Trotula

This paperback edition of the 'Trotula' ensemble differs from the 2001 hardback edition in the following ways:
- it omits the critical edition of the Latin "standardized ensemble," retaining only the modern English translation
- the historical Introduction remains the same, aside from the correction of a few minor errors
- it omits the Index verborum (list of all specialized Latin terminology) of the 2001 edition; instead, it offers an index of Materia medica Employed in the 'Trotula'

Picking up from where John F. Benton left off in his 1985 study announcing the discovery of the *Practica* of Trota of Salerno, the present investigation brings together all known evidence for the writings and precepts of this early 12th-century Salernitan healer, for whom we have no other contemporary evidence beyond these writings themselves.  Using the evidence of the *Practica secundum Trotam* (“Practical Medicine According to Trota”) as well as the compendium *De egritudinum curatione* (a collection of excerpts from the works of seven Salernitan “masters,” including Trota) and the *De curis mulierum* (“On Treatments for Women”) and even an Anglo-Norman text which purports to record the teachings of Trota, I argue that collation of this evidence shows that Trota's oeuvre was probably much larger than previously suspected. Trota’s historicity was already established by Benton, and she can now be clearly distinguished from the textual fiction “Trotula,” which is in reality just the title of an ensemble of the *De curis mulierum* and two other, unrelated texts of likely male authorship. The present study offers further circumstantial evidence about the historic Trota, suggesting that it is possible to place her in the early 12th century. She was to some extent aware of and in dialogue with fellow male practitioners in Salerno, but she remained peripheral to the general trends toward theory and sophisticated pharmacopeia that characterized the work of her male contemporaries. The study includes editions and translations of excerpts of Trota’s authentic works and other *testimonia*.

This is a revised version of my description of the *Antidotarium magnum*, a collection of over 1000 medical recipes produced at Monte Cassino by (or under the direction of) the Tunisian immigrant monk, Constantine the African (d. before 1098/1099). This is the first Latin work of pharmaceutics to incorporate the new materia medica of the Islamicate world. Unlike Constantine's other works (which were all translations of Arabic texts into Latin), the *Antidotarium magnum* seems to be a genuine effort to integrate traditional recipes from the Greek and Latin ancient and late antique traditions, with the newer approaches to pharmacy that Constantine brought to Italy from the other side of the Mediterranean. Included is a complete list of extant manuscripts, as well as a bibliography of studies published to date.

Now that a fair amount of Anglo-Norman medical literature has been edited (most of it by the Oxford scholar, Tony Hunt), it is possible to give some assessment of the genesis of this unusually early corpus of vernacular medical writing. Like the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus before it, the Anglo-Norman corpus makes a fundamentally Mediterranean system of medicine accessible to readers (and auditors) in the north. In fact, England was one of the biggest markets for southern Italian medicine in the 12th and 13th centuries: of all the Latin medical works circulating in this period, whether new compositions and translations or old classics, England had copies of well over half. Therefore, it becomes of interest to see which of those many works were chosen for translation into the vernacular. Although works of basic therapeutic utility like Roger of Frugardi’s *Chirurgia* and Johannes Platearius’s *Practica brevis* are known in unique copies, the field most represented in Anglo-Norman medical literature is women’s medicine: gynecology and cosmetics. The gynecological texts are all translations of some form or another of the so-called *Trotula* text, which came out of 12th-century Salerno, specifically the *Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum* (Book on Women’s Conditions). Likewise, the two known cosmetics works have clear signs of derivation from southern Italian practices. I hypothesize that these works may have been commissioned by women, who knew of the medical lore coming out of southern Italy through a variety of Norman contacts. Just how new works in “the French of England” interacted with older Anglo-Saxon terminology is an issue still in need of investigation.

NOTE: For the *Trotula* tradition in Middle English, please refer to my later survey: Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts.  Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings,” Scriptorium 51 (1997), 80-104 (also available here on Academia.edu). I changed the designations of the different Middle English translations there, and that system should now be cited in all scholarly references. For further updates on the texts mentioned here, see Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009” (2010), which can likewise be found here on Academia.edu.

NOTE ALSO: Everything said here regarding the two versions of the Gilbertus Anglicus translation (Syknesse of Wymmen) should now be supplemented by the editorial commentary in Monica H. Green and Linne R. Mooney, “The Sickness of Women”, in Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 455-568.  This is a complete edition of and commentary on Version 2 of this Middle English gynecological text, with a full analysis of the genesis of both Version 1 and Version 2.

Questo Convegno internazionale, promosso dalla Edizione Nazionale La Scuola Medica Salernitana, ha inteso sottomettere la monumentale Collectio Salernitana ad una revisione storiografica, tanto più necessaria in quanto la Edizione Nazionale sta procedendo ad una riedizione critica dei testi salernitani. Monica Green presenta uno studio complessivo sulla prima diffusione dei manoscriti salernitani. Romana Martorelli Vico, Florence Eliza Glaze e Mireille Ausécache, propongono uno studio, rispettivamente, delle Anatomie salernitane, del Passionarius di Garioponto e delle opere del magister Salernus. Michael McVaugh offre una nuova datazione del Liber mitis e pone il problema della vera natura dei legami intrattenuti da Ruggero Frugardi con Salerno. Riesaminando il Carmen medicale del diacono Crispo, edito nel primo volume della Collectio Salernitana, Anna Bellettini illustra la medecina pre-salernitaina, tra il VI e il X secolo. Alejandro García González ricostruisce le tappe delle metamorfosi del lessico botanico-medico Alphita, edito dalla Edizione Nazionale. Iolanda Ventura presenta un ampio panorama dei testi farmacologici presenti nella Collectio Salernitana. Ad
Antonio Garzya spetta il merito di aver dato alla Collectio Salernitana il suo spessore storico, indagando sulla ricca personalità del suo artefice.

Despite centuries of debate about the medieval medical writers Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen, there still remain widely disparate views of them in both popular and scholarly discourses. Their alternate dismissal or romanticization is not due to a simple contest between antifeminist and feminist tendencies. Rather, issues of gender have intersected in varying ways with other agendas (intellectual, nationalist, etc.). Recent philological researches have helped not only to clarify why these earlier interpretations were created in the first place, but also to raise our understanding of these women and their work to a new, higher level.

“From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), 5-39 – Abstract

This study documents a subtle but highly illuminating change that occurred in texts on women’s medicine over the course of the later Middle Ages: a change in title. Whereas all texts addressing the particular medical conditions of women’s bodies that circulated in the early and central Middle Ages had simple descriptive titles like “On the Conditions of Women” or “On the Sufferings of Women,” from the 13th century on we begin to see the word “secret” in the titles and in other rhetorical elements of these texts. It is argued that the language of secrecy comes particularly into play when the focus of such texts narrows from gynecological and obstetrical topics in their full range, to a more limited concentration on fertility and generation. This development is particularly interesting since, in earlier centuries, the topics of generation (i.e., the theoretical aspects) and gynecology and obstetrics (the practical descriptions of diseases and their cures) had been addressed in separate texts. Also addressed is the way texts on women’s medicine became juxtaposed to works on “generation,” or incorporated into codicological contexts that suggested that the works were being read for reasons other than therapeutics. A final sort of intervention was actual adaptation of texts on women’s medicine, omitting sections on, for example, uterine diseases and focusing only on reproduction.

Latin was the main language used for medical writing in the early Middle Ages, but from the late 12th century on, first Hebrew and then various European vernacular languages produce writings on women’s medicine, and these follow some of the same shifts seen in Latin works. (Languages covered include Hebrew, French, English, Dutch, Italian, and German.) The study is based on direct consultation of manuscripts in various languages from across Europe, including New York Academy of Medicine, MS SAFE; Oxford, Pembroke College, MS 21; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 399. In addition, medieval library inventories are surveyed, including those of the Sorbonne and St-Victor in Paris. The Trotula texts make up the bulk of material surveyed, though there is also incorporation of other texts on women’s medicine.

This is a "stub" for the 2015 version of my "cheat sheet" "Who/What is 'Trotula'?" The most recent version posted is from 2023 (https://www.academia.edu/97430512/). See https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Trota-and-the-'Trotula';; for all posted materials.

If you need a copy of the 2015 version for reference purposes, please feel free to write me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This is the 2020 edition of my "cheat sheet" of info on Trota/the Trotula. Note that there is a more recent version, from 2023 (https://www.academia.edu/97430512/).

'Trotula' is a title, not a woman's name. The 'Trotula' is the title of a group of three separate works on women's medicine and cosmetics, each of different authorship. (Two of them are likely of male authorship.) Trota is the name of a documentable female medical practitioner who lived in the early 12th century. She was not a "professor" at the University of Salerno; no such institution existed at the time. She may have had acolytes but she is never acknowledged by name by her male contemporaries. The title 'Trotula' was generated when the three Salernitan texts on medicine were fused into an ensemble; the ensemble is first documented in the late 12th century, and the title in the early 13th century. Ironically, this collapsing of three separate textual units caused the historic woman Trota to be forgotten and the textually fabricated 'Trotula' to take her place as an alleged authoress. If 'Trotula' and Trota are confused, however, we miss out on what is really interesting and unique about the creation of knowledge about women's medicine and the practices of female medical practitioners in the Middle Ages. That is because the "hands-off" practices of male practitioners (seen most clearly in the 1st Trotula text, Book on the Conditions of Women) were noticeably different from the "hands-on" practices of Trota. For more information on the unique "hands-on" knowledge reflected in Trota's work, see chapter 1 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

This essay critiques the idea--common in feminist historiography--that throughout the Middle Ages "women's health was women's business."  Using the evidence of women as medical practitioners (which is minimal) and that of texts on women's medicine, I argue that the gendering of knowledge production and practice in the fields of women's healthcare was complicated.  Women had no monopoly in the field.  Indeed, it is questionable whether much of the written work on women's medicine was written for female readers.

The present file includes the corrigenda and addenda, updated up through 2010, to Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73. This review essay, summarizing the state of the field in the late 1980s, was first reprinted with minor corrections in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78. It was reprinted a second time (here from the Sisters and Workers version) in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).  In the last reprint, Corrigenda and Addenda were included. I have here updated the Corrigenda and Addenda by including references to works published between 1988 (when it was sent to press) and 2010.

This essay was meant to capture the state of the field in the late 1980s. A lot has happened in the history of women and medicine since then. (Note that ALL the statements regarding the Middle English tradition of gynecological writings were superseded by my later work; see especially my publications in 1992, 2003, 2006, and 2008.)  Readers are encouraged to refer both to my subsequent writings (especially my 2008 book, *Making Women's Medicine Masculine*) and to the 82-page bibliography, Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender, and Medicine (1980-2009),” available gratis at http://www.sciencia.cat/biblioteca/publicacionssc.htm, and here on my Academia.edu page.

The original article can be found on JStor at this URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174557, or by writing to me directly:  monica.h.green@gmail.com.

Scholarly work on all aspects of women, gender, and medicine has exploded in the past 30 years, largely due to the influences of women's and gender studies.  Texts on women's medicine, in Latin as well as the medieval vernaculars, have been edited, and new discoveries have been made about women as medical practitioners as well as the care women received as patients.  This bibliography comprises all the entries that appeared in the bibliography on “Women and Medicine” that I published periodically in the Medieval Feminist Forum (formerly, Medieval Feminist Newsletter) from 1990 to 2004. The previously published entries have been merged into a single alphabetical list by author, and some editorial commentary has been updated or modified. I have added items that were previously overlooked or that date before the original dates covered, and I have added new material published up through 2009, including a few items that cross over into the early modern period since they carry forward issues that began in the late Middle Ages.  At the end, I have added a summary listing of all those works that include edited primary sources (noting English translations where they are included); these will be especially useful for teaching purposes. This bibliography is intended for free use, but please note that the editorial commentary should be properly credited if cited elsewhere.

This essay offers the philological background to the edition of the Trotula standardized ensemble that was published (with a facing-page English translation) by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2001.  As demonstrated in full detail here, the Trotula ensemble is actually a grouping of three different texts, each of separate authorship, that were likely produced in the southern Italian town of Salerno in the 12th century.  Each of these three texts—the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum (Book on the Conditions of Women), the De curis mulierum (On Treatments for Women), and the De ornatu mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)—circulated independently and each is found in two or more different versions.  By the late 12th century, the three works were combined and then this ensemble went through its own textual development; I identify at least six distinct versions.  The essay surveys all 122 Latin manuscripts of the texts that were known to me at the time.  It also builds on the findings of John F. Benton, who was the first to show that the Renaissance editor of the Trotula thoroughly rearranged the text, erasing any last traces that there were three component works (and three authors).  Hence, the Renaissance edition fixed for the next 400 years a false understanding of these works and their possible associations with a female author.  In a final section of this study, I describe the medieval vernacular translations and Latin re-writings in relation to the Latin tradition.

For fuller information on the Latin Trotula manuscripts, see Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts.  Part I: The Latin Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 50 (1996), 137-175.  For the vernacular manuscripts, see Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts.  Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings,” Scriptorium 51 (1997), 80-104.  For further information on the historic female writer and medical practitioner Trota of Salerno (who is only to be associated with the De curis mulierum text), see Monica H. Green, “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 183-233; and chapter 1 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

This is a "stub" for the 2019 edition of my "cheat sheet" of info on Trota/the Trotula. The most recent version posted is from 2023 (https://www.academia.edu/97430512/). See https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Trota-and-the-'Trotula'; for all posted materials.

If you need a copy of the 2019 version for reference purposes, please feel free to write me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This is a "stub" for the 2017 version. The most recent version was posted in 2023 (https://www.academia.edu/97430512/). See https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Trota-and-the-'Trotula';; for all posted materials.

If you need a copy of the 2017 version for reference purposes, please feel free to write me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This is the conclusion to my 2008 book, Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ISBN: 978-0-19-921149-4. The book was awarded the 2009 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize by the History of Science Society in recognition of an outstanding book on the history of women in science published in the previous two-year period.

The Conclusion--an epilogue, really--addresses the question of what it means to look for the history of women in medicine and find that they are marginal, illiterate, or in other ways not the equivalent in their accomplishments as the "great" men of history. It asks what is the importance of literacy, of institutional access. It asks, "What difference does it make whether women’s medicine is constructed at its theoretical base, or practised in its clinical mode, by men rather than women?"

Menstruation formed the bedrock of medieval concepts about how the female body functioned. In medieval Europe, menstruation was seen as the end result of a whole bodily process of purification, one unique to the female body. Menstruation was also seen as a necessary prerequisite for conception. In fact, many references to menstruation in the context of fertility see the successful completion of its purgative function as key to fertility—a fact crucial to understanding why emmenagogues (preparations for bringing on menstruation) were not necessarily seen as abortifacients but may well have had a deliberately pronatal purpose. This essay examines various notions surrounding menstruation in medieval Europe, including why the menses were called “women’s flower,” in what circumstances they were likened to poisons, and why in some instances men were thought capable of “menstruating,” too. Outside of medical contexts, menstruation is largely seen as nefas, something that cannot or should not be named or spoken about. Thus, medical discussions of menstruation are our main source for reconstructing beliefs and attitudes toward this key aspect of female physiology.

This is a complete edition of and commentary on a Middle English gynecological text probably compiled in the mid-fifteenth century.  We edit it here from its latest exemplar, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.52, ff. 107r–135v, but we draw on all three other extant copies for variant readings:  London, British Library, Sloane MS 249, ff. 180v–205v; London, Royal College of Surgeons, MS0175 (here referred to under its old shelfmark, MS 129), ff. 1r–45v; and British Library, Sloane MS 2463, ff. 194r–232r.  It was already established by Green in 1992 that the first version of the text 'Sickness of Women' was simply the independently circulating chapters of a fuller Middle English translation, made in the early 15th century, of the Latin 'Compendium medicine' of Gilbertus Anglicus.  Then, in the mid-15th century, a redactor took that original translation, rearranged the chapters, and added new material, especially on the topic of childbirth.  That redactor also incorporated the fetus-in-utero images from the late antique text, the 'Gynaecia' of Muscio, and a number of untranslated Latin passages, some of which address peripheral topics such as male impotence.  Finally, the redactor placed at the beginning of the text a preface stating that its intent was that “one woman may help another in her sickness.”  Our introduction to the edition summarizes this textual history, but also addresses the question of the intended audience.  We argue that despite the prologue’s formulaic claim to be addressing women, 'Sickness of Women' was included in Trinity R.14.52 not because it was meant to be used by women, but because it was of interest to the male compilers, who not only were concerned (as the other contents suggest) with matters of natural science broadly defined, but had correctly assessed that this second version of 'Sickness of Women' had always been meant for male as well as female readers. 

Addendum:  In the original edition we referred to Gilbertus Anglicus as having lived “in the early part of the thirteenth century” and the 'Compendium' as having been composed ca. 1240 (p. 456).  New work by Michael McVaugh has corrected our biographical narrative of Gilbertus, who now seems likely to have flourished in the middle decades of the century.  There is no firm evidence that he studied at Salerno, though his training at either Montpellier or Paris now seems certain.  McVaugh estimates that the 'Compendium medicine' was written in the 1250s, perhaps late in the decade; it is thus not much older than its oldest extant copy, which is dated 1271.  See Michael R. McVaugh, “Who Was Gilbert the Englishman?,” in 'The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff', ed. George Hardin Brown and Linda Ehrsam Voigts (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010; also published by Brepols), pp. 295-324.  Also, McVaugh adds an additional 10 items to the list of 27 Latin MSS referred to here (p. 456, n. 2).  We have since identified four more copies (several of them fragments), raising the total to 41 extant copies.

""La Scuola di Salerno produsse tra l’XI e il XIII secolo le opere che
hanno contribuito a forgiare la sua leggenda.Verso la fine dell’XI secolo, i maestri salernitani appaiono come i primi destinatari, e dunque anche molto probabilmente i richiedenti, di traduzioni dal greco e dall’arabo. Il secolo XII è il periodo culminante nella storia gloriosa della Scuola di Salerno: in questo tempo furono realizzati trattati anatomici; raccolte di testi interessanti la farmacopea, tra i quali il celebre Antidotario di Nicola, ancora utilizzati alla fine del Medio Evo; riassunti versificati destinati alla memorizzazione della dottrina medica e che, disseminati nei manoscritti medievali, meritarono poi di essere raccolti in epoca tarda sotto il titolo di
Regimen sanitatis di Salerno; come anche i famosi testi ginecologici che vengono attribuiti alla celebre Trotula. Il convegno internazionale, che si è svolto all’Università di Salerno (3-5 novembre 2004) e di cui si pubblicano qui gli Atti, si è proposto di gettare le basi scientifiche dell’Edizione Nazionale «La Scuola Medica Salernitana», sulla base di nuove investigazioni critiche dei testi salernitani, che sono di straordinario interesse per la storia del pensiero occidentale.""

"Salvatore De Renzi’s mid-19th century, five volume work, Collectio Salernitana ossia documenti inediti, e trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica salernitana, 5 vols, Naples 1852-1859, has stood for 150 years as the foundation for most understandings of what “Salernitan” medicine was in the 12th century.  Yet that study was based on an essentially random survey of extant manuscripts (MSS) that had come to the notice of De Renzi or his collaborators.  In many instances, no early MSS were known or consulted.  This study presents preliminary results from a survey of all extant MSS dating from the “long” twelfth century (c. 1075-c. 1225) that contain Latin medical texts.  Surveying the 375 MSS identified as of 2008, it is argued that four different corpora can be discerned.  These largely circulated in separate patterns, which suggests that they came out of and reflected different centers of genesis. 

These were:  (1) the early medieval corpus:  this includes texts of late antique and early medieval origin, including various epistulae ascribed to Hippocrates, works coming out of late antique North Africa (like Theodorus Priscianus, Vindician, Muscio), and Alexander of Tralles.  These MSS tended to come out of peripheral centers (France, Germany, etc.).  (2) The “eleventh-century Renaissance corpus”:  under this rubric I put both new translations from the Greek (Paul of Aegina, Philaretus, Theophilus) and substantial re-editing of older Latin material (the Dioscorides alphabeticus, the adaptations of the old gynecological corpus as well as the new, abbreviated editions of the Metrodora text, De passionibus mulierum, and Gariopontus’s mid-11th century Passionarius).  MSS including these texts seemed only rarely to incorporate any of the older materials.  (3) The Constantinian corpus: most of Constantine’s corpus enjoyed fairly wide circulation in the 12th century, making it all the more notable that the Salernitans’ embrace of him seems to have been late and slow.  Although readily placed amid other texts of the 11th-century Renaissance, Constantine’s works never seemed to be found with Salernitan texts until the end of the 12th century.  (4) The Salernitan corpus:  I differentiated between theoretical works (under which heading I mostly put the Articella commentaries), which circulate early and broadly, and the works of praxis, which almost universally show up only late in the century and then usually only in N. French and English copies.  Exceptions to this pattern are the Practica of Bartholomeus and the Chirurgia of Roger Frugardi (which, I argue, is indeed associated with Salerno). 

I argue that these findings throw into question the traditional tendency to connect all medical production of the central Middle Ages with Salerno.  Of the 11th-century corpus, only Gariopontus’s and Alfanus’s works are demonstrably Salernitan.  Moreover, I suggested that the still inadequately studied Antidotarium magnum was not necessarily of Salernitan origin but may have come from elsewhere in southern Italy.  Finally, I concluded that other 11th- and 12th-century productions also merited analysis, including the anatomical and cautery series that resurfaced around this time, and such recent works as the ‘Macer floridus’, De viribus herbarum.  I also noted what was not on the list:  any copies of Gerard of Cremona’s (d. 1187) substantial medical output from Toledo, save for one copy of the Urtext of the Liber ad Almansorem (which might not be Gerard’s work) and one copy of Avicenna’s Canon.  A Table was included listing all Salernitan texts whose earliest extant copies or attestations seemed to come from Anglo-Norman areas."

Il MS. 532 della Wellcome Library di Londra è latore alle cc. 64r-70v di una traduzione italiana tardomedievale di due libri della Trotula, il Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum e il De Curis Mulierum. Il testo, di cui si offre l'edizione con analisi linguistica e glossario, compendia in ventuno capitoli (corredati da un prologo) i rimedi relativi alle malattie ginecologiche e ostetriche delle donne.
La veste linguistica del codice è di chiara marca settentrionale, ma la mescolanza di fenomeni fonetici e morfologici afferenti a più di una varietà linguistica non permette di stabilire una sua localizzazione sicura.
Ricco e significativo il patrimonio lessicale che offre diverse prime attestazioni e numerosi altri lessemi che integrano la terminologia medico-farmacologica e botanica.

Este artículo estudia si la 'Practica secundum Trotam', una obra medieval de medicina general atribuida a Trota de Salerno, ha sido utilizada como fuente para componer un poema anónimo de contenido médico publicado en la 'Collectio Salernitana' (vol. IV, 1-176).

This book examines the role of literate medicine in shaping women's access to medical learning and medical care in the high Middle Ages.  At its core is a cultural history of the so-called 'Trotula' texts, including an analysis of the role that the historic female healer Trota of Salerno.  Note that the complete Conclusion is available for free download from the OUP-UK website (click on the link for "sample material").  Available for download here is the full Index, including the index of manuscripts cited.

To celebrate Women's History Month 2021, I posted a series of daily tweets on Twitter capturing some element of current knowledge about texts on women's medicine that circulated in medieval Europe. From Arabic and Hebrew to German and Dutch, the texts range across all languages. This Calendar captures all the tweets and gives in full the "Alt Text" accompanying each image. In addition, I have listed pertinent bibliography for each day's theme. You can find all the original tweets (and download the original images) at this thread: https://twitter.com/monicaMedHist/status/1366145216529326080.

Thanks again to all the libraries that have generously shared digital images of manuscripts in their collections, and provided other "discovery tools" that allow scholars to find and work with these materials.

English/Español
The Še’ar yašub is a short treatise, written in the second half of the thirteenth century, devoted to the care of women’s health and beauty. However, most of its contents are not original, but portions from the Hebrew translation of two of the three treatises that made up the famous medieval Latin compilation known as Trotula: the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum y the De ornatu mulierum. This article narrates the process of identification, and includes a preliminary study of both the circumstances of its production and its contents. It also offers the edition and Spanish translation.

El Še’ar yašub es un breve tratado, compuesto en la segunda mitad del siglo XIII, dedicado al cuidado de la salud y la belleza femeninas. La mayor parte de sus contenidos no son, sin embargo, originales, sino secciones de la traducción hebrea de dos de los tres tratados que formaron parte del famoso compendio latino medieval conocido como Trotula: el Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum y el De ornatu mulierum. Este artículo incluye la narración del proceso de identificación del tratado, junto con un estudio preliminar sobre las circunstancias de su producción y sobre sus contenidos. Ofrece también su edición y traducción al castellano.

In this collection of seven major essays (one of them published here for the first time), Monica Green argues that a history of women's healthcare in medieval western Europe has not yet been written because it cannot yet be written - the vast majority of texts relating to women's healthcare have never been edited or studied. Using the insights of women's history and gender studies, Green shows how historians need to peel off the layers of unfounded assumption and stereotype that have characterized the little work that has been done on medieval women's healthcare. Seen in their original contexts, medieval gynecological texts raise questions of women's activity as healthcare providers and recipients, as well as questions of how the sexual division of labor, literacy, and professionalization functioned in the production and use of medical knowledge on the female body. An appendix lists all known medieval gynecological texts in Latin and the western European vernacular languages.

Contents:
Introduction

Section I: Historical questions and methodologies:
Women's medical practice and health care in medieval Europe [I]
Documenting medieval women's medical practice [II]

Section II: Identifying the texts:
The De genecia attributed to Constantine the African [III]
Obstetrical and gynecological texts in Middle English [IV]
The development of the Trotula [V]

Section III: Exploring the contexts:
'Traittié tout de mençonges': the Secrés des dames, 'Trotula', and attitudes towards women's medicine in 14th- and early 15th-century France [VI]
The possibilities of literacy and the limits of reading: women and the gendering of medical literacy [VII]

Appendix: Medieval gynecological literature: a handlist
Bibliography
Indices

This paper was published in 2011 as part of a Festschrift for the British scholar, Henrietta Leyser. It surveys the corpus of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and early Middle English texts on women's medicine in England up through the 14th century.

Feel free to contact me via email to request a copy of the paper: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

The Wife of Bath’s famous erudition, resistance to authority, and unapologetic sexuality all come together in one of Chaucer’s epithets for her private parts. Bele
chose (beautiful thing) occurs only three times: in Chaucer’s prologue to the Wife of
Bath’s Tale, in a Middle English translation of a Latin medical text, and—the present
paper argues—in the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer uses the term as a deliberate repudiation of pudendum (shameful thing), a term that he does not use but which was
undoubtedly known to him through several classical and medieval sources. A survey of
all Chaucer’s euphemisms for private parts in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue contextualizes
the discussion

This essay was my first attempt to work systematically through the puzzling question of why, in the later Middle Ages, gynecological literature—and gynecological authorities—came to be seen as sources for misogynous views on women. I took as my theme the question of why the great Italian-French defender of women, Christine de Pizan (d. ca. 1430), had never mentioned the alleged female author “Trotula,” despite her evident fame among medical specialists at the time. (The fact that Christine’s own father had been a physician made this lacuna particularly puzzling.) But Christine does mention explicitly another treatise that actually overlapped with the Trotula in its later medieval circulation, and was at times even confused with it: the Secreta mulierum/Secres des dames. Christine’s opinion of this work is unambiguous: it is a traittié tout de mençonges, “a treatise composed of lies.” I argue here that Christine knew of the particularly peculiar French version of this text, and that, in condemning it, she was accurately reflecting the misogynous connotations that had indeed come to accrue around gynecological literature in this period. Yet I also point out that in simply condemning this text without critically assessing why texts on women’s bodies should be so perversely misused, “Christine foreclosed an opportunity to shift the debate about the female body in a new direction. Nowhere does this physician’s daughter draw on any natural philosophical (what we would call ‘scientific’) or medical arguments to claim the similar character of the male and female body, to assert the awesome generative properties of the womb, to plead, as the author of a contemporary English gynecological text did, that the alleged ‘defects’ of living women’s bodies are no different from those of women ‘who now are saints in heaven’.”
The essay gives the first extensive description in English of the French Secrés des dames and examines other aspects of Christine de Pizan’s possible views on Aristotle’s authority and other aspects of natural-philosophical traditions. I also survey in detail the circulation and reputation of the Trotula texts in France, including evidence for Christine’s possible access to copies of the Trotula (or mentioning the authoress “Trotula”) at the royal library. Particularly, by going through the actual codicological context of both the Trotula manuscripts and those of the Secrés des dames, I show that in some instances the two texts were virtually interchangeable. Of the eight known copies of the Secrés des dames, for example, seven were found with surgical manuals. The equivalency becomes so extreme, in fact, that the Trotula takes on the title “Secrets of Women.”
I then turn to assessing the ways in which the female figure “Trotula” may have been seen as a parallel to Heloise—both being defined by the intimate association between their sexuality and their learning (and both, I point out, linked together by Christine’s contemporary, Chaucer). My assessment: “Christine’s silence on ‘Trotula’ and the Trotula may, therefore, not be a matter of ignorance at all, but a deliberate silencing of a female authority who, like Heloise, represented a kind of learning about women that Christine could not condone.”
For further discussion of this phenomenon as it applies to western Europe more broadly, see the end of Chapter 4 and all of Chapter 5 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Also, note that the image of “Trotula” reproduced here in a quite defective black-and-white image can be found now, in full color, at this link: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trotula_of_Salerno_Miscellanea_medica_XVIII_Early_14th_Century.jpg.

Notice: this study must now be SUPPLEMENTED by revised descriptions and categorizations of the Trotula and Gilbertus Anglicus texts as found in the following studies (and references cited therein):

• on the Middle English Trotula tradition, see the revised descriptions and categorizations of the five different translations in: Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts.  Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings,” Scriptorium 51 (1997), 80-104
• on the Middle English Gilbertus Anglicus tradition, see the revised descriptions and categorizations of the two different versions of the Sickness of Women in: Monica H. Green and Linne R. Mooney, “The Sickness of Women”, in Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 455-568.  This is a complete re-edition of and commentary on Version 2 of the Sickness of Women.

This study surveys all the Middle English texts on women’s medicine that were known to me in the early 1990s. Included here are five different translations of the Trotula texts; two different versions (the original and a later, mid-15th-century rearrangement and elaboration) of the ob/gyn section of an anonymous translation of Gilbertus Anglicus’ Compendium medicine; and several miscellaneous texts, including recipe collections, a still-unedited text in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 483 (SC 2062) that combines ob/gyn and andrology, and a translation of some Latin excerpts from Muscio’s Gynaecia known as “The Nature of Wommen.” A transcription of the latter text is included.

"Il volume riunisce i contributi presentati al convegno svoltosi ad Ariano Irpino nei giorni 5-7 ottobre 2008, ospite del Centro Europeo di Studi Normanni, i quali dimostrano che per la storia del rapporto tra terapie e guarigioni il mondo normanno-svevo ha svolto un ruolo di primaria importanza.
Ad esempio, i trattati della tradizione salernitana hanno dato largo spazio alle ricette mediche nei trattati o al rapporto tra animali e terapia. Gli ambienti salernitani prima del 1200 sembrano invece dedicare poco spazio al veleno. Alcuni testi medici salernitani hanno conservato l’idea che la musica potesse avere un valore terapeutico. Anche la biblioterapia fu considerata come utile strumento terapeutico. Ildegarda di Bingen mostra un’attenzione per le malattie femminili che riconduce alla Scuola salernitana o a fonti comuni ad entrambe. La tradizione salernitana sembra invece accordare poco interesse all’uso terapeutico dei veleni.
Alcuni contributi si soffermano su Federico II di Svevia, un sovrano che ha riservato un’attenzione particolare all’ordinamento degli studi medici e più in generale alla medicina. L’età sveva si rivela importante anche perchè problematiche mediche entrano preponentemente nelle fonti letterarie e cronachistiche.
Come ricordano alcuni contributi presenti in questo volume, nel Medio Evo, la storia del rapporto tra terapie e guarigioni nel Medio Evo non è stato affatto lineare, incontrando profondi contrasti: la medicina medievale riteneva infatti che l’ars medica non può mutare la natura e il monachesimo occidentale aveva posto tra i grandi compiti della vita monastica il dovere della caritas, per cui la cura del malato doveva perseguire anzitutto obiettivi spirituali. D’altra parte, a sanare il paziente poteva concorrere anche l’incubazione, che poteva seguire modelli classici, come dimostra l’agiografia napoletana del IX-X secolo.
"

This innovative course attempted to answer the following question:  with the Digital Revolution making so much of medieval material culture newly available online, was there a way to reinvent undergraduate pedagogy to allow students direct access to unedited medieval texts and all the cultural knowledge they contained?  We chose a hitherto unedited text on fertility and childbirth, Pierre Andrieu's *Pomum aureum* (The Golden Apple, 1444), which had been written for the Count of Foix, and designed a course around it that explored the History of the Book (codicology, paleography) and the history of reproductive medicine.  Our aim was not simply to start work on editing the text, but also to raise the myriad historical questions that needed to be asked about the investments that hereditary monarchs and nobles had to make in their personal reproductive success.  We wrote a five-part blog to summarize our efforts, as follows:
Royal Mothers, Part I: A Text Comes To Life, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/06/24/royal-mothers-part-1-a-text-comes-to-life/
Royal Mothers, Part II: Down the Rabbit Hole We Went, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/06/30/royal-mothers-part-ii-down-the-rabbit-hole-we-went/
Royal Mothers, Part III: A ‘Pregnant’ Text, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/07/24/177/
Royal Mothers, Part IV: What On Earth Did Pierre André Mean?, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/08/15/royal-mothers-part-iv-what-on-earth-did-pierre-andre-mean/
Royal Mothers, Part V: Looking Ahead While Celebrating a Royal Birth, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/08/19/royal-mothers-part-v-looking-ahead-while-celebrating-a-royal-birth/

Muscio’s Gynecology was a work on women’s medicine written in North Africa probably some time in the fifth or sixth century.  Why it came to play such an important role in the development of gynecology and obstetrics in England is a function of many lines of development that the text underwent between the 11th and 15th centuries.  At the end of the Middle Ages, the text existed in many different forms in England:  full text, abbreviated text, text with images, images extracted from text.  Although there is no evidence that the text ever circulated in French, it was available in both Latin and English versions.  It was hardly a “static” text.  Instead, it was repeatedly manipulated to allow it to better serve the interests that both clerics and medical practitioners developed in women’s medicine and childbirth in the later Middle Ages. 

I argue specifically that the particular function of Muscio’s Gynecology and its derivative texts was that it provided obstetrical knowledge not otherwise available in the more widely circulating Trotula texts.  Although obstetrical information was also available in al-Zahrawi’s (Albucasis’s) Surgery and in Guy de Chauliac’s Surgery, in neither case were those sections extracted for special circulation. Rather, it was the Muscian texts that were turned to repeatedly for obstetrical instructions, in part, I argue, because the fetal images that sometimes accompanied the text gave the material a particular guarantee of importance.  Particularly, I argue that incorporation of obstetrics was important to practicing surgeons (likely male), who give increasing evidence of involvement in obstetrical interventions.

in La civiltà del vino. Fonti, temi e produzioni vitivinicole dal medioevo al Novecento. Atti del Convegno (Monticelli Brusati - Antica Fratta, 5-6 ottobre 2001), a cura di Gabriele ARCHETTI, con la collaborazione di Angelo BARONIO, Roberto BELLINI, Pierluigi VILLA, Brescia, Centro culturale artistico di Franciacorta e del Sebino, 2003 (Atti delle Biennali di Franciacorta, 7), pp. 675-712

The Wellcome Library (www.wellcomelibrary.org) is one of the foremost research libraries in the world for the History of Medicine. It holds a number of medieval copies of the Trotula treatises (in Latin, German, Hebrew, and Italian). This blog summarizes some of the ways that the insights of feminist history helped unravel key questions about the history of the Trotula treatises, including authorship, medieval audiences, and the larger questions of how medical care was delivered to women in the past. The blog includes a complete list of copies of the Trotula at the Wellcome Library, including LINKS to those copies that have already been digitized.

This blogpost recounts the transformation in understanding of a learned medieval woman, Trota of Salerno, whose history had been buried for centuries under a complicated and sometimes confused textual tradition associated with the *Trotula* texts on women's medicine. A Twitter poll in the Fall of 2019 offered the opportunity to reflect on the processes by which women's histories are retrieved. The original blogpost can be found at this link: https://nursingclio.org/2019/11/05/when-third-place-is-a-win/.

In response to a query about glossaries of medieval medical terminology, I'm posting the typescript to the *Index verborum* from my 2001 edition of the *Trotula* texts (Monica H. Green, The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ISBN 978-0-8122-3589-0). Feel free to send queries to me at monica.green@asu.edu.

Citation: Monica H. Green, “Trota of Salerno (and the Trotula),” Dictionary of Medical Biography, ed. William F. Bynum and Helen Bynum, 5 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), vol. 5, pp. 1235-1237.

This is a short summary that laid out what was known at the time about the historic Salernitan medical practitioner Trota, explaining her oblique relationship to the so-called 'Trotula' treatises that took on a diminutive form of her name as a title.  For fuller details on Trota, see these later studies:  “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 183-233; and chapter 1 of her book, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Also, my periodically updated "cheat sheet", "Who/What is 'Trotula'?", has the key details and bibliography.

If you would like a copy of this 2006 encyclopedia entry for reference purposes, please feel free to write me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar un aspecto muy atractivo desde el punto de vista de la creación literaria: la versificación de una materia de carácter científico como es la medicina. Para ello, prestaremos atención a un poema médico medieval latino publicado en la ‘Collectio Salernitana’ bajo el título: ‘De secretis mulierum, de chirurgia et de modo medendi libri septem'.

1-Orta Çağ Avrupası'nda kadına karşı olumsuz bir tutum olduğunu biliyoruz peki kadın anatomisine bakış nasıldı hocam, dinin etkisi burada da var mıydı? Evet, kesinlikle vardı hatta neredeyse tamamen teolojik temelli değerlendiriliyordu. Çağın başlangıcında konuyla ilgili anlatıların çoğu kilise babalarının metinlerinden alınıyordu, Yunan ve Roma etkisi şüphesiz vardı ama bu etkiyi dinin öğretileriyle harmanlayıp sunuyorlardı. Orta Çağ Avrupası'nda kadın anatomisi deyince dikkate alınan tek şey kadının asli görevi olan üreme idi. Onunla ilgili her şey üremeye yönelikti. Genel olarak bakıldığında kadın iç organları ve özellikle de üreme organları tarafından yönetilen bir varlık olarak görülüyordu. Temel üreme organı olan rahim vücutta bir aşağı bir yukarı hareket ediyordu ve bu hareketlilik kadınların psikolojik durumunu çok etkiliyordu. Histeri denilen duygu durum bozukluğunun sebebi de bu idi ve rahim yerine oturduğunda sonlanıyordu. Bunun için tütsüler kullanmak yaygındı. Çağın tamamına hâkim olan kadın düşmanlığı, kadın anatomisinin doğru anlaşılmasına da engel oluyordu. Kadının bir erkeğe ihtiyaç duymadan doğurabileceğine inananlar bile vardı. Ayrıca kadın anatomisini açıklamak için hayvanlardan da yararlanıyorlardı. Örneğin domuzların üreme anatomisinin kadınlarınkiyle aynı olduğuna inanılıyordu. 2-O zaman kadın hastalıkları ve doğum/jinekoloji konusunda çok yazmışlardır değil mi? Aslında yazmışlar ama bunlar konuya ilişkin müstakil kitaplar değiller. Genelde her tıp kitabı zor doğum, rahim sarkması ve doğum sonrası ile ilgili birkaç bölüm içeriyordu. Doğum yönetimiyle ilgili ayrıntılı talimatlar ise yalnızca iki metinde vardır. İlki 5-6. yüzyılda Muscio/Moschion tarafından, 2. yüzyılda yaşayan Efesli Doktor Soranus'un Yunanca metninden (Gynaikeia) tercüme dilerek yazılan Gynaecia (MS 1. yüzyıl) idi. İyi bir ebenin özellikleri ve normal doğum hakkında bilgiler içermektedir. İkincisi Ebul Kasım El-Zehravi tarafından 10. yüzyılda yazılan bir metindir. Fetüsün hatalı görünümlerini, ölü fetüsü çıkarmayı ve doğum sonrasını ele almaktadır. Bu iki metin Geç Orta Çağ'da cerrahlar arasında kullanılmıştır. Salernolu hekimlerden ya da ebelerden biri olan Trota'nın Kadınların Tedavileri adlı eseri hariç bilinen tüm Orta Çağ jinekolojik metinleri-ki bunlar 150'den fazladır-kesin olarak ya da büyük ihtimalle erkek yazarlara aittir. Sayısız tıp eseri de jinekolojiye değinmektedir. Çoğu, erkekler tarafından okunup kullanılmıştır. Yazılanlara örnek vermem gerekirse ilk dönemlerde rahmin çift boynuzlu bir organ olduğuna inanılıyordu. Arapça metinlerde daha akla yakın ifadeler vardı. Rahmin mesaneye benzediği, cenin geliştikçe genişlemesi için lifli kaslardan oluştuğu ve cenini tutmak için içinin tüylü olduğu bunlardan bazılarıydı.

From the early Latin Middle Ages, we have medical works by the two important women authors, both from the twelfth century: Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Trota of Salerno (fl. first half of the twelfth century). Hildegard’s medical oeuvre did not circulate beyond the boundaries of the Rhineland, but the name of the woman healer from Salerno, soon transformed into Trotula —‘little Trota’— became a Europe-wide symbol of women’s medicine.
This article presents, firstly, a summary of current scholarship on Trota of Salerno and her influence on medieval culture. Her authority
as Trotula is deconstructed, as the figure who gives her name to an epo-
nymous Latin compendium of women’s medicine, the Trotula, which includes the De curis mulierum, a work deriving directly from her me-
dical expertise. Such was the fame both in Latin and the vernacular of this compendium that Trotula came to denominate a genre of medical texts on treatments for women, thematically but not textually related to the original compendium. An explanation is provided as to how the
figure of Trotula was disseminated through several texts in which she is cited as an authority on women’s medicine.
There then follows the presentation of a corpus of manuscript witnesses in Catalan from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which reflect the dissemination of this female symbol of authority. News is provided for the first time of a Catalan Tròtula copied in a fifteenth-century medical miscellany, currently held in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. It is a fragmentary translation of the De curis mulierum which the anonymous copyist of the Florentine manuscript —probably a surgeon— collates with an old Latin version, highlighting the differences. The age of the Latin originals explains why the Catalan tradition retains Trota’s original name and high esteem, a unique occurrence in the vernacular traditions of the Trotula.
Other important ways in which Trotula’s authority was disseminated are also documented: firstly, through the explicit quotations in the chapters on gynaecological treatments from one of the mid-fourteenth-century Catalan versions of the Thesaurus pauperum attributed to Petrus Hispanus; and secondly, through texts entitled Tròtula that circulated in
250 ABSTRACTS
the Crown of Aragon, even though it is not always known which treatises were included under this title or in which languages they were written. An inventory of the books belonging to a Barcelona apothecary from 1428 lists a book in Catalan with the title Tròtule de Grècia: although this is clearly a vernacular text, the transcription of the short fragments of the incipit and explicit are not sufficient to determine which text the volume contained. Finally, the Tròtula by Mestre Joan is described. This is a Catalan medical compendium of women’s medicine from the third quarter of the fourteenth century preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, which includes a wide range of health and beauty treatments for women. This text is preceded by an Occitan ‘salut d’amor’, in noves rimades metre, addressed to an Aragonese princess (an edition is included in the article). Extant documentation shows that in the fifteenth century this Catalan Tròtula was disseminated beyond the royal court, amongst surgeons and barber-surgeons. We conclude that the Catalan tradition is rich in witnesses that illustrate how medieval culture constructed a female medical authority around the figure of Trota, the woman healer from Salerno, for whom we only have a sketchy biography. Transformed into Trotula and Tròtula, she came to lend her authority to knowledge about medical treatments for women.