At twelve, Olympia Fulvia Morata was already reading and debating, in Greek and Latin, classics that most men of her time never touched. Born in Ferrara, daughter of the humanist Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, she was educated at home with a rigor rare for a girl of the Renaissance.
In 1539 she entered the court of Ferrara as study companion to Anna d’Este, under the patronage of Renée of France, whose sympathies leaned toward the Reformed faith. There she mingled with Reformed thinkers, among them John Calvin, and deepened her engagement with the Bible.
After her father’s death in 1548, she lost favor at court: the atmosphere turned hostile to heterodoxy, and she went so far as to write that, for as long as she remained there, she was never able to read the books of the Old or New Testament freely. The praise she had received in childhood from scholars such as Celio Calcagnini, a friend of her father, brought no serious recognition once she became an adult: in a letter to a former teacher, she complained of being abandoned by the court and treated in a humiliating way.
Around 1549 and 1550 she married Andreas Grunthler, a Bavarian physician and scholar, in a Protestant ceremony. The union also sealed a choice of faith: shortly afterward the couple left Italy and settled in Germany.
In Schweinfurt, Olympia devoted herself to theology and translated seven Psalms into Homeric Greek, joining classical form to biblical content. In letters and dialogues she also argued that serious study should not be denied to women.
In 1553 and 1554, during the Second Margrave War, Schweinfurt was besieged and sacked. Olympia fled barefoot, lost her library and most of her writings, and was even imprisoned with her husband in Hammelburg under threat of death, until they were protected by the Count and Countess of Erbach.
Taking refuge in Heidelberg, she rebuilt part of her library from memory and began teaching Greek and Latin privately. Her health, already weakened by the flight, began to fail.
She died in Heidelberg on October 26, 1555, likely of tuberculosis. Her husband and her friend Celio Secondo Curione gathered her letters and writings, published in Basel in 1558, a text that centuries later would be read again, including by Goethe.
