theses were held in the churches of the religious orders: the choice of the Palazzo
Pubblico underlined the exceptional nature and importance attributed to the event. All aspects of the
ceremonial had been arranged by the Senate: the candidate arrived at the Palazzo Pubblico in the
gala carriage of the gonfaloniere, accompanied by doctor Tacconi and two noble ladies, the
countess Ranuzzi and the marquise Ratta. In the great hall a raised throne had been installed where
the Cardinal Legate (the governor appointed by the Pope) and the Archbishop Cardinal Lambertini
were seated, and opposite a chair, also raised, and covered with a canopy, where the candidate took
her place, with her ladies in waiting on her right, and on her left her teacher Tacconi. Beside the
cardinal's throne were the vice-legate, the gonfaloniere and the elder senators. In the first three rows
of seats opposite the readers of the university and of some religious orders were seated, and in the
fourth the senators. Around them crowded nobles and the bourgeois, literary men and curious
onlookers. The function opened with a praefatio [Miscellanea, p. 15] spoken by the candidate, who,
addressing the authorities present, confessed she had to assume the guise of the philosopher philosophi persona – in order to tackle the disputation. In this text, that had most likely been
worked out together with her teacher, the graduating young lady appealed to the divine will and
prescience, which from eternity had foreseen the beginnings, the progress and the outcome of her
studies, to justify her presence there, and the nature and echo of the event celebrated, incompatible
(because of her age, sex and condition) with existing social and moral norms.
A printed pamphlet was then distributed to those present containing the philosophical theses
[Miscellanea, pp. 1-11] that, according to custom, the graduation candidate had to defend against
those public lecturers or lecturers of religious orders who had been chosen to dispute them with her.
The 49 theses presented (6 of logic, 16 of metaphysics, 18 of physics, 9 de anima) to a large extent
reflected Tacconi's influence, though at some points Laura's future interests can already be
glimpsed. A contemporary, the Rimini doctor Giovanni Bianchi, pointed out that the few modern
theses were immersed in a “peripatetic and monkish waffle”. In fact, despite the persistence,
especially in the logic and the metaphysics, of scholasticism's themes and terminology (see for
example the articles on the angels), the metaphysical ideas of Descartes and Malebranche prevail,
ideas that had begun to circulate in the university thanks to the teaching of Francesco Maria Zanotti
and others. This can be seen for example in the sixth metaphysical thesis, where the centrality of the
Cartesian principle of evidence, founded on the clarity and distinction of ideas, is argued for; the
seventh, tracing the four Aristotelian causes to the efficient cause; the ninth, denying there can be
second causes that act at a distance; and the twelfth, that in order to explain movement, falls back
on the direct intervention of God. The physics' theses, however, reveal an idea of matter that is
clearly atomistic, moreover appearing strongly influenced by the tradition of Paracelsus'
iatrochemistry, profoundly rooted in Bologna medical circles. And in the articles devoted to
movement (physics theses seven to twelve), it is written that bodies, solid and liquid, as well as
moved by an external force, can be moved by a vis intrinseca, identified with the natural tendency
to descend per impares numeros to the centre of gravity: a formulation that seems to follow the
same lines as Galileo's interpretation of the law of falling bodies and of the inertia principle put
forward by Pierre Gassendi (a new edition of the Opera omnia had been published in Florence in
1727) – in his Epistolae tres de motu impresso a motore traslato.
Among the various articles there are marked signs of interest in Newton's theories on optics,
which were increasingly well known in Bologna, especially after the stir created by the experiments
on the different refrangibility of the rays that go to make up white light, successfully carried out in
1728, in the rooms of the Institute, by Francesco Maria Zanotti and his youthful pupil, Francesco
Algarotti. For this, the explanation of the rainbow in thesis XVII of the section De meteoris should
be referred to, “that multicoloured arch produced by the reflections and refractions of the sun's rays
that illuminate the drops of water of a cloud”, and especially thesis V of the section De anima,
which explains the vision of the colours as due to the different degree of refrangibility of the rays
emitted by lucid bodies, via a very rapid but not instantaneous vibration. If the (on the whole)
prudent tone of the theses probably reflected Tacconi's concern, in a situation of such dazzling
public exposure, not to stray too far from the accepted official programmes of the University, it is
nice to think that the articles on Newtonian optics were personally included thanks to Laura Bassi's
own wishes. As a matter of fact, one of the occasions in the discussion of the theses which received
the greatest applause was her answer to the difficulties on the optical reflection of bodies raised by
one of the appointed oppugnatores, the mathematician Gabriello Manfredi, which gave her the
chance to set out a concise and lucid explanation of Newton's theories of optics. Among the other
professors called upon to argue against her theses, we recall only Iacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, a
skilled physicist and chemist, who put forward some problems concerning hydrostatics, probably in
relation to theses X and XI of the section De motu.
On the following 12 May, in the hall of the doctoral colleges of philosophy and medicine of
the palazzo dell’ Archiginnasio (seat of the university), in the presence of all the doctors of the
college, of the gonfaloniere of justice, of the senate elders, the two ladies-in-waiting, the cardinal
legate and the cardinal archbishop, the graduating examination took place. Not only was the young
candidate declared to be worthy of her degree, but she was also co-opted, as an honorary member,
into the college of the doctors of philosophy. A procession of coaches accompanied those present to
the Palazzo Pubblico, where in the suitably decked out sala d’Ercole, crammed with ladies, knights,
literary men and curious onlookers from Bologna and elsewhere, and in the presence of an
illustrious French prelate, Cardinal de Polignac, Laura Bassi was proclaimed doctor in philosophy
by the archdeacon Formagliari, the high chancellor of the University. The latter delivered to the
candidate, clothed in black, the symbols of her degree (a book, a silver crown of laurels, a ring and
ermine mantle), and made a speech in which among other things he evoked the case of two Roman
women endowed with male virtues, Hortensia and Anasia, who had dared to plead cases in the
forum, and praised the strength and wisdom of the Omnipotent, who would from time to time
miraculously “open the mouths of the mute, or bestow eloquence on the tongues of infants, or
clothe women from on high with virtue, and illuminate their minds with supreme light so that they
could challenge the valorous and even confound the strong” [Miscellanea, pp. 16-17]. Then Matteo
Bazzani, president of the philosophical college and the Institute of Sciences, delivered an oration in
praise of the new graduate. They all then passed into the apartments of the cardinal legate, where a
great crowd enjoyed plentiful refreshments. The celebrations continued the day afterwards with a
splendid reception in the palazzo of one of the city's most prominent noble families.
Bologna could talk of nothing else. The marquise Elisabetta Ratta, one of the two ladies-inwaiting, wrote to Algarotti: “I can see nothing else in the city than eyebrows raised in wonder and
foreheads lowered in veneration” [Algarotti, 1792-1793, X]. Unambiguous signs of the social
significance of the events Laura Bassi had been at the centre of are the collections of verses, three
printed and others left in manuscript versions, and an unknown number of individual compositions
published on single sheets or left unpublished, the fruit of an unprecedented mobilisation of poets,
not just from Bologna. And not just Italian, witness the ode in strong feminist accents composed by
the German poetess Cristiane Marianne von Ziegler on hearing the news of the bestowal of a degree
on a woman [Ceranski, 1996].
Also from a female pen came the opening composition of a little collection Rime per la
Conclusione filosofica [Miscellanea, pp. 83-92], published and placed on sale in Bologna,
“All’Insegna della Rosa, sotto le Scuole”. The author was the Venetian Luisa Bergalli, the editor a
few years previously of an important collection of poems by Italian poetesses. Her poem is full of
female pride, most explicitly in the last stanza: “Donne gentili, questi / Pregi c’imparte il Facitor
divino; / Ch’atte siam pure a gloriose imprese […]”. Also the second poem is by a Venetian,
Gaspare Gozzi, Bergalli’s husband, while the other authors come from other Italian cities.
None of the poets appearing in the volume Rime in lode della Signora Laura Maria
Cattarina Bassi [Miscellanea, pp. 93-123] are from Bologna, nevertheless it was printed in Bologna
by Lelio dalla Volpe, with an interesting dedication to the candidate by the priest Lorenzo Stegani,
the relation of Bassi, who had been her first teacher. A copy of this volume was offered to Laura
with a sumptuous cover in embroidered silk (see image below). The volume was of slight worth, but
the publisher's initiative, like the previous one, is indicative of the desire to broadcast the echo of
the events in Bologna well beyond the walls of the city. The most significant of the poetic
collections published in Bologna in the first few months of 1732, appears to be the one entitled
Rime per la famosa laureazione [Miscellanea, pp. 35-82], again published by Lelio dalla Volpe, to
which writers either from Bologna, or closely connected to the cultural life of the city, and who
therefore had direct knowledge of the dottoressa, had contributed. From some of these
compositions Laura Bassi, leaving aside the ambiguities of the theses, emerges as a Newtonian
philosopher. Algarotti presents her as such in his sonnet Ombra del gran Britanno [Shadow of the
Great Briton] and especially in the poem Non la Lesboa, in which he calls her the “rich
inexhaustible mine of the new, beyond the seas, high knowledge”, a perfect expert in the Newtonian
system, from the stars' orbits (among which, however, he ambiguously places the sun as well) to the
explanation of tides, to the theory of light and colours. And Giampietro Zanotti, painter and poet,
perhaps Laura’s most devoted admirer, in a long poem celebrates the pleasure and diligence
(“diletto” and “cura”) with which the young philosopher knows how to penetrate “entro i più
riposti, inaccessibili / Misteri (…) di natura [into the least accessible mysteries of nature]”, through
an adventurous research that leads her in the end to the “Anglica beach”, to offer the highest honour
to the ashes “of the British philosopher”. It may well be wondered whether Laura Bassi's interest in
Newton, her adherence to his system, was already in 1732 as marked as it appears in the verses of
Algarotti and Zanotti. A confirmation, and at the same time a corrective, comes from another
composition of the collection, a poem by Gioseffo Pozzi addressed to Laura's teacher, Tacconi. For
Pozzi Newton was not the only great mind Laura measured herself against. He saw “l’ombra del
Filosofo Inglese / Per man tenerla [the shadow of the English philosopher holding her by the
hand]”, but added that “il sottil Renato [René Descartes] a Laura omaggio rese [Subtle Renato
rendered homage to Laura]”. Bassi studied nature as a whole and so she knew “degli astri il giro e
de la terra il moto [the movement of the stars and the earth]”. As far as the theories of optics were
concerned, Pozzi was more accurate than Algarotti in describing Bassi’s Newtonian approach, but
also listed a series of other themes in the theses that were extraneous to Newton’s physics. The most
convincing explanation of the epistemological incoherence of this text is the suggestion that she was
ready to adhere to the optics and perhaps the natural philosophy of Newton, in the prudent forms
characteristic of other Bologna figures, and this was known to those that in the previous year had
been admitted to private discussions with her. A public profession of Newtonian faith had perhaps
been judged to be imprudent and ill-suited to her role as the Bologna Minerva, which a carefully
worked out propaganda strategy had provided for her [Cavazza, 1990 and 1997; Findlen, 1993].
The insistence on the exceptional quality of her knowledge and the association of her glorious
reputation with that of Bologna (the ancient Felsina) are indeed recurrent themes also in the verses
of this volume, the most official of them all. Ferdinando Antonio Ghedini addressed his sonnet to
Felsina herself, in whose honour Laura had carried out “her rare and admirable achievement”.
Father Achilleo Geremia Balzani ended his poem with these words in praise of her: “Tu gloria, e tu
tesauro / sei del felsineo nome, e del tuo sesso [You the glory, and you the treasure are/ of the name
of Felsina, and your own sex]”. And Flaminio Scarselli, her devoted friend, called her “Laura gentil,
delizia, e amore / del secol nostro, anzi pur gloria, e onore [Laura the gentle one, delight, and love
of our century, indeed glory too, and honour]”. According to Giovanni Battista Vicini, Laura, in
emulation of the one who had inspired Petrarch, “del suo Sesso l’onor spento ravviva [revives the
honour of her sex]”. “Gran Vergine,/ Che adorni Felsina [Great Virgin,/ Who adorns Felsina]” is
how Gioseffo Manfredi addressed her. The link between Bologna and Bassi, between their virtues
and their glorious reputation, is brought out most completely in the last two stanzas of the poem by
Gioseffo Pozzi, already mentioned. On the one hand he invites his “Patria (…) felice [happy
Country]” to remember “to do honour” to her “ancient Heroines”, meaning the legendary Bologna
women who in the Middle Ages gained a degree and taught law or medicine in the university,
whereas on the other hand, in the leave-taking, he exhorts Tacconi not to try to bring about the
miracle achieved with Laura Bassi with others, because it would be quite impossible to find another
woman “d’ugual virtute, e di sì eccelsa mente [of equal virtues, and such an exceptional mind]”.
The successes of the young Laura Bassi and the considerable sensation they caused in Italy
and abroad, together with the pressures of Cardinal Lambertini, helped to make the idea of
conceding her a paid post in the university a fact. For this to happen another defence of
philosophical conclusions was necessary, and this took place on the 27 June 1732 in the palazzo
dell’Archiginnasio in the presence of the Cardinal legate, the vice-legate, Archbishop Lambertini,
the Bologna authorities and the usual great crowd of citizens and visitors. The theses to obtain the
lectureship concerned a precise argument of natural philosophy: water as a natural body, as element
of the other bodies and as part of the universe [Miscellanea, p. 32]. Five professors, among whom
Matteo Bazzani, Marc’Antonio Laurenti and Giovanni Antonio Stancari, argued against them. The
explanations of the corpuscular structure and fluidity of water, of the stages of its passage from the
liquid state to ice and steam, as well as its presence and function in all the mixed bodies, should be
placed in the post-Galileo tradition of research in the mechanical and medical-naturalistic
backgrounds to the subject, represented at Bologna by personalities of the first rank such as
Geminiano Montanari and Domenico Guglielmini. This may be seen when she denies (thesis II)
that the viscosity of water is linked to the shape of its particles (as Montanari believed), but in a
prudent manner, so that she avoids positively attributing it to reciprocal attraction, as she will in
writings in the years to follow which are definitively inspired by Newtonian physics. As far as the
last four theses, IX-XII, are concerned, we have her implicit but confident adherence to the theory
Antonio Vallisneri set out in his Lezione accademica sull’origine delle fontane (Venezia, 1715 and
17262): mountain springs, like rivers and lakes, all have meteoric origins, i.e. they derive from the
snows and rains that had penetrated deep into the earth; on the other hand the atmospheric
precipitations derived from the evaporation and condensation of earthly humidity. Laura Bassi
rejected the idea of those (among whom many Cartesians) who believed that the waters from
springs and rivers derived from those of the sea, having risen via mysterious cavities right up to the
summits of the mountains and hills, losing their salt on the way. Vallisneri, who taught all his life at
the University of Padua, but had been a pupil in his youth of Marcello Malpighi in the University of
Bologna, was profoundly tied to Bologna's experimental tradition and to the Institute of Sciences
circle. Moreover, his family came from the same small town in Emilia, Scandiano, which Laura
Bassi’s family came from, and this might be a further reason for importance the latter attributed to
his theories.
The discussion of the theses on water had been preceded by a praefatio of the candidate, a
speech that shows how aware she was of the break with tradition and with socio-cultural values that
her presence there meant, and with the aim of obtaining official permission to teach there.
“Audacity” and “arrogance” are the key words. Laura, foemina adulescentula, feels herself under
scrutiny and judged by the monuments that on the walls of the chiostro, of the main stairs, of the
loggia, of the lecture halls of the Archiginnasio recall the teachers of the University, great men who
honoured the institution and the city with their male virtues, and that she would now like to emulate
“assuming functions of male dignity” [Miscellanea, pp. 19-20]. In fact, the idea of providing the
dottoressa with a paid readership in the University had created bad feeling in the city, because of
worries that the post allocated to a woman would diminish the chances of male graduates who much
more legitimately aspired to a readership. This was an opposition prudently expressed in private
(conversations, letters and diaries), or which were even clandestine (anonymous satires), avoiding
open conflict with the plans and propaganda strategies of the civil and religious authorities. On 29
October 1732 the Senate assigned ex officio an honorary readership of philosophia universa to the
graduate Bassi, with an annual salary of 500 lire, decidedly higher than that of ordinary readers at
the start of their careers. The fact that it was not an ordinary lectureship derived from the conditions
causa sexus placed on the young lecturer: she could give lectures in the Archiginnasio only by order
of the Cardinal legate or the gonfaloniere of justice.
Laura Bassi's first lecture [Miscellanea, p. 14], a truly exceptional event, took place with due
solemnity on the 18 December in a lecture hall of the Archiginnasio, with the by now customary
train of authorities, literary men and curious onlookers. She herself summed up the argument of her
opening lecture in a letter to Flaminio Scarselli: “The need for moderation in philosophical studies,
given the ease with which human ingenuity lets itself be overwhelmed by arrogance and vanity,
where it is led to investigate beyond the limits of its powers and is often deceived by the admirable
and by the speciousness of things” [Melli, 1960]. The text of the praelectio [Miscellanea, pp. 21-31]
reveals the influence of Locke's empiricist epistemology on the young scholar, who with steadily
increasing confidence was seeking her own intellectual independence, even at the price of very
strong disagreements with her teacher Tacconi. The Essay concerning Human Understanding was
to be placed at the Index of prohibited books only a few years afterwards, but its reading already
raised suspicions. In Italy, and in particular in Bologna, it was nevertheless widely known and
talked about. In the space of a few months the young scholar seems to have arrived at a firm
rejection of Descartes' philosophy, taken as the emblem of philosophers who were builders of vain
systems founded on rationally evident. principles independent of experience. The task of the
philosopher, for her, is to deduce the laws that govern nature from phenomena observed
experimentally: a position where Newtonian epistemology, Gassendi's phenomenalism and
Galileo's experimental tradition come together in a joint rejection of Cartesian apriorism.
Philosophical moderation is invoked as an antidote to human arrogance and vanity, dangerous to
science because of the risk of losing one's bearings in speculation and wild imaginings, and to
religion through the claim of extending the power of reason also to objects that cannot be reached
by it, and that are subject to the jurisdiction of theology and faith. The latter was a concern that,
rather than aiming at an Enlightenment affirmation of secular values for ideas, appears to hark back
to the position of “metaphysical neutrality” assumed in the second half of the seventeenth century
by Bologna's followers of Galileo, to safeguard both the independence of their research into the
physical world and unquestioned loyalty to the Catholic Church [Cavazza, 1990].
On the occasion of the lecture a silver and pewter commemorative medal was coined
[Miscellanea, pp. 124-125], the work of the Bologna sculptor and jeweller Antonio Lazzari: on the
back a bust of Laura Bassi with the symbols of her graduate status (crown of laurel and ermine) and
a text in Latin with her name, her titles of collegiate doctor, her public readership, her membership
of the Institute of Sciences, her age (20), the date; on the front a young woman (Laura Bassi herself)
with a big book under her arm, the laurel crown in her other hand and at her feet a map of the world,
symbol of natural philosophy, surmounted by a little owl, is watching Minerva, who is handing her
a lantern and is brandishing her shield with the Gorgon. Around all this there is a Latin text,
dedicating the medal “to the only one who was allowed to see Minerva”, i.e. to the only woman
who had been able to access knowledge. It would be hard to imagine a more ideal summing up of
the image of the “philosophessa” that Bologna wished to transmit to their contemporaries, to fellow
citizens, to foreigners, to the academies of the other cities that acclaimed Laura Bassi (like the
Accademia dei Dissonanti di Modena and that of the Apatisti of Florence [Miscellanea, pp. 33-34])
as their member,: a woman who had obtained honours and male posts thanks to her knowledge, to
her mastery of natural philosophy; an extraordinary woman because unique (like the virgin goddess
Minerva, whom Juppiter gave birth to and who was without female ancestors or descendants); a
woman therefore whose successes did not undermine the gender hierarchies of the times, did not
inscribe themselves in a female intellectual genealogy and could not be claimed as precedents and
models by other women.
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