Luna remained in the same position. She was no longer aware of the man staring at her in order to capture the smallest detail of her features. Her mind was absorbed in the words of Isotta Nogarola, the Veronese child prodigy who’d chosen the cloth of God over marriage and gone on to engage in an astonishing eight-year correspondence with the Veronese governor Ludovico Foscarini. That famous dialogue was held within the pages of the small book in Luna’s hands; her greatest treasure, for the conversation captured within showed that a woman could meet a man in debate and even best him. Oh, how she admired this lady! Isotta Nogarola had been alive in a less enlightened age, more than thirty years ago, and still she’d found a way to freely express her ideas and engage in debate with men, even to have her dialogue reproduced in a book such as this. That was true acceptance of her intellect. If this lady’s words could be published later in her life then there was hope for Luna’s own desire to further her education in astronomy now she was a woman.

Luna opened the book to her favourite passage, where the author so cleverly defended Eve as the lesser sinner in the Garden of Eden. Her command of the argument was masterful, for how could her opponent disagree with a woman who acknowledged it was the innate weakness of her own sex that led Eve to sin and so she could not be held responsible, when all of Christendom agreed that women were inferior to men? Woman could not be held both to be weaker in nature and to be more culpable in original sin. The lady Nogarola had turned man’s judgement to her advantage and in the process proved she was the more intelligent of the two. It was bold and exciting thinking. Luna wished she could have met Isotta Nogarola.

There was no shame in wanting to use your mind; Isotta Nogarola had proved it and so Luna must prove to her father that she deserved to tread a different path from other daughters and be allowed to keep studying. There was so much to explore in astronomy. The planets were lonely and majestic things, each carried by an elusive force in the sphere in which it was embedded, unable to move beyond its orbit in the infinite space of the heavens. She felt a symmetry with her own fate. She was yet to see an eclipse of the Sun or Moon but she imagined, as the Moon slipped into the Earth’s shadow, that the one shivered in close proximity to the other. It would be wonderful and utterly shocking to see something so distant with her own eyes and she prayed her father would gift her such a moment.

Luna stretched her neck to one side and then the other to loosen her collar. There would always be limitations put upon her by God and her sex, such was her life, but Isotta Nogarola had found a way to express herself despite these challenges, and so would she.