Trotula
Trotula is a name referring to a group of three texts on women's medicine that were composed in the southern Italian port town of Salerno in the 12th century.
[1] In the 12th century, the southern Italian port town of Salerno was widely reputed as "the most important center for the introduction of Arabic medicine into Western Europe".
They cover topics from childbirth to cosmetics, relying on varying sources from Galen to oral traditions, providing practical instructions.
[4] The Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum ("Book on the Conditions of Women") was novel in its adoption of the new Arabic medicine that had just begun to make inroads into Europe.
As Green demonstrated in 1996, Conditions of Women draws heavily on the gynecological and obstetrical chapters of the Viaticum, Constantine the African's Latin translation of Ibn al-Jazzar's Arabic Zad al-musafir, which had been completed in the late 11th century.
Indeed, the author presents a positive view of the role of menstruation in women's health and fertility: "Menstrual blood is special because it carries in it a living being.
"[7] Another condition that the author addresses at length is suffocation of the womb; this results from, among other causes, an excess of female semen (another Galenic idea).
[9] All the named authorities cited in the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum are male: Hippocrates, Oribasius, Dioscorides, Paulus, and Justinus.
One therapy that he claims to have personally witnessed, was created by a Sicilian woman, and he added another remedy on the same topic (mouth odor) which he himself endorses.
[18] Already by the late 12th century, however, one or more anonymous editors recognized the inherent relatedness of the three independent Salernitan texts on women's medicine and cosmetics, and so brought them together into a single ensemble.
This fragmentary translation of the De curis mulierum is here collated by the copyist (probably a surgeon making a copy for his own use) with a Latin version of the text, highlighting the differences.
[32] Alongside "her" role as a medical authority, "Trotula" came to serve a new function starting in the 13th century: that of a mouthpiece for misogynous views on the nature of women.
[33] A text called Placides and Timeus attributed to "Trotula" a special authority both because of what she "felt in herself, since she was a woman", and because "all women revealed their inner thoughts more readily to her than to any man and told her their natures.
As Green has noted, "The irony of Kraut's attempt to endow 'Trotula' with a single, orderly, fully rationalized text was that, in the process, he was to obscure for the next 400 years the distinctive contributions of the historic woman Trota.
When the text was next printed, in 1547 (all subsequent printings of the Trotula would recycle Kraut's edition), it appeared in a collection called Medici antiqui omnes qui latinis litteris diversorum morborum genera & remedia persecuti sunt, undique conquisiti ("[The Writings of] All Ancient Latin Physicians Who Described and Collected the Types and Remedies of Various Diseases").
Wolf emended the author's name from "Trotula" to Eros, a freed male slave of the Roman empress Julia: "The book of women’s matters of Eros, physician [and] freedman of Julia, whom some have absurdly named ‘Trotula’" (Erotis medici liberti Iuliae, quem aliqui Trotulam inepte nominant, muliebrium liber).
The idea came from Hadrianus Junius (Aadrian DeJonghe, 1511–75), a Dutch physician who believed that textual corruptions accounted for many false attributions of ancient texts.
"[41] Green has suggested that this fiction (Salerno had no university in the 12th century, so there were no professorial chairs for men or women) may have been due to the fact that three years earlier, "Elena Cornaro received a doctorate in philosophy at Padua, the first formal Ph.D. ever awarded to a woman.
Mazza, concerned to document the glorious history of his patria, Salerno, may have been attempting to show that Padua could not claim priority in having produced female professors.
[43] The inclusion of "Trotula" as an invited guest at Judy Chicago's feminist art installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79), insured that the debate would continue.
After Benton's death in 1988, Monica H. Green picked up the task of publishing a new translation of the Trotula that could be used by students and scholars of the history of medicine and medieval women.
"[49] The depiction here (based on publications prior to Benton's discovery of Trota of Salerno in 1985) presents a conflation of alleged biographical details that are no longer accepted by scholars.
Chicago's celebration of "Trotula" no doubt led to the proliferation of modern websites that mention her, many of which repeat without correction the discarded misunderstandings noted above.
[50] A clinic in Vienna and a street in modern Salerno and even a corona on the planet Venus have been named after "Trotula," all mistakenly perpetuating fictions about "her" derived from popularizing works like that of Chicago.
That it is taking even longer for popular understandings of Trota and "Trotula" to catch up with this scholarship, has raised the question whether celebrations of Women's History ought not include more recognition of the processes by which that record is discovered and assembled.
[52] Since Green's edition of the standardized Trotula ensemble appeared in 2001, many libraries have been making high-quality digital images available of their medieval manuscripts.
129v–134r (s. xv ex., probably Flanders): proto-ensemble (extracts), http://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1964315?lang=eng Lat49: London, Wellcome Library, MS 544, Miscellanea Medica XVIII, pp.
176r-189r (s. xiii ex., England): proto-ensemble (LSM only); DOM (fragment), http://digital-collections.pmb.ox.ac.uk/ms-21 Archived 2015-12-16 at the Wayback Machine Lat87: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat.
77rb-86va; 97rb-100ra (s. xiii med., England or N. France): transitional ensemble (Group B); TEM (Urtext of LSM), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9076918w Lat113: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal.
in Hunt 2011 (cited above), [1][permanent dead link] (see also Fren3 below) Fren2IIa: Kassel, Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt und Landesbibliothek, 4° MS med.
