DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125

TROTULA, WONEN'S PROBLENS, AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION

OF MEDICINE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

John F. Benton
HUMANITIES WORKING PAPER 98
© John F. B@nton December 1983
Revised November
 ABSTRACT

The professionalization of medicine in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries led to an exclusion of women practitioners from the best paid

and most respected medical positions. Male doctors controlled the

teaching and theory of women's medicine, and their gynecological

literature incorporated male experience, understanding and learning.

The treatises attributed to Trotula, which survive in nearly 100

manuscripts, were the most popular texts used by academic physicians in

the later Middle Ages.

Although Georg Kraut's Strassburg edition of 1544 treats the

treatises of "Trotula" as a single, unified work, three separate texts

circulated in the Middle Ages, and on stylistic and other grounds it is

likely that each was written by a different author. Reasonably solid

evidence demonstrates the existence of a woman physician at Salerno

named Trota or Trotula, but she was not a magistra (as is often

asserted), and it seems that she did not write even one of the three

texts attributed to her. Instead, she produced a Practica from which

extracts appear in a Practica secundum Trotam, which survives as a

single mansucript in Madrid, and in De aegritudinum curatione in the

Wrociaw (Breslau) ~ Salernitanus.

This paper is to be published by the Bulletin of the History of

Medicine in 1985.
 TROTULA~ WOMEN'S PROBLEMS~ AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF MEDICINE

IN THE MIDDLE AGES

John F. Benton

In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the practice

of medicine in the Christian West moved from a skill to a profession~

with academic training based on authoritative learned literature~ with

degrees and licenses~ and with sanctions against those who practiced

medicine without a license. Traditional folk remedies continued to be

used, of course, and the actual delivery of babies was exclusively the

domain of midwives and female attendants~ but increasingly the health-

care of well-to-do women was supervised by academically trained

physicians. The universities did not, of course, produce enough

graduates to fill the medical marketplace, but medical schools

nevertheless provided the standards and the concepts which determined

the nature of professional practice. Since they were excluded from

university education, women were thereby barred from the formal study

of medicine and from professorial positions, as well as from the most

lucrative medical practice. There were, naturally enough, regional

variations in this development, and these generalizations apply more

completely in northern Europe than in the south, particularly southern

Italy and Spain.

 2 - Benton

Once universities had been granted a role in medical licensing,

female practitioners could easily be prosecuted as charlatans, and

though women provided most of the direct, bedside care of other women,

it was to male physicians that wealthy couples turned for consultation

on such matters as sterility or care during pregnancy. The theoretical

understanding and scientific investigation of women's medicine was

therefore a near monopoly of men. Overwhelmingly, the gynecological

literature of medieval Europe was written for a male medical audience

and was a product of the way men understood women's bodies, functions,

illnesses, needs and desires. For those women who could afford

professional medical care, the most fundamental questions of their

health and illness were defined by men. 1

The process I have just described as occurring in the Middle Ages

was repeated in the United States with remarkable consistency in the

early twentieth century, as the country altered its rural and frontier

medical practices and incorporated its new bDmigrants. At the

beginning of the century the ratio of physicians to total population

was three times what it is now, and many physicians were products of

unaccredited medical schools. Midwives delivered approximately half

the babies born in the early years of the century, and women were

extensively involved in non-professional health-care for their families

and neighbors. Women were excluded from many medical schools and were

discriminated against in others, so that in 1900 only 5 percent of the

students in regular medical schools were women, though 17 percent of

those in homeopathic schools were female.

 3 - Benton

In the light of these facts, it can be seen that the early

twentieth-century campaigns against midwives and for "regular"

professional medicine practiced by licensed medical school graduates

worked against any significant role for women in medicine except

nursing, and even obstetrics and gynecology became overwhelmingly male

domains. Today, while the percentage of women students in medical

school is now approaching 30 percent, still only 12 percent of board-

certified gynecologists and obstetricians are women. In the United

States as elsewhere the professionalization of medicine has meant that

the scientific investigation and treatment of women's bodies has been

largely in the hands of men. 2

I have cited this modern experience not simply as an example of a

"structural regularity in history" but because it is difficult to

understand much of the secondary literature on the legendary figure of

Trotula without appreciating the social context in which historians

have written about women in medicine.

Two questions have long dominated discussions about Trotula: did a

medieval female physician named Trota or Trotula really exist, and if

so, did she write the widely distributed gynecological treatises

attributed to her? In this paper I hope not only to answer, but to go

beyond, these long-standing questions. If a re-examination is now

appropriate, it is in good part because the intellectual and social

climate has been changed by notable women like those with whom I am

about to differ.

The modern history of Trotu1a was shaped by Kate Campbell Hurd-

 4 - Benton

Mead, who took her medical degree at the Women's Medical College of

Pennsylvania in 1888. A gynecologist and president of the American

Medical Women's Association, she published an article on "Trotula" in

Isis in 1930 and devoted a major chapter to her in A History of Women

in Medicine from the Earliest Times I I the Beginning of the Nineteenth

Century, which she published in 1938. Dr. Mead made a founding heroine

of Trotula, whom she called "the most noted woman doctor of the Middle

Ages": "To any woman doctor of the twentieth century • • • there would

seem to be no good reason for denying that a book having such

decidedly feminine touches as Trotula's was written by a woman. It

bears the gentle hand of a woman doctor on every page.,,3

Dr. Mead's work inspired Elisabeth Mason-Hohl, a Los Angeles

surgeon, who in 1940 delivered her presidential address to the American

Medical Women's Association on "Trotula: Eleventh-Century Gynecologist"

and in the same year published a translation into English of most of

the work attributed to her. 4 With such eminent sponsorship as this,

there is little wonder that Trotula is one of the honored guests in

Judy Chicago's feminist work of art, The Dinner Party.

In the later Middle Ages the most popular treatises on the

diseases, medical problems and cosmetics of women were attributed to an

author generally known as Trotula. Commonly two treatises were

distinguished, known as the Greater Trotula or Trotula major and the

Lesser Trotula or Trotula minor, but the situation is more complex than

that, for three different units were presented under these names. One

tract, beginning Cum~, is concerned exclusively with medical

 5 - Benton

matters and is often called Trotu1a major. The authorities cited in

this work include Galen, Hippocrates, Oribasius, Dioscorides, Paulus,

and "Justinus.,,5 A second tract, beginning Ut de curis, is largely

concerned with medicine, though it includes a good deal of cosmetic

information too. It repeats a number of topics treated in Cum auctor

and cites no ancient authorities, but refers to Copho of Salerno,

Magister Ferrarius (the name of a family of physicians at Salerno in

the twelfth century), the women of Salerno, and Trota or Trotu1a

herself. Both treatises deal predominantly, but not exclusively, with

medical matters concerning women. A third tract, called De ornatu,

deals almost exclusively with cosmetics, beauty aids, dentifrices,

depilatories, body odor and so on; it cites no authorities except

unnamed "women of Salerno" or "Saracen women." Ut de curis and De

~ are often lumped together in the manuscripts as Trotu1a minor.

Other manuscripts present all three tracts together as a single,

undifferentiated work, and manuscripts of this type appear as early as

the second quarter of the thirteenth century.6

The contents of these treatises shows that all three were either

written at Salerno, the most important center for the introduction of

Arabic medicine (and therefore Ga1enism) into Western Europe, or under

the influence of Sa1ernitan masters. A survey of the existing

manuscripts suggests two further things about their origins. In the

first place, no manuscript of any of these texts has been discovered

which can be dated much before 1200, a fact which speaks strongly

though not conclusively against composition before the latter part of

 6 - Benton

the twelfth century. Secondly, in some of the earliest manuscripts the

three tracts appear separately from each other, and commonly

anonymously, indicating that they were not thought to have a common

author, or even any identifiable author.

In one of the two earliest manuscripts of any of these texts I

have studied, which on paleographic grounds may be attributed to the

early thirteenth century (or possibly the very end of the twelfth

century), Cum auctor appears with De ornatu but without Ut de curis.

This manuscript, from southern France, is headed Liber de sinthomatibus

mu1ierum and does not mention Trotu1a in either its text or rubrics. 7

Another manuscript of approximately the same date contains Ut de curis

without the other two texts; this is the earliest manuscript of these

texts I have seen which contains the name of Trotu1a in its rubrics. 8

In a manuscript of the second quarter of the thirteenth century which

once belonged to Richard de Fourniva1, Ut de curis is followed directly

by De ornatu, creating the usual form of Trotu1a minor, but Cum auctor

does not appear at a11. 9 In some ten manuscripts De ornatu appears

without the other two treatises. The origins of these three texts are

to be found in the separateness of their manuscript histories, not in

their eventual unity.

Stylistically Cum ~ differs so markedly from Ut de curis that

I conclude they had different authors. For instance, in Ut de curis

twenty-five sentences begin with the word Sunt (Sunt guedam mu1ieres.

Sunt guedam. Sunt et a1ie, etc.), while in Cum auctor no sentence uses

this construction. The third treatise, De ornatu, begins with a

 7 - Benton

preface, Ut ait Ypocras, followed by the main text, Ut mulier levissima

et planissima. While the first two tracts always use the first-person

plural, this treatise occasionally uses the first-person singular and

in its original form addresses a female audience directly; it seems to

me clear that it was written by a different author from either of the

first two. This author, in fact, refers to himself as a man. The

introduction which normally begins De ornatu when it appears with other

texts is an abbreviated variant of the prologue to the independent

treatise which survives in a mid-thirteenth century manuscript from

southern France as well as in later manuscripts. In this prologue the

author or compiler refers to himself in the masculine gender, quotes

Persius, and says he is publishing his work because women have many

times asked him for advice on beauty aids. The rubric of one

fifteenth-century manuscript identifies the author as "Ricardus medicus

expertus," perhaps meaning Ricardus Anglicus, sometimes known as

Richard of Salerno. 10 The edited prologue follows in an appendix.

Most manuscripts of the three tracts make no distinction of

authorship. In their rubrics the scribes commonly attribute the texts

to "Trotula" or "Trota," treat the author as a woman, and sometimes

identify her as a "healer from Salerno" (sanatrix Salernitana) or

something of the sort. Such information shows us what scribes believed

to be the case, but rubrics are a notoriously poor source of

biographical information. In the sixteenth century the situation

became even more muddled, for the editor of the editio princeps, Gebrg

Kraut, created a single work from the three medieval treatises at his
 8 - Benton

disposal, rearranging material from Cum A!!£!Q!., Ut de curis and De

Ornatu under chapter headings he thought appropriate. ll Practically

all of the material which appears in the manuscripts is in the printed

text, but in an arrangement of Kraut's creation. He thereby

obliterated the stylistic distinctions in the material and for

centuries confused readers, who thought they were reading a unified

work by a single author. All later editions followed or indeed pirated

Kraut's edition of 1544, to which he gave the title De passionibus

mulierum or The Diseases of Women.

The Trotula texts were extremely popular in the thirteenth,

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; in fact, separately or together

they became the most widely circulated medical work on gynecology and

women's problems. I am aware of nearly one hundred extant manuscripts

containing one or (usually) more of these three texts, and there are

doubtless others to be found. A Latin verse translation was written in

the thirteenth century, an Irish translation in the fourteenth, and in

the fifteenth century works attributed to Trotula were translated or

rewritten into French (both prose and verse translations), English,

German, Flemish and Catalan. 12 By the end of the thirteenth century

the name of Trotula had become famous. In the Dict de l'Herberie of

Rutebeuf, a medical charlatan making his spiel tells his audience that

he has been sent by "ma dame Trote de Salerne," "the wisest woman in

the whole world."l3 Chaucer put her in distinguished company. as one of

the authors included along with Tertullian, Heloise, Ovid, Chrysippus,

and Solomon in the "book of wikked wyves" from which the Wife of Bath's
 9 - Benton

fifth husband used to read. 14

No one seems to have doubted that the works attributed to Trotula

were written by a woman until 1566, when Hans Kaspar Wolf of Basel in

his edition declared that De passionibus mulierum was the work of Eros

Juliae, a Roman freedman of the first century A.D. 15 This particular

bit of unsupported nonsense was the first salvo in a continuing attack

on Trotula's existence, or at least on her gender. Wolf's position

has been frequently criticized, however, and historians of medicine

have regularly included her in lists of women physicians.

Today the question of Trotula's identity remains a subject of

controversy, with three major positions being championed. The first

and most widely repeated is that Trotula is a well-documented

historical figure who lived in the eleventh century and who is

sometimes cited as a member of the faculty of the medical school of

Salerno or the first woman professor of medicine. According to the

retrospective World Who's Who in Science, she came from the Ruggiero

family of Salerno, was born about 1050, and was married to a physician

named Joannes Platearius. 16 Other authors say that she flourished

around 1050, rather than being born then. Sometimes we are told that

she died in 1097, and Mason-Hohl adds that she was followed to her

grave by a funeral procession two miles long. One could hardly ask for

more precise identification, if in fact these statements are based on

solid evidence.

The second position, advanced by Conrad Hiersemann, a student of

the great German historian of medicine, Karl Sudhoff, is that there was
 10 - Benton

an eleventh or twelfth-century physician and author with a name like

Trotula, but this author was in fact a man named Trottus. This

position is based on a famous manuscript of Salernitan medical texts,

once in Wroc~aw (Breslau) and now apparently destroyed, in which

passages from an otherwise unknown author are identified by

abbreviations such as Tt and most particularly Trot, followed by

abbreviation marks which Hiersemann interpreted as representing the

masculine -Y& ending. 17

The third position, recently brought forward by Professor Beryl

Rowland, is that the name Trotula is not that of a real person but is

related to the French verb trotter, to run about (as in the proverb

besoin fait vieille trotter), and is echoed in the names of Trota-

conventos, the old procuress in the Libro de Buen Amor of Juan Ruiz,

and of the Dame Trot of English nursery rhymes.

The widespread use of the word "Trot" and its associations with

expertise in feminine matters may explain why a number of

manuscripts variously treating of women's diseases came to be

ascribed to her. Although women doctors certainly did exist in

the Middle Ages, there appears to be no firm evidence that Trotula

was one of them. My own findings do not add another

proverbial nail; they tend to deprive her even of her coffin. 18

Here I will argue that there is something wrong with all three of

these positions. First of all, I have to say that the commonly

presented biography of an eleventh-century Trotula is a ~issue of ill-

founded assertions created largely by enthusiastic amateurs and local

 11 - Benton

historians.

With respect to the statement that Trotu1a came from the Ruggiero

family of Salerno, I can find no author who cites a scrap of medieval

evidence. The idea may have been based on the assumption that since

the Ruggiero family was extremely important, Trotula should have come

from it and therefore did. As far as I have been able to determine,

the first person to assert that Trotula was a Ruggiero was Enrico or

Heinrich Baccus, a German printer in Naples in the early seventeenth

century, who wrote a Nuova descrittione del regno di Napoli (Naples,

1629). In his list of the leading people produced by Salerno he

included "Trotta or Trottola di Ruggiero, who wrote a book concerning

the diseases of women (de morbis mulierum) and another on the

composition of medicines (de compositione medicamentorum).,,19 This

unsupported assertion by Baccus probably lies behind a similar

statement made in 1817 by Fr. Nicola Columella Onorati in a

biographical dictionary of illustrious men of the kingdom of Naples.

Columella Onorati needed no more evidence than a hand-written note in

his personal copy of the Diseases of Women which identified the

author as "Trottula of the Roggeri family of Salerno, distinguished

equally for its antiquity and its nobility.,,20 And so it has gone,

with assertions repeated until they became accepted as unquestioned

fact.

As for the idea that Trotula was the mother of Matthaeus

Platearius (supposedly the author of a twelfth-century herbal named

Circa instans), and therefore the wife of Joannes Platearius, this was
 12 - Benton

a conjecture, clearly labeled as such, of that prolific but unreliable

nineteenth-century historian of the medical school of Salerno,

Salvatore De Renzi. De Renzi noted that Circa ins tans (as printed)

refers to the mother of Mattheus and Joannes Platearius as a physician,

and assuming that it was unlikely that there would have been two

distinguished women physicians in Salerno at the same time, concluded

that Trotula and the mother of the Platearius brothers were probably

the same person. That supposition could bear no weight unless it was

buttressed by other evidence (which it has not been), and it would have

no force at all unless it seemed likely that Trotula lived at the same

time as the wife of Joannes Platearius. De Renzi, I should add, did

not consider that Trotula, in his opinion surely author of the "Trot'"

selections in the Wrociaw Codex Salernitanus, was also the author of

the Trotula major and minor. Those works he considered compilations

made by someone about 1200 who used the work of an eleventh-century

physician named Trotula. 21 My point here is not that De Renzi was

wrong or that his statements are inherently improbable, but that his

assertions were not supported by solid evidence. As we shall see, his

conclusion that "Trot'" was a female physician of the period of

Hochsalerno and that the "Trotula" treatises were written around 1200

is probably correct.

And so we come to the third alleged biographical datum, the

assertion that Trotula lived in the eleventh century, in fact, in the

mid-eleventh century. This idea stems from a passage in the

Ecclesiastical History of Ordericus Vitalis, who reports that Ralph

 13 - Benton

Mala-Corona, a worldly cleric and skilled physician, visited Salerno

sometime before 1050 and "found no one there as learned as he in the

art of medicine except a certain learned woman" (sapiens matrona).22

Again, the principle of economy has been applied. How many learned

women can there have been at Salerno? Knowing the name of but one,

historians have assumed without supporting evidence that this sapiens

matrona was Trotula. And once one felt confident, however

unjustifiably, that Trotula lived in the eleventh century, one could

then build on this assumption. De Renzi cited as an example of the

appearance of the name "Trota" in the eleventh century a reference to

an act of 1097 in which Roger (Ruggiero), lord of Castello di Montuori,

made a donation to the monastery of Cava, releasing the usufruct of his

mother Trotta. 23 Mead repeats the reference, adding that Trotta I~ay

have died the same year.,,24 This statement in turn appears to be the

basis for Mason-Hohl's assertion that Trotula died in 1097. For her

colorful detail about the funeral procession two miles long, I can find

no evidence whatsoever.

As for the third position, that there never was a female physician

named Trotula or Trota and that her myth was a response to the semantic

pull of the word trot and in association with the traditional figure of

the Old Whore who appears in Ovid, the Roman de la Rose, etc., this

view seems to me quite unnecessary, since it ignores the evidence for

the existence of an actual person named Trota or Trotula. Let us now

see what we can learn about such a person from reasonably solid

evidence.
 14 - Benton

First of all, the woman's name "Trota" was common in Southern Italy

and specifically in Salerno in the period which interests us. 25

The membership rolls of the confraternity of the cathedral of Salerno

from the eleventh to the thirteenth century contain references to some

seventy women named Trota or Trocta. 26 None of these women, alas, was

named as a physician or as the wife of one, though another woman,

Berdefolia, was identified as a physician or medica. 27 The obituary

rolls also mention a man with the intriguing family name of Trotulus. 28

Trotula as a diminutive means "little Trota," "dear Trota" or even "old

Trota"; moreover, the form could be used in creating a book title, a

point to which we shall return. Given the frequent use of the name

Trota, we should not be surprised to find that the physician who

interests us bore that name, and there is no reason to think that it is

derived from the verb for "trot." In fact, references to Old Trot,

etc. may well receive some of their force from the existence of the

Trotula texts.

What evidence is there for the existence of a woman physician

named Trota or Trotula? The one reasonably solid piece of evidence on

which attention has focused up to now appears in Ut de curis. In the

form of this text given in the two oldest manuscripts known to me, this

treatise tells us how a physician named Trota made her reputation. An

unnamed girl was supposed to be "cut," we are told, because of

misdiagnosed wind or gas in the uterus. "Hence it came about that Trota

was called -- so to speak -- a female master {Unde contingit quod Trota

~ fuit tanquam magistra)"; she took the girl into her home,
 15 - Benton

treated her with a bath in which mallows and pellitory had been cooked

and with a plaster made of radish juice and milled barley, and this

cured her. 29 The same story appears in two manuscripts of the second

and third quarters of the thirteenth century, where the physician is

named "Domina Trotula" and we are told that she was called "quasi

magistra" -- "as if she were a female master." 30

The point of this story is, of course, that a woman effected a

gynecological success not achieved by men. It is evidence of Trota's

reputation, but it also reveals how unusual her situation was.

Magistra, a feminine form of magister, is an unexpected word in a

medical context, perhaps even a neologism, and tanquam calls attention

to its rarity; as one dictionary tells us, tanquam is "used to

introduce the application of a term to something which is not properly

so called.,,31 In other words, a woman was not properly a master, but

Trota's reputation was so great that an unusual term had to be created

to express her situation as a female near-equivalent to men who held

that position.

From this anecdote we may turn back to the now lost Wroctaw codex,

which on paleographic grounds can be dated about 1200. This manuscript

contained an extremely important compendium of extracts called De

aegritudinum curatione, made up of the work of a group of well-known

Salernitan masters named in rubrics and marginal annotations, Joannes

Afflacius, Copho, Petrocellus, Platearius (whichever member of the

family wrote the Practica brevis, which is excerpted here),

Bartholomeus and Ferrarius, plus a series of extracts attributed to an

 16 - Benton

author designated in the rubrics as "Trot'," "Tt," or some similar

form. In addition, many passages bear no indication of authorship;

some have been shown to come from the Viaticum of Constantine. Conrad

Hiersemann, who prepared a careful edition of the extracts labeled

"Trot'," pointed out that there is no correspondence between the

remedies attributed to "Trot'" and those in the Trotula texts known to

him, and that except for one prescription for vomiting to induce a

woman to expel a still-born fetus, none of the extracts labeled "Trot'"

has anything to do with gynecology, obstetrics or the specific

interests of women. This observation provides a form of negative

support for his conclusion that the Trot' of the Wroc~aw codex should

be considered a male physician. 32

On the basis of these extracts Hiersemann concluded that the

therapy advocated here was never "senseless" and that the author was a

"skilled practitioner who practiced scarification, phlebotomy and

physical medicine lege artis." He also noted one curious distinction

in the labeling of these extracts. 33 When the scribe of the Wrociaw

manuscript identified his selected passages with abbreviated names

entered in the margin, usually these names were preceded by the initial

1:1, meaning magister. Thus we have "M.J.A." for "magister Joannes

Afflacius," "M. Plat'" for ''magister Platearius," "M. Bart'" for

"magister Bartolomeus." Once or twice the 11 was omitted, but in

practically every caSe it was there. But for one set of entries an 1:1

never appeared, and that was for "Trot'''. If we are to judge from this

consistent practice in De aegritudinum curatione, "Trot'," whoever she

 17 - Benton

or he was, was not a master.

Up to this point, then, the only evidence historians have had

testifying to the existence of an actual practitioner named Trota or

Trotu1a or anything of the sort is the passage in Ut de curis about

Trota acting tanquam or quasi magistra and the ambiguous Wroc~aw

manuscript. To this material can now be added a previously unnoticed

text. It appears in a manuscript, now in Madrid, which was written by a

northern French or English scribe about 1200. The Madrid manuscript is

therefore contemporary with the Wroc~aw codex and with the oldest

manuscripts which contain Cum ~ or Ut de curis.

The Madrid manuscript is an easily portable physician's handbook

containing a collection of Sa1ernitan medical texts, including several

translations by Constantine the African and a treatise by Johannes de

Sancto Paulo, a Sa1ernitan physician and author whose work also

appeared in the Wroc~aw manuscript;34 it closes with a work identified

in the margin in the scribe's hand as Practica secundum Trotam and in

its later (early thirteenth-century) rubric as Practica secundum

Trotu1am. This treatise begins "According to Trota in order to bring

on menstruation when a woman cannot conceive because of its retention"

(Secundum Trotam ad menstrua provocanda quorum retentione mulier

concipere ~ potest) and continues for four folios with remedies and

medical advice concerning gynecology, the care of children, beauty, and

a large number of topics which concern men as well as women, such as

vomiting, insanity, scrofula, piles and snake-bite. In a number of the

chapters the masculine gender is used to refer to the patient. 35

 18 - Benton

The most remarkable feature of this text is that almost half of

the material which appears in the Practica secundum Trotam is also to

be found in De aegritudinum curatione. Two of these chapters are in

paragraphs which were labeled "Trot'" in the Wroc%aw codex. With one

exception, the others appear in sections where no author was given, or

appear at the end of chapters, after the work of a named author has

ended. A comparison of the two texts makes it clear that a large

amount of the anonymous matter in De aegritudinum curatione is by the

author of the Madrid Practica. Much of this previously anonymous

material is specifically concerned with women and appears under such

headings as "Ad menstrua restringenda," "De purgatione mulieris post

partum," and "De albificanda facie." Hiersemann's most convincing non-

paleographic reason for concluding that "Trot'" was male is therefore

eliminated. 36

A full discussion of the nature of the Practica secundum Trotam

and its relationship to De aegritudinum curatione must await the

publication of the new text. On the basis of the comparison I have

made, it seems safe to say at this point that since the "Trot'"

selections in the Wroc%aw manuscript and the text in the Madrid

manuscript both contain identical passages and yet each contains

chapters not in the other manuscript, both were drawn from a larger

work, a "Practica" similar in its form to those of Platearius and

Bartholomeus. The Madrid manuscript is quite explicit in attributing

this work to a woman, Trota, whose name is twice spelled out in full.

The scribe of the Wroc%aw manuscript always abbreviated this name,

 19 - Benton

but I am not convinced that his abbreviation indicates that he thought

the author was a man, and it seems to me likely that Hiersemann was

mistaken in interpreting the abbreviation as a masculine -~ ending.

Hiersemann describes the mark which interests us as "sometimes a comma,

sometimes a flourish, sometimes a line." I suggest that it is a simple

mark of suspension, a common scribal practice to indicate that a

familiar name had not been completed, just as the same scribe wrote

"Plat'" for Platearius, ''Petro'" for Petrocellus, "Ferr'" for

Ferrarius, etc. 37 Hiersemann made the mistake of concentrating on the

abbreviation of one name alone, rather than taking account of the

scribe's abbreviation of other names, and he was probably influenced by

finding no passage marked "Trot'" which showed a particular concern for

women's medicine or appeared in the treatises attributed to Trotu1a.

Faced with the evidence of the Madrid text, the abbreviation used in

the Wroc~aw manuscript does not constitute a sufficient reason to argue

that "Trot'" was male.

Three chapters of the Practica secundum Trotam provide a problem

of attribution. These chapters (De conceptu, De matricis humiditate,

and De vicio viri) appear in De aegritudinum curatione as one long

chapter ascribed to "M[agister] C[opho]." Stylistically this material

differs from the other chapters in the Practica secundum Trotam; it is

more fully developed and theoretical, and it uses the verb precipere

three or four times, a word which does not appear elsewhere in Trota's

chapters. Since the Practica of Copho has not survived, the

attribution of the Wroc~aw manuscript cannot be verified, but it seems

 20 - Benton

reasonable to assume that either Trota or the author of the Madrid

summary of her work borrowed this material from Copho. 38 These same

three chapters appear as the final three chapters in most manuscripts

of Cum~. Since the author of Cum ~ shows no other evidence

of familiarity with the Practica secundum Trotam, it seems to me likely

that these chapters were borrowed from Copho rather than from Trota.

The authors or compilers of the three "Trotula" treatises drew upon a

number of earlier works, but there is no compelling evidence that the

Practica secundum Trotam was one of them. 39

On the whole, the remedies prescribed in the Practica secundum

Trotam differ from those iu the three texts attributed to Trotula which

we have considered earlier. When the subject matter in the Practica is

the same as that in one of the three other treatises, it commonly is

less complex and differs in the materia medica prescribed, and when the

remedies are reasonably close, there is still a distinct difference in

wording which suggests the independent repetition of a common

prescription. Cum auctor and Ut de curis are both far more systematic

and fully developed gynecological works; they present a more "learned"

level of academic medicine than the Practica, which on the whole seems

to represent the traditions of empirics and midwives.

It is the evidence of the Madrid manuscript which will allow us

for the first time to write with some confidence about Trota as an

historical figure in the history of medicine. Rather than citing that

text in further detail, here I will only summarize the more general

conclusions I have reached from reading the available material. I

 21 - Benton

begin with the evidence that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

there were a number of women healers in Salerno, the frequently cited

mulieres Salernitane, and that some of them were distinguished for

their medical skill. We have already met Berdefolia medica; Ordericus

Vitalis tells us of an eleventh-century sapiens matrona who greatly

impressed Ralph Mala-Corona, a noted physician in his own land;

Matthaeus Platearius cites his mother as a physician, and we have no

reason to think that these references are all to the same person or

that they are in any way exhaustive. The methodological error of De

Renzi -- and even more obviously of others who have gone beyond his

lead -- was to assume that the scattered evidence which has survived

from the past was produced by a very limited cast of characters, so

that a fact here and a reference there can all be used to write a

biographical sketch, without the necessity of a close demonstration of

the relationship of the different parts.

The texts of the Practica secundum Trotam and the "Trot . . " sections

of De aegritudinum curatione together establish that Trota produced a

larger Practica, which is now lost. She very likely was, as Hiersemann

said of his masculine "Trottus," a skilled and sensible physician, but

the missing H in the Wrociaw manuscript suggests that she was not
accorded the title of master. Since her Practica shows some influence

from the work of Constantine and incorporates chapters from Copho, she

may be considered to have been active in the twelfth rather than in the

eleventh century; indeed, she may still have been alive at the end of

the twelfth century when the Madrid and Wrociaw manuscripts were
 22 - Benton

written. Though her work was obviously valued at that time, as those

two manuscripts (as well as the reference in Ut de curis) show, it was

apparently not copied in later centuries and was replaced by more

learned, complex and theoretical medicine.

Two pieces of evidence, each uncertain, suggest a relationship

between Trota and Johannes Furias, a little-known physician who

probably lived in the twelfth century. In a section on the care of the

eyes in De aegritudinum curatione which Hiersemann prints as the work

of "Trot'," there is a reference to a cure used for fifteen years by

Johannes Furias. This is the only reference to a contemporary in any

passages attributed to Trota, and if it is indeed hers, it could help

to date her work. 40 Johannes Furias is cited in the "German

Bartholomeus," a macaronic German-Latin medical work which has

preserved traces of material no longer extant in Latin. Several

manuscripts contain a recipe for a depilatory which Johannes Furias is

said to have sent to "his friend, called Cleopatra." What makes this

reference intriguing is that the recipe is a German version of one

which appears in Latin in the Practica secundum Trotam. 41 With this

text in mind one wonders if Johannes and Trota were in fact colleagues

and if she was known familiarly by the name claimed by the author of a

late antique or early medieval work on gynecology which was attributed

to Cleopatra, medica reginarum.

The texts which can be attributed to Trota with reasonable

security strongly suggest that she did not write the three widely

circulated treatises which have so long been attributed to her. These

 23 - Benton

treatises are difficult to date more precisely than to sometime in the

twelfth century, or possibly very early in the thirteenth. As stated

before, the earliest manuscripts were probably written at the beginning

of the thirteenth century, or just possibly in the closing years of the

twelfth. Cum auctor draws heavily on the work of Constantine, the

reference to Ferrarius shows that Ut de curis must have been written

after the beginning of the twelfth century, and De ornatu quotes from

the preface to Hippocrates' Prognostica in the translation attributed

to Constantine and given wide circulation by its inclusion in the

Articella. It seems to me likely that all three works were composed

not long before the time of the earliest existing manuscripts, that is,

in the late twelfth century, or possibly at the very beginning of the

thirteenth. No manuscripts have been found from the early or mid-

twelfth century, and I have found no reference to these treatises in

twelfth-century library catalogues. 42 Moreover, no author before the

thirteenth century cites "Trotula" or quotes from these texts. For

example, Bernard of Provence, who wrote at the end of the twelfth

century, cites the mulieres Salernitane mor'e than a dozen times,

without ever mentioning the name of Trotu1a, and the recipes he

attributes to these women are quite different from those which appear

in the treatises. 43

There may be some significance in the fact that one of the

earliest manuscripts seems to come from southern France. Salerno was

sacked by Emperor Henry VI in 1194 and in the thirteenth century

the university appears to have been in a period of decline. Both

 24 - Benton

Montpellier and Paris benefited from the decline of the Italian city as

a center for medical education. It would be plausible to imagine that

Salernitan masters or students brought these works with them to

Montpellier or produced them there, and that from Montpellier they made

their way to northern France and to England, the center of their

greatest popularity and diffusion in the thirteenth century.44

The authors of these three treatises were probably men. Since men

controlled the academic medicine of the time, this supposition is a

natural one, and it is supported by some evidence in the texts

themselves. Though in late manuscripts adjectives referring to the

author in the preface to Cum ~ use feminine endings, in the

earliest manuscripts that preface is written without any grammatical

indication of the gender of the author. The distancing implicit in the

way the author writes about their diseases (~, ~J in eis) and

says that the treatise was composed "largely at the request of a

certain woman" (maxime cuiusdam mulieris gratia) suggests to me that

the author was male, though these points are hardly conclusive. This

author has little to say about childbirth itself and comments that it

had been concealed from him how the empirical remedies used by midwives

(such as a magnet held in the right hand) actually work. 45 If this

tract was indeed written by a woman, I can find nothing in the text to

indicate it. The longer, original form of the prologue to De ornatu

shows that the author or compiler of this treatise was a man. Though

it de curis contains no specific phrasing indicating the gender of the

uthor, the fact that Trota was cited in the third person does imply
 25 .,; Benton

that she was not the author of the tract.

If Trota was not the author, how did these treatises come to bear

her name? In his editio princeps Georg Kraut noted his belief that the

treatise was called Trotula because her name appeared in the text. 46 On

this basis, however, Ut de curis could as well have been named after

the better documented Copho or Ferrarius, and one must remember as well

that eventually Trotula major and Trotula minor came to be applied to

all three texts, though only one mentions the name of Trota.

"Trota" is the name used in the text of the Madrid Practica, and

it is apparently the form originally used in the anecdote in Ut de

curis; "Trotula" is the form used with overwhelming frequency by the

scribes and rubricators who wrote the headings and explicits of the

Trotula texts. It was common practice to form book titles in this

fashion, so that the Summa of Angelus Carletti was known as the

Angelica, that of Roland of Parma as the Rolandina, etc. One early

thirteenth-century manuscript makes it clear that Trotula is the name

of the work through its rubric: "Summa que dicitur Trotula.,,47 Though

the evidence is sparse and subject to dispute, it appears that the name

of a real twelfth-century author, Trota, was applied to a set of texts,

the Trotula major and minor, in the thirteenth, and that by a process

of back formation, the diminutive Trotula was then thought to be the

proper name of the author.

The evidence of the manuscripts suggests that the name given to

these texts was not a simple accident produced by the presence of the

name Trota in Ut de curis. When these three texts devoted to women's

 26 - Benton

medicine were brought together early in the thirteenth century and the

gender-specific prologue to De ornatu was dropped in the compilation,

it is not unreasonable to conclude that they were deliberately labeled

with the name of the best known female physician of the previous

century in order to give them greater credibility or acceptance.

Though they bear the name of a female author, I must say that

throughout these three treatises I see no evidence of "the gentle hand

of a woman" or that the medicine prescribed, as another writer has

said, is "remarkable for its humanity.,,48 The major sources of Cum

auctor are the Viaticum and Pantegni of Constantine, and as we have

seen, some material was probably borrowed from Copho; other medical

treatments advocated here are similar to those one finds in the work of

male doctors such as Platearius and Bartholomeus. The heavy baggage of

Galenic theory, which treats women as "imperfect" and deficient in

"innate heat" when compared with men, provides a conceptual frame of

mind absent from the simple, non-theoretical treatment of the Practica

de Trota. 49 In Cum auctor and Ut de cur is bleeding is prescribed for

such conditions as excessive menstruation, and in this respect those

treatises differ significantly from the Practica secundum Trotam, where

bleeding is not prescribed for any gynecological problem. As had been

advocated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, in the Trotula major

and minor (and in the work of Trota) the womb is to be moved about by

subfumigation, that is, having the patient sit over the smoke of sweet

or foul-smelling substances. Poultices of various sorts of dung,

cupping on the groin or pubis, and pessaries and douches made of such
 27 - Benton

substances as pitch, honey, weasel oil, nutmeg and cloves are

frequently advocated. As far as I can tell, with a few exceptions it

would be a coincidence if a remedy prescribed here did some good, and

many were unpleasant or even harmful.

Academic medicine may even have been more harmful than the empiric

practices of Salernitan herbalists, since it was more influenced by

theory and farther removed from its practical roots by reliance on

classroom instruction and the written treatise. To the degree that the

mulieres Salernitane were skilled in herbal medicine and were the

source of treatments advocated in these treatises, their "traditional"

and occasionally effective medicine, tested by experience, was deformed

and sometimes rendered dangerous by the process of literate

transmission by academic physicians and professional scribes writing

for an equally academic audience. Surely the best way to learn herbal

medicine was from direct instruction. In manuscripts the symbols for

ounces, drams, and scruples were confused with careless abandon (thus

at times leading to the recommendation of massive overdosing with

powerful herbs) and errors in transcription were common. In the

copying of these texts, for example, through a misreading fisalidos was

transformed into siseleos, directing later doctors, if they followed

their instructions, to prescribe mountain brook-willow rather than

drop-wort, a mistake which could not be made by herbalists working

directly with the plants. 50

At the beginning of this paper I said that learned medieval works

on gynecology were largely written for men and contained the ideas of
 28 - Benton

male physicians. Cum auctor and Ut de curis were written specifically

for an audience of other physicians, and that audience was overwhelmingly

male. The man who wrote De ornatu says in his prologue that he

composed the work because women had often asked him for advice. He

intended that treatise, which by our standards is only marginally

medical, for a female audience. In its original form, recorded in the

manuscripts which contain the long version of the prologue, the author

addresses a female reader directly with such phrases as "ut sudes" and

"abluas te optime," but in the text which became standard these second-

person forms were changed to the third person. 5l The readers of all

three treatises were normally male, for these Latin texts circulated

with other works used by medical school graduates, and the owners which

have been positively identified were men or (usually) male

institutions. In the fifteenth century when vernacular gynecological

and obstetrical treatises were written with an audience of women in

mind, we find that some of these new texts differ from the Latin

Trotula and pay more attention to the practical obstetrical problems

which concerned female practitioners. 52

A striking feature of the three treatises which have traditionally

been attributed to Trotula is that they were so frequently copied and

so widely disseminated. The existence today of nearly one hundred

manuscripts shows that they became the standard gynecological texts of

the late medieval medical profession, though I can find no evidence

that they were assigned as school texts in any university. Indeed, the

mUltiple reprintings of the sixteenth century demonstrate the continued

 29 - Benton

importance of the works into the early modern period. Though a few of

the earliest manuscripts are anonymous, later copyists, owners and

readers assumed that they were dealing with texts written by someone

named Trotula or Trota, and until Wolf's misguided and unconvincing

attribution, no one doubted that these treatises were written by a

woman. Trotula was, moreover, cited as an authority by such medical

writers as Peter of Spain, better known as Pope John XXI.

This authoritative use of treatises ascribed to a woman occurred at

the very time that licensed women physicians were incredible rarities

and university masters were prosecuting women for practicing medicine

without a license. For example, in 1322 the masters of the Parisian

medical faculty argued successfully that just as a woman was disbarred

because of her sex from practicing law or testifying in a criminal

case, there was all the more reason that she could be prohibited by law

from the practice of medicine, "since she does not know through the

letter or art of medicine the cause of the illness of the ill."S3

English physicians wanted a blanket prohibition against women·in their

field and in 1422 petitioned Parliament requesting the enactment of a

statute which would bar men from practicing medicine without a

university degree, under pain of imprisonment and a fine of 40 pounds,

and would insure "that no Woman use the practyse of Fisyk undre the

same peyne."S4

How did treatises attributed to a female author become accepted and

widely diffused texts among male physicians at the same time that those

same physicians were attempting to drive women from the practice of

 30 - Benton

medicine on grounds of professional incompetence? In the first place,

though we have reason to think that these treatises were produced by

men, the idea that they were written by a woman from Salerno was

plausible. In its early years as a medical center, Salerno may be

thought of as a highly favored health spa where both men and women

practiced medicine (probably frequently as members of the same family)

and taught it to others, making what use they could of the learning of

the Greeks and Arabs. Though some of these early physicians were

clerics, this educational activity was not based institutionally in a

cathedral or monastic school. In the twelfth century medical licenses

were granted by neither the church nor an organization of masters, but

by royal officials; as a decree of Roger II in 1140 stated, "henceforth

anyone who wishes to practice medicine should appear before our

officials and judges, to be evaluated by their judgment." Since no

clerical status was required for such licenses, it seems likely that

they could be granted to women. Records still extant from the

fourteenth century show that at a time when the Parisian doctors

mentioned above were arguing that a woman might easily sin by killing a

patient through her ministrations, women in the Kingdom of Naples

received licenses occasionally. For example, in 1307 a woman with the

intriguing name of "Trotta de Troya" was granted a license to practice

surgery. From a perspective north of the Alps, if a woman skilled in

medicine was to be found anywhere, it would most likely be in southern

Italy.55

The frequency with which Trotula's gender was stressed by scribes

 31 - Benton

and rubricators suggests that it was not only plausible that a woman

should have written these treatises; more important, it was

desirable. Men knew little about feminine physiology and some were

intensely troubled by their ignorance. In De secretis mulierum, a

late thirteenth or early fourteenth-century vulgarization of questions

raised by Albertus Magnus, the author deals with the most elementary

anatomical questions and tells of a man who confessed to him that once

after intercourse he found his abdomen covered with blood, which

"frightened him greatly, and he did not know the cause." This basic

sexological handbook, which makes use of information to be found in the

treatises attributed to Trotula, illustrates something of the nature of

medieval male curiosity about female sexuality.56 Since male

physicians did not make intimate examinations of female patients and

were normally not present at childbirth, their need and desire for

information must have been acute. 57 Yet a fellow male, even an older

and more experienced physician, could not provide that information with

authority. A great advantage of the treatises attributed to "Trotula,"

even though they reveal nothing that could not be found in other

Salernitan works, is that they appeared to be written "from the woman's

point of view." This point was made with striking force by the author

of a scientific encyclopedia of the second half of the thirteenth

century, Placides et Timeo, also known as Les Secres ~ philosophes.

The author of this curious dialogue tells us that physicians "who know

nothing, derive great authority and much solid information" from

Trotula, partly because she could speak of what she had "felt in
 32 - Benton

herself, since she was a woman" and partly "because she was a woman,

all women revealed their inner thoughts more readily to her than to any

man and told her their natures.,,58

The modern reader who, like the author of Les Secres ~

philosophes, wants to know the medical views of a medieval woman is

more fortunate than the medieval public, for the works of Hildegard of

Bingen have now been printed. This twelfth-century Benedictine

abbess corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops and abbots, and was a

candidate for sainthood in the thirteenth century. She was also the

author of two works which deal with medicine in a highly personal way.

Though they do not focus exclusively on "female medicine," they do deal

with such subjects as sexual relations, childbirth, and prediction of

the character and physical characteristics of offspring. These books

were presumably intended originally for use in Hildegard's own

monastery, and their circulation in the Middle Ages was always limited;

today three manuscripts of the Subtilitates exist, and of the Causae et

~ only one manuscript remains. 59 It is an ironic fact that the

treatises attributed to "Trotula" flourished, while the Practica of

Trota and the medical works of Hildegard remained practically unknown.

The position I have presented here is that the professionalization

of medicine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, combined with the

virtual exclusion of women from university education, prevented them

from entering the best paid and most respected medical positions. Male

doctors controlled medical theory, though not the day-to-day practice

of women's medicine, and their gynecological literature incorporated

 33 - Benton

male experience and understanding and the academic learning available

to males alone. Though it appears that Cum auctor and Ut de curis

first circulated anonymously and that De ornatu was prefaced by a

prologue written by a male author, by a process which remains obscure

these three texts were brought together and attributed to a female

author, and once this change had occurred, no reader could know that

these works were not authentic. By including in their medical compendia

these treatises falsely attributed to Trota, medieval physicians

thereby unwittingly excluded women even further from participation in

their own medicine. Though the treatises of "Trotula" bear a woman's

name, they were the central texts of the gynecological medicine

practiced and taught by men.

In the Middle Ages a female medical author seemed a believable

figure, though one best imagined in an exotic locale. But in the

sixteenth century Wolf considered that such a woman could not have

existed and in the 1920s Hiersemann created the phantasm of "Trottus"

from the flourish of a pen. Mead and Mason-Hohl, however, knew in their

bones that women could practice medicine and teach it to others. A

fresh study of the manuscripts, especially of the Madrid Practica,

provides evidence for the existence of an expert woman physician named

Trota, but also shows, ironically, that she was not the author of the

three treatises commonly attributed to her. Thus my investigation

fully supports Mead and Mason-Hohl in their faith in an historical

Trota, even though it rejects their imagined biography. Seen in a

fuller historical context, it should come as no surprise that Trota's

 34 - Benton

career was limited by the social forces of her own day, that she

produced a Practica quite different from the treatises usually

attributed to her, and that when the term '~aster" was applied to her

as a woman, it was with a reservation, tanguam magistra.

 35 - Benton

Appendix: Original Prologue to De ornatu

Ut ait Ypocras in libro quem de scientia pronosticorum edidit,

"omnis qui medicine artis studio seu gloriam seu delectabilem amicorum

copiam consequi desiderat, rationem suam regulis prudentium adeo munire

studeat,,,1 ne in singulis ad artem medendi spectantibus inermis

5 reperiatur et rudis. Quod si facere neglexerit, loco glorie et fame

dedecus et infamiam, loco amicorum quamplures sibi acquirat inimicos.

Sic etiam efficietur, ut a quibus in foro salutari debet et medicus

appellari, eis ridiculum fiat in publico, et neque ab eis medicus

appelletur. Huius intuitu rationis, ego his regulis mulierum quas in

10 artificiali decore faciendo sapientes inueni, meam adeo in tantum

muniui rationem, ut in singulis ad ornamentum faciei et aliorum

membrorum muliebrium doctus reperiar. Ita ut cuilibet mulieri nobili

uel gregarie de huius artificio aliquid a me querenti, iuxta suam

qualitatem et modum conueniens sciam adhibere cons ilium, ut et ego etiam

15 laudem et ipsa optatum consequi ualeat effectum. Sed quoniam, ut ait

Persius, "scire meum nichil est, nisi me scire hoc sciat alter,,,2 ideo,

hoc exemplo motus, uolo que de hoc artificio noui et efficaci opere

probaui, litteris commendare et in compendiosum scriptum redigere. Quo

mediante, quod in mente habeo in aliorum ueniat usum et iuuamen.

1 ait PL dicit OS; post libro add. suo ~; edidit ~. ~ 2 seu 1 om. ~
3-4 rationem ••• studeat~. Q 3 prudencium b prudentum PS; post
prudentium add. etiam b; post adeo add. se ~ 4-5 inermis ••• si POL
ne rudis reperiatur et si rudis hoc ~ 5 et fame ~. ~ 6 quamplures
POL plures ~ 7 etiam PO quod b ~.~; debet OLS deberet P
8-9 eius ridiculum fiet ••• appelatur ~ appeletur scripsi; ;is fiat
r. in publico b; eis fiat r. in populo et plebis abittio ~; eis fiat
r. in populo et plebis abiectio Q 9 Huius OS hoc PL; his regulis POL
 36 - Benton

uo1ens a1iquas experiencias ~ 10 sapientes POL facetas~;

adeo Qm. ~; in tantum Qm. LS 11 post singu1is add. tam~; ornamentum POL
ornatum~; et a1iorum b quam ceterorum ~ 11-12 faciei ••• membrorum
om. PO 12 mu1iebrium POL mu1ierum~; reperiar POL reperiatur~; Ita
~ Ista b Qm. PO; ut POL Qm.~; cui1ibet POL cuius1ibet ~ 13 ue1
••• huius POL seu genti1i et de eius ~; a me Qm. Q; suam ~ sui POL;
14 sciam POL suum~; et 2 Qm. ~; etiam b Qm. POS 15 ipsa OLS
ipsam R; optatum POL exoptatum~; ua1eat POL ua1et~; Sed POL Sit ~
16 Persius POL Proferius~; meum POL teum~; me POL Qm.~; hoc OL
meum R tuum~; alter PO a1terum b aliter ~ 16-17 ideo ••• motus POL
Qm. ~ 17 que POL itaque ~ 17-18 et ••• probaui PO Qm. LS 18 Quo ~
Quod POL 19 i~om. Q; post habeo add. et ~; usum et iuuamen PO
usum b notitiam ~

[N. B.: Differences of word order are not indicated.]

Paris. B.N. 1at 16089, fo1. 113 (c. 1250) = R; Oxford, Exeter College

35, fo1. 227v (XlVI) = Q; London, B.L. Harley 3542, fol. 97v

(XVI) = b; and Salzburg, Museum Caro1ino-Augusteum 2171, fo1. 180

(XV med.) =~

1. Prognostica, trans. attributed to Constantine the African, preface,

printed in Articel1a (Venice, 1492), fo1. 40.

2. Sat. 1.27: scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter.
 37 - Benton

NOTES

* Revised version of a paper presented at the Joint Meeting of the

Medieval Association of the Pacific and the Medieval Academy of

America, Berkeley, Calif., 9 April 1983. I am grateful to the Division

of Humanities and the Social Sciences of the California Institute of

Technology for financial assistance in procuring microfilms and

photographs. I have benefitted greatly from the corrections and

suggestions generously offered by Joan Cadden, Monica Green, Will T.

Jones, Luke Demaitre, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Berthe Marti, Michael

McVaugh, George Pigman, Irwin J. Pincus, Margaret Schleissner, Eleanor

Searle, and Daniel Sheerin. None of these scholars is responsible for

the errors which remain. I am particularly grateful to Richard H.

Rouse of the University of California at Los Angeles. He does share my

responsiblity, for I have relied continually on his paleographic skills

and judgment for the dating and localization of manuscripts.

1. For a recent prosopographical study based on references to some 125

women who practiced medicine as midwives, surgeons. miresses, etc.,

see Danielle Jacquart, Le Milieu Medical Jill France du Xn e lll!. XV e

siecle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981), pp. 47-55. Pearl Kibre, "The

Faculty of Medicine at Paris, charlatanism and unlicensed medical

practice in the later Middle Ages," Bull. Hist. Med., 1953 27: 1-20,

remains a fundamental source for the study of the exclusion of women

from the practice of medicine. For the larger setting, see Vern L.
 38 - Benton

Bullough, The Development of Medicine as ~ Profession: the contribution

of the medieval university to modern medicine (Basel and New York: S.

Karger, 1966).

2. For a critical review of recent literature see Martha H. Verbrugge,

''Women and medicine in nineteenth-century America," Signs, 1976, 1.:

957-72. For the details in this and the preceding paragraph see also

Frances E. Kobrin, "The American midwife controversy: a crisis of

professionalization," Bull. Histo Med. 1966, 40: 350-63; William G.

Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 300-301, n. 5;

and Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches. Midwives. and

Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N. Y.: The Feminist

Press, 1973). On the development of male midwifery (unknown in the

Middle Ages), see John S. Haller, Jr., American Medicine in Transition.

1840-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 150-91.

3. Quotation from Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, "Trotula," Isis, 1930, 14:

364-65. It is evident that the editor of Isis, George Sarton, accepted

this seriously flawed article for publication without being convinced

by it, for when submitting a revised text, Mead wrote to Sarton on 3

January 1930: "I only hope you will be converted to my theories about

Trotula and become one of her champions." See her correspondence in

the Sarton collection at Harvard University, 6MS Am 1803 (1022), and

George Sarton, Introduction!Q the History of Science, 3 vols. in 5

(Washington: Williams & Wilkins, 1927-48), 2: 242-43. The contemporary

 39 - Benton

treatment of Trotula by Dr. Melina Lipinska is more cautious and

restrained than Mead's; see her Les Femmes et 1& progres des sciences

medicales (Paris: Masson et cie., 1930), pp. 27-30.

4. The lecture was published as "Trotula: eleventh century

gynecologist," Med.Woman's ~, 1940: 47 349-56, the translation as The

Diseases of Women ~ Trotula of Salerno (Hollywood, Calif.: The Ward

Ritchie Press, 1940).

5. Most early manuscripts read Justinus, Justinianus, or something of

the sort; Paris, Bibliotheque nationale (B.N.) lat. 7056, ff. 77-86v (=

Ms. A) cites Copho at this point (f. 78vb), but it is the only early

manuscript I know to do so. Perhaps the name of Justus, a contemporary

of Galen and the author of a Gynaecia, appeared originally, in which

case all of the authors cited in Cum auctor would have been ancient

authorities. In the second chapter of the introduction, the author

says the text is based on material from Hippocrates, Galen and

Constantine the African (A, f. 77rb); other manuscripts frequently

replace the name of Constantine with that of Cleopatra. One should not

be overly impressed by the author's learning; most of the ancient

citations are to be found in the Viaticum and Pantegni of Constantine

the African.

6. Cambrai, Bibliotheque municipale ms. 916, a northern French

collection of medical texts, presents all three tracts as a single unit

on ff. 228v-242v, with the rubric: Incipiunt Cure Trotule.

 40 - Benton

7. Paris, B.N. n.a.l. 603, ff. 55-59v. I have not yet seen Erfurt,

Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek, Amplonian Q 204, which contains De ornatu

on ff. 78v-79v and Cum auctor on ff. 95v-97, both in hands described in

the catalogue as twelfth century; see Wilhelm Schum, Beschriebendes

Verzeichniss der Amplonian Handschriften-Sammlung ~ Erfurt (Berlin,

1887), pp. 461-63.

8. London, British Library (B.L.) Sloane 1124, ff. 172-178v; the

opening rubric is Incipiunt capitula Trotule in the same hand as the

rest of the text, though the chapter headings were never added. The

manuscript is contemporary with B.N. n.a.l. 603, cited above.

9. New York Academy of Medicine ms. SAFE, ff. 77-82. This important

manuscript, which once belonged to the Drabkins, is described in

Caelius Aurelianus, Gynaecia, ed. Miriam F. Drabkin and Israel E.

Drabkin, Supplement to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 13

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951), pp. v-vi.

Though the Drabkins state that the manuscript "seems to be a copy of

the very volume that de Fournival had in mind," Prof. Rouse is

convinced that it is the manuscript owned by Richard de Fournival (who

was licensed to practice surgery) and which he may have inherited from

his father, physician to Philip Augustus. For the history of the

manuscript and the transmission of the text, see L. D. Reynolds, Texts

and Transmission: ~ survey of the Latin classics (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1983), pp. xxxvii and 33-34.

10. Paris, B.N. lat. 16089, f. 113; Oxford, Exeter College 35, f.
 41 - Benton

227v; London. B.L Harley 3542, f. 97v; and Salzburg, Museum

Carolino-Augusteum 2171, ff. 180-180v. In the last manuscript the text

is headed: Incipit tractatus brevis et utilis. De decoratione et

~ mulierum Reichardi medici experti. In all four manuscripts the

text has been badly distorted in transmission, and my edition is

conjectural in places. The possibility that Ricardus Anglicus was the

author is worth exploring further. Munich, CLM 444, f. 208 also

contains this prologue, but I received a microfilm too late to include

its readings in this edition.

11. Kraut was a physician from Hagenau. His edition appeared as

Trotulae curandarum aegritudinum muliebrum • • • liber in

Experimentarius medicinae (Strassburg: apud Joannem Schottum, 1544),

pp. 3-35. Paulus Manutius labeled his reprinting of this work as

nusguam ~ editus, corrected the chapter numbers of his edition, but

otherwise changed little else and used no new manuscripts in Medici

antigui ~ (Venice: Aldus, 1547), ff. 71-80v. Other editions, such

as those of Benedictus Victorius, Empirica (Venice, 1554), pp. 460-525

and Hans Kaspar Wolf, Harmonia Gynaeciorum (Basel, 1566), cols. 215-

310, and their numerous reprintings, repeat the text of the Kraut

edition with occasional misprints or "corrections." I have consulted

and compared the copies in the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda.

12. The Latin verse translation is printed in Salvatore De Renzi,

Collectio Salernitana, 5 vols. (Naples, 1852-59; rpr. Bologna: Forni

Editore, n. d.), 4: 1-24. An Irish translation of Cum~, preceded

 42 - Benton

by a translation of De gradibus dated 1352, has been edited by Winifred

Wulff as A Mediaeval Handbook of Gynaeco1ogy and Midwifery in Irish

Texts: Fasciculus X, ed. John Fraser, Paul Grosjean, and J. G. O'Keeffe

(London: Sheed & Ward, 1934), pp. 12-54. There is a French translation

in Paris, Bib1. Ste-Genevieve 1057, f. 20ff. (which I have not seen), a

literal prose translation in Paris, B.N. ms. fro 1327, ff. 61-117

(closely related to the Latin of the N.Y. Academy of Medicine ms. cited

in n. 10), and a verse translation in Cambridge, Trinity College

0.1.20, cited by Paul Meyer in "Les manuscrits fran~ais de Cambridge,"

Romania 1903, 32: 87-90. The fifteenth-century German translation by

Dr. Johann Hartlieb exists in many manuscripts, including Baltimore,

Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, ms. 3, ff. 69-109v;

see Henry E. Sigerist, "Johannes Hartlieb's Gynaecological Collection,"

in Science. Medicine and History: Essays in Honor of Charles Singer,

ed. Edgar A. Underwood (London, Oxford University Press, 1953), 1: 231-

46. There is a Catalan translation of De ~ in a fifteenth-century

manuscript, Madrid, Bib1ioteca Naciona1 3356, ff. 1-32v, accompanied by

a Catalan translation of a work of erotica, the Speculum A1foderi; see

A. Paz y Melia, "Trotu1a, por Maestre Joan," Revista de archivos.

bib1iotecas y~, 1897, ~: 506-12. An English translation appears

in two fifteenth-century manuscripts, Oxford, Bodley ms. 483, ff. 82-

117 and Douce ms. 37, ff. 1-42. Beryl Rowland's Medieval Woman's Guide

to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (Kent, Ohio: Kent

State University Press, 1981) is not an edition of this work, but of

another gynecological treatise in B.L. Sloane 2463. I have no idea why

 43 - Benton

she calls that text the "first." The Flemish Liber Trotula (Brugge,

Stadsbibl. ms. 593), published by Anna Delva, Vrouwengeneeskunde in

Vlaanderen tiidens de late middeleeuwen, Vlaamse Historische Studies

(Brugge: Genootschap voor Gescheidenis, 1983), is a very free

translation and adaptation.

13. "La plus sage dame qui soit enz quatre partie dou monde" in Oeuvres

completes de Rutebeuf, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin, 2 vols.

(Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1959-60), 2: 276-77.

14. Wife of Bath's Prologue, 11. 676-685; of the authors whom Chaucer

cites here, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus alone seems out of place

as the author of a work a fourteenth-century student of women might

have read.

15. Harmonia Gynaeciorum, cols. 215-216.

16. World Who's Who in Science, ed. Allen G. Debus (Chicago: Marquis -

Who's Who, inc., 1968), p. 1688.

17. Conrad Hiersemann, Die Abschnitte ~ der Practica des Trottus in

der Salernitanischen Sammelschrift "De Aegritudinum Curatione," Inaug.-

Diss. (Leipzig: Institut fHr Geschichte der Medizin, 1921), p. 6.

18. "Exhuming Trotula, Sapiens materna of Salerno," Florilegium, 1979,

~: 52; the word materna in this title is presumably based on a

misreading of the word matrona in Ordericus Vitalis. Rowland repeats

her argument in Medieval Woman's Guide, pp. 3-6. In her book, p. 49,
 44 - Benton

n. 14, she cites Edward F. Tuttle, "The Trotula and Old Dame Trot: a

note on the Lady of Salerno," Bull. Rist. Med., 1976, 50 : 61-72 and

says that he "reaches conclusions very similar to my own." In fact,

in his intelligent and useful article, Tuttle says that "Trotula" was

"in all probability the name of a Salernitan matrona or midwife" (p.

68, n. 28) and urges caution "in relating Dame Trot to Trotula" (p.

72) •

19. I quote from the seventh printing, Naples, 1671, p. 156, from a copy

kindly supplied by Dr. Thomas Waldman. A somewhat expanded version

appears in a Latin translation, Nova descriptio regni Neapolitani,

reprinted by J. G. Graevius in the Thesaurus antiguitatum ~

historiarum Italiae. Neapolis. Siciliae. etc., vol. 9, part 1 (Leiden,

1723), col. 42. I have no idea what work on the compounding of

medicines Baccus may have had in mind.

20. Biografia degli uomini illustri del regno di Napoli, 10 vols.

(Naples, 1813-26), 4: s.v. "Trotola."

21. Salvatore De Renzi, Storia Documentata della Scuola Medica di

Salerno, 2nd ed. (Naples, 1857; rpr. Milan: Ferro Edizioni, 1967), pp.

194-208; this is a revised version with additions of ColI. Sal., 1,

149-161. There is no modern edition of Circa instans. On the passages

used by De Renzi to support his argument, see Walter Starkenstein, tlEin

Beitrag zur 'Circa instans'-Frage," Archiv Gesch. Med., 1935, 27:

375-76. The Starkenstein manuscripts have recently been acquired by

 45 - Benton

the Library of the New York Botanical Gardens; see Eugenia D.

Robertson, "Circa Instans and the Salernitan materia medica,"

(unpubl. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1982), pp. 104-6. I am grateful to

Mrs. Lothian Lynas for sending photographs of these manuscripts which

allowed me to verify that the mother of the Platearii was not called a

magistra in these passages.

22. The Ecclesiastical History of Ordericus Vitalis, ed. Marjorie

Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-80) 2: 28 and 74-76.

Though it is frequently said that Ralph visited Salerno about 1059, the

eodem tempore which provides that date refers to the year when Ralph

left Marmoutier and became a monk at St. Evroul, not to the time of his

visit to Salerno. Ordericus gives contradictory information about the

date of Ralph's monastic profession at Marmoutierj he probably became a

monk somewhere between 1052 and 1055 (see pp. 28 and 76). Ralph's time

of study (and also warfare?) in Italy apparently occurred well before

he retired from the world, perhaps in the 1030s, when the Normans

established their power at Aversa. Charles H. Talbot, suggests,

probably incorrectly, that sapiens matrona should be translated as

sage-femme in "Dame Trot and her progeny," Essays and Studies, 1972,

25: p. 1. Michel Salvat, "L'accoucbment dans la litterature

scientifique medievale," Senefiance, 1983, ,2.: 92, shows that the term

sage-femme only appeared in the later Middle Ages, and so Ordericus

could not have had it in mind when he wrote in the twelfth century.

23. De Renzi. Storia documentata, pp. 198 and XXXIX, document 42,
 46 - Benton

citing Arch. Cavense Arca D. no. 152. Document 43 refers to a Trotta

in 1105 who was the sister of a physician named Landulfo.

24. Hurd-Mead, A History of Women in Medicine from the Earliest Times

to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (Haddam, Conn.: The

Haddam Press, 1938; rpt. Dover, N. H.: Longwood Press), p. 128.

25. In late Latin "trocta" means "trout," which is what ~ still

means in Italian today. "Trout" seems an odd baptismal name for a

woman, and as a proper name it may have had some other origin.

26. Necrologio del Liber Confratrum di L.. Matteo di Salerno, ed. Carlo

Alberto Garufi, Fonti per la storia d'Italia (Rome: Tip. del Senato,

1922) •

27. Ibid., p. 62. George W. Corner, "The rise of medicine at Salerno

in the twelfth century," Ann. Med. Hist., n.s., 1931, .1: 14,

is in error in saying: "The Registers and Obituary of the Cathedral,

which name many doctors and women of all ranks, do not apply the title

medica to a single woman."

28. Ibid., pp. 110, 134. Though it might be imagined that there is

some connection between Trotulus and Trotula, it must be stressed that

there is no evidence at all that the Trotulus of the necrology was a

physician.

29. London, B.L., Sloane 1124, f. 173 and N. Y. Academy of Medicine

ms. SAFE, f. 77v: "Unde contingit quod Trota vocata fuit tanquam
 47 - Benton

magistra, cum quedam puella propter ventositatem debuit incidi quasi ex

ruptura laborasset, et admirata fuit quamplurimum." Cf. Kraut ed.,

Trotulae, chap. 20.

30. Leipzig ms. 1215, f. 66v and Ms. ~, f. 82ra. Some later

manuscripts have "quasi magistra operis" or "quasi magistra huius

operis." It seems to me likely that tanquam was the original form,

later replaced by quasi, which means almost the same thing.

31. Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), s.v.

tamguam.

32. August W. E. Theodor Henschel discovered the codex and published

an unfortunately faulty text of De aegritudinum curatione in De Renzi,

Coll. SaL, 2, 81-386. Hiersemann's edition of the "Trot'"

excerpts in his Leipzig dissertation, Abschnitte ~ der Practica des

Trottus, pp. 10-21, is a distinct improvement. See pp. 7-8 for the

points made here. For a description and analysis of the manuscript see

Karl Sudhoff, "Die Salernitaner Handschrift in Bres1au," Arch. Gesch.

Med., 1920, ll: 101-47. Sudhoff dated the manuscript 1160-70, but on

the basis of the photographs Sudhoff published, Prof. Rouse prefers a

slightly later date, in the period 1185-1215, though more likely in the

late twelfth century because of the small, compressed size of the

script. In his opinion the writing is that of northwest France or

Norman England. The crude, "Romanesque" style of the miniatures also

suggests composition in the twelfth rather than the thirteenth century.

 48 - Benton

33. Hiersemann, Abschnitte, pp. 7 and 9.

34. The Liber de simplicium medicinarum virtutibus of Johannes de

Sancto Paulo, which appears anonymously in the Wroc~aw manuscript, is

edited by Georg Heinrich Kroemer, lnaug.-Diss. (Leipzig: Institut fUr

Geschichte der Medizin, 1920); the text in the Madrid manuscript is his

Flores dietarum, ed. Hermann J. Ostermuth, Inaug.-Diss. (Leipzig:

Institut fUr Geschichte der Medizin, 1919). Johannes was active as a

physician in the twelfth century; see Ernest Wickersheimer,

Dictionnaire biographique des medecins ~ France ~ moyen~, 2 vols.

(Paris: E. Droz, 1936, rpt. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979) 2: 480-81.

35. Madrid. Biblioteca de la Universidad Complutense, Ms. 119 (formerly

116-Z-31) 119), ff. 40-44v. I would not have been aware of the

existence of this extremely Unportant text if it were not for the

reference to it by Guy Beaujouan, "Manuscrits medicaux du moyen age

conserves en Espagne," Melanges de la Cas a de Velazquez, 1972 • .§.: 199

(here called a copy of the Trotu1a minor). I am grateful to Dr. Cecilia

Fernandez Fernandez for permission to see the manuscript in November

1983 and to have a microfilm prepared. I intend to publish an edition

and discussion of the Practica and a description of the manuscript

elsewhere.

36. As examples of correspondence between the Practica (~) and De

aegritudinum curatione (DAC), I will cite here only the passages edited

by Hiersemann, Abschnitte, with the differences in italics: 1. X (fol.

 49 - Benton

142): "Ad vomitum restringendum, accipe oleum et acetum et simul

bullias, et ibi spongiam intingas et pectori '!£ponas, et restringetur."

DAC (p. 15, 11. 19-20): "Ad vomitum restringendum, accipe oleum et

acetum et simul bullias, deinde spongiam intingas et pectori

superponas, et restingetur"; 2 • .f (fo1. 141v): "Ad cancrum, si in

gingivis vel 1abiis fuerit. In principio loca patientia lavabis, et

postea fricentur cum al~umine ovi desiccato ~ subti1iter pulverizato,

I I hoc assidue facias, et sanabitur." DAC (p. 13, 11. 37-39): "Ad

cancrum, si in gingivis vel labiis vel dentibus fuerit. In principio

10ca patientia bene ~ ~ lavabis, et postea fricentur cum alumine

subtiliter pulverizato; hoc assidue fac et sanabitur ~."

37. Abschnitte, p. 6. Unfortunately Sudhoff did not publish a

reproduction of the hand which wrote De aegritudinum curatione (see

Sudhoff, "Salernitaner Handschrift," p. 191) and the lithographic

reproductions appended to August Henschel, "Die Salernitanische

Handschrift," Janus, 1846, 1.: 40-84, 300-68 are also of no help.

Henschel had no doubt that "Trot'" should be expanded to Trotula; on

this and the abbreviation of the other names see pp. 329-30. When

Hiersemann wrote his dissertation, he was not an experienced

paleographer or medievalist, but a twenty-eight-year old medical

student. Sudhoff, his dissertation director, accepted the reading of

"Trotus" in "Salernitaner Handschrift," p. 128, but seemingly with

caution.

38. Co11. Sal. 2, 342-43 Practica, fols. l42v-143. The work which
 50 - Benton

De Renzi publishes as that of Copho in ColI. Sal. 4. 415-505 does not

correspond to anything attributed to Copho in De aegritudinum curatione

and was probably written by Archimatheus; see Friedrich Hartmann, Die

Literatur ~ FrUh- und Hochsalerno und der Inhalt des Breslauer Codex

Sa1ernitanus, lnaug.-Diss. (Leipzig: lnstitut fUr Geschichte der

Medizin, 1919), pp. 14-15.

39. On the sources of "Trotu1a" see Hermann Rudolf Spitzner, Die

Salernitanische Gynikologie und Geburtshilfe ~ dem Namen der

"Trotula," Inaug.-Diss. (Leipzig: lnstitut fUr Geschichte der Medizin,

1921), pp. 29-36. The question needs to be re-examined after an

edition of the texts has been established. Spitzner (p. 29) cites a

couplet from the Regimen Salernitanum which appears in chap. 29 of the

printed text and which should help to date the work, but this passage

does not appear in any of the manuscripts I have collated and must be

considered an addition.

40. Hiersemann, Abschnitte, p. 12, lines 39-48; see also p. 22. The

passage is in a section on the care of the eyes which is not labeled

"Trot'," but which follows another which is.

41. Christian Graeter, Ein Leipziger deutscher Bartholomaeus, lnaug.-

Diss. (Leipzig: Institut fUr Geschichte der Medizin, 1918), pp. 48-49,

quotes this passage: "Ein meister hiez Johannes Furia, der schreip

siner friundinne, diu hiez Cheopatra (sic) diese erzenie. Er sprach

" The recipe in the Practica secundum Trotam appears in almost

 51 - Benton

precisely the same words in De aegritudinum curatione in De Renzi,

Coll. Sal. 2, 145.

42. For example, in the twelfth century the monastery of Saint-Amand

owned copies of pseudo-C1eopatra's Genecea and of the "liber Muscionis

de pessariis," but no "Trotu1a"; see Gustav Becker, Cata10gi

Bib1iothecarum Antiqui (Bonn, 1885; rpr. Bruxe11es: Culture et

Civilisation, 1969), p. 233. There is also no reference to her in Karl

Sudhoff, "Die medizinischen Schriften, welche Bishof Bruno von

Hi1desheim 1161 in seiner Bib1iothek besass, und die Bedeutung des

Konstantin von Afrika im 12. Jahrhundert," Arch. Gesch. Med., 1916, ,2.:

348-56.

43. "Commentarium Magistri Bernardi Provincialis super Tabu1as

Sa1erni" in De Renzi, Coll. Sal., 5, 269-328. For example, the recipe

of asses' dung he attributes to the women of Salerno (p. 287) has no

parallel in "Trotu1a." De Renzi found only one parallel passage worth

noting (p. 273), a short recipe which does appear almost verbatim in

later manuscripts of De ornatu and in the printed version, chap. 61.

But this recipe is not in B.N., lat. 16089 or B.L., Harley 3542, which

I consider to represent the primitive form of the treatise. Many

recipes were added to De ornatu in later manuscripts, and this one must

have been borrowed from Bernard.

44. On the rivalry of Salerno and Montpe11ier and movement between the

two see Karl Sudhoff, "Salerno, Montpe1lier und Paris um 1200," Arch.
 52 - Benton

Gesch. Med., 1928, 20: 51-62.

45. "Notanda quedam que sunt phisicalia remedia, quorum nobis virtus

est occulta, que ab obstetricibus profuerunt"; ms. A f. 80rb or Kraut

ed., Trotulae, chap. 16.

46. See Kraut's marginal note on p. 27 of the Strassburg edition

(chap. 20). This is also the opinion of Tuttle in "Trotula," pp.

65-66.

47. On the adaptation of authors' names to titles see Paul Lehmann,

Mittelalter1iche BUchertitel, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie

der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Kl., 2 vols. (Munich: Verlag der

Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1948-1953), 2: 14. The

manuscript cited is B.N., lat 7056 (Ms. A), f. 77. The same rubricator

introduces De ornatu on f. 84v as Alius tractatus ~ dicitur minor

Trotula and makes a clear analogy with the Rogerina of Roger Baron; see

f. 75: Tractatus ~ dicitur minor Rogerina. Tuttle, however, has

argued in "Trotula," pp. 66-67 that "Trotula" was probably the author's

name and that Trotula major and minor are equivalent to the Priscianus

major and minor.

48. The second quotation is from Susan Mosher Stuard, "Dame Trot,"

Signs, 1975 1: 538.

49. The issue of Galenic theory itself does not, of course, indicate

male authorship, since the thought of people of both sexes is normally

 53 - Benton

dominated by the available theory of their times. On the role of

Galenic theory in ancient medicine and the treatises of "Trotula" I

have benefited from the dissertation on gynecology from Galen to

Trotula which Monica H. Green is preparing at Princeton University.

50. Fisalidos is the reading in ms. A, f. 77vb, siseleos that of the

Kraut ed., Trotulae, chap. 1. On the two plants see The Herbal of

Rufinus, ed. Lynn Thorndike (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1946), pp. 135 and 298.

51. See B.N., lat 16089, f. 113 and B.L. Harley 3542, f. 97v. In the

second, fifteenth-century manuscript "ut sudes" remains in its original

form, but "ungas" was corrected by the original scribe with a mark of

deletion and a superscript .t and "te" was overwritten to read "se."

Ms. A, an early manuscript of the version which brings all three

treatises together, has third-person forms throughout.

52. See the texts published by Delva and Rowland cited in n. 12 above.

Delva argues that the Flemish Liber Trotula was written for an audience

of midwives by a practicing midwife critical of male university masters

(pp. 30-34). The author of the English text Rowland edited (B.L.,

Sloane 2463. ff. 194-232) states that it was composed for the benefit

of women ("and that oon woman may helpe another in her sykenesse &

nought diskuren her previtees to such vncurteys men" -- p. 58), but

Rowland makes far too much of the unusualness of this work, for much of

it is a literal translation of Roger of Parma; see J. H. Aveling, "An

Account of the Earliest English Work on Midwifery and the Diseases of

 54 - Benton

Women," Obstet. b- Great Britain Ireland, 1874,1.: 73, and the severe

review by Faye M. Getz in Med. Hist., 1982, 26: 353-54. The Middle

English translation of Trotula states that it was written in English

because it was intended for women: "Because whomen of oure tonge donne

bettyr rede and undyrstande thys langage than eny other and every

whoman lettyrde rede hit to other unlettyrd and help hem and conceyle

hem in her maledyes, withowtyn shewying here dysese to man, i have thys

drauyn and wryttyn in englysh" (Bodley, Douce 37, f. lv, quoted by

Rowland, p. 14). The French verse translation of Trotula in Cambridge,

Trin~ty College 0.1.20 is also addressed to women, beginning (fol.

214): "Bien sachih, fennnes • • • " It is a quite literal translation.

In the fifteenth century Giovanni Michele Savonarola wrote a work in

the vernacular specifically for midwives; see 11 trattato ginecologico-

pediatrico in volgare "Ad mulieres ferrarienses de reg imine pregnantium

et noviter natorum usque ad septennium," ed. Luigi Belloni (Milan:

Societa Italiana di ostetricia e ginecologia, 1952).

53. Henri Denifle and Emile Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis

Parisiensis, 4 vols. (Paris, 1889-97), 2: 266: "cum nullam causam

infirmitatis infirmorum per litteram vel artem medicine cognoscat"j cf.

Kibre, "Faculty of Medicine at Paris" (note 1 above), p. 8. This

argument was put forward by John of Padua, surgeon to King Philip IV.

Male authorities were most concerned with female practitioners who

posed an economic threat to the male medical establishment. Prof.

Michael McVaugh has kindly called to my attention the case of a Catalan

 55 - Benton

woman from near Sant Cugat del Valles who had learned from a visiting

medicus how to examine urine, take the pulse, and give advice. She

swore that she sent cases of abscesses and quartan fever "ad medicos

maiores." This early fourteenth-century rural nurse was permitted to

continue her practice on condition that she not use charms and not give

medicine. See Josep Perarnau i Espelt, "Activitats i formules

supersticioses de guaricio a Catalunya en la primera meitat del segle

XIV," Archiu de Textos Catalans Antics, 1982,1.: 67-72.

54. Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols. [London, 1767-1777], 4, 158. The

ordinance against charlatanism which was enacted in response to this

petition dealt with qualifications rather than gender; see ibid.,

p • 13 0, no. 11.

55. On the institutional and intellectual history of Salerno, see Paul

Oskar Kristeller, "The School of Salerno," Bull. HisL Med., 1945, !l.:

138-194 [reprinted in Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and

Letters (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1956), pp. 495-551],

esp. pp. 146n, 148n, 164, 171-172. In "Learned Women of Early Modern

Italy: Humanists and University Scholars" in Beyond Their Sex: Learned

Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York

University Press, 1982), p. 102, after questioning the existence of

Trotula, Kristeller adds that "in Salerno, Naples, and the rest of

Southern Italy, we do find a number of women, beginning in 1307. who

received royal licenses to treat specified diseases." Michael McVaugh

kindly pointed out to me the license of "Trotta de Troya" in Raffaele

 56 - Benton

Ca1vanico, Fonti.l?£!. 1a Storia della Medicina ~ della Chirurgia .l?£!. i1

Regno di Napoli ne1 periodo Angioino ~ 1273-1410) (Naples: L'Arte

tip., 1962), pp. 124-25.

56. On De secretis mulierum see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and

Experimental Science. 8 vo1s. (New York: Columbia University Press,

1923-1958), 2: 739-45, 749-50; his "Further Consideration of the

Experimenta. Speculum Astronomiae, and De Secret is Mu1ierum Ascribed to

A1bertus Magnus," Speculum, 1955, 30: 427-43; Brigitte Kusche, "Zur

. . Secreta Mulierum' Forschung," Janus, 1975, 62: 103-23; and Helen

Rodnite Lemay, "Some Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Lectures on

Female Sexuality," Inter. ~ Women's Studies, 1978,1.: 391-400. See

Alberti Magni De Secretis Mulierum (Amsterdam, 1740), p. 17 (liutrum

menstruum fluat per anum • • • aut per vu1vamll ) and pp. 104-5 for the

post-coital blood; material from "Trotula" is cited as being from a

"documentum" on pp. 109-11.

57. In the case of Jacqueline Felicie heard at Paris in 1322 and

discussed above, her lawyer argued that "it is better and more decent

that a woman who is wise and trained in the art should visit a sick

woman and see and inquire into the secrets of nature and her private

parts than a man, who is forbidden to touch the hands, breasts,

stomach, feet, etc. of women," Chart. univ. Paris., 2: 264 and Kibre,

"Faculty of Medicine at Paris," p. 11. Richardus Ang1icus makes quite

a point of the fact that he was not present when a patient and the

attending obstetrix attempted to insert a pessary he had prescribed;

 57 - Benton

see Karl Sudhoff, "Der 'Micrologus'-Text der 'Anatomia' Richards des

EngUfnders," Arch. Gesch. Med., 1927,!.2..: 232-33.

58. Claude A. Thomas set , ed •• Placides et Timeo.Q!! Li secres l!.§.

philosophes, Textes Litteraires Fran~ais (Geneva: Librairie Droz,

1980), pp. 133-34. Though Thomasset understandably makes much of this

passage, which he says reveals "a la lettre • • • une attitude capable

de bouleverser Ie monde medieval" [see his Une vision du monde .! la

fin du XIII~ siecle: Commentaire du dialogue de Placides et Timeo,

Publications romanes et fran~aises, 161 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1982),

pp. 160-61], it is likely that for the author himself these words are

empty rhethoric. I can find no evidence that the author of the

dialogue actually read any of the works attributed to Trotula. The

passage quoted is used to support the statement that women desire

intercourse more when they are pregnant than at any other time, an

assertion which does not appear in any of the texts of "Trotula."

Moreover, later (p. 148) the author of the dialogue refers to that

growth which such physicians as "Ypocras, Galien et Trotules" call

molla, though this term itself is not used in any of the treatises

attributed to Trotula.

59. On Hildegard, see Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental

Science, 2: 124-54. Hildegard von Bingen. Heilkunde, trans. Heinrich

Schipperges, 4th ed., (Salzburg: Otto MHller Verlag, 1981) contains

corrections to Paul Kaiser's faulty Latin edition of the Causae et

~ (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903) in its translation. Peter Dronke writes

 58 - Benton

evocatively of Hildegard's life and thought and cites the most recent

literature in Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A critical study of

~ from Perpetua i±.. 203) .!Q. Marguerite Porete i±.. 1310) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 144-201, but a fully

satisfactory study of Hildegard's views on sexuality remains to be

written. In his translation and discussion of a passage crucial for

understanding Hildegard's treatment of intercourse, Dronke mistakes the

closing of the womb over the seed which it has just received for

contractions which accompany the sexual act before its climax; see

ibid., pp. 175-76.

[Revised 26 November 1984]