The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (review)

Monica H. Green, ed. and trans. The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xvii, 301 pp., illus. $55.

Monica Green’s critical edition of the Trotula brings the first modern English translation of the most famous medieval compendium on women’s healthcare. The treatises have long been the subject of scholarly debate, as has their alleged author, the mysterious Trota (Trocta) Salernitana, master of medicine at Salerno. Written around the year 1100, the texts circulated widely in learned circles between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and beyond. Green’s methodical examination of 126 extant manuscripts allows her to reconstruct the evolution of different textual forms and to elucidate some of the historical questions that have for so long dogged this important work and its author.

The reader learns that Trotula originally referred to a title, not an author’s name. Indeed, there was not one but three distinct texts: Conditions of Women, Treatments for Women, and Women’s Cosmetics. It was the second of these, Treatments for Women, which was composed by a woman named Trota. The protean later versions of these original treatises eventually became known as “Trotula,” literally “little Trota,” a title that belied their wide-ranging influence in later medieval Europe as compendia of collected gynecologic theory and empiric wisdom on women’s health care.

While Green firmly establishes Trota’s partial authorship, her close textual analysis also reveals that the ensemble is a veritable patchwork derived from multiple sources. The Salernitan texts bear few marks of other early medieval gynecological writings, grounded mostly in Hippocratic and Soranic theories. In fact, they represent a significant break with contemporary European learned traditions. Conditions of Women, anonymously authored and the most theoretical of the three, is quite independent of the relatively sparse Latin and Greek corpus heretofore known in Western Europe. Instead, it articulates physiological theories based on Arabic medicine, itself derived from the Galenic precepts first reintroduced to the Western world through Constantinus Africanus’ translation of Ibn-al-Jazzar’s Viaticum. Treatments for Women, on the other hand (less so Women’s Cosmetics), includes little theoretical speculation. Rather, it appears to be primarily based on local empiric traditions, where magical elements intermingled with humoral therapeutics, plainly attesting to the survival of primitive medical beliefs. Green’s scholarly dissection of textual antecedents produces clear evidence that the Trotula is a prime example of the hybrid transmission and application of medieval medical thought. Indeed, the work reflects a “new synthesis of indigenous European practices” (p. 2) with the more sophisticated philosophies of the Eastern world, its rich pharmaceutical lore, and its idiosyncratic assimilation of Hellenic medicine.

For the neophyte reader, a detailed introductory essay provides a summary of pre-Salernitan gynecology and a useful, albeit brief, synopsis of Salernitan socio-cultural history. The translation collates nine of the earliest, most complete Trotula manuscripts. They are presented in a facing-page Latin– English format with paragraph division for ease of reading. The editor’s careful annotations highlight major divergences from the base manuscript (Basel, thirteenth century), and variations attributable to scribal interpretation. There are several well-chosen illustrations drawn from manuscript illuminations. A short appendix elaborates compound medicines encountered in the Trotula recipes; additionally, there is an indispensable Index Verborum explicating technical terms, disease nomenclatures, materia medica, and medieval Latin usage.

The number of surviving manuscripts and the variety of versions and vernacular translations attest to the enduring popularity of the work. Clearly, for medieval readers this was a basic reference work, providing vital information on women’s diseases and physiology. Perhaps, as Green opines, the imprimatur of female authorship contributed to the work’s success. More likely, though, it was the practical relevance and crucial importance of the subject matter. Indeed, the reader learns about prime gynecological concerns of the day, not discernibly different from those of...