Monica H. Green

From "Diseases of Women" to "Secrets of Women": The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages

�� Writing about the diseases and conditions peculiar to the female body is as old as medical writing itself. Nearly a fifth of the oldest corpus of western medical writings, that attributed to Hippocrates and written in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., is devoted to the female body. Although not all information on women’s diseases in the medieval period was to be found in separate, specialized tracts on gynecology and obstetrics, 1 the hundred-some different texts composed between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries constitute a sizable corpus. 2 This essay will examine one subtle but highly illuminating transformation that specialized gynecological literature underwent in the later Middle Ages: a change in title. Latin gynecological literature from the early Middle Ages appeared under a variety of titles: Curae ad causa[s] mulierum (“Treatments for the conditions of women”), De passionibus mulierum (“On the sufferings [or diseases] of women”), Liber de muliebria causa (“Book on the female condition”), or, most commonly, Genecia, a corruption of the Greek g ynaikeia meaning simply “women’s matters” or “women’s affairs.” The new and extremely influential texts redacted in southern Italy in the twelfth century (later to be known as the Trotula texts) were likewise initially headed by such titles as Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum (“Book on the conditions of women”) and De curis mulierum (“On treatments for women”). These titles may have been inelegant but they were accurately descriptive: the texts did indeed recount the causes and the cures of the many diseases, the many physical sufferings and dysfunctions unique to women. Beginning in the thirteenth century, however, and gathering momentum in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a new usage emerged. Some gynecological literature began to be called “Secrets of Women,” an epithet which hitherto had never been used for these texts. 3

The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine

The Trotula was the most influential compendium of womens medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to the first English translation ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. Green here presents a complete English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the midthirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The work is now accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, womens studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.

The De genecia Attributed to Constantine the African

In the 1536 edition of the Opera omnia of Constantine the African (d. ca. 1087), the editor, Henricus Petrus, published an opuscule entitled De mulierum morbis liber (hereafter referred to by its incipit, De passionibus mulierum). 1 Apparently he thought that this brief tractate corresponded to the De genecia, a title included by Peter the Deacon (d. after 1154, possibly after 1159) in his list of Constantines translations from the Arabic.2 Petrus said nothing about his manuscript sources, nor did he explain what had led him to believe that the De passionibus mulierum was a product of Constantines hand.3 Petruss silence on these questions is unfortunate, since the De passionibus mulierum had by the late sixteenth century been associated in manuscript and in print with the names of no fewer than five other authors.4 These multiple accretions of spurious attribution do not eliminate the possibility that the work should be attributed to Constantine. Nevertheless, they plant a seed of doubt. Is Henricus Petruss equation of the De passionibus mulierum with the De

In search of an "Authentic" women's medicine: the strange fates of Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen.

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

The sources of eucharius Rösslin's 'rosegarden for pregnant women and midwives' (1513)

Few medical authors can unambiguously claim to have written one of the most important works in their field: most important not simply in one language but in half a dozen, and not simply for a few years but for over a century and a half. Yet that distinction has long been given to the work of a largely obscure early sixteenth-century apothecary-turned-physician from Freiburg, Worms, and Frankfurt, one Eucharius Rosslin (c.1470–c.1526).1 His Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives), first published in Strasbourg and Hagenau in 1513, went through at least sixteen editions in its original form, was revised into three different German versions (each of which went through multiple printings), and was translated into Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, with almost all of these translations then going through their own multiple editions.2 The Rosegarten is the only work known to have been produced by Rosslin. His son, Eucharius Rosslin Jr, further capitalized on the work by producing in 1526 a German compilation of “marriage texts” which he called Ehestandts Artzney; this included his fathers Rosegarten as well as extracts from the Enneas muliebris (Nine-Part Treatise on Women) by Ludovico Bonacciuoli (d. c.1540), a herbal by Johannes Cuba (Johann Wonnecke von Caub, d. 1503/4), and Bartholomeus Metlingers (born after 1440) tract on paediatrics. Eucharius Jr. also produced a Latin translation of the Rosegarten in 1532. That Rosslins work was only the third obstetrical text addressed directly to an audience of midwives in a thousand years also places it in an important position in the history of the professionalization of midwifery.3 While it remains to be determined how frequently midwives themselves read the text, it is clear that both physicians and laypersons used the Rosegarten and later adaptations as the basis for medical training and as a reference for information on generation.4 Despite the unquestioned historical importance of this work, its textual sources have never been examined in any systematic way. In large part, this seems to have been due to scholars’ sense that the text was sui generis, an “out of the blue” creation that suddenly revived the long-lost obstetrical practices of the ancients. The one source that scholars have always acknowledged for the Rosegarten is the late antique work of Muscio, the Gynaecia (Gynaecology, itself a Latin translation of Soranuss second-century Greek Gynaikeia), from which Rosslin derived the foetus-in-utero figures that are still the most recognizable feature of the work. Yet, as I will show, while it is clear that Rosslin must have consulted at least one independently circulating fragment of Muscios text that included the foetus-in-utero images, the Rosegarten owes nothing at all to the full text of the Latin Gynaecia. In 1994, a philologist, Britta-Juliane Kruse, published an initial analysis of a German manuscript now in Hamburg, dated 1494 and so predating by nearly twenty years the initial publication of the Rosegarten. She argued that it presents an Ur-version of Rosslins printed text. It lacks a number of features found in the printed work: the imprimatur of Emperor Maximilian; the dedication to Katharina, Duchess of Brunswick-Luneburg;the rhymed prologue with its viciously critical account of the errors of contemporary midwives; and a closing glossary.5 It also has no illustrations. In nearly every other respect, however, it is the predecessor text of the Rosegarten, which Kruse could now prove had not been created for publication in print. Kruse announced plans to publish this Ur-version (which bears the manuscript title Von Kranckheiten, Siechtagen und zu val der Swangern und geberenden frowen und ihrer neugebornen Kinderen [On the Sicknesses, Illnesses, and Accidents of Pregnant and Labouring Women and Their Newborn Children]), a project that is still much anticipated. Important as Kruses analysis was, however, it only pushed back to a manuscript phase the question of the texts origins. Rosslin would have been in his early twenties at the time the Hamburg manuscript was written, and it is by no means clear that he had anything to do with its production. Indeed, it has long been questioned how he could have assembled such a detailed text on a topic on which, as far as we can tell, he had no particular expertise. So where did Von Kranckheiten, Siechtagen und zu val der Swangern und geberenden frowen und ihrer neugebornen Kinderen come from? The present study is meant to contribute to a new understanding of the genesis of the Rosegarten and its antecedent German text by demonstrating that the bulk of the text was not a novel composition by Eucharius Rosslin himself, or even another German physician or apothecary, but a translation of a pre-existing Latin text (composed between 1440 and 1446) from the other side of the Alps by the Paduan and Ferrarese physician Michele Savonarola (c.1385–1466). Savonarola was himself drawing heavily on the obstetrical chapters of the early fourteenth-century Neapolitan physician, Francesco da Piedemonte (d. 1320), but the nature of the correspondences between the German texts and Savonarolas is close enough to prove that the latter was the direct source, not the Neapolitan da Piedemonte.6 This discovery also helps us better understand the relation of Rosslins 1513 Rosegarten to the one similar printed German text that preceded it, the anonymous Frauenbuuchlein (Womens Manual) that was first published in Augsburg c.1495. Finally, it suggests the importance of interrogating more systematically what was really “new” in the age of print; as this example shows, Rosslins Rosegarten was as important in disseminating late medieval northern Italian obstetrical practices to the rest of Europe as in capturing local empirical practices in sixteenth-century Germany.

Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women in the high middle ages

This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the topic of ‘Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages’. Despite the fact that both interfaith relations and womens history are now well established subdisciplines within the field of medieval studies, the question of how medieval women themselves established cross-sectarian relations has rarely been explored. Documenting womens history is almost always problematic because of limited source materials, but this essay suggests that much can be learned by looking at areas where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women shared certain facets of their lives: either by reason of social relations tied to religion and ethnicity (money-lending being a common bond between Jewish and Christian women, slavery between Christian women and Muslims) or by reason of events that connected them due to their shared sex and gender (childbirth, caring for the dead, even cosmetics). By actively looking for ‘spaces’ where women would be found, we can begin to hear the dialogues that passed among women across religious lines.

On the misuses of medical history

A surprising amount of bad history passes peer review in the sciences and medicine. What do we mean by bad history? One example would be the misuse of historical images. Many images of so-called plague used in scientific publications depict patients suffering from leprosy.1 Another example is when commonly repeated claims about historical people or events are lifted from earlier scientific or medical writings, without checking whether professional historical scholarship has revised earlier interpretations.

Introduction to Tributes to Joan Cadden

n 2006, I had the great privilege and honor to write a review of Women Medievalists and the Academy, Jane Chance’s amazing (and massive) collection of biographies of women who had contributed to medieval studies since the eighteenth century.1 It was an equally great privilege and honor to be asked to organize a Medieval Foremothers Society tribute for Joan Cadden at the Kalamazoo meetings in 2009. But what made those two experiences so very different was that whereas the former assignment involved the bittersweet task of acknowledging achievement while bemoaning discrimination and restraint, invisibility and neglect, the latter was sheer celebration. Joan received her graduate training in the 1970s at Indiana, held a postdoctoral position at Harvard for three years, served on the faculty at the elite Midwestern private school, Kenyon College, for twenty-odd years. She then finished her teaching career as Professor of History at the University of California at Davis. During that time, she won fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most importantly, her breakthrough 1993 book, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge University Press), won the highest book prize offered by the History of Science Society, the Pfizer Award. Meanings was not only the first book on medieval studies to win that award in thirty years, but it was also the first book ever on gender studies to crack through the glass ceiling of recognition in a field especially heavily dominated by “great men and their books.” I won’t pretend that Joan did not have her struggles against sexism or challenges as a parent. But Joan’s career—and her life story—present us with a new chapter in the Medieval Foremothers story: success! And I

Book Review: The book of women's love and Jewish medieval medical literature on women: Sefer Ahavat Nashim

The Hebrew Book of womens love (Sefer Ahavat Nashim), here edited and translated for the first time, is known to exist in only one late fifteenth-century copy, made probably in the area of Catalonia or Provence. Caballero-Navas postulates that the text was composed in the thirteenth century, but a more precise dating may never be possible. It gathers together different kinds of knowledge, juxtaposing magic with detailed remedies based on the traditional pharmacopoeia of simple and compound medicines widely used in medieval Europe. After introductory sections on love magic and aphrodisiacs, it organizes the remaining cosmetic, gynaecological, and obstetrical remedies in head-to-toe order. The combination of medicine and cosmetics, topics we would now consider quite distinct, is not at all unusual in the Middle Ages, being found in Latin and vernacular texts on womens medicine throughout Europe. More unusual is the incorporation of mechanisms to improve the sexual success of men, which are rarely found so closely allied to womens medicine in other linguistic traditions until the late Middle Ages. The Book is first and foremost a remedy book, with virtually no theory of causation. As such, it is probably of most interest as evidence for the sociology of the body and will rightly attract a broad audience of historians of womens medicine and sexuality. Such readers will no doubt find this edition and its accompanying commentary a bit obscure not simply because of the unusual nature of the text but also because of certain editorial decisions. Instead of merely stating that the works of the Arabic authorities al-Ra¯zī, Ibn Sīna¯, and al-Zahra¯wī, all of whom are cited in the text, were translated into Hebrew at such and such a date, Caballero-Navas might have confirmed whether the references can be traced or if the author was simply name-dropping. Greater engagement with Latin medical traditions might have also shown that this Hebrew tradition is not as directly derivative of Arabic medicine as it seems. Caballero assumes (pp. 28–9) direct use of the North African Arabic writer Ibn al-Jazza¯r, ignoring the more obvious parallels with the Latin Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum, a twelfth-century Salernitan treatise that drew heavily upon Ibn al-Jazza¯r and was available in Hebrew translation. And most readers are likely to miss the passing clarification on p. 81 that the Catalan cosmetic and gynaecological treatise, which has already been referred to over a dozen times as the Trotula, has no direct relation to the Latin treatise that circulated under that name; they will find no explanation at all that this is actually a rendering of a Latin treatise on cosmetics usually attributed to Arnau of Vilanova. Caballero-Navas is least persuasive in her arguments about the books intended audience. As the original author himself declares, this book is about “what women like and need for themselves; for this reason it has been called Book of womens love, for you will find in this book what women, and those who are able to have intercourse with them, ask from the art of medicine” (p. 116). Caballero-Navas fails to engage with the significance of that penultimate phrase and with items such as “A love formula … that is so strong that she will run after you” or a concoction which the reader is to make from his own semen (p. 108). Male use of cosmetic and gynaecological texts, whether to treat female patients, to inform themselves about sexuality and generation, or to woo women through knowledge of cosmetics, has now been well documented for other medieval gynaecological and cosmetic literature. The one extant manuscript copy of the Book situates it alongside works of Kabbalah, medicine, and natural philosophy; despite Caballero-Navass citation of evidence for Jewish womens book ownership, the character of this codex suggests interests more typical of learned males. The present study does not supersede Barkais 1998 survey of a larger body of Hebrew gynaecological literature, which addressed important questions of the motives for translation and the relation of Jewish learning to that of the majority Christian culture (Ron Barkai, A history of Jewish gynaecological texts in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998). Nevertheless, this handsomely produced edition contributes significantly to the recovery of medieval Hebrew learning and, one hopes, will serve as the basis for future analyses of how knowledge of sexuality and medicine was shared or contested between men and women, and who was actually reading books such as this.