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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 361-362



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Book Review

Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West:
Texts and Contexts


Monica H. Green. Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2000. xx + 388 pp. Ill. $111.95 (0-86078-826-1).

Today when discussions of digital mammography, antigen marking, and the Visible Human Female are common even in the most secluded of academic settings, the topic of this work may seem, at best, arcane. I hope that this review will persuade its readers that Monica Green's anthology is anything but, and that it deserves the attention and respect of any historian seeking to understand the status of women and the clinical sciences of obstetrics and gynecology during the Latin Middle Ages. A collection of six essays previously published elsewhere and one published here for the first time, "Women's Health Care in the Medieval West," affords a range of writings by one of America's most productive and gifted medieval scholars.

Professor Green seeks to open up the entire field of medieval women's health care, by addressing some issues and by highlighting others that still need to be addressed. She divides her gatherings into three sections. The first contains two essays, one examining gynecological practice in medieval Europe and the other seeking to determine to what extent and in what areas medieval women were involved in health care. Both, although originally published six years apart, pose questions concerning prior writings and suggest new topics that Green believes deserve further investigation. The second section, comprising three essays published in the decade between 1987 and 1996, is essentially philological in nature and introduces the novice to the difficulties and rewards afforded those who seek to discover and authenticate medieval texts. The third section directs attention to the laborious task of uncovering the history of certain gynecological texts, and to exploring how they were used and misused.

Finally, Green provides us with a bibliography of gynecological texts that she has identified, together with a listing of the manuscripts in which they appear. The index to this volume expands on this bibliography with an index of the manuscripts cited in one or more of the seven constituent essays. The documents listed in both these registers, together with Green's interpretation of them, provide vivid examples of her learning and her dedication to her subject, as well as the collaboration of many of the most eminent twentieth-century medieval scholars. The development of the Trotula text offers a case in point: John F. Benton began the study as a project to which many of his colleagues contributed. After Benton's sudden and unfortunate death in 1988, Green took up the task of tracing and identifying the texts comprising the tradition that ultimately resulted in the printed edition of 1544, thus affording us a real medieval mystery story that must be read to be appreciated.

My favorite essay, however, is the earliest. In it, Green shows that Constantine the African, an important medical translator of the eleventh century, did not write the text De passionibus mulierum that appeared in the 1536 edition of his Opera Omnia, but did write a work on female anatomy and reproductive physiology found in three manuscripts under the title De genitalibus membris. This is thus [End Page 361] the true identity of the work that Constantine's twelfth-century biographer, Peter the Deacon, called "De genecia." This is a classic piece of detective work, which is extremely useful for introducing students to the delights and rewards to be found in medieval scholarly texts.

I have only two reservations about this book. The first is that the pagination corresponds to that of the original publications in which these essays appeared; citing particular passages will thus create difficulties for future references. The other difficulty I find is Green's belief that "medieval medical history has been as much a scholarly orphan as women's history. Medical texts were not...

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