Olympia Morata “A greater mind than a man”

With its Olympia Morata Programme, Heidelberg University supports outstanding female early-career researchers who have conducted independent postdoctoral research and would like to earn a habilitation or similar qualification. Yet who was the woman after whom this support for women in academia is named? Olympia Fulvia Morata, whom the Humanist Johann Herold called “a woman in body but a greater mind than a man”, was a poet and scholar from Italy influenced by Humanism and the Reformation, who died in Heidelberg in 1555. Her connection with Heidelberg University is that she was probably the first woman to be admitted to the teaching staff – and was therefore the first alumna of Ruperto Carola.

That is how then 14-year-old Olympia describes herself in 1540 in a poem – at the time she was regarded as a child prodigy. She was born in 1526 in Ferrara; her father Pellegrino Fulvio Morato was an open-minded Humanist, Calvinist, scholar and teacher who gave lessons in Latin and Greek to the sons of the Duke. He recognized the talent of his eldest daughter early on and instructed her in Latin and classical literature. In 1539, 13-year-old Olympia joined the Duke’s eldest daughter in her lessons and so received a Humanist education. Her teachers were the physician and Greek scholar Johann Sinapius, who came from Schweinfurt and had held a professorship for Greek in Heidelberg in 1530/31, and his lawyer brother Kilian, who was also a Greek scholar. During this period Olympia impressed the court and scholars with her compositions in Latin, including translations of the first two stories in Boccaccio’s “Decamerone”, and a lecture she gave at age 15 on Cicero’s “Paradoxa Stoicorum”. She learned Greek quickly as well, and due to her elegant prose, poems and letters she was called “little Sappho”.

Olympia left the court in 1548 when her father fell seriously ill, devoting herself to caring for him until his death and to raising her younger sisters and brother Emilio. Brought to the Protestant faith by her father and their family friend Coelio Secundo Curione – one of the first Italians to enthusiastically accept the teachings of the German Reformers, and who had to leave Italy later for that reason − Olympia now occupied herself more intensively with the study of theological works. She got to know the physician and fellow-believer Andreas Grundler who, like the Sinapius brothers, came from Schweinfurt, married him and in 1550 accompanied him and her eight-year-old brother Emilio to Schweinfurt, where Grundler became the town physician.

Then followed a happy period, in which Olympia taught Latin and Greek not only to Emilio but also to the daughter of Johann Sinapius, continued her literary activity and studied Reformation writings. Yet in 1554, after the destruction of the city in the Second Margrave War, the family had to flee, with Olympia falling ill and never fully recovering. They finally found shelter with Georg II, Count of Erbach, and his wife Elisabeth, who nursed the invalid Olympia. It was probably owing to her mediation and that of Heidelberg Greek professor Jacob Micyllus that Andreas Grundler was appointed to the third chair for medicine at Ruperto Carola – and Olympia was to teach Greek at the university.