Trota of Salerno

A Latin text that gathered some of her therapies (and recounted a cure she had performed) was incorporated into an ensemble of treatises on women's medicine that came to be known as the Trotula, "the little book [called] 'Trotula'".

These misconceptions about the author of Trotula contributed to the erasure or modification of her name, gender, level of education, medical knowledge, or the time period in which the texts were written; this trend often resulted from the biases of later scholars.

[3] Debates about whether "Trotula" really existed began in the 16th century, generated in part out of the inherent inconsistencies in the assembled work that circulated under "her" name.

Additionally, a comprehensive concordance of all textual witnesses to Trota's writings and practices, published in 2007, allows an estimation of the full scope of her work.

In her practical book of medicine, Practica Secundum Trotum, she dedicated about three quarters of the text to ailments that are not specific to women, such as internal diseases, fevers, and wounds.

Trota's writings included radical ideas that were not common in that time, claiming that both men and women were responsible for failure in conception.

[11] Trota is also the authoritative figure behind one of three texts in the so-called Trotula ensemble, a compendium of works on women's medicine brought together later in the 12th century.

The Latin word for "master" here is in the feminine form, magistra, the most compelling sign that Trota had a social stature comparable to that of male magistri.

Green posits that the text seems to capture the collective practices of one group of female practitioners, setting down their cures for another group of readers (or auditors) who will have the same unfettered access to the bodies of their female patients: "it appears to have been written down to provide a more permanent and concrete mechanism for the transmission of knowledge from woman to woman than the oral forms that had traditionally served the needs of Salernitan women.... [T]he text posits a community of female readers who would be able to rely on this text for instruction..."[14] Women's literacy is not well documented in southern Italy in this period, which raises the question of why the De curis mulierum was written down in the first place.

[16] In fact, the manuscript where we find the earliest copy of the original version of the De curis mulierum—Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 79, from the early 13th century—seems to have been written both in Italy and in England.

A thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman cosmetic text, Ornatus mulierum (On the Adornment of Women), refers to "Dame Trote" twelve times.

[20] As Green has suggested, Trota's international esteem may itself have led to the creation of Treatments for Women, which, as noted above, shows signs of having been assembled by an English-speaking visitor to Salerno.

Trota's status as a medical author is most strikingly documented by a work found uniquely in a late 12th-century manuscript, the Codex Salernitanus, that was held in the city library of the Polish town of Wrocław (Breslau).

Wrocław, Stadtbibliothek, MS 1302, was destroyed in bombing during World War II, but major portions of it had been published in the previous century.

The Trotula works fell into the hands of Georg Kraut in 1544, who rearranged the three component texts to appear as though it was authored by a single person.

[5] This falsely accredited the text to a man and placed it in the ancient period, contributing to the erasure of a woman author in the Middle Ages.

[5] Often, the time period, gender, author attribution, and/or Trota's believed level of education are downplayed, upgraded, or dismissed based on the bias of the scholar or the purpose of their research.

Although Trota is not frequently connected to Hildegard of Bingen, another female author and practitioner of medicine in the 12th century, in academic writing, Green draws parallels between their lives and the future of their texts.

Later, specifically the Renaissance and the modern period, their works were studied by historians, philologists, and physicians, who often questioned the legitimacy of or contributed to the erasure of their authorship or medical knowledge.

[23] In the early 20th century, the Leipzig historian of medicine, Karl Sudhoff, had a stream of medical students edit (or re-edit) different texts from the Codex Salernitanus.

[24] This erasure of the female author Trota was not questioned until 1985, when John F. Benton, a historian at the California Institute of Technology, discovered the Practica secundum Trotam, the text in the manuscript in Madrid.

What Benton did not realize was that the Practica secundum Trotam also had multiple overlaps with the second of the three Trotula texts, the De curis mulierum (On Treatments for Women).

"[27] Indeed, Green sees the story of Trota as emblematic of the marginal status of women in the changing spheres of intellectual life in Europe in the 12th century, when universities were first taking hold.