Trotula’s Fourteenth-Century Reputation, Jankyn’s Book, and Chaucer’s Trot

Trotula's Fourteenth-Century Reputation, Jankyn's Book, and Chaucer's Trot Lorrayne Y. Baird-Lange Youngstown State University In J,nkyn's "book of wikked wyves'' (WBP D 699-81), V,l,cius, Theophrastus, and Saint Jerome-the chief authorities in a "flourishing body of antimatrimonial propaganda"1 used at Oxford and other univer­ sities in the fourteenth century-are accompanied by others whose author­ ity may seem of lesser weight: Tertullian, Crisippus, Heloi"se, and Trotula. Tertullian, author of De exhortatione castitatis, De pudicitia and De monogamia,2 is in the general ambit, but Crisippus,3 mentioned by Jerome, is only a prankster: Ridicule Chrysippus ducendam uxorem sa­ pienti praecipit, ne ]ovem Gamelium et Genethlium violet (As a joke Chrysippus advised a philosopher to take a wife to avoid offendingJupiter Gamelius and Genethlius). Heloi"se, as Alice Hamilton has proved, con­ tributes to the celibate propaganda and enriches the Wife of Bath's Prologue not only by virtue of the advice in her letters to Abelard "against marriage [which] raised the same arguments as did Jerome's Adversus ]ovinianum"4 but also in the inevitable reminder in the mere mention of her name of Abelard's Historia calamitatum, in which are united two major ideas of the Wife a/Bath's Prologue: "lechery and folly in the cleric Abelard, in the Wife, and in her Jankyn," and "the forced burning of a 1 Robert A. Pratt, 'Jankyn's Book ofWikkedWyves: Medieval Antimatrimonial Propa­ ganda in the Universities," AnM 3 (1962): 5-27. All citations of Chaucer are from F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works a/Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). 2 Robinson, ed., The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, p. 701. 3 Chrisippus may be a Chaucerian confusion of Egisippus. See Pratt, 'Jankyn's Book," p. 13. I am indebted to John H. Parks, emeritus professor, Kent State University, for help with translations. 4 AliceHamilton, "Helowysand the BurningofJankyn's Book," MS34 (1972): 202. Inthe Helo1se story in the Roman de la Rose (lines 8753ff.), where Chaucer would have known it, Helo1se insists that marriage must be lived "senz seignourie e senz maistrise" (line 8768), a major theme in The Franklin's Tale. 245 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER personal book, without trial, by a clerk of Paris [Abelard] and by a clerk of Oxford Uankyn]." As Chaucer's aesthetic vision thus widens into that evocative indirection which so often enriches his allusions, Heloi:se as antimatrimonialist, wife, and nun serves as a contrary of the Wife of Bath, or, asHamilton says,"...the wife is a parody ofHelowys since she uses the same authorities to show 'wys' women how to manage husbands."5 Of this immediate company is left only Trotula, the famous (whether real or legendary) Salemitan midwife and medical writer, who clearly has the least claim, it would seem, to the antimatrimonial company of authorities, and whose purpose in the passage has not been fully examined. Various medical historians mention Chaucer's Trotula without, of course, analyzing the rationale for her inclusion in such an apparently unlikely context.Henry P. Bayon evades the issue by conjecturing that all Chaucer really knew ofTrotula was the titles of theTrotula treatises held by the library at Canterbury, and, thus not aware of their serious medical content, he did not really know what he was doing6 - an explanation to be accepted only if all else fails. In his"Trotula," G. L.Hamilton7 attempted to justify her inclusion in the "book of wikked wyves" by assessing as "pornographic" some of her clinical descriptions and procedures and by using an argument in the fourteenth-century FrenchLe livre des secrets aux phiiosophes that she discloses the natures ausfemmes (naturally wicked?); but perhaps he succeeded only in revealing more about fin-de-siecle chauvinism and prudery than about eitherTrotula or Chaucer. Nothing, in fact, compels us, as Beryl Rowland has argued, to believe that the poet was even thinking ofTrotula as the medical woman; her inclusion might have been for other reasons.8 It is my purpose to look at Trotula's fourteenth-century reputation and to argue that, in contrast toHeloi:se, a slanderedTrotula serves as a type of the Wife of Bath, as personification of...