BASSI, LAURA (1711–1778)

BASSI, LAURA (1711–1778), Bolognese physicist, professor, and experimenter. Laura Bassi holds the unusual distinction of having been the first woman to pursue a paid scientific career. A lawyer's daughter, Bassi received her early education from the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi, who subsequently introduced her to the Bolognese scholarly community. With the encouragement of the archbishop of Bologna, Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV, 1740–1758), Bassi's patrons proposed her as a candidate for a university degree in philosophy. Following a public defense of forty-nine philosophical theses on 17 April 1732, Bassi received her laurea (university degree) on 12 May—the second woman whose graduation we can document from any university. On 29 October 1732, she became professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna. She subsequently taught philosophy, mathematics, and physics there until her death in 1778. By the end of her life, Bassi held two other professorships—an appointment at the Collegio Montalto and, as of 1776, a professorship in experimental physics at the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in Bologna. In collaboration with her husband, the physician Giuseppe Veratti (1707–1793)—whom she married in 1738 and with whom she had eight children—Bassi offered private lessons in physics and performed experiments in her household. She was routinely celebrated throughout her lifetime for these accomplishments, not only by the Venetian philosophe Francesco Algarotti, who sketched a vignette of her in his Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), but also by well-known figures in the republic of letters such as the electrical experimenter Abbé Nollet (1700–1770), who visited her, Voltaire, who corresponded with her, and her cousin, the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), who claimed he never would have become an experimenter if he had not studied with her.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cavazza, Marta. "Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: Realtà e mito." Nuncius 10 (1995): 715–753.

——. "Laura Bassi 'maestra' di Spallanzani." In Il cerchio della vita, edited by Walter Bernardi and Paola Manzini, pp. 185–202. Florence, 1999.

Ceranski, Beate. Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem: Die Physikerin Laura Bassi. Frankfurt am Main, 1996.

Findlen, Paula. "Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy: The Strategies of Laura Bassi." Isis 84 (1993): 441–469.

——. "The Scientist's Body: The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in Enlightenment Italy." In The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Gianna Pomata and Lorraine Daston. Berlin, 2003.

Logan, Gabriella Berti. "The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth Century Italian Woman of Science." American Historical Review 99 (1994): 785–812.