His family provenance was Italian, but his social and professional network revolved around the ethnically German community centred on Prague.
Cornova was ordained in 1770 after which he pursued a teaching career, focusing initially on grammar and quickly broadening his scope to include poetry, Classical Greek and humanities subjects more broadly.
[1][7] The outlawing of the Jesuits which became effective in the Habsburg territories during 1773 deeply impacted Cornova's career, but he was able to return to Prague and obtain a post teaching humanities at the "Altstädter Gymnasium" (secondary school) in the city for ten years till 1784.
Cornova's principal contribution to historical scholarship is the new edition of Pavel Stránský's Respublica Bojema (1634) and the translation of it into German, adding numerous supplementary notes.
His surviving works on philosophy include handwritten lecture notes about the methodologies of history teaching at Prague University.