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

194 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Green, Monica H., ed. and trans., The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xvii, 301; 9 b/w illustrations, map; RRP $US55.00, £38.50; ISBN 0812237894. Professor Green has been working on the surviving medieval texts relating to women’s health for a quarter of a century, producing in the process invaluable hand lists on the existence and whereabouts of such material and assembling the information necessary to disentangle the complicated history of a number of texts that have been generically described as Trotula. In the course of so doing, she has been able to demonstrate the many different recensions, the alterations, additions and modifications which the text underwent and the layers of editorial changes involved. This edition is the result of these labours and makes available to the world both a scholarly presentation of one form of the Latin text and a modern translation into English. This must supersede any edition or translation based on the printed sixteenth century renaissance edition by George Kraut who substantially re-organised and re-wrote the sources he used. Green’s magisterial and enlightening introduction covers the development of the text, demonstrating that it is an accretion of three separate texts which probably had three separate authors, and that these three core texts were augmented as time went by with the addition of bits from other various sources. None of these reached a position of scriptural untouchability, so that every surviving copy is in some ways unique. Apart from different versions of the core text the eventual amalgamation had at least six significant different forms presenting a major problem for an edition. Green has solved this in the traditional editorial way by explicitly using the text she has identified as the ‘standardized thirteenth century ensemble’, of which 29 extant copies, mostly associated with universities, survive. Of these she has selected nine of the earliest as the basis for her version of the Latin text. In this way she effectively creates a thirtieth text precisely identical to no one existing copy. This solution will doubtless have its critics amongst those who think that each text is its own self-generator, and also perhaps amongst scholars who have worked with texts edited with multiple layers of footnoting which embed all possible variations, but it has the considerable merit of producing a clear and useable text for more general purposes. It is, one should consider, a beginning, not an end. The possibility of a separate edition or editions of the different forms, particularly perhaps one using the recension of the Conditions of Women which Reviews 195 Parergon 20.2 (2003) pays attention to normal birth, would be a useful comparison. To some extent Green admits defeat in one other area of editing, admitting that the precise identification of the pharmaceutical ingredients is imprecise and may be misleading although she has tried so far as possible as a non-botanist in an area of botanical disagreement to indicate the probable modern signifier. The three core works are first a work called the Conditions of Women (Trotula major), second one called Treatments for Women (Trotula Minor) and lastly Women’s Cosmetics. Green does not doubt that these treatises were produced in Salerno in the eleventh/twelfth century medical renaissance. She is less certain that any of them was the work of a woman called Trotula although she believes that a skilled female medical practitioner called Trota whose expertise lay in the areas of ophthalmology and gastro-intestinal disorders did exist. Green devotes a section of the substantial introduction to the city of Salerno, its peoples and its medical traditions without being able to determine whether Trota also wrote the second treatise – since she thinks the Conditions of Women and Women’s Cosmetics were almost certainly written by men. She offers an explanation, however, for the Salernitan interest in women’s medicine – the available texts on the subject combined with a willingness to take local empirical practices into consideration as the medicos attempted to systematize, explain and understand the evidence. She shows that in treatises one and three the two medical traditions...